Unlocking the Secrets of Lifespan Extension with Karl Pfleger

This week, we speak with Karl Pfleger, PhD who, after studying Machine Learning at Stanford and working a successful tech career, now does all he can to support longevity research and biotech. Karl discusses the inadequacies of traditional healthcare in addressing the root causes of aging and shares insights on groundbreaking research that can slow down or even reverse aging processes. He emphasizes the significant impact of lifestyle choices on longevity and previews promising future therapies, including stem cell treatments and mitochondrial health interventions.

What kind of SuperAger are you? Check the SuperAge Quiz and find out! (visit: ageist.com/quiz)

Thanks to our sponsors:
InsideTracker – the dashboard to your Inner Health. Listeners get 20% off on all products at InsideTracker.com/AGEIST.

Timeline Nutrition — our favorite supplement for cell support and mitochondrial function. Listeners receive 10% off your first order of Mitopure with code AGEIST at TimelineNutrition.com/ageist.

AmeriCorps Seniors — Get involved in your community through AmeriCorps Seniors’ volunteer opportunities and change your life. Go to AmeriCorps.gov/YourMoment 

Key Moments
“So the traditional health care and medical practice in our country, in the US and most of the world concerns really considering everyone to be baseline healthy until they get sick to a level where they're very sick and they cross some kind of a threshold for diagnosis of having an actual disease. So even though we call it health care, a lot of people kind of pejoratively describe it as sick care.”

“In short-lived species you can extend lifespans manyfold. One single gene mutation in worms can extend their lifespans by 10X, for example. And even in mice, we have interventions now that can extend their lifespans by 30% or 40% sometimes. And many of these interventions work across multiple species. So we believe they’re likely to work for people as well."

“I wanted them to realize how big [the longevity field] had gotten so that they wouldn't delay getting into it with more serious amounts of money. They didn't realize that they were two years behind given how fast it was growing.”

Connect with Karl Pfleger
X
AgingBiotech.info
LinkedIn

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:15

What kind of super-ager are you? Go to agistcom slash quiz, take the super-ager quiz and we'll send you directed, personalized information to help you super-age the best that you can. Welcome to super-age. My name is David Stewart. I am the founder of Agist and your host on the super-age show. We talk about how to live healthier, how to live longer and how to be happier and who doesn't want that?

Speaker 1: 0:42

Today's show is brought to you by Inside Tracker, the dashboard to your inner health. Go to insidetrackercom. Slash agist Save 20% on all their products. Today's show is also brought to you by Timeline Nutrition with their breakthrough product, mitopure, the first clinically tested urolithin A supplement, which is showing tremendous results for mitochondrial health. Go to timelinenutritioncom. Slash agist. Use the code AGIST at checkout and save 10% off your first order of Mitopure. Today's show is also brought to you by AmeriCorps seniors, our favorite volunteer organization for people 55 plus. Go to americorpsgov. Slash your moment to learn more and give back to your community.

Speaker 1: 1:25

Welcome to episode 168 of the super-age podcast. It is so great to have you with us. This will be dropping on January 24th 2024. This week on the show we've got Carl Flager on, and Carl is one of the original AI people from Google clearly a very, very smart guy and he is now an investor in the longevity biotech space and he's put together something called agingbiotechinfo, which is this incredibly information dense overview of various, all these various technologies and methodologies that are out there in the aging biotech world. The reason I wanted to have Carl on is because he's somebody who has like a bird's eye overview of all these different techs and asking him like what does he think for working out there? What's interesting? What are the companies that are really driving this forward? We're gonna have Carl Flager on and I just want to say it's a huge privilege to have Carl on, very busy guy and it's taken us a while to set up this interview. So I hope this is informative to you guys and you get something out of it.

Speaker 1: 2:34

All right, quick update here, back in Park City. I was in Sun Valley, idaho, this last weekend participating in a ski race which I did not do well in, partially because my knee is giving me a lot of problems. So I'm gonna have to sort of reevaluate this little adventure I'm on based on my knee. You know, how much recovery time do I need here? And then also, when I was there in the first run, I was dead last and yes, I like to be exceptional, don't we all? But not in that way. Second run, I just sort of turned it up and ended up sort of like in the middle of the back, which was fine.

Speaker 1: 3:08

A couple of things came up when I was there. The first is I was asking other people well, okay, so how long you be doing this 40 years, 30 years, you know, oh my god, the least amount of time of anyone I spoke to there was 15 years and some people have been doing it 50 years. These are men and women. It was about a third women, I will say. In the first run there were maybe five women, 65 to 75 and every single one of them beat me. In the second run I did better, but it was just a huge reality check to me and I started thinking to myself.

Speaker 1: 3:41

I tell people I do this thing because it's a hard thing and I want to demonstrate to people that we can do hard things at this age. But is it really the hard thing or is it something else? That it's like avoiding the hard thing. Like there's a couple of books I'm supposed to be writing and I'm not doing that because I'm doing this other thing, and I sort of wonder, like, how does one untangle what's really the hard thing, the important thing, the thing that one is avoiding by doing something else? This really requires some outside counsel. So what I did is I've hired a coach, I've hired someone to help me sort this out and I'll be starting with that person this week and you know I'll let you know how it goes.

Speaker 1: 4:18

I'm big on getting outside advice. I'm really big on getting outside help. I think that one of the greatest limitations, especially people of my gender seem to have, is not wanting to go out and find outside help, to get outside advice. So I'm going to do that and hopefully like untangle a little of this and get some other things clear in my life. Anyway, that's enough about me. We're going to get with Carl Flager in just a moment after a quick word from our sponsors. We speak a lot around here about how great it feels to give back to mentor, to be out there being useful with all this knowledge and strength that we've accumulated over the years.

Speaker 1: 4:55

There's an organization that I'd like you all to know about. It's called AmeriCorps Seniors. It's a volunteer organization for adults 55 plus not just 65 plus or retirees and they will work with volunteers to match them with opportunities based on their interests. Go to americorpsgov slash your moment or follow the link in our show notes below to learn more AmeriCorps. Americorpsgov slash your moment. Connect to volunteer opportunities that match your skills, interests and desire to be part of something bigger, because the people in your community need you and you'll get back so much more than you'll give.

Speaker 1: 5:36

Today's show is also brought to you by Inside Tracker, the dashboard to your inner health. I've been using Inside Tracker for over three years now. I've been able to reduce my inner age from my chronological age of 65 to an inner age now of 56. I did this gradually over time, following their recommendations, because not only with Inside Tracker do I have a dashboard to my inner health. Knowing what's going on inside me, I also have a roadmap on how to improve that. Their food first, supplements, second recommendations have helped me tremendously. I recommend everyone get a dashboard to their inner health. Go to insidetrackercom. Slash Agist, save 20% on all their products. Hey, just a quick reminder that after our conversation with Carl Flager, we've got just try this, that little bit of information to help you live a little happier, a little healthier, a little more joyfully. But now let's give Carl a call, find out what's on his mind. Hey, carl, great to meet you, great to have you with us today, glad to be here. Where does this podcast find you today, san?

