Factually! with Adam Conover - Republicans Are Shortening Our Lifespans, with Dr. Eric Topol

Episode Date: July 9, 2025

When it comes to medical science, there’s never been a better time to be alive than now… other than maybe a few months ago before the new Trump administration. Americans today are living longer than ever before, and that’s owed in no small part to the National Institutes of Health—a government organization that has been responsible for some of the most significant biomedical advancements in the history of healthcare. Unfortunately, the Trump administration just virtually annihilated the NIH, and sentient gob of clay and anti-vax charlatan RFK Jr. is now in charge of the future of American health. To figure how how to navigate this insane dichotomy of medical potential and squandered medical possibility, Adam speaks with Dr. Eric Topol, a cardiologist and scientist, and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute. Dr. Topol’s book, Super Agers: An Evidence-Based Approach to Longevity, explores the cutting edge advancements in living longer, healthier lives—advancements which are now in jeopardy. Find Dr. Topol’s book at factuallypod.com/books--SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a HeadGum Podcast. Hello and welcome to Factually, I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. You know, it's a weird time for medical science. On the one hand, we are seeing legit, incredible breakthroughs. We have the mRNA vaccines, which were developed in record time and saved countless lives from COVID. And the same technology holds promise for diseases like cancer and rare diseases like Ebola. Then there's gene therapy that seems to do magical things like restore vision in some people or even take out sickle cell anemia.

There are also tools to better detect Alzheimer's and ever improved imaging techniques for everything. All of this is astounding and really positive progress. And it's not just all high tech. We also know more about what people need to do to stay healthy for longer. If you want to prolong your one precious life, there is more to know about it and do about it today than at any point in human history. But you know, that's just on the one hand. The other hand for American medical science is looking incredibly bleak.

R.F.K. Jr., our new head of Health and Human Services, is an anti-vaccine, anti-science charlatan, to be quite honest, and he is in charge of our entire country's biomedical apparatus, and that apparatus is being demolished. We are seeing billions in cuts to the National Institutes of Health, which had been the largest funder of biomedical research on the planet. And we are making it more and more difficult for researchers to work in this country at all. In fact, there is genuine worry that we are going to see

a decline in biomedical research in America, period. So what are we to make of this moment? Biomedical research is reaching new peaks, right as those in power are taking a wrecking ball to it. Well, on the show today to talk about the amazing promise and counterproductive stupidity of this moment, we have an absolutely incredible guest. Before we get into it, I want to remind you that if you want to support this show, you can head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month

gets you every episode ad free. We have a lot of other wonderful community features as well. And of course you can always find my tickets and tour dates at adamconover.net. Now, let's get to this week's interview. Dr. Eric Topol is a cardiologist and scientist and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute. He's one of the most published authors in medical science and his recent book is Superagers, an evidence-based approach to longevity.

It is an honor to have him on the show. Please welcome Dr. Eric Topol. Eric, thank you so much for being on the show. Oh, great to be with you, Adam. It's an honor to have you. I apologize if I'm a little sneezy. I'm getting over a summer cold, which can we make those illegal is my first question to you. You should not be able to get a cold during June is it was like 75 degrees in L.A. I'm

sick inside is horrible. What do you what the fuck is up with this? I know the fact that we haven't been able to eliminate common colds by now. It's it's pretty extraordinary, isn't it? Here's what I would like. If we can't eliminate them, can we make them worse? Because the problem is a cold isn't bad enough for you to get out of doing any of your shit. You know, I got like one day off and then apart from like, I got to go tape a new video. I got to do day off and then apart from like, I gotta go tape a new video. I gotta do the zoom meeting. But like, if it was just, if I,

if I was throwing up, I could have at least stayed in and watched a movie, but instead of said to work through it, it's horrible being an adult. I understand totally. I mean, one thing about a cold, it does raise up your immunity, you know, that little challenge. So there's some good parts to it. The next time you get exposed to that virus, you'll be, you know, fortified. So it's fortified me against the other deadly illnesses

that might be coming my way. Yeah, could help you, yeah, that's right. Wow, a positive spin on a cold to start the interview. This is gonna be a great conversation. So look, you're one of the most eminent doctors who is present on social media, on the internet, as a public communicator, and I thank you for doing it because we're obviously awash in medical misinformation. To the extent that medical misinformation

is now running our nation's health department in the personified form of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. So first of all, I just wanna ask, how alarmed are you by that, and what do you think the effects are gonna be? Well, you described it really well, Adam. I mean, they're running the show now, and it's pretty scary.

I mean, yesterday we saw how RFK Jr. thinks it's fine to have stem cell clinics all over the place that are basically predatory without data and dangerous. And that list of the things that are reckless is pretty extensive. You know, getting rid of vaccines, for example, in pregnant women for COVID, where there's been no shortage of demonstrable important benefit, both for the mother and the baby. So, I mean, the list is just endless because it's just not based on any science, any evidence. Now, of course, there's hiring a person to try to link back, which has never been there, autism with measles vaccines, which has been refuted,

probably most refuted extensive deep research that's been done to show that Andrew Wakefield's fabricated study in the Lancet many years ago, which set the whole thing off, is complete, you know, balderdash. So it's pretty discouraging to see how this is not just miss, you could qualify it as disinformation, and it's really gonna hurt people. How do you think our medical system is going to be affected in the long run?

And I'm also thinking about all of the doctors and scientists who work for Health and Human Services and do take an evidence-based approach, which is still the majority of them. How must they be feeling working under this regime? Well, the question, of course, is how are we gonna get past it? I mean, on the one hand, what's really interesting is R.F.K. Jr. and his Maha

following have a few good ideas, like for example, challenging big food about the ultra-processed food constituents to deal with the environment, whether it's air pollution or the micro-plastics, nanoplastics or forever chemicals. But on the other hand, the Trump administration is gutting out all resources for environmental protection and as you know and just referred to, really taking away all the medical research support. Yeah. So these are not synced in any way. So some of the promises that RFK Junior made that actually had some basis, the only things that had some basis,

there's no ability to execute when the funding for research is being basically, I've never imagined anything like this. It's horrific, nightmarish. Yeah, I mean, on my show, The G Word, we visited the NIH and we met the scientists, for instance, who at that time were working on a cure for sickle cell anemia, which is sickening and killed countless people

and no one was working on but the federal government. And I believe that program and countless others like it have been just cut and destroyed. I mean, we're setting back medical research by decades, aren't we? I mean, that's actually so important because we've never been in a more powerful position to advance and prevent diseases, the big age-related diseases like cancer, neurodegenerative, and heart disease. So here we have made this remarkable progress.

