The Science of Lookmaxxing with Dr. Noc

Are we doing more harm than good in the pursuit of perfection? Neil deGrasse Tyson, comic co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O'Reilly explore looksmaxxing, peptides, body composition, and the scientization of health & beauty trends with pharmaceutical scientist & medfluencer Morgan McSweeney, aka Dr. Noc.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on things you love like those iced lattes that help you get ready to face the day. So switch your home and auto to Progressive and see if you could save and keep sipping away. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers not available in all states.

• 0:29Gary O'Reilly?

  Startalk Radio is presented by ChatGPT. ChatGPT Work, a new way to work in ChatGPT, helps you move from goals to real outcomes. ChatGPT Work can use info from your apps, files and plugins like Slack, calendars and meeting notes to help produce finished materials. Plus, it can stay with bigger projects for hours while you still remain in control. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting work mode. Available on Plus and Pro Plans.

• 1:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Loved me some Dr. Knock.

• 1:11Chuck Nice?

  He's great, isn't he?

• 1:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, man. And he told us how to not look old.

• 1:14Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, looks maxing, baby. Not that I need it.

• 1:17Gary O'Reilly?

  You may need creatine.

• 1:18Chuck Nice?

  Ah, now that I might need.

• 1:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, coming up, Dr. Knock on everything that you think is wrong with you, but might not be on Startalk, special edition.

• 1:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to Startalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. Startalk begins right now.

• 1:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is Startalk Special Edition. We're thinking today about what everybody does to look different, although they would think to look better. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. It's special edition. That means. Me.

• 1:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hey, how you doing, man? I'm good. All good, Neil. All right. All very good. Gary O'Reilly from the UK. Yes. But you're ours now. Yes. Good. And we got Chuck Nice.

• 2:08Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 2:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, baby.

• 2:09Speaker 03

  How's it going, guys?

• 2:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm good, man. We're talking about looks maxing.

• 2:13Chuck Nice?

  Ooh, you mean you guys are discussing me?

• 2:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Looks maxing. Let's figure out what this is all about. So Gary, take, get us buried here. What's going on?

• 2:24Gary O'Reilly?

  We've all thought it. What if I looked better, seemed younger, shaved off a few pounds, couldn't hurt, could it? No, not really. From, as you said, looks maxing to biohacking, your biological age. So to perfecting your body composition, modern science has offered us a whole new litany of quick fixes, or so it would seem. But are people doing more damage than good to the, in the pursuit of perfection? What are the facts? What is the fiction? And most importantly, is there something you can prescribe me to get back to my glory day so I can get back out on the field? So Neil, please introduce our guest.

• 3:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I will. Making a second appearance.

• 3:02Chuck Nice?

  Ta-da.

• 3:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On Startalk.

• 3:04Gary O'Reilly?

  Our returning champion.

• 3:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And undefeated champion, the one and only Morgan McSweeney, Dr. Knock.

• 3:11Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 3:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Morgan, welcome back to Startalk.

• 3:13Speaker 03

  Well, I'm surprised I got invited back, but I'm happy to be here.

• 3:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we had, we took some debate on our side. It was fine.

• 3:20Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, man.

• 3:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have an academic background in pharmacology and immunology.

• 3:25Speaker 03

  That's right. Pharmaceutical sciences and immunology.

• 3:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is a thing that matters now to everybody.

• 3:30Chuck Nice?

  It does.

• 3:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is. And you're.

• 3:32Chuck Nice?

  Especially since we're all gonna die in another pandemic because everybody has abandoned the safety precautions from the last one because, you know, you won't tell me what to do anyway.

• 3:45Gary O'Reilly?

  Feel better?

• 3:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You are a, the term I think is med influencer. You're online combating.

• 3:56Speaker 03

  Chronically so.

• 3:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All the misinformation that we're flooded in. And the big challenge is how does someone know that you are not the misinformation and the misinformation itself isn't real?

• 4:08Speaker 03

  People accuse me even further of being totally AI generated sometimes. So your job is to vouch for the fact that I'm sitting here.

• 4:14Chuck Nice?

  I think it's your perfect Dixon that causes that to happen.

• 4:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And his perfect hair.

• 4:19Chuck Nice?

  And his hair.

• 4:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let's, let's lead off. It's clear that everyone wants a quick fix. No one wants to do the hard work, whatever that is. And I remembered I was in middle school and I wrote a book report on Ponce de Leon.

• 4:34Chuck Nice?

  Ooh.

• 4:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes.

• 4:36Chuck Nice?

  I know the way you say his name.

• 4:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ponce de Leon.

• 4:38Chuck Nice?

  Look at that.

• 4:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. And he came to South America, I think it was, in search of the Fountain of Youth.

• 4:44Chuck Nice?

  Fountain of Youth.

• 4:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I was a geeky kid, so I said, was he an idiot? What, you drink from the thing and you never, what, doesn't he know better than this? And maybe he didn't back, you know, centuries ago where anything was possible and there were deep religious convictions. And so the supernatural and forces beyond our knowledge or control were not an extreme thought. And, but I would learn that that urge persists to this day within us. Nobody wants to go to the gym for six months. They want a pill. They want an injection. And the closest thing we have lately, the.

• 5:20Chuck Nice?

  GLP-1s.

• 5:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The GLP-1s. So let's start there. What has that done to the people who are not diabetic? Where it was a medicinal treatment for their health condition. You have all kinds of other people injecting themselves. What is the consequence of that on our culture, on our civilization?

• 5:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think there's two things culturally and medically, medically revolutionary category of drugs. They are peptide drugs. We can talk about other peptides.

• 5:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, definitely want to go there.

• 5:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. So it's kind of the, the knight in shining armor story for peptides, along with insulin was one of them. But, I mean, I think they're a medical revolution. They're going to prevent a huge amount of chronic disease that otherwise never would have been prevented through lifestyle interventions alone. No, no matter how much you talk about, you gotta get good sleep and physical activity and you gotta eat right. We've seen in practice for decades that even if you know that, it can be very hard to do in the context of real life.

• 6:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And for some people even impossible, just given their own inability to focus or, or.

• 6:22Speaker 03

  Challenges, everyone's.

• 6:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sure, sure.

• 6:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so now to augment, you can, you still do those things, but in combination with these drugs, right, you're going to see huge reductions in chronic disease as a result. So I think that's a very good thing. Culturally, I think it has shifted what it means to lose weight. It's, I don't want to say it's easier now, but you know, with the medicines, it's more likely to happen for a lot of people. There's this familiarity with, you know, sometimes injecting yourself with medicines, which many people who previously never took injectable medicines now maybe are with GLP-1s. And maybe some of that familiarity is bleeding into being comfortable with injecting other things like all the other types of peptides that aren't as well studied.

• 7:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So what about, I mean, I don't want to distract ourselves on this, but I'd wanted to, to be there somewhere in the backdrop. Before the GLP-1s, there was a movement to be comfortable in your own body. There'd be people overweight, but not.

• 7:21Speaker 03

  Body positivity.

• 7:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Body positivity. They were not morbidly overweight. They're just a little chubby. And now you can just get rid of that. And are we resorting to the skinny person mindset? And the body positivity is no longer a thing?

• 7:39Speaker 03

  I think it's shifting self-perception for sure. And so there's two separate things. There is the health impact of particularly visceral fat, which is different from the health impact of subcutaneous fat, which is the part you can see and pinch and everything.

• 7:51Chuck Nice?

  Well, you should talk about that because people need to know that the visceral fat is the really dangerous fat.

• 7:59Speaker 03

  It is.

• 7:59Chuck Nice?

  It's the fat that forms around your organs and, you know.

• 8:02Speaker 03

  Which you can't necessarily see.

• 8:03Chuck Nice?

  See.

• 8:04Speaker 03

  From the outside.

• 8:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can't pinch that.

• 8:05Chuck Nice?

  You can't, like, subcutaneous fat is when you look in the mirror and go, I gotta lose weight.

• 8:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, which is not as much of a health risk. So there's separately sort of the health side of reducing visceral fat is generally good for your health. Totally different from, do I feel good when I look at myself in the mirror? I think what we know very clearly is even people who you would consider to be, you know, thin or athletic looking can look in the mirror and still not feel great about themselves. So I think it's a little bit deeper than necessarily just the number on the scale. I think a lot of people struggle with that, especially in, you know, the era of Snapchat filters and social media and unrealistic expectations.

