What if living to 98—healthy, vibrant, and strong—wasn’t just a dream, but something completely achievable with today’s technology? In this eye-opening episode, we’re joined by Dr. William Kapp, who pulls back the curtain on what he calls the “longevity crisis”—a global issue that goes beyond just living longer. With birth rates plummeting worldwide and aging populations demanding more resources, the balance between lifespan and healthspan has never been more crucial. Dr. Kapp shares the cutting-edge science behind high-performance aging and reveals why most healthcare systems are stuck in a sick care model, spending 97% of their massive $4.9 trillion budget on fixing what’s broken rather than preventing illness in the first place. But there’s hope—because with the right tools, knowledge, and strategies, reaching a robust 98 is within our grasp. Tune in to discover how we can flip the script on aging, embrace preventative care, and secure a future where longevity doesn’t mean decline—it means thriving.
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The information presented in Fully Alive is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or treatment and before making changes to your health regimen. Guests’ opinions are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host, production team, or sponsors.
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Breaking The Longevity Code: How To Live Healthy To 98 and Beyond With Dr. William Kapp
I’m excited about this episode because we have with us the Cofounder and CEO of the world’s leading longevity company Fountain Life. I’m a client of Fountain Life as well. I’ve benefited from Dr. Kapp’s amazing work. He has such an extensive background in the medical field. He’s a Board-Certified Orthopedic Surgeon. He practiced Orthopedic Surgery for a number of years and started hospitals. He’s amazing entrepreneur as well.
He started hospitals and other healthcare companies, and now he’s working on Fountain Life in shifting the way and the paradigm of the entire healthcare model through his work with Fountain Life. We’re going to dive into a whole number of topics about the healthcare system, how Fountain Life is addressing some of what is becoming a national security crisis in terms of longevity, and the need for us to live longer healthier lives, then how we can do that. I’m excited for us to learn about all of the things that we’re going to cover in this episode. Let’s dive into it with Dr. Bill Kapp from Fountain Life.
Dr. Kapp, it is such a privilege and an honor to have you here and for you to be at show point over the last couple days sharing with so many of our residents has been amazing and enlightening. One of the things that you shared in your presentation that I heard that struck me was about longevity as a national crisis and even a worldwide crisis.
I’ve always thought of it as I want to be healthy and extend my house fan. There’s a lot that I want to do in this lifetime. It struck me when you talked about it as a much larger problem and issue. That longevity for our population needing to live longer is a much larger broader problem and you have a solution to that. Maybe talk to us a little bit about this national crisis that we’re facing.
Longevity As A National Crisis
I’m happy to do that. First of all, thanks for having me, Zach. A lot of people talk about longevity and what’s available. We believe we have a step possible solution for what we would call the longevity crisis. There’s nothing wrong with the living long and we all want to live longer. The question is, do you want to live a robust healthy life? Do you want to live the last 10% to 15% of your life in decline? Which is what we do now.
When you think about health span vis-a-vis lifespan and that is what we wanted to focus on and certainly at Fountain Life that was our main driving forces. When we look at the trends over the years around the world since we started Fountain Life, what we’ve noticed is a massive decline in birth rate worldwide. Now there are people out there who are constantly worried about overpopulation. That has been a common political buzz for a lot of years. The reality is, we’re nowhere near getting close to overpopulation. As a matter of fact, the entire world’s population. Let’s back up and say, what is replacement population for the world? It’s 2.1 live births for every couple.
That is considered replacement because we know some people will not make it to maturity. We have infant death, accidents and things of this nature. You need 2.1 live births to maintain parity with the current status quo 2.1 live births replace your parents essentially. When you look at what’s happened in every Western Country, it has a below 2.1 birth rate. Significantly below what we used to be. At the turn of the century in the United States, there were 5 or 6 children per couple and around every Western country, was 3 to 4 couple at the minimum.
Europe is at 1.4 live births per couple. In United States 1.6 and dropping. Chinese are about 1.2 to 1.3 and Japan is 1.2, at least that’s what’s published. We think it’s lower. Korea is now 0.52 as a last measurement. Effectively Korea will see to exist within about three generations if they don’t turn their population around. It’s not a problem. It’s just immigration consult because even when we look at what we would call developing countries. They are seeing massive drops at our birthright. Some of this is due to technology and certainly some are due to increased economic opportunity.
When a country goes from third world to second world to first world, the population always drops. The birth rate always drops. In India now, they’re at 2.1. They used to be at 4 or 5 because technologies now found its way into India. When people can create an economy for themselves, they can create some wealth and savings for themselves then they start thinking about, how do I educate my children? The cost of education is high. How do I get up to college? Their concept of how many children they could afford drops dramatically.
By itself that wouldn’t be a problem except for on the other side of longevity. We have aging populations that are in decline and those aging populations require more resources. IEV attacks dollars or more human resources which means people. I joke with my team all the time, I say a young person in twenty years is going to go work for whatever the current Apple is. They’re not going to work at the nursing home. Given a choice, when there’s a shortage of skilled labor, you’re not going to gravitate toward that.
It’s super important, but what is on the promising side is that you don’t have to accept aging as a consequence of debility. Debility is a consequence of aging. There is a technology now and we would call it high performance aging where you can live a robust life to 98 or beyond. It’s a question of applying the right technology with the right tools and the right road map.
I love that you said what we know currently getting to 98 healthy is completely accessible.
That’s correct. That’s technology. Those are not my words. Disclosure Dr. Eric Verdin who’s one of our advisors at Fountain Life is this chairman in the CEO of the Buck Institute. The Buck Institute is the leading longevity aging institute in the world. It’s in San Francisco, but it’s also affiliated with UCSF and Stanford. Dr. Verdin will tell you that their research at the Bucks says, “You can make 98 healthy and robust with what we know now.”
You don't have to accept aging as a consequence of debility, nor is debility an inevitable consequence of aging. Technology offers solutions. Share on X
We don’t need like brand new breakthrough gene therapy or new cell therapy. You can make 98 healthy with the tools that we have now. The problem is the knowledge and access to those tools are not uniformly distributed. People don’t know where to turn because the medical system, which would normally have the responsibility for getting you to a healthy 98 doesn’t even understand the tools because they’re not taught in med school and in residency because we have a sick care system. We don’t have a healthcare system. You’ll hear this more commonly. The reality is, technology will ultimately find its way to consumers, but we’re trying to accelerate that technology into consumer’s hands faster.
There’s a couple of things. You mentioned 97% of healthcare of $4.9 trillion. Is that the right number?
In 2023.
Ninety-seven percent of that went to sick care and only 3% went to preventive care. Is that correct?
Healthcare Spending: Sick Care Vs. Preventive Care
That’s correct. We spend 97% of our dollars on, I call wait till you break and then fix your medicine. The reality is, 3% has been on prevention, any shape or form. The traditional healthcare system based on symptoms worked well for hundreds of years, meaning 100 years ago, you probably didn’t have passed 35. You were lucky if you live past 35 or 40. 200 years ago, you certainly wouldn’t look past 35, unless you were an outlier.
