# Function Health: AI, Testing, and Longevity Strategy

**Podcast:** a16z Podcast
**Published:** 2026-11-07

## Transcript

When it comes to longevity, Mark Hyman says it's not the heroic interventions that matter most.
It's the small things you do every day.
In this episode, A16Z partner Daisy Wolf sits down with Mark, co-founder of Function Health, to walk through what he actually does for his own health.
We get into strength training, protein, supplements, sleep, meditation, sauna, cold plunges, and why Mark believes muscle is the currency of longevity.
We also discuss how testing and AI could change preventative medicine by helping us understand what's happening in our bodies long before it becomes disease.
Mark, today we are going to dive into what you do for your own health.
And we're going to be honest because I think we all look to people like you and think, are we doing enough?
And so I'm very curious, like, what a good day and a bad day looks like for you as it pertains to food, exercise, supplements, sleep, tracking, diagnostics.
Let's talk about an average day.
What time do you wake up?
Do you do it with an alarm?
Do you do it naturally?
As you don't wake up an alarm.
As you wake up.
naturally around 637.
And normally if I say what is my typical ideal day, what would I be doing?
And I would say it's not about getting it perfect.
It's about just the little tiny things you do every day, the little investments in your health bank account that add up and pay massive dividends.
And I think you don't have to get it perfect, get everything right.
But if you kind of stack the deck in your favor, it's going to end up actually helping you to have energy, to feel good, to sleep well, to prevent disease.
It's not the giant heroic things I got.
seven-day water fast or something that's better.
They make the difference.
It's a little investment for reading.
So if you only have 10 minutes to meditate, just do it for 10 minutes.
So this morning I had something to do.
So I did a 10-minute meditation, something to do 20.
And that's the first thing I ever turn on my phone before I turn the lights on.
And it just helps me sort of ground for the day.
And I do a little gratitude practice, right?
One of the three things I'm really grateful for.
It's just a great way to start the day with a positive mindset.
And then I'll typically work out.
So I'll do like a pretty hard 45-minute strength training session.
In my gym, if it's a nice day, I'll take my bike, maybe go for a bike ride for 45 minutes, which a lot of hills are on off there.
And then I usually have like a really good, I call my longevity shake.
So that would be like the way I start the day.
And that's goat whey protein.
So whey is really important for building muscle.
And muscle is the currency of longevity.
If you don't have muscle, you will become frail and dysfunctional.
And that's kind of what ends up killing people.
And so...
make sure I have a good load, about 40 grams of protein after I do my straight training with creatine, five or 10 grams.
10 is more good for the brain, five is good for the muscles.
And I put a lot of other things in there.
I'll put in prebiotic fibers, probiotics.
I'll put in polyphenols.
We've got microbiome.
I'll put in Uralathinae, which is this mitochondrial booster, longevity compound.
I'll put in sometimes a little bit of extra fatty acids if I want.
But basically, that's my shake.
I found some strawberries and some cashew or almond milk and just blend it up and that's my breakfast.
So that kind of keeps me going.
And then sometimes if I'm on a peptide kick, I'll do some peptides doing BPC-157 and TB-500, which are sort of tissue repair.
So this is a little bit of advanced lifestyles.
So there's like the foundational stuff.
So you don't want to eat all this stuff unless you've already got the basics.
So if you're not eating well, if you're not exercising, if you're not sleeping, if you're under constant stress, it doesn't matter how many vitamins or peptides you take, it's not going to matter.
So just be aware that you kind of think we're metal on top of everything else.
So peptides are essentially mini proteins.
They're defined as less than 20 amino acids, which is something everybody's familiar with.
Ozempic is the peptide of the day.
It's a peptide, something that the body makes, GLP-1, made by the body.
It's a natural substance.
We do it in pharmacologic doses to have different effects, but insulin is another peptide.
So the body has tens of thousands of these peptides, and they have all such a regulatory capacity.
