3 Dimensions of Longevity That Will Extend Your Life – Sergey Young with Dave Asprey : 852

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You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. As usual today we have a live audience from the Upgrade Collective. Go to ourupgradecollective.com if you'd like to be in my mentorship and membership group where you get access to authors and speakers directly to ask questions at the end of the show. Today is a returning podcast guest and a friend and a major investor in longevity and anti aging and now a new author of a very, very cool book about aging. It is called Believe it or not, the science and technology of growing Young. That's kind of funny because Sergey Young is our guest so he named the book after himself, which is the world's biggest dad joke. Sergey, was that your intent when you named your book?

Yes, a little bit.

All right, the truth comes out. Well, welcome back. And we are airing this on the date that your new book comes out and actually hits the shelves. I have the advanced reviewers copy and in pre sales though, you're kind of killing it right now. How's the book doing before it's even out?

Yeah, it's kind of interesting. We already done, we are number one new release on Amazon in three categories like preventive medicine, aging and longevity. And we're even competing between number one and number two, bestseller even before book is sold with some of the existing books in preventive medicine. So I'm very happy. Like, I mean, you know, it's better than anyone. You know, every book is like a baby. And this is my first baby book and I'm very excited that it's getting well and obviously it comes down to support rec from you and a lot of people in our field.

Well, I mean, let's see, your foreword is by Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil. So kind of some big names and there's some quotes on the back from like Tony Robbins and some other big names. One relatively small guy on there in the back, this Dave Asprey guy. But basically guys, I've endorsed the book and so have many other leaders in the field because Sergey spent years connecting with the world's anti aging research leaders. That's how we met years ago. And he believes that we can live to 200 years old and beyond that it's inevitable, not just possible. And that makes me very angry because my number is 180 and here he is. I'm going to do 20 years more than you. And so Sergey, I mean, was this an intentional slight?

Yeah. Well, I think what we see in our field Is this certain inflation of, of life expectancy and lifespan target? So I know one guy from China, he wants to live to 300 years. I think it's just kind of typical Chinese stuff, you know, better, bigger, longer, etc. But yeah, otherwise I do think it's obviously well beyond the sound barrier of 122 years. The maximum lifespan that we had on Earth for the record, and all of the technologies and scientific breakthroughs that we're expecting in the next 10, 15 years within the near horizon of longevity, will give us an opportunity to break this sound barrier and live beyond 122 years. Well, well up to 150 or even 200 years.

Well, I, I agree with you 100%. And it's funny because our mutual friend Aubrey de Gray, who's been on the show, he's 10,000 years, and no one ever approaches that because no one can grow a beard like Aubrey. So we just know that he can be like the Merlin of anti aging. So I'm good with. I just come close to that. It's okay. Now, you're uniquely credible because you run the Longevity Vision Fund. So you're putting $100 million to work accelerating life extension technology and making it affordable for all of us, which is a big theme in your book. Big theme in my aging book as well. Like, hey, it starts with the crazy people willing to spend more money. Like, enough money to go to space. No, I'm going to spend that on hacking myself. But that's what enables it to be much more affordable a few years later. So it kind of. It just evolves that way, like phones did. And you've also managed a $2 billion private fund. You and I are in the Longevity, or in the X Prize donor thing, where we helped us select and create X Prizes. You did the Longevity X Prize. I did the carbon Capture one that Elon Musk ended up funding, which was pretty cool. So, like, we, we care, but you've been in this for a long time, which is why I want to dig in on your take on the science and the technology so that, that our listeners and our Upgrade Collective members can ask questions and just learn how real is it and what are they going to have to do? That's the scary thing. I don't know. Should I go plant based? Should I fast, you know, should I, you know, inject stem cells? Or should I do what, you know, some of the. Like Craig Venter says, let's have pizza and beer while we wait for more data. Like, there's a lot of Options here.

Yeah.

So. Well, let me start with you. You mentioned it's possible up to 20 years. Have you staked a number for yourself?

Well, yes, I do. So my plan is to live to 200 years.

Okay, it is 200.

Okay, yeah, 200. So partly because I'm typical placebo guy, if I kind of believe in something and it's called psychological aspects of aging, then I'm going to do it. And as insecure overachiever, I do everything to achieve this number. Unfortunately, all of the technology that we have today, what we've been doing so far, we were just avoiding early death on Earth. We were fighting cancer, heart disease, diabetes, we're trying to find neurodegenerative diseases. But it was enough just to move like a statistical average of the lifespan. And I mean we've done a lot. It's up from 35, 40 years 100 years ago to 75, 80 years of average lifespan today. But we never actually crossed this border, this barrier of 122 years of maximum lifespan. And, and this is where technologies that we expecting to be available to us in 10, 15 years from now, like gene editing and gene therapy, organ regeneration, longevity in appeal, like we're going to see a new class of drugs which going to tackle and fight the aging at its core rather than go disease by disease. So it's going to be like super helpful for us, you know, finally to expand the maximum lifespan and you know, have an ability to live to 150 and then, and so this is near horizon of longevity. But to enjoy that in 10, 15 years from now, you need to stay on longevity bridge, as our mutual friend Ray Corswell say. So you just need to be to keep your body and your mind in a state which is worth expanding its resource. And then it comes down to far horizon of longevity, which going to be available to us in 25 to 50 years. But we're going to be redefining humans by this time. We're going to be heavily influencing our DNA. We're going to stop or even reverse aging processes in our body, influencing all 3,000 longevity genes that we already know in our DNA. And it's going to be a world of human avatars, human brain, AI integration. And we're going to talk about concept called Internet of bodies, similar to Internet of Things. We all going to be full of sensors. I'm full of sensors today, you probably as well. But you know, people around the earth, you all going to be interconnected to this distributed artificial intelligence run system which is going to be responsible for our health. So that's, that's like, you know, three things, three steps that we need to take to enjoy 200 years of healthy and happy life.

