#412: From Anti-Aging to Age Reversal: The Exosome & Copper Peptide Breakthrough For Younger Skin With Debbi Barber and Dr. Jordan Plews

Welcome to Longevity. I'm your host, Natalie Nidham. I'm a nutritionist, a human potential and epigenetic coach, and I created this podcast to bring you the latest ways to take control of your health and longevity. We cover it all from new technology and ancestral health practices to personalized interventions and a very special interest of mine, peptides and bioregulators. Enjoy the show. Welcome back, folks. I'm Natalie Nidham, your host, and we have a great episode for you today. Today's conversation is all about regenerative skin health, and we go deep into exosomes, stem cells, what roles they play, and we talk about what it really takes to keep skin functioning like it did when we were younger. I'm joined by Debbie Barber, a repeat guest. We talked with Debbie about three years ago for the first time, and this time we bring Dr. Jordan Plew's PhD to break down the biology behind copper peptides, exosome signaling, and the role stem cells really play in skin repair and resilience. 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That's manucora.com slash nat to save 31% plus get $25 worth of fabulous free gifts. Welcome, welcome everybody to the show. This is a very special episode. I have with me not one, but two guests. One guest is a repeat guest, Debbie Barber from Vitali Skincare. She, I don't, Debbie, I think it's been a couple of years since we've recorded together, right? Right. Founder and muse for the brand and self-made expert in this whole space. I mean, it is amazing your journey in this. And then also we have Dr. Jordan Plews, PhD, who I believe you guys work together and is helping with new product development, particularly a new product at Vitalian. So we're going to talk about skincare and copper peptides and all the things. I'm so excited. Welcome to you both to the show. Thank you. So good to be back with you, Nat. Yeah. So the good news is we have a girl voice and a boy voice. So everybody's going to be able to tell when they say it. But my first question is going to Debbie. And Debbie, can you just share with us what was going on in your life when you first realized that skincare could actually become a career for you instead of just kind of like a little side hustle or interest? I need to talk to my husband about that because it was a passion. It really was just a passion. And you know, Dr. Faree is the one that introduced me to the copper peptide, the little foam that I use because I said, okay, you have all these amazing peptides. What have you got for crepey skin? And she said, oh, I can get you a prescription. I can get you, you know, GHKCU and the phone. And the story there is for the first time, this phone that was not exciting, but after eight weeks, I thought there is something to this that is different than these $300 jars that I have from Neiman's and all, you know, this is different. This is doing something. And so it really was Terry's the one that decided that, you know, we need to share this with more people. And I think that we can develop this and we can save money because you're paying too much to the compound pharmacy. I mean, that was one of it because it was expensive. It was all about costs. And so I have to give him, I don't know if it's the credit or the blame or what, but he's the one that really, you know, pushed this into, we need to share this. And I thought this might last for a year. And all my friends that play tennis and everybody, you know, that's waiting at the door, we'll get some copper peptides. And instead it just grew and grew and grew. And I mean, it's like the fight we're now five years, Nat. I mean, this started from crepey skin five years and it's exciting. And now I cannot learn enough. My head hurts from studying. And I know Jordan, I mean, I wear him out with questions. And then after the calls, I sent him more questions and he's been so patient to teach, but it's, it's exciting. It's exciting to be almost 70 and having a whole, a whole new career that is totally separate and different from the career that I, you know, 37 years I was in this marketing career and was not even that good in science. And I just want to invite the audience right now to go to YouTube and take a look at Debbie, who's almost 70 years old. That's all I'm going to say. Just go to YouTube, find the podcast, go check out Debbie who's in in quotations almost 70 years old that's all I can say walking the walk talking the talk sister you're doing something right was there a moment when you felt that this wasn't just about beauty anymore but it was really about biology and longevity like there's because you know you you're so passionate about it and yes we all want beautiful skin we want to look great we want to although we want to look how we feel we want to reflect that vibrancy, especially as we're aging. But I think for you now, at some point, there's a flip that happened and moved into not just beauty, beyond beauty. Biology, but health. I think it was about the health. I got to the point where the healthier I am, the healthier my skin is, the better, it's going to be more beautiful. And so that's why I talk to people about the health. And even if they use it and immediately they don't find benefits, It's like, oh, I've used this 10 days and I'm still whatever. I say, but you're improving the health. Your skin is healthier just by applying this copper peptide and taking care of it and not putting junk on it, you know, not putting the bad stuff. I mean, I feel as strongly about that. So, yes, absolutely. The biology and the more I study and the more I hang out with people like Dr. Flues, I mean, the more I learn and then the more questions you have. And I just can't wait for the next product. This one, though, I'm the most excited about. For sure. Well, I mean, look, the GHK copper as a peptide is just so freaking fascinating. It is. It's this minuscule little three amino acid with a little copper thing attached to it that, what is it, 4,000 genes that it resets? Oh, yes. Up and down, regulates it. And it's for skin and it's for brain and it's for the gut and it's for the nerves. And it's like there's no end. And it is really high levels in serum when we're young and it drops as we age. And so it's, you know, and our ability to regenerate skin drops as we, like, it's just this amazing thing. So what it's almost to me, sometimes I think of it almost like, this is almost like a hormone replacement program. Absolutely. Right? Absolutely. Because you're restoring something to the body that allows the body to do the work that it was doing before. Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. So for Jordan, you haven't said a word yet. We've been taking up all the years. Oh, this way. This way. So what originally drew you towards regenerative medicine? Like, was it intellectual curiosity or some kind of personal health? Like, was it a personal health experience thing or what took you there? Yeah, I think, you know, most people who get into science are hoping to make a positive impact on humanity. I did my undergrad in biochemical engineering and then I worked for Pfizer in their bioprocess development group. And after about a year there, I felt like, you know, we're doing a lot to cover up symptoms. I don't know that we're fixing problems. And I got Alzheimer's and diabetes in my family and things like that that were cellular issues. And so that's what pushed me towards stem cell research. And that's what I got my doctorate work in. And it just really felt like that's the future here is how do we understand the regenerative system of the body? and what can we do to boost it, help it, support it. Love it. So when did you realize that regeneration could be applied beyond medicine and into longevity and skin biology? It was really out of impatience. During my postdoc, I was doing a postdoc on regenerative medicine at Stanford. And I said, I wanna apply this science in a practical way. And as you know, Stanford's surrounded with venture capitalists and people who wanna invest. And I had people approach me for investment. And when I told them it's a 10 to 15 year runway, probably 50 plus million dollars to get something through the FDA, their response was more or less like, what can you do in four or five years? Right. And I said nothing. Right. But then they came back and said, there's there's some aesthetic products here that are cell derived. Can you do better than this? And I did some umming and ahhing over it. And I said, yeah. And so, you know, it's been about 10 years now that I've been developing these cell derived topical products. But that's where it started. Wow. That's amazing. All right. So Vitaly was built around clinical strength copper peptides, right? I mean, that's your kind of, to date, that's been your hero product. What was the moment you realized that there was still something missing, that there was still, that there was another step? Because you have, you know, until now, you had a beautiful line of products that's really effective, that gets really great results for people. I mean, I'll never forget some of those before and after pictures of people's burns and stuff that you which showed a long, long time ago. When did you realize that you're like, you know, we could take this another step further? Yes. Well, it has to do a lot with aging. And basically thinking about when we thought about the next product, we said, what can we do to make these products work better? You know, that was one of the questions. What can we do to make these products work better? And then what can we do that can make it better even without these products? I mean, we wanted something. And one of the things in looking at aging and also stress, Jordan and I were talking about this earlier, there's this thing called stem cell exhaustion. And so no matter how wonderful your peptide, if your peptide signal is strong and it's going, but if your stem cells are exhausted, they're not going to be able to read it. And it's not going to perform the way it used to perform. And that's really, you know, as I age, I'm thinking, how long is this going to work? I'm going to be 70. It carried me through the 60s. It's been wonderful. So really thinking about the stem cell exhaustion and how do we address that? What can we do with that? And in the study, I realized that exosomes seem to be the answer to that. That really seemed to be what would help the exhausted, tired, stressed stem cells be able to read the blueprint. and uh and jordan you know happened to be a person who had researched this and we were just so fortunate i mean this was meant to be because we were introduced to him at