Want To Live Longer? Here's the Truth About Supplements, Peptides, VO2 Max, GLP-1's, and the Only Real Miracle Drug | Kara Swisher
6/19/202656 min
Plus: Hyperbaric chambers, red-light therapy, mRNA, cancer research, and the surprising importance of boredom and friction.
Kara Swisher is a veteran tech journalist, host of the Pivot podcast with Scott Galloway, and one of the most influential voices covering the intersection of technology and power. Her new CNN documentary series, Kara Swisher Wants to Live Forever, takes on the longevity industry — separating genuine medical breakthroughs from the pseudoscience being sold to anyone with a credit card and a fear of aging.
Kara Swisher has been covering Silicon Valley longer than most of its billionaires have been rich — and she's watched them turn a simple fear of death into a multi-billion dollar industry of expensive, largely unproven interventions. After her own stroke at 49, she decided to investigate: what actually works, what's a grift, and what does the science really say about living longer? The result is a new CNN documentary series that's part BS-detector, part genuinely hopeful look at the medical breakthroughs that could change everything. This conversation covers both.
We talked about:
- Why biohacking culture is basically a men's eating disorder dressed up as science
- Bryan Johnson, Peter Attia, and what Silicon Valley gets catastrophically wrong about longevity
- The supplements, therapies, and interventions that are mostly hype (peptides, hyperbaric chambers, red light therapy, full-body scans)
- What VO2 max actually measures — and why it's one of the few metrics worth tracking
- GLP-1 drugs: the real promise behind the Ozempic headlines
- The mRNA breakthroughs that could produce a pancreatic cancer vaccine
- Why your relationships are a more powerful longevity drug than anything you can buy
- The case for boredom, friction, and putting your phone down
- How thinking about death every day can make you happier and less afraid
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsDan Harris· Host0:00
[upbeat music] Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Ten Percent Happier podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. Today, we're gonna talk to the legendary tech journalist Kara Swisher about the misleading and often very expensive longevity bullshit that we all encounter online and elsewhere. Kara Swisher is not only going to debunk some of this stuff, but she's also gonna talk about what she has found in her research actually works to live a longer and healthier life. Some of the things she'll talk about that actually work you will have heard of, but she will also reveal some really interesting technological innovations that are coming down the pike at us that could have far-reaching and really awesome effects on the species. Many of you will know Kara Swisher. She is, as I said, a legendary tech journalist. She's been around for a minute. She is the co-host of the Pivot podcast. She co-hosts that alongside Scott Galloway, who's been on the show a couple times. She has a solo podcast that's called On with Kara Swisher. But most relevant for this podcast, she is the star and host of a new docuseries on HBO Max that just dropped that's called Kara Swisher Wants to Live Forever. So we'll talk to Kara Swisher right after this quick break. A few things before we hear from our sponsors. We've got this awesome new series launching soon on my new-ish meditation app, Ten Percent with Dan Harris. Many people ask me, "How do I get started in Buddhism? How do I learn