We read about Leonardo da Vinci and some of the older politicians Benjamin Franklin living to his 80s. He was a total outlier, because most people died of infection or of trauma. People died early and it was accepted. Nobody ever thought that they were going to live to 80 or 90. Those were the true outlier. Part of that is, when you’re the outlier, you have accumulated all the knowledge of all the people of gone before you. When you’re in your 80s, you can be the smartest guy in the room because you’ve had time to absorb more information.
What was important about that is when you are treating infection or trauma, but particularly infection, symptoms or how we treat it those. When we were based on if you’re having gastrointestinal problems or GI upset, or things of this nature. Those are symptoms that we can match to a diagnosis then came the term theory disease. In the first real inroad, we saw a massive increase in life expectancy is when we started doing preventive health measures, kill the rats and clean the water then we go to antibiotics, which were pivotal in changing life expectancy.
Once you get rid of the public health measures, vaccines, implant, and antibiotics now we double life expectancy fairly quickly. In the process of doubling life expectancy, we uncover what’s lurking under the covers which is chronic disease, meaning heart disease and neurodegenerative disease. The disease of what we call aging. When you realize that is what we’re focused on and that 80% to maybe 90% of what we treat is chronic disease, we didn’t have that problem 100 years ago. We’re the victim of our success to some extent. We have a healthcare delivery system that is not predicated on detecting those problems early for chronic disease.
That makes them sense. As you said, we’re a victim of our own success. We’ve doubled the life expectancy in the last 100 years.
It’s amazing, right? We’ve gone from penicillin to CRISPR in one lifetime. People fail to realize how much advanced we created as a civilization and considering where we work 200 years ago or 500 years ago. It’s a tremendous advancement that we’ve made in terms of technological ability to understand and unravel the complexity of the human body but we’re scratching the surface still.
You also mentioned another amazing stand about the clinical latency gap seventeen years from the first trials to FDA approval. The technologies that were receiving in our healthcare now are seventeen years old before they’ve been making it to our doctor’s office.
The time frame at which the FDA takes to evaluate a technology but even once the FDA said, “This is this works. We’ve got good evidence that this works.” It’s still seventeen years until it gets into your doctor’s office and the reason is because medicine tends to be generational. What I mean by that is physicians learn generationally. Most physicians leading medical school or residency, don’t keep up on all the latest advances. We’ve also then fragmented medicine into multiple specialties.
There’s no quarterback anymore. The quarterback’s gone. Ten people have armies of specialists that don’t talk to each other and those specialists keep up with their little small part of the equation, but they don’t look at the big picture. When it comes to using new technology, if there’s no reimbursement code for that, or if there’s no way for patients to access it or insurance or Medicare to pay for it. Consequently, it doesn’t get promoted to the physicians.
We always say you get the behavior that you incent. If we incent sick care and doctors only take care of you after your symptomatic and broken, then that’s what we get. By the way that $4.9 trillion that we spent in 2023 is half of the world’s entire healthcare spent just for the US. The whole world spends about $10 trillion on healthcare and we spent half of it. It’s 4% of the population.
Our outcomes are terrible for what we invested. It depends on which you should survey you want to read. If you need the latest coil in your brain, the latest stint in your heart, or the latest organ transplant. We are the best. If you want to be and stay healthy, we are not the best by stretching the imagination because we don’t make investments in the front end to try to keep our population healthy.
Let’s get into that. You’ve cofounded Fountain Life. I’m a member of Fountain Life. I’ve had my core diagnostics completed there and have pictures of the inside of my coronary arteries, my platforms, and everything else. It’s been an amazing help and benefit to me, so I’m excited for our readers to know more about that. You’re taking that clinical latency gap and shortening it to almost zero. You’re on the cutting edge of paving the way and disrupting and shifting the paradigm on healthcare. How did this all come together with Fountain Life?
We often think healthcare happens within the four walls of a doctor’s office, but that's not truly where it happens. It happens in your home — in how you sleep, eat, and exercise, the toxins you're exposed to, and the quality of your air. That's where… Share on X
I spent many years in healthcare. I’m an Orthopedic Surgeon. I have built electronic health records companies, hospital companies, and surgeries centers. I’ve done everything inside the healthcare space, including running a health insurance company for a short period of time. I believe I have a unique vantage point with looking at healthcare. I have a background in Molecular Genetics and Immunology.
The Science Of Aging And Cellular Health
My vantage point is a little different than most and I’m not siloed into one particular viewpoint. What I noticed after many years of practicing healthcare, particularly being in the hospital setting. We were always early to adopt new technology and try to lower the cost to healthcare. We were always bringing the latest surgical procedure or whatever to improve outcomes and try to lower costs. It will be a low-cost surgery center or low-cost implants or things to try to move the needle.
What I didn’t understand at the time was that it didn’t matter how much more chronic disease we were treating even through the orthopedic lens. We were not going to impact the tsunami. We call it the silver tsunami, meaning of the number of people that were going to age. As we’ve seen the aging population explode worldwide due to increase in life expectancy, what I realized very quickly is that 80% of what we’re trading was chronic disease. We weren’t addressing it with any of the tools that made sense.
Years ago, I started a company called Longevity Performance Centers. We took a first principles approach to healthcare. If you were going to redesign a healthcare system, what we would you build? Would you build a system that waited until you develop symptoms, have a heart attack, put a stint in you, give you stat and maybe got some dietary education? Would you create a system using the best technology to detect the disease long before you’re at a symptom and avoid it just like the airline industry does, for the most part?
That was the moment for me and that was years ago, so we Longevity Performance Center. We took every bit of latest technology we could to screen you and to find early disease then put together a team of physicians, nurses, health coaches, and nutritionists to optimize every facet of your life. Once we started measuring, we found out we could manage. We were in that process for about four years, a matter of fact, our first group of patients that come through.
What we notice that was that when we detected disease when you’re asymptomatic and treated it early, the cost of treating it versus the cost of treating it when you became symptomatic was 70% less expensive. Not just spending the cost curve, crushing the cost curve. The point being when you look at every other industry, I became very apparent that waiting until the house was burning didn’t make much sense anymore. It was a few years ago that Tony Robbins showed up and said, “I heard what you folks are doing. Let’s look at this.”
We were in Naples Florida where we started our first center and he said, “Can we grow this?” That was great for us because Tony, as you know, is a healthcare advocate. He’s also mind and body and everything else. A lot of people don’t know about Tony. Everybody remembers Tony walking across coals, but the reality is, Tony is involved with that 175 different companies. He’s quite the business entrepreneur and a great spokesperson for us as well.
