Part 1 - The Shocking Truth About Aging

Welcome to this edition of the million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

Hello everybody. We have a real treat this afternoon. We, we've got George C. Shapiro. Hello, George.

Larry, how are you? How you doing everyone?

I guess I should say Dr. Shapiro. You know, it's amazing to me, you know, I was looking at your background you have been in so to kind of accelerate people getting familiar with you and get excited about hearing from you. As we're talking today with a guy who has been an insight insider in cutting edge medicine for such a long time, knows the ins and outs and works with so many people in so many different areas of it. He's got his finger on the pulse really. So many exciting technologies and you know, in the past, the fact that you were the chief medical. Well, you've, you've done with cenegenics. Let's just talk about cenegenics. You know, I, I remember being on planes and I would see these, these ads and articles about cenegenics and I almost wanted to get on a plane and fly up and get, go through the program up there because it sounded so exciting. What you're doing up there for, with health up in New York, that's just one of the things, your name top doctor in New York City. How many doctors are there in New York City? Probably hundreds of thousands and 2018 as well. So just from, as a medical doctor, you're named at the top. You've got patents, you've got awards. And I'm curious, do you mind if we do dial back? George, how do you start out your career? What's your mindset that puts you on a track for this kind of exciting life?

You know, Larry, I can, I can definitely start from the beginning. So my parents were a big part of it. My dad was a masters racquetball champion. So back in the day when racquetball was a pretty active sport, he kept taking me for racquetball tournaments, believe it or not, on the weekends and we'd get in a, we get in the van and I'm a leolis of six children and we would travel and all of us played racquetball and we started getting really good at it. And this is age 13, 14. And right before that I was playing paddleball, believe it or not, in Orchard beach in the Bronx. And that's how it really started becoming an athlete. And I took racquetball to the next level and became, you know, a state champion, a regional champion, a national champion, and then became semi pro racquetball player. At the same time. I was into martial arts and judo and also started doing judo tournaments around 13, 14, 15, and went to the Olympics as a Junior Olympian. So that started me with, with really getting extremely confident and in shape. And martial arts are so important when you're younger. It just, it gives you a different perspective in life. And then my mom, at the same time I was doing sports, was pushing science. And I mean, friends of mine on the weekends would go out and play. I'd be forced to my room studying. So she really wanted me to be a physician at a young age. And that was my early life, sports and science. So I eventually got into medical school and it was in New York. I was born in New York. I was born in Bronx Lebanon Hospital. And I did most of almost all my training in New York. And I was in New York Medical College. In the summers I went to work in a lab and learned about publishing papers and clinical trials. So I started really early. And I really liked cardiology because it was living on the edge. Cardiac medicine is. It's things happen rapidly and sometimes, unfortunately, people have what's called sudden cardiac death. Their life just ends. And that kind of intrigued me. Why does that happen? Why does someone. Life just end like that? So I trained and went into cardiology. I got into Columbia University for my cardiology fellowship, which was in the 1990s, that the place to be in New York for training. And I had the best professors you could ever imagine from all Ivy League schools, Harvard, Yale, U of P. And I learned cardiology. And I was focusing really on heart transplantation and heart failure. Some of the people you probably know, Dr. Mehmet Oz, was working with me and he was a cardiothoracic surgery fellow as I was a cardiology fellow. And I remember us being on call for like 20 hours straight. We'd go to the hospital on a Monday and come back home on a Wednesday. And after doing this for 15 years, I started to find out I was getting tired. And I didn't know whether was I was overworked, working 50 to 80 hours a week, or I was just getting tired. My body was changing. I noticed when I'd wake up in the morning, my back would hurt, my knees would hurt, sort of like when you get the flu where all your joints ache. Then I started getting belly fat. And when I'd exercise and I was Exercising heavy. When I was younger, I noticed that I wasn't getting any muscle mass, and for some reason, it wasn't working. I was tired. My drive went down, motivation went down, Fatigue was present. Belly fat. Something was going on. So I wanted to investigate what happens to people as they age. And this was when I was in my 40s. So I went to investigate companies, and I found a company you mentioned before, Cenegenics. It was in Vegas. And I actually liked their philosophy. It was optimizing your hormones, your metabolism, and exercise and nutrition. I was eating the wrong foods at the wrong times and the wrong amounts. I wasn't exercising right. I wasn't sleeping well. And it turns out that my hormones were way down. And this is normally what happens with aging. You. You lose hormones and you lose your metabolism. It slows down, and you tend to gain weight, specifically fat, visceral fat around your organs, which is highly inflammatory. And now we know that number one drivers of cardiac disease are inflammation and metabolic dysfunction with high sugar, insulin resistance, belly fat, et cetera. So I became a patient. Within two weeks, I felt tremendous. Energy was back. It was like a light went on, and it was hard to believe how good I felt so fast. Within six months on the program, my. My body fat was 44%. It went all the way down to like 14%. And I became really fit again. And I felt like I was 18 again when I was 45. So that started me into believing there's a better way. And there's a better way not to just age gracefully, not to just let nature take its course, to really get active and figure out why you're not feeling good and do something about it. So they decided, the company, Cenegenics, decided to expand out of Vegas and Florida and South Carolina to other cities. So New York was one city. And they asked me to be president of New York City. I had an office down at Wall street and became the president of Cenegenics New York. And I took care of the who's who of celebrities and prime ministers of countries, presidents of countries, CEOs of organizations. And I met very interesting people.

