The Next Big Longevity Conversation Is Stem Cells with Dr. Dan Pardi

How do we, like, harness what's being discovered about stem cells and do something with it?

Stem cells change in a variety of different ways. Sometimes we're making more, sometimes we're making less, and that has to do mostly with the environment that they're in. Things like exercise, lifestyle absolutely matters. Lifestyle factors like nutrients that you may or may not consume.

What's one daily habit that you do that you feel like moves the needle the most for your longevity?

I have prioritized walking as something that I just don't ever not do. There is still a process that we consider aging. However, you can do surprisingly well when you put a body back into the conditions that help it thrive. They sew together an old mouse to a young mouse.

They're alive? Yeah.

It's called parabiosis. They perform a surgery, they sew them together, and what you see, though, is an exchange of fluids. The older mouse becomes young.

You know that moment when you realize that body just doesn't bounce back like it used to? Maybe you're sleeping a little less, you're recovering a little slower. You just feel like when you wake up in the morning, it's like, oof, you know, what's going on? Now, you probably also heard the buzz about stem cells from anti-aging clinics to cutting-edge recovery therapies. But what if you could actually activate your body's own stem cells naturally? You didn't have to fly to Panama. You didn't have to drop $25 grand on injections.

Interesting? I thought so.

Especially since I have played around with some of the stem cells and they have been game-changing. But I'm like, how do I get more of this without spending so much on this? So I've got Dr. Dan Pardi with me. He is the chief health officer at Qualia Life Sciences. I'm a huge fan of Qualia, as you know, if you've been listening to the show. In fact, such a huge fan that I started using their products years ago and I became a brand spokesperson a couple of years ago. Literally met the founder, I think about 10 years ago, and they kept asking me to come on board and I was like, no, no, no, no, no. And I was like, yes, yes, yes. And so part of what I get by being a brand spokesperson is to interview their amazing group. I interviewed Dr. Greg Kelly. We'll link to that in the show notes. We talked about Sinalytics, and today we're going to be talking about stem cells, what they are, why this matters, how this is like the key to aging powerfully, how you can activate your own so you don't go have to spend $25,000, what you can do supplementally to really boost the production of them. And then of course, some of the dos and don'ts of lifestyle, etc. So I am really excited to have Dr. Dan Parti in the house with me, literally in the house, because we built a podcast studio in our house. He's one of the sharpest minds in human performance and longevity. He's a neuroscientist. He's worked with elite military units, Fortune 500 execs, and again, now he's working with Qualia, which I'm thrilled about. So So we're gonna talk stem cells, and I will share with you that as I was listening to some of his other interviews, I went, wow, this actually explains a lot about protein pacing, about what type of exercise to do. So we're gonna now break it down, simplify it, share with you what you need to do in order to optimize your stem cells and how using a stem cell product 4 days a month can dramatically change your life. So I will be right back with Dr. Dan Pardi. Stay with me. Dan, hi. Welcome to my house and my studio.

Thank you for having me. It's so good to be here, JJ Virgin.

I gotta tell you, I've been thrilled to have you here because I have literally been binging on all your stuff. I'll be honest, I would listen to an interview and listen to it again and then listen to it again, then pause it, then rewind it. You know, so I was like, good, I'm gonna have him here and we can unpack all of this because stem cells, I feel like are a confusing topic. Yeah. You know, starting with what the heck are they? What's a stem cell? What's an exosome? Do you get your own? Do you get, you know, placental? All the stuff. Yes. Can you just create better of your own? You know, so that's what I really wanna unpack is starting from the beginning for the average person to understand and then understand how they can work with them so that we can have a great life and age powerfully. Yeah, that's a great plan. So can we start from the beginning?

Let's, it's always my favorite place to start.

Okay, starting with just, What the heck are stem cells?

Yes, they are a major repair system in our body. So these are cells that— we'll talk about something called potency, which means what essentially the stem cell can become. But generally, stem cells will divide and create a copy of themselves, and then another— the other part of the daughter cell is a progenitor cell.

And what's a daughter cell?

That is when it divides, this— the cells that are created. And one of those is destined to become some type of functioning tissue in the body, and the other version just makes another stem cell so it can do that same job downstream. That's what our stem cells basically are. They divide, they create a clone of themselves, and then they can find different areas of the body that need some sort of repair, and they will then become that new type of tissue. So think of it like a lump of clay. When that lump of clay is wet, you can mold it into a cup or a plate, all different sorts of shapes, and that is like a stem cell in the body. But once you then mold it into, let's say, a cup and it hardens, that is what it is. It can't go back into that lump of clay and become something else. We call that cell fate. It's determinate. It's now said, okay, I've made some choices in my life and I am now this specific thing. So that's generally what stem cells are doing. One of the reasons why we're so interested in them now for better aging is because one of the hallmarks of aging, which we can talk about what those are in general, is that we experience something called stem cell exhaustion, which basically means the stem cells don't do their job as well as they did when you were young.

And how do we know that?

It's actually very visible for somebody who is getting older. We start to see visible signs of aging. When you're young, you're definitely creating damage through the course of living, but every time you lose a cell, you replace it. And so the net effect is perfect harmony, the balance, homeostasis. And as the scales start to tilt with age, we're not replacing— every time we lose 10 cells, we're not replacing them with 10 more functioning ones. We're now replacing them with 8 or 7. And that then declines the older and older we get.

Is there— because I've been looking at some of the, you know, the different biological clocks. Is there a way to actually test to see your rate of decline?

Specifically of stem cells?

Uh-huh.

Measuring stem cells is a challenge. There is a whole field of metabolomics. Metabolomics is looking at all the different metabolic products and proteins that are created through our metabolism. We now have technologies that can take a sample of blood or a buccal swab and find out a tremendous amount of information about what's changing in a person from, let's say, point A to point B in a study, before or after an intervention. What's the average of a person for these particular markers? 10 years younger, 10 years older. The field is very new, very exciting. It's almost overwhelming us though, because we can collect so much data that we couldn't before. Validation process takes a long time, so you have to repeat it, you have to show— demonstrate it in multiple people. Right now, I think that expresses a bigger tension in our world, is that our technology is significantly outpacing— the innovation is significantly outpacing our ability to then standardize it, right, and test it.

And plus, I would assume that We don't know if there is standardization, like someone else's rate of decline. And then is it tissue-specific?

There are some researchers who are very knowledgeable in this space, like Michael Snyder at Stanford, and he thinks that the best comparison is yourself. You're a great example. Very, very fit. If you were to look at a cohort your age, let's say a therapy was to work in them, that might not perfectly apply to you because you have a fitness level that is not standard or normal. For your age cohort. And fitness is an extraordinarily important part of how we age.

It makes me so happy. Honestly, I'm an exercise physiologist, right? That's my whole background. So I was like, I always felt like the peasant in the healthcare practitioner world. And now I feel like we are the rock stars. Yes. So everything that goes around longevity is like, oh, fitness. I'm like, finally.

Yeah. Finally. I know it was, it was just written off. Like, I know.

Yeah.

And kind of banished.

It was like, As if exercise is one thing. Exactly. That's the other thing that drives me nuts. I'm like, well, there's tai chi and there's powerlifting and they're a little different.

I think this is so important. They sound like platitudes. And I have a talk that I gave at the Institute for Human-Machine Cognition in Florida. And the way I talk about our healthcare system is that imagine if you were like trying to fly a helicopter and you would go to what I call the helicopterologist and they, did everything to like test the mechanics, but they didn't teach you how to fly it. So you just imagine like a 10-minute consult and then out the door, they're like, oh, and remember to fly safely, right? That really in order to understand how to do these things that like exercise and diet, they're not topics, they're categories. And underneath those categories, there is a tremendous amount of information. What we want to do with these things is we can't outsource all this information to an expert. We have to embed this knowledge into ourselves so it becomes a skill that helps us navigate our day. That is our, our template that we have to work with, our 24-hour period, and not adopt what unfortunately is the modern pattern of living. And so knowledge on how to do this and training on how to do it by people like yourselves and others that say, hey, this stuff is really important and here's how you go about doing it— super important.