Okay, you dropped one really important piece of advice that I think we. We glossed over. And the first actionable thing from this, and I'm going to share what I do for it. This is a piece of paper. It says 28% on it, and it sits right here under my camera. What's 28%? Well, this year I'm having my 28% birthday, because I don't think in years. That's minimum expected lifespan. I love it. And what Sergei just told you, there is a placebo effect. In fact, it's as powerful as a lot of pharmaceuticals within 5 or 10% of them. So if you don't tell. And by the way, placebos work better if you tell everyone about them. Like, literally, oh, yeah, I'm doing this. Even if they crap over it, it doesn't matter. So you need to pick a number. This is the minimum acceptable thing. And you tell yourself, I am not old. I am actually this percent of that. And the cells in your body, I believe will listen. That's part of how placebo works. The really stupid, really fast systems in the body that pick that stuff up. So you actually, you actually really do need to pick a number and make that your reality. And that's a part of it. And Sergey does it, I do it. And I'm pretty sure a lot of the other leaders, the anti aging, are like, this is my number and I'm sticking to it. And if you tell me I'm wrong, it's because you're dumb. And we go on. Am I right?

I love it. Look, when I started to do my motto every morning and every evening, which is, I'm going to be living to 200 years in a body of 25 years old man. My life has changed exactly. Like, imagine every morning I wake up and like three, four of my life is ahead of me. Yeah, I'm full of dreams, I'm full of energy. I'm so young in kind of lifespan terms. And I like it. My body responds to that.

Your body will. In fact, there's a very old Russian, you'd like it meditation technique where you look at pictures of yourself when you're 12 and then 11. And so you do it every night until you're like a baby, and just tell everybody, this is me. This is me. This is me. And who can explain all the mechanisms there? But whatever it is, I Think it's important that you set your expectations that way. But the rest of what you talked about, Sanda, like you've been watching altered Carbon a little bit too much.

Yeah. Well, obviously we kind of think in that to solve the aging problem, it's going to be one silver bullet. But the human body and human biology is probably one of the most complex things I've ever seen in my life. So I'm still learning how it works. So it's just very likely that it's not going to be one thing. It's going to be combination of the things. Whatever horizon you take, like what you need to do today or what you're going to be doing in 10, 15 years from now or 25 years from now, it's always going to be a combination of things, both on a physical side and then psychological side as well.

I 100% agree that to live way past the built in expiration date that we have today, it's going to require a little bit of editing of biological processes. And I see zero ethical problems with doing that as long as you're not changing the germline. So if I do it to my body after I've had kids, it's my body, my choice. If I do it in a way that's going to pass it on to another generation that could spread around the planet, we might have some issues there. All right, so back to altered Carbon and all of this. I come from the computer security industry. I was a computer hacker. You are familiar with the technical capabilities of certain governments for hacking who shall not be named, but are pretty much all global governments. I am not naming anyone in particular other than Russia, China, the US and North Korea and Israel as probably the most effective hackers. If I forgot your country hackers, I apologize. I'm sure there's good hackers in other countries too. Please don't DDoS me. But here's the thing. If you have implantable stuff, guys like I used to be are going to get in there and we're going to put banner ads in front of your eyes that you can't take out. By the way, I didn't make that up. That's a Bruce Sterling and a Neal Stephenson novel from the mid-90s in the cyberpunk genre. But seriously, you want to implant all this stuff? Do you trust those guys any more than you trust, I don't know, big pharma companies to not lie.

Look, I'm for experimenting. Oh, me too. Yeah, I'm kind of cool with that. But, like, do you Want to do experiment with the whole global population? Probably. No, but with a few of the people like us who are super positive and less risk averse like us. Yeah, we should do it.

If it's open source, I'm down for it. I just don't want code running that I cannot see and control because there's great evil that can happen from that. Especially when you have an algorithm that you didn't get to tune that decides what you see and it's in your eyes and you have augmented reality built in. That's pretty scary territory. We're going to get there. Bad things are going to happen, I promise you. And really, a lot more good things will happen as well. That's kind of how tech always works, right?

Yeah, I think we've made this trade off already. We kind of traded this whole expectation of data privacy with how helpful our smartphones are. So in a way, the same thing will happen with Internet of body and outsourcing a lot of decisions and a lot of monitoring to artificial intelligence. And I don't think it's going to be human intelligence contradicting AI. We're going to be working in combination and it's going to be very complementary either or so it's not going to be like one fighting with another.

Yeah, it'll all come together eventually and there'll be little camps like we have today. Are you Apple versus Microsoft and things like that. All right, back to bad stuff might happen, but you'd be willing to do it. All right, what about neuralink? Would you do a neuralink if Elon called you tomorrow and said, sergey, I've got a spare one.

Well, every time I'm scared about the new technology, I'm always thinking about the cohort of people which actually do need this technology. And I don't know if you watched this movie called the Father with Anthony Hopkins and it's, it's pretty recent movie, so the whole movie done through the eyes of someone who suffers from dementia. And if you think about these people, so for them, integrating their brain, their human intelligence with artificial intelligence, that's like the only way to sustain the quality of life in the last five to 10 years of their lifespan. So every time I'm scared by technology, I'm just trying to think about like, what is the best use of this today? Like, even gene therapy, when it was invented and gene editing, like CRISPR was invented a couple of decades ago, was available to some of the people with rare genetic diseases. They had nothing to lose. For them, it was like perfect solution because there were no other solutions. So I do think if you think about Neuralink, it's going to start with, with this particular cohort which really requires help and integration with artificial intelligence. So then we'll have an opportunity to test it and then roll it out. So we at Longevity Vision Fund, we've been struggling to find what are we supporting it should it be like invasive integration or non invasive? And I'm, yeah, I'm big fan of non invasive way of doing that. But this is not the first and probably not the last time when Elon Musk was right and I was wrong. So I'm not going to argue with Elon Musk and who knows, probably the invasive way similar to what they do in Neuralink and what I've heard, they're going to be starting human trials pretty soon in human terms might work better. Again, I'm waiting for this in combination of excitement and fear. But in the end of the day it's a viable piece of technology and I can see a lot of people on Earth which do need that.

