Longevity science is powerful because it asks a serious question: how do we extend healthy, capable years? It becomes fragile when confidence outruns evidence. The conversation around bold claims reminds us that healthspan deserves rigor.
Full transcript with clickable timestamps linking back to the source video.
[Music] I think it's pretty solid advice groups of cells in different parts of your brain they're all connected the statistics just don't back it up there's nothing here any complex life you find has mitochondria we have discovered things from athletes juicer my name is Matt cine and welcome to the optis fan [Music] podcast so today I have another reaction video for you so you actually talk in this video so I was like okay I got to give Matt's opinion on it it is about David Sinclair and it's the journalist Scott Carney who have you watched any of his other videos I have watched his Peter AA video and I think we should probably do a react video to that I have not watched this one I'm I'm aware of this video so it's probably worth giving a little bit of um background context here so uh as I've talked about before on the podcast uh I've known David Sinclair since I was a graduate student he was a postto in the guarante lab when I started as a graduate student um actually was a a mentor to me during my graduate career David really is the one who suggested my first project in the lab um uh and then you know we've had our scientific differences over the year the years including the Resveratrol work that we have an episode on so people should check that out if they're interested um it's been a challenging relationship I don't really think we need to get into it other than to say that I have been um somewhat disappointed in some of the behaviors that have gone on over the years uh and then as many people may know I publicly left the academy uh based on the fact that David was president of the academy and selling nmn for pets and making dishonest claims about that so I think people will perceive that I probably have a very negative opinion of Dave um I like I said I haven't watched this video uh Scott Carney emailed me and
asked me to be interviewed for this video which I turned down because I don't really want to be publicly uh out there bashing David so I'm a little bit ambivalent about doing this react I guess you guys will find out if we end up publishing it because I'm going to wait and see how it goes um simply because you know I don't know what's going to be said I I will again I feel like I do a pretty good job of separating my um sort of em emotional uh disappointment in individuals from being able to try to evaluate the facts of the situation so we'll we'll see how it goes but I haven't seen this video yet so again I'm a little bit wary uh and we'll just kind of see how it goes well I'm happy you took this route because now we kind of post it on our Channel we get your opinion and kind of have the final sort of say on it uh to just get the timeline straight so you were in the lab before David no he was in the lab he'd been there for I think probably a year and a half at the time I joined the lab um I started in the lab as a first year graduate student this would have been I guess early 1998 so I started graduate school in September of 1997 and then um started in the guarante lab you know probably March of 1998 um so David was already there like I said been there for about a year and a half he had just within the last uh year published what at the time was sort of a uh seen as an important paper in the field which was a mechanism of Aging this was in single cell yeast but a mechanism of Aging involving ribosomal DNA instability and it was actually that story among a couple of other things the lab had been working on that really got me interested in studying aging when Lenny when I heard Lenny give a talk on that and so like I said Dave David was extremely welcoming um I think you know
really I valued his uh um advice and scientific Insight had you know what I considered to be you know very um uh intellectually stimulating conversations with him and like I said he actually was the one who suggested a genetic screen that I did to look for mutations that supressed some defects in the yeast C mutant and that led to you know much of my PhD thesis and and at least contributed to kind of the first big result that I got out of my PhD which was showing that you could overexpress siru an increased lifespan in yeast again we've got an episode on that on the podcast if people are interested but that result really set the stage for ceran as a potential mediator of longevity okay would you consider yourself like friends at the time like did you get drinks or I considered him a friend yeah and and again I think you know this is where it gets challenging when the interpersonal relationships and science sort of clash right um absolutely I considered David to be a mentor and a friend when I was in graduate school and even afterwards that really soured when we couldn't reproduce the results from his lab on res Vera Char and again you know I I talked about that in depth in the episode on the podcast and in other places um I think unfortunately you know sometimes when scientific disagreements uh uh remain unresolved that can complicate interpersonal relationships yeah so the first time I would have read your name would have been in his book life span I think he speaks highly of you in the book too so so anyways I haven't read it you haven't read it oh okay no i' I know I've seen comments of people wanting us to do a deep dive on it but I don't know if you and I have the bandwidth for that read a whole book and pring episode yeah all right I I'll just say I've got better things to do with my time yeah sure all right so here we go react to Scott
Carney videos yeah this is more passive all right here we go start the video what if the key to a longer healthier life was as easy to achieve as taking a simple and scientifically proven pill well what I'm going to tell you tonight you would find extremely difficult to believe is true but one day we could be 80 but biologically 30 it sounds amazing but yeah it does kind of sound too good to be true none of these claims are our good friend this guy took galaxo to the cleaners a few years ago the world's largest pharmaceutical company put out a scientific paper that said that all of this science was wrong dead wrong I knew it but what would happen if after this scientist's work was roundly rejected he found another pill and amen and this time he was sure it would work Harvard Professor David Sinclair got away with 720 million and is using the same strategy to do it again today the immortality grift is as old as Humanity it goes back at least to the Epic of Gilgamesh 5, 000 years ago so I mean I think what one one thing I would say is I have never heard David talk about immortality as if it is a real uh likelihood um so to me this feels I mean again not surprising they're going for clicks but to me this feels like kind of setting an unrealistic expectation that you know that that David's been claiming things that he as far as I know hasn't ever claimed now there's plenty of stuff David has claimed that I take issue with like reversing aging or that you know a a molecule nmn um most recently has been shown to reverse aging at least in dogs that's not true and he has said that there are plenty of things he said that aren't true that you don't have to
