← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Life Is About To Change Forever: Immortality, AI, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Crypto & Economic Collapse | Dr. Greene PT 2
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- [00:00]
Dr. Bill Green
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Dr. Bill Green
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- [00:46]
Podcast Host
Welcome back for part two with Dr. Bill Green. As we start targeting the different therapeutics, whether it's cell therapies, whether it's gene editing, what do you think is going to be the consequences of that over the next, let's say, decade? Do you have a near term target that you think that we're going to be able to meaningfully hit? Is it life extension? Is it health span extension? What do you think is more near
- [01:16]
Dr. Bill Green
term in the, in the spirit of, of breaking big problems up into solvable chunks? I think in 10 years there's no question that we're going to have discovered some more of those fundamental simple ground truths that create the complexity of biology. We're going to understand some things that we don't understand now. We won't have observed them yet, but we will. And we will use that to look at in a new way the approach to some diseases and to some processes that lead to disease. So in 10 years we'll know more in a fairly fundamental way. And two, we will apply that to new sorts of approaches to a variety of diseases, of aging and processes of aging that I think for sure. And that's the chunk that evolution can bite off today. Now we're focused on much more than just that. We're looking beyond 10 years. We're looking at the long term. What that turns into, what that 10 years worth of work turns into is new therapies in development for new definitions of disease. So that's where we get to some of the interesting things that really people care about that affect, you know, what happens when I go to the doctor today or how do I think about going to the doctor? I think within 10 years we'll think about going to the doctor differently. We Will start to really move from, if I feel good, I don't go to the doctor. Oh, I feel sick, I go to the doctor. Now it's kind of too late for a whole bunch of things, but we can try to stop or reverse whatever bad thing is happening today. But in the intervening time, a whole bunch of things have happened to us that we probably didn't want to have happen. I think we will, within 10 years, start to really see a shift to thinking about our health as a continuum to saying that story in our mind. I don't want to look in the mirror and see wrinkled skin, so I'm going to put sunscreen on today. We're going to be able to take that approach in so many more ways, not because it's a good idea, but because we'll have actually shown people that it makes a difference. I think that's what we need. That's what we need to do to make that leap is it's one thing to say, eat your vegetables, get enough protein, exercise, get enough sleep. We all know those things are helpful. We all know those things have a meaningful impact in your health span. And yet we don't always do them, in part because it feels hard, but in part because I want to see tomorrow the results of what I did today, not I want to see in 30 years the results of what I did today. So we're impatient. We all are. We should be. I think within 10 years, we will start to really see this fundamental research into aging biology start to yield both opportunities for drug development, but also approaches to treating people that will give people more of that aha moment in a relevant time frame. And so it will seem today what seems today sort of unnatural for a lot of people to think about, well, if I do the right things today, I'll be better in 30 years, but tomorrow I'm just going to feel tired or that I didn't get that donut or whatever to give them something that they can feel, maybe not tomorrow, but next year, they can see. And that's where we talk about this geeky thing. We need biomarkers for disease. We need to be able to do clinical trials and have intermediate outcomes, things that we can measure in blood that will predict diseases of aging later. But they're more important than just clinical trials. They're important for people because just as today we can measure your cholesterol and say, gee, your cholesterol is really high, we kind of know that if you don't do anything, you going to be at higher risk of this. Later. So really we should do something about it. We need more of those, and aging research will give us more of those things to work with. And to the extent we can show that they're predictive, that they. That they help us break some of the rules, then we'll have a mindset of, I want to do these things today, whether it's take a supplement or make a lifestyle change or go to the doctor and say, let's do a survey of the. Of the aging diseases that I might be susceptible to and not just feel depressed about it, but have something to do about it. That's. That's what we can do. I think we can move there. We can start moving there in 10 years, and over the next 20, 30 years, which isn't that long, we'll really have some things.
- [06:33]
Podcast Host
And so I. It's my understanding you guys are funded for 20 years. At the end of that 20 years, what would you expect the average life expectancy to be? And before you answer that, I'll give you some stats. In 1900, the average life expectancy was 47 years in the U.S. as of 2023, the average life expectancy is 79 years. That's an increase of almost 70% in 100 years. What do you think we can do in the next 20?
- [07:05]
Dr. Bill Green
I'll give you a couple answers to that one left. In a relatively perfect world with people going to the doctor and doing all the right things, that average lifespan will inevitably inch up. It will, because we'll take care of ourselves. We'll edit ourselves to the extent we can, we'll prevent chronic disease to the extent we can, and an average life expectancy will move up now by what percent?
- [07:39]
Podcast Host
So over the last, I don't know, five or six years has been 0.08% per year, with a couple down years thrown in the mix for good measure, but pretty small amount.