And wouldn't it be great if we actually did that when kids were little? Like, imagine that. That kids didn't have the kids menu at the restaurant, that the kids menu at the restaurant was actually geared towards creating a healthier eater and not a chicken finger eater.

You're making my heart sing. Right now we let kids develop a relationship with the environment, and then we try to reverse that pattern that has been ingrained over decades, a few decades, instead of dedicating a certain amount of schooling to help them interact with their environment in a healthy way so that It's avoiding the problem later. And if you can embed that into how a child learns to interact with the world from the beginning, there's much greater likelihood.

Right, so eating healthy is normal. Yeah. Exercise is normal. Like these are just, it's, we brush our teeth, we do our, like these are just what we do.

Yes.

So, and I'm going to bring it back to stem cells, 'cause I've gotta assume that all of this stuff would affect the health of your stem cells. So as we start to age, what are some of the signs that And is it quality of your stem cells, quantity of stem cells? What's going on?

Yes, in general we think of aging— what's common, I'd say, is that there is a general decline in proteins and function. It's not exactly true. There is a decline in function, but stem cells are a really good example of how exactly this is not true. We can break this down into maybe 5 different categories of what's happening to stem cells when we age. One of those is that for a stem cell to be healthy, they're actually need to be sleeping in their bed most of the time. So imagine that they're, they're resting and they're waiting to do work. Well, as we get older, two things can happen. One is that they are too asleep. They're hard to wake up, right? So imagine mom going in to wake up their, their boy, the child, and they, you know, on a normal day, you wake them, you nudge them a couple times, they get up, and then they're ready for their day. In this scenario, they're too asleep. You just can't get them up out of bed. But that's not the only thing that happens. The opposite of that happens as well. So some of our stem cells are too arousable. And guess what happens there? They're too easy to wake up and it— they're releasing into the environment too often. And that causes them to be exhausted. We don't want to be constantly releasing them. We want it to be really tightly regulated. And so a regulated stem cell system when you're young has them resting most of the time in a very specific state. And when we get older, either they're too asleep or they're too arousable. And that's one example of what happens when we get older.

Okay. Now, is aging causing this or are other things we're doing causing this?

It is a part of the aging process.

Think about muscle loss. Yeah. You know how you say, oh, starting around age 30. Sure. And what happened was I did a DEXA scan at 39 and at 59. Yes. And I did it 'cause I was like, I actually did 'cause I wanted to see what his was, my husband's. And 'cause I decided I wanted to get into like really good shape at 60. My DEXA was exactly the same. Like, exactly. My weight was the same. Muscle fat-free mass was the same. Fat mass was the same. Where the fat was, was the same. And my bone density was the same.

It's great.

And I looked at it and I went, "Okay, so that just disproves this whole idea that as we age, blah, blah, blah." I'm like, you know, I think it's a lot of the behaviors that happen as we start to age because we have kids and work and all these things, you know?

Yeah, yeah, yes.

So that's why I just wonder, some of this I'm sure is aging, but is some of it also, the behaviors? And what would those bad behaviors— what would— are they the things that we would think about for being bad for everything, like smoking, drinking, all that, or what?

I like to break these down into a couple of different categories. So we have our behaviors, which is how we're interacting with the world. We have the environment, which is the spaces we inhabit and the influence that those environmental factors have on our health as well. And then also what I call pressures. So pressures are the components of modern life that then shape your environments and your behavior. So imagine, for example, if you have a job at a, at a desk, that is going to determine largely where you are spending your time, sitting at a desk working for most of your 16 hours of the day. All these sorts of pressures of modern life are then shaping how we are living, and we have to now counteract that so that we don't become a consequence of these pressures that apply to most of us. But yes, how we live significantly significantly determines the— our aging trajectory. On the other hand, even in a perfect environment, perfect diet, exercise every day, don't get sick, don't smoke, all the things that we do, no matter— sleep really well— there is still a process that we consider aging. So it's not a completely preventable process with perfect behavior. However, what we're really trying to do is— you can do surprisingly well when you put a body back into the conditions that help it thrive.

Yeah, because otherwise we shouldn't have this conversation because it would just be depressing. So, yeah, okay, so what are some of the signs then that either over or under is happening?

Maybe I'll go through this. What is the life cycle of a stem cell? I'll start there because then I can talk about how aging is affecting it. Okay, so we have stem cells that are generally asleep, and we've got pools all over the body, many, many different pools. They are generally asleep until they're woken up and then they are activated, then they will undergo proliferation. They will make copies of themselves. Some of those will then stay in the niche, their home where they live or where they're from, and others will then enter into circulation and they will then migrate to a place where there is damage. And they do this through these very interesting homing signals. So the analogy that I like to have people envision is imagine that these stem cells have a nose on them and they are someplace around the body is baking some cookies and they can smell those cookies and they want to find them. That scent is these chemical signals that say, hey, come help. And so that's how the stem cell is finding where to go. It's not wandering aimlessly throughout the body. And once it actually gets closer to where it needs to go, it'll adhere to the vessel walls, right? So imagine it's circulating and then it's like, okay, I need to be here. It adheres and it makes its way into the tissues through the bloodstream. And at that point, it is listening to a variety of different signals from the extracellular from hormones, from cytokines, these signals that say, okay, now start to turn into the cell that is going to help replace this specific type of tissue. That is called differentiation, and it helps a— that lump of clay become that bowl or the plate. It's a fascinating process. So these different signals bind to the surface of the cell, and they cause these signaling cascades that will cause transcription factors inside of the cell, which are essentially messages that go to your, your genes and turn on only the right type of genes, because every cell Cell has all your genes, but you don't want to be making every single protein. You want to make specific proteins that are helping that cell turn into, let's say, a muscle cell. And so it's listening to those external signals. Now we've got these chemical messengers that create the right proteins. And then this will cause— locks in cell fate and it makes then a specific muscle cell. One thing that happens when we age is that process breaks down. So you can have a muscle cell that doesn't turn into— or what's— you could, excuse me, you could have a stem cell that should be making a muscle cell in that particular niche, but it starts to make a fibroblast instead. You're creating scar tissue. Oh yeah. And that leads to stiffness. That leads to, you know, imagine a very old person and how they move.

Yeah.

The reason for that is because their muscle cells are now populated with a lot of scar tissue because of this improper, out-of-balance differentiation process.

Hmm.

Those are all the different parts of the cycle. Waking up, mobilizing, finding the right place, becoming the right cell. And at every single step of that journey, things can go wrong with the aging process. But the really exciting message here is that— and this is shown clearly by work from Irina Conboy at Berkeley. She's somebody that I interviewed years ago where they did what are called parabiosis studies. So they sew together— it's a bit gruesome— an old mouse to a young mouse.

And they're alive.

Yeah. It's called parabiosis. I know.

Wait a minute.

Wait.

So I'm trying to get a visual of this. Like, they're alive and they're sewing them together?

They perform a surgery. They sew them together.

Are they like making them like Siamese twins type of thing? Kind of.

Yes. And what you see though is an exchange of fluids. So the older mouse becomes younger.

I'm surprised Brian Johnson hasn't done this with one of his sons.

Well, he is actually.

I know he's kind of doing something with the young blood type. Is this— That's where it came from.

Okay.

Yes. All right.

That's where it came from. Wow. So there's a group of people that have really championed this work. Tom Rando at Stanford, Irina Conboy at Berkeley, and then a guy named Dobri Kiprov who's out of Mill Valley where I had moved from before I moved to Austin a couple years ago. They've gone from basic science research, looking at animals, noticing that there was a rejuvenating effect of tying together these old and young mice, and then turning that into a therapy that you call total plasma exchange.