For someone who's nearing end of life, you should experiment like crazy because what are you going to do? Die? You have a sacred right to do what you want then and share what you learn. Even if you die a couple years earlier or maybe a couple years later, that's totally the time. Right. So I'm with you there. I'm not betting against Elon, although I will say I believe there are a lot of EMF risks that are ignored in all the implant industry that affects mitochondria, which are very dense in the brain. And, and having run a lab testing company that looked at rejection of implant materials that is not mediated by antibodies, I think the problem might be different than what he thinks it is. I'm not eager to have any implants, including breast implants. I mean, look how many people are getting those taken out. I thought about it, but I just, it wasn't the right look for me. But you know what I mean, like any implant material can be a problem. So I'm going to probably hold off on that because I think by the time we get really good there for non sick people, there's so much data coming off the brain we can pick up without implants that we can probably do the same thing or at least some of that. And besides, what would happen if you didn't pay your neuralink bill?

I can imagine that I don't know.

But it's like your Tesla drives slow and drives into a tree. I'm not sure. One of the myths that you have in the book that I love you busting is that longevity is dangerous and selfish. Why is longevity not dangerous and selfish?

Well, I think the mental model of aging that we have today in our mind is pretty outdated. So like when the thing about longevity we are assuming that we all going to add last 5, 10 years of our life when you are in the most fragile state, when you require a lot of support and like every technology that I know that we invest in is working on inserting 10, 20, 25 years right in the middle of your life just extending a productive part of it. So that's one second. I also think we have a wrong role models here. Like we always look in centenarians, people who already live 100 plus years on this planet and we just trying to learn from them. I actually think and there's a lot of studies supporting that they just been lucky in a genetic lottery and that's why it's obviously it's combination of environmental lifestyle changes predetermined by the environment where they live in. But otherwise I think it was near Barzilla just done study on centenarians and like you and 70% of their secret is genetic luck. So therefore the whole model of longevity that we have is based on the wrong assumptions and we are well pretty social species and wherever we invest in for longevity Vision Fund is making amazing changes and transformation of current healthcare procedures and interventions and solving problems like efficiency gains that we get from investing into early cancer diagnostic or in affordable ultrasound devices is like the improvement is 10 to 20 not percent but times. So therefore it's. We're going to democratize this whole access to the healthcare. It's not going to be. I'm not interested in building something for like a billionaires with people who can pay millions of dollars to live longer. I'm actually interested in bringing the scientific discoveries and technological breakthroughs to almost like a guarantee to everyone access to the most efficient and technology based version of health care. So this is. Well that's going to happen.

It is going to happen. And it's a similar thing to what I'm doing with 40 Years of Zen. It's a five day intensive $15,000 program with neuroscientists hovering over you doing stuff to help you change your brain. Probably a little expensive and not that scalable. And there's an executive chef there too because you have to eat the right stuff. When we get enough data and we're done, it'll be available in high schools without the chef that's the path for all of these technologies as far as I can tell, where you make it as cheap as you. Right. And you make it so that you can show what's possible and you learn how to do it. And every year it gets cheaper. Just like processors, just like phones, just like cars, just like everything.

Yeah, like even like sequencing human genome. I think it took us like 13 years, 30 years ago and $3 billion. They even thought they would stop the experiment and the project after the first two years when they managed to decode like a 1% or 2% of human genome because they thought they're going to be doing this for like 100 years. And then this whole democratization and exponential increase in the computing power and processing power arrived. And here we are right now, I think sequencing human genome. I just had my genetic review with Human Longevity center in San Diego yesterday. Well, it's. It's probably a few hours and few hundred dollars and that's it. And you can even buy like a toolkit for your kids to amend the DNA of bacteria and it's $170 toy. Well, this is where we are. And we can also talk like gene therapy. Moderna AstraZeneca. Many Covid vaccines are the outcome of gene therapy. We just don't realize that we all participating in a global and hopefully positive. I do think it's positive experiment of using gene therapy on. On mass population. So this is happening and changing every year, every decade.

It is changing for sure. I mean when I was a kid, you know, if you were mean, you might, you know, dye the hair of your friend's cat. But now my, my kids are making their friends cats glow in the dark actually through genetic engineering. It's just like a prank you do. I mean it's totally crazy. He's trying to figure out whether I'm pulling his leg. But he's totally got a poker face. Totally didn't do anything there. He's like, is he, is he telling me the truth? All right, Yeah, I could tell. You're like, Dave, either you're nuts or you're like, I don't want to tell you you're stupid. I was trying to read you, but you were flat. They're like, I don't want to play poker against you.

So many crazy things that you just tend not to be surprised by everything which is happening. Like we invested in this company called like Genesis. They based in Pittsburgh and they use our lymph nodes to regrow organs.

Yeah, I heard about that.

Yeah. Well, this is Amazing. Like today, liver transportation is very expensive procedure. As far as I know, it's 600 to $800,000. People wait for six, nine, 12 months for your liver donor. And some people die just in the process of waiting. So what they do in like Genesis, they take donor liver, the split in 50 to 75 pieces and they use very simple laparoscopic operation to put it in your lymph node. It's actually here. And in the course of three to six months with a little support, the new liver is just regrowing in your body and it supports the, you know, the function of your liver, which is not working properly today. Well, that's amazing. And they've done it with pigs, dogs, primates, obviously mouse and, and this year they're starting human trials. This is amazing. So you tend just not to be surprised like, like every, everything which is happening in, in this space.

