How Chamath Optimized His Health

I have so many of my friends that just literally have everything except their health and I just don't want that.

You know, there's a limited amount of time.

I'm not trying to live forever.

I'm just trying to live well. So, this week I'm going to explore some questions that I have about my health and I suspect that many people out there have about theirs.

>> That's great so far.

My father lived a really unhealthy life.

He struggled with alcoholism for decades.

He was diabetic. He had heart issues.

And in the end, he died of a cardiac arrest.

We were expecting his death, but he still left my mom, my siblings, and me, honestly, to pick up the pieces.

When my friend Dave died of a heart attack, I wasn't expecting it. To me, he seemed perfectly healthy and that was my real wakeup call.

We were in Mexico and he had a heart attack and it was a real tragedy to be totally honest.

But on the heels of that, his wife asked his four best friends just to like really try to, you know, take care of ourselves better and specifically to start going and seeing a cardiologist.

Hey, welcome back.

>> Thanks. It's great to see you.

>> It's great to see you online on X, we saw some uh interest about statins.

>> So, Dr. Carlsburg, he is the best interventional cardiologist in the United States.

>> When he discovered some plaque in my arteries, he put me on statins.

They're supposed to lower bad LDL cholesterol, reduce the risk of heart attack, and stabilize plaque.

But to some they are controversial.

>> Well, you posted basically trying to do something um for cardiac health across all of America and you tagged me and Bobby, but the amount of commentary in Twitter or in X rather was all about the whether or not I should be on a statin and whether or not it was just completely um pseudocience.

Look, what I've learned in my career is I could talk about anything.

I could say the sky is blue and there will be opinions that say it's not.

So, to be honest with you, I kind of ignored most of it except to say that the few people who are very thoughtful in there brought up, I thought, a very legitimate question.

A lot of my followers feel like statins might help them in some areas, but also hurt them in others.

That's one of the reasons why I've been coming to Dr. Carlsburg so regularly to help me figure all of this out.

What's the most difficult part of doing all this testing, would you say?

>> To be honest with you, it's the cognitive load before you start it because I think there's so many incentives.

There's little voices inside of many people's heads that says don't even start because of what you could find.

>> And I do this test every four or five years called a CT angagram with contrast.

It's basically a way of injecting a die into your veins and then imaging your heart so that you can see all the arteries.

>> Breathe in. Hold your breath.

>> What it's also able to do now is image it in such a way where you can take that corpus of data and send it into a machine learning model and then now you can start to extract an even more detailed sense of what's happening.

>> That young lady is a perfect study.

>> Absolutely beautiful.

>> I mean it's weird when the contrast goes in your body.

>> Yeah.

>> Um I've had it done a couple times before obviously >> but I really I forget each time.

The heart is important, but it's only part of the story. If you want a more complete sense of your overall health, you really need a prenal scan.

>> Good morning.

>> Hi, >> how are you? Good. How are you?

>> Good, thanks. So, I reached out to Chimath when we had just opened a clinic in Silicon Valley during CO and I thought I knew he was a bit of a hacker, a biohacker, and I really wanted him to experience what we were doing.

He was nice enough to come in. We developed the friendship and he's been in for several scans.

Click. You accept right there.

>> In the 5 years since I met Chamath, we've now imaged about 150,000 people.

We've saved or made about 4,000 life-saving diagnosis.

And every day we get stories from folks where we might have saved their life or gave them clarity or delivered peace of mind.

So, it's really great to be building a company and at the same time having positive impact.

>> Okay, let's do it.

So what makes us unique compared to others is we operate our own customuilt research grade MRI hardware. We have AI that enables us to enhance image quality.

And then we have this incredible team of radiologists and medical professionals now over 100 that deliver a tremendous stand of care for our patients.

So I just did a full body advanced MRI scan.

Took like an hour and 15 minutes.

But it really didn't feel that way cuz I just was lying in the machine watching Netflix.

So, it's actually like a really it's really great actually.

>> Okay. Yeah. So, we just got in the car.

We are uh headed to Toronto Tech Week.

>> Our first stop is at the Shopify headquarters for a fireside chat with my friend Farhan Thoir.

>> Good. How is the AI?

What's up?

>> Being on stage is something I like because it allows me to tell people what I think is going on right now and what will go on.

>> I hate to say it this way, but like the more success that you can have, the easier it is to detach yourself from real life.

And then you start to miss out on people.

>> And if enough people, you know, find that truth credible, some subset of those people will self- select and say, "Hey, I want to work with you on this.

" And then I, you know, feed them into those businesses.

It's a great opportunity for them. But it's also how we get one step closer to achieving our dreams. >> Now, we're going to jump in the car and uh go to the 8090 office and have lunch.

>> Yeah. Just trying to say hi. Good to see you again.

Good to see you.

>> Okay, let's talk because I don't want to run out of time. So, what do we have till 3:00?

