Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #427 The Secrets of Human Optimization w/ Dr. Dan Pardi

Episode Date: October 12, 2025

In this podcast episode, Kyle welcomes Dr. Dan Pardi, a health optimization expert, known for his extensive work in longevity, sleep, and wellness. Dr. Pardi shares his background and journey into health optimization, discussing how his personal experiences and interests led him to focus on areas such as sleep, aging, and holistic health approaches. Key topics covered include the importance of sleep in overall health, the role of stem cells and senescence in aging, the benefits of various phytochemicals, and how modern life necessitates certain supplements like magnesium. Dr. Pardi also elaborates on the intersection of diet, exercise, and longevity, emphasizing personalized and adaptable health strategies. He shares insights into his work at Qualia, focusing on products designed to enhance healthspan and the complex interplay between diet, environment, and genetic predispositions. The episode ends with a discussion on the importance of mind-wandering and managing modern distractions for better cognitive and overall health.   Connect with Dr. Dan here: Dr. Dan Pardi - Qualia Life   From Kyle: The Community is coming! Click here to learn more   Our Sponsors: Let’s level up your nicotine routine with Lucy. Go to Lucy.co/KKP and use promo code (KKP) to get 20% off your first order. Lucy offers FREE SHIPPING and has a 30-day refund policy if you change your mind. If there’s ONE MINERAL you should be worried about not getting enough of... it’s MAGNESIUM. Head to http://www.bioptimizers.com/kingsbu now and use code KINGSBU to claim your 15% discount. These are the b3 bands I was talking about. They are amazing, I highly recommend incorporating them into your movement practice.   Connect with Kyle: I'm back on Instagram, come say hey @kylekingsbu Twitter: @kingsbu Our Farm Initiative: @gardenersofeden.earth Odysee: odysee.com/@KyleKingsburypod Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Kyle-Kingsbury Kyle's Website: www.kingsbu.com - Gardeners of Eden site If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe & leave a 5-star review with your thoughts!

Welcome back to today's podcast. We have Dr. Dan Party in the house. This was a, not party, like party time, but P-A-R-D-I. I've actually known Dan for a while now. I've been coaching his sons at Gracie Jiu-Jitsu and saw, you know, he had a lot of same friends in the same arenas of health and wellness and optimization. And he was recently hired with the boys at Qualia and girls to do some really cool stuff. So I'm like, dude, we got to get on the podcast.

I've had James Schmockenberg on this podcast more than one. who was one of the founders of Qualia. These guys famously created one of the best neutrophics ever, and they're doing some really cool shit now. So we talk all things, longevity, sleep, stem cells, how to clear senescent cells, and just rejuvenate the body. Not to necessarily extend life, but to make sure that our lives are optimal until we die.

And that's one big difference I have from the Ray Kurtzweil's and some of the transhumanists out there is that I do want to optimize. and I'll use science to do it. I'll even use some technology to do it. But that's not in an effort to stay alive for, you know, 150 years or to become immortal. It's simply to get the most out of my time here.

And I think a lot of people resonate with that. All right, share this far and wide. Leave us a five-star rating with one or two ways the shows helped out in life and support our sponsors. Right, without further ado, my brother, Dr. Dan Party. Dude, this is awesome. I know. I'm so stoked to have you on.

I was stoked when you got the job in the first place Because I remember you coming in and you're like, hey, the neurohacker guys. And I was like, yeah, man, Dan Stickler and Schmachtenberger and all the guy. I was like, that's so cool, dude. Super cool. Yeah, so I met them back in probably 2016. So they had just gotten started. And I met Vanessa Hall and a guy, Daryl.

And they were two of the founding team. And it was at this transhumanist conference that I did not go to, but there was an after party with Wimhoff and Huberman and others. Transhumanist is like futurist or like Neal Jolval, Newell-Parrari kind of deal. We're going to become the Borg. Yeah, a little bit of that. I didn't go to the conference. Great Kurtzweil. Yes.