- [07:49]
Dr. Bill Green
Well, I was going to measure that. I was going to add that what can change that is we can do things to ourselves that will definitely lower that number. So I can't give you a prediction for what the average lifespan will be in five years, because I can't tell you whether we have created a new pathogen that wipes us out or whether we've all decided to stop exercising or whether, for that matter, we cure diabetes. Like those are things that will meaningfully affect these curves. Back to the speed limit idea, though, personally and frankly, Hevolution isn't concerned with, in and of itself for its own purpose, extending the theoretical maximum lifespan. There is some presumably theoretic maximum lifespan. Humans haven't lived beyond the 120s. There's probably some number, and I don't know what it is, that is the, in, in the absence of a wholesale jellyfish like re restarting some. Some point at which basically something stops working and beyond our ability to fix it. So there's some, there's some theoretic maximum lifespan. I don't know that we're going to change that in 10 years or 20 years. We might, it may or may not be important to do so. It's vitally important that we change health span the percentage of our lives that we're living in. Relative health as opposed to relative decline.
- [09:32]
Podcast Host
Why is that vital?
- [09:34]
Dr. Bill Green
That is vital because. So average human lifespan is expended from 49 to 60, 70 something. True. But today, one in three people is living with multiple chronic diseases. 20% of people living with, I think three or more, and that number is going up, not down. We're spending a larger percentage of our time living with chronic disease. So we're adding years, but in one way, in one sense, to what end? Now, as an individual, look, if you live to 90 and fall off Mount Everest right before the summit at the age of 90, you probably feel like you had a pretty good life. But if you live to 90 and the last 30 years of your life, you're in and out of the hospital, you have multiple diseases, you can't do the things you want to do, you can't work, that's no good for you. And it's also really no good for society and civilization. The big picture, the biggest picture is across the planet, people are living longer. That's good news. Also, fertility rates are dropping, people are having less babies. And you put those two things together and there's no. I'm not editorializing. I'm not, I'm not. I'm giving the news, not the weather. That's just true. As, as that happens, a whole bunch of the assumptions on which we've built everything have to come into question. We've built everything we do on the assumption that there's lots of young people eager to get into the job market and they're productive and, and make money and support older people. And then they're. There's older people and they kind of leave. What happens when there's fewer young people coming into the job market, into the productivity market, broadly speaking, and more people not leaving? Well, one thing we got to think about is, are we. I mean, I'm not an ageist and I'm not accusing anyone of being an ageist, but are we kicking people to the side of the curb at 65 and saying you're done? Well, we know we're not doing that. But to say something more rational, how are we ensuring that as we age as a people that we can remain vital, productive, working, producing, paying taxes, all the things that we want to do? Well, if we're sick and have multiple chronic diseases that impoverish us financially, emotionally and physically, we're not going to be able to do that. So it is in my mind, absolutely vital that we improve healthspan because I need it, you need it, children need it, and society needs it. We have to keep people productive and vital. We, and we want it. That doesn't necessarily, one doesn't need to extend the theoretic maximum lifespan to do that. It's a different approach. We have to stop the ravages of aging without having to stop aging itself. And that's what we're really concerned with. And that, by the way, is where I think we can have real impact in the 10, 20, 30 year timeframe. We can make a real impact here if we do it. If we bring together scientists, investors, companies really exploiting the science that we're discovering and other stakeholders, we have to deliver this to people. And we certainly can't be having a mindset that, well, we'll figure out a way to do this for one person at a cost of a billion dollars. I mean, that's exciting, I guess, for that one person. But this is a, we're a civilization that's global. We're societies that are global and evolution is absolutely concerned with global accessibility. So we need solutions that are broadly applicable. But if we can do that, and I'm sure we can, we'll have an impact globally. That's really big and, and it's going to take all of us. It's, it's not. I mean, Hevolution is really set up to be a convener, a catalyst to bring attention to this, to put capital to work at the pain points and to, and to jump start and bring in additional capital. And that's across the value chain, if you will, from new scientists with new ideas to starting new companies which, which we're going to work on, to investing in companies that exist, to bringing more investors into that space and showing them it's a fun pool to swim in and a safe place to invest, and then getting those therapies through clinical trials and thinking about regulatory and commercial frameworks and delivery frameworks to Think about prevention medicine more forthrightly than treatment medicine. So we're concerned with all those things. And as we develop, the best way to. To. The best way to create that change isn't to browbeat people into believing. It is to show people why it matters to them, to give them tools that they want to use for themselves. And that means discovering more stuff, breaking some rules, creating new drugs and getting them delivered to people.