So they're like the conductors.
They control everything.
They control your hormones, your immune system, tissue repair, healing, inflammation.
gut health, and so you can use these to actually help improve your health.
That's why I use peptides.
It's a little diabetic syringe.
I'm a doctor, so it's bothering me, but it's a little bit invasive, but it's something that can be helpful.
So if I've had injuries from working out and I tear a muscle or something, I can just put that in there, and it's like in a couple of days, it's dramatically improved.
So I'm a big fan of peptides.
By the time I get all that done, it's probably like 8.30, 9 o'clock.
Sometimes I'll do a layup, I'll do a workout later, like at 9, I'll do a shake at 10.
I might do a 12 to 16 hour fast depending on what I'm doing from the night before.
Okay, great.
So, and then is intermittent fasting good or bad for women?
People have mixed opinions on that.
It depends.
It depends on your overall health.
I mean, if you're skinny and probably not a great idea.
If you're underweight, if you're sometimes in hormonal shifts, it can be a thing.
If you're trying to get pregnant, if you're trying to deal with some hormonal issues, it can be challenging.
So I would say you have to listen to your body and the one feels good.
So if it doesn't feel good, then listen.
I think the minimum people should do is 12 hours.
That's intermittent fasting.
Most people don't even do a 12-hour overnight fast.
And so that means if you eat dinner at six at night, you can eat at six in the morning.
If you eat dinner at six at night, you can eat breakfast at eight in the morning.
So that's a 14-hour fast.
Most people can do that.
Okay, cool.
And what's an average lunch for you?
So I remember lunch would be, for example, this afternoon, my lunch was probably got my jar of mackerel, like kind of canned mackerel.
And I have these seed crackers that I love, which are flax and sesame and sunflower seeds.
And so I have sort of that.
And I'll typically have a fairly good portion of that.
Because it's quick, it's easy.
I've got meaty, so I don't have time to just open the can and have the crack solution.
It's like I get...
A lot of, I might get three fats, I get a lot of protein, I get a fiber, I get a lot of minerals, and it's a great quick snack.
Or I might make a fat salad, which would be, I use like good lettuce, like arugula, I'll put in cherry tomatoes, I'll throw in avocado, I'll throw in olives, I'll throw in some toasted pumpkin seeds, I might throw in some goat cheese, and I'll usually have a can of something, like a can of sardines or mackerel or salmon.
And that...
There's lots of olive oil, so it's a lot of fat.
You got the omega-3s from the salmon, you've got the nuts and seeds fat, you've got the olive oil fat, you've got the avocado fat.
And so you're getting a lot of vegetables, but you're also getting a lot of fat, which makes you satisfied and not crave sugar, which I don't usually do.
Okay, snacks?
I'm not a big snacker.
I have a thing about snacking.
I think snacking was a modern invention.
It's something that humans really never did.
And there weren't snack foods when you were hunters and gatherers.
You're just like, you know, and even in agrarian societies, there weren't.
Snacks.
People just ate in meals.
And I think the promulgation of a snacking culture has been a huge problem for America.
It led to this massive, partly this massive rise in obesity and type 2 diabetes.
So I'm really not a big fan of snacking.
That said, if I'm hungry and I'm like traveling or whatever, I have a whole snack pack.
My wife terrorized it the other night because we were in a hotel and she had her friend's house and she was hungry.
And so I have to go replenish it.
But I have a salmon jerky sticks that are delicious.
I think those are Patagonian ones, I think.
Or Epic, they're Epic bars.
The salmon sticks where I get medicine sticks or bison sticks where they're like kind of not exactly beef jerky, but they're kind of dried meat.
I'll put nuts in.
So I'll have like cashews or almonds or other nuts in my bag.
And also some that have nut butter packets.
I have like cashew butter.
I have these packets.
I can just, it keeps for a long time and I can keep it in my...
backpack when I'm traveling.
And so I never get in a food emergency.