Speaker 2: 6:44

Francisco.

Speaker 1: 6:45

You have quite a background. Could you tell us a little bit about where you were and where it's brought you to today?

Speaker 2: 6:50

Yeah, the sort of capsule couple minute history is. I was a tech guy. I have a PhD from Stanford in artificial intelligence and computer science focused on artificial intelligence, machine learning, neural nets. I did that a little bit early before the explosion in AI and deep nets from the mid 2010s I was about 20 years before that that I started working on it.

Speaker 2: 7:10

Then I worked at Google for about a decade doing practical big data machine learning stuff and then I decided to refocus my attention on things that would most help the world, most help the most people in the world, and cursory analysis suggested that besides the poorest of the poor, you know, living in sub-Saharan Africa and places like that on less than $2 a day, the highest leverage other thing in the world was to fight against the aging process, because aging is what kills the vast majority of people 70% globally, 92.5% plus in Western developed countries. That's really a science and technology play more than a lobbying political play. So I decided and also I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, which was kind of ground zero for that science and the biotech and the entrepreneurship and so I just basically whole hogs, switched fields and have just been ramping up the bio knowledge ever since started with philanthropy, then got into investing and I'm also doing a whole bunch of other things involved in community building and information dissemination with my website agingbiotechinfo.

Speaker 1: 8:23

It's an incredible resource, this thing that you've built agingbiotechinfo and we will put that link in the show notes and I'm gonna ask you a little bit about that in a minute. But first, before we get that, let's get to sort of baseline definitions. What does aging mean to you?

Speaker 2: 8:36

So the traditional health care and medical practice in our country, in the US, and most of the world concerns really considering everyone to be baseline healthy until they get sick, to a level where they're very sick and they've crossed some kind of a threshold for diagnosis of having an actual disease.

Speaker 2: 9:00

So even though we call it health care, a lot of people kind of try accurately but pejoratively described as sick care, because it's really what we, what the science in the last two or three or four decades has discovered, is that the reality of the situation is that the process of aging, from the time in an organism, animal or person becomes an adult in some ways, in some cases starting even before they become an adult, there are a bunch of biochemical, molecular processes and there's and there's multiple of them, maybe five to 15 ish, and people argue about the exactly how many which which things count which together underlie all chronic diseases that people have for decades as they get older.

Speaker 2: 9:43

And that set of diseases includes all the top killer diseases heart disease, cancer, all the dimensions, including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, diabetes, and a bunch of things that don't kill you but make life really terrible as you get older, like osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, age related blindness, and Not only do the do are all those terrible conditions sort of directly attributable to the molecular changes of aging.

Speaker 2: 10:13

But traditionally People thought of aging as this sort of the unalterable clock that just ticks at a constant rate. But we now know of the science that's going on in the past half century that one can actually interfere with the rate at which the aging processes March on. You can slow them down considerably, and in short lived species you can extend life spans by many fold. One single gene mutation in worms can extend their life spans by 10x, for example, and even in mice we have interventions now that can extend their life spans by 30% or 40% sometimes, and many of these interventions work across multiple different species. So we believe there's likely to work for people as well. It's hard to tell with people because to do the study you have to wait so many decades, and so we're working on other ways to tell if it's working or not.

Speaker 1: 11:08

You mentioned the word clock. How do you feel about you know there's a lot of the Horvath clock, that these methylation clocks.

Speaker 2: 11:14

There's a number of these new kinds of biological clocks and we're trying to measure the underlying molecular changes so that you can tell better how old, how fast somebody has been aging, how old they effectively are from a biological standpoint. And there's a big history there, the big you know. There's multiple ways to build a clock. One can do functional readouts like how fast you run and how strong are you, how fast you think the big clocks that have happened in the field recently are based on DNA methylation, which I think one of your previous guests has already described, which are these Small chemical groups get attached to the DNA which basically affect which genes can work or not in a given cell, and that epigenetics is what controls the difference between different types of cells.

Speaker 2: 12:05

But those changes can also be measured because they sort of progress in certain patterns as people age and there have been multiple generations of these clocks and we can talk about, if you want, about which ones are better and worse.

Speaker 2: 12:16

But there's all kinds of interesting things happening with these clocks and making them better, and every year or two a new fangled realization comes out from some basic science that shows that the previous clocks weren't as good as they could be, and here's a way to make them better and there's been two or three of those developments just in the last two or three years.

Speaker 2: 12:35

So all the clocks from five plus years ago are really. There's just much better stuff available now and some of these are available direct to consumer. The companies and I don't have any financial stake in any of these companies that the company true diagnostic and the company Elysium, both sell Three hundred to five hundred dollar clocks to consumers and those are some of the best ones that are currently available on the market. One of the recent developments is that they can now tell from these DNA methylation patterns how fast certain individual organs or systems in the body are aging, not just the age of the entire body. So you get like a liver age and a brain age and immune system age, etc. For nine ish or ten ish systems.

Speaker 1: 13:15

I'm curious, your data guy, how much utility do you feel these clocks have? I know a lot of people. We've had some of those folks on the show. As you said, you don't have an interest in them. I'm just curious.

Speaker 2: 13:25

This is a big debate like how much utility those clocks give to humans. Right now I can't tell you definitively what the answer is, but here's a few pieces of information about that question that you can use to triangulate what you think the answer might be. So, first of all, the reason people are very interested in these clocks is what I alluded to a minute ago, which is that to do a lifespan study in humans would take Decades and people don't want to wait that long. Ideally, what you can do if you have a clock that really did tell you the true underlying biological age, is that you could test various interventions and see which ones made people younger or which ones made them age more slowly, and that would tell you quickly whether or not you had a good intervention and which things you should take, etc. What things you should do. So that's the reason why there's a lot of interest in this and people are already using that strategy in developing new drugs by looking at clocks on mice and by looking at clocks on people, and we'll see you know, the proof will be in the pudding as we start putting those things to clinical trials which things, whether that clock strategy actually works. In the meantime, the clocks are getting better and so, even if it doesn't work in the past, we're getting closer and closer to to accuracy In terms of the clocks are available now.

