Mark Hyman’s Guide to Living Longer and Staying Strong

What actually matters if you want to stay healthy as you age? Dr. Mark Hyman argues it isn’t the most extreme longevity intervention. It’s the small investments you make every day in strength, nutrition, sleep, and stress. Mark joins a16z Partner Daisy Wolf to walk through what he actually does, from meditation and strength training to protein, supplements, sleep, sauna, cold plunges, and the occasional ice cream. He explains why preserving muscle becomes increasingly important with age and how he uses testing to understand what’s happening inside his body. They also discuss the idea behind Function Health: combining blood tests, imaging, wearables, medical records, and eventually AI to move healthcare from treating disease toward understanding and preventing it earlier.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Erik Torenberg?

  When it comes to longevity, Mark Hyman says it's not the heroic interventions that matter most, it's the small things you do every day. In this episode, A16Z partner Daisy Wolf sits down with Mark, co-founder of Function Health, to walk through what he actually does for his own health. We get into strength training, protein, supplements, sleep, meditation, sauna, cold plunges, and why Mark believes muscle is the currency of longevity. We also discuss how testing and AI could change preventative medicine by helping us understand what's happening in our bodies long before it becomes disease.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Mark, today, we are going to dive in to what you do for your own health.

• 0:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, very.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  And we're going to try to be honest, because I think we all look to people like you and think, are we doing enough? And so I'm very curious, like, what a good day and a bad day looks like for you as it pertains to food, exercise, supplements, sleep, tracking, diagnostics. Let's talk about an average day. What time do you wake up? Do you do it with an alarm? Do you do it naturally?

• 1:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. I usually don't wake up with an alarm. I usually wake up naturally around 6:30, 7:00. And normally, if I say, what is my typical ideal day, what would I be doing? And I would say it's not about getting it perfect, it's about just the little tiny things you do every day, the little investments in your health bank account that add up and pay massive dividends. And I think you don't have to get it perfect, have everything right, but if you kind of stack the deck in your favor, it's going to end up actually helping you to have energy, to feel good, to sleep well, to prevent disease. It's not the giant heroic things like a 70-day water fast or something that's going to really make the difference, it's a little investments every day. So if you only have 10 minutes to meditate, just do it for 10 minutes. So this morning, I had someone do it, so I did a 10-minute meditation, someone do 20.

• 1:58Speaker 02

  And that's going to first thing I do, turn my phone before I turn the lights on, and it just helps me sort of ground for the day. And I do a little gratitude practice, right? What are the three things I'm really grateful for? It's just a great way to start the day with a positive mindset. And then I'll typically work out. So I'll do like a pretty hard 45-minute strength training session at my gym. If it's a nice day, I'll take my bike, maybe go for a bike ride for 45 minutes, which a lot of hills around Austin. And then I usually have like a really good, I call my longevity shake. So that would be like the way I start the day. And that's goat weight protein. So weight is really important for building muscle, and muscle is the currency of longevity. If you don't have muscle, you'll become frail and dysfunctional, and that's kind of what ends up killing people. And so make sure I have a good load, about 40 grams of protein after I do my strength

