Health Longevity Secrets

Exponential Longevity

• Robert Lufkin MD • Episode 189

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The episode dives into the transformative perspectives on aging and longevity provided by Dr. Jeffrey Gladden, one of the leaders in longevity science, who emphasizes that aging should not be viewed as a decline but as an opportunity for vitality and growth. The conversation explores the Five Circles of Longevity, the deconstruction of individual health profiles, and the importance of integrating psycho-spiritual health with physical well-being to foster a youthful mindset, ultimately urging listeners to redefine their approach to aging. In this episode we discuss:

• Dr. Gladden's personal health challenges leading to a journey into longevity medicine
• Importance of a psycho-spiritual mindset in achieving longevity
• The Five Circles of Longevity encompass life energy, physiological health, performance, environmental influence, and personalized interventions
• Advocating for an integrative approach to health, emphasizing the need for individuality in assessments
• The interplay between modern science, holistic health, and personal empowerment in redefining aging

For those interesting in hearing more, Dr Gladden is hosting a free online summit that I am participating in along with many experts starting on January 21.
https://drtalks.com/summit/exponential-longevity/?oid=88&ref=2541&uid=832.  

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Speaker 1:

As a true trailblazer in life, energy, longevity, health and human performance optimization science, dr Gladden's groundbreaking work applies the best science, deepest insights and greatest technologies to unlock the secrets to longevity at his clinic. Gladden Longevity, yeah.

Speaker 2:

Hey, jeff, welcome to the program hey man, good to be here, Good to see you again.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, this is going to be so much fun. I'm really looking forward to our conversation today about longevity and really understanding your view and the great work you're doing. Before we dive into that, maybe, since this is the first time you've been here on the program, could you take a moment and tell us a little bit about your journey, how you came to be interested in this field.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I'm happy to you know, I think it started really. I think it started probably back when I was 12 or 13 years old and my grandmother on my mom's side. I was very close with my maternal grandparents, my dad's parents. I also saw intermittently, but never really developed the same closeness or relationship as I did with my mom's parents, and we did vacations together and trips together and they would visit us and we would visit them and all this kind of stuff. So it was very, very close. My grandfather was a very central figure in my life, quite honestly. But my grandmother from an early age started telling me, jeff, you don't want to get old, it's hell to get old. And she would just kind of reiterate this mantra to me, you know, all the time. And then my mother picked up that mantra and then, you know, I basically went to medical school and then decided to do internal medicine and then at the end of internal medicine realized I didn't want to be an internist and so I selected cardiology because I thought, well, that's interesting line of work.

Speaker 2:

I couldn't really relate to some of the other specialties as well. So I did cardiology, uh, and finished that at in Colorado and then came to Texas and and 1988, and then practiced interventional cardiology. Uh, so, you know, there are cardiologists that are just diagnosticians, right, but then there are interventional cardiologists that do the diagnostic work but then, you know, put the stents in, do the angioplasties, the casts, the pacemakers, things like that. So that was the kind of cardiologist that I was and I love that work. I ended up building my own heart group.

Speaker 2:

I had 10 offices, I had 12 doctors, we flew around Texas and Southeast Oklahoma in a little A36 Bonanza, you know, kind of like the classic Texas doctor, I suppose. But really the goal there, my passion, was to bring high quality care to outline areas that didn't have access to it, that didn't want to drive to the big city, right. And so we started a lot of programs in smaller towns and you know it had real dramatic impact for people. We started STEMI programs. I mean we had better STEMI numbers in small towns than they had in Fort Worth, for example. I mean because we dialed up, you know we got the whole community behind what we were doing. It was really fun work. I really enjoyed it.

Speaker 1:

And we built cath labs. Tell our audience STEMI numbers, clarify what that is.

Speaker 2:

If they are out there with cardiology. Yeah, exactly Sorry to throw an acronym, no worries, sorry to throw an acronym, no worries, but.

Speaker 2:

STEMI is basically a heart attack. It stands for ST-segment elevation, mi, which is basically just shorthand for somebody who's having a heart attack. And when I was training, angioplasty was just coming on board, where you put a little wire down an artery, put a balloon in to highlight the artery and reestablish or improve blood flow, and I light the artery and you know, reestablish or improve blood flow. But then it became clear that in order to get the best outcomes for people having a heart attack was not to simply put them in the ICU and monitor them, but to actually take them into the cath lab and go in with the catheters which initially was thought to be very dangerous in the course of a heart attack but then became routine. We'd go in and put a little bit of dye down the artery, see where the blockage was, go in with a guide wire and pass it down past the blockage and reopen the artery and reestablish blood flow, and so that became the standard of care. And then the situation was you were trying to get somebody from their home or their place of heart attack occurrence into the cath lab with the artery open within 90 minutes. Initially it was from the ER to the open artery in 90 minutes. But in our world, because we had control over the EMS services and everything, we got everybody synchronized to where we could get the call we could get in, we could actually get the artery done in 90 minutes, and so that's why we're actually beating the numbers in the big city was because we were able to take this integrated approach and so I really loved actually, you know, providing really high quality care to people that couldn't otherwise access it. Right, and there were many other things that came from that, of course. But but in addition to that, you know, we did work in the big city and I worked at Presbyterian Hospital in Medical City and then ultimately, with a former partner of mine, we co-founded a heart hospital in Plano, Texas, the heart hospital Baylor Plano, which is now Baylor Scott and White, which now has about four other branches and has become nationally recognized as a center of excellence as many research projects, and you know the passion there was really to provide a higher level of care than what people could normally get.

