AGEIST
The AGEIST podcast is where we rewrite life after 50. Hosted by David Stewart, founder of AGEIST and Super Age, we talk with extraordinary people—scientists, creatives, and thinkers—about living vibrantly in your 50s, 60s, 70s and beyond. From longevity science to emotional well-being, fitness to purpose, we explore the tools and mindsets that help us stay curious, energized, and deeply engaged with life. This isn’t about aging gracefully—it’s about living boldly.
AGEIST
Dr. Florence Comite: Own Your Health Destiny
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This week on The AGEIST Podcast, Dr. Florence Comite, clinician-scientist, and author of Invincible: Defy Your Genetic Destiny to Live Better, Longer, explains why “normal” lab results can miss the early signals that shape long-term health. Learn how sugar, insulin, A1C, cholesterol patterns, HDL, and free testosterone can reveal metabolic changes before a conventional diagnosis appears. She makes the case for tools like CGMs, deeper family history, better sleep, strength training, and hormone awareness as practical ways to understand what is happening beneath the surface. The episode gives the audience a clear framework for asking better questions, acting earlier, and taking more precise ownership of the next decades of their health.
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Key Moments
“I want everyone to own their future health destiny.”
“The first phrase that's completely wrong is you're in the normal range and everybody relaxes.”
“Aging is not a disease, it's a gift.”
Connect with Dr. Comite
Website
Invincible: Defy Your Genetic Destiny to Live Better, Longer
Connect with AGEIST
Click Here for the full interview transcript.
Welcome to the Ages Podcast. I'm David Stewart. This is episode 284. Today I'm speaking with Dr. Florence Komite, a physician scientist, endocrinologist, and author of the best-selling book, Invincible Defy Your Genetic Destiny. Live Better Longer. Florence trained at Yale and the National Institute of Health, spent decades inside academic medicine, and then took a very non-traditional path. Her work is built around a simple but powerful idea. By the time something is called a disease, we may already be late. The better question is: what are the patterns showing up under the surface long before we feel them? This conversation is right in the Aegis Wheelhouse. We talk about metabolic health, testosterone in men and women, continuous glucose monitors, sleep, genetics, family history, exercise, and why the phrase you're in the normal range may not be as reassuring as we think. In fact, if you hear that, you really want to perk up your ears. Florence is one of those rare doctors who balances tech talk with candor. She's rigorous, funny, optimistic, and very clear that this is not about trying to become 25 again. It's about becoming the best version of the age we are now. Here are a few moments from the conversation.
SPEAKER_02So the first phrase that's completely wrong is you're in the normal range and everybody relaxes. Normal range means you're grouped with thousands of people who are not healthy. That's how they collect those numbers, right? And then who wants to be average or normal? So it's dangerous. It's a dangerous signal because people think they're fine when they can get those numbers and they walk out of the doctor's office and drop dead of a heart attack. I would like people to feel that they have ownership over their future health destiny and that they can change. They don't have to turn into their mother with diabetes or their father with a heart attack or a grandparent with dementia. And I think it's that ownership over the patterns and the choices, particularly because you're coming from a place where you feel like at 50 you can have a brand new awakening.
SPEAKER_00What I appreciated about this conversation is that Florence is advocating responsibility, or maybe more accurately, she's reminding us that we have agency. And agency is a word I keep coming back to. We can look at our numbers, we can understand our family history, we can sleep better, lift more, manage glucose, choose who we spend time with, and pay attention to the quiet signals our body is sending before they become loud. I also like her point that aging is not a disease. Aging is a gift, and not everybody gets to do it. So the work is not to fight age, but to become more capable, more informed, and more alive every day. We'll talk to Dr. Florence Komite right after a brief word from our sponsors. Every movement we make starts with energy, and that energy starts inside our cells. As we age, our mitochondria, the little engines that power us, can become less efficient. That affects strength, recovery, resilience, all the things we actually care about. Timeline developed MITAPURE with Urolithin A to support metophagy, the process that helps clear out damaged mitochondria so our cells can work better. I think of it as working closer to the source. Timeline's clinically proven formula is now available at a new, lower price. MidaPure now starts at$79 when you go to Timeline.com slash AGIST. That's Timeline.com slash AGIST. Hydration is one of those simple things that can change the whole day. More energy, clearer focus, and fewer of those sluggish afternoon stretches. I've been reaching for Element's new 12-ounce sparkling cans because they make hydration easy. They're crisp, refreshing, and formulated with 500 milligrams of sodium plus potassium and magnesium with zero sugar. It's a smart addition to the day, whether you're working, training, or just trying to feel a little sharper. Get your free element sample pack with any order at drinklmnt.com slash AGIS. Get your free element sample pack with any order at drinklmnt.com slash AGIST. Before we get started, a quick favor. Please take a moment to give the AGIST podcast a five-star review. It really helps other people find the show, and we truly appreciate it. Okay, let's give Dr. Florence Kamite a call right now.
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SPEAKER_00Kamite, welcome. Where does this podcast find you today?
SPEAKER_02In Manhattan. Yeah, at our mean office on Central Park South. I'm looking outside at Central Park and Cherry Blossoms, so it's nice. Oh. Nice. I'm looking out at the East River. Excellent. You're we can walk to we could have done this in person, maybe. Yeah. That would have been fun.
SPEAKER_00I live near the East River, not far from Cornell. Isn't it amazing the river traffic?
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Until I lived here, I never realized how much stuff goes up and down the river. I know. Did you grow up here or are you uh from somewhere else? Oh, I grew up in this little farm town in upstate New York. Oh, cool. I remember I first came to Manhattan when I was like, oh gosh, this was exactly 50 years ago when I was like 17. And I remember coming up out of the subway, and it was sort of like a misty, rainy night in uh end of October, and I saw the Empire State Building like all lit up.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And the subways weren't, they were called like IRT, BMT, that sort of stuff. And it was like really Byzantine to get around back then, but old days in New York. So we have so much to talk about today. Are you are you okay if I call you Florence? Yeah, please do. So, Florence, you have a new book called Invincible. Defy your genetic destiny, live better longer. You've been selling quite a few books. Is that true? Yes, very exciting. So you were on the USA Today bestseller list?
