David Stewart of Super Age at 67 and 11.4% Body Fat: What Real Longevity Looks Like

"Sleep is free": the $0 longevity stack

I think when people think of legendary, they think old rich white guys, right? Spending 150,000 or more a year, right, on it. And what I'm what I'm hearing too is a lot of this is not expensive, right? This is very accessible for people.

People, they always want to ask me about the exotic stuff. And I tell them it's just like, are you sleeping? Sleep is free. Most powerful thing you can do. I had this sort of fancy woman the other day, and she was at dinner and she wants to talk to me about all of her longevity set up in her house. And she's like, I got this like fancy red light thing. I said, you know. I said, listen, like, just get up at quarter to seven, you and your dog go outside when the sun's just over the horizon and walk in nature. You went for a walk, you were nature, and you got red light.

All right, here we go. David Stewart, welcome to the future of fitness, man. Good to see you.

Great to be here. Thank you

Something is very wrong with longevity science

for having me.

We we have some really, really fascinating topics today. Uh, you know, just uh in our little chat here before recording, I'm I'm pretty fired up for this and and the things you're working on. A lot of it has just hit so close to home for me, especially as I turn 50 in like two weeks now a month. I gotta give myself a more grace. So there's a lot going on with what you're doing at Aegis, the superage games, and uh some of the longevity, I know I hate to say protocols, but like the this this this program that you're establishing to help people live longer, healthier, right? Um there's a lot to it. And longevity is such a big buzzword. And there's uh you and I are just laughing about the uh New York Times article, which was something is very wrong with modern longevity science and how so much of it. It's just bullshit, right? There's just so much bullshit. There's so many charlatans, there's so much to gain off people's longevity wants and desires. So let's start with this, David. Give us a little background. You started the Aegis about what, 10 years

From fashion photographer to AGEIST founder

ago?

Yeah, about 12 years ago. So previously that I had a very successful career at the highest levels of photography. I used to live in Paris, New York. Tons of magazine covers. I've done big time advertising, Nike, American Express, stuff like that. And then I created Aegis really as an investigation to understand why I was 55, I'm 67 now. How did I get to be 67? Jesus. I don't know, man. So back I, you know, I was in my mid-50s, and I was like, hey, all the communication aimed at me is just like whack. Like it's all this like weird, medicalized, infantilized, be scared, be very scared. And I was like, I'm not like that. I don't know anybody like that. What's what's up with that? So we wanted to understand what was wrong there, and that was the genesis of Aegist. And really the so the key finding that we had there, because we could not understand these really smart people, these big companies, why are they why is it so wrong? And so what we found was you can it, yeah, the sort of the normal quant stuff is like, yeah, like hull to somebody, like their education, a geo, that stuff. Yeah, yeah, okay, that's so somewhat important. That's not the thing. That's not the fulcrum. The thing you want to know is how does that person perceive their physicality in the future? And that is based upon how they feel about their physicality now. And if you know that, you can predict a whole cascade of consumer decisions, ambitions, all of that. So that brought me like I I once spent a year in a hospital with like this weird autoimmune thing, which is not something I recommend to anyone, but it brought me like that was sort of my first like big picture view of the medical system. But this brought me into the realm of health, wellness, science, medicine, all of that. And so we we started a podcast. I've interviewed like 400 of the leading figures there. And it it became, it became clear that like this was sort of the thing. So we started SuperAge about, we started working out about three years ago. We launched in November 2024. The idea for Super Age, even though there's the word age in there, it's what what is happening what happened over those 10 years is the the things of like deep focus for somebody who's over 50. I mean, it's mortality, right? But that sort of like focus on health and wellness went up and down the age column. Suddenly, you have 18-year-olds thinking about the same stuff that I'm thinking about. So superage was really not age-specific. It's about cutting through all the nonsense out there, like what's real, what's not. I mean, you can, and there are famous podcasters out there who will tell you about some study about six earthworms in Israel 20 years ago, and you should base a protocol on the full moon or some kind of bullshit. You will not see that in Super Age, right? It's like to get something published in Super Age, this the bar is really high. Like, there's got to be a lot of science here, and anything that's a little dodgy, we're gonna say, like, hey, this is a little dodgy. You know, be careful of this. So we started that in November 2024. Quickly, six months, we grew that to 1.2 million readers. We publish um, our publication is called the Mindset because we realized the mindset is everything. That's like the circle around all of this. You have to have an optimistic mindset, or else why are you gonna do any of this? Like, if you if you don't think the ROI on this is gonna work, like just smoke and drink yourself to death. What does it matter? So that was how we, you know, we started Super Age, really understanding, because I've been in media like my whole life. So the problem with media people is they're very confused. They think it's about the media, it is not. It's about the brand, and it's about that reader, i.e., customer that you're dealing with, establishing trust, veracity with those people, and then you can do lots of other things. So, unlike what I'd seen in the past, people will launch a product, they put it out in the world, and then it's they're like, oh, I guess we need some sort of like customer comms. We're like, no, no, no, you do that first. So so we did that. So we that's what we did. And then, but we always knew this was just a vehicle to get us to where we wanted to go. And so the first big thing we wanted to do was the Superage games. And we started working on that last September. And that is, you know, ultimately, we're in the behavior change business. And if what you're looking at is just feeding people information, that is not the same as behavior change. That's like you can, you know, you can do that all day long. It's helpful, but it's not really going to cause the needle to move. If you get, you know, we have 900, this is like sort of a go bigger, go home moment, like super age games. We have 960 athletes, we have several thousand spectators, we've rented the armory track in northern Manhattan, which costs a couple of bucks. And we've got this big, it's a big deal. That cause that causes, like to do that, that is an action. People have to do that. And not only that, people see that action. So that was very important to us. And alongside that, you know, people like you or I or some of your readers could roll out of bed tomorrow and just do it, and they'd probably do fine. But a lot of people needed a training program. So we created a program called the Super Age Standard, which is our first digital product and is, to my mind, the first scientifically backed training program that's about a longevity outcome. So there's a lot of other, you know, you can aerobic training, hypertrophy, you know, whatever. But what we realize both with the games and with this, it's like, like you and I have been around gyms for decades, right? What are we doing in there? Why are we there? We're there because we want to live healthier longer, right? Maybe there's like a target of an event we're training for, but ultimately that's really the thing we want. So that's how we focus the games, and that's how we've created the standard training protocol.