Speaker 2:

I worked for about two and a half years with a major hospital system in Dallas to build what we wanted, which was a very patient-centric, very family-centric care model for people undergoing cardiac events, because, as you know, that is a big trauma. I mean, you talk about a, you know, facing your own mortality kind of event and that is a big trauma, right. And so to be able to create that environment that was supportive of who they were and their family and help get them through all that and cardiac rehabs, etc. You know we wanted to do that. So I spent about two years with this hospital trying to develop this program and at the end of it they said, well, we really like your ideas, but you know, I think we're going to, you know, put our funding elsewhere. And I was like, oh my gosh, what a disaster. I'm never going to waste my time with a institution like that again. So I connected with one of my other partners who also had a concept for a heart hospital, and we got together and, on a you know typical, on a napkin in a coffee shop, sat down and mapped out what we wanted to build. And then initially we were going to build it ourselves. And then I was like, well, you know, I've got a good relationship with the people at Baylor, let me go talk to them, maybe they're interested. And so sure enough they were and they became a great partner and you know, the rest is history, except we hit a number of different hiccups to get it all done. I won't go into that in this podcast, but it's quite a hero's journey, if you will, to have gotten that built during that time frame. That being said, you know I loved all this work. I love the development side of it. I was. I love doing the interventional work. I was always pushing the envelope in terms of tools and technologies and teaching and things like that. So it was great work.

Speaker 2:

But you know what happened to me? The journey that's relevant to this conversation is that you know I got sick in my fifties and I was putting on weight. I was exhausted all the time. I basically was losing libido. I was putting on, you know, fat around the middle, losing muscle mass, and when I would become stressed I would feel myself actually go over a cliff of depression, not like, oh, I'll go for a run or have a conversation, I'll feel better. No, it's just like, oh my gosh, like I really want out of here. And on top of that, I was developing brain fog and my dad ultimately died of dementia or with dementia, right. So I'm really worried about this. I'm worried about it, right.

Speaker 2:

And I go in and I have my colleagues test me and I go in to get the test results and what I'm told is this you know, all of your labs check out for your age, you're just getting older. Why don't you take an antidepressant, right? And I'm like, oh my gosh, you talk about an existential moment. It's like, oh my gosh, it's all downhill from here. You know, really, that's it, that's the whole thing, it's just downhill from here. So I really couldn't make peace with that. And I've always been very athletic, you know mountain biker, snowboarder, runner, surfer, body surfer, adventurer, I mean. You know motorcyclist, you know, done motorcycle trips all over the world, I mean all kinds of stuff right. So I'm like no, no, no, no, no, no, I'm not, I don't believe this, that can't be right.

Speaker 2:

So I threw myself into the whole early age management medicine field, if you will integrative medicine, functional medicine. I went out and got certifications and trained and it took me two and a half years. What took me two and a half years to solve back then we could probably do in 15 minutes now if I had the labs in front of me. Probably in six minutes, quite honestly, if I had the labs in front of me. But back then it took me two and a half years to figure out that I had subclinical hypothyroidism. All my thyroid numbers were in the normal range, but it wasn't until I did reflex testing to show that my reflexes were super slow. And now we do resting metabolic rates to actually see what is a set point for the thyroid right. And I've learned you can't trust what the blood work shows you on thyroid. So anyway, I got that fixed.

Speaker 2:

And then genetically I don't convert inactive thyroid or T4 into T3 in my brain. I'm homozygous, deficient in my ability to do that. So I have like a 60% to 70% reduction in my ability to do that. So I need a combination of not just T4, but T4 and T3. When I got T3 and T4, all of a sudden the lights came back on in my brain. It's like, oh my gosh. I popped out of bed again. I'm like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. I was hormonally depleted. Testosterone was going down, dhea was going down, I lost 20 pounds of fat, put on 10 pounds of muscle, weighed what I did in college, and I'm like, oh my gosh, this is great, I love this.

Speaker 2:

And then also I figured out genetically I don't make certain neurotransmitters very efficiently, I don't make serotonin, I don't make dopamine and I have too much homocysteine. I don't methylate. Well, I'm at risk for dementia through several different pathways. And once I actually understood, oh okay, here are the cards. I'm at risk for dementia through several different pathways. And once I actually understood, oh OK, here are the cards I'm holding. Let me, let me figure out how to play this game.

Speaker 2:

And I got on the right combination of supplements. It was like, oh wow, I feel mentally sharp again, I can feel, you know, razor sharp, and when I get stressed I don't get depressed at all at all. Right, and it wasn't from taking an antidepressant, it was basically from increasing my body's ability to make serotonin in the proper way, right, and so really fascinating stuff. And I thought, oh my gosh, this is amazing. This is medicine I cannot practice. This is healthcare. I cannot practice sick care anymore. I've been practicing sick care. I have to leave that.

