The Stem Cell Scandal That Put An Famous Doctor In Hospital | Scott Carney

0:00Dr Karan: Today's guest has unearthed a huge scam involving dodgy hucksters selling stem cells from dodgy clinics. And it's just one of the many grifts he's exposed. So how can you avoid falling for scams like this too? Mark Hyman got sepsis. Justin Baldoni was hospitalized. Kim Kardashian got fake stem cells. If he's going to do those to celebrities with platforms who can ruin him, then what's he doing to the ordinary patient who comes in? I'm Dr. Karan, and in this podcast, I speak to the world's foremost experts in science and medicine to cut through the BS of modern health advice. Thanks, as always, to Throne Science for sponsoring the show, the world's first hands-free continuous gut health tracking device that can measure your hydration scores and prostate health with every flush.

0:43Dr Karan: And also thanks to Loam Science, the world's first invisible fiber blend with 10 grams of fiber per serving even has its own clinical trials. Scott Carney, welcome back to the podcast. You are the master of unmasking and exposing a lot of these grifters. And the word grifter, unfortunately, I think we're seeing it used a lot more these days. And unfortunately, I think that's because there are more people doing more questionable things online. Something you spoke about recently is investigating the world of stem cell clinics and regenerative medicine, the longevity space, which lends itself quite nicely to grifting.

1:22Dr Karan: What did you exactly uncover there? Grifting is not just fraud or a scam or something like that. It is the monetization of lying. And it's different from a crime. So I used to investigate organ crimes where people would like literally buy and sell organs, sometimes stealing those organs. And that's really bad, right? When you do that, that's not grifting. That is just like, that's just a crime. And with, you just said that, that we're in this like sort of golden age of grifting, which is absolutely right. We have, we have found a way to monetize lying, you know, on such a huge scale across the internet with the sort of advent of social media on that.

1:58It really is sort of like what the tenor of the world is that we live in like right now, but it's different than like just straight capitalism too. Some people think that like, Hey, you're, you're online and you're selling something and that is grifting. It's not. Capitalism has its problems, but it's not grifting. What it is, is just the way that people make money in the world. Grifting very specifically has to do with lying. So you lie and your lie makes you money, which is why the stem cell world is so ripe with it. And I did this, I think it was like a three or four month investigation into a sketchy stem cell clinic in Mexico called Eterna Health, where I had learned that this really famous grifter named Mark Hyman, who's a medical grifter, he's sort of the founder of functional medicine.

2:49And while he does have some good ideas, mostly what he does is monetize these sort of like protocols that have no basis in actual science and sells lots of supplements. So like one of the biggest medical grifters out there had disappeared for six months, had just sort of gone like totally MIA. And there was this rumor mill that he had went to this sketchy stem cell clinic in Mexico and had gotten some sort of concoction and had almost died of sepsis. And I thought that was an amazing story. And I wanted to find out like, you know, what did he take? Who was the guy who did this? And then I'd spent like a really long time tracking down one specific clinic.

3:29And what I found was that it blew up into not just Mark Hyman almost getting sick, but also like Justin Baldoni, who's like a really big, famous, you know, heartthrob movie star. I saw them. They gave fake stem cells to the Kardashians, to like a whole bunch of celebrities that I can't mention because we're under a confidentiality with them. But like it became this huge expose into this, you know, sketchy stem cell clinic to the stars and a doctor named Adil Khan.

3:59Dr Karan: The problem is, I guess, when we're looking at the spectrum of grifters and, you know, by cheating, lying or falsifying things, there are grifters for supplements where, you know, typically on Amazon, there's lots of supplements which are just fake. They don't actually have the ingredients, the active ingredients they claim to. And then people buy them and then they get basically placebo pills with nothing, which sometimes may cause harm if it's something bad cut up in them, but it may be nothing and it just, it's a waste of money. But then the other extreme end, you're saying when there's actually pharmaceutical grade medication that people are injecting into their bloodstream and that contains potentially contaminants, as you mentioned, you know, famous doctor who almost got sepsis or got sepsis.

4:48Dr Karan: What is being done in terms of safeguards and authorities, compliance, mandatory testing, certifications needed to run this? Is it purely because of the geography where it is in Mexico, you can flout these rules? Karin, you must be from a country that has sort of like rational medical oversight. I mean, you must be from England. Am I right? Correct. Oh, yes. No. So from over in Mexico, first of all, America. So a lot of these patients are American. And we have under RFK Jr. and the MAHA, the Make America Healthy Again sort of paradigm, we are gutting medical regulations and evidence-based medicine in favor of sort of vibe treatments often promoted primarily through social media.