So all those ideas about how the human digital interface and where it's going to go. And it seemed interesting, although it's not totally my jam, but anyhow, I ended up meeting them. And there was a lot of cool people at the party, but we just hit it off right away. So that then led to Daniel Schrockenberger, who you know, coming on to my podcast, and I interviewed him about neutropics. and then he had me on to talk on sleep for a few episodes. So we got to know each other really well and then stayed in touch. So we stayed in touch over the years when they had new products. They'd send them to me and check in.

Hey, how do you like it? And then James was in town last December and said, hey, we've grown a lot and we'd love for you to be our spokesperson, basically. And I said, okay, that sounds really interesting. I'd love to do that. But why don't we talk about something even more substantial? So I'm now their chief health officer. And so basically I work with marketing a lot, which is all. trying to get a message out to people about what we do. And I am really interested in how do we

help with our messaging and with our content development educate people on the therapeutic areas that we work on and also the products, but also what is health span? And how can we address it in a way that's effective? Where is the state of the union right now in that space? All of those things I'm really interested in. So it was perfect thing. I want to dive right into that. That'll be the meat and potatoes of the podcast. But as I do with anybody, I want to know personal background. Where'd you grow up? What was life like? What was your education? What drew you into the space of human optimization and the betterment of man? Isn't it always interesting to know why people get into this space? Because we all have our different stories. For me, I was an athlete growing up.

I played soccer, basketball, and I got injured. And in a way, it was a gift because from a very early age, when we take that supreme health for granted, you don't even have to think about it. I started to think, how do I heal myself so I can get back into doing what I love? So that then led to me becoming like the default performance coach for my team. And all people would come to, you know, all my teammates would come to me and to ask questions about supplements and training techniques. And I loved it. I would read about all that stuff all the time.

And then so from there, that was the origin when I think back. That's probably where it all started. I went on into college. I went to USF. and I didn't know what to study and take. So I took, I did a double major, double minor, all sports medicine, exercise physiology, just taking everything I could to try to see what hooked me the most. That led to me doing a master's in exercise physiology at Florida State.

And I went across the country because they had the only program in the country that was both exercise physiology and sports nutrition. And I knew I wanted to do both. Cool. Were you Bay Area before then? Like, why did you choose USF? Yeah, yeah. So I went to, I grew up in Marin County in Nevada, which is this little sleepy town.

Most people think of Marin. They're thinking of Sausalito, Tiburon, Mill Valley, like these really kind of bougie areas. Nevada is very blue collar. It's right between Napa Valley and Marin. And it was a great upbringing. My mom had a dad divorced when I was young and stayed really good friends. And I had this sort of interesting, you know, what I was raised was sort of this interesting mix. So my dad was pretty successful and not.

other you know not crazy successful but he did he's doing really well my mom struggled to this she had some hallmark stores and they went out of business when the mall that she was in decided to go from this beautiful outdoor space to like creating a cover so she had no business for like a year so i had this weird mixture of you know having resources but also being like having scarcity and i had a sick sister too so she was in the hospital 13 times in a two-year period when she was like 13 14 with asthma. And it was always really urgent. So I remember being in the hospital until two in the morning, three in the morning, seemingly like every other weekend. So yeah, but it was a great upbringing. I had a great relationship with my mom and dad. My dad, so after I graduated with my master's,

I went to work at the UCSF's Preventative Medicine Research Institute. And we were looking at how a multifactorial lifestyle program could influence the progression of prostate cancer. And so we were looking it was really cool diet relationship counseling um so these people would come in and you could imagine how like a lot of men when they quit their job they don't they haven't developed kept up with friends they're friends and the relationships they had were through work so now all of a sudden they leave their job and the only relationship they have is what their spouse if they have one and so that if there's any stress or challenges with communication that's going to affect the internal milieu that can certainly affect the progression of just

the job loss in it of itself is going to create a pressure cooker at home. Yeah, yeah. All of a sudden, you're spending a lot more time with this person. And then, you know, meditation and exercise physiology. So it was a really cool experience. Once a week, these over 100 prostate cancer patients would come, and they'd have a seven-hour intervention where they would learn to cook. They would have relationship counseling, learn to meditate,

talk about their exercise, and develop a program for the next week. And it made a really profound impact on me. Because, you know, if you think about how a lot of research is conducted, it's reductionist. We try to limit all of the factors so that we can understand how one thing is having an impact on the thing that we care about. And I get it. Like, it's the reason we do that is so that we have controls and we understand, does this thing impact whatever outcome we're looking at? And you have to do it that way. Otherwise, there's a lot of uncertainty.

