Hey everybody, this episode with Dr. Eric Topol is amazing. We go into AI in medicine. We talk about, you know, why we should be looking at our health span versus our lifespan. We're going to talk through some numbers that are going to be mind-blowing.
But Dr. Eric's going to give you a lot of tips that you can use right now to increase your health span. We don't talk about or believe in reversing aging. We just need to make sure that we understand that it's going to happen. But what can we do to have a prolonged health span?
So without further ado, this is my good friend and someone that you're going to get a lot of wisdom from Dr. You're listening to Mick Unplugged, hosted by the one and only Mick Hunt. This is where Purpose Meats Power and Stories spark transformation. Mick takes you beyond the motivation and into meaning, helping you discover you're because and becoming unstoppable. I'm Rudy Rush and trust me, you're in the right place.
Let's get unplugged. I love it. Again, you're doing so much. You have done so much and you continue to do groundbreaking things in your industry.
When did you know that that was going to become a passion of yours to make change and to make impact? Well, I guess when I was training, I was at UC San Francisco and I was in the middle of really a revolution in cardiology where the beginning of angioplasty and clot-dissolving therapies and all sorts of things are happening very quickly. That gave me a sense that, well, that's not a one-off. Why don't we do this more often? Why don't we start to really take medicine to levels that are not the status quo, which is typical.
It's a slow-moving field and we need to get on the accelerator and there's too many people that are suffering, that are dying or have whatever disability. That could be as cleaning up the problems of medical errors or it could be coming up with new strategies to prevent diseases. We're just not doing that. Everything we do, essentially a medicine, treat, treat, treat. Where is the prevent prevent?
And so we now are empowered to go at route. And it's a lot like what I experienced in the early 80s, which is when a field within medicine went through a radical change. We need to do that more frequently than every decade or two. Again, all the things that you're doing, you have a new book coming out, Super Agers. And what I love about this book and the things that you're talking about, it's evidence-based. You're not just giving hyperbole, you're not giving theory,
you're not doing the what ifs, you're not trying to scare people. You're talking about evidence-based topics and help. Could you, for the viewers and listeners, talk about Super Agers, where the idea comes from and what do you want people to get out of this? Yeah, I think many people in your audience are like me, we're a terrible family history. When I was growing up, I remember the most going on these funerals of my relatives, my aunts and uncles, my grandparents, dying all at young ages. And I figured, well, I'm condemned to the same fate. So I've always been interested in genetics
and health span, life span. And we did a study we called the Welderly. And the Welderly, basically another name for them were Super Agers. We were able to find 1400 people who were average age 89, who'd never been sick in their lives. And they were on no medication. Now that's a rare
fied group. And we did whole genome sequencing on these people. And we found very little from their DNA sequence to account for their Welderly Super Agers status. Now, there's a small genetic component, but it's far less than we ever had assumed. And so that actually felt that's liberating.
I might not have to, you know, succumb like my road is. And I think it's an eye-opening finding. And then the question is, what does account for healthy aging? And we do know, as you mentioned, the evidence, the body of evidence, of course, supports healthy lifestyle. You don't have to go to a longevity clinics or take these anti-aging supplements that have no data or other very expensive things like plasma for recess, unproven stem cells, all kinds of supplement stuff. Actually,
first off is concentrating on healthy anti-inflammatory diet and lots of physical activity, not just aerobic, but also strength resistance training and sleep quality, really important. But the list goes on about being out in nature, having a purpose, you know, having lots of social engagement. So we've learned a lot about lifestyle factors. It's not all about that. The other thing we learned that I reviewed in Super Agers is the immune system is really big. We need to keep our immune system
healthy because as we old this term immunosinescence is prone to promote inflammation, another term inflammation, which is what sets off these age-related diseases to occur. So we have to get on top of that and not let our immune system moves its integrity as we age. Some people, the Super Agers, they're just naturally got a great immune system. But most of us, we have not the ideal progression as time goes on where our immune system moves as some of its protective capabilities or it gets dysregulated. We got to prevent that if we're going to get our health span extended to the max.