make it sound like he's been trying to claim immortality every single generation has launched its own breed of immortality grifters and they all claim the same thing somehow all the earlier Generations were wrong but this time things will be different because they so I mean again I think the issue here is there's there's it this is part of the unfortunate consequence of making dishonest claims or wild exaggerations is Again David and I don't think any legitimate scientist in the field has claimed that anything we're working on today is anywhere close to achieving immortality um but it is the case that it is possible we I think and this is where you know the way that Scott's sort of starting this is as if the whole thing is is fraud right like oh yeah people have been saying for thousands of years that we can modulate aging and that's never been true therefore it's not true now first of all that's a logical fallacy to even take that approach but it is true now we actually understand the biology of Aging enough that it is possible to modulate the aging process in laboratory animals to slow aging increase lifespan improve health span you know by some percentage points 20% 30% it hasn't been proven in people but it is possible no question about it and so again unfortunately that reality when people make videos like this sort of gets lumped in with the sort of immortality snake oil stuff and I think because people some people operate at that sort of interface where they're both in the scientific world and in the snake oil World kind of all gets jumbled up and and I don't think at at least so far the way this is being presented helps clarify for the average person where the science stops and where the the nonsense begins mixes we'll see
how we where we end up but so far I'm not impressed and in every single generation Kings and Titans of Industry sunk their vast fortunes into speculative ideas that have so far never paid off this is the story the most this is a logical fallacy of course so far never paid off in terms of immortality right um duh but that doesn't again that doesn't mean that it's not scientifically valid or possible to modulate the biology of Aging right kind what I'm hearing is something is science fiction before it becomes science so like going to the moon in the 1800s was science fiction and today it's it's science that's true and yet going to a different galaxy is still science fiction and it's not science and not within the realm of anything that's likely to happen I mean I think that's the analogy here he's making the claim that because people have talked about wormholes and traveling to different galaxies you know for hundreds of years uh it is impossible to consider traveling to the Moon I see right so I think that's maybe more the analogy in this case and clearly we've traveled to the Moon right uh so now you could say well but you know nobody's ever traveled to Mars someday somebody will like that's within our grasp and I think that's where this disconnect comes from it is sometime I believe in the very near future we will have clinical evidence that we can modulate the biology of Aging in humans in a way that increases lifespan and health span some would argue we already have that if to the extent you believe these biological age clocks are actually measuring biological aging right so we're not that far away from that are we anywhere near immortality not not that I can tell yeah um but that doesn't mean we can't have an impact on health span and lifespan I I have heard David give a sort of a
theoretical idea of um longevity escape velocity for every chronological ear you go forward yeah I wish he wouldn't do that I mean it's a theor it's a good thought experiment I guess uh again no evidence were anywhere near achieving that and that's where you get into the realm of of you know these futurists who who speculate um those are people who who in my view are either intentionally misleading folks or don't really understand the data and where the biology is right now doesn't mean it's impossible and yes theoretically if the human race doesn't destroy itself someday we may get to that point no evidence we're getting close now and people will point to well what about AI who knows what's going to happen with AI right but there's no evidence yet that we're getting close to longevity escape velocity something I wanted to give your opinion I I've been thinking a lot about how these companies were trying to sell stuff it's they present the problem then they sell the solution so problem is you're getting cramps because you're eating keto diet solution is drink our electrolyte powder and this is the ultimate problem is aging which is why you have so many companies trying to sell a solution that's right and no real way to validate whether it's working or not I mean that's the beauty of making claims around anti-aging or longevity escape velocity you know uh you can make those claims nobody can prove you wrong if you are wrong you're going to be dead before they can prove be wrong so yeah and then have your money so right immortality grift and while there have been many people offering up eternal life from uploading brains to the cloud to cryogenics the most notable longevity biologist in the last 25 years has been the Harvard geneticist David Sinclair and until a that's debatable he seems like the real deal a beacon of scientific innovation and hope but then someone sent me a tip someone who said they wanted to remain anonymous and that you no no actually we should clarify that that is absolutely not me uh so I I
uh as I said Scott asked me to be interviewed for this video I politely declined by email I definitely did not send him a tip about David or anybody else isn't just a deep dive into the spirous health claims that I often dig into on this channel because Sinclair well he doesn't likees one of the most success health grifters of all time raising billions and yes billions of dollars in investment over his career based on results that he might have simply made up The Story begins in 1999 where lab partner of Davids showed that if you overactivate an enzyme called CO2 in yeast you can cause a 30% extension in lifespan here's how Sinclair explains those same results what we found was these yeast cells as they got older after about a week all the genes started to come on and they died now we I mean well first of all I'll just be gracious and assume he's using we as in the entire lab because David had nothing to do with this work but um siru in yeast which is what we're talking about here affects gene expression at only three very specific locations in the genome and what we showed was that in the deletion mutant which is short-lived the shortening of lifespan is due to actually not even really gene expression but uh a loss of stability within What's called the ribosomal DNA so you get hyper recombinations DNA damag sort of phenotype so the gene expression model uh has nothing to do with the lifespan effect that we showed we being Mitch McVey and myself and Lenny who is a senior author on the paper um back in uh 1999 when that paper was published but people can look David's not on that paper he had nothing to do with this work yeah I see the three names there and so you're the first name