the right time and i have to say we could not have found a person who could have worked first of all just worked with us that let me just say that and patient with us uh about how much we needed to understand but that that is really it is because it this addresses the situation when you're aging and the wonderful products that are still doing, like if you're 40, probably the GHK is working wonderful, sending the signal, your stem cells are working. But at 70, they're, and you know, when I read this about the exhausted stem cells, I thought, I get it. I'm tired. I'm tired. They are tired. Well, I mean, you're adding another signal, right? And I think that's part of where, you know, when you have something like a copper peptide that is so powerful and you start to think about okay but let's look at aging tissue and that's what really what you're saying the signal is really important but are the worker bees there that is exactly the factory workers need help they're tired materials and they exactly yeah that's exactly it so that is that is why we were and we could have had three products by the time we had this product but nothing that is i mean this has been a long journey, but it is, oh, it is pain. I mean, it is going to be, and it's so interesting to me because I think what happens very often people think, well, you know, if some copper peptide is good and we don't think it's doing enough, well, let's just use more. They might've said, let's increase the concentration of our serum. And maybe one of you wants to speak to this a little bit, but it seems to me that that's the equivalent of someone who's not speaking the same language as you and just talking to them more slowly and more loudly. Like they're not, their capacity to do what they need to do has been met. What they need is something, a different tool to help them to do their job as opposed to just bringing more of them on board. I don't know who wants to take that. It's kind of a question, but. No, I think Jordan, I would say though, that's about balance. I mean, this is about balance. And I know that because of that man sitting there, I've really understood that, but Jordan. Yeah, I mean, one of the ways I think about this and, you know, kind of an analogy is if you had your Thanksgiving dinner, right, and you finished your turkey and someone walked in with two more turkeys, are you going to eat those turkeys? Are you going to say, like, I'm full, right? Most of us are full. But the next day, you're still going to be hungry, right? And I see a lot of focus on this kind of more is better mindset. And yeah, to an extent, you want to make sure you're getting an optimal amount. But beyond that, it's wasteful and it's more about spreading it out over time. and I do think in a lot of areas of biology more is not better right that's just not how biology works like you were talking about hormone replacement therapy earlier if you went to a hormone replacement doc and they said well I'm going to give you 10 times the amount that that guy down the street's giving you you should be scared right not excited run away 100% I love that so if copper peptides signal repair what do exosomes signal that the that the peptides can't don't or cannot. I mean, we talked about it a tiny bit a minute ago, but maybe you could position for us, what's the copper peptide doing and what's the exosome doing that's filling the gap or completing the job or whatever the case may be? Yeah, I mean, we can speak to this for hours, so I'll try to keep it simplified here. There was a paper that was published about six months ago that I'm a co-author on where we looked at all of the proteins that were being produced by stem cells. These are peer-reviewed studies that are out there and did a bit of a meta-analysis and looked at particularly the main sources of mesenchymal stem cells that are used, like bone marrow, adipose, umbilical, right? And you can see the overlap in the amount of proteins. And basically what we found was that, yes, there's a good amount of overlap, about 2,100 genes that are all the same. But then if you look specifically at umbilical, which is often called zero age, and they haven't aged yet, these stem cells have about 2,600 proteins that were not detected in the other forms of stem cells. So I think this is an ongoing area of study to really delineate exactly what is changing over time. But there are now also other studies out there that have shown that younger cells are producing a different array of proteins and biomolecules than older cells, which most people say, yeah, of course, that's common sense. a younger cell is different than an older cell, right? In terms of what is actually happening there, we can dive into the different proteins, the growth factors, the cytokines, right? Interleukins. Generally speaking, you know, when we looked at this from the angle of skin, we started putting them in different buckets. And what we found was there was an enrichment, particularly in these very early young stem cells around extracellular matrix proteins. So that has a big deal to do with how quickly you heal, how well you heal, right? You can think about this as kind of the mortar between the bricks where your cells are bricks. And the different cell types, if they don't have the right stuff to grab onto to move in when repair is needed, move into the wound or the damage, they just won't. And the cells that produce ECM naturally better, like fibroblasts, are going to outcompete them. And that's where you end up with a fibrotic scar with a lot of extra collagen, usually collagen one. And it heals, but it's not quite as beautiful or as nice as it used to heal. when you were younger. And so, I mean, again, we could dive in deep on any one of these things, but effectively the groups around immune cell activation, around extracellular matrix, around things like MMPs, which often dictate how well or how much you scar, these are all higher, they're upregulated in these early umbilical stem cells and hence the exosomes that they're expressing. Interesting. Well, it's interesting to me because I've used the Vitaly serum to heal a surgical scar in the past, very small one on my chest. And, you know, I used it with a bunch of other things, but I would imagine then from what you're saying that if I'd had access to exosomes at that time, that would have kind of, like, I still have like, I've like, I was warned by every plastic surgeon who looked at this, like you're going to have a scar, like a big scar. I have a hairline, very faint. You'd really have to, if you're that close to me? You're too close. You used it right after the procedure, right? I mean, I remember that. Yes, that's great. But I wonder if I'd had the exosomes at the time, if that would have even enhanced the healing even more, right? Because from what you're speaking about, there's other signaling pathways that might've kicked in. So, okay. So let's talk about your partnership here. let's talk about let's talk about debbie like you said you don't chase trends and i know you don't chase trends like you you're like but what specifically made you trust and and you know everybody's talking about exosomes right now everybody they're like they're the new kid on the block they're not even that new but that you know so what made you trust jordan in this hype heavy exosome market because everybody's an expert no looking at all but there's just so much hype out there. And as the more I study this, you know, and Terry and I decided, yes, we definitely want zero age stem cells exosomes And so we said we need a stem cell researcher we don need a cosmetic chemist So that was number one We wanted a stem cell researcher And Jordan had over 20 years you know experience in this And that was number one. But then second, he's a biochemical engineer. So the beauty there is that not only can he do the research and, you know, deal with the stem cells in the lab, in the freezer, etc. But he knows how to take those signals and stabilize and put them in a bottle and actually put them on a shelf without being lyophilized. And he may talk about that. And that was really important because, you know, all of our products you can use, put on your shelf and you don't have to send in a, you know, ice chest or anything like that. So that biochemical engineer, you know, background just made him perfect for what we were looking for. Love it. So, Jordan, when you evaluated Vitaly, what made you feel confident that this wasn't just some other cosmetic brand trying to greenwash, whitewash science and spin it? Well, you just heard such flowery language from Debbie. I mean, it's hard to say no to someone who's as sweet and as nice. And at the same time, we share a lot of passions here, right? I think, you know, we want to really make a difference and make products that work, make products that are going to help people, right? This is about improving skin health. You know, the analogy I often use is I feel like so many products, it's like taking a tree with brown leaves and painting the leaves green. And the obvious thing to do is just water the tree, right? And so that's what we're hoping to do is be more supportive to the natural processes here. And that's something we both shared. And they're great to work with, right? So consulting with them has been amazing. Have you ever had to push back on formulation decisions because of scientific integrity? Oh, yeah. All the time. I mean, so many people think that they know this area. I've yet to meet a person that doesn't feel like they can go and make a product themselves. And, you know, most of those people... We'll just throw this and this and this together. It'll be great. Yeah, yeah. It works in the kitchen. Exactly. That's the same analogy I use. is when you go to a formulator, they're going to treat your formulation like they're making a batch of cookies. They're going to throw it all in and mix it up. And for speed, they're going to turn the heat up because they want to get to the next run and they're going to blend it as fast as they can. So I usually have to go in and be like, okay, don't do that. Don't do that. Don't do that. Let's do it in this order, right? And things that when you really understand it, it's common sense in a lot of cases, but you have to understand the business part of formulating products is speed and scale, right? And so that's part of the expense with making a good product, though, is making sure they're doing it the right way at the right speed. All right. So let's get into the science of source here. We're going to talk about why zero age, why you pick those. You mentioned it a little bit earlier, but what does the biological age of an exosome source matter more? Why does it matter more than consumers might