And like you just mentioned, the whole genome editing field, which might not just only help, it has helped rare diseases, but even these common diseases like heart disease. So here we are at this just unparalleled exciting time, but at the same thing that we're confronting is to take it all apart. Just disrupt and upend all the progress that's being made. And I don't know how we're going to keep up any momentum when the funding is, the rug is being pulled out from under it. Yeah. How much does the traditional medical establishment bear responsibility for the rise of RFK Junior's movement

or the general sort of anti-science medical movement. Because when you look at, just I think too much is made of him personally because I think he's the figurehead of the movement, but when you look at him, he spent much of his career railing against large institutional actors in, you know, that were hurting the environment, et cetera, right?

And it seems that a lot of that anger has simply been turned towards the federal government itself. Look, when you look at big food, right, the federal government is complicit in the problems with America's food system. Complicit and often the cause of them. And that's been very, very difficult to change. Not that he's gonna be able to change them, he's actually running the wrong department if he wants to do that. But, you know, so at the same time,

you and I have skepticism about the federal government's power there, and yet we're sort of asking, hey, we need to protect the great work that the federal government does in this other area, in medical research. And so it's difficult because a lot of people simply are skeptical of any large institution, right?

So how much fault do you think the medical establishment itself has in bringing that about, bringing that skepticism about? Yeah, so there's a couple of different points on that. Firstly, we don't have enough of the people who have a kind of clear-eyed view of science, who are standing up for science, who are actually involved in all the research and the progress, involved to ante up to the social media and the kind of stentorian voice, which is financed and well orchestrated, of the minority of these people who are the anti-science,

anti-vax, and challenging all the things that are firmly established. The other is that the notion that science is fixed at any point in time, that you shouldn't question anything, is of course wrong. And as we learn through the pandemic, it was kind of on the job training. That is, we were kind of on the job training. That is, you know, we were questioning some of the myths that had been from the 1918 pandemic, because we needed to relearn and learn

more than we knew at that time. So part of this was because public health agencies and the individuals were deemed as giving out misinformation. And so that added fuel to this, the anti-force. And then part is that we just are not organized. Less than 1% are showing up against the social media. So we're getting crowded out. And that's not good. Less than 1% of doctors are on social media, is that?

Yeah, doctors and scientists basically have been trained as to keep your head down and do your work, whether it's see patients, do their research, and don't mess with this whole social media interaction. don't mess with this whole social media interaction. And so the willingness to express, to have a voice is really low. And there are of course people in the biomedical space on these social media platforms,

but they're more following, they're not really speaking out. And now of course, there's a concern about retribution because we have a culture of fear, you know, that for you to really express yourself, you could have your grant taken away or you could be attacked. And so, yeah, we're in even a worse shape than we were before this new administration. I also think, though, that there's a bit of asymmetry between the people putting out misinformation and the people who really know.

Like, it's very easy to start a podcast and say, hey, the cure to what ails you is take my supplement, eat what I tell you, and, you know, work out and don't get vaccinated, right? These are easy, simple messages that have sort of an intuitive appeal to appeal to people that you can repeat over and over again. But if you're a real scientist, you're someone who knows you're thinking, well, the research is extremely complicated. It's extremely technical. We maybe don't know all of the answers yet because the research is preliminary, etc. That's a more difficult message to get

across. It's a little bit harder to know what to say on the podcast if you're really trying to be like stick to the evidence really strictly, right? Yeah, I mean that was actually an impetus for me to write Superagers because there are books out there and there are people doing podcasts that are putting out things and companies that are promoting longevity, no less all these anti-aging supplement ads and extremists out there.

And so we need to get this field straight, just like we needed to get the COVID story right. This one is now become center stage, because we have people advocating to get total body MRIs. We have advocates for not just a long list of supplements, not just one, and paying large amounts of money for things that, for example, plasmapheresis, you know, getting young blood transfusion through a aphoresis machine to get hyperbaric chamber or a stem cell treatments. I mean, just crazy stuff for ridiculous amounts of money. These are predatory.

These are dangerous. And so this is another new thing right now, which is, you know, where it's being called this longevity moment, which it's not a good one because it's largely, I mean, there's some good science going on in the science of aging, for sure. But this is an area that is much akin to what the, what we were seeing during the pandemic with all sorts of completely bogus, you know, nothing backed up making these proclamations just like you were reviewing. And it's, it's all over the place. Uh, and it really is predatory.

That is taking advantage of people, uh, financially without data. Uh, and it's sad to see it. Yeah. financially, without data. And it's sad to see it. Yeah, you know, we once had a inquiry to to do a anti-aging supplement ad on this show. And I looked at it and I said, well, I do supplement ads very, very rarely, unless they're, you know, they're really, really well established, like a vitamin or something like that. This one, I looked at it and I was like, I can't tell what it does and I can't tell,

I don't know how to, they say they're backed by science, I don't know how to evaluate the science, I can't find anyone who's done a really clear evaluation for me and so I don't feel comfortable promoting it, but a lot of people do. And longevity is one of the areas that people are most interested in, right? Because people are terrified of aging,

they're terrified of death. And so it's sort of a magnet for misinformation and for advertising like that. With new McValue and McDonald's, you get more than you expect. So after a long day, buy a double cheeseburger and add a McChicken for a dollar. Because saving with deals is always on the menu with new McValue. Prices and participation may vary.

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That's hungerroot.com slash factually, code factually to get 40% off your first box and a free item of your choice for life. Hungerroot.com slash factually, code factually. So let's talk about the actual science. Let's get into it. Like, first of all, how exactly does aging work? How does it affect the body and how does it eventually kill us? It seems like an obvious question, but like, wait, why does time make you die?

Yes, really good question. So that's where we've seen some great advances in recent years to understand this biologic process, which really comes down to, you know, we have these super ages where they can make it to, you know, well into their 90s and they never have had an age-related disease, any major disease. They're the rarity. The so-called welderly, most of us are, it turns out, the elderly whereby in our 60s we have one of these diseases. And the reason for this is really interesting because as we age, we have this process called inflamaging. We are much more prone to inflammation in

our body and in our brain. And that's bad for our tissue, our cells, because it disrupts them and can actually kill our cells, no less, you know, create damage. The other process that's interrelated, intertwined, is known as immunosensence. And that is young people's immune system usually is really intact. And it is providing great protection. Whereas as we get older, certainly in the 60s and 70s and beyond that immune system, it's variable. But in many people, it starts to be failing. It doesn't provide the protection. And if in fact, if anything, it's dysregulated. That is, it can be overreactive and be causing inflammation when

we don't want it to, like in arteries or in our brain, or it can just yield to a cancer clone that's just getting going. So the reason why these three diseases do us in or compromise our health span is because of this, basically this unified process of inflammation and immune system. The immune system is what kicks out these inflammation proteins. I mean, they're called like cytokines and chemokines. The cells of the immune system are the ones that are responsible for driving inflammation. And when it's in our body, whether it's because of a bad diet, lack of exercise, poor sleep,

all sorts of things, but also some of us are very fortunate, like the super-agers, because their immune system just holds up beautifully throughout their life, just fine-tuned, you know? So the aging process is very much affected by this interplay, and essentially, it's an immune system story largely. It's largely the immune system is like the main thing that changes when you age that leads to all the other changes that were, or that might affect your health.

