The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast Episode #321 - Chris Burres

TRANSCRIPT

Chris Burres
My target's still 125, but I don't think that's gonna be how long I'm gonna live. I think I'm gonna live a lot longer because the rate at which medical information is changing is so fast.

Our stem cells are born out of our red bone marrow and our red bone marrow shrinks with age and at some point if your red bone marrow shrinks and is gone, you don't have any repair mechanisms. He's seeing in his clients with our product an improvement on HRV.

Melanie Avalon
Welcome to the Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast, where we meet the world's top experts to explore the secrets of health, mindset, longevity, and so much more. Are you ready to take charge of your existence and biohack your life? This show is for you. Please keep in mind, we're not dispensing medical advice and are not responsible for any outcomes you may experience from implementing the tactics lying herein. So friends, are you ready to join me? Let's do this.

Welcome back to the Melanie Avalon biohacking podcast. Friends, you're in for a deep dive today into one of the most profound compounds out there when it comes to longevity. I am honestly shocked that people are not more aware of this supplement. Not only does it look like the Epcot ball, but it also is the one compound which has shown to have the most profound lifespan extension ever in a clinical study to date.

Kind of wild. And it was so fun to have CRISPRs on the show. We've hung out multiple times at the biohacking conference. I love his energy and what he does. And he dives deep into all things carbon C60 and in particular ESS60, which is the version he specifically makes, which is definitely safe for human consumption. I was also kind of shocked, but not really shocked to learn that when he tested over 20 other companies for their C60 products, most of them had negligible amounts of C60 actually in the product. Why am I not surprised? I personally am obsessed with ESS60. I make carbon 60 a part of my life every single day and can't recommend checking out my vital C enough. And yes, you can get $15 off your first order, as well as a link to a free guide and more information about ESS60 skincare products, as well as all of the products to try at myvitalc.com slash Melanie Avalon. And we'll talk about it in the show. There is an olive oil version, an avocado oil version and an MCT oil version. You'll learn all about the differences in today's episode. So definitely stay tuned for that. Again, myvitalc.com slash Melanie Avalon to get $15 off your first order. Cannot recommend this enough. He even has ESS60 products for pets, which is so cool. Also definitely check out Chris's book, Live Longer and Better. Your journey to living longer and better has never been more achievable than today. Yes, I agree with that. And we'll talk about why that's true. In today's show, we talk about my favorite topic, the pursuit of the extension of lifespan and whether or not we can reach immortality. You're going to learn all about a shocking way to reduce inflammation, the concept of selective antioxidants, whether or not we'll reach longevity escape velocity and so much more about this Nobel prize-winning compound. Yes, Nobel prize. We also talk about fun things like being an entrepreneur. The show notes for today's episode will be at MelanieAvalon.com slash C60. Those show notes will have a full transcript as well as links to everything that we talked about.

Melanie Avalon
So definitely check that out. I can't wait to hear what you guys think. Definitely let me know in my Facebook group, IF Bio. Attackers, intermittent fasting plus real foods plus life. Comment something you learned or something that resonated with you on the pinned post to enter to win something that I love. And then check out my Instagram, find the Friday announcement post. And again, comments there to enter to win something that I love. All right, I think that's all the things.

As a brief reminder, you can get $15 off your first order of My Vital Sea. And yes, that does work on subscriptions. So definitely do that because you'll save money. You can always cancel it later at myvitalsea.com slash Melanie Avalon. And now without further ado, please enjoy this fabulous conversation with my dear friend, Crispers. Hi friends, welcome back to the show. I am so incredibly excited about the conversation I am about to have. It is with a dear friend. I love having episodes on this show where I've actually met and hung out with the guests in real life. And Crispers and I, we have now, we've hung out twice late night at the biohacking conference. Actually, well, two trips. And then I think a few nights on those trips, you and your wife, me and my sister or friends, like late night talks, conversation.

Chris Burres
Lots of people around us, at least the first one, had these blue tongues, which was like that was apparently just going around.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, i remember that the that actually that was my first time not doing methylene blue because i have been doing methylene blue.

Like a decade ago and ordering fish tank stuff online but my first time doing like approachable shot types of no no no was it a shot or was it was like a tongue thing like a pellet.

Chris Burres
some like an eyedropper of methylene blue.

Melanie Avalon
something. It was my first realization of just how blue it makes your mouth.

Chris Burres
It's incredible and your pee like later that's that you know, I mentioned this to somebody the other day He's like, yeah, that's really exciting. If you're a ten-year-old, I don't know. I'm kind of excited about it.

I think it's kind of cool

Melanie Avalon
I don't know it kind of feels like being a super like a superhero. It's like what's what's like

Chris Burres
night. Although, it's a smurf. So, I don't know what the superhero...

Melanie Avalon
Murph is. It makes you just feel like an alien or something, which is always fun.

In any case, I am here with Chris Burz, and actually, let me tell, I'm gonna tell the story of us coming to know each other, if I even remember it correctly. So actually, I had seen your stuff, like I had seen your stuff, I had seen you on podcasts, I had heard your name, I was very familiar with you. To be honest, I wasn't sure, because I knew that you talked about, and we're gonna talk about it in the show, this whole ESS 60 carbon 60, you know, thing. I wasn't sure if it was legit or not, actually, like when I first saw it, I was like, I don't know, like looks too good to be true, I'm not really sure like what this is, but then we connected and no, no, you then you had me on your longevity summit. And I was like, Oh, I was like, this is super cool. And I got to meet you and know you and I and you told me, yeah, that's when I first like heard from you a little bit about the this, can I call it C six years I call it ESS 60. We need to like ESS 60.

Chris Burres
And really, we can talk about that in the podcast, why we make that distinction. But yeah, ESS 60 is if you're if we're going to talk about it from the perspective of safe for humans and pets, yeah, ESS 60, but it is carbon 60, the raw material and really for industrial purposes, we say that that's C 60 or carbon 60.

And then if you process that molecule to be safe for humans and pets, then we call it

Melanie Avalon
ESS 60. Okay, got it.

Which actually speaking, I'm not going to go on too much of a tangent right now, but you mentioned something in your book about its potential to make planes invisible. Am I remembering this correctly? That was an

Chris Burres
Extreme example of how this extremely expensive molecule could have been brought to market

Melanie Avalon
It's crazy. So we can circle back to that in any case.

So whenever I saw this concept, I immediately would think once I learned what it was I immediately would think of and you just held up that ball. I would think of the EPCOT dome, the geo. Do you say

Chris Burres
The geodesic dome. The geodesic dome. Yeah. Yes.

Melanie Avalon
So many questions here, but in any case, you had me on your summit. It was amazing.

And then we connected. I think then is when I first met you in person after that at the biohacking conference first time in Dallas, Orlando, Orlando. It was Dallas. Yeah, Dallas. Okay. We just recently met again at the one in Austin and now you're here on the podcast after literally friends. I think we've rescheduled.

Chris Burres
I remember when i first got scheduled i don't remember it was probably in like february or something and you're like i have to buy july available and i hit you up on texas like july really like and i know we get busy and things are scheduled way out and you're like yeah that's all i got like okay i'm happy and then we've had to reschedule it a lot of times at this point it wasn't july obviously cuz this is june but it felt like long and

Melanie Avalon
into the future. Yeah. We schedule like over a year out.

So it's... But then it... But it happens. And we're here. We're here now. And I am actually... So since actually meeting you, getting to know you, reading your incredible book, which is called Live Longer and Better, Your Journey to Living Longer and Better has never been more achievable than today. I have so many questions from it. But after learning about all this, now I'm like sold on the carbon-60, ESS-60 situation. And I have so many questions about it. So Chris, thank you so much.

Chris Burres
for being here.

Melanie Avalon
Here we are. So this is a good moment. I'm feeling it. This is awesome.

Okay. So I will say when I started reading your book, I didn't know what to expect. It's super awesome. I highly recommend listeners check it out. And your background, your story, I didn't expect any of it. So it's really funny how I'll let you tell listeners a little bit about your story, but I really appreciated how you said things like you basically wanted to have, you know, Lamborghinis and you're like, how do I do this? I need to be an entrepreneur.

Chris Burres
If you think about, you know, what you would ideally wish that the person who's making a high quality supplement, what their background would be, it would be like when they were very young, they knew that they wanted to save and rescue human beings from whatever traumas existed in their own biology. And that is not my case.

Like I'm here very, like that's serendipitous, serendipitous nature of this getting even into the health space. It's a crazy story, a crazy journey. Yes.

Melanie Avalon
So let's dive even deeper into that. So like when did you have an epiphany or realize that you actually were interested in this whole lifespan thing?

And how does that relate to wanting to be an entrepreneur? And I mean, we have to hear about you building reactors in your garage. Like there's just so much, so much here.

Chris Burres
So, I think the first time, if I can think back, the only thing that really pops up in my mind as being kind of related to longevity and health was at some point in my life, I decided I was going to live to 125. Like I don't know where the number came from, you know, and engineering backgrounds are like very round numbers, so 125 makes more sense than 124 or 126, but I got this number in my head. And, honestly, until frankly, probably 2018, maybe mid-2017, health wasn't on my radar, right?

I played semi-professional soccer as I've had interviews with amazing kind of athletes and health people. I'm sure you have too. These people were dialed in with their health way back when they were in high school playing competitive sports. That was not me. Like, you know, we kind of joked before we got started. I just watched Michael J. Fox special on Netflix called Still, and he said he turned over his nutrition to Dr. McDonald's when he was younger. That was me. Now, I was actually eating nuggets because I read somewhere that the chicken was better than the beef, right? So that was something that I always thought I was doing from a health perspective. And so, certainly, there were pieces that were trying. I also grew up in an era where there was no internet, right? So, if you wanted to get new health information, you had to be extremely proactive and go get the magazines and actually read them. My magazines were more engineering-focused, and we can talk about that, or more science-focused. They weren't necessarily focused on health. So, health, like, way back, it's probably the thought that I was going to live to 125. And if I'm honest, it probably wasn't going to look very pretty, right? 125 wasn't going to be very graceful. And that piece of the story certainly has changed now.

How I ended up even in this space, right? So, we're going to talk about this ESS 60 molecule. If you're, I'm holding up a model of it. If you're listening, just imagine a soccer ball where the lines on the soccer ball represent the bonds between the carbon atoms. So, you have a spherical molecule of 60 carbon atoms. We'll get into what this molecule does, etc. But the way that I even got to be working with this molecule was not this kind of traditional path, I don't think.

So, when I was 14, I had a poster on my wall, and it was of a red Lamborghini Countage. The doors were open. I could smell the leather. This was something that I actually wanted. Like, you know, when you want something, you can feel that you want it. At the time, I can only think that I picked up like an auto mechanics or a road and track magazine and it outlined, hey, if you want to own a supercar, what you need to do is one of two things. If you want one, you become a neurosurgeon. If you want more than one, you become an entrepreneur. I'm not even sure I knew exactly what an entrepreneur was, but I was 14 and two sounds better than one. So at that moment, I knew I was going to be an entrepreneur.

Chris Burres
I had no idea what I was going to be an entrepreneur in, what I was going to look like, kind of fast forward to the time where I'm about to go to college. In my family, it's kind of interesting because it was understood we were going to go to college, my brother and I. But we didn't really talk about it. We didn't plan it. So I know a lot of people their junior year, they know what college they're going to. I hadn't applied any place and had no idea at the end of... When I graduated, as I'm walking across the stage, I don't know what college I'm going to go to.

At that time, my father got his second civilian job. He was in the Air Force. So we moved every two years, which is an interesting aspect of kind of my background. But he got this job in Houston and it's his second civilian job. So we're like, why don't you go to the University of Houston? So we fly down to the University of Houston, I apply, and you've got to think, what does a kid still who believes that they're going to be an entrepreneur, what do they study? And today, you might choose the course of an entrepreneurship program, right? I actually had a great experience about a month ago. I got to sit down with a young entrepreneur in the entrepreneurial program at the University of Houston. But that program didn't exist at the University of Houston at the time. It actually didn't exist anywhere in the country at the time. When I was doing research for the book, I think there were one to three classes on entrepreneurship. So not programs, just classes across the whole country. And I'll be honest, I don't think I would go down that path today because my thought process was, what is the fastest way to the highest salary so that I will have money to invest in a business that I'm clearly going to own as an entrepreneur?