SPEAKER_02I was, I am, as of today. And um, the biggest change, I think, Gail King was just phenomenal. I was on CBS morning and she just loved it. She actually read the book, came in and met me in the greeting room. She was really funny. I asked her, you know, like, so what do I do to make this go well? And she said, just don't fuck it up. That was her. I said, great, not too much pressure. And then I tried to find the Zen moment and I had a great time on the set. She actually handed me her phone before the piece started and said, okay, put in your contact information because I'm going to call you and I'm going to bring my bestie to see you. That was pretty empowering, you know. When I heard that, I felt like, okay, I'm doing something right. Why did you write this book? I want everyone to own their future health destiny. I think that we're living longer lives, but not necessarily healthy. So the baby boomer population, where this is the first big experiment post-antibiotics that could live long. But when you look around, it's diabetes, strokes, dementia, heart disease. It's going to be worse for those of us who come after the great generation, the baby boomers, because we're living long, but we're not taking care of ourselves. And I think we saw a microcosm of that with COVID. And I felt by distilling the knowledge I had created prospectively, as an academician trained at Yale and NIH, I wanted to design the way I collected the data with people so that it was interpretable at the end of it. I could publish it. Because you know, in medicine, nothing counts unless you're able to actually define what you're doing. It can't be just a story. Stories are great. In fact, they're much more fun. So I define, I defined it as real-world data and looked at people through particular lenses that I'm happy to drill into. And by doing so, I felt like I could create a book that everyone can see themselves in and use it to jumpstart taking control of their health for life.
SPEAKER_00Let's unpack the the five key biomarkers of health and the seven patterns of health decline, which I'm sure I'm in like five of them, but let's All of us are in at least one, and most of us are two, if not three or four.
SPEAKER_02But if you compare that to chronic disease, there's 40 to 60 percent of people, depending on where you look at the quote, who have two or more chronic diseases. And so what do you want? Do you want your health or do you want to know the pattern so you can take control and not decline and really live life to the fullest till 100, 120, 150, enjoying all that life has to offer? That's what I always wanted. The five biomarkers, which give you initial insight, because right now everybody's doing biomarkers. You can get 50, 100, 1,000. The question is, who's interpreting it? And how do you figure out what it really means? I have people who are in those startups and companies coming to me because they're confused about what to do next. They don't get it. And so I decided when I looked at the data, I could see that five biomarkers were going to be critical. And they have to do with carbohydrate metabolism or sugar, insulin, hemoglobin A1C, cholesterol, which is total cholesterol and good cholesterol HDL, high density lipoprotein. And the final one, which is a surprise to a lot of people, but it is, it shouldn't be really, is free testosterone. Because testosterone is this ubiquitous hormone that is one of the first signs that your body, as it declines, your body can't do what it used to do. And that happens in your 30s. You don't have to wait till you're 50 or 60. It's actually happening once you hit your 30s. And so those are the five biomarkers when read together and connected the dots to how you live life. What are your habits, sleep, exercise, food, stress and anxiety, how do you manage that? Do you do anything restorative? And then the rest of your health story, which is what is your personal medical background? What have you dealt with in life? What are you concerned about? What diagnoses do you have? What medications are you on? What supplements? Along with what is really insightful is your family history. Because your family history is the emergence of what's going on in your DNA. And DNA, frankly, dictates everything. But here's the thing: DNA itself, or genetics, is really a rough draft of what you can actually see happen. What is really far more important is the epigenome. How exactly does your genes manifest? And are there ways to work around it so you can magnify your assets and limit liabilities in terms of your genetic makeup and what you've inherited?
SPEAKER_00You wrote a piece for super age about normal is not really what you want. I'm not a health practitioner, but people often ask me these questions about like, oh, they go to see the doctor. And I tell them if their doctor says something like, well, this looks okay, but we want to keep an eye on it, that's like a huge red flag. Like Exactly. What exactly is this number that you're looking at? And and tell me about this. So with something like A1C, I what's the number for diabetes? It's like six. Six point five.
SPEAKER_02And if you know the commercials for semaglutide or a wagove or Manjaro, they use seven as this magic number that dances around on the screen. And if you're less than seven, how fantastic. Well, we're used to a six-central healthcare system where we go to doctors or doctors see us. They're trained in reactive medicine. You have to have a chief complaint. In my world, you don't want your hemoglobin A1C to be greater than five, because as you head towards 5.7, 5.7 to 6.4 is pre-diabetes. And typically you only go one direction, up, up, up. But even if you're less than five, here's the conundrum. I am less than five. I always have been. But I had insulin resistance. And that's even a stronger marker of future disorder of diabetes. And so understanding where those numbers come from and what they actually translate to for you specifically or for me, it's what's much more vital than being told. So the first phrase that's completely wrong is you're in the normal range and everybody relaxes. Normal range means you're grouped with thousands of people who are not healthy. That's how they collect those numbers, right? And then who wants to be average or normal? So it's dangerous. It's a dangerous signal because people think they're fine when they can get those numbers and they walk out of the doctor's office and drop dead of a heart attack. The next most dangerous is I'll keep an eye on it. Till when? Till you get diabetes. So if your sugar is a little high, which is one common test, right, that a doctor will get, you're lucky if it's done fasting, you fasted overnight, you get your sugar. If it's not between 70 and 80, you're if it's higher than that or lower than that, you're in trouble. And that's where you have to start paying attention. And it can be seen, frankly, it could be seen before the age of 30. But 30 is when, in effect, our bodies at the cellular level begin to change and decline. And we may think it's regular life. We're raising a family, we have a lot of kids, or we're trying to get pregnant, or we're working really hard, or our career is demanding. We have aging parents, we're stuck, we're the sandwich generation. But all of that, you can't even if you do everything perfectly, and I have patients who do and look perfect, actually, on the outside, and yet our body is declining under the surface. And that's what is important to look at. And these five biomarkers give you your first lens into what exactly is detectable, and how do we predict, almost like a crystal ball to me, predict the path you're on for your future health trajectory. That's what I consider important. Because if you want to live your life to the fullest after 50, you want to feel good. It's hard to live to the fullest in vitality and all and energy if you aren't healthy.
SPEAKER_00I'm going to get to like, you know, some of the more insidious, unseen patterns of health decline that you talk about. But first I want to go to the free T the free testosterone. And we're talking about men and women here.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, absolutely. Although testosterone is not formally approved for women. But we have more testosterone in our body than even at our peak reproductive years when we're having cycles. We make a lot of testosterone, but only a tenth of what men have. It's just never been recognized as something that's vital for women. I've personally been on testosterone for three decades because I knew back in the 30s that I was at very high risk for osteoporosis. And I wasn't going to go down that route on both sides of my family. My father's sister, my mother's sister had severe osteoporosis. In the end, my father had it, because you know, men suffer with osteoporosis in exactly the same numbers as women. 25%. You've seen men walking around New York City, right? As we chatted before, you're in New York, I'm in New York, with a walker and hunched over. And they can't straighten up because their spine has shrunk and collapsed. It just starts about 10 years later in men than women. Heart disease is the reverse because test estrogen is a little more powerful to protect the heart for a little longer. And we as women have more estrogen than men.