Can I interrupt you right here to get you to elaborate more on that? Because I just want to make the point that there are a lot of people listening to this that are in their, you know, their 5, 10, 15 years into their careers. They're putting a lot of energy in it, and they're not feeling that great. And they're running, they're going through kind of a thing, and they need to know you need to know that even medical professional, it doesn't really matter where you are. If you're eating wrong, you got your bad diet, you're working hard, you're asking a lot out of your body and your mind. You're taking on a lot of responsibility and stress. If you're not taking care of yourself, it doesn't matter. If you're the president of a country, you're a celebrity, you're. You're a medical professional, whatever, you're a billionaire, it doesn't matter. Your body has got to be taken care of. And so I just wanted to point that out, George, that there's something for every. Everybody needs to be locking in on this.

That's a great point. And it turns out that in men, it's a slow decline in function. Very slow. So you don't think it's. You don't think it's a problem. You start sitting on the couch. You eat and you sit on the couch, you'll fall asleep. You just don't have that drive and you lose it. That's called andropause. Women, menopause, that happens over a month. You start to feel like a rapid change. So women, it happens quickly. Men, it's a slow decline, and they think they're okay. And that's when. That's how the term couch potato came about. You just have no energy to do anything. And I'll go into why that happens after. So one of my patients was Tony Robbins and his wife. They came to New York. I saw them, and I was taking care of Tony with. With Peter Attia. A lot of people know Peter. Peter and I became good friends. Tony was a strong force. He was one of my famous patients at the time. And it turns out that, you know, we became close. He said, george, why don't we start a company where we can bring all these new hot innovations into a platform to make it easy for the general public to. To understand what's going on. Because everything that comes out is new. And it's just so much, so fast. Everybody gets overwhelmed. They don't know where to turn.

Yeah.

So we were talking about doing this at the same time. I was still running my parallel cardiology practice, and that was more of sick care, taking care of the patient with a heart attack. So I'm going to ask you a question. Do you want to see the doctor when you're having an acute MI chest pain, or do you want to see the doctor 10 years before and find out if that's going to happen? 10 years in the future.

Yeah.