So I try not to actually get a food emergency, which is a big thing because if you get a food emergency, you're going to eat whatever's there.
Like I was once traveling and I had a conference.
I had to get up super early at six in the morning and then my flight was delayed and I wasn't going to get back till three in the morning.
It was like a whole thing.
And I felt sorry for myself and I was tired.
And so there was a Cinnabon at the airport and I was like...
I went for it.
And that's a rare moment for me, but it was like probably 20 years ago, but I haven't had one since then.
And the thing is, you don't want to be in that situation.
So you want to always have food on you.
So I always have food on me.
But at that said, I really think if people are hungry, want to have a piece of fruit, have some nuts, that's a pretty basically good snack.
You heard it here first.
Mark Hyman, Innocent and Bun once 20 years ago in an airport.
Yeah.
Well, I had the one with nuts because my rationale was it had more protein and fiber.
So it was not so bad.
Do you have any indulgences that you have from time to time?
What's the worst?
I mean, I do like chocolate and I'll have dark chocolate, but my chili sauce is ice cream.
So I love ice cream.
And if that was up to me, I would literally have a pint of ice cream every night.
But it's not up to me.
It's up to my higher self.
So I don't want to go into consequence.
And so, yeah, I don't know, every like, I don't know, for six months, I'll have like Chunky Monkey ice cream or I'll order like to sell you pistachio from Red Lilins and like that, I love that.
So like I'll do that, but it's not like a regular thing.
I like teeth simply.
I mean, what I believe is that flavor always follows the quality of the food.
So I was in Sardinia writing my book, Young Forever, about longevity.
And I met this guy, Linto, and he served us a nose to tail pig meal.
And he says, we flavor the animal before we kill it.
Meaning we know we feed a carob, we feed an acorn, we feed all this stuff.
So we're literally flavoring.
We know the shepherds know that they take their goats or their sheep to eat certain times, a certain time of year, that their milk or cheese is going to taste better.
And what that's about is the medicinal properties of the food.
So I always like to eat really good quality, just simple food.
Like last night I had a Japanese sweet potato.
And that's like a purple sweet potato from Okinawa, one of their longevity foods.
So the purple is full of phytochemicals.
I used ghee, which is clarified butter, on it, and salt.
And that was it.
And then I had, I actually ordered medicine chops.
They're like lamb chops, but they're medicine chops.
They had a bunch of those.
And it was just a very simple, which is meal.
I'll usually have maybe some stir-fried mushrooms or brocolini or some kind of vegetable.
And I'll usually have two or three vegetables and a piece of protein.
And I try to avoid sugar or too much starches.
I don't need that much pasta.
I don't have a lot of noodles and stuff like that.
So I don't need that much rice or grains.
And, you know.
I'm 65 and my body composition is like, you know, 10% body fat.
And so I think the visceral fat is the killer.
That's the belly fat that you get as you get older.
And that's every, as you look around, it's like almost everybody in America has this.
And this is just what's driving all the diabetes, the obesity, the heart disease, the cancer, dementia.
And so keeping your sugar low, if you could take nothing else from this conversation and your starch low is one of the best things you can do for your health.
And it sounds like you're not explicitly gluten-free, but you do kind of avoid gluten largely.
Yeah, I think it's important to know what your biology is.
So testing is so critical, and I think most people don't know how they are in the spectrum of gluten sensitivity.
And so the way you think about it is if you look at your antibodies, which we do testing through function for celiac antibodies, and we do a much more extensive panel than any traditional doctor would do for celiac.
They just do one test.
We do five different tests.
And if you look at the range, you know, you shouldn't have any antibodies to gluten because it's an indicator that your body's reacting to the protein.
And if it's reacting to the protein, it's just seeing the protein and it's seeing the protein because you've got a leaky gut and your gut's damaged in some way.
And the protein's getting into your bloodstream and your immune system's going, wait, wait, this isn't me.