- [15:16]
Podcast Host
Yeah, I think that is a really good way to get people to care is to make it tangible in their own lives. Even something as stupid simple as if you reduce the inflammation in your body, you will feel so different. That's one of the things I wish if I could snap my fingers and give people would be just to show them what it feels like to not eat sugar. When you break that addiction to sugar and you no longer get headaches because you're hungry and you don't get grumpy because your blood sugar has dropped and you don't feel inflamed and your joints don't hurt, it feels awesome. And you end up not wanting to go back down that path. Another thing, if I could give people a glimpse into is in terms of getting them to take this stuff seriously. And this is what you were speaking to. But just to say it really concisely, the pyramid's about to flip. So we have always had more young people than old people. And so you had this huge young base, and people died off as they got older. And the retirement age was 65 because 90% of people were dead at 60. And so what you were effectively saying is the vast, vast, vast majority of people are going to work until they die. So you're going to contribute to a system to which you're never going to remove anything from the system. And cool, we're in a good spot. The problem is people keep retiring at 65, but they live 279. You now have a problem. And as we increase the chronic disease burden that people are able to carry now, all of a sudden you're staying alive. But as you said, you're in and out of the hospital. You're a massive drain on the system. And I'm going to be directionally correct, if not it, precisely accurate, when I say in something like the next 10 to 20 years, 2/3 of our GDP will go to healthcare. That is completely unsustainable, especially when you look at the debt crisis that we're in now. This is fun to have this conversation with you, somebody that really understands the macroeconomic climate. And so getting people to understand that this isn't just a health crisis, of the disease burden that people are carrying due to modern lifestyle, but this is also crisis. When you've got so much global debt, you've certainly in the US you've got so much money printing, known as monetizing the debt, where we're basically saying, ah, it's all good, we'll just keep printing, literally making them up more dollars, more dollars, more dollars. And you end up in a position where you've got healthcare that's draining your gdp, but you've already got servicing the debt that's draining your gdp. And the only way that you have to address it is to print more money, give people stimulus checks, constantly flirting with inflation. And as you push that too high, you can obviously end up in an extremely dark position where if you get into even just radical inflation, forget hyperinflation where the dollar becomes meaningless, where you're just at, you know, 15 to 20% inflation, that's real nightmare scenario. And now you increase what's known as the Gini coefficient, where you've got the discrepancy between people that are rich and people that are poor just becomes so extreme and now you the division reaching really extreme proportions. And so when you look at somebody like Ray Dalio, who for people that don't know him, nobody has made more money betting on the fact that they understand where the world is going than Ray Dalio built the largest hedge fund in the world. He's a global investor. He spent over $100 million just assessing the last 500 years of history and the debt cycle that we go in and how predictable all of this stuff is. Normally when we get into the kind of DEB numbers that we're talking about now and there is another rising global power like we have, it almost always ends in war, something like 65 to 70%. It's ended in a hot war. Ray Dalio has upped his estimate of a global war to 50%. When I look at the things that are going to exacerbate that, I know most people are going to put climate as the number one. I'll say debt is probably number one. Number two is going to be the increased burden of health span not being increased at the rate that disease burden becomes a problem. And now you have because of demographics, you've got this flipped pyramid and you've got no way to combat it. So when I look at what you guys are doing at evolution becomes urgent. Urgent.
- [19:55]
Dr. Bill Green
Couldn't agree more. I've often said to my colleagues when they ask why am I doing this? That the health span crisis is the climate change crisis of human biology. It's that big a deal. I agree. Now we could look at that and sketch out a fairly dark future. And there are futurists who do that. And it's relatively straightforward to say a lot of debt, emerging powers, a lot more debt. We're spending a lot of money on debt service and healthcare, crowding out other things, drain on gdp, printing too much money. Those do potentially follow one another. So one can walk down the path of that fairly dark future. I have to say I think one should be as an investor, very clear eyed, but to be a venture capital investor, you have to be an optimist. You just have to be. So I look at that and I see tremendous opportunity. I see an opportunity that hasn't ever existed.
- [21:09]
Podcast Host
So let's start with what exactly is that opportunity?