Fitness has never claimed its health role

Okay. There's there's a lot of threads to pull on there, David. Thank you for all that. Was a great summary of what you've been up to. And, you know, you and I were talking prior to recording, like we firmly believe that there is this, you know, it's it's this convergence of fitness, health, wellness, and how fundamental our industry is to health. And I don't think we've ever really, and I'm talking about the fitness industry, we've never really fully stepped up into that role, right? And I think this is a really good time for us to say, no, we're actually way more important than we've ever given ourselves value for. And that's that's important. So maybe talk to me about the superage games and and what's included, because I feel like that's a really good cohesive framework for what you believe as far as longevity.

"The number one longevity drug is fitness"

Yeah. Well, there is the number one all-star longevity drug proven over thousands of years, is guess what? Fitness. Shocking. It and ain't your supplements stack or some kind of bullshit or rapamycin, whatever the fuck that is. That stuff, that function that sounds helpful, but it's just like the fringes, it's the edges, it's like the one or two percent. The the big stuff, the big rock is like your fitness, right? Like that's the thing, man. So when we decide, you know, when we created the Super Age Games, actually created this because this was like oh god, a little over a year ago. I'm sitting in the park over here with my my friend Peekaboo Street. Um, and I I live in a town where there's like a lot of these kind of people. She's a legend. So Peak, Peek and I are hanging out, and Peek's, you know, Olympian world champion, and she's getting ready. She's working for NBC, she's going to Cortina, and we're talking about stuff. And I suddenly said to her, I said, Peak, I want I'm gonna do the Super Age games, and they're gonna be about longevity. And, you know, with all the hubers of an Olympian, she's like, What the fuck you want to do that for? I was like, no, no, no. No, this is good, we're gonna do this. So, you know, six of the trials are physical, there's one cognitive, and there's one relational. So why relational? Well, if you want to know how long you're gonna live healthy, there's a lot of people that are gonna tell you the number one marker of that is how many friends you got. If you cannot make friends, you got a problem. And that will, depending on the science you look at, that's gonna overpower your LDL or like a lot of other stuff. So that's really important. And one of the things about the games is we sp we purposely designed this to be very social and to be fun and joyful. Because I'm gonna have to use this, use this term a lot: whole human. A whole human is not just the ability to throw a sandbag. It's not just like your blood work, it's like this whole experience, and a lot of that is this joyful interaction with other people. So we've set it up to have teams. We're really big on teams, and we have sort of mind-blowing. We so far we have 80 teams who have signed up. We have one team of 53 women that's coming with like their own special shirts and they're like a whole gang.

A 78-year-old hacked the ticket site

Oh, yeah.