I'm really good in science, I'm really good in math, and so engineering was that fastest way to the highest salary. And a couple things kind of fell apart with that plan. You know, you're hopeful that you get out with your degree in four years. It actually took me six. I did get a minor in computer science and a minor in math. And the other one is I ended up starting a company before I even graduated from college.

And what that looked like is I met my business partner. We've now been business partners for 34 years. And I met him in a science class. The teacher, I'll never forget his name, was Dr. Weinstein, because you just kind of feel like if your name is Weinstein, you have to be a physics professor. Like, that's just what you have. I don't even know if you can do anything else. I think it's a law. So he is in Dr. Weinstein's class. I met my business partner, Robert. And at the time that this all really got kicked off, Robert was working. at the Texas Center for Superconductivity, right? So this is an institution that's housed inside the University of Houston campus. It's led by a Dr. Paul Chu, who is very famous, although you've never heard of him.

Chris Burres
He's very famous in the superconductivity world. And in fact, the building that Robert was working in, we would call that Chu's Castle because it was his fame in the super conductivity world that got that facility built.

So Robert was working with this recently discovered molecule. We'll talk about that in a second and we'll get there. He was working with this molecule. He's actually separating because the molecule comes in a bunch of with a bunch of different kind of partners. There's 60 atoms, there's 70 atoms, there's 74 atoms, and you need to isolate those down so you can get just the ones with 60 atoms. And he was doing this in the chromatography lab again at the Texas Center for Superconductivity. And one day Dr. Paul Chu came in and he said, hey, you guys are a bunch of young kids. This molecule is selling for six thousand dollars a gram. You should actually go start a business. And I joke that my business partner did a back of the napkin calculation, which looked exactly like six thousand dollars a gram, nothing else. And he was from an entrepreneurial background. His parents were entrepreneurs. And so he was off and running. They brought me in to help. It's extremely difficult to manufacture this molecule. So they brought me in to help with the drawings, to help with the actual engineering. And that's how I ended up starting the company even before I got out of college.

Melanie Avalon
So many things. So when you first were exposed to this molecule, it was just for the money potential. It wasn't much

Chris Burres
beyond that. Yeah, no, a hundred percent. And we knew it was a fantastic molecule, right? It turns out, so let's talk about what the molecule is, right? So we call it ESS 60. It's this soccer ball-shaped molecule. It was discovered in 1985. The three scientists who discovered it actually won the Nobel Prize in 1996. So that's a short 11 years from discovery to being awarded the Nobel Prize. They won the Nobel Prize because the molecule is spectacular.

First, it's the first closed-cage molecule that was ever discovered. There have since been more closed-cage. And what I mean by that is, if you think about other molecules that exist, they all have dangling ends, right? There's some end that could be attached to that you could bond with. In the case of the ESS 60 molecule, it's entirely a closed-cage molecule. So it's the first one. It's big enough that void in the middle is big enough for any atom on the periodic chart to fit inside of it. So there's actually a new symbol in chemistry because of this molecule. So I think that's how you know you're gonna win a Nobel Prize, right? Like if you add a new symbol to the language of chemistry, you're probably gonna win a Nobel Prize. The at symbol, the one from our email address, right, if you take lanthanum at this molecule, right, or the partner that's 70 or 74 or 86, then you're actually talking about that this molecule or that atom physically trapped inside of the molecule, right? So not covalently bonded to the exterior, not ionically bonded to the exterior, but actually trapped inside of it. So I was that that was one of the spectacular pieces of it. And kind of in summary, the way I described the molecule is it performs as well or better than the current best material in almost every application. It makes better inks, better batteries, better tires, better photo cells. And this is often when people get nervous or like Melanie talks about health stuff. And you just said inks, batteries, tires and photo cells. No one in your audience woke up today, looked at their car and thought, I wonder what parts of my car battery I should be taking on maybe one or two people, right? We're talking about bioacres. We're always thinking outside the box and thought, what components of a battery should I be taking on a daily basis? And so that's kind of the how we knew this molecule was spectacular.

And ultimately it won the Nobel Prize in 96 and if you think about it, about how the timeline works, we started manufacturing and selling. it to research institutions around the world in 1991, right? So a full five years before they won the Nobel Prize. And it's fair to suggest, right, not emphatically state, but it's fair to suggest that the fact that we were actually delivering commercial quantities of this material to research institutions around the world so that they can then do work on the material could contribute to the fact that other scientists understood the value of the molecule.

Chris Burres
And that's part of the reason they actually won the Nobel Prize. And so we have been here from the very beginning.

And at this point, we're the oldest and longest manufacturer of the molecule on the planet.

Melanie Avalon
Wow. So many questions for you. First of all, the Nobel prize thing. Is this the only longevity related compound molecule with a Nobel prize or are there other ones, do you know?

Chris Burres
Well, I think there's some research, not specifically longevity, and in fact, I think it's a misnomer because at the time the Nobel Prize was awarded was not about longevity. Exactly. But I do think, you know, there was an award for nitric oxide. I think it happened two years after this one, and that is at least health focused at the time.

And I'll share this kind of fascinating. They did understand that this ESS 60 molecule might in fact have some health benefits. One of the concepts was I mentioned any atom, it's big enough for any atom on the periodic chart to fit inside of it. They conceptually had the idea of putting a radioactive atom inside of it or two or three depending on the size. And then actually all of the wet chemistry that works with biology works with this molecule typically. So they thought they could attach a protein to the exterior of the molecule and have this go meet up and bond with, say, a cancer cell. And if you do that, you're delivering a radioactive payload directly to that cancer cell. Now, although that's feasible, it's just cost prohibitive. These are hard to make to begin with, the ESS 60 molecule. And then to actually have it with an atomic atom trapped inside of it is even more problematic. And even back in the 90s, when this was discovered, there are patents related. It was the middle of the AIDS epidemic. And there are patents that were published based on this ESS 60 molecule fitting into one socket that was necessary for the AIDS virus to replicate. And by fitting into that socket, it blocked the replication of the AIDS virus. So we know that it has kind of antiviral properties and they did theorize to some degree that it might have some health benefits if they processed it properly.

Melanie Avalon
And actually related to that cuz you're talking about the potential for it to you know they add something to it and i can like attached to something and have a specific purpose but so when it's normal state. You're talking about how it's completely enclosed so does that mean it doesn't really react with things.

Chris Burres
One of the things that we knew right away, and this just comes from the theoretical chemistry understanding how the bonds work, you actually have a lot of carbon-carbon double bonds on the exterior of this cage. And that means that this can hold up to six negatively charged particles on the exterior of this cage.

So let me give you a good parallel because this also will come up later. The chemistry that works on benzene also works on this ESS60 molecule. And let me describe how important benzene is. We literally don't have modern society without benzene. And just to give you kind of proof of that, if you look around you and imagine everything that's plastic, gone because its foundational molecule is the benzene ring. You can also look to many medicines, including aspirin, the foundational molecule is the benzene ring. And even detergents, a lot of them are the foundational molecule is the benzene ring. So we don't have modern society without the but when the ring is all by itself, it's known to be toxic and known to be carcinogenic.

Now, we'll talk about that in a second, but I just bring that all up. So the same chemistry that allows that benzene ring to be a plastic, allows that benzene ring to be in medicines and to be a detergent, that same chemistry works on the exterior of this cage.

And so that allows it to be put into a lot of situations. And there's another part of the reason that they won the this could be this is a 3d version of benzene. And it's actually why they thought it might be toxic, which is kind of a teaser for the next part of the story. Okay.

Melanie Avalon
Gotcha. How prevalent is it? Like do we have to specifically put it into things like manufacturers that are interested in it or does it naturally occur and stuff?

Chris Burres
It's absolutely a naturally occurring molecule. And to give you kind of a case in point, if you take the soot of a candle, so if you took a candle flame and you put a cold steel plate over that candle flame, you would get that deep dark soot. That deep dark soot has parts per million or parts per billion of the ESS 60 molecule. So your audience has absolutely been exposed to it.

We now know, actually subsequent to the Nobel Prize and through some history and looking into space and understanding the spectrum that's in space, that there's tons of this molecule out in space. And even the KT boundary, that's the layer of Earth associated when the asteroid struck the planet and killed the dinosaurs, that layer has an elevated concentration of the ESS 60 molecule. Now, it's not enough to go mine. And in reality, even the parts per million parts per billion in that deep dark soot isn't sufficient to throw into supplements. And so you actually have to manufacture it. It turns out, in order to manufacture it, you have to vaporize two graphite rods in an inert environment at a slight vacuum. So it has to be devoid of oxygen, or you won't get the molecule. And it has to be at a slight vacuum. It happens to be the case that graphite is the hardest one of the hardest materials on the planet to vaporize. So you actually need local temperatures of the sun between these two graphite rods. As an example, we have a sight glass to watch this reaction. And if you don't have welder's goggles between you and the reaction, you will burn out your retina. And if you let that light shine on your skin, you will get a sunburn because it is local temperatures of the sun in order to vaporize this graphite and then turn it into a soot that has about 10% of a collection of molecules called fullerenes, which includes this ESS 60 molecule. That's insane.

Melanie Avalon
When you started producing this, you know, forever ago, you were doing this yourself

Chris Burres
in your garage? Well, we actually started in Robert's dad's garage, right? And it's Home Depot parts. It's big things. We had some explosions here and there, which were not that traumatic, but certainly kind of woke us up and caused us to be a little bit safer.

But yeah, this is, you think back to what you might imagine Thomas Edison's laboratory to be like, that's where we were. But we were actually working with bigger and higher voltage things. Wow.

Melanie Avalon
Actually, is it your parent company that's SES research that you created? That actually has the word SUT in it. It stands for what?

Chris Burres
stands for? It stands for soot, extract, and 60 as in carbon 60.

We actually considered naming it S-E-C-S because it was soot, extract, and carbon 60. That would have sounded like sex, but thank you for calling sex.

Melanie Avalon
Oh, that's funny. Okay. Wow. Yeah, this is just so so mind blowing to me.

And when you actually create it in this reactor and you, you know, have the the graph, you said the sorry the graphene graphite graphene rods.

Chris Burres
Graphite rods, which is actually a lot of graphene together, right? So graphene is, you know, the we it's kind of like our society is going, oh, graphene, it's all new.

Literally, when you're writing on a sheet of paper, if you ever allowed one thin graphite sheet to go on that piece of paper, that's actually graphene. You're actually putting down graphene on your piece of paper.

Melanie Avalon
Wow, okay, so when you create this reaction, like how much material is required to create, like what does it create, like the actual material, what does it look like, the carbon-60, the stuff?

Chris Burres
That's a great question. A good comparison might be the best comparison is probably carbon-black, but the one that's probably most relevant to people is if you've ever gotten ink toner on you, that is kind of what we're creating. But again, it's in the right conditions so that it ends up having the fullerenes. So, we're going to go through that. So, we're vaporizing these graphite rods. We actually have to rotate them in different directions. Otherwise, it will tend to skew, and then it actually becomes a reaction that's not going to continue. So, we've got to rotate them in different directions. We've got to feed them into a vacuum. What comes off of that, we call fullerenic soot.