SPEAKER_00I don't want to use the word controversial, but it's newish now. Hearing women, as you said, it's not a it's not approved for testosterone therapy.
SPEAKER_02So as a physician, we can prescribe what we want as long as, you know, you look at to me, I have to assess risk benefit. So back in the day when I started women's health at Yale, which happened in the 90s, way before this now big movement around menopause and perimenopause, which I'm glad it's finally out of the closet. But I was doing it at Yale in a woman-only center, probably the first in the world. I knew that we could use testosterone, particularly to protect a certain group of women who had already had all the estrogen wiped out of their body because they had breast cancer. And a lot of doctors still feel that estrogen contributes to breast cancer. And not in that category. I think there are various forms of estrogen, and sometimes it it might relate, but most of the time it doesn't. But in order to protect these women's lives, they were suffering. They didn't feel good. They lost their jobs because they didn't think they looked good, and neither did people who hired them. They were suffering on every level. So I created a protocol because as a clinician who's also a scientist, I'm trained in clinical investigation from the National Institutes of Health. And at Yale, it was a big thing to do research. And I did research in people, children and men and women. I knew that they had to have a quality of life that they didn't have. So I put them on testosterone with a protocol through a protocol that was approved by what we call the IRB, which is a review board or the HIC, the Human Investigation Committee, and it worked and they did great. And in fact, years later, Sloan started doing the same thing, you know, here in the city, where they would give women post-smastectomy, post-breast cancer, testosterone, and you can block the conversion. Testosterone and estrogen are like siblings. You can convert testosterone into estrogen with certain enzymes in the skin, men and women. And by blocking that enzyme, you don't get conversion. I have not found in women that you get a lot of conversion. In men, you can, but not in women. So I've been using testosterone a very long time, completely safe. It has effects on every cell of the body. It's not just about sexual function and libido in men. Most men complain about energy and loss of energy beginning in their in their 30s, not sexual function so much. There, the mind might be more powerful than the body. But after a while, it does have an effect. So energy, memory, cognition, and they've seen all these outcomes in my studies, bone, muscle, that's obvious. You can't package sugar effectively. That's why those five biomarkers come back to looking at hormone, testosterone, and sugar management because you need muscle. And when you don't have testosterone, you can't make it by going to the gym. Unlike growth hormone, growth hormone, you can actually increase production of growth hormone by working out harder and sleeping better. But without adequate testosterone, you have trouble increasing growth hormone. So there's a there's a synergism in our system that works through mind and body, and we need all of it to be as optimal as possible. And that's why I evaluate and I do what I do based on really what I think of as investigative lens, meaning I look at the evidence. I start with evidence that's published, but you know that no article is perfect. There's inclusion-exclusion criteria for men and women. You can't test everyone. Partly why a lot of women were left out of studies because of pregnancy. With women, we have a handle on when they go through menopause because of the menstrual cycle. With men, we really don't. So they just studied a lot of men for a lot of diseases. And then, but by looking at the whole system, you can tell what's changing and you can change the direction of how you're aging. So to me, 30 years ago, it was how do we keep people at their peak health, which is generally thought of as 25 to 30 in men and women. And then if we do, maybe we won't get disorders of aging. That was my press pressy. That was my hypothesis at the time. And if I could prove it, that's what I needed to do. And I have. It's taken three times as long as I hoped. I hoped it would be like a decade, try three decades. But I now know I have scientific proof of concept in real-world data looking at each individual. So start with the evidence, but then drill it down to the human being right in front of you. And what's right for you will not necessarily be right for your best friend, male, let's say, or your sibling. And that's the other epiphany. I'm an identical twin. So but she, as a dermatologist, very smart of her. And so my identical twin made it obvious to me when genetics and the genome was described initially by Craig Venter and then a group at the NIH that it isn't only genes that dictate, it's the way we live life. It's even where we are in utero. So when you implant in utero, one twin may get different kinds of, you know, food than the other twin. So they can be born differently. Even the right side of your face, the genes you have on the right side of your face are not identical to the genes that have expressed on the left side of your face. So by applying that concept that you can read numbers across the system, you are really more about your genome and what expresses from your genes and the choices you make in life can affect those, the expression of genes. And that's the epigenetic piece of the epigenome.
SPEAKER_00Talk to me about the seven patterns of health decline. So are there some there that are particularly insidious and sneaky that we need to be aware of?
SPEAKER_02I would say yes. First of all, my goal with the seven patterns was to find yourself in it. Since I wasn't going to be able to take care of millions of patients, how do I make a difference in everyone's life around the globe? So to me, it was where do you start and how do you recognize yourself? The most insidious to me is one that saved, made us who we are today because we inherited them from ancestors who lived through being cavemen, lean times. And if you couldn't live off your own body, your genes died. So in the days where there was famine and there wasn't enough to eat, the people whose genes survived, our ancestors, had to be able to pack away sugar and live off of it, right? And so that's why we all, each one of us, and I wrote an op-ed piece about it, I'm happy to share back in November in the New York Post, we've inherited genes, all different patterns of genes, that express this ability to hold on to sugar and to increase our insulin and to make it available when life is tough. But life is no longer that tough with Uber Eats, and most of us have access to food, which is another issue. We have access to terrible food, you know, ultra-processed, processed food that aren't great for our body and our health. So they add another dilemma on top of it. So it's the notion of what your sugar management is. Not sugar, sugar to me is not evil. I feel like I say that a lot because I do have a sweet tooth, but it's the way the sugar engages with our body because of our genetic makeup and what we express. And we learned that there's actually a brilliant study done in Israel at the Weitzmann Institute where they studied about a thousand people. I think Iran Siegel was the principal investigator. And they showed that for some people, a banana will cause your sugar to go sky high. In another person, a banana won't do anything wearing a continuous glucose monitor or checking your blood sugar. And yet a cookie will. The truth may lie somewhere in between for other folks. So learning what your body does when you eat, when you're stressed, when you work out, when you sleep or don't sleep, or have a glass or two or three at wine at dinner, sugar can go sky high, but then in the middle of the night, you can drop down and be really low. And it can wake you up and disrupt sleep. So you don't get the deep sleep you also need to sustain your health and wash your brain and all the metabolic waste that you sleep with. And if you can't wash it away and you can't get good deep sleep, that's another risk factor for getting diseases with age. I'm sure you've explored that as well.
SPEAKER_00Do you encourage your patients to uh wear CGMs?
SPEAKER_02I do. Every single patient actually, as long as they don't object, and the biggest objection, a lot of times, women who wear sleeveless, I'm a geek and I'm a data geek, so I wear it all the time. I just have to remember which arm it's on. And thankfully nowadays they have an alarm you can turn off. So just in case you go too low, it doesn't wake you up. That was the have you tried it?