5:33And so there is this desire for the next great thing. Like what is going to be that, that thing that's going to fix all of your problems right now with a shot, with a pill, with whatever. And the problem is evidence-based medicine isn't fast enough to create those miracle cures. Like we don't have like an antibiotic for something as effective as antibiotics for bacteria for say cancer, right. Or for, you know, AIDS or for, you know, your back pain. But there are a lot of like sort of interesting, promising science and studies about fringe treatments, you know, whether we're talking about peptides or stem cells or like some NMN plus or like all of these like sort of like, hey, maybe that's going to be the next thing.

6:13And so then people say that the marketing is good enough, that that is now the science. And can we go find one of these experimental treatments and sort of YOLO our way into perfect health? It's not a good plan, but it is the plan that America seems to be embracing. So stem cells are, it's a broad category of things. There is some science to it. Stem cells, there are some really good, there's some good, there are some plausibly evidence-based stem cell therapies that might work in certain circumstances. But there's also a lot of like vibe around there that maybe there's like certain types of stem cells, like Dezawa muse cells, if you've ever heard of that.

6:56Now, Dezawa is like a scientist in Japan. Muse cells are sort of a stem cell, a type of stem cell that she discovered that looks promising in the clinical literature. And then, you know, from that base, and there are some small studies that say, hey, maybe this is good, right? But from that small base, now people are all over the world are saying like previous types of stem cells maybe weren't great, but this one is great. And they're all going to the people who say that they can provide it. And the main provider for a long time, at least sort of as far as the internet went, right, as far as people watching on the internet was this guy named Adil Khan in Mexico.

7:31And he was selling, you know, he may have had some affiliations early with the business in the company and sold them, you know, mostly to celebrities for about like$100 ,000 a shot. And the idea was it would fix anything. Like, you know, the idea with the stem cells, you inject these cells into your body and then the stem cells like look around and look for the problem. Bad back will fix the bad back and will become the broken back, will become the healed back cells for your broken back area or maybe your heart or maybe your brain or maybe I don't care where it goes. Like these things are pluripotent.

8:05They're going to do great things for you. And so people went down there in mass to try to get these stem cells. And a couple of things happened. One, the science is not totally there on the Dazawa stem cells. Like it's promising. Maybe in the future, it's going to be great, but maybe it's just a fad. We really don't know because we haven't had large clinical trials. Second, the demand for Dazawa stem cells was so much more than you could actually produce in the factories that what Adil Khan did was he just started like giving people other types of cells or fake treatments entirely or sham treatments.

8:37And those, so they didn't even get what they thought they were getting. And then third, the third thing that he did was he didn't have a clean lab. And sometimes he was just, we assume, using like tap water in his injections because you need a medium to shoot the stem cells through. And people were like Mark Hyman got sick from a common bacteria in Mexico called, I think it's called Ralstonia, where that developed into sepsis in his back and he almost died. So we have like shady science, like not full science. And then we have the marketing gift and then grift. And then we have on top of that, the almost deadly concoction that he was giving.

9:14And that seems to be not totally an unusual situation for Americans going to Mexico.

9:19Dr Karan: Yeah, I think the phrase longevity doctor comes with it a lot of caveats because there's no such thing as a longevity doctor. You know, you're either a cardiologist, an endocrinologist, you're a specialist in one area and then you might be interested in preventative health. I mean, preventative health is like the main umbrella term for looking at lifestyle factors which could improve your health and improve health span and lifespan. And I worry this world of longevity is breeding people who, you know, are maybe chiropractors and naturopaths and increasingly actual board certified doctors, any doctors with accreditation to then go into this world because it's so appealing.

10:03Dr Karan: And what's even worse is that, as you mentioned before, a lot of these therapies are very promising in many cases, and they have ex vivo or petri dish studies, which is a good starting point. But that starting point is likely several years away from looking promising in human studies. And, you know, there is a whole valley of dead promising studies which have died after the petri dish study and never made it to human studies. I mean, I think that's most promising studies, right? And it also baffles me how the tried and tested things like more fiber and, you know, vaccines and going to screenings, that doesn't obviously get the same clout that these treatments do.

10:47Dr Karan: Are any of these longevity therapies associated with some of these clinics that you've mentioned, do they do anything beyond just promising? I mean, you're raising a whole rat's nest of issues, right? And, you know, you, one question that I think that the world is struggling with, or at least America is struggling with, but probably the rest of the world is like trying to struggle with what America is struggling with is like, what is health anyway? Like when, when we think about what a, what a doctor treats, right? You said that all doctors are essentially longevity doctors because they're, you know, trying to do things that make you live longer.