It's totally one of those things that could be real because they have made glomadar cats but you can't do it to an existing cat, as far as I understand. Maybe you can make part of it glow, but also it's not, it's kind of mean to do that to your friends. You make another reference in here and it's a TV show that needs remaking. The $6 million man, which I watched as a teenager, you've got a part of your book, you have a $6 million you. So really making the case that part of this is going to be some pretty aggressive upgrades. What's your timeline on that? Is this a 10 year, 20, 30 year? When is this really going to become possible and when is it going to become common?

Okay, so I think it's going to be possible in 10, 20 years from now. But my biggest concern is actually ethics and regulation. Like in 10, 20 years time the biggest obstacles is not going to be in science and they're not going to be on the technology side. It all will come down to human ethics and ability and desire to our society to accept that. And this is the biggest problem because we never started the conversation so how morality of immortality should look like. And like if you ask people in US and UK and I have these numbers, 65 to 80% of people, when they offer to extend their lifespan, they say no. And well, this is counterintuitive for you and me and our audience, right? I was really shocked when I first heard that. But so what is happening? And I just did a TEDx talk on that. We've created the science and technology to extend our lives, but we haven't created lives that we want to extend. And that's why we're living in a world of physical health problem, mental health problem, and people are trying to search for meaning of their life like the purpose of their life. And therefore there's just not a lot of people who have enough plans, enough ambitions and understanding what they going to do with these extra years. And this is all multiplied by, you know, myths that we just discussed that we all think that we're just going to be like older for longer, but not that we're not going to be growing young. So that's the part of the problem. That's why the whole ethics of the today's and future world is important as well. And this is, we need to have like a global conversation on this whole thing. So how are we going to sort out inequality gap? Like my favorite ones actually two one, all these social contracts, the constructs that we have today for our society has been developed for the average lifespan of 35 to 40 years. Well, think about career, think about marriage, like 2/3 of the marriages go through divorce in the first five to seven years after the beginning in the developed world. Or what if I outlive my finances? This whole concept of retirement when it's like binary, when you either work full time or you retire full time. And if you listen to Dan Buettner, the author of the Blue Zones book, he says two most dangerous years of your life is the date of your birth and date of retirement. We need to be less binary about all these social contracts. But my favorite one, and I don't know the answer to that, is when you talk about radical life extension or some people talk about immortality. I'm not big fan of immortality because I do think life should have end to be meaningful.

Plus it's dumb. The universe will collapse in on itself. We're all going to die.

Yeah, I agree.

Immortality is a false promise unless we prove something about the nature of the.

Universe that's different than we have today in isolation. But you don't live in isolation. You're going to be exposed to external shocks anyway. So what I'm saying, so this whole life extension paradigm going to be based on you making decision every five to 10 years to extend your life or not. And in the current society it's called suicide. It's called playing God. And I don't even know if I will have a bravery once every five to 10 years to make this decision.

Well, it'd be interesting if that little survey you talked about earlier that I kind of find offensive where 65% of people say I wouldn't choose to extend my life. Well, what if it came with a free cyanide pill? Well, seriously, if you don't want to extend your life, why are you here? And you don't have to be here. Right. And I'm not advocating for suicide and you wouldn't want to do that with people have mental illness or depression or at risk and all that kind of stuff. But honestly, like why are you putting one foot in front of the other if you can't say I want to be here and it does not compute for me? I don't understand. I guess it's fear of being weak is they see aging as weakness, which it isn't.

Yeah, yeah, I agree. Well, we're going to change the whole paradigm of aging because everything we work on and we invest in is about influencing healthspan, adding more healthy years to our life rather than just artificially extending last five to 10 years.

I was interested when I read your science and technology of growing young. I had identified seven primary causes of aging in my aging book. But you've got 10, which was interesting. So can you walk through the 10? And I'm going to ask you to go in on a couple of those but just kind of hit what they are. These are the big things. We got to stop these if you want to live forever.

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Yeah, so I mean these when, when you talk about nine hallmarks of aging and well that's, that's the concept which is known to us starting from 2013. I think like, you know, you and Aubrey Degree speaks about the same stuff but like you group Them in seven and within this hallmark hallmarks there's just a, a lot of disagreements. Some of the people, I think there's some of them like a primary sources and some of them are just the outcome of this. So in the end of the day and it's. And you know it better than I because I'm investor, I'm not biologist. It goes you know, from our genetic setup like you know, genomic instability to telomeres to epigenetics to and like deregulated nutrient sensing. What else? Stem cells exhaustion. Yeah. And there's so many things that we kind of think we know about the what, what drives aging and what do we need to fight. But I do think we it's not going to be like one hallmark that we need to sort out. It's just going to be like combination of the things that we need to, to address. But like my favorite one is still genetic one because I do think if we will be able to, to amend our DNA and, and influence our longevity genes so well, this is like, it's almost like the only fundamental way to redefine humans. And that's why I'm very optimistic about the, the scientific and technological side of that. But you know, obviously ethics and regulation is a huge obstacle similar to I think what is happening stem cells.

That's not a problem. You just have to go to one of the many countries without ethics. I didn't name any of them, so that was okay, right? It's going to happen is what I'm saying. It is just going to happen. And so we need to know about it because it's inevitable because the technology exists. Someone will do it somewhere and it'll probably be sponsored by a government, I will bet you.

Yeah, I agree. But like, you know, my mission is to change as many lives as possible. So you know, obviously like you and I can do that but like what about people next door? And if I'm gonna be doing my second book, it's gonna be a book on longevity gaps. You know, Some of these zip codes which are like close in US has a lifespan difference of 15 years. In London, some of the two parts of London close to each other have longevity and lifespan gap of 18 years. Why we have this on Earth and no one looks at the different dimensions of longevity even difference between men and women in lifespan. Like half of the medicine is like white males are doing research and trials on the other white males and assume it works for everyone.

