The Genius Life
541: Can a Pill Help You Live Longer? The Science Behind NAD and Longevity | Robert Fried
12 Jan 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
What up, everybody? It's episode 541 of The Genius Life. Let's go. The Genius Life. What's going on, everybody? Welcome back to The Genius Life. I'm your host, Max Lugavere, where we try to live a little smarter, longer, and ideally without having to mainline wellness trends like it's a competitive sport.
Today's episode is all about NAD, a tiny molecule that sits at the center of cellular energy, mitochondrial function, and DNA repair, and the supplement that's become one of the biggest players in the NAD conversation, NR, or nicotinamide riboside. My guest is Robert Freed, CEO of TruNiagen, and his path to get here is wild.
Hollywood studio executive and film producer turned longevity science CEO. We break down what NAD actually does, why levels tend to decline with age and metabolic stress, and what the research suggests about boosting NAD to support healthspan.
Now, quick note on transparency, TrueNiagen did sponsor this episode, but as always, sponsors have zero input on the questions that I ask or where the conversation goes.
On this episode, you'll hear us get into the real science, the uncertainty, and even the hype, especially around NAD IV drips, why taking NAD itself may not make sense, and why precursors like NR are likely the more rational route if your goal is to raise NAD inside cells. If you're curious to try out TrueNiagen for yourself, head to trueniagen.com, that's spelled
T-R-U-N-I-A-G-E-N.com and use code genius20 to get 20% off of your purchase. Listen all the way through to the end. You're not going to want to miss a beat. And as always, don't forget to share this episode with friends and loved ones that you think may benefit from it.
And if you enjoyed it, please leave a rating and review on your podcast app of choice and make sure that you're subscribed here and on YouTube. With all that out of the way, let's get into it. It's episode 541. Let's go. Rob, welcome to the show. How you doing? Nice to be here.
Doing great. You won an Oscar. You have run a movie studio. You have this incredible career in Hollywood. And you've since pivoted, despite all of your many successes, to running one of the preeminent science platforms in the world regarding NAD. So I want to learn more about that pivot. I want to learn about all things NAD.
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Chapter 2: What is NAD and why is it important for cellular health?
And I want to learn about NR, nicotinamide riboside. So let's just start high level. Do you see, well, what is NAD and what are its implications in terms of health and disease? NAD is very exciting. It stands for nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide. It's a coenzyme that's found in all living cells, plant and animal, and is vital to all key metabolic processes within that cell.
We make energy inside the cell. It's not made outside the cell. There are these organelles called mitochondria, which take oxygen from air that we breathe and nutrients from food that we eat, and they put it through something that we've called the Krebs cycle. And the yield of that process is something called ATP, these molecules that are filled with energy that transfer throughout the cell.
NAD is at every step along the way in that conversion process of taking oxygen and nutrients and converting it into ATP. We have studies that show that when you elevate NAD with NR, you not only have an increase in mitochondrial biogenesis, you have more mitochondria, but you have a higher yield per mitochondria. It actually creates actual energy without creating more calories. Wow.
I mean, that's incredible. We've done a number of shows, episodes on the importance of mitochondrial health and conversely, the conditions associated with mitochondrial dysfunction. And so this is a really interesting sort of piece of that to that puzzle. Yeah. And NAD even goes beyond mitochondrial health. There are mechanisms in place within the cell for healing when there is damage.
There are these enzymes called PARP enzymes where there's a gene mutation or there's some physical damage or there's oxidative stress or inflammation. One group of PARP enzymes will flag it and another group of PARP enzymes will try to heal it or cure it. And then even another group, if the cell is irreparable, will actually do something called apoptosis, kill the cell.
All those processes are related to NAD. So when you have a high saturation level of NAD, they do those things very well.
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Chapter 3: How does NAD decline with age and metabolic stress?
So it makes sense that as a prophylactic for disease or other types of conditions, higher NAD levels are important. And what is the relationship between NAD and aging? Great question. I've heard people say NAD is aging. The levels of NAD that we have decline fairly rapidly, even beginning in your 20s.
But what we've seen is that when a cell is under metabolic stress of any type, that's when NAD levels go down. Interestingly, there are these whole sets of orphan diseases, meaning rare diseases, where kids age very, very rapidly. There's several of them. We've studied all of them. Progeria, is that one of them? That's an example of one. Cocaine syndrome is another example of an ataxia.
