If we are to be don't die, we both have to cure our incurable diseases. So either they get us or we get them.
Anti-aging entrepreneur Brian Johnson revealed a recent diagnosis of autoimmune gastritis. Kate Tolo is the most measured female in history.
One of the sharpest content minds, Kate pitched Brian: what if the science experiment was done in public.
So we're spending $2.6 million on my protocol. I was like, oh yeah, I think I have suspected endometriosis. Brian hears about it and I was diagnosed in something like 42 days. Women typically take 6 and 1/2 years to get a diagnosis.
I think it's possible that we have a cure within like 6 months. This has never been done before. We've done all of this in 4 weeks time.
There's a perception that this is about you wanting to live forever.
I can't understand what living forever means. I simply want to say yes to existence. And what I really concluded is that...
Super nice to be here, you guys. Thank you for inviting me into your beautiful home, into the sanctum. I'm excited to talk to both of you together. And my first question really is for Kate. Like, I just want to know like what is it actually like to be in a relationship with this lunatic?
To look over and you're just smiling.
Yeah. Just, you know, have at it.
Um, it's a lot. It's definitely different. Um, Brian is a unique, special human being and I've known that since day one, since the first moment I looked into his eyes and honestly, I feel like it's out of my control. I don't think I am in charge of whether or not I love Brian. My body just does.
And so, what is your kind of like relationship history prior to this? Like in terms of like other guys that you dated and the kind of delta between that and the experience of like living with Brian.
Yeah, I mean I think Brian's just one of a kind. So I would categorize myself generally like both in relationships but also lifestyle, how I think about the world as a fairly normal average bell curve person prior to meeting Brian. And so even in just the way I live life now, it's entirely different.
Initially you came in like as an employee, right? Like you were working here for quite a while, right, before the relationship blossomed. What attracted you to want to be in his employee to begin with? Like what was it inside of you that like wanted to be part of this whole thing?
It was his neuroch company that I fell in love with so deeply. I was 21. I just moved to New York. I had grown up in a small town with immigrant parents. So, I didn't have a ton of exposure to like what is an engineer and you know what's a consultant? Like those words just didn't mean anything to me. I got to New York. I was working in fashion because I learned how to sew when I was 8 years old and I started to see the world for the big space that it is and learned about AI. This is back in 2016 and I thought that is the next thing happening and I surveyed the world trying to find somebody who's actually working on solving the issue of the crisis that AI might bring. And I really felt like the only path forward would be to merge humanity and AI in some capacity to be able to speak the same language. And so I was looking into brain computer tech companies, brain interfaces. These are you know can you translate the human experience into a computer's experience through some sort of interface. And 2016 December I was sitting in a cafe in Brooklyn and I got an email from Singularity University and I had a quote from a man named Brian Johnson and the quote resonated deeply with me as a person who's working on this whose vision align with mine. So I started reaching out to him and it took a number of years and I was just every year pinging him on these various platforms saying I would love to come work your neuroch company. But of course going from fashion to tech is a really hard transition to make and so yeah it took a while and then eventually he responded I think by chance by accident and then we started working together and it took us about a year and a half of when we started this project for science and for health before it actually took off.
And then I transitioned full-time to that with Brian.
How do you feel about how this AI experiment is going so far in the years between 2016 and what we're seeing currently? And this premise that the future is some merging of humanity with this, you know, superpowered technology.
Yeah, I definitely was naive and I've been humbled by like what's happened across the last six, seven years. Um, I still have hope that if we can quantify and understand the human experience enough that we may be able to have a world where we truly merge. And what we're building is ultimately a path where we can swallow artificial intelligence to use it for humanity's benefit. Like what we're really trying to have survive is our kind. So not like our biological beings necessarily, but our shared intelligence, thoughts, collective consciousness, our libraries, the internet, those spaces where we come together and it's something other than like our biological selves. It's our spiritual selves collectively. That's ultimately we're trying to hitch that onto the backs of AI because AI has the capacity to run away as a train and become its own thing and then we're you know our existence is...
Right. How are you reconciling like that vision, that aspirational vision with the you know kind of potential for this being an existential threat, you know that that will augur the extinction of our species?