Let's talk about fullerenes here for a second. The reason they're called fullerenes is the most abundant of them is this ESS60 molecule. Like you mentioned, it looks like the geodesic dome. If you go to the Epcot Center, I know often when you're at a beach driving down the road at the beach, you'll see every now and around house because they're actually really good. Those are geodesic domes. Those were brought to prominence by a guy by the name of Buckminster Fuller. And because this molecule has the same shape of that geodesic dome, they decided to call this whole collection of molecules fullerenes. And then again, the most abundant one is this one with 60 atoms in it. And it's affectionately called a buckyball because it looks like a ball. And Buckminster Fullerine is whom it's named after. So, it's a buckyball. So, you've got this fullerenic soot. That soot on a good day has about 10% fullerenes in it. So, it's not just the ESS60 molecule. It's the 60 atoms, 70 atoms, 74 atoms, actually 76, and then 84. Those are kind of the bunches that exist together. So, you get a 10% fullerenic powder out of this 100% of vaporized graphite. Hopefully, I've done a good job explaining that. Now, you actually want to separate that graphite soot, we'll call it that fullerenic soot, from the actual fullerenes. And the way you do that is you use a solvent. And it's kind of the same way that you might separate sugar and sand. You would pour it in water. The sugar would go into solution. And then you would filter it. The sand would stay on top of the filter. And the sugar would go through in solution. And then you would boil off the water and you would have your pure sugar. In the case of this fullerenic soot, you dissolve it in a polar solvent. You filter it and the carbon junk, which is again, about 90% of what's in this soot. And the 10% that goes through is, we call it like an extract solution. And we just call it extract because we've just extracted it from the fullerene soot. We would also call it a fullerene extract. And that's the E in SES. The E is for extract. So that is a product that we sell and we still sell today. to research institutions around the world. And then finally, you want to take that extract.

Chris Burres
It has about 80% of the ESS60 molecule in it. The rest are higher fullerenes, so you want to use a kind of standard chromatography process to separate and isolate that.

It's actually a beautiful purple solution when you take this ESS60 molecule and you dissolve it in things that turns a beautiful purple color. As an example, our MCT product is a beautiful purple color. If you're familiar with MCT, it's clear as soon as you put this black carbon soot in it, excuse me, not the soot, as soon as you put this black ESS60, pure ESS60 in it, it turns a beautiful purple color. And that's actually something I put in my coffee every day. Do you know why it's purple? It's just the way the chemistry works. So when this molecule is dissolved and now floating around as an individual soccer ball molecule, the way it refracts light is such that it gives a purple color.

Melanie Avalon
Wow, okay, so you were talking about like C 60 those other ones like 70 74 etc. Are they also like sphere type shapes? Yes

Chris Burres
So, C70 is the next most abundant one, and it's more of a rugby shape, right? So, you take that sphere, you stretch it out a little bit because you're adding another ten atoms to it, and they tend to go like right at the equator, if you will. And so, it gets a little bit more rugby shaped.

And then, 76 goes back to a more round shape, and then it's just bigger and bigger molecules that are more and more spherical.

Melanie Avalon
Okay, and what do you do with all the, you call it carbon junk that's created?

Chris Burres
So all that carbon junk actually does just get thrown away and then the fuller next set will you use that you save the higher fullerenes cause there are different research institutions that want to do research on those and then now like ninety five percent of this is sixty that we produce actually goes into supplements okay why.

Melanie Avalon
So I'm really, really intrigued by like we were saying before how it wasn't originally looked at for longevity if it was for all these other commercial type purposes. So how have things evolved on both fronts?

So on the commercial side of things, like what, like what has that journey been like? Like, is it being used a lot, a lot today? Is it still being looked at for more things in the future?

Chris Burres
What's that timeline looking like we know that it's getting used in some applications it is expensive to make and and really what starts to get used is what are called nanotubes so if you can take this is a sixty molecule and you just stretch it out is one way to imagine it so now it's a long tube. Or another way to think about it is if you take that flat graph I graph I graphine sheet and you fold it over it'll actually attached to itself and now you have this nanotubes so they do use nanotubes and kind of electrostatic situation so for paint adhesion it's not a big commercial product they'll use it and i think it's mostly for marketing and like graphite structures an example would be like a golf club. Where but really I think that's more for marketing hey we're using these nanotubes i'm not sure that they have a sufficient quantity of nanotubes and even nanotubes are a spec spectacular kind of discovery an offshoot of the discovery of these fullerenes. Just just to note, we know, because of the carbon carbon double bond that the nanotubes are the strongest material intention that man will ever see you can't make a stronger material than that.

And if you've ever heard about the space elevator right and the concept here is. You know if you swing a string with a with a nut on the end of it right or a washer it'll swing and it'll be taunt right and you can imagine that an ant could be on your hand and crawl out that string out to the washer right. Well there is that concept with a space elevator where we could have something attached to earth that's getting swung around earth as it rotates and causing enough tension for us to be an ant and crawl up that cable right. But the only cable that strong enough to do it would be a nanotube cable the problem with having a nanotube cable is these are small. Nano size things you if you could have a mile of it in your hand and not see it because it is so small in terms of the diameter. And so how do you connect one to the other i'm going off the rails here, but how do you connect one nanotube to the next the weak point is the bonding that's between the two nanotubes it's no longer the strength of the nanotube. But you know conceptually you could build a space elevator with a nanotube which is an offshoot of the.

Melanie Avalon
flooring technology. Okay, wait, I am so excited right now because I am getting hit with this memory.

So was there a time when they were talking about that a little bit more, the space elevator concept? Because I have this memory when I was young of reading something about building an elevator to the moon and to this day I'm like, did I make up that memory? Because I never saw anything else again about that. But would that have been what you're talking about right now?

Chris Burres
Yeah, exact same thing and it was probably in like.

Melanie Avalon
Oh my gosh, I feel so validated. I was like gaslighting myself. Okay.

Chris Burres
If it was just you, what a great story, what a fantastic imagination. No, it was talked about, but it fades because there's no materials to execute it.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, wow, that's fascinating. Okay, so interesting. How could it, in theory, make errors?

Chris Burres
planes invisible? Oh, so really, that was an example. One, it can't. Now, exciting.

So in the context, so that was in the book where we're talking about, early on, you know, of course, we're manufacturing small quantities of this, we're selling it to research institutions around the world, and we're trying to figure out like, what is the niche that this is going to go into and actually grow our business, right? Because I still have this goal of having a Lamborghini Countage. And that's not going to happen on this kind of small scale science sales stuff. And so as you look at the landscape of the industry, we're aware of really two key situations that this molecule might really start to expand. One of them is, if you put a very small amount of it, and it has an outsized benefit, then you would actually start to sell more of this molecule. And I would say that in the supplement space, that's what's exactly what's happened. A small amount of it in the study we'll talk about, you know, the test subjects live 90% longer than the control group. That's an outsized response for how much you added to that particular supplement. And then the other kind of conceptual thing is in the Department of Defense world, if it can do some things, then they will pay anything, right? So as an example, if it could make airplanes invisible, the DoD wouldn't even care how much it cost, they'd be like, hey, we need enough of this to paint on every one of our airplanes. And you know, sadly, that is not the case. And here we are, it's now kind of folded into the supplement space. Okay, so

Melanie Avalon
which speaking of... Also, I just have a really quick question about your entrepreneur journey. I'm like an accidental entrepreneur, so like I never set out to be an entrepreneur, but then I had a moment one day where I was like, I guess I'm an entrepreneur. And then I remember there was an article that published about me in Entrepreneur, and I was like, well, I guess I'm an entrepreneur now. I have proof.

I mean, because you're still an entrepreneur. Has your relationship to entrepreneurship changed when your passion for longevity, which I want to know when it actually got ignited, and also now it aligns with the product you're creating? Like, is there a difference between creating stuff just for money, entrepreneur, versus when you're creating stuff and it relates to this inner passion you have? Like, how does that feel different? Yeah, I think...

Chris Burres
I think the reality is what an entrepreneur is is somebody who solves problems for money. In that context, and I haven't touched on it, I know I touched on it in the book a little bit, one of the things that I think helps me in the health space is I've always been the person who people will come to for advice. I don't think that's because I have any particular skill set that's better than other people in the advice section. I think it's because I actually care and I actually am interested in listening to you if you were to come to me and you're like, oh, I've got this challenge. I actually listen and I actually want to figure out how to help you. And so that is actually a driving thing I've had in me. You know, I certainly recognized it in high school where I was kind of the go to person for like, hey, I need some advice on this thing or parents or relationships or soccer or whatever people could come to me and often would come to me. So that is folded in very naturally.

And that, of course, ties in well with entrepreneurship in general, where you're solving problems for money. Now, sometimes the problems are really sexy, like you're helping people live a better life. Right. And a lot of people a better life. That's that's great. But sometimes they're a little boring and you're delivering commercial quantities of carbon nanomaterials to research institutions around the world like that. You don't necessarily wake up and and you get all jazzed about that one scientist who's excited. Although there is a piece of that, especially at least in this industry, because it's so cutting edge and it's been cutting edge from 1991 when we started manufacturing it. So for 34 years, I've been on this cutting edge of science. And, you know, it's exciting when I bump into somebody who's heard about the molecule, let alone used it. And and so I do have that piece. So I think to answer your question, I'm not sure that my relationship with entrepreneurship has changed much other than I'm much happier now in this health space because I'm able to deliver value, actual value to so many more people.

Melanie Avalon
That completely makes sense, yeah. And so for you, because you mentioned in the beginning that your first memory of longevity was wanting to live to 125.

How did that change? Was there a moment when you became much more interested in health and longevity? And do you still want to live to 125?

Chris Burres
I think I asked you this when you were on my longevity summit. How long do you intend to live and how long do you think humans can live? Really interesting. This is off of that summit.

Only two, I think it was three, three people gave the same year. Think about this. If you believe humans can live to 120, why are you giving a number that's less? The answer is pretty simple because you don't believe that longevity and a long health plan are actually tied together. Even experts in longevity still don't separate living older from living in some sort of infirm state and most people are not that interested in living in an infirm state. Because I'm asking this question all the time, I end up kind of asking myself that question. How long do I intend to live? I think there's actually, well, there's a two-fold answer. At this point, giving the technology that we have today, my target's still 125. I don't think that's going to be how long I'm going to live. I think I'm going to live a lot longer because the rate at which medical information is changing is so fast.

I give this example. In 1950, medical information doubled every 50 years, every five, zero years. Now it doubles every three months. By the way, I've been using that number for nine months now. It's probably even faster than that. What does doubling every three months actually mean? What it means is we're going to have 16 times as much information at the end of 2025 as we had at the beginning. 16 times more information. Whatever we had in the beginning, multiply that amount of information times 16 times at the end of this year. Really what that boils down to, and you and I are on the exact same page. I think you mentioned David Sinclair probably before we got started today in his book Lifespan, Why We Age and Why We Don't Have To. I'm absolutely on board with what he's lobbying for and his thought process about aging.

Let's just pretend we're in a case of it's either possible or it's not possible. If it's not possible, we're going to know really soon. If it is possible, it's going to happen a lot faster than you can imagine. We're going to have 16 times more information. Now, is all that information going to be great? No. Does that number even include AI? I think the answer is no. Again, I was using it about nine months ago. I started using that number. That was really before AI started kicking in. Really, you can look at AI from two perspectives, I think, as it applies to medical information. One of those perspectives is it helps you write a paper faster, right? But it's not that much faster. It doesn't actually take that long to get a paper. I can tell you, we've published some papers recently. We just got one approved. We published one in May of last year. It took more time to get it approved to get published than it did to actually publish. know, write the paper. So AI isn't going to make changes there that much. Where I think AI is really going to add value is a scientist goes in and they have this kind of expertise, this broader understanding, and this access to all these papers, and they have an idea of, let's say, 10 different studies they'd like to do.

Chris Burres
And they can turn that over to AI, and AI will tell them the top two that are the most likely to succeed. So now it's not just that we have 16 times more information.

The research we're doing has a significantly higher likelihood of succeeding and being a valuable contribution to the medical information in general.

Melanie Avalon
I'm so fascinated by all this like the longevity escape velocity concept and I guess and you touched on it when you said like either is or is not possible because if it turns out that for whatever reason there is this limit on human lifespan kind of like you mentioned I think in the book like I'm the

Chris Burres
Bible. It's like 120, I think. Well, 120 is is Jean Clement, the oldest living human. And then the Bible, you know, I think there are some pieces of the Bible that talk like talk about like

Melanie Avalon
Or no actually you're right they talk about like 700 don't they talk about like way older. Yeah

Chris Burres
Yeah. Yeah. 700 wouldn't surprise me. I know it's at least in the 250s, 300s. So yeah, those ancient doctrines are talking about much longer lives.