Um and, you know, so you so like how did we do these trials? Well, there's like we immediately started working with um Eric Verden at the Buck Institute. And we're like, okay, Eric, we want to do this. Talk to like we have we have a really pretty robust research department. And we're we said, like, okay, we think these are the markers. Is that right? And he's like, Yeah, that's right. It's like, okay, now we need to invent, more or less from scratch, things that will, you know, be parallel to those that we can use as proxies for these things. Because we also have the the question of like, I got 960 people, I got to put them through this thing in a day in a very tight space. Like the the armory track is not small, but it's not a football field, right? So, how what are these gonna look like and how can we do that? So that that took about three months to figure that out. And they're, you know, there are a couple that are like hanging hanging from a bar. You've seen other people do that, but most of them is like we just like created them from like nothing. It's like, okay, how can we do this so that pretty much anybody can do these? Like, I gotta tell you this, Eric, you're gonna love this. The first, so the first person to buy a ticket before the ticketing site went up, like she somehow hacked into our system to buy a ticket is this 78-year-old woman from she was like in the Midwest or something. We were like, we all get an email, like bing, you sold a ticket. Like, how? What? So I so I call her up and it's like, hey, first of all, how did you do this? She's like, well, I sort of heard about it and I hunted around and I was like, okay, you somehow managed to hack into our ticket site, like gold star for devotion. Like, who are you? She's like, I'm 78. I've never done anything like this before. My dead hang time is three seconds. Three, right? And she's like, I really want a focal point. I want something to train for. Can you help me? And I was like, yes, we can do that. So we have people like that. We have three people who are gonna be over 80. Our youngest person is 19. You have to be at least 18 because you get assigned a waiver. 20% of the people that bought tickets are medical professionals, like doctors, physios, all of that. It's in, and it's, although it's in New York, I think only 30% of the people who are coming are from the tri-state area. So the people from all over the country, somebody from Kuala Lumpur bought a ticket yesterday. We got people from like all over the world coming for this thing because it is this unique thing, and you'll the people who come, you're gonna get sort of a lot of the early people were, you know, we were talking earlier, like you and me, we could just like roll out of bed and do this tomorrow. You know, we've got a couple of former Olympians coming, and there are there are people coming who are in it to win it because that's just how their brains work. They're like Of course, of course. Yeah, they want to win, and they call me up and they send me emails about like the cheat code of how to win. Okay. That's not really the I'm I'm happy for that, but it's really about us helping you become the best version of yourself and then celebrating that with other people. So I've, you know, I've also had questions like, is are you gonna do prize money? This is completely antithetical to what we're doing. No, we will never offer prize money. That doesn't make any sense for what we're doing here. This is about, you know, as you we talked earlier, you get an assessment at the end. We have this very complex algorithm about this is your superage age, this is your chronological age, and then a day or so after, after we collated all the data, you get a report and says, like, okay, this is like where you stand, this is these are the things you need to work on. You're crushing it on VO2 Max, your balance that needs some work. So like that. So that's that's one of the value props here.

Is "longevity" even the right word?

What do you what do you feel about the term longevity? Like, do you use it? Well, it's I mean, it's it's it's commercially recognized now, right? So it's like it it people you kind of have to like refer to it at times, but it's not the best word. And it comes along with a lot of weight, like we were talking about the charlatans and the you know, the the overhype and the overselling.

You you gotta use it because it's just like when you use the term, you're speaking, you're is somebody really gonna be live longer? Who knows? Humans of the long time. Like, you know, ask me that question 40 years, I'll be able to answer that. We don't we don't really know. Um, but I think it it's sort of like it's a bit amorphous, like the word fitness. Like if somebody January 1st says, I'm gonna get fit, like, what do you mean you're going to get? Like, like help me to understand that, like longevity. What does that mean? And I think it's I think it's really just a set of sort of pro-health behaviors that may lead to this outcome, which is at the moment, you know, you that's why people test mice. They only live three years. But like humans, we live a long time. We're really complex. So I we use it. What else? What I I don't know in other words.

Yeah, I know I use it all the time, but I don't really like it. You know. Um But you know, until we come up, I like health span, I like preventative health, but that just feels very clinical and sterile. You know, I feel like, yeah, we'll we'll we'll figure out a better word eventually, but for now it's what we got. So walk walk me through the events. So you mentioned a dead hang.

