PBD Podcast
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Longevity Science, Anti-Aging Hacks & AI Gene Editing | PBD #740
17 Feb 2026
Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
I'm 47 years old. I want to feel 30 by the time I'm done talking to you.
The cells in our body have a biological age and that biological age can be younger if you're leading a really healthy lifestyle or they can be older.
Give me three things you'll say. These are three crazy wild things we may see.
Yeah. So this is where you can basically take this old skin cell and make the cell young. So essentially reversing the aging, but also we can grow organs like that's a new So you can basically take someone who has a disease and completely wipe that disease out. It's really kind of cool.
It is.
It's a tuning up you can get.
Will we get to a point that people will choose what their kids are going to look like? Because that's pretty scary if you can get to that point.
I mean, that's the ethical question.
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Chapter 2: How can we reverse biological aging?
I mean, what does the world look like in 50, 100 years if we're able to do that? We're living in the shortcut era. Serena Williams, she did a GLP-1 commercial. The average woman looks at that and says, if she couldn't do it naturally, why should I try to do it naturally with exercise?
Doing intermittent fasting or counting calories does require effort, whereas taking a pill does not. The pill does it for you. Exercise is the key, and not just any type of exercise. You have to get your heart rate up. You have to move faster. Being sedentary is a disease, and we need to start thinking about it as a disease. At the end of the day, I'm excited about healthier living.
I'm excited about, you know, yeah.
So it's not often I do an interview and I take six pages of notes while the guest is speaking, but that's what happened today with Dr. Rhonda Patrick. Fascinating. We talked about chemotherapy, the effects of it. We talked about GLP-1. She reacted to what Oprah Winfrey said a few weeks ago that being fat is a gene that she has. It's not her fault.
And her reaction to it was very detailed, very thorough. We talked about diet, exercise, what causes 13 different types of cancer that you have control over, which when you're not going through it, you don't think about it, but if you can prevent it, you may as well. Talked about a lot of different things. What's healthier for you, being married with kids, being married or staying single?
Simply, what is healthier for you to do? So the tie between being bilingual and reducing Alzheimer's. Why would being bilingual lower Alzheimer's? Some of the effects of your gut has with inflammation. Just a very fascinating conversation.
It's going to feel like a five, ten minute conversation when you listen to it because by the time you're done listening to Dr. Rhonda Patrick, you're going to be making a few different lifestyle changes that is going to positively impact you probably the same way it's doing it with me. So having said that, enjoy this interview with Dr. Rhonda Patrick.
Did you ever think you would make it? I feel I'm supposed to take sweet victory. I know this life meant for me. Adam, what's your point?
The future looks bright. My handshake is better than anything I ever signed, right here. You are a one-on-one? I think I've ever said this before. You can be pushed out of California. Maybe that's something we'll talk about. Okay, so I got a couple goals today. I'm 47 years old. I want to feel 30 by the time I'm done talking to you, specifically what things I can do to feel 30.
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Chapter 3: What role does exercise play in heart aging?
Candy, kids, cereal. I know we talked about cereal a minute ago. But for the people that don't know you, I've seen you. You've been on Rogan 10 plus times. You've been all over the place. We've been consuming you for many years. My wife, the family, we watch your content with the things you've talked about. Creatine, a bunch of different things that you discuss.
But if the audience doesn't know, if you don't mind taking a minute to introduce yourself, that'd be great.
Well, first of all, thank you, Patrick, for inviting me on the show. It's a pleasure to be here. For those people who are wondering who I am, My name is Rhonda Patrick. I have a PhD in biomedical science. And classically, you know, I trained as a lab scientist doing research in the field of aging, cancer, metabolism, nutrition.
So I've really got a broad range of different types of research I've done over the years. But my true passion is public health and trying to educate people using science and evidence-based science in terms of like what they can do with their lifestyle, their diet to really, as you said, improve the way you age. So, you know, there's our chronological age and number, you're 47, I'm also 47.
But what's different here is that even though we have this chronological age number, depending on how we live our life, the cells in our body have a biological age and that biological age can be younger. if you're leading a really healthy lifestyle, or they can be older, accelerated if you don't lead a healthy lifestyle. So if you're overweight and you smoke, you drink, things like that, right?