Melanie Avalon
Okay, so in any case, it's like, you know, is there for whatever reason some sort of limit and if there is a limit, it almost Doesn't matter how like much we extend because you're going to just hit this limit interesting that you said We will know that we will, you know, no sooner rather than later about if that's even possible How do you think we would definitively? Know there's a limit when there always be the potential that we somehow break the limit in some way. Yeah, I think

Chris Burres
you're right. And I'll tell you, you're exactly right. There is an example that, for me, was born out of my longevity summit. I went into the summit, interviewed 55 experts, including you, on longevity. And I went into it looking for what I call two silver bullets. One of them was the silver bullet that you could take and live forever. I did not find that. So if that's the only thing you're looking for, you do not need to check out that summit.

By the way, I'm going to relaunch that summit in August. The other one was kind of the silver bullet that would kill us, right? And I think I did find that. I had the opportunity to interview two stem cell experts. You know, Christian Drapo. He was one, and the other one was Dr. Joy Kong. And out of those conversations, I came to realize that our stem cells, which are the repair mechanisms of our body, or you could almost call it the refueling in the example that I'm going to give you, our stem cells are born out of our red bone marrow. And our red bone marrow shrinks with age. And at some point, if your red bone marrow shrinks and is gone, you don't have any repair mechanisms. Let's say you had unlimited gasoline, but you couldn't repair your car. It will stop eventually, right? Like that, that is a death sentence if you no longer have access to stem cells.

So that was, that's a potential. But I also already have some ideas about how we might be able to get on the other side of this, which is to actually store our stem cells and then grow our stem cells exogenously and continue to get stem cell injections to replace the bone marrow that's gone. Maybe we can grow bone marrow outside of our bodies. So I think, I think we're right. I think my statement is still right. We will either know we can't or that we can. No, we will either know that we can't really soon, which I don't think we're going to know because I think we can. Like that's where I sit. Or if we can, it's going to happen a lot quicker than we realize. Because I think for, you know, that's one of the great things about humanity is like the more, the more people there are to be thinking about a problem and addressing a problem, the faster we're going to get a solution to whatever the problem is.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, I love Christian Japro. I've had him on the show a few times and I had this distinct memory in one of the episodes of him saying that, like you just said, he believes that death is essentially like stem cell exhaustion, like when you run out of stem cells.

Chris Burres
Like you're done your car cannot be repaired right eventually the tires will pop eventually you know it'll just stop right there's a reason you change your oil on a regular basis so that the car will continue to run i think it can probably run a lot longer than people realize on without an oil change but eventually it will stop.

Melanie Avalon
so fascinated by this. I often think of this as well about, is it David Sinclair of Walter Longo's book, or maybe both, where they talk about how, you know, when a human creates an embryo, I think it's Walter Longo.

Like clearly that shows we have the capability to create a, you know, an unaged thing in us. So in theory, in theory, it seems like there would be a way to apply that to our actual body. It's just

Chris Burres
really interesting. What David Sinclair says is his evidence of this information theory of aging is that I can take like a hair sample from you or a skin cell and we've got the DNA and from that we can actually clone you, right? I'm sure somebody is doing it somewhere on the planet.

I think they, even in China, they did it so that some children wouldn't, well, no, they did genetic modifications at the genetic level in children when they were embryos to make sure they can't suffer from AIDS, which is a weird thing to do in that kind of region. You can take that cell, you can clone you, so you can make a baby Melanie from basically any cell that you have. So the information for baby Melanie is there. We just gotta figure out the levers to pull so that we can roll that back or we've gotta figure out maybe the solution is we take these cells out, we grow the individual parts that need to be replaced from time to time and then you're good and you can replace those parts and including potentially red bone marrow and now things get dramatically extended, not just kind of, oh, another 10 years, another 20 years, no, dramatically extended if you've got technologies that can do that.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, the thing that you mentioned that they did in Asia or was it Japan or China with the the twins? That was like super controversial, right? Because he didn't say he was doing that And then like he didn't say that that was like what he was doing

Chris Burres
And you know, there's somebody in some, you know, fancy garage somewhere who's cloned upper. Like it's probably been probably crazy.

If you go by what the movies say, it's, you know, in some government lab somewhere. Yeah.

Melanie Avalon
surprise me. I'm super curious, so in your inner summit you said there were three people who said the same number?

Chris Burres
Yes. What was that number? I think it was like a 122, right? So right in that range.

And so they were comfortable saying that they wanted to live to the extent of human capacity, which is kind of what you would hope that longevity experts would say, right? Which is like, I believe we can live to 122. I also believe that you can live to 122 in a state that you'd actually like to live to 122. Did you have surrogates?

Melanie Avalon
gay young on that summit. I did. Did I connect you to him? I don't know.

I love him. I think I did. Maybe. Is that possible? Regardless, the conversation I always think about with him is because I, I always thought everybody wanted to live forever. Like literally, I thought that was, I realized I'm seeing the world through my perspective.

Chris Burres
Yeah, no, I can tell you a story about like how people react to this research. You might have told me

Melanie Avalon
on the summit, is it where like, were you talking or it's like where people

Chris Burres
People are raising their hand? No. This is different. So this is interesting.

So I tell the story of this molecule and how it extended the life of these test subjects in peer-reviewed published research by 90%. And I kind of joke that I get two responses. One of them is if they are from New York, they are like, Chris, why would we want rats to live longer? You are an evil person. We need to bury this research. There's no value here. And then kind of less facetiously, many, many people say, why would I want to live longer? And I remember in the early days of me telling a story and getting that response that I would first again, I'm here thinking I'm going to live to 125 with that as my goal. And so it didn't make any sense to me. And then what I realized, this is what they're hearing. They're not hearing, hey, do you want to live longer? They're hearing, hey, Melanie, in some sort of state of infirmment, because that's guaranteed, how long do you want to live? And like I said, a lot of people are like, not that long. But if you change the question and you're like, Melanie, if you could have the same mental capacity that you have today and the same physical capacity that you have today, would you then be interested in living longer? And you are already a yes, so it maybe doesn't apply to you.

Melanie Avalon
No, literally that's it because when I get asked a question, I don't even think about being old and infirm. I think of myself now and I'm like, do I want to live forever? Yes.

And then if they follow it up with a question of like, would you want to live forever if you were, you know, old and aging and infirm, I'm like, oh, well, no, but I don't think of it that way because it's like a hypothetical question. And I don't know. I feel like if we had immortality, like why would it exist in the infirm state of it? Like it might as well just exist in the young state of it. If it's immortality, if it's immortality, there shouldn't even be aging, I guess.

Chris Burres
Yeah, well, that goes back to David Sinclair. Like if we have an eternity to figure out how to pull the levers of our genetic makeup, right, and how those genes get expressed, then we'll eventually be able to go back to where we want to, right? And it's funny because I always thought, yeah, go back as young as possible. Yeah, I probably don't want the raging hormones that were occurring, you know, at 19 through 25. Yeah, it's a

Melanie Avalon
It's so true. It's like, I feel really good right now, the age I am, if I could just stay like this.

I'm down. I'm so down. We're speaking up. Okay, we've hinted at it. We've danced around it a lot. So dying to hear what are these studies that were actually done on carbon-60? Is the first big one the one with the rats with the olive oil and the control, the olive oil, the olive oil carbon-60 group? What happens?

Chris Burres
What do they test? So, again, because there's 20 of these benzene-shaped rings on the exterior of this ESS60 molecule, and again, just from my perspective, we say ESS60 if it's been processed for people and pets, even though these were test with our rats, we'll assume it's, well, we actually know it was processed the right way to be ESS60. So they thought it would be toxic. In that study, they gave one group of rats water, so that was the control group. Another group were given olive oil, kind of a semi-controlled group, and the other one, the last one was given olive oil with the ESS60 molecule. Again, they thought it would be toxic. I like to kind of point out that in a toxicity study, you typically are not, you know, let's give a little to this rat and see if their tummy is ache. No, you're giving a lot because you're trying to identify if it is, in fact, toxic. So they gave a lot to these rats, and instead of being toxic, the rats given the ESS60 and olive oil, really the MyVitalC formula lived 90% longer than the control group. And that represents the single longest longevity experimental result on mammals in history.

It's peer-reviewed, published research, you know, the kind of research you would want to hang your hat on. And I'm very proud to share that our lab provided the material, and our lab is actually mentioned in that original study. And I'm going to go a little bit deeper. We'll just get the research on this particular paper out of the way. So my director of research came to me once, and he was like, you know that paper that was published in 2012? It's out of the University of Paris, right? It's the main one that's kind of launched this molecule into the health space. That could have been five separate research papers because they were doing so many things in terms of research in the lab. So let me talk about another one. So a typical Wistar rat lives out to 32 months and has a known amount of tumor mass in its body. The longer it lives, the more tumor mass it has in its body. Even though the ESS 60 rats lived out to 62 months, again, 90% longer, none of them had any tumors.

Now, I've told that story, and people have been like, oh, cure for cancer. And the answer to that is no. And then I follow that with another no. There is a huge difference between dealing, being able to deal with a cancer that has metastasized or to be what's called a cancer preventative. And we actually know things as simple as good exercise, good nutrition, good sleep are cancer preventatives. that piece of the story kind of lumps it into the potential for being a cancer preventative. I am gonna add one study, because I think this is fascinating. It is a Petri dish study. So this is the lowest level of study, but I think it's really interesting. If you took a Petri dish, or they actually did take a Petri dish in peer reviewed published research, they had cancer cells and healthy cells in the Petri dish.

Chris Burres
And they introduced an anti-cancer agent. Now an anti-cancer agent is a poison. The goal is to poison the cancer cell before the healthy cells. In the presence of the ESS60 molecule, when they introduced the anti-cancer agent, there was increased efficacy against the cancer cells. So more cancer cells died, and there were protective effects of the healthy cells. So more healthy cells lived. That's a pretty profound result.

And I'm gonna kind of wrap up that. I'll actually probably come back to that as we start talking about the theories of how this molecule is probably working in your body. The last piece of the study, it's a carbon tetrachloride injection. So basically a separate group of rats, they injected with carbon tetrachloride. Now carbon tetrachloride is an oxidative agent that attacks the liver. They kind of understood, remember we said that this molecule can hold up to six negatively charged particles on the exterior of its cage. By the time they did this research, there had been some studies that showed it to be an antioxidant. So they wanted to see like what level of antioxidant and maybe would it have protective effects on the liver. So they inject the group water, olive oil, and olive oil with ESS 60 with this carbon tetrachloride. They waited, I think it was a day, but they waited some period of time. Then they euthanized them humanely and then dissected them and looked at their livers. The livers of the water rats did not recover at all. The livers of the olive oil rats did recover to some small degree. So olive oil is great for like take olive oil. Dr. Stephen Gundry and Brian Johnson, their focus on olive oil is well deserved. And then you look at the last group. So that was the group given olive oil with the ESS 60 molecule. Their livers were almost completely recovered. So if you're talking about liver protective effects from oxidative stress and damage, then there's a great result for you in that particular study. So those were the kind of key pieces of the study that I tend to talk about.

Melanie Avalon
So the first the first one you're talking about that the twenty twelve one with that with the rats. So what do you think is the significant you just mentioned like the olive oil so looks like and five months at the beginning all the water control rats were dead, buy it sixty seven percent of just the olive oil ones were alive and a hundred percent which is crazy of the c sixty were alive and i'm just really intrigued by this all of oil only versus the olive oil plus c sixty.

What like what how much of the here's my question they didn't test just c sixty they only tested c sixty with olive oil so how do we know how much of it is the c sixty versus the olive oil.