Inside the trials: Inferno, Net, Tightrope

Yeah, yeah. So we don't know. We we have and I and I want to say all of these they're designed so that if you're an animal, you can go at this and it's gonna be uncomfortable. If you're somebody who's just like, okay, I just sort of want to go to a certain level. So we, you know, we have one called the Inferno, which is sort of our proxy for VO2 Max. It's a it's an assault bike. It's four minutes on an assault bike. Yeah, okay. But it all that is really how hard you go at it. So we had one guy in our prototype day, he's a former elite Jamaican um high hurdler. I think he had for four minutes, I think his average was something crazy, it was like 380 watts for four minutes, which is just like, wow, okay. So if you you want to do that, you can do that. I advise people to sort of like calibrate on this and understand like, okay, it's so many RPM, this is uncomfortable, I can keep it, and then maybe scale up during the four minutes. If you go full at this for 20 seconds, your next three and a half minutes are not gonna be pleasant. No, you know, again, you could sort of do it whatever you want to do it. We we have something called the Super Age 800, which is the it's an eighth-mile track, and you're given a sandbag, and we're still working. We have another prototype day coming up in a couple weeks. We're working on the weight of the sandbag. We'll say somewhere between like 10 and 30 pounds at the moment. We we tried like the first ones we tried like 10 to 60 pounds, and it was like only some kind of like monster can like run with a 60-pound sandbag. But then you've got a you have the sandbag, and it's like, okay, how am I gonna hold this thing? Like, and am I gonna run with it? Am I gonna walk with it? How am I gonna do that? So that that speaks to load and endurance. So these two things. We have uh we have the thing around balance. So the balance thing is a it's a standard four-inch wide balance beam. It's only about five inches off the ground, it's 12 feet long, and then you have a hydro tube. So the hydro tube is half filled with water. Now, generally most people can like, you know, unless you like twitch around too much, like you don't want to twitch around because the water's gonna slosh and that's gonna make things a lot harder. So you get to the end of the beam and now you have to go back. Now you have a decision. Do you pivot and the water's gonna slosh? That's gonna be hard. Or do you walk backwards? Another decision. So I I encourage people practice walking backwards because if you pivot this thing and you don't, and you're not really careful, and you have to, you have to, it also depends on how you hold the tube, right? Like what part of your body do you have it against? How do you do this? So that's that's our balance test. So we have, you know, there's a lot of we're we're aiming to test as many different parts of this that are accessible to pretty much anyone. It's challenging. I mean, you get your elite athlete in there, okay, show me how you do on this. There's um, you know, we have a mobility thing where it's it's basically an over-under, sort of like a high girdle and then a bar. I think the the low bar we're testing is, I think is about 18 inches. So you have to be able to get over and then flat on the ground, go forward, and then again. So again, like how quickly can you do that? And and so that requires a certain amount of agility, proprioception. We have one called, uh, my favorite one is called the net. So it's a cargo net, but most cargo, I can tell you, not most cargoes, every cargo net in the world is vertical. Ours is specially designed, it's horizontal. So it's 40 feet long, and now you have to figure out how to get down and back as quickly as you can. So to do that, the net's not super taut. So now you got to decide it's basically a bear crawl. And where do you put your hands? Where do you put your feet? Proprioception, there's a cognitive thing, there's a balanced thing, and there's like a speed thing. How quickly can you get across? So these, you know, tests, these different things that have to do with sort of real world, how how how long you're gonna live healthy. So if you can do all these things fairly well, you're you're in pretty good shape. If you can, you know, if you can, if you can do the net fairly well, you can do the balance thing, the overunder, there's a pretty good chance you're not gonna fall down and break a hip, or you're not gonna like, you know, cars coming down the street, you're gonna be able to get out of the way.

How do you measure friendship?

And you mentioned too, um, just think as you're talking about, I'm like, how would I do that? Yeah. I was literally walking through my head, like, yeah, how would I do that cargo now? I think I'd and I would walk backwards on the balance beam, I think. But I may go practice later for some odd reason. You mentioned something about community too, like that factor. So how does how do you like, yeah, how do you quantify or qualify that that component of of longevity? That's an interesting thing. I mean, it's critical. It's just a hard thing to measure.

It's gonna and I think you've you you you're speaking to a really interesting point here, which is metrics. And a lot of the things like people really gravitate towards the measurable. Because, you know, the measurable can be tracked and improved. So biomarkers, okay, really important. You know, VO2 Max, good. I just got a DEXA scan, good. Oh, 11.4% body fat. Go data. That's pretty solid.

67? You're 67? Yeah.

Wow.

Impressive.

Wearables as "well-ertainment"

So like these things are they're useful. They're also they a lot of times to my mind, they fall in what I'm gonna call well-ertainment. It's like there's a useful element to it, but there's also sort of an entertainment, entertaining for part of this. And that's and that's fine. I think we I've I've worn a whoop for about six years. What is the what is the the relationship between entertaining, entertainment value and actual useful information? The entertainment value is much higher than the useful information. Although useful information is still very useful. And I don't want to denigrate. I think whoop is a great product. And I I'm but like I'll tell you like this morning, my wife is in New York. I'm here. How do we communicate in the morning? I do send her a screenshot of my whoop score, and she's sending her screenshot of her whoop score. That's hysterical. Right? It's just like how rather than say, like, how is your night? It's just like here, it's a screenshot. Oh, honey, you didn't sleep smile or something.