• 2:43Speaker 02

  training with creatine, 5 to 10 grams, 10 is more good for the brain, 5 is good for muscles. And I put a lot of other things in there. I'll put in prebiotic fibers, probiotics, I'll put in polyphenols, so I've got microbiome, I'll put in your L F N A, which is this mitochondrial booster longevity compound. I'll put in this sort of, sometimes a little bit of extra fatty acids if I want, but basically that's my shake. I throw in some strawberries and some cashew or almond milk and just blend it up, and that's my breakfast. So that kind of keeps me going. And then sometimes when I'm on a peptide kick, I'll do some peptides, doing BPC157 and TB500, which are sort of tissue repair. So this is a little bit of advanced lifestyles. So there's like the foundational stuff, so you don't want to get into all this stuff unless you already got the basics.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  So if you're not eating well, if you're not exercising, if you're not sleeping, if you're under constant stress, it doesn't matter how many vitamins or peptides you take, it's not going to matter. So just be aware that you kind of, it's incremental on top of everything else. So peptides are essentially many proteins. They're defined as less than 20 amino acids, which is something everybody's familiar with. Ozempic is the peptide of the day, it's a peptide, something the body makes, GLP-1, made by the body, it's a natural substance. We do it in pharmacologic doses to have different effects, but insulin is another peptide. So the body has tens of thousands of these peptides, and they have all sorts of regulatory capacities. So not like the conductors, they control everything, they control your hormones, your immune system, tissue repair, healing, inflammation, gut health, and so you can use these to actually have, improve your health. And so I always use peptides.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  So it's a little diabetic syringe, you know? I'm a doctor, so it doesn't bother me, but it's a little bit invasive, but it's something that can be helpful. So if I've got, I've had injuries from working out, and I tear muscle or something, I can just put that in there, and it's like, in a couple of days, it's dramatically improved. So I'm a big fan of peptides. By the time I get all I've done, it's probably 8:30, 9:00, 10:00, sometimes, sometimes I'll do a layup, I'll do a workout later, like at 9:00, I'll do it, let's think, at 10:00. I might do a 12-hour, so 16-hour fast, depending on, you know, I'm doing it from the night before.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Okay, great. So, and then is intermittent fasting good or bad for women? People have mixed opinions on that.

• 4:49Speaker 02

  It depends, it depends on your overall health, I mean, if you're skinny and probably not a great idea, if you're underweight, if you're sometimes with hormonal shifts, it can be a thing, if you're trying to get pregnant, if you're trying to deal with some hormonal issues, it can be challenging. So I would say you have to listen to your body, and it would feel good. So if it doesn't feel good, then don't do it. And listen, I think the minimum people should do is 12 hours. That's intermittent fasting. Most people don't even do a 12-hour overnight fast. And that means if you eat dinner at 6:00 at night, you can eat it at 6:00 in the morning. If you eat dinner at 6:00 at night, you can eat breakfast at 8:00 in the morning. So that's a 14-hour fast, and most people can do that.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Okay, cool. And what's an average lunch for you?

• 5:27Speaker 02

  An average lunch would be, for example, this afternoon, my lunch, I've got my jar of mackerel, like kind of canned mackerel, and I have these seed crackers that I love, which are flax and sesame and sunflower seeds, and so I have sort of that, and I'll typically like have like a fair, really good portion of that, because it's quick, it's easy, I've got meetings, so I don't have, and so I just open the can and have the crackers. It's like, I get a lot of omega-3 fats, I get a lot of protein, I get a fiber, I get a lot of minerals, and so it's a great quick snack. So I'll be like, or I might, I make a, I call a fat salad, which would be, no, I'm sorry, I use like good lettuce, like arugula, I'll put in cherry tomatoes, I'll throw in avocado, I'll throw in olives, I'll throw in some toasted pumpkin seeds, I might go

• 6:08Speaker 02

  in some goat cheese, and I'll usually have a can of something, like sardines or mackerel or salmon, and that, lots of olive oil, so it's a lot of fat, you got the omega-3s from the salmon, you've got the nuts and seeds fat, you've got the olive oil fat, you've got the avocado fat, and so you're getting a lot of vegetables, but you're also getting a lot of fat, which makes you satisfied and not crave sugar, which I don't usually do.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  Okay, snacks?

• 6:29Speaker 02

  I'm not a big snacker. I have a thing about snacking. I think snacking was a modern invention, it's something that humans really never did, and there weren't snack foods, when you were hunters and gatherers, you're just like, you know, and even, even, you know, in agrarian societies, there weren't snacks, people just ate at meals. And I think the propagation of a snacking culture has been a huge problem for America. It led to this massive, partly this massive rise in obesity and type 2 diabetes. So I'm really not a big fan of snacking. That said, if I'm hungry and I'm like traveling or whatever, I have a whole snack pack. My wife terrorized it the other night, because we were in a hotel, and she, or a friend's house, and she was hungry, and so I have to go replenish it. But I have the salmon jerky sticks that are delicious, I think, those are pedigoni ones,