• 8:42Gary O'Reilly?

  We'll get into the, the psychology and the imposition of certain body shapes. People say you must adhere to this body shape rather than the one that you have. But take a step back with GLP-1s. How much clinical data is there that we have? Because we, we're seeing right, that we're there for, as you said, diabetes. We're now looking at it as a weight loss drug, and it's sold mainly as a weight loss drug, regardless of your, your conditions, if you have or haven't any. Do we think there are other downstream benefits? Do we think, hang on a minute, this could cause problems, not just have a list of benefits?

• 9:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, so certainly.

• 9:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we turn 70, do we grow a second head or something, you know?

• 9:21Chuck Nice?

  I want one of those.

• 9:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If the drug has not been in civilization for more than a certain amount of time.

• 9:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't know what that will do as people age beyond that.

• 9:33Speaker 03

  Right. So what do you know? You know, taking these medicines can lead to weight loss on the order of 10%, 20%, depending on where you're starting, depending on your dose. What do we know about carrying, you know, in some cases, extra body weight? It increases your risk for a long list of diseases. We're talking even dementia. People are surprised about that one sometimes. Your cardio metabolic health, which is influenced by your visceral fat, influences your risk for brain disease, obviously for heart disease. And so what we do know is it helps people lose weight if they, if it was medically indicated for them to lose weight. Therefore, we can predict it's probably going to help reduce risk for the long list of chronic diseases that we know are associated with carrying excess weight for a long period of time.

• 10:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 10:15Speaker 03

  We don't know what will happen in 20 or 30 years. But is that enough rationale to wait 20 or 30 years to start taking them? When we know there are some concrete benefits we could kind of act on now?

• 10:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm gonna wait 30 years and then I'll start.

• 10:29Gary O'Reilly?

  GLP-1, semaglutide? Am I pronouncing that? Is that a naturally occurring peptide within the body?

• 10:36Speaker 03

  No. So the GLP-1 signaling pathway is endogenous to the body. These are the.

• 10:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Endogenous.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  Endogenous, it's in your, it's in your body. Thank you for that.

• 10:49Speaker 03

  They're different molecules. So the ones that you inject as the pharmaceutical versions, they're longer lasting. It's obviously more controllable. But when you eat a meal, you do have hormone signaling going on to tell your brain, okay, you're feeling full. You don't need to eat more right now. Right.

• 11:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But so that was the.

• 11:04Chuck Nice?

  So that's what he's saying that, you know, you already have that your gut tells your brain to, we're done.

• 11:10Gary O'Reilly?

  I'm hungry.

• 11:10Chuck Nice?

  I'm hungry. And then your gut tells your brain.

• 11:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thanksgiving it doesn't do that.

• 11:14Gary O'Reilly?

  So it's an amplification of certain messaging.

• 11:17Speaker 03

  That's right. And so those hormones, they respond differently to different types of food that you eat. If you eat something rich, you know, in whole foods and particularly plant-based foods with dietary fiber and protein, you're going to feel more satiated for longer. You're going to feel fuller for longer. If you're eating often ultra-processed foods that are rich in sodium and added sugars, but not particularly fiber or protein, you're not going to feel as full for longer, which is totally separate from the nutritional effect of those foods.

• 11:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I got a question. For the longest while, there are these herbal supplements to your health that would make claims, none of them were verified by the FDA. All right. Have we transitioned from that era to an era where science actually is accomplishing what everyone was thinking was getting accomplished by herbal cures that they were told would either.

• 12:09Speaker 03

  Support metabolic health.

• 12:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Support metabolic health. You've got the lingo. Support metabolic health, support your sex life, your social life. You know, these claims were all extraordinary. And are the scientific circles, the pharmaceutical circles, learning how to do that, but with authentic science?

• 12:29Chuck Nice?

  Is it the snake oil that actually works?

• 12:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think, I think there probably is something to that. I don't know how the supplement market has shifted after the introduction of GLP-1s. I think you're probably right, that you've probably seen decreased interest in, you know, the bottles you can buy that support weight loss or support metabolic health with no efficacy numbers attached to like, oh, these drugs actually have clear clinical data on both the benefits and the risks. My guess is you've probably seen a flip in those.

• 12:57Gary O'Reilly?

  So people are believing the science? Or are they getting to the point where they're ready to believe the science? Or they're demanding more science?

• 13:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There comes a time where science rises up to a level where it cannot be ignored.

• 13:09Gary O'Reilly?

  There you go.

• 13:09Chuck Nice?

  And I think you are both underestimating the utter stupidity of who we are as people.

• 13:16Gary O'Reilly?

  There is always that element.

• 13:18Chuck Nice?

  There's always that.

• 13:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, okay. You're right, Chuck.

• 13:21Chuck Nice?

  Because, listen, one of the things that happens is that people see the results for themselves. So with GLP-1s, I think for everybody out.

• 13:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everybody's got a friend.

• 13:31Chuck Nice?

  Everybody's got a friend. And here's what you saw with that friend. What happened, man? Look at you. Are you sick? Do you like, you know?

• 13:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the old days.

• 13:40Chuck Nice?

  In the old days, I'd say, hey, I don't know. Have you seen Jimmy lately? Man, he lost a lot of weight, man. I don't know, man. I'm worried about him.

• 13:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Unexplained weight loss.

• 13:48Chuck Nice?

  Unexplained weight loss.

• 13:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I looked at the data on that. Unexplained weight loss, you're dead in six months.

• 13:54Chuck Nice?

  Okay, but now, but now you say, and your friend, you're like, oh my God, that works.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  It works. Live five years longer.

• 14:01Chuck Nice?

  So there's like these walking testimonies now that says this stuff works.

• 14:13Gary O'Reilly?

  You may have heard the best voice in show business, Morgan Freeman, talking about a serious and under-diagnosed heart condition that's often missed, A, TTR, cardiac amyloidosis or A TTRCM. It's a condition that can greatly disrupt your life with symptoms like severe fatigue, shortness of breath, and carpal tunnel. If left untreated, A TTRCM may become serious, leading to a shorter lifespan. Attruby helps adults with A TTRCM live longer and have fewer hospitalizations due to heart issues, so you can focus more on living for what you love. Tell your doctor if you're pregnant, plan to become pregnant, or are

• 14:56Gary O'Reilly?

  breastfeeding, and about the medications you take. The most common side effects were mild and included diarrhea and abdominal pain. If you have A TTRCM, talk to your cardiologist about Attruby and visit attruby.com/podcast. That's A-T-T-R-U-B-Y.com/podcast to learn more. It's time to get busy living. Brought to you by Bridge Bio. Curiosity is fundamental to progress. So why not take what you're curious about and turn it into a master's degree? Whether you want to build on existing expertise or study

• 15:35Gary O'Reilly?

  something entirely new, SNHU offers over 80 graduate programs you can complete online. Learn from instructors with real-world experience. Connect with people from all over the country and gain knowledge you can use at work and in everyday life. Give in to your curiosity and visit SNHU.edu/startalk.

• 15:59Chuck Nice?

  Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on things you love, like those iced lattes that help you get ready to face the day. So switch your home and auto to Progressive and see if you could save and keep sipping away. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states.

• 16:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Space fact. So life doesn't simply require the sun. It requires a source of energy. One source of energy is Earth itself in the form of hydrothermal vents, places at the bottom of the ocean where heat is coming out. And there we find life forms as alien as anyone has ever dreamt of, thriving on geochemical energy from the depths of the earth.

• 17:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you like that fact, you can find 4,999 more in Lost in Space. 5,000 facts to help navigate the universe. Lost in Space is now available wherever you get your books.

• 17:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what is this with peptides? Just introduce me. I learned it in high school biology and I forgot it. So just catch me up on what a peptide is and why you guys care.

• 17:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. So peptides are closely related to proteins. You can think of them as really small proteins, almost. It's, there's a short number of amino acids, which is the fundamental building block of proteins. And if you've got between two, up to around 40-ish, depending on the definition, amino acids, that's a peptide.

• 18:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 18:03Speaker 03

  And so functionally, that's the scale where they're not really doing complex three-dimensional folding on each other like larger proteins would.

• 18:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But they're still busy and useful.

• 18:11Speaker 03

  They are. Yeah. And so you make them in your body. They have critical signaling functions and hormonal functions, like the GLP-1s, like insulin. Insulin's a little bit bigger, I think around 50.

