I have since joined as an advisor. This is our first public conversation.

Petal is your tracker in the form of bra insert, as pictured above. link here.

Julia: Start with your background, because Petal is not your first company and the path here matters.

Anand: I fell in love with wireless communications very young, back when it was still car phones. By the time I graduated it was cell phones, and I ended up doing research on 3G and 4G protocols sponsored by Nokia Research Center. Then seven years at Motorola Mobility, where I worked on the 3G Razr, the platform that became Android, the first Android tablet, and something we called a smart watch before anyone used the word wearable. That was the Moto Active.

I moved to San Francisco because I was entrepreneurial and the VC infrastructure in Chicago wasn’t there yet. Worked at a few companies, including on the Jambox and at Lab 126, then started my first company in 2015. UJet. The thesis was that people communicate visually and contextually through smartphones, except when they’re talking to a business. I built that for almost ten years. The name is dedicated to someone I lost to breast cancer. Everyone around me, including my investors, knew I was going to come back to that.

Julia: So Petal was always the plan.

Anand: Always. I started looking more closely at women’s health and saw two major crises running in parallel. The first is cardiovascular disease. One in three women ultimately dies from it. Women live longer but sicker. They are dismissed at emergency rooms without proper cardiac testing at seven times the rate of men, and their symptoms present differently, what medicine calls atypical, which I find a frustrating term. Jaw pain, back pain, nausea instead of the textbook chest and arm. The second crisis is breast cancer, and the trend lines are going in the wrong direction. The largest relative increase in incidence is now in women in their 20s and 30s.

Julia: Tell everyone what Petal actually is, because even I had to see it to believe it.

Anand: Petal is a bra insert. It sits at a woman’s anatomical core, right over the heart and the fibro-glandular tissue. It uses bioimpedance analysis sensors, not the optical PPG sensors or temperature sensors you find in wrist and finger wearables. We are not shining a light and extrapolating from the blood flow response. We are listening directly to what the heart is telling the ventricles to do. The signal is the same as an ECG. That matters because it is more accurate, and because it does not require the hand to be still.

Every other wearable is designed around the assumption that you filter out movement. We don’t need to. Women move their torsos significantly less than their arms. So our signal quality during a workout, a commute, a stressful presentation, a walk pushing a stroller, is high when others are filtering noise.

Julia: Which is the part that got me. Most wearables are still essentially optimized for sleep recovery. You are going the other direction.

Anand: Exactly. Cardiovascular and cardiometabolic events happen during the day, under stress, during activity. Women wear bras for an average of twelve hours a day in our research. So the adherence is built in. It fits into the lifestyle women already have rather than asking them to build a new one.

The other thing that is distinct is style. A lot of women stop wearing wrist wearables because they are bulky, or they interfere with strength training, or the battery life drops off. This is invisible. You associate it with your sports bra, you use it for a workout two or three times a week, forty-five minutes to an hour, and you are getting real data measured at the source.

Julia: Walk me through what I am actually tracking.

Anand: Right now, heart rate, HRV, breathing, and adipose tissue composition through the bioimpedance sensors. That last one is significant. The breast is majority adipose fat tissue. Characterizing that gives you a proxy for midsection fat composition, which is more predictive of longevity risk and disease than BMI. It is also invisible. No scale. No number that follows you around.

The app shows you what zone you are in, accurate HRV, and real breathing data, not a timer but an actual visualization of your heart rate declining and your breathing pattern shifting when you do breathwork. The app was designed starting from women, not adapted from a male athlete use case after the fact.

Julia: And where is this going. Because the cardiovascular piece is the first chapter.

Anand: The second chapter is early anomaly detection for breast cancer. We are building the foundational model right now. Women were excluded from early clinical trials until 1993. Mice do not have a menstrual cycle. The data we have is not built on women’s physiology, and that is the gap we are filling.

Mammograms are a 2D rendering of a 3D organ. Over 50% of women have dense tissue, which means they get a letter after their mammogram saying the results may be incomplete. Our approach starts from 3D, from the breast in its natural form, characterizing tissue types, looking for deviation longitudinally over time. The head of breast radiation oncology at UCSF is part of the team. We have FDA clarity on the classification of the bioimpedance sensors. We are moving.

The goal is ambient. Technology that disappears into your life and builds a baseline specific to you, over time, that is actually useful when something changes.

Julia: Last question. Who are you looking to connect with?

Anand: Anyone obsessed with women’s health. Get the device, petal.today. Try it. The more women using it, the stronger the model, the stronger the mission.

Petal is available at petal.today. $199. Bra insert with app, two colors currently shipping.

That’s the question I keep coming back to every time I read another profile of someone who lost forty pounds on a GLP-1 and then, almost as an aside, mentions they also stopped wanting wine. And shopping. And the 2am spiral of should-I-or-shouldn’t-I. The food noise went quiet, and then, a little more quietly, so did everything else.

The science on this is genuinely interesting and genuinely incomplete, which is how most useful science tends to be. GLP-1 receptor agonists, semaglutide and tirzepatide specifically, don’t just talk to your stomach. They communicate with the brain’s reward circuitry. Nora Volkow at the National Institute on Drug Abuse has spent decades mapping exactly these dopaminergic pathways, the ones that make you reach for another glass, refresh the feed, text back too fast. GLP-1s modulate wanting itself. And they do it, from what the early data suggests, quite well.

Which should probably give us a moment’s pause.

I’ll say where I sit in this, since it’s relevant to the argument. I’ve been trying to answer this question for myself. Not academically. Personally. Sitting with whether to try them. And there’s a view I’ve arrived at that I find mildly inconvenient: if you work in this space and you haven’t tried the thing you’re forming strong opinions about, that’s a gap worth being honest about. Especially if you’re a doctor (which i’m clearly not!). The n=1 data point you’re missing is your own, and that tends to show up in the quality of the thinking.

So I remain curious, genuinely. And equally unsettled. Not by the mechanism. By the category. The idea of getting hooked on a pharmaceutical solution to maintain something I’d always understood as being about will, desire, the kind of person you are. That framing runs deep. Replacing it with a weekly injection feels less like an answer and more like a sharper version of the original question.

The premium wellness market spent decades building a very expensive infrastructure around a single idea: that craving was the problem. Too much appetite, too much indulgence, too much noise. GLP-1s are the logical conclusion of that project, delivered once weekly, subcutaneously, elegantly.

But here’s the thing. Desire is also, inconveniently, what gets things made. The longing that drives creative work. The hunger that makes someone call the person, stay in the argument, order the dessert and mean it. I’m not making a case against the drugs. That would be facile and also not my lane. I’m making a case for noticing what we’re framing as the problem.

Subscribe now

Because when “decreased interest in reward-seeking behavior” is listed as a side effect with quiet neutrality, we’re describing something more than a reduced appetite at dinner. We’re describing a modulation of how a person moves through the world. Research from Olivia M. Farr and colleagues in Diabetologia established that GLP-1 receptors exist in the parietal cortex and hypothalamus — brain regions with nothing to do with digestion and everything to do with how we process experience. A 2025 clinical review by Tveit and colleagues went further: GLP-1s increase serotonergic activity at the 5-HT2C receptor, the same pathway behind SSRI-induced motivational blunting and reduced sexual desire. The mechanism for quieting desire isn’t just theoretical.

The broader psychiatric picture is net positive and I want to be clear about that. Large population studies find GLP-1s associated with meaningful reductions in psychiatric hospitalization, not increases. This is not a story about a drug making people worse in the ways medicine knows how to measure.

What medicine isn’t measuring yet is this: those trials track hospitalization, adverse events, depression scales. They are not tracking whether someone stopped wanting to call the person, lost the pull toward the project that used to wake them up at 6am, or found the things they used to hunger for simply quieter than before. Those don’t register in any database. They’re the texture of a life. And they may be exactly what the 5-HT2C pathway is modulating.

The question isn’t whether these drugs work. They do. The question, and I think it’s the more interesting one, is what we believed was broken that made us reach for them in the first place.

We are all in search of something. That’s the whole premise. But it’s worth asking, occasionally, whether we’re searching for less wanting, or for wanting the right things.

Share

If you’re not subscribed yet:

In Search Of covers the intersection of longevity science, culture, and the questions the industry isn’t asking loudly enough. No hype. No supplement stacks. Just rigorous thinking on what it actually means to build a longer, better life.

→ Subscribe below. One post a week.

Subscribe now

References

• Farr, O.M. et al. (2016). GLP-1 receptors exist in the parietal cortex, hypothalamus and medulla of human brains and the GLP-1 analogue liraglutide alters brain activity related to highly desirable food cues in individuals with diabetes: a crossover, randomised, placebo-controlled trial. Diabetologia, 59(5), 954–965. PMID 26831302

• Volkow, N.D. & Koob, G.F. (2015). Brain disease model of addiction: why is it so controversial? Lancet Psychiatry, 2(8), 677–679. PMID 26249284

• Volkow, N.D. et al. (2025). GLP-1R agonist medications for addiction treatment. Addiction. doi:10.1111/add.16626

• Tveit, M. et al. (2025). Clinical review of how glucagon-like peptide-1 agonist obesity medications decrease sexual desire, and a biopsychosocial model for why we don’t ‘see’ it. The Journal of Sexual Medicine, 22(Suppl 1). PMC12704374

• Sa, B. et al. (2026). Psychiatric effects of GLP-1 receptor agonists: a systematic review of emerging evidence. Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism, 28(1), 50–59. PMID 41126551

• Taipale, H. et al. (2026). Association between GLP-1 receptor agonist use and worsening mental illness in people with depression and anxiety in Sweden: a national cohort study. The Lancet Psychiatry. PMID 41862258

• Watabe-Uchida, M., Eshel, N. & Uchida, N. (2017). Neural circuitry of reward prediction error. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 40, 373–394. PMID 28441114

Spa at Verdura Rocco Forte Resort, Sicily, where I spoke at the Leadership in Retal Conference

Will we still be talking about longevity in 5 years?

I’ve been saying this for years. Longevity was always going to become luxury. Not in a weekend-retreat way. In a serious, where-is-the-smart-money-going, who-owns-the-next-decade way.

And now it’s arrived.

A few months ago I genuinely thought the word “longevity” had gone stale (and wrote about it here) - overused, stripped of meaning by brands slapping it on collagen powder and infrared saunas. But it’s back. And this time it means something different. The era of the solo biohacker optimizing HRV at 2am is winding down. What’s replacing it is harder to articulate but unmistakable if you’re paying attention - a move away from data fatigue, away from the quantified-self as personality, and toward something more integrated. More cultural. More, frankly, sellable.

The major luxury houses (think Loreal x Kering deal as example) don't make bets on trends. They make bets on the next century. When groups that built some of the world's most enduring heritage brands start allocating seriously into longevity - through partnerships, acquisitions, and internal investment - they're telling you exactly what they think the next heritage category is. These are not curious observers. They're acquirers.

Think about millennial pink. That wasn’t an arbitrary color trend. It was a precise cultural expression of where wellness was emotionally at that moment — soft, aspirational, faintly anxious. Wellness has always worked this way. It doesn’t lead culture. It mirrors it. And right now, culture is exhausted, overstimulated, and quietly desperate for connection. So longevity is following. The nervous system. Community. Saunas you go to with other people. Cold plunges that became social rituals. The shift isn’t random - it’s a direct reflection of what people actually need right now, dressed up in the language of health optimization.

Image from https://www.byrdie.com/millennial-pink-trend-revival-11679781

This is what the luxury brands are reading. Not the biohacking data. The cultural mood.

The industry spent years treating chronic stress as a productivity problem. Optimize around it. Push through it. The research is now catching up to what good practitioners already knew: dysregulation isn’t a mindset issue, it’s a physiological one. Somatic stress storage - how the body holds unresolved stress at a cellular level - is entering the longevity conversation whether the mainstream is ready or not. The science isn’t fully there yet, but the signal is impossible to ignore. The sheer volume of people reporting somatic releases, breakthroughs in bodywork, nervous system resets - that’s not anecdote anymore. That’s a pattern.

So. Will we still be talking about longevity in five years?

Yes. Just not the version we started with.

The word is being redefined in real time - away from the solo optimizer with a CGM and a supplement stack, toward something that looks a lot more like a cultural movement. That shift is already happening. The capital is already moving. Watch it enter the consumer and political mainstream the same way nutrition did. Slowly, then all at once.

Retail Hub Annual Conference - Leadership in Retail - at Verdura Resort, Sicily, with founder of the conference, Massimo Volpe.

Is Longevity The New Retail Category?

Short answer - yes.

I was recently in Sicily, speaking at a summit organized by the Retail Hub of Massimo Volpe - a room full of serious retail founders, department store operators, people who think about physical space professionally. Longevity didn’t squarely fit their world. And then after I spoke, the hallway conversations started. People running major flagship stores quietly asking: is this a retail category now?

Galeries Lafayette in Paris was earliest with their Wellness Gallery bringing french pharmacy beauty, wellness services and longevity curved into the department store. Ahead of the curve, by most accounts. (Sometimes being first and being right aren’t the same thing.) But the direction is clear. Physical retail is shifting from products to services as its primary value proposition, and longevity sits right at that intersection. The problem is that monetization hasn’t been solved. Services are entirely staff-dependent. And we have not yet produced a generation of floor staff who actually know how to sell wellness — to explain it, contextualize it, make it feel necessary rather than optional.

