Dr. David Agus: How dolphins and elephants could help extend human life

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Subscribe to Trends and Insights now at jll.com slash podcast. Hi, welcome back, everybody. Dr. David Agus joins us now after a brand new book.

It's called The Book of Animal Secrets, Nature's Lessons for a Long and Happy Life. He's also the founding director and CEO of the Ellison Institute of Technology, professor of medicine, engineer at the University of Southern California, longtime CBS contributor, and Howard Stern is one of his biggest fans. David, Dr. Agus, welcome to The Brian Kilmeade Show. Thank you, Brian. Great to be here. Yeah, great to see you. A big fan of yours.

I've never seen someone so conversational on camera, and I feel like I'm in your office every time I see you. And of course, the way you're able to express complex subjects. I know with this book is long delayed because of the whole plagiarism issue. Your co-writer admitted she did take some of the passages.

How did you take action after that came out? Yeah, it was a shock to me, right, in that she admitted that she had taken some of the sentences from the book from other places. I rewrote it that night at my own expense. I pulled all of the books that were going to go in the market, and we re-released it with everything corrected. She had done it for dozens of books, and it certainly says something about the publishing industry in today's world where you can check for these things.

I'm glad it was caught before the book was released, and I'm proud to have the book out. Right, and so you went through that, but you still kept your practice the whole time, right? It sounded like you were out of work. No, I mean, I'm still seeing patients. I'm still doing research.

You know, luckily she admitted to doing all of this, you know, on her own, and I knew nothing about it. And the same is true for many other books with other authors. So, luckily, the bigger focus of my work, which is helping people, is continuing.

Gotcha. So, why did you say to yourself, like, there's clues to our, I guess it's kind of obvious, too, if you do experimental with animals, but there were clues to our existence by studying other animals. That's real premise of this book, correct? Yeah, and listen, it's so freaking cool is that we've been on the earth a million years, humans, so have animals, and we've all adapted to the same conditions.

So, how can we cheat? How can we learn about human health by studying other animals? You know, I was on Africa with our family, which is the coolest trip in the world in Safari, and this elephant walks by, and I go to the, you know, the guy who's taking us and go, listen, they're 50, 60 times bigger than you or I.

They're in the sun all day. Elephants must get lots of cancer, because the more number of cells, the more chance for mutation in cancer, and he looks at me, he goes, no, elephants never get cancer, and all of a sudden, here was a clue. Elephants, even though they have so many cells and all these conditions that could portend to cancer, don't get it. So, we started to study each of these and figure out why, and it really was an amazing lesson to me.

So, a couple of things. Elephants in the wild, I get it. Untouched by man, I understand it, but when we put them in a controlled environment like a zoo, aren't they susceptible to the same chemicals that we're around, that people reportedly say play into some of the health challenges that we all get? So, are you telling me the elephants also don't get cancer in captivity?

Yep. You know, listen, these chemicals, right? Egyptian mummies all died of cancer, and so, obviously, they had different chemicals than we have today, and yet, they still had significant cancer. So, elephants, you and I have a gene called P53. It's called the guardian of the genome. It corrects error in DNA from inflammation. You and I have one copy. Well, every elephant in every continent has 20 copies of this gene.

And why? By the time we hit 20 or 30 as humans, we've had our children. So, actually, knocking us off through evolution gave more food and housing to the next generation. Well, elephant females give birth into their late 60s, and the dominant male protects the herd until the day he dies. So, they couldn't afford to get cancer, and they evolved away.

So, all of a sudden, here's a clue that if we can recapitulate, we could prevent all cancer. So, what did you learn from dogs, being that there's so many different breeds? I mean, I have a great Pyrenees. You might have a bulldog. What do you get from dogs that could help us? Great Pyrenees are pretty cool dogs, and they actually have a long life, which is very impressive.

Right, for a big dog. All dogs, they sleep all day. And so, the reason for that is they don't get deep sleep, REM sleep.

If they did, you'd be able to walk right by them and kill the sheep or whatever they were bred to guard. Your first night in a hotel, Brian, you sleep like a dog. Your brain says, I don't recognize these surroundings. And so, you don't get deep sleep because you're afraid.

It's a mechanism of security. So, when I travel, I'm traveling tonight, I'll bring a pillowcase with me for the pillow. I'll use my phone, my iPhone, as a clock before I go.

So, I have a visual cue, a sensory cue, and a smell cue. So, I can feel more like home, and I get better and more deep sleep when I travel. Do you put that pillow in a bag, or are you one of those people that walk on the plane with the pillow in your arm? No, I put the pillowcase. Oh, pillowcase. All right. And I put it on the pillow at the hotel, and yeah, and I have a little travel pillow I bring sometimes. But no, I don't bring it on the plane.