• 18:21Gary O'Reilly?

  Are they more easily absorbed through the biological barriers, which makes them more effective?

• 18:27Speaker 03

  You still have to inject them. With any peptide or any protein, if you eat it, your body is going to break it down.

• 18:31Gary O'Reilly?

  Your body acid will destroy it.

• 18:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then you'll still absorb the amino acids.

• 18:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you have to bypass your digestive tract in order to get it into your bloodstream?

• 18:37Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 18:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 18:39Speaker 03

  For most of them. Actually, there is, I think semaglutide now has an orally available pill. But the bioavailability, it's like 2% of it, ends up making it into your actual system compared to injected, where much more obviously.

• 18:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  100%.

• 18:51Gary O'Reilly?

  People prefer oral to injection. All right. Let's go back to the enemy, visceral fat. How do we manage that with, say, a peptide? Or do we have another route of approach?

• 19:02Speaker 03

  Visceral fat, and this is one of the unique places where our biology is on our side. When you lose a little bit of weight, visceral fat comes off disproportionately first. It's also disproportionately risky to your health. And so, you know, losing even a couple percent of total body fat, you'll see much more of your visceral fat go. And the reason you care about that is it is crazily associated with risk for future cardiometabolic health. UK Biobank did an interesting study. If you compare people who were overweight, you know, by looking in the mirror, looking at the total body weight scale versus normal weight, but people who are normal weight with a lot of visceral fat, because that can happen. You can be overweight on the scale, but not have much visceral fat. The normal

• 19:43Speaker 03

  weight people with a lot of visceral fat had like a 6% chance of getting type 2 diabetes. It was like 2% for the people who were overweight, but with low visceral fat. So a threefold difference in the opposite direction of what you would expect by looking at somebody. So visceral fat has, it's a disproportionate impact on your health. But when you go to either lose weight, actually don't have to lose weight to lose visceral fat. If you just increase aerobic activity, you have to increase it kind of a lot, like the threshold is 150 minutes.

• 20:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Minutes?

• 20:13Speaker 03

  Per week.

• 20:15Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say, that's a long workout. The gym tells me I can only stay on this thing for 30.

• 20:22Speaker 03

  But you don't have to lose, the number on the scale doesn't have to change for your visceral fat to be going down meaningfully. You can do body recomposition, if you're doing more aerobic activity. The fact that it is so metabolically hot works to your advantage that it can go off first, even if not much changes in your whole body.

• 20:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Said body recomposition.

• 20:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:41Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay.

• 20:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What is that?

• 20:42Gary O'Reilly?

  Exactly.

• 20:43Speaker 03

  So, you know, say I'm 193 pounds and say, I'm going to add more strength training.

• 20:49Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 20:50Speaker 03

  I'm going to be eating, you know, my total energy intake is going to be, is going to keep me right at 193 pounds, but I'm going to be eating enough protein and I'm going to be doing strength training.

• 20:57Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 20:58Speaker 03

  What's going to happen is maybe my body fat is going to go down a little bit.

• 21:01Chuck Nice?

  But your muscle is going to go up. So you're going to weigh the same, but your body is going to be recomprised in such a way that you're more lean and muscular at the same weight?

• 21:12Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 21:12Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 21:13Gary O'Reilly?

  We used to call that conditioning.

• 21:14Chuck Nice?

  Conditioning.

• 21:15Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 21:15Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 21:16Gary O'Reilly?

  What if I'm that lazy-ass guy that says, you got a peptide for that?

• 21:20Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 21:20Gary O'Reilly?

  So how, how do we attack our visceral fat and we want to get lean muscle mass? There's got to be a go-to peptide.

• 21:29Speaker 03

  There is. So anytime you're going to lose even a little bit of total body fat, the visceral fat's going to come off first. So the GLP-1s are going to kind of by nature reduce your visceral fat while you're reducing total body fat. Separate from that, I mean, it's all the boring stuff. We all know. It's the sleep. It's the proper nutrition. It's doing the strength training. It's doing the aerobic activity.

• 21:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Remind you of the lazy-assed.

• 21:53Speaker 03

  Or maybe the sleep.

• 21:54Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, sleep I'm good at. Yeah, I can do that.

• 21:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then, you know, quite a few tiers down from the GLP-1s, you can take creatine to amplify your strength training.

• 22:02Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 22:02Speaker 03

  And so we can get into that. But the way.

• 22:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Creatine is a what?

• 22:06Speaker 03

  It is a supplement.

• 22:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A protein supplement.

• 22:09Speaker 03

  It is a dietary supplement.

• 22:12Speaker 03

  It's not, I don't think of it as like a protein powder.

• 22:15Chuck Nice?

  No, it's not a protein powder. But apparently, if you are weight training specifically, not, not, not the only thing, but weight training, it really helps with your recovery and to help build muscle supposedly.

• 22:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the way it works, we actually make creatine kind of natively. We make about a gram per day. You get about another gram per day through dietary sources if you're omnivorous. A typical supplemented dose for weight training is on the order of five grams per day.

• 22:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's hardly anything.

• 22:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, so you're going up about threefold-ish from like the native endogenous.

• 22:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, just, I'm just, I just know how little five grams is.

• 22:52Speaker 03

  Oh, it's a small total.

• 22:53Gary O'Reilly?

  It's a tiny little.

• 22:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can't just jump into a. It's a fraction of an ounce.

• 22:56Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, when you actually add it to whatever you're going to supplement, whatever food, it's literally, it looks like a thimble.

• 23:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay.

• 23:04Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 23:05Gary O'Reilly?

  Thing is, if you take a dosage that is way above, because you think, you know what, I'm gonna really.

• 23:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, because why take a low dose if you can take a high dose?

• 23:11Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, so you get, you end up with a shock in some capacity in your body.

• 23:15Speaker 03

  Gastrointestinal.

• 23:16Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, so then you're just not in balance with your own biology.

• 23:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 23:20Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, you know what, while we're on that, maybe as a doctor, you can tell people.

• 23:24Speaker 03

  Scientist.

• 23:24Chuck Nice?

  I'm sorry, as a scientist, you can tell people.

• 23:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As a doctor or scientist?

• 23:27Chuck Nice?

  Doc, doctor, scientist. Just because this much of something works, doesn't mean two times that works twice as good.

• 23:36Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. There is a threshold effect with creatine, it has a very good example. I mean, the way it works in your muscle cells is when you're going to be doing, you know, a set of 10 reps of bench press or whatever it is, you've got kind of this quick acting energy system with ATP. While you're doing it within the first few seconds, you blow through that and your cells have to say, okay, we got to recharge energy here. So you've got this battery system in your cells that has creatine phosphate. And so you can kind of increase the size of that quick acting battery by supplementing with creatine. And the order of effect here is about 10%, 20%. So instead of being able to do, you know, 10 reps on the bench press, now you're going to do 11 reps. And so you get a little bit more growth stimulus, you get a little bit more out of your workouts, you can work out with a little more intensity.

• 24:20Speaker 03

  And that's the entire mechanism for how supplementing with creatine leads to more lean mass gain when you're doing training. The stimulus though is still coming from training, that's a misconception. People think, if I take creatine, I'm going to start hulking up.

• 24:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, back up.

• 24:34Chuck Nice?

  I'm on a creatine and ice cream diet.

• 24:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Back up, just remind us about ATP.

• 24:41Speaker 03

  ATP. Yeah, so in your cells, they need a way to quickly get energy. And so the way that works is you're going to be burning the macronutrients, you're going to be burning carbohydrates preferentially, or you're going to be using fat, or least ideally, you're going to be using protein. When they get combusted in your body, right, they can take the phosphate and through a complex series of molecular vents, you result in molecules called ATP, which is what your mitochondria in your cells use for the energy to do whatever they're going to do. In the case of muscle cells, you know, to contract.

• 25:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I have in my head that that stands for adenosine triphosphate.

• 25:18Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 25:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Does it still stand for that?

• 25:20Speaker 03

  As far as I know.

• 25:24Gary O'Reilly?

  Let's visit this sort of, you know, you go big with the dosage.

• 25:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:28Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, so jump back into peptides stacking. So if I'm stacking, it's not one peptide, but you're multiple different peptides coming in at the same time. That's become very popular, but how A does that work and B how?