It will, it'll happen. The number of studies done that recognize the difference between Men and women in the last 10 years is higher than it's ever been. And we're starting to notice. Oh, that's funny. There's differences in genetics and differences in gender that make a big difference when you're doing studies. So you have to do that. One of the things that you talked about, and we're going to get in a minute into sort of what's actionable, what can we do right now? One of the things you talked about that I didn't cover in as much detail actually, really in the same way you do in my look at it. And people in the Upgrade Collective, longtime listeners, have heard my list of seven. They are already taking action on some of them. But you talk about deregulated nutrient sensing as a major part of aging. So what is that one specifically and what do we do about it?

Look, I think it really comes down to our inability to, to accept and, and use the nutrients inside our body. So this is very much related to microbiome and the fact that like when we think about ourselves as a one integrated body, we actually full of bacteria and different species which are helping us with absorbing nutrients and accepting the food and supporting microbiome. So that's basically one of the problems.

It's one of those things where if your cells aren't sensing nutrients, they aren't sensing amino acids or other things like that. It feels like fasting, probably longer fasting versus shorter fasting is really going to help. And we know it helps with things like dopamine and insulin, and it likely would. Those aren't nutrients, those are neurotransmitters. But still neurotransmitters are hormones. So I'm pretty sure that we're gonna end up doing more of that or mimicking that because people still like to be able to eat, which is one thing. What are the top three most affordable anti aging things that listeners could do today to help them live until they can live forever?

When I have 30 seconds, you know, I push everyone to do their annual checkup medical screening because like yeah, if you going to be able to catch cancer at early stage, your recovery rates for some of the cancer types today is from 93 to 100%. Like 20 years ago, cancer was case of that and people were like delaying their day of cancer screening. Right now if this is early stage and with the current advancements in technology, you'll be able to catch cancer at really early stage. Your chances to recover is, you know, are almost 100%. And what is more important, the quality of your life and your health going to be sustained. So think about, you just go in like what I say and my wife disagrees with me. Like one of the most important days of your life every year is the date of your medical checkup. And I so I do it every year. Like this year it was June 8th. And even this year to identify colon cancer you don't need to do colonoscopy anymore. So it's combination of full body MRI in combination with cologuard or any other kind of liquid biopsy test which is now in development by the companies like Freenom. We invested in Freenom and they started with colon cancer. Well this is super helpful. And even if you see you think the same MRI machine right now your scans are done and revisited by artificial intelligence first and then human radiologist and combination of human and artificial intelligence is extremely effective. So it can detect early stage cancer. And I think it was example of breast cancer in like 98% of cases. While human radiologists alone working on time pressure and they always do unfortunately is like 38% effective specifically for early stage cancer. I think we'll see the different numbers there. So thing number one I think is just understanding the value of your medical checkup, understanding how many changes in technology and the science that we can use now. And well that's why by doing this we can enjoy more years on earth. So that's one.

So I'm going to push back a little bit on you on that one, at least in the U.S. okay, you go in for your annual medical checkup, they hit you on the knee with a mallet, they take a very basic blood test that probably don't do anything and they tell you your cholesterol is too high and give you drugs even though the cholesterol isn't too high and you don't have inflammation or maybe you do, but they don't actually do any of the cool stuff you talked about. But I do the same thing. So I've done The high resolution MRIs, I've had the liquid biopsies. In fact probably my most successful investment right now. I don't talk a lot about being an investor, but I am has is able to detect about a half a dozen types of cancer better than any other company using big data and some other stuff. And I can't say who it is or what it is, but that's crazy pants land because we couldn't do that five years ago. So like this, this is all happening right now. But what people can do is you can when you Identify this stuff and you list it like you list the companies, you list what it is, how to do it, like what's happening in your book. You can use your flexible spending account if you're in a position to fund that in the US So you can say, all right, I want to get this test right and you can use your FSA to do that, which makes it pre tax dollars at least. And you don't have to do all of these every year, especially when you're younger. But I will say there's really good value to doing that and I love that as an answer, like get the data instead of just, you know, eating some kale. That's a bad idea. All right, what's number two on your list?

Number two for me is just using your wearable. And what I like about wearables, they becoming our personalized healthcare devices, I'm pretty sure. So right now I'm like wearing continuous glucose monitor, like I'm using Apple Watch. I'm actually experimenting for my fifth day with whoop Oura ring and you can wear Zeo patch. So I do believe that wearables is not going to be activity tracker anymore. It's going to be more like a personalized healthcare devices and you know, like latest app which can do a lot of things and I think in few years from now they would just add their glucose monitoring in the form of satellite device but still integrated data wise with what we have on us and then probably like measuring our blood pressure. And I do think with all of this it's going to be more than 50% of this stuff that you need to measure on a regular basis about your health. So I think it's an opportunity for all of us to start early enough in embracing and using wearables and working with the largest companies on earth who are investing and over investing in healthcare to kind of enjoy this level of personalization from our wearable sharing the data and has been able to catch disease and address disease at much, much earlier stage. So when people ask me like so what's going to happen in healthcare? And this relates to your point like if you go to the hospital next door and you ask for checkup, you're going to be seeing pretty short list of the things that they going to do with you without necessarily helping you to identify your major risks. I do think the change in the healthcare system will come not from the old players doing new things, this will come from new players completely disrupting the space. I do believe in 10 years from now the largest healthcare companies on earth going to be Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft. And I'm not necessarily like the biggest fan of big tech, but watch out Apple. I think, well that's why I'm wearing Apple watch and I still miss my Fitbit time before it was bought by Google.

You're not using it because of the privacy issues?

