Transcript
Dr. Michael Roizen:
We're here at John's party, and John told me you had lost a ton of weight. Is that true?
Chris Wood:
Yeah, 85 pounds actually.
Dr. Roizen:
That's great. Did you use the GLP drug? And one of the great advances that people have been investing in is the GLP-1 drugs, and that's true of a whole bunch of pharmaceuticals that are now coming down the line that are going to change our length of life and our disability rates. Did you use one of the GLP-1s?
Chris:
Yes, I did actually. I started with Mounjaro. My doctor put me on it in January of 2023. So I lost the first 25 pounds basically doing nothing in three months.
Dr. Roizen:
Well, I hope you did resistance exercise.
Chris:
Yeah, so I'd layered things on top of it. Basically, I guess it was I didn't have the motivation to really get this whole journey started until I'd lost those 25 pounds first. And then after that, I attacked the alcohol. I was drinking too much. I love beer and wine and whiskey, and unwinding after a long day's work with a couple glasses. I got used to that, and that was just part of it, part of my life. And then I realized that that was just too much, and so after I lost those…
Dr. Roizen:
We should say this is water.
Chris:
Water, yeah. After I lost those first 25 pounds after the first three months, I cut way back on booze. First down to just a few drinks a week, and then now I'm down to averaging less than a drink a week. So I'll have a couple here at John's party, but then probably won't have another one for a month or so. But then after the booze I kept going down, and I got more motivated and more motivated until I moved into the exercise. And I played college sports, a little bit of college football, and I was an athlete my entire life as a kid. And then work took over when I was in my 20s and 30s, then I just didn't have the motivation to do it.
Dr. Roizen:
So are you doing resistance exercise?
Chris:
Yeah.
Dr. Roizen:
Did you start with that?
Chris:
I started with endurance exercises like running and hiking, and then layered in to try to get the three dimensions, I guess you could say, of fitness. I tried a hit of endurance, stability, and strength. So doing the running for…
Dr. Roizen:
They're really a four, which is any (exercise).
Chris:
Yeah, okay.
Dr. Roizen:
So people have got to start with any (exercise), whether it is just walking or whatever, or the step equivalent. But the key thing with the GLP-1s, and it may be an investible thing, is you've got to do resistance exercise or else you lose muscle mass disproportionately. So when you go on the GLP-1s, we like to actually have you go on a protein supplement, make sure if you're over 50 you're getting more protein than you've ever gotten in your life, which helps turn on the muscle building. But do resistance exercise as well, otherwise you lose muscle. And since muscle's so caloric consuming, you actually will gain some of the weight back. So that's one of the keys in both maintaining, if you will, longevity from it as well as maintaining, if you will, your weight loss is to do resistance exercise.
Chris:
Yes. And I got back into that, thankfully, with the resistance bands and weights, and to do all three things. And yeah, it's worked. It's taken two years to get where I am now, but I really wouldn't be there without…
Dr. Roizen:
So you've probably extended your healthy life expectancy by about six years, because obesity, and we can be frank, if you will, 70% or 68% of America is obese. And if you are overweight, and 33 or 34% is obese, but obesity is the leading cause of heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, memory loss, six cancers, and osteoarthritis. So getting rid of the obesity helps you live at least six years longer.
Chris:
That's great, I feel a lot better too
Dr. Roizen:
Without disability, and you're more active.
Chris:
My BMI went from 37 to 24, and my A1C went from 7.6 to 5.3 or 5.2.
Dr. Roizen:
So you got rid of type 2 diabetes, isn't that a wonderful thing?
Chris:
Yeah.
Dr. Roizen:
That's what modern drugs... We're seeing such an advance. Now, I'm going to ask you a tough economic question. And if you get this right, you're the first person I will have asked that got it right. And I've done this at a number of financial symposiums where they're just... 1992 to 2001, the Human Genome Project was done, which has enabled a lot of the progress. That Human Genome Project was done in private by Craig Venter and at NIH led by Francis Collins. What did it cost?
Chris:
It was about $3 billion.
Dr. Roizen:
You're right on that. Now, the second thing, second part of the question, what does the same amount of information now cost?
Chris:
Isn't it about $100 today?
Dr. Roizen:
$40.
Chris:
Wow.
Dr. Roizen:
So there's been an 8,000-fold reduction in the cost of doing science. That's why we're getting the exponential changes that I think will enable you when you hit 90 to become 40 again with an 80% probability.