So speaking of that with the immune system, for those that are watching or listening, what are one or two things that we can do to improve our immune system or help out our immune system so that we can become one of those Super Agers? Well, one great example, I mean, you're young, but if you're over 50, you better get a shingles vaccine. It's actually pretty incredible. Now, as of this week, there'll be four studies, natural experiments, large countries, U.S., Canada, Wales, Australia, you know, with collectively millions of people. And the people who got the shingles vaccine had 20% or more reduction of dementia. Most of course is Alzheimer's, about 80%.
And then today is a report about how a shingles vaccine slows the aging process in people. Now, these are not related to that it's having a big effect through the herpes zoster, which is what causes shingles. But what we've now seen is that the immune system is really amped up. It's made healthier. And that's what accounts for the slowing aging and less risk of developing Alzheimer's disease. So we got one thing right now, which if this was a drug, people would be taking this left
and right. And Alzheimer's is probably the most feared dreaded disease of all people. So we have something and we're going to build on that, you know, medications, other vaccines, maybe there'll ultimately be a vaccine just to prevent neurodegenerative disease. But that's a big jump in our knowledge base. And it's really exciting. And it goes beyond, of course, lifestyle factor. That's awesome.
You know, one of the things that I've been passionate about as our society continues to evolve is artificial intelligence of AI. I personally believe that in the health space in the longevity space, AI is actually more powerful than it is in any other spaces because people forget the intelligence part of AI, right? Like a lot of times when we're thinking AI, we're thinking of bot or we're thinking about automation, but that's not really AI. Those technologies have existed for years and years and years and actually decades and decades. But in the health space, AI is making huge impacts. How
are you viewing AI for the good for the bad or for the indifferent? Yeah, when there's kind of three big parts to that story, which, you know, I agree with you. Firstly, there's ability to improve accuracy of diagnosis. We've already seen that proven for images like mammograms and colonoscopy, picking up polyps and many other forms of imaging of scans. So that's one that is very clear cut that the AI sees things that human experts can't see won't see ever see. So that's one. The second is the
ability to give the gift of time back to clinicians because they're very much burdened with data clirk function. And they're not even looking at patients, they're typing on a keyboard. And now we're seeing how natural language processing and all the other downstream functions of an automated synthetic note. So there's total attention being paid one to one, I, I, and there's a presence back, but moreover, we're seeing randomized studies show that it provides a gift of time. It's a big morale booster. So we're getting back that patient doctor relationship gradually, and that's going to be big.
But the one I think is the biggest contribution in the future is using AI to prevent diseases that is taking all the data of a person, many, many layers of data, and using that to know who's at high risk and getting all over that person so they never get an important age related disease. These are the three big areas. Now it doesn't mean that AI is perfect, there's liabilities, of course, but I'm very sanguine about all three of these being a big deal. Yeah, you often emphasize the importance of not just lifespan, but you talk about the health span. Break that down for us for those that are listening or watching. Well, the average American health span ends at age 64,
because they have a major chronic disease, mostly age related diseases, cardiovascular, a cancer, beginning of a neurodegenerative disease. The lifespan, as you know, in the US, average is about 79 a couple years more for women and men. So that's a 15 year age gap between the end of a person's average health span to the end of their life. Now that 15 years shouldn't be, it should be that their health span and lifespan are close. That big loss of nearly 15 years, that's what we have to start to, you know, people want to have longevity and live to 120.