So this was this concept that we had and the big story was, where's medicine? Where was medicine today? And this is going back about 10, 15 years ago. I mean, if you look at medicine, I trained in a great institution with great professors and I learned medicine with my hands. I didn't have the big fancy machines like MRIs and CAT scans until later on. Initially we were diagnosing without with our hands. And I taught the physical diagnosis course for many years. The otoscope that we look in the ears, do you know when that was invented? 1838. Wow. Stethoscope. And I, I love heart mermaids. And I was a big, big in cardiac physical exam. The stethoscope was invented in 1816. The reflex hammer in 1888. And I was at a conference recently in, in, in Israel at the Global Wellness Summit. This woman gave, this woman professor gave a great lecture and she was talking about women and women changes and instruments for women examining women. The vaginal speculum was invented. Guess when. Roman Empire. So think of these tools for medicine. It's something, you know, it's, we need new stuff. So that's why AI now is so big. But the problem with healthcare, it waits for you to get sick before you get involved. And if you think of today's healthcare checkup, it's once a year, the doctor's in there for 10 minutes. He may be looking at a cell phone or looking at the computer, typing notes. There's limited technology. You think about today's aircraft, okay, there's maintenance continuously, hourly, computer driven, a lot of sensors. I mean, think about the last time you were on the tarmac and you couldn't get off because the, there was something wrong with the computers. Airplanes are taken care of better than humans. We're born with one life and chronic disease is a big problem. So when I started, when I was started getting involved and listening to, you know, sick care versus well care, this new model that, that Tony Robbins and Peter Diamandis, Bob Harari, Bill Capp, myself were talking about was look at chronic disease in America and look at the cost of chronic disease. Do you know that chronic disease contributes to about 90% of the 4.1 trillion annual health expenditures today?

Wow. Mind blowing.

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I mean, it's just expand and everything is really not personalized. It's one size fits all. Does everybody need a statin? Does everybody need a blood pressure pill? So we were talking about doing a company where we can do testing when you're healthy, young age before you get chronic issues. And that's where we came up with this company called Fountain Life. And that's where. So I'm the chief medical innovation officer of Fountain Life and one of the co founders and one of the things that we I bring to the table is searching the world for the latest and greatest cures and treatments and new innovations. Right before I joined Fountain Life, Bill Cap is an orthopedic surgeon in Naples, Florida. And he's also a hospital owner. And him and I met at a medical conference. We became close friends. We were lecturing together and he introduced me to the field of exosomes because he was using it for orthopedic issues. So I started researching what exosomes are. So if you think of stem cells in general, we're born with billions of stem cells. As we age, we lose about 10% of our stem cells per year. And, and we start to, you know, we start to see signs of aging. So when you look at someone who's 20, all the way up to 80, you'll see a transition in their skin, their hair, their body composition, muscle mass, body fat, and so on. And a lot has to do with loss of these stem cells. But what makes the stem cell work are these small particles inside the stem cell that are called exosomes. So exosomes are about 30 to 100 nanometers. And for the people who don't know what a nanometer is, it's about a thousand times smaller than the diameter of a hair follicle. It's extremely small. But what makes these particles work is what's inside. And what's inside is, contains something called micro rna. Micro RNA is a communicator. This microrna is in most cells, but it communicates with an old cell, an inflamed cell, an infected cell, or an aged cell. And that. So this company that I started working with, with Bill Cap, I Became the chief medical officer of. It's now Zoscientific, before it was called Organocell. And the goal was to make. They were manufacturing these exosome biologic products. Yeah, a lot of controversy about exosomes, but the thing is the FDA is very careful. So I'm very careful. And when I did all this research and published papers, I'm very, I'd like to stay on the right side of the line, so.

Right.

My dad always told me that, you know, you know, there's a fire here. You put your hand in a fire, you get burned. Don't get burned. Like law and order. I try to stay right in the right line. So we started doing clinical trials during COVID And if you know about COVID obviously it's an inflammatory situation where you get an acute inflammatory process. So we started doing trials in patients with COVID because we believe these exosomes reduce inflammation. And I'm going to get a little scientific here, but in our body we have these macrophages, which are white cells. And there's two types, M1 and M2. M1 are pro inflammatory, they cause inflammation and two are anti inflammatory. And the exosomes convert a pro inflammatory macrophage into an anti inflammatory macrophage. And that's what, that's why when you get an injection, you feel better because you're reducing a lot of that inflammation.