Nico Mermoud - HOKA founder - shared the origin story behind the brand! More to come on him in a follow up post! Send me any questions you want to ask him :)

Equinox had to build that capability from scratch. It took years and it was hard. Now we have more physical retail spaces selling wellness in the US than almost any other category, and the knowledge gap on the ground remains enormous.

That gap is exactly where the opportunity lives. It’s something I’m actively building toward. More on that soon.

If this landed for you, share it with someone who’s paying attention to where health is actually going. And if you’re building in this space — or just have a strong opinion about where it’s headed — I want to hear from you. Reply or find me. And if you’re not subscribed yet, now’s a good time!

My speaking entourage in Italy, aka my mom :)

Appendix: References

• Porges, S.W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. Norton.

• van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. Viking.

• Levine, P.A. (2010). In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness. North Atlantic Books.

• Bower, J.E. & Irwin, M.R. (2016). Mind-body therapies and control of inflammatory biology. Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, 51, 1–11.

• Epel, E.S. et al. (2004). Accelerated telomere shortening in response to life stress. PNAS, 101(49), 17312–17315.

• Slavich, G.M. & Irwin, M.R. (2014). From stress to inflammation and major depressive disorder. Psychological Bulletin, 140(3), 774–815.

Hoan - high end dermatologists offering anything from stem cells injections and plastic surgeries to non invasive treatments. This is a picture from one of their rooms, right before I did SOFWAVE (more on it below).

Early this year I took an impromptu trip to Seoul. Partially because I was in the region, but mostly because it’s impossible these days not to see K-beauty (or Seoul procedures) overtaking my feed (if you don’t care about beauty recs - scroll all the way to the bottom)

I planned the entire trip in 48 hours.

Between a few (lucky) phone calls, local recommendations, amazing hotel concierge (Josun Palace) and running into equally unprepared friends from Miami (hi Chad & Steph) with equal determination to figure out the place (what to do and what’s fair to pay) - we figured out the system… quickly.

But here’s the thing: you need real self-esteem going in. This is not a sport for everyone. Before you even book a consultation, be prepared to hear - consistently and repeatedly - everything that’s wrong with you (especially given the Korean aesthetic of of perfection and glassy and “plumpy” skin).

Chad called it “radical transparency for your face” (borrowing from his former boss management style) and I honestly couldn’t come up with better description of how the trip felt.

The former I don’t need to explain, but the latter… skin is your largest organ, and it shows (many) internal imbalances of aging. Aiming to look good isn’t just vanity - it’s preservation in the darwinian sense.

Seoul is a city where grandmothers still practice 400-year-old herbal medicine next to spotless clinics and dermatology offices that look like Apple Stores. Hotel lobbies full of tourists with bruised faces from plastic surgeries (you get used to it) and fashion that doesn’t take itself too seriously - I AM SOLD.

I would divide Seoul into 3 (wellness) categories:

1. Can do in the US, but here it’s cheaper (quality on par with top US clinics)

2. Can’t do in the US due to legality

3. Wellness culture just done better and more affordable

Below is my full itinerary:

Tamburins store - Gentle Monster’s 1/4 brands - this one is all about perfumes. Perfumes a side, the design is absolutely worth going for)

The Beauty Concierge Question

I wasn’t in the market for anything big - spending $1K+ for help, on top of treatments didn’t make sense for this trip. That said, there are beauty concierge services in US you can hire if procedures are your main goal, and in many case very much worth the price (here is someone that was recommended to me). They know who’s best for what, especially if you’re moving toward invasive work or plastic surgery. Most places don’t speak English, so concierges handle scheduling, translation, and matching you to the right practitioner.

I personally built my schedule from recommendations and had hotel concierge schedule it all.

One thing I learned fast: places I found on Instagram advertised by US influencers were not good. Overpriced, underwhelming. This is based on two visits, but still - trust the local lists and people, not the algorithm.

Day One: Aquafield

I landed on a red-eye and went straight to Aquafield in Goyang before hotel check-in. $18 for 6 hours lying in semi-warm spaces watching nature projections. It’s where locals go to destress from the city. I left after two hours because I got bored, but it did the job of post-flight decompression. I do wish some of the sauna’s were hotter but alas!

There are many brunches of Aqufield, but this one apparently is the nicest! If you do go there I highly recommend the food hall in that mall.

Day Two: CESTIQ Face Contour

CESTIQ SPA is famous for their painful hand-slimming facial. Using just their hands, my face got slimmer - and bruised. They told me not to eat for two hours. It hurt. It worked. But like any non tech treatments - results come from regular use.

Pre and post the massage - other than big invisible bruises, less than hour later I noticed much more defined cheek bones!

This is the menu option I chose (which apparently is the most painful - it was - but I felt like practionair went easy on me clearly seeing i’m a tourist. You also are asked to change in this outfit which is a style I have seen in 5 different contexts in Korea.

Day Three: Facial Acupuncture at Kyunghee Hyojeon Clinic

Friday morning was Song at Kyunghee Hyojeon Clinic for facial acupuncture. Song developed her own technique. She treated one side of my face first so I could compare in real time.

This wasn’t spa relaxation. It felt like neuromuscular training. My face didn’t just look different - it felt plumpy!

The protocol: seven weekly sessions to train facial muscles, then maintenance monthly. Cost in Korea: $68 per session. Same treatment in New York: $500+. That pricing gap makes a different for sustainable wellness. That said, if you compare this to price of lifelong botox and fillers - might be in fact worth it.

The abdominal acupuncture that followed was intense - or to say it differently, had I known what is about to happen, I would 100% said no (below is an image of a needle that went into my stomach so you can understand). Dr Song - with whom I now text in case anyone needs a referral - also created a custom herbal mix for me and sent it to hotel - and I have to say - it helped me a lot!

Facial acupuncture - I did 20 min first on one side only to see if I can actually see and feel the results. I DID - the skin felt very toned and different - sadly, not something you can see on a picture.

This is 뜸 (tteum) - called moxibustion on my stomach that helps with all stomach issues and digestions.

Later: Glossy Skin Consultation + Treatment

Glassy Skin is the place you’ve seen on Instagram and TikTok. They do a full facial scan - detailed imaging that makes it feel clinical and measurable. If you’ve seen a Korean derm clinic on social, it’s probably this one.

I went in planning to do treatments after the scan. But the consultation quickly moved toward $3,000+ in recommended procedures - pricing closer to US rates than what I’d been seeing elsewhere. When I decided to leave, the pricing suddenly became negotiable, which told me everything I needed to know.

Sometimes the best treatment is walking out.

The face scan shows you your skin problems not visible easily - from deep sun marks to under eyes due to “too much screen”, you see it all. Worth nothing, this type of scan is not unique to Korea and you can find it in US or Europe.

Day Four: Numero 1 Scalp Treatment

Saturday afternoon was Numero 1, a 90 minutes of scalp treatment combining head massage and hand massage. The scalp work felt methodical, targeted, different from typical spa treatments. I loved it! Wish I could do it on a regular in US!

Later: HOAN: The Premium Derm Experience

HOAN was my favorite - and the most expensive. Stunning two-floor design, beautiful area. Everything is still at least 50% cheaper than the US, but this is where treatments felt truly premium. One doctor, one translator and what looked like 20 treatments rooms and many “nurses” - this was a well run operation’s place!

This is where I would have gotten Rejuran (salmon sperm injections), but I was too afraid of the pain and they didn’t sell it well enough for me to commit.

They sent full pricing upfront (via whatsapp). I met with the doctor, discussed goals. What surprised me: they didn’t push what I initially planned. No upselling. They suggested different treatments. It felt consultative.

But the overall price level was higher than I was emotionally ready to commit to in that moment. Even without pressure, the options created overwhelm.

I ultimately did Sofwave. Partly because it’s cheaper than the US. Partially because it’s what a friend I trust recommended (Hi Tara) and partially because I was flying that night and panicked about downtime from more aggressive treatments. I wasn’t sure about swelling before getting on a plane.

Sofwave felt like the safest, lowest-regret decision under time pressure.

Results: Absolutely LOVE IT!

** From google: Sofwave is an FDA-cleared, non-invasive cosmetic procedure using proprietary SUPERB™ synchronous ultrasound parallel beam technology to lift and tighten skin. By generating heat in the mid-dermis (1.5mm) to stimulate collagen and elastin, it reduces fine lines and wrinkles on the face, neck, and chest with minimal to no downtime.

Day Five: Spa Gogyeol

Thursday evening was Spa Gogyeol: body scrub plus massage. It was fine. Good, even - ended up serving the “post flight debloat / lymphatic” purpose without being that. But $300 for 90 minutes isn’t a steal, even in Seoul. Not worth it. I also, personally, get extremely board with anything over 60 min (and there wasn’t a single treatment with this length!)

Later: Christian UNV Head Spa

Sunday morning I did Christian UNV Head Spa - 75 minutes of what they call “head thinning treatment.” This was my favorite experience of the trip.

They photographed my scalp before starting, had me change into (very cute) treatment clothes, then did the full treatment followed by another scan to show what changed.

I lay in a reclining chair with warm water streaming over my scalp (see below), eye mask blocking all light, red-light heat on my belly, simultaneous foot and arm massage. The scalp scan showed I have three hairs growing from single follicles - apparently excellent for density.

The treatment + the outfit you get changed into (very Hill house vibes if you ask me)

Not sure that the actual scan did much - cool to do once and never again - but the experience itself was top notch - it felt luxurious and cosy at the same time. The most shocking part for me was that, despite whole shelf of sculp cosmetics, I wasn’t offered to buy any of them (a little sad in retrospect as I would have gotten a few things!)

Even the animals are getting skin care love in Seoul!

What I Actually Brought Home

All the products I bought at Olive & Young

(Non Beauty) Products:

• Japanese raisin (aids alcohol metabolism, tastes incredible)

• Black bean tea (daily routine now)

Beauty Products

• Korean face creams—very clean formulations

Fashion:

• J.Rium: Cashmere-blend basics, clean design

• Leha: Looks high-end, priced like COS. Current favorites.

• Coor: Korean Acne vibes minus the jeans

• Fox Vintage (Gangnam location): Koreans don’t value vintage. You will. Shockingly cheap.

• Gentle Monster Haus Nowhere in Seongdong

• Point of View: the cutest stationary store

• LOEWE Cafe: somewhat new but worh visiting for the experience and decor

Coor store (local brand)

Unlike what it looks like, everything on this picture is edible and it’s a dessert. The Cafe at Gentle Monster store in Seongdong

Didn’t Do But Wish I Did:

• Realign Official

• The (painful) ear pilates

• Riverhillspa

• KUDO Derm (Kim K’s Clinic)

Food & Non-Wellness:

• Josun Palace brunch: Legendary even if you don’t stay there

• Mr Ahn: Creative Korean tasting menu (thanks to Eric Ripert from Le Bernardin for an awesome list)

• Gebangsikdang: Amazing crab - prepare to get messy!

• 압구정진주 한남직영점: locals only korean bbq (need to put like this in google maps)

• Yeongdong Jang-eo & Mirak: Freshwater eel restaurant, was truly the most memorable meal (outside of Mr Ahn); very fancy

• The Cafe at Gentle Monster store in Seongdong

• Byeokje Galbi the Cheongdam - fancy (and excellent) Korean bbq

• Zest Soul: Amazing cocktails. On the World’s Top 50 list, which is often risky, but this one delivered.

Museums / Art:

• National Museum of Modern & Contemporary Art

• Leeum Museum of Art

• Amorepacific Museum of Art

The Josun Palace fitness & wellness was absolutely amazing. Reformer studio overlooking the city, gender sauna, pools and steam rooms, as well as beauty counters with latest products to try. It was also very clear this was hotel for the locals as the place has a membership

If you need recommendations (outside of what above) please reach out!

If you liked this newsletter or if someone you know does, please share, comment, subscribe!

Subscribe now

And as someone who witnessed Noma’s fermentation revolution firsthand, Ben understands how a restaurant’s internal experiments can grow - often in strange and unexpected ways.

Here’s what struck me about Ben’s story: he’s been observing a form of health innovation for decades without calling it that. While longevity science was catching up to the benefits of fermented foods, seasonal eating, and dietary diversity, chefs like René Redzepi were already solving for it - not because they read the research (though they were often the ones writing the research papers), but because constraints forced creativity.

The question I kept circling back to: what does someone who watched Noma’s food revolution from the inside see that the wellness industry is missing?

Ben Liebmann

Julia: You’ve had this fascinating career arc - music, television, hospitality. What’s the through line?

Ben: Creative people. Creative industries. I’ve spent 25 years working with extraordinary creative people. There was no business case behind what drove me to these industries—it was purely driven by gut and heart.

I left college and went to Warner Music at what I describe as “the end of the heyday and the beginning of the disruption”. I was there when Napster arrived and saw what real disruption looked like from the inside. I left the music industry when I wasn’t loving it anymore, when it felt like it was becoming more of a job. The moment I left, my love of it came back.