• 7:13Speaker 02

  I think, or epic, they're epic bars, ones, the salmon sticks, where I get meniscus sticks or bison sticks, where they're like, kind of, not exactly beef jerky, but they're kind of dried meat. I'll put nuts in, so I'll have like cashews or almonds or other nuts in my bag, and I also some, I have nut butter packets, I have like cashew butter, I have these packets, I can just, it keeps for a long time, and I can keep it in my backpack when I'm traveling, and so I never get in a food emergency. So I try not to actually get a food emergency, which is a big thing, because if you get a food emergency, you're going to eat whatever's there. Like, I was once traveling, and I had a, it was a conference, I had to get up super early at 6:00 in the morning, and then my flight was delayed, and I wasn't going to get back till 3:00 in the morning, it was like a whole thing, and I felt sorry for myself, and I was tired, and so there was a Cinnabon at the airport, and I was like, I went for it.

• 7:58Speaker 02

  And that was, that's a rare moment for me, but it was like, probably 20 years ago, but I haven't had one since then. And the thing is, you don't want to be in that situation, so you want to have, always have food on you, so I always have food on me. But that said, I really think if people are hungry, want to have a piece of fruit, have some nuts, like that, that's a pretty basically good snack.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  You heard it here first, Mark Hyman, innocent and bun, once, 20 years ago, in an airport.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I had the one with nuts, because my rationale was it had more protein and fiber, so it was not so bad.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  Do you have any indulgences that you have from time to time? What's the worst?

• 8:30Speaker 02

  I mean, I do like chocolate, and I'll have a jar of chocolate, but my chili sauce is ice cream, so I love ice cream, and if it was up to me, I would literally have a pint of ice cream every night, but it's not up to me, it's up to my higher self, so I'm tired of something, so I don't want to go into consequence to that. And so, yeah, I like, if, I don't know, every like, I don't know, three, six months, I'll have like chunky monkey ice cream, or I'll order like just a pistachio from Man Louis, and like, that, I love that, so like, I'll do that, but it's not like a regular thing. I like to eat simply, I mean, what I believe is in flavor always follows the quality of the food. So I was in Sardinia writing my book, Young Forever, about longevity, and I met this guy, Linto, and he served us a nosetail pig meal, and he says we flavor the animal before we

• 9:12Speaker 02

  kill it, meaning we know we've eaten a carat, we've eaten acorns, we've eaten all this stuff, so we're literally flavoring. We know, the shepherds know that they take their goats or their sheep to eat certain times, a certain time of year, that their milk or cheese is going to taste better. And what that's about is the medicinal properties of the food. So I always like to eat really good quality, just simple food, like, last night I had a Japanese sweet potato, and that's like a purple sweet potato from Okinawa, one of their longevity foods, so the purple is full of phytochemicals. I used ghee, which is clarified butter, onion and salt, and that was it. And then I had, I actually ordered meniscus chops, or like lamb chops, but they're meniscus chops, I had a bunch of those, and it was just a very simple, which, you know, I'll usually have maybe some stir-fried mushrooms, or broccolini, or some kind of vegetable.

• 9:56Speaker 02

  And I'll usually have two or three vegetables and a piece of protein, and I try to avoid sugar, too much starches, I don't eat that much pasta, I don't, well, noodles and stuff like that. So I don't eat that much rice or grains, and, you know, I'm 65, and my body composition's like, you know, 10% body fat, and, so I think the visceral fat is the killer, that's the belly fat that you get as you get older, and that's every, as you look around, it's like, almost everybody in America has this, and this is just what's driving all the diabetes, the obesity, the heart disease, the cancer, dementia, and, and so keeping your sugar low, if you could take nothing else from this conversation, and your starch low is one of the best things you can do for your health.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  And it sounds like you're not explicitly like gluten-free, but you do kind of avoid gluten largely.