Operates like a switch. Is that what you're saying?

Well, it's, it takes some. So there's two phases. One phase is the first phase, it's about a week, reducing inflammation and swelling. And then the regeneration phase is the second phase that takes six weeks, three months. But the interesting things about these biologics is, you know, when we do clinical trials, which is the way you're supposed to do it, and it's being, you know, you're being watched by organizations, you want to make sure it's done right. So we did it in a hospital. If you remember during the pandemic when people were getting really sick with COVID 19, they started to go into the ICU and they needed to be on a ventilator because they couldn't breathe anymore. Because SARS causes respiratory inflammatory process. And what happened was a lot of these patients were on respirators for 21 days. They were having some neurodegenerative issues, brain fog, cardiac issues, kidney issues and so on. So we did a trial given these exosomes iv, day one, day three and day eight. And we measure a score called Sofie S O F I and the sicker you are, the higher your score, the healthier you are, the lower your score. We reduced the Sofie scores in seven out of 10 patients and seven people got off the ventilator after they were on it for 21 days. Better mentation, the mental status came back, their kidneys recovered, the vital signs improved, and they walked out of the hospital. So I started really believing in these biologics and then we started doing it for acute Covid. Now we're finding out people have long Covid, but that was the start of it. Then we switched to inflammatory disorders like osteoarthritis. And why do people get osteoarthritis? Why do people get immune diseases? So transitioning back to fountain life, what fountain life does is it's a baseline four hour upload. We will put you through about advanced. We'll do advanced imaging of your brain using AI, we'll do advanced imaging of your heart that we can, first time in 50 years, visualize coronary plaque and tell you whether that plaque is vulnerable. In other words, is it going to rupture, is it stable like cement, or is it a vulnerable plaque like a volcano that can erupt at any time? And you just don't know when that's going to happen. And that's what's called, you know, sudden cardiac death or acute mi. You never want to be in that position. So, so we can look and see where you're at. And we believe if you test someone when they're healthy and they start to have the soft plaque, that's not the dangerous plaque yet, and you can prevent a heart attack. Let's do it the same thing with the brain. If I could do a test on your brain and say, okay, you have certain biomarkers of Alzheimer's dementia, I can reduce the inflammation and stop that from happening, or I can visualize your gut function. So functional medicine, when I said we try to find out why does someone have Crohn's disease, why does someone have colitis? There has to be a reason for it. Is that a parasite? Is it the microbiome in the gut that gets inflamed? So we do testing on your gut to see if you have an imbalance of bacteria called dysbiosis. Do you have a leaky gut? Do you have too much fungus? You know, a lot of people, when they drink, let's say red wine and they drink it from a certain region, insecticides that, that are in these, in that area can seep into your system and that's glyphosate and it turns out that these toxins disrupt your endocrine system, disrupt your metabolism, disrupt your hormones. So Suddenly in your 40s, if you drink a ton of wine, let's say it's just one example, and you start getting bloated, your gut gets all inflamed, and you have gas and bloat. And by the way, no one should have gas or bloat. It's a problem with your microbiome. We test for the microbiome and we fix it. You should have a flat abdomen, belly fat is toxic, and a lot comes from toxins. So we will do an evaluation of your toxins. We'll look at your gut microbiome, and we'll look at your oral microbiome. If you think about it, the mouth, the dirtiest organ in the body, believe it or not. And. And when you look at bacteria in the mouth, there's a bacteria called Porphomonas gingivalis, and this has been linked to Alzheimer's dementia. The bacteria will creep up into your brain. The brain will protect itself. It covers it, and you have these amyloid plaques. And believe it or not, you can treat some of these with an antibiotic, and it'll be fixed. So there's different things that we look at. We look at your biological age and how fast you're aging are you aging by the minute, by the month, by the year? And we can slow down aging and reduce your risk. We have a test that can predict mortality in the next seven years, believe it or not. So. So looking at the cellular function or the mitochondria is also very important. And when you have a problem, you just don't want to get a medicine for it. You want to. You want to find out why. And that's what we do. We answer the why. And most doctors don't do that. So we want to evaluate you when you're healthy. It's called well care. Proactive, not reactive. I think medicine's broken. I know hospitals aren't liking what we're doing because they're involved in sick care business, pharmaceutical companies, sick care. But if there's one death every 34 seconds from a heart attack and it's the leading cause of death currently in this country, do you think we should fix that? I don't know if you know some of these stats, but one in three people, the first sign of heart disease is a heart attack. Did you know that? I don't know if you knew that.