It's like one or the other. Like Brian, like what's interesting about like everything that you're doing and maybe this doesn't get enough attention is the fact that like the substrate that's underlying all of this really is AI. Like I had the privilege of coming to one of your Jeffersonian dinners and the provocative prompt to instill the conversation to follow is if there was a superpower AI that had your best interest at heart and would basically tell you everything you need to do to be as healthy as possible, would you surrender all of your decision-making over to this AI with the understanding that you could never revoke it? It would never expire. And that's that's the very provocative question obviously. I mean did I get it right? Is that essentially like the prompt?
And so the premise is that if we can understand this and we can empower a certain technology to help us make these decisions for us because we're terrible at making these decisions, we're emotional beings etc. that humanity by proxy would be better off as a result. That remains kind of the thesis. I mean the question itself is really more to draw out the person's beliefs than it is to practically answer the question. And so I in this Jeffersonian dinner I set the stages where I give two purposely provocative statements that draws people out. And in doing that they show their cards, their beliefs, their biases, their preferences and then I take that and then I flip it around and give them a mirror. And so it's a process that I go through. What I'm really trying to do is with AI, what's happening now is we are trying to say intelligent things about reality.
And when you bring up the topic of AI, you can go down a near infinite number of paths in trying to string words together that try to make sense. You can talk about jobs, you can talk about meaning, you can talk about, you know, utopia, dystopia, solving cancer. But I think the purest insight is it's possible no human can say anything intelligent about AI. And I don't think we fully internalize that relative to AI, we may be cavemen in terms of our ability to understand what's coming. And therefore, our models of reality, our perceptions of ourselves, our goals as a species, maybe they don't translate into the bridge. I don't know. And so what I'm really trying to do is I'm trying to say as me as Brian Johnson, can I say one intelligent thing in this moment? And what I really concluded is that I simply want to say yes to existence. That's all I can say. Outside of that, I have no idea what to say. I don't know what to think. I don't know how to feel other than like I say yes to existence under all circumstances.
Mhm. And that's what this project is about. And so, of course, people hear us through the language of the things we do together, the experimentation and the therapies and the performance art, but that's really it is the species at a moment in time of transitioning to something different that we can just openheartedly say we want existence.
There's a perception that this is about you wanting to live forever, but there's a ripple in that. Like there's a difference between this notion of living forever and don't die. Like what is the how do you distinguish those two things?
The human brain is very funny if you speak about it through the frames of Buddhism and reincarnation. It doesn't necessarily a person doesn't feel concerned about that reincarnation cycle. If you talk about it through a Christian lens that you go to heaven that's soothing. If you talk about it from an Islamic lens that is soothing. If you talk about it without those safe landing spots, it drives people crazy. You know, like I can't understand what living forever means. I don't know how to compute that. And so you're just putting them in unknown land. And then the same is true if a person's an atheist. And so the mind has certain tracks that it follows that says this is a safe thought process or this is a dangerous thought process. And then if you try to do another frame where you know we're speaking today on a Tuesday, tomorrow's Wednesday, all three of us are probably excited for what's coming tomorrow. And then when tomorrow comes, we're probably all excited about Thursday. So being excited about tomorrow is the same thing as living forever. You're just doing one tomorrow at a time. And so it really is just a it's how the mind processes information. And if you catch somebody off guard of living forever, but you don't give them like a really constrained container like it's this, it feels like this, it looks like this, and you feel safe like this. People are like, I don't know, man. That kind of sounds really scary. I don't think I want that. That's kind of that's bad.
The impetus for this having this conversation now is because of the health journey that Kate has been on. And so I want to hear more about how that has unfolded and what it is that you're trying to communicate publicly around women's health. We were chatting earlier. I shared that over the course of many years of hosting this podcast, I've had the good fortune of conversing with many very accomplished women doctors who all you know share this sentiment that you know the science is lacking in terms of our understanding of the female body like when it comes to hormonal health and the issues that are unique to women that kind of get lumped in with just overall health and the canon of science that is basically you know all of these studies are essentially performed on men and so there's a real gap in understanding and I think there's a lot of women who suffer as a consequence of that oversight and this is something that you've decided to address head on and do it with storytelling by sharing your own kind of personal experience with some of the things that you're contending with.