So you know, it's one of the dorkiest yet funniest things I've ever heard. Yeah, that's great.

So it's just, you know, one of the ways we communicate. So I I think that where I want to circle back to this idea of the what you were saying about social, because social is very hard. You can't, it's something you can't put a metric on, really. You can possibly look at the relationship between social and your HRV. That's maybe, but there's lot of other stuff that sort of goes into that. But it's one of the squishy things. So like, how do you put a metric on joy? Like, how do you put a metric on these things that are really what we this is like the this is what we're aiming for, right? And these things are they're very hard to, they're not measurable. You can, you can, you know, you can, I guess you could like count up, okay, how many, this is how many friends, and this is going to be hours every week. I mean, if you're really, I don't know where that's going to get you, but but you you see my point here, that these are things that we want to sort of like loosely pay attention to, but they're hard to put numbers on. So you will not see, you know, the biohacky community like talk about this too much because they can't measure it. But it's really the name of the game, right? Yeah.

Longevity isn't just for rich guys

It is. It is. And you know one of the things that uh and I want to talk about in a second too how this is translated into the uh the training program, right? Yeah. Like how how you've given people like actually a framework for how to to improve. But um one of the things I don't like, longevity to me is has kind of branded itself into, you know, I guess it's a little more biohacking, but I think when people think of longevity, they think old rich white guys, right? Like, you know, spending a hundred 150,000 or more a year, right, on it. What I'm what I'm hearing too is a lot of this is not expensive. Right. This is very accessible for people. And and it it should be. And like listen, I I totally understand like most 90% of a healthy lifestyle doesn't really cost you a lot of money. You can do the peptides, right? You can do the hormone replacements, you can do the stem cells, you can do all that cool fancy stuff and maybe it'll work. I've tried a lot of it, right? I've done a lot of it. I still do a lot of it. But that's kind of the cherry right on top for for most things. So yeah I haven't heard you say like this is an expensive lifestyle, right? That you got to dump a lot of money to live better.

Why Brian Johnson fails the ROI test

I mean you I advise people to look at the ROI on things. And especially health health and wellness is essentially time management and resource management. So if you want to live like Brian Johnson, that sort of lifestyle is going to consume like what, 12 hours of your day? You got to like be in this tube, this pod, this light like what? It's exhausting. This is not what I would call like a whole human experience, right? It's Brian alone doing this weird shit. Okay. And I know I I I really I mean a lot of people have a problem with Brian I I really like Brian I think he's a really nice guy. But he's a weirdo. So like I think that going for a walk is free. Like eating healthy food you know within reason like you know like how much does broccoli cost? Like it's not that expensive. You know, if you want to you know like a your gym membership like my my my gym here is you know it's like 70 bucks a month. I'm in that gym six to seven days a week and I'm in there probably an hour and a half a day which is seems like a lot but it's much more than most yeah it's a I I get a lot of ROI on that. Like I mean I'm sort of person if I don't exercise I'm gonna have trouble sleeping I'm gonna be grouchy I'm not a nice person so I need to like do this. But I I I think that there's all this ex people they always want to ask me about the exotic stuff. And I tell them it's just like are you sleeping? Sleep is free. Most powerful thing you can do figure out your sleep right like water it's free you know like reasonably nutritious food is not that expensive. Dealing with your how are you dealing with your stress like breath work free doesn't cost anything you know most if you I understand some people don't like to go to gyms that's fine you can you know like our training program is 79 bucks for the year. If you don't want to do our training program you can go to like YouTube videos and they're free. But you got you have to I mean it's up to you to take these actions here. So I think that's the thing you can people everybody wants the magic blue pill right they're all like well what about XYZ exotic thing and it's like well yeah I mean you want to do H bot it it definitely works for certain things but you're gonna be in a tube for 90 minutes five days a week for like a couple of months you want to do that? Okay. Depending on what you're solving for you have a TBI that's okay that's that that'll work. But you you you sort of want to balance out like I I I had this sort of fancy woman the other day and she was at dinner and she wants to talk to me about all the whole all of her longevity set up in her house and she's like I got I got this like fancy red light thing I said you know I said listen like just get up at quarter to seven you and your dog go outside when the sun's just over the horizon and walk in nature. Okay, you got a three four you you you you you go you went for a walk, you were nature and you got red

Is this just a standard training plan?

light.