does that mean anything in particular I mean so Mitch and I are technically co-first authors Mitch McVey so that means we equally contributed to the data that was generated and then Lenny as the head of the lab was the supervisor of the research so we can cut this out but one question is like it does it feel weird that he built his of foundation's career which made him a lot of money off of something that you were a lead author on actually he didn't I mean he didn't really build his career off of this work it was really the NAD work of suju Lynn that when David left the lab because again he had nothing to do with that work um or and really wasn't working on NAD at all until he left the lab and then he took what he knew of suju's work and brought that to his own lab and then had people in his lab start working on it so if anybody has reason to be upset I would say that suju probably does okay um uh but you know that's kind of the way science Works in certain places and and Boston in particular and Harvard and MIT in particular seem to be places where that sort of stuff happens um you know For Better or Worse brilliant people often hyper competitive often willing to take other people's ideas and run with them the other thing is I was getting my bachelor in 2013 and I remember at the time thinking TED Talks were like the gold standard for scientific rigor I watch him in my free time now it's YouTube right yeah do you feel like T talk credibility has dropped in the last decade or I mean I think certainly interest in TED Talks has has dropped again I never was a big fan of TED Talks because it is often as much about the spin as it is about the reality of the topic and so I really am personally prefer to to deal in facts and data and reality as much as possible and not get lost in the hype and the spin okay that's something thing I've learned here is before working op span I let people
like Sinclair for example kind of be the middleman between me and the literature and now working here I just read it for myself yeah and I mean you can't be an expert on everything so you do have to do that to some extent but I think you know there are different venues and forums for for the type of information that you want to digest and I'm I much more prefer to get the information um in a less flamboyant way and hopefully from sources that are more credible yeah so that I can then to the extent that I have background knowledge evaluate what the information that I'm being given in the context of that background knowledge and make my own decisions about you know how much credibility do I give it that process down we could find genes that could switch off those Rogue genes and silence them and this led to a discovery of a longevity Gene called Sir two his papers were Sensational but there were some problems what would you consider the odds that something that a fungal cell does anticipates the causes of aging and 100% we already know that's true this is I mean again this is being there's there's a couple issues being conflated here one is C and Resveratrol as we talk about on our episode Resveratrol probably doesn't actually activate sirtu or cerin in generally most people probably already know this but cerin are the family of proteins of which sirtu is the founding member so they're all related okay so the idea that because Resveratrol is ceran are that doesn't make any sense because the whole idea that Resveratrol is an activator of cun is wrong generally speaking um and then this idea and I mean again you know Charlie's been on the show he's a friend of the show a lot of respect for Charlie in his domain he doesn't really understand the biology of Aging to any great depth Sorry Charlie I know you're not going to like that uh we already know that things that affect Aging in yeast affect Aging in mammals mtor
obviously uh so this idea that just because something works in yeast you know it's not going to be true in mammals or vice versa uh it it's been disproven so trying to discredit S two because it came out of yeast I think there are other reasons why you can question the extent to which cerin affect Aging in mammals but the fact that it came from a study in yeast and by which by the way has stood the St test of time I mean this study has been highly reproducible nobody questions whether or not overexpressing C and East increases lifespan and there's some reason to believe that cerin may affect aging they're is certainly in the same network with mtor in other organisms I just don't think they're particularly good nodes in that Network to to tweak so I think Charlie's criticisms here are not based in data or logical thought they're based on emotion in my opinion journal every aspect of the ceran Aging hypothesis has fallen apart it also should be noted that brener works a little bit of an overstatement so for as I just got done saying the yeast component has not Fallen apart in fact it's been reproduced over and over again and I think even the idea that ceran can regulate Aging in worms and flies a little bit unclear there's been controversy but it hasn't been disproven uh and if you believe the literature on ct6 which is a mamalian ceru that seems to affect Aging in mammals so um to Simply say that all of all the entire idea that CTU have anything to do with aging has fallen apart is not true it's at a minimum an overstatement and it neglects literature that is supportive of that idea do I think the ceran hypothesis and aging has been overhyped and overblown and that you know there has been data there that has not been reproducible absolutely to
say there's nothing there is just not accurate yeah throwing the baby out the bath waterer uh none of that stuff is repeatable right even by again I don't really know this guy but um it's just not true like just to say that all of the work that David did as a postto none of it has been repeatable is just not true all of the work on the ribosomal DNA circles is repeatable I reproduced some of it when I was a graduate student other people have um so yeah are there questions about some of the data that David has published particularly since he left Lenny's lab yeah there are questions and some of that hasn't been reproducible but to say that nothing has been reproducible I just don't think it's useful to make false claims like that you're if you want to make a case that somebody has a pattern of producing data that you know has problems you make the case with specific examples you're not going to convince people by just saying oh yeah everything this person does is wrong it's especially when it's you know easy to disprove that statement so I yeah I just don't get why people do that while R vrol could indeed have health benefits they didn't work through the mechanisms that Sinclair said existed indeed for which Sinclair was getting rich promoted after Hees ideas in magazines and on TV shows and on TED talks for more than a decade in 2008 Sinclair sold his company to the pharmaceutical giant galaxo Smith Klein for $ 720 million even a slight statistical Improvement in lifespans would make them billions of dollars in profit the marketing guys loved it but according to sfani they were blindsided by by the potential profits and didn't listen to their scientific cohort so this is that's that's true so again a couple things I can just add for context there um so that happened in 2008 we published