Yeah. So we're spending $2.6 million on my protocol. I'm measuring 1,900 biomarkers. I'm doing around 100 days of this just to get baseline data on what happens to a female's body as she goes through the menstrual cycle. So like you can think about the female body as a waveform and we know generally there's a waveform like you know X biomarker changes in this way and this biomarker changes this way but we don't actually have enough robust data on exactly what happens through the female body. And so I'm taking on that challenge with Brian's protocol and setting that up. What we were able to do is like take his baseline pretty much one day and then start off the races in terms of optimizing. But for female health, we don't have the luxury of having this huge data set on what we can compare me to and actually understanding the female body. So like for example, something as simple as cholesterol.
We know that in the first half of the cycle, it can be up to 19% higher the result than in the second half of the cycle. So there's one study that looked at this in women and around 6% of women actually tested high above out of range for cholesterol in the first half and then they get tested again and they're back into the normal range. And so it has these implications because nobody when they go to the doctor to get a blood drawn is being asked where are you at in your cycle so we can compare reference ranges for cholesterol specifically. And so another study looked at around 400 metabolites in the blood. These like downstream byproducts that are happening in the body and around half of them they discovered did fluctuate through the cycle but that has not been characterized. So we know it moves. We don't know how. We don't know what's normal. And it's a really hard measurement problem because to be able to do that, you need lots of women tracking their hormones daily. And then as soon as you know the LH surge happens and you transition to the second half of your cycle, you go in for blood work testing. That's an extremely logistically complicated problem to solve. And so we thought, why don't we start with my body and see if we can create the most quantified menstrual cycle ever. And so now I'm on day 29 of that process.
And the impetus for this was an endometriosis diagnosis.
Can you talk a little bit about that? What is endometriosis? How is it traditionally treated and how are you kind of like treating this differently or using it as a means to better understand the female body?
You know, actually we started this process and then as my team were asking me about my health background, I was like, 'Oh, yeah. I think I have suspected endometriosis.' And they were like, 'Oh, okay. When did that happen?' I was like 7 years ago. Did you do anything about it? No. Like I got heard when I was like 22 from the doctor, you know, you can go get surgery to figure it out. I'm not getting surgery. I have no idea. I'm young in New York and I'm like, I'm not doing that. And so all this time goes by and my symptoms get more and more severe. But because it's a general trend and I know that surgery is the option, I'm like, I don't want to go down that process. Then Brian hears about it and he's like, I think we could solve that. And so he starts calling doctors and scientists from around the world sometimes at 4:00 a.m. when he first wakes up so that he can catch them in various time zones. And through just pure persistence like in a startup like mentality, he able to essentially organize four different ways to confirm my diagnosis and get me diagnosed in something like 42 days. So like an insane change, whereas women typically take 6 and 1/2 years to get a diagnosis. So they live with it for a very very long time.
Interesting.
I mean what is it and how many women suffer from this?
It's around 1 in 10 confirmed women suffering from it, but the suspicion is that it's much much more because it's such a general disease that affects so many people and lots of women just never get a diagnosis.
And what it is is in the uterine lining, you have cells that grow outside of the lining and then that creates problems because they act as if they're still in the uterus. And so they cause all these issues like fusing organs together, scarring, having nerve firing. So that they're very very painful. And so like for example, one of the symptoms that's very obvious for endo that I experience is pain while defecating on my period. You know, somewhere in my bowel system, there's endo lesions that are firing while I'm on my period and just causing excruciating pain.
And so this is something that develops over a long period of time. Hence six and a half years before a proper diagnosis.
No. The reason it's that long is because surgery is the traditional way of diagnosing it.
And it's expensive to get surgery. It's very invasive. And so women just put up with it.
Or they go to the doctor saying, 'Hey, I have painful periods.' And the doctor will be like, 'That's normal.' And then they're sent home. But there's a real missing education around what is endo. What can you do about it? What we were able to do, we got a transvaginal ultrasound that came back negative. Then we went and got an endo-specific protocol because it turns out you really need someone who's trained to do these ultrasounds for endo specifically and that then it came back positive. Same thing with my MRI. Firstly, came back negative. We went and did an endo protocol for MRI. It came back positive. I got a blood test done and I also got a saliva test done. So with four different modalities, we were able to like kind of triangulate this and get a confirmed diagnosis. And at the same time, I also got diagnosed with two other issues at the same time that I had no idea that I had PMOS, formerly known as PCOS and then a condition called adenomyosis. So my uterus is essentially swollen and it shouldn't be.