Where these kids age very rapidly, and some of them, they actually die of old age at the age of 12 or 13. What we've seen in some of these conditions is non-detectable levels of NAD. Wow. So the relationship between NAD and the way the body ages is quite direct. And what is aging?
Chapter 4: What role do NAD precursors like NR play in healthspan?
Aging is the accumulation of damage at the molecular level, that's all it is, but the diminished ability to repair that damage. Right, so by elevating NAD, you're improving the cell's ability to not only create energy, but also to heal itself. So you have less damage. Now, how much research is there elucidating the causal role of NAD in all this?
Because, I mean, it's one thing to decline in a way that's
associated with aging right but is the decline in nad have we determined whether or not the decline in nad is causally related to the dysfunction that we see related to aging that's a very good question and specifically relating to those orphan diseases we don't know if the non-detectable levels of nad is because that caused the disease or if it's just correlational because
the cells trying to cure some sort of DNA damage and consumes all the NAD in an effort to do that. We don't know the answer to that question, if it's causal or correlational. But we do know that by elevating NAD levels, the cell performs better. That sounds auspicious.
Right.
Yeah. I mean, so how would you stack it? You know, there's a lot of talk of telomeres, for example, as like one of the biomarkers of aging. It's like the, you know, shoelace caps at the end of your chromosomes is how they're colloquially thought of as. How would you kind of, where would you place NAD in terms of its reliability as an aging biomarker?
The telomere research is really fascinating and quite interesting. There again, we have seen obviously a correlation between the length of the telomere and age. But we haven't, there's an example of elongating telomeres, we haven't been able to do that and prevent aging or reverse aging. However, it's a very specific biomarker.
The thing about NAD is it sort of varies over time even during the day and even organ to organ. Most people are measuring their blood NAD levels these days. Blood NAD levels isn't really a great indicator of how high your NAD levels are. Where you have a damaged cell is where you're likely to have a diminished NAD level. It's very difficult to do that in a kidney. You'd have to get a biopsy.
Right. There are ways to measure NAD in a brain with an MRI without actually non-invasively. But we don't really have good, consistent, easy ways to measure NAD levels in the tissue. And it varies. It's almost like cholesterol. In the course of the day, it could go up, it could go down. If you're feeling stressed, it's clearly going to go down because it's consuming the NAD.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of NAD for mitochondrial health?
within the cell. And actually, the Nobel Prize winner who discovered that is the father of one of our current scientific advisors, Roger Kornberg. It was Arthur Kornberg. Roger also was a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry at Stanford. And then in 2003, Charles Brenner, who you've had on twice, had this incredible discovery that nicotinamide riboside, which is found in trace amounts in milk,
not only more efficiently elevates NAD levels in the cell than anything else we've seen, more than niacin, more than anything else, and not only extremely safely, but it does something else fairly remarkable, which is when a cell is under specific metabolic stress, it opens up a pathway that he named the NR kinase pathway, calling out for whatever trace amounts of NR are floating through the bloodstream.
So NR is amazing in that it not only safely and efficiently elevates NAD, but it specifically does it in the cells that are the most damaged. Wow, interesting. Right. So people say to me all the time, what can I expect if I start taking TruNiagen? And my answer is, what's broken? What worked better 10 years ago? Could it be your elbow pain? Could it be recovery from workouts?
Could it be your sleep level retrieval, cognition, something like this? It could be an actual disease that you're trying to manage. But this is where to look. Often people say the number one reason people stop taking it is because they take it for two weeks. They say, I didn't feel anything. Well, A lot of people say they do feel much more energized. That's very, very common.
But we don't like people to think in terms of feel because there are other things that will affect the way you feel like hormone levels or stimulants like caffeine or how much you slept. Better is to try to take a scientific approach before you start taking what worked better once and try to quantify it. Try to create a metric around it and then take it for two or three months.
and then measure it. Is it your recovery rate on your workouts? Is your levels of your workouts? or your sleep levels, that's where the most damaged cells are. And that's where you're most likely to see the benefit if you are patient and you give it time. And how much time do you think it might take to start to see an improvement?
In my experience, the diligence that I personally did behind the company was I started taking it for several months before I made the decision to make an investment and even go on the board. I had a knee from a skiing accident that I had been living with for 10 years, and the knee pain was fairly severe, and I favored the other leg every time I went up the steps.