• 10:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's important to know what your biology is. So testing is so critical. And I think most people don't know how they are in the spectrum of gluten sensitivity. And so the way to think about it is if you look at your antibodies, which we do testing through function for celiac antibodies, and we do a much more extensive panel than any traditional doctor would do for celiac, they just do one test, we do five different tests. And if you if you look at the range, you shouldn't have any antibodies to gluten because it's an indicator that your body's reacting to the protein. And if it's reacting to the protein, you've just seen the protein, and it's seen the protein because you've got a leaky gut, and your gut's damaged in some way, and the protein's getting into your bloodstream and your immune system's going, wait, wait, this isn't me.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  So the range goes from zero to like 19, or zero to five for the other one. But if it's like, what if it's three or four, like one of its 10, you know, it means your body's creating a response. And it's always worth a trial of a three week pause and see what happens. Because, you know, I think one of the most amazing things people have no clue about is how food affects their body. And one, how food can make them feel bad and how it can make them feel good. And that's because food does create so much of an issue. So gluten is one of the most problematic foods that are in our food supply right now. Why? Because it's hybridized and not GMO, but hybridized in a way that create way more genes, that create way more gluten proteins that are way more inflammatory, has super starch

• 12:04Speaker 02

  called amylopectin A, which is like basically worse than sugar for your bloodstream and your glucose. It's sprayed with glyphosate off it at the end of before harvest to desiccate it and make it easier to harvest. And so it also, you know, it's just, it's just in everything. And it's, I think it also has calcium appropriated as a period of which can be linked to autism in animals, studies, it's kind of scary, hyperactivity. So there's a lot of problems with our modern weed. Probably 20% of people are gluten sensitive. It's just a lot.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Do you, we're in a protein craze right now. Like everything is protein added. Do you try to have like, you know, 100 something grams of protein?

• 12:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. So here's the thing, when you're younger, you have a lot of trophic hormones. What that means is you have hormones like estrogen, testosterone and so forth that help you maintain your muscle. For women in menopause and for men in andropause, which is this much slower sort of continuous gradual decline, you'll see hormone levels drop. And we see this a lot with function health. We see a lot of the, you know, the hormones out of whack for people. As you get older, and you've got to preserve and maintain and even build muscle. And I had a health issue this year, I ended up losing weight and I gained back 25 pounds of muscle just because I knew what to do by the training I did, plus the protein.

• 13:28Speaker 02

  And as you get older, and this is based on the ProNAD group, which is an international group of protein experts, scientists, who basically said, look, after 60, you need between one and a half to two grams of protein per kilo. So that, that's basically about a gram per pound of ideal body weight. So, you know, if you're 300 pounds, I'm going to use 300 grams of protein. But if you're, if you're 180 pounds, you know, for me, I probably could eat anywhere between 120 and 180 grams of protein a day. And that's not easy. But as you get older, it's, it's really important, particularly if you're strength training. So quality matters and not all protein's the same. And so you'd be careful, but animal protein is a much better catalyst for muscle synthesis

• 14:13Speaker 02

  than, than plant protein, which has lower levels of this amino acid called leucine, which is important for actually stimulating muscle growth. So you have to eat the right protein and whey is one of the best sources of protein for this. So whey and creatine are a great kind of combo for, for protein and protein synthesis. But it doesn't work in the absence of, of strength training. So it's like you're going to eat protein and build muscle. So you might preserve a little bit of muscle, but if you lose weight, I think what's happening now with GLP-1 is terribly frightening because people are taking these drugs, they're not hungry, they're not eating much, they don't have much protein, they're not strength training, and they're losing significantly amounts of muscle, and they're, they're not replacing it. And that, that means they're going to have a slower metabolism eventually, and then they're going to eat less food, even at the same weight they were before they started

• 14:58Speaker 02

  the diet or the shot. And so it's important to kind of make sure people eat enough protein and strength training while they're on the GLP-1s.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, it feels like it's one of the key kind of contributors to rapid weight increase when people stop GLP-1s as well as like they've lost a lot of muscle.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I true, yeah, I think people get Ozempic face because muscle comes out their face.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  Um, okay. What supplements are you taking right now? When do you take them? What are you taking them for?

• 15:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I think, you know, what's interesting daily in, in function health is that we've seen staggering rates of nutritional deficiencies in the population. And we think most people who are doing function are probably a little more health forward than the average American population. And yet, even these people who are may try to pay more attention and be proactive about their health, 70% are deficient in one or more nutrients at the minimum level, like the minimum, not, not like what you need to have healthy bones with vitamin D, but how do you, how do you not get rickets? Right? So that would be like 30, 30 kilograms per deciliter is what the lab says is the cutoff, but actually probably should be 50.