Then I went to Fremantle and was working for them when MasterChef launched in Australia. The media was up in arms: “Nobody cares about watching cooking in prime time”. Some pundits suggested this would become the biggest failure in Australian television history. It became the highest-rating show in Australian television history. That was the first time I saw the power of food to entertain and inspire. Within five years, that show was being produced in over 50 countries and broadcast in over 100 around the world. That’s how I started connecting with chefs. Many of the world’s best had been part of that show - Ferran Adrià, Daniel Boulud, Thomas Keller, Gordon Ramsay, Anthony Bourdain, René Redzepi.

Noma | credit: Ditte Isager

J: How did you end up at Noma?

B: René and I met through this sliding door moment and got to know each other over two to three years. I was living in London, traveling to Copenhagen each year to attend the MAD Symposium - his gathering where the most important minds in food (chefs, farmers, academics, authors, etc) would discuss the future of the food system. Not just what we’re eating, but how we’re going to create a working system that supports the planet.

In 2015, René was doing the first Noma popup in Tokyo, and I stopped by on my way back to Sydney. We were sitting at the bar after service one night, and he talked about how well it had gone and wanting to do it again. What do you think about Australia?” I said, “Yeah, of course you should. It is a food and restaurant obsessed country” He said, “Then you help us. You do it.”

I thought I was doing it as a project and then I’d go back to television. Six months in, he said, “When this is done, I think you should move back to Denmark.” So my family packed up the shipping container we’d just unpacked from London. I was with René and the team as COO of Noma for seven years.

Noma | credit: Ditte Isager

J: Noma Australia - 5,500 tickets selling out in three minutes - what did that tell you about where food culture was heading?

There was research you mentioned to me showing Gen Z and beyond would look to what they ate, where they ate, and the people who were cooking it for them, to define and who they were to the world - the way previous generations had done through fashion, music, sporting teams. Food was becoming part of our identity.

And here’s where I want to dig in, because what Noma was doing - the fermentation, the foraging, the seasonal constraints - turns out to be exactly what longevity science now tells us we should be doing for our gut health (or metabolic flexibility). But you were watching it happen for completely different reasons. Walk me through what René was actually doing!

B: That’s a misconception people have. The pillars of Noma’s creativity was driven by constraint. Fermentation initially was about preservation. Noma opened in November 2003, followed by one of Denmark’s coldest winters. René would tell the story - the ground was so solid you couldn’t grow anything, not even root vegetables. They turned to fermentation to preserve ingredients for the following seasons.

What they found was that through preservation, they were unlocking new flavors. That curiosity - René will tell you curiosity is the most powerful tool of any chef—led them to keep exploring.

J: And the foraging?

B: Foraging was intertwined with the New Nordic manifesto: cooking only what grew native to where you were. Time and place. For a restaurant in Denmark, that meant no citrus, no olive oil, no spices. Things we take for granted were suddenly out of the restaurant’s pantry.

I believe René was given a Swedish survivalist’s book about how to survive on the land in a post-nuclear Europe. He started tasting and foraging his way across the wild landscape.

Through fermentation and foraging, a new pantry was created. A new language was created.

Salad with dried berries and herbs with warm chocolate sauce, summer 2025 menu | photo credit: nomacph

J: And the famous ants on a shrimp dish?

B: The ants weren’t done for art. Chef Alex Atala had taken René into the Amazon and taught him that first nation’s people would eat ants - the stomach enzymes replicated the flavor of citrus. Suddenly René had citrus in his pantry through Danish wood ants. It was problem-solving, not performance.

J: So René accidentally built what we now know is one of the most gut-healthy, nutrient-dense approaches to eating: fermented foods, wild foraged plants, extreme dietary diversity, seasonal rotation - all because he was solving for flavor under constraint. That’s fascinating to me because the wellness industry is trying to convince people to eat this way with data and studies, and he just made it delicious and desirable. You’ve said chefs should be change makers for some of our biggest challenges. This feels like proof.

Read more

If you decide to stop reading this newsletter here - this is my conclusion on the topic:

If you want to take care of your health in 2026, nervous system regulation is (definitely) the place to focus.

But there is as much art as science as to the how - or to say it differently, you actually cannot (fully) biohack it.

Here’s why it matters: Nervous system is the communication network between your brain and body that controls everything from heart rate and digestion to immune function and stress response, constantly assessing whether you're safe or under threat

Blue Monk an image made for a custom tea blend from Gentle Monster’s cafe brand Nudake; next to it a dessert in vegetable form, which definitely messes with your senses! If you have SEOUL longevity recs, send my way!

When it’s dysregulated, everything else fails: your sleep, your immune system, your ability to recover from stress, even how well your body receives the supplements and protocols you’re investing in.

And for certain personality types (👋 Type As), it's often hard to spot when it's dysregulated until we hit a wall: burnout, unexplained fatigue, constant colds, weight gain, you name it.

But the answer isn’t: stress less…

…in fact, many of us (hi Type A again) learn to operate only in fight-or-flight mode, making it our default state where we don’t even register feeling stressed anymore.

It’s also not about eliminating stress but about building resilience so your body can actually bounce back from stress into true parasympathetic relaxation. Stress is good (evolutionary speaking)

Let’s dive in.

Read to learn why it’s misunderstood, what Covid and nervous system dysregulation have a lot in common and how to think about it, why supplements and protocols timing matter, our recent event on the topic in NYC and my personal (mostly Equinox) recs I go to in NYC to optimize my system.

Disclaimer: This post is inspired by early proponents in the longevity space of topic such as our Dr Tamsin Lewis (who even coined the term Wellgevity to account for exactly that), as well as learnings from of the recent events we did with Dr Sogol Ash and The Altar (sign up for waitlist here), and of course my own health!

The Problem: We’re All Running From Bears

I’ve been on my own longevity journey for years - not enough energy, gut issues, the works. I’ve had COVID five (?) times - hard not to pinpoint when my health issues really started.

Here’s the thing: I’m not alone. There’s probably a reason this video by went viral on Substack with half a million views: people are connecting dots between viral exposure and what feels like accelerated aging.

And here’s where it gets interesting: your mind, nervous system, and immunity are completely intertwined. Viruses like SARS-CoV-2 aren’t just temporary infections. The spike protein attacks ACE2-rich tissues-lungs, heart, blood vessels-causing long-term vascular damage and cognitive decline. ORF8 disables your interferon signaling, allowing the virus to evade detection while triggering massive inflammation.

This leaves your immune system in chronic activation - exhausted, dysregulated, prone to autoimmunity. The result? Immune burnout. Chronic inflammation. Mitochondrial dysfunction. The exact cascade that tanks your nervous system and keeps it stuck in threat mode.

As part of our ongoing programming residency at 113 Spring in NYC (go check it out), last week we hosted an event on exactly that topic with Dr. Sogol Ash and The Altars’ founders Sheba Jafari and Henrique De Castro. The biggest pattern Dr. Ash sees in founders and high performers confirms it - its not lack of discipline or taking care of themselves. It’s a dysregulated nervous system despite all that.

And here’s the catch: if your nervous system is stuck in threat mode, your body won’t receive the supplements, peptides, or protocols you’re throwing at it. The system needs to feel safe enough to heal first.

What to Actually Do: You Can’t Biohack Your Way to Safety

Here’s what I’m learning from Dr. Tamsin Lewis, our head of expert community - most of us are approaching this backwards. We think nervous system regulation is another thing to optimize - breathwork sessions, therapy appointments, yoga classes, wearables, protocols. These tools help. But they’re not the foundation.

This is why so many high-functioning people keep adding more tools and feel increasingly dysregulated.

Your nervous system doesn’t respond to optimization. It responds to conditions. When your body consistently receives signals that its environment is predictable, relationally safe, and metabolically supported, regulation emerges naturally.

What this actually looks like? Movement that feels supportive rather than punishing, self-compassion that reduces internal threat, nourishing connections, play and laughter, shared meals. Your heart rate variability (HRC), vagal tone, and immune signaling respond to these conditions just as powerfully as they respond to advanced techniques.

Here is a list I pulled from Dr Tam and others in this space:

Start with the foundations:

• Sleep: Aim for 90+ minutes of deep sleep - that’s when repair and immune function rebuild

• Protein in the morning: Signals safety, stabilizes blood sugar and cortisol

• Daily downshifts: 20 minutes before bed doing anything that doesn’t require you to be “on” (that means, don’t wake up and scroll your thing first thing)

• Movement that feels supportive: Strength training that signals vitality with focus on breathing, not workouts that feel like punishment

• Nourishing connections: Shared meals, play, laughter - oxytocin matters for REM sleep and bonding

• Self-compassion: How you talk to yourself creates or reduces internal threat

Then add targeted support:

• Vagus nerve work: Breathwork, humming, or tech like Pulsetto

• Sauna 3x/week: 20 minutes of actual sweating for parasympathetic activation and immune support

• Reduce cognitive overload: Less doomscrolling is a good start

Support immune and mitochondrial function (especially post-viral):

• NAD+ precursors (1MNA, NMN, NR): Mitochondrial repair and cellular energy

• Polyphenols (Resveratrol, Fisetin, Quercetin): Natural senolytics that clear damaged cells

• DHA (Omega-3s): Repairs vascular damage and reduces neuroinflammation

• HBOT: Restores immune function and repairs viral-induced inflammation

• Thymosin Alpha-1: Boosts T-cell function and reduces chronic inflammation

And then there are peptides (which I’m pro, as long as you can verify your source and your vial, an impossible task when all of this is coming from China. Here’s an article from NYT on just that).

Get the data:

• HRV (Heart Rate Variability): tracks your nervous system’s ability to shift between sympathetic and parasympathetic states. Mine sits below 30 when it should be around 100. Oura, Whoop, Apple Watch etc. measure it

• Cortisol patterns: DUTCH test, or at-home devices like ElI Health or Lumen

• Blood work: cortisol, or inflammatory markers through Function Health

  • Tip: look at your DHEA levels on next blood test. DHEA is the precursor to all your hormones and when it tanks, your body is telling you it is interpreting everyday life as danger.

• Feelings: “Not feeling like yourself” or “not 100%” is equally as valid data point

My NYC Spots

HBOT (hyperbaric):

• Equinox Domino

• Extension Health

• NextHealth

Sauna:

• Equinox Hotel Spa

• Equinox Hudson Yards (female locker only)

• Equinox Domino

• Equinox Park Ave (infrared; side note compression boots and red light therapy is part of the membership in this location - a hidden secret; yw)

• Clean Market Battery Park or 54th (infrared)

• The Altar (opening soon) - I am biased as founding member but go sign up!

  Dr Sogol Ash & Sheba talking about nervous system regulation at 113 Spring

Bottom line: Many complaints - anxiety, exhaustion, brain fog, gut issues - are less about mindset and more about autonomic load. The system isn’t broken. It’s asking for support.

Repair begins when your body can downshift without bracing, and when everyday demands stop being interpreted as danger. That’s what 2026 should be about.

• The new food pyramid flipped upside down in US (South Park predicted this chaos 11 years ago - seriously worth watching)

• ChatGPT went into healthcare (for consumers); Anthropic followed with AI for Healthcare day after

• The FDA softened wearables regulations (peculiar timing!)

• Torch - a four-person team - got acquired for $100M (and why I might have to eat my words when I said that data aggregation is not a business model ;))

These aren’t isolated incidents. They’re signals that health consumerization is moving faster than regulatory bodies and doctors want it to.

And that’s the point. So let’s dive in

The Food Pyramid Gets a Rebrand (Finally)

Let’s start with the inverted pyramid. After 82 years of grain-lobbying disguised as nutrition science, the US government finally acknowledged that maybe, just maybe, prioritizing 6-11 servings of bread daily wasn’t optimal metabolic advice.

The 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines flipped it: protein, dairy, and healthy fats at the top. Whole grains relegated to the narrow base. Added sugars explicitly called out as something to avoid, not “limit.” This is progress.

It’s been interesting watching the divide online - some people are ecstatic, other calling it equal hypocrisy (here is a good watch).

My opinion? We are arguing over the wrong thing - the universal guidance on nutrition makes no sense anyways.

Do I love that giant block of cheese sitting next to red meat and vegetables at the top? 🧀 🧀🧀 Not particularly. But I can find a study to support it. In fact I can find study to support any and all diet approaches from ketogenic to high carb and everything in between - and that’s why half of the arguments are not relevant.

Nutrition and its impact on each individual is highly complex - we are all individual beings with wildly different and changing factors that affect our metabolism. So the argument over whether meat and cheese should be on the top, is a true waste of energy IMO.

However the move towards minimally processed foods is a huge and necessary upgrade. Real nutrients, prioritizing protein, minimizing added sugars - all a directional win for the guidelines!

Big congrats to companies like EatReal.org and advocates like Dr Mark Hyman who’ve been lobbying for real food for years. This shift didn’t happen in a vacuum - it took sustained pressure from people who understood that the old pyramid was making us sick and that is a reason to celebrate. 🥳🥳🥳

Here’s the real part: the new design of the pyramid might matter more than the content shift!

Debbie Millman, chair of SVA’s branding program, eviscerated the visual execution in STAT, calling it “emoji-inspired clip art from a 1950s health pamphlet.”