Which seems a little easier than sewing people together.

Can you imagine?

No, no, I don't want to even go there. But, you know, it's kind of funny that they would even start that way. I was like, why wouldn't you have just tried something like that? Rather than sew something, sew animals together. Anyhow, plasma exchange, because yeah, that's happening in different places. Is it legal or not legal at this point?

There are a lot of places that are now doing it. And so plasma exchange has been around for quite a long time for organ transplants and whatnot. So it's now just being used in a different context. And the idea is that you sit there for 3 hours, it is exchanging the plasma. You're keeping your blood cells, you put them back into the body, you clean out the plasma that contains a lot of this— Is it ibu?

Is that what ibu is?

Um, I don't know. Ibu?

Maybe.

Typically what you do is maybe 6 times in a year. But Irina has a really good analogy. She says, let's say you have this pile of bananas and they go rotten. You can't just throw healthy bananas on the pile. You gotta clear it out. And that's what this plasmic exchange is doing. The reason why this is relevant and why it matters for stem cells is because a major reason why stem cells stop being able to do their job is because the environment that is internal, the internal environment starts to build up more damage. And that damage is interfering with all the different processes. And the cool part of this is that when they do things like total plasma exchange and others, you see a rejuvenation effect. All of a sudden, the stem cells that exist are able to act like they did when they were younger. And so that's a whole science area.

Now, is there a way to do it without doing that? Is there a way, like, to make your body do that themself?

Yeah, that's a lot of what Qualia is aiming to do with our stem cell product is what are the different ways that we can manipulate the physiology in a health-promoting manner? So lessening inflammation, for example. Inflammation— a rise in inflammation is a major driver that interferes with the proper signaling of this homeostatic process. And homeostasis is generally just maintaining a balanced functioning system. And when we have dys— homeostasis, something is off. And a protein is elevated. In fact, that's what ends up happening in a lot of cases. I was saying earlier, aging is not just a decline. In some cases, we're making more proteins than ever before. It's just not as tightly regulated. And so something that was good and has—

so things are going rogue. Yes, yes. I want to get over to this part, obviously, and like how we can do this for ourselves. But then, you know, I don't know if you know, my son had a massive traumatic brain injury, and one of my Buddy started like one of the first stem cell clinics all over the country. And so we all banked our own stem cells. And that's the first question. If you're banking older stem cells, what happens there? Wouldn't quality matter? But for him, he was 16. They took his stem cells, they grew them, they expanded them, and then they did intrathecal injections. And we also did the thing with, I'm blanking on his name. He got actually a, I think he became a lord because of his work. He used laser to kind of activate the stem cells. Do you know who I'm talking about? He lived in Encinitas.

Oh, really? Yeah.

He ended up at my house at a party and he was telling me this and I'm like, oh. So I did both of those things on my son. And it was really interesting because 3 days after he got them injected in his spine, it was like being in the hospital with him again as he woke up. And you were like, uh-oh, you know, I mean, it was good and not good at the same time. The other ones actually worked quicker. But for someone, I mean, these things are super expensive. Yeah. Like super expensive. And I just had some harvested from my hip and put in. Yeah. That was unpleasant. But how do I know if I'm getting good quality there? Like what you're getting?

That's— Yeah. So maybe I'll take a second to just describe.

And is there a way to do it without spending that much money? Because the bigger one.

Yeah. So stem cells is a huge topic, and there's lots of different things to discuss. But how most people know about stem cells is stem cell therapy, which is harvesting some of your own autologous from the self versus allogeneic from a donor cells. And then usually they're harvested from the iliac crest. So you do a little mini surgery, you aspirate them from the bone marrow, a very rich source of hematopoietic stem cells, and then you will expand them and you put them back into the body in an area that is needed. That is a medical procedure, thousands of dollars. You can also harvest them from fat tissue.

I had both of those done. Okay. The fat took a month to recover from.

Okay.

It was absolutely awful.

Oh, wow.

Interesting. Bruised everything else. Yeah. But it repaired a torn hamstring.

Yes.

It was life-changing.

That's— Yeah. What's possible with these tissues and these types of therapies is remarkable. And I do think we're just at the beginning of understanding how many applications they have. Yeah.

So you can harvest— But again, it's so cost prohibitive.

Yeah, it's very expensive.

And you don't know if it's gonna work. And you don't know if it's gonna work.

We talked about hematopoietic stem cells. These are stem cells that are from bone marrow. And I want to give an analogy because it's helpful. So stem cells have what are called potencies. And a potency is a scientific term that means that they can become—

like, what can they turn into?

So a pluripotent potent stem cell can become just about anything in the body, but a multipotent stem cell can only become a few things. So here's my analogy. Imagine you're a college freshman. You haven't taken any courses. You're like a pluripotent stem cell. You can do anything. Once you're a junior, you've taken some classes, you've made some choices, and let's say you've done some science classes. You don't know if you want to be a researcher or a doctor. You've gone down a lineage, and now you have fewer options. Yeah, that sounds bad, but you're, you're going to become something, and that's good. So then you do a couple more years, and that would be like a multipotent stem cell. And that is when we're talking about, for example, hematopoietic stem cells. Those are multipotent stem cells. They have different— what's called lineages. And that lineage, they could become various blood tissues. They could become red blood cells or platelets. That's the myeloid lineage. And the lymphoid lineage is making your immune cells— T cells, B cells, natural killer cells. All of those come from your bone marrow, and the stem cells that are in your bone marrow. So where you harvest stem cells from matters because, all right, what kind of tissue do I want to affect? Let me make sure that I'm using the right stem cells for the job. It's a good way to think of it is that you've now made some choices and you can become certain things. And so, and by the way, bone marrow also has what are called Mu cells. Those are really interesting. I think that's a key area that we're going to see a lot more on in the future. These stand for multi-lineage differentiated stress-enduring stem cells. Wow. Yeah, very, very cool. So there's so much— there's so much richness in that name. Multilineage, they can become multiple things. They can differentiate into different tissues. Stress-enduring, they're very stress-resistant. And they can now— they are constantly circulating in the body. A Japanese researcher, Mari Dozawa, she identified them. Very cool story about— very serendipitous, like a lot of science. She discovered them and is now turning that into a company that is looking to be able to commercialize the knowledge so that we can find— they have a lot of advantages to other types of stem cells. I think we're going to see more of those in the future.

But again, you have to use your own.

Great question, because typically yes. Mu cells, no. They do not elicit the same autoimmune issues.

So this could be a little college fundraiser.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You could become— when we're selling sperm now, or eggs, you can sell mu cells.

Exactly. So yeah, lots happening in the space.

Wow. Okay. However, that's again, I mean, that's like the, you've got to have a lot of money to be able to do these things or be fortunate to have a really nice friend in Palm Desert take care of your— take care of your son. Thank you, Dr. Elliot Lander. For everybody else, how do we like harness what's being discovered about stem cells and do something with it if it can target the hallmarks of aging?

So I'm going to answer this question by saying one more thing about mesenchymal stem cells, which will matter to the next step in this discussion. So mesenchymal stem cells, yeah, they're stem cells, but they probably aren't— these whole cells are not actually becoming differentiated tissue. They're probably acting more like exosomes. And exosomes are these vesicles that are released by stem cells and other, other tissues that create a better environment for recovery and regeneration. And so you see now exosome therapies for tissue and joint regeneration.

Like facials.

Hair restoration.

And you can use— you don't need to use your own for that. Exactly. And why is that?

There's no evidence that they generate any sort of immune rejection or reaction.

