Kay, well, hello, hello, guys. You're listening to beauty bites with Dr Kay, secrets of a plastic surgeon. And today's podcast is a very trending we are going to talk about longevity with one of the world's longevity experts. It's Dr David Liu. David is a cardiac surgeon. He's a longevity tech entrepreneur and a philanthropist, and he's really dedicated to extending human health and health span, and he's founded several tech platforms, including longevity docs, which I take part of, and it's this is the first physician network that's focused on precision longevity medicine. And he is such an interesting thought leader. This year, he's been featured in Wired Men's Health, The Hollywood Reporter. He's spoken at CES the Milliken Institute, the United Nations, World Humanitarian Summit. So it's such an honor and a privilege to have him here. David, welcome to the podcast. Dr Kay, thank you so much. And you know listening to all of that, and you know, really humbled and grateful to be in this journey with with so many other doctors and sharing, what we love most is is really practicing medicine and and transitioning into educating the next generation of physician. So thank you so much for having me. Thank you for joining and I think this topic is so top of mind. And on the tip of everybody's tongue, longevity medicine is becoming a whole cultural movement right now. It's not just a medical concept, but from your perspective, what kind of forces are driving the shift? What's making us all so interested in living longer and healthier? I think it's not I think we're talking about it right now. But that was always humanity. You know, Holy Grail, in a way, right? We always wanted to defy death. And right now, we have an understanding on what lives mean in terms of biology and so, I guess we are there's two things merging. Is the myth of of leaning longer and almost being immortal, which have been, you know, I would say, a discussion for many, many millennials and civilization. And right now, the biology and the science is catching up. We in the past decade, starting to understand the mechanism of aging. Civil publication look at, obviously, you know, the Yamanaka factor, the hallmark of aging, understanding the pathways that lead to accelerated aging. And so I think this is two words are emerging, like this cultural movement that's been started. I would say, you know, yeah, probably, probably like three, 3000 years ago, I would say, and this new type of medicine and technology now, I think the shift that changed everything happened during the pandemic. You know, people didn't want to die, and so they didn't want to live longer, per se, but they didn't want to die too early. And I think that's what was the wake up call. A lot of people said, Hey, I don't think I'm healthy enough to fight the external factors, those environmental threat. And so they started to look at the health as, first of all, it was a fear to lose health, but as well, it was an asset they wanted to protect. And so now you have this Venn diagram where you have a population, a civilization is aware of the value of health, the value of life, the value of maintaining the biology at the I would say, the optimized biology. And then you have a cultural shift, right? And this cultural shift comes from the technology. It comes from the the understanding of science. And we have more and more tools, again today, to understand, you know, our human body. But I think last is we have, as well, the the economy, around longevity, right? And so what I think to, you know, years ago when we started to talk about prevention, right? So as a cardiac surgeon, obviously, I was the end of the chain, right? And so when we're coming a little bit before you were talking about prevention, prevention was never something people were excited about, right? And so I think we started to transition from preventative model, which was a little bit, you know. How do I say that, in a way, under underutilized right, by a lot of population? If you look in America, the annual wellness. Services are not, I think, are utilized only by 10% of the people that can have access to it, right? And so to now something that is more aspirational and and and based on that, an economy started to be built on top of it, from Precision biomarkers to imaging to data, AI wearables testing, concierge medicine, and now it's getting into a little bit more mainstream, being accessible to a lot of people, to online services, but as well, integrating academia, and I think that's where we're seeing as a shift, like you're saying, Is it started as a niche and now probably became a movement. And for movement has to become a standard, and from standard will become an institution. But few, if you look back in the days, you know Medical School, where everyone could do the medical school, and it was like less than 100 years ago in the US, which is really interesting to me, emergency medicine was not a specialty, right? It was something we're doing in hospital, and all of a sudden you had, you know, urgent care popping up outside of the hospital. And so people are saying, what's going on? Why do we have, you know, urgent care coming out of the hospital? Obesity medicine was not something we were talking about. There's no board of obesity medicine back in the days. And so I think everything is shifting. But what I think is the most important is the will from the doctors practicing every day. And doctors have been, you know, they start in medicine to help people, and as soon as you get in the in in the system, the system is here to treat the disease and save life, and I think the system is doing that extremely well. Now, obviously it's only a part of the population, right? You're only seeing the sick. And so what happened was the rest of the population that was ignored because they were not sick enough, right? They were waiting for the sickness to arrive, to be taken care of. And I think you have an awareness in this, in the medical in the medical community, saying, hey, I want to be as well, part of this tribe, you know, trying to help people before they get sick and and so that's why, I think the convergence of the demand right from the patient, the technology, being able to understand disease or state of disease before they become an actual disease, understanding aging at the biological level. And then the technology, which is now more affordable. I mean, if you look at it 20 years ago, it probably cost a billion dollar to sequence the genome. Now it costs $100 and so I think as we're going to become, and when I say we, as the whole global community of physician, we're going to become more aware of the transition from a healthy state to a six state, sixth state, and because in between, there is nothing today. And so the slow transition to a state of disease is mainly because we age too fast, right? And obviously, if you if you get to get another type of disease, that's different story. But, you know, most population or aging and aging with disease, and so if we can prevent that, that's going to be an immersed, an immense impact on population and civilization. So that's what I think longevity medicine is becoming a movement. And I don't think it's I don't think no one started it. I think it's a combination of different forces and dynamics who came together and and now you have something really emerging, because there is a demand for it. That's interesting. There's almost