in 2004 again we did a podcast episode on this that the uh model that Resveratrol activated sir2 or sirt1 the human homog of siru was incorrect I mean we proved that biochemically as did John the newslab so you know that was out there in the scientific literature the folks of gxo had every opportunity to know that in fact I know they knew of that data because people who I know were advising them as they were going through this process it is also true that at least some of the scientists at Glo knew that uh Resveratrol did not activate cerin I know that because I talked to those people I actually went out to visit one of the Glo locations I don't know 2006 20 7 something like that so yeah it is accurate that that this that at least some of the scientists within glaco were saying don't do this it's based on shodi science and I don't have any insight into the decision-making process when they chose to buy cerus other than um to know that some of the people involved in that process were in fact being given advice that they should run away very quickly and they chose not to yeah I just want to add around that time so 2009 I was working at GNC and I was selling a lot of Resurrection yeah popular there for a while the ceru hypothesis was junk and Sinclair made out likeand I ask they conflating here the Resveratrol story with the CTU biology and I think it's important to separate those two things because the Resveratrol activating cerin and increasing lifespan is junk that's been disproven the role of sirtuin in aging biology I think is still an open question his papers get accepted because people that are accepting his papers he accepts their papers yeah right so it's probably worth
stopping here for for a second because I mean I think there is some truth to what he's saying uh and I think a lot of us in the field wondered uh for many years how it is the case that that some of David's papers and some of the other papers on Sirin uh and also on ad keep getting published in high-profile papers when the flaws are obvious to anyone I mean it's like you look at the papers you're like who reviewed this piece of garbage right and I know lots and lots of people who have said that and feel that way and I think there probably is some truth that there is this buddy system where you know I'll give your paper a softball review you give my paper a softball review are the editors in on it I tend to not think so and I know some of these editors and I think you know in general they're trying to do a good job but I don't know for sure and it is a question how it is that some people seem to get a different peerreview process than other people and it's often high-profile people from places like Harvard and MIT um that's that's real and but but I think this idea that they're all in on it is probably uh almost certainly overstated like I think that I don't think it's as arious as that um I think it's corrupt but not necessarily corrupt with the intent to deceive it's more corrupt with the intent to be successful in my career meaning if I get a paper in cell science or nature published that helps me get grants that helps me get promoted and if we help each other get papers published in these top journals then we both win right I don't think it's usually the case that it's I'm trying to get bad data published it's more let's just help each other out but I I don't know but I tend not to think that it's so much the editors that are
driving this although sometimes editors do over overrule reviewers um that's pretty rare do you think a part of the frustration is there's not much money in geroscience when people see it going down the wrong route they want to reallocate it or they wish um no I don't think so I think this is probably true in fact I know it's true in every field there are imbalances in the peer review process I think in geroscience or aging biology because the topic is somewhat Sensational uh it is maybe more inclined to uh abuse for high high-profile Publications because people are interested naturally right people are much more interested the broader community the general public are much more interested in longevity than they are in you know this slight confirmational change for a bacterial protein right so I think the nature of the topic sort of predisposes to Bad decisionmaking by Journal editors because it is true some journals are for-profit journals nature and cell in particular um uh and there is a an incentive to publish papers that are going to get a lot of attention and I will say again you know I I feel like uh among the big three so there cell science and nature in our field maybe not so much anymore but but certainly in the' 90s 200000 to 2010 you know when you look at the big three cell was by far the worst there was just a bunch of garbage aging papers published in cell really really bad stuff nature there were a few including the res veratrol paper uh and then I think science probably had the best quality paper but in all of those cases this is going to be true regardless there's no perfect system there's always going to be mistakes that get through there's going to be misinterpretations that get through the
system that's not going to change but you did see a lot of repeat offenders show up in sell for sure is it same today or better now I think I I think it's gotten a little bit better but in part the field has expanded so there aren't so many big dominant names in the field anymore that are able to do that sort of repeat offense model like so many things in society people with power and influence are able to get their way almost irrespective of what is right or even just I've pointed out how this same old boy network has allowed scientists like Andrew huberman and Peter AA to use their positions to alter the scientific publication process so wait a minute hold on so okay okay Scott why don't you show us the publication records of Andrew huberman and Peter AA and we'll see how much they've actually dominated the literature yeah I mean come on it's an MD they yeah I don't even know if Peter's published in the scientific literature so yeah he helps raise funds I know like dog aging project or whatnot that's different yeah come on you can do better than that so I again I don't think bashing this the scientific process sort of broadly speaking based on a bitter scientist is necessarily the the best approach here and making sort of broad unjustified claims okay I wanted to add so in the podcast Community there's a bunch of comedy podcasts La New York they all have different scenes and there's these channels that have hundreds of thousands of subscribers and millions of views all they do is they like criticize and poke fun and it's becoming a market of like you have these big podcasts like huberman and Tia you can have these sub channels that are growing just by pulling out and so this feels like the scientific version or the journalist version of that thing that's happening in the comedy world I don't know yeah I mean again I mean I think he's trying to be an investigative journalist but there's a lot of sensationalism here and
a lot of statements at least so far that just aren't accurate uh or are over the top right and sort of you know bundling a bunch of stuff under a larger umbrella and making inaccurate statements on that larger um umbrella sure there's corruption for sure and you know um I'm sure you can find things to criticize David Sinclair and Andrew huberman and Peter AA about um but this idea that they're all part of this old boys network that's that's contaminating the scientific literature is just yeah not true I want to give a little bit compliment sandwich too because I do subscribe to Scott and there he has sort of opened my eyes to some other things so I think there's a need for people like him but it's just sort of filtering out when I guess and and I agree I guess the question would be the things he's opened your eyes to are they real or not like how do you know right because if you don't have my background you might not know what I just said very true and according to scani and brener Sinclair was able to influence the publication process for his own personal profit let St there to the two so that may be true this last statement Sinclair was able to influence the publication process for his own personal profit I would be interested to know whether Charlie or scani actually have any data to back that up because that's a pretty serious accusation show us the data right it might be true and I think it probably is but I'm not going to walk around making that accusation unless I can actually back it up yeah uh the other thing I would say is yes um scientists are human beings and scientists are motivated by the same kinds of motivations that influence every other human being in the world right money's one of them it's certainly not the only one uh you know uh uh recognition being