Chris Burres
I think what you look at is the the gap between the extension of life. So yeah, you're right 60. Well, I'm trusting you. I haven't looked at the research in a while.

67% of the olive oil rats were still alive. But overall, it extended their life by about 30%. And then with the ESO 60 rats in olive oil, about 90%, right? And so you've got this kind of big gap. I think the straight up conclusion of this, let's just say you're a skeptic, and you know, cutting edge molecules are not your thing. You might not be listening to this podcast, you might not be a biohacker. But but let's just say that is the story in that study is take olive oil, like olive oil is actually really good for you. And the reason that they didn't just use the the way again, we call it if it's for consumption, ESO 60 is so you can take a pile of this black powder, it's a carbon, so it's going to be a black powder, it's going to be a crystalline powder, kind of like sugar crystals or salt crystals, you have this pile of crystalline black powder. And if it's ESO 60, you can consume it, but it's not water soluble. So it's barely going to be bio bioavailable, and you'll just end up excreting it out. When you dissolve it in olive oil, you end up with the individual ESO 60 molecules floating around in the oil. So now it's basically infinitely more bioavailable just because of surface area, right. And so that's part of the reason that it was dissolved in olive oil. Now, this is always fun to stop at to give a little perspective. One drop of our product, which is the same thing that was used in that study, olive oil with the ESO 60 in it has more than 400 times as many of these ESO 60 soccer ball shaped molecules as you have cells in your body. That's how small it is. So one drop 400 times as many of the ESO 60 molecules as you have cells in your body.

Melanie Avalon
Okay, so actually that that inspires a lot of questions for me when we take it so if we Eat actually know before that really quick question about the olive oil and this might come up more when we talk about mechanisms of action But we know olive oil for example Well a it's really hard to find like good quality olive oil It's like a very very scammy market and then when you have it you want to make sure it's like it oxidizes easily So you want to make sure that it's you know kept at the right temperatures and in the dark And I know that you you've talked in your book about like the creation process and how you're like stirring it and olive oil In the dark for a certain amount of time does the ESS 60 actually protect the olive oil from oxidizing olive oil?

Chris Burres
say that it oxidizes readily, I think it oxidizes readily in the wrong conditions, and that would be exposed to heat and to light, right? That olive oil that's sitting in your pantry is probably going to last three years.

Melanie Avalon
I have, like, all these fears of olive oil going.

Chris Burres
rancid you don't and you can actually you'll know when it's rancid right and I'll just give a segue here a little bit. We do have some customers who will call us and they'll say hey this olive oil is leaving a peppery flavor in my back of my throat.

Melanie Avalon
Right, that's the thing confusing it with them.

Chris Burres
I'm scared that it's rancid, right? And the reality is a high quality extra virgin olive oil will leave a peppery flavor at the back of your throat.

Some people may have been at an Italian restaurant where they'll put olive oil in a small plate for you to dip your bread in, and they'll crack pepper into this olive oil. Why are they cracking pepper? So that inexpensive olive oil can taste more expensive by giving you that peppery sensation. Yeah.

Melanie Avalon
It's actually like the throat burn is actually from a compound in olive oil that is the same compound. It's like the similar effects of taking like an inset, I think.

Like there were studies looking at it, comparing it to insets and whatever compound it is that creates that burn is very potent for as an animal.

Chris Burres
inflammatory. Yes, yeah, all is an anti-inflammatory on its

Melanie Avalon
own. So, okay. So coming back to this and the olive oil on the C60, you said there's 400 times the amount of this molecule than cells in your body. This is something that I should know more about in general with supplements and things like that.

So when we eat it and now it's in this very absorbable, bioavailable form, does it go to all of our body? Like how does that actually work? Is it systemic? How does it get up? Does it touch every cell in our body?

Chris Burres
our body? How does it work? Yeah, well, I mean, our current theory is yes. And you know, this question actually kind of harkens for me back to, I don't know, when I was 11 or 12. And you know, you have a toothache, and your mom gives you aspirin, and then you have a headache, and your mom gives you aspirin, and then you have, you scrape your knee, and it hurts, and your mom gives you aspirin. And I'm a little kid going, well, how does that aspirin know where to go? Right? Like, like, where's it? How does it know to get there? And the reality is, it's going systemically, it's only applying in the place that really matters, right? Where you're experiencing pain, it's actually doing its job there.

So, yeah, we believe that this goes systemically. And we actually, I mean, this has been one of my challenges as you know, I've stepped into the role of a chief scientist of a supplement company of identifying, okay, one, and we'll talk about this, probably here in a second, like, what are, what are the mechanisms of action? Like, what do we think is going on? And then two, how do we explain head to toe testimonials, right? Part of me as we were bringing this to market and giving getting these amazing testimonials was like, does this happen with every, like, maybe this happens with everything that ever goes on the market, and everybody says great things about it. I don't think that's the case. It is the case that we believe it's going, you know, throughout the body and actually having a positive impact on the mitochondria.

Melanie Avalon
Oh my goodness. Okay, Chris, this is why we're friends.

So literally, and I talked about this in my book, literally when I was in kindergarten, I have this memory of having a headache at one point and my mom giving me an aspirin and then like stubbing my toe and my mom being like, I'll give you an aspirin. And me thinking, I was like, this is really suspicious. This doesn't make sense. Like how can one thing fix both things? Something's going on here. We, we had the same, we were the same kid, basically.

Chris Burres
Yeah. If it's okay with you, I'd like to talk a little bit about how we evolved from this study, right, where the rats lived 90% longer, and then resisted for a long time.

Like we tried not to get into the supplement industry until things dramatically changed, if that's okay with you.

Melanie Avalon
Literally had that on my list because you talk about that in the book and yeah, I would love to I would love to hear about that Okay, good

Chris Burres
I think it helps preface what's my role as I'm going into this chief scientist and trying to understand what's going on. Picture this. Robert and I are, I like to call us, happy-go-lucky carbon nanomaterial scientists. We're manufacturing this molecule. We're all black and suited up because this stuff goes everywhere. If you think about that ink toner that I mentioned earlier, if you take a handful of this fullerenic soot and you drop it, nothing will hit the ground. It'll just start floating because it's that light. You can imagine this black soot floating around everything. We actually manufacture it in a different facility because it's so dirty and you really can't have it around the supplement, which may sound ironic, but it makes perfect sense. So we're these happy-go-lucky carbon nanomaterial scientists.

This study comes out and we're like, oh, that's interesting. We started getting these phone calls from this crazy, wacky group of people that, you may know them, biohackers. I can affectionately say that now because I am a biohacker. They were saying, hey, Chris and Robert, how much of this stuff should—I read that study. How much should I be taking every day? As conservative carbon nanomaterial scientists, we're like, well, wait a minute. You're asking me how much of this stuff that I sell to research institutions around the world, to put into inks, batteries, tires, and photocells, how much of that stuff should you be taking? We, both Robert and I, we're going to go with zero.

You probably shouldn't take this. We actually added not-for-human consumption to our labeling in mid-2013. Think about that. From 1991 all the way to 2013, we did not have to have not-for-human consumption on our labeling. Then we do. We did add it to our labeling. Let me be clear. The literature was clear. The molecule was safe. We're just conservative carbon nanomaterial scientists, and we're selling it to research institutions around the world. It just didn't make sense. Take this thing that you put into inks, batteries, tires, and photocells, take it, and start consuming it. We add not-for-human consumption to our labeling, and that stayed on our labeling really until the latter part of 2018, and a couple of things happened in that timeframe.

One, we were getting two to three phone calls per week, and those phone calls sounded like, hey, Chris, my knee pain is gone. I was like, you mean the knee pain of your rat, because it literally says not-for-human consumption on the labeling. They were like, oh, yeah, yeah, that's right. Hey, if my rat weighs 275 pounds and does HIIT training on Tuesdays and Thursdays, should they take more on Tuesdays and Thursdays? We know what's going on. My business partner and I, actually in the conference room right behind me, are getting together quarterly, and we're going, do we want to get into the supplement market? It is a very different market than this carbon nanomaterials. If you think about it, we ship a product to a research institution somewhere in the world. They take that product. They give it to a grad student, or they give it to a research associate who takes it to their agency.

Chris Burres
HPLC and confirms that we shipped them what we sold them. That is not how the supplement industry works. In fact, in this kind of timeframe between 2013 and 2018, I found a peer-reviewed published research paper that said 50% of the supplements they had purchased off the market didn't have in them what they said they had in them, right? So every quarter that my business partner Robert and I are getting together and asking ourselves if we want to get into this supplement market, we're just like, that's not the industry we want to be in.

Like this is not like we're, you know, happy-go-lucky carbon nanomaterial scientist. Finally, at the latter part of 2017, a guy with a big YouTube following started talking about all the benefits he was getting taking it on a daily basis. And our phone went from ringing two to three times a week to 10 times a day. And in that quarterly meeting, we're like, hey, Robert, this is kind of an entrepreneurial opportunity bigger than we even ever imagined. And we both look back to that paper, right? That paper that said 50% of the supplements on the market don't have in them what they say they have in them. That's actually why I'm very specific about C60 and ESS 60 process for people and pets. Because we knew that industry was going to, that was going to happen in that industry. And we also know we're the oldest and longest manufacturer and distributor of the molecule on the planet. We have the lab. We're in the unique position of delivering the highest quality product to research institutions. We really do need to get into this market in order to keep the consumer safe.

And we kind of pause and we asked ourselves two questions. The first is a moral question. Are we comfortable selling it? My wife takes it. I take it. And that's me. I take it. My wife takes it. Everybody on our team takes it. By the way, it's not a requirement. You don't have to take the product if you work here. They just have access to actually the research and the testimonials from the customers. And so yes, everybody here takes it. And then the next is kind of the legal side of things from the FTC and the FDA. You've got to cross the T's. You've got to dot the I's. And then that's where we've been kind of moving this into the market in 2018. And then I can talk about what my role, how my role shifted, but that was quite a lot. So I want to turn that back over to you in case you have any questions.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah no it i mean it's wild the supplement industry and it's funny so we were recording some content before this not not for this podcast which people have to work and people watch that content that we created also.

Chris Burres
So that'll be on our Instagram account. So just go to the Instagram, MyVitalC, and that's what you'll find it there.

And on our YouTube, you can find us on all the socials under MyVitalC, C as in carbon.

Melanie Avalon
Okay, so we'll put links to all that in the show notes. So listeners definitely check that out But one of the questions you asked me was if I could wave a magic wand and have RFK You know do something what would I pick and listeners will have to check out your Instagram to see what I said But the other one I was debating between saying was it's complicated though.

Like I wish there was more access to things that I know I want to take or ingest for health related purposes, so Like this this ESS 60 I mean well I can take it now through you but you know for the longest time it was talking you were talking about how It's you know You have to label it for not for human consumption when and and there's others other things on the market that are hard to get access to like rapamycin and you know Things like that, you know NMM was like on the gray list for a little bit So it's a complicated answer because on the one hand I just want there to be more access to stuff and then on the other hand I understand why you need to have these rules about potential toxicity with things and you don't want people just you know Killing themselves with stuff without meaning to but then at the same time also the supplement industry is like you said you can test things They're not even what they say. They are so I don't even know I'm saying here Except that I would like more access to things and I still acknowledge the problems with you know toxicity and not actually knowing what you're getting half the time

Chris Burres
I think in that question right one kind of maybe key piece that is easy to glance over is a magic wand and if you could just say i wish all the fraud would go away. Right i would that be right cuz you don't even like at some point you know there may be stuff that you and i are wholeheartedly and if you dig into it and i'm not so sure and then if that magic wand could just make it go away and i got well that's not available anymore that would be amazing yeah.

Melanie Avalon
So when you did testing of other companies making this product, some of them are just lying? Like, it's just the wrong amounts?

Like, what did you find? Like, how different were the amounts that you would find when you did testing?

Chris Burres
I am very altruistic, and I desperately want to believe that the companies that are out there are trying to do the right thing. The best way, we tested 22 of the products that were in the space, all of them except for one, and of course ours were woefully low in concentration. So that's just a challenge.