• 25:45Speaker 03

  I'm not sure it does work. So this is a totally separate class of peptides. So the GLP-1s went through the route you would want them to go through, big clinical studies, thousands of people. You get a clear idea of benefits and risks. The peptides I think we're talking about now when people talk about stacking with BPC157 or TB500, there's very, very little, in some cases zero, human clinical data on either the benefits or the risks of these peptides.

• 26:08Gary O'Reilly?

  Those two peptides you mentioned, they the Wolverine stack.

• 26:11Speaker 03

  The Wolverine stack.

• 26:14Speaker 03

  And so it's touted for, with very little evidence, some animal evidence, but not much human evidence. And anyone who's been in biology for a long time can tell you how many times we've cured cancer in mice and how many times we've solved every disease in animal models of disease that have failed to translate to humans. I think the stat is among drugs that start clinical studies, actual clinical studies.

• 26:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On humans.

• 26:36Speaker 03

  On humans, only about 10% of them make it all the way through, make it to market. It's even lower in cancer, I think it's about 5%.

• 26:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And 100% of those were tempted by their results from animal.

• 26:47Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 26:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Research, okay.

• 26:48Speaker 03

  Right, so you're starting out.

• 26:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They didn't just pull it out of their ass and say, let's give it to people. They had some evidence that it might work.

• 26:54Speaker 03

  Right, enough to convince.

• 26:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But how do you explain that if mice are actually quite close to us genetically? What is the fundamental divide between us then?

• 27:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, there's phenomenal differences, even coming from non-human primates, maybe as a more striking, you'd think it's almost identical.

• 27:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go there, go there, yeah.

• 27:13Speaker 03

  There was a really tragic clinical study started for an antibody years back at this point called TGN1412, which was supposed to be a powerful treatment for autoimmune disease. It was supposed to turn up the types of immune cells in your body that help dampen down the immune response.

• 27:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just before we had a cure for AIDS, was that?

• 27:29Speaker 03

  I don't know the exact.

• 27:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The timeline, okay.

• 27:31Speaker 03

  Timeline, I think it was from the 2000s. But the idea was, we're going to turn up these helpful immune cells that work against autoimmune disease. And they tested it in non-human primates. And then they said, okay, based on that non-human primate dose, everything looked fine. We're going to scale it down 100-fold, 200-fold, I forget what it was, and try it in humans. They put it into the first six humans, I think it was either all of them or five out of the six first people who were tested, within minutes, started going into this severe inflammatory response, their organs started shutting down. One of them lost, I think, a few fingers or something.

• 28:04Chuck Nice?

  Damn.

• 28:05Speaker 03

  And afterwards, what they found out was, oh, actually, in this non-human primate model, this type of T cell doesn't have the exact same marker that is present in human T cells. And it turned up the wrong type of inflammatory T cells in humans that wasn't visible even in non-human primates, let alone rats or mice.

• 28:22Chuck Nice?

  So it caused like a cytokine response instead?

• 28:25Speaker 03

  It did, it causes huge inflammatory response acutely.

• 28:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's really unfortunate.

• 28:30Speaker 03

  So unexpected stuff happens all the time.

• 28:32Chuck Nice?

  See, that's why we should just test everything on humans to begin with.

• 28:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What you're saying is, we should expect unexpected things.

• 28:40Speaker 03

  Right, which is why, I mean, that's why clinical trials are structured the way they do. And actually, in response to that, now instead of dosing all six people at the same time, and six is already a small number to be starting with. Now they do called sentinel dosing, where it's like, you start with one person and you wait and see what happens to that one or pair of people, and then you kind of scale it up.

• 28:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you might handpick your person who is in a really dire strait.

• 29:02Speaker 03

  In the case of cancer, absolutely.

• 29:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, so that the upside, the potential upside is way good for them.

• 29:08Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 29:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Relative to some bad happening on the drug.

• 29:12Speaker 03

  That is how it's done in cancer. For a lot of other drugs, they actually start with like a maximally healthy person.

• 29:17Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 29:18Speaker 03

  To minimize the odds, like if it is going to do something bad, maybe it's not going to tip them over the edge.

• 29:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, it might knock them off, wow.

• 29:24Chuck Nice?

  And with the cancer, unfortunately, they, it really isn't just dire, like my mother died of cancer and she had bone cancer and it was resistant to every treatment.

• 29:33Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 29:34Chuck Nice?

  And there were some new drugs coming on the market and I had some friends at a foundation, I said, hey, and they actually wanted to help, but she was too old. And basically, they were like, the information that we get from her is not usable because of her age.

• 29:52Gary O'Reilly?

  Interesting. Are peptides that people are using for their body composition naturally occurring in our bodies or are they being pharmaceutically developed and then introduced?

• 30:05Speaker 03

  Most of them are modified based on naturally occurring molecules, is my understanding.

• 30:11Gary O'Reilly?

  So they're changing the signaling, and so if I want to reduce fat, you make the signal of reducing the fat and triggering the chemicals in the body.

• 30:19Speaker 03

  To make it more powerful, to make it last longer. Now, for these, what could be compounded peptides, and I think these very differently, from the type of peptides like GLP-1s, the ones we're talking about that have minimal human data, that have animal data, that people are self-dosing with, kind of through the gray market, I'm very concerned about that. There's two big types of risks. The first one, which is the one that people talk about the most, is the less concerning risk. That's where, you know, it's being made in these for research use only applications, but they're actually marketing it to people for personal research. The risk is, well, maybe they didn't do a good job of being sterile in their preparations, maybe there's some inflammatory endotoxin from the bacteria they use to produce the peptides. Maybe what's in the vial isn't safe to inject.

• 31:01Speaker 03

  That type of risk you can mitigate by bringing it domestically in, you know, regulated pharmacies, compounding it here. The second type of risk is much more concerning to me, which is that some of these peptides, they're touted for things like tissue repair, like BPC157, it gets pitched as, oh, it's going to help you recover from your tendon injury or your muscle injury or whatever.

• 31:21Gary O'Reilly?

  Athletes would be very interested in that.

• 31:23Speaker 03

  Right, which, you know, on the benefit side, that could be great. One of the things is, you know, they say it may promote angiogenesis, the growth of new blood vessels, which is good in the context of tissue repair, where you need to get nutrients in and immune cells to help. On the flip side, cancer biologists think of angiogenesis in a very different light.

• 31:40Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 31:41Speaker 03

  And so if you have a particularly well-vasculized tumor, that can lead to runaway tumor growth in a way that wouldn't happen.

• 31:47Chuck Nice?

  Because you're feeding the tumor.

• 31:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 31:49Speaker 03

  Not to say that, you know, it causes cancer or that it exacerbates cancer among people who have cancer who take it.

• 31:55Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 31:56Speaker 03

  But I wouldn't rule that out personally.

• 31:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that risk is definitely there, for sure.

• 32:00Speaker 03

  So, I mean, clearly they have biological activity, but having biological activity is not a compliment when it's coming from a biologist. It could have benefits, it could have risks. I would want to see a very carefully studied, an objectively studied weighing of those benefits and risks in formal clinical studies before I would take any of these types of.

• 32:19Gary O'Reilly?

  Is there a list of the good guys and the bad guys when it comes to peptides?

• 32:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, so all of the ones that you're going to be buying from these gray market, research grade sources, I wouldn't touch them.

• 32:31Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 32:31Speaker 03

  For the reason of both of those risks, because some of them, you can even buy like retitrutide or trisepotide or semaglutide, the ones that are the real GLP-1 drugs. And it may be cheaper to get it through these unofficial sources, but I'm not 100% sure that what's in the vial is what they say it is.

• 32:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I want to pivot to the anti-aging movement, but before I do that, to learn, at least for me for the first time, that a peptide is some transitional place between an amino acid and a full-up protein. And so much happens in our body, or is prevented from happening in our body, based on what proteins do, how they fold, how they behave. And given that AlphaFold just got the Nobel Prize for the AI application to solving the protein folding problem.

• 33:21Gary O'Reilly?

  AlphaFold 3, I think.

• 33:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  AlphaFold 3. In principle. If these molecules are so fundamental to everything we are, is that the future of our health? Just some brilliant people in the lab, finding out how to

• 33:36Chuck Nice?

  Puzzle these together.

• 33:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Puzzle these together.

• 33:38Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 33:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And whatever is your need, this new chemistry gets introduced.