- [21:11]
Dr. Bill Green
I'm going to tell you, let's start with people. People are living longer and we keep talking about the problems of chronic disease. I think about it every day. But what about the opportunity in that? People do live in their own heads. Our minds evolve just as our bodies do. And as we get older, assuming we can keep up with cognition and we don't get neurodegenerative disease, we know that, for example, things that we call judgment, wisdom, get better as you get older. Now we know that the frontal lobe, which is important in humans, is one of the things that distinguishes humans from primates, isn't fully developed till you're 30 or 40. So as humans live longer, there is potential for human insight and human capacity that we haven't fully unlocked yet. So there's things that we can't predict what would happen if our workforce were made up of people with quantifiably more wisdom and judgment than it is today. I'm not dissing the workforce today, but that might unlock some pretty interesting opportunities. So I think there's opportunity to affect the macro by addressing healthspan. Also to come back to the dark economic future. Look, I worry about those things too. On the other hand, to take off my biologist hat for a moment, the US dollar is backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government. It's not backed by gold in Fort Knox or silver in Nevada anymore. So to the extent that we, it's really important that we believe that the United States is the most productive nation on Earth and the biggest engine of creation of wealth and opportunity and productivity on Earth, which it is, to the extent we believe it, then we Live it just as when you start a company, the odds are the chips are all stacked against you. But people do it because they believe and they believe and they work hard. And all of a sudden, maybe not all of a sudden, maybe it takes a little while, they build stuff and create stuff. We as a people in the United States can keep creating stuff and building stuff, focusing on actually doing real things, and that becomes reality, that becomes the strength of the dollar to an extent. And then of course, people around the world have to believe it. For the dollar to continue to be in the reserve currency of the world, that's important. I personally, there's something we haven't talked about yet. I personally am not as bullish on cryptocurrency currency as some others are because I actually really like the dollar being the reserve currency of the world. I like people believing the United States is something special economically and productively because I really don't want to see people saying we don't need dollars anymore. Because then that dark future of we got a lot of debt, it's going to get bigger. There's $52 trillion of unfunded pension and retirement mandates globally as it is today. And the bottom of that iceberg of debt is not going to get smaller as we get older. That becomes more of a real problem, not a theoretic problem. If we say, well, currency doesn't matter, all those dollars are just pieces of paper, that's a problem. And I don't want that future. And I don't think we, we're, I don't think we're condemned to that future. I think entrepreneurs, regular folks, people go to work in the real world, people go to work, they're productive, they buy houses. We need to, we need to make sure that that opportunity is available as broadly as possible. For sure, that's not just a good idea, it's really important. And we need to make sure that people continue to believe that there's a reason to keep doing those things. And if we do, I'm actually pretty optimistic about our economic future as well as our health future.
- [25:55]
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- [26:56]
Podcast Host
Seems pretty inevitable that the economy will right itself eventually. The thing that I don't think people take into consideration is that economic bloodshed cares not about the individual. It's perfectly happy for there to be a 10, 15 year period of just absolute agony for everybody and then you come out the other side and you're fine. Even if there is a hot war, the hot war will eventually end. And so the bad news is that going through that even a five year period when you're living it on the ground is an interminable amount of time. It's just unbearable.
- [27:35]
Dr. Bill Green
And given look at 2008 for sure, much less. I mean, sure, the Great Depression, but we don't remember that. We weren't there. We were there for 2008 and it was really scary and really painful and it didn't care who you were. I agree. Correct.
- [27:51]
Podcast Host
So my thing is, look, I1, I don't think it takes any energy to be pessimistic. I think it takes a lot of energy to be optimistic. I think optimism is the right place to put your energy. As a 20 plus year entrepreneur, I know what it means every day to wake up and be like, wow, the odds are stacked against me and yet I'm going to show up and just play my guts out. But at the same time, I have learned as I have gotten older and wiser is that to understand the context you're living in so that you can play the game well. I think life is a winnable game that isn't just money, but money is a part of it. And anybody that blinds themselves to that I think is very foolish. And so to understand where we are in what is really a pretty predictable cycle I think is very important. No reserve currency has lasted much more than 100 years and depending on where you start the clock, we're somewhere between 70 years and like 115 or something. So it ain't going to last forever. So now let me ask you, you brought up crypto. I didn't know if you'd be well versed in crypto. Do you think, even though I know you don't want it now, do you see it as an inevitability? And if it is not an inevitability, what is it that draws people to it now in this moment, even if they're just the obscure?
- [29:15]
Dr. Bill Green
You said. You said the most correct thing just now that you've said all day. I am not an expert in crypto. That is. That is absolutely true. With that in mind, I didn't say I don't want it. I think it exists, and I think it has a role. The future that I'm not excited about, not sure whether it's going to happen or not. But the future I'm not excited about is that sovereign currencies become irrelevant and that only crypto matters. That presents, I think, a lot of uncertainty and upends a lot of assumptions on. On which all of us are living our lives. That could be a pretty big dis. Pretty terrible displacement. So I'm not anti crypto. I'm anti a future where nothing matters, because I'm an optimist. Now, what's the attraction today? Gosh, that's a great question. I think to some people, it's getting something for nothing. I'm going to go mine Bitcoin, and I'm going to essentially get something for nothing. Gold rushes are relevant. Humans are attracted to that. Okay, we're not going to stop that. But let's remember in the gold rush in 1849, very few prospectors got rich, but many enduring fortunes were created by selling picks and shovels. So as currency is digitized as national barriers to economic activity continue to fall, irrespective of any government wanting to change that, let's pay attention to who's selling the picks and shovels. How do we create an ecosystem that allows for crypto to exist and create opportunity from that? And I don't have the answers because I'm not an expert, but I think there's. I think that's attractive to people and should be and attractive to entrepreneurs. And there are things beyond exchanges that can be created and built, businesses that can be created and built, that. That encompass and maybe even improve digital currencies. So that I think is. Is attractive and interesting.