I put it in my little suitcase. All right. I have seen that. We've all seen that, by the way. I'm not one of them, I promise you.

All right. So, before I go into other examples, because all this is fascinating, how do you realize this is something we can learn from? For example, people always say, oh, they use mice because they have similar makeups to humans. That's why people always try these different vaccines and medicines and studies on mice.

What made you decide where to dig in and where to say, well, this is not going to help us? You know, the way the book work is I went to the world's expert in each of these creatures. I sat with Jane Goodall and talked about big apes, and she told me about their parenting and the diet and what we can learn about human parenting. You know, it turns out they're the three types of parents in the ape world, and I met with all the experts. But what's interesting is that they're the parents who said, let the kid do whatever they want. They climb a tree, they fall, they break their arm. Those kids die at a very early age because they took too much risk. They're the parents who never let a kid climb a tree at all, and those kids are always followers and never leaders. And then the parents who, out of the corner of their eye, follows the tree, the kid. And once they get a little bit too high, they go and they rescue that kid.

And they basically let them fall a couple of times, skin their knees a bunch of times, and those are the kids that become leaders. An amazing lesson for us on parents. I met the world's leader on ants, on giraffes, on all of these animals, and I say, here are the hallmarks of Alzheimer's, cancer, heart disease, and longevity.

What can I learn from your system? So where do you go for Alzheimer's advances or insights? So it turns out dolphins are one of the few creatures on earth that get something very similar to human Alzheimer's. And so what can we learn from dolphins for humans? Well, one of the things is that when dolphins are part of a pack, even if the brain looks like it's Alzheimer's, they're asymptomatic, and they live very well. But once they become loners, not social, the incidence of Alzheimer's goes up significantly. And the same is true in humans, and we really have to focus on that. Being social connections is important and why we are human and critically important to prevent disease. You know, people with a large social network, it's one of the things that portend for longevity. You know, if you look at the largest study ever done on Alzheimer's, it was every year you delay retirement, you reduce the incidence of Alzheimer's by three and a half to four percent. Really?

Wow. And so it doesn't mean you have to do your primary job. You don't have to still host a show. But what you do is you keep your brain active. You don't use it, you lose it. Instinctively, I think that's correct. How do you know if a dolphin has Alzheimer's? You start to see it do erratic behavior, and it's not doing the behavior searching for food and others, and it starts to get very skinny. And then on autopsies, it's got some of the changes in the brain that the human brain has on Alzheimer's.

Understood. A couple more examples. You say a rhinos. Yeah, so the rhinos, it's two very cool things. One is, if you've ever seen a rhino, it is a large animal, yet they don't get arthritis, which is pretty amazing if you think about it.

All of us get osteoarthritis, which is the common form of arthritis in our knees, our hips, our fingers, et cetera. Part of it is rhinos only run in straight lines, right? They don't do that zigging and zagging, mainly that we do in common sports where we get our injuries, an important lesson there. But I think the key one to the rhinos is they were trying to breed the rhinos in captivity, and they weren't having any luck. And they started to look at the food they were eating, because rhinos are very large.

They need a very large amount of food and expensive. So they were using an inexpensive source of protein, soy protein. And it turns out soy protein is what we call a phytoestrogen. It has properties of the molecule estrogen.

So when they change the food from this phytoestrogen soy to an estrogen, it's not going to go from phytoestrogen soy to another source of protein. All of a sudden, the rhinos got pregnant in captivity, and we were able to breed rhinos and bring many of them back from literally near extinction. An important lesson that too much of something is bad, and many of the rhinos, even though they're coming from a plant, can have properties that are medicinal. Throw perfect for sharing and softer than anything you've ever felt. So give the gift of ultimate comfort with Cozy Earth's lounge wear or the gift of relaxation and pampering with premium bath products. And you can sleep with confidence thanks to Cozy Earth's remarkable 10-year warranty, promising decades of restful sleep. Cozy Earth's provided an exclusive offer for my listeners today.

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It's going to be a huge hit. The Book of Animal Secrets, Nature's Lessons for a Long and Happy Life. Just every page you learn something. But just got to ask you, you know, we're trying to figure out what happened with the pandemic and we know Dr. Fauci's going behind closed doors saying, well, they're three feet apart, six feet apart. We kind of made that up and masks did or didn't work or kids really were not affected in retrospect. What, what do you, what questions do you still have about the way we approached the pandemic from when it hit to the actions we took to the mandates on the vaccines? So it's not a simple question, right?

Is that no question, the first time the public saw the sausage being made in my field, right? Proclamations had to be made based on little data because we had to start to make decisions because there were large numbers of hospitalizations and deaths. And I think it's very important to realize that when a hospital is full, you can be much more stringent in what you do.