• 33:44Chuck Nice?

  To address it.

• 33:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then I don't have to go to the gym. I don't have to put on makeup. I don't, we'll get to that in a minute. I don't have to do any of these things. I can just sit with my ass on the couch and watch TV.

• 33:56Speaker 03

  I mean, I would be surprised if medicine didn't continue to get better and better. I would be astonished if these were the last peptide drugs that were ever approved. They're not the first either, I should say. There's something like 80 FDA-approved drugs that are peptides. So there will be more. Probably they will be better. Probably they'll be designed better, sort of with an in-silico approach, maybe with the use of AI.

• 34:19Chuck Nice?

  What's in-silico?

• 34:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everybody knows what that means. Why are you even asking?

• 34:21Chuck Nice?

  Oh, I'm sorry. I'm asking on behalf of the people out there who may not know. What is in-silico?

• 34:29Speaker 03

  Traditional drug development is you take this library of 3,000, 10,000 compounds from microbes and from soil and from all different places, often natural compounds. And you've got a target. You know you want to modulate in the body. And so you screen 10,000 compounds and you're looking for the hits. And then from those hits, which often came from a natural starting point, you modify them to say, okay, can we make it a little bit better activity, a little bit better safety? That's been kind of the cornerstone of traditional drug development. Or you vaccinate a mouse against something and then you look through all its antibodies and you try to find the best one. And you sequence that and you turn that into a drug. I still consider that to be from a natural type of origin. Increasingly, as we understand kind of how you rearrange all these different building blocks,

• 35:12Speaker 03

  people can start to predict that using computational methods that I know nothing about. But I think we will see more power from those computational approaches, you know, with better computing potential and with better understanding of the biology itself.

• 35:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What does that have to do with in-silico?

• 35:27Speaker 03

  Oh, in-silico means in the chip. So like computer-based.

• 35:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, computer.

• 35:31Chuck Nice?

  Computer-based.

• 35:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Computer helping you.

• 35:33Chuck Nice?

  Oh, look at that.

• 35:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I didn't get that. I didn't get that.

• 35:38Gary O'Reilly?

  To Neil's point about anti-aging.

• 35:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:40Gary O'Reilly?

  All these peptides, all of these skincare regimes that are now coming through, playing straight into a vanity.

• 35:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 35:48Gary O'Reilly?

  A need to comply with the body type, the skin regime, whatever it is. Is that just a human condition that we will hijack it just to look better?

• 36:02Speaker 03

  I think so.

• 36:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Looking younger.

• 36:04Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, rather than it being, you know what, I need this for my health, dude. No, I just want to look more better.

• 36:08Speaker 03

  I mean, I think we all, we choose to present ourselves. Like, we've all made conscious decisions about how we're showing up here today.

• 36:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's curious to me, to Gary's point, is that we are rejecting wholesale the natural aging phenomenon of the human body.

• 36:26Gary O'Reilly?

  Mm-hmm.

• 36:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I dropped an explainer on getting old. And I have a strong thoughts about that.

• 36:33Gary O'Reilly?

  Hmm.

• 36:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I don't want people who are old to be viewed as something you never want to be, would never want to look like.

• 36:44Chuck Nice?

  Too late.

• 36:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It feels wrong to me.

• 36:46Chuck Nice?

  It is wrong.

• 36:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Socially, culturally.

• 36:48Gary O'Reilly?

  We've forgotten the respect your elders conversation we as young people had.

• 36:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, I see, I see two things here. One is looking older and being older. And the second thing is, we know there's some stuff that happens as you get older. If you are 30 years old, you can bet, you're pretty sure that with every passing decade, you're going to lose somewhere between 3% to 8% of your muscle mass. Your cardiorespiratory fitness is going to be trending down. Your bone density, particularly in women around menopause, is going to be going down.

• 37:17Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 37:17Speaker 03

  We know these things are going to happen with age.

• 37:19Chuck Nice?

  Talk about the prostate, geez.

• 37:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why you always got to bring your prostate into all these conversations?

• 37:23Chuck Nice?

  Can you not tell that I am going through something, man?

• 37:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I didn't mean to. Okay, fine, thank you.

• 37:31Speaker 03

  What I was going to say is, those trends, you can never escape those trends. You're not going to go up, you know, in muscle, total muscle mass or bone density, probably, or cardiorespiratory fitness from age 30 to age 80. But you can totally influence the slope of that change.

• 37:45Chuck Nice?

  Uh-huh.

• 37:46Speaker 03

  And so that, you know, when I do videos, I'll talk about bone density or strength training or cardiorespiratory fitness and VO2 max. And it's not just pitched at people who are 50, 60, 70, 80, who are starting to worry about these things very acutely. It's also for if you're 30.

• 37:59Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 37:59Speaker 03

  And you're in maximal control of what is the slope going to be over the course of decades.

• 38:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And VO2 max, that's the uptake rate of oxygen into the metabolism of your system. Did I say that correctly?

• 38:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's your total, if you're going max all-out effort, how much oxygen can you use? I think of it like, you know, if you're a car, it's the size of your engine.

• 38:21Gary O'Reilly?

  Mm-hmm.

• 38:22Speaker 03

  And having a bigger VO2 max engine means you have a better cardiorespiratory fitness, total health. It's very highly predictive of your total health, total mortality. You increase it as you would expect by doing more aerobic training.

• 38:34Chuck Nice?

  Right. So now going back to younger people, is health like saving money? Where if you start earlier, do you bank benefits later on in your life? Or is it something where it's like?

• 38:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Were you just a lazy-ass person? And you're trying to get back in right now?

• 38:52Chuck Nice?

  Hey, man, what can I say?

• 38:54Speaker 03

  You can get back in now, but there's no point.

• 38:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Get back in the game.

• 38:56Chuck Nice?

  I had some foolish years, that's all I can say.

• 38:59Speaker 03

  Okay. There's a really interesting study in people in their 90s who started doing a strength training program. They saw like a doubling in strength, tremendous improvements in muscle. Like, there's no point where it's, oh, it's too late for me to do this type of training.

• 39:12Gary O'Reilly?

  People, once they hit a certain age, men in particular, get bombarded with testosterone commercials. You've got to have it. It's going to be beneficial on a number of different aspects of your life.

• 39:24Chuck Nice?

  So you'll like it and she'll like it too.

• 39:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But she'll like it more.

• 39:28Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that's right, right, right. She'll like it more, yeah.

• 39:30Gary O'Reilly?

  So, okay, so possibly it's for the lead in your pencil, but if that's other of it.

• 39:35Chuck Nice?

  What?

• 39:36Gary O'Reilly?

  It has other of it.

• 39:38Chuck Nice?

  I've never heard that before.

• 39:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Permission to say that?

• 39:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here, smack it, say it.

• 39:49Chuck Nice?

  Ah, that was hilarious. Oh, that's so good.

• 39:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 39:52Gary O'Reilly?

  It just depends who you write to.

• 39:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 39:55Gary O'Reilly?

  That's enough of the jokes from me.

• 39:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is a pencil.

• 39:58Gary O'Reilly?

  Is it that situation where you do naturally have diminishing testosterone over the years? Or just, is everybody different?

• 40:05Speaker 03

  Everybody is different, certainly. It's also a highly predatory market. And it's not just for older men, right? You see people 20, 30 years old on social media talking about being on testosterone, which

• 40:14Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, but are they being led towards that by an influencer of sorts?

• 40:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's this optimization culture.

• 40:20Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 40:21Speaker 03

  Where even people who, you know, if you asked a clinician, you know, do they need to have more testosterone? And they would give you the answer of no.

• 40:29Chuck Nice?

  No.

• 40:29Speaker 03

  There's these hormone clinics who are trying to convince you that, oh, your testosterone may be in the normal range, but maybe it should be a little bit higher in the normal range, which is very not backed by evidence. The percent of people under 60.

• 40:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very not backed by evidence.

• 40:46Speaker 03

  The percent of people under 60 who actually have low testosterone is on the order of 1%.

• 40:52Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 40:53Speaker 03

  In their 60s, it's like 3%. In their 70s, I think it's about 5%. When they tried to recruit people for the big clinical studies, they pooled, they pooled 51,000 people, 65-plus men, who thought they had symptoms of low testosterone.

• 41:05Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 41:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If they tell you that enough on an ad, then you'll believe it.

• 41:08Gary O'Reilly?