realize? and there's so much there's so much you know there there's a lot of noise about this out there and and lord and misunderstanding a lot of my god you put five different people with five different opinions like professionals in this i don't know this is gonna come out alive no we we understand that also by the way that but yeah so tell us jordan like what why yeah so So, I mean, this is something that in the last five years, I've spoken at a lot of conferences nationally, internationally on this. And I feel like the amount of misinformation has only increased. It's like you're saying, there's a lot more people standing up saying that they know what they're talking about here, most of whom have never set foot in a laboratory before. So, you know, I'll start with the kind of common sense answer, which is that, you know, if you maybe when you were a child, you fell off your bike, you scraped your knee. It happens to all of us. Now, recall the last time you had a similar injury, right? You might remember that didn't heal so quickly and maybe not so scarlessly, right, as it did when you were young. So that's kind of where we are right now is understanding that that system is going back to those younger cells and borrowing their healing capacity, borrowing those instructions that are normally present there all the time. um and you know i i started making products about 10 years ago with adipose derived stem cells and that was usually coming from liposuction aspirate right people uh we were joking to call this the fight club model you know they're giving away the fat um at the end of the day though these are not the healthiest people typically right if you're getting liposuction done you're not usually the youngest you're not usually the healthiest yeah you're inflamed you got you know environmental and age-related things associated, right? And if you really want to dig into the science, I'll point you back to that paper I mentioned before from about six months ago where we're looking at this comparison. There's clear differences in what you're producing at a young age versus an old age, and they do tie to known healing repair pathways. And they've even shown in a few studies that if you're to take the exosomes or secretome, the extracellular vesicles from an older cell and put them on a younger cell, you not only don't get a benefit, but in some cases it can be negative because you're asking a young cell to run an old cell program effectively, when in reality you want your older cells to run the young cell program. Either less than or equal to the age of your cells is what you're looking for at an exosome. Exactly. Yeah. If you were to say, okay, I need a blood transfusion and the doctor came in and said, here's the blood of somebody who's older than you and less healthy than you, or you can have the blood of someone who's younger than you and more healthy than you, I don't think you need to be a scientist to know what that choice should be. Right. Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. That's a really good analogy. So, so what fundamentally differentiates umbilical derives exosomes from adult fat, PRP, or even plant cells? Because plant cells are all over the place right now. Like the marketing claims that these guys are making, like where does the umbilical cord population? And I mean, we're talking, and I, and I, maybe we should spend a second just reminding people that we're talking about exosomes, not stem cells here. Thank you, Matt. That's a massive, massive distinction that I think, you know, and I've had a few people on talking about this, but I think if someone's new to the podcast or they missed it, they went to get their snack last time while we were talking about it. I think it's really important to lay down that foundation of understanding of, you mentioned it a little bit, but what is an exosome versus a stem cell, what's in this product, and then what really fundamentally derives these umbilical derived exosomes from adult fat, PRP, or plant stem cell marketing claims? Sure. Well, so for me, I just think back to when I was doing my postdoc, I was in a heart lab, and effectively, we were taking stem cells and injecting them into the hearts of pigs after they were caused a heart attack, an MI, and trying to fix the heart, because heart disease is the number one killer and we want to fix that. And so I was part of a group that was working on that. And effectively, whether they put different types of stem cells in from different mesenchymal sources or took a stem cell and differentiated it into a beating cardiomyocyte, injected that in, in most cases, you did see improvement. But what really stood out to me was there were some groups where they were taking what was being released from the cells. At that time, we were calling it paracrine factors and things like that. It wasn't being called exosomes at the time. But that was put into a hydrogel, injected into the heart, and that was often as good or sometimes better, right? And the benefit there was you can't put a stem cell in a bottle on the shelf, right? Stem cells are growing in a very controlled lab environment. You have to control the microenvironment. Incubators, et cetera, has to be done sterile or aseptic. So this is not practical. But the benefit here is that the exosomes are not alive. They are not cells. They're not dividing. they are just a packet of information and that that vesicle that exosome vesicle is protecting those you know contents that are otherwise delicate and so that can be put on the shelf and and saved if done correctly right and that was a big aha moment for me but you know this is this whole shift is really you know towards plant you're talking about to me reminds me of the history of human stem cell research because the exosome stuff that we see today really was born out of human stem cell research. If you go back for a minute, you might remember George Bush banned a lot of stem cell research in 2001. That was overturned in 2009. But then you remember when that was overturned in 2009, 2010, we started to see this huge influx of stem cell derived products and people injecting stem cells. The FDA was not happy about a lot of this, but because of regulatory reasons and the brand value of stem cells, we saw plant stem cell emerge. And then all of a sudden, there's a lot of plant stem cell products. So the short and sweet answer here is that most of the plant or non-human cell derived things here are trying to benefit from the brand or the marketing of what was done with human cell derived products. you literally cannot sell a human cell derived or often a cell derived product in a lot of places around the world so if you're a big brand and you want to sell something you got to have another option and i'm not going to say that plant exosomes are totally useless but i don't think that they're really a comparator it's like if i went in your front yard and broke a branch off your tree you wouldn't go and run out to inject your blood into it to grow back the tree branch right but any times we're kind of saying the same thing in reverse let's take this plant derived thing and expect regeneration in humans. Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, there's a supplement out there that are plant exosomes, but the promise is not to deliver information to cells necessarily. The promise is that that is how the plant moves a lot of the phytonutrients and things that we want access to. And it delivers it at a cellular level because it's in an exosome, which I think is a really interesting concept. So it's not a plant exosome trying to instruct human cells to repair, but it's a plant exosome delivering nutrients at a cellular level, which I think is a different, it's a nuance. But basically what we're saying is that it's not just that younger exosomes are more active. It's fundamentally that they're giving different, better, more youthful regenerative direction to the cell. It's reminding the cell, this is what you used to do when you were young and the cell still hopefully has the capacity to do that and if we look at Debbie's I can't believe you're almost 70 face clearly there's something to it going into this to the umbilical cord age zero exosome did that that make the project more expensive or slow it down at all or like why did oh oh slow yes I said we could have had three products. It was slow. It was slow, but you knew every, I mean, it's worth it. In fact, it's still, we're like two weeks away, I think, or like when this shows two weeks away, but yes, it's slower, but it's worth it. And because we learned every step of the way, what was being done and why it's going to be better. And so it's kind of like worth waiting for. So definitely more expensive, more, you know, it was going to be September than it's going to be October, you know, but again, there's a reason. And, and he, and, you know, Dr. Plews was not rushing anything. He was doing it right. I mean, the way we would want it to, the way Vitaly would want our products to be. Yeah. Yeah. No, there's clearly a philosophical core alignment here between you guys and between all you guys that is, you know, that's how you build legacy, you know, and products that actually work. Let's talk about some safety regulations and the insider truth here. Like, and you've addressed some of this, Jordan, already. If a brand claims human exosomes, what is the single most important verification that consumers should demand? Like, let's help people to educate themselves a little bit here. So what should people be looking for? yeah we could do a whole podcast just on that but i i think you know part of this is questions they need to ask and where to look for sure sure i think the thing that most people don't even think to ask is is there any animal derived products being used in the manufacturing right is this uh you know the most common thing if you're in a laboratory around the world growing a cell a mammalian cell is something called fetal bovine serum. It's very common. And if you've ever grown cells in a lab, you have seen that you probably use that. The problem with it is that we have things like mad cow disease, which is a prion-based disease. And this is something that can't be filtered out. You can't test for it. It's pretty much a risk that you take. I know we've had outbreaks over the years. And there's places like New Zealand that have been isolated and their cows have been isolated. But generally speaking, you know, feel it's a risk that's not worth taking by using that product. So not using any animal derived products is an important one in my mind, not only for safety, but also batch to batch consistency. Because if you're going and you're getting something from an animal cohort to feed your