like emerging between the fringe biohackers, who we read about, you know, doing all sorts of exotic, non medical interventions. And then, like you said, traditional medical health, which really is geared to just emergencies, save people from death and critical emergencies, and have the infrastructure is built all around, you know, preventing death and dying. But you almost have to be practically dead or dying to get care at that level, in our in our health care system. So now it's kind of the merging of these two fields in the middle, where we can take the science and, you know, hopefully innovate what, how can we get around what the problem I feel that we're now facing is too many people coming into longevity space and people coming in without evidence based medicine, without really interest. You know, importantly, we need to follow guidelines and look at, hopefully large scale clinical trials before we start recommending things to people. I know, I don't know your thoughts on this, but I'm very curious to know, like, how do we prevent too many people from the marketing side and the business entrepreneurial side getting into the field of medicine when they are not really promoting guidelines for, you know, scientific based care? Yeah. Yeah, I would say education. Education is the number one thing right? Is you want to educate your patient, you want to educate the public, you want to educate the investors, you want to educate the media, but you want as well, an education is made by people who are legit, right? And so what does that mean? Is, most of the time, people have opinion, right? When you say, yeah, they're educating on on promoting product, I think, yeah, you can have an opinion, right? It's really open to have an opinion. But I think having an expertise and making recommendation has to be made by, you know, by the people who know what they what they talk about. And so without, you know, saying that Who should we should own and we should do what, I think what is really important is medicine. Is Medicine, right? So, is it performed today by doctors, or is it performed by someone else? So, is it the tech industry? Is it an AI? Is it, you know, the large conglomerate, or is it a hospital? Is it the physician? And so I think this is where you know the question should be a question that every patient should ask themselves, who do I want to give my trust to? Right? And so as soon as you start asking this question as an individual, then you might find the answer. Do you want a bio hacker who might know a lot about optimizing some pathways because they did it on themselves. Do you want a large, you know, commercial enterprise organization, or do you want to start up with several young founders from the Silicon Valley? Or you want, you know, a doctors that is trained, or doctors who doesn't know yet about about longevity care, or longevity science, but wants to learn. So I think it's all about the positioning. And, you know, I disagree that there is too much, too many people. I think there's too many interests, right? And conflicting interests. Yes, I think the more we have educated, educated professionals, and that can come from scientists, economists, healthcare providers or professional, obviously, physician, pharmacist and and healthcare leaders. I think that's what's going to shape the ecosystem, right? And the the idea of having an ecosystem is everyone can raise the bar together, right? And so if you're able to do that in a coordinated way, where we support each other, the technologies support the science, the science support the clinician. The clinician helps support the research. The research is supported by by by the policymaker, and therefore the industry can support it as well. I think there is this beautiful orchestra of common vision. And obviously there is some commercial interest for, you know, many people. But at the end of the day, what we are looking for is to, you know, probably become something that's going to be scaled, is going to be impacting a lot of lives, the same way antibiotics did or imaging did, right? So you need a little bit of both. I think you need a lot of excitation. And so that's what happened when you have a new fuel emerging. So you're right. There's so much interest today, so many you know, different dynamics and an investment, right? So it becomes sometimes confusing for the patient. Can be confusing for physician, saying, because I don't know, I say it doesn't work, because I have no time, I cannot learn about it, and because this is not something I can access easily, I will deny it. But the future is bit different. I think the next generation of physician will be this is the type of medicine I want to practice. I want to be a doctor, because I want to help people, right? Yes, I want to be saving life if there is enough enough electric shock, for instance. I want to be preventing diabetes before it happens. I've seen my aunt having that. I don't want my grandmother to have a stroke. That's doable. And I want my mom to be able to remember my name without having a dimer. Can we do that? Can we go in the direction of a world where it's going to be possible? That's the type of word I imagine. And so you want the next generation of professional to be excited about it. And so I'm not just not thinking about physician, the nurses, right? The physician assistant, the scientists and pharmacists developing all the procedures, compound and and studies. I think it's amazing to see this whole world coming together. Because the excited about about seeing something in a different way. So you're right. I The only thing I worry is that longevity will become commoditized, that successful right now, the best longevity measures are accessible to the very ultra rich, and that to the. Yeah, I think the mainstream people are seeing this kind of longevity management, which is getting GLP ones from an online provider, where it's you may not even have a physician interaction ever. You're just getting drugs shipped to you or ordering peptides. Or, I'm seeing so many, you know, gym combination, gym settings, where they're turning it into a longevity spa situation, and you're able to get your peptides on the side. So I feel like there's that distinction that we we need to not commoditize. We need to have. Hopefully, at some point, maybe David, you'll be the one to innovate a curriculum for what real longevity, you know, medicine training would look like and even like bringing it into practice. To be a certified longevity type of provider, you need a certain level of educational, training courses you've been through, and then understanding of the scientific rigors of it. What do you think about that idea? Yeah, no. Thank you so much for mentioning that. I think you're totally right. The gym are going into it, the digital platform, the hotel, and I don't think we can stop that, but we can support it, right? And so if, if you don't have to open a practice, but you can run your practice, your practice in the gym, right, where patient come to entrust you, because they're already a gym member, I think that's, that's, you know, you get both of the two words, right? And so I think they're really excited about it. They want to learn more, and they want to trusted guidance. Now, today, like you said, the gym doesn't know, right? When you own a gym, and let's talk about a small gym, right? You own a gym, you're not you're not providing medical