So you know the the panel will do certain things how much time you got today like yeah yeah well said and uh this this training program you put together so what are what are give me the ideas like what are the pillars of the training program and how is it is it different or is it still kind of fundamental to like what most people in this industry would say is a good standard training program that's an interesting question because I don't know what the standard would be well I think a standard yeah let me help you define that because I don't I think there I don't think there is one to be honest with you. But I think if most if you ask most trainers and coaches they'd be like okay two to three days of strength, right? A couple days of cardio, maybe one day like if this is like you know like ideal, right? One day of like a high intensity VO2 max type training program. But just fundamentally like it doesn't have to be a lot like 30, 40 minutes of strength a couple times a week take more walks, right? Maybe get your heart rate up a couple times a week and you're in pretty good shape for a very long time.

Training for resilience, not looking hot

I will say it's similar to that. There are elements of that. But again what we're interested in in the standard it's like how much time? What is your what is your goal? So for somebody like me my goal is quite different from somebody who's um more sedentary. So I'm able to like do more harder stuff. I think that the difference here is that it's we're looking at the target is resilience. So durable capacity and if you're gonna talk about that then you sort of bring some other elements in here. So your ability like holding your body in space there's certain things that are are brought into this that and are elements of focus that you know it's additional you know it's a lot of the you know there's we do a lot of this at sort of the the heavier load level here. So you're gonna be doing farmer carries you're gonna be doing a lot of the sort of like things that you would normally do, but you're also probably going to be doing a lot of plyometrics that maybe you're not used to doing you're going to be doing a plyometric and then a stick hold like in a position. So can you do that? Can you can you manage deceleration force? Can you are you able to like how's your single leg balance and proprioception while doing movement. So there'll be some of these things in there that you may not get in a sort of a a a more usual you know what you said like this much zone two we've got like a day a hit we've got three days of strength and we're gonna hit the different body parts there's there's because it's a different we're looking um for a different outcome here which again is resilience. And the program is set up so that you get to it's gonna ask you like do you do you have access to a gym? Okay you don't do you have dumbbells at home um yes or no? Is it just body weight? Okay that's fine. Like we can we can really challenge you with just body weight believe me here. I believe if you start key if you key and you say okay I'm an elite athlete okay like you're you're in for it. So and it it because of the AI it it scales and stuff. So we one of the things that we invented for this is we have this sort of fingerprint. So you take a lot of people don't want to do an assessment because it's like 20 minutes of like this thing that I don't want to just do this. And what it'll do is you get this sort of spider chart of where you're at. So it'll say like okay your you know your VO2 max is really good. Again your balance is great your strength not too good like so we and it corresponds a lot to the things that we're testing at superage games. So you get you get this thing and then that is what helps drive the drive what you're fed every day as to how you're gonna train and then if you you know a month later you do another assessment you'll see the the the spider charge is dynamic and you say oh okay like this changed this is really good. Okay oh I still need to work on that.

I love it.

And it's all delivered through now I'm gonna call about the terminology here soap. What it is now it is a it is a it is a web-based app that like what I do is I put it on my phone. So what we're doing here is we want to have a few thousand people through this first before we go to the trouble of like actually developing the like you know we have permission from Apple we're gonna do this thing but that's like I sort of want to get some more user experience through this. So we just you get it free when you buy a ticket to the games and it went out to the public when like 10 days ago. So we want to get a little more experience user experience here and then we'll go to build the app I I want to pivot a little bit because I you're a media guy.

How Super Age avoids AI slop

And you know I guess I'm I kind of fell into media too. I mean this is media right I would never consider myself a media guy but you you have been like you photography into the like everything you do is is is you're obviously very adept to it. In this world of AI, you know, how is media like it's getting so overrun with slop, right? Like how do you stay ahead in the media? I mean no one really knows yet right like how it's easy I'll make slop.

It's like you know there's a reason why I send now four times a week to 1.2 million people and I have a 50% open rate. We don't make slot like we make really quality stuff. So I think that that's you know sometimes we'll have people write for us and it comes back and I can tell like it's got this like AI accent. It's like I'm sorry like do over like you cannot do that here. We we are humans and we write like humans to other humans. So you know you can use we use AI a lot for research and you know seeing what's going on but even with research anything that the AI gives back we have to we because the thing hallucinates. So especially when you're dealing with like science medicine and stuff it's like okay you know Claude why do you think this is true? What are the references? And then we actually have to like a human has to read them and be like, okay, is this really what this thing is saying or is Claude just you know making it up yeah yeah it's it's a really interesting now I see it so much and especially on LinkedIn because I'm on LinkedIn a lot.