cells, that can be different every time. And that can have different effects. And we want a product that's very consistent. And the more you have changes, whether it's changes of donors, you know, some people are, they're, they're getting the cell population. Maybe it's from plasma from a different group of people every week, every month, this introduces variability that you just don't want. Yeah. In your case, are you basically sourcing very like, like, so help me out with this because so basically people should ask, number one, are these human? Are these not bovine or, you know, is there no, how do you know there's no contamination, is the lab basically also working with animal product? But also from what you just said, how do you manage this whole sourcing issue about not wildly variable batches, or are you just testing every batch to make sure that each batch meets the criteria that you require? Because you can only get so many exosomes out of one umbilical cord. Sure. Yeah. So there, I mean, we could delve in how you get consistency there. A lot of it, people imagine there's a new umbilical cord or a new source of cells every week, every month. That's not actually the best way to do it. Generally speaking, you're going to get multiple cords and put them into one master cell bank. You're going to test that cell bank to make sure that there's no communicable diseases in there. There's a standard list of those kinds the things to worry about. Usually we go a few steps beyond that testing for things like Zika and whatnot as well. And then every batch, you got to do microbial testing, make sure there's no bacteria or fungus. And that happens multiple times through the process. The whole process needs to be done in a lab that's meeting CGMP standards. So aseptic technique, making sure things are basically as sterile as possible throughout. And then, like I said, the animal component I bring up because of the fact that it is significantly more expensive to feed the cells non-animal derived products. You have to use synthetic chemically defined alternatives and things that costs a lot more money, generally speaking. And so there's a reason companies don't want to do that, right? They're making better margin by using the animal products. But I would say that it's something from a safety and reproducibility standpoint, every company should be doing. But if you don't ask, they just won't mention it. Most people don't know to ask, frankly. That's why we're having this part of the conversation, right? Because I think the consumer needs to know where are the sticking points here. What are the places that people might be cutting corners or whatever? And so would that be a Xeno-free sourcing? Is that what that term means? So guys, Xeno is X-E-N-O. So you're really trying to stay away from the animal products just because of all of the things that Jordan just talked to us about. And I'm guessing that when it comes to, are there risks in terms of contamination or immune reactions with poorly sourced exosomes? There's got to be. Again, you've just talked about this, like the sterility and maybe you want to. Yeah, I think a lot of what I hear out on social media is often a bit overblown. The scariest thing that could happen usually would require a company to do something malicious. I don't think anyone out there is doing that, right? Like, for example, if you were to go and to take a cell line that you knew was bad, like a cancer cell line, and you were trying to get exosomes out of that, that would be malicious. That would be crazy, right? I don't think anyone is in that bucket. But certainly there are places where sterility is maybe not up to code. They don't have great SOPs. They're trying to, you know, when something gets really popular, as exosomes have been, you find people that are not experienced trying to jump on the bandwagon and benefit. And because they don't have that experience, they're going to cut corners. They're going to miss steps. They're maybe not following known practices. So this is where working with people who've really been doing this for years and have the proper background, usually PhD level, is important, in my opinion. And the other thing is I think that labeling standards are still not really quite up to snuff, right? So are there specific things you would direct consumers to look for on the label of the products they're using? I feel like this part is a little bit just education for the audience. I mean, obviously this is going to be on all of your products, but what are the elements of labeling that you think are most important people need to look for so that they can at least ensure that it's safe and that it's at least some efficacy? Yeah. I mean, the short answer is the label is not going to tell you everything that you need to know, unfortunately. That's the truth. Like you should do a little bit more than read the label. When I'm looking at a label, though, I'm often looking at, you know, where are the preservatives? because if you're making a topical, you need to have some preservative. If the preservative is right at the top of the list, that tells you there's a lot of preservative, right? That's not a good sign. And usually it means that there's not a lot of active. And so the part that is related to the exosome portion, the active portion, that should be towards the top of the list. And then, you know, there's basic things. Like we know if you go out in the sun, the sun's going to damage your DNA and your skin. It can cause a double strand break. Well, inside these exosomes, you've got very unstable molecules. So you don't want the bottle to be clear. You don't want to be exposed to sunlight and UV. You don't want it to be oxidized. So using a double wall airless pump that really keeps oxygen out. This should be pretty basic, but a lot of things out there are using a dropper bottle because it looks scientific. But every time you open that bottle, you're introducing air. You're introducing contaminants from the outside environment. So, you know, when you're talking about a product like this, it should be very well protected. I do get a lot of people that are concerned about temperature. Yeah, well, because we imagine it must be perishable. Right. Yeah. And in many cases, it would be. But you have to remember, you know, what temperature is your body, right? 98.6 degrees, I hope. And that's more than room temperature. and these are floating around in your body right now. We found them in every biological fluid from lymphatic blood, saliva, urine, right? So it's not temperature that is breaking them down. Often it's oxidation. It's other things from the environment, you know, vigorous shaking. Even if you combine these too much, too concentrated, the lipid envelopes bump into each other and they can merge. And there is some physics behind this. something called the Coiters equation that talks about the physics of these vesicles. And basically the larger the diameter of the vesicle, the more likely it is to pop. And so actually smaller is better. So these are all things to consider when you're looking at a product. But again, you probably won't find all this on the label. One of the things that as I've aged that I've started to understand, because we're always talking about skin, skin, skin, skin, skin. Yeah, I got to take care of my skin. And then it comes to your awareness, a lot of the negative visuals that you're getting on your face that you're seeing is really happening under the skin. Having good skin is amazing, but all the stuff underneath is really what's holding the ship up as it were. How deep do exosomes go in terms of their signaling effects? Like, is this all skin or are we, are we actually, and you mentioned the extracellular matrix earlier, like how much of that, like, can they really shift your skin aging trajectory over time? And what I am going to say to the audience is if you're listening to this and you're under the age of 50 or 40, this it's not too soon because no, but because the The younger you are, the earlier you slow things down. Right. I didn't start taking care of my skin really until I was about 50. I was lucky that I had good skin until 50, but that was my kind of starting point because it might take me back a little bit, but it ain't taking me back to 30. So anyway, so talk to us a little bit about how deeply the benefits of the exosomes, and And we could even bring in GHK a little bit here because it may also play a synergistic role. But are we able to affect what happening underneath Yeah So there some interesting things out there that have been studied I think people default is to say it can affect what happening underneath Yeah so there some interesting things out there that have been studied I think people default is to say I can possibly be getting in we have a great barrier. You know, if you talk about it, again, as an engineer, I think about where are the places that this can get in? What are the sizes we're talking about, right? If you look at the typical diameter of an exosome, we're talking, you know, 30 to 150 nanometers-ish, a lot of people talk about Daltons and I've heard about people saying, oh, anything bigger than 500 kilodalton. I've heard people say 20,000 kilodalton. I know a lot of this stems back to a doctor from 20 years ago. The reality is that the skin is not like a metal plate with holes drilled in it of a specific size. And I think that's how a lot of people think about it. Right. Well, the skin around the eye is thinner. We know absorption there is better than say other parts, right? And there's a stretchiness and elasticity. We know we have sweat glands, we have hair follicles, right? Just to kind of put it into perspective, if your typical cell is maybe 10 to 15 micron across, and your typical exosome is 30 to 150 nanometers across roughly, you know, to fit an exosome down a sweat gland, typical sweat gland, typical hair follicle, it's like a marble down a well. We're talking about something thousands of times the diameter of an exosome. So this idea that you can't rub something on topically and get it down those wells is just not true. Now, in order for this to be effective, you do want to see the exosome making contact with a living cell. You don't want it all to be touching dead cells on the surface, of course, right? A lot of people think, okay, well, I'll just microneedle it in, that will work. And there is some evidence that that may help with the delivery. And there's other modalities that help as well. But you would be surprised by how much data from just topical application alone has led. And so people ask what you've asked, how deep is it going down? And they imagine this little bubble traveling through this Byzantine maze through the cells, right? When