care, however, we're starting to see different type of collaboration. And so we have, you know, doctors that are opening gyms with a clinic into it, right? So they know what they talk about, right? And and I think it is interesting to see that. And then you have larger gym saying, Okay, we're going to open a gym, and then we're going to open a clinic into it, a clinic, totally different. And so you merging those two work together. So yes, I think the beauty is we have as physician, the opportunity to guide those new industries, and then to have a chief longevity officer in the gym, for instance, right shaping the protocols, shaping the the intervention and helping deliver evidence based care. And I think, as well, a population is able to monitor themselves, having great compliance and providing, you know, outcome that can be monitored, right and published. So you're talking about, you know, learning, you know, when we started longevity dogs, I mean, I give you a little bit of the story. Was really interesting. I started first program on prevention and preventive medicine in 2014 when I came back from Africa, we were doing cardiovascular screening with mobile clinics. And someone said, you're doing that in Africa. We need it in New York. So why don't you just go and do some, you know, screening, and build that. And so this is, this is what I did in, you know, 12 years ago. Now fast forward 2020 and we were, by the way, we're doing that in gyms and in airline with airline companies, in lawyers offices, corporate world in 2020 when covid hit. My wife had covid really early on, so I started to aggregate a lot of different data from wearables. I mean, she was this lady in the room and collecting them on an app, sharing that with with different doctors. And then one day, I met another doc and say, you know, that's trying to do with my practice. Why don't we do it together? So I started to build a platform and a longevity focused practice. And since then, obviously, was really hard to find doctors that were trained. So longevity Doc is born from, from, from that statement started a small group of 20 doctors on Whatsapp group, and now we have, you know, probably more than, let's say, 1400 doctors will apply to join longevity doctors across 68 countries and territories in the world. So it just show how fast is growing and the interest. But yes, we created now the certification, the first longevity medicine certification, you know, by 14 faculties, 15 faculties, 100 hours, you can you can access it from anywhere in the world. And the idea is to bring this knowledge from what is longevity medicine? What? What are the pathways of HOW DO YOU UNDERSTAND aging in a way, right? General medicine, the new biomarker of aging. How do you leverage that in your practice. What are the protocols? What are the type of intervention that we have today? And you were talking about all the different intervention from the one that probably less non regulated today, exosome, you know, peptide stem cell. We need to still understand that, because I'm sure you know you have patient. Coming and say, this what I've read, this is what I've tried. This is what I want, yeah. And so this is what you have to know to answer the question, right? And I think it didn't exist. And so we wanted to create a place where people, I mean, these doctors, felt heard, understood, and felt safe, to learn again. And the idea is to be able to to democratize longevity medicine, to bring that to institution. So we're discussing now with academia to bring that type of knowledge to academic center right, and to make that, you know, an option for residents, for doctors and even from students, to learn about what will be the future, and integrating data, wearables, evidence based research learning how to promote and communicate safely with ethics, right? That's not something we learn in medical school. We never learn about doing a podcast. Yeah, right. I think this and that. I think medical specialties are so slow to evolve, like we've seen this year, the reversal of the estrogen black box warning. And finally, hormones becoming something accessible mainstream, or understanding that these hormone receptors keep our, you know, keep us young. But like, for example, my husband's an interventional cardiologist. He goes to meetings all the time. I will, I don't know when you're going to have a Cardiology meeting that incorporates any element of longevity medicine, like I've been asked him, I've seen so many studies that show that MIP post heart attack patients benefit from taking NAD or NAD precursors to improve, you know, mitochondrial function after heart attack. And like, they're just, he's so just, you know, top of mind, state of the art. He does all the high tech procedures. But cardiology has not yet evolved to that thinking. They're starting to do experiments with you, right? You're right. I mean, we have a cardiologist that was really, you know, prominent interventional cardiologist, like your husband, and indeed, you know, right now, he really jumped into it, trying to understand all the mechanism of arteriosclerosis, the inflammation, how? You know, the endothelium, the glucocallex, you know what is, what causes the pathology right of of ischemia. And you know, arteriosclerosis is the complex disease, in a way we think is only cholesterol sticking to the to the wall, and there is a lot of things going on right from, you know, like I said, without getting into the details, but from, from the inflammation to the dynamics of it. And so, yes, it is almost like a new a new specialty that you have to learn when you're emotional cardiologist. You did cardiology, but right now you're doing the intervention of it. And the same way, you know cardiac surgeon is, you know, I would say operating and changing valves and and doing cabbages, we're not cardiologists, right? But we're not preventative cardiologists, and we're not physio pathologists, right? And so I think even within the cardiovascular specialty, with so many subspecialties and that, I think, and that's why I always say longevity medicine, longevity science or medicine, can be a layer on top of every specialty, right? You don't have to do that alone, but you can have a little understanding. I mean, we were studying stem cell. I remember when I was a resident, which was, you know, 20 years ago, right? And so as, you know, as a dermatologist, you know, a stem cell, I'm shown, you know, a lot of different I would say, you know, mechanism and outcome, yeah, it's not used for everything, right? Still needs to be demonstrated. But we were studying that back in the days. And so that's where I think is it takes time. I think you're totally right, from the government to change policies, to academia and then large society organization to change guideline. It takes decades. And so decades every trial is like 60,000 people have to enroll before they'll even think it's a worthwhile you know exactly, but you know, I audiology was not a specialty 50 years ago. Yeah, right. Like, and I think this is what I think is really interesting, what we take for granted today was fringe and pioneer, right, developed by back in the days, cardiac surgery was not something you know, we were bioacking. I mean what I say we do the community of cardiac surgeon, bioacking to create a back bypass, right, cooling the body. That's not something that was got in guidelines, and we have to think about it. How