Yeah, if you were to look at one system that's really the prominent, the most important driver, this would be it. And the problem, Adam, is if you go to a doctor today, and here it is, 2025, say I want to check my immune system. Good luck. There is no test. Okay. You get a blood count and that basically doesn't tell you anything about your immune system. Only in research labs where you can like sequence the B cells, the T cells, check for all these antibodies and check for functionality. That's the only way we can do it. And we don't have a way except

new recently, and that's one of the advances in the science of aging. There's an immune system clock, which will say, okay, Adam, you know, you're this age, but your immune system clock is that age. And there's gap here. If it's younger than you, that's great. If it's older than the rest of your organs and you, because you have a heart clock, a brain clock, a clock for each organ, then we better be wary of your immune system. It's not functioning like it is.

And that's going to get us to a whole different state in the future of medicine. Because, for example, if you're older and you get the shingles vaccine, it's a twofer. Because now these three really incredible so-called natural experiments in large populations just by chance by a birth date or availability of the vaccine in different countries, in Wales and the UK and Australia. It was shown that if you get a shingles vaccine, not only does it protect you from shingles, but also from against Alzheimer's and dementia. It's like, wow, you know, that convinced me to

get a shingles pair of vaccines. But the reason is, it's not going after the virus herpes that causes the shingles and that it possibly linked to Alzheimer's, what it does is amp up your immune system. Wow. So in the future, if your immune system is starting to show wear and tear and you're just not doing the job, that's the kind of thing we can do. We wouldn't get necessarily give you a shingles vaccine. We might just give you an immune activating vaccine. And wait, so the immune system being activated is also preventing Alzheimer's,

Alzheimer's, cancer and heart disease. So what's the connection between the immune system and Alzheimer's? Because I mean, for I think for a lot of people, Alzheimer's is, is frankly the most frightening of the age related diseases, because I've always sort of felt, Hey, what happens to my body is fine, but my mind is, is that's me, you know? Right. I'm with you.

It is, I think the most dreaded. Yeah. So, um, there's been really big breakthroughs there. Um, and the key here is that you can identify who's really at high risk for Alzheimer's. And I mean, the rest of the people are low risk, but the high risk people, they have a family history, they might have a family history of Alzheimer's. They have a gene called APOE4, then it may be a carrier. They can have a polygenic risk score that you can get from your saliva that will save

your increased risk. And up until now, it was just yes or no. So if you're at high risk, you didn't know if that would be age 98 or 68, right? But now we have another, we have this brain clock, and we also have this specific protein marker, fancy name P-tau-217. What it is is a tau protein. It's a misfolded protein, an amyloid, another misfolded protein. They do get in our brain.

They accumulate in our brain. But now back to the immune system. If you don't react negatively to having some misfolded proteins in your brain, it's not a big deal. You don't go on to get Alzheimer's. But if you have this big inflammation reaction to these proteins, that's when you get destruction of brain tissue and damage. And so, if we get on this, what most people don't know, Adam, is it takes more than 20 years for this process to go forward. So we can get, identify people at high risk early, you know, let's say when they're 50 or even younger, and then

get all over them. You know, we basically test their P tau 217, there's other protein markers. The best thing is though, it responds to lifestyle. So if you exercise, if you have a good weight, you have good nutrition, good sleep, you can bring these markers way down and that should either not just forestall the chance of getting Alzheimer's, but truly prevent it. So we're at this exciting time where we never had this opportunity before.

Wow, that's a lot of like, that is a lot of advances for the last time I have like looked at the causes of Alzheimer's. I know just as recently as a decade ago, it was much more mysterious. I mean, lifestyle changes are difficult for a lot of people, though. I mean, it's not a simple matter for especially folks in their 50s and 60s, right? Who maybe have been working their entire lives, maybe don't have that much saved for retirement, you know, et cetera. That's where a lot of people's lives, their rubber starts to meet the road, right. And exercising more eating, right.

That can be difficult when you're on a fixed income, for example. Right. Well, you're absolutely right. And also, if you just say everybody should do this stuff, people don't do it. But if you say, Mr. Jones, we've detected that you have this high risk for this condition, and this is what we're going to prevent this, we're going to.

Then you get a much better uptake of doing the right things. And most of the things we're talking about for lifestyle, I mean, they're very inexpensive or free. I mean, going for walks, you know, doesn't cost anything, you know, and having a better diet, you could save a lot of money from some of the junk that you buy, perhaps and, you know, going to have to eat it, you know, for bad things. And then, you know, for sleep, that really shouldn't cost you much too to get good sleep health.

You know, the details are, we can get into, but you know, these things are not expensive. That's why these longevity clinics that charge up to $250,000, you know. Right. The things we're talking about are, you know, they're like nothing compared to that. Well, and look, if you can afford $250,000 for a clinic,

you're probably doing pretty okay financially. And that means it's gonna be easier for you to eat some chicken breast and some broccoli and to get a good night's sleep, right? Whereas if you're, you know, getting by on social security and Medicare and, you know, maybe working as a Walmart greeter and, uh, et cetera, later in life, it might be harder to do all those things. Right. So,

so those people might not need to help that much from the and one other point just to emphasize, because I totally agree. It's never too late. You know, it's like, um, if you, if you start adopting, you know, more physical activity, age 70, 80, it helps. In fact, what's amazing is the studies, then there's multiple studies. Let's say you start this age 50, which isn't really that early, but you can get seven to ten years of health span, healthy aging without major disease. That's a lot of extra, like a decade more, you know. But if you do this even at age 70, you're going to eke out more years

of healthy aging. So this is what has been under emphasized is that we know things today. We can prevent 80 to 90% of heart disease and about 50% just with what we know today, no less like I just reviewed for our also knowers, just by really healthy lifestyle behaviors. Well, that's the, I mean, that's been the challenge though for Americans medically for like a century. I mean, look, we've known about eating healthy

and exercising as being cheap ways to, you know, make your life better for a very long time, right? Doesn't make it easier to do it on an individual basis, you know? Like, we can sit here and talk until we're blue in the face, hey, eat right and exercise. And yet, the majority of Americans will not or cannot, right? More likely cannot. And I mean, that is something we have to cannot, right, more likely cannot.