11:20Right. But when you look at like what a symptom is, when you look about at the, at the things that afflict people, you know, you might have some good nutritional guidelines for things, some general ideas, but in general, you're trying to treat a disease. You're trying to treat an ailment that someone has that causes something called symptoms generally. And those symptoms can be then ameliorated by hopefully evidence-based medicine. That's like the paradigm. This is what the wellness people call the disease paradigm, right? And then the longevity world, the functional medicine world says like, no, no, but what if we did something better?

11:53What if we actually fixed health. Like what if we, instead of just fixing the problems, we, we added to this metric called health. And the problem is with this, and it sounds great, right? It sounds great. I want health too. I want you to give me a pill that gives me 25 health points, like in a D &D game. And so that I just get healthier. What's wrong with that? Well, the problem philosophically is we don't know what the hell it is, right? We don't have, there is not like this, this elixir, that this ambrosia you get, that this is your health and you increase your health potions. and then you're just better all around because life actually has a lot more factors and it's too simplistic a notion.

12:30So then they create ideas and they sort of like throw, they spit ball at the wall of what health is. And I think that that's like, I mean, this is a really difficult question to wrap your head around. And I think that most people don't even fundamentally understand that idea. They also don't understand trade-offs with evidence-based medicine. Like if you take a treatment, a lot of treatments have side effects and bad things that can happen with it. You know, if you get a surgery, for instance, you're gonna have to cut the human. You're gonna have to wound a human to get the surgery and that's going to hurt.

12:59You know, that's gonna cause some other downstream problems and people don't want the downsides. It was also the same with vaccines, right? When we get our COVID vaccine, it's pretty common to have some minor side effects with it, right, you know, maybe someone died from the COVID vaccine. I mean, there's probably some number of people who died, but you're making this public health evidence-based things on statistics being like, it's better than this other thing. People don't want trade-offs. We want miracle pills. And so what happens in this longevity space is they're looking for things that are miracle pills and they will sell you on a miracle pill.

13:31And usually people will have gone to doctors first anyway, right? And the doctor, you'll have a vague symptom or sometimes maybe even like an acute symptom. Maybe you have back pain. Back pain is really notoriously difficult to treat. And it's also true that if you don't treat back pain, a lot of back pain will spontaneously resolve itself anyway because of the natural healing course of the body. And now then these grifters come in and they take advantage of these natural processes and the lacuna in our understanding and our desires of medicine. And then they sell you a thing that will possibly plausibly make you better.

14:08And the really bad part about the longevity medicine thing is that you don't have an ethical, you know, reporting requirement to report negative side effects, right? Like doctors in America, you know, you got to be like, well, we killed two patients because this, you know, rat poison we gave them didn't work out. Like that's going to be like a pretty standard thing. Like our treatment didn't work because we have to worry about evidence. In the longevity space, they're like, well, we don't actually have evidence, nor do we collect it in any sort of rigorous way. So we don't know if anyone got hurt.

14:36But I promise you this next shot I give you will work out. So you have this sort of double standard that makes them more profitable and a regulatory space now under Maha, which valorizes and enables poorly documented treatments over evidence-based treatments because, again, we don't want to report bad side effects.

14:59Dr Karan: I want to talk about something that's quite postural to me and about some medical conditions that I suffered from. I used to have high cholesterol and fatty liver disease, and that primarily stemmed from a severe lack of fiber in my diet. And on my quest for finding the perfect fiber supplement over the last few years that could help me add more fiber into my diet, I couldn't find one that ticked all the boxes that I wanted and the high bar that I set for myself. So I built Loam Science. What I'm most proud of is not the product. I know that's great, but it's the fact that we've run two clinical trials on it, two randomized controlled trials, which is far more than the vast majority of supplements on the market will ever do.

15:34Dr Karan: And we've got even more coming because I'm a doctor first and foremost and a scientist. And I wanted to build something that I could actually stand behind with data and not just rely on good branding. So if you want to understand what's inside Loam Science and why, the science is all on the website and the link is in the show notes. I can see a lot of similarities between this dodgy stem cell clinic in Mexico and the career and actions of Walter Freeman, the original lobotomist back in the day who just had this newfangled treatment, the lobotomy, putting a needle into someone's brain and curing them of mental health ailments and then leaving them in a vegetative state or, you know, at best, you know, slightly paralyzed, you know, if you can even say at best.

16:19Dr Karan: given that the complication rate of what Walter Freeman, you know, almost several decades ago was doing, you know, left essentially one in three or one in two patients crippled, uh, irreversibly that obviously, you know, leaves its own trail and would, you know, form its own review. What was like the burden of side effects like at this clinic? Cause you know, you mentioned a few examples there, were they just notorious examples or was this like a pattern where there was pretty much every other patient was getting complications and it just didn't come to the surface because they weren't celebrities?