do you protect the brain? And so I think yes, there's a lot of things that are so normal today, right? Or basically medicine, hormonal, you know, hormonal, hormonal care, like you said back in the days, even 20 years ago, there. Was French 50 years ago. It didn't exist. And so that's what I want to open the eyes as well to other doctors. Be open minded. Be again the student you used to be right. Be, you know, keep dreaming that, yes, there's new things that we don't know about that we want to learn. And, you know, learning, by the way, learning is, you know, is a great way to fight aging, at least brain aging, and keeping our purpose, right. So, so I think, you know, I would say I love to talk to you, to your husband, you know, and to tell him, like, look, I was a cardiac surgeon doing procedure all day. Now, I'm excited to understand why the, you know, why the the heart is moving into that, this, this, you know, this direction. So, yeah, there's, there's a lot of things that we still need to learn, and we have to be humble about it. You know, medicine treats you right when you're having your heart attack, open the open the artery, put in the stent, do the intervention. But then the things that biologically could maybe prevent that, like nitric oxide for the blood vessels, or these glyco calyx, you know, getting rid of the proteins, having an mRNA shot that can improve your lipid profiles. These, these interventions are coming, but it's, you know, it's super exciting times. I just think it's really going to take a while for any of this to come into mainstream medicine. It's interesting, yeah. So it depends the, I mean, it depends the window of, you know, how do you assess time, right? So think about all the innovation we find in the past. You know, century in medicine, most, most innovation and discovery happened in the past century. So in terms of, you know, civilization and humanity, it went really fast right now, I think, you know, when you look at the career of a doctor, let's say you work until like 65 you know, that's at least, this is what it is in most European country, or even, you know, a little bit later, right? I think we still have, you know, you and I, the opportunity to see so many things happening. If you look at GLP one, the first GLP one was discovered, what, 20 years ago, maybe, and so only right now, right? It's becoming something that really impacts, right, only impacts population at scale, and that's going to have, you know, tremendous economical, you know, economic saving, and probably, hopefully, some years of quality life, you know, saved. So, yes, it takes time. And I think you know what we need to do is, and this is what I admire, the work you do is being pioneering things. So in the curve of adoption is, I think we're still at the beginning, yeah, the pioneer, newly adopters, I think. And there's something like the kayas chaos we call we need to pass that right to kind of making mainstream. And you always going to have the laggard, the people deny, always everything. They will be late. They don't like it. They think it's changing the way they practice. It's a threat to them. But that's okay. We need as well to work with with those people, right? To have open discussion, to make sure that we involve everyone, and we include everyone in this change. So yes, I think it takes too long, because you and I are impatient. When you're an entrepreneur, you're always impatient, right? And I am impatient to make it happen. But yet, I think we have such an amazing opportunity where my kid, Tyrone, was 11, I think is going to see, you know, whenever he's going to enter his adult life, a new type of medicine where he's going to have, you know, probably technology monitoring it without thinking about it. You know, several doctors are trained or, you know, to guide them. Why? Why? Technology is doing a lot of work in the background, right? And, and so, I think, in the future, in such a positive way, where we don't die from infectious disease anymore, chronic diseases like cardiovascular, you know, cardiovascular disease won't exist, probably, anymore, right? So I agree, it'd be amazing. I'm in esthetics. I do facial plastics and surgery. And it's really interesting to see the crossover of new technologies. And esthetics is a fast moving place. So we're seeing things like exosomes, platelet derived growth factors, like, you know, recombinant DNA derived growth factors, in addition to, of course, stem cell injections, fat transfer injections, all the things that we're doing in esthetics, I feel that we're a great space for longevity medicine to come into, and you're seeing that in medspace today. So of course, yeah, there's little. There's so much to talk about there, because I believe that we should be regulated. But I'm also excited to see what people are doing that's not quite regulated yet, like people are doing peptides. And you know, with RFK recently mentioning that he's going to allow more research to go forward regarding these peptides that have it's never been allowed to. FDA previously prohibited compounding of certain peptides. Just curious, what are your thoughts on that, and how that's going to help change our industry a little faster to have some governmental backing? Yeah, I think what is really interesting on all your remarks is we need an alignment between innovation and then standardization. Right? It's hard to create standard before we have an innovation, right? And so I think the if you look at the same way was done in technology, in a way, you have to discover something, and, you know, some, let's take peptide and stem cell. I've been there for, you know, many decades right now, as, yes, we know what works and what doesn't, but we don't have the standardization. So I think it is important to start linking both, right? You cannot have innovation along right? It's like having a car that runs really fast and but without, you know, getting any regulation that's crazy. You don't want anyone in your family driving this type of car. I think it's the same for health, right? You want to make sure that any innovation that gets into the mainstream gets, you know, standardized tested, validated and safe. And so I think there is a lot of new initiative, and not only in the US. I think there is different, you know, first of all, in the US, there is different state doing that, right? You see in Montana, they trying to fast track, you know, clinical, you know, clinical research right now, there's the first with, with, you know, our page, the first testing of a clinical trial involving a drug, not focused on disease, but focus on Aging, you know, endpoints, and so I think it is interesting to see that, yes, there is, there was some discussion, I know on the podcast. There's as well some latest FDA, you know, as well a recommendation on, on on peptide. I think it is important to have a communication between all actors of the ecosystem. We will never avoid the strong commercial interest of bad actors, right? But I think what is need to be privileged is communication like always, right? And I think it's everyone that has to have an open main mind mindset to make proposal as well. It is important to come to the table, to discuss, at the table, to have strong proposal. And I think there's a lot of physician involved in those discussions. So I truly applaud, you know, whoever have an initiative to start bringing things to you know, safe