Chris:
Yeah, that's just fascinating.
Dr. Roizen:
So this is an amazing time in medicine. For those of us in medicine, it's like we really have a shot of getting you healthy much longer. And then if the longevity revolution takes over with what we say is 14 shots on goal, that you and Patrick Cox are going to discuss, with those 14 shots, there is a real chance of being 40 again when your calendar hits 90.
Chris:
That's amazing. The first time I read that was in your book, The Great Age Reboot, which honestly played a huge part in my longevity journey so far.
Dr. Roizen:
Thank you.
Chris:
As far as diet goes, exercise goes, what to eat when, so I've added a lot of olive oil and nuts, and healthy fats, and took away the saturated fats. And that's the thing too. Saturated fats, I thought red meat was great for you. I thought butter was fine. And it wasn't until I read your explanation of it that it's not the fat itself, it's the inflammatory proteins that come with it, that's the issue.
Dr. Roizen:
So it isn't the saturated fat unless you also have carnitine. Carnitine pills alone don't do it. Carnitine from red meat with saturated fat together turn on the bacteria, and I'm going to go to one of the major advances we had this past week in the microbiome. So the microbiome is the gut bacteria, and we know that if you feed them carnitine and saturated fat, 80% of people produce a very inflammatory protein that's worse than an LDL cholesterol of 250 as far as causing heart disease, stroke, and memory loss. So that's why we say don't eat red meat or processed red meat. So John is cooking it tonight, but we also are having fish. So if I'm effective at this and some other people around here are seeing it, they won't have much red meat. You know the last time I had red meat?
Chris:
When is that?
Dr. Roizen:
Take a guess.
Chris:
17 years ago.
Dr. Roizen:
More than that.
Chris:
25.
Dr. Roizen:
It's 1994. When you read the data, the data was so clear that red meat was a carcinogen. It causes cancer. It also causes heart disease, stroke, memory loss, impotence, anything you want. My job as a doc is to motivate people. It's pretty simple to prescribe a pill, but whether you take it or not, there's another test question. If I prescribe a statin or a blood pressure pill, those are the two that are studied well, and it's free for you, but you have to walk two blocks to pick it up. What's the chance you'll actually pick it up, get the prescription?
Chris:
40%?
Dr. Roizen:
It's 66%. What's the chance you'll still be taking it a year later?
Chris:
That might be maybe 40%.
Dr. Roizen:
It's 33% in total, so that's pretty good. But that's why in America, medicine is so expensive here. We don't take personal responsibility. It's stupid not to take personal responsibility, because if you don't, you end up with a walker. I was on a plane coming over here and I couldn't believe it, there were 17 people in wheelchairs getting on the plane. And you say, "This is crazy." And none of them, I'll bet out of the 17, if they had done what you've done and done what modern medicine allows us to do, it would've been one. And that's why our costs are, whatever it is, 6% of GDP. But just imagine, with this revolution, if we get people to behave, if we make it some form of personal responsibility, we'll be able to lower that cost to the government to 13 or 12.5%.
Chris:
Yeah, the only way forward. We're going to go broke otherwise, won’t we?
Dr. Roizen:
Right. So the longevity, investing in the longevity revolution is good for the country as well as for you as an individual. So let's turn around, you said there were five areas.
Chris:
And you wrote about, I think, 14 areas of longevity that you're very excited about.
Dr. Roizen:
14 areas of research and the mechanism of aging.
Chris:
And I tried to take those and distill them into five different buckets that are kind of general. We don't need to get into all of them here, but one of them is basically…
Dr. Roizen:
Oh, they want us to get into them.
Chris:
One of them is leveraging the body's natural tools and defenses. So we can talk about peptides in that area, even though they're not all bioidentical molecules, but they're all basically inspired by nature and trying to make it broad. And immunotherapy, which is a huge... And that's part of it too, is taking a very broad view of longevity in the sense that we're not just talking about reversing age with these new cutting-edge technologies that nobody's heard of, we're talking about managing chronic conditions better and with new technology.
Dr. Roizen:
So obesity, hypertension, arthritis, cancer, the death rate. And should I ask you another question?
Chris:
Sure, absolutely. Yeah.
Dr. Roizen:
Okay. You're on such a roll, you got it perfect so far. If we had the same death rate from heart disease as we did in 1970, how many more people in America would've died last year?
Chris:
500,000, that's exactly right.