And I mean, that is something we have to face, right, if we care about it on a population level. Yeah, so this is, I think, where there's another adjustments we need to make in our thinking. So one of them is this kind of fatalistic approach that, you know, my parents had these diseases, I'm gonna get these diseases. And we did a really rigorous study in 1400 of these elderly people where, you know, the

average age was 87, and they'd never been sick, there are no medications. And it took seven years to find 1400 of these people. And then we did a whole genome sequence. And what did we find? Basically nothing that's different from them as compared to the elderly people, which are the more typical people in that age or even younger. So we know much of this is not in our genes,

or in our DNA at least. We know a lot of it is a immune system story as we reviewed. And so the real question is, instead of people feeling that, you know, it's not worth taking better care of themselves because they're just kind of destined to have one of these diseases, I think we have learned that there's a path to prevention we never had before. Basically, Adam, it's not just for a century, it's for millennia, like pre-hypocrates. There was this dream that we would prevent the major diseases, but we didn't have the ability to do that. In fact, we haven't done it, right? But now the difference is we have all these layers of data we didn't have before.

From the science of aging, you know, like these clocks and protein markers and genes, we're finally at a point where we can take all the layers of data and using AI, which is I mean software, right? And say, Adam, you know, you have incredible resilience. All your systems are go, except for this, right? And we're going to get all over it and we're going to prevent that. And that I think is what is changed now. We've never, in fact, in medicine, I've been practicing as a cardiologist for, you know, almost four decades now. And we don't prevent much. I mean, we should, but we don't. And for cancer and for Alzheimer's,

we've never really prevented those diseases from occurring because we didn't have the way, we didn't have the means to do it. That's what's different now. So I think that's why it's such an exciting time in medicine. And ironically, it's occurring at the worst time in the US for supporting research. Yeah, because does it feel like just a little bit more research is going to get us over

the hump on some of these diseases that we're making progress and if we make some more that you know, we can come up with some real therapies? Yeah. So here, the fantasy of achieving primary prevention, these big diseases that would never occur in people, we're finally at a point, you know, this fantasy to be, you know, turned into a reality. And it's, as you say, it's just we're right near the goal line to do this. And we have to get the validation that we can do this at scale and for all people, not just for the affluenza, but for all people. And people that need it most are the people who,

you know, are the ones that don't get the right type of, you know, care and attention. But the other thing is the economics of this, just think what it costs to treat people with these diseases. Yeah. You know, treating Alzheimer's, we don't have anything that really does that in a meaningful way. Nothing that reverses Alzheimer's. And cancer, look what we still have to people to go through with cancer, right? And heart disease, the treatments are good, but they're not terrific. And the expense here across the board is just, so the only really smart thing is to prevent these diseases. You know, coming to cures, getting cures is like, you know, a one in a gazillion that we're going

to get this cure that's going to have no side effects and all this, but getting preventions, that's what this should all be about. And we couldn't do it, but we can now. And we just have to follow through. And somehow it's gonna get done. It might not be in the United States, but it's gonna get done. That's the key part, is it might not be in the United States because of A, what's happening politically

to our medical infrastructure because of who's running the country right now. But B, I mean, we have a pretty unique healthcare system here in the United States, that we have a extremely expensive profit-based healthcare system. And of course, you know, even in places like the UK, there's plenty of people making money, but you know, in the United States,

it is one of the largest portions of our GDP is the medical industry. And you hear this argument often, and you also hear it from our FK types, that there's no money in prevention, that the money is in the treatment, not in the prevention. And so I'm just curious what you think about that argument. Is that a piece of why we don't prioritize prevention

enough in this country? Yeah, I mean, we have a very much of an outlier, horrible model for healthcare, and you nailed it. So when I was asked by the UK government to do the review of the NHS, the National Health Service there, I learned a lot about how that country works and the amount of allocation they put into healthcare is a tiny fraction of what

the US does. As are most countries around the world, we are truly the outlier and we have the worst outcomes of all rich countries. So here we have a real interesting situation is in this country, the insurance and the Medicare and our whole system is geared for reactive, not preventive care. The quote prevention is, oh, we want to have you get a pneumonia vaccine, pneumococcus or something very primitive, but not for preventing these diseases, not for that, because everything here is got this motivation of malincentives. I get paid to treat this person's heart attack, cancer, or their mild cognitive impairment. That's how I get paid.

And that's what I'm going to do all these scans and tests and put them in the hospital. That's how our four to $5 trillion system per year is managed. Whereas in other countries, to the north of us in Canada, the UK and so many other countries, they do have an interest in their population because they don't have insurance companies that people can change one year to the next. They are trying to do the care of the population at the lowest cost. And that's a whole different model. It's a, you know, it's a, a Galatarian. It's what we should

have human health. It should be a citizen's right to a human as, you know, that should be everyone should have that And we don't have that and I don't know if we're ever gonna have it certainly not in my lifetime So we have we're very disadvantaged even before This pseudo maja movement make America healthy again. If you want to make America healthy again We would be doing almost everything the opposite of what's happening. But we already had a very poor system to do these things because of the malincentives that are perverse incentives, if you will. Yeah, or sometimes lack of incentive.

I mean, when you talk about how, you know, Americans move from one insurer to another, so none of those insurers really have reason to watch those people throughout their whole lives. What about the millions and millions of people in America who have no insurer at all, have no healthcare at all, and so the first time the medical system ever interacts with them is when they have a horrible problem develops,

or when they become old enough to qualify for Medicare, right, and that's the moment at which the federal government, you know, has an interest in making sure, okay, hold on a second, let's keep the costs down. Let's treat these people in a low cost way. Well, if the federal government was, hey, for instance, what if we had Medicare for everybody? Then the federal government would have an incentive

to stop those problems earlier in life, right, and to safeguard the health of people throughout their entire lives, rather than leaving people. I mean, so many of our societal problems in all respects are because we do not take care of people at the easiest times to take care of them. We do not support them having housing, having a way to make a living, having being able to get around their communities,

all the simple ways that we could be making life better for them, and then those lead to social problems, medical problems, financial crises, that we then eventually have to deal with because now, holy shit, they're homeless on the street. Oh my God, they're dying in the emergency room. But if we had prevented that problem at the earlier stage, it would have been far cheaper.