That's not worth anything if you're basically demented and frail. I mean, we can do that today, we can put you on a life support system and keep your life forever, but you're a functional. What good is that? So we have to get this maximal extension of health span and start and stop this terrible gap that exists today between health span and lifespan. And this longevity craze is wrong. We shouldn't be going after longevity. We should have a health span interest. That's the
primary objective. How do we, how do we achieve this? Right? Like, how do we, I mean, I know you're doing your part in articulating this message, but how do we really just let people understand that this is a thing and steps that they can take in order to improve their health span? Yeah. So first of all, we could accept that we're going to age, you know, that's kind of a normal
process. Yeah. Instead of trying to block aging and your reverse aging, you know, we're going to age, but let's not accept the age-related disease. So in the weeks ahead, we're starting the first prevention of Alzheimer's trial by taking all the data in high-risk people and that you go randomizing to very intensive, continuous lifestyle improvement versus just providing some educational materials. And then in 1200 people who are at high risk for Alzheimer's, we'll be able to tell whether we're making a headway. And then we'll start with different meditations that have a lot
of promise on top of lifestyle. So we believe Alzheimer's ultimately will be a preventable disease, as will be most common cancers and heart disease. But it's going to take a while. You have to have the proof of concept. You have to have compelling evidence, but we have to get started on this. And
you couldn't do this without multimodal AI because you got to take the data from all these different layers. And that includes genes and proteins and biomarkers. It's not very expensive, but it relies on great analytics. And I think that's what's the, that's why I'm so excited about the new year of prevention. So in your estimate, and this is about to be a bad question, I shouldn't even ask it in the way that I'm getting at. But so I went to the doctor for a regular checkup a few weeks ago,
and I was asking him and the team about using AI to help with diagnosis or with symptom prevention and all this. And he said, that's not something I'm comfortable with. And I don't want to experiment with that. Like, why is that mindset still there? And how do we change that mindset?
Yeah, it's very hard to change anything in medicine. As I've learned over four decades, unfortunately, it's lots of resistance among physicians to incorporate AI, especially when it's proven. I mean, there's many things that we're still waiting for, you know, that kind of compelling evidence. But it's sad because there are things that should definitely be part of daily routine medical practice and care. There's just a gap that's time and it's just really unfortunate because it's not delivering state of the art care for patients. Oh, wow, the AI is going to take over
my role. Doctors are typically control freaks. They want to control everything and hear AI's coming in and and croaching their control of fact. I mean, there's lots of things here that account for this reluctance to accept or embrace a. So here's something you don't know. And I waited till we were
live together to tell you this ground truth, your newsletter, my mom who will unsubscribe to any and everything in the world, right? The one thing that she subscribes to that she can't wait for the latest and greatest is ground truth. I love to give you the more to talk to us about ground truth, your newsletter. I'm going to make sure we have links to that and obviously links to the book as well, too. But I love to talk about that newsletter because my mom loves it. Oh, well,
that's fantastic. Thanks so much for passing that along. Well, four years ago, I started reluctantly to do this newsletter, which is now kind of newsletter and podcast can alternating weekly or if not more frequent. And what I learned was so much better than using Twitter or these other social media because you can really express yourself. It's not like, you know, 240 characters. And I
started to realize that this was helping people, you know, get the latest medical advances or talk here from the leading figures in the world of biomedicine. And it's been fun for me. I really, I love doing it. I have one. Another one I'm going to work on this week is the big jump in new shingles of vaccine. This happening just this week. But you know, I really want to have people aware
most of the time is stuff that's not covered in the media. And if big things happening, a lot of people these days are not very optimistic for various reasons. But I try to show, hey, you know, what we're making great progress. And we're going to get to the point of preventing these dreaded diseases and whole different practice of medicine, you know, whether that's changing how we screen for cancer, how we prevent cancer, all the things that we can do to get on top of preventing heart disease. I mean, there's something every day I have to pick the things that each week that deserve spotlighting. But it's fun. It takes some time to do it, but it's so great to get the
feedback from your mother. No, again, my mom will unsubscribe to anything. But she loves the fact that what you send out is informative. And this is me and me only. I'll say it because it's the truth.