I'm sure we would have heard because it's like a common thing now.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So again, this is all part of the broader space. We've come back a couple of times now. It's pretty expensive. And you know what, I mean, for— want to be sensitive to— we all have our own capabilities in order to afford some of these things. But if somebody chooses to do them, it might be like, well, gosh, you know, I just can't heal this. I've tried everything and I can't heal it. And for example, my orthopedic surgeon, who is great, very even-keeled, and he said, yeah, I use stem cells with great success in a lot of different injury recovery. And this is in Texas. So I think even the more mainstream mainstream docs are recognizing the real potential here. But is that the only way to attend to your stem cells? Well, we talked about things like exercise— lifestyle absolutely matters. We can discuss that even further. But then this is what we created with Qualia Stem Cell, which is a 15-ingredient formulation that is aimed at addressing the various aspects of the stem cell lifestyle that corrode or degrade with the aging process. The main idea there is stem cells change in a variety of different ways. Sometimes we're making more, sometimes we're making less. Sometimes they're self-renewing, but they're only renewing on one of their lineages. Sometimes they're not differentiating or differentiating into the wrong tissues. All these different ways that things go wrong. And that has to do mostly with the environment that they're in, right? The neighborhood that they're in is not as supportive as it once was when we were younger.

So we gotta fix the hood.

Gotta fix the hood. Guess what? Lifestyle factors like nutrients that you may or may not consume— but these are food, food-like substances that we can consume— do have an impact.

Like what? What are some of the key ones?

Well, for example, phenolic and polyphenolic substances.

So like, so olive oil, olive oil, great coffee.

Coffee has phenolic substances. Several of the compounds in Qualia stem cell— ferulic acid, Salvia middleterreza. These, these have very rich sources. Sea buckthorn, very rich sources of polyphenols and phenolics. So how do they help? Well, they help in a variety of ways. So that's one thing too, like the different ingredients, they're doing more than one thing, but you can generally categorize them. But we talked about how inflammation, a rise in inflammation with aging, is a major inhibitor of function. And so how do, for example, these compounds have a positive impact? Like olive oil too. That has enough polyphenols, right?

This is the big thing— not one of those grocery store crappy olive oils.

Yes, green, pungent, pungent. And, you know, find one that's tested. So polyphenols degrade with time, light, and heat, and so you want to protect them. And so one of the nice things about our standardization— the ingredients that we use, they're standardized, so you can see that they actually contain the ingredients, right? So you— let's say you go to Trader Joe's and you get some olive oil, you're like, great, I'm doing this good thing for me, and it has almost no polyphenols that have survived.

Yeah, this is why we have to do these things because this isn't 100 years ago. Exactly. I mean, that's the difference. And we're not living in Italy, we're not Tom O'Brien living in Italy, getting this great olive oil.

Right, that's made at the tree, right from right there.

I get Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club. Do you know that one?

I know several of those and I think they're a great idea.

Yeah, it's like fantastic.

At home, I have my cooking olive oil and my dressing olive oil. Olive oil. And the dressing olive oil is more expensive, and it's guaranteed for certain polyphenolic content. And so I'm using that one to top foods but not cook with. But anyway, why does that matter? Why do phenols and polyphenols matter? So a major regulator, a master regulator in fact, of inflammation is nuclear factor kappa beta. And that is a transcription factor that will trigger the induction or production of a lot of different inflammatory compounds. And what phenols do is they will go and they will lock it up, and they'll prevent that master regulator of inflammation from getting into the nucleus and then triggering compounds that you may or not have heard of, the audience— TNF-alpha, interleukin-1 beta, IL-6— all of these things that we know are driving inflammation and rising with age and inhibiting, in this case, stem cells. Now you're lowering the inflammatory burden and you've now created a better environment for stem cells to do their job. And they've not lost the ability to do that.

Here's the interesting thing though. And it's the interesting thing with the synolytics too, which those, the synolytics are fascinating to me because it is something that you can actually notice a difference when you take it. I think it took me maybe 2 months, but my kryptonite is all the dairy. The dumb things I did when I was a teenager, you know, like why does a 6-foot-tall person think they should be a gymnast? You know, like why, why did I do that? Or a pointe ballerina, like all the dumb things that resulted in broken feet, blown out knees, blown, you know, just stupid. So that's what I'm paying for now. So I can, I'm a great test on anything related to joints, cuz I'm like, I can tell or not tell pretty quickly.

This is a key point. Can I say something about that? That when we're getting older, there is a real benefit in that you can tell what's healthy and what's not healthy better than you could when you're younger. When you're younger, you're protected.

We've got a big margin for error. You can do all sorts of dumb stuff and you won't really notice. Not anymore. Yes. So we're going to couch that as a benefit.

Yeah, it is.

You—

when you do something that is not healthy for you, you feel it, but The other side of that is when you do something that's healthy for you, you feel it too.

It's true.

You have more deft feedback on what is really good. And if you care about health and you're a good listener to yourself and your body and the different experiments you try, like you with Synalytic, you can notice.

So then if this— these phenolic compounds are reducing inflammation and this inflammation is causing this problem, why wouldn't you want to turn that up all the time. So what is it with— because both with senolytics and with stem cell, you don't do this as a turned on all the time. What's the, what's the thought process? What is going on here?

Yeah, I'll start with senolytic. So senolytic is a topic I've been interested in this topic from very early on. I interviewed a couple of people, including the person at the Buck who is really champion this, Judith Campisi. So she's unfortunately passed away now, but I often thought that she was somebody who would win a Nobel Prize because of her work in this area. She was somebody who identified these as very important. These are senescent cells. Mm-hmm. Did a lot of work under the banner of the Buck Institute of Aging, the first biomedical research institute solely dedicated to aging in the world out of Marin County. And, uh, she's somebody who identified, for example, SASP factors. This is, uh, senescence-associated secretory phenotype. So these senescent cells are releasing these inflammatory molecules into the surrounding, and that actually serves a purpose. They're telling the immune system, hey, come clear me out.

Oh, but what happens when your immune system's not listening?

That's right. So we have immunosenescence when we get older. So now you have senescent cells— you don't want to prevent senescent cells from actually doing their job because They're—

because then you wouldn't know they were there. They'd be stealth, right?

Well, they're actually performing a function, and the function is that when a cell gets sick, it doesn't want to continue to replicate. It wants to cease existing, and so it can undergo what's called apoptosis, which is programmed cell death, or it can go into a replicative senescence. So it's listening to the building up of molecules in the cell, and then that can trigger certain pathways either for cell death or for senescence. Unfortunately, with senescent cells, the— and the zombie analogy is a good one because they're partially alive and they're partially dead. They're not functioning as the same in the way that they were before, but they're not dead. So they continue to survive and dole out these inflammatory molecules. And even 1 in 10,000 cells can have an outsized effect on inflammation in the body. Wow. Yeah. Now, when you're younger, kind of like with stem cells, When you're making more senescent cells, you make them, you clear them, right? And the net burden is pretty much zero. But starting in our 30s, we start to see a rise in the amount of—

everything happens in your 30s.

Yes, there's very, uh, we could, we could, we could divert here and have another hour conversation on why. It's a fascinating one. It has a lot to do with the evolutionary theory of aging, which is that our Evolution really cares about us up until— reproduction, and then like, okay, yeah, the average first age of reproduction in a population, which is then after that it has less— evolution has less of an ability to influence our health. It's kind of the analogy that Professor Michael Rose gives. It's like you're in Las Vegas and now you're driving out into the desert and you've got the stereo on, and the farther you get away from the city, this— it's really staticky, and the farther you go, it has a harder time time hearing the signal. That's like evolution. It has a harder time acting on us after reproduction. That's why we start to see these declines that start around that time.

So we have senolytic cells, we want some. Yeah, we just don't want them to zombie out and start creating— wreaking havoc.

We want to keep them under control. We want them— we want the process of senescence to be able to occur, and then once they're— once it occurs, we want to clear them because there's also what's called bystander standard senescence, which means that they can cause cells nearby, right?