I think in actual fact, what's more likely to be occurring here is that the exosome is talking to the cells near the surface, and those cells are changing based on the instructions that they're giving. And then they, in turn, release their signals to their neighbors. And then you start a bit of a domino effect that goes deeper and deeper down. And then of course, as your skin is turning over, over time, you keep doing this, you keep nudging in the right direction, you will see fresher, younger, better looking skin coming to the surface. Okay. But it is still very much a skin intervention. It's not so much in the deeper layers of the dermis or down to the muscles or like, this is really, and I mean, look, Great skin takes you a long way, but this is really addressing the health of the skin and the appearance of the skin just by renewing the cells as they turn over so that you're ending up with younger, better looking cells. Yeah. I guess, sorry, let me rephrase that. Can it go deep enough to affect wrinkles at all? For sure. Yeah, so this is the surprising thing is that, you know, there has been a few studies looking at histology where you can actually see an increase in collagen, an increase in elastin, an increase deep, right? They're thinking of like a full skin punch biopsy and seeing all the way down in improvement. And so this is a growing area of research. But I think the thought is you can't possibly get down to the dermis. You can't possibly be doing anything more than the surface. But that's not what the data shows. It is showing that, and it may take 12 weeks to get there, right? But at the same time, it is affecting all the way down the depth of a skin punch biopsy, at least. Yeah. And we can't forget our friend GHK. No, I was going to tell you. Right? Because GHK-CU, like, it's getting in there. And if I would think that the GHK, like, I mean, what a partnership. I mean, that's what I used on my scar. I have a six-inch scar from my spinal surgery. and once the doctor gave me the of course you can't talk to them about this but can I put something can I put something you know this is no and but I used it and and and submitted my photos regularly and was told that it was a month ahead of the healing of the wound because I was using the exosomes and the GHK together and just covering my poor back which was I mean I I wouldn't even look at the pictures for the first week. Jordan, would you say that Nexosome Skin Care could be considered like a localized longevity intervention? Yeah, for sure. I think of this much more as a treatment product, right? I think this is something that is supporting the health of your skin and really just reminding your skin cells how to look and act young again. Yeah, I love that. So if someone were to use this for years, I mean, we're at the beginning of the runway here. I mean, I'll be chasing Debbie. That's right. What cumulative biological benefit do you think we might see? I mean, we don't know necessarily, but. I think over time what you're seeing is your lifestyle, your genetics, aging, environmental exposure. They're infecting our epigenetics, right? And epigenetically, we're basically turning some genes off that used to be on. And the beauty here is that if you get that packet of information through an exosome, that that gene that you normally were expressing is turned off, now it can still read that message in the exosome and it can still get the benefit of that protein, that biomolecule that used to be naturally produced, right? And all these things are natural, right? At the end of the day, we think natural, we think plants. But, you know, natural to our cells is human proteins. On a human level, we all speak the same protein language, right? So over time, as that builds up, you're going to stay in a state that is more like when your cells were younger. That's what the science shows, right? And I think the more we can maintain that, the better. So in your analogy earlier, right, the speed at which things are going down is probably going to slow, right? The growth factors that you've turned off or aren't producing as much of, now you're going to have more of. And you've got the help of GHK copper in there too. So I think, is it a magic bullet? No. I think nothing is. But I think that the big shift here is that I think we need to get away from what I would call the hero ingredient model, where we have one ingredient doing like 10, 20 different things and expecting the world from it, and instead need to embrace this idea that in order to change a lot of things, we need to have a lot of components. And what's in these exosomes, when you look at it from a protein level, We found thousands of different molecules, right? You're not going to have thousands of different things on your bathroom shelf. So this is a shortcut, right? You put back a lot. I don't use them all. But yeah, I think that's the other thing to mention here is like when you mix together all these different products, sometimes they play well together. Sometimes they don't. Part of the goal here was how do we get as much into one as possible that's all going to be natural, healthy, and boosting the main things that your skin is going to be missing with time. As we head into the new year, I'm thinking less about drastic resolutions and more about choosing better daily inputs. And protein, of course, is one of them. Like many women, I'm working hard to hit my protein goals for muscle, metabolism, bone strength. But I've also learned my lesson with proteins. You really have to dig for the truth about their ingredients. I've read that two thirds of protein powders tested had more lead in a serving than California safety limits. Not exactly the morning ritual I had in mind. Now, this is why I switched to Peori PW1. I use the bourbon vanilla made with real vanilla seeds from Madagascar, and it is so smooth and naturally sweet that adding it to my yogurt bowl or shake actually feels like a treat. Plus, for every scoop, I know I'm getting clean, high quality whey that supports my strength goals. Pure doesn't just say they're clean. They prove it. PW1 is third-party tested for more than 200 contaminants. And Pure was the only brand that earned the Clean Label Project Transparency Certificate. All you've got to do to get it for yourself is go to pure.com forward slash NAT and use code NAT for 32% off your first subscription or 20% off anything on the site. And I promise you, everything on that site is just as clean and just as tested as the protein powder. You definitely are building synergistic products within your line. You can't speak to anybody else's, but you are building synergy in your line. So where do you see exosomes fitting into that broader longevity stack? The things like peptides and the NAD boosters and the synolytics. Where does this fit into that whole kind of puzzle? Yeah, well, I go back to the hallmarks of aging and think about, you know, there's a lot of talk about mitochondria, a lot of talk about antioxidants, right? I think one of the big step forwards that we're understanding at this point is even if you went and lived in a cave without any sunlight, you're still going to age. And so if you're not getting these oxidants from damage from the sun, where are they coming from? And now I think we understand it's coming from your mitochondria. They're breaking down and they're releasing the reactive oxygen species. And we've been covering up those ROSs with antioxidants when really we need to probably get rid of those cells or push them to recycle, right? Get rid of the zombie cells, the senescent cells. A lot of that is down to your immune system. And the stem cells have a role with the immune system. So we do know that some of what's in these exosomes is relating back to supporting and boosting immune function. and so I would expect that you're going to be quicker to get rid of those senescent cells on the surface so while you're taking all these things internally most people who care about that also want to look good externally and so we're attacking it from both angles I think that's a better more well-rounded approach some might argue if I take enough internally eventually it's going to come out through my skin but you know for those who want to do everything why not you know go from both angles yeah my point of view on that though is also the body deals with things from a hierarchical perspective purely based on survival, right? The body could not give a flying fajita, how we look, right? Like it just doesn't care. You have a skin, it's got a barrier, it's doing its job. I don't care if it looks like a prune. I don't care what it looks like. It's there. We've got bigger fish to fry and there will be bigger fish to fry as we age. So I do believe that I think, you know, the skincare, good skincare that's based on good science is going to deliver those nutrients to the skin where you need it, when you need it. I think it's just foundational. We wouldn't survive otherwise, right? If there wasn't that hierarchy of needs that the body has dictated and sticks to. There's no negotiating. So anyway, let's talk a little bit about what people see. What's the first thing people notice? Is it texture, tone, inflammation, resilience, healing speed for sure we've talked about that a ton but let's talk about aesthetics a little bit because we've kind of done the beneath the surface stuff like what do people notice first and how long does it take i think that might be a debbie question well initially because uh i was fortunate enough to be using this for several months before the surgery and after and during the surgery my body talking about exactly what you described it was totally about building bone i mean i was fusing bone. And I was told that that is my number one job. You know, anything I tried to do or talk about your job is to build, to, you know, do everything to support that. I had to stop supplements that were very good supplements because I needed the right kind of inflammation to build the bone. So I learned so many things through this, but I did have my exosomes. I didn't have to get permission to put them on my face or, you know, so I was sort of bathing in those. And I'm telling you my body in this, it was using so much energy to heal my spine. And yet my face and skin looks better and it's fuller. Yeah. That was what was so interesting. I thought, oh my goodness, my skin is thicker. Yeah. And I did. One day I said, Jordan, does this stuff make your skin thicker? Because I am really, I'm feeling this. I'm feeling like my skin's like my daughter's skin. So how long did that take before you started to notice? Do you think? About eight weeks. Okay. So, and that's what I'm wondering, right? So you're talking about texture, tone. What