respected being successful in your career taking care of your family all of that stuff comes into play and so I don't think scientists are are intrinsically any better or any worse than anyone else they're operating in a system where the incentives are misaligned and I think there are real problems with the scientific publication process um it's not primarily money really and this is probably a separate issue but it's also not new like he implies like oh now that we have podcasters on YouTube you know things are suddenly worse this look I dealt with this and trying to clean up the literature you know when I was a postdoc when I couldn't reproduce results that were important for my research this has been happening for decades I don't think there's a lot new I think the landscape has maybe changed a little bit the funding has become a little bit more competitive but um but it's not as if you know there's corruption run rampant the vast majority of scientists are trying to do good science are trying to get the right answers some of them haven't been trained to the highest standards there's actually in my experience being in this world for you know 20 plus years doing research running a research lab uh blatant dishonesty is pretty rare uh mistakes get made and misinterpretations happen a lot again because I think a lot of scientists are not trained well in critical thinking or the scientific method but I think intent by and large among scientists is pretty good and this idea that you know science is hugely corrupt I think is just and and it's unfortunate when people who don't really know what they're talking about imply that you think it's probably less rare in YouTube scientists than it is in lapt I don't think there are that many YouTube scientists how many YouTube how many people on YouTube are legit doing research actively yeah not many I mean the big names
any yeah you mean that they still have a lab or like they're yeah they're they're actively publishing research papers running a lab getting grants doing the scientific Enterprise I don't know I know one of his complaints is that certain people I'm use hubman as an example go from he calls it petri dish to protocol so they he'll find he'll cherry pick one study that says whatever something about light and then he'll say here's a protocol I want my audience to do yeah no that's a different thing though that's not publishing misinterpretation or bad data in the scientific literature that's doing science on YouTube right okay which is very different and again I think there are problems there too that's not the scientific process that's the though that is a different problem Harvard takes a cut of any IP that their professors take to Market even if that IP is ultimately based on a lie so while Sinclair profited the most from his grift the institution had every incentive to keep it going it's a similar phenomenon that we see where top influencers all go on each other's podcasts and promote whatever junk idea the other is promoting long as everyone is planing how are those equivalent I don't get it Harvard not firing David being equivalent to podcasters going on each other's podcast what's that doesn't make any sense so I do think this question of you know why hasn't Harvard taken action is legitimate I think again many people in the field the scientists in the field have wondered this for a long time um I suppose profit maybe part of it although I'm doubtful given the just the absolute magnitude of dollars here you think about the the total value of the Harvard endowment and the you know 0. 1% that they might be getting from patents that that David has filed through Harvard I
just doubt those dollars add up to the point where it's a significant incentive for Harvard I suspect it's much more related to um the challenges that go along on with disciplining faculty at these institutions um and that's more built into the faculty structure and honestly you know universities are mostly about um covering their own butts right 90% of what universities do with respect to their faculty is really avoiding any uh uh opportunity where they can get in trouble right so they they you know take all sorts of steps to be able to disavow or distance themselves when things go wrong and so part of that is a hesitancy to take disciplinary action against faculty members because the faculty members can come back and and sue them basically and often win just because of the structures that are in place so I don't know maybe maybe profit is part of it but I also suspect it has something to do with just it's too much of a headache to try to go through that process so I would guess they're trying behind the scenes say hey come on knock it off for a little while let things settle down let's just you know not not you know raise any any uh attention for for a little bit I I honestly don't know I haven't been obviously involved in in any of that but just my experiences at University of Washington and other places makes me believe it probably isn't so much about the money was the comparison he was trying to make is that both Harvard and the YouTube Science World are both old boy networks maybe not necessarily connected but we talked about the same how can the YouTube science Network being an old boy now well like we've talked about how like the same 10 people do each other's podcast without naming names you see them they help each other share an audience and you haven't really been a part of that I don't really see the equivalency though with with Harvard not taking action against the faculty member like I don't it does not maybe I'm just not seeing it I don't I
don't I don't get it I'm just trying to think about where where he was coming from so I'm not sure I believe there's really an old boy Network the way he's uh talking about it at least in terms of Harvard in terms of the sort of uh academic science community in the field okay and he's doing this entire Playbook again with a different molecule called NN he hyped NN up on the Joe Rogan podcast and lots of people started taking it he's claiming that he's cured Vision in mice he's claiming that he has a company that is curing Vision hold on let's stop for a second completely different project the vision project is using uh epigenetic reprogramming nothing to do with nmn he's claiming that he's reversed um functional Aging in mice and none of these um you know claims are sound in the experimental literature evidence aside can you guess what happened next in a matter of weeks domestic and foreign supplement companies opened up a new market for nmn powders and pills based on Sinclair's endorsement alone so largely it's a totally fake space where people are just basically surfing on the David Sinclair aura that you don't have to age and that is going to I mean again anybody who's watched watching the podcast or what seen our other episodes knows I am not a proponent of nmn but to say that it's a totally fake space again is just not true there is a body of literature using nmn just like there is with NR imperfect literature several things that haven't been reproducible but some things that look pretty solid suggesting that treatment with nmn can have impacts on certain disease conditions in mice