- [31:51]
Podcast Host
Yeah, crypto, to me, is a very interesting use case. I'm intrigued by your reaction to not wanting there to be no sovereign currencies. I don't know how I feel about it. Is the honest answer. I'm very much not a. Oh, just rip the band aid and go entirely to cryptocurrency. I think it's. I like living in the U.S. the U.S. is predicated on a strong government having power that they can project into the world, being financially strong. All of those things are amazing and I love it the most. And I'm perfectly happy to have a government. The problem is going back to how much of this stuff is predictable. So humans work in a certain way. Again, just to bolster my own argument that we're living in a simulation. We are born of a simple set of rules and because of that human behavior. There's a great quote. Any one man is. This is a paraphrase. Any one man is a mystery. But as a totality they are a mathematical certainty. I think any individual human is near impossible to predict. But when you step back, all of a sudden humans become really predictable in their behaviors and there is yet to be a government that, that did not print their way out of problems. And eventually that stops working and you just get so much debt that there has to be a reset. And it's just we are so perfectly marching down Ray Dalio's six phase cycle. The sixth phase being total collapse. Ray Dalio puts us in phase five and a half, which is so deeply disconcerting. But it seems pretty self evident given the amount of debt that we're taking on. So when I look at that, I ask myself, when I think about crypto, I ask myself, myself one question. Will tomorrow be more or less digital than today? And the answer is more. Because every kid that's born into a world that is increasingly digital, that just becomes de rigueur for them. It is. It's just of course to them, buying an outfit inside of a video game is as meaningful as the outfit that they buy in their real life. That's just self evident. They don't even think about it. What do you mean they wouldn't understand? Like, oh God, I forget who said this, but they, their kid asked them for V bucks, which is the dollars inside of Fortnite. And the parent was like, why do you want that? It's not real. And their answer was, what do you mean it's not real? They, it wasn't even like a challenge. They just didn't understand what they meant by the statement. And so as that happens, those kids will then raise kids that are even more digital than they are. And as things go digital, everything we care about, including money, is going to become digitized by Google. Now the question is, what's a darker future where the government controls the digital currency and they can track every dollar you spend. And if they don't like the way you've done something or spent money, they'll just stop you. Or one where it's sensor resistant and no one can stop you. Now the bad news is people in crypto want me to be. Oh, crypto is seizure proof. It's not. It might be seizure resistance resistant, but if a government comes to me and says, I'm locking you up forever unless you give me your code, I'm giving them my code. So I don't understand people's pushback on that. That is self evident, but it is harder for sure to censor. And I think that that is ultimately a good thing. But I also don't want a world that just flips on a dime. The slower the transition, the happier I will be. It just gives everybody time to acc. Have you been paying attention what's going on in Argentina?
- [35:40]
Dr. Bill Green
A little bit.
- [35:41]
Podcast Host
Be very interested to see how this plays out. Like you, I have not paid super close attention, but one of the things that the guy that was just elected cites is that that basically when you monetize debt, you are stealing from people. And so with all the money printing going on, something like two thirds of all the money that's ever existed was created in the last, I don't know, whatever, three years. It's really pretty startling.
- [36:08]
Dr. Bill Green
Well, look, I think what we really need, speaking of living in a simulation, I think we need Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton to come and take a look at this and give us their perspectives. Right?
- [36:19]
Podcast Host
Can you channel their perspective?
- [36:22]
Dr. Bill Green
I don't know that I can, but I'd really like to hear it. We were, of course this, this conversation happened in the early 20th century around the gold standard. You can only print as many dollars as you have gold because someone decided gold was valuable and important. And then we changed our mind. And to your point, I guess it works until it doesn't work, but it really worked. So no, debt isn't the right answer. Infinite debt isn't the right answer. Which would tell someone like me that there's some optimal amount of debt and one can look over time and say, oh, too much debt, not enough debt, monetizing debt. Those are all good arguments. I agree with you though that one of the great things about humans and civilization, it, with some notable course corrections, it sort of moves forward. We're not going back to the gold standard unless something really bad happens. And we're not stopping the digitization of currency unless something really good or really bad happens. So I agree with you. The question is what do we do about it? How do we adapt to it? Not unlike climate change, I guess you got two choices. We can say thanks Earth, it's been great and create civilization on Mars, or we can figure out how to adapt to the reality the climate's changed, the climate changes, it's always gets warmer, it gets colder and our biology is a little bit fixed in time. We can't evolve to be heat or cold tolerant in the extreme in 20 years. But climate's going to change, it is changing. So how do we adapt? How do we use technology to adapt? How do we create technologies to adapt? How do we look at big picture things like can we moderate the rate of climate change? All important, but changing the trajectory of the warming of the Earth from 1 degree centigrade to 0.75 degrees centigrade to 1.25 degrees centigrade, okay, if it goes too fast and we don't have time to adapt, if it goes slow enough, we have more time to adapt. I like that. But I presume that if we could truly stop and reverse climate change, we'd pretty soon be talking about an ice age and that wouldn't be so cool either. So it's all about can we adapt? Currency is going to get more digital. Governments will seek to assert control over that, just as they seek to assert control over banking transactions of dollars. And we have to adapt. We have to right size policy and we have to adapt technologically and economically and personally to that digitization. And that's where I think it gets interesting.