We were also joined along the journey with Peter Diamandis, an XPrize fame. He’s a great futurist. Also, Dr. Bob Hariri who’s a cellular biologist, and a lot of others. We had some notable billionaires and celebrities that wanted to help us build this. We’ve now got four Fountain Life centers. The whole component of this is accelerate the technology to make you available and have it. More importantly, give you more knowledge about your health than you’ve ever had in your life and even to than, is to give you as much information, if not more than your physician has. That’s the game changer for most people.
Becoming to the CEO of your own health. Build your agency.
We believe agency is the key, because one of the challenges in healthcare and we’ve had this for years, is it tends to be episodic and reactive, meaning because we’re symptom-based. By the way, this is what you’re taught in med school, so it’s not fault to the doctors. They’re not taught to go look for problems before they begin. Since we’re symptom-based, we have a tendency to be episodic and reactive, so we wait until you break.
The problem with that is there’s no feedback loop for your health, meaning you don’t know on a day-to-day basis outside of your annual physical exam what’s going on inside your health. I would argue that only 5% of healthcare probably happens on the doctor’s office. We think of healthcare is what happens in the four walls of the doctor’s office, but that’s not where healthcare happens. Where does healthcare happen?
It happens in your home. It happens with how you sleep, how you eat, how you exercise, what toxins you’re exposed to, and what your air quality. That’s where healthcare begins and we measure none of that. What I’m excited about as we’ve started developing our AI platform, the ability to have an AI that is your personal health coach. It can help you monitor all of those things that you’re not normally thinking about and have somebody watching over you when you’re not paying attention essentially. What that allows for the first time is what I call a closed feedback loop.
Feedback Loops And Wearable Technology
One of the things that’s interesting is we all like sports and humans love sports and video games. One of the reasons we like it is because we get immediate feedback. It’s like automatic feedback. You hit the golf ball. You hook it immediately. You know what you want to correct the action to be, but in healthcare there’s no sleep feedback loop. You don’t know what’s going on in between those periodic visits at the doctors, so the goal here is to start using wearable technologies. You’re continuous blood glucose monitors and things of this nature. For instance, our clients who use a CGM, which are commented. Now you can look and see when your blood sugar spikes when you’re eating something.
It’s interesting because we find this across different people. People are like, “You can eat. That’s not going to bother you.” It turns out, they eat it and their blood sugar spikes. We don’t know, but the point is, there is a feedback loop that you can get into. Now, this thing we call the human body is no longer as much about black box and you can start to understand it. It is complex. Human body has 40 trillion cells and every cell does a billion to 10 billion chemical reactions a second.
Bigger and bigger hospital systems aren't the answer. The solution is to go back to first principles — keeping people healthy so we don't have to fill those big hospitals. Share on X
I would say we’re probably 0.5% of figuring out true longevity, but we do know that there are patterns that we can reproduce and there are subsystems in the body that we can improve upon to get you to that healthy 98. It’s going to be a while until leaving the AI is can help us elucidate all the pathways into the body that are happening. Our goal is found is to get to what we call Precision Medicine, meaning a solution for you as an individual, not a general recommendation for the population. That’s how we practice now. We practice in broad strokes and we want to get down to that granular level of your healthcare with you controlling or at least aware of every facet of it.
The work that you’re doing is amazing. I’d love to take a minute and look at this through a different lens. You’d mentioned some stats in your presentation about 70% of people to have a heart attack, or asymptomatic the day before or up until it happens. He was one of those people. At aged 71, he had a massive heart attack and his life was over, unfortunately. I didn’t get to know him as an adult. I know him when I was a kid, but I missed out on a lot of wisdom that I could have gleaned from him. I know you shared a story about your own mom. Walk us through if your mom and my grandfather had access to something like Fountain Life, what test would have happened? How would that have changed their trajectory?
Preventative Screening And Early Detection
Sorry about your loss. It’s always hard to lose a parent, grandparent, or child, especially when it’s something that could have been prevented. In my case, my mom died a few years ago of varying cancer. The challenge with that is she wasn’t diagnosed until stage 4. It was interesting because I was driving by on a highway and I saw a big billboard. It said, “If you have abdominal, bloating, weight gain and abdominal pain, you might have ovarian cancer.” I was like going, “That’s like stage four.” What does that do? That does nothing.
The point being, it’s a silent killer. It’s the fourth leading cause of death among women now. The reality is, if she had had access to the Fountain Life technology, we would have done a whole-body scan, MRI scan. We would have picked up her ovarian cancer at stage one. She would have an outpatient procedure and it would have cost $5,000. She’d be home and healthy because she was a healthy robust 80. Instead, we spent $600,000 or $700,000 in chemo, radiation, and surgery, and all of it with about outcome at the end because we waited too late to look for those problems.
The other point of that, it was not only super expensive. It was bad outcome. With a fraction of the dollars spent at the front to look for these problems, you could lower cost dramatically. What we found is even if you take a population of 1,000 people and we know that we will catch significant disease in 14% of them that even if we spend the money up front and treat those people. The amount of savings including the cost of testing 1,000 people is still results in a 70% reduction in healthcare costs.
What that means is, if you are vibrant and robust, you shouldn’t succumb from a heart attack or cancer or neurodegenerative disease, if we can catch it early enough. The goal here is to catch all of this early enough so that you can continue to live a healthy and robust life and contribute. There’s a vast repository of knowledge inside aging populations. It is going to be critical that we keep those aging populations healthy, robust, working, and contributing because we don’t have enough population coming behind them.
There is a lot to be glean from people with more gray hair. The opportunity to learn from our parents and grandparents, unfortunately is not afforded people. I can’t tell you over and over again. Many of our Fountain team members who work for us, and I can’t take credit for everybody at Fountain, the amazing work they do. We have a fantastic team of 130 dedicated individuals that are mission-driven. I will tell you, I’ve been with most of our employees. I have interviewed all of them one time or another.
They are here for a mission and you’d be surprised how many had a mother who died at 57 from cancer, had a father who died of a heart attack, and had some major health concern that they had to fight through and realize that the system wasn’t helping them. These are people with great training backgrounds like MDs, PhDs, and nutritionist. They all are working at Fountain because we want to change how healthcare is rendered going forward.
Thank you. It’s amazing the work that you’re doing. I know you’re up against it. It’s an uphill battle. It’s going to take time. One of the things you said the way the system is designed now is to get you into the healthcare system. What you’re shifting is changing that model and it’s a disruptive uphill journey that we’re on, but you’re clearly using your expertise, experience, training and your brilliance to change the world.
I don’t know about brilliant. I better go with tenacity. I will tell you that we have great team and a great group of investors that are very passionate about the topic and realized what we’re trying to do. Education is the key here, because when people realize that our options outside of the current system, they will avail themselves of them. What we do now is not inexpensive and the trick here is to figure out how do we repurpose existing dollars to do this type of testing. I am encouraged in two facets.
Physician Burnout And Systemic Challenges
One is that the system is a structured. It’s unsustainable. If we continue down the path that we are, it will just get worse because we don’t have the resources and we’re burning out our doctors. When I talk about burnout, I mean physicians are not given the tools to do the type of medicine we want them ideally to do for you. They are certainly not giving the tools to detect disease early. They are not giving the time that it takes to be able to analyze that information and make a difference in your health.