I had heard that the first time, that the first Heart attack is usually the one that gets you, you know, you usually don't survive the first one. I don't know if that's accurate.

50% of people, the first heart attack is their last. That's it, it's fatal.

And then you don't hear about it that much because they're dead. It's not that a topic of conversation. No.

And a lot of people don't realize we're born with one body, let's not do anything to destroy it. You have any idea how many blood vessel miles we have in our body?

No.

60,000 miles of blood vessels in our body. Wow. And the blood vessels are key. And there's a lot of new things that's happening that we're finding out with blood vessels. Blood vessels contain something called heparin, H E P A R A N sulfate. And this has been shown to bind pathogens. And there's a, there's a therapeutic now that we're looking at that is part of a dialysis program. But this filter filters out viruses, COVID virus, the spike protein, Ebola virus, Zika virus, HIV virus, retroviruses that now have been linked to neurodegenerative diseases like als. Not only does it remove pathogens like viruses, removes bacteria, the flesh eating bacteria, the bacteria that kills people in the icu. And it also now has been shown to remove circulating tumor cells. Let's just shift to cancer for a second. Everyone thinks that you get cancer, it's over, it's cancer's changed. The cancer starts with the primary and that's easily treated if it's in a certain location. If it's in a lateral part of your lung, you can do surgery and cut it out. What makes cancer so deadly is the spread, the metastasis. Those circulating tumor cells are satellites and they all communicate with each other. And what they do is they're resistant to chemo and they're resistant to radiation. So this filter reduces the amount of these circulating tumor cells from metastatic sites by 10x. And if you keep doing that, it's called subtractive therapy. You're removing the pathogen and letting your own immune system that is strong when you're younger, it gets damaged when you have a gut issue and then it gets really weak as you age. But now it gets powerful again and it could be deployed and kill that cancer. So blood vessels are important and we do things to damage our blood vessels. Believe it or not, if you think of an ice skating rink, how smooth that is, that should be the lining of your blood vessel if you think of a gritty floor with epoxy paint and sand on it, that dries. That is a hypertensive patient. And plaque joins it. Plaque starts on it.

And that and the plaque and the interruption in the blood vessels is what leads to so many of these. The strokes, the. So many of these devastating injuries.