So the range goes from zero to like 19 or zero to five for the other one.
But if it's like, what if it's three or four?
Like one of them's 10, you know?
it means your body's creating a response and it's always worth a trial of a three-week pause and see what happens.
Because, you know, I think one of the most amazing things people have no clue about is how food affects their body.
And one, how food can make them feel bad and how it can make them feel good.
And that's because food does create so much of an issue.
So gluten is one of the most problematic foods of our food supply right now.
Why?
Because...
It's hybridized and not GMO, but hybridized in a way that create way more genes, that create way more gluten proteins that are way more inflammatory.
It has super starch called amilpectin A, which is like basically worse than sugar for your bloodstream and your glucose.
It's sprayed with glyphosate often at the end of before harvest to desiccate it and make it easier to harvest.
And so it also, you know, it just...
It's just in everything.
I think it also has calcium propria and is a pre-erritant, which can be linked to autism in animals.
It studies, it's kind of scary, the hyperactivity.
So there's a lot of problems with our modern wheat.
Probably 20% of people are gluten sensitive.
It's just a lot.
We're in a protein craze right now.
Like everything is protein added.
Do you try to have like, you know, 100 something grams of protein?
Yeah.
So here's the thing.
When you're younger, you have a lot of trophic hormones.
What that means is you have hormones like estrogen, testosterone, and so forth that help you maintain your muscle.
For women, menopause, and for men, menandropause, which is this much slower sort of continuous gradual decline, you'll see hormone levels drop.
And we see this a lot with function health.
We see a lot of the hormones out of whack for people.
As you get older, you've got to preserve and maintain and even build muscle.
had a health issue this year and I'd end up losing weight and I gained back 25 pounds of muscle just because I knew what to do by the training I did plus the protein.
And as you get older, and this is based on the Pronage group, which is an international group of protein experts, scientists, who basically said, look, after 60, you need between one and a half to two grams of protein per kilo.
So that's basically about a gram per pound of ideal body weight.
you know, if you're 300 pounds, I'm going to eat 300 grams of protein.
But if you're 180 pounds, you know, for me, I probably could eat anywhere between 120 and 180 grams of protein a day.
And that's not easy.
But as you get older, it's really important, particularly if you're shrink-training.
So quality matters, and not all protein is the same, and so you have to be careful.
But animal protein is a much better catalyst for muscle synthesis than...
than plant protein, which has lower levels of this amino acid called leucine, which is important for actually stimulating the muscle growth.
So you have to eat the right protein, and whey is one of the best sources of protein for this.
So whey and creatine are a great kind of combo for protein and protein synthesis, but it doesn't work in the absence of strain treating.
So it's like you're going to eat protein and build muscle.
So you might preserve a little bit of muscle, but if you lose weight, I think what's happening now with GLP-1 is...
It's really frightening because people are taking these drugs, they're not hungry, they're not eating as much, they don't have much protein, they're not strength training, and they're losing significant amounts of muscle, and they're not replacing it.
And that means they're going to have a slower metabolism eventually, and then they're going to eat less food, even at the same weight they were before they started the diet or the shot.
And so it's important to kind of make sure people eat enough protein and strength training while they're on the GLP ones.
Yeah, it feels like it's one of the key kind of contributors to rapid weight increase when people stop GLP-1s as well.
It's like they've lost a lot of muscle.
Yeah, I mean, people get a zempic face because all the muscle comes out of their face.
Okay, what supplements are you taking right now?
When do you take them?
What are you taking them for?
Yeah, so I think, you know, What's interesting, David, in function health is that we've seen staggering rates of nutritional deficiencies in the population.
And we think most people who are doing function are probably a little more health forward than the average American population.
And yet, even these people who are made try to pay more attention and be productive about their health.
70% are deficient in one or more nutrients at the minimum level.
Like the minimum.
Not like what you need to have healthy bones with vitamin D, but how do you not get rickets, right?