She’s not wrong. But…

The fact that the government is even thinking about branding and visual communication for health guidance is proof that health has truly entered the consumer arena (here is Calley Means talking about it)

People are visual. If you want them to do something, make it look good. Make it feel modern. Make it shareable.

And case in point, this inverted pyramid? It’s generating discourse, criticism, memes, and most importantly, awareness. That’s consumerization at work!

In general, Health as a Political Topic Means More Confused Consumers

When RFK Jr. is unveiling dietary guidelines and the MAHA movement is influencing federal nutrition policy, health has officially become a political football.

That should worry us, right? Not necessarily.

Political attention (even messy, controversial political attention), accelerates consumer demand for clarity and solutions.

When the government says “eat protein,” people start asking: How much? What kind? Does this apply to me?

Confused consumers create demand. Demand drives innovation. Innovation attracts capital. The private sector delivers. This will probably be the most accelerated year in health tech innovation ever. That's exciting!

ChatGPT Health: The Reviews Are Mixed, But The Trend Is Clear

ChatGPT launched GPT Health and the internet lost its mind. The move makes sense: 230 million people weekly already ask ChatGPT about health and wellness. Being able to give personalized answers based on actual personal data? Obvious next step. Easy data integration across all your disconnected health outputs? Overdue.

Hard not to notice the new soft pastel tones. Are females the primary demographic asking those 230M weekly health questions? The design team's answer: obviously, so here's your millennial pink interface.

The skepticism is real. AI can give wrong or harmful guidance. Research shows AI learned to be persuasive - what a doctor sees might differ from what someone with zero medical knowledge gets, and there’s no way to control it. Data privacy concerns are valid, though maybe that’s the trade: privacy for personalization. We gave Google our location for better search results. This isn’t THAT different.

Good reminder however that right now ChatGPT Health isn’t replacing doctors. It’s an integration play. Better pipes, cleaner UX, faster answers. Diagnostic is not care. But diagnostics enable care.

Also to debunk other narrative going around - consumer health companies aren’t dead. The ones selling “data aggregation dressed up as care” are (though Torch just sold exactly that to OpenAI for $100M, so maybe I’m wrong). The companies that survive will treat ChatGPT as the front door, then win on longitudinal delivery, behavior change, and trust.

A great interview in the Information with and Dan Battelle on the topic of ChatGPT and broader implications. Listen here, start around minute 33.

Then This Happened: FDA Softens Wearables Regulation

Same week as the ChatGPT Health launch, the FDA announced it would limit regulation of health and fitness wearables.

The timing is fascinating. ChatGPT is entering the most valuable data collection play ever, your biometrics, while still defending itself from mental health support fiascos. Rules to use and sell this data? Not ready. Yet the FDA softened regulations anyway.

To me, this signals even regulators realize consumerization isn’t slowing down. Oura partnering to track migraines. Breath-based glucose monitoring (PreEvnt) entering trials. An explosion of devices measuring everything is coming.

The question isn’t whether technology advances. It will. The question is whether data governance keeps pace. It won’t. Problems we’re not ready for are coming.

The Real Story

All of these signal the same trend: health is moving out of the exclusive domain of doctors, regulators, and institutions.

Consumers want control. They want data. They want personalized solutions. And companies are racing to give it to them.

The regulatory bodies can’t keep pace. The medical establishment doesn’t want to. And that’s fine. The consumer will win anyway.

Here’s what I learned: we quantify everything except the brain.

We track HRV with Whoop or Oura. Glucose with CGMs. Microbiome diversity through stool tests. But the brain - the central signaling system - gets treated like a black box we can’t measure.

That’s finally changing.

Even Nike is now claiming a shoe that supports the brain, called NIKE MIND.

Measure, Fix, Remeasure

The standard framework for health optimization has three steps:

Measure —> give recommendation to fix —> remeasure to see change

Think about it. You get a CGM, see your glucose spike after pasta, switch to fiber/ protein-first meals, remeasure and see the improvement. Or you track HRV, realize you’re not recovering, adjust your training, and watch your scores climb back up.

In brain health, EEG is becoming that measurement standard to see how your brain is reacting to lifestyle. Many companies do it now, and we saw particular boom past 2020 when FDA regulation changed for at-home devices.

The competitive advantage today? Size and complexity of the scan - who can make it smallest, fastest, most accessible.

When I first got scanned in 2015, it required 45 minutes, a gel on my head, a technician to put the nodes, a doctor to evaluate results and suitcase-sized hardware.

2020 EEG remeasure with Brain Treatment Center to directly measure impact of living in NYC vs CA :)

Fast forward to 2025 and we have companies doing that scan with a cheap - Neurable is one of those companies and just announced a $35M raise (Huge congrats to Adam Molnar and the Team!). They’ve compressed that same 30-minute EEG into 90 seconds using headphone-embedded sensors and LLM-powered analysis. Brain age, processing speed, all in a simple report.

If I can measure HRV daily with my Oura ring, why not my brain’s response to sleep, stress, or that third espresso?

Sample report of the Neurable 90 seconds EEG scan

What Excites Me: Proving Simple Things Work

But what excites me most about the future? We are getting very close to continuously measuring the brain - with Neurable, you buy headphones and they do the job! But most importantly, we have some interesting solutions to fix it - from high tech to no tech - working very well!

Meditation and breathwork being prime examples. We’ve always known these are good. We just couldn’t prove it. Now we can.

Earlier this year in Switzerland, we ran an event with a luxury brand where Dr. Tamsin Lewis - our new Head of Expert Community - led breathwork sessions with Boniface VC. wrote about it. We measured brain states before and after. The shifts were quantifiable.

Just recently, we did a talk at 113 Spring in NYC with Neurable specifically on women’s brain health. Here’s what makes this urgent: women are 3x more likely to develop Alzheimer’s. Hormonal shifts during menopause aren’t just “hot flashes”—they’re fundamental neurological restructuring. And yet we have almost no studies measuring women’s brains through this transition.

We measured the brains of women in the room. Everyone was fascinated. Being able to see your brain state in real-time, understand what’s happening neurologically during different life stages - this is what’s been missing. Jessica Randaza, Neurable’s VP of Marketing & Communicaton, did a great post about it (read here).Ou

Event with Neurable on Brain Health for women led by Jessica Randaza at 113 Spring in NYC. DM me directly to get on list for future events!

This is the unlock: not just measurement for measurement’s sake, but measurement that validates simple interventions and makes the invisible visible.

The Solutions Taking Shape

Like all fancy longevity testing, it’s the care that comes from measurement that matters most. Here are some companies I’ve been looking at (outside of Neurable).

• Brain Treatment Center / WaveNeuro (what we piloted at Equinox), uses eMRT (electromagnetic resonance therapy) to adjust your wavelengths to optimal state. The DTC product requires 30 minutes daily for a month. This is where my journey started in 2015.

• Pharia Health - Backed by Sam Altman and others. A 5-hour “brain bootcamp” that supposedly leaves you more sane on the other side. I’m yet to try it, but the compressed timeline is intriguing compared to WaveNeuro’s month-long protocol. It does involve a pharmacological intervention tough.

• Muse - Consumer headband combining EEG and fNIRS (blood oxygenation) that’s been on the market for a while. It’s an instant EEG scan of sourts as well.

• 113 Spring NYC - You can now experience mind-scent EEG visualization to get in real time feedback on how your brain waves are responding to smell. This is stunning to watch and interesting to learn how YOU respond, but less of a “health” measurement.

• Beacon Biosignals - Raised $86M in November 2025. Clinical-grade at-home EEG for sleep and wake monitoring. Building the world’s largest neurodiagnostic dataset, working with half of the top 10 pharma companies on AI-driven biomarkers.

• Emotiv - Multi-channel EEG tracking attention, stress, engagement. Partnered with X-trodes for remote brain monitoring. Bridge between consumer wellness and research applications.

Why This Matters Now

Brain measurement matters. Not to add another metric to obsess over, but to prove that simple, accessible interventions work. To show that you can shift your brain state with breathwork. To demonstrate that meditation isn’t just woo-woo - it’s measurable, repeatable, and effective. And to open a world of possibilities for what it can feel like to actually hack your brain - for better overall performance and life.

It’s clear brain health is taking center stage in 2026. And here’s what’s exciting: alongside regulatory changes on what can be sold for at-home use, a lot of people have been building in this space quietly for decades. The interventions are there - just fragmented, not marketed well.

We’ve spent a decade measuring peripheral markers. 2026 is the year of brain.

Leave a comment

Appendix: Key Studies & Research

1. EEG and Cognitive Performance: Neurable neuroimaging research (2024). “Passive Brain-Computer Interfaces for Enhanced Focus and Cognitive Load Assessment.”

2. Menopause and Brain Changes: Mosconi, L., et al. (2021). “Menopause Impacts Human Brain Structure, Connectivity, Energy Metabolism, and Amyloid-Beta Deposition.” Scientific Reports, 11, 10867.

3. Brain Measurement Technology: Various studies on EEG compression and accessibility (2024-2025).

4. Women and Alzheimer’s Risk: Multiple epidemiological studies showing 3x increased risk in women vs men.

I get the question constantly now.

“Do you have a peptide person in [insert city name]?”

Having one has become a status symbol, like knowing a guy who knows a guy.

I used to think Hims & Hers prescribing GLP-1s with essentially zero oversight was reckless. I still do. But now everyone’s entering the game - Superpower at least asks for your bloodwork first. Small victories.

Somewhere in the Polish mountains, I realized I needed to figure out my own peptide risk tolerance.

Here’s what most people miss about peptides: they’re not new.

GLP-1 agonists hit the market for diabetes in 2005. That’s nearly two decades of longitudinal data on side effects, safety profiles, real-world use. This matters. It also places GLP-1s in one of longevity’s most promising categories: existing drugs repurposed for life extension. Smart money is betting here - James Peyer PhD, founder of Cambrian Bio and advisor to my company, is one of them.

Then you have BPC-157 for injury recovery, inflammation and gut. SS-31 (elamipretide) for mitochondrial function - a key aging pathway. Thymosin Alpha-1 for immune support. TB-500 for tissue repair. CJC-1295 and ipamorelin for growth hormone optimization, and so on. The landscape is sprawling.

But not all peptides are created equal. Most have only been proven in mice. And as any scientist will tell you: mice rarely translate to humans.

Yet we have something that’s hard to ignore: massive-scale anecdotal evidence.

People report feeling better - for sleep, recovery, gut health, metabolism. The data is self-reported, yes, but it’s happening at volume. We’ll likely never see clinical longitudinal studies on every peptide. They take too long, cost too much. Even when we do have studies, we can get it wrong - see hormone replacement therapy for (menopausal) women, which we completely botched for decades until recently.

What we do have is a growing mountain of anecdotes that carry weight. Take GLP-1s and fertility. Technically, GLP-1s shouldn’t impact fertility. Yet now we’re casually discussing “Ozempic babies.” Reality doesn’t wait for peer review.

Risk #1: Quality control is a nightmare. once third-party tested a peptide vial from one of his patients. Sure enough, it contained the compound labeled on the bottle, alongside traces of MDMA and weed killer . With regulation lagging, you’re playing Russian roulette with what enters your body.

Risk #2: We lack long-term efficacy data at scale. We’re flying blind on what happens after years of use.

As Anant Vinjamoori, MD put it when we discussed this: the question isn’t “are peptides good or bad?” It’s “what’s your personal risk tolerance?”

Are you comfortable injecting something without knowing its long-term impact? Some people raise cancer concerns, a valid conversation I’ve explored with Anant here.

Others, like me, wonder: if it wasn’t made by nature, can we really expect a free lunch long-term?

And practically speaking: are you okay stabbing yourself with a syringe? That friction might disappear soon - GLP-1 pills are scheduled for 2026, and BPC-157 already exists in oral form. The experience becomes no different than swallowing a supplement.

Here’s my personal (non-medical) risk framework:

The body is capable, but sometimes needs a boost. When it does, I’m open to trying low doses for a maximum three-month window. The logic: if there are unintended consequences, a low dose and short duration means the body can likely recover. Benefits hopefully outweigh harm.

My actual experience? I tried peptides when conventional medicine failed my gut. Two months of high-dose BPC-157 (oral + injections) plus low-dose SS-31. It helped marginally but didn’t fix me - another reminder that without finding root cause, these interventions are Band-Aids.

From a psychological standpoint, GLP-1s fascinate me. They’re clearly rewiring how we think and operate. At some point I’ll experience it myself for 2-3 months. Otherwise, how can I possibly understand the major consumer shift we’re witnessing? The emerging science is compelling for longevity and I’ve seen first hand many doctors and scientists who argued against them, now micro-dosing them themselves.

For actual medical perspective, here’s my interview with Anant Vinjamoori, MD.