about things like, um, like beyond wrinkles, like barrier strength, redness, immune function? Like, are we seeing, are, can people expect to maybe see some of that? Like people that are, have those kinds of issues and is it at a two month, three month? Like, yeah. And obviously everybody's going to be different and it depends on a million things, but how long do people, first of all, can they expect to see any improvement in barrier strength, redness, and, immune. Absolutely. Jordan, you can talk more. You've seen the studies longer. I know Terry has a red face all the time, and this is definitely toned down. I mean, we have seen this on Terry because he's Irish and he's got this red look a lot, and this has really made a difference. And so, Jordan, you can talk about longer studies. Well, what I would bring up is that we put in a biomimetic of ceramides. So, there's a blend of ceramides that is similar to the ceramides that your skin naturally produces to make its natural barrier. And if you're scrubbing or you're using too many hydroxy acids and things, there's a variety of reasons you might have destroyed your barrier. Once you get to that place and bacteria and inflammation is getting in there, it's hard to get it out. It's hard to get those cells to produce more ceramides again. So by putting ceramides in the serum, you're almost having this biomimetic like bio bandaid, if you will, to put that barrier on while the exosomes and the aloe and green tea and the things that are calming, calm down that redness and inflammation and give your skin a chance to rebuild that barrier. Otherwise people get caught in this cycle where it's just redness over and over again, it seems like. How should expectations differ? And we talked about this a tiny bit, we touched on it between younger skin and older skin. Because as we age, we want our skin to go back to being bounced right back. But so what, how do we manage people's expectations in who might be starting a product like that, this in their thirties, their forties, their fifties and beyond? Yeah. I mean, from my point of view, if you're in your twenties and thirties, this is prejuvenation. You're probably not at a place yet where this is going to have a big move of the needle for you. This is probably more for like say the 40 plus, but some level of stem cell exhaustion, some level of obvious aging that they've seen on their face, right? I think in general, you know, you should see fine lines and wrinkles go down, you should see redness improve, you should see some improvement in fullness. And a lot of that could be extracellular matrix, like collagen, elastin matrix underneath the skin, slowly strengthening and rebuilding properly, right? Those are the types of things. But the very first thing usually is tone and texture. Sure. And I have to remind people, your skin turns over, not overnight. It takes, you know, a good month or more for the skin to turn over. So you want to go through at least a couple of skin cycles. So when Debbie says eight weeks, you know, I'm thinking that's a couple of skin cycles. It's only going to get better after the third and the fourth, right? So give it at least a couple of months before you pass like a big judgment. But I will say most people do within the first four weeks see something that is visibly different and improved. Even if it's just calming. Yeah, that's really good point thank you or softening i think soft i mean that was the other thing both with ghk with the copper peptides is soft there's just a softer texture yeah i found yeah this is interesting and i mean to younger women listening to this this weird thing happens as you age where the texture of your skin changes it becomes a little rougher especially below the mouth and when you're using good product you will notice that it will start to smooth out and or dry it It becomes dry. It's dry. For sure. You really need to do something about that early. You need to do something. All right. So what kind of feedback from customers impact you the most? What kind of just sets you back in your chair? What's the kind of feedback that just blows you away? You mean like makes me excited? Yeah. I mean, I know the answer because you've sent me the pictures. I mean, there's healing, but there'd be the healing of the surgical wound on your back, number one. No, that's number one. But no, people who, I mean, people who have had problems all their life. And now this is, you know, like this is more with the copper peptides because we're just now releasing exatomes. But when we're solving a problem that, I mean, people who said, I always had bad skin in my young life. And now people are noticing my skin. And that just, it makes my day. And then we had someone with a flesh eating bacteria from the Costa Rica, from Costa Rica. that she was in this clinical trial and she heard about copper peptides and she reached out to us and I immediately sent her the 3% serum and the picture she showed us, I mean, she'd been in this clinical trial. So her skin had calmed down, but she had all the scarring. And this was after just like four to six weeks. She said, I can tell a difference. The scar is starting to end. She had been dealing with this for a year. When she started applying the serum, she could tell a difference within four to six weeks. She just said, I cannot believe the difference. Yeah. I just want to frame this to the audience, just so you guys hear. The flesh eating disease had been basically treated. She was now left with the damage. Yes. And I think what's important about scars, and this is a different question also maybe, and I don't know if it's exosomes or GHK or both, but what about old scars? Can these products help with old scars? Because this is a fresh scar. The body is still going at it, which is the perfect time to go at it, clearly. And that's amazing. But what about older scars? Have you seen that it can be helpful? Do you need to irritate them a little bit to bring attention to it? What are your thoughts on that? In my experience, it is better to agitate the scar tissue a little bit. So whether you're doing a nanoneedling, a microneedling, something that draws the body to say, oh, this is still injured. We need to get back onto the healing cascade. Otherwise, I have seen it improve without it, but it's much more slow. Yeah. Well, it's interesting. I have a scar on my cheek. Actually, it's a birth scar. And it has, over the years, has improved just the last few years of using these types of products. And I, you know, and I'm, I mean, I've used the GHKCU for a long time. I'm pretty excited to see with exosomes and maybe I'll give it a little poke every once in a while, but it's almost invisible now. That is great. Which people used to come up to me all the time and say, oh, you have lipstick on your cheek. All right. Have you ever seen a transformation that you're like, oh my God, this is like beyond cosmetic. This is next level. Because people are going to respond differently, right? Maybe based on their genetics, maybe based on their diet. Like, who knows? Like, have you ever seen a transformation that's just maybe made you go, oh, holy wow, this is crazy. I mean, now we're going to go back to GHK because we just don't have the track. We'll talk about this in a year or two about the exosomal. I have a lot of before and afters where I have seen skin, I mean, look significantly better. It's on your website, right? It's on the website and I have people who write me and talk about, you know, and they don't have to do this. They make a point to write and talk about how their skin feels. I can't, I love to touch my face again or, you know, things like that. And I call that a transformation. And I had a scar. I was hit by a golf club when I was nine years old and had a scar. Like, I know, I know. Now that we can talk. And it was a scar that, so you're talking now 60 years or 50, 55 years. And I started putting the serum on and I didn't microneedle or anything because it was a scar. and I put it on twice a day and I put the oil on top of it and it just, they, it truly did just, I mean, it's barely there, but it's significantly flatter. And I've had, I've had people actually, uh, the person who does my hair, she came and said, I wish I could hold up my sweater and show you my breasts. And I'm like, what? And she said, I've been using the serum. And she had had this procedure 10 years ago and she's had one place where the scar did not heal and one that did. And so she used the serum and we're, I mean, she used it as four or five weeks, not five minutes. And she said, it's totally flattened out like the other one. And she just, she was so excited. So I have a lot of people with a scarring and GHK. I mean, that is probably wound healing is where it just shines. Absolutely. For sure. Okay. So let's talk about the more is better myth. We talked about it a little earlier. You can only eat so much turkey in one sitting, but many brands are like, oh, we've got billions, we've got trillions, we've got hundreds of trillions of exosomes. Why can higher numbers be biologically meaningless? Do we have any idea what the threshold or saturation point is on signaling molecules like this? Yeah. I think the reality is that from cell type to cell type, it's very different. We got to remember it's not about the number of exosomes. It's about the cargo inside the exosomes. And so So if you have a bunch of boxes of junk, you don't want that. And in actual fact, if you spend a good time working in this field, you'll know that you can get more exosomes out of a cell by agitating it, treating it in a negative way, basically upsetting it and roughing up the cells. You can get more of these particles that can show up by an NTA analysis as exosomes and they not good They containing inflammatory markers or they not actually of benefit right Like the secret sauce for me is you know how are those cells being treated in the laboratory? It's kind of like the old physics adage, you know, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Well, you need to push the cell in the right way to produce the good stuff. If you're just trying to maximize for number of particles, number of exosomes, you're not likely to get the right blend. And so, yeah, I think from a marketing standpoint, this is what a lot of companies go with. But as I mentioned before, in biology, it's rarely a more is better. And this is why really we want to nudge the skin in the right direction each day with a reasonable dose, with something that's more balanced. What is in your mind, what's a reasonable dose? Because I haven't. If you're talking about hundreds of thousands of exosomes, you're probably too low. You should In the millions or more. Okay. Now you start talking about