Speaker 2: 14:40

What I'll tell you is that there's a growing interest in these, treating aging and longevity as a direct target by medical doctors. So there's a usually this goes under the umbrella term of all phrase longevity clinics and there's a few places in the world where people are coming up with these Clinics to directly assess people's aging and try to help treat, you know, even essentially trying to help make healthy people even healthier. It's sort of like functional medicine, but with a slightly different bent, and most of those longevity clinics at least the most prominent ones that go to the global conferences and things are using these clocks directly on their patients. So you know, they think that they're good enough. Most people in the field don't think that they're good enough to be surrogate endpoints in clinical trials. Right so good biomarkers like blood pressure and cholesterol have already been approved by the FDA as things that you can Use as targets for your drugs to get a drug approved on the market. Right so, nowadays, to get a drug approved to help with heart disease, you don't have to run a 30 year clinical trial. If you can show that it decreases cholesterol, you can get it approved, and similarly, if you can show that it decreases blood pressure, you can get it approved. We don't. We aren't at that point where people trust the clocks well enough that if you just lower the clock you can get a drug approved. So that indicates that the clocks aren't good enough for you know, prime time yet Yet on the other side so that's sort of upper bound, you know, on how good they are, lower bound, on how good they are that not enough people in the field talk about. Is that?

Speaker 2: 16:18

And this is a bugbear of mine that I repeat a lot is that most of the data suggests that they're already better than chronological age. Right, chronological age Basically represents the number of times the ball we live on has gone around the big hot ball in the middle of the solar system, to use a phraseology that Jordan slain, doctor in San Francisco here, gave me a few a week ago, and that seems like a pretty arbitrary way to measure. You know something that you're going to use clinically, and yet in medicine we do use what is called in your medical chart age clinically all the time, right the age at which you're supposed to start getting colonoscopies is based just on that chronological age the the age that is used as cutoffs for when you should have covid shots or whether you should have covid shots during the pandemic was based on age, and there's just you know a hundred other ways that people medically make decisions based on thresholding that one number. The clocks that we have now are probably already at the point where they're better than that, but they aren't used that way at the moment. So, for example, you know all clinical trials. Another way we use age is that we look at the baseline age of the treatment and the control groups and we make sure they're reasonably balanced so that if you run a clinical trial on a new drug, you didn't put, like, all the old people in the in the control group and all the young people in the treatment group. You know.

Speaker 2: 17:43

But instead of using chronological age, we should probably at the very least the testing biological age using these clocks and using that as a way to make sure that there wasn't a skew that we didn't detect in the clinical trial, and I think that kind of realization of this increased use of these clocks over time is going to is going to happen.

Speaker 2: 18:03

In terms of the system aging clocks, I'm very excited that you know getting a clock that tells you that you know you're mostly aging fine, but one particular organ is actually way out of whack and is aging much faster. Those are a good way to detect that it's time to use conventional medicines, way to assess organ health more specifically. So, for example, if it says your kidneys are, way you know, 20 years older than the rest of you, that's a good sign. You should maybe go do some extra blood tests and maybe some scans on the kidneys, and so I think that that's going to come along soon as well. But we're not quite there yet. We're traditional doctors, or even the longevity clinics, are doing that with the systems clocks. That's probably a couple years away.

Speaker 1: 18:46

I've had Ryan from True Diagnostics on and we've talked about his clock and pasted on and that stuff. What I would like to see is someone someone probably clever, from your field to making composite of the methylation clocks with functional inputs like what's your VO2 max, how long can you hold? What's your grip strength you know this sort of stuff to put together something that goes together. That's a big math problem far beyond me.

Speaker 2: 19:11

And in the meantime other omics are coming along right methyl methylone that the True Diagnostics commercializes is based on and the systems clock there is based on work at Yale from Morgan Levine's group. She then went to Altos and the PhD student stayed Rogov, this is named and finished that work and then True Diagnostics just licensed it and sells it. But paper just came out of Tony was Corey's lab at Stanford in the past six months or so with a similar kind of systems clock based on the proteome, so based on just looking at proteins. Based on this is the logic, has this array where you can test 5000 different proteins and in blood, and so they basically made a clock and we haven't even started doing the detangling of the math of like correlating those and seeing how you can use both to get a better overall read, let alone to combine the functional stuff to. So yes, there's, there's a lot going to come down the pike.

Speaker 1: 20:03

I don't get too heavily in the clock world but I did sort of off the record books, ryan, from True Diagnostics, and I said, listen, you've got, you know, a lot of data here. What you seen. It actually moves the needle, like I said. So my form is moving the not hdh like me, slight negative.

Speaker 2: 20:20

I said you know sir lemus rapamyus and that stuff he's like oh yeah, that works, that works part of the trick here is that what moves the needle will vary depending on what your Baseline starting point is. People are very different, right. So if you're very, very overweight, a different set of drugs are gonna need a verses. If you are not and if you are, you know if you have certain weird conditions that not a lot of people have, things that help correct. That won't appear in his overall data set because he's just like, right, the data set on most people who used his test.

Speaker 1: 20:52

That's right. He's just looking at large populations and ryan johnson, who I've had on the show, uses that test and he makes a big deal out of his greatest reduction. But you have to look at where brian was to where he is now, and actually Myself the delta between my my actual age and my biological age is measured same clock is better than bryans, but it's only because I wasn't coming from such a bad place as he was, so something to keep in mind.

Speaker 2: 21:18

Yeah, I posted this, this point to, on social media, which is that you know, the amount of improvement isn't the great measure, because that just rewards you starting getting yourself in the day before you start measuring.

Speaker 1: 21:32

That's not what we want. Let's tell everybody about aging biotech.

Speaker 2: 21:36

When I got into the field in the mid twenty tens there was it was much smaller field. It's grown considerably, which is great. It's still a very small corner of the overall biotech world but it's going because there's an inevitable logic of treating these underlying biological causes that underlies so many different Bad conditions. But when I get into the field it was small but there was still quite a lot written about it. Most of the stuff that was written Was just pros right. There were books and there were blogs and it was a lot of blogs, of text, and there were some companies already in the space and I decided to get into investing in the twenty sixteen ish and started investing in biotech companies in twenty seventeen. One of the things I did once I started doing that was every time I went to a conference or an event where any company was mentioned, I wrote it down on the list and Quickly my list of companies was a hundred to one hundred twenty companies. You know I had investigated each one so I wasn't sure Whether I counted each one as you know really being an aging and longevity related company or not but so was on the side and have an exact count hundred twenty. I kept reading these stories of people talk who were giving an overview of the whole aging or longevity field, talking about how there's thirty companies where there's Forty companies are, usually there's twenty five companies, really like that, and I was like these people don't know about a lot of the companies and I would talk to the professors who work in the field. So just north of me here in san francisco there's a place called the book institute for research on aging. It's the largest Independent. It's essentially a sort of ivy league stanford at my t level biology department, sitting all by itself without the rest of the university around it, I'm but and where it's not just a biology department. Every single one of the twenty on the order, twenty p, is all focused specifically on the biology of aging. And you know, the professor's in post like there didn't even realize how, and that was the most of the ground zero academic academia for aging stuff, and they didn't even realize how many companies there were at the moment.