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Chapter 6: What does the future hold for NAD research and applications?
The other thing is I had reached the point in my life where I wasn't sleeping through the night. Like every night I was getting up in the middle of the night, and I thought, well, that's getting old. Both of those dramatically improved after three months. Both of those. In fact, today I don't even remember which was the knee that hurt. That's a dramatic reduction of inflammation. Did it help?
Was it a meniscus tear? I don't even know what the actual diagnosis was. But it ain't there now. And I still, now I've been taking this for 10 years, I still sleep great. Whereas I went for a number of years where I just would, I couldn't sleep through the night. So that indicated to me that those two issues that were broken at the time improved.
And that convinced me from my own personal experience.
Chapter 7: What are the potential risks of NAD supplementation?
And that's how I then got more deeply involved in the enterprise. What dose are you taking? I take a thousand milligrams every day. But as you and I were talking before, I just, for example, last week I had to go to Madrid for two days and then Sydney for two days and then return. That's a lot of time zone changes. That's a lot of flying.
So I started taking two grams a day and I got four actual injections. Injections of NR or injections of, because I know that they're offering that now in certain places, like pure NAD, straight mainlined. Don't take pure NAD. Don't? Okay. Do not. No, I get shots of Niagen. Niagen, wow. And I was fine. I mean, literally, the plane landed, and I went to work.
I was on a conference call in an hour, and I feel good. It really does manage. Circadian rhythms are tied to NAD levels, so when you do time zone changes and you fly a lot, it helps. Interesting.
Chapter 8: How does NAD relate to aging and disease prevention?
But also the energy metabolism problem. So I take a gram a day every day, but then I vary it. I up it depending on how I'm feeling or what's going on in my life at that time. Yeah, your allostatic load, your stress load. Exactly. Why would you say it's not smart to take NAD? Because I know it's kind of trendy. I don't know if trendy is the right word, but people are doing it, at least here in LA.
And they always say it makes them feel sick. Every one of them. It makes them feel sick, and they sweat, and they have headaches. Today, there are zero studies, and I spend a lot of time reading studies, so does our team, that we know of that show that taking NAD elevates NAD. NAD is not bioavailable.
It's a very large molecule, and it's a nucleotide, meaning there's a phosphate group on the perimeter of it. It cannot enter cells. You inject it into your bloodstream. It pours through your bloodstream. It tries to get up into the cells, and all you're doing is creating inflammation. It doesn't get in. Whoa. What happens is it breaks down into many smaller molecules. one of which is NR.
That NR will then get up into the cell. So we say, why not just inject yourself with NR? And so it took us several years to get on the approved list of ingredients that could be compounded, and for us to develop pharmaceutical grade NR, because if you're going to inject or do an IV, it has to be pharmaceutical grade. And we've now made that available.
We're in about a thousand clinics across the country. But you have no side effects. These people go into NAD and they sweat, they have stomach pains. If you get a Niagen IV, it ingests in just a few minutes without the side effects and many times higher NAD levels than actual NAD. Niagen is the way to go. It's the better NAD product. So that's what I get. I don't get an NAD.
I know a lot of people go in and get these NAD IV infusions and they go through the punishment. If they just switched to Niagen, they'd change their life. Fascinating. Yeah, I mean, there's no shortage of, you know, quote-unquote biohacking clinics trying to sell you on NAD drips. It's very hot right now. It's very popular. There are articles all over the place about it. These people that are...
You know, it's a larger conversation about the dietary supplement space in general, how you could play, in my opinion, a very vital role in helping to educate consumers. That's an example of misinformation. It's trendy, people are selling it, people make money by selling it, but the science isn't there. The studies don't yet exist for taking NAD.
If you go online, you'll see all these companies selling an NAD supplement. NAD supplements don't elevate NAD. You need a precursor. You need something that's cleanly and safely gets into the cell and converts into NAD. And the same is true with IV and injection. But the industry hasn't evolved to a place where there's a way for consumers to learn that information.
This is why we were excited that you invited us to come on here and try to explain that. It transcends just NAD. It's dietary supplements in general. Oh yeah, we've talked about that quite a bit. The lack of scientific literacy is, more often than not, exploited to sell products these days.
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