billions, trillions, hundreds of trillions. It's getting pretty wacky out there. I know of one company that within the span of five years went from selling you 100 million to multiple trillions. And the pace at which they were moving forward, I really question that that's true. Right. It's very easy to just keep adding a zero on to whatever you're saying. And, you know, the proof is in the results, though. You know, you're talking about results before. I've seen a lot of different exosome products over the years and in many cases a lot of skeptics and the thing that really stood out to me was some would actually do a split face and put it only on half the face for eight weeks and had many people come back going okay I have to stop because I look like I have Bell's palsy here I got half my face is like lower than the other that's commitment yeah you know this is this is a great sales tactic if you can get people to commit to that but most by four weeks or eight weeks in they see that difference in their own skin and you can't deny that yeah you can't make me do that it's not happening i'm not losing eight weeks on half my face it's not going to happen so would you compare exosomes to hormones powerful in the right dose harmful or wasteful in excess right look at the experiments that were done I think it was a Japanese researcher on water and speaking to water with kind words versus speaking to water with angry words. And it actually affected the physical structure of the water molecules. Yeah, and I think it definitely needs to think about what you're doing very carefully and how you're treating the cells. And how you treat them does determine what they produce. What we're trying to do effectively is to trick these cells in the laboratory into producing the right blend. So they are reacting, thinking that damage has occurred and producing a specific balance of exosome and exosome contents based on that. Whereas, you know, others might starve the cells or subject them to different forms of damage that could result in a profile that's more inflammatory. I even was on another podcast a while back with a trainer for injections and does a lot of facial treatments and lasers. And she found that, you know, if you get exosomes from the wrong cell source, they can actually keep you in that inflamed period longer, not less. And so you're red longer and, you know, it's actually not necessarily in your benefit. Right. So there are some examples of this, but I think it's about balance. I think the analogy here is more like, you know, we understand if you had a set of multivitamins, right? You want a little bit of everything so that if you have something that you're in deficit of, you've got it in there. It's not about taking 50,000 times the dose of one vitamin, right? It's not going to make up for something else that you're lacking. Yeah, I love that. Perfect. Let's talk a little bit about what else is in there. why pair exosomes with vitamin c glutathione and sod superoxide dismutase too specifically yes i'll talk real real briefly about the vitamin c because probably the number one question i've had in the last five years is how do i use vitamin c with copper peptides and you know we want to keep them apart yeah yes we do well we do we do if it's ascorbic acid okay ascorbic acid and that's what most people have been using. But I've learned, as you said, when the light bulb went off, I've studied and learned that there are other sources of vitamin C that actually are much more stable. They're oil-based, so they actually absorb deeper into the skin than the water-based. And we decided, okay, I'm going to solve this vitamin C problem for everyone because we also have copper peptides in our exosomes, in our Vita product. Not a heavy amount, but we have a good amount to balance. Again, because if they're using the serum, they need to continue using that for the same purposes. But the vitamin C that we have added is stable and it is in the product. So you do not need to buy another vitamin C when you use this product. You have two stable THD ascorbic and MAP, which are two stable sources of vitamin C. And that was my first request. And I know that sounds funny, but he says, okay, we had the first formulation meeting. I want vitamin C that works with copper peptides. Can you do that? And, you know, of course. I mean, it's interesting with vitamin C, right? Because people think of it as an antioxidant and all the things, but vitamin C, C equals collagen. Yes, absolutely. It's crucial for collagen. So, sorry, Jordan, over to you. Yeah. No, I was just going to say, yeah, that I think we all understand the importance of vitamin C. I think sometimes it's a little overblown, but certainly the low oxidizing forms of vitamin C are better specifically when mixed with GHK. And you just generally don't want something like ascorbic acid that oxidizes very easily floating around and they're doing damage to other ingredients and often turning brown and, And it causes a lot of effects around it. So coupling it with glutathione, it kind of extends the life of the vitamin C as well. It acts more like a time release because in our cells, glutathione helps to recycle vitamin C and E through our cells. So that is a bit of a stabilizer and helps to elongate the value of this. So instead of this game of I need really high percentage of ascorbic acid, you can actually use a lower amount of these low oxidizing forms and get a kind of a time release effect. Great. And the SOD2? Yeah, this is not something we're adding in as an external ingredient. This is actually something that stem cells are naturally producing. And we highlight it because in the body, that is the ultimate antioxidant, really, right? I think there's a lot of attention given to vitamin C and glutathione. But when the cell needs to perform an antioxidant activity, that's its go-to. And so you're getting that as a side effect, as a natural benefit of the stem cell exosomes. Okay. So if I understand it, the way these ingredients are working, they're like supporting actors, right? We've got the signaling, we've got oxidative protection, we've got cellular energy. You're basically making sure that there's the right situation, right everybody's got what they need to kind of deliver on these instructions that are being delivered by the exosomes that's perfect basically right you said that perfectly yeah so and you don't have to buy 20 bottles i mean if you want to do that you can but this you know that's one thing people like to simplify yeah or some people doing a lot of work yeah there's there's a lot of work by by the combining of these ingredients you don't have to have as many ingredients you don't have to have the separate C. And the vitamin C. Did I ever tell you the story about having a vitamin C serum that was supposed to resurface my face that I spilled on a polished marble counter at a house I was staying at? And it resurfaced. It completely ruined the polishing of the marble. So it worked. And when they sent the guys in to fix it, the guy looked at me and said, you put this on your face? I don't know. I might be rethinking my strategy right about now. Are there any ingredients on the floor that you guys thought you really wanted to use that you're like, yeah, no, not going to work. Sounded good marketing wise, but just didn't like any hot ingredients that maybe you might've been, you know, you might've said, well, we should have this. Everybody's got this in there. Like salmon sperm, for example. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, this is something that, you know, I think there are things like that, that, you know, again, a bit of a fad product right now. And I think there is some evidence to how it can help. I'm not convinced that the PDRN or salmon sperm is good, good topically. um you know right and and people will talk about the a2a salvage pathway for that and there's ways to rationalize how it works you know in my mind it's more like you're taking dna from a salmon and you're putting it in your face and your immune system is going this is not mine and in the process of booting it out it's probably cleaning up the area and a lot of the benefit is probably there so it wasn't something that made sense for us with this product but certainly there is a lot of peptides. And when you start going through what's out there, the companies that sell the peptides are marketing to you. And you've got to be careful. Some of the science there is really wishy-washy and they can put together a beautiful one sheet saying what it does. So we did go through a lot that looked good on the surface, but then after digging in, it didn't have a lot of oomph behind it. But we did add some peptides that have been proven that support collagen and elastin as well for that extra oomph. We've got things like, you know, brightening agents like licorice root extract. There's a specific form of it that has been shown in a few studies to really do a lot more. So I think most people are looking for a brightening effect. So this is not a pure brightening product, but does, you know, support that brightening effect as well. And you brought up longevity and NAD. So niacinamide really plugs right into that NAD pathway, It helps to draw blood flow to the surface, helps with absorption, great with blemishes and cellular energy. So I wouldn't say this is everything that I would want to put into one single product. But if you were to go and buy all these and mix them together, chances are they won't emulsify. They're going to pill up and there is limits there. Well, you talked about this earlier, right? I mean, the temptation to put it all in without paying enough attention to what are the pathways that we're stimulating here? what makes sense to do at the same time. There's something about timing of delivery, right? And of instructions. And I'm a big believer that if you give too many instructions all at once that aren't all moving in the same direction, you could end up with either wasting or just like kind of confusion, right? So it sounds to me like what you've done is you've identified this stack of compounds that work together to get us to an objective. Is this the product that's going to be the one product that anybody ever uses ever again? No. Does it do a lot of heavy lifting? Absolutely. So, you know, and I think that's reasonable. Like that, that actually makes sense. We should not expect. So, okay. A couple of more things. Do you think that skin aging can conserve as an early signal of systemic aging? Like how, how deep do you think that relationship goes, like the aging inside the body reflected in the skin. I might have something to say after you're done, but I'd like to hear your take on it, Jordan. Yeah. I mean, the short