Speaker 2: 23:42

So I decided that instead of keeping my list of companies is sort of some kind of internal secret to make my investing be better, I would just open source of essentially, and so I put it together and put it on this website I called aging biotech info and I made it just a pro bono, open, open, free, nonprofit for everybody and it's worked pretty well on the goals when I the use cases I envisioned when I started it, where I wanted the postdocs and phd students and even professors to realize they haven't an exit ramp from academia if they want to do something else is they can start a company, and I wanted the invest. I wanted the tech people in silicon valley, the venture capital groups, to realize that they should be putting more than a few percent in this field, that there was a lot more going on than they thought. They should be ramping up to five, ten, fifteen percent of their mostly tech portfolios, which they, you know, which they have done. I'll never know how much this website contributed to any of that, but that has certainly helped. I've heard people tell me it's helped. I wanted the big investors, the investment banks and the sort of instance you huge institutional money, pension funds and all they were kind of vaguely paying attention to the field, but one or two of them would release a report every now and then. I want them to realize how big it had gotten so that they wouldn't Lay getting into the field with more serious amounts of money just because they didn't realize that. You know they were two years behind realizing how fast it was growing.

Speaker 2: 25:08

So that was the goal and because there were all these blobs of text and pros, I decided that in making it I would not make you know, for example, a jim melin wrote a book in twenty seventeen that had a list of fifty or sixty companies with like a paragraph on each one. You know I had little fields like a database and that it would have a you know Something in a colon and something. So I have a few categories for each one, but they're also presented as text. I decided my website would all be about structured info. So it's. It's basically a flat file, database, a table, and got lots of fields. You can sort by the number of employees, which clinical trial stage and the people really like the company's list.

Speaker 2: 25:47

And since then I've expanded the set of information on the site to include Basically being a one stop shop for linking to everything important in the ageing longevity field. That's outside of academia, so it's too, too complicated and intractable to make a list of every single lab at every single university All across the world that's doing anything related to aging, especially at the field, grows more and more biology department so, and more and more biology Professors have at least something in their lab that's touching a related to aging, and so that's just pretty crazy amount of stuff. But For people to make get any benefit from all this science and biotech development, it will have to go through companies, and so essentially the site now has not just a list of companies but also has a list of the best books, the best podcasts I just put this one on this weekend the best journals, the best conferences to go to A sort of a one stop shop of everything important in the field. If you want to ramp up your knowledge from nothing I'm even for researchers is useful things is a list of databases that postdoc francesco nary at the buck, help put together. That has a bunch of free public databases that researchers can download and play with.

Speaker 2: 27:07

Lots and lots of data, and there's a wealth of really good data is because this is the new thing in the twenty twenties and beyond is that biology generates huge amounts of data, and a lot of that's just given away for free. Just have to Do the glue code to make sure you can access it, and so there's a lot of really interesting stuff going on there. There's even a list of the common objections. People here, when they when they hear about the field, like oh, it's gonna cause overpopulation or oh, it's gonna be only for the rich, and, and you know, smart people, have thought about each of the sort of top ten or so of these objections and analyze them very carefully and come up with two or three or four good Counter arguments that show why that objection is not a good reason to not do science in this area. And so there's a one page sort of summary of the top three counter arguments. Teach at the top ten objections is one of the tables there so anyway, it's a one stop shop.

Speaker 2: 27:57

It's free check it out, if you.

Speaker 1: 28:01

Just repeat, it's called aging biotech dot info and I will testify it is, if not the most information dense website I've ever seen. It's up there.

Speaker 2: 28:11

Yeah, the philosophy of the website is very much like Google, the company I worked at for a long time, which is, you know, it's not flashy. Its UI is not optimized to be flashy, it's just optimized to get information to you. Almost all the information on the site, you know all the information on the site comes from other web pages. It's all public. I don't disclose anything. I find out privately from conversations with companies or anything like that, and so most of the cells in the tables are direct links to where the information came from, which allows you to A verify the accuracy and, b tell if anything's new. You know to the extent to which it goes out of date. You just have to click the link to actually get the up to date info.

Speaker 1: 28:51

That brings me to what's working now and what will be working, and the reason I have to come on the podcast, carl, is to answer those questions, because you are an investor with a long term horizon, as you say.

Speaker 2: 29:04

Let's go with what you can do now and what the range is.

Speaker 1: 29:07

Exactly.

Speaker 2: 29:08

If people want to follow me, I'm on Twitter and I'm on LinkedIn. I'm easy to find and I post in Reddit on RSS Longevity as well. I covered a lot of these topics there, but I'll give a capsule overview here. There's enough epidemiological data on humans to show that it's very clear that lifestyle affects your rate of aging to the point where it affects human longevity, and so there's multiple papers that show that doing the unhealthy things versus doing the healthy things in terms of diet, exercise and activity, sleeping and abuse of alcohol and other substances makes a 12 to 14 year difference in lifespan. And you can do this in various different ways. And there's multiple papers that suggest a couple years for each one of these things eating at least five servings of fruits and vegetables, not being a couch potato, et cetera, et cetera and you can go into the details. There's some papers that suggest it's in the mid teens, like that. 12 to 14 years, that's if you sort of take each one of those lifestyle factors and just make them a binary, like do you eat healthy versus unhealthy, do you smoke versus not smoke If you break those down into like finer grained deciles and then you take the best one, the best level of exercise versus completely none. Smoking nothing versus smoking a lot You've maybe the difference goes up to 20 years in lifestyle, but essentially what's happening is that a lot of people think of it as the sort of an average lifestyle of what people are living right now today, in the 2020s, in the US, for example, and that there's better lifestyle you can do that will get you extra years. I think of it the other way around. Evolutionarily, a lot of the things that we do shorten our lives now after the Industrial Revolution, are things that have changed compared to the long evolutionary history, and so I think of it as like the optimal is the sort of baseline and that's the sort of normal rate of aging for a human. Before we lived in offices and didn't do much activity during the day and ate real food instead of all this packaged, processed, largely junk. And what we're doing, what a lot of people do, what the average does and a lot of people do, is speeding up your rate of aging. It's very easy to speed up your rate of aging by doing bad things right smoking, being couch potato, etc. Not new chronically deprivation so one can control those things to a certain extent and get longer life, and not just longer life but, importantly, a longer duration of health, because you stave off the biological processes, you slow them down, that cause all these terrible things that make life unfun and and cost. So so that's what's happening now is that we have this ability with lifestyle to control these things.