Speaker 2:

And I was, you know, I had lots of things going on in the cardiology world. I knew how to make a great living in cardiology, right, but I was like I can't do it anymore. So I basically base, jumped out of cardiology in 2012 and with no idea how to make a living, and started what's become Glide and Longevity with a view of really optimizing health and then longevity and then really creating a new paradigm about you know how we go forward in life, and so you know that's. That's the version of how I got to where we are. I can talk to you a lot about how we think about stuff, but that's that's kind of the journey.

Speaker 1:

So yeah, yeah. Well, I love that, I love that, that journey, and and maybe I I'd love to understand how you think about longevity, I mean, how you think about aging. Why do we age? What is it? And you know, you've told me some of the things that that you used in yourself and your patients, but first of all, maybe give us the big picture there, if you want. What is aging, what is longevity? What drives it in us?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think it's a great question. I'm going to back up even prior to that and talk a little bit for a minute about you know, what is the target that we're after, right, one of the problems that we face in longevity medicine. I mean, you could go out on the street and you could ask a bunch of people hey, would you like to live to be 100? And I'll bet you the majority would say no. And the reason is is that our preconception of what it is to be 100 is not very pretty right. Every picture you ever saw of somebody 100, 110, it's like geez, I don't know. That's not what I'm going for, right, it's quality of life over quantity of life, right?

Speaker 2:

And so we've basically been coached not only by the medical profession, but by society, our peers, our families, the government. You know, as you go through life, this is supposed to happen. You shouldn't do that anymore. Now it's time to retire. Now it's time to do this. Now you shouldn't be, you shouldn't be skiing anymore, you know. You know your sex life needs to slow down. What are you doing now? You're going to. You know you can't do that.

Speaker 2:

And so we have this whole, basically, system that's reinforcing us getting older and what that means, basically, system that's reinforcing us getting older, and what that means, right. And so when you realize that there's a reason for that, of course, but when you realize that in life everything, quite honestly, is made up right, somebody made it up we sit here and think, well, we know this and we know that Not really Everything was made up right, everything was made up. Then it's like, oh okay, well, let's make up a different reality, right, let's make up a reality where we don't age, and what does that look like? So now, what's the target? Right? And so the target for me, when I'm 100 years old, is not to be like any other 100-year-old person, it's actually to have a 30-year-old body and a 300-year-old mind. Year old body and a 300 year old mind.

Speaker 2:

Because I really believe yeah, I really believe that if we're going to be here a long time, even beyond 100 years, what's so important for us is not only to maintain our youthfulness and fitness and ability to perform and you know every avenue we want to perform in but it's our ability to actually reach new levels of psycho-spiritual insight, equanimity, peace, tranquility, love, things like this that actually create an environment in which humans actually thrive, and so it's not going to be through efforting our way to 100. That's not how we're going to get there. We're going to really do it by going after both those things the physical, biochemical pieces of it, but also the psycho-spiritual, and they interplay with each other, as you know, heavily, much more heavily than people realize. And so that's really our approach is to optimize both those things. That's really what we're going for.

Speaker 1:

I mean, I hear a lot of discussion about aging is wear and tear. Our bodies are wearing out. Other people are saying it's programmed. Is that a good way to look at it and what's your take on that?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's both. It's everything. It's also environmental, it's also psychological Um. It's also environmental, it's also psychological Um and it's also biochemical Um. And I do believe that we are apart from uh interventions to disrupt what could be considered the hallmarks of aging, right? So in 2013, there was a paper outlining 19 different uh physiological processes that contribute to the aging process, and then in 2022, five more were published. Later that year, another one was published. Then David Sinclair published another one in the summer of 23.

Speaker 2:

So we're up to about 16 hallmarks of aging now, and these are basically processes that both define the aging process, and we're not talking about wrinkles on your skin. We're talking about mitochondrial health and telomere length and senescent cell burden and intracellular communication and nutrient sensing and some of these things that are really like the cause below the cause, below the cause, right? So you talk about root cause. Well, this is the root cause below the root cause. So, looking at those processes, when you start to see how they interplay with each other, what actually happens in the aging process is one of those things starts to go awry, Then it impacts three or four of the other ones and they start to go awry, and then that impacts three or four more, plus the other one that originally started it.

Speaker 2:

So you start to spin this thing up. It's like a tornado If you've ever seen a tornado from a distance? From the distance it's spinning very slowly, right, but on the inside it's spinning very quickly and it's really a tornado of aging. It spins up in a way that it starts to reinforce itself and that's why, you know, we live with this misconception that aging is somehow linear, right, Like, I don't know what age you are, I know what age I am. I was born in 1954, February of 54, right so, but I wake up 27 every day.

Speaker 2:

But the point is that, you know, as aging goes on, we tend to think well, it's another birthday, I'm not that much different. But actually it's not a linear process, it's an exponential process, and so if we're going to actually have a hope of making 100 the new 30, which is the book I wrote 100 is the new 30, then we have to have an exponential strategy, right, and the idea of eating better, getting a Fitbit, cutting down on stress, cutting back on alcohol, improving relationships, learning how to meditate those are all wonderful, but they ultimately are a linear strategy to an exponential problem and they're not going to get the job done. We have to be working across five different circles of areas, if you will. That need to be addressed in order to actually create the exponential strategy.