APPENDIX: Key Scientific References

1. Lincoff AM, Brown-Frandsen K, Colhoun HM, et al. Semaglutide and cardiovascular outcomes in obesity without diabetes. N Engl J Med. 2023;389(24):2221-2232. [SELECT trial showing 20% reduction in major adverse cardiovascular events in 17,604 adults]

2. Guo H, Yang J, Huang J, et al. Comparative efficacy and safety of GLP-1 receptor agonists for weight reduction: A model-based meta-analysis of placebo-controlled trials. Obes Pillars. 2025;13:100162. [Comprehensive meta-analysis comparing efficacy and safety across GLP-1 agonists]

3. Pharmacovigilance analysis of neurological adverse events associated with GLP-1 receptor agonists based on the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System. Scientific Reports. 2025. [Analysis of 28,953 neurological adverse events from 2005-2024]

4. Emerging Use of BPC-157 in Orthopaedic Sports Medicine: A Systematic Review. PMC. 2024. [Review of 36 studies from 1993-2024; only one small human study with 12 patients showing pain relief]

5. Multifunctionality and Possible Medical Application of the BPC 157 Peptide—Literature and Patent Review. Pharmaceuticals. 2025;18(2):185. [Comprehensive review noting lack of FDA approval and cancelled Phase I trial results in 2016]

6. Campbell MD, Duan J, Samuelson AT, et al. Improving mitochondrial function with SS-31 reverses age-related redox stress and improves exercise tolerance in aged mice. Free Radic Biol Med. 2019;134:268-281. [8-week treatment in aged mice showing improved ATP production and exercise tolerance]

7. Birk AV, Liu S, Soong Y, et al. The mitochondrial-targeted compound SS-31 re-energizes ischemic mitochondria by interacting with cardiolipin. J Am Soc Nephrol. 2013;24(8):1250-1261. [Mechanistic study demonstrating SS-31’s cardiolipin binding and mitochondrial protection]

8. Colalto C. Aspects of complexity in quality and safety assessment of peptide therapeutics and peptide-related impurities. A regulatory perspective. Regul Toxicol Pharmacol. 2024;153:105699. [Italian Medicine Agency analysis of quality control challenges and impurity assessment in peptide therapeutics]

9. FDA Guidance for Industry: ANDAs for Certain Highly Purified Synthetic Peptide Drug Products That Refer to Listed Drugs of rDNA Origin. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 2017. [Regulatory framework for peptide impurity thresholds and quality standards]

Key Takeaways

• On Safety: Research chemical companies are accessible, but physician supervision matters. Most peptides require strategic cycling to maintain efficacy and avoid receptor desensitization.

• On Evidence: Peptides exist on a spectrum from FDA-approved (GLP-1s) to “lots of clinical experience but zero published human studies” (BPC-157). Know which category you’re playing in.

• On Cancer Risk: The growth hormone concern is theoretical. Cell culture models show acceleration, but clinical experience hasn’t confirmed the fear. Still unresolved.

• On What Works: BPC-157 works (it’s on the banned substance list for a reason). Oral form for gut health, injectable for injury recovery. Anecdotal evidence strong, peer-reviewed studies weak.

• On 2026: Regulatory clarity is coming. The longevity space will mature, painfully. Some inflated promises will collapse. Traditional medicine needs to join the conversation.

The Spectrum of Certainty

Julia: You’re advising companies from Superpower to Modern Age, you’ve seen every peptide protocol imaginable. Give us the unvarnished take: peptides—good or bad?

Dr. Vinjamoori: Neither. It’s context-dependent. Peptides are the first pharmaceutical-grade tools patients can access without doctors. That’s either liberating or dangerous depending on how you use them.

I love patient autonomy. But most people would benefit from clinical support before injecting compounds they found on Reddit. You need the basics dialed in first” sleep, nutrition, movement. Peptides aren’t magic. They’re amplifiers.

Julia: So what do you think of these research chemical companies selling peptides direct-to-consumer?

Dr. Vinjamoori: I don’t recommend them to my patients. I source from reputable compounding pharmacies under physician supervision.

That said, plenty of people buy from research chemical companies and do fine. Individual choice. But for me and the people I treat, I prefer oversight.

Julia: Let’s talk evidence hierarchy. Not all peptides are created equal.

Dr. Vinjamoori: Exactly. Think of it as a spectrum of certainty.

• Tier 1: FDA-approved drugs. GLP-1s, certain growth hormone peptides like ipamorelin, tesamorelin. We have data. These are real drugs being used off-label by telehealth companies.

• Tier 2: Approved in other countries, not the US. Thymosin Alpha-1 (immune balancing, used for viral hepatitis in Asia), Cerebrolysin (neurocognitive disorders, popular in Eastern Europe). Solid data exists, just not FDA-level.

• Tier 3: Everything else. Not approved anywhere. Animal studies at best. But a decade of clinical experience accumulated by practitioners seeing real benefits. Most peptide users today operate on this accumulated wisdom, not published research.

Julia: BPC-157 falls into Tier 3. It’s everywhere in the performance space. Oral versions, injectable versions. Does it actually work or is it placebo?

Dr. Vinjamoori: It works. Wouldn’t be on the World Anti-Doping Agency banned list if it didn’t.

We don’t have peer-reviewed human studies. We have ten-plus years of clinical experience. It’s effective for recovery: both from intense training and acute injury.

Critical distinction: Injectable BPC for muscle tissue recovery and injury. Oral BPC for gut health - it acts locally on the gut lining.

Julia: The form factor question is huge. Sprays, pills, injections—do they all work or is this just marketing?

Dr. Vinjamoori: You’re stacking layers of uncertainty. We already don’t have published data on most peptides. That’s layer one. Most clinical experience is with injectables. That’s layer two.

Once you move to nasal sprays or other delivery methods, you’re adding layer three. We just don’t have experience with BPC nasal spray or other formulations.

Exception: Oral BPC-157 for gut health. We know that works.

The Cancer Question

“In cell culture, if you give growth hormone to cells growing out of control, they grow faster. Clinically? We haven’t seen it play out.”

Julia: Growth hormone peptides and cancer risk. What’s the real story?

Dr. Vinjamoori: Theoretically, yes. In cell culture models, absolutely - growth hormone accelerates out-of-control cells.

Clinically? Practitioners using these peptides for a decade haven’t seen direct causation. Attribution is hard.

Here’s what’s interesting: These are being studied for cancer patients. Clinical trials using growth hormone peptides to augment appetite and muscle retention in people with cancer. IRBs approved that.

Cancer is multifaceted. You can argue both sides. Growth hormone peptides augment mitochondrial function. Cancer cells have dysfunctional mitochondria. If we correct that, maybe it helps. We don’t know yet.

Julia: So physician oversight isn’t just about biomarkers. It’s about risk tolerance.

Dr. Vinjamoori: Exactly. My job isn’t just ordering labs. It’s understanding what risks someone is comfortable taking. What matters to them. What their values are.

I spend my first visit understanding the patient as a person. Once I know their risk tolerance, navigating uncertainty becomes possible. Everything in medicine is uncertain: FDA-approved drugs, diets, supplements. Everything.

Cycling, Receptors, and Why You Can’t Take Peptides Forever

Subscribe now

Julia: You posted something recently about bio-regulators and why cycling peptides matters. Break down the science.

Dr. Vinjamoori: Peptides work by binding to receptors on cell surfaces. Think keyhole and key. You open the lock, trigger beneficial cellular responses.

Problem: Keep opening that lock repeatedly, the receptor becomes desensitized. Eventually stops working.

Worse: It’s not just the injected peptide using those receptors—your natural peptides use them too. Now you’ve broken native function.

That’s why cycling matters.

Bio-regulators are different. They work at the epigenetic level, not through cell surface receptors. Less desensitization concern.

Julia: Is there a hard limit on peptide duration before efficacy drops?

Dr. Vinjamoori: Individual-dependent. That’s why you need a physician. The breakpoint is different for everyone.

This applies to everything—diets, exercise protocols. Bodies benefit from continuous adaptation. That adaptation response makes us stronger.

What Dr. Vinjamoori Actually Takes (And Why It Doesn’t Matter)

Julia: What peptides have you tried on yourself?

Dr. Vinjamoori: What I do for myself isn’t what I’d recommend for patients. Influencers hesitate to share protocols because people hear it and immediately copy it.

I’ve tried many peptides. I don’t take anything continuously. I believe in cycling. I believe in continuous adaptation. I believe in measuring.

Right now? Vitamin D and omega-3. That’s it.

Julia: That’s incredibly basic for a longevity physician.

Dr. Vinjamoori: I’ve taken GLP-1s on and off. Experiencing what patients experience matters. I had bad brain fog initially—it cleared, it got better. But having that lived experience is important.

The human experience part of medicine is completely missing. We’ve reduced it to cookbook protocols—evidence shows this, doesn’t show that. Institutions specify what works.

I respect that. But we also have to respect lived experience. Most practitioners in this field experiment on themselves for that reason.

Julia: The lived experience has to become evidence. We’ll never have enough studies to match the pace consumers are moving.

Dr. Vinjamoori: Exactly.

2026 Predictions: Regulatory Clarity and Industry Maturation

Julia: Two questions. First, what are you most excited about in 2026 for peptides specifically?

Dr. Vinjamoori: Regulatory clarity. I’ve heard through the grapevine it’s coming. That would unlock a clearer framework for clinicians to use these compounds safely and effectively.

Julia: Broader prediction for longevity and health optimization in 2026?

Dr. Vinjamoori: Maturity phase. It’s going to be painful.

The last two years have been hype, growth, excitement, pop culture integration. We have businesses with billions in capital, tens of billions in cumulative valuations. Expectations are sky-high.

We’re hitting a plateau. Some things won’t work out. We over-inflated certain promises. That’s fine—we’ll come out with better systems.

We also need to talk about this in ways that feel credible and approachable to normal people. Right now it still reads as biohacker bro culture. We’re changing minds, but there’s more work to do.

Most importantly: We need to engage physicians practicing traditional medicine. Right now, longevity physicians and functional medicine practitioners are in an echo chamber. Everyone else is looking at this feeling excluded.

We need those conversations. I did a grand rounds at my old residency program—it was hard. I got criticism. But those are the conversations we need for this space to mature.

Julia: The consumer is currently the only glue between what their doctor says and what TikTok says. That’s not sustainable.

Dr. Vinjamoori: Exactly. And that has to change.

Final Thoughts

Peptides aren’t good or bad. They’re powerful tools that require context, supervision, and honest risk assessment. The era of “inject and pray” is ending. The era of integration with traditional medicine is beginning.

2026 will separate the signal from the noise. Some companies will fail. Some promises will deflate. That’s healthy.

What remains will be stronger, more credible, and more accessible to the people who actually need it - not just the biohackers, but everyone navigating the uncertainty of optimizing human health.

Dr. Anant Vinjamoori is a longevity physician and advisor to companies including Superpower and Modern Age. He believes in physician-supervised peptide use, continuous adaptation protocols, and bringing traditional medicine into the longevity conversation.bringing traditional medicine into the longevity conversation.

Curious to learn more? Say hi and leave a comment (subscribe below)

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

The TLDR I hope you makes read this entire thing: you’re probably making yourself sicker by trying too hard to be healthy.

Tommy (probably) explaining to me the below traffic light system metaphor for busy humans

The Traffic Light System for Busy Humans

Tommy introduced me to this brilliantly simple framework for managing health when life gets chaotic. Think of it like traffic lights:

Green: Everything’s cruising. You’re hitting the gym, meal prepping, meditating, sleeping eight hours. This is your baseline.

Yellow: Things are busy but manageable. Drop the meditation, simplify your workouts to quick home sessions, but keep the fundamentals. Pick what matters most and let the rest go - without the guilt.

Red: Total chaos mode. Deadlines, travel, family emergencies. You get one anchor. Maybe it’s just protecting your sleep. Maybe it’s a 10-minute workout because you know it helps your brain function. That’s it.

The insight: worrying about all the things you’re not doing creates more stress than just accepting reality and doing one thing well.

Metabolic Flexibility: What It Actually Feels Like

Forget the complex science for a second. Here’s the test: Can you eat a big bowl of pasta without feeling like you need a nap? Can you skip breakfast without spiraling into hangry chaos?

That’s metabolic flexibility. Your body can handle carbs. It can handle not eating for a bit. If you can’t do these things without feeling terrible, that’s your signal.

The Perception Problem (or Opportunity?)

This is where things got interesting. Tommy said something that’s been rattling around in my head:

I take magnesium for sleep. Maybe it’s placebo. Maybe it’s real. But if I wake up feeling rested and believe the magnesium helped, does it matter? The perception of recovery might be as powerful as the recovery itself.

He cited studies on creativity and cannabis - people feel more creative when high, but objective tests show they’re either the same or worse. The subjective experience doesn’t match reality.

But here’s the twist: for sleep, for stress, for daily functioning, your subjective experience is your reality.

The best chicken paillard - not much fiber but I definitely got my protein portion!

The Workout Hierarchy (for longevity)

Stop overthinking your exercise routine. Tommy laid out a dead-simple hierarchy:

1. Stand up more. Break up sitting. Walk. Take stairs. This improves blood pressure and brain function without breaking a sweat. Unplanned movement is understated key to health.

2. Move 20-30 minutes daily. Just walk. That’s it. Not everything needs to be optimized.

3. Lift weights 1-2x per week. Hit every muscle group. Three sets of 8-12 reps. Nothing fancy. This is for your brain as much as your body.