  That's just it, isn't it? If you hear it enough times, it must be true.

• 41:11Chuck Nice?

  But it's, you have to understand that those ads are positioned in the same way like the Zodiac is. They give you very general traits that we all share.

• 41:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You feel tired sometimes.

• 41:24Chuck Nice?

  We all have these traits and then they say, you must have low T. Does your chest go up and down when you breathe?

• 41:31Speaker 03

  Like, yeah, yeah. I mean, 51,000 people who thought they had symptoms of low testosterone, six in seven of them did not. Only one in seven did. And so if you expand that out to the general population, it does happen. For people who do have low levels, replacement into the normal range can improve some things, particularly sexual symptoms, desire, libido.

• 41:54Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 41:54Speaker 03

  Uh, you know, erection quality. Maybe some improvements in mood. There's a couple ingredients there, nitric oxide and, you know, cardio, surprisingly cardiovascular health is

• 42:04Chuck Nice?

  Is really the bit.

• 42:05Speaker 03

  Super important.

• 42:06Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 42:06Speaker 03

  But if you do have truly low testosterone, replacing back into the normal range can help some sexual symptoms. Maybe it can help mood a little bit. It can help bone density. A lot of the stuff, though, that you hear, or that you would, like, you're not going to Hulk up from replacing into the normal range. If you think about like bodybuilder testosterone, steroid cycling, that's going well beyond the replacement dose.

• 42:27Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 42:27Speaker 03

  Which is a totally different ballgame with much greater risks.

• 42:31Gary O'Reilly?

  And we've seen some of those risks with the Roy rage.

• 42:33Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 42:34Gary O'Reilly?

  Et cetera.

• 42:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So my issue about the aging wasn't just what happens to you metabolically or physiologically, it's just the overall appearance.

• 42:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Look at how much we invest in what we look like to look younger. Nobody's looking at your visceral fat. They're looking at your face, your skin, your

• 42:52Chuck Nice?

  Well, we have a youth culture, that's why. And the reason we have a youth culture is because, this may not still be the case, but I read an article about the psychologists that work on Madison Avenue and what they found.

• 43:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For advertisers.

• 43:06Chuck Nice?

  For advertisers specifically.

• 43:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 43:09Chuck Nice?

  So the deal is that in the surveys that they took, people over the age of 30, and pretty much every year after that, become far more rigid in their purchases. And which means you have to spend a lot more money to get them to switch from Ford to Toyota or from Tide to Dash. And so the result is, spend all your money at people who are 13 to 25, because those people haven't made up their mind. And if you can get them on board with you at that time, then the other advertisers have to spend money to get them later on.

• 43:53Gary O'Reilly?

  Brand loyalty.

• 43:54Chuck Nice?

  Brand loyalty.

• 43:54Gary O'Reilly?

  If I can get a younger person into my brand.

• 43:57Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 43:58Gary O'Reilly?

  Then the chances of me keeping them further down the line is much, much higher.

• 44:01Chuck Nice?

  But the result has been, very quickly, all of our movie stars, and I grew up in a time where all the movie stars were old people. They were like middle-aged people. They're not now. They're all, they all look like Timothy Chalamet. Your sports stars, of course, because you've got to be young to play the sports. Your pop stars, all the music. So all of the cultural, like, influences in our society are now owned by young people for the sake of advertising to those young people.

• 44:31Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 44:31Chuck Nice?

  So everybody else is like, well, I don't want to look old. Look, everybody looks young. I don't want to look old. But what they forget, and this is what advertisers will never tell you, so you take it from me, all right? Young people are dumbasses. Stupid as hell.

• 44:50Chuck Nice?

  You don't want to look stupid, do you? See, that's my conversion.

• 45:09Chuck Nice?

  Since when has building a website been hard? Since forever until now, that's right. With Wix, the first of its kind AI website builder where you get the best of AI and drag and drop editing in one place. Wix Harmony allows you to build a real working website for yourself in minutes with the business stuff already built in. I'm talking e-commerce, scheduling, payments, all of it. Plus easily switch between prompting AI and editing things by hand whenever you want. So every detail of your site is exactly right. It's like having a website engineer looking over your shoulder and at your fingertips at the same time.

• 45:55Chuck Nice?

  Aria is an AI agent specifically trained in web design and business strategy. Click anywhere on the website and ask her to make a specific change instead of endless back and forth prompting. It all runs on Wix's tried and true infrastructure with 99.99% uptime and enterprise grade security. So your site performs as good as it looks. Wix has been a pioneer in website tech for more than 20 years, powering millions of businesses around the world. So what are you waiting for? Go ahead and be that website building genius that you are. Try Wix Harmony for free at wix.com. That's W I X dot com.

• 46:41Gary O'Reilly?

  As an environmental advocate, professional climber Alex Honnold knows the most critical battles for our planet happen far from the spotlight. That's why he hosts Planet Visionaries, a podcast dedicated to the people finding real, hopeful solutions to climate challenges. Throughout season six, Alex brings together extraordinary change makers for powerful conversations about grit, determination, and the power of hope to fuel our fight for a better future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.

• 47:19Chuck Nice?

  Hmm, let's see. Cashmere hoodie, cashmere crudit net, long sleeve tee, performance pants. Hmm, what else? Well, what am I doing right now? I am kind of counting some of the pieces in my closet that make up the staples in my wardrobe. I'm talking about easy pieces that make fashion effortless and make me look like a fashion guru. Not that I'm not, let's be honest. Quince is what I'm really talking about because Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials and designs that are timeless, thoughtful, crafted and made to be worn again and again. And that's exactly what I do.

• 48:04Chuck Nice?

  And when the temperature starts to drop, Quince makes it easy to build on those everyday staples with versatile layers designed to keep you warm and comfortable all season long. If you're new to the podcast, you probably don't know that I've been a longtime customer of Quince long before they started supporting StarTalk. And that's why I'm super happy to tell you about them. All the pieces that I named up front, I have and more. Not to mention the number of family members that have received their excellent cashmere pieces from me as a gift. Keep that in mind because you know the holidays are coming. Find your next fall favorites at Quince.

• 48:46Chuck Nice?

  Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know that it was StarTalk Radio and the fashion guru Chuck Nice that told you all about it. It's the best way to support the show. Quince.com Go there right now.

• 49:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So add to the list of things that happen as you age are these, these sort of horrific fate of the mental functioning of so many people in the form of Alzheimer's, in the form of dementia. These are clearly age tagged ailments. And what kind of progress can we hope for these going forward?

• 49:41Speaker 03

  There is some hopeful news here. The big one is there actually is a long list of risk factors that we know influence your risk for future dementia. Now, of course, even if you do all of them perfectly, you can still get dementia.

• 49:54Chuck Nice?

  Can we get to the drugs part? How, how, how much doing drugs does it mess up your?

• 50:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Again, you're checking for someone else.

• 50:03Speaker 03

  The list, what, so I guess what I was trying to communicate was you can do all these things perfectly, you can still get dementia. So it's not a moralism about.

• 50:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's statistical risk factors that people don't know how to think fluently about. But yeah, it's a risk factor. It's a risk factor.

• 50:17Chuck Nice?

  And is, is heredity a big part of it?

• 50:20Speaker 03

  It is part of it. The ones I'm thinking about, so there's kind of three clusters. One is cardiometabolic risk factors. If you have better control of your blood lipids, your blood pressure, your blood sugar. So this is going back to the visceral fat discussion, your cardiometabolic health, your brain, as it turns out, is a highly vascular organ and the health of those blood vessels to your brain influences your odds for brain disease later. That's the first bucket. The second bucket I think of as environmental. So things like air pollution, we know is associated with increased risk of brain disease later. I'm going to forget all of them. There, there's a list of 14 risk factors. The third bucket is things like social contact, which is linked to, you know, if you have challenges with hearing, getting that corrected reduces your risk for progression to dementia.

• 51:05Speaker 03

  Because it's linked to, you know, you may be shying away from social interactions.

• 51:08Chuck Nice?

  Isolation.

• 51:09Speaker 03

  Right. So they all kind of play together.

• 51:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 51:11Speaker 03

  But if you combine all these things together, and I forget the exact number, I think it's, I think it's roughly at a halving of your total risk for dementia is accountable to these various risk factors. So there is.

• 51:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The sum of them together will have your risk.