Beyond that, doctors have been beaten down so severely down by the system, meaning that if you were in practice, which I started many 30 years ago, 70% or 80% of physicians were independent practitioners. They were and they were hanging out a shingle and making it work just like every other small business in America. Now, 70% of physicians are now employed by large health systems. While that sounds good in some ways, the reality is they’re not their voluntarily. They’re there because they can no longer afford to work outside the system and need subsidies from the big health systems in order to continue to practice.
You need to take control of your health and be proactive; otherwise, you'll end up outsourcing your healthcare to a disinterested third party. Share on X
What that means now is even less time with patients and less control over the direction that they want to treat their patients. Now, they’re getting pressed into algorithms and being pressed into practice patterns. They’re penalized for not seeing enough patients, for ordering too many tests, and for so many things to the extent that physicians suffer tremendous burnout. In 2024, it was the first year that suicide was a number one cause of death among physicians. When we take somebody with 130 plus IQ and put them in such a box but they see no hope. That’s challenging.
My daughter who is a breast surgeon and she’s trained at Georgetown. She just finished her fellowship. Prior to going to her fellowship, I met with all of her colleagues. There are about fourteen of them. They were all graduating from medical school residency, particularly residency. They were all Radiology, Orthopedics, and Internal Medicine. A whole group of people that she had gone through medical school and training with.
I was sitting at the table and the number one question I had from most of the kids around the table and I say kids because they’re half my daughter’s age. They asked, “How long do I have to practice till I can quit?” It’s because they’re burned out. The medical record system has burned them out. The system has burned them out and there’s very little job satisfaction. That’s not because we didn’t take the best in the brightest in the medical school. It’s because we put them in a position where it’s corporatized medicine. Bigger and bigger hospital systems aren’t the answer. The answer is to go back to First principles and keep people healthy so we don’t have to fill the big hospitals.
That’s disruptive. The savings to the economy and the savings to the American people is so enormous. We can’t put a price on great health. Tony always talks about the fact that a man who has his health has a thousand dreams, but a man who doesn’t have his health has about one. It’s just to get healthy. We were talking about impacting healthcare and the nation, getting people optimized with their healthcare. It’s things as simple as exercise and depression. There’s not a single depressive medication on the market that has ever been proven to do better than just exercise at alleviating depression, but you’re not taught that in med school.
In med school, you’re taught, “That’s a depression. Here’s an SSRI.” We joke about it in medicine because lots of people in medicine are on antidepressants. You’d be surprised how many of your providers, even nurses, to the extent that they used to laugh because in the surgery area, you have the prep area where all the nurses hang out. I walked in there one day and there’s like this big massive tablet hanging on the wall. It’s like 12 inches wide and says Prozac across of it. I said, “What is that?” They said, “That’s the Prozac Salt Lake.” I would say three quarters of the nurses were on antidepressants. Why is that?
We do that because a lot of times, they have medical conditions that we don’t have time to ferret out. They may have hormonal imbalances or it may be something else that’s going on. Outside of statins, antidepressants is the second most widely prescribed medication in the US and they’re not that effective. Exercise would be better, but once again, we don’t look at you holistically.
I’m an MD and we have a very scientific perspective on things, but we’re not taught about exercise. As a matter of fact, most medical schools do not even have a class on nutrition. When you start to get base level of understanding how the human body works, we get it for two years science, anatomy, physiology, and all of that then you’re told to forget it then you go work in the clinic and match symptoms with diagnosis and chase with bills and procedures. That’s what I did because that’s what I was taught to do. Any deviation from that is not tolerated in medicine, even though we know it’s not working.
Taking Control Of Your Health
They all know it’s not working. You cannot find a single healthcare professional in the country that will tell you the healthcare system is working is just fine. They all will tell you “It’s not broken.” How do you fix it? It can’t be fixed. I’m like, “That’s not true. It can be fixed. It’s just not going to be fixed through the lens that you may look at healthcare.” That’s important, and it’s a important thing for people to understand. That’s why given the lack of enough doctors and nurses that are practicing medicine, you need to take control of your health and be proactive. Otherwise, you’re going to just outsource your healthcare to a disinterested third party.
This is a negative on health provider but I’ve been on that side. I know what that looks like, but until you start to ask the hard questions about why we’re not healthy, why we’re not doing a good job at keeping people healthy, and how the healthcare education system is not keeping people healthy. We want every one of our doctors to be great at taking care of acute problems. We send airline pilots to simulate our training to train for emergency that may never happen in their entire career, but we want to know that they can do that. What do we pay airline pilots to do? To get you to your destination safely.
We want our doctors to get you to the end of your life healthy. They should know how to take care of the sick stuff, the stents, the traumas, and when you break when something scenes happens, but the technology exists that you can have such insights into your healthcare that if you decide to have a bad outcome, it’ll be a choice because a bad behavior. Not the fate of the genetic Gods. We can give you enough of a roadmap to put you on a different path. Now, whether you choose to do that, it would be up to you. It will be your choice, but it won’t be a question mark.
It will be like how much plaque you have. If you want to reverse your plaque, this is what you have to do. This is your diet, your medication, and your exercise routine. If you want to get healthier, this is what you have to do. Now, if you don’t want to do that, then you can’t turn around and say, “I didn’t know,” because now you will know. That’s what we want with Fountain long term. We want to change the system.
The point is to start with a small group of people and then grow it. I think we’re ready, because when we looked at how healthcare is paid for in the US. It’s either paid by a government or out of pocket or by an insurance company. When you look at the number of people that are covered in the United States by a self-insured plan, so it would mean that employer who is self-insured. I will tell you. The insurance companies have done a masterful job over the years in transferring all the risk to the employers because 68% of all employees in the US are covered by a self-insured employer, meaning they’re taking 100% of the risk.
It's a smoke-and-mirrors game with the insurance companies. Most big insurance companies make more money from their pharmacy benefits and administrative fees than from insuring people. Share on X
The insurance company is providing the pharmacy benefit, plan administrator, and maybe the network to the doctors and hospital, but they’re not taking any financial risk. They make a fortune of the pharmacy benefit because they inflate to cost to the drugs and they keep a profit on every one of them that comes through. They’ll tell you their saving money and offer retail, but they get it much cheaper than you know. It’s a smoke and mirrors game with the insurance companies. Most big insurance companies make more money off their pharmacy benefit in their administrative charges than they ever did insurance people.
If it’s not bad enough, then they’re buying up practices like United Healthcare is buying up hospitals and doctors and becoming vertically integrated. When you see what they’ve done and what we believe the opportunity is, it’s those 68% of employees that are covered by self-insured employers. Once self-insured employers know that they’re taking 100% of the risk. If you have a patient that has a bad outcome or one of your employees, you paid for to stop loss carrier or out of pocket up until you hit the stop loss.