You have to wear masks, you have to X, Y and Z with the hope that you can reduce infections than when they're not full. And we didn't take that into account. We are a country that made most of our policy decisions based on a small Middle Eastern country with six million people. We had zero data on what was going on in the United States. We got all of our data on the outcomes, on vaccines, on the immune system related to COVID from Israel, which is astonishing if you think of it there.

We need to build our data infrastructure. Early on, obviously, there were major mistakes made with testing. And I think that was the beginning of what became us having some of the worst outcome of any country in the world was because we screwed up testing for two and a half to three months because of a CDC misstep. And I think this is a call to arms that we have to restructure what we're doing in the CDC, restructure what public health is, and really be prepared going forward. There's going to be some blame games because I think some wrong decisions were made. That being said, we have to take some positive from it and learn so this doesn't happen again. If you look at the probability, there is a 32% chance of another pandemic in the next decade. That is not insignificant. And so we have to be prepared so we don't shut down again going forward.

I don't care where you stood. The CDC has lost a lot of credibility with the American public. How do they gain it back? I think we have to restructure what they do and where they're doing things. First is developing a nationwide data infrastructure program. This idea of states rights, states can collect their own data, do what they want with it in today's world doesn't make sense. There needs to be a national level of data so we can know what's happening and a feedback loop so we can do the right things. And no, this policy makes no sense or this policy is actually saving lives and stopping the spread of disease.

And so there's going to have to be new leadership and I really think building that infrastructure, it's not expensive, but it really requires us to make a fundamental change because historically, each state is responsible for its own public health and that has to change. Because people have privacy. So for example, you know, if you need information for me from my health in order to be like, no, I don't think so. I don't want to share maybe what I experienced or any of my personal data. That's privacy is at the hub of what you do, right?

Yeah, you're right, Brian. But if I said to you, Brian, listen, give me all your credit card data, all of your financial data, and I'll consider you giving you a home mortgage, you say no problem and you give it to an anonymous person in the bank. If I say I want to use your health data in a privacy protected way, we have the ability now of literally removing every identifier and being totally protected on your personal privacy and use it for health, you say no way. That attitude has to change and we need to build the infrastructure to protect privacy and enable the use of data in healthcare because it will be game-changing going forward. Explain to me as a non-professional that the mRNA is the what you're using that gives you the most encouragement on cancer and that was used to design the vaccine.

Is that correct? It's certainly a way where we can improve immune therapy and cancer. And I think going forward, it will be how all vaccines are made. The problem with conventional vaccines is they're very hard to make. Their yield can be small. You can do a hundred thousand bioreactors.

If you ever flow into Newark, you see those big beer tanks making Budweiser. That's how we make conventional vaccines. And you could do an entire couple month run and get a hundred vaccines or a hundred thousand vaccines.

You don't know. mRNA, you program it in. You can get them literally a week later and have it to give to people and they are safe and they work. So it is going to be a new frontier and we can use it to actually prime our immune system to attack cancer. And that's what gives us some more excitement also. So this is going to be very exciting going forward to actually stop suffering from disease. At the same time, we have screwed up science trust in our country and that also needs it. In order to get normative behavior change, which we're going to need in all of this, you need leadership. So we need a new form of leadership in science. Is there anybody showing you that they want to be that leader to lace everything back together and regain trust?

Not right now. I think there's a lot of fear of media and other things attacking anybody who becomes a vocal spokesperson in science. But I think we have to push in that regard.

And so we're trying to help as much as we can at the federal level, at the international level to change that. And I hope it changes. The Book of Animal Secrets is out.

Last question. What do you hope people get from this book? I think I hope it's optimism.

It's that hope that we're going to be able to implement some changes soon to really prevent disease. And at the same time, when I wanted a blurb for the back of the book, the publisher said, get a bunch of them. I texted one person, Jane Goodall, and I said, listen, I want you to blurb this book because it tells people they have to conserve nature and animals. And at the same time, it gives us clues on human health. And she answered me back two words.

She goes, hell yes. And, you know, it was very privileged to have that there. But I really want to bring that hope and optimism that there are secrets out there that we can all use today to live a better and longer life. All right, go get them. Dr. David Agus, thanks so much.

The Book of Animal Secrets is out. Thanks, doctor. Thank you, Brad. Give the gift of ultimate comfort with Cozy Earth's lounge wear or the gift of relaxation and pampering with premium bath products and you can sleep with confidence. Thanks to Cozy Earth's remarkable 10 year warranty promising decades of restful sleep. Cozy Earth provided an exclusive offer for listeners today up to 35 percent off site wide when you use code the five. Go to cozy earth dot com and use the code the five for 35 percent off. That's cozy earth dot com code the five. Listen to the show and free on Fox News podcast plus on Apple podcast, Amazon music with your prime membership or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.