So you really want to have a younger biological age relative to your chronological age. And so there are a few things that we can talk about that really do help people get there. But I will say that, so you asked me who I am. So I love public health and I decided to start a podcast about 10 years ago. So
I have a podcast called Found My Fitness where I interview guests that are MDs, PhDs, all about what kind of research they're doing and how it's basically showing how people can live a healthier life by doing a variety of different lifestyle changes and dietary changes to improve the way they age. And I love it because I left science. I left science. I left doing research in the lab.
And the thing that I missed most were the conversations I would have with other scientists because you learn so much. It's so... intellectually stimulating much more than reading a scientific publication.
In fact, that's one of the reasons why I started the podcast is because it was like, well, I learned so much from these little conversations I have in the coffee room or at my cubicle or in some professor's office. And it's like, why not record these conversations for the public so that they can learn? And it's really been great ever since.
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Chapter 4: How does gene therapy relate to aging and health?
So I would say I don't believe that Brian Johnson's 18.
You don't believe he's 18? His biological age is 18.
No, not at all. I do believe that he is healthier because he does a lot of things right. He exercises a lot, which is the number one thing you can do. He eats very clean. He's dialed in a lot of really important metrics in terms of aging healthy, but I think it's a very sensational statement to say that I'm biologically 18 even though I'm 47. I don't think that's accurate at all.
It's attractive to men his age, right? People hear and they're like, wait a minute, I'd like to be 18 again. What does it take for me to be 18 again? Is there anything men can do today to get their body to be that much younger?
So I'll tell you about a study that was done from Dr. Ben Levine. He's probably one of the world's leading experts in exercise physiology. Ben Levine. Ben Levine, Dr. Ben Levine. He's out of UT Southwest in Dallas. He's got a big research lab there. And he did a study on middle-aged adults. So these are adults that are age 55.
years old they had no diagnosable diseases so they didn't have type 2 diabetes or cardiovascular disease but they were sedentary so they were not exercising and i would argue that is a disease being sedentary is a disease but what i'm saying is they didn't have any of these other classical diseases and he took these individuals and asked a question can i put them on a pretty regimented exercise program for two years and reverse the aging of their hearts
Now your heart aging does, you can accelerate it if you are smoking, if you are sedentary, if you eat a lot of added sugar, all these things accelerate the aging of your heart. So as we age, our hearts get stiffer and our hearts shrink. And that really predisposes us to cardiovascular disease, the number one killer in the United States, as well as many other developed countries.
So he took these individuals and put them in two groups. One group was going to get the exercise treatment, and the other group was a sham control, sort of a placebo, and they were doing sort of stretching yoga-ish type of exercises, enough to make them think they were getting the intervention, right?
So the individuals that got the treatment, the exercise treatment, I mean, this is a progressive program. It's two years long. You can't just take someone who's never really exercised and just immediately make them start doing five hours a week of exercise, right? It's too much. So it was a progressive loading.
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Chapter 5: What are the benefits of short bursts of exercise?
You have to have this, you know, more, intent type of exercise. And this kind of goes, I would say along those lines, we have what are called the Vilpa studies, the vigorous intermittent lifestyle, physical activity studies. And these are studies also with accelerometers where people are doing vigorous intensity exercise, but they're not, it's not a structured type of exercise.
So they're not just getting up and doing one minute of body weight squats or, you know, a minute of high knees or jumping jacks, all these things I did this morning, by the way. Um, What time? They're doing – What time did you exit this morning? Right after I woke up. Here? Yeah, here in Fort Lauderdale. So basically they're doing – they're sprinting up the stairs to get to work.
Chapter 6: How does exercise impact cancer mortality rates?
They don't take elevators. They're doing that sort of everyday situation, right? Individuals that do – let's say they do three minutes of that just brief burst of getting their heart rate up, moving, walking really like faster – you know, sprinting up the stairs and they do that three times a day. Okay. So it's a total of nine minutes of vigorous exercise a day.