SPEAKER_00I made the mistake of putting it on the outside of my arm.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And the first night I slept on it, and it it said I was basically dead. Right. You know, alarm, go to hospital immediately. And my my very thoughtful wife, her like I just I was asleep, the thing is going off, and she's looking, there's all these red lights and stuff, called the ambulance, this sort of thing. And she goes over and she's like, puts her hand there. So he's still breathing. I think it's okay. It should just put the phone in the other room.
SPEAKER_02But yeah, people who in the tech world learned how to get rid of the app, even though the phone would scream at them. I have to sleep with as a doctor, I sleep with my phone. It's the closest thing to me in bed, actually, not my husband. So I use it to wake myself up also. I set it on like vibrate. And and yes, so but nowadays you can actually get six hours, which is a little annoying because I tried to get seven hours by doing six hours and 59 minutes, but it reverts to just six hours. That's the maximum. So if you want to avoid that, that's what we do. And now people can don't they don't need a prescription. Finally, in the last year or two, you can get a lingo, you can get a Stella, even wearable other companies with VIP wearables used to be able to get it on Amazon. I think you might. It's not that expensive. But to me, it's life-saving because it can help you if you're comfortable with it, it can help dictate the choices you might make. Like a banana does that high sugar thing for me. So I, if I do have a banana, I just make sure that I have nut butter with it or a handful of nuts or protein, and I don't have it just alone as a banana, which will cause my sugar to spike. Then insulin follows and then drops. So first I become hyperglycemic and then I become hypo or low. And so you don't want that. You want to keep a nice steady state, kind of like our temperature. Not everyone's 98.6, right? There are some of us who are 97 and others who may be 99 at baseline. And we all learn that through through COVID, right? And so, but if we can keep our glucose within this nice frame, and you don't even need a doctor to do it, you just get a CGM over the counter and learn what changes you might want to make to keep yourself as stable as possible. Maybe there are toxic people in your life, and every time you're with them, your sugar goes sky high. Well, it might be time to cut out those toxic people. Now forget the sugar. So, and I know with other endocrinologist friends of mine, when I told them about it, because I was one of the first in it, I actually um snuck some in from another country before it went straight to consumer. We had it here, but you had to bring the hard drive back to the doctor. And so I was visiting and I saw the store selling them where the consumer, the person using it, could see the numbers on their own app. And I was able to hack the system and bring it in. I got stopped, you know, when they checked what I was bringing into this country, but I showed them my drop my doctor's license and they let me go. It's just a game changer completely, along with the GLP ones, by the way. But the CGMs really can inform an individual about choices they make and give them the option to eat differently and sleep differently and drink differently and work out, and all of that adds up.
SPEAKER_00Let's pause here for a moment. Florence is making an important point. The body is giving us information all the time, but most of us were never taught how to read it. We'll be right back after this. Most of us think about muscle health in terms of lifting weights and consuming protein, but there is a deeper layer underneath all of it, and that is cellular energy. Your muscle cells are packed with mitochondria because muscle takes a lot of energy to do its job. As we age, mitochondrial function naturally declines, and that can show up as lower energy, less strength, slower recovery, and a little less bounce back than we used to have. Timeline has spent more than 15 years researching mitochondrial health and developed mitopure, which contains urolithin A. Urolithin A supports metophagy, the body's process for clearing out damaged mitochondria and recycling cellular components. In one study, participants saw a 12% improvement in muscle strength in four months with no change in exercise. That gets my attention. For me, healthy aging means protecting capacity, the ability to move, train, recover, and keep showing up for the life I want. Supporting the cellular machinery underneath strength and energy feels like a very smart place to start. Timeline's clinically proven formula is now available at a new, lower price. Midopure now starts at$79 when you go to Timeline.com slash agist. When it comes to the pillars of health, hydration has a way of influencing everything. It affects how you recover, how you feel, and how well you move through the day. That's one of the reasons I like Element. It's a zero sugar electrolyte drink designed to support hydration. Lately I've been reaching for their new 12-ounce sparkling cans. I especially notice the difference after a workout when I want to recover well and get back to feeling steady and clear. Beyond that, I found it just as useful when I'm traveling, which is one of the easiest ways to get dehydrated without really noticing it. Flights, long days, changes in routine, more coffee, less water, it adds up quickly. Element makes it easy to stay ahead of that. Each sparkling can has 500 milligrams of sodium along with potassium and magnesium, and the flavors are genuinely good. Lemonade salt, black cherry salt, orange salt, and pineapple salt. It's a simple thing, but it can make all the difference in improving your routine and keeping your body optimized. Get your free element sample pack with any order at drinklmnt.com/slash agist. It sounds like we're talking a lot about metabolic health here. We are. It's a big piece of it. What is it that people, as they get a little older, don't understand about metabolic health?
SPEAKER_02They don't understand that it's happening below the surface. And if they have aches and pains, they might be used, and I've heard patients tell me this just like, you know, I'll keep an eye on it, is, you know, get used to it. You're getting older. Well, guess what? You want to make choices, as your podcast says, of living life to the fullest after 50. How do you live life to the fullest after 50 if you're declining and you're in pain and you have joint pains and you don't have the energy to hang out with your friends or, you know, go to a play ball with your grandchild? And all of that to me was like, it's not inevitable. And so that's where I think the change has to happen, you know, for for most of us metabolically, we have to understand that our system is evolving. We're not, we weren't really intended to live till 120, even if nowadays lots of folks are living above 100 and we'll get to 120. And by owning the decision making about your body, for example, I diagnose the, I use these, I use a lot more than five biomarkers. When you come to my center, we're gonna get 100, 150, and then even more because I can connect all those dots. That's a apparently a superpower that I was told by the Silicon Valley folks was we opened up in Palo Alto, so I have an office there as well during COVID, because I'm a risk taker, as you might tell. I went there in July 2020 with a small team from New York, and we ended up getting very busy and nothing was open there. So it was fun. Everybody thought they'd be safe in a doctor's office, so it was great. And but if you know that you can do these things, if you know you can own it, you can actually make better choices for yourself. And I think that that everybody saw that viscerally for themselves during COVID because it was the first responders who weren't in good shape, people who had diabetes who were on respirators and died, eight times more likely than somebody who did not. Here at the center, I've had no one with long COVID, not one person. And yet all my colleagues in longevity talk about long COVID that it's a given, and it is a given. The CDC has studied the outcomes of early heart attacks, diseases, neurological strokes, and other, even in children. But to me, I I've never prescribed insulin and I'm an endocrinologist. I it's probably reportable in the New England Journal of Medicine because I reverse it all the time. I can see where it's coming from, I can see where it's going. And apparently, this superpower for me, which I assumed every doctor knew, allows me to look at numbers and put it together as a story and say, hey, this is where you're headed. And it's also using, to the extent it's available, family history, because family history is also expression of your genetic makeup. And but truth be told, for me, I've seen thousands. So if I get somebody who is adopted or doesn't know their biological family, I can still see, I can tell them what ran in your biological family by looking at the numbers. So it helps.