So that's where it's zombie, zombie-ish. It's kind of— that's more like a vampire situation.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's like Twilight meets, uh, a zombie movie. Yeah, because this is really them turning other cells bad.

Yeah.

So you want to have some.

Yes.

Which is then why— and I have had no one explain it so well— you would go and go and kill them off, try to clear them out, but only briefly so they can come back. You're just trying to clear out all the excess and the bad ones and all that, I would assume.

So, so here's a really interesting part about that. These cells that become senescent, they have upregulated survival pathways. That's good for them if they want to continue to live, but it also creates a vulnerability in them. We can target that vulnerability. If they have these upregulated survival pathways that's preventing them from dying, if we target those pathways and knock them down, and particularly using a strategy called synthetic lethality, more than one compound knocking out the different legs of the chair, now all of a sudden it's less protected and it can undergo cell death and you get rid of them.

So with Synalytic, you take it once a month, and I think you have some protocols where they might start and take it every other week. I think, didn't you do that in one of the studies? But generally it's, it's 2 days a month.

Yeah.

Now, I'd never heard this and I heard you explain that what you would have someone do is either fasting mimicking diet or vegan diet or fasting. So explain that piece, because to me when I heard that, in the longevity camp there are the low protein and the high protein, it's like the war. And it always struck me that there's times you want to be eating protein and there's times you want to not. And this isn't like— no one would ever say, "Hey, just drip protein all day long." suck on amino acid drinks. That would be silly.

24 hours a day.

Like, pulse this. So I felt like that was the key to understanding why you want to eat and stop eating, you know, but then also there are times when you want to do drop your protein.

Yeah, these— we are trying to get rid of these cells and we're going to create a moment of vulnerability with them with our senolytic ingredients, which is a combination of a variety of compounds that have shown to work on different pathways— BXL-2 to protein tyrosine kinases, increasing reactive oxygen species. It's all aimed at trying to hurt these cells that are unique to your other cells. Well, we don't want to give them a lifeline. So when you have protein, you're triggering something called mTOR, which stands for mechanistic target of rapamycin, and that would make them more resilient. So you wouldn't want to take NAD precursors, you wouldn't want to have a high protein diet And the way— it's what I do is I have a very low protein meal the night before. Here's how I do Synalytic. I have it in my calendar.

Taking notes right here. All right. I've been doing Protein and NAD+. So I was like, oh, okay, go ahead.

Well, it's going to be even more effective then.

Yeah. Exciting.

Yeah. I have it in my calendar the first weekend of every month. I've been doing this.

That's when we do it too.

Okay, great. And I've been doing this since 2017 before Qualia actually even invented this product, which, by the way, I think is superior to what I was doing previously. I was taking high doses of fisetin, which is one of the flavonoids from cucumber and strawberries. I had invited a bunch of friends to the calendar invite and, you know, then that's what we were doing. And then Qualia came out with what I thought was a better version of what I had been doing because it was targeting from multiple angles. What you do is then you would take low protein the night before and qualify what low protein would be. Sure. What I do is I have a big salad. I'm not consuming protein sources.

It doesn't have to be zero. So it could be plant-based. Protein, or would you even be super careful there, like not have legumes, not have— I don't eat soy anyway, but yeah, you would just maybe just have some vegetables?

Yeah, none of that. While plant-based proteins have less amino acids that do trigger the mTOR pathway, we want to just have a real high veggie meal.

So like 5 grams or less?

Yeah, I'm, I'm aiming for 10 grams or less.

Okay, 10 grams or less. NAD+ is totally doable. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. When the NAD+, when did you stop that?

That morning, because I usually— I take our product in the morning. So Friday morning, no 8 and NAD+, which by the way might be my favorite product.

I was just gonna say, that makes me so sad because like that's one that I'm like, don't take that from me.

I know, you, you love it too. Oh yeah, I love it. Don't take it that morning. Normal day, low protein dinner.

So just a low protein dinner or low protein Low protein dinner.

That's what I do.

Oh, so you could eat normal protein throughout the day and just have a low protein dinner?

Yeah. Not bad.

Yeah.

Yeah. Then the next morning I have a low protein breakfast and I will try to do some form of high intensity interval training. Quick burst, 20-minute spin session. I might do it fasted so I don't have a lot of fuel in me. Just get in there, work really hard. There is evidence that high-intensity interval training itself will promote a senolytic process. It clears out senescent cells. So let's pair what we know from lifestyle with this as well. And then I'll start to have a— I'll eat more normally, maybe at lunch, maybe at dinner that day. So 2 days in a row I'm following that model. The product is going to be efficacious by itself. So these are things that you can augment your investment, but don't let it get in the way.

Yeah.

Oh, you know, I had a protein meal, so let me skip this week or this month. I don't recommend that. I think the studies that show efficacy didn't pair these types of lifestyle augmentations with it, and it was still efficacious. We're just trying to get extraordinary results.

It's a great way to look at the argument between, you know, the high protein and low protein. And it first came up because I went to Dr. Ashu Goyal's office to get Regenekine done on my foot. First of all, he was like, "Be on an anti-inflammatory diet." I'm like, "That's the only diet I'm on, ever." But then he said, "You know what we've been doing with our patients is we'll have them do a vegan diet for a couple of days before." I'm like, "Ew." You know, but now I'm hearing that it would have to be even more than a vegan diet because you could eat a vegan diet and get totally fine on your protein if you were doing soy and like maybe a pea protein powder and all that. You wouldn't accomplish what you're looking to accomplish, which is drop the branched chains and get low. You know, and then he was talking about, and I thought this was really interesting, he had someone who came and fasted for 72 hours. I said, "I'd be a mean person coming into your office." So you wouldn't want that. But having people do some HIIT training pre. And I think you could, you know, even just doing a more like a fasting mimicking diet, maybe not with all the, like that fasting mimicking diet by day 3, I looked at my husband and go, "I'm going to get a steak." now, and I'm angry. It's like, I'm hungry, I'm angry, and I'm going to get a steak. But 2 days of that and maybe some, you know, fasting in the morning and HIIT could be incredible.

Yeah. My protocol isn't even— it's not very severe. You know, this is just—

Yeah, that's doable.

It's like, I can do that. Low protein dinner, low protein breakfast, easy.

Yeah. Well, I just interviewed Dan Buettner yesterday.

Oh, you did?

He has these Blue Zones kitchen meals. Yeah, I was like, oh, this would be a great thing to have in the freezer. And I was joking, I'm like, oh, I'll just throw some protein on top of it. Yeah. But if you look at them, they would be the perfect thing because they're 10 grams of protein. Yeah, it's great. Basically as whole as possible. So yeah, yeah, there you go.

You know, the amino acid composition of different protein sources does have a differential effect on mTOR. And mTOR is specifically what we're trying to reduce the signaling around mTOR so that these senescent cells don't have that lifeline. We're not going to— we don't want to make them a little more resilient in our efforts to try to knock them out, we want to take away their little— their lifeline temporarily.

Now, how does— so how does the stem cell product work with the senolytic product?

Yeah, that's a great question, and I think that these two products are completely complementary. What would you expect from doing a product that does cause senescent cells to die in terms of inflammation? You're probably going to see an elevation in inflammation because you've cleared out some of those cells, then that comes back down. And we see that in clinical research.

And then what are you looking at? What markers?

A variety of markers that, like, could— like, ones that a person could test.

Could they do it with, like, an hs-CRP, or do we just take your word for it? I can take your word for it. Yeah, you guys do a lot of research.

Some of these are not as common in terms of, like, what you would get on blood work. So the question of, is there something that we are familiar with with, but there's a lot more inflammatory molecules that can be assessed in a clinical trial.

Some cheap way that someone could do it. But bottom line is, for what, like 48 hours, you've got elevated inflammation?