My point being, they’re the ones that can change the system if they ask for a different answer and going to the insurance companies who have no idea how this technology works, and don’t want to invest in it because they’re population health focused. They believe whatever’s good for the masses is how we should practice medicine. That’s the wrong way to look at it. On the other side, the insurance companies have very little inside to lower cost in healthcare because they’re not at risk.
If you’re not at risk, why do you care? I always tell people, if you’re an insurance company and you’re making most your money off administrative claims and the size of the premium is percentage of the premium and also on Pharmacy benefit. You want more pharmacy benefit because that’s where you make your money. You want higher premiums because you get a percentage of that and that’s where you make your money. I know they hate this conversation because I know enough about their business. They don’t know anything about my business.
I know more about their business than they know about mine. They don’t have a vested interest in keeping you healthy. If you think about even with ObamaCare, good, bad, or indifferent, they lock the insurance companies into a 15% profit margin, which 10% goes for administration. They only have a 5% profit margin, which is fine but if there are going to make more money, they want to see premiums going up or premiums going down. It’s going up because you have that 5% of $10 billion than a billion. It’s that simple. It’s these structural problems that we got into with all this healthcare. Most insurance companies have gotten out of the risk game, and they’ve transferred it to the employers.
What they haven’t transferred at the employees, they’ve transferred it to doctors, hospitals, and bundled payments and all these other clever euphemisms. All of that is the symptom of the problem, and the problem is we’re not addressing the root cause of disease early. If you fix it early, all the other problems go away and that’s the challenge.
That’s where Fountain Life comes in.
We have one potential solution. We want to get the cost down. We know the cost of the scans and the cost of the testing will come down with time, but it’s not that we don’t spend enough on healthcare. We spend $4.9 trillion. We won the competition in the rest of the world. We spend more than anybody else. The problem is not enough money. The problem is how the money spent. Once again, if we’re always going to chase disease, we’re never going to get the right answer.
AI And Personalized Healthcare Solutions
I think the world is waking up. COVID woke a lot of people up, but cost of healthcare is waking people up even more. Senator Scott is a good friend of the company and he knows the problem very clearly. He also knows how difficult it is to turn to ship, so to speak. He’s a big advocate of what we do. Dr. Meadows is a big advocate of this whole preventive look. The question is, how can we get costs down for the screening, so we can screen more people? More importantly, how do we get the average person engaged in their healthcare? That comes back to that closed feedback loop, giving you more information about your health. That’s where our AI agent comes in. Zora is going to make a huge difference.
I look at my Zora and I asked her, “What should I eat based on this?” We were talking about this. I can scan the menu and ask Zora based on my profile which of these choices should I have and she’ll give me a very clear answer based on my blood work, my labs, and everything that’s uploaded into her. It’s amazing what you folks have developed.
She’ll only get better. I tell him all the time that’s as bad as she’s ever going to be, meaning that she will continue to get more data. What we realized very quickly when generative AI started to emerge, which we were always big fans of using machine learning. When generative AI came out, for the very first time, we could start to assimilate massive amounts of information. We’re very proud to have launched Zora. We did that months ago after training her for about a year and a half on reinforcement learning.
For those people who are not familiar with AI or artificial intelligence, particularly the way we look at it is based on neural networks. Those neural networks are largely patterned after the human brain. The inspiration for the architecture was the human brain. What we’re able to do now because we can stack neural nets on top of each other, is all those neural circuits start to talk to each other. If you think about the evolution of AI when ChatGPT 1 came out, that was like a toddler. ChatGPT 2.0 was maybe a grade schooler. ChatGPT-3 was probably as good as the smartest high school student you know. ChatGPT-4 is at a collegiate level.
It will be very soon, probably within the next few years, if not sooner, you will have the smartest doctor in your pocket, period. That will be Zora, hopefully. More importantly, she’s only going to be as smart as the information you give her. If you don’t have full body scan information and deep data to feed her, she’s just going to give you generic recommendations that you can get from any source out there. We took all that data and we put in a private data cloud. Everything Zora is secure.
The second component of that is we fed her so much data on root cause analysis and why things happen. You can ask for questions about diet, exercise, and fitness. You can also ask her, “Based on my genetics, what is this risk factor? Based on my sleep patterns, what would you recommend? My cholesterol is elevated and I have this problem and that problem. What would you recommend?” She’s very good and she gives it to you in layman’s terms. Instead of you having to sort through the medical jargon which we’re good at, she can tell you that.
We’ve always been big fans of using machine learning, but when generative AI emerged, for the first time, we could truly assimilate massive amounts of information. Share on X
What was interesting was I with the team. We have a remarkable team of AI engineers. One of the things that’s very unique that people fail to realize about Fountain is that our clinicians sit side by side with our data engineers to design and develop these products so that our clinicians and our data teams know each other’s workflows. They’re not working in a vacuum from each other. First of all, they start to talk like Zora like she’s like one of the family.
The data teams are like, “Let’s ask Zora.” “What do you think about that?” “I don’t know. Let’s ask Zora.” What we’re finding is that she’s that good and now the subtleties start to come out. People are uploading their medical documents from other sources. You can do that inside Zora and if you have other medical records that you want. We’re just in the process of adding in wearables, so you’re sleep score and all of those things. What happens is, she gets smarter and thinks about you 24/7 essentially, and she’s available 24/7.
If you have a question about your health, or what’s good for you or not good for you or whatever. By the way, she’s going to remind you about your appointments or when your blood works due or when your blood works in. She has the ability of these large language models to get smarter and smarter over time. That’s from the patient side, which is great. Our members get this amazing clarity in their data, but you can imagine when you start collecting all the data on a whole-body MRI. It’s 10,000 images that you went through, head to toe and 10,000 slices on the body. When you take 10,000 slices, that’s an amazing amount of data. We talked about taking your entire genome. That’s 3.2 billion base pairs.
It’s an enormous amount of data, but we can now search that data and your genome. If any new variants come up, we can pop it in to AI and the AI will say, “Yes, you have it, or don’t have it.” We get new insights in your genetics and all of your microbiome. We talk about 40 trillion cells in the human body. You have ten times as many cells in your gut that are bacteria. They have a huge impact on your health one. Now, we can quantify those and we can tell you what’s in your gut. As we start pieces together, what’s interesting is that’s a massive amount of data for any one physician to try to put together, but Zora can.
AI-Assisted Decision Support For Doctors
On the clinical side, Zora is reading all of the reports and she’s giving a complete summary for the doctor. Once again, we’re trying to not burn our doctors out. We want our doctors have the best tools, but if I burden them with tools that are so cumbersome that takes them two hours to figure out what’s going on to collect all the data, then I haven’t done them at any service. What we know with Zora is she thinks for 2 or 3 minutes, then she generates a report. She’ll also make recommendations that the doctor might not make.