And I can share with you, there are two products on the market that claim to have carbon-60 in them, and they don't have any carbon-60 in them at all. One might have some accidentally, it's actually nano-onions, and that doesn't have any toxicity data. You should not be selling nano-onions for consumption. Another one, a water-soluble version of carbon-60. You can add OH molecules to carbon-60 and make it water-soluble. But there is no toxicity data on water-soluble C-60. I would not bring that product to market. I would not put that product in my body.

And those are kind of the things that caused us to shift and say, listen, if we're going to be talking with a new audience and we're talking about the ESS-60 molecule, we know a couple of things. Like, I'll admit, it's good for business because, yes, you kind of lock us in with us. But we're really doing it out of, again, an altruistic perspective, which is, do you want to go into a space where there is fraud and you've got to figure it out yourself? Or do you want to stay in a safe space where, yeah, there's a couple of competitors. They're using our product. We monitor those competitors so that they have a high-quality product and you can buy from any one of them.

Melanie Avalon
I love it so much. This is, again, how we're so similar. That's a primary reason I made my supplement line was because I just wanted to know exactly what was in what I was taking. And it really comes down to trust.

And so you really have to vet and find the people that you trust, the brands that you trust. Right now, I'm trying to make digestive enzymes and I'm finding out that brands I actually thought were listing everything are not. And it's really frustrating. So it's nice that, I mean, because we haven't even talked yet about the potential mechanisms of action for the health benefits here. But it's really exciting that there's clearly so much potential here and that we have you as a source in your company with MyVital C so people can know that they're getting what we're talking about. So thank you for doing that. Yeah.

Chris Burres
No. Honestly, it's the only way I would do it. I'll give this example. A lot of supplement companies don't do research, and even fewer publish. And I mentioned we published a paper in May of last year. We do do the research.

The reason most supplement companies are scared to do the research is they're scared that they're going to find out that their product doesn't do anything. And what do you do then? And I'll be honest. Remember, I didn't invent this to solve any sort of problem. I didn't invent this to be great in your mitochondria, to give you focus and energy and sleep. None of that happened. And I'd rather know the truth. If the reality is that this doesn't do anything, which I don't think is true, but if that's the truth, the magic wand, and this goes away, I'd rather go away. And then I can go spend my time on something that's actually going to have an impact than be somebody who's kind of pushing something that doesn't add value.

Melanie Avalon
This rat study we talked about you're talking about the research here and mentioning the research and i think that's incredible like it is it's so true that there's so few supplement companies where they're actually doing the research as well especially like published research but this study is so impressive.

Why do you think there hasn't been more research?

Chris Burres
research on it in general? Well, I think the biggest reason is because there's no currently no room for intellectual property, right? So the molecules old enough, any patents associated with it have expired. And so there's no way that a big pharma company could come in, do research, protect that research with patents, and then, you know, reap the billions of dollars that they might reap with the right marketing program.

And so I think that's the big reason I am very much take ownership. The reason that a lot of people haven't heard about it is because I'm needing to do a better job and that's part of the reason I'm here today. So thank you for helping me do my job, you know, getting out there and spreading the word to as many people as possible.

Melanie Avalon
Well, first of all, of course, and thank you for everything that you're doing and could a company come in because that completely makes sense about the IP and such and the patents. Could they come in though and kind of like we were talking about the beginning of the episode where there was this idea of turning it into an anti-cancer thing by attaching something to it?

Like could they modify it?

Chris Burres
and create a compound? 100%. That is absolutely on the table, and I'm sure there are people who are working on that.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, okay. So how is this working? How is it working? What effects can it actually create in humans from a health perspective?

Chris Burres
This is the perfect continuation of the story. We decide that we're going to go to the market in 2018.

My role shifts, and now I'm in this chief scientist of a supplement. My first goal is, well, one, actually the first goal was, hey, it's a 90% extension of life, even a big deal. It sounds like a big deal, but you don't know. I certainly never really saw anything in GNC that was saying, hey, extend your life by 30%, or reading anything about that. I read a lot of scientific literature anyway. It turns out 90% is a big deal. The next best way to live longer is calorie restriction. If you reduce your calorie consumption by 30%, you can extend your life by 30%. I call this the starve yourself one-third to death diet, and nobody likes to sign up for that diet. If you get a clipboard and you're like, hey, here's this new diet. You want to try it? No. They're not. They need more better marketing, I think.

Melanie Avalon
Restriction Society, they do it.

Chris Burres
Yeah. And actually, Dave Sinclair mentions it in his book and talks about if you're going to do that, those people are typically a little bit frail, have sweaters on all the time. So even if you give them a sweater, not many people are signing up for it. So yeah, 90% extension of life is a big deal.

And then mechanisms of action. I think I've mentioned, if not, we'll repeat. Our most consistent testimonials, people take the product in the morning, they report mental focus and energy during the day, and then better sleep that night. And if you improve sleep, you will improve your physical, mental, and emotional well-being, right? Like, it's absolutely paramount for kind of any longevity protocol you might be thinking, any health protocol you might be thinking, sleep is paramount. And so that was kind of the first place that we hung our hat, which is like, hey, if we're helping you sleep, then great, everything's going to be better.

Then we started digging a little bit further. These rats live 90% longer. What does the medical community think about aging? And they tend to think, not all of them, but they tend to think that it's an oxidation and an inflammation process. And from an oxidation standpoint, there's an ad hoc study out on the web showing our product to be 172 times more powerful than vitamin C. There's peer-reviewed published research that shows it to be 125 times more powerful than vitamin C. So I'm in Texas, I like to put a big old checkmark on the on the oxidation. When it comes to inflammation, you have to be really, and you're in the supplement space, you have to be really careful when you're talking about inflammation, because the FDA equates discussions of inflammation with discussions of the diseases of inflammation, which are also the diseases of aging. So that's arthritis, Alzheimer's, cardiovascular disease, cancer. So if I say to this audience, hey, we address chronic inflammation, what the FDA hears is me claiming we cure cancer, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's.

We're obviously not claiming that. There's so much extremely expensive research that would need to go down that path. What the FDA will allow us to say is that we address inflammation as it relates to exercise induced inflammation. So we've all had like a tough workout, you know, maybe with your little electrodes, right? Had that tough workout, maybe just walked further on one day than normal and felt that inflammation in our bodies. The FDA allows us to say that we address that type of inflammation. And I want to stick on inflammation just for a little bit to share some kind of recent exciting things at the A4M, so American Academy of Anti-Aging. They have an event called Longevity Fest. We had a booth there. Dr. Lane Young came up to me and I had a conversation with him at the previous biohacking, the one where we met, the biohacking conference where we met everybody with the blue tongues, right?

Chris Burres
And he came up and he shared something with me and I was like, Dr. Young, I have to record this. So I actually have a video of this. And what he shared was, Chris, I don't care if you're male, female, pre-surgery, post-surgery, cardiovascular disease, otherwise healthy. If you have elevated HSCRP numbers, and we'll talk about that here in a second, your product brings them down into normal ranges in four to eight weeks. His example was he had a client at nine who his protocols was not moving and our product brought it down to 0.9, so under one is normal ranges in four to eight weeks. He went on to say that he's seeing in his clients with our product an improvement on HRV, right, so heart rate variability, and in sleep between 20 and 60 percent.

That's kind of shot us in the direction of doing, again, we do research, first, an ad hoc HSCRP study. I'm going to give you a little perspective on this 9 to 0.9. After kind of I became aware of that data point and was having conversations with other people, I had a conversation with an oncologist. He said, listen, if you have a 9, we assume you have cancer until we prove otherwise. That's how inflamed that particular client was, again, brought it down to 0.9. We're doing an ad hoc HSCRP study, so we're looking for people with elevated HSCRPs that aren't able to move it. We'll get them product and we'll get them a follow-up HSCRP test with the plan as we prove out that data that goes directly into a peer-reviewed, placebo-controlled, double-blind research paper. That's our plans. And I do want to share kind of my own testimonial as it relates to kind of inflammatory markers. So we can talk about markers. We can't talk about inflammation in general. At the recent Health Optimization Summit, the booth right next to us was Core Health. You'll be interested in this technology, Melanie. He is an Apple engineer. You look at him, you're like, that dude's an Apple engineer. His name is Bob. He created a device that looks at ESR, erythrocyte sedimentation rate. What that is, basically, you take a drop of blood, you put it in a capillary tool, you put it vertically in the rate at which it exposed to gravity, right? The rate at which the blood cells separate from the plasma is an indication of your inflammatory status, right? I think it's the slower it is, the more inflamed you are, but I could be wrong on that piece either way.

So I took that test and he has a biological age component of that test. So based on what your HSR ESR is, he had me at 25 plus years younger than my chronological age. Really excited about that. I'm going to share two other ones that happened. Glycan age, right, they look at glycans and how they're attached to cells in your blood. Glycans are a sugar molecule and this typically has one direction so as you age it goes in one direction and they're measuring how you compare to other people in your age bracket or not in your age bracket.

Chris Burres
It is also an incredibly powerful inflammatory marker so understanding your inflammatory status and I actually, I haven't asked this yet, it wouldn't surprise me if this sugar molecule is the thing that changes the rate that you separate blood cells from plasmas, right? So that particular test, glycan age, had me 34 years younger than my chronological age which when I took that test it had me at 21. If you're younger than 21 biologically are you still able to drink? So I don't know if I want to be younger than that.

And then the last one, this is interesting because the test is I think good, right, comparatively meaning I don't think any of these tests actually give your biological age. I think they're really good tools for understanding if the protocols that you're doing are moving you in the right direction or the wrong direction. The last one is my DN age. When I took that test when I was 51 it had me at 59. I was not very happy about that. I'm like I'm doing lots of things here like how is this even real? Three years later, so when I was 54 I took the same test and it had me at 58. So three years later chronologically I had reversed one year biologically. And I know you're familiar with the Rejuvenation Olympics which is where people are submitting their test data and racing to see who has the slowest aging rate, right, and it tends to be in the 0.6 to 0.7 range. So for each year the participants, the leaders of this Rejuvenation Olympics, every year that passes they're only aging 0.6 years or 0.7. If I had turned in that data it would have been the first negative, right. In three years I regressed biologically one year. That's a fantastic direction. I don't like that it's older but I do like the direction that it's going in.

Melanie Avalon
Wow, okay, wait, so for that Aging Olympics, to clarify, are they looking at a test that looks at your rate of aging in that moment, or you have to submit at different times and see how much you changed? Like, it's the change.

Multiple times.

Chris Burres
Yeah, you do have to submit multiple times and they have to be pretty recent. I just haven't actually got around to testing again.

Melanie Avalon
okay gotcha so it's the the change that they're looking at yeah i was wondering because i had i don't know dr matt dawson he's the ceo of diagnostic

Chris Burres
No, I have not had him yet.

Melanie Avalon
I think he's CEO is his role. He's amazing and I had him on and I took through True Diagnostic. They have a biological age kit that uses like three, it uses three different ones. And one of them is Pace Aging, which was with I think like Duke in Columbia. And he told me on the podcast that my numbers were like some of the best he's ever seen.

And I was like, whoa, that's insane. But the reason that one is Pace Aging, that looks at your rate of aging. That's like specifically what it's designed for. I'm really fascinated by all these different biological age clocks, especially because I don't know that there's any one that is more definitive or it's kind of like you have to, like two ways you can go about it. One, you could look at one and like keep testing like you're saying and see how you changed within that same test. And I guess also you could look at your results on different tests. There's just so many theories out there about like which one's the best and what to do. But either way, you clearly see like with what you're doing that there's been a change and that it's having a...

Chris Burres
beneficial effect? I think it's very much, all of them are very much qualitative, not quantitative. So if you get a result and I'm 20, 21, according to GlycanAge, does that mean I have another, you know, if I were to live just the average human, is it another 64 years? I'm not sure that's what it means, but it does mean from those things that tend to get worse as you age, I'm not getting worse as you age, right? And those two statements can be very different.