• 16:14Speaker 02

  So just given that, even at the minimum level, it's 70%. So we're talking about a lot of nutritional deficiencies because we have such a nutrition poor diet. Now, I don't really have those because I make sure I take my stuff. But I think a good multivitamin is important, a good omega-3 fatty acid. We, we're one of the few places where you'd actually check your omega-3 fatty acids because nobody checks that, but it's one of the most important fats. It's actually called an essential fat and many people are deficient, 90% of us are deficient at some level or another. I think vitamin D for sure with K2, vitamin D3 as a staple. And then I take a probiotic, I like seeds, my favorite one, I take that and it's a staple for gut health. And then, and then I take a, I call like a longevity stack.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  It's stuff that helps my mitochondria and the aging process where there's been a fair bit of research. So I mentioned one earlier, your Lithin A, coming out of Mitopurin. And they basically did a ton of research looking at this pomegranate derivative that when it's metabolized by their healthy gut microbiome, which most of us don't have, it turns into this compound called the postbiotic Urolithin A that helps to reduce inflammation, improves mitochondrial health and cleans up old mitochondria, makes new mitochondria, reduces inflammation, helps with exercise performance. And this is really overall great product. So I put that in my shake, for example, in the morning. I use creatine, which is something that would help boost muscle mass. I'll also take something called NMN or NR.

• 17:43Speaker 02

  There's some good research on that as a, for health, for helping a lot of the mechanisms of aging and degradation. And I'll take something called fatty 15, which is basically an essential fatty acid. It's been newly discovered, this again, anti-inflammatory. And then I take a little bit of Fucutan and I take some supportive for my detox system and it is L-6-sten. And I basically try to help my gut, my microbiome, my mitochondria, my immune system. And, and that really all helps. I also take something called Himalaya tartary buckwheat, which is a, an ancient grain that come in capsules or powder, sprout powder, but you should put that in my shake. And that again, has all these immune rejuvenating properties. And there's a lot of data on this.

• 18:27Speaker 02

  So I look at where is the data good? And where's there good evidence on products? And unfortunately, there's not a lot of products out there with live evidence. So, but I'm very kind of selective about the products that I choose. And that's kind of my, my basic routine.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Do, oftentimes they get asked, like, okay, you know, I'm, I'm doing function, what add-on test should I get? What imaging should I do? Can you maybe walk us through like two examples? One for people who just want to make sure they're catching all of the things, you know, that could be severe issues or, you know, kill them early. And one for people who are like truly trying to optimize their health. What do you recommend they do in terms of, you know, additional blood tests, imaging, et cetera?

• 19:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, so we, we have a lot of depth in what we can do. And I think that the, I mean, the basic membership includes over 110 biomarkers that look at almost every system in your body that are missed often. Your heart and cardiovascular system, your immune system, hormones, autoimmunity, toxins, metabolic health, nutritional status, hormonal health, all these things are important to understand. And, and depending on where you are in your life and what's going on with you, you may want to look at different things. For example, if you're getting older, you have Alzheimer's in your family, there's

• 19:55Speaker 02

  a really robust brain health panel, but I'll just look at some of the really newer biomarkers that are emerging around, almost like a blood test for Alzheimer's that you can take decades earlier and do something about. We also look at cancer screening, you know, if you're 20, you're probably not going to do this, but as you get older, there's something called the gallery test, which is a multi-cancer detection test to look at over 15 different cancers. It's not perfect, but it's, it's better than most things we have to really screen for cancer. You know, if you're concerned about your toxic exposure, you might want to do a deeper dive on PFAS or forever chemicals and BPA. If you are concerned you might have, you know, chronic fatigue or something like that, there's, you can do a viral panel, we'll see what's going on with your, with your immune system.