So that would be like 30, 30 milligrams per deciliter is what the lab says is the cutoff, but actually probably should be 50.
So just given that, even at the minimum level, it's 70%.
So we're talking about a lot of nutritional deficiencies because we have such a nutrient poor diet.
I don't really have those because I make sure I take my stuff.
But I think a good multivitamin is important, a good omega-3 fatty acid.
And we were one of the few places where you actually check your omega-3 fatty acids because nobody checks that, but it's one of the most important fats.
It's actually called an essential fat.
And many people are deficient.
90% of us are deficient at some level or another.
I take vitamin D for sure with K2, vitamin D3 as a staple.
And then I take a probiotic.
I like seeds, my favorite one.
I take that and it's so stable for gut health.
And then I take a, I call it like a longevity stack.
It's stuff that helps my mitochondria and the aging process where there's been a fair bit of research.
So I mentioned one earlier, Uralithin A, coming into Hormitopur.
And they basically done a ton of research looking at this pomegranate derivative that when it's metabolized by their healthy gut microbiome, which most of us don't have, it turns into this compound called the postbiotic Uralithin A.
that helps to reduce inflammation, improves mitochondrial health and cleans up old mitochondria, makes new mitochondria, reduces inflammation, helps with exercise performance.
And this is really overall great product.
So I put that in my shake, for example, in the morning.
I use creatine, which is a supplement to help boost muscle mass.
I'll also take something called...
NMN or NR.
There's some good research on that.
Not necessarily for health span, but for helping a lot of the mechanisms of aging and decrypidation.
And I'll take something called fatty 15, which is basically an essential fatty acid that's been newly discovered, this again, anti-inflammatory.
And then I take a little bit of Focu10 and I take some support for my detox system and it is C-16.
And I basically try to help my gut, my microbiome.
my mitochondria, my immune system.
And that really all helps.
And I also take something called Himalayan tartarine buckwheat, which is an ancient grain that come in capsules or powder or sprout powder.
I usually put that in my shake.
And that, again, has all these immune prejuvenating properties.
And there's a lot of data on this.
So I look at where is the data good and where is there good evidence on products.
And unfortunately, there's not a lot of products out there with a lot of good evidence.
So I'm very kind of selective about the products that I choose.
And that's kind of my basic routine.
Do, oftentimes they get asked, like, okay, you know, I'm doing function.
What add-on tests should I get?
What imaging should I do?
Can you really walk us through, like, two examples?
One for people who just want to make sure they're catching all of the things, you know, that could be severe issues or, you know, kill them early.
And one for people who are, like, truly trying to optimize their health.
What do you recommend they do in terms of, you know, additional blood tests, imaging, et cetera?
Yeah, so we have a lot of depth in what we can do.
And I think that the basic membership includes over 110 biomarkers that look at almost every system in your body that are missed off your heart and vertebrate system, your immune system, hormones, autoimmunity.
toxins, metabolic health, nutritional status, hormonal health, all these things are important to understand.
And depending on where you are in your life and what's going on with you, you may want to look at different things.
For example, if you're getting older, you have Alzheimer's in your family, there's a really robust brain health panel, but I'll just look at some of the really newer biomarkers that are emerging around almost like a blood test for Alzheimer's that you can take decades earlier and do something about.
We also look at cancer screening.
You know, if you're 20, you're probably not going to do this.
But as you get older, there's something called the gallery test, which is a multi-cancer detection test to look at over 50 different cancers.
It's not perfect, but it's better than most things we have to really screen for cancer.
You know, if you're concerned about your talk exposure, you might want to do a deeper dive on PFAS or Forever Chemicals and BPA.
If you are...
considering you might have chronic fatigue or something like that, you can do a viral panel to see what's going on with your immune system.
If you want to see what's going on with your cardiovascular health, you can even do deeper dives on cardiovascular health and look at all kinds of subsets of different cholesterol molecules.
Get pretty sophisticated.