SPEAKER_00Talk to me this idea of energy of your 20s into later life. I'm 67. Lawrence, I'm in really good shape. I cannot run the way I ran at 22. It's just not gonna happen.
SPEAKER_02Why, why is that? Do you have joint issues, or you don't have the strength to do it, or you can't make the timing work?
SPEAKER_00The timing, it's the joint. When I was 20, it was just like I guess I could run like an antelope. It was just like and now it's just sort of like clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk.
SPEAKER_02Obviously, the dynamics of your body has changed, right? Bones, muscles, tendons change. But I don't know you well enough. I can tell by looking at you that you are one of these people who try to take care of themselves. You look great. I've had lots of people who look great on the outside, but it doesn't matter. I have a couple who I adore, and he has early Alzheimer's and 7% body fat, and he's a wonderful man. It's it's genetic. So to me, and and his wife, who's also gorgeous, is in your age group, their VO2 maxes are equivalent to a 25 to 30 year old. But their genes have dictated, in her case, very early heart disease. She had two sisters die of a heart attack in their 50s, and he has Alzheimer's that's rampant in the family. My goal is to not allow that to happen. I have lots of people, people who you might even recognize, where that is why they came to me years ago. And they actually noticed that their memory was declining, like you with running, and they got it back. So one of the most important factors is testosterone. I I can't begin to understand. I'm happy to take a story from you, but you'd have to know more. I'd have to know more to understand where we go. So one patient you remind me of is a wonderful guy. He comes in from Chicago. He's he also ran a well-known company that was started as a startup, very successful, brilliant guy. And he was a big runner. And he came to me because he heard about my work. We were at a meeting together and he met people who were my patients. And he was a phenomenal runner. He didn't love it, but he ran a lot. He had no muscle. And as a result, he was not in the best shape he could have been. And so once we course corrected that with what the work we did with him, and in my case, I don't just give out testosterone, you know. I do believe it's useful. But I have a little bit more of a kind of developed approach in that I use a peptide called human chorionic anatotropin that's used in women to ovulate them at the time they, if they go through IVF and they have to release 18 eggs because it acts like the hormone you need. And in men, it's used to stimulate the testes to make testosterone. So, depending on the combination of variables in the hormonal pattern and other patterns, we use this peptide, which I've used for 30 years with complete safety, to stimulate a man's testosterone. Because men age differently than women, as you probably know. They we get a little more fat around our middle earlier because we have less testosterone. Men hold on to it longer. Men age in a more linear fashion, where the numbers drop every decade. And it depends what, and for every man it's one decade or the other, but it's a dropout, like through their 80s. So HCG, I can use it. I've used it in people in men in their 80s to stimulate their own testosterone, which I like physiologically because it works with the body as opposed to taking over. It's also great if a man wants to conceive, you know, have another child because it actually stimulates the lighting cells to a degree where you're improved with um spermatogenesis and making sperm. Some men need testosterone in their 40s, but other men don't need it until their 80s. And then there's everything in between. Whereas we women basically hit a wall. The eggs in our in our ovaries begin to decline when we're born. If we're little girls and we're born, the eggs are starting to go. And every month more and more go. And by the time a woman hits menopause, all the eggs are gone. Nowadays they're working on ways to prolong those years, either by taking a piece of the ovary that's happening at Yale and implanting it elsewhere in the body, or by using rapamycin, which looks like it allows fewer eggs to be released. So there's all sorts of options there. So in your case, it's a matter if you've done, you know, the big biohacking nowadays, we can get your numbers everywhere. It's more ubiquitous than the continuous glucose monitor. So if you've gotten numbers run at like Function Health or Aura, or you can even go to Quest or Lab Core, they target everybody. That would tell me a lot. And that's how I started. I started by having people just send me their numbers. It never was as complete as I wanted to. And I've come full circle because now I know you can start with these five. Then I didn't know it. I didn't know that 20, 30 years ago, but I was able to make do with what I had. And this superpower allows me to connect those dots and tell you how we integrate it and then how we interpret it to get meaningful insights and to, of course, correct your running. Because maybe in your case, you need regenerative medicine and you might want to consider stem cells or platelet-rich plasma if there's a part of your body that's aching and not fully healed because you've probably been injured over the years. You've taken a pounding. But look where you can prove the genetics of it. Who's won places one, two, three and now beat the two-hour time frame in the marathon in the UK? Every one of those guys was from Kenya. Why? Why, if people are racing from around the world, because it's genetics. And there's in fact a recent study in twins, identical twins, also out of Israel, I think it was published in science, where they showed in thousands of twins by eliminating what was not pertinent that more than 50% of what was expressed is genetic. And so we have the power to understand that. And now we have the ability to reverse it and to slow it down and to stop what aging does to our body, like for you and running. Luckily, I always told everyone I had power genes, not endurance genes. Like I would never run a marathon. It's not my thing. And then when I studied my genes, it turns out that I do have power genes. My family is more known for the sprinting.
SPEAKER_00There's one member who does marathons, but I've switched to more uh weightlifting sort of things from in endurance stuff and the bike.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Weightlifting, by the time you're where you are in life, you want to at least do 50% weightlifting in your time, like three times a week, 30 minutes to an hour. You can even do aerobic in between. Actually, probably the least helpful exercise is pure aerobic, trudging on a treadmill or even because after a while your body acclimates to that. So I emphasize in this order more resistance training than high intensity, which is good to make sure your heart gets the power it needs when it needs it, and then aerobic, which you can do just by moving, you know, and uh that is important. I also don't believe that there's this magic 10,000 steps for everyone. So I think we need to take information we get off the internet. We in the old days we get on social now with a lot of grains of salt. And in fact, salt is good for you. A lot of people think salt is bad for you, but as you age, you uh mature people have a harder time balancing electrolytes. And you might know this as a runner, but more runners die of overhydration than underhydration. So electrolytes are critical, and I've seen a lot of people with their sodium's too low, their potassium is too low. So we believe in using electrolytes liberally. And you know, I used to be yelled at for putting too much salt on my eggs, and now of course I could quote everybody else and say, no, I need that salt. I use Himalayan salt though, because first of all, it's pretty, it's pink, and also it has more minerals and less sodium, a little less sodium in it.