Speaker 1:

Well, I want to get into those and as we do that before I leave your last comments. So yeah, make adjustments, understand, think. Are there uniform tools that apply across the board to everyone for longevity, or is it pretty much? Is it highly specialized or it's obviously a combination of both. But, like you know rapamycin, should everybody be taking rapamycin, just as a you know? Or take your pick stem cells or you know we could go into different ones.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, I think it's. I think it's a really important question that you bring up. I think what's really important for people to understand is that there are a lot of tools out there, right? You know rapamycin, stem cells, peptides, exosomes, plasmapheresis. You know EBU ozone I mean on and on and on. There's many, many tools out there. You know EBU Ozone. I mean on and on and on. There's many, many tools out there. The question becomes for if you're listening to, this is okay, there's lots of tools. What do I need? Right, what do I need?

Speaker 2:

And so what we've done at Gladden Longevity is to actually really focus on deconstructing the situation prior to making recommendations, and I think we do that. We do all of it exceptionally well, but I think we do that really exceptionally well. So, when somebody comes to us, what we want to do is actually understand them better than they've ever been understood, right, better than they've ever known themselves, better than any doctors ever understood them. And so if there's something uniform in the process, it's in the deconstruction process, right? Well, what are your genetics, what you know? What's your cardiopulmonary exercise test look like? You know what do your arteries look like? What are your hormone levels? You know things like this and do you have any cancer, you know? And screening for all these things. And once you actually deconstruct the situation, it's remarkable how it becomes clear oh, here's the path forward, right, as opposed to coming into a clinic saying, well, I'm feeling this way or that way, I want to be younger and healthier.

Speaker 2:

Oh okay, well, we'll do some stem cells for you, we'll do a treatment, right, we'll do this and we'll do that. To me, that's really missing the point. It's a really misapplication of a wonderful technology because it may not be the right thing. It may not be the right thing. Like, if somebody has got cancer cells, stem cells may be the exact wrong thing for them, right? So you can really get this wrong if you don't really do the deconstruction properly, right. And, for example, if you don't know the genetics, you don't know that somebody's got a number of, you know, clotting gene disorders. Well, you put them on hormone replacement therapy. The next thing you know they've got a blood clot. It's because you didn't understand what you were dealing with. So super important to actually deconstruct and then build, and that's how you get the most durable solutions if you will. So that's kind of how we think about that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and that is certainly an argument for a longevity-based practice where you look at the individual and analyze the individual, rather than having a hyperbaric chamber and everybody comes there and does hyperbaric, or you know I mean no shade on that.

Speaker 1:

But it's such a good point you make because obviously, I mean, we go to many of the same longevity conferences and you don't have to go to many of those to figure out that I don't have enough time left in my life, no matter how long I live, to try all of the technology solutions that are out there and like you say, some of them may not be a good fit or might even be harmful for each individual and fortunately, now we're getting the tools for each individual and fortunately, now we're getting the tools you know we talked offline about.

Speaker 1:

You know AI and things, and you know being able to, through practices like yours or through some of these tools we'll be talking about, actually analyze huge amounts of data and personalize the approach with these Before we leave your book book. Can you, can you touch on those five, the those five uh points?

Speaker 2:

yeah, yeah, 100 is the new 30, so um yeah, I recommend that to everyone, by the way.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's a great.

Speaker 2:

It's a great book. It's also on audible. It's on amazon.

Speaker 2:

It's also on audible if you like to listen to a book um I actually it took me a week to read it, so but, but it is there. A lot of people who've read a lot of the longevity books end up reading this one and say you know, yours was the best book I ever read, and so I always take that as a compliment. But really the way to understand it is that you have to have an exponential solution for an exponential problem, and so I have broken it down into these five different circles, right? The first one is called the life energy circle, which you can really think about that as a psycho-spiritual space, and I think that the life energy circle is really like in the Lord of the Rings it's really the ring that binds them all. Because if you don't have the psycho-spiritual space really dialed in, like to where you have a growth mindset, let's say and a growth mindset is being married to your questions and not your current answers it's also moving away from binary thinking into quantum thinking, right. So I think humans are at our worst when we're binary thinkers. When you look at all the conflict around the world, it's all binary thinking, right, somebody's right, somebody's wrong, right. And so I think for humanity to really progress, for that 300-year-old mind to come forward.

Speaker 2:

It's really important for us to be married to the questions and not the current answers. Answers all have a shelf life, and I, you know people will argue with me Well, yes, but I have a religious belief this is forever and I'm like, okay, but let me tell you there's a question behind that belief that's even more eternal, and that is how do I become more like God? How do we come more in the presence, how do I manifest more love? Right, the questions behind are infinitely more powerful than the answers we have in any realm, and certainly in medicine, right, and so it's so important, I think, to align yourself with the questions. What are the questions that you're trying to answer? And I think, in our practice, you know, we literally have thousands of answers. We're not married to any of them, we're only married to the questions, and there's four. Really, you know, how good can you be? How do you make 100 to new 30? How do you live well beyond one 20? Crack the hay for Clement, and how do you live young for a lifetime? Right, which is, in many ways, a mindset, right?