And then for hormones, we also do deep hormonal testing.
So everybody gets a basic hormone panel for men and women.
But if you want to add on stuff, you can do extended hormone panels and see.
you know, other things that may be relevant for your health.
And then the beautiful thing is that you can, you know, get your choice of your testing, but then you add on things if you want.
For example, if you want to know extra nutrients that we may not be testing with the first screen, like if you want to look at zinc or maybe an extended body mineral panel that looks at selenium and molybdenum and iodide and co2-10 and chromium, you can do that.
So depending on where you're interested in, if you're like just on the basics or if you want a full like...
go all in, I want to do everything, it's available for you.
And then, of course, you can get your Azure Scan, which is a deep look at a total body MRI and gives you a real sense of...
risks in different conditions, such as hundreds of different diseases, and allows you to be proactive about it.
And we've saved so many lives on this.
I mean, I just got an ad text from a friend of mine who said, the guy who works for him, did the function panel, and saw he had, you know, a pretty bad cardiovascular risk profile they didn't even know about.
He went and got checked out and ended up needing a bypass immediately.
So, you know, we're seeing people like that, or people who have cancer, as an opinion they had, and it saves their life.
It's helping that, you know, and people can get a sense of what they want to look at.
Amazing.
Okay, talk to me about like kind of your environment.
Like how much are you thinking about microplastics, toxins, household products, skincare products?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So that's a great question.
So I'm on the board of the group called the Environmental Working Group.
And that is a sort of a research and a lobby organization that has done a lot of work to help identify what are the removable sources of toxins in our environment.
And at EWG.org, a lot of the free resources there, but they have great resources, for example, on food.
What are the dirty dozen foods that you never want to eat if they're not organic?
Like strawberries, you should never have if they're organic.
But you want to have a banana or an avocado or whatever, it doesn't matter.
So it gives you a list of the dirty dozen, the pink 15, so you don't have to shop only.
Organic, if you want to do a clean 15, there's very low pesticides on those, for example.
I think cleaning the skin or not is kind of the thing that matters.
Yeah, yeah.
A little more than that, but yeah, basically, yeah.
And then there's how to choose the right fish that has a lot of mercury, how to choose the right meat that's the safest for you and the planet.
So they have real good guys on that.
And then they have a skin deep.
which is very sensitive where you can literally scan or put in your product, they have an app for it.
So any skincare products, lotions, creams, shampoos, you know, makeup, whatever, with a lot of toxins in the skincare products.
So I really recommend people doing that.
They also have household cleaning products.
You know, one of the brands that, you know, if it has a stone crossbow on it, you know, and you have to lock it away from your kids, you probably don't want to use it in your house, right?
So I think, you know, I'm really pretty strict about household cleaners and detergents and so forth.
So that's, again, another great reason.
source.
So you build these into your automatic things.
I just have those products in the house.
I don't, I don't, I know my skincare products are all from brands that are clean and good.
So I don't have to worry about it because I just reduce my exposure.
Then I have a reverse osmosis filter in my kitchen where I pick my drinking water and I have an air filter in my bedroom and a few of the key rooms I spend a lot of time.
And those are the ways I minimize my exposures.
You can't do it impossible to do 100%.
And I'm just like, you know, my joke is if humans were food, we wouldn't be safe to eat because we're so full of environmental toxins that we accumulate them.
We're on the top of the food chain.
So, you know, it's really unfortunate.
But you can minimize your exposures and reduce your risks.
Microplastics is another big one.
I mean, drinking out a bottle of water, you know, have a steel bottle and not drinking out a plastic.
You've always been technical on the cutting edge.
How do you like kind of decide where to draw the line between what's clinically proven, what's emerging, what your gut and you is right?
Really just depends on what you're doing.
Less so advice for others.
I think you probably.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, you're right.
I mean, I might be more adventurous, but I would say that, you know, there has to be some scientific rationale or evidence for it.