SPEAKER_00Um I I gotta ask, like, you were you were at Yale for 25 years and you left. Like people don't do that. Uh why did you that's a pretty risky move. Why did you do that?
SPEAKER_02Well, we've already established that I'm a huge risk taker, right? I was frustrated. As I alluded to, I had several epiphanies around the time that the genome was described by Craig Venter, who actually just recently passed away last week. He was only 79. He started a similar kind of company in San Diego called Human Longevity and Health Nucleus. I don't know if you've heard of it, where they tried to look at biomarkers. And I was looking at these numbers and patterns, and I was getting, I did a lot of clinical research. I bought drugs to market in kids and adults' peptides, actually, was the field which is now everywhere, but not quite in the way I think about it. I gave a journal club at Yale, and I was in three departments, as we all are overachievers. I was in adult medicine endocrine, which is diabetes, thyroid, cholesterol, osteoporosis, lipids. I was in gynecology. There wasn't even a separate department for men in andrology, which is the equivalent of gyneconomic. It's why we don't know much about hormones in men. It's very different. I I know a fair amount because I was trained in it, but most doctors don't. And I was in pediatric endocrine because I worked in growth, development, and puberty. So I was lucky enough to see every decade of life. And as a result, one journal club, I decided to present what I had seen, but also tie it to evidence and show that why does disease, why does infertility, why do heart attacks in men, osteopenia in women, we get collie's fractures of the wrist? Why does it all begin at about 35? Why do we start feeling not ourselves? We can burn the candle at both ends in our 20s because we're compensating. You can ski all all day and then play cards and drink all night and still get up and ski the next morning. It rapidly dissipates as we get older. And it's not just having kids and working hard, it's because our body is declining. So I felt like I had a basis for this understanding, even though I felt very isolated. It really took, David, 20 years, maybe more, for this field to get really hot. And I think COVID pushed it over the edge where now it's a thing, it's a huge trend. How realistic it is, I won't go there, but I think there's a lot of buyer beware, you know, the perception, because it is hot. And as some of my patients said, there's a lot of marketing and hype out there and a lot of money to be made. I started it, I'd like to believe, for more altruistic reasons. If you read my book, you saw that I started with my father asking me how to stay healthy when I graduated Yale. Okay, my brilliant daughter. I need to know how, because he was a health knot. And he made his own brand muffins and ran and swam and did all the I couldn't keep up with him in the gym when he was in his 90s. And I had pictures of it. He wanted me to swim after working out, and I'm like, no, you've worn me out. I can't do that. And then I asked him, you know, Dad, like, what do you feel now compared to when you were my age? Because he was an older father. He had come as an immigrant from war-torn Europe, and as did my mom. They met here. And he said, I feel much better. I can take care of myself. I can invest in my body. But why can't you tell me how to stay healthy? His view of doctors is you had to know yourself because you only got like five minutes in front of a doctor. And if you didn't know yourself, what would the doctor know about you? So that's where my whole health story came from. Yeah, he's right. And I knew that even when I was in training, I remember meeting with a young woman who was telling me about pain that she would have every month, and she tied it to her cycle. And I was pretty sure she had a certain condition called endometriosis. I entered a room of about 50 men, because we had rounds afterwards to discuss the cases we had seen that morning. And I remember saying, This is what she reported, and she thinks she has, and this is, you know, the disorder, maybe endometriosis. And the men, almost to a fault, except my mentor, who is absolutely fabulous, said to me, How does she know anything? She's not a doctor. So my answer to them at the time, being very young, was she lives in her own body. Don't you think she's observing these changes and can track it? So I'm a firm believer that we can all biohack, but we have to biohack from a position of knowledge that hopefully my book will allow people to take and turn into wisdom. Because you can get symptoms that sound like you're going through perimenopause for women, periandropause for men, but it may be thyroid disease. I have a lot of patients who have a very low. Acting thyroid, and because they do one test which isn't valid because it doesn't show you the full interaction between the brain and the thyroid, they usually test something called TSH, thyroid stimulating hormone, which comes from what other countries call the third eye, the pituitary gland, stimulates the thyroid, but that stimulation can go awry, and your thyroid numbers can be quite low, and you can have classical symptoms, but you're not treated. So dementia, too, dementia is not just Alzheimer's. It can be metabolites like electrolytes. You can have sick cell syndrome where your sodium is too low. Thyroid disease. I just spoke to a reporter I was interviewed for the UK, and the woman was started telling me the story after she interviewed me about her grandmother had just recently passed, leaving a grandfather who had dementia. So I said, Oh, how is he doing? Who's taking care of him? Well, my mother stops in daily, but he lives by himself. And I'm like, what? Okay. So tell me a little bit more about your grandfather, because I can't help myself. And she said, Well, he's been, he's had this condition where he gets very confused for 12 years, and but he lives alone and he seems to be able to take care of things. I said, That's not dementia. That is a form of probably metabolic dementia. And it turns out, after I probed a little more, he had a pacemaker put in because he had a very low heart rate. Well, a very low heart rate translates to poor perfusion of the brain. And he might have been hypothyroid, which is one of the side effects. So I said, when you go back, ask your mom to get him tested for thyroid. Because I've heard that story over and over again. And it's sad to me that the information just isn't readily available out there. I know I'm running on a bit because I'm still, believe it or not, passionate about what I do, even though it's been a long time. But I feel like you can change a life, and that is really a gift. Becoming a doctor, you know, is truly to me a way to help people live well. And that's what I'm that's why I'm glad I did what I did and I left Yale because it was very hard, very bureaucratic. I was kind of different. When I was there the first time when I was on the faculty after coming back from NIH, finally they had one woman chair. Everybody else were men. It was much more common for women like me to drop out to raise a family, to maybe work part-time. But I guess I was always pretty driven, and as you can tell. And to me, if I got to a point where I had proof of concept in the work that I did, it would change it could change the lives of everyone. And you could sit next to me on a plane, and if you really want to talk to me, usually I bury myself in a book or something and I'm working. I'll talk to you. I'll I'll find out who you are. And if you find out I'm a doctor, I'll tell you what I think and where to go get help. So it's part of the, you know, doctorhood, I think, taking that oath.
SPEAKER_00I just want to say I I really appreciate your smile and your sort of joie de vivre.
SPEAKER_02I think we're it's trained in us in some ways to be a little more. I think you have to learn that hope and compassion really change a life also and relationships. So it's not just the numbers. Your health story to me is composed of I inquire, like, well, tell me about your brothers and sisters, tell me about your mom and dad. And then I ask, and I'm sure at the end, at the other end of the line, they don't realize what I'm really asking is you have a relationship. Are you you have friends? What are you doing in your life? Because that to me is also life-giving and full of vitality. And I know when I went through my own divorce, it was my best friend who, even if I was depressed, I could go over there and laugh and feel a thousand percent better. And I believe that laughter, compassion, and hope really heal, you know, and the numbers are important, but biohacking is not gonna give you the quality of life you need without the rest of it.