Yeah. And what is one of the problems of stem cell function? Elevated inflammation. So now you've caused— you're clearing out some of the major drivers of age-related inflammation in the body, and now you are in a much better neighborhood and environment to drive a pulse of an increase in stem cell performance. You'd go back onto your NAD because you're rebuilding. You'd go back onto protein.

And another— would you go back on your NAD right away, or do you have to wait 2 days?

Go back on it right away. Monday. I know. Yeah. So no NAD Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and then the rest of the month NAD. Okay.

And then when would you start the stem cell product?

The protocol that we've discussed is you wait Monday and then you go on it Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.

And what do you do when you're on the stem cell product? Are there any dietary changes, any exercise changes? What— anything there to make it work better?

This is an area where I would love to see more research. How do we optimize this? Should we do high-intensity training? Should we do steady-state training? Just trying to promote blood flow. What about sleep and circadian rhythms? I think generally we want to just live as healthy as we can during those couple of days. Another interesting factor is the usage of ketones, exogenous ketones, beta-hydroxybutyrate. These have shown to have a very impressive impact on stem cell health. That's going to lead to all all the different types of— in that whole life cycle that I described, you're going to see the health of these stem cells performing better.

So would you want to take— like, I've been taking Kinetics. Yeah. Would you want to take Kinetics while you're taking the stem cell product?

I do.

Okay.

Yeah, I do.

You've got to know what you're doing. You're being very secretive.

No, no, I'm not going to tell you everything.

Yeah, don't hold back here.

Yeah, I take ketones, Q-I-T-O-N-E-S. Great product, tastes really good. But take your exogenous ketone of choice, and that is potentially going to have an impact to augment our product doing its job even better. Sort of like how doing some protein fasting prior to our Synalytic product is going to make it do its job better. And so again, what are we— it's like, all right, these two products are really great and very complementary. What else can we do to drive up our results?

Yeah, and I hear this and I think of all of my friends who are in regenerative medicine And this seems like, this seems like the obvious foundation for everybody because in most situations, this is the one you can afford. But then if you were going to go spend the money to go do the others, that was my big question. I was like, all right, what are you doing to make sure that you have the best cells to work with?

I think without a doubt, my perspective is that if you're going to go get one of these expensive therapies, you absolutely want to, create the better neighborhood for them to do their job.

And how, how would you start? 3 months? How, how far in advance would you really want to do that?

Let's say you're going to be getting your stem cell injections at a clinic on a Wednesday, then I would start stem cells that morning.

Start the stem cell products. I know, um, my buddy Dr. Vinnie Di Pasquale, who was at Mindshare, came out with the stem cell product. Okay, putting all his patients on it. But I was like, you know, you might want to I'm gonna look at the Synalytic thing too and start to rotate all of this.

So we're seeing doctors do that now in their clinics. They're ensuring people do Synalytic a couple of days before. And since we've just launched the stem cell products, I think you would want to absolutely do that two-product protocol with your stem cell medical therapy.

Now, but with the Synalytics, when I think of the research I was looking at— because you guys have been doing some great research and some of the improvements in osteoarthritis— but it took a couple Yeah. Which means that you're taking a couple months to really optimize. Yeah. And so in a perfect world, I would assume that you would go like 3 months of prep. Yeah. Would be like amazing. Yeah. Now I know, you know, we are not people who are patient, speaking for myself, and like once you want to get something done, you want it done now.

Yeah.

So at the very least, you would do it a couple days before and then the stem cells the morning of.

I think keeping your stem cell neighborhood healthy is really— this is something we do in perpetuity. That's the earliest that you can.

Yeah, when would you start? At like 30, when everything seems to be going sideways? Like, when's the most important time to start worrying about your hood?

You're not going to notice it as much in your 30s because you're still in a peak of life. It's harder to notice things in your—

but if you're— even though you're not noticing it, if you started it then, just like— I think that— I don't know what it was when you were a kid, but when I was a kid, you were told you should never lift weights. First of all, I was taught in grad school, don't have people lift weights until they lose the weight, which is one of the most stupid things I've heard. But also when we were kids, and I remember it was always so weird, 'cause here I am an acrobat and they're like, "Don't lift weights." I'm like, "Well, what do you think I'm doing here when I'm pushing myself onto my hands off the floor? You know, what weight? There's a weight, I'm pushing it." You know, like I think kids should be packing on as much muscle and bone as they can, you know, for as long as they can. Like at the point that you start to feel like your neighborhood's getting compromised even the slightest, wouldn't you want to start?

There's a couple of ways to— for us to theorize on the right age, and one of them is very practical and one of them is more like scientific. Yeah, whenever we start to see some sort of decline, the sooner that we can intervene in that age-related decline, from what we know scientifically versus what we feel in our bodies which can take sometimes 15 years before we start to notice any signs, then you might push out that trajectory. That's a really good idea. However, I know that mentally we are very different people at different— every decade of life. And what's interesting to us, what motivates us changes. And so when you're 25, 30 years old—

Yeah, who cares?

You're like— You're just— your focus and your resources are towards something else. You start to pay more attention to aging once the effects of it are visible and something that you can feel. And, you know, that's okay.

So, which I didn't feel them until like a couple years ago.

Yeah, yeah.

I wasn't even— then all of a sudden you're like, you know, it's— my husband and I laugh because we'll go to sit down, we're like, oof. What is that? What's the oof? Getting down, getting up, like the oof. Like, you know, that was my big thing. I was like, no more oof. What do we need to do to not oof?

Yeah, yeah, that's— it's so true. I think this is the reason why the term healthspan has taken off, which I like the term strengthspan.

Yeah, I think that's the real ticket.

But so I'm writing a book, and I want— and in that book I'm exploring health and its meaning, and also I offer a new definition of healthspan, which the years spent in good health feels like a feckless description, you know, like what does that actually mean? I think Healthspan is a great general idea of trying to extend or elevate your health level farther into the lifespan, but there are an innumerable amount of healthspans that you can define. So you can define peak performance span for a particular sport. You can look at independent living span. You can look at career span. You can look at hearing acuity span, all different things. Perfectly fit that model. And it is up to those people who work in those areas to say, okay, these are the levels that we're going to define as somebody who is good for their particular age. They're doing well compared to normal— normalized data for that demographic. But all of those, since health is far more than just the avoidance of disease, we now can apply that to a lot more than just the appearance or absence of a disease, including other ways that health affects how we live. And that's how I like to think healthspan. And yeah, we want to try to extend that as long as possible. And the earlier you start, then you are in a— going to be in a better place when you're— as you're involving effective strategies in a consistent manner over decades. And you may not feel it right away. We— I heard you talk about this before. Some people can— are really sensitive to their bodies. Other people, they're not sure if they can feel it or not. Let's say a product hypothetically has a 25% improvement in some outcome, but it took 6 months to get there. I created a term for that called the meaningful but invisible. It's a really meaningful effect, but it's— you've acclimated it to it over time. And so what if you give up something that's really good for you because you're like, I'm not sure if it was working or not?

Here's the thing, and I remember this, I forget what product I was taking, where months later I went went, "Oh, I don't ache when I get up in the morning." But you don't remember. You remember when you hurt, you don't remember when you stop hurting. So, you know, the absence of these things— when I used to see a lot of people one-on-one, I had a whole scoring system because I got so aggravated by— nothing's changed. I'm like, everything has changed. You were like not even close to the person you were when you walked in here. You just don't remember any of it. You know, it's like you blocked that out. Out.

So that's why I like measuring aspects of your health over time. You can compare yourself to a different version of you, or earlier version. You can compare yourself to an age-related cohort that is relevant to who you are at a particular age. There's all sorts of ways that you can try to glean insights about, is what I'm doing effective? But it is— you're right, it's really easy. The squeaky wheel gets the attention, right? And so the wheel's no longer squeaking, you're focusing on new things.

That's great. Yeah, that didn't really do anything. Yeah, like, yeah, it did everything. Yeah.