• 20:38Speaker 02

  If you want to see what's going on with your cardiovascular health, you can even do deeper dives on cardiovascular health and look at all kinds of subsets of different cholesterol molecules, get pretty sophisticated. And then, you know, for hormones, we also do deep hormonal testing. So everybody gets a basic hormone panel for men and women. But if you want to add on stuff, you can do extended hormone panels and see, you know, other things that may be relevant for your health. And then

• 21:03Speaker 02

  The beautiful thing is that you can get your twice your testing, but then you add on things if you want. For example, if you want to know extra nutrients that we may not be testing with the first screen, like if you want to look at zinc, or maybe an extended vitamin or mineral panel, looks at selenium and molybdenum or mania diet and cooked you 10 and chromium, you can do that. So depending on where you're interested in, if you're like just want the basics, or if you want a full, like go all in, I want to do everything, it's available for you. And then of course, you can get your Azure Scan, which is a deep look at a total body MRI, and gives you a real sense of risks in different conditions, such as hundreds of different diseases, and allows you to be proactive about it. We've saved so many lives on this. I mean, I just got a text

• 21:45Speaker 02

  from a friend of mine who said, the guy who worked for him did the function panel and saw he had a pretty bad cardiovascular risk profile they didn't know about. He went and got checked out and ended up needing a bypass immediately. So we're seeing people like that, or people have cancers that they didn't know they had and saves their life. It's probably that, and people can get a sense of what they want to look at.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  Amazing. Okay, talk to me about like kind of your environment. Like, how much are you thinking about microplastics, toxins, household products, skincare products?

• 22:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's a great question. So I'm on the board of the group called the Environmental Working Group, and that is a research and lobby organization that has done a lot of work to help identify what are the removable sources of toxins in our environment. And at ewg.org, a lot of the free resources are there, but they have great resources, for example, on food. What are the dirty dozen foods that you never want to eat if they're not organic? Like strawberries, you should never have if they're organic, but you can have a banana or an avocado, whatever, doesn't matter. So it gives you a list of the dirty dozen, the clean 15, so you don't have to shop only organic. If you want to do the clean 15, there's very low pesticides on those, for example.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  And is it leading the skin or not is kind of the thing that matters?

• 23:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, a little more than that, but yeah, basically, yeah. And then, and then there's how to choose the right fish that has the lowest mercury, how to choose the right meat that's the safest for you and the planet. So they have real good guys on that. And then they have a skin deep database, which is very sensitive, where you can literally scan or put in your product, they have an app for it. So any skincare products, lotions, creams, shampoos, makeup, whatever, with a lot of toxins in the skincare products. So I really recommend people doing that. They also have household cleaning products, you know, one of the brands that has a skull and crossbones on it, and you have to lock it away from your kids. You probably don't want to use it in your house, right? So I think, you know, I'm really pretty strict about household cleaners, detergents, so

• 23:44Speaker 02

  forth. So that's, again, another great resource. So you build these into your automatic things. I just have those products in the house. I don't, I don't, I must think your products are all from brands that are clean and good. So I don't have to worry about it because I just reduce my exposure. Then I have a reverse osmosis filter in my kitchen where I pick my drinking water, and I have an air filter in my bedroom and a few of the key rooms. I spend a lot of time. And those are the ways I minimize my exposures. You can't do it, it's impossible to do 100%. And I'm just like, you know, my joke is, if humans were food, we wouldn't be safe to eat because we're so full of environmental toxins that we accumulate them around the top of the food chain. So, you know, it's really unfortunate. But you can minimize your exposures and reduce your risks. Microplastics

• 24:29Speaker 02

  is another big one. I mean, drink out of a water, a bottle of water, you don't have a steel bottle and not drinking out of a faucet.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  You've always been kind of on the cutting edge. How do you like kind of decide where to draw the line between what's clinically proven, what's emerging, what your gut and you is right? Really, this is what you're doing. Less so advice for others. I think you probably.