No, I actually think that Apple has better chances to make good investments and build a platform in, in healthcare. And I, I've seen the research report done by last year by Morgan Stanley that Apple can generate up to 50 of its revenue by the end of this decade from, from their health platform. So and as a consumer product I, I do think Apple is a little bit better platform. It fits at least how you know I do see the evolution of that. Well that's not the only reason but in the end of the day we'll have a choice and I'm pretty sure that it's not going to be only like big tech. There's a number of startups who are working in this space so wearables transforming themselves into our personalized healthcare devices. I do think it's pretty important.

I'm going to ask a personal question here as a fellow investor. Although I don't have a hundred million dollar fund investing in this stuff but I've done it. I was co founder and CTO of the first company to get heart rate from the wrist but it was too early. Fitbit became a multibillion dollar company and we sold for like 100 million to Intel. And you're like oh you only sold 100 million? Well okay, I didn't sell for 2 or 3 billion, whatever the heck. Right. So it wasn't the unicorn. Big win. I tend to look at these things very early on and assume that they're going to happen before everyone else because well I just assume the future is here sooner than I think it is. So how do you assess time frames on this kind of tech?

Look, we actually investing more in a different type of technology. So we have probably two or three investments out of 16 companies that we invested in. Two or three investments into the Medtech itself and it's very likely to be like big niche like so we invested in company called Ecoimaging and they, they build in affordable and accessible version of ultrasound diagnostic device. The, the market is already there. So we when, when you look at the total addressable market it's like any improvement to that is is a big thing or we currently invested in a company or just do like glucose monitoring. I couldn't mention their name yet. But like, well that's a huge problem for people who suffer from diabetes and from, you know, for people like us who just want to monitor their glucose level, you know, all the time to see how our body responds to different type of foods and activities on that front. So in a way, I mean we are investment funds so we just need to be careful with our investors money as well in addition to making an impact. So whenever we see like a huge addressable market, we invest there. But what I must say, and this is the reason why we're 95% focused on us within our portfolio and I say it with a lot of love, US has the most inefficient and expensive healthcare system on earth. Like we spent 18 of our GDP on healthcare. UK I'm part of UK Parliamentary Group on National Longevity Strategy. UK spend like 8% of their GDP and have the. And they have better average lifespan number Singapore. I just done a speaking in Singapore. They spend like 5% of GDP on their healthcare and they share in like the top two places in the world ratings of health span and lifespan together with Japan and in US Covid, as far as I remember, 3 out of 5 years pre Covid, pre 2020 US had lifespan actually decreasing rather than increasing. So we just need to have a massive change and like and, and I do think we discuss it a couple of years ago on one of the express events like 60% of the data transfer from one medical institution to the other medical institution is happening By Fox. When was the last time you've seen Fax machine and this is still happening? Well, that's why I'm more optimistic about big tech disrupting this whole thing rather than just trying to change the current system. Sounds a little bit radical, but. Well, here's what I think.

Investing in a place where things are too expensive is not a bad idea at all. You can always trial it in a place where things are cheap and then sell it in the us which is what we did. What a lot of companies are doing. All right, well it's helpful. It's a tough thing to know when something's going to happen and it matters more if you're 70. We have a few upgraded collective members who are 70 and we have some who are in their early 20s. But if you're 70, you're like, all right, you know the timeline for this, like when should I plan to do this? Because you have a more urgent need for some radical life extension than someone who says I just have to not get in a car accident and I'll probably be okay for the next five or ten years.

So that second part and then like third is, I call it passive longevity. Just don't die stupid like tobacco smoking which is minus 10 years from your life. Well and some of the stuff that are like pretty obvious like tobacco smoking, like you know, alcohol drinking and driving using seat belts. But some of the things like just embracing driver's cars, like driver's cars will bring mortality rates from car accidents by a factor of 10 pretty soon. So that's, that's an important driver of longevity as well. And just not taking risky choices is important as well. So I receive a letter two weeks ago from a very good friend of mine from California. She's a big fan of mountain hiking and she's. And, and, and the letter says Sergey, I'm about to climb one of the most dangerous mountains on earth. And it's K2 mortality rate. So it's 25. So like Russian roulette is like 70, sorry, 1 7. 17% chances of dying. Just going to K2 is 25% of, of dying so, or just riding motorcycles, you know, like the mortality rate from motorcycle accidents is like 17 times higher than driving the car. So and then people think, you know, look, it's going to be fine, I'm going to be safe, you not. So that's, that's, that's important as well. So coming back to your question, so what do I eat? You know, obviously there's just a lot of disagreement in academic field like what extends our lifespan. And I do think this like one agreement that decreasing your calorie intake is going to extend your lifespan by three to five to seven years. And it's easier to say than to have a discipline to like manage your two or three meals a day and make sure it's, it's a low on the caloric front. So I'm big fan of vegetables, right because simply because of their very low caloric intensity. And even if I would just have like a half of my table full of vegetables, I'm probably still going to be fine on, on the front of, of calories that I'm, I'm taking. So that's, that's one obviously I'm, I'm very mindful of the quality of my meat and fish. I don't do a lot of meat and fish but like if this is meat then it's you know, meat from the farm and you just, just to make sure it doesn't have antibiotics, growth hormones, equally bacteria, all this dangerous stuff. What I learned like I Think it's in US. Like 70% of antibiotics is consumed by animals on the farm. Right. And a fish.

We need to stop that right now. That's going to lower human lifespan. It already has. Yeah, it's, it's not okay.

When we, when we started to use antibiotics like hundred years ago, the average lifespan on earth increased by 10 years, from 35 to 45 in the course of two decades. Like, why are we trying everything to reverse this and the use of antibiotics as well? So that's kind of one thing that I do. Second thing, I do fasting. And I like fasting because statistically, so I fast like 36 hours a week, Monday evening to Wednesday morning, and I feel fine. I can survive on water and herbal tea and I actually love this feeling. So. And it's pretty important not only from just decreasing the calories that you, you take, but also in terms of, you know, giving your body the opportunity to reset and, you know, clean all the system and, and start auto fogging. Obviously autophagy, you need to, if you can, like a longer fasting, like 3, 4, 5 days are better for that. But like when I fast for so long, my family is not saying I'm not the best person in this mode. So, you know, I'm, I'm just trying to be meaningful with my work commitment and family commitment as well. So that's, that's basically what I do. And I do, you know, supplementation, you know, like Bulletproof is one of my favorite brands in terms of the supplements, and I, I take a lot of which ones as well. So in Bulletproof, what do I take? Yeah, I take you're saying.