16:55Yeah. Well, you know, you raise a really important part with the lobotomies, right? This was still an evidence-based treatment because they collected evidence about it. You just gave statistics. One in three people had permanent problems about it because we did. I mean, even though it was horribly unethical and they went beyond their remit. This was a doctor reporting their evidence and collecting side effects. Now, the problem with these longevity clinics is they don't have any reporting requirements. They don't actually have to do anything so you know what is going wrong. So when I, as an investigative journalist, go in there, I can't be like, let's talk to the Mexican health authorities and see his audit for all the people who almost died.

17:35No, that doesn't work. The way I work is I basically try to get leaks from within the clinic, from people who worked with him, who talk about things. I don't get like a trove of evidence where I can give you statistics. What I can say is if Mark Hyman, which got sepsis, Justin Baldoni was hospitalized, Kim Kardashian got fake stem cells, which I can prove because he honestly, a lot of it is social media. He posted social media that he was doing bad things. If he's going to do those to celebrities with platforms who can ruin him and almost in Hyman's case, almost killed him, then what's he doing to the ordinary patient who comes in?

18:14He doesn't have like a, he's not exhibiting a duty of care, right? And other things that I heard, and again, this is, would be, I'd have to say this is anecdotal because again, this is things that I heard from multiple sources within his clinic. He actually gave brain shots of stem cells. And I think it might've been through the ocular socket, just like our lobotomy guy, right? To between seven and 10 patients with severe brain problems. I think we had some Parkinson's patients in there and several of them had like seizures and serious complications. I don't know about deaths, but again, these aren't reported.

18:50And so you have this sort of litany of problems and because people don't report these things, these aren't sort of public record. It is probably so much worse than what I, Scott Carney, the investigative journalist based in Denver, emailing lots of people can find out.

19:06Dr Karan: You mentioned there that obviously there are these very famous examples of certain celebrities who can potentially ruin and deplatform someone. And we've seen that online. We're in the age right now where millionaires and stars are made and destroyed overnight, whether it's a good review or a bad review. Whether you're like a food truck serving amazing food or a shitty influencer that's done something, you can get cancelled and made into a star overnight. Right. So in this example where so many celebrities have been compromised to an extent where they've become close to death or hospitalized, why haven't they ruined him?

19:43Dr Karan: I mean, some of the examples you mentioned, you know, he's a famous doctor, Mark Hyman. Why hasn't something been done in terms of retribution? Yeah, I don't know, Karin. I'm really actually confused by this as well because I was almost killed by a doctor. I would be right on, I would be like, you know, disclosing this immediately. That would be my thing. And it's really surprising to me that someone like Mark Hyman is the worst is, is I think the worst of it, not only because he almost died because before he, he got these shots, he was doing podcasts with a deal con saying, you know, saying, Hey, you're going to give me a shot in a few days.

20:20And like talking about all the great treatments and, and you know, how these stem cells are going to do all these magical things. And then like the next day, then he got a shot in Mexico or like, you know, soon afterwards, he got a shot in Mexico that almost killed him. All he did to respond to that was take that episode down off his website, which I did. I was able to get myself off his, you know, through archives and things like that. But, you know, and he never, to my knowledge, released a statement being like, hey, guys, I gave you advice from a doctor who almost killed me. Maybe you shouldn't do that.

20:51And I think it actually has to do with the complicity of when you are a grifter, when you're in this grifter thing, you don't want to ever retract a statement. You never want to make a correction because once you start admitting that you've made mistakes, people are like, well, have you made other mistakes? And maybe does that undermine your whole platform? And the trend that I see in the griftoverse writ large, so we're not only talking about wellness influencers, but they almost never issue genuine corrections, right? They almost never go and put under their videos, oh, actually, the science on my monkey testosterone light enema that I was suggesting actually didn't bear out.

21:29In fact, three monkeys died because of the enema that I gave them. You never, ever see that in these wellness grifters' face. Or maybe sometimes you might see a disingenuous one where they'll put a correction for something that didn't matter. And I think this is partially because you build up an image of always being the next smartest person. And if you're a substandard health guru, people are going to go to the guru who will present an impermeable face. And as an investigative journalist, I am very proud to issue corrections when they come up or issue data that doesn't bear out to what I thought the data should be.