4. Add sprints if you have time. Short bursts of hard effort. Not mandatory, just beneficial.

5. Bonus points for coordination. Pickelball, dancing, soccer, anything with complex movement and social interaction seems to be magic for brain health. You’re getting exercise, coordination, and social connection in one shot (I see you Padel!)

The Alcohol Question Everyone Asks

Tommy’s take: the recent studies (promoted by the likes of Attia) claiming “no safe amount” are based on Mendelian randomization, which he calls “not real science” for this purpose. The actual data? One drink per day on average shows basically no net effect. Cardiovascular risk goes down slightly, cancer risk up slightly, dementia risk is a wash.

He drinks maybe once every couple weeks, something he enjoys, with people he enjoys. No supplements, no mitigation strategies, no guilt.

The Brian Johnson Effect

So are we (those obsessing over longevity) going to actually live longer?

No one knows… but, Tommy has been wondering whether all this tracking does more harm than good - not because of the protocols themselves, but because of the psychological stress of believing aging is so terrible while inevitably aging anyway.

Studies show people with positive perceptions of aging live significantly longer than those who view it as decline. If you’re constantly stressed about getting older, you’re creating the exact conditions that accelerate aging.

What I’m Taking Away

I’ve spent years in the longevity world, and honestly, sometimes I feel that the closer I get to it, the worse my health anxiety becomes. I know too much. I read too much. I stress about what I do and do not do to optimize everything.

Tommy’s message: metabolic flexibility isn’t just about your body adapting to different fuels. It’s about psychological flexibility - adapting to imperfect circumstances without creating fragility through rigidity.

The science matters. The data matters. But your lived experience matters more. If you feel good, perform well, and aren’t constantly stressed about your health metrics, you’re probably doing fine.

Maybe the real optimization is learning when to stop optimizing.

About: Jenny and Phil are advisors to In Search Of and are the founders of OBJECTS ARE BY- a future-conscious homewear brand + creative studio. They are a power couple (Jenny is the ex-CBO of Versace, Phil is an artist and creative director), living and creating in Milan. I had the pleasure of sitting down with both of them to hear more about what inspired their recent book, their take on Milan, longevity and their newest project - a teahouse!

While everyone’s obsessing over their VO2 max and ordering another supplement, we’re missing the people who’ve actually figured out how to live well: creatives.

I’m talking about the people who obsess over their craft the way biohackers obsess over their bloodwork. Who understand that to create anything worth a damn, you need a clean body and a clearer mind. The difference? Creativity isn’t linear. Which means these people are better equipped than anyone to understand that health isn’t either.

Here’s where it gets interesting: many of them stay up at night to create. They fly across time zones to play shows, to shoot, to perform. Everything a longevity guru would tell you is actively shaving years off your life.

And yet.

Subscribe now

Creatives often have something most people grinding through Huberman protocols don’t: neuroplasticity on steroids.

Your brain ages faster than most organs, and these people are naturally working it out in ways a crossword puzzle could never touch. Research backs this up - a 2019 study in Aging & Mental Health found that engaging in creative activities is associated with lower mortality risk and better overall health outcomes. Another study from UC San Francisco showed that creative engagement literally changes brain structure, increasing gray matter density in regions associated with emotional regulation and cognitive flexibility. Creative people show better stress recovery patterns than non-creative controls, according to research in The Arts in Psychotherapy.

Maybe we’ve been looking at the wrong athletes this whole time.

I had the honor of writing a forward to a book called Keys to Milan, where Jenny and Phil, shot over 100 Polaroids of key creatives in the city. The project captures something essential: that creativity isn’t just about output: it’s about how you move through the world, who you surround yourself with, and the intentional friction you introduce into your life.

Here is the full interview with the authors:

Julia: This book you did with Polaroid featuring over 100 creatives - what inspired it?

Phil: We wanted to create something well-rounded. We’ve all seen “top 10 creatives in Milan” lists. But for us, creativity here is wide-ranging: the chef, the bar owner, the architect, the painter, the graffiti artist. We wanted to understand what that looks like holistically.

Jenny: Milan is booming right now. The Milanese creative community inspires us so much. What’s exciting is that it’s definitely on the global map, yet there’s still room for additional development, creativity, and growth. The level of talent here is world-class!

Keys to Milan Launch Event, April 2025

Julia: How did you choose who made it in the book?

Jenny: Most people were either those who inspired us or people who were already in our immediate community: a lot are existing or future collaborators. But it’s also about people who are good at participating and contributing to community. For example, a friend used to be an editor at Vogue and now she’s building a hiking club. That’s not the traditional creative trajectory, but she’s contributing to the creative community.

We were walking to get one of the pictures and passed a graffiti wall, then a fashion showroom, then a publication office. We said, “This is Milan.” It’s everything. There’s a graffiti artist and a tattoo artist next to an editor of a magazine.

Phil: That’s what makes Milan special. Like the salons in Paris - you’d have a writer sitting next to a painter sitting next to a scientist. It’s the spirit of this city where Leonardo da Vinci had such a strong impact. In LA, I have friends in Hollywood and friends who are artists, and none of them know each other. Here there’s this overlap, which is really inspiring.

Keys to Milan Launch Event, April 2025. Jenny & Phil with Tamu McPhearson.

Julia: Give me a highlight from shooting all these people.

Jenny: Edward Buchanan stood out - the first creative director of Bottega Veneta ever, a powerful voice in Milan as an African American who’s been here about 20 years. Going to his house, we talked about 2000s New York, the ‘90s, people we hadn’t thought of in such a long time.

The next day we went to Francesco Risso, Marni’s creative director at the time. He took an old cheese factory and turned it into his house. You get to touch what they’re working on, and a lot of times it’s stuff they don’t publicize. Even if you know someone for a certain title, they’re doing 20 other things you’re not hearing about.

Phil: The name Keys to Milan came from how Milan doesn’t show off. You arrive, you don’t think it’s amazing right away. People who don’t take time to connect really don’t like Milan. You need to have the keys to the city. And we realized the key to the city is the people. Full circle, it became the key that led us into people’s houses and studios.

Julia: You’re technically healthier than anyone else just by being creative - your brain is better. But you also have a very specific longevity routine. Walk me through it.

Phil: Health and wellness has been a conscious part of our lives forever. I’ve been vegetarian since I was three and vegan since I was 14.

Jenny: We’ve been doing wellness things before the concept of wellness and longevity was popularized.

Phil: We’ve been vegan together for about five years. That goes to other wellness practices that are very ritualistic. I wasn’t working out as much before - now she pushes me.

Jenny: I’m slightly more active than Phil. But we’re big tea drinkers. We love the outcome of tea - there’s tea that’s energizing, calming, detoxifying. There’s a solution in the tea world for everything.

Phil: It’s tied to gut health, metabolism, vitality. In China, they put tea leaves in corners of factories because it sucks in toxins. It does the same thing in your body: it’s a detoxifier, great for cell longevity

Jenny at The Ranch earlier this year.

Jenny: I’m not a big coffee person, so he’ll have coffee, I’ll have tea in the morning. Every night he makes me a tea - usually peppermint or a nighttime blend. Recently I went to The Ranch in Malibu. I’m already vegan, so the diet portion of the retreat wasn’t difficult. The more challenging and rewarding part was that they push you every day, you’re hiking two to four hours, then you work out, and then you do these workshops like energy work or...

What I loved was being away from my phone. You’re out in nature, touching grass, and there’s a sense of community. They had amazing teachers: meditation, a sound bath, someone who studied Qigong and Tai Chi. I took some of those practices on. If I don’t feel like doing yoga, I’ll just do some gentle Tai Chi or Qigong moves.

Ferdinando Verderi & Jenny Pham

Julia: What Milan spots do you go to where you feel creative?

Phil: Milan has incredible natural wine bars right now: Bar Nico, Ultramarino, Bar Paradiso. Very cool, well-designed spaces. But one place it’s lacking is day spaces where you can hang out.

Jenny: Day spaces aren’t super common here. It used to be very traditional - everyone works, then everyone eats lunch at the same time. Very predictable. Now there are more freelancers working in cafes with laptops, but that culture isn’t common here like in New York or LA.

Julia: Is there a name?

Jenny: CROMO teahouse. Cromo has different meanings: It means chrome in italian, it means color in greek, it also is short for chromosome. We love that it’s open-ended. And I love the link to chromosome because it has a wellness tie.

Phil: What’s missing is a focus on health and wellness in Milan in an accessible way. There are longevity spas if you have money. If you don’t, it’s harder. For us, it was about creating a space that feels democratized, where anybody can come and have tea that actually gives you benefits. It’s not all focused on alcohol. This is our current obsession.

Julia: Most places in pretend they’re about longevity - there’s no real longevity. Getting an LED mask in a fancy spa affects you less than having tea in a community surrounded by good design.

Jenny: That’s exciting for us. We hope it’s also a space for creatives in Milan. That’s the real goal.

Phil: Where do we bring friends in the middle of the day? We don’t know where to go. So let’s create that space where the community can come together. Like the salons in Paris - where the thinker and the scientist and the artist and the musician can all sit together at the table.

Julia: And then life comes full circle. The only longevity study we have is the Harvard one about community. So you’re doing exactly that!

Jenny and Phil are doing something that should reframe how we think about wellness entirely. They’re not building a supplement brand or a biohacking lab. They’re building the space where the most neuroplastically advanced people on the planet can gather, drink tea, and do what they do best: make unexpected connections.

Because that’s the thing about creatives: they’ve always understood what the longevity world is just starting to grasp. Health isn’t about control, but about adaptability and community. And mostly, It’s about building a life that makes you want to stay in it.

The CROMO teahouse opens in Milan soon (see their first pop up here). And if you’re keeping score, that’s one more reason the creatives are winning.

Follow Jenny and Phil at Objects Are By and explore Keys to Milan here.

• Six planes, eight days, one properly administered glutathione shot at Reborne Longevity in London that actually worked - learn why

• Dr. Jack Kreindler’s Leaders in Health Conference: DeepMind’s Shamil Chandaria explained why AI might develop consciousness not intentionally, but because general intelligence may structurally require it

• The stat that reframes everything: 30% of people in certain communities report their most meaningful emotional connections now involve AI

• Four layers of caring intelligence, and why consciousness might not even be necessary for profound care (AGI = Artificial General Intelligence, btw)

• Why “longevity” is dying as consumer language and why I’m excited about it

• What Ayurvedic tradition knew about living to 120, Dubai’s Harvard Business School Healthcare Conference, and why lighter regulation creates interesting innovation (alongside plenty of expensive marketing gimmicks)

Audemars Piguet hosted an amazing exhibition and party in Dubai in celebration of the Watch Week here and their 150 year anniversary!

Last week I logged six planes in eight days - a new personal record. Sant Barts bachelorette to London to Dubai. My body, understandably, was crushed.

In London, Dr. Tam fixed me up with an IV and glutathione shot at Reborne Longevity. I’ve had plenty of glutathione shots in the US, including one memorably administered in the back room of a conference (sterile wasn’t the vibe). I could never tell if they did anything. This one? Different. Just 1200mg of glutathione, delivered slowly into my vein, finger monitor tracking vitals. It worked. A sharp reminder that quality matters. Congrats to Faye Mythen for paving the right new way for longevity clinics!

REBORNE+ Longevity Clinic in London getting 1200mg glutathione slowly into my vein (while my vitals are tracked real time). I asked if we could go faster, answer was no, and I’m grateful for that forced moment of recharge. Some things can’t be hacked or sped up.

—-

But it also crystallized something I’ve been thinking about for a while: is “longevity” dying as consumer language?

Not the science, the branding. There’s a growing perception (accurate, honestly) that longevity clinics peddle quick fixes instead of real care. Testing without follow-up is just data. What we actually mean when we say longevity is optimization and holistic, integrated care. The semantics might be shifting to match the substance. I was impressed how Reborne thinks about it - worth checking out if you find yourself in London.

The beautiful entrance to the Reborne Longevity Clinic which is also actually a full hospital (but don’t tell anyone ;)

Speaking of care...

Still in London, I came straight off a red-eye to Dr Jack Kreindler's Leaders in Health Conference. The format was unusual but effective - active debates led by experts rather than one-way lectures. First session I chose: Consciousness x AI, led by Shamil Chandaria (DeepMind, Google).

It was the kind of conversation that reorients how you think about the next decade.

The Care Revolution: What Happens When Machines Learn to Tend

We’re not debating whether AI can process medical data anymore. We’re asking if it can genuinely care. And neuroscience is offering a fascinating answer.

Chandaria mapped the architecture of consciousness - global workspace theory, recursive processing, self-modeling - and revealed something unexpected: the features required for artificial general intelligence increasingly overlap with the neural correlates of awareness. We might get conscious AI not because we’re trying to build it, but because general intelligence may structurally require it.

Chandaria outlined four layers of alignment that define caring intelligence:

Read more

The Patient Will See You Now

I remember the first call with Jonathan Swerdlin, Function Health’s Co-founder and CEO. Function had maybe a few thousand members (optimistically) but Jonathan had something more valuable: unshakeable conviction. He told me, with the kind of certainty that makes you either a visionary or delusional, that he’d hit a million members soon enough.

I believed him.