Now, all of our doctors ultimately are responsible because this is a decision support. This is not replacing your doctor, but this is making our doctors much better. By the way, that data that Zora gives a doctor’s, you get the same information from Zora. We don’t shield any data from our patients. That’s the only Zora doesn’t do. We don’t make medication recommendations through her because that needs to be done through the physician.
There are certain things we don’t do because legally, it needs to go through the doctor. We want to make sure we stay comport with the law. What’s interesting about Zora is our physicians now are finding that she’s finding things that get overlooked. When you think about what we do versus your standard primary care doctor. You go to your standard primary care doctor. He’s whipping out the 200-year-old stethoscope that was invented 1817 and the otoscope that was 1836. He’s looking in your eyes and ears. He’s going to ask you a few questions and maybe pushes on your belly. Maybe he listens to your carotids and to your heart. That 200-year-old exam is not going to catch stage one kidney cancer.
It can’t see. It can’t feel it. It can’t hear it. By the way, there are no symptoms. Once again, we’re using a super old tool. Your doctor gets 45 minutes to do that physical exam, if you go but most people don’t go. Only very few people go to an annual physical. Women are better than men. Men never go unless it’s late-late. What’s interesting about that is, you take that concept of that limited amount of information and it will still take a doctor 45 minutes.
If I then go over to what we do with 250 gigabytes of information, it’s going to take them a lot longer to understand it. Once again, it’s like an autopilot. Early days of autopilot’s, the pilots didn’t trust them. You can’t fly a jumbo jet without one. Very soon you’re not going to want your doctor flying without an AI and you’re going to want the AI. You can probably go to pick your doctor as to whether or not they’re using AI.
We are interested and excited because we’re the only company that we’re aware of that is using AI in a proactive fashion to try to detect problems early. We’re not aware of anyone else in the world that are doing what we’re doing. Most people who are using AI in healthcare are using it to make the doctor-patient interaction maybe record it passively so they listen to your conversation and they write it into note-taker then the AI then codes the interaction and bills for the interaction. It’s still based off symptoms.
Nobody’s using it the way we’re using it. We think there’s a good opportunity to continue to build on Zora’s capabilities. Once again, people ask us all the time, “Why don’t you just give it to a big health system?” I’m like, “It’s because they don’t even know what information to feed her.” If we don’t give her what she needs, she can’t do her job. If I just give her a 200-year-old physical exam with some doctor’s notes. That’s not going to do it. I need to give her your body scans, your heart scan, and your brain scan. I need to give her all the things that she’s going to learn from.
Also gut microbiome.
Proactive Healthcare With AI
All of it because it’s a massive amount of information, but she can’t do her job unless we give her the tools to do her job. Once again, it’s a paradigm shift. It’s moving away from sick care in episodic reactive care to this proactive care where we’re looking for problems before they occur. Our teams are thinking about our patients all the time and Zora’s thinking about you all the time. She’s constantly looking at your data. This is just how she works.
We are strong believers in what we call the Information Theory of Aging, which suggests that aging occurs over time because the genes of youth gradually get turned off. The question is, how do you turn them back on? Share on X
Zora’s Continuous Learning And Doctor Collaboration
One of the things that’s unique about Zora also is, we’ve had 6,000 people go through our process, so we’ve got a pretty high learning curve on that. What secondarily is unique about Zora is when one of our doctors might treat something uniquely or that’s unusual, Zora learns that from that interaction with the doctor then she can help with all the other doctors because it goes into that database. It doesn’t require the doctors to sit and have a conference and say, “How do you treat this?” Zora has now learned that. She can provide that as a solution for the doctors.
She’s earning from all the interactions.
Very much. What’s interesting about Zora also is she’s got a little bit of a personality as you ask for more questions. I wouldn’t say she’s cheeky at this point, but she certainly has her ways of telling you over things. As I said that will only get better and better over time. We believe everybody needs their own personal health AI, essentially that’s locked up in your side your data cloud so you don’t have to worry about somebody stealing it or whatever. It’s important.
It’s amazing stuff that you’re working on. I know that one of the things that’s cutting edge with Fountain Life is all the regenerative therapies that you folks are make available to your clients and members. What are some of the most exciting regenerative therapies that you see on the horizon or you folks are practicing now or utilizing now?
We are big believers in what we call the information theory of aging, meaning that you age over time because genes of youth get turned off. The question is, how do you get those turned back on? Dr. David Sinclair pioneered that work. Also, there are others out in the space that believe in epigenetic reprogramming, which we think are very valid as well. There is a little different take on it. We don’t believe there’s a single molecule, so they’re called twelve hard hallmark pathways of aging. There were nine a few years ago.
I read that. It used to be nine and now there’s twelve.
The question becomes, how many are there really? It’s a nice way to think about it and contextualize it. I think what we’re leaning at Fountain and where we believe the technology will go, is it’s not necessary. It’s not, “We’re going to find a single pill or molecule to reverse aging.” It’s just way too complicated. They’re way too many pathways. There’s not enough intersection across, but there are some common themes. One of those is cellular senescence. We believe in cellular senescence, meaning that cells get old. Some of them can be toxic.
Not all senescence cells are toxic. You need some senescence cells. You need them for wound care or wound healing. Some use of them are positive, but what we also believe is the body’s a lot smarter than we are and they’re broken subsystems in the body and subroutines in the body that we think we can restore. We think that’s how some of the regenerative medicine works.
We are involved in IRB and FDA trials with a couple of different companies that have isolated, what we will call the secret tone, which is what these stem cells secrete. They have characterized that. We believe that they have effects at the epigenetic level because what we are seeing is that in some of the individuals in early trials get the exosome treatment, the secretome, and they are seeing a reversal in their physiologic immune age or they’re seeing an increase in muscle mass even though they’re not exercising. These are things that were just saying it’s early.
It’s the ultimate bio hack.
You see other people doing this similarly by going against stem cell therapy outside the United States. Now, you cannot legally do it in the United States now.
You have to go to the Bahamas.
We will direct people to certain areas where we believe they do a good job and it’s safe, we’ve vetted their labs and their products. We want to be able to do that in the US. Certainly, exosome treatments are in very valid for that. It has great results with arthritis, exosomes and partial rotator cuff tears, and tendinopathies. We see amazing results. By the way, the NFL now is allowing stem cell therapy, for the first time.
It’s coming.
It’s just not allowed in the US, so all these players go outside the US. This hasn’t been publicized. I’m not betraying anything, but Tyreek Hill has talked about his experience going down and getting stem cells and how it’s extended his career. What do we believe stem cells do? These are either cord blood stem cells or placental drives stem cells. They are day zeros stem cells because they’re from newborns.
You’re born with all the new stem cells you’ll ever have, and they’ll they deplete over time. The question is, what do you do when you get to meet your 60s and 70s? Do you want your stem cells or young stem cells? Most people would opt for the younger ones. What we know is we infuse those stem cells in your body. We’ve never seen any major adverse events for them.