So I think it's a really good tool, and it probably should be the same test. It's a really good tool to say, like, you know what, I started smoking, I started drinking, and I stopped exercising. And now, look, my biological age is older than what it was, right? I think that will clearly show you you're doing the wrong things. And I think it will also clearly show you that you're doing the right things. Amazing.

Melanie Avalon
So, is it largely the antioxidant potential of it that's doing this, we think?

Chris Burres
Yeah, well, this goes into our last theory, our current theory, and I think it's our strongest theory, and it is related to the antioxidant capability. So the theory is, it's called the BOSS theory, so buffering oxidative stress system. So there is peer-reviewed published research that shows the ESS60 molecule gets into the mitochondria. I think we've probably mentioned that already.

And back when it was discovered, we already talked about the fact that it can hold up the six negatively charged particles on the exterior of the cage. And how that plays out, systemically, we believe. So quick refresher, mitochondria is the powerhouse of every cell. There's between 50 and 5,000 mitochondria in every cell in your body, except for your blood cells, which have zero, and your brain and neurons, which actually have 2 million. That's how much energy our nervous system uses relative to our other systems. Like every power source that you're familiar with, there is a negative byproduct. You think about your car going down the road, you've got exhaust. You think about your power plant, you've got a smokestack with smoke coming out. In the case of mitochondria, it's reactive oxygen species, and these are positively and negatively charged particles. I kind of like to picture them like little bumper cars. So when they're left on their own, they run around, and everything they slam into, they're rusting or causing oxidative stress, oxidative damage, and ultimately, inflammaging. So internal to the mitochondria, you actually have two antioxidants to manage those reactive oxygen species, so they don't run around like little bumper cars and cause problems. Those are glutathione, a master antioxidant, and melatonin. And I like to pause here because melatonin is, of course, the sleep hormone, and one of our most consistent testimonials is related to sleep.

So you've got some nice parallels here. So melatonin and glutathione bond to those reactive oxygen species so they don't run around and do damage. But what happens when you stress a mitochondria? When you stress a mitochondria, it starts producing more energy, and it also starts producing more reactive oxygen species, and more than can be handled by the internal glutathione and melatonin. And that's where we think this ESS60 molecule comes in. We know, again, from peer-reviewed published research, that it's in the mitochondria. We believe it holds on to up to six negatively charged particles so they can't do any damage. And then when that mitochondria is able to replenish the glutathione or melatonin, they can then manage those reactive oxygen species appropriately. I know that's kind of science, you have a fun analogy, and I'll tell this story. I think your audience probably gets the science, but the analogy is so fun, we're going to go for it.

You'll probably agree. I think all biological analogies should start with Mardi Gras. I mean, a lot of biology happens at Mardi Gras, so.

Chris Burres
So it's the end of Mardi Gras, and you have these drunk reactive oxygen species running around Bourbon Street, smashing windows, spray painting stuff, causing oxidative stress, oxidative damage, and inflammaging. You have the New Orleans Police Department, the glutathione and the melatonin, coming on to Bourbon Street, handcuffing themselves to these reactive oxygen species and getting them off of Bourbon Street.

But what does the New Orleans Police Department do when they get overwhelmed? They take those reactive oxygen species and they put them in a paddy wagon. They attach them to the exterior of this ESS60 molecule, again, so they can't run around and do any damage. And then when the New Orleans Police Department is able to replenish the glutathione and the melatonin, they then handcuff themselves to those reactive oxygen species and get them off of Bourbon Street. And that's why we say that this ESS60 molecule is the boss of buffering oxidative stress.

Melanie Avalon
system. So basically it's capturing all the things and holding them until the glutathione can come in and do its job.

Chris Burres
Yeah, I and I've got another analogy. So I'm kind of my summary of it is it's reducing the negative impact of Stressed mitochondria and again, I kind of joke like how do you stress a mitochondria? You just live in modern society? That's how you stress a mitochondria, right? Like a tough workout an airplane flight with the EMF smoke if you drink if you Actually smoke smog tough emails tough conversations with people that's gonna stress that mitochondria But here's another way that I like to look at it because because remember stress is actually good If we don't have stress like things will go way awry I mean in order to build muscle and maintain strength you have to stress the muscles and if you still have any doubts Think about the astronauts when they come back from space Their health is an absolute dumpster fire, right?

Their bone density has been lost They've lost bone density their immune system. It has been compromised So that that's just from losing the stress of gravity. So so you really do need to be stressed So I like to picture us physiologically as a prairie like this beautiful prairie with Prairie flowers and grasses right blowing in the wind. This is a beautiful picture, right? And stress is that gentle rain that just has the right amount of stress for that prairie But what happens when you have this dark ominous cloud in the middle of the prairie? Pouring water like a faucet in the middle of the prairie It's gonna start impinging on the prairie and digging a hole right becoming a problem and doing damage And that's where I like to picture this ESS 60 molecule like a sponge that's between the dark cloud and the prairie absorbing that stream of stress and Preventing it from hitting the prairie now There is something to note here if you don't take care of that deep dark cloud. That's pouring water Eventually, the sponge will fill up and it'll start overflowing and it'll start impinging. So you do need to manage that This is really good at helping you manage the peaks, right and the troughs are where you get to recover So let's say you manage that deep cloud dark cloud And then you just take this sponge and you gently squeeze it over the prairie and it goes back to being wonderful and waving In the wind having not experienced the damage that stress mitochondria would have typically caused. Gotcha

Melanie Avalon
Okay. Wow.

Do you know with the one more little quick nuance question about the vitamin C, do you know Dr. Niam Patel? I mentioned oral glutathione. No, not on this show. That was us recording content before this.

Chris Burres
have you met him i have met him a kind of funny story i went up to his booth at a health optimization summit and i was like hey i'm about to interview and then i looked at my schedule and i was like actually he's not even on my schedule i haven't made contact with him in my head i had already made contact with him so yeah i've read his book and i'm about to interview him i don't remember when that is but soon oh nice

Melanie Avalon
Oh, I love him so much. Yeah, he's actually gonna come back on for like the third time, I think.

He also is somebody I like really, really insanely trust with, you know, doing the research and products he makes. He talks a lot about vitamin C. Like he thinks one of his theories is that the main way vitamin C is working is not so much directly being an antioxidant but actually being responsible for helping glutathione recycle. I was just wondering if there'd be any connection there with the C60, like could it directly help glutathione recycle at all or is it probably more this antioxidant with, you know, free radicals and such?

Chris Burres
I think we have theories at this point, and certainly it could fit in the role. His is a theory that vitamin C is actually facilitating more glutathione production, glutathione master antioxidant, absolutely very valuable.

But the ESS 60 actually operates different than vitamin C. And here's a way to think about it. There's a guy, Chris Gethin. I don't know if you know Chris Gethin. I love Chris so much. He is so awesome. I did a video for him, and I had little sample packets. And I'm like, hey, this is what this one does, whatever. And I was like, this is my last one. He's like, hey, you got to let me send you some. And I was like, I already bought some, and I'm about to do another video. So ha. But Chris, this was interesting. So at the biohacking conference that we met, Chris came by my booth, by the way, just to share with the audience. He's a bodybuilder. He is not a meathead. There's so much science. I would trust any of his products. Actually, I took some of his dilucine this morning. And he came by my booth and he said, hey, I'm going to be presenting. And I'm going to be talking about your product. And in my kind of small head, I was like, oh, he's going to be talking about antioxidants or anti-inflammatories or whatever. I almost didn't get to his talk. And by the way, this year, I didn't get to any. But I got to his talk, like the last five minutes of his presentation was about my product. I see. And what he's talking about is you actually don't want a lot of vitamin C in your system. If you're working to have hormetic response, do what it's supposed to do. So hormetic response, you you lift the heavy weights, right? You stress the muscles, cause micro tears, your body knows to build back strength and size if you're doing it in the way that a bodybuilder would do it. If you take too much vitamin C or too much antioxidants in general, or the wrong kinds of antioxidants, then that will dampen that hormetic response, which is not what you want, right? So you've got to be careful. The reason he talks about our product is like hydrogen gas, which is a selective antioxidant, the ESS 60 molecule. Again, remember, it goes after the negatively charged particles. And I'm going to tell you mention Nyan, when I was reading his book, I actually kind of added pieces to my theory, like it supported my theory in these ways. So reactive oxygen species are both negative and positive, right? We know the ESS 60 molecule holds on to negatively charged particles, but we also don't want to dampen the signaling that happens from reactive oxygen species, right? Because some of that signaling is what's signaling that hormetic response to build that muscle, to build that muscle strength. Well, our molecule holds on to the negatively charged particles which tend to do the most damage and the positively charged particles are the ones that do the signaling. So this really fit perfect and kind of I was able to pull this theory together even better while reading Nyan's book. So it's a selective antioxidant. So the way that vitamin C might work to support glutathione is probably not what's going on here.

Chris Burres
Literally, it's that sponge that's preventing the stress until that vitamin C can help your body build that glutathione. Because if you think about this, if we have reserves of glutathione all over our body, it wouldn't matter if we stressed our body because the glutathione is right there to manage those reactive oxygen species. But our body doesn't do that.

It uses glutathione or makes glutathione as it's needed. And that's where this ESS 60 molecule can say, hey, we really need a lot of glutathione right now, but there isn't any available yet. Let me hold on to these, let it build the glutathione and then it can manage them properly.

Melanie Avalon
So yeah, so very important question. The timeline.

So when you take it, like, do you need to be conscious in the timeline of taking it with your exposure to other things or, and how long does it last in the body? Like what's the half-life?

Chris Burres
What's going on there? Yeah, so we tend to recommend you take it in the morning And like I said people report mental focus and energy during the day and then better sleep that night and I'll pause here for a Second because I think it's really Important how many things are you aware of that you take in the morning and positively impact your sleep? I actually had one person tell me ashwagandha and then I had another Ayurvedic expert say well Yeah, ashwagandha But you got to take it in the morning for mental focus and energy during the day and then you take it again at Night and actually will help facilitate sleep. You don't take it in the morning and positively impact sleep So this is very a very unique aspect.

I would recommend that you take it before a workout We have good testimonials of people not experiencing. I don't know what the right word We got to be you know, FDA compliant here Experiencing more benefits as it relates to how they might feel after their workout by taking it before they actually do the workout so you want these molecules I think the A reasonable way to describe it is fresh molecules freshly in your mitochondria there to help you manage the stress That's occurring during that workout other than that again We say in the morning at night I can share my routine is I actually put I do kind of a bulletproof coffee thing You know bulletproof coffee is a high quality coffee some ghee or purified butter and then some MCT I pulled the ghee out. I don't like the taste that much Personally and I actually don't want those calories And so I do use a teaspoon and a half of our MCT in my coffee. That's water and oil So while that's blending I take a teaspoon and a half of our olive oil product when I'm at conferences We probably did a shot together when you came by our booth I'm doing five to ten shots at every conference and that actually helps me sustain my energy throughout the entire conference So it's no problem. By the way on at the end of day three These are these are 17 hour days like straight through by the end of day three. I need a break Even with our product you you you do have to get your rest speaking of that I'll talk a little bit about sleep the testimonial that I like related to sleep is my business coach He said for 50 years He needed the alarm clock to wake up when he's taking my vital see he wakes up before the alarm clock and and I like He's a business coach. So he's out, you know, it's there's wine tastings. There's late-night dinners There's whatever going on and no matter what's going on He's actually waking before his alarm clock when he's on the product and then to your question about kind of half-life at about 10 days He starts to need the alarm clock So the research the literature suggests that this is excreted out of your body at about 10 days That's when he needs more product or the alarm clock Wow

Melanie Avalon
Okay, and so the MCT, have you done studies on or have you done research on the olive oil versus the MCT and the health benefits? What are the potential effects there?

Chris Burres
Yeah. So, well, one is there's a lot lower concentration of the ESS 60 molecule in MCT. So, olive oil has about 0.8 milligrams per milliliter, avocado about 0.6, and MCT 0.3. So, it's a lower concentration of the ESS 60 molecule.