potentially some impacts on in humans so again to say that it's all just you know there's nothing there is at inaccurate in my view as claiming that nmn reverses aging it's the the data is somewhere in the middle and you know where you fall in terms of how much you believe that nmn is likely to ultimately have an impact on healthspan or lifespan I think it's legitimate to there's a gray area there but it's not it's neither extreme and so again I I kind of feel like I guess so far I guess we're getting towards the end my view of this video is while the underlying problems and concerns are absolutely valid this is mostly like just people saying stuff without a lot of specific facts to back it up there's plenty of facts like you could make a very factual case against Davidson CLA if you wanted to this to me has not been compelling so far just a lot of is coming from emotion like you mentioned earlier maybe or yeah I guess I mean maybe it's just that I'm thinking about this more from like if this was a court case right you'd want to actually be able to lead people in a logical way here's this specific example and the data to back it up this is mostly just like people's opinions and overstatements to me that's what it feels like is that court case something you feel like you'd ever want to do or no I feel like there's there's demand I mean I already did it in the scientific literature we already did it I see with r veratrol at least yeah true so I sort of feel like you know given that that was largely ignored for several years until people realized oh yeah these guys were right like I've got like I said I've got other things that I'd rather spend my time doing than cleaning up other people's messes yeah you're busy outside of the podcast you do a lot of other stuff so I don't think some people don't realize that but well it got super
weird when Sinclair used his relationship with the FDA to effectively Corner the nmn market he created by going on Rogan now this led the to issue a letter that effectively made that supplemental NM that all his competitors were selling illegal so again I think this is this this is true so I'm interested though that he said that David used his relationship with the FDA like what relationship yeah where is the evidence to support that I mean it makes it implies that there's like this you know backroom kind of stuff going on uh I haven't heard that again maybe it's true but I never heard that before yeah and if he can't prove these things wouldn't that make him you know liable for defamation I mean again this is sort of stated in a way that you know he's covering relationship with the FDA like what do I really mean by that but it does imply that there was this corrupt process uh when my understanding of the situation is that this is really more of a bureaucratic uh structural thing and and this is the way Charlie sort of described it as well where because metrobiotech that's the company uh had gotten this patent and started the human clinical trials first under current uh FDA guidelines they are able to have nmn classified as a drug rather than a generally recognized as safe natural product which can be marketed over the counter so I think it I mean I think it's it's completely non-scientific there is no reason why nmn should be classified as a drug when NAD NR nicotinamide nasin or not um but given the current FDA guidelines it's my understanding that this in fact was the correct legal decision for FDA to make I'm not even 100% positive that it's a
law like this is where it's a little bit gray and I've tried to look into this but you know there are companies still selling nmn technically they're not supposed to by FDA guidelines which is why Amazon and Google won't show you those results um but is it against the law not completely clear to me I I tend to think it probably isn't it's against the guidelines so again but that's a different issue but the way it was framed here I I think is designed to lead people to believe something that as far as I know there's no evidence to support that that David had this sort of you know back Channel relationship with FDA that caused them to make this decision in favor of his company is it possible sure but I don't think there's any evidence to support it at least none that I know of yeah technically speaking only David Sinclair can sell Ann in America right now even though well again actually it's Metro biotech not David right so yes he's a co-founder of the company um so I guess that maybe that's a reasonable way to frame it I I wouldn't frame it that way though okay the FDA issued some provisional rulings on the matter and the entire Market at the moment well it's in limbo until they come up with a final ruling on whether the natural chemical in food is a drug or not okay so that answers the question about whether it is currently a law or a guideline it sounds like it's a preliminary decision the claims are so obviously insane it's hard for me to even find the words so once again I'll just use his here's another Ted Talk where he's talking about growing many brains that are conscious to test how nmn makes them younger these are human plur poent stem cells that are being engineed into little mini brains on the left of this image you can see these are little organoids these are
quite similar to human brains they have electrical activity and on the right is the electrodes that we put the brains on we can measure that we think they dream they have thoughts it's alive and we can also age them using our technology of disrupting EP genome and now we've shown that if you reset the age of those little brains they get their ability to think again the electrical activity comes back it's outrageous it really is outrageous I mean think what does he mean by is a philosopher now right it's not really science anymore now he's a philosopher they're thinking really come on thinking I can't even express yeah I mean I kind of agree with that it's it's over the toop ridiculous although you know this is part of the I mean this is part of the frustration right is David's a brilliant guy he's a brilliant scientist uh and yet he repeatedly crosses that line into dishonesty or in a case like this into just complete nonsense do youan I don't know what what causes that motivation but it's very disapp point this is speculation on your end but do you think he believes that they think or is it more interesting no he's a smart guy yeah no interesting the Longevity Institute that Sinclair founded was called The Academy for health and lifespan research and it started to fall apart one of its members Matt cabine posted on Twitter that Sinclair was a snake oil salesman and within a matter of days Sinclair was forced to step down scads of newspaper articles including in the Wall Street Journal as well as my fellow Health misinformation Fighters here on YouTube took apart Sinclair's evidence so I mean this is probably I should probably comment on this since I was the precipitating event here I I mean again I think um this is all accurate right uh that I uh resigned from the academy uh