intervention, safe solution, to mainstream, to the public. I think it is really good. But even that at the at the global level, right? We're talking about, you know, America, but at the global level, we need to have discussion between standard, right, and so I think this is, this is where we can play a small role as as longevity Docs is bringing people together around the table and communicating and unique unifying those voices and uniting doctors together. And they don't have to agree on everything, right? It's like a Thanksgiving dinner. You don't have to agree with everyone, right? Like your uncle's like, they can pick and choose, right? But I think everyone can have a voice to to, you know, to have a great expertise and bringing, I would say, an educated and informal opinion. And that's the same way doctors are practicing. They've been practicing the same way for many, you know, many years. Is when you have a patient in front of you, you gather all the evidence you have, you know, some of the data you could, you have collected, and then you make an informed decision, right your diagnostic. And then the intervention you don't have to go to, you know, all the books and say page 24 it was said, we cannot use that. No. What is said is in whatever books of medicine, and that's why you have to apply medicine and practice medicine with with that was that in mind is you have to help the patient the best way you can, right? And first, what we said is, do not arm, right? And so I think, I mean, do we have to apply the hypocrites off from, you know, many 80 years ago, or do we have to adapt it? You know, I don't have the answer on that, but I think everyone should have at least the ethical drive, the knowledge and the agency to say, Okay, I want to practice the best medicine I can in 2026 what does that mean? Where do I get my knowledge? What, what information do I provide to my patient, and what are the type of of of solution I can safely provide and offer, right? And so it's not, it's not that easy, right? You have to. Have a great judgment and great knowledge base to be able to have this, this judgment, I think the hardest thing is finding time in a busy physician schedule to sit down and read for two or three hours a day. Like it's almost as if you're back in school and training and you're teaching yourself this curriculum that you really have to almost put together yourself with like longevity Docs is amazing because it has it all in one place. But if you're a physician out there in the community, you may not even know about this resource. I'm glad people are hearing about it, but it's that investment in time where you sit down and read through the evidence and the literature, and you make yourself understand the vocabulary of like, all of this molecular biology that we learned in college is now at the forefront of what we need to know every day. Like, if I'm going to talk about CRISPR and cast nine and, you know, mRNA technologies, my own position, head and mindset has to be able to be, you know, with that lingo, and able to explain it in simple terms to a patient. So it's fascinating time. I think if you're we have a lot of people that are in esthetics and longevity, want to get into longevity medicine. What do you think is a good route for people who want to bring longevity into their practice to start with? Yeah. I mean, look, I think you know that better than anyone is the skin is really the largest organ right of the body, and so it's only a reflection on what's going on inside. So once you go for the esthetic, really the cosmetic procedure, people want to one lasting result, right? They want to understand right now they can be obviously becoming smarter. They want to understand the root cause of day, skin aging and so, yes, age and and years, right impact the way our our body function, and how skin and and earn, the skin and muscle function. But what I think is really important is to have lasting impact is, what do you have to change, right beside a procedure, right? And so, yes, you can start with your lifestyle. You can have, you know cellular, you know cellular pathway to optimize and understanding why this create an impact on your skin. So I would say for this community, really understanding that skin is only the reflection. What is the what is the journey, right? How do you come to this impact on the skin? And that's what I think it is interesting, because I'm sure you're seeing a lot of patient right now with the impact of GLP one for instance, right? Yeah, definitely. Right. That's huge. So understanding how GMP one function and why impacts the skin, right? So that could be the skin quality, the skin density, the skin you know, morphology, the skin dynamics impacts as well the collagen, the fat and the muscle under it, right? But you can improve as well several other factors. And so I think it's really understanding the physio, pathology of it and and all those different pathways. Because as soon as you understand and you become interested in it, and now you want to talk about it and educate your patients, saying, by the way, do you know that's the impact? Do you know what you could do right to prevent that? And I think you're starting to become, as well, the trusted guide for for your patient, I think all this knowledge combining, you know, traditional medicine, longevity medicine, and, you know, cosmetic and regenerative, regenerative care, I think it's, it's a new era where we don't have a specialty anymore, right? And so once they come to you, and it's hard to say, Hey, I won't do any tests, or I don't know anything about those tests, right? So you better go to see another platform, right? Because I don't do that. No, once they're in, they trust you. They trust you for the surgery, they trust you to for the procedure on their face. That's a lot of trust they get from, you know, that you get. And so I think I would say, because they trust you so much, right? Bringing even more value, right? Bring more value to the knowledge through the education, and then, you know, those people will be forever grateful, and those, you know, they will stay patient for a long time. You're going to provide great value and great outcome. So, yeah, learning is, for me, that's the, you know, that's the ultimate knowledge. And by the way, you're saying it's hard, I totally agree with you, to find the time, but knowledge is going to be free. It's almost free right now, right? With, with AI knowledge, there's literally too much to read, exactly. So, so that's where you need to have like this creation, right? What do I need to do? Like, this is the gold standard of my baseline and my foundation, right? Yes, you can read everything, and that's what we do as doctors. We read a lot every day, right from the news to journal and papers to to the latest innovation you just mentioned some so many of them. How do we know what works, what doesn't, right? Where do we need? To learn about what we need to learn. And so that's, that's what we created, this certified longevity docs program, just trying to make life easier when you when you building your practice, when you still practice, when you want to transform your practice. And you know, it's 100 hours, but you can do it from your car, from an app. And now we develop our own AI, where every morning you can have a 10 minutes quiz with hippo, you know, Hippocratic, right? And and now it can teach you, whenever you have time, instead of