Speaker 2: 32:04

And there's not just, it's not just the sort of typical grandmother Lee exercise and eat right, there's also fine tuning week. One can do with some personalized medicine in terms of you know, you don't want to be deficient in anything super, super important. It seems pretty clear, for example, that vitamin D deficiency probably speeds aging Diffusion, c is probably not good, especially for brain, and there's a whole bunch of these kinds of things that that also will speed things up. That are more in the realm of supplements and optimizing. One can address some with food. Okay. So all that's happening Now in the now what's also happening is we have some drugs that we've identified on the market that exist already and there's lots more in development, and not just drugs but other kinds of advanced biological therapies, like cell therapies, like stem cells and like gene therapies, that are coming and being developed to try to improve on a number of things and, broadly speaking, I put them in two different categories on those that are attempting to slow the rate of aging and those that are attempting to reverse or undo some of the molecular damage or molecular changes that happen with aging, and there's lots of work in both areas.

Speaker 2: 33:14

So, for example, there are a lot of drugs that can directly act on the same pathways that are affected when one simply eats healthy food and not too much, and you can essentially mimic some of the lifestyle things biochemically with with treatments. Rapamycin is an existing drug that a lot of people talk a lot about. It affects the mTOR pathway, which is the same pathway that's affected when you don't eat enough, when you don't, when you have protein restriction or calorie restriction and you and you eat less, and there's lots of people working on better versions of that. And there's a whole bunch of other drugs that affect various aspects of the very complicated biochemical web of metabolism that can slow down your rate of aging essentially, but we don't know just how well any of them work yet because of this problem where you can do. We know how well they work in mice, but we don't. You know it doesn't translate well to people usually and we don't have enough time to figure out exactly how well they work in people. So there's lots of debate about a lot of these things, but you know there's two, three, 400 companies now working on bringing these things to market that will either slow down your rate of aging or fix some of the subcategories of different molecular changes that underlie the age-related diseases. So we can talk about what are some of the sub areas of the field, and there are a couple different papers and ways that people have tried to break down the overall aging field into different categories of molecular and biochemical processes that are happening as one ages and there's a famous one is a paper called the Hallmarks of Aging that came out in 2013,. About a decade before that, aubrey de Grey had his seven Cens areas and there was also one called the Pillars, and about a decade after the hallmarks, they expanded the original nine into 12 or 13 or 14. We won't talk about. There's basically still argument about exactly which ones are important, but there are some that everyone kind of agrees on. So let's just cover a couple examples.

Speaker 2: 35:27

Right, the accumulation of senescent cells. So senescent cells are normally some of your cells in your body don't divide anymore. They're called post-mythotic, but many of the cells in your body are stem cells that will continue to divide over the course of your life and provide renewal to pools of cells that are constantly turning over and dying. Many immune cells are constantly turning over and dying. New ones come along when a cell, sometimes cells get damaged, and they get damaged in such a way most of the time when cells get damaged they just die, but some of them, when they get damaged, go into this state called senescence, where they can no longer divide, and that's good because then they don't go into the other state that a lot of cells get damaged and go into, which is cancer, which of course means they do divide too much.

Speaker 2: 36:19

But it turns out that people now know that senescent cells accumulate with age, so the body has more and more of them as you get older and they're better than cancer cells.

Speaker 2: 36:31

That's good, but they're bad because they send out these chemical messages that cause inflammation constantly.

Speaker 2: 36:38

They're basically part of the normal immune response, but when they accumulate and they don't get cleaned up and they live a long time, they cause the body to go into this sort of hyper inflammatory state all the time and as a result they damage cells around them that are getting these signals and make them more likely to turn senescent too and also more likely to turn diseased.

Speaker 2: 37:02

So they figured out this a while ago that if you kill all the senescent cells in a mouse, or kill all the P16 positive cells, which was an approximation for senescence, the mice lived 30% longer in better health. And so that kicked off a big race to come up with senolytic drugs. Senolytic is the word that means to kill the senescent cells, and now there are 12, 15, maybe 18 different companies working on various ways to treat the accumulation of senescent cells. Most of those companies are working on killing the senescent cells, and the idea is that you would do that intermittently, so every couple of years you would kill all your senescent cells and then you would let them start accumulating again because you don't want to like there are some good benefits, like when wound healing is involved.

Speaker 2: 37:51

When you get wounds and you they heal. There are senescent cells involved in that process, so blocking the whole process might be bad, but there are companies that are working on that as an angle anyway and hope to get around the any negatives. So, besides just killing the senescent cells, there's companies that are working on preventing cells from turning senescent in the first place, or at least reducing the rate at which they do, and there are other companies working on letting the senescent cells be there but blocking their inflammatory signal, so those are typically called xenomorphic companies. There are a couple companies working on taking the senescent cells and reverting them back out of senescence to become normal, normal state again, but the majority are working on just killing them, and there's a lot of different approaches to that, and that's one of the things that's been going on the longest in the field since the mid 2010s and is there's one company that's publicly traded called Unity, that's famously had a couple clinical trials, some of which have failed, some of which have done okay, one of which did okay in phase two, when they're pursuing a diabetic retinopathy indication right now. This is one of my favorite areas of the field is the killing of senescent cells.

Speaker 2: 38:56

For a long time a lot of the work was approached by repurposing chemo drugs that are good at killing cancer cells. Cancer cells and senescent cells both have the property that they're damaged in some way and they end up that ended up making them more fragile than normal cells. So of course, the idea behind chemotherapy originally now we have more targeted ones but you know, originally it was just basically let's give all the cells in your body some poison and the weak cells will die and the rest will survive, and the weak cells are mostly the cancer cells, and so that's a way to differentiate. Now we have better chemo drugs that are more targeted and we're applying the same kind of targeting or slightly different targeting to senescent cells. But at first the senescent cells were being approached by let's find chemo drugs that we can repurpose that happen to particularly like to kill senescent cells. Nowadays we have some even better Gen 2 therapies coming along, but they're still in preclinical development, so they're still going to be a few years before they can start, or a year or two at least, before they can start phase one clinical trials in humans.

Speaker 2: 39:59

But some of the interesting approaches, for example, are do the same thing that they did in the mouse studies where they showed that the killing the cells every now and then. The way they did that in mice is they created. They did something they can't really do easily in people they created a transgenic line of mice where they created a whole new strain of mouse by affecting the genome and made it so that a simple drug would just kill all the P16 positive cells. Well, to do that equivalent thing as a treatment not without affecting the genome in utero or before conception you would have to have gene therapy. So there's a company that's working on non viral gene therapy to basically kill P16 positive cells.