Speaker 2:

I mentioned, I wake up 27 every day, and the reason I wake up 27 every day is because I want to reference myself against being 27. What happens for people is they're 50, they're 60, they're 70, they're 80, whatever it is, and they wake up and it's like, well, I feel pretty good. I feel pretty good for my age, right? You see what I'm saying. You've already acquiesced, you've already lost, you've already acquiesced to the aging process. So it's not about feeling good for your age, it's not being better than most people.

Speaker 2:

Your age, it's like pick an age that you want to live for the rest of your life and reference yourself off of that. And that's what I do, because if I'm going to be 100 or 30, when I'm 100, I'm 27. This decade I'll be 28. The next decade, 29. The next decade, 100, I'll be 30. And I can tell you that there are days when I wake up and it's like, oh my gosh, I don't. Maybe maybe this paradigm, maybe I have to give it up. You know, maybe I need to give this up, maybe this is just a fantasy. And yet I always double down on it. I say no, I'm going to be 27. Whatever I need to do to get back to 27, that's what I'm going to do, and I can tell you that it has kept me so youthful, not only in my mindset, but my ability to move to mountain bike, to surf, to run, to enjoy my kids. I mean, I can do things that most people my age would never dream of, and yet I'm not good for my age. I'm only referencing being 27. So one of the tricks, if you will, one of the deep insights to being, you know, living young for a lifetime is to be young for a lifetime. Pick that age you want to be for the rest of your life. Everybody should think about that age right now. You know, I don't care if it's 27, 25, 40, you pick the age you want to be, but reference the rest of your life against that and you'll find it's such a powerful tool. So, anyway, mindset, things like that are super important, right, and I could go through the whole life energy circle. It's in and of itself is probably an hour conversation, but you get the idea. We touch on many, many, very, very cool things there.

Speaker 2:

And then the next one. The next circle is really two circles, but I call it one circle is really looking at those hallmarks of aging. What are the drivers of aging, what are the physical processes that are actually driving the aging process. And then the third circle is looking at health. So how do we look at all the different organ systems, right? What's your brain health, your eye health, your lung health, cardiovascular health, et cetera? We deconstruct all that.

Speaker 2:

And then the fourth circle is performance. Right, so when I'm 100, I want to be fast, agile, strong, quick, balanced, great cardiovascular capacity, reserve recovery and flexibility. That's what I want to be. So if I'm going to be that on a hundred, then I need to be that today. Right, it's not that. And walking around the block doesn't get you there, right. Working out in the gym three days a week doesn't get you there, right.

Speaker 2:

So what does it take to be 27,? Right? Well, it takes actually doing something every single day, and the beautiful thing about committing to doing something every day is you don't have to decide if today's the day, right, because as soon as you basically introduce a decision into the equation, what's the failure rate? It's 100%. It's 100%. So we do something every single day, right, and we recommend that our clients do something every single day. It could be on a day when you're traveling and this that only all I can get was resistance bands training for 10 minutes. I did something right, something every day, and so this is really, really helpful. So, really, if you're going to train for this, then you've got to train agility, you've got to train speed, you've got to train balance, and when you do that, all of a sudden, what's phenomenal is you can move like you're 27 again. I mean I can. I have people come in here that are holding onto the rails, they go down the stairs. By the time we're done with them, they're dancing like they were 27 again, right, and it's about training your nervous system.

Speaker 2:

So the last circle is really related to the environments that we reside in, and these environments are incredibly powerful. They have the power to reinforce what we want and they have the power to tear down what we think we want. So, for example, we all live in four environments we live at home, we live at office, right. We live at business travel and we live in vacation time, and there may be some other, but that's probably 96, 98% of it, right. And so what's critical is to architect each of those environments to support the mission, right? So if we don't architect them right, we will not succeed, we will fail.

Speaker 2:

So if somebody goes to a Tony Robbins event, right, and they get all fired up. Oh my gosh, I've got all this inside, I'm wonderful, everything's good. Right? Three weeks later, how many people are still firing on all cylinders out of Tony Robbins? Right, it's been looked at. It's 4%, 4%, 96% failure rate.

Speaker 2:

Now, why is that? Why do they fail? It's not because they didn't have good intention. It's not because they didn't have a good experience. It's not because they didn't have real insights. It's because they go back into an environment that doesn't support the mission. They go back into an environment that's distracting them away from what it is they're supposed to be doing or wanting to be doing, and to other things. Right, it's like well, it's too easy to grab the Twinkies.