And yet, for some reason in this country, we refuse to do it. And I'm always baffled why. Is it a problem with our national spirits that we don't take care of each other in the way that so many other countries do? Well, it's a great question, because we've been off track for seemingly forever here.

Yeah. But the interests of each group that have remarkable lobbying power. So for example, the American Hospital Association is one of the top lobbying groups. And here we could get a lot of people they never have to be in the hospital, because we could use, you know, sensors and AI and monitor them home and be like an intensive care unit at home. And that, you know, you could one night in the hospital is a charge

of over $5,000 in a regular hospital room you could buy years of data plans for people and all sorts of technology and Algorithms to moderate home. Why would the American Hospital Association want to do that? Right? And so they they wouldn't want to do that the pharmaceutical industry Alright, so why have this country never? negotiated drug prices all these years? Every other country, they would really take these companies to task and say, you know, why are you charging this ridiculous amount for this cancer drug that gives three months more of life or, you know, this whatever drug?

And the problem here is we just are bowing strong lobbying of the pharma, bio-pharma industry, and the list just goes on of all these insurance companies, very strong lobbying power as well. And they basically have such a chokehold. And because they have no long-term interests in their members, if you will, their employers or their individual members, why would they possibly change their model of actually caring about and preventing diseases? So we don't have anything in our stack of strong governmental lobbying power or government willing.

Like, you know, during the Biden administration, and they said, oh, finally, we're going to seize control of the drug prices. Well, in a way, that was a joke because they did get insulin prices down. The companies that made insulin, they didn't care because they were making these GLP-1 drugs. They knew that they don't need to worry about insulin anymore. And meanwhile, all the other drugs they wanted to move on, it was like over the next 10 years for 10 drugs. Well, this should have been for all drugs, you know, but, you know,

it costs a third or less for any of the costs of our medicines if you go to other countries. So these are just examples of why we can't provide for all our people, all 330 million of them, in an equitable way in this country. ["Deadly Sins"] ["Deadly Sins"] Is there a reason that you think the United States, and I know you're not a historian, but just off the top of your head, I'm curious,

is there a reason that this form of hyper-capitalistic medical industry I'm not a historian, but just off the top of your head, I'm curious, is there a reason that this form of hypercapitalistic medical industry grew in the United States, whereas other countries grew different models? What happened? Yeah, there's probably some really good reasons of how this got entrenched, but I'm not really sure

if I could tell you. We'll get a historian on sometime. Yeah, yeah. I don't want to put you on the spot, but it's so funny how in America you start talking about the problems of our medical system and it's so the question so quickly balloons into, you know, how our entire society is structured and organized, you know, and why are we this type of country rather than another?

I think it's such an irony, though, that again, that the Maha movement, the Make America Healthy Again movement, is actually doing the opposite of the one thing we would need done to make America actually healthy, which is that we need, the government is the only organization in America who is tasked with looking after every person,

and it needs to look after Americans better. And the one part of the federal government that actually did do that was our scientific research apparatus, the NIH and the rest of it, that is one of the best in the world and one of the best things about America. And that's the one thing that they're just, that the one thing they're doing is destroying that.

They're not actually expanding. You know, why isn't RFK Junior talking about, you know, expanding Medicare, right, to cover more people or childhood health or anything like that? No, everything's just the opposite. I mean, the NIH is truly seen as the crown jewel of biomedical research in the world. It had a budget before this administration of $47 billion. And some would argue it could have been much higher for the investment return.

The plan is to take out $18 billion beyond what's already been done. So we're talking about a you know, a huge cut of the research support. And that is what is the engine for, you know, the discoveries, the prevention, the new medicines, 99% of new medicines have come out of NIH funded research, even though the pharma companies, of course, exploit those discoveries. So this is a real problem is that the MAHA movement, which, you know, I like the idea, let's get Americans healthy, but it's totally dissociated from what is being done. And it's

just everything we're seeing now is an illusion. It's or delusionary, because there's no way that that's going to get executed. If you take away vaccines, you take away the mRNA platform, which was used for COVID vaccines, but is used also to prevent, treat cancer, to use for genome editing and gene therapy and all these other autoimmune diseases. Now they want to gut that work, which was a Nobel prize just a couple of years ago for saving millions, tens of

millions of lives during the pandemic. I mean, the kinds of stuff that's happening now is unimaginable. And as you said, the mission of healthier American citizenship, that's great. But the methods of reckless, indiscriminatory cuts of funding, I'd love to see the funding be more efficient. There might well be ways to cut it, but not just a wrecking ball. And I had earlier, many years ago, wrote a book of the creative destruction of medicine. But this is a new book, Adam, that's being written,

The Destruction of Medicine. This is just horrific. Yeah, I mean, we've talked about on this show many times how the mRNA vaccines were an incredible medical advancement and discovery. Like it's, when I learned how they worked, oh my God, we've learned how to use the means by which the human body programs itself

to create an immunity to a disease the body hasn't even encountered yet by sort of slipping just a little bit of basically biological computer code into our systems. Incredible, once you actually understand how it works. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And one of the things that really struck me is,

I feel like 30 years ago, 40 years ago, an advancement like that would have been broadcast much better to the public, would have been shared with the public that we would have seen it as a sort of moon landing moment in the same way that we, I don't know, I thought it was the polio vaccine, right? Why do you think that that didn't happen

in the case of the mRNA vaccine and the pandemic? Well, you, I think, made that point eloquently. That is, this is like the moon shot, the moon landing. It's one of the most, if not the most moment momentous advance in biomedicine of this century. And that is, right in the midst of this pandemic that was such a killer that within 10 months of sequencing the virus, The trials of 70,000 people with placebo control show that, you know, 99% of people are protected. I mean, just incredible. You just don't see that kind of efficacy. Now, of course, it didn't last as we learned. The immunity waned over the course of many months, but it saved the lives because even though the immunity to getting an infection of COVID

was waning, the exposure to that spike protein, that's the only thing, not the virus, but just as you say, the code for the spike protein, enough of that spike protein was inducing immunity to prevent deaths and hospitalizations, which still is the case today. So the point being here is that this save tens of millions of people's lives. And the problem with the messaging is that there's nothing perfect. There's some people who are going to get a reaction to the vaccine, not just the acute phase. I mean, I got sick for a couple of days each time, each shot and boosters. A lot of people got that. But later there could be, in rare cases, an inflammation of the heart,