- [39:37]
Podcast Host
All right, you talked about slowing things down, not wanting change to happen so rapidly. We can adapt. Talk to me about if, if we're going to try to reach longevity, escape velocity, where for every year that we live, technology adds more than a year to our lives. What lifestyle interventions should people be doing that will have the biggest impact and help them live not only healthy, but as long as possible?
- [40:04]
Dr. Bill Green
Well, it's a great analogy. So back to why does it matter to you today? Matters to you today because if you do things today that we think we know work or do know that work, essentially what you're doing is buying yourself health span time for technology to catch up and do some things. So just like if we can slow down climate change, we buy ourselves more time to adapt. If we can slow down the unhealthy aging process by using tools we have today, we buy ourselves time for hevolution to make all the investments it's making for the ecosystem to deliver more knowledge, develop more therapeutics, create, preventatives we need time to do those things. So what works today, Unfortunately or fortunately? I think it's a lot of things that we know we'll start. We could start anywhere. Getting enough sleep. When we sleep, our bodies do all sorts of incredible things. And sleep researchers are finding more and more incredible things that happen when we sleep. It's the opposite of a passive process. It's actually just as important as being awake. We've learned that when we sleep, aspects of our immune system get turned up. So there's a circadian rhythm that when we sleep, our immune system is like, okay, he's sleeping. Let's go fix some things. Let's go find some inflammation to quell. Let's go find some infections to treat. So sleep is important. It's hard. We give up sleep voluntarily for work, for recreation. But sleep's important, so get enough sleep. Nutrition. My wife is in food banking and is far more of an expert on clinical nutrition than I. But ultra processed foods, not so good for you in ways that we're only really understanding today. Now, a little bit, of course, a little bit's not gonna hurt you. We're human beings are the most resilient species. It's amazing what we can kind of do to ourselves and do well with for a while. So a little bit is fine. But wholesale replacing, excuse me, replacing a diet with ultra processed foods we know is not good for you. And the more science learns about it, the worse it looks. You mentioned things like food composition. Are we eating. Forget ultra processor. Are we eating more sugar and carbohydrates, more proteins and fats, More vegetables? No, no. Meat. Some meat. Good news. The human body can adapt to a variety of diets. Most fad diets work in the short term. None of them work in the long term. But fundamental approach to healthy mix of real food makes over time, over the short term, makes you feel better. That's good news. And over the long term, there's almost no question it's good for you and good for slowing down aging processes. So those are some basics I'm a fan of an appropriate amount of exercise. Humans were to either steal a line from a sports book or a Bruce Springsteen song. We were born to run. We don't have to run, but we were born to move. Our brain loves it, may or may not require it. We could in some, I think, dystopian future, actually live in the matrix and just be brains hooked up to water baths. But we like our bodies. We use our bodies. Our bodies and our minds work together. It likes a little exercise in whatever form and amount works for you. So those are some basic things. I am not here to push a supplement or even supplements in general. I think that to the extent that we are missing micro and macronutrients which happens because of the way we, because life and the way we make food, then replacing what we're missing is important it remain. I think the jury's out on whether giving supranormal amounts of supplements, big pharmacologic amounts of supplements is always good, always bad or sometimes good. It's going to take a lot more clinical research. That's where things like drug repurposing comes in. Where looking at drugs like metformin or rapamycin that in the longevity world have a lot of currency, but looking at them objectively, it makes sense. There may be something there. But I don't think we're going to be at a place where there's a magic pill that everyone takes that's a poly pill that replaces good nutrition, sleep, exercise, you know, basic things that don't eat too much sugar. I don't think that, I don't think we need that future. I don't think we want that future. I don't think that future is actually possible. I don't think there's a magic pill. And then there's paying attention to the primary and secondary prevention, to use an epidemiologic term that we know. We know that if someone has known heart disease they really need to pay attention to things like lipid levels and cholesterol. We know that that will save people's lives. It might save your life. If you've had a heart attack and you have really high cholesterol, it could save your life. Now 35 year old healthy person thinking about can I buy a house? Is inflation too high? What's my job? How's my, how's my relationship with my spouse? They may not be thinking about their lipids, but primary prevention has a role too, at least getting checked. So getting people into really a mindset of we should be in a preventative mindset today. We know enough that people should have a preventative mindset today is true. Now what. What sometimes gets confusing is we do epidemiologic studies and say if you're 35 and healthy and your cholesterol is 175, you might have a 0.001 increased chance of something someday. That's pretty abstract. It's pretty hard to interpret that for my present and my future. And it kind of feels like There might be some pros and cons in there somewhere. So that's complicated, but it's worth having the discussion because only by having the discussion will you find out if you're at really big risk or maybe you're kind of doing okay and you just need to do more of what you're doing. But let's have that conversation. Let's get people to think about their long term health as something worth checking in on today. Just as we encourage people to start saving money for retirement early, even if it feels like you're giving up spending some money today, we really want people to do it. And there's all sorts of good reasons. So I think those are some real basic things that we give lip service to and we spend some effort on. But if we could really cause change, if we could really get people to think about that the way they think about putting a seatbelt on when they get in a car, right? That was a social change that saved a lot of lives. That wasn't inevitable. We introduced seatbelts, we mandated them. It wasn't obvious that everybody would comply and kind of unthinkingly wear seatbelts, but it's been a good thing. So how do we get that?