Speaker 2:

So the question is what's in the refrigerator? What's in the pantry? Where are the sneakers? Where am I going to work out? What am I going to do when it's raining? What am I going to do when it snows? How am I going to if you won't have success? But when you do that, all of a sudden you succeed, day after day after day, and now it changes your identity. It's not about building habits, it's about changing your identity. I am an exerciser, right. I'm on a spiritual growth path. I am these things right, because I do them every single day, and it changes your identity, which changes your reality, and so that's how you get these things done. So those are the five circles that all need to be addressed.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I love that you have the psychosocial as the ring that encapsulates everything like that and for the work you do in your clinic. You've mentioned it. People, if they want to access that, they need to travel to you, right? And what sort of experience will they have there? What is that process like?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So the first thing is people are interested to work with us. You know, and they're really our best clients are the people that are asking the same questions. We are Right, that's true for any business. And so if people are asking how good can I be? How do I make 100 to new 30? How do I live well beyond 120? You know, how do I live young for a lifetime, those are good clients for us. And then, of course, course, they need to have the financial resources to participate. Right, and what happens is we have a call with them Typically it's a 90 minute to 120 minute zoom call with them before they ever set foot in Texas to sit down and get as much information about them as we can, and then, based on that, we build out an initial program for them.

Speaker 2:

Okay, based on what we understand, here are the things that we would like to do for you, some because you're human, some because it's specific to you. You, everybody in your family, has cancer, everybody in your family gets this or that or whatever. This big history of depression or addiction or whatever. It is Right, so we can tailor things to go down different rabbit holes with people and then, based on that, we build out a program, then they basically will write us a check and they'll come in and they'll spend two to four days with us doing all the initial testing to go through everything and getting results and starting the process of initial work. And we're now starting to where, when people sign up, we send them a couple of genetics tests to their home immediately so they can get those going. So that takes maybe six weeks to get that back. So maybe by the time they get their appointment and get in, we have some of that results or shortly thereafter. So we do that and then from there we start to have follow-up calls with them for coaching and then we like to see them back again for a day to put all the cards on the table.

Speaker 2:

It's called the revelation visit. It's like okay, here are the cards you're holding, here's what we discovered, here's the whole story. Now let's break this down and show you how the pieces are going to fit back together and this becomes you know, the individualized story. Right, do people have different priorities and different things? And then from there we start to do the regenerative work, we do the palliative work, we take out the things that are poisoning the system, we work to optimize the energetics, both internal mindset and external environment, and then we start to put in the regenerative pieces and this is how we actually start to take people back in time. So again, it's a 30-year-old body, 300-year-old mind. So we're doing both simultaneously, yeah.

Speaker 1:

And for the gene analysis, do you use genotyping or do you do full sequencing for everything? There's enough with genotyping.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, genes, you know genetics are not about sequencing anymore, as you know. I mean you can get good sequencing in lots of places and it's important to have good sequencing because you got to oversample the genes to make sure you have, you know, specificity in terms of what you're reporting on. But really, gene testing has to do with the reporting, not so much the sequencing. So we go to different labs to get different reports on different things that we're interested in, and I won't give you a whole list of everything, but we probably work with at least eight different companies, depending on what somebody is working with, to kind of get what we need know the cards you're holding. Right, if you don't know the cards you're holding, which are your genetics, you know you can't win. That being said, genetics are probably only about 10 to 15% of longevity per se, but you've got to know what they are, because if you've got, you know, this increased risk for clotting or macular degeneration or cardiovascular disease or dimension, you don't know that you don't want to get hit by a bus that you could easily have dodged right. So that becomes critical. And then you have to know where you are in the aging process and that's where all the other testing is that we built out so we can actually tell somebody where they are, and we all end up as a mosaic of many, many, many ages.

Speaker 2:

We talk about a chronological age. We talk about, oh, I have a biological age and this is another misnomeromer. A lot of people will go get their biological age tested. No, downside to that, we applaud them for doing it. The problem becomes when they come back and I said, oh, my biological age is five years younger than my chronological age, so I'm good. It's like no, no, no, no, no, you're good in that one sphere. What we see all the time is I can be 40 years younger here, but I can be 10 years older there and you're only as young as your oldest age. So you really want to know that mosaic of ages so you can actually know where to put your time, attention and resources Right. So, anyway, it's this. It's this really beautiful dance that we do with clients. You know deconstruction, reconstruction, building, optimizing. It's really, it's a joyous experience.

Speaker 1:

So yeah, it sounds, it sounds beautiful. Do you do you find there's, there's there's so many monitoring devices? Now you know CGMs, and do you do you find at-home devices useful for the people that you work with in your longevity journey? Are there any go-to ones that you like?

Speaker 2:

longevity journey. Are there any go-to ones that you like? Yeah, we like CGMs. Cgms are super helpful.

Speaker 2:

We do actually do two-hour glucose tolerance tests on all of our clients with an insulin curve, and I will tell you that so many people are underdiagnosed, with insulin resistance. It's really quite dramatic, you know. They'll have a hemoglobin A1C of 5.2. They'll have fasting blood sugar at 90. Everything's perfect, you're beautiful, no problem. You stress them with 75 grams of glucose. Oh, my gosh, that fasting insulin. That was four, instead of going up by, you know, a factor of five to 20, goes up to 90, right. And then at two hours it's, instead of being back to normal, it's still at 60, or maybe it's gone to 120, right. And so people don't realize that having that excess insulin is really driving the aging process. That's a lot of what drives senescent cell formation, facilitates cancer. And so people are misdiagnosed all the time, all the time, with regards to their hormone levels, their thyroid, their insulin resistance. Over and over again. We see it over and over again. So we're really meticulous about that. And so CGMs, to your point, continuous glucose monitors, are a piece of the puzzle, because they'll show you what your sugar is in response to food.