22:08I think it's very important to publish that null set, to publish the results that don't work because otherwise you're just a liar because no one's right all the time. We all make mistakes. Even the best of us make mistakes. If you're not able to live up to that, it's a problem. And so this is a long way of saying these people who got sick, I think they are professional grifters through and through. Like I think their whole thing is to lie constantly and always move forward to the detriment of their audiences and the people who are doctors and present themselves as legitimate health authorities, you know, they should be actually censored by the community.

22:46There should be people out there being like, look, Dr. Mark Hyman, this was a really bad thing. And you are, you were complicit with the person who almost killed you. And that is actually worse. He should be like disbarred from doctoring anymore because that whole do no harm thing that there's a Hippocrates oath. And I, you know, and there's some things in the Hippocrates Oath, which are weird, like you have to go teach your son how to become a better doctor. There's some weird stuff in that. But the first one is first do no harm. And I think these people do great harm. And I think with people like Kim Kardashian and Justin Baldoni and those people, it's like, well, why are you following their health advice anyway?

23:22Like just because Kim Kardashian takes it like, oh, she is not a doctor and she's just sort of taken by the hype as much as anyone else. But with the doctors, I have a real ethical problem with them.

23:33Dr Karan: Yeah, I think the problem with a lot of these medical influencers online and health influencers who are not doctors doing all of these fancy things, building a large audience, inevitably people who follow them will see them as more than just the content and as more than just an experiment and see it as something that they should try themselves. And I think, you know, a prime example of something like that is Brian Johnson. You know, he claims to be the most healthiest human on the planet, recently diagnosed with autoimmune gastritis. And for me, what was striking about that was not the fact that he was diagnosed with it because it is a relatively rare diagnosis as things go, not completely uncommon, but it is on the rarer side of things.

24:13Dr Karan: But just a simple fact that for someone who spend millions of dollars a year, has a concierge team of doctors 24-7 does tracking every single thing, full body MRIs, doesn't track or do the things which would move the needle. Like you're measuring a lot of things, but maybe not measuring the right things and you're optimizing for the wrong things. Like I believe he's 48 years old in the US, men 45 and over. Well, people 45 and over should have a colonoscopy for bowel cancer screening. He didn't have a colonoscopy at the age of 45. And you thought he would have, you know, if he's trying to biohack and track everything.

24:50Dr Karan: And if he potentially had a colonoscopy earlier, would he then have had that cleared for a cause of his iron deficiency anemia, which is driving his autoimmune gastritis, and then had a upper GI endoscopy and then had biopsies? Then would it have been found sooner? And I just, you know, he ultimately got this autoimmune gastritis diagnosis with a couple of very basic things, an endoscopy and a blood test, you know, a ferritin blood tests, which is not sexy. It's cheap. And, you know, it's a pretty basic thing to do, but he does all of these weird biomarkers, which didn't do anything. So, you know, it's funny how we optimize for the wrong things.

25:27Dr Karan: And in the case of this, there are so many things that most people don't do. Most people don't do all the easy things, which we've known about for decades, which the World Health Organization have been bleating on about for decades and decades. Most of us, you know, even the best of us don't do it every single day, but yet the allure and appeal of something sexy, which can change your life in an instant is unfortunate. And I guess to your point, some of these celebrities actually endorsing and allowing these clinics to gain credibility and these edge case novel therapies to gain traction is the real problem.

26:03I mean, you're right. It's such a rat's nest of problems. Like I think Brian Johnson, There's an iteration of Brian Johnson that I, as an American who lives in freedom and liberty and all the things that I can wave a flag about. Right. Like like I think that people should have a right to do things to their bodies. Right. I think that you should be able to test on yourself with, you know, within ethical boundaries, like within like, you know, you can't you shouldn't be able to like actively do things that hurt you. But like, I think that if you want to go above and beyond and try some experimental things, I think that's OK.

26:40As long as you're aware of what the risks are, I think you need to have informed consent on what your risks are. And I think that in an ideal world, a person like Brian Johnson could actually be sort of admirable because he's sort of the astronaut going out on the ledge to be like, I'm going to just do it and I might die doing this. And you all need to know that I might die doing this and I'm going to do it and we can be along for the journey. The problem really becomes in when he starts becoming an influencer saying that you need to do this too. And he's got that powder that he sells and an oil literally called snake oil that he sells where he's then monetizing this astronaut thing, which is really what the – that's where the grift comes in.

27:18Because, you know, part of it, I really sort of do admire some of the things, some of the general approach of the astronaut theory, because that's you do find out things by taking risks. But it's the secondary order of things that actually really get concerning. And also the idea, and I think this is what you were pointing at legitimately, is that that it becomes a substitute for health. Right. Like like the guy, you know, you know, reaching for the moon is actually what. healthy is. And it is not that. And it is the standard test. It is like the annual physical you get from a doctor is actually a really high-tech intervention with centuries of data behind it.