scrolling social media to find the information, boom, you ask the question, and it comes from our, you know, proprietary knowledge base of 100 hours of training that we design, right? And so I think it is a new way of learning, you know, what? Just do not want to sit in the library and opening and books. You want to have a concrete discussion with a colleague. And now the colleague can be, you know, can be an AI platform that helps you really understand longevity care, longevity science, longevity medicine, faster and even better. So excited after people hear this podcast, you're going to get a whole bunch of new people wanting to sign up. Yeah, look, I think thank you so much for doing that. I think it is important like, again, the education is, is one of the most important thing. You know you want your Why do you want to educate your kids? So can we educate the next generation of doctors? That's exciting time right now. You know what? It's a challenge. Even I tell my own kids, like, starting at age 20, you start to deteriorate, but they don't quite believe it yet. But at least we're getting them the right supplements and the right diet, and they're, you know, they're doing all the things. But what excites you about most, about studies you've heard that are potentially coming up this year. Is it Yamanaka factors and David Sinclair's new clinical trials that they're launching? Yeah, we're going to hit some big interventions this year that show us that we can literally teach ourselves to turn on the anti aging mechanisms. Yeah, I think, I think, you know, this is the, you know, cellular reprogramming. Think it's really something that's super interesting. What I think is the most interesting to me, it's probably not the intervention itself. There's so many that are really, really cool. Is the shift, right? The shift that we see at our society right now? There's two shifts that I see. First of all, policies are changing. They're starting to listen, and they starting to see that aging could be associated to too many diseases and could be itself considered as a disease. And so changing in points and understanding there is new biomarker of aging can be a new way to develop therapies medicine that can target those, you know, premature aging, or, you know, age related disease. I'm really excited about this mindset shift. There's another thing that I'm, you know, excited about is, I believe everyone will be able to study their own aging trajectory in the next five years. The way to do that is, I call it ambient longevity. We'll be able to gather so much information, so many information coming from our own body to understand what works what doesn't. And so I think this is the most exciting part of it is the global knowledge right that we can amass and understand, to understand how life is functioning, right within our body. So there is two things, isomorphic labs, the new startup that the founder of Google, DeepMind, Demi sasabi is building. I'm excited about that. Jensen hang from Nvidia, said that, you know, AI and you know, computing biology is going to be the next frontier in in civilization, we'd be able to understand the billions of interaction ourselves are are having every single second. I'm excited about that. I think this is, this is, you know, I'm starting to see that as a kid saying, Wow, we the same way. We're discovering space. I think now we're getting deeper and deeper, we have the opportunity to understand life and biology. So, yeah, the intervention is something that, again, is really reactive, is going to save a lot of lives. But if we start understanding how our body is functioning, and we know we don't understand that yet, like we're going to have so many interaction with, you know, understanding of the interaction between systems and organs and environment. I think that's one of the most beautiful thing that's going to happen for me as a physician, trying to understand how the body functions and why function this way, and what, you know, what breaks and how. Can fix it. That's that's the revolution of humanity. I think that is a revolution. When I look at these charts, sometimes I'm looking at biochemistry, reactions and charts and even just learning the NAD pathways, the number of arrows and interconnections of the you know that, like the human brain can tackle and understand that. But boy, does it take time to integrate it? And like, imagine that in every system, in every cell and every portion of our body. And like, we the AI and machine learning aspect, can literally process that simplify it and bring together thinking that the human brain takes, it takes a lifetime. Like, that's why we have researchers that work 10 years, 20 years in a field to be experts, you know. So yeah, on one Yeah, on one subject, you're right on one subject, on one subject, and one tiny area of the, you know, the retina, or the exact area that the sun. But to bring it all together is a whole different conversation. So, yeah, I'm very excited for that too. Are there any last misconceptions that you want to clear up, that you must get questions all the time from patients, providers, physicians, anything that, yeah, I think what is, what is exciting right now is a lot of people Really focus on on the solution they want a quick fix, right? And so misconception is associating longevity medicine to peptide and NAD, right? And I think it is, it is really reductive, or it is intentional, or is a lack of understanding or knowledge, right? And so I think this, it is a misconception that a field really trying to understand the mechanism of aging and how we can intervene, right, and how we can prevent those future diseases for humanity is only linked to several, you know, small intervention. And so making that, that, you know, summary is a is a thing, really reductive. And so that's, for me, a misconception of semantic or, you know, are we even talking about the same thing, right? And on the other side, you know, obviously there is. There's a world where a part of this type of medicine can feel like reactive medicine. You have this, get this new drug, right? And so then you you again, in the same, in the same pattern than, you know, traditional medicine. You wait for disease, you get the, you get the, you get the magic portion, right? And so I think this is the misconception. I think it should start as early as possible. I don't have the age to give you. But in our group, you know, we have close to 500 doctors in our in our chat group, and one of the question was like, When should we start right for talking about longevity and prevention for kids? And I think, you know, disease starts really early in the kids, right and several type of disease. But even if you take look at diabetes and and obesity, right, especially in the US, such a large, you know, number of kids that can have, you know, good enough prevent. Right? In terms of education, we don't even have to do testing. You can see it already, you know, in a in the wrong trajectory. So this is where I think is the misconception is, we're not really trying to extend, you know, life and live forever, right? It's not the immortality quest. It is really trying to provide the best life that a human can live in 2026 right? With reducing suffering. Imagine a world with where there's no suffering from those disease. I mean, that'd be amazing, right? And so I think is, how do we get into this new era of saying, Oh, we don't have