• 24:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you're right. I mean, we were more adventurous, but I would say that, you know, there has to be some scientific rationale or evidence for it. It has to have some safety profile to it. And it has to sort of not have no serious downsides or side effects. So if it's something in that category, and the price is also an issue to plan if you can afford it, but I'm lucky I get it. Or I also get help for free because people like give me stuff, so I'll take it. So for example, one of the things that I've found really interesting is a lot of the work on platinum ferrous. So a lot of science labs that are funded by a lot of the Silicon Valley billionaires are looking, for example,

• 25:33Speaker 02

  how do we, how do we look at interventions that can help reduce the aging process or clean out old damaged proteins? So platinum ferrous is actually blood cleaning. It's kind of like a little bit of Brian Johnson, where they kind of did the plasma machine with his kid and father, that was a little strange. But there's, this is a medical technique that's been used for decades in hospitals for various issues, but it's being applied in a new way to help remove all the inflammatory damaged proteins, toxins from the blood. So I'll, for example, do that, which is a little more on the edge. And that I find to be quite interesting, and the data is there. So I'm willing to try something like that.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  What's one thing that gives you hope about this current moment where, you know, I think we're seeing more focus on personal health than we've ever seen before? And what's like one thing that kind of gets you pause or makes you concerned?

• 26:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a great, great question. I mean, I think we're at a radically historic moment in medicine right now. And most healthcare, medicine, government has no clue that's happening. And this is this intersection of a number of different, really radically big trends and innovations. One is reimagining of human biology from a systems perspective. How is everything connected? How is the body a network, a network system? Even though we have specialists and organs and diseases, it's not actually how the body is organized. And so when scientists now have been funding this and researching the hallmarks of aging, which is the underlying mechanism of aging, they're like, well, if you would have treated those, you could extend life for 30 or 40 years. But if you just got rid of cancer

• 27:04Speaker 02

  and heart disease, you could extend life by five to seven years. So looking at what are the underlying biology and how do we think about the laws of nature, what are the laws of biology? And that's really where we're at now. It's like, it's like, almost like 1905, when Einstein writing the theory of relativity. It's, it's that thing of a frame shift and understanding between physics and quantum physics and, you know, old medicine and new medicine. The second thing that's happening is just the amount of data we can get. So you can get, you know, terabytes of data on your human biology, from lab testing to genomics, to imaging, to, the amount of data is just insane. And so we've never had the capacity to look at your body in such a comprehensive way, and also at its cost.

• 27:49Speaker 02

  You know, you can get your whole genome sequence for $300 now. It used to be a billion dollars, like a billion with a B. So that's radical. Your MRI, I mean, I went and did my knee done, and it was $2,500 for a knee MRI. Now I can get my whole system done for like whole body for $499. And then, and then we have the, whether she learned the AI revolution, which is the only thing that's going to allow us to understand the massive data sets that we can now accumulate on individuals. So the idea for function, in my view, is to create a system that democratizes healthcare, that gives access to low cost, affordable, preventive, and health optimization care for billions of people. What's, what's concerns

• 28:29Speaker 02

  me is that, that this process is happening too slow, and that so many people are suffering about that the, the system is so hard to change. You know, Matthew Bailey said that, you know, it's very, you know, it's very hard to, you know, kind of change ideas, right? So how do I, how do you like change people's thinking? And, and, you know, people who are, who are invested in this, unfortunately, are not going to want it to change. We've got a whole medical industrial complex that profits off of people being sick. We can see it. I mean, the food industry doesn't want to change. Mahas, whether you like it or not, is in and out there happening, and it's driving, you know, a lot of pressure on the food system and the food sort of companies. And they don't like it, and they're pushing

• 29:13Speaker 02

  back pretty hard. And they're doing all kinds of nefarious things to sort of undermine any change in our food system. So there's a lot of pushback. But, but I think change is inevitable, you know, like whether it's data slavery, or women's suffrage, or civil rights, or women's rights, or gay rights, like these are all things that happened over a long periods of time, that, you know, were cultural moments that then allowed everybody to kind of shift to the next frame of how we navigate the world as human beings.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  Amazing. Thank you, Mark, for all you are doing, all you've done over the course of your career. And we are really grateful.

• 29:50Speaker 02

  Thanks, Steve.

• 29:54Erik Torenberg?

  Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z Podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X, A16Z, and subscribe to our Substack at A16Z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.

• 30:19Erik Torenberg?

  As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16Z.com/disclosures.