We don’t do this in the US at Fountain, but we send people out when they ask it, even the early studies that are being done I have several colleagues that are doing those outside the US. What they’re seeing is some level of epigenetic reprogramming. It’s probably because the stem cells don’t last forever. They hang around the body for a week or so. They are secreting these substances that help you reverse some of this aging process. We know one thing for sure, they’re massively anti-inflammatory.
One thing people often forget is that the body was never meant to be comfortable. This concept is called hormesis, the idea that when your body experiences a certain level of stress, it stimulates the genes of youth. Share on X
The FDA just approved the very few first use of cord blood stem cells for very specific indication. We’re starting to see that dam start to crack a little bit. Hopefully, it will crack wider. Those are two things when we talk about cellular or epigenetic reprogramming. We think the cellular mechanisms are probably the fastest way to get there.
The second one is we are big believers in therapeutic plasma exchange. That means that we can take out 800 CCs of your blood plasma and replace it with without humans. You might consider an oil change but the reality is, we’ve seen the early data especially coming out of the back ends. There’s been a regression of physiologic age by 1 to 3 years. By the way, we can measure your biologic age. That’s the important part of this, too.
There’s tests where we can measure blood proteins on top of your DNA. We can tell you from those 800,000 sites that we can measure what your physiologic ages. Not your chronologic age. Not what calendar says, but what you biologically are. We know that we can reverse your biologic age and get you down to seven years younger than your chronologic age, what the calendar says, then we will probably reduce your incidence of chronic disease by up to 50%.
That’s the tip, seven years.
Seven years is what we had target, but anything is better. People come in, they’ve got an accelerated pace of aging. We can measure that and show you how to slow that or even possibly reverse. It doesn’t happen overnight. It takes years to do this. Sometimes, maybe 2 to 3 years, but it took you a lifetime to get there. All of these cumulative effects do have an effect. If you are hard on your body or if you smoke, and we know that smokers have significantly higher biologic age. We know that people who do ultramarathons are always biologically older than they are physiologically because it’s too much stress on the run.
There’s a happy medium and what you want to get to is that exercise zone that you’re not overstressing the body, but it’s perfect. One of the things people forget is that the human body was never meant to be comfortable. When we talk about this, it’s called hormesis. It’s a common term that say in a biologic world. Hormesis means that when your body is on some form of a stress, it stimulates those genes of youth. People ask me all the time, “Should I do a cold plunge? Should I do red light therapy?” We know how all of that works.
I’m not saying don’t do it. I personally don’t want to jump in a cold plunge, but I’ll go in a sauna but I’m stressing my body. Whether you stress it cold or hot, it doesn’t matter. This isn’t new. This has been going on since the Ancient Greeks, this idea cold. I was in Peloponnese in Greece, and I went to what they call the sanatorium, but it was where Hippocrates took care of patients. It was diet, exercise, cold plunge and hot plunge. Not sure how far but we’ve been doing that component for a long time because that’s all we had. We couldn’t measure it, but ask people ask about red light therapy. Red light therapy works fine. It’s a way to stimulate your mitochondria to make more energy production.
Muscle Mass And Longevity
That stimulates collagen production and everything else. Once again, all of these are bio hacks. There’s nothing magic to any of them, but I do think they all go after this idea around hormesis. You want to put your body in that stress state. We’re massive believers and muscle mass. The people who live the longest in most disease, have the highest muscle mass period. That’s the number one longevity hack and number two is sleep. Those are probably your two biggest hacks, if you take anything away.
On the muscle mass side of it, if you’re going into the gym and you’re not sore in two days after you leave the gym. You didn’t lift hard enough. You need to lift to failure and people ask, “Why about muscle mass?” Muscle is probably the largest paracrine organ in your body. It’s responsible. I was in orthopedic surgeon. I was taught it’s what got in the way to get to the bone. I did sports medicine for years. I did knee reconstructions and at all kinds of different things.
I could tell you we were never taught anything about muscle physiology. Not at a level as it pertains to longevity. What we do know is when your strength train, you can stimulate brain derived neurotrophic factor which increases the connections of the neurons in your brain. It makes more connections. We also know that when you do zone 2 cardiovascular training, which can be measured and most machines are wrong. You need to do this with the laboratory or different ways you can do it. VO2 measurements or things of that nature, but when you do Zone 2 training, you can increase the size of your brain.
Anybody at any age can change their physiologic state but it doesn’t happen overnight. It takes six months to start to see epigenetic change. That’s why you start training for a marathon six months before. That’s why when you want to body build and get into weight training, you don’t see many results the first 90 days and that’s when people quit. “I’m not seeing any difference.” Once again, it’s this idea of starting to incrementally change over time and get those epigenetic kicked in.
It’s important when you do strength training to understand that you have control ample studies of people with early cognitive decline, doing strength training, and improving then reversing it. The idea that we can start to catch this, reverse it early. It’s hard when it’s late because there’s so much built-up damage. If you can catch it early or catch it before it becomes a problem, then you have a real shot.
That’s amazing. You’re in your 60s and you have tons of energy. Your cognition is off the charts. What do you do? What are your protocol?
I weight train.
How many days?
Four to five days a week. I lift heavy.
Are you using something like techno jam?
The people who live the longest and are the most disease-free have the highest muscle mass. That's the number one longevity hack. Share on X
I have done it all. I’m a little bit old school, so I do bench press and large body compound movements. When you do regular functional training, meaning with barbells, squats, and all that. You improve neuro vestibular function because you’re doing balancing and everything else. It’s super important. Everybody can do something, but you have to do to go to failure. That’s important. Diet is always important and sleep. We try to do that.
As far as we do a very in-depth tests for our members that want to go through. I just went through it. It’s called neutral valve. It’s a great test. We didn’t invent it. Somebody else did, but it showed me exactly where all of my nutrient deficiencies are. I’m not guessing it when I do my supplements. I know exactly what I need to take.
I take vitamin D because I’m genetically predisposed to low vitamin D. By the way, if you take nothing else, you should take vitamin D. One-third of people who are Northern European lineage, which is most of the United States are going to be genetically predisposed for low vitamin D. It doesn’t matter how much sun you get, you still need vitamin D. A minimum dose is like 5,000 units. Not what with the 500 units. It’s what people tell you. It’s true to medicine. It said a long time ago 5,000 units is not an issue, but you need to take it with fat because it’s fat soluble. If you don’t eat with some non-saturated fat, then you probably not absorb it.
There’s a lot of bio hacks like that. We go this with our Fountain clients a lot. Other things that I do, it’s important to mindfulness. I don’t meditate, but I do spend time with my wife. We go to church every day when I can. I think that certainly helps. Alos, half of the aging conundrum is you need to set what your number is. You need to pick how long you’re going to live. I don’t say that pejoratively. I say that because if you don’t know how long you want to live, then you’re not going to do anything different.