publicly um uh and it led to eventually um David being asked to resign and and doing that as president of the academy um obviously this wasn't the first time you know as I've said we published back in 2006 that um uh Resveratrol doesn't activate uh sir two and that ran contradictory to David's results published several papers since then basically stating that we were unable to reduce aspects of what David published been public many times saying that um I'm not quite sure why on this occasion like it is hardly the case that this is the first time I have publicly stood up and said this is not true right when it comes to things that that David has said or published I'm not completely sure why this time it had the effect that it did um I think it's a good thing it wasn't my it really was not my intention to have this blow up into a big as big of a deal as it did um honestly I mean the honest truth is is what caused me to do this publicly was the fact that he said that he had uh something that reversed Aging in dogs which was completely untrue based on the paper the pre-print not even a paper that was published there was no data in there to support that it did anything really beneficial for dogs at all and the fact that it's dogs it just pissed me off and I'm like you know what I'm done I'm I'm done being part of this organization that David's the president of when we have somebody out there buying and selling snake oil So Not only was it selling a product for which there is no real evidence of benefit it was lying about it taking advantage of pet owners and there's another preprint suggesting that the the product may actually cause kidney damage at least in aged mice so it was all of those things together that just really upset me and
I'm like you know what I just don't want to be involved with this organization anymore um but you know on the surface every single scientist in the field knew that it was a lie the statement in the press release that you know this is the first product shown to reverse aging in dogs every single scientist in the field knew that was a lie it still pisses me off that I was the only one to say anything and that really I think is the bigger issue here like when it has when that sort of behavior has gotten normalized to the point where nobody even blinks that's a real problem for the longevity scientific Community um and so that to me I think is something that still hasn't really been resolved as far as I know David is still a member of the academy so and that company is still selling this product so the scientists in the community are continuing to allow this sort of behavior to happen unchecked and um I think that's a bad thing for for the scientific community and I think it does contribute to videos like this like if if the scientists were being responsible we wouldn't need Scott Carney to be doing these kinds of videos on misbehavior by scientists right which makes everyone look bad so there is some truth to that yeah well I respect that it's funny it's like people humans wasting their money like you're pissed messing with dogs it's like yeah I know right not too far yeah you can tell where my priorities are throughout every age people have come up with the idea that it's possible to achieve immortality or at least some semblance of it with the right magic pill or protocol and while certainly humans are living longer and better now than ever before there never has been and likely never will be a Magic Bullet From reaching for stop stop okay again this is as nobody's talking about immortality
here Scott okay I think need to get informed on the biology of Aging before you make statements like that because there are good reasons to think that there are real advances being made again this is the sort of point I was just making that misbehavior by high-profile people in the field damages The credibility of the field and allows people like Scott Carney to make to kind of lump the whole field together Under the Umbrella of snake oil and and bad behavior there are very good reasons to think that there are Therapeutics close to being available maybe already available that can have a significant impact on health span and potentially lifespan in dogs and people um that's going to happen and nobody's talking about immortality but to suggest that that's not going to happen is just it's just you know it's wrong and it reflects a complete ignorance of where the science actually is yeah I could tell he's an author like he writes books as you can see with this video he tried to create the sort of conclusion and sort of opening like like a theme uh with that said Scott I'd love to see you on the podcast you're welcome welcome to anytime we can have a conversation and and Hammer it all out yep and again I think what I told Scott in the email was that I appreciate the need for this kind of work when I said I didn't want to be part of it um uh but I would like to see it as as I've sort of already said my preference would be to see it done in a way that makes a much more factual case than this sort of emotion driven conspiracy theory stuff you think this gets more views though as a part of it probably but again you know I I guess if your goal is to get clicks you do it one way if your goal is to be credible you do it a different way closing thoughts I wanted I I mean I think I've sort of already said it but but again I think so there's a lot of Truth to the story right that
that he's trying to tell again I would find it much more compelling if it was more factual and backed up by by solid data than based on opinions and you know insinuation and it feels like there was way too much opinion and insinuation which again you know I obviously tend to be a fairly critical thinker and so so those things to me make me less likely to believe the overall story when you know when it's not when there aren't those those facts given in a very detailed way maybe this is more effective and again I think if one of the goals is to raise attention to uh individuals who are potentially Bad actors maybe this achieves that goal but I worry that this kind of an approach that again is not not really based on facts and is based much more on storytelling um can be misused against people who are really good actors like I this guy could probably come up with a fairly well produced video targeting me right and look folks I got far as I know no skeletons in my closet like I'm pretty open book um but you can make it into a story that sounds you know as if there is this hidden corruption and you know sedy sort of behavior without any real facts and that's my concern is that you know that I didn't really feel like the details were nailed down I wish what I could see is like an alternate timeline if you did do one of these Zoom calls with him and gave your advice like how would this video have looked would you have sort of added that rigor would it would or would my statements have been taken out of context like I don't know yeah I don't way of knowing so the other thing too is I don't know if we want we did invite David on the podcast months ago yeah so I I feel like when we're talking about