particularly in young men, or there could be, you know, other serious side effects. But they were exceptionally rare. Like every vaccine we've ever had. I mean, some vaccines like a flu shot, you could get gamma ray, be paralyzed. I mean, we vaccines like a flu shot, you get gamma ray be paralyzed. I mean, we have known that there are rare side effects. But instead, there were mandates, there were the message of these vaccines are perfectly safe. And whenever there were side effects that were being raised, they were, oh, no, that's not possibly linked. And, you know, the point was, let's acknowledge that rarely, ultra rare, there could be some side effects, but the benefits

are exceptionally overriding. So that wasn't handled well. That is the denialism of the side effects, not really lethal side effects, as some, you know, of the anti-vax community claim, but rather these other side effects that they existed, they occurred, but not at the frequency that the anti-vax community was claiming. In fact, anybody who died suddenly during the pandemic, all of a sudden it was, oh, because they had a COVID shot. I mean, just, it got ridiculous. And the rarity that, I mean, how many people died from a shot,

you know, we still don't know if that actually occurred. Certainly, if it did, it sure wasn't at any scale. So the messaging wasn't good. Some of the leaders of public health during the pandemic, they will acknowledge that they could have done better of setting expectations and explaining to people the public is much smarter than most people realize. If you explain it well, here's how we mimic this virus through this message to the body and the immune cells get all pumped up and make antibodies so that you're going to be and your lymphocytes, your B and T cells.

And it's not perfect, but it's pretty darn close. And in fact, most times a vaccine takes eight to 10 years. And when this has been done in 10 months, right in the middle of a pandemic, this is a miracle. So it just doesn't, And, you know, when you do mandates, I understand that that, of course, was deemed necessary to get, you know, the vaccine uptake. But that always gets people, you know, rattled because, oh, they're making me get this vaccine and I'm going to lose my job if I don't get it and that kind of stuff. You know, it should have been

you'd want to get this vaccine because it could save your life or your family's life or your friends, get the vaccine. It's so good. And your chance of a problem is so minuscule. That should have been a better way to handle this rather than if you don't do this, you know, you're on the list, man.

You're in trouble. Yeah, I often think about how the United States is so good at certain sciences, you know, we're good at the physical sciences, we're good at engineering, we're good at medical science. Um, but something that we, uh, do not fund to nearly the same degree is social science is literally understanding people and it sort of seems like a little bit of what happened was, you know, we had the amazing folks at the NIH, you know, Operation Warp Speed, which, you know, is the greatest

achievement of the Trump administration, which, you know, they currently are running away from or never talk about. But it was a genuinely, a genuinely massive achievement. It's like, you know, again, up there with walking on the moon, wearing these life-saving vaccines in 10 months, focusing on the technology, but with a lack of understanding of how to actually work with people in order to convince them to take it,

and understanding of what might happen to the country politically as a result of the mandate, a lack of understanding of just, you know, people in general, or how to bring the care to people, right, like, again, when I visited the NIH, one of the things I was struck by was, oh my God, this is a cathedral to medical science, and yet, there are people in this same city,

in the Washington area, who are dying because they don't have access to healthcare. And that's a problem that our country hasn't solved. And so, it's that distance between our medical technology and our social technology, our understanding of medical science and social science that got us into this problem. And I feel like I've seen very little reflection about that

from scientists or from the medical community in the United States. I completely agree with you on that point. That is, we didn't handle that well. We still are not well positioned going forward. What's happened, unfortunately, is that the anti-science movement, it not only has grown, but now, as you pointed out at the top of this conversation, that it's taken over.

Yeah. I mean, you know, it's just, so it will continue to grow. And there's no antidote. There's no counterforce. So we are in a very unfavorable position. You know, we have that basically there's not going to be this so-called gold standard science that's being used, a term by Trump and others. That's farcical. And added to that is, you know, you know,

gutting all the funding of what is really solid science. At the same time, you have this, you know, negating evidence, you know, making stuff up. You know, a report that comes out, that, you know, is made up of all kinds of fabricated references. This is incredible that we would have to face this at such a time where we could be moving in the right direction. But the messaging, the anti-science community are really good at getting their people revved up. They just know how to do that. And they're so, you know, even though they're a minority, they are, you wouldn't know they're the minority, because, you know, they just take over. And where is our voice?

It was a recent Nature study that showed there's still a lot of trust in scientists. But the problem is they have little to no voice. And I think that's that's essentially true that, you know, we we we sure don't. And we've lost any voice that we had with with it. Now who's running the show? You know, it's even more undermined. Yeah. And especially, you know, the decline of the legacy media,

which is a place that, you know, maybe scientists used to go on 60 minutes more often, right? But that's not what anybody's watching anymore, right? Everybody's watching Andrew Huberman and et cetera, where those more simplistic messages are coming across. And they're presented in a really special way, like the secrets, you know, like the medical doctors, they're just telling you crap, I like the secrets, you know, like the medical doctors, they're

just telling you crap, I got the secrets for you. Yeah. And it sounds so good, you know, that, you know, take this supplement and it's going to, you know, give you years of healthy life and longevity. And, you know, these are the things that your doctors won't tell you, but I know kind of thing. And it's just incredible because people just go for that stuff. As you say, this is not, we're in a time where, you know, TikTok and these various platforms, Instagram has taken over, and people can easily be taken in by that. I mean, they don't know that there's no evidence, there's no data to support anything that they're saying

or very little. The other problem is there's typically an ad mixture of good things, true, and then the completely bogus stuff. And so how do you differentiate, right? Right. But I also think that all of these sort of bullshit artists or alternative medicine practitioners or whatever you say are often giving people something

that the traditional medical establishment is not giving them. It's giving them a, sometimes a sense of care or a, you know, I'm very struck by, an old episode of my old show, Adam Ruins Everything that we did years ago about alternative medicine was one of the most revelatory for me we ever did because we talked to a doctor

who told me that one of the reasons like alternative medicines really do work to some extent is that the placebo effect is real. It really works on your body, but it works because you believe that it's going to work and what makes you believe it's gonna work is you're talking to someone who is treating you with care and with kindness and really listening to your problem and et cetera,

and that makes you believe, and then that makes certain, you know, disease fighting things in your body activate, and that's something that a good doctor will do, a good, you know, evidence-based doctor, but it's something that they often don't. People interact with the medical system and they leave feeling a lack of something if they're able to access it at all. And so there's a gap that, you know, these sort of bullshit artists are able to fill. Does that track for you?

Yeah, let me build on that because you're making a fundamental point here in that there's been such erosion in the medical community for the patient-doctor relationship. Typically, not only does it take many weeks to get an appointment, but when you finally have this appointment, it's very, we're talking about single digit minutes and the doctor typically isn't even looking at the patient. And you have no real relationship. There's no bond. It used to be, decades ago, this was the most important intimate relationship you might have besides your partner in life or your family.