Longevity Escape Velocity
If you set your goal, then you will be more likely to hit it. You never hit a target you never set. These are all adages but it’s super important because what we know is for every one year you live, you’re getting about extra four months due to technology. That’s incrementally increasing every day in every year. We expect that by 2029, 2030, and 2032 at the latest, the estimates now just looking at where the paths are going, is you will get one year of additional life expectancy for one extra year that you live.
That’s that longevity, escape velocity talks about.
There is nothing suspicion that it won’t occur now just like advent of AI. Let’s say you’re 60, what does it look like when you’re 30, 30 years from now? It’s not like everything stayed the same. It’s going to get better. We have a very unique opportunity. I do that. I’m very cognitive of that. Also, having purpose is super important. Tony talks about this a lot. It’s interesting that most men will die within five years of retirement.
I’ve heard that stat before.
Majority of men will die within five years, and that’s a lot of it. Men tend to be dragon slayers and all of a sudden, you don’t have a dragon to slay. I live in Naples. I joke with a friend of mine, Neal Boortz. He says, “Naples is full of PIPs.” Previously Important People. The point is, you go from 120 miles an hour to zero. You need to retire to something.
From a VIP to PIP.
It’s super important to retire to something, and more importantly staying engaged. Staying at top of cognition is physiologic as it is psychologic. That’s super important. Also, monitoring all the things I do. I go through the annual testing every single year. I check my blood work 3 or 4 times a year. I don’t have any surprises that I’m aware of. I have always have things I can work on. If anything, I probably get behind my workouts because I travel so much. Travel is always a challenge, but those are the things that are the most important. I started this process for years ago. My physiologic age was two years older than my chronologic age and now I’m about 4 to 5 years younger than my chronologic age.
You’re getting close to that seven.
Age Reversal – XPrize
More importantly, my brain age came back at like 50. I told my wife, “See?” Anyway, those measurements are interesting. Once again, we will find these. There are lots of great technologies coming out and on the horizon. I’ll talk briefly about Peter. He has the $101 million age reversal XPrize. Peter founded the XPrize Foundation. They’ve given over $300 million or more in grants to companies that are pushing the edge of the envelope. The inspiration of the XPrize came from the Lindbergh Prize way back in the 1920s when they were trying to figure out who’s going to fly across Atlantic and a bunch of businessmen in Saint Louis who put together $25,000 prize.
Peter read about it and that’s where you get the idea. He’s done all these prizes since then, but now he has $101 million prize. $40 million came from the Saudi Arabian government because they’re very interested in this idea of aging because it’s a big problem. Every aging institute in the world is looking at longevity now. What he did is he said, “We will establish this prize and we were going to give it by 2030.”
Interestingly, Dr. George Church, who’s at Harvard, who’s a friend of the company. He’s head of their genetics lab and several others that were going to be on the panel to judge the results of the first team that can reverse aging by twenty years. All decided to opt out because they’re competing. They believe this is entirely plausible. I heard George Church speaking. He said that he believes the first people have been born that have probably will not see an upper limit of their life expectancy.
What does that mean? Does that mean we’re all going to survive to a ripe old age or are you going to thrive to a ripe old age? The answer is obviously thrived. There are now 600 teams competing worldwide for that prize. The goal is not to just use what we do at Fountain and hope that will get you to 98. The goal is to make the next decade and see where the incremental improvements occur. Since we’ve been starting this process years ago, the price of genome sequencing has dropped from $5,000 to $200.
Half of the aging conundrum is deciding your number — how long you want to live. If you don’t have a goal, you won’t change anything. Share on X
Democratizing Longevity Care
The concept of a whole-body MRI has gone from $15,000 to $1,500 and now dropping further. Now, it’s all being accelerated with artificial intelligence. We will see more massive gains. That clinical latency app is only going to get wider, which means you need information about your health now. You need a vehicle to get the latest and greatest. Fountain is not it for everybody because there are some people that just don’t care how long they live until usually the end they care a lot. Most people aren’t thinking about it. I do understand it’s a little bit of a luxury item because the average guy is still trying to figure out how to pay bills and put food on the table and stuff. Our goal ultimately is democratizing it and make it the standard of care across the country.
That’s amazing. I can’t thank you enough for the work that you’re doing. You’ve deeply impacted my own life. I hope this will become the center of care for everyone and this will impact the entire healthcare system. Also, just many lives and we will be able to have those extended health spans and gain that wisdom that’s unlocked in those later years. It takes a lifetime to build up that way, so now we can learn from that. What you’re doing is changing the world. I just want to say thank you.
I appreciate that. As I said, I don’t take credit. I’m the voice for this but I can tell you that we have an incredible team of physicians, leaders, and board members that have helped us get to this spot and we’re excited. We do believe we’re the number one leader in longevity just in terms of size and what we’re doing with artificial intelligence. Elon never wanted to make every electric car. He just wanted everybody else to go make one. We don’t want to be the only opportunity out here doing this, but we want everybody else to flip the model. If we achieve that, then that will be a win for us.
Where can everybody find you?
You can go to FountainLife.com. If you don’t want to become a member, that’s fine. There’s a free newsletter. You can follow us on social media. There’s always something interesting. We will be starting a show with Tony Robbins and Peter shortly. You’ll get a chance to get more information on what we do. I appreciate that.
Thank you so much, Dr. Kapp.
Thank you so much, Zach. I appreciate it.
What an amazing conversation with Dr. Kapp from Fountain Life. I hope that you learned as much as I did from this episode and from that conversation. There are so many topics from the changes in our healthcare system, the amount that we’re spending on healthcare, and how we can shift that to be. It focused a lot more on prevention and the work that Fountain Life and the team there is doing to be at the cutting edge of that.
I’m excited for what’s ahead. I know I’m going to shift and increase my weight training so that I can keep my brain healthy, work on my zone 2 training, and continue to increase that so that I can grow the size of my brain, as Dr. Kapp mentioned. Those things sound exciting to me. I love this idea of these longevity escape velocity.
As these tools and these diagnostics become democratized, meaning that they’re accessible to all of us. If we can shift our system a little bit so that they can become accessible to all of us, then all of these new breakthroughs and things like Zora, the AI program that we talked about, are going to be available to all of us so that we can extend our health span extend, our lifespan, and live fully alive all the way through the end. Thanks again for reading and tuning in. We can’t wait to see what’s going to come next time as we continue our conversation on the show.
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About Dr. William Kapp
Leading Fountain Life with a vision to redefine healthcare, my team and I harness AI to detect and combat illnesses early. This innovative approach has positioned us at the forefront of the medical industry. Our success lies in our ability to blend medical expertise with advanced technology, aiming for a future where vitality at 100 mirrors that at 60.
With a foundation in orthopedic surgery from Baylor College of Medicine, I steer our organization with a unique blend of clinical knowledge and executive acumen. My dedication to pioneering a new healthcare paradigm is unwavering, focusing on the asymptomatic reversal of diseases to enhance patient outcomes through groundbreaking medical advancements.