Speaker 2: 40:43

In exactly the same way, there's another company that's working on figuring out which cells in the immune system actually normally kill senescent cells. And one of the reasons why they accumulate with age is because the immune system gets worse at killing In the same way that it gets worse at killing cancer, and that's one of the reasons that cancer gets more likely as you get older. And so of course the separate part of the field is working on restoring the immune system to full health. But within the Stenolytics world there's a company that's working on figuring out that specific part of the immune system that works on killing senescent cells and poking that back into higher gear so that it works more like when you're young, and there's a variety of other approaches. So that's just one example area of what's going on. So in five years to eight years, maybe at the outside, 10 years, I think we're very likely going to have multiple companies with approved therapies on the market to kill senescent cells.

Speaker 2: 41:41

One of the problems is we don't actually know we don't actually have a good measure of just how many senescent cells one human has in their body. So figuring out who will need these therapies will be a little bit tricky. So right now, of course, also senescent cell accumulation isn't an FDA indication. So all these companies have to find official diseases that are have high buildup of senescent cells, as implicated in their pathology, and then go after treating those diseases on the assumption that there's a lot of senescent cells in the bodies and people who come down with those diseases. And so that's the way all the companies in this field get to market, is they have to find some Disease that happens to be related to the aging change they're working on. So for senescent cell accumulation, there's James Kirkland at the Mayo has a slide of about 20 or 22 different Conditions, that there's good evidence that senescent cell accumulation is a part of the pathology. Some of the popular ones that the Biotech startups are going after our chronic kidney disease and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a lung condition. So that's just one example area.

Speaker 2: 42:47

There's lots of other interesting things going on in the field. We could talk about cellular epigenetic reprogramming. We can talk about stem cells and Regenerative medicine. We can talk about the slow aging. You know there's a whole bunch of, as I said, companies going after the medics for exercise or a medics for Cali restriction. There's a lot of work on mitochondrial health and there's a lot of different approaches to that. I haven't fully wrapped my brain around all the different ways people are going to address the aging in mitochondria, but there's a lot of work there if it's okay, I'm gonna ask you a personal question, carl, since you feel strongly about senescent cells.

Speaker 1: 43:26

So what are you personally doing? You have access to the highest levels of knowledge and technology out there. How are you personally incorporating this into your life?

Speaker 2: 43:36

So I'll give you the background to the answer. But that and I'll give you the answer. So One of my personal frustrations with the field is that, if you look around, there are a number of things available now besides just Exercise and healthy eating and sleeping enough. There are a number of drugs that are accessible now. Besides wrap-a-micein and metformin there's a, there's a bunch of others that are in the rate of aging Modulation category and there's even things in this analytic category. Disatnit plus quercetin is a combination that's been shown to work well in rodents and Lots of case reports of people having success with it. Visitin is another one, and there are clinical trials underway in humans run by the Mayo Clinic on these. James Kirkland is adamant that people Shouldn't be doing them themselves, but lots of people are, as with wrap-a-micein, and some people report good results. But if you look at the list of all the different things that are available now and I have a budding a draft list of this that I'm gonna launch on aging biotech info In a probably a month or two the problem is that we almost certainly know for sure that different people Need each one of those to a different extent, extent and at different parts of their life, especially in sort of midlife.

Speaker 2: 44:55

Many people don't need each one. So, for example, metformin, you know there's good evidence to suggest that the diabetics really get life extension and slowing rate of aging from it, compared to their accelerated rate of aging from their metabolic disease. But there's not good evidence that healthy, lean, not metabolically out of lack people get benefit from it, and especially people who are in their 30s. Near Barzolize, the biggest champion of Metformin, and he was sort of a gas that, the idea that people who were under 40 were taking it because they thought it was gonna help them live longer. For all of these things, for a couple of them you can kind of guess, like with metformin you know you can look at, you know your, your diet or you pre-diabetic, you can look at your glucose and your HPA, one C and your and your weight and things like that.

Speaker 2: 45:43

But for most of these we know something about their mechanism of action, we know what pathways they affect. We even know what biological state we're talking about, like Accumulation of sense and cells. We don't actually have a good diagnostic or biomarker to tell who actually needs it, when do they need it and how do you titrate the dose to tell that you've been successful in treating that and bringing it back into range right. Most things in biology have this sort of you shaped or reverse, j shaped, curve or optimal, you know, lump, if you want the good to be up where there's sort of a range of optimality and Things get out of whack and you, the treatment can, can move it back in the right direction. But you know we don't have the right readouts to know if you've moved it too far in the or if you've not moved it far enough. And so that's definitely true for senolytic or for nesnesin cell accumulation and that's true for a lot of other things, and that makes it difficult to Decide which of the things that are actually available one would want to use on oneself or one would want to use if you were a longevity clinic trying to treat your patients.

Speaker 2: 46:48

So as A result of that, even though there's a lot available, I don't do much Outside of the sort of things that people would have judged as pretty normal Decades ago before the field came along right. So I I very instead I take the approach of really trying to optimize as much as I can lifestyle while we wait for the data and the Clinical development of the better thing. So I I eat a whole food plant-based diet, mostly sugar, oil and salt-free. So that means basically I just eat vegetables, fruits, whole grains and legumes, with a little bit of nuts and seeds and Pretty low fat.

Speaker 2: 47:27

I tended to follow the ornish Esselstyn style of that whole food, plant-based paradigm. I think there's good, pretty good data there and there's some interesting work in the field of nutritional geometry from invertebrates and mice that show that low fat and low protein is actually better. For all the Who-How people make about protein sufficiency. Um, I exercise both cardio and resistance Several times a week and I do a lot of tracking and quantification of all these things heart rate monitor, you know, garmin watch or a ring, etc. Etc. I sleep and I start and I track the sleep and I try to sleep as well as I can. I don't smoke and I don't drink alcohol anymore.

Speaker 2: 48:09

So that's just sort of the basics and then you know, I try to make sure I'm not deficient in anything. I make sure I test vitamin D levels and omega 3 levels and I take good Quantities of those, which are more than what the rda is, and there's some good science there. We could talk about vitamin D in a whole other podcast, if you want.

Speaker 1: 48:26

I just want to ask you one question what's your ideal vitamin D level?

Speaker 2: 48:29

You know, everyone should be above 20 nanograms per milliliter, which is the clinical deficiency threshold in most countries. Uh, and the endocrine society recommends above 30 nanograms per milliliter, which is 75 nanomoles per liter. A lot of doctors I know concierge medicine doctors recommend between 40 to 60 nanograms per milliliter. Is a sweet spot. Um, I try to make sure mine's above 40 and, uh, I don't, I don't push it too far. Above 50 to 60.

Speaker 1: 48:59

Okay, just curious, we can continue.

Speaker 2: 49:00

I'm just curious, I ask that multiple times a year if you live in a, not at the north pole and not on the equator, because the the amount varies so much by winter versus summer. Um, in terms of assuming you're getting outside at all, and that, and for me that requires more.

Speaker 1: 49:15

you know, many times the rda, yeah me too, you know, I think 5 000 a day.