>> What I found is that early on, especially when you're trying to do something extremely ambitious like the 8090 team is trying to do, the biggest problem is drift. Meaning, you just kind of drift away. Everybody just drifts away.

they lose an understanding and I think the responsibility of the CEO in that early phase when you're in a build cycle is to minimize the drift.

The way that I think a good CEO can do that is just reminding people of what they're there to do. And so, you know, in Toronto is just a chance to just take everybody and sit them down, whiteboard something, just talk to them so that they could feel a sense of what was happening.

It's one thing to hear it on a Zoom or see it in slides, but it's another to just be in the room and feel that connection.

>> Super excited. Thank you guys.

>> Okay, so what's the plan today?

We're going to go and get a little readout of the pre-nuvo scan. Um, and hopefully everything is, you know, relatively straightforward there.

These health tests may seem a bit like overkill, but I feel strongly that people need to advocate for their health and ask a lot of questions.

>> What we know is that you lose about 3% of your brain volume every decade on average.

>> Is that right?

>> Yeah. And so the question is, how do you compare?

>> Honestly, my stomach fell a little bit when Andrew mentioned brain volume loss because I knew the FDA label on statins warns about memory loss.

>> All right, Sean, over to you.

Tell me the good news or the bad news.

So, um, this is the enhanced scan now.

And so, what what we're looking at here is just blood flow throughout all the, uh, higher functioning brain tissue.

And this is all very symmetric and normal.

>> Um, >> well, I think what Dr. London is saying is you're on a normal curve here.

>> Suck it, people. All the all the haters out there.

>> Nothing worrisome, no change when it comes to my brain. I'm really relieved.

But something that did confound me is that I have some muscle loss, which is concerning.

This is the main thing I wanted you to to focus on and to highlight was the muscle the muscle mass because we know how important maintaining muscle mass is particularly for you know brain health too over time and it's harder to maintain as we get older.

>> Plus the internet internet thinks that I don't work out that I should be doing more leg day. So this is going to really feed the whole conspiracy.

>> I mean take everything with a grain of salt too.

You know like >> they're going to love it.

>> I mean it it's not like a a terribly concerning decrease.

Yeah, >> it was just it was just more notable than the than the other uh fluctuations.

>> But the trolls are going to love it.

Like I told you, you don't work out your legs.

>> It's not true, guys. I'm just tall.

I mean, every time I come, it just gets a You're doing a better and better job building this thing. It's so great.

I love being a guinea pig for stuff like this.

>> Yeah.

>> And it's been really valuable for me.

The next like 10, 11, 12 years.

I really want to make sure I pack as much muscle as possible.

>> Insulate myself going into my 60s and 70s.

Seems like the right goal.

Thank you.

>> Thank you very much.

Thanks for visiting.

>> Great to see you.

>> Yeah.

>> Now it's time to check back in with Dr. Carlsburg and face the music on my heart.

>> Welcome back.

>> Thank you. Good to see you.

>> Uh you had a really busy day yesterday, didn't you?

>> Busy day, >> but a good day.

>> What I'm going to do now is present something that's quite astonishing.

You have a zero calcium score and you still have a zero calcium score.

>> Let's get out of here.

Not so fast.

>> We see that over the 10 years you had a 370% increase in that material, which means that you are on a pathway to atheroscerosis, but you're one of the few peoples on the planet that have this kind of information >> and you're going to take advantage of it.

And so what we're looking at here was a percent change that went from total plaque volume fell from 24% a year to 10% a year, which is consistent with what we found in much bigger studies.

Now, given the first level of tears, which is listen to your audience and come off the drugs because they're dangerous, or stay on the drugs, the first level of decision on your part based on what you heard is going to be what?

>> Obviously, we're going to stay on the drug.

So, >> okay, that's your decision.

>> Yeah.

>> Okay.

>> I think what I'm hearing from you is >> we started this statin a decade ago.

It seems to have had a pretty meaningful impact.

we >> in all of these other things that we never would have known to look for had this stuff not existed.

>> Exactly.

>> So, what I'm learning from you actually is a big deal. You've done some good stuff and that was actually pretty preventative and good, but there's now an even better leading edge for you because you're fighting against a genetic trend that will eventually catch up with you.

>> It that's a secret. That's fantastic.

I want to know the secret. I want to know the answer.

Now, >> there are no standard treatments for you.

I think that you could choose to wait.

Your calcium score is zero.

Your outcome is going to be fine for the next 5, 10 years. Chances of you having a cardiac event are very, very close to zero.

>> No risk of a cardiac event in the next five years.

Hopefully 10.

>> Uh that's my prediction. All right.

>> You're doing a great service. Thank you.

Thank you. See you soon. Have a great summer.

>> Byebye.

You know, if there's one thing I've learned through this process, it's that there's no finish line.

Honestly, optimal health isn't a destination.

It's a journey. But at the end of the day, we all face the same choice. Do we wait until something breaks or do we start listening now?

Starting the health journey can be scary. But in my opinion, I think it's worth it because living well is the best return there is.

>> Well, we're home. It's been a long week.

I hope you enjoy following me around, but now it's time to get the out of here.