Yeah. So that's something to keep in mind. And it's a challenge when we're trying to shift a trajectory as we're getting older. So sometimes we have the benefit of feeling an immediate improvement in something, and sometimes— this is conceivably true— we've shifted our trajectory, so we're going to be doing much, much better.

Like, I can't wait for the time where you get up in the morning, you spit in something, you know, you brush your teeth, your toothbrush triggers something, you pee, that goes somewhere, you step on the scale, you've got the thing in front, it does all your biometrics and it plots out your trajectory. You're like, cool.

I love that we're getting there. Are you familiar with Withings, that brand? They just released a new product, which is health tracker that goes in your toilet.

Oh, they did?

Yeah. So that it's monitoring different aspects of urine and then giving you feedback on, you know, your diet and other aspects of your health. I think that's great.

It would be great when you can do a stool test that way and never have to go scooping again.

Yes.

Yes.

100%.

Yes. Oh, well, on that note, I know we have a code for everybody listening. It's going to be capital BEYOND, all caps, 40, and that will get you 15% off any of the Qualia orders. So I'm going to put that in the show notes. At jjvirgin.com/I'llDoStemCells. I just have a couple of little rapid-fire questions.

Let's do it.

Okay. What's one daily habit that you do that you feel like moves the needle the most for your longevity?

For me, I know what that is. I have prioritized walking as something that I just don't ever not do. So it's a mental health behavior. I've maintained over 10,000 steps for 12 years. Now. I'm really proud of that. Yes, I track it. And I think of these things not just as trackers. I think of devices like Fitbits and Apple Watches— they're performance enhancing. If you set a goal and you attend to the feedback and you let it change your behavior, say, okay, wait, I've got a goal and here I am, then it can help you. Because I've, I've heard a lot of people say, yeah, I tracked for a while, but I don't know if helped shift the perspective on that to let it help you. Yeah. Right? If you're getting 10,000 and you keep getting feedback, great. If you're at 7,000 steps before dinner, plan a walk.

Mm-hmm. I'm right there with you with walking. Yeah. And I used to be like walking's controlled falling, blah, blah. And now when you really look at metabolism, like the most modifiable thing you can do in your metabolism is do more of non-exercise activity.

Yeah.

It's like hands down. That was one thing when I was talking to Dan Buettner, he said, if you look at, any of these Blue Zones, they move 9,000 to 12,000 steps a day. And he also said the people that live on steeper hills live longer.

Yeah.

So that doesn't bode well for Florida, but there it is. All right. If you could only measure 3 biomarkers for the rest of your life, what would they be?

Oh, gosh. The biomarkers that I would track is probably steps, sleep, and blood glucose.

All right.

Yeah, focusing more on am I doing the things that ultimately get me results versus what are the results? But it's good also to see what those are, the results, right? I would like to have feedback on the things that get me to where I want to go, but then also some insight into what's happening internally.

I love this. I'm literally— the book I'm writing right now, it's got, you know, a new way to look at your body. No more weight, only body comp. But then it has you measuring these metrics. Because if you live like a healthy lean person, you will become one. You know, so it's like, let's measure the activities that are going to give you the results you want. You'll get the results, but let's face it, a lot of these things that you're shifting in health, it's sort of like watching grass grow.

Yeah, yeah, true.

So you got to have something. We got to have a dopamine hit along the way of something like, I hit my steps.

So at the same time, I'm an advocate for getting blood work done 4 times a year.

I just did my Function Health. This morning. Nice.

Yes. Why? Well, we don't get great feedback on biomarkers. If your vitamin D level, let's say, drops down below a level that is ideal, you might not feel it. And now you might spend, let's say, the next year or two with a lower than ideal vitamin D level. And what happens? You age faster. So when you get that insight from the 50, the 100 biomarkers, you can make little tweaks that allow you to put your— yourself in a better state.

And I know you just cheated, so I'm just gonna call it out. Not only did you cheat with like— you cheated, you threw out 50 to 100 extra biomarkers, whatever your service provides. But it is funny because I literally just went and did that, and it is so true when you're talking about these. It's like there are a lot of these things that are mission critical, like magnesium and vitamin D. Like, yeah, no one goes, God, I just— my vitamin D was low, I feel rotten. It's like, never says anyone. Yeah. What is one habit that kills stem cells?

Well, I would say smoking.

It still blows my mind that people still smoke.

And overdrinking.

So what's overdrinking?

Well, you know, because there is Right. You had Dan Buettner on yesterday. Yes. Part of the Mediterranean diet, which—

I don't buy into the no alcohol ever. Sorry.

Yeah.

But I grew up outside of Napa. I grew up in Berkeley. Okay. We literally used to skip school on Fridays and go wine tasting because they didn't card back then.

Amazing.

So yeah, it was really bad to go off to college and you're used to drinking Caymus and Opus One and Silver Oak. And you're like, what's that box of wine? Wine. Yeah, because they didn't— they didn't charge and they didn't cart.

There's so many interesting elements that are tied to alcohol that we have to try to disambiguate from the—

all the social aspects, the social stress aspects.

And yes, so overdrinking— I think of anything where I don't want to create a habit that will promote mindlessness around it, where every day I'm I'm drinking this amount or doing anything that might not be healthy. You have to do except for walking.

Exactly.

So I try to think about that. But we also know that with red wine, very high, rich in polyphenols as well, that there is research that shows that is a meaningful component of the benefits, the health benefits of the Mediterranean diet. There's been more research now that alcohol might not be as health-promoting as we thought. So I think that— listen, people, people do drink. I love like Dry Farm wines, lower alcohol.

I do, it's all in my fridge down below.

Yeah, they're great. Um, and there's other products too that have lower alcohol content. Whatever your relationship is with drinking, be mindful that there is a side of drinking where it is, it is too much, and that would have a toxic effect on stem cells. And we see it aging.

There's a side of food that is too much, and there's a side of exercise that is— although I will say They say, you know, there's this whole thing out there about over-exercising cortisol. I go, you know, I've been doing this for 40 years. And I can, on one hand, think about the people that I had to, like, get them to calm down on their exercise. It's rare.

That's a really important point.

Most women are afraid of raising their cortisol. I'm like, if you work out really hard, what's great is your cortisol gets more adaptive and it will have a lower curve and you won't be problematic. This is what you need to do to become more sensitive here.

If you look at curves of mortality and the amount of exercise, if you really have the steepest benefit going from sedentary to not even half of the recommendation.

I think 7,000 steps a day of, you know, just walking makes a major difference.

It's the steepest part of the curve for benefit. So for example, this is good to consider if let's say you're not doing 10,000 steps 1,000 steps a day, it's not as though the 10,000th step is where the benefit happens. In fact, you could argue that every subsequent step is less important than the last. You have the majority of the benefit when you're moving away from sedentary. But on the point of too much exercise, even when you're doing 10 times the level of the minimum of the national guidelines, the curve does come back down, but you're actually still right at the level. Yeah, at what the level of health benefit that you get from meeting the guidelines. The point is, I think too much exercise can be problematic and a tiny percentage of the people have to worry about it.

Yeah, and again, 5 people in 40 years have I seen this that I was like, "You know, we might want to just shift some of this over." But oftentimes it's more that they are not doing other things, that it is like kind of an exercise addiction. I'm like, "Um," you know?

Exercise can be addictive. Once you get into a rhythm, it releases chemicals. Oh, yeah. A wonderful thing. And for some people, usually that are processing other things as well, it can mean you're doing too much. And like you— like we're saying, I think if you were 99% of the population, that's not the concern.

Yeah. I literally, when I was going through my divorce, I ran and ran and ran and ran and ran and ran. I'd had a Gore-Tex ligament put in for my ACL, and I ran right through it. And the doctor's like, I've never seen this in this short of amount of time. And I'm like, yeah, like, oh, a little stressful.