MCT has its benefits. In fact, I'll share this because this ties in. And it also helps kind of understand that prairie analogy. So, we have a guy named Anthony Kunkel. He's a two-time US ultra-running champion, absolutely loves our product. My first conversation with him was fantastic. And what he shared with me is, Chris, I started taking your product, and I didn't really notice anything. And then I joke, like, oh, good biohackers, he tripled the servings. By the way, don't triple everything. There's things, you know, if you get your hands on Rapamycin, don't triple it, right? There are things not to triple. But in his case, he did. And by the way, it's safe. We can talk about, like, what is the safe amount of the product? I know people who said they've taken 120 mils at a time. That's a whole bottle. So, safe. He tripled the serving, and he was like, wow. What he shared with me is that he believed our product could be the difference between somebody having running as a hobby or running as a career. And the thing that he finally shared with me is, I don't think your product speeds exercise recovery. I believe it prevents damage in the first place. And the reason he said that is on the last five miles of a 50 mile run, which is, by the way, I only hear that phrase from Anthony. I don't think, have you ever heard that phrase? Last five miles of a 50 mile run. He said, where strength and stability used to be a problem, they're no longer a problem. And if you think about that prairie, right? Yes, Anthony Kunkel's deep, dark cloud that's pouring water onto the beautiful prairie is much bigger and pouring much more water than us. He's currently, like, running 200 miles per week. So, yes, it's darker and deeper. But he's also taking more of the product, right? So, at least triple the servings. And what that does is that product acts as that sponge. When he comes off, he's doing all the bio. He's an amazing biohacker. I don't know if you want to interview him. I'd love to introduce you. He's an amazing biohacker and he has all the things, right? So, he's doing the red light therapy. He's doing the sauna. He's able to squeeze that sponge and get ready for that next training session. So, hopefully that answered your question. Wow. Yes.

Melanie Avalon
So when people are, well, actually almost, so when people are ordering, when they're trying to choose which product to use between the olive oil, the avocado oil, the MCT oil, you do know or you don't know if there might be slightly different effects, concentration aside of the amount in it with the carrier. Like how should people know which one to get and how to dose it?

Chris Burres
Yeah, you reminded me. I did not answer your question. I told a really wonderful story. And then now I'll answer your question.

So Anthony, at the early part of his training block, he starts with MCT, right? So it has a lower concentration of the molecule. MCT is known to be good for hunger suppression, right? He's running 200 miles, he needs to be as lean as possible. And so he starts there and ends up ramping up into the olive oil. When people ask me, which one should I order? I always, or we, the whole company, always says olive oil for two reasons. The first is we're a science-based organization and almost all of the research is with the ESS60 molecule in olive oil. So that's the number one reason. And then I've already told you there's a higher concentration in olive oil over the avocado oil and over the MCT.

I'll add one other piece. There's some kind of mindset. We understand that MCT can be directly used as an energy source, like immediately. It doesn't need to be processed by the liver and that it can get, you know, cross the blood-brain barrier and actually provide energy to your brain. If it's dragging along this ESS60 molecule, you might notice some more kind of mental benefits. I would say I take olive oil a lot more when I go on trips. I don't even bother taking my MCT oil.

Melanie Avalon
Actually, wait, so to that point, so yes, starting with the olive oil, could the MCT version be the only one that crosses the blood-brain barrier?

Chris Burres
No, no, no, because the molecules too small, right? Remember there's two, you know, 400 times as many of these molecules in one drop as you have cells in your body.

It's only 60 atoms. And so yeah, this is getting.

Melanie Avalon
everywhere. Okay. Regardless. Okay. So I bet listeners are super excited to get their hands on this. I know I am.

I got to stock up now myself. So listeners can go to, and Chris, you're so, so kind for this, go to myvitalc.com slash Melanie Avalon. So myvitalc, like just the letter C, dot com slash Melanie Avalon. There's going to be so many goodies at this page. So there's going to be a $15 off coupon code that you can grab to use on your first order. There's going to be a link to a free guide that Chris has created that you can get as well. There's going to be all the products to look through so that you can, you know, pick what you want. And there's going to be some products we haven't yet talked about, which Chris also has some skincare using this the SS 60 or carbon 60 when it's in skincare, is it can it just be carbon?

Chris Burres
Carbon 60. Also, yeah, we process it to be safe for people and pets before we put it into the skincare product. So yeah, it's ESS 60.

Melanie Avalon
Okay, so that compound absorbs transdermally? Yes. And what does it do? It works locally.

Chris Burres
on the skin? So let me tell you the story because it's kind of fascinating. At one point, we had a business partner who would literally just drink out of the bottle and there'd be some spillage on the side so she would take that and wipe it on her skin. Even before she was doing that, we actually have testimonials on skin and hair improvement just from taking this product which, you know, if you're addressing the mitochondria, reducing the negative impact of stressed mitochondria, then that's not that big of a surprise.

But she kind of felt that there was a bigger difference. So she was like, hey, we need to make a skin serum. And if I did a good job telling the story, I didn't even want to be in the supplement space. So when she was like, hey, we need to make a skin serum, I was like, yay, that sounds amazing. I woke up this morning and I thought we should make a skin serum. But we wanted to support her, like to say that I was not enthused is an understatement. But I wanted to support her and so we put this. This is a night serum and I won't demo this, but it's kind of a nice bottle.

You actually squeeze this down and a little bit comes out the top and it's damask rose. It smells amazing. This is one of my wife's favorites. And then at the time we were bringing this to market, my director of research came to me and said, hey, Chris, I found this peptide. It's got 30 years of skin and hair improvement. I want you to look at it. And so I kind of looked at the research. Sure enough, it's peer reviewed, published research, 30 years skin and hair improvements. Like how do we bring this to market? And we wanted to combine it with ES 60, but this peptide is water soluble and our ES 60 molecule is oil soluble.

So we ended up, I mean, we could shove these together with an emulsifier, right? I don't like how emulsifier sound. And if you Google them, there are no health benefits. So we wanted to stay away from that. So we ended up doing a kind of cool two part product here. This is our peptide. We call it UTH 29, which is kind of cool because it stands for youth 29. That's right about the age. Most women apparently want to stop aging like right at 29. And and then our activator, which is our ES 60. So I'll kind of demo this. I use this every day. So basically, I tend to do two squirts of this beautiful blue color. I don't know if you're if you've actually got video, if you're listening. It's a beautiful blue color. That's the best description. And then our ES 60. Remember, I mentioned that it turns purple in an MCT oil. This is mostly MCT oil. You put two drops per squirt of the UTH. So two drops of the ES 60 per squirt of the UTH 29. You mix it right there in your hand and then you just apply it to the places that you think might age and you should address aging on.

And so I like I said, I use this every day. And so that'll be right there on the landing page. Amazing. Wait, when did you launch that? That's probably been out a year and a half. OK, so I think after.

Melanie Avalon
or are we probably first connected? Yes. Okay, because I was like,

Chris Burres
I don't remember this. I will see.

Melanie Avalon
Oh, I'm excited. I'm like, I'm like all in now to the the skincare peptides like this now the c60 all the things So this is great. And I love that explanation of the formulation in the two-part system. That's amazing Wow. Okay

Chris Burres
Hey, well, let me share this story, right? Because I'm not supposed to be in the supplement space. I'm not supposed to be making cosmetic products.

We had at the A4M in Las Vegas about five people who work at the Boulder Institute of Longevity, who I was on a call with them at one point. They came up, and two of them, like I'll describe it like this. They were like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, living longer, get that out of the way, living healthier. Also, get that out of the way. I am here for this skin redo set. Like, they didn't care about anything, internal, whatever benefits, mitochondria. Get that out of the way. I just want your skin care product.

Melanie Avalon
Wow, hey, see, you gotta have all the doors, all the doors for people to find their way in. Oh my goodness, amazing. Okay, so wow, my mind is blown. This has been, this is absolutely incredible.

Clearly I have done a complete 180 on my initial skepticism many years ago about this. So thank you, Chris, for everything that you're doing.

Chris Burres
If i could share one thing and i'm sorry this is really near and dear to my heart and very important that the last part but let me start with this. Go to that link my battle c dot com slash millenia you do have the fifteen dollar coupon code that's on that page go with the olive oil usually kind of tell people we do offer a twenty five percent discount if you go on subscription and that coupon can apply to that Even if you're interested in trying the product just once go ahead and go on subscription you can cancel at any time i like to share our customer service team has a thousand five star reviews on google they are not trained to talk you out of canceling your subscription please just take advantage of that discount and i'll tell you most people stay on it.

The charity piece that i have is related to my book right so the book is live beyond the norms your journey to living longer and better has never been more achievable than today. And it's the history that we've talked about today like the discovery of the molecule it getting into the health space and then early on my learnings and kind of some of the support stuff that we talked about. With david Sinclair's book lifespan i do have a charity piece to the book so you can find the book on amazon for twenty dollars or on my website now it's not on that landing page but still go to that landing page. Pick up the coupon code and then go to the menu structure you'll find the book the book is twenty dollars on our site and for ten extra dollars i'll autograph the book for you a hundred percent of that ten dollar fee goes to operation underground railroad you may remember a movie called the sound of freedom. Which was an absolutely amazing book a movie about an absolutely horrible subject which is child sex trafficking which should be off of our planet as soon as possible operation underground railroad is addressing that issue and a hundred percent of the signature fee goes to operation underground railroad amazing.

Melanie Avalon
Okay, incredible. Wait, so the book is, it's called Live Longer and Better, right? Or you just called it Live Beyond the Norms.

Chris Burres
Oh, I'm sorry, that's my name and better.

Melanie Avalon
We're just all the living, all the better, beyond the norms, all the things. Okay, that's incredible. I love that you're partnering with them. So many good things.

Okay, friends. So, oh, Chris, thank you so much. This has been absolutely, like, mind blowing beyond incredible. I'm just so grateful for everything that you're doing. I know listeners are as well. I feel like we have so much. I knew we had a lot in common, but now I know we really do with the entrepreneur's spirit and being suspicious of aspirin in our

Chris Burres
our younger years. The things.

Melanie Avalon
Are you together? I know, right? Hopefully, we can see each other next year. Are you going to come back?

Will you have a booth? Yeah, so if listeners want to meet Chris in person, which I cannot recommend enough, come to the, well, it's going to be called the Beyond Conference, I think, next year in Austin. And I'll be there. We can all hang out. It'll be a fun time. So again, myvitalc.com slash Melanie Avalon, get all the things there. And Chris, the last question that I ask every single guest on this show, and it's just because I realize more and more each day, the importance of mindset and gratitude. So what is something that you're grateful for?

Chris Burres
Well, there are so many things that I'm grateful for. If we kind of tie this story into, I didn't know what kind of entrepreneur I was going to be.

I didn't know I was going to be in the health and wellness space. I didn't know I'd have a podcast and a book and this longevity summit. I'm so grateful because what I get to do every day is, I am the science geeky guy, so I get to share this geeky science and kind of work on these theories and understand these theories and drive the research forward. Then I get to turn around and reap the benefit of people sharing the results that they're getting. I honestly can't imagine being anyplace else. I'm so grateful for where I've landed at this point.

Melanie Avalon
at this point. I love it so much. I feel the same way. I'm just, it's just, it's really wonderful to exist in this community and like to be able to do what you love, which that was one thing we didn't talk about, but you mentioned in your book, how you love working, you know, like you love what you do. That's the way I feel like I just want to keep doing it. That's why I want to live forever. So yeah, I'm so grateful for you, everything that you're doing.

Can't wait to see you again at the next conference and all the things. Can't wait to see all that you do in the future as well. So thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Talk to you soon. Bye. Thank you so much for listening to the Melanie Avalon biohacking podcast. For more information and resources, you can check out my book, What Win Wine, as well as my supplement line Avalon X. Please visit melanieavalon.com to learn more about today's guests and always feel free to contact me at contact at melanieavalon.com. And always remember, you got this.