So 10% of women are suffering from this. It goes undiagnosed, misdiagnosed or diagnosed late and traditionally the treatment is surgery and that's it. Right. And so the exploration that you're on is are there better ways of detecting this and are there alternative treatments that could be effective short of like having to cut you open?
And where are we at with that?
Oh man, it's so sad. So much of it is just like pushing things forward like it's like it's laying there. So, we're actually right now working on getting this blood test available so that women in the US can go and get this blood test drawn at home and that'll give them signal on if they've got it or not without having to go and get an expensive MRI or...
And that's a reliable test so you don't have to do all of the multiplicity of tests that you had to do to really confirm this diagnosis.
That's right. Yeah. Yep. Yeah.
And why is that not already widely available?
Um a combination of sexism, people not knowing about this disease, the fact that it is there's many different ways that this disease can present itself. Um yeah, it's just an infrastructure issue, just not enough attention on this so far.
And is this initiative something that's being celebrated by the broader medical community? Are you getting push back and criticism? Like what is the feedback been like?
Yeah. Are there women doctors who are like, 'Finally, like I'm glad somebody's doing this' because a lot of the criticism that you get, Brian, is like, 'Well, if you have all this money, you're spending all this money on yourself, like why don't you put it into trials, you know, like gold standard science? You could be approaching this totally differently that would benefit humanity and also, you know, kind of serve the purpose that you know, this mission that you're on. These N of one experiments, like how valid are they really?' So it's easy to like you know for like a traditional scientist medical approach to like have a battery of criticisms around like what you guys are doing but this seems like it's something that you're not getting that kind of...
No, like a sigh of relief like finally and especially like Brian as a male in power dedicating his brand his platform to this cause like just women around the world and especially like in academic settings are just like finally somebody's going to put the spotlight on this. So, yeah, it's really a testament like Brian truly... I have a hard time accepting love and being seen and being taken care of and but that entire first process like Brian was just like all in reading books on female health, educating himself. So, yeah, I was really lucky.
Yeah. I mean, and it's complicated as a result. It's really complicated.
Let's talk about that. Yeah. Why do you feel that way, Kate?
What do you think after having been with me for 5 years?
Uh, yeah. So, Kate, we've been trying to get to the bottom of this actually. And that the hypothesis we had is that Kate is not legible to herself.
What does that mean?
She can't understand herself. She struggles to understand herself. And I think and we also were trying to explore this hypothesis that women are not broadly legible to society. And so when you read the history of female health, the same words the Greeks use. So they were trying to understand planetary alignment. And so they were, you know, they were trying to figure out planets and they would like draw these circles like they spin in circles to make sense of the orbits. They couldn't make sense because their assumption was they thought Earth was stationary and the planets are circling.
First of all, like I ask a question about like Kate's psychology and you're talking about like planets and...
Yeah. And so in the same way they refer to the womb as the same kind of chaotic structure. So they're like the planets are chaotic and the female womb is chaotic. And so there's a deep history of seeing females as chaotic, as like systems that can't be understood. And that's it's not like a ancient thing. It's recent. And so there's a bunch of carryover where women have never been as legible to the world as men because they're more complicated in the same way as planetary, you know, planets were at some point in time. But the women thing's never fully resolved. And so that's what we've been working on is in part what Kate is doing by this quantification is by showing how her microbiome changes throughout her cycle and her eyesight and pain tolerance and metabolism and breast size and you basically see like there's a system that moves just not in ways that have been intelligible or legible.
But really it's a system that you know that produces life like that like produces these cycles. And so in many ways we've been trying to like figure out how to explain this to the world. It's not just about biomarkers. Kate is not trying to be the healthiest person in the world. She's not trying to biohack herself. It's a legibility project. And to me like really at the heart of like what does it mean to be female and what does it mean to be a male understanding a female.