There has to have some safety profile to it.
it has to sort of not have no serious downsides or side effects.
So if it's something in that category, and the price is also an issue, depending on if you can afford it, but I'm lucky I get it.
Or I also get help for free because people like give me stuff, so I'll take it.
So for example, one of the things that I've found really interesting is a lot of the work on platinophoresis.
So a lot of science labs that are funded by a lot of the Silicon Valley billionaires are looking, for example, how do we look at interventions that can help?
reduce the aging process or clean out old damaged proteins.
So, plasinopheresis is actually blood cleaning.
It's kind of like a little bit of the Brian Johnson where they kind of did the plasmatry with his kid and father, that was a little strange.
But this is a medical technique that's been used for decades in hospitals for various issues, but it's being applied in a new way to help remove all the inflammatory damaged proteins, toxins from the blood.
So, I'll, for example, do that, which is a little more on the edge.
And that I find interesting and the data is there.
So I'm willing to try something like that.
What's one thing that gives you hope about this current moment where, you know, I think we're seeing more focus on personal health than we've ever seen before?
And what's like one thing that kind of gets you pause or makes you concerned?
Yeah, it's a great, great question.
I mean, I think we're at a radically historic moment in medicine right now.
Most healthcare, medicine, government has no clue that's happening.
And this is this intersection of a number of different, really radically big trends and innovations.
One is reimagining of human biology from a system's perspective.
How is everything connected?
How is the body a network, the network system?
Even though we have specialists in organs and diseases, it's not actually how the body is organized.
And so when scientists now have been funding this and researching...
the hallmarks of aging, which is the underlying mechanism of aging.
They're like, well, if you had treated those, you could extend life for 30 or 40 years.
But if you just got rid of cancer and heart disease, you could extend life by five to seven years.
So we're looking at what are the underlying biology and how do we think about the laws of nature?
What are the laws of biology?
And that's really where we're at now.
It's almost like 1905 on Einstein writing Mysterio Relativity.
It's that big of a frame shift in our understanding between physics and quantum physics and old medicine and new medicine.
The second thing that's happening is just the amount of data we can get.
So you can get, you know, parabytes of data on your human biology, from lab testing to genomics to imaging.
The amount of data is just insane.
And so we've never had the capacity to look at your body in such a comprehensive way and also at its cost.
You know, you can get your whole genome sequence for $300 now.
It used to be a billion dollars, like a billion with a B.
So that's radical.
Your MRI, I mean, I went and got my knee done and it was $2,500 for a knee MRI.
Now I can get my old system done for like whole body for $499.
And then we have the Taylor Schiele and the AI revolution, which is the only thing that's going to allow us to understand the massive data sets that we can now accumulate on individuals.
So the idea for Function, in my view, is to create a system that democratizes health care, that gives access to low cost, affordable, preventive, and health optimization care for billions of people.
What concerns me is that this process is happening too slow.
and that so many people are suffering, but that the system is so hard to change.
And, you know, Machiavelli said that, you know, it's very, you know, it's very hard to, you know, kind of change ideas, right?
So how do you, like, change people's thinking?
And, you know, people who are invested in this, unfortunately, are not going to want it to change.
We've got a whole medical industrial complex that profits off of people being sick.
We can see it.
I mean, the food industry doesn't want to change.
Maha, whether you like it or not, is out there happening and it's driving a lot of pressure on the food system and the food companies.
And they don't like it and they're pushing back pretty hard and they're doing all kinds of nefarious things to undermine any change in our food system.
So there's a lot of pushback.
But I think change is inevitable.
Whether it's in slavery or women's suffrage or civil rights or women's rights or gay rights, these are all things that happened over long periods of time.
We're called for old moments that then allowed everybody to kind of shift to the next frame of how we navigate the world as human beings.
Amazing.
Thank you, Mark, for all you are doing, all you've done over the length of your career.
And we are really grateful.
Thanks, Daisy.
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