So I just didn't hear you say Bulletproof. Now there just to be a clip. There's a lot of, lot of good brands. The bulletproof stuff that I formulated, if they're still making it the way I formulated. Thumbs up. Right. I'm not at all involved in the company and they won't share any information with me, so I have no idea what they're doing. But I'm pretty sure it's good. I still take it. So I'm with you there. But just to be really clear, like I said, you take a lot, a lot more than Bulletproof makes. Because Bulletproof only makes like 10 things.

Oh, sure, yeah, yeah.

How many a day of total do you take?

So it's usually like somewhere around 20 different types. From simple things like, you know, omega 3 garlic for my heart system and for my vessels. D3. I, I do think we all need to have like, yeah, vitamin D supplementation as well, some of the exotic stuff from Japan. Like, so I do a lot of seaweeds on rotation. So I, I have like six month rotation schedule with for seaweeds because I do think it be useful on a lot of different fronts. So I, you know, I have certain problems with my liver, so milk thistle can be pretty helpful in this regard.

I do that too. Yeah, that, that makes a lot of sense. So about 20 a day. See relatively light for someone wants to live as long as you do. Do you do like spermidine? Do you do urolithin A like all the cool autophagy. There's a bunch more.

Yes. I just bought spermidine. I, I, I haven't started to do it like, but I take NMN for the last probably a year and a half.

All right. There's an almost unlimited number and I struggle with this. Well, actually that's not true. I actually don't struggle with it because struggling uses a lot of energy that I don't. I will say I have questions, but I don't suffer because of them. Questions about, okay, I take a lot more than 20 supplements a day, about 150 a day depending on what the day is and what I'm doing. And they're carefully tuned for it. You know what, it works. I don't have the inflammation I used to have. My brain works all the time. I'm full of energy and it's been an evolved thing. But maybe if I did 120 it would work just fine. I just get lazy and it's just not worth the trouble saying, should I take resveratrol every other day versus today, versus in the morning, versus at night, versus with my bulletproof coffee because it's fat, absorbable. I mean, you could always worry about perfection. I don't do, do you think we're going to get to the point at some point where we have good enough advice that machine learning and AI just tells us just take this handful of stuff?

Yeah, I do think so. And just coming back to your earlier point, I'm typical placebo man, right. So if I believe that my supplements are kind of doing a good job for my mental and physical health, I mean, this is what I experience and I think in some of the medical studies, like the biggest competitor to, you know, particular drug is actually placebo. Placebo work in so many cases that we couldn't even mention. So that's why, that's like one of the first reason why I like supplements. I do believe that the problem with like a supplement sector and supplementation as well, it's just, it's just specifically when you take like a lot of things, it's just very difficult to establish relationship between the change of, of the kind of level of how your body works and respond to some of these supplements with supplementation itself. So probably in 10 to 20 years from now we'll be able, just by using artificial intelligence we'll be able to find the answers. Like Freenom is the company that I mentioned which do early diagnostic of cancer. So they, they use our blood test to identify your risks of the colon cancer. And so like the biomarkers of colon cancer was always there but we like 20 years ago it was just not possible to establish this whole correlation. So they analyzed more than, I think more than 100,000 different samples to establish correlation. And right now they're running human trials on colon cancer specifically. So the data is there. We're just missing. What we're missing is capacity of the computer power and artificial intelligence to track that and establish relationships. So I'm pretty sure we're going to.

Be.

It'S not going to be like 100% unified, like a mix of the things for everyone, but we can do it as personalized as possible for everyone.

I like that. I know we're going to get there. I think it's going to take a very long time. There's companies working on it from a blood test, from a urine test, certainly from a stool test. Our friends over at Viome, Naveen's working on that and I think has done some really good work from that front. But I don't know, I just believe I'll be taking less probably. But I'll still be wanting it customized because what we're optimizing for using machine learning is people who die when they're 80 or 90 and like no, no, no, no. I don't want to have average numbers for my age. I want to have nutrient numbers and performance for my 25 year old age. And that's going to take a new kind of thinking, a new kind of machine learning of setting targets. So that, that's a long term thing that might always be hard to get because it's almost like we build in our expectations in the systems and that happens. Well, would you be up for a couple questions from the upgrade collective?

Yeah, please.

All right guys, you have some questions ready? All right. Raise your hand if you want to go and I'll call you in. Joanne's got a question. Her hand is up. Go for it. Joanne, hi.

Kind of a question statement. I just happened to see the Louis Schwartzberg fungi, fantastic fungi movie the other night and Paul Stamets is the miracle guy behind these mushrooms. And they were doing some tests later on in the film with some people with Alzheimer's and dementia and they used a fifth of a portion, I guess you'd call it, of psilocybin. And it gave these people their life back where they were sitting in chairs all slumped over. And then his mother, Paul Stamets mother was really at stage four cancer and there was some mushroom experience going on with the company. He gave it to her and she came out of it. So I think both. I love the technology, I love the development of the science and I think we have to combine both nature and science and would love to hear what you think about that.