28:03And you catch so much more on that boring physical, even the crappy boring physical that you get in America that's like 15 minutes, that's compounded by all the paperwork and all the horror of the American medical system. Even that is actually really high-tech, has so much weight of evidence behind it, that we almost view it as normal. And that like, so therefore normal can't be good. And this is like a problem in the world right now in general. We don't want normal. We want the next thing, but we can't get to the next thing until we have evidence. And I really worry about the world we live in where YOLOing is, and just like just jumping for a future that we hope is there, that is going to be the way things happen.

28:47And, you know, it's, it's, there's similar conversations happening in artificial intelligence and, you know, with sort of the rampant movement of, of just sort of like hope in the world. And we need less hope and we need more like, let's just like be a little rational about things, guys.

29:02Dr Karan: Quick one before we continue. And something I've been genuinely nerding out on in my chief of science role at Throne Science is poop and pee. You see, most of us are completely blind to what's happening in our guts and urinary health day to day. We often wait until something is wrong, but your body's actually constantly churning out data in your urine, in your bowel habits, in those patterns that most people never track. I'm proud to say that at Throne Science, we're building technology that captures exactly that. Passive, consistent biomarker monitoring of your gut health, your hydration status, your prostate health markers, without you even having to think about it.

29:37Dr Karan: From a clinical standpoint, the shift from reactive to continuous monitoring is really important because that is where the early signal detection happens and that's when you can change your habits and hopefully outcomes as well. I've been deeply involved from the science side because I think the research here is serious and with rising rates of colon cancer, poop talk is no laughing matter. So if you're curious about what that data could tell you, the links in the show notes. You know, what struck me in your reporting is that often on both sides of the coin, the people involved, both the victim and the person doing the grift, are often seemingly intelligent, wealthy people from the kind of upper reaches of society.

30:16Dr Karan: So in your case, the Kardashians, a very wealthy family, were at the receiving end of dodgy treatments. And the person doing them also, a doctor, supposedly a celebrity doctor, also clearly wealthy and intelligent as well. You can't be a complete dumbass to be a doctor. I mean, you have to at least do something to get there initially. So, you know, why are rich people, smart people trying to grift to make more money? And also why are smart, rich people so easily manipulated? Is that just par for the course because they want more? Yeah. Yeah, I think it really is. And there's this whole, there's this whole well-known syndrome called VIP syndrome, where people who are VIPs see constantly more and more treatments from doctors, which actually ends to worse outcomes.

31:08And you can look at this up in the literature, wealthy people, especially people who are on sort of the cutting edge and have more ego behind them, often get worse health outcomes overall. The prime case is, of course, Steve Jobs, jobs, right? Where, you know, he had a type of cancer that was, you know, it sucked to treat, right? The treatment for pancreatic cancer is not great. You're going to be on a sort of a lifetime of drugs afterwards. But he was like, no, I can outsmart it. And he did various other health protocols. I think he was on a very restrictive diet and things. And then because he delayed treatment, he died.

31:41That's sort of the star example of VIP treatment. But it happens really right across the board. And I think that, and I actually know a tremendous number of wealthy people because of sort of the circles I have circulated in the past. And I've been on like vacations where there were like eight billionaires on my vacations, right? And all of them are into Brian Johnson. All of them are into like all of the influencers because they want to be, think of themselves as smarter than the average, right? A lot of them have very big egos, right? And they also have unlimited resources. And they're like, I want as much time as I can get on this earth.

32:17And I want to be as healthy as long as possible, which are reasonable things to want. But then they think that my money can solve intractable intellectual problems. And it just can't, right? You actually need to, like, look at the history of, you know, do you think the Egyptians who built those pyramids lacked wealth, right? Or the Chinese emperors who spent huge quests and like the treasure of their nations searching for like infinite or immortality and longevity. Like we have a history of rich people wanting to stay rich for the rest of time. And in wonderfully, historically, it hasn't worked out.

32:55Right. Historically, we're not there. But if you look at the, this is what the real longevity grift is, is that you try to sell rich people on the idea that they can live forever. And maybe with medical science where we are now, there are some things that do look pretty good. Like there are people who are living longer, right? The average life expectancy has increased by like 40 years over the course of the last 200 years. That's a big deal. We all have gotten the benefits. But they're selling the billionaires now on the idea that maybe you can make it to 130 right now with our treatments and interventions.