• 51:24Speaker 03

  Okay. In theory. So there is stuff you can do. It happens to be the exact stuff you already know you should be doing for every other chronic disease. But the idea that kind of it's totally up to fate is an incorrect one. There are things you can do to modify your risk.

• 51:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 51:40Gary O'Reilly?

  Is there anything we've discussed today in terms of a peptide or a supplement that is showing any signs of?

• 51:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You got something you can give us on the side?

• 51:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Just slide one across the table.

• 51:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, you just kind of move it, you know, like across the table.

• 51:55Speaker 03

  It's going to take a long time for the data to give an answer either way.

• 51:59Gary O'Reilly?

  All right.

• 51:59Speaker 03

  I would be surprised if the GLP one drugs in improving all those cardiometabolic risk factors didn't give some reduction in risk for brain disease in the future. It's going to be a while before we come to that answer, but my guess right now is that improving those cardiometabolic risk factors now, maintaining it for decades will probably reduce your risk for brain disease later. That's my guess.

• 52:22Chuck Nice?

  Hmm, all right.

• 52:24Speaker 03

  So for creatine, there's very clear evidence that it can increase your benefits from strength training, build more lean mass on the order of 10 to 20%. Separately, what people often pitch it for is cognitive benefits. And so there the evidence is much less clear, not particularly compelling as of yet. It could turn out in the future. Right now, what we have are small scale heterogeneous studies that aren't often controlled. There was one last year that people bang on about on podcasts and social media. It was a group of 20 patients with Alzheimer's giving creatine and no placebo group, by the way, so uncontrolled. And their outcome of interest was performance on this cognitive test over time. And so they saw some improvements on some of the outcomes or processing speed on those

• 53:08Speaker 03

  test measures as they took the test time and time again. But one thing about taking tests time and time again, sometimes you get better at that test. So, you know, the authors of that paper are saying.

• 53:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Took the same test.

• 53:18Speaker 03

  You're this, I'm not sure if it was the exact same test instrument or the same type of category, but the authors are saying, you know, maybe this is an effective practice, which is well known, sort of in the cognitive testing space. So the authors are framing it as it's feasible to give it to people with Alzheimer's. You increase the creatine stores in the brain. We're going to have to do bigger, better studies to show whether or not there is a benefit in amelioration of symptoms or people who don't have dementia yet in terms of reducing risk of getting dementia. That's what the authors are hedging. And then on social media, you'll see, take creatine, it's going to solve Alzheimer's disease. It's not going to be an issue.

• 53:51Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 53:51Speaker 03

  So there's this huge disconnect where the data are legitimately very uncertain as it relates to cognitive outcomes from these small studies, but people pitch it as it's going to solve all your trouble.

• 54:02Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 54:02Speaker 03

  And the main risk with that for me is knowing there is this long list of risk factors. We do know influence your risk of dementia. What happens if people start thinking, all I have to do is take a scoop or two scoops or three scoops of creatine? If that in any way reduces the effort you're putting towards the rest of stuff we know matters, then that's going to be an indirect harm of taking creatine and thinking it's, even if it's not causing direct toxicity, you know, I consider that.

• 54:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The absence of other actions.

• 54:28Speaker 03

  Right. Which I see as the main sort of category harm of supplements in general.

• 54:32Gary O'Reilly?

  NAD as an anti-aging.

• 54:36Gary O'Reilly?

  Now, I think it's nicotinamide, something like that, but I'm gonna mangle whatever I think it is, but you're gonna be able to tell me exactly.

• 54:43Chuck Nice?

  NAD?

• 54:44Speaker 03

  Nicotinamide, adenine dinucleotide.

• 54:46Gary O'Reilly?

  Thank you.

• 54:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everybody knew that.

• 54:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Wow, from me.

• 54:50Chuck Nice?

  Nicotinamide.

• 54:51Speaker 03

  We are in an uncertain place where we know that, first of all, what does it do? It's important in energy cycling within your cells. It takes an electron, like when you burn sugar, it takes the electron, carries it to your mitochondria. It cycles that way many times in your body.

• 55:05Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh.

• 55:06Speaker 03

  The second thing it does is it's broken down by some enzymes related to DNA repair and inflammatory responses and stress that are pitched as like longevity enzymes called surgeons.

• 55:15Gary O'Reilly?

  Things that people will want to have.

• 55:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this is all mechanistic and this is a big, I write about this all the time, I talk about this in my videos all the time. There's a difference between improvements in some number on a lab test or a very compelling mechanism about why something should be important and showing that it's important in a clinical outcome. And so for NAD, what we see is clearly if you, as you get older, as you look at cohorts of people over time, levels go down. What you also see is if you supplement with nicotinamide supplements, levels go up very measurably. What people have not shown, except for one particular case, is that getting those levels to go back up improves outcomes in any meaningful way.

• 55:57Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 55:58Speaker 03

  The one case where there is clinical data to show it is useful to have that happen is very niche. It's among people who are at high risk for skin cancer. In the study, they had had two skin cancers in the last five years or something, so not representative of the general population, who took nicotinamide supplement. That's the one trial where they showed something like a 20, 25% relative risk reduction of another skin cancer diagnosis.

• 56:20Gary O'Reilly?

  Mm-hmm.

• 56:21Speaker 03

  And so that's totally different from what you see on social media, which is the story of your levels go down as you get older, therefore take more.

• 56:28Chuck Nice?

  Take this.

• 56:29Speaker 03

  Right. Which, you know, in a cancer model, in mice actually, taking nicotinamide supplements led to worse outcomes.

• 56:35Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh.

• 56:36Speaker 03

  You can imagine all your cells in your body, you know, have this dependence on energy cycling, maybe in some cases, that could be a bad thing depending on where you're starting from. Not to say it does cause cancer or exacerbate cancer if you have it and start taking it, more to say, I'm not particularly convinced I know the answer to that. So people pitch you on this mechanism, on the numbers going down, you should make it go up again. What I would want to wait to see is how is it gonna influence a clinical outcome in, you know, in a placebo-controlled study in a way that I care about?

• 57:05Gary O'Reilly?

  Interesting. So there's this noise out there in society that's coming from influences from social media that is affecting how we currently see our bodies, how we see the supplements and treatments. I mean, is that more a comment now on where we are as a society? How we've built up this pressure and people are just so, on occasions ashamed of their bodies? Or they are needing to find a new way to look younger or in their own mind, better looking?

• 57:39Speaker 03

  I did an experiment yesterday, actually, it's still running on my Instagram story. And experiment's a strong word for what it is, it's more of like a game. And the prompt was, okay, your goal, and maybe we can do this now, actually, before I give you the answer. So think of it as if you were answering it. Your goal is to make the options on this poll 95% option A and 5% option B. And so you click one of the two buttons and you only see the answer from everybody else after you have chosen.

• 58:06Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay.

• 58:07Speaker 03

  And your prompt is, as a group, you have to make it so the answer is 95% people have chosen A and only 5% of people have chosen B. But you have to cast your own individual vote in that poll.

• 58:17Chuck Nice?

  And the poll is just A or B? I don't really know any.

• 58:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's just A or B?

• 58:21Chuck Nice?

  It's just A or B.

• 58:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A or B.

• 58:23Speaker 03

  That's it.

• 58:24Chuck Nice?

  Well, I'm going with B. You know why? Cause screw you. Forget the 95%. I don't ever wanna be a part of 95% of anything. So I'm going with.

• 58:32Gary O'Reilly?

  So you're dealing with some skeptics here.

• 58:34Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I'm going with B.

• 58:35Gary O'Reilly?

  Who are inherently difficult in nature.

• 58:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So letters as a sequence in the alphabet.

• 58:40Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 58:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Happen to also be letters that you're graded in school, where you're better or worse. So we have value judgments placed on whether something's an A or a B.

• 58:48Chuck Nice?

  That's true.

• 58:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so.

• 58:50Chuck Nice?

  See, I never got, I never got that first letter, so that's not my problem.

• 58:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think most people would wanna be A.

• 58:56Chuck Nice?

  A, yeah.

• 58:57Gary O'Reilly?

  B or A, you said wanna be A. Sorry, sir, sorry, don't hit me.

• 59:01Speaker 03

  Okay. Gary, what's your answer?

• 59:03Gary O'Reilly?

  I'll go with B, cause I just, I'm difficult.