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Well, legibility is an interesting word choice. I mean, it's really marginality like the you know the long history of women being marginalized and men being confused by women and being dismissive of them and just saying well they're complicated or like she's being hysterical and you know that that's the real context here of like talk about you know an idea that we've incepted. It's like oh this less than perspective of women and what they're capable of etc. that has you know been a real violence in terms of like you know existence and you know kind of the shared consciousness etc like in an expansive way like it's really you know an awful legacy how we have treated women perceived them made assumptions about them and that's reflected in the canon of science in terms of how we understand them and this is sort of an antidote to that. Legibility is a digestible word that sort of sidesteps like you know like just this really awful history in terms of how we've conceptualized women and their role and their strength and their power and the like in society. And so this is like a small example of just let's celebrate these women. Let's improve that. Let's change that understanding.
Yeah. Like one simple thing with her endometriosis is that like I've been working on my language to communicate to men what is endometriosis. So, how is it the case that you have this?
This is a whole black box to us. Like, I don't know. Like, my daughter had an issue and I was like, I don't know. This is like a girl problem, you know, like it's a black like it's a mystery, you know, we don't talk about it. It's between the women, you know, like this is not functional. Right.
Exactly. So, if you're hanging out, you're my friend, you're like, 'Oh, Brian, I've never heard of endometriosis. What is it?' I'm like, 'Okay, Rich, it's like one in 10 women.' So, like it's a major disease, right? So, here's what it is. It's like an alien is inside of you fusing your guts together and then it feels like you get kicked in the balls. That's what endometriosis is. Now, if a man is experiencing that, they're like, 'Man, this sucks. We got to solve this.' So, it's like this women compl... it's like, 'Oh, you're being emotional or like you know, like just it'll go away or like...'
Yeah. The dismissiveness of that, right?
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. At the same time, I've been super humbled. I was hoping this was just an issue of historical sexism making its way into the medical world. And of course, it is, but I've been really humbled through this experience of like I'm a systems person. We built a business together. I'm extremely like, you know, if I want to solve a problem, I'll go and solve it. It is so hard to measure myself. It like just being able to separate the noise in measurement on just one person doing the same thing every day versus the signal of my body's actually changing. That's one thing. And you stack up, okay, you want to do that for hormones so you can correlate it with where you're at in the cycle. Most people think women ovulate on day 14, halfway through a 28 day cycle. Most women actually don't have a 28 day cycle. Most women actually ovulate on day 17, but it's incredibly variable. Like I think I ovulated this cycle on like day 23 or something like that.
And so there's like tons of myths around this but what it means is that it's very variable so how to kind of lock down in our existing paradigm of how we consider measurement that process is incredibly difficult and if I was to try and measure 100 women at once I'm not sure how I would go about it robustly to the standards by which science has currently set up our system of what we consider justice in terms of good science, you know. So I think we need a paradigm shift entirely and that's actually why weirdly the N of one may be the perfect entry point that actually we may discover population level science on women through many many N of one experiments at home and then with that you're able to kind of detach the signal from the noise.
Right. And at some point concoct the best clinical trial that you could run at scale.
Yes. And it might look entirely different than what it does for men right now.
Yeah. But in the immediate kind of day-to-day of like dealing with this condition and trying to understand it, what else have you discovered that you think would be helpful to a woman who's watching or listening to this who is struggling with that right now?
Yeah, we so we have a master plan to cure endometriosis.
So, right off right up our alley. So like first...
The hubris sitting right alongside the humility.
Yeah. Exactly. So like first I'm going to give to the haters. So you know Kate and I do this documentary on Netflix. We are bright-eyed bushy tails. We're like we're going to you know take on death and then within a year we both have a diagnosis of an incurable disease.
It's so delicious. So there you go haters. Like autoimmune disease for you, endometriosis. Yeah. You know karma is alive and real.
Exactly. So like there you go. It's a gift. Now also the dual diagnosis has been the best thing that could have ever happened to us because like if you think about this from the universe's perspective, irony is always going to show up and play a role. So it's a journey now, right? Like if we are to be don't die, we both have to cure our incurable diseases. There's just no path forward.
So either they get us or we get them. But there's just no middle ground.
So like, you know what? We've got our tasks laid out for us very clearly. So we have been hustling both and we immediately got to work. So we have probably on each of our teams like three or four international groups helping us try to solve this. We've had all these people rally around the intent. So what we find is that in any given area of course there's a rich world exploring these things but often times they don't have the publicity or reach or focal point and we happen to be that on these two diseases and so we've just rallied so many incredible people to work on these things and so we think we could potentially make significant headway on both within 12 months.