33:31And I don't know, maybe some of them will work. I mean, we haven't borne out the evidence. Like YOLO, maybe it will work. But the critical part is that we actually haven't done the studies. Because to find out if you're going to live to 130, you need a population of people who did an intervention and then live to 130, right? And they don't want to wait that long for that evidence. treatments and my guess is that they're not going to make it and that they're actually a lot of them are going to get VIP syndrome. A lot of them are going to actually have some pretty bad outcomes because they, you know, when you start piling on experimental treatments, every one of those experimental treatments is an additional risk and that's not what they're thinking about.

34:09And my guess is that a lot of them will have complications over time that we can't anticipate. And then of course, there's going to be one or two who actually YOLO'd it just right. And they will live a lot longer than you might expect because wealth is also known to be a good way to live longer because you've controlled your environment and you've made like everything else easy about you that you're, you know, you live longer.

34:33Dr Karan: Yeah. I wonder if it's too much of a good thing, similar to how if you plotted, you know, if you looked at, you know, the amount of exercise someone does, if you don't do any exercise, your mortality is going to be the highest. As you do more exercise, your mortality continues to drop and then it picks up again as you over exercise so you know if we look at some of the data of people who are chronically over exercising and by over exercising that's a small percentage of the population who are maybe professional athletes or who are you know extreme iron man in the desert you know multiple times a month you know beyond what the body can do.

35:11Dr Karan: And that also comes with its own health risks, you know, rhabdomyolysis and thickening of the heart. So I wonder whether there's a U-shaped curve similar with wealth as well, where, you know, clearly if you're at the bottom of society, the bottom of the socioeconomic status, where you are maybe below the poverty line, your mortality is going to be the highest. It drops as you get more money to a point. And then maybe the mortality goes up again And to your point, as you have billions and trillions potentially, and you just don't know what to do with it, and you're seeking for something basically off the menu.

35:47Dr Karan: And when you pick something off the menu, there's a chance that whilst a one in a million chance it does make you live longer, it's probably got a significant chance of injuring you in the short term. So it actually worsens your outcomes. I think Brian Johnson is an example of this where, you know, in the peak of the rapamycin longevity drug craze, he was taking rapamycin as an N equals one and realized that was actually harming him. And clearly that's not something the healthiest man in the world would do. So I wonder whether there's a similar thing there where it's just like, you know, the poisons in the dose and the dose in this case could be money.

36:25Rapamycin is an interesting case because, you know, like six, seven years ago, all the biohackers were like, this is awesome. Look at the mice who live longer. And then we, you know, we've only had a couple studies. You know, these were basically function claims. You looked at some lab rats. You looked at the chemical mechanisms behind it. You're like, oh, this might increase health span, lifespan. And then they actually did a study, you know, another YouTuber, Brad Stanfield and Matt Cable line did a study on rapamycin. They found that actually the, there's some pretty serious muscle loss associated with it.

37:00And that muscle loss, they correlated that they correlated loss of muscle with not being great on longevity because they had to, had to have an end point because they, they didn't want to study this for 70 years to know for sure. So they said, if you get weaker, as you get older, you have less muscle, then that's probably not going to correlate with a longer lifespan, but we don't really know. And, and what you're saying is essentially we are running a natural experiment right now on billionaires, right? And rich people where in 30 years, we're going to see how this relatively small group of ultra rich people, how they fare.

37:35And we're not going to be able to control the variables, unfortunately, because they all have like wildly different health protocols, but we are going to see something in 50 years. And I don't know where it's going to go. Like when I look at Elon Musk, for instance, the richest guy on the planet, he doesn't look particularly healthy to me, right? I know he's got some hair plugs, so his hair came back, but like he doesn't, and I'm not a doctor, like I don't want to judge the guy necessarily just in the fact that he's overweight, but you know, we do have GLP-1s, which do seem like they're pretty effective.

38:03And I don't know if he's necessarily thinking in that direction. But on the other hand, we also have Larry Ellison, who's like, I mean, how old is Larry Ellison? He might be 700 years old because he looks like he's been waxed and like preserved in some sort of cryogenic something. There's something about, him that maybe we're going to see that he did figure it out or he's going to die next week. I don't know how it's going to go. I mean, and honestly, when we speculate about how this will turn out, we're actually playing the same game as the longevity influencers, because we're also acting without evidence.

38:33We are also saying that we presume a health outcome will be X when we really don't know. And I think that we need to just be a little bit more humble with what we do know. And to go back to the normal things that we know that we should be doing, we should be getting our shingles vaccine because that's like a 20 % reduction in dementia. We should be getting our HPV vaccines because that's a lowering of cervical cancer. We should be getting basically all of our vaccines. I mean, there's probably some that aren't great, but like, you know, we should be doing the things in the boring public health world that we've seen that over broad populations have like substantial effects on human health.