But that's lost largely. Now, what you really highlighted is about care. And, you know, this famous quote from a hundred years ago, Francis Peabody, the secret of medicine is care for the patient. Well, who can care for the patient when you have, you know, seven minutes? Right. Or a new patient, 12 minutes, right? So that's just led to rejection, repudiation of, I don't get anything from my doctor. But when I go on this podcast and I am part of this cult, I mean, they don't know it's a cult, and they feel like this doctor or this person is caring for them, because care is what it's all about. To have another human being that you feel has got your back, that cares about you, that is the

most meaningful thing that you could ask for. Even if that person is not practicing the stuff that's evidence-based, it doesn't matter because I am getting cared for, right? This is so big, and if we don't get that patient-doctor relationship back, we're not gonna get medicine to move forward in a meaningful way. Yeah, if we don't have that personal relationship, including with media figures,

like if we have parasocial relationships with people in the media, and that's what folks have with a lot of these, you know, sort of RFK-aligned people who are doing podcasts, we don't have enough actual doctors who are doing this, who are creating that connection of care. I actually know you talked to this fellow, Dr. Mike, who is a big medical YouTuber, who is evidence-based and does have that relationship with his audience, I can tell.

I know that you're building it yourself. You have a very popular substack where you, you know, write about very, you know, really follow the evidence in a direct way and are communicating with folks and have become a leader doing that. Do you think it's something that's possible that we can have more, more real doctors communicating with folks in this sort of setting?

I hope so. I never lose hope. I'm an optimist, so I hope. But I keep trying to get the people that I'm involved in training and the younger crew to do this. And, you know, it's hard. As much as I try to tweak them and, you know, beg them, you know, the success rate for me to get them to actually show up is low. So I haven't lost that optimism, but we do need it. I mean, I just think about Dr. Mike's 35 years old, right?

This guy has a phenomenal audience and is like telling the truth, right? I mean, what if we had thousands of Dr. Mikes? Sure. A hundred, it would change everything, but he's like a lone ranger. He's like one of the few young doctors who because he stuck to the science

he's now bringing in the He's actually even converting some of the people that were the doubting Thomas's to you know believe back in Real data of the evidence, so I give him a lot of credit. We need so many more we need Exponentially more like him. Yeah We need so many more. We need exponentially more like him. Yeah. Well, let's, I want to make sure we talk a little bit more about the subject matter of your book before we go,

since we are here in a, we are talking to a real doctor who really knows the evidence and the science. Let's take advantage and let's learn a couple of fucking things. So, so when it comes to, when it comes to aging, you say there's all of these longevity companies out there and they're offering

these massive numbers of tests that you can do for very high rates. Is it good to get all of these tests or no? No, no, very simple. Don't do it. Because you're wasting your money, but worse than that, you'll get false positives. Whenever you do a test in medicine, you want to do it because of a pre-test higher probability.

But if you just do tests on a willy-nilly basis, like get a total body MRI, the chance of you finding some nodule in your lung, your liver, or somewhere else that has to get biopsied and have all sorts of other, you know, rabbit hole investigations, this is really bad because the number of people harmed by whether it's unnecessary blood tests, calcium scores for the heart, the total body MRIs, the list goes on and on. The harm ratio, and it's everything is this ratio of harm to benefit, and the chance that you're benefiting is less than the harm. And so this is the real problem. There's so many companies, I reviewed 12 of

them in a recent substack, and they're basically getting every test under the sun. Now, in a way, they're moving in the right direction is having more data for each person so you could forecast what is their vulnerability. But that's not the way to do it. The way to do it is a tiny fraction of these tests, the right test, the right person at the right time. Well, of course, that's not financially a good model. They want to just have everybody get everything. And of course, they catering to the rich. Who could afford to do all this stuff? And they use tactics like this Pranovo company that does a total body MRI. They've had Kim Kardashian and all these celebrities that had a total body MRI says they saved their life and just complete BS, right? But this is their marketing. I mean, they're very effective marketing forces.

So I hope that people from the book will get that there's no reason to do this and that if you're gonna have a test like the one I talked about for Alzheimer's, it's because you're at increased risk and because then you know things line up and then you have a way to if you have a test, and it come back with something that's not actionable, what good is it? Just to cause

you worry the rest of your life? You not only want to have the test that you need for your situation, but one that you can do something about. And that's, of course, what's so exciting about the future of medicine. And that's what super ages really gets into, which is we have a way of action ability to prevent diseases that we didn't have before. And it's a whole new day. And let's get on this. It's a hard thing to tell people, Hey, don't get every test under the sun. It's very natural for someone to look at a pitch saying, hey, get these 20 tests, you'll get all the data on your body.

Most people say, yeah, sure, give me the tests, I wanna know everything. It's a very counterintuitive idea. Well, what if the test gives you a false positive and then you end up getting a surgical procedure you didn't need? And that's gonna happen statistically more likely than you're gonna learn something good.

I love that because it's a counterintuitive point, counterintuitive points are my favorite thing, but it's a little bit hard to tell people that, right? Because most people are gonna say, I wanna know. Oh yeah, no, they have this thing about, you know, more is better when more is less. We've not yet moved into this kind of era of individualized medicine that each of us are unique.

Even identical twins are unique. And the fact is that this idea of doing anything the same for all people is inherently wrong because of our unique status. So that's why not everybody should have all these tests. In fact, only a few of these tests might be justified, you know, in a specific individual. So trying to do this kind of carpet bombing approach or whatever you want to call it, it's just completely fundamentally wrong. And I think I know we can do better than that. I mean, like if you just look at mammography, 88% of women, 88%, will never have breast cancer in their life. So why do every woman is supposed to have a mammogram starting at age 40 or 45, you know, every other year or whatever?

That's crazy because we could identify the people at high risk and say, you know what, you're the ones that should have the mammogram every couple of years, and the others, you know, you might not ever have one at all, or every decade, or, we waste so much because of this idiocy that all of us are the same, and we're only gonna use age, just your age, and then we're gonna do mass screening for colon cancer, prostate cancer, breast cancer. It's just dumb.

We have to do better than this. So yeah, you use this phrase individualized medicine, and this is something I've been hearing for a long time, at least a decade, that this is the future of medicine. And to a certain extent, it just sort of seems natural. Yeah, there's a person in front of you, they have specific symptoms, they have a specific life history.