SPEAKER_00I think labs are really great and we need to take care of our bodies, but what's the point?
SPEAKER_02Exactly. I think about that a lot now. I really do, because my work leaves me very little time and I'm trying to work on how I free up time to really hang out. And, you know, it's uh to me, that is paramount. You know, it's hard. Like I too had an aging, aging parents. I took care of them. My sister took care of more of my mom. I was sort of assigned to my dad for a variety of reasons. And I realized the pressures on all of us, and if we can make time that, and and we also maintain relationships. I I'm always sad when I hear somebody say, yeah, their mother and father or sister or brother are alive and well, but they have no relationship with, they really don't know what's going on in their life. It's kind of a sad signal that you need to look at what why you're doing what you're doing. And it's in fact, they have studies on that that have shown that people who are diagnosed with metastatic cancer, if they join a group and and work together, they actually live longer than if they don't, or if they have a heart attack. This was done at Penn, and they go home to an empty house versus to a partner versus to an animal. In that order, they live longer and longer. So the animal unconditional love is the best. But even a partner makes a difference because you're not isolated and alone. And it's sad in New York, this you'll find funny. When I first started working here, I was working with a guy who sadly had been diagnosed with cancer and he was young, he was only 64, and he had stopped, his doctor stopped smoking like in med school because he saw what it did to the lungs and he got squamous cell lung cancer because he had genetic propensity for it, likely. Serendipitously, when we spoke on the phone, I basically said I was interested in proactive prevention, and he told me what he was looking for. And then both of us recognized each other's last names, which was different. His was Yanoff. I had taken care of his daughter when she had early puberty years ago at Yale. I never met him because he was a diehard family doc. He he actually died in his boots. His way of solving people who were overweight or had high cholesterol was basically to starve them. He was only one and the only people who, with cancer, gained weight. And the last night of his life, he was at Blue Note. He went to hear jazz. He's just lived life to the fullest. And so when I met his patient population, because he was one of those who was not in the insurance world. So he was the kind of early beginnings of a concierge doctor. And he would, he said to me that, you know, there were a lot of lonely people, and I would hear their stories and I actually set up people. This was before like social media became great, before he got Bumblebee and all these other match and all of that. And it was a great, you know, way to do like I would ask if they were interested in meeting someone. And then if I found someone through the through the practice.
SPEAKER_00After someone finishes reading your book the next day, what do you want them to feel or do?
SPEAKER_02Well, that's a great question. No one's really asked me that except to say, you know, is it is it actionable? I think I want them to understand that there's a lot they can do with baby steps. They can pick one area that maybe they're not sleeping well and focus on that and begin to sort of change the way they make choices slowly. I don't believe in massive New Year's Eve resolutions. We know they're gone by even the end before the end of January. And I think if you can do that, uh somebody once coined, and I love this, atomic habits for the fountain of youth or for longevity. Like if you do small little changes, they compound over time and they add up. So sleep, for example, to me, although I didn't feel that way that when I started, I actually made it uh exercise, food, sleep, and now I flipped it. You can do without exercise if you get quality sleep. If life is tough and you've been running around, don't get up after four hours to get to the gym. Sleep in, get your six hours minimally. And so I would like people to feel that they have ownership over their future health destiny and that they can change. They don't have to turn into their mother with diabetes or their father with a heart attack or a grandparent with dementia. And I think it's that ownership over the patterns and the choices, particularly because you're coming from a place where you feel like at 50 you can have a brand new awakening. And I agree with you. I actually, one of my mentors at Yale, Bob Gifford, who became a dean when I was a first-year student, he was the one that took me and three of my classmates to meet patients because it's the way they introduced you to patients. You'd meet them by the bedside, you'd get a story. And he was so funny and so dramatic. I loved him. But he's the one that said to me that at 40 or 50, you need to pick a new career. You need to do something different. And so, going back to your question about Yale, perhaps that reverberated in me at the time where I feel like curiosity, my insatiable curiosity, my interest in putting things together and figuring, analyzing things. I'm definitely an over-analyzer, led me to the place where I think I am today and where people can be too. If they just understand that, you know, there's no set plan. You do not have to turn into your parent or your grandparent. You can really change the course of your life by owning it and making proactive choices, whether it's finding a different kind of career or for people who are lonely, joining a photography club, making sure you do something different with your life and you look and weigh the risk benefit and decide I can do this. I can go to sleep 15 minutes earlier. I can get a checkup that helps me understand, you know, what I'm doing wrong. I can maybe hire a trainer to teach me if I'm working out effectively. And so I think those baby steps will add up, just like compounding atomic habits and make a huge difference. And we is actually somebody who's a big critique of longevity for a number of years, Tom Pearls. I don't know if you know of him, he's a physician. And recently I heard that he was espousing that if women did all they could to take care of their health and change what they do to the better, they could, their life expectancy could be more like either 89 or 93, which we don't have today, and men 83. And I believe that's true. So even the critics of this field, a lot of doctors out there who are now huge supporters and they're well known, were really anti-this whole field. But to me personally, aging is not a disease, it's a gift. Not everybody is lucky to age. They die young. And so I never understood the anti-aging movement. For me, it came about thinking of precision medicine and what by understanding the data and marrying it to being personal and proactive, you can own your own story and you can get the help you need by being astute, not you know, learning what a CGM might tell you. Buy a CGM. I spoke to somebody involved with the book, and I knew she was perimenopausal, and she said, Well, what's the one thing I can do? And hearing a story, I was pretty sure she was pre-diabetic and that's why she was putting on weight. And I said, get a CGM. And that was when the lingo came out. And three months later, she had lost 25 pounds. She was well on her way to kind of being healthier, and she couldn't believe it. She couldn't believe the difference. She never even saw a doctor. She just heard one fact and put it into play.
SPEAKER_00We have agency.