- [48:18]
Podcast Host
Speaking of things like seatbelts, I know you know about vaccines. Vaccines have now become very controversial. How should people be thinking about vaccines?
- [48:29]
Dr. Bill Green
I can only tell you how I think about them. And you, you might expect someone like me to say, all vaccines good? Well, vaccines are complicated and, and the answer is, it depends. There are diseases that are preventable with vaccines that have been meaning millions and millions and millions and millions of humans and that have contributed meaningfully, really meaningfully to that increase in lifespan that you talked about. So one of the things that lifespan didn't March up from 49 to 79 just because it marched up due to clean water, antibiotics, vaccines and a couple other things. But vaccines are in the mix. There were a lot of kids that died of a lot of bad diseases that still exist that don't die because of the basic childhood vaccines. They're safe, they're effective. It's. I don't think that there people can have a conversation about it, but boy, that stuff's really good for you. It's really good. It's responsible to do for your children and your family and for yourself. Now where it gets interesting is a new, new vaccine for a new disease. We don't know everything about the disease, we don't know everything about the vaccine. In order to create vaccines quickly, we use new Technology. So we have new disease with somewhat, you know, some predictable and some unpredictable effects on people, short and long term. New vaccine which stimulates your immune system to interact with that disease in some predictable ways, maybe some unpredictable ways. New technology that is really great. But you know, we don't know everything about it. So now we got three unknowns. Think about that complexity thing. We now have three unknowns in like three dimensions that we've just been hit with all at once. Making predictions about the future for you as an individual in that environment, pretty hard to do. I wouldn't stake my career in saying, what's going to happen to you tomorrow if I do this to you today? That's a tough one. So are all vaccines good? No, no. There's been lots of vaccines that haven't worked out in the clinic or in people. One example that I can think of having been raised in New England in the US is Lyme disease. So Lyme disease, real problem. First Lyme vaccine was developed. It did what it was supposed to do in terms of stimulating the immune system against the bacteria that cause the Lyme disease. But it didn't really work out because people got reactions to it that were complicated and had something to do with the interaction of the human body and that bacteria. And the vaccine that you can only figure out when you gave it to a lot of people and kind of did the population experiment. We don't like to think that we're being experimented on, but we're doing experiments on ourselves all day, every day. Right? We're eating ultra processed foods, we're doing an experiment. What happens if you do that? Is it good or bad? We're, I don't know, flying around and exposing ourselves to cosmic rays in airplanes. Is that good or bad? Turns out it hasn't really caused a problem, but could have, could have been something that would be a problem. So vaccines with a capital V are not all good or all bad. And there's nothing like the tincture of time and data to help determine better who should get vaccines, when should they get them? You're right. They become really controversial. And Covid was an incredibly difficult, scary, painful, challenging, expensive time for the planet. But take a step back. It was an emerging disease, it is an emerging disease, but it became an emerging disease that we were worried might wipe everybody out. Let's not forget that. That was a legit worry that people had. We gotta do something about that. The best tool we could think of was develop a vaccine quickly. It's been effective, it's become controversial in part because if you ask people to do something based on statistics, none of us are statistics. So that's been true throughout history. That's not a COVID 19 vaccine question, that's a human experience question that we've always had. Why should you put your faith in this thing? Well, on average, you'll be better off if you do. Okay, but what about me? How do I make a prediction about whether I will benefit or be harmed by that? It's impossible to answer with certainty. The more data we have, the more precisely we can answer, the more confidently we can answer. But we were, you know, in a really scary time, the best tool we could think of was create vaccines. Those vaccines did what they were supposed to do, do what they're supposed to do. It seems clear that they were, broadly speaking, super effective. We probably avoided millions to hundreds of millions of deaths. And if you're one of those people that would have died and didn't, you're pretty happy. I gotta say. You can't necessarily know if you were one of those people. But there's probably a few hundred million happy people because of that. Now there's some unhappy people. Take the vaccine. You didn't get sick. Well, see, I didn't need the vaccine. Or did the vaccine prevent your disease? Never know. Can't play the game twice. So it's hard. I'm sympathetic. Even as someone who's invested in a vaccine company that developed a life saving vaccine, I'm sympathetic to both sides of this conversation. I just think it's really important to remember that at the end of the day it's not politics. At the end of the day, it's not belief. At the end of the day it's are we doing the best we can do to keep the most people safe and healthy for the longest period of time? And if we have enough goodwill towards folks who are doing that, then we move forward. And if we lose goodwill towards people doing that, then it gets harder to keep doing the things that we're trying to help people with.