Speaker 2:

Well, what if you have, like this young girl we just saw about six weeks ago who came to us with MS and she's got genes where Epstein-Barr virus predisposes her to MS? Well, she had Epstein-Barr out the wazoo, right, so we figured that out. But she comes out of a Hispanic family and she's probably carrying a few extra pounds. Her fasting blood sugar was, you know, 85, hemoglobin A1C 5.2. All right, well, let's do a glucose tolerance test with an insulin curve.

Speaker 2:

One hour glucose should go up a little bit. Went from 82 to 97. Right, and then at two hours it was back down to 84. Okay, great, fasting insulin 10 should be two. At one hour was 200, wow, 200. Right. At two hours it was 180. This is massive insulin resistance that would never be detected by any other doctor unless they're deconstructing this right. And so when you see that she has massive insulin resistance, it's like, oh my, this is a big deal. This is driving the aging. She's going to become diabetic, she's going to burn out her pancreas. We're picking this up a decade before that train wreck is going to happen. So when you really are meticulous about this deconstruction process, it's not about getting to the answer as fast as possible. It's about getting to the most durable answer for this individual, and that's how we think.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, do you think insulin resistance or how broad do you think insulin resistance is, as a root cause for aging in general? Or is it just certain people, or do you think it's across the board that we eventually all face it, along with other things like inflammation and all driving it? I mean there's some people that just don't have any insulin resistance at all. Yes, there are. There are people that don't have any insulin resistance, and they do great. They age for other reasons and they age for other reasons.

Speaker 2:

That's right. And then there are actually many people that have some level of insulin resistance, that are completely unaware of it. And then there are other people, as you know, that are, you know, truly you know diabetic or certainly on that spectrum. But we found that, you know, uncovering things like that is super helpful, right? So I mean, there's a lot of other things we do, like doing cardiopulmonary exercise tests for everybody, right? Oh my gosh, we pick up subtleties in vascular health, and I've been board certified in, you know, internal medicine, cardiology, interventional cardiology, nuclear cardiology, right. I mean, I used to do all kinds of stuff, right, and I've never seen a test as good as the cardiopulmonary exercise test that we do to actually uncover endothelial dysfunction in the cardiovascular system.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so we look at that all the time. We have other tests that we do here for our clients that you know have amazing ability to look at the whole nervous system, the whole psycho-spiritual side of things, that can look at cardiovascular health, just with a blood pressure cuff that's pumped up twice instead of once but has a computer that basically will give us central aortic pressure and arterial stiffness and resistance right. So we want to understand as much as we can about somebody so we know what they're dealing with, because if you don't, then you just get it wrong.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, how big a role do you think nitric oxide plays?

Speaker 2:

It's important. Nitric oxide is really important, right? So? Like with anything in biology, too much of a good thing is a bad thing, right? So? You know, too much nitric oxide is too much oxidative stress. Too much nitric oxide can drop your blood pressure too far, like in sepsis, right so?

Speaker 2:

But what we find is that many people don't really create enough nitric oxide, and a lot of that is a dietary deficiency. They don't take in enough dietary nitrate, which is basically a form of nitrogen that comes in from plants, particularly things like kale and arugula and beets, and, you know, bok choy and spinach and things like that contain dietary nitrate, which your body uses as fuel to make nitric oxide. And so if you're on a I only eat meat diet, you know, where are you getting your dietary nitrate right? How are you going to make enough nitric oxide, right? So we look at people's diets and deconstruct them relative to their physiology and their genetics, and maybe this is a good diet for you, but maybe it's not. The problem with every diet, as I see it, is that it all starts with the food, right? Oh, we're carnivore, we're keto, we're vegetarian, we're vegan, we're you know whatever we're Mediterranean. So it all starts with the food. The only way to get to somebody's diet is to understand their genetics, how they're built to eat, what the status of their gut is, what their digestive system is, whether they have leaky gut, right, what food sensitivities they have, you know. Unless you understand all that you know, you don't really know what foods to recommend, right? So it's really interesting Again, if I can leave the audience with something here about this concept of to understand deeply before you take action really saves you a lot of problems.

Speaker 2:

One of the pitfalls of traditional medicine, let's say in psychiatry, is you come in with depression. We're going to put you on an antidepressant. Well, unless you've done the genetics to see how somebody's going to react to that, you know you have probably one in. You know a 10% chance that that's the right drug, right, and so you've got to go through six weeks of all these drugs to try to figure it out, whereas if you do some upfront testing you can really narrow it down and make a better decision. So anyway, kind of a good example, yeah that's all great.

Speaker 1:

Well, in the last few minutes I mean one of the things I love about longevity the whole the science of it. It's progressing so fast. What are you most excited about in the field moving forward?