What is your autoimmune disease specifically? How is it impacting you and where are you at in terms of like addressing it?
It's I have no symptoms. It's basically I don't really I didn't realize I had it. So, it is my immune cells mistakenly attack my stomach. So, they basically eat my endothelial lining of my stomach. It is a autoimmune condition I had starting about 30 years ago with my thyroid. So, it's been cooking in my body for a very long time. That has nothing to do with what I've been doing for the past 5 years. And in fact, had I not been taking such good care of myself for the past 5 years, my diagnosis could be really bad. So, just to be clear, because a lot of people, they think this autoimmune condition is from that. It's not. It's from a thyroid and hypothyroidism.
Yeah, hypothyroidism and the stomach are very closely linked in the immunology. So, that's the pairing, but it's not what I've been doing the past couple years. So, what we're doing now is we did two things. As soon as I got my immune system sequenced. So, we did a blood draw, we got a million of my immune cells and we looked at each one of these guys individually like who are you? What's your job and what's your special key and then I went under again two weeks ago. Kate was there for it. So I went under general anesthesia. We had a scope down my throat and we took 24 biopsies on my stomach. And so we biopsied the actual autoimmune condition. We took those samples and then we did like an Ocean's 11 style operation to cool them at the proper speed, deeper cool them at the proper speed, then cryopreserve them, transfer them over overseas to a special lab. So we now have a mini Brian growing in a dish from these immune cells.
And so we'll take these, we'll actually get results in a couple days. We'll take my biopsy and my immune system and say now we have a full picture. Who are you guys and what are you doing? And with that we can then say okay we're going to do this therapy or that therapy and we'll carve out the path. But this has never been done before. We've done all of this in four weeks time.
And how receptive is the traditional medical community to this initiative or this ambition?
It's purely it's a scientific endeavor. It is as purely scientific as you can get.
Yeah. So, it's like a it doesn't get caught up in things like, you know, should you eat meat or vegetables, you know, where people are like going to war with each other. This is just a pure biology plan.
Got it. You mentioned many Brians growing in a petri dish. You know, perhaps your greatest accomplishment in terms of like attention farming is this idea that you're cloning yourself, right? Like this is just headline bait and internet gold again. The reality of that is of course very different. So walk me through where you're at with that. What's going on? Basically what you're doing is you're establishing a culture of pluripotent stem cells, right? Which are cells that can express them in any number of ways that can be replacement for cells that are diseased etc. But you know eventually and hopefully like rebuild organs and all kinds of you know interesting things that are happening at the very you know sharp edge of these technological advances in medicine. Is that accurate?
That's right. Yep. So the way this works is I did a blood draw 150 milliliters. You separate out the cells and you take the cells and then you apply Yamanaka factors and that will reverse the age of my cells from 48 to zero epigenetically. So now they're in an embryonic state. Now what it doesn't do is my cells at age 48 has gone through a number of cell divisions and I have these somatic mutations like it has the errors in my DNA and my mitochondria. So it doesn't fix that. It takes the epigenetic age back to zero. So embryonic. So now I have these raw materials. So if I get a disease like an autoimmune condition and I need to rebuild my stomach lining, I have my own cells. I can say, can we rebuild my stomach with my own embryonic-like cells? So now I have the raw material to do that because if you take somebody else's cells, your body might reject it. You have a high risk. And so currently in the world there's trials going on where people with Parkinson's disease are using their iPSCs induced pluripotent stem cells to replace the neurons that die in the Parkinson's process and also for heart failure. So it's the raw material. So the technology is phenomenal because everybody should have their cells banked.
Right? You have this bank and this is available to you if and when you're going to need it at some point in your life.
And on a surface level it's like okay this is insane. This is some sort of gaita you know kind of situation. An indulgence of a you know wealthy privileged person but it's just like anything else. I mean when Elon Musk started Tesla like his first offering was that like Lotus supercar which was very expensive but that's what you have to do to get to the model 3 that's affordable etc. So by dint of you kind of investing in this and trying to share understanding of it, the idea is that at some point this will catch on. It will incept as an idea and then with scale these things become affordable and just second nature. On some level we've already been doing this. You take like when you have a baby you can get the stem cells then and you can bank them etc for future. So it's not necessarily a new idea. It's just a more kind of like advanced refined version of that.