Dr. Roizen:
I can't believe it. I have never had anyone ever, you should go to a casino. But anyway, so that's right. So that's how great the progress has been with poor lifestyle choices and not doing the medicines the way we should. I blame doctors for not motivating the patient well enough. But the second thing is there's a whole raft of news, so cancer is getting to be that same way now. So how many extra people would've died last year if we had the same cancer death rates as we did in 1992? So it took till 1992 that we started to see progress with cancer.
Chris:
2 million?
Dr. Roizen:
No, no, 150,000. Okay, you finally got one wrong, so you're entitled. But it is increasingly getting better and we're getting earlier detection. So one of the things you talked about was immunotherapies, and they're incredibly expensive now, but they don't need to be. So I'm going to just ask you another question. The same GLP drug, Mounjaro, that you probably paid over $500 a month for, what does it sell for in 10 times the beginning dose? So just imagine a tenfold reduction in costs. What does it sell for in Great Britain, and they make a profit on it, Eli Lilly does?
Chris:
100 bucks.
Dr. Roizen:
$95, that's right. So I can't believe you got that.
Chris:
I'm back on track now.
Dr. Roizen:
So it's like $9 a dose. It’s ridiculous that they're charging, the wholesale price is $449 or something like that. So there will be competition, that's just a peptide.
Chris:
Yeah, that's Eli Lilly, and Ozempic is Novo Nordisk. And it makes sense to…
Dr. Roizen:
And you're probably going to tell people in the letter about a bunch of other companies that are coming along with drugs that may look even better.
Read more about Transformative Age
Chris:
Yeah, exactly. But it does make sense to look at these bigger companies too, because yes, obviously we want to invest in a lot of the cutting-edge stuff, the tiny little micro-cap with amazing technology. But you don't want to fill your portfolio with those, because it's going to be too risky. So we're breaking it up into three separate buckets of investments where we're going. One of them is going to be these high-risk. pre-revenue companies with this amazing technology of these micro-caps and small caps. Then we're going to add in some more medium-risk, pre-profit, but revenue-generating companies that are small caps and mid-caps. Then we’ve got some big dogs like the Lillys and the Nova Nordisks where…
Dr. Roizen:
So we've now gone over one category.
Chris:
Of area of research?
Dr. Roizen:
Yeah, well in your five buckets.
Chris:
Oh, so sorry. Yeah, so it's five areas of research in three buckets, it's a little complicated, but it's just how I've been thinking.
Dr. Roizen:
Go ahead. What's the second bucket?
Chris:
Manipulating cells and genetic material.
Dr. Roizen:
So that's CRISPR-Cas9.
Chris:
Yes.
Dr. Roizen:
And there was a breakthrough this week in using AI with CRISPR-Cas9 to reduce the error rate of, if you will, gene editing by 95%. So amazing, so that's an offshoot company that you'll probably talk about.
Chris:
And yeah, going back to why it's important to invest in some of these bigger companies too, because some of this stuff isn't investible quite yet. But if you're following the space and you're being smart about it, managing your risk by going big companies and small companies and everything in between, you get a better balanced portfolio. And plus the big guys are going to be buying a lot of the small companies and partnering with them, so you get the exposure to the cutting-edge tech that way too.
Dr. Roizen:
Now, does stem cells fit in that bucket or a different bucket?
Chris:
So I'd say, yeah, I think that one, it fits into that bucket. The other three are harvesting zombie cells or proteins and rebooting the body.
Dr. Roizen:
So harvesting senolytics, like therapeutic plasma exchange, is a big area for that.
Chris:
Senolytics, exactly.
Dr. Roizen:
That's the one thing that's been shown in randomized control trials to reverse, not just slow the progression of, but reverse Alzheimer's dementia.
Dr. Roizen:
I want to go back one though, when you said stem cells with the other breakthrough?
Chris:
Yeah, manipulating cells and genetic material.
Dr. Roizen:
So I'm an advisor, so I should say the conflict to (unintelligible 23:08) pharmaceuticals, which in the animal model regrows stem cells, and in human cells and culture increases telomere length, which is why we run out of stem cells. So we should say we have cells that repair our cells. Every cell in the human body can get repaired by a stem cell. That's where we came from, stem cells. So none of these areas are that far away. Okay. So I interrupted, we've gone through three areas. What's the fourth?