Speaker 2: 49:21

Yeah, I think I'm taking 4 000 at the moment in the winter and I was taking 2000, but also getting several hours of sun In the summer, okay, so, anyway, back to what I do. So that that's basically it, that you know, basic supplements, plus you know and, and lots and lots of paying attention to the details of blood tests. So, for example, I take more b12 than I need for based on blood levels, because my home Assisting was high and I needed to keep cranking b12 and and a few other be a few other related things to get the home assisting down. For example, um, I take creatine because I'm vegan. You don't need to take creatine as a vegan because your body will make 1 to 2 grams a day, which is about how much the meat eaters get. But, um, the process of making it, according to michael greger, uh has home assisting as a byproduct and so it can help lower home assisting to get it Exigenously. Um, but I don't take the weightlifting, the typical weightlifting, 5 grams per day Uh, that seems clearly super physiological 2 and a half to 5 times more than what bodies normally get or produce. So, so, things like that.

Speaker 2: 50:31

So basically, I and and and, while I do all these things to optimize my rate of aging. To the extent to which I can, I'm paying attention to all the other Data that's coming out on things that are available now and I'm investing in the companies that are making the next generation things that are could really work and have a lot of clinical proof once they get on the market. Excellent to hopefully provide all those things for everybody, you know, because I think that I truly believe that almost all the treatments of this field is going to produce are going to be paid for, inexpensive enough for everybody, who are paid for by the government, because they're much better than paying for old people to be sick for Decades, and so I think they're going to be accessible to everybody. That's the overall goal is to save as many lives as possible 100%.

Speaker 1: 51:16

My feeling is that initially, a lot of this is going to be funded by Billionaires who want to live forever. That's fine. They can throw as much money at it as they want. I think that's great because they are currently throwing they can. They can keep doing it. I think that's a great idea and, as you said, if we can just extend, I had an economics professor from Oxford come on and describe the economic benefits to just if you add another, like one Healthy year. Right, yeah, it was Andrew, so no, it's.

Speaker 2: 51:48

it's astonishing so yeah, and it scales right. It's one one year adds 38 trillion, 37 trillion, and then ten years adds ten times that. Like it's not, it doesn't start to like plateau.

Speaker 1: 52:00

Yeah, so it just makes sense. This is gonna happen. It's interesting. I think one of the some of the things that you brought up are fascinating, one of the reasons why I started with the clocks. So what's the metric like? What are we looking at here? How do we need to understand how these different things interact? The personalized parts of this. I tried to be a vegan. It about killed me. That doesn't work for me, but it's very individual, so you know what works for different people. What I'm next interested in is you've described yourself as Investor with a very long-term horizon, so could you give us, say, the five top sort of therapies, technologies that you see out there, that that will actually come to fruition in ten years, and and what those effects could be?

Speaker 2: 52:49

So I mean, I think some of the x will come within ten years. I think that treatments based on stem cells are gonna be here within five to ten years. There are, of course, clinics now or you can get stem cell treatments. What's happening in the regenerative medicine stem cell world right now is that the FDA is rightly nervous about inserting whole cells with DNA, with DNA in them. There's the broadly speaking in the stem cell world, there's two subcategories autologous, where you take your own stem cells out and then put them back in, and Allogeneic, which is do you get one person you know, you get a source of stem cells from other people? Both of those are sort of getting falling out of favor compared to taking the secretions from the stem cells and and giving those as a therapeutic and Because, though it seems like the stem cells themselves, most of their power comes from the things that they secrete when they, after you, insert them into the body, and I think that there's lots of Companies working on what are called exosomes, which are the sort of little vesicles that the stem cell Packages its secretions into as it releases them, and I think that that there's lots of efficacy there. Right now, it's a Wild West in terms of the clinics and you can go to and what you can get. But there's Companies doing proper clinical trials in this area and I think there's going to come to fruition within a decade. So some of the x stem cells or regen medicine stuff, epigenetic reprogramming there's a huge amount of money going into that. I think that at an earlier stage so we're still a little more basic science, but the rate, the amount of money going in and the Repunity of the progress is really really fast and so, for example, there are ways that that will probably come to market within a decade, at least in some areas, such as topical application for skin, for things like wound healing at least. Probably that will be Something we'll see within a decade and there's just a huge potential for treating all kinds of diseases as well as slowing down aging or rejuvenating not not so much slowing down aging, the promise of that is really just rejuvenating Cells to a younger state. Let's see.

Speaker 2: 54:57

You asked for five, one of the big areas that I think, and I've invested in two companies in this area. You know heart disease and cardiovascular disease at the top killer is single disease according to our current disease categorization paradigm and that right now is treated in clinical medicine with Only treatments that essentially slow its rate of progress. It does. There's no disease modifying treatment that reverses you back to a fully healthy young adult state of cardiovascular health, because the plaques that build up in the arteries and the stiffening of the blood vessels Are simply not reversible, for the most part, by statins and psk9 inhibitors. There are Multiple companies now coming out of the aging and longevity communities that are working on true reversal technologies. So there are two companies working on and I'm a you know disclaimer, I'm an investor in both of these companies working on Actually reversing the plaques, like getting rid of the plaques, and there are two different approaches to do that. And then there's multiple companies working on the stiffening of the arteries that's caused by extracellular matrix, cross links and other problems with the ECM, and so I think that within a decade we're going to see some progress on meaningfully reversing cardiovascular disease is not just slowing it down by by Trying to floor your cholesterol as as as low as possible. So that's for I think probably the other area I would highlight is that within a decade we're going to see some treatments that really dramatically affect mitochondrial health and that those are going to be huge Because mitochondrial aging is it's such a big and complicated part of both the sort of metabolic aspect of aging, but also it's possible to reverse some aspects of aging by making mitochondria healthier.

Speaker 2: 57:04

There's all kinds of different sub and I can't predict which sub area within mitochondrial Aging biotech is going to be the winner. Probably there's going to be multiple. There's all kinds of things. The mitochondria are these Sub parts of the cell. There's sort of energy factories within a cell. The cell has lots of them in it and there's all kinds of things that are important there. The Membrane around the mitochondria the stronger that is the better and that's what where you get reactive oxygen species and and anti, all kinds of interesting biochemistry to interfere with, to try to reduce the, the stealing of the electrons and the and the sort of crazy things that oxygen and iron do reactively in the body, that sort of sort of like human equivalent version of rust.

Speaker 2: 57:53

But there's all kinds of approaches. Mitochondria divide and merge, fission, infusion, and we can regulate that. We can make the mitochondrial membrane stronger. We can give Exogenous mitochondria and cells take them up and there's sort of. There's a probably a dozen different mechanisms of action. People are using that area but I there's at least 20 companies working on it with one or more of those Mechanisms of action, and I think that some of those are probably going to get through clinical trials within five to ten years and they're going to make everyone feel more energetic. Part of the reason why you don't feel as energetic as you get older Is you mitochondria are just not nearly as healthy, and this is going to be a wonderful thing. It's going to be like a caffeine shot, but but it's just all natural mitochondria.