It's one of my major platforms and you just see slop all the time like at least remove the M dash right like just base level like no one writes with m-dashes that much ever. And uh it's it's it's it's so tell I mean how do you how do you is there certain qualities when you look at like okay this was obviously AI driven and this was like human like what what are some of the telltale signs in your like that's I mean there's just sort of an obvious the um the use of adverbs and adjectives.

The tells that give AI writing away

So when it when it says this is genuinely useful human did not say that. Yeah human would say or actually is the one that it uses or that like there's all these modifiers so like as soon as I see that it's like no or the way the the paragraph is structured like it it's just you know I had I had this PR woman write me she she wrote me this thing about somebody who was like really good. She pitched me like we should you know do this and I wrote her back and I was like listen like never send me any of this like AI crap. This guy seems pretty good and in spite of your pathetic pitch to me I still want to talk to this guy but don't do that again. Yeah and it's good advice sorry

Where gyms miss the 50+ member

busted.

Yeah well it's good advice I I get four or five pitches a day. Yeah uh you know for for maybe more because a lot of it just lands in my I don't know I don't check the spam anymore but it's it's like you don't you haven't been following me for a while. You don't listen to my podcast. If you have a good guest just be like hey here's the link we think you'd be great given the topics that you like to cover. And you know it's it's uh that's that's a big it's a there's a lot of it dude it's so much. Yeah. Well here's a big question for our industry. Like, you know, could you go to a gym, you know, six six times a week you've been in gyms for a long time you know for health club operators and gym operators and you know even part of the I guess the connected and online fitness operations and and brands like how can we be serving the 50 plus 55 plus better? You know, do you think we're missing the mark in any ways? I mean it's an incredibly lucrative demographic, right? Especially now that everyone's focused on like, oh shit, how long am I going to live? Like my mind has changed quite a bit over the last five years as I creep up to 50, I'm now like, well, I want to perform for as long as I can at this current level I want to be as lethic as let as athletic as I can for as long as I can. But yeah I feel like we're we can do better. And it doesn't come down to like adding peptides. I think that's nice, right? But I don't think that's the core of what we could be doing better. It's not our core functionality.

"Cool is ageless": stop dumbing it down

Is a really I I I've thought about this question. I think it's it's a really interesting one. These are the people with the money they are probably the ones who are going to pay for personal training but they're gonna be paying for personal training with a different a different outcome or a different a different they want a different outcome. So somebody who's 2530 going to the gym, they want to look hot that's really that's that's the name of the game right um I want to look how do we do that? Nothing wrong with that. I think Equinox has done an excellent job at where you know hotness. That's that's their brand. Okay. You know just a you know I just want to say they also have like excellent excellent trainers they they're they're they're really good. I think the as one gets a little older one needs to be more how should I say I guess mindful about how one uses one's body. When when I was 40 I could just like you could call me up and you could say like hey hey David let's uh I want to go run 15 miles. You want to go? And it's like yeah let's go. Like I wouldn't even think about it. Be like okay yeah I'm gonna be like sort of uncomfortable tomorrow but we can do this. Like I that would that is not on the menu today. I am not I I cannot physically do that. And if I did I would I would injure myself. So understanding that as somebody gets a little older there's sort of a different there you're you don't have as much elasticity your recovery rate is a little different but that does not mean that they cannot perform at a very high level like I'm I'm pretty fit and I can I can rip off push-ups with like the best of them and people say to me like oh wow you're 67 you can do like no it's just like I've just been you just do this six days a week for like decades and this is you that's what happens yeah that's what happens it's not like I'm a super athlete or anything I'm just stubborn. So I I think that there's sort of a fine line between the ghettoization around age and assuming everybody's the same. So it's your question about how to make this how to make gyms more 50 plus so I I mean I live in a town that's basically retirement community and there's two kinds of people here like Olympians and retired people. And they both go to my gym. I I was at the sauna the day the other day with a guy and we were talking about heart rates and I was like so what's your resting heart rates you know in the mountains it's a little high it's 34. It's like 34? Whoa like like who the fuck are you? Yeah he was number three in the world unconscious. He's like he he ran a four minute mile when he was in high school so it's like it's like okay you're one of those all right so but like I think that I go to my gym because I like to exercise and because I know the I mean I know the names but I know the faces of the people there. And it's a very it's not Manhattan when I go to gyms in Manhattan it's a different it's a very different vibe. But I I think that this idea that I think true so okay you want to add okay so how would I attract somebody who's 50 plus to come to my gym so the one thing is they want to they feel they are still in the game so and they want to stay in the game. So how do they stay in the game? So and the game is the game of life so how can they be be that best version of themselves going forward? It is slightly different than buns and guns which is like 25 year olds right it's but it's not like that doesn't matter. Like we still want to look good we still want to function and you have to be careful about this sort of geriatric sort of like you know we're gonna do water aerobics or something. Like no that's not keep it you want to never forget inspiration and aspiration these these these work throughout any age right and for some reason it gets dialed down at a certain age and like you know the New York Times is very nice to me over the years but I can makes me insane how they lower the bar around what fitness actually is because they don't want to alienate anyone. Like you need like mall walking twice a week I'm sorry that's probably better than like a total sedentary lifestyle but you got to work harder than that if you want to get where you want to go. And I and I think that you increase one of the biggest changes I've seen in the last 10 years is you're seeing pictures of people and videos of people who are older who are cool because cool is ageless. I'm sorry Laird Hamilton is cool. There is nobody on the planet that is not going to say Laird Hamil is not cool. He's pretty cool. He's cool and he is a badass. So and Laird is so is his wife yeah oh his wife is worse oh my God oh my god is terrifying yeah yeah yeah do not train with Gabby just saying like word of the wise somebody who's done that don't do that. Yeah um but like these are people who are you know like let's look at that like like that's inspirational that's aspirational it doesn't have to be this sort of like you know dumb it down lower the bar and well I know you're this age I'm so sorry. Like I, you know, in the town that I live in I'm average or sub-average for the sort of people that live here. And it's a very super fit place but it's an example of like this is not impossible. It's just like you know it's time management. Like like that's