A lot of folks that have newsletters, they're trying to show you how smart they are or getting you to click into something else where you're like, she feels like you were genuinely in your heart is to help people and to give them information that can help them. And so that's who does to you. Well, thanks. No, I really appreciate it. It means a lot to me because, you know, I don't know, there's no sponsors, there's no ads, you know, it's free. It's something that is the main purpose
is to spread, you know, the word, spread, which is really important going on in medicine that a lot of people might not know about. Like, for example, the breakthrough test about Alzheimer's disease, still today, you know, I go into a giving a talk and there's several hundred people. I say, anybody here of the P-TOW 2017 test, like one person raises their head, you know, but you know, I've written at least two newsletters about it. I say, anybody heard of organ clocks, you know, two people raise their hand. You know, it's just so much stuff going on that's exciting and people don't know about it and it's not covered elsewhere. So that's what I try to do.
Awesome stuff. So what else do you have going on? What else are you excited about any projects? I know the book and like I said, we'll have links to the book, but what else is Dr. Echorna?
Well, there are doing that starting up that trial Alzheimer's to prevention. We just enrolled a thousand people with long COVID to try to prevent or treat on COVID, which is there is no treatment validated. And we're testing a GOP one drug bound for people versus placebo. So this is a directive participant trial. All of our clinical trials are directive participants. We don't involve
any medical centers. You know, we just go right to the people. And that's what we shouldn't be doing. And we shouldn't be doing trials like old way. They cost too much and they're very inconvenient and very slow and extremely costly. And we can cut 90% of the costs just by going direct to
participants. So that's something we do. But you know, basically the AI analytics, that is our main thrust is being able to take many layers of data, including sensors, parable sensors, and bring that together to extract the most meaning so that we live in a new era. Now, everybody's talking about the information era for decades. Well, we're in a hyper information era.
We're in a tsunami of information, but no one really is analyzing it very well. So that's one of the things that we really work on. That's awesome. That's awesome. So Dr.
Eric, where can people find and follow you and keep up with the latest, greatest of you? Well, thanks. I mean, sub stack ground truth. I named it ground truth as a double meaning. One is it's a big term in AI, how you tell whether the AI is performing versus the truth, the ground truth.
But it's also I'm on the ground that I'm trying to tell the truth, you know, I'm trying to get out there, things that people should know about. So that's one thing and you know, that's easy to find ground truth. Super age is book is the fourth book I've written about the future of medicine. And when I'm really, as I mentioned, very keen about preventing diseases. And otherwise, you know, we're publishing quite a bit in the main, you know, journals and you know, that's that's kind of what we believe you got to have the evidence got to have peer review. Don't give me these influencers that
are hawking supplements and other crap. You know what? If you're hawking something, then that means you're not credible. You know, you're never going to find me selling a supplement or anything. So, you know, that's I think something really important. And I wish we had, you know, a lot less of that
stuff because it's got people very confused out there. They don't know who to believe being a trusted source. That's something you know, you have to work hard at getting that trust and maintaining it. So, so I try to do I and you do an amazing job. Again, I'm honored to have you on. I'm a huge
supporter and follower of all the things that you do. Just just truly blessed to have you here and in the wisdom that you have. And so I could talk to you forever, but I don't want to do that. But what I'm going to do is this. I want to think of the right way to do it. But I want to provide 20 copies of
your book to someone. So I'll make sure I purchase them. But the first 20 people that message me, whether it's LinkedIn, Instagram, my phone, whatever, the first people that message me super agers, I'm going to send a copy of his book. How about that? My gosh. Well, thank you. Yes.
And I thank your mother for me because that's really wonderful to hear that she's a he the reader and have it reader. And yeah, I mean, that's what it's all about is connecting with people and trying to share worthwhile information and perspective. You got it. Again, I'm honored to have you here for everybody that's watching or listening. Make sure you go to the show notes in the description. I'm going to have links to everything that Dr. Eric has going on. Trust me, you definitely
want to subscribe to the newsletter. If you're not on sub stack, go on sub stack right now just for him. Forget anyone else because he's an amazing writer and information share as well too. And for all of you listeners, remember, you're because here's your superpower. Go and we.
That's another powerful conversation on Mick unplugged. If this episode moved you and I'm sure it did, follow the show wherever you listen, share it with someone who needs that spark and leave a review. So more people can find there because I'm really rushed. And until next time, stay driven, stay focused and stay unplugged.