That's associated with a 40% lower all cause mortality and a 40% lower cancer related mortality. compared to not doing it, and a 50% lower cardiovascular-related mortality. This is phenomenal because it really shows that you don't have to go to the gym and spend an hour at the very least. You can accumulate these short bursts of exercise. They have to be at least a minute long to have an effect.
Three minutes if you're really going for that robust effect. If you're only doing three to four minutes a day, it's still associated with a 30% lower cancer-related mortality. Again, to bring it back to the cancer, there are things that you can do to lower your cancer mortality risk and to lower your cancer incidence as well.
diet obesity obesity accelerates 13 different types of cancer so weight loss is also something that's critical and really does lower your cancer risk okay but let's say there's this scenario where you get cancer and you there's there's a genetic component let's say you just you know the genetic jackpot you unfortunately you got it right you have cancer there are now studies and i had i had um
a researcher on my podcast. It's a new field. It's called exercise oncology. So Dr. Kerry Kernier, he's also from Canada. He's one of the leaders in this field of exercise oncology. And what he does is he does studies with individuals that already have cancer, a lot of prostate cancer.
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Chapter 7: What is the connection between anxiety and exercise?
He looks at also colon cancer and breast cancer. And these individuals that are undergoing perhaps a classical type of standard of care treatment like chemo or radiation or the combination of the two. But he adds on exercise to that therapy. And those individuals, it's dramatic how much they respond to the cancer treatment much, much better where they're killing cancer.
the cancer cells, the tumor is shrinking. They're dramatically improving their cancer survival. So their mortality goes down and their recurrence goes down. So every possible metric is improving if you're adding the exercise onto a classical cancer treatment therapy. So again, I think exercise is that toggle and it's so, so important.
And I know I talked about a lot of things and there's a lot to unpack here.
No, I mean, it's interesting. Again, for you, it goes back to a... a process of something I can't control, right? In a society of living in short term, you know, when you're talking about obesity, all the obesity stuff that we talked about earlier with GLP-1, I can take GLP-1 and be at a body weight that I'm okay with, right? Let's just say I'm 5'6", 135, and I'm a female, 45 years old.
But if I don't exercise, that doesn't prevent me from the risks I have up here. I still have to exercise to prevent obesity. this from happening, 40% lower cancer, 50% lower cardio. If I'm doing three minutes, three intervals of three minutes of hit throughout the day, that's insane to look at how simple that is. Cause we have that time. We can do that.
Totally. You have, you have that time in here and the reverse is also true, Patrick. So, for example, a really good biomarker of whether or not you do cardiovascular exercise is something called cardiorespiratory fitness. It's often measured as VO2 max. Have you heard of this?
Of course.
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Chapter 8: How does spirituality relate to happiness and longevity?
It's maximal oxygen uptake during maximal exercise. All you have to know is that cardiorespiratory fitness is a biomarker of your health and longevity.
So, for example, there have been studies showing that people with a high cardiorespiratory fitness are 80% less likely to die from all cause, you know, early all whatever that is, fill in the blank, cancer, cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, right, than someone with a low cardiorespiratory fitness. But what's even more compelling than that, well, that's not surprising.
We just talked about that. If you're physically active, you're going to be healthy. You're going to lower your risk of, you know, dying early from any of those diseases. What's interesting is that people that have a low cardiorespiratory fitness, that predicted their early mortality the same or even like more than smoking. than type two diabetes, than cardiovascular disease.
So in other words, having a low cardiorespiratory fitness was like having those diseases in terms of early mortality risk. Showing you, and this goes back to what I said earlier, being sedentary is a disease. And when you start thinking about it as a disease, it's a disease. You need to be physically active. And to avoid that disease, you have to get up and move.
And it doesn't have to be an hour in the gym. It can be these short, brief bursts of what are called exercise snacks. Now, this is the more, you know, I would say structured type like I did this morning. You get up and you do, you know, three minutes of body weight squats. You do three minutes of jumping jacks.
You do high knees, something that gets your heart rate up, something that makes it where after you're done, you're breathless. You know, you're sweating. You get sweat on your brow. Like that stuff you can do and make it part of your personal hygiene.
Do you still jump rope?
I do. It's part of my routine.
Every day?
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