39:11And we should be doubling down on that. What we're doing in America and actually also the UK, I'm sorry to say, right? We're heading towards this privatized world where we're getting rid of public health for concierge health. And that will definitely, instead of the N of one, in the N of population level studies, we will, we know the evidence shows that we will be getting less healthy.

39:34Dr Karan: Yeah, I think the longevity enthusiasts, when they take it too far, they're probably guilty of, you know, something called reverse survivorship bias, where they are constantly looking at the outliers and they're cherry picking the data which suits them. You know, instead of the typical survivorship bias where you're saying, my grandfather drank and smoked till he was 90 and never had lung cancer and liver problems. And this side is saying, hey, these mice did this and they lived longer than mice who didn't. So we must all be doing this. And I think there is, you know, probably some significant nuance lack there.

40:13Dr Karan: I guess when people are so bombarded these days on social media with all of these wild claims and supplements and products, what can someone do to buffer themselves against some of these grifty claims? Oh, really, super simple. Delete Instagram off your phone and you're going to be 25 % healthier. Buy my discount code for my deletion app. Like, seriously, get off. Don't get your health advice from social media. it's so primed for grifters, right? It's so primed for the monetization of lying because of this lacuna in evidence, which is what we've been perseverating on for this conversation. But, you know, when we move beyond the lack of evidence, we have to look at that business model.

40:56We have to look at the way social media works and financially supports certain types of creators who shill bad healthcare things. Okay. So for instance, I just did a video on peptides. Let me show you. I got these peptides from a company on the internet who approached me. They're like, Scott, we want you to sponsor these peptides. And I was like, I'm not going to be your peptide shiller. But I went through their sponsorship process and I tested them at a lab. And I was like, these guys are liars and grifters. And I caught them on all sorts of lies that they were just lying through their teeth about everything, where they were manufactured, what they were doing.

41:37And then I took this stuff and I took it to a mass spectrometry lab and I tested it. And I was like, and I'm going to show that they've got like horrible peptides that are killing people. And the fact is, no, actually they were, they seemed fine. The mass spec came back and I was like, no, it's like 98 % pure. And I was like, and which pissed me off because I wanted to be like, the grifters are trying to kill you right across the board. And it enters into this weird world where they would probably happily give you substandard peptides. But then there's a Chinese pharmaceutical producers who are like, no, we want to mass produce better quality peptides because we want to have our broad base of customers to keep on buying these things.

42:16So there's like layers of grift going on all based on the lacuna that BP-157 does something for you. And I don't know if BPC-157 does something for you. There are some directional studies that say it might. And here's the thing that's really crazy. So I put this on YouTube, right, this video. And then I was like, I make money through sponsorships, probably like you, and also through YouTube ads. And on YouTube ads, I think I've made at this point probably$2 ,000 on YouTube ads. I think it may be somewhere around$2 ,000. But I put the promo code for this in there. I was like, don't do this. But I know that because I've talked about this company, you're going to go buy someone, some idiot out there is going to go buy these peptides.

43:00And I do not endorse this. and I still do not, actively do not endorse this. I think you should not do it. But I did put the promo code because I was like, oh, let's just, you know, if you're going to do it, like I'm going to give this money to a charity. And I gave it to a local charity, you know, in America. And, but man, I've already pulled in like three grand on that. And I'm baffled. And this is going to a food bank. Don't look at Scott, you're shilling these things. Like, yeah, yeah. Okay. I get, I get there's sort of like an ethical weirdness there, but like, it's not for me. I did this because I didn't want the peptide company to get the money.

43:30and this is going to a food bank. Scott Carney's not enriching himself, but it shows you how much more profitable it is to be a grifter and someone shilling this stuff than it is to be someone putting out legitimate information. And that is such a big problem that we're not talking about enough because what we do need profitability for people telling the truth. Because when we've monetize lying at the platform level, we have a societal problem. It's not just a wellness problem.

44:00Dr Karan: Yeah, I always look forward to your deep dives on grifts. And whilst I don't enjoy the fact that these exist, and I'm shocked every time I watch one of your documentaries, because whilst I'm aware at the surface level of a certain grift, like peptides or, you know, the stodgy clinics, longevity clinics, I'm continually baffled at the, you know, the layers of the onion you uncover, just because how deep it goes and who's involved. So, you know, I'm going to be waiting for your next grift. Thank you very much, Scott. All right. Well, grift expose, my friend. Grift expose. Well, okay. I appreciate you too, man.

44:42Thanks for having me on. This was a lot of fun.

44:43Dr Karan: You can watch Scott's deep dive into this subject and many more amazing grift expose videos over on his YouTube channel.