rabbis anymore. We don't have, you know, the Spanish flu. We don't have, like, that was a word, you know, few centuries ago that didn't exist, and now we exist, right? And so I want to, I want to bring always, perspective in that. I think what we thought, you know, 200 years ago, was not possible. That was the norm. Like, would you think that, you know, but look, things are coming back. Some some years that are coming back. So it's never one battle. So I think again is, let's get some perspective. Let's think about humanity first, not only our practice. How can I impact civilization? We always underestimate the power of the human right, the social connection in the community, and the purpose and how we can help people. I want to always, you know, I started as a humanitarian. Before I was I was a surgeon, right? And. Was 21 and so, and then we still want to develop, you know, things that are bringing, you know, citizen together, right? We're building a program in Africa where, you know, we eventually be able to help people understand the health better, diagnose themselves, you know, easier, and train the doctors in at the last mile in villages that where people don't have access to anything. So I think we don't want to discount that to the quick fixes of of the things that we see on social media right is starting to see a little bit of social anxiety about tracking all you know, every person wearing a biologic tracker, and the metrics that they have to follow in the routines that seem like so obsessively over the top that I watched some of the routines with fascination, because it just feels like you can't maybe attain happiness when you're having anxiety about checking how many hours you slept and how many grams of protein you're taking and did you do all of your interventions and supplements at the right time? Like that's not a life as we've seen, you know, Brian Johnson and some of the other bio hackers doing such complexities. I feel like, I almost feel like my current patients have anxiety too about like not doing enough, or do they're doing too much, or they don't know what to do with the data, and they lose track and perspective of what human existence really is. Oh, man, you told you so, right? I mean, even myself, you know, I used to wear all type of wearables, and now I'm trying to really understand my body without measuring it. And so I cycle it sometimes, like I don't need that right now, or when I know I going to need those data to keep me in track, then I bring it back, and I think is really being humble and in a way that we practice or have, you know, learn or teach, our longevity mindset. Some people don't need it. Some people want, want to monitor and to control a lot. I think it's all about the personality as well, right? The personality trait and being obsessive on one thing is never good, whether it's for your health, whether it's for another addiction, right? And so I believe you don't want to trans, you don't want to you don't want to pivot your your your obsession, right? And that's why I see sometimes people can say, oh, now I'm obsessed about my data, but I don't see anyone anymore because I cannot go out anymore, right? So, so like, Yeah, it's interesting. You monitor you, right? So even myself sometimes like, Oh, my God, it's late. Should I go to this dinner, right? And when I say late for me is like, you know, eight late dinner. In Europe, we do late dinner sometimes like, and you have to relax, you know, let's go to this dinner, enjoy. And then you wake up two hours later, that's it. So I think is, how do we enjoy life? Is, I think, the number one priority of longevity when you start your longevity journey, and, you know, design my own longevity canvas, because, you know, as an architect of my longevity, I wanted to do that near an exist. I mean, health is only one, pillar of it, the biology is one pillar. Yeah, right. All the rest is you are designing a life that you want to enjoy living every single day. That's why people invest fine and resources in in their longevity plan. Why they just want to get another year, another hour, another time with the loved one, another, you know, another week traveling, another year with was the the children. So to me, it doesn't make sense to spend too much time obsessing to control because you wasting this time enjoying, yeah, now for life, living Exactly, exactly life, living, but then at the same time, if you live too fast and live too much, then you consume it. So again, it's all about balance, homeostasis at the cellular level, homeostasis at the at the civilization and societal, societal level, I think it's all about balance in life. You cannot have too much on anything. You know, the does is the poison, right? I don't know how you say that, right? There's a saying, yeah, the dose is the poison. Yeah. No, I know what you mean, but I'm trying to remember the expression we say. We say that, yeah, the dose is the duration, like, you know, the magnitude of the effect, but, but I'm really right on the same page with you. I think that we can be obsessed with health tracking, and I think I agree. I take breaks, I throw out all my once in a while, I take all my supplements, and then I'll have weeks go by where I take nothing. And what do you, what do you? What do you track that you don't like anymore? Let's say I stopped wearing my iPhone, my Apple watch, because I think I have you know, there's low level EMF that's pinging your body all the time, your family, you write your wrist, same thing with the sleep trackers. I don't like the idea of wearing any electronics like I really feel that EMF is going to affect our cellular function and and it's disruptive. And definitely no more heads headphones, but I did all kinds. Of testing, like generation lab testing and testing, you know, you know, trying to look for my biologic age versus chronologic age. So I had a phase of going through that, and then all this, all of this, just it was nice to pinpoint certain organ systems aging faster. But also it just kind of says you're aging. It's like, yes, we're slowly deteriorating. So now I'm focused much more on, I think the daily interventions are like some solid supplements. I have maybe top five that I take. What are your top five that you take right now? I mean, look again, I never, never mentioned my supplement. Because people, you know things, the idea is, is, how can you really supply yourself with what you need that has been validated and that that you you think is going to optimize today based on your recommendation of your physician. And so for me, I'm trying to optimize where I have the most upside, which is my cardiovascular health, you know, I have genetic, you know, predisposition, unfortunately, and so I'm trying to build, you know, whatever resilience I can and optimize my my cardiovascular biomarker. So mostly, I would say my routine is the most important, based on, compared to the to the supplement. So I love doing my hot yoga, my, you know, my cardio, if I can, trying to exercise and move every day and yesterday, you know, I was at the gym. I was, you know, doing some strength training, and say, Oh, I didn't stretch, I think, this week, and that's for me, was one of the most important. When I wake up, I can feel my body is like, do you think I sleep enough? I slept enough, right? Sometimes, you know, I have to, you know, I'm sending emails a little bit late at night, and then I start, you