The vision was pure. No supplement upselling, no. Just prevention that actually meant something: giving people ownership over their health instead of making them feel broken and reaching for their wallet. Function wasn’t trying to sell you on being sick. It was designed to keep you from getting there in the first place.

Even as a very new startup (back then), they managed to power Equinox’s $40K membership program.

One of many interviews we did for Equinox Optimize, this one was with Rebecca Batterman

I’m an early investor, and I couldn’t be more impressed with what Jonathan, Pranitha, Dr Mark Hyman and the team have built. This week, Function closed an oversubscribed $298M Series B at a $2.5B valuation (congrats to Daisy Wolf and the team on the follow-on). The raise is impressive and so is the execution on that original vision.

With the launch of the Medical Intelligence Lab, Jonathan is methodically moving healthcare out of waiting rooms and into your pocket. As a user and investor, I am watching patiently on how he disrupts the healthcare world!

He’s also the kind of friend who drives 30 minutes just to catch up and discuss his Ezra acquisition while Diplo plays in the background. Never change, Jonathan!

Here is a quick Q&A we did a while back and now felt like the right time to post!

Memories from NBPA Performance Summit in Malaga last summer with Deborah Embaie from

What made you start Function?

I had no choice. Too many sleepless nights imagining how this could play out: tackling suffering and preventable death at a scale of billions. I looked for others building what I was dreaming. Nobody appeared, so I made the decision to create it myself. It started as big words: “I’m going to dedicate my life to this.” Some wrote it off. Others invested. There’s nothing more rewarding than looking back at commitments and knowing you’re doing exactly what you said you would. I’m on my life’s mission to serve. This work doesn’t end. It will take lifetimes.

Your ride-or-die travel health hack: What’s in your carry-on that you never fly without?

My travel armor: red lens glasses from Roka, a black hooded puffy from Patagonia, and a 40oz non-insulated water bottle. When I land: immediate 50 push-ups and 50 squats to get the blood flowing. I avoid red-eyes unless absolutely unavoidable.

Guilty pleasure flex: What’s one non-wellness thing that makes you ridiculously happy?

Late night movie on the couch with popcorn.

Where have you felt most healthy and at home this year?

Austin. Dialed-in sleep, exercise routine, and kitchen.

Longevity confessional: The most “extra” thing you’ve done in the name of health.

Swapping out shitty light bulbs in Airbnbs and in the homes of people I love when they’re not looking.

What expanded your brain and POV culturally this year?

Montana. I spent time there this summer and it completely shifted my aperture on America’s beauty. Also started listening to music coming out of Nigeria while I work: it paces me well.

What’s most exciting about where Function is headed?

The breadth of positive impact Function generates for an increasing number of people. That will always be what excites me most.

Share

Subscribe now

Hello from my first day of my five-day PROLON fast. This is my 3rd time this year and my rate of aging is supposed to decline after it (that’s what their studies show, let’s see). Brain’s still (somewhat) clear - hence the newsletter actually happening.

Last week was packed - Founders Forum in NYC, then the 26th Annual HBS Healthcare Conference where Christy Turlington Burns received this year’s Ellerin Achievement Award for her work with Every Mother Counts.

At that conference I made a case that the longevity revolution isn’t (only) being driven by scientists in labs - it’s being driven by consumers, mostly women, who refuse to accept “that’s just how aging works” as an answer.

The data’s stark. 12.5% of Americans are on GLP-1s. Nearly 40% asked their doctor for it - not the other way around. And women drive a lot of that movement (75% of the preventative market), fueling companies like Allara (shoutout Rachel, HSB grad) and Midi Health. You could argue it’s because they were underserved for decades, or because they’re willing to spend on solutions, or because they’re done leaving doctor’s offices with zero answers. Whichever it is, the shift is very clear.

But David Shaywitz MD, PhH nailed the real shift: humans now have genuine agency over their health outcomes for the first time in history. That’s behavioral. As Anant pointed out, energy and mental clarity are biology - metabolic dysfunction clouds judgment. For many, GLP-1s provide the catalyst for lasting lifestyle change. What excites me most? The FDA and regulatory bodies are finally watching what consumers care about. This is societal power for change we’ve never had.

When self-diagnosis becomes the problem

Consumer-driven healthcare has a shadow side. The Atlantic just called out how “inflammation” has become wellness culture’s favorite buzzword - a catch-all that lets people believe they can heal themselves. The risk? People with actual inflammatory conditions get drowned out by the noise. It’s the tax we pay for democratized health information: everyone’s an expert, nobody’s a patient.

Women’s health: the $1 trillion blind spot

The economics are brutal: $1 trillion opportunity by 2040, yet only 2% of research dollars support 51% of the population. At the Harvard Alumni Healthcare panel, Laura Rippy (Alumni Ventures), Neil Shah (Maven Clinic), and Alex Delight (Sundial Health) made the business case impossible to ignore.

The shift needs to happen now - women’s health must move from the margins to mainstream VC, just like climate tech and defense tech did. The real solutions? Making fertility care accessible where patients actually live and work. Cutting extractive middlemen from the system. These aren’t charity cases - they’re massive market opportunities.

Speaking of which: at Founders Forum in NYC last week, I met Anand, founder of Petal, a new wearable for women - a bra insert that measures everything your tracker can, plus strength training metrics and tumor detection. Haven’t tried it yet, but the premise is compelling. Equinox is betting on this moment too with Equinox Arc, pairing Function Health biomarker testing, Oura wearables, and proprietary strength training programs designed for women.

AI’s real moonshot is longevity

said it best: when global AI leaders talk about changing the world, they’re mostly referencing longevity tech. Hard to argue. AI’s greatest power isn’t productivity hacks- it’s extending human healthspan.

Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan just consolidated the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative around one thing: AI-powered biology. Schools, housing programs, social initiatives are scaled back. It’s Biohub, 10,000 GPUs by 2028, and virtual cell models now. They’re joining Bezos (Altos Labs, $3B in anti-aging research) in the billionaire longevity migration.

Interesting pivot - from philanthropy as moral gesture to philanthropy as R&D lab. Science is where breakthroughs happen, obviously. But when your social impact strategy reads like a compute roadmap, it raises a question: are we curing disease, or designing the next platform? Whichever it is, I am excited to see the progress!!

Which brings me to something Noubar Afeyan (Moderna co-founder) said at Founder Forum about moonshot thinking: “If you keep telling yourself something is not yet known not to work, but you’re still working on it, once in a while something will work.” That’s the entire game.

Sound waves vs tumors: the $3B bet

Speaking of moonshots, Thiel and Bezos backed HistoSonics, a $3B US medtech startup born out of University of Michigan. The play? Destroying tumors with focused ultrasound. No scalpels, no radiation, no chemo.

Some scientists already believe we’ll treat diseases with light and wavelengths in the future (happening in labs now), but this is the first investment at this scale I’ve seen. Bold move and one I am watching closely!

Share

Subscribe now

Today? Longevity as luxury couldn’t be more accurate.

Earlier this month, my company In Search Of curated a health and longevity immersion for a heritage European brand. Hannah Bronfman did a great write-up on it here.

But here’s what’s been catching my attention lately.

Lake Garda in October, 2025

The Luxury Industry Is Finally Getting It

Kering just divested their beauty division to L’Oréal and officially announced a focus on wellness and longevity - with a 50/50 joint venture to explore business opportunities at the intersection of luxury, wellness and longevity. Two major brands going after something that seems obvious and yet still at its infancy phase aka a lot to figure out. I’m watching this one closely (as an insider, naturally).

The L’Oréal x Timeline Nutrition partnership from months ago didn’t get enough attention, but it’s incredibly relevant now. We’re finally arriving at the “skin is your largest organ and the truest sign of your health” understanding. You can eat for your skin. L’Oréal knew it for a while, but now they’ve made it official. Finally.

Fresh pomegranate, source of Urolithin A, key compounds produced and patented by Timeline Nutrition.

Wellness Travel Is Booming - But What Does It Actually Mean?

Lanserhof made the leap from family-owned to institutional backing with a recent €95M investment to expand beyond Germany and Austria - a signal that longevity travel and hospitality is getting serious capital attention

With 77% of travelers now citing wellness as a key reason to travel, the sector is growing. On one hand, you have what Equinox pioneered with Equinox Hotels in NYC in 2019: meticulous design focused on human performance, optimizing everything from sleep to fitness. But as gyms, saunas, and red light therapies become table stakes, it’ll take more to lead.

But there’s another concept of wellness that’s low-tech, almost anti-tech: nature, locality, and real farm-to-table. I’ve been thinking about this. Why does having produce served from a few steps away matter? Because you lose nutrients during transport. Studies show vitamin C losses can range from 15% in green peas to 77% in green beans after just seven days of storage, and fresh produce experiences measurable declines in vitamin C, β-carotene, and folate within five days of refrigeration. The new luxury won’t be global; it’ll be hyper-local. Belmond in Portofino reminded me of that (but more on that in another post)

Brain Health: Luxury’s Next Frontier

If travel and hospitality are where the capital is moving, brain health is where the innovation is accelerating. And it’s about time.

The stats are sobering: women are twice as likely to develop Alzheimer’s than breast cancer, two-thirds of Alzheimer’s patients are women, and women lose brain volume 30% faster than men during perimenopause. Yet until recently, brain health has been the most overlooked dimension of longevity.

That’s changing fast. In 2023, we piloted brain performance tracking with EEG scans at Equinox in California using WaveNeuro. This year, we brought that same approach to the event Hannah wrote about - partnering with Neurable to show guests how their brains changed in real-time after just 30 minutes of guided nervous system regulation work led by Dr. Tamsin Lewis. Watching someone see their own brain shift on a screen? That’s the kind of feedback loop that changes behavior.

Nike released NIKE MIND - probably their most advanced shoe ever, designed with actual brain impact studies informing the process. You can see the little nods throughout the design if you know what to look for. Atlas just emerged from stealth with $14M in funding to create a brain wearable. The tech is getting better, smaller, more accessible.

The Nike Mind Shoe

The Bottom Line

Here’s what I’m seeing: the luxury industry just woke up to what some of us have been saying for years. Longevity isn’t a trend - it’s the recalibration of what wealth actually buys. Not another handbag. Not another suite. Time. Clarity. Performance. A nervous system that isn’t fried. A brain that works.

The infrastructure is being built as we speak. The capital is moving. The experiences are being designed. And whether you’re tracking your brain with EEG headphones or eating tomatoes grown 50 feet from your table, the question is the same: are you optimizing for living well, or just living long?

Study Sources:

1. Managa MG, Sultanbawa Y, Sivakumar D. Impact of transportation, storage, and retail shelf conditions on lettuce quality and phytonutrient losses.

2. Li J et al. Selected nutrient analyses of fresh, fresh-stored, and frozen fruits and vegetables. Journal of Food Composition and Analysis

3. Bouzari A et al. An alarming decline in the nutritional quality of foods. Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition

Last weekend: Lake Garda. Hotel Fasano. Possibly some of the best October “work remotely” views on earth.

Two studies dropped this week that made me feel simultaneously optimistic about the future and deeply concerned about our collective lack of preparation. Which, honestly, is kind of the vibe for 2025.

First: John Hancock and MIT’s AgeLab released what they’re calling the Longevity Preparedness Index, and the headline is that U.S. adults are catastrophically underprepared to live well as they age. Shocking? Not really. But here’s what’s actually interesting - we’re finally asking better questions. Not just “how long will I live?” but “what does it mean to make that time worthwhile?”

The real issue isn’t individual mindset. It’s that our systems - healthcare, insurance, financial infrastructure - are designed for a world where people die younger and faster. They’re not built for a population that sticks around. Andrew J. Scott has been screaming about this for years if you want to go deeper. (I do recommend it. He knows his stuff.)

There are people trying to solve for this. My friend Anna Frankowska is building products to help older adults unlock liquidity when their net worth is tied up in real estate and they actually need cash to, you know, live. It’s the kind of unsexy but essential work that doesn’t get enough attention.

But then there’s the other question, the one that actually keeps me up at night: Who do you want around?

Because a second study - this one out of Cornell - tried to measure whether your perception of relationships affects your epigenetic age clock. In other words: do the vibes of your social life influence how fast you age at a cellular level?

The methodology was solid (sample size okey: 2,000 people). They measured two types of epigenetic aging and looked at four pillars of relationships: (1) the warmth and support you got from your parents growing up, (2) how connected you feel to your community, (3) involvement in faith-based groups, and (4) ongoing emotional support from friends and family.

The results? People who scored high across those dimensions had lower levels of interleukin-6, an inflammatory molecule linked to heart disease and diabetes. They’re literally aging slower because they feel loved and connected.

Plot twist: short-term stress markers didn’t drop. So you can love your spouse, be furious at them half the time, and still live longer. Marriage: it’s complicated, but apparently good for your telomeres.

More here.

Writing this from a train from Milan to Geneva, stubbornly clinging to my morning routines like they’re the only constant these days (This Equinox red light mask is helping. Kind of.)

The Spermidine Situation

Speaking of things that might help you live longer: the Financial Times published a piece this week that perfectly captures the chaos of longevity supplements. It’s about spermidine, which showed promise in mice by mimicking the benefits of intermittent fasting (hello, autophagy). Naturally, brands jumped on it. Bryan Johnson put it in his stack. The hype cycle began.