Speaker 1: 58:36

I'm going to try and summarize and you let me know where I'm wrong here. It sounds like the best program here is to keep your organ systems in as good a shape as possible by doing the sort of normal things that we talk about here, like if you're not sleeping, well, figure it out, get an exercise program, eat right, take care of your stress. What's your connection to purpose and humanity? You get sort of that stuff dialed in, and that's 95% of it and then make sure your biomarkers are where they should be. Keep an eye on that stuff, with the idea that we don't have to self experiment At some point in the very near future five to ten years, like if we can keep everything Relatively good shape for that amount of time, there's going to be some significant therapies available. Did I get that right?

Speaker 2: 59:22

So your summary is the best available summary I could give for a generic person without knowing their age. I'm really one should adapt what you just said based on how old someone is. If you're Young, if you're in your 30s and 40s or even your 20s, then, you know, you can even have more flexibility on how, how well you optimize your lifestyle, as long as you don't really shoot Yourself in the foot too badly, and they are like, the best things you can do are help, support the field, you know, right to your congressperson, support the, the a4li organization that's doing Lobbying in the on behalf of the field, you know, give philanthropically to the foundations and, you know, maybe get a job in the field or do you know or learn biology is as your chosen career. And if the other end of the spectrum, right, if you're in your 80s, you know, or 90s or late 70s, then you might not have the time to wait the decade for these new things to come along, and so so plenty of people who are in there, you know, late life, are not waiting.

Speaker 2: 1:00:21

They're just taking their best guesses with some of these things that are available now, and I, you know, I can't fault them for that. I'm not that old and so that's not what I'm doing. You know plenty of people in the field would have managed them not to do that and to just like go quietly in you know the way you based on until we have good data, and some of them just don't like that idea. So some of them go offshore to do the more experimental things and some of them find the more experimental things and ways to access them here. I'm young enough I don't have to worry about being quite that desperate yet. But you know, in midlife, in in 40s, 50s, 60s, that's where your summary comes along. But you know it's different if you're 65 versus if you're 53 versus if you're 40, 46. You know these are. These might all have different shades where you want to nudge towards one or the other of those extremes.

Speaker 1: 1:01:09

Very well said. Thank you for making that a little more granular. I appreciate that. Is there anything you want to leave our Audience with today?

Speaker 2: 1:01:18

I think the field is clearly going to grow. More people are going to read more and more about it. It's already getting to be more popular press articles and just regular newspaper articles for the people who aren't paying attention to podcasts like this one and your website and Anybody who wants to help get involved, there are. It's not necessarily an easy field to break into, but there are going to be more and more ways to Get involved.

Speaker 2: 1:01:44

In terms of philanthropic donation right, a lot of people donate to something you know in addition to donating to your local food bank and church. You know this is a great philanthropic area for everybody to donate to, because it's really going to affect everybody and you know, if you really are Energetic and have extra time and have want to do Things, there are ways to engage with the field, and so some of the ways to engage with the field you can find on aging biotechinfo In terms of forums you can participate in, blogs you can listen to, or Podcasts you can listen to. Blogs you can read, conferences you can go to, depending on what your background is. Pay attention and engage Politically, socially, tell other people about it. This should be a topic of dinner conversation around the world.

Speaker 1: 1:02:30

Absolutely, absolutely. I want to encourage everybody to check out Carl's Twitter feed. That's how I initially found out about Carl. He also has an incredibly informative, useful Twitter feed. Well, I X feed now. Have a look at that, carl, it's. It's been a pleasure. I've been a follow of your work and your writings for a little while now and I'm glad that we were able to get together and make time for this today.

Speaker 2: 1:02:49

It's been a wonderful conversation. It was a really good to connect with you.

Speaker 1: 1:02:52

That was a great conversation. It's really wonderful to have somebody like Carl on the show. It's a privilege to be able to speak to people like this. One of the things that I find interesting is whenever I speak to people really in the know about this technology, about what's actually happening out there in the field, pretty much everybody's telling me the same thing. You know, five years at the inside, ten years at the outside, there's really gonna be a Radical change in the way way we age, the way our health spans are a length of our health spans, the length of our life spans, and I it's something that I like to stay away from, my problem, because we were all promised flying cars back in the 60s. We don't have one yet, but I think that there's just such an enormous, enormous amount of money, mental capacity, energy resources being put into this. I just don't see it going any other way. So that's a plug for keeping your organ systems in really good shape for the next five, ten years, and then, hopefully, this technology will be available to all of us.

Speaker 1: 1:03:58

One supplement that I take every day is Mitopure from timeline nutrition. It contains urolithin A. There's a tremendous amount of science out there about urolithin A and it's all very positive. Urolithin A helps us with something called mitophagy, which is cleaning out our older, not so functional mitochondria and at 65? I've built up some dysfunctional mitochondria Cleans those out, replaces them with new, better functioning mitochondria. What it does is it helps us with all the energy production in our bodies, our brains, our immune systems, our muscles. All of those Include mitochondria. They're the energy powerhouse and you want to have the best mitochondria we can. This is why I take mitopure every day, why members of my scientific board take it, why their families take it. It's a great product. If you go to timeline nutrition Dot-com, slash a, just use the code a just at checkout and you'll save 10% on your first purchase this week on.

Speaker 1: 1:04:58

Just try this. My suggestion is Super easy. It's walking. Probably the most impactful Human exercise we can do is simply walking. There is so much data on this. 30-minute walk is just so much better than no walk. And even if you've got a high level of activity, even if you're you're at the gym, you're you know you're doing your thing an hour every day. You're lifting weights, you're doing hit training, all that. Having that 30-minute sort of Decompression walk every night before you go to bed is going to do you huge, huge benefits. It's going to increase your HRV heart rate variability. That's great. It's going to increase your parasympathetic nervous system response, which means less stress, and it's just super easy and it's really enjoyable. So this week on, just try this. Try and get yourself a 30-minute walk every day. It doesn't matter what sort of physical shape you're in, whether you're an Olympian in training, any of that stuff. Just go for a walk. It's going to do you good. Just try this.

Speaker 1: 1:05:59

Thanks so much for joining us on the show today. This is where we ask you for something. I'm going to ask you to right now go and leave this a rating, hopefully five stars, up to five stars. It's up to you, and you can also leave us a comment. We would love that. It really helps us out there in podcast world and you can maybe share this with somebody out there that you think could use it. We'd really appreciate that. Everybody, have yourselves a wonderful week, go for a walk and we'll see you next week. Take care now.