SPEAKER_02Yes, we do. We do. And hard to believe because I think even on CBS mornings, all three of the anchors were very upset when they heard that, you know, what's the most dangerous words? The first set is telling you you're nor in the normal range. You're like, I'm fine. And they heard that and they were like, oh my God. So that means it doesn't matter if I'm told I'm normal. I said, it doesn't stop you from being optimal. I think that we can all make decisions that help us, you know, get get on our A game. And I hear that particularly from a lot of men who I take care of. They're little more men than women now, which is funny, having started women's health. I was first asked when I came to New York, well, do you take care of men? Because I see you do women's health. And I'm yes. And now I get asked, well, do you take care of women? I'm like, yes. But, you know, the men who I tend to see want to be on their A game in the boardroom and the bedroom. And they realize they're slipping. And one last observation that I had when I started Women's Health is I thought all these women would come to me who were perimenopausal, menopausal, and complain about weight. No, they complained about their husband's sexual function or inadequacy at around 40. And I started wondering if the midlife crisis in men really came from the inability to perform and to feel like they had the energy they needed. And so it stuck with me for a while and uh still does, because I do think it plays a role. I think the fact that when we we know we're starting to slip and we may not know why. And I think the book can help people understand and not either blame themselves or blame their family, but rather take agency over it.
SPEAKER_00Florence, this has been a delightful conversation. Same here. I appreciate your work. I appreciate you. And I haven't had a CGM for a couple of years, and I'm going to Amazon as soon as we get off this call. Plug another one into my arm, see what's happening.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Just try to plug it in on a place you don't sleep, but then remember to turn off the alarm. So that's great. I didn't learn much about you and your work, but I tell you that I'm impressed with I think the articles in SuperAger are amazing. I enjoyed ours. I was working on it with my sort of co-author, Jeff Kasari. I think you know him. And, you know, they go very deep. They're very true. Like they are not superficial, which I I really appreciate.
SPEAKER_00We believe that people have intelligence.
SPEAKER_02Yes. And can own it, right.
SPEAKER_00They can't own it. Like we we don't have to dumb it down.
SPEAKER_02Like I think part of it has to come from, and this is where biohacking is somewhat misleading. It has to come from deeper knowledge of how complex we each are as human beings. And that's what you guys share. Because if you don't realize that, I frankly I don't know what I don't know. I don't have answers for things. Like I don't have questions or answers. I'm learning all the time. And that's part of being a doctor, but I think it's in any field in life. If you're not learning, you're not growing. I'm still an open-minded skeptic, definitely skeptic, but I'll test things and look at things, you know, and make a decision about what's real and what may be snake oil. And take keep that in mind. I mean, following people, for example, who are influencers who may do things that work for themselves may not be a fit for you. And that may hurt you actually. And so keeping that in mind, I think, for people, which your articles allow people to dig in is really valuable.
SPEAKER_00It's important to know yourself.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. I tested Vietto, which was the first GLP one. It was the most bizarre feeling because these GLP ones to me are also completely amazing. And academicians know that. There's a lot of studies going on, not just losing weight, fat, but other studies, looking at organ systems like the mind, the body, the heart, the liver. And I couldn't enjoy the lava cake when I would go to a restaurant that had that chocolate cake with melted chocolate in the center. I didn't want it in my head and I didn't want it in my stomach. It was like too much. I would hold it when I went and went out to a restaurant so I could enjoy it because you want to live life and it's a it's a balancing act. It isn't easy, but I think it's possible.
SPEAKER_00We discussed in the beginning, what's the point? Right. Like, why? I'll tell you the reason I want to be healthy and live a long time is because I really enjoy being a human.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I just enjoy meeting other humans. And I love this incredible, like I get up in the morning and it's like, I exist. Oh my gosh, this is amazing. I know. Look at all the things I can do, but it's not about putting numbers up on a biohacky scoreboard. Like that's pointless to me. But at the same time, I don't get to be this sort of like fully alive, whole human self unless I take care of a physical vessel.
SPEAKER_02That's yeah, you got it. You have to live somewhere. Right. You gotta have both, right? So you have to invest in it. Like the other week, I was gonna be on TV and I had to do makeup or work out. And I'm like, nope, I'm gonna go work out. You know, really, I did that. I figured I can swap on some makeup at some point. But yes, you have to make those decisions.
SPEAKER_00Florence, you have such a busy schedule, and I just so enjoyed our conversation. I and I want to say thank you for carving out the timing.
SPEAKER_02Thank you for having me. I actually, you know, it's a lot of work when you do a book because you want word to get out, because otherwise it's like the tree in the forest and who hears it, right? But you know, I've met such wonderful people, and this was such a fun conversation. I think I was a little nervous because Super Age is so commanding. But I I feel like being me is like, I have to be authentic. I don't know how to fake it, you know, like I can't.
SPEAKER_00I'm amused by your comment that you you're intimidated by us based on your background.
SPEAKER_02Because I've been in a vacuum for a long time, like just doing my thing, you know, and knowing that it was very hard, but I felt like I was changing lives and I felt like I was getting somewhere and finally, you know, right around COVID, you know, because I created an app, I actually can do this virtually completely. I have a proprietary database that's very different than all the AIs out there and machine learning. And so I realized that unless I could do this and unless I could speak to it and be the real me and, you know, try to tell the real stories and, you know, speak to vulnerabilities as well. I I'm not superhuman, you know, I am who I am, and you know, I want to make a difference. I grew up with that feeling because I had parents who survived concentration camp. And so to me, it was like, what is my value gonna be to the world? And I have heard from a few podcasters, I don't know if you know Chip Conley, who was I know Chip very well. Oh, my God. Brother from another mortar. That was one of the hardest. He like told me at the beginning, you are gonna talk about yourself personally. And he got me to tap into things I hadn't from three years old that I hadn't remembered at all. It was fun. In the end, I realized that it would probably make more of a difference to people if I could be out there more. So I'm trying because, you know, as doctors, as you pointed out, it's kind of drummed out of us, you know.
SPEAKER_00I'm glad you got it back.
SPEAKER_02I'm glad too. I think it's gonna make a difference in the quality of my life.
SPEAKER_00Thank you so much. The book is invincible. Defy your genetic destiny, live better, live longer. That's what I want to do. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. That was Dr. Florence commented. Normal is not the same as optimal. I've heard that phrase from doctors, and I imagine many of you have too. Everything looks normal. We'll keep an eye on it. Yeah. It's not something I really want to hear. Florence makes the case that those words can sometimes lull us into passivity. I also came away thinking about my own habits. I've not worn a continuous glucose monitor in a couple years, and after this conversation, I'm gonna put one back on. Information changes behavior, and I'm excited to find out if and how my metabolism has changed. When we can see what is actually happening, we make better decisions. The larger lesson here is that we do have agency, not total control. Nobody has that, but we have more influence than we may think. Sleep, lifting weights, metabolic health, hormone, stress, food, work, friendships. It all adds up. I love Florence's point that aging is not something to be pathologized. We are lucky to get older, and it is up to us what we do with this time. That's it for this week. Stay strong, stay vibrant, we'll see you next week. And if you don't know about it, Super Age Games, see you there, November 7th, New York City. Take care now.