know, looking at, oh, I need to look at this study. Or starting scrolling on Twitter, cool stuff on AI, oh, man. Like, wow. You know, it's like, no, I'm not perfect. I can tell you I'm not perfect at all. So to me, is, is not this like, I would say, 3% incremental, right? Success is, how can I maintain 80% or 90% of this routine for the next 20 years? And I know I want ingest, you know, you know, every single day, you know, something that's going to only increase 1% what I want to do is focus a lot of time on my time on the things are really important down the road, long term. So one thing I love doing is calling my friends, right? And so friends there are, you know, I'm from France. I live in New York, so friends I don't see all the time, but I grew up with, I went to med school with, and so I think it gives me peace, right? I think it must, it must improve my HRV and my, you know, parasympathetic, you know, system in a way. And I like that. I think this kind of my daily supplement is sometimes that, you know, again, on the bike, I look at one friend I'm gonna call, and even if we didn't talk for, you know, several months, or even, you know, maybe a year, sometimes like, Hey, how you doing? Let's, let's have a chat. I have 30 minutes. So I love to do that. This is kind of my the routine. I love doing. I love cooking as well. And so, you know, getting my time of meditation cooking, and then cooking for people that I love as well. So you see, there is, there is yes, what we can do at the cellular level, but what can we do at our, you know, in our environment, right? How can we do to help people and to lead with generosity, kindness and abundance, right? And so such a good role model for that, David, because I see you on your Instagram stories, and you're in the sunlight, you're doing, you know, strength training, but it's also your own body weight often that you're lifting, which I think is incredible and like, it's just really a healthy life because you are engaging with this nice community. You're stimulating your brain, you're eating right so you're doing all the things that, for me, that's like being a role model for all of us. Oh no. Thank you so for saying that. I'm trying to be at least a 50% role model. 50% bad boy, all the buckets, at least on all the buckets. I mean, think about it, if you, if you 50% where you can be in the future, on all the buckets, I think it's already amazing. So I'm proud of, I'm proud of not on myself. I'm proud of the effort that, you know, I've been applying for many years, and now I wasn't really good, you know, when I was practicing surgery every day, no, yeah, I didn't sleep a lot. Self help, you know exactly. So I'm proud of the I'm proud of the journey and, oh, and so if I can help few people, I think it's amazing. So that's why we encourage, you know, doctors to communicate and to, you know, really inspire. They, you know, first circle this. Second circle, they patient, and others. I think it's a great way to walk the talk, right? And again, you don't have to be perfect. Like I said, You were mentioning, you know, several, you know, people are famous for, you know, pushing their biomarker to the next level. I think that's, that's one thing. But, you know, being how can we get, you know, 80% of the population to reach, you know, 80% of the great outcome is all about having a plan, routine, a discipline, and then believing in it that you will improve. I think someone said that happiness is about personal growth. So can you write is, can you grow your biomarker to the next level, or your impact to the next level. For me is the same. A lot of people look at, you know, metabolomics biomarker. I'm looking at, you know, macro biomarker. What is the impact in life? What is the impact on the other side of the planet? And so it's all about, you know, how do you use your reference system to to to situate yourself in your life. And so, you know, if you can impact million of people, that's kind of my biomarker, you know, and that's what's going to make me happy. That's what is the purpose. And then probably that's why, hopefully it's going to keep me, you know, live longer, because you're driven by something like those Japanese principles of finding your purpose in life and your you know you need to have a mission for all of the things that we do that unifies your goals and makes you wait, want to wake up every day. So I think that you are one of the people who has really set this longevity movement into cultural knowledge. And it's, it's definitely, I'm so grateful to be part of the longevity docs group and to have your leadership, kind of innovating how we're going to take this charge in medicine. So I Where can people find you if they want to get more information? Thank you. Touch base. I mean, the best way is obviously the longevity docs. You know that org website, we always available for the community. You know, it's, it's really the, now, the leading platform for longevity physician. Could you imagine when we started, we're like, 10 or 15 now, very early on, across 68 countries, almost like territory. Some are not countries, but you know, it's, it's, it's amazing. And then Dr David Lu on on social media. And, you know, obviously LinkedIn, Instagram is something somewhere you can, you can find me, or in can, you know, in person, I think, you know, I love the in person. You know, giving a right real life hug is nothing can replace that. So in Cannes, in June, nine to 11, we have our submit an award, and and the theme of this year is back to medicine, right? Inspired by back Back to the Future movie, because it's in CAD obviously. And so back to medicine means a lot, right? Is the, I think technology allows us doctor to go back to the root and to the values and the principle and foundation of what should be medicine. I love it. I definitely think everyone should, you know, check out longevity docs platform. Start learning. I wanted to learn because of my own aging process, doing all the interventions I can for my patients and bringing all the most high tech things to our practice. Thank you so much for joining us, David, and please keep doing all the hard work do all the good. Thank you so much, Doctor Kay, thank you so much. And you know, I'm really impressed by all the great work you're doing. You know, you're educating your you are teaching. You're doing going to a conferences. You're seeing your patient, you train your team. I mean, this is what you know, true longevity leaders are, you know, impacting everyone around them, in the in the circle. So this is thanks to people like you that we can do whatever we do at long journey, Doc. So I appreciate you. I'm grateful for you to be part of our community and and thank you for inspiring other you know, the next generation of doctors, this is what we need to do as physician, as the torch. I love it. That's it for now, guys, don't forget to find me on my instagram. It's Beauty by Doctor k, d, r, k, a, y, and our website is the same Beauty by Doctor kay.com that's where you can find our new skin longevity line, which has NAD precursors, mitochondrial boosters, pigment perfectors, and, of course, G, H, K, copper and my very own tripeptide collagen, elastin, complex. So I hope you guys will check that out. One more thing you can do in terms of innovating the skin, which is the biggest organ and the protector of all the longevity. That's it for now, guys stay beautiful. You Hey.