Yeah, thanks, John. Well, first of all, can I just agree that we need to look to the mother nature which already has a lot of answers to us. Like this whole current paradigm of medicine, which is not relying on the ability of our body to heal itself, not from all diseases. Right. You still need to have professional help. But like there's so many tools that we have inside our body and mind for recovery and healing as well. And it's been offered by Mother Nature. So I do believe this is, this is really massive when, when you talk about mushrooms and psychedelics we are. Well, frankly speaking, I like nothing to say because this is such a emerging early stage industry. So we haven't built our competence on that. Like imagine we have like hundred million dollars to invest in so many different things. And so we haven't, you know, made any allocation for this new industry. It's a little bit like cryptocurrency five or 10 years ago. So you know that it's going to change the world. But who's going to be Bitcoin and what's going to be Ethereum and what particular crypto coins will disappear? You don't know. Or it's like Internet back in 1998, you know, like Amazon and Google is there but you don't know who's going to be the winner. So we really, at early stage, I do think it's very promising but we haven't tested it with our money and usually it's the best test. When we invest in something we do a lot of diligence and we understand it much, much better.

Well, I have made an allocation there. I think Paul is the best guy in the world specifically for that cancer stuff. So actually last week I Had dinner at Paul's place, and I made a small investment in his new pharmaceutical company that's working on neuroregeneration. Because one of the things you have to do as you age, your neurons break down, especially lining. And I think he's got some serious patentable and patented tech to grow neurons back like a young person. So I want a young person's brain and a young person's body when I'm old. And frankly, I'll take the old person's body and the young person's brain if I have to choose. So I did that. And then someone just sent me a study today showing that a single dose of psilocybin caused rapid and persistent growth of dendritic spines in the frontal cortex. That's the thinking part of the brain. And they said it sticks around for at least a month. So I'm like, I know there's something going on here. And I also use, you know, I use the life cycle ones because there's an Australian strain of mushrooms that I can tell measurably with my wearable. It makes my sleep better. So that's my go to sleep one. And so there are pharmaceuticals, but like you said, there's all kinds of stuff we don't know yet. So it is a bit of a shot in the dark. But I just go with ones either I can see they work or with the most knowledgeable people. And you hope. And I also didn't put $100 million into it the way you would have.

Thank you. Thanks, Dave.

All right, that was a great question, Joanne, and bringing the world of nature in, because we've been doing this for thousands of years in traditional Chinese medicine and things like that.

That.

All right, Tina, you've got a question. What's up? Oh, thank you so much. This has been really great, and I look forward to getting your book. My question is, what do you do for exercise, and what do you think the role of exercise is for longevity?

Okay, great question. I do think our view on exercise is pretty binary. Like, for we humans, we, like, kind of black and white. So you either, like, go for marathon or do Ironman or Iron Woman, and. Or you just staying at your home and kind of watching tv, right? That's your exercise. I do think there's something in between, and I do believe, like, 10,000 steps a day is two thirds of the things that we need, exercise wise. So you can integrate walking into, like, so many activities in your life. And this is what I do. On top of that, I. I'm. I Do think you actually need to have like a combination of the things. So you need to do stretching. So I do yoga stretching two times, two times a week. Then what I'm missing is cardio. I had particular difficult Covid case back in December for like 20 days and I still haven't recovered, so I, I still haven't add my cardio into my life. I still find it difficult. So but then my rule was always like 90 minutes of cardio every week. So it's either like, you know, three, three like trainings, 30 minutes each or two times 45 minutes each. And what I, I've never done but I want to do is like weightlifting because what I've seen that you know people, and it's people who do like a weightlifting once a week. It's, it's, it's really good prevention for, you know, all the, you know, all the problems with your bones and cartilage for the latest stage of your life. And so I've seen few studies to support that. I haven't done it. So that's my, you know, pretty open answer on what I do and what I don't in this field.

It's a beautiful answer. There's great evidence lifting something heavy for a brief period once a week does huge amounts of good in a small amount of time. And you can use tech for that. Some of the upgrade labs tech is there and then having some cardiovascular stuff, it turns out you can get what you're looking for in about six minutes a day using an AI algorithm instead of 90 minutes. And University of Colorado research shows it actually gives you better improvements in VO2 Max than doing the longer stuff. So it's not just as good, it's better. Yeah, we're doing that at upgrade labs too. But I have some things I'm going to share with you, knowing a lot about what you just mentioned. With lungs not recovering, addressing mast cell activation with Claritin and Pepcid over the course of months as well as niacin, adding it to your other stack that's improving your NAD levels. And then this is the thing and I consulted with a dear friend who's one of the luminaries of anti aging and nutrients and he's been on the show, but I don't have permission to name him, so I'm not going to. I suggested a banned substance for the olympic committee called GW 501516 that increases mitochondrial growth and his results were where. Oh my God, I can't believe I just improved this fast. Like a week Later, I feel like myself again. So, basically, let's give your mitochondria a little kick in the pants, turn down mast cells at the same time, and go back to working out. This is hackable.

Perfect. Thank you, Dan.

All right. I hope that doesn't. Hope that doesn't get the show banned. Geez. Didn't name any particular things there, so I think I'm okay. I was just talking about bad lungs. All right. Always looking to give back, especially to people like you, Sergey, who are really doing good work in the world. I gotta recommend your book, Science and Technology of Growing Young. Here's the deal. It's gonna happen. It is happening. Now. If you look backwards, you don't see it. If you look forward, and you have the ability to look forward. Not everyone does. Sergey does. I do. Many listeners. Do you? It's blindingly obvious that this is happening if a comet doesn't hit the planet. So start paying attention to it. And if you want a very readable brief, actually shorter than my book book that says, here's what's happening, here's why, here's the tech. Very well organized. It's Sergey's book, so check it out. And just worth your time. Not a heavy long read, but full of knowledge, Sergey. Thank you, my friend. I can't wait to hang out with you again. Maybe at the X Prize or somewhere else, but it'll happen soon.

Thank you, Dave, and thanks to Upgrade Collective. I'm really delighted to make it interactive today and thanks to all of our audience. Stay healthy and happy, please.

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