Yeah. Like, and I like to promote a mixed intensity, mixed modality movement.

Yes. Exercise is a blanket term. So yes, resist, like walk is my foundation. Yep. Then resistance training. Yeah. As you progress in that, adding in power and strength, then adding in some HIIT and then adding in some zone 2 and adding in mobility, maybe do some yoga. I hate it, but I do it. I think that's the one. Like, if I could go back and tell my younger self, yeah, just do that. Let's start that way younger. But all that stuff matters. It's all different.

Yeah. I developed a yoga habit about 10 years ago, and it's because it's what my body needs.

I know, that's what I— and I can feel it. Yeah. Like, I will go in the gym happily every day, all day. I'd just be in the gym lifting weights and throwing things around. I love it. Love, love, love. And I'm like, nope, you are going to go do some HIIT, and then you were going to go do that yoga class. And luckily Tim now is coming. He, for a while there, went on strike. And I'm like, don't do this to me.

I'll say this, if somebody doesn't have a regular exercise practice now, they can hear what you said and be like, oh gosh, I wish I was JJ Virgin. The way exercise will promote, it will reinforce itself. There are good chemicals that are released. That make you fall in love with it over time. And I think we have a relationship with it for a lot of people where we— all right, I'm going to start off and I do too much right away and it's overwhelming.

I— the way I program it, because when I very first was starting out, I remember I was in grad school and I took a client to the gym.

Yeah.

This poor woman, Brenda. Brenda was in bed for a week after that because I completely trashed her back. She was just destroyed. I never did that again. I'm like, let's give you a little bit. What's so cool when you're when you're first starting is you get strong so fast that you're like, wow. You know, so it's like, yeah, just a little bit, a little bit more, a little bit more. Like just start with 60 air squats, start with 10 air squats, start with anything. You know, start with going up the stairs, like the littlest bits. Yes, we are in line with that.

That's the benefit of not being currently fit is that it takes just a little bit.

I know, it's like washing a dirty window. It looks amazing. You wash a clean window, and they're like, nothing changed, you know. So, yeah, but on the other hand, when you're fit, it's easier to stay there. That's right. There's benefits to both.

Once you're fit, you feel— know this, if you are listening and you're a place where you don't feel you're fit, once you get into that good rhythm, it's your favorite thing. Yeah, you feel like, I could stay here forever. This is so preferable to not becoming fit. I think a lot of the things we're talking about with health in general, I think health is really durable when it's not homework, but it's your hobby. Cooking is your hobby. Fitness is your hobby. Walks with your partner. All of it becomes the things you look forward to most in life.

You know, it's funny. They're like, "What do you do for fun?" I go, "Pretty much all the things I do, I do for fun." Like, you know, I'm sitting here doing this and I listened to all these podcasts as I was getting ready for this going, "This is awesome. This is like someone I'd want to get on the phone and get all this information from." And here you are. So it's like, Just make all the things fun. Yes. And then you'll do them all the time. Yeah. And get rewarded. There you go.

Absolutely. I even, I wrote a newsletter not that long ago about dancing, an underappreciated form of movement, one that now has evidence.

Well, now you know why we had Transcend Dance at the Mindshare Summit. And there's so much research on this that we put it into all of our events. Yes. And just for everybody listening, and then we're going to tie a bow on this at our big professional event, we have a costume party. And the reason I do it is very specific. So, you know, here's all these practitioners and they're a little in their heads, a little uptight. And so I'm like, you know what? Just put a costume on. No one will know who you are. Half the time I'm like, who's that? The funniest thing was, so we have the superheroes party. I don't— I have no idea. I kept going, who is the Batman? Who is the amazing dancer? I am calling it out from stage. I am like putting video videos up of you going, "Who is this amazing dancer?" Because you were masked. And then you come over here and I find out it was you. This is so funny. But, you know, it's now everybody's favorite thing. But I have to— when they're coming for the first time, they're like, "Oh my gosh, it's a costume party." I go, "We'll have things for you.

We'll have capes." I think it's genius, JJ. My favorite Halloween— I mean, favorite holiday, excuse me, is Halloween because everybody relaxes when you put on a costume. Because you can just be someone You can be, and it's easy to go, it's a conversation starter. It is, everybody's laughing. And that's exactly what happened. People start a little nervous and then they get there and they have the best time.

Well, 'cause they get there first, they're like, am I gonna be the only one in a costume? So I—

Let me tell you, no, everybody was in a costume.

If you don't wear a costume, you will feel like the weirdo. And that's why I always have costumes, extra costumes. Very smart. 'Cause I've gone to some of these costume parties where they say there's a costume party and there isn't a costume party.

Oh.

And you're in the costume. I've done that too. That's like, I love costumes. We built a room-sized closet down below that has all, like, 'cause my costumes. I love it. It's the other side. So yeah, it's so incredible. If you just, if all you did was have a little mini dance party throughout the day, things would shift. So again, easy enough to move these things in. And then the big thing that I thought was exciting is you just start layering. Like first you layer in the habits, then you layer in the Synalytic and the stem cells. You might feel them right away. I give you 3 months, but like some people feel them right away.

I've heard it. That's what we've— so our first beta study. So with Qualia, we always do surveys and studies on our products, which I really appreciate about the company. Yeah, it's rare. Yeah, it is rare. We won a science and innovation award from the Nutrition Business Journal, which we're all really proud of because not everybody does this. And we think it's important to to test our products. And so in that, even though it was only 4 days of usage, it was not over multiple months for the people who responded. So we had 30 people that responded to the survey, and it was age range of, let's say, 40 to 70 was the range. So you did a first survey as a baseline on day 0, the day before you started it, and then you did the next one on day 5, the day after it ended, and then another one at 11. And really across the board for energy and mood, for things like joint soreness, other aspects of aging that might show a decline of some sort, there were people reporting on average, I would say across the board, like 30% improvements.

That's crazy.

Only in 4 days.

That's crazy.

That actually exceeds what I would expect.

Yeah. I would've taken 10 and gone, I'm in. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Wow. All right, well, everyone gets a discount. Again, BEYOND40, all caps. I'm gonna put it all at jjvirgin.com/stemcells. And thank you, Dan Pardi, for being here.

JJ, I was really looking forward to this one. I admire everything you do and what you bring to the world, and, uh, it's been a real pleasure.

Thank you. Here's what I hope you're walking away with: aging powerfully, it's not about avoiding aging, it's about really keeping your body's repair machinery in tip-top shape, turned on. That means lifting weights. That means eating protein, dosing it strategically, right? Don't just drip it all day long. I've talked about not dripping protein, sleeping well, managing stress, and adding in both the Qualia Synalytic, which I've been on now for years. Now my newest, latest fascination obsession is the stem cell product. But now I'm going to be pairing that with the plan that Dan laid out, which is lowering that protein. It was great timing because I just interviewed Dan Buettner, so I'm going to use some of his Blue Zones frozen meals for those. Lowering that protein, adding in some HIIT, and taking these products. So very excited about all of that. So be sure to visit the show notes to get the discount. Remember, if you go to Qualia, Qualia Life, and use BEYOND40, all in caps with the BEYOND and then 4-0, you will save 15% off the Qualia price. I will put that at jjvirgin.com/stemcells along with my interview with Dr. Greg Kelly where we went in depth on senolytics. I know we talked about that here as well. These really go hand in hand, and I'm like, this is a key part of your longevity routine. Like, when you look at what people are spending to have their stem cells harvested and injected, this is step one. Like, let's see how far you get with this. And I'm a great test subject because I really trashed myself in my younger years. Like, ugh, if I could go back and tell my younger self, don't do those things. So I really notice when things work and these have helped me tremendously. So I'm excited for your experience with them too. And if you've loved the show, pass it on with some other friends who would love to age powerfully with you. All right, see you the next time. Bye.