But here’s the thing - what works in mice doesn’t always translate to humans. And until we have large-scale, long-term studies proving efficacy, the rest of us are left doing our own makeshift clinical trials: bloodwork, three-month testing windows, finding the right brand with the right dosage, and hoping we’re not just ingesting expensive placebo dust.

Or, you know, you could just eat aged cheddar, soybeans, and wheat germ. Same compound. Way cheaper. Decidedly less sexy.

Read the FT piece here.

AI vs. Doctors (But Actually, What’s the Question?)

The annual DOC Napa conference happened this week, and I have nothing productive to contribute except that my FOMO is through the roof. One of the debates I desperately wanted to see was Will AI replace doctors?

AI said yes. The room (with a lot of doctors present) said no.

But I think we’re asking the wrong question. It’s not will AI replace doctors - it’s what should the role of the doctor be in a world where AI is inevitably here and objectively better at pattern recognition than humans?

If you’re not following the organizers of DOC John Battelle and yet, fix that. Here’s John’s post on the AI vs. Dr. debate and Jordan’s post on the conference and its origin itself.

I will also leave you with this powerful slide that one of our advisors at In Search Of - Jennifer Garrison, PhD - presented at DOC - a 40x return on investment in female research!

One Last Thing

I’m building a curated community at the intersection of health, science, and culture: doctors, scientists, founders, investors, creators. If that sounds like you (or someone that you know), fill out this quick form (2–3 minutes). It helps me figure out how to best include you in future projects: events, collaborations, thought leadership, the works.

Form here.

If you got something out of this, send it to a friend who’s either obsessed with longevity or pretending they’re not thinking about it yet. (We’re all thinking about it.)

And if someone shared this with you - WELCOME. Subscribe below to join the conversation.

Subscribe now

Harvey Spevak has a reputation for being tough.**

I was about to leave my comfortable finance job for him - a massive risk, a total pivot away from Wall Street. So during my interview, I asked him point-blank: why should I work for you?

His response: “If you’re good and you survive, I’ll mentor you.”

I survived. He mentored me. The rest is history.

Harvey likes to joke he taught me everything I know, and in every joke there is some truth. The man who turned a gym into a lifestyle brand, who made fitness aspirational before anyone knew they wanted that and who bled fashion into fitness through his legendarily provocative ad campaigns. For six years I got a front-row seat to how he thinks, operates, and builds.

So here’s a glimpse into his world - the same one I was exposed to day in, day out. Does he take peptides? What’s his legacy? Why does he still do IV drips in 15 minutes flat? Read below.

And if there are questions you want to ask him, drop them in the comments. I can’t promise he’ll answer them all, but I promise I’ll ask ;)

** Disclaimer: He also has a soft side (see adorable pup Louie below). I’ve had the privilege to see both sides throughout the years. It is what makes him a dynamic and special leader!

March 2019 touring (the construction site of) Equinox Hotel / HQ for the first time!

Julia: As the man at the helm of creating Equinox, what makes it special?

Harvey: It’s the unique experience driven by our people. They’re the heart of our brand. But it’s also how we design our clubs, how we program them. And then the community we’ve built as a result - we inspire people to live a high performance lifestyle.

J: Equinox is known to push the boundaries with its campaigns. What’s been your favorite, or most controversial?

H: We definitely have a lot of controversial ones that I love - ”Equinox Made Me Do It,” “Commit to Something.” But my favorite, and also the most controversial, was what we did in 2003 with David Lipman. We created what I believe is one of the best taglines of any brand: “It’s not fitness, it’s life.”

That tagline is more relevant today than it’s ever been. But what made it controversial was how we shot the campaign - in a very provocative, sensual, some might have said sexual way. We definitely got some pretty intense feedback that we were living on the edge. But it was all done really well by Steven Klein as the photographer.

J: Any regrets? Would you do it again?

H: Oh, absolutely!

I told you his ads were provocative :)

J: Let’s talk longevity - it’s become such a buzzword. What’s your take?

H: I think it’s all about energy and vitality more than anything. Everyone talks about healthspan versus lifespan, but healthspan really comes down to energy and vitality.

At Equinox, we define high performance lifestyle with an acronym called MNRC: Movement, Nourishment, Recovery, and Community. That’s the lifestyle I personally embrace, and I think a lot of our members embrace. When you do that, it leads to the energy and vitality you want, whether you’re young or older.

Can you complement that with vitamins, supplements, biohacking? Absolutely. But at the core you need MNRC.

Peak COVID era: the office roster was down to three: Harvey, his Frenchie (Louie), and me.

J: Speaking of supplements and biohacking - peptides, plasma therapies - it’s a Wild West out there. What’s your view?

H: As you know, I’ve become a human guinea pig, trying a lot of things. But I’m pretty focused on safe and effective. A lot of things out there are fraudulent. There’s no science behind them. And even those that might have science, the research isn’t there yet.

Some people are willing to take risks with whatever the latest thing is. And every day there’s another thing. Peptides have been around for a very long time and I think they’re here to stay. But it’s going to take time to figure out what really is a difference maker and what’s just hype.

J: What’s your personal routine? Give us the basics and the extras!

H: I’m very disciplined. I eat clean. I work out religiously: strength training three times a week with Hicham, my trainer who’s been with me for 20 years. Then I do cardio six times a week, mostly sprints, though I’ve backed off a little because it’s a lot of impact on the body.

I work with Dr. Morrison on my biomarkers - been doing blood work for almost 20 years now to inform my eating and my vitamins plan. My plan’s been pretty consistent, about 80% the same. He’ll tweak things based on what he’s seeing in my results.

The supplements I take are pretty benign versus the more progressive stuff. But I do believe in IV drips and I do one every two weeks at the hotel.

J: You’ve been doing IV drips for years, right? Even before they were popular?

H: I used to do my IV drips at my desk.

J: I’ve Seen Them In meetings too…

H: Internal meetings only! Then I thought it got kind of weird. Now I do it at our Equinox Hotel. I take the biggest safe needle they have and open it up so what takes 40 minutes I can do in 15 to 20 minutes.

LEFT: Sometime in the summer of 2020 when the world was collapsing and we decided to set the SoulCycle outdoor tents in Hamptons | RIGHT: Me getting the exact large needle I copied from Harvey to squeeze in a quick IV in between meetings.

J: Last question: 20 years from now, what’s Harvey Spevak’s biggest legacy?

H: That’s a great question… I hope that when people look back, they see that I created this unique, phenomenal brand called Equinox that impacted the lives of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people - both our members and employees - and inspired them to maximize the potential within themselves.

LEFT: Quick pit stop in the Berkshires for a $1B lottery ticket, Harvey dubbed it our “alternative source of financing.” | RIGHT: When I asked him to support my Substack, he gave me a signed $50 — the “annual subscription fee,” apparently - because he’s “too busy to pay online” like a normal person.

Share

Subscribe now

COPERNI - the cult fashion brand - just announced their entrance into beauty. But not the way you’d expect. No perfumes, no skincare, no makeup. Instead: probiotic-infused athleisure.

Clearly, the job-to-be-done for activewear is shifting. Yesterday was all about material feel and fit (think ALO) or performance (Arc’teryx). Tomorrow’s consumer still wants fashion, still demands performance, but now expects materials that won’t hormonally damage them mid-workout. (No plastic in my leggings, thanks.)

The real winners will treat clean materials as table stakes and extend the job-to-be-done of the product itself: infusing you with the good stuff.

As for the science behind COPERNI’s probiotic claim? I have no idea how those are supposed to reach you through fabric and into your bloodstream. But a world where your leggings measure hydration levels in real time and adjust accordingly? Not a crazy concept. What do you think?

🤳🤳🤳 Your Selfie Is Now a Biomarker

David Furman and his team just published a model where facial photography acts as a pretty accurate proxy for body inflammation. Revolutionary on multiple levels.

First: we know inflammation drives aging (it even has its own term, inflammaging). Until now, measuring it meant blood work with markers like CRP or IL-6. Invasive. Cost-prohibitive.

Now imagine your phone camera collecting that data. Skin and appearance are no longer just vanity metrics - they’re the cleanest view into your internal system balance. (Same with grey hair, btw. These changes are reversible with diet interventions.)

Link here

🩸🩸🩸 Everyone’s Jumping on the Blood Test Wagon

Last week: Whoop. This week: Oura - which also just dropped a beautiful campaign featuring their new ceramic rings and a pop-up at Harrods. (See it here.)

It’s cool to see biomarker testing spreading like wildfire, though I still find the Quest Diagnostics experience suboptimal. But regular, preventative testing is quickly becoming “normal” thanks to moves like this.

I’m watching this one cautiously. Not all biomarkers can be affected by lifestyle, so the winners will be the ones who turn data into thoughtful coaching - not information overload. Can Oura pull it off?

PS. Congrats Oura team Doug Sweeny, Dorothy Killroy, Sanya, Tom Hale on this and the latest valuation!!

🔬🔬🔬 The 117-Year-Old Woman Had High Cholesterol

Scientists just published the metabolic workup of Maria Morera, who lived to 117. Her LDL cholesterol? High - buried in the supplemental figures like an inconvenient footnote covered by one of my favorites Substack’s here.

But her HDL was stellar. Triglycerides near zero. Inflammatory markers (GlycA, GlycB) lower than most 30-year-olds. Mitochondria functioning like someone decades younger. Gut microbiome packed with beneficial bacteria.

Her telomeres - those chromosome caps scientists obsess over as aging markers? Tiny. Yet she was sharp and metabolically efficient past 110.

Also, if you want to dive in, the report shared her exact diet, which included 3 yogurts with variety of probiotics a day - I guess dairy isn’t that bad after all? ;)

The insight: resilience beats perfection. As Mark Hyman discussed in that podcast I wrote about, it’s not about every metric being flawless, it’s your body’s ability to rebound. Maria’s system could clean up, regenerate, and keep inflammation in check. That’s what mattered.

Stop chasing perfect numbers and focus on your ability to rebound and recover -That’s the real game.

Subscribe to get the next post in your inbox 👇

Comment below - I read every one.

Subscribe now

I wasn’t wrong.

The longevity market was worth $27 billion in 2023. By 2030, it’ll hit $44 billion. Americans now take an average of four supplements daily, up from basically zero a generation ago. The shift from “fitness enthusiast” to “biohacker” happened so fast that drinking something called Athletic Greens became a personality trait.

But here’s what bothers me after spending years vetting 650+ companies for Equinox partnerships (I approved 10, by the way - that’s a 98.5% rejection rate, if you’re counting): We’ve confused feeling like we’re doing something with actually doing something.

The “Science” for Marketing Problem

I love science. I also love branding and marketing. The issue is when the three pretend to be the same thing.

Take any emerging wellness brand. Founder calls. Deck looks beautiful. They’ve got “cutting-edge research”. They’ve got influencer testimonials. They’ve got that soft-focus Instagram aesthetic where everyone’s skin glows like they’ve been gently basted in Youth Serum™.

And look - I buy this stuff. I’m a mark. Five founder calls a week, minimum, and I get seduced every time by the promise of optimization, of becoming the platonic ideal of myself if I just add this one thing to my stack.

But then nothing sticks.

The problem isn’t that these products are necessarily bad. It’s that they’re marketed as universal solutions, which is biologically impossible. You are not the person next to you. Your gut microbiome is not their gut microbiome. Your sleep debt, stress levels, genetic predispositions, and whether you had coffee this morning all matter.

Twenty years ago, if you went to the gym every day, people thought you were insane (an analogy I verbatim took from Harvey Spevak). Equinox didn’t just sell fitness, they sold cool.

They made sweating aspirational. That was brilliant because exercise actually works. The science is settled. Moving your body daily has almost no downside.

Here’s the key distinction though: Some things ARE universal. Clean water works for everyone. Non-toxic products touching your skin work for everyone. Removing endocrine disruptors from your environment works for everyone. These aren’t adding things your body may not need, they’re removing harm and supporting systems that already work.

But taking a gummy? That’s different.

Let’s Talk About Gruns (With Respect)

Full disclosure: I have enormous respect for what Gruns has built. The branding is sharp. The messaging is clean. They borrowed the AG1 playbook - ”one thing for everyone” - and executed it beautifully. Consumers love simplicity. Digital platforms reward simple messages. And honestly, if eating a vitamin gummy instead of a Sour Patch Kid gets someone thinking about their health, that’s not nothing.

But does everyone need a multivitamin gummy?

The honest answer: No.

Some people are genuinely deficient in key nutrients. For them, supplementation makes sense. Others are just... fine? And throwing more vitamins into an already adequate diet doesn’t make you superhuman. It makes your pee expensive.

The bigger issue is this: Can a single gummy actually extend your lifespan?

No serious scientist would say yes. But that’s not how it’s marketed, is it? It’s marketed with implication. With aesthetics. With the promise that if you just take this one small, delicious action every day, you’ll be healthier, sharper, better.

And in some cases? It might actually be detrimental. Excess vitamin A, for instance, can cause toxicity. Too much iron in the wrong person can oxidize and cause damage. Your body isn’t a gas tank you can just top off.

The Future: Personalized Products, Universal Message

Here’s my bet on where this goes:

Read more