Dr. David Agus
speaker
53 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Dr. David Agus’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Your behavior, if you had a virus, if you had COVID-19 and you came home and hugged your kids, you could spread it to them. If you stayed away from them, you didn't. So the notion that the behavior of one affects all is really something that we should have and could have observed in the ants and learned from very strongly.
What was amazing to me of sitting there in Africa on safari, which was a privilege to be there, is that every creature is looking over its shoulder and worried. That lion is worried that somebody will eat its cub. The elephant is worried that its baby will be taken by somebody else. That antelope is worried about the lion. They're all worried about something.
You know, we as humans have basically built ourselves a zoo, right? We live in our house. We have our security system. We've tried to take away that worry, that stress from our life by living in a zoo. And it's a really amazing observation. Never used to be like that. But we've evolved as humans to create our own zoo in a sense. And that's a good thing? It's hard to tell.
When you look at one of the correlates to living long with your brain intact, so slowing cognitive decline, it's getting uncomfortable. Every year you delay retirement, you reduce the incidence of Alzheimer's by 3%. Over several decades, that's an enormous percentage reduction. You don't use it, you lose it. You need to be uncomfortable, but you need to control it. We worry about things.
if your dog you know something happened to it doesn't worry animals don't necessarily carry that worry forward and stress them they worry in the moment but they don't carry it forward like we do we don't have the ability of disconnecting like they do and so our worry can cause stress you're worried all the time Basically, you lose that stress response. Michael Jordan played well in practice.
In the game, he was amazing and very different because he had an adrenaline response that he can respond to. That lion has a basal level of fear, but when something happens, it goes up and they perform. You hear about the people lifting the car off the baby when their adrenaline went up. Well, if you're always stressed at a very high level, you don't have that adrenaline push.
Many of the new devices, the Apple Watch, the Oura Rings and others measure something like heart rate variability, which is actually a surrogate for that. You can measure, do you have that adrenaline response or not? Very important for athletes or anybody who wants to perform.
So talking to some of the experts in those, they talked to me about child rearing. There are three types of gorillas, right? There's one who says to their kid, hey, do whatever you want, fall out of the tree, get beaten up. I'm just going to go about my daily life. Those kids have a relatively short life expectancy. Then there are the parents who don't let the kids get into any fights.
When they start to climb the tree, they pull them down. Those kids are always followers and never leaders. Then there's the kids who the mother looks at them with the corner of their eye, and once they get to a certain level in the tree, they bring them down. They let them start to get in the fight, but when it gets too aggressive, then they intervene.
Those are the kids who know how to deal with conflict, know how to take some risk and become the leaders. So what's amazing is, is that Jane Goodall can look at a pack and identify who will be the next leader by the parenting behaviors.
Yeah, but if you look at the mummies in the Egyptian time, most of them died of cancer or they died of heart disease. And so they're dying of the same things and they died at a much earlier timeframe. We're living longer. We're still dying of heart disease and cancer, but you're right, we portend for longer. But the key is, right? I really think we can stop most disease at an early age.
So all of us can go to our ninth or 10th decade and die of something. Until the 1950s, you could die of, but it was made illegal after that, something called old age. Ever since the mid 1950s, a death certificate needs a cause of death and old age isn't a cause of death anymore. I want to go back to dying of old age, right? You don't want to die at age 50 of pancreatic cancer.
You don't want to have a heart attack at age 53. What you want to do is live till there's general engineering failure until your quality of life at that point starts to go down, which is normally the end of the ninth or 10th decade and live quality until you get there. And I believe you can, if you do the preventive strategies, many of which we can learn from the animal kingdom.
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