Right? So if we can early detect plaque, I mean, really early, where you have minor plaque stage one and prevent you from getting stage three, that's a big deal. So I like to walk the walk. I like to do all the testing myself. So I decided to do this new cardiac test and look at plaques. And I had zero calcium scores five years in a row because calcium measures the calcium in your body. The problem is you usually don't get. Usually do not get calcium until you're older. So. So I had zero calcium scores. Then I find out, I did this plaque test, that I have plaque in my proximal vessels, which are the beginning, and there was inflamed plaque. And I was like, I couldn't believe. I thought I was bionic. I always exercised. I was. I had a bad issue in my 40s, but I got back in shape again, and I couldn't believe it. So I. I started aggressively going back to better nutrition, more exercise, watching what I'm eating, improving my saturated fats. And then I noticed that in one year, I reverse plaque and melted away the dangerous inflamed plaque, and I prevented myself from getting a heart attack and possibly a stent five years down the road. So we can do this. What's really interesting is data gathering. The data. What we're doing right now is we have about 4,000 patients that we looked at who came in and got this heart test. And you won't even believe the biomarkers associated with plaque are not the typical things you would think. Everyone thinks it's the LDL cholesterol level or your total cholesterol level or your triglyceride level. They're associated. But the main drivers of plaque number one, hemoglobin A1C. It's the amount of sugar attached to your red cells. It tells me how much your sugar is over three months. Uric acid is a big mediator of plaque homocysteine. I once thought that was nonsense, but it's true. It's a big correlator of plaque volume, something called oxidized apob. It's how sticky your LDL cholesterol is. But it's the inflamed LDL cholesterol and uric Acid is also a marker. Insulin, believe it or not, is a big marker of plaque really called insulin resistance. So if you put all those together, it's inflammation and metabolic dysfunction. So that's a typical metabolic syndrome. People who have belly fat. You walk around the malls, you walk around the amusement parks, what do you see? You see more people in wheelchairs with obesity. And then you say, okay, why? If we want to try to do something healthy for this world, we need to reduce obesity. But what's the cause of it? You got to answer that question. Why are people obese? Number one, lack of exercise. Number two, eating the wrong foods with high fructose corn syrup. Sugar was the detriment to this society. Sugars are bad, sugars are toxic, sugar is poison. We need to really focus in on what you're eating. Over 60, you need to be in the gym four days a week and lift weights and get muscle mass. Muscle is your largest longevity organ that contains your stem cells. Over 60, your DNA changes and your body changes. It's like a switch. It happened to me, I'm 64, I couldn't believe it. Suddenly your blood vessels get harder and, and non compliant, like a steel pipe. They're not rubbery and soft. They don't expand that much because we lose nitric oxide. And nitric oxide is a vasodilator. So at 60, things change. So we're finding out there's certain things you need to do after age 60. You must start lifting weights. But I don't mean going to the gym like a bodybuilder. I mean doing it slow and careful and not get injured. But you know, you should have a proper, a trainer initially to know what you're doing. But you need that muscle mass because as we age, we have sarcopenia, loss of that muscle, and that ages us because the largest longevity organ in our body is muscle. Contains your stem cells along with other cells in the body. But a lot of them, a lot of the reservoir of stem cells are in muscle. And muscle keeps you less frail and it keeps your bones strong. So there's certain things you need to do. You need to sleep. Over six hours a night, you must sleep. We have wearable devices now that we can measure sleep. Unfortunately, when you get overweight and so many people are overweight, the worst thing that happens when you sleep is you stop breathing. Obstructive sleep apnea, and that's been linked to ventricular arrhythmias, cardiac arrest, pulmonary hypertension, reflux. So if you notice people starting to burp and belch and always have heartburn. A lot of this is because. And high blood pressure. A lot of this is related to sleep apnea from belly fat. So getting back to the why, why is everyone getting sick earlier now than before? Toxins also. So we put everything together. We look at your inflammation, we look at your toxin level, we look at your gut, we look at your. Your muscle mass, your bones. Do you have brain fog? Your hormone levels, your biomarkers. You can't just look at one thing. So we have about 18 different tests that we do, and we call that out Advanced Diagnostic Program program. And then we have the advanced therapeutic program. The therapeutic is how to treat this. So we can filter your blood with something called therapeutic plasma exchange. We can recommend some regenerative medicine therapies like stem cells or exosomes. Usually these are done under FDA clinical trials. Everything that we do is under an FDA clinical trial here in the U.S. we may recommend some sites outside the U.S. for stem cells, but our goal is really to do with the basic stuff, find out why people are having problems and address it. And exercise and diet and sleep are big, big factors.

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