- [55:17]
Podcast Host
I know people are going to ask in the comments, where do you get the estimation of 100 million people alive because of the vaccine?
- [55:25]
Dr. Bill Green
So I don't remember the exact number, but the US CDC has done some model, has done modeling around this and I could certainly find the epidemiologic modeling. It's actually I think way more than 100 million. I think the estimates based on what the case fatality rate before there was a vaccine was, what the case fatality rate after the vaccine, the rate of spread. Now there's, there's a. Again, one could kibitz over this because. Well, but there were all those social interventions. Did they work? Did they not work? Leaving all that aside for the moment because I don't know. Right. I don't know whether social distancing saved a lot of lives or didn't save a lot of lives. It's not my area of expertise. A lot of heat and passion around that. I'm talking about vaccines, you know, but people have tried to tease out just the impact of the vaccines and I think the estimates are pretty high for the number of lives it probably saved.
- [56:31]
Podcast Host
The thing I'll be very interested to see, there's a guy named Gary Breca who is convinced the insurance industry is going to down rate people that had the vaccine. I don't know if he's right, but that is certainly a very interesting metric to pay attention to over the next couple years. Do they see patterns in the data that indicate that it helped, didn't help, held steady? I'll be watching that closely.
- [56:58]
Dr. Bill Green
Well, the insurance industry is either the most important industry we've ever created or the most evil industry we've ever created.
- [57:06]
Podcast Host
Interesting. Give me the case where it's the most evil.
- [57:09]
Dr. Bill Green
Well, you're asking people to bet on something that hasn't happened. That's what insurance is, right? Homeowners insurance. You're asking people what's the, what's your quantification of the bet that your house is going to burn down? Health insurance is a little different. Health insurance is probably an oxymoron, right? We're not insuring against bad health, we're financing health care. That's a, that's a whole different story. But insurance is essentially a bet in a market where there's no real product and it's unclear who has. I mean, the insurance companies have the best data, actuarial tables about this. So do we need it? I mean, it's pretty intangible. We need food, clothing and shelter. As you pointed out, we need money to do stuff. But do we need insurance or do we want insurance? Or if we create an environment where the perception of need of insurance. I don't know. I don't know. But that's the case that it's not an unfettered good. Is there now Lloyds of London would say, well, no, I mean, commercial shipping wouldn't happen without Lloyd's of London insuring cargo ships. They're probably right too, you know, I'm just saying it's not an unfettered Good. It's not an inevitability. Insurance companies down rating people presumably for things like life insurance based on did they get a COVID vaccine? Well, insurance companies down rate people for smoking pretty darn good evidence that if you smoke for 30 years, 40 years, a pack of cigarettes a day are the equivalent, you're pretty much more likely to live a shorter and simultaneously more expensive life than if you didn't. And that's fair. There's really good data. Now insurance companies rate people on all sorts of things that we know about and don't know about. Are all those ratings fair? Doubtful. There. No doubt. We know that insurance companies rate people on social decisions. Really social decisions. Auto insurance. If you are married versus unmarried, your car insurance is cheaper. But does everybody get married? Should everybody get married? Should you get married so you have cheaper car insurance? Is that what the insurance industry wants? Is that right? I don't know, but they do it. Do we have enough data to rate people's long term likelihood of dying a more expensive death because of COVID vaccines? Of course we don't. We don't even know what the pros and cons of the vaccine are over a 10 year period, much less a hundred year period. So I can't stop the insurance company from doing or any insurance company from doing it. But I'm not sure that that rating would be based on things that you and I would agree are super rational and great sets of data.
- [60:25]
Podcast Host
Bill, this has been amazing. Where can people follow you?
- [60:29]
Dr. Bill Green
I'm on LinkedIn and hevolutions on LinkedIn I'm on Instagram, although that's more about cute pictures of my dog and food we've food we've cooked but we're there.
- [60:46]
Podcast Host
Just that. Bill Green
- [60:51]
Dr. Bill Green
I'll get it to you. W W Green W G R E E N E and I'm definitely on LinkedIn through hevolution for sure.
- [60:59]
Grainger Announcer
I love it.
- [61:00]
Podcast Host
All right everybody, speaking of things you will love, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care.
- [61:07]
Dr. Bill Green
Peace.