• 59:06Speaker 03

  This is what I found. It was something like 24% of people chose option B. And so my reading, like clearly, like the logical answer is probably you should be choosing A for any individual person to get it as close as possible to 95, five split. So I thought it might err on the side, actually, of above 95% being A, like you were thinking, Neil. 24%, instead of being 1 in 10, that's like 1 in 4.

• 59:29Gary O'Reilly?

  Mm-hmm.

• 59:30Speaker 03

  And so we see ourselves, and so behavioral psychologists will make fun of me for this interpretation probably, and for calling this a study, but my reading of it, very amateurishly, is we see ourselves as exceptional, as not one of the crowd, like, oh, everybody else is gonna be voting for A. I've gotta counterbalance it to get that 5% up there. But then we way overshoot beyond that. So I think there's something to that where, you know, it's like, well, I acknowledge that the clinical data for everybody else may tell this story, but what if I'm different?

• 59:58Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, but see, those people are dumbasses. I'm sorry.

• 1:00:02Speaker 03

  What did you vote for?

• 1:00:03Chuck Nice?

  No, I'm not talking about that, cause that's just, that's really, psychologically, what your poll is also asking is, do you see yourself as a part of a crowd? Do you see yourself as a part of a group?

• 1:00:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:16Chuck Nice?

  And there are a lot of people out here, believe it or not, who feel like they don't fit in anywhere. And so if you ask them, do you fit in? They're gonna say, no. I happen to be one of those people who's always felt throughout my life, I don't really fit in, like I know how to get in, but I don't know how to fit in.

• 1:00:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You fit in here with family.

• 1:00:32Chuck Nice?

  And I mean, that's why I'm up there here, Neil.

• 1:00:34Gary O'Reilly?

  All right. So you know. I mean, all right, I'm not qualified to analyze it as a psychologist, but you have body dysmorphia with a growing number of people. Are they the group that are 24% of the votes and there's pressure for them to look like the people in group A?

• 1:00:56Speaker 03

  Like the A group.

• 1:00:57Gary O'Reilly?

  And they can't and they're ashamed and, and why, why is this even happening in society?

• 1:01:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think part of it is you feel like you are alone often in today's, like you're scrolling by yourself, there's not as much social connection as we have. And so you may not realize that there's actually a lot of other people out there who are voting B with you, who may be feeling very similar to you in that respect, but you're not connected, you know, to each other. I think there probably is something to that.

• 1:01:23Chuck Nice?

  B people unite. Let's get together, B people.

• 1:01:27Gary O'Reilly?

  We got two T-shirts, one A, one B.

• 1:01:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One B, A and B T-shirt.

• 1:01:30Speaker 03

  On the dysmorphia, there's a really interesting, there's like a Snapchat dysmorphia in the Journal of Plastic Surgery or something, where they were writing about how people come in, you know, they're asking them what they wanna look like. And they show them an image of themselves with a Snapchat filter on.

• 1:01:44Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, God.

• 1:01:45Speaker 03

  And so just fundamentally, like the disproportionate expectations from what can be possible in the real world is just being blown way out of proportion by what we see all the time, which increasingly is on our screen and not actual real people in the real world.

• 1:01:59Gary O'Reilly?

  So before, before we wrap this up, Neil, if I may, what are we more likely to get rid of? The obsession with looking young and the possibility of being old or unattractive? What one are we likely to get rid of? Or are we now in a one-way street?

• 1:02:15Speaker 03

  Hmm. I can give you my answer for myself.

• 1:02:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I have an answer too, but.

• 1:02:20Gary O'Reilly?

  Sure.

• 1:02:21Speaker 03

  Which, for me, I'm focused on the stuff I can control, which is doing the strength training, doing the aerobic activity, doing the nutrition, improving my sleep. My sleep got a lot better in the last year. I'm sleeping 45 minutes per night more this year compared to last year.

• 1:02:33Chuck Nice?

  Good for you, lazy son of a gun.

• 1:02:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the glow in your face shows.

• 1:02:36Chuck Nice?

  You lazy son of a gun, you.

• 1:02:38Speaker 03

  We'll save it for next time, what I, you know, what those changes are to sleep better. For me, that's what I'm focusing on. Like I know otherwise, my muscle mass is gonna go down, my bone density is going down, my cardio metabolic fitness is going down. I know that by improving those things, I will feel better as I'm older, I'll be able to do more things with my daughter for a longer period of time. That's what I care about.

• 1:02:56Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, all right.

• 1:02:57Chuck Nice?

  That's great.

• 1:02:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the way you phrase that, I would have added a third option.

• 1:03:02Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay.

• 1:03:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause you, you made it like it's only two directions on the street. Must we force ourselves to look younger or must we just get old?

• 1:03:10Chuck Nice?

  Get older.

• 1:03:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And maybe looking old can be beautiful.

• 1:03:16Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm, yes. I think so.

• 1:03:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So can you, in just a few sentences, convince an audience why they should pay attention to you online and not all of the noise competing with you in the very same space?

• 1:03:34Speaker 03

  What you'll notice is that when we talked about creatine, I didn't recommend a particular product, there's no affiliate code. When we talked about compounded peptides, there's no affiliate link. That's very not true on social media. Often people telling you to take creatine are saying, use my code. And by the way, behind the scenes, there's often a 30 to 50% affiliate kickback they're getting.

• 1:03:56Chuck Nice?

  Whoa. Neil, we gotta start affiliate, man. We're the wrong business.

• 1:04:01Gary O'Reilly?

  We're gonna get another game.

• 1:04:03Chuck Nice?

  We're gonna get it on this action, guys.

• 1:04:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, so what I can say, like my business model, I run it, like there's a newsletter I do, Substack newsletter, I have no ads, I have no affiliate deals, I have no sponsors on the letters. It's entirely reader-supported. And so the reason for doing it that way, and I thought for a long time about this, is that means like, my motivation is to give them the best information possible so they keep funding the newsletter. It is not to pitch the more expensive version of creatine that it doesn't matter compared to the less expensive version. It's not to pitch the more expensive air purifier just cause I have a discount code. And so to me, that's kind of the only way that you can expect someone to believe what you have to say, if they're telling you to do a particular action.

• 1:04:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, very helpful. And we're delighted to share your expertise with our audience. And I know they would eat it up, I mean, they're all scientifically literate.

• 1:04:59Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And to get some physiological insights into our lives from especially you is a great benefit to us all.

• 1:05:07Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, you do a great service, I have to say.

• 1:05:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you.

• 1:05:10Chuck Nice?

  I watch all your videos and I just love the fact that you bring peer-reviewed science and the best available information. You're not conjecturing, you're not trying to tell people anything that isn't just in the literature, which is great, but you make it accessible so they can understand it. So it's really a great service.

• 1:05:29Speaker 03

  I appreciate that.

• 1:05:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And this episode's brought to you by the Big Bang Never Happened vitamins.

• 1:05:33Speaker 03

  Have you optimized your Big Bang?

• 1:05:36Chuck Nice?

  Nicely done. Let me tell you something, I'd buy that product.

• 1:05:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so we out. Again, Dr. Knock, thanks for coming back to us.

• 1:05:48Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:05:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, your baby.

• 1:05:50Chuck Nice?

  Always a pleasure.

• 1:05:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary.

• 1:05:52Gary O'Reilly?

  Hey, my friend.

• 1:05:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Neil deGrasse Tyson here for another installment of StarTalk Special Edition. Until next time, keep looking up.

• 1:06:14Speaker 04

  Chevy is called the heartbeat of America for a reason, and Silverado keeps its rhythm. You feel it in the Turbo Max engine with best-in-class standard torque, an available Z71 off-road package that keeps you rolling when the road turns rough, and the most functional truck bed with best-in-class cargo space. They're trucks that work as hard as you do, so you can do more of what you love without missing a beat. Chevrolet, together let's drive. Based on latest competitive information, excludes other GM vehicles.

• 1:06:42Speaker 05

  Fidelity Crypto is built on 80 years of investing experience with the same discipline we apply to everything we do. So you can trade crypto and stocks together at Fidelity, while getting industry-leading security for all your investments. That's crypto without compromise. Visit fidelity.com/crypto to get started. That's fidelity.com/crypto. Crypto is offered by Fidelity Digital Assets. NA is not insured by FDIC or SIPC and includes risk of significant loss. Securities are offered by Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC, member NYSE, SIPC.