Mountain towns and raising your game

it.

Yeah. Yeah and if you ever want to get an idea of like fit people move go to a mountain town like I spent time in Truckee, California. And oh my God, it's just a bunch of savages there. Like um you know Park City I'm sure whitefish like you walk around here like there's very unassuming people who can do incredible things is that's just what they've always done. Right like multiple peaks in the same day. Just like it's it's it's very aspirational and inspirational to me. And you know when I moved here nine years ago I'm like hey I got out of my game a little bit that came from a CrossFit guy right like so up your game. Yeah yeah it's great you got and that's I think that's a big part of it is like surround yourself right in anything whether it's entrepreneurial ventures or you know life like it if if you surround yourself with people who will aspire and you know you can aspire to and be inspired by then it's it's a really powerful thing. And okay. So David the last question I always ask people on the show is like as an industry how can we help you? Like what challenges are you facing? What what what do you need help with? And if you're ever going to hear from people after listening to this, like what would you want them to reach out about?

Fitness, medicine and a peptide warning

I want you to go to the games go to games.superage dot com. I want you to try out the standard standard dotsuperage.com you can always I'm very I'm very reachable david at superage.com happy to engage in any conversations questions whatever I think that understand as you pointed out in the beginning we're in what I would call sort of like a 2.0 of a lot of this intersection of fit like health wellness medicine longevity and fitness this is all the same thing you need you you you you know you need the meta you need to be m be medically sound in order to engage in fitness and in order to live long and healthy and become all of that you you you need to engage in fitness like this is that these things have been separated I understand why a physician and trainers and they're they have different um domains of expertise but they intersect at you. So that's that's where all this comes together you and under these these are not don't expect don't go to your physician and ask for a strength training routine. That's not his gig you know probably don't ask your trainer about like you know optimizing your labs. He might have some ideas on this but you you you want to like discern who's gonna give you the best advice about where you want to go. And just can I touch on peptides for a second oh yeah of course like okay all right rule number one do not be shooting shit into your body that you do not know what this is you're getting some kind of stuff on the internet from some Chinese peptide doctor are you out of your mind? Yeah we're doing it every day what yeah just if you're going there are um some values to to these substances for some people not all people find a physician who is skilled in these things they should be coming from a licensed compounding pharmacy and make sure your physician is monitoring all of your labs because what you're putting in here may or may not be changing things that maybe you don't want to change. Humans are really complex. There's a lot of different overlapping systems here. So you know pay attention to that stuff. I'm not I'm not somebody who's you know I think GLP ones are amazing. Insulin is a peptide these are amazing there's a lot of other very useful ones out there but anybody who's responsible is going to want to like monitor a lot of stuff on you if you're gonna if you're gonna do this.

Well said well said Dave it's been an absolute pleasure man really enjoyed it and I'm excited to see you know follow up on the games and and see how that that works out. And um you know I'll I'll check out the training program as well but it's it's been great man. I'd love to have you back. At some point we could talk about this stuff more. Yeah.

We've got to get it flag in the blue zones at some point.

Yeah that's a good one right I want to be prepared for that because I have so many thoughts swimming around my head about it. Yeah it's it's been great. Ladies and gentlemen David Harry Stewart.

Thank you so much. Appreciate it