That's what every doctor should do, is treat each person individually. So how is this a sort of revolution in medicine? That's what it's always billed as. Yeah, I mean it was, the idea was you would know what medicine, what dose you would take by your genes, and there's something to that. And certainly in cancer, by knowing the mutations of your cancer, that can help give you better treatments. But we've never used it like what you and I are talking about today, which is to prevent

diseases. We've never used it. And the reason is we didn't have all these layers of data from the science of aging about what's going on in our brain and our immune system and in our heart arteries and inflammation in our body and all this stuff. We didn't have it. So we couldn't use it in the most important way. And so you're right, this term precision medicine and individualized medicine, it's been around

for 20 years, but it didn't have real legs potential until we had the missing layers of data that we have for the most part now or will imminently. And that's what is a big change now because when individualized medicine prevents the big diseases that are age related, that's when you say, aha, this is really eureka. But you know, we're not there yet. We can, we will be there eventually in the future, at least some parts of the world will be.

Yeah, tell me about, just to wrap us up, you keep saying that we're so close to solving so many of these diseases. Where do you think we'll be if we are able to rebuild our science research apparatus, right, and actually make these pieces of progress, what kind of future could we have in terms of aging? Like, we're not gonna cure death, presumably,

but are we talking about, you know, increasing the human lifespan even more, increasing people's health as they're extremely elderly? Yeah, I don't think, you know, trying to improve, extend lifespan, per se, is of any real reasonable goal if that person's lifespan is enhanced, extended with one of the particularly Alzheimer's, but if they're fighting cancer or they have bad heart failure and, you know, so that is the wrong objective. But if you want to go for healthspan, you know, I see that we will do this.

It's inevitable. This is where AI is kind of the real frontier of AI for healthcare, where it really finally does what it, you know, reaches its actualized potential. And the reason is that if you have a way to start off, you know, in somebody in their 40s or 50s, ideally, but even in their 60s, to say, I want to determine if you're at high risk for anything. And I have not just lifestyle, but also medications that will and some of them exist today, some of them will be coming out in the near term, that we will be at a place where we're going to have lots of superagers. Today, they're the rarity, but in the future, they'll be the most common.

We'll flip this from the elderly to the welderly, right? So, I'm confident that we can do this. The question, of course, is, is there a will? Well, there doesn't seem to be much will when you have the funding, you know, being just completely gutted. So, this is the problem right now is that we're close, you have to validate it. So, you have to show in a study. So, you know, you randomize people to having their risk defined and intervention prevention, and then the other half, you know, business as usual, medicine as usual. And you show that in those people, let's say Alzheimer's, that you got all over them. And by the way, all their markers went in the opposite direction. Their brain clock got younger than their body actual age. Their p-tau 217 dropped by 80%. Their methylation clock changed, you know, years younger. That's the way you prove it in a kind of ideal trial.

And that has to be done. That can be done today. That trial that I'm talking about, it could be. It should be done today. And that's how we start eradicating Alzheimer's disease. Wouldn't that be a dream that's worth pursuing? Yeah, that's an incredible vision. And I hope we're able to actually do it and we come to our senses as a country. In terms of what people can individually do, I'm curious if in your book to wrap us up,

if when folks are aging or if they have aging parents, as I do, what are the steps that they can do individually to make sure that they age in a way that increases their health span? I love that word, by the way. Yeah, I mean, that's the key to health span. It's all about, remember we talked about inflammation. So you wanna have a diet, we talked about inflammation. So

you want to have a diet that doesn't promote inflammation, things like ultra processed foods and minimize it if you can and red meat, and you know, fried foods, things that are just bad for you, you know, it's fine to eat these things, but not on a frequent basis, right? So a diet that's sound optimal exercise that's not just aerobic five times a week, you know, a nice brisk walk or, you know, even more rigorous, but also balance and strength or resistance training. Yes, that's a huge one. People need to get, you know, not just that they get seven hours of sleep, but more importantly,

do they get a good amount of deep sleep? That is the early slow wave sleep that is when your brain is getting rid of all these toxic metabolites that each day you generate. And they, if you don't get rid of them, they cause inflammation in your brain. And you don't want that. So adopting a regular schedule of sleep, trying to stick to that, trying to get, um, as much of the deep sleep, uh, if you track it, these are the big things that will help everyone's health span. But as you pointed out, Adam, it's hard to get everybody to do that until you say, Hmm, you know, we can prevent this disease.

Let's go after this. Yeah. We can prevent Alzheimer's this disease. Let's go after this. Yeah, we can prevent Alzheimer's this way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Incredible. Well, Eric, please tell us, where can people find you on the internet? Well, I'm on Substack, I'm at Ground Truce,

I'm on X, Blue Sky, LinkedIn, you know. I try to, I don't have the presence of Dr. Mike, but I try to do, you know, I try to do Sky, LinkedIn, you know, I try to, I don't have the presence of Dr. Mike, but I try to do, I try to show up and get and share what I learn and, you know, try to pull things together. And I still, I'll never lose my optimism, even though of course it's being challenged right now. Eventually, eventually we'll get to this. Yeah.

You know, we've been through worse periods as a society in terms, we used to not even understand what germs were, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, you know, maybe we're going through a brief period of forgetting some of the medical things we learned as a society, but hopefully we'll be able to get back to it and keep learning and improving our lives pretty soon. I'm with you.

In cardiology, we use this term reactive hyperemia, which is when the blood flow is really diminished, but it comes back, it comes back torrential. Wow. So what I'm thinking is, okay, we're going through a rough patch, but when we get over this, watch out. Ah, I love that metaphor. I love the idea of cardiologists using like blood flow metaphors in everyday life is very

funny to me. Thank you so much for being here, doctor. It's been wonderful to have you. Oh, I really enjoyed it. Thank you. Well, thank you once again to Eric for coming on the show. If you want to pick up a copy of his book, Superagers, you can get it at factuallypod.com slash books.

And any book you purchase there will support not just this show, but your local bookstore as well. If you want to support the show directly, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad free for 15 bucks a month. I will read your name in the credits of the show. This week I want to thank Avaro Eggburger,

Tracy Nicholas Jose Soura, Aaron Harmony, excuse me Erin, Erin Harmony, it's not so hard to pronounce your name, I just have a cold that I'm getting over, all right? Joseph Mode, Rodney Patnam, Greg 0692, Marcella Johnson, and Matthew Bertelsen, aka The Bugmeister. If you want me to read your silly username or your real name at the end of the show, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. We would love to have you. I want to thank my producers, Sam Roudman and Tony Wilson, everybody here at HeadGum for making the show possible. Thank you so much for listening and we'll see you next time on Factually.