Yeah. Yeah. We've done the same with my immune cells. So, we did during this immune profile, we take my immune cells, we also bank them because you want to store your immune system as young as you possibly can, right? Because every day you age and the cells have more somatic mutations. So, I'm trying to basically take all of my body's raw material. In the iPSCs, you take it back to zero epigenetically. With the immune systems, you're taking 48-year-old Brian, but still like your immune system is your ultimate weapon to detect disease and cure disease. And so we're trying to take all these precautions of like this is the way for everybody eventually like you're saying to have a shot at if we say that we are going to be able to extend our lifespans and imagine a future where we're not decrepit, we're healthy and we're vibrant, we can rejuvenate our organs, these will be the raw materials that will help along that path. So, we're just like it's the next stage in our evolution. We are an example of what we're doing. We're an example of that. We're rolling this out to our customers today so they also have access and we'll just it'll get cheaper over time and more accessible.
How accurate are these biological age measurements? You know, like now we're all wearing wearables, etc. Depending upon the device, you get different analytics. These things vary wildly. Like I have one device that says I'm 44...
years old. I've got another one that says I'm like one year younger than I am. Like the delta is gigantic, right? And I assume that you have a different measurement system that on some level you're going to contend is superior. But it does seem like do we really how like reliable is any of this or is this just all nonsense in the interest of like this longevity Olympics and the leaderboard of who's the youngest etc.
I'll take one example. Eight Sleep. They're just about to announce this. They did an age predictor where they had a model like an AI model and they showed it data of nights of sleep and it said the question to the AI was here are two separate nights of sleep. Is it from the same person or not? That was the only task that the AI had in determining this data set. So, it just went through a bunch of iterations to find out, okay, yes, these two data sets are from the same people. These ones aren't, these ones are, these ones aren't, etc., etc. And it got checked on that ability. Through that process, essentially mapping what is the same about these data sets establishes the same person versus what's different, what changes. Maybe you have alcohol the night before one and so your breathing rate is a little bit higher. In that process, it actually ironically found all of the markers that are associated with age. So your how good is your heart pumping blood for example is a really good age marker. So it was able to detect within I think three and a half years of precision how accurately how old that person is just based on their sleeping patterns. And so that's an example of like scientifically backed or a scientific process of within 3 years delta accuracy of that. And so then you apply okay take this person have them sleep in this bed. What does their body act like? And it's like, okay, it acts like a 21-year-old with, you know, a three-year degree of margin. So, some of these algorithms are just like pretty much like wash outs, you know, they're like they just grabbed like three markers, put it together, and they say, "Yeah, yeah, this is like typical of like a 21-year-old." Others are actually like genuinely predictive and accurate, and you can actually prove it with science.
Mhm. Yeah. You could probably just do a ranking. So one thing I'm proud of, we gave birth to biological age. Like everyone doing biological age markers has come from our initiative of like making it as a centerpiece of conversation and bringing people in. And so you can just take a ranking. If you look at volume of the brain via MRI, that's a very good marker predicting age. Like the brain shrinks with age. There's of course some variation according to certain things, but that's going to be a more powerful predictor than your off-the-shelf wearable. And so you just look at we basically in our effort we are willing to accept hundreds of inputs into biological age. We know some are better than others. And so the one like the wearables we kind of discount a little bit because it's like it's a the measurement robustness is not as good. You have a lot of variability etc. So yeah I mean biological age is a real thing. We visually know that's true in our lives and then depends on the measurement modality and the data behind it.
Sure. It depends on how how good these sensors are. It's like your wearable is never going to be a comp for like being in a sleep lab where you've got like things all over you or whatever and it's measuring you at a at a at a much more accurate level and then the algorithm making decisions about you know where all of these metrics fall in the hierarchy of what's important like and this percolates into you know social media discourse around this. One month it's VO2 max and the next month it's you know mitochondrial health and mitochondrial density like you know it's it's all it's all about like it's it's the human mind like wanting to just just give me like this one thing and then I I have certainty around that it's more complicated it's vastly more complicated than that but for the average person who's thinking about their longevity who's living on a budget who has a busy life you talk about these principles for you know how to like live an average life and do what you can within the constraints of your busy life on a budget to you know extend your long your health span and those are they're simple things.