Speaker 2:

I'm excited about. What I'm really most excited about is that today we've been chasing the thousand different phenotypic expressions of aging right. Let's look at your eyes, let's look at your heart, let's look at your blood vessels, look at your skin, et cetera, et cetera. So there are there's really a thousand different. Excuse me, maybe you can edit that out. There's really a thousand different phenotypes of aging, or expressions of aging. What I'm excited about is technology that's now looking at actually resetting central clocks of aging. What I'm excited about is technology that's now looking at actually resetting central clocks of aging. So there's a central clock of aging that involves the stem cells that are in the walls of the third ventricle in the brain. So think of the brain. You know that it has some chambers inside of it. Think of them as caverns. Well, in the walls of one of those caverns are some. In the walls of one of those caverns are some stem cells and those stem cells are releasing information, called exosomes, into the system that is keeping us young. And if you destroy those stem cells, you keep those stem cells alive by the way, by melatonin. But if you destroy those stem cells, you will age rapidly. You can take a mouse, destroy those stem cells, they will age in a week. In a week they will be old, right, you can replace those exosomes and they will be youthful again. So now we're talking about a central clock of aging, Rather than trying to go after every different hallmark of aging. Maybe there's what I call cutting off the head of the cobra, where we can actually get back to a central clock and, with some procedures that we can do to reprogram these stem cells, it enables us to actually bypass chasing a thousand different phenotypes. And, yes, we can always use stem cells and exosomes and peptides and things like that to, you know, rebuild your knee and help your shoulder and you know, and improve brain function and all that. But what if, from a basic underlying piece, we could go in and periodically reset the clock for an individual? This is what I'm excited about. I think this is really coming and I'm also super excited about the impact of AI, which is accelerating much faster than people anticipated, and I really think in the next three to five years, aging will be solved completely. It will totally be solved.

Speaker 2:

And then I give a talk about this. It's like, okay, so you're going to live a long time. You're going to live a really long time. You're going to be youthful, you're going to be 30. You're going to develop that 300 year old mind, okay. So now what? That 300 year old mind, okay. So now, what Right? So now, what Right? Because it's it's really sort of makes you change the question into a more existential question. Okay, I'm going to be here a long time. What if I'm going to be here a hundred years, or 150 years, or 300 years? You know now what Right.

Speaker 2:

And so I asked the audience and I'll ask this audience a similar thing. So you know the best of your ability what's the meaning of life, right? And then the second question is what's your purpose? Right, what's your purpose? Why are you here? And then the third question is if you are going to focus on one thing to optimize, to actually make all this work, what's the one thing you're going to focus on? And it's really, it's quite moving for the audience, because I do it as an experience, right, and they have a chance to have time to think about this, even write it down. And what I've come to understand I'll share this with the audience now is that in really profound, deep meditations that I've done, I've come to understand that consciousness, when you directly connect to consciousness, god source energy, you know.

Speaker 2:

However you want to describe it, oh my gosh, it is 100%, pure, pure love, just pure love. And what does love, love to do? Love loves to create. And this ever-expanding universe, potentially multiverse, that we're in, of self-perpetuating creation, this is an act of creation in and of itself. This conversation is an act of creation. So love loves to create. And what's the feedback loop? What's the feedback loop for consciousness?

Speaker 2:

On love, creating Well, it's joy, it brings joy. Creating Well, it's joy, it brings joy. And so love creating joy, this has become my purpose in life. That's the meaning of life for me. My purpose is, from a loving place, to create joy, and that's it. That's all I'm here to do, right?

Speaker 2:

So this conversation is a loving conversation about creating joy for ourselves, for the people that are listening, and that's what is in my practice. It's about love creating joy for the people we work with, in the work I do, in the recreation I do, in the family time I have. It's all about love creating joy, and so it makes your life very, very simple, instead of chasing lots of different things. And what's the one thing that you need to do to optimize this right? Well, for me, it's optimizing the nervous system, right? How you think, what you feel, how you respond, what you think is true, what you believe is true about yourself, what you believe is true about somebody else. You know, this is all up for grabs, this can all be programmed and reprogrammed. How you move through space, how you run down the stairs, how you dance with your partner, it's all about the nervous system, right? So when you simplify life, it's about love, creating joy, and it's really about optimizing the way the nervous system works. This is how you find your answers.

Speaker 2:

You identify with being 27. You say, no, I'm going to be at 100. I'll be 30. With a 300-year-old mind, I'm going to develop this stuff. Boom, there it is. And you stop worrying about chasing the dollar, so to speak, or chasing the urgent thing in front of us, and it's like, oh no, this is a really beautiful, what a beautiful planet to be on, what a beautiful day it is, what a beautiful opportunity to have this conversation right. And all of a sudden, you see how the world shifts and it's like, oh yeah, I'm going to live a long time, this will be fun.

Speaker 1:

Wow, that is such a beautiful concept and I can't think of a better way to end our conversation with that thought. That is such a beautiful concept and I can't think of a better way to end our conversation with that thought. That is so, so wonderful. Thank you so much, jeffrey. We'll have a link to your program and the book in the show notes and everything there, but I just want to thank you for sharing that with us and all those beautiful thoughts. It's been a real joy.

Speaker 2:

My pleasure, rob, such a pleasure to chat with you, as always. Thank you so much for the work you do. Yeah, thank you.