version there is yes. This is something that often your nails, your skin, your hair are the first sign that something internally is not quite right. I think there's, you know, we've all experienced something in the course of our life that showed up on our skin and we're like, what the heck? And I think the better we get at connecting those dots, you know, the better off we are. But I think there's still a lot of work to be done there. I can't tell you the number of times I just kind of overlook something and don't think anything of it. And then, you know, later on, you know, maybe that was because of this, right? Yeah, I love that. Well, I mean, I've just gone through a bit of a, I'm not going to go into detail about it. I've gone through a really major health event over the last four weeks. And part of it was that my skin and my skin barrier got attacked. And I would say that in the last two weeks, my skin has aged from the inside, you know, without sun or anything. And there's no doubt in my mind, we're going to turn this ship around and make it better. But at the same time, it is remarkable to me how a systemic issue can show up in the skin. And it can do that fairly quickly. So I'm just putting my two cents worth in here. I think, you know, our skin is an expression. And, and I think it's part of how people with some of these chronic skin conditions like eczema or psoriasis, they get into so much trouble because there's so much energy being put on suppressing the symptoms and so little energy being brought to what's happening in the, within the body to drive it. And, and I think this is where, you know, the conventional medicine can poo-poo all they want skincare. But at the end of the day, if you're not taking it, I mean, going at it also from the inside, it's, you're, you're not addressing the problem. And that's this, you know, we see things going chronic and really getting people into trouble. So. Nat, I have that. So, you know, Dr. Free is our medical advisor and she has been wonderful when people, I mean, because I answer so many people, you know, the notes when they write what their situation is. And I, if, if I can answer it and I've seen the, you know, seen how it works. Yes. But there's so many, I shoot over to her and she will start, oh no, this is totally an internal situation that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You said earlier, as your scar was healing and your job one was to, was to heal bone, right? All that energy was going there. But what you were doing was topically applying, bringing it out into the face at the same time. Absolutely. And with love. I mean, it was, you know, we know, We know it. So how do you think, and maybe this is for Jordan, how might future topical therapies communicate with deeper tissue and immune systems? Do you have, have you ever like kind of thought about them? I mean, I'm sure you've thought about it. Well, I mean, the skin is the largest organ, right? So I think it gets kind of relegated as this aesthetic thing, but it's our first line of defense for so many things. So, and it is, depending on how you look at it, the skin is a lot of different cell types. I think people think fibroblasts, keratinocytes, you know, some people say seven cells, but there's really more than 20 cell types, depending on how you look at it. A lot of them are immune cell types, right? And so these immune cells are scavenging. They're looking for zombie or senescent cells. They're looking for invaders. You know, you want your skin to be on guard. You want your body to be on guard, but you know, there is, there, sometimes it goes too far or not far enough. And so again, this is where biology and balance is really the name of the game and making sure that you don't have any bottlenecks in your biochemistry where something is missing and holding things back. I think, you know, what's going to happen in the future is we're going to figure out ways to copy and paste the program of youthful immune activity and other things into the body. There is a well-known stem cell researcher that I'm familiar with named Dr. Hans Kirstead, who runs a company called immunists. And they've basically in phase two right now with an immune secretome that is meant to do just that by the sounds of it. You're taking an injection of a secretome that's boosting the immune system. And so I think technologies like this, where we're thinking more broadly than the single molecule are really going to change the way we age in the future. And they're exciting, right? And so there's multiple opportunities here to do that now. I love that. All right, Last three questions, people. Where do you see exosome technology evolving in the next five to 10 years? That's Mr. Jordan. Again, I think we're moving towards a place where you're going to have maybe an exosome or secretome for the immune system, for the skin, for the brain, for the kidneys, for the heart, right? You start going in organ systems. I think what we start to realize is that each system has its own progenitor cells, its own conductors that dictate a variety of things in that area. And the more we can grab the whole set and apply it correctly, the more we can regenerate and boost what's there naturally. So I see maybe some narrowing happening where we're more specific and not narrowing down to like say one molecule, but maybe instead of a whole soup that is different from company to company, we're going to circle around, okay, this is the optimum soup that we're trying to grab. And here's why. Could personalized exosome therapies become possible? Like I'm sitting here thinking when a baby is born, we harvest their cord, we store it properly. What are your thoughts? And Jordan did that. Yeah. I mean, this is something, well, yeah, the umbilical thing, I think this is something that makes sense. But at the same time, if you look like a lot of my doctorate work was literally about molecular de-aging of cells. And so we're turning cells from an adult state back to an embryonic state. And from there, you can go forward, right? It's called IPS cells. And these cells can be turned into whatever you want and effectively be your own donor. Now, there's a lot of technical difficulties in that. But I think once that technology is more perfected, that's where we'll end up. And the other way to look at it is kind of the way that a lot of David Sinclair's work has been where it's building on the same research and saying instead of the four factors that we know go all the way back, we'll take three and we'll de-age across the body. Now, the problem we have with that is how do you de-age everywhere? How do you get something everywhere, right? It's short of like being a Gattaca baby where we put something into you at the embryonic stage, right? I think it's going to be tough for those of us that don't benefit from that. But I do see a future where some of that research is leveraged to literally de-age cells. And I think what we're doing in the meantime is copying and pasting from young cells onto our older cells to try to keep them in this younger state. I love that. Last two questions. What scientific breakthrough in regeneration excites you the most right now? And immunist sounds pretty darn exciting because if you can keep your immune system young that's that's pretty powerful i i think so the when i look at these technologies like you know yamanaka won the nobel for this you know reprogramming work in 2012 and i think exosomes got the nobel in 2013 but it was basically this idea of using these compounds to literally de-age is very exciting but if you really understand it, there is this possibility of, at least with the four factors, cancer, right? We know that. I think it's a double-edged sword, right? When you look at the cells that are growing endlessly, naturally, that don't have a natural limit, those are embryonic stem cells and there's cancer cells, right? So I think the future is around how do we get past that and control that, control for that, prevent that. But the most exciting things in my mind are also arguably the most dangerous. The other thing that's really exciting that's more near term is a company called Mesoblast that got a stem cell treatment approved, I think, end of 2024 for graft versus host disease, if I remember correctly. And I think that was a big step to get any mesenchymal stem cell therapy FDA approved, big step. And I think we're only a few steps away from that being something where we're maybe injecting exosomes instead of stem cells. Because anytime you're injecting cells, it could have a capillary blocked up or something like that. Exosomes don't suffer from that problem. They're arguably inherently safer. So I think we're on that path where maybe that's the interim excitement, exciting technology that will come next. Love it. Last question, and this is for Debbie. um so you said the exosome is a standalone product if people want it to be but let's say somebody is a vitali user what's the order of operations here is it exosomes first is it ghk serum no that's a very good question i just want to close it up like that because no that is no absolutely and and we actually have that on the box exosomes first and then the ghk um so and then moisturizer eye cream moisturizer and the eye cream and the you know the body cream yes absolutely and would Do you put the squalene because you have the hydration boost? Where do you put that? I use it every day. It's last and I use it. I mean, you can. So you use it almost like as your finisher. You talked about using it. It almost acts as a primer under your makeup. Yes, it is under sunscreen or anything. But I use that every day, no matter what. I put that squalene because it's most like your own skin cells. It is amazing. And it's a simple product. It's a simple one ingredient. I know. Wonderful product. that helps finish it off. All right. Well, lady and gentlemen, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you both so much for your time. This has been deep education and inspirational. So Debbie, thank you for your inspired work in this space. Jordan, thank you for joining forces with these people and bringing your inspired work into the space. Folks, if you want to get your hands on some Vitaly product, which I would say could be a worthwhile endeavor. You'll want to go to vitalyskincare.com and you'll want to use code NAT20 to get 20% off. Thank you again, both. It's been a totally amazing time. Thanks so much. Hey folks, just a quick reminder that all of the information presented in this podcast is for information purposes only. No medical advice, no diagnosing, no treatments suggested here. Before you try anything that you hear about or learn about here, make sure that you check with your medical provider.