someone I want the audience to know that and he politely you know declined which is great but that this isn't just like a one-way sort of thing that we have I would love to sit down with David and and Hammer some of this stuff out I don't think he will um because I don't think my guess is he's not prepared to be for that level of honesty yeah right to actually sit down and have an honest conversation about some of this stuff it's easier in front of someone like Rogan who can't push back and who has a giant platform and that's not the point of that conversation right exactly yeah and so lastly Ian we do have the tredition of looking at the comments so let's dive in um once again the secret to longevity is your credit card number the bigger question why are places like Stanford and Harvard legitimizing people like yeah I mean I actually think that's a legitimate question I don't want to talk about hberman um uh but uh I mean I do think it's a legitimate question when there is pretty clear misbehavior again I think you know in the case of David and some other people often times you will hear it the the sort of misbehavior be characterized as oh it's just an exaggeration right and there is this gray area of when does it cross that line and but to my mind you know selling something and claiming that it reverses Aging in people's dogs like that's pretty black and white yeah when there's no data to support that no evidence at all and I think you do have to ask why would a prestigious institution like Harvard not take action and again I don't think it's about the money I I don't know for sure but I don't think the money is enough I think there are probably other reasons but it is a legitimate reason like I'm guessing Harvard has a faculty code and I'm guessing lying about your research uh is against that faculty code yeah why don't they do something about it legit question yeah I don't know all right so forget Davis and Clara Peter Tia so on I want Jane Goodall's longevity protocol I think about that
like like Betty White and the queen these people who you know lived a long time and never took a single well yeah sure I mean again there's lots of reasons why some individuals live longer and maintain function and other individuals don't so a lot of its lifestyle obviously some of its genetics uh some of it is um you know the the attitude with which you approach life I think plays a big role but all of those people are undergoing biological aging all of them eventually go through functional declines get diseases of aging and die right so I don't think that it's mutually exclusive to Aspire to achieve a healthy longevity similar to some of those people and also aspire to understand the mechanisms of biological aging so we can do even better right yeah I do a couple more so stop listening to Sinclair when he blocked Dr Stanfield um an honest person doesn't block he engages and explains and the last one I saw which I liked was uh the two best things you could do to improve your health and extend your life is to stop consuming processed foods and get regular vigorous exercise both are free well Foods aren't free anyway uh your body does not suffer from uh deficiency of Pills and Potions kind like that last sentence a little bit of I mean again I think that that is uh accurate to some extent right again we know lifestyle factors are the uh most effective levers we have to pull right now so yes eating a healthy diet which largely of reducing highly processed foods although not exclusively uh reducing alcohol consumption exercising regularly getting good sleep reducing stress focusing on human connection uh having a fulfilled life yes all of those things are important to maximizing Health span and presumably maximizing longevity again that's not mutually exclusive with the idea that there are pills and supplements that could
additive or potentially make up for deficiencies in those areas I think the problem is we don't have the science and we don't have enough data around the pills and supplements yet to know which ones we can be confident in um which ones are likely to be effective which ones are snake oil right so I think that's just the nature of kind of where we're at in the maturation of this field the last thing I will say again because I think you can't say it too much the reason why lifestyle factors improve health span and reduce your risk of of every age related disease is because they modulate the biology of Aging that's why lifestyle works and that's important for people to understand all we're saying all I'm saying is the better we can understand that biology of Aging the more opportunities we have to move the needle in a positive direction perhaps through additional lifestyle modifications perhaps through supplements and drugs perhaps through other types of interventions yep I think there's a place for for both like I talked to been over at Aura all the time so over here like I live more in the exercise realm nutrition the pillars we talk about and over there they're doing research on different molecules and we talk to each other we both are sort of learning and I think we need both types of people right and I think um you know there is this this there are a group of people who sort of naturally push back against the idea that that a pill can make up for having a bad lifestyle that's true right now uh is it theoretically impossible that we we someday you know won't have a a pill that gives you the benefits of exercise without exercise I mean it's theoretically possible that could happen so I don't see any reason to think that's impossible but yeah for right now we don't have that we are starting to get drugs that can help with lifestyle like again I think we can point to the gp1 agonists which basically induce caloric restriction that's basically mostly what they're doing through rtiz they cause people to eat less um that is a pill that can help when when used
properly with some of the lifestyle challenges that many people experience are there downsides to gp1 agonists yeah if you don't do resistance training at the same time you will likely lose lean mass at the same time you're losing fat Mass that's going to be true of caloric restriction if you could just stop eating as much you're also going to lose lean mass if you aren't doing something to maintain the lean mass so I think we're starting to see cases where pills potentially supplements can Aid in uh optimizing your lifestyle and maybe someday we'll get pills and or supplements that can substitute for lifestyle as far as I know we don't have that right now one of these days we'll do a video about what we take yes we we'll get on that all right man well that was entertaining and learned a lot I hope people enjoy this this format again we'll see if it ever airs I'm I'm still of a mixed mixed mind about it but um but uh uh yeah assuming you're watching this then that means we decided to uh to go with it and hopefully you enjoyed it as always let us know uh in the comments below if you're not yet a subscriber you should hit that subscribe button I'm guessing by the time this airs we be over 10, 000 which is a a nice uh milestone for us obviously as you can tell we're trying hard not to put stuff out as clickbait and to do this the right way so again please give us your feedback um and we hope to see you next time on the optisan podcast
Transcript auto-generated by YouTube. Verbatim — duplicates intentionally preserved.
A pathway can be fascinating without being clinically settled. Genes, proteins, epigenetic clocks, and animal studies can suggest where to look. They do not automatically tell a human being what to take, buy, or believe.
The most useful longevity practices remain grounded: strength, cardiorespiratory fitness, sleep, nutrition, metabolic health, connection, and prevention. These are not fashionable because they are familiar. They endure because the evidence keeps returning to them.
Science moves through disagreement, replication, correction, and restraint. When public claims become too polished, skepticism protects the field. A mature longevity practice keeps curiosity alive while asking for better proof.
In longevity, the most confident voice is not always the most useful one. Evidence should set the pace.
Separate mechanisms from proven outcomes before changing your health practice.
Prioritize durable basics before experimental interventions.
Use skepticism as a form of respect for your future self.