Chris:
Rebooting the body's instruction manual. So epigenetic switches, which you go a lot into in the book, The Great Age Reboot, which was actually very motivating for me too, to get my butt exercising a lot. Because being able to, I think how you put it was you only have, what, 1500 genes on at any given time? And you basically, with your behaviors, you can control 1200 of them. And also basically how your body decides which ones are off, have I butchered that too much?
Dr. Roizen:
No, you did it perfectly. So when the Human Genome Project started, they expected to find 300,000 genes based on the amount of DNA in each person's nucleus, but they only found 22,500. And only 1,500 of them were on, meaning producing proteins at any one time. And they said, "What's the rest of the DNA?" Well, they called it junk DNA. But eight years later with the ENCODE Project, a group of scientists from the US and Japan and Asia and Europe found out that they were switches. You have more DNA in switches than you do in genes. And the switches go between the protoplasm and the cytoplasm and the nucleus, and they control which of your genes are on and your choices. So when you exercise, if you get this one right I'm quitting asking questions.
So when you exercise, you turn on a gene where? What does your muscle do when you exercise?
Chris:
Like physically?
Dr. Roizen:
When you're lifting weights.
Chris:
It tears slightly, right?
Dr. Roizen:
It tears. And what happens then?
Chris:
Sends in…
Dr. Roizen:
You turn on a gene that repairs it. You repair. When you jump, you create a little fracture in your bone and you repair that by building the bone stronger. But the muscle does something else. So this is the test question, because it's in The Great Age Reboot. Let's see, you read it pretty well, I’ve got to admit. So what other gene does muscle turn on, muscle exercise turn on?
Chris:
Doesn't it boost brain neurotrophic factor?
Dr. Roizen:
Right, it turns on irisin, which is a small... And the way we know about irisin is because again, UC San Francisco and MIT Mass General patented the same day, filed the patents the same day for irisin. So one of them or both will get some revenue and you'll find an investible company. But anyway, and you say, why do we turn on a gene in the muscle when we do exercise? That's the test question that was the tough one.
Chris:
And why do we do it, I don't know.
Dr. Roizen:
Muscle memory. When someone attacked us, we had to learn how to avoid it. So running in a different pattern or lifting something up, so your muscle learned. That's teleologic, we don't really know the answer. So that's four areas, what's the fifth?
Chris:
Rebooting the body's power sources. So brown fat and mitochondria were the two I thought of when putting that together, obviously mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cells, but there’s a lot more going on.
Dr. Roizen:
So does GLP give you more energy? Do you have more energy now than you did?
Chris:
I definitely do, yes.
Dr. Roizen:
Yeah, so you're not killing your mitochondria with too much food. So what's the worst day in America for your mitochondria?
Chris:
Thanksgiving.
Dr. Roizen:
That's right. It's either Super Bowl Sunday or Thanksgiving where we overeat. Now, the breakthrough is in one other area. Maybe we can fit it in in the protein area, which is your microbiome. So your microbiome is that thing that we said when you have red meat, it creates an inflammatory protein. It turns out your microbiome, when you eat food, you're not absorbing that food to a great degree, it's going to your bacteria. And the bacteria eat it up, and then you eat the bacterial poop. Probably not a perfect thing, but we ought to learn that. But it turns out the breakthrough this week was that there are a, what we call parasite bacteria. They need a specific substance, protein produced by a different bacteria, that produce a, if you will, a small amount of protein that allows the bacteria to produce either healthy proteins for you that decrease mental illness, that decrease brain dysfunction or abnormal proteins. And no one has known that they're these really tiny amounts of weird species of bacteria that are key for what proteins you produce. So that was the breakthrough this week.
Chris:
That's fascinating.
Dr. Roizen:
So again, someone's going to patent that and you're going to find it in a vegetable company.
Chris:
Absolutely. Yeah, of course. That's how it works.
Dr. Roizen:
Yes. So the fun of my area is learning about the research, and you have more fun making money off that.
Chris:
Trying to help people make money off it. Yeah, exactly. I love learning about the research too, I wouldn't just read your books. They are entertaining in and of themselves, but just the knowledge imparted and the motivation that I got out of it was really helpful for my own personal longevity journey. I think that kind of stuff can really help a lot of people.
Chris:
This was a great conversation. Thank you so much for taking the time. And I think it's time to maybe go against some of the healthy things we said today and have a beverage, alcoholic beverage perhaps, or maybe not. Or maybe some meat.
Dr. Roizen:
No red meat.
Chris:
No red meat though, no red meat.