Ultimately, though, what we care about is how do we tie together all the things that we know work to get the greatest outcome that we can? for the patient and that type of work's not done and so unfortunately his work was criticized dr dean ornish his work was criticized because we're like how do you know what's working and at some point you have to say I don't really care what's working what I care about is that these people are doing better than anyone else is whatever we're seeing with just single interventions so that made a really big impact on how I thought about the world and then after that I went I worked to this genomic company was really cool work so we're in the race to try to mine the human genome for the first time. We had these very high-tech clustering alignment tools that were sequencing the genome and

figuring it out. And then we were trying to create products for the pharmaceutical industry so they could make more targeted meds. That company, all 33 companies in the space went out of business. And all the talent was brought up into pharmaceutical companies. And I made that jump. I worked for a company, Orphan Medical, which was a great experience. So they were working with rare disorders.

So these are disorders that have 200,000 people. people are fewer that have it. And that's typically not a big enough population for a pharmaceutical company to say, we're not going to get the financial remuneration to invest in this. And so there are special programs from the FDA that say, all right, these people still need help. So let's see if we can expedite the development process. Can we give some additional funding to help these people in need?

And so I knew nothing about narcolepsy. I knew nothing about sleep. And I knew very little about GHB, but that was the drug. Let's go, dude. Yes. Yeah. Oh, this is great. I had no idea we're going to, if this is a part of the conversation, this is great, dude.

Yeah. Isn't that fascinating? I stayed there for about a decade, and I do not think I would have stayed at one place for that long if it wasn't so damn interesting. All of it. I fell in love with sleep. You had, at the time, there was one group of people saying, we cannot launch GHB into the world as a pharmaceutical. It's going to turn into another oxycon. mountain, you're releasing the scourge into the world.

There was definitely advocates that were trying to suppress its development. On the other side, you had narcoleptics that are saying, listen, I have had friends who have had a cataplectic attack, which is a symptom of narcolepsy where you lose muscle control in response to emotion. So like the telling of a joke, all of a sudden you go paralyzed and they've had telling emotional stories where friends would fall downstairs and die because they'd hit their head, or having to avoid emotional contact, like seeing a grandfather seeing their nephew or their niece

and not wanting to pick them up because they don't want to fall over. And they're telling these emotional stories about how this medication, as how they viewed it, was more helpful than anything else that was available. It's the only one that works, correct? Yeah. I mean, at the time, at least.

It was the only thing that worked. And I fell in love with GHB in college. Yeah. Not for nefarious purposes, because it is, you know, can be used nefariously, but for the fact that it, you know, I was looking for better ways to get high because alcohol would destroy

my cardio and my muscle gains and I, you know, I'm trying to put on as much muscle as I can playing football at ASU. And, you know, I learned Valium doesn't have many negative effects on the body. It always has quite a bit of addictive qualities and other negative effects. But GHB was used by bodybuilders as well. And because of the fact that uniquely both those two compounds would put you into a deeper sleep. There's no real sleep medication out there that puts you into actual sleep. That's the big fault of Ambien and all these other things. And I'd love to dive into that with you. Yeah. Is that you're not actually sleeping there. It's like a pseudo sleep. Just like when you pass out when you're drunk. It's like pseudo sleep. It's not the real deal. Yeah.

But GHB puts you in such a deep sleep that you get a huge dump of natural growth hormone. Yeah. Which increases recovery, recycling the brain tissue on all that. And you can actually get the quality of sleep improves as such that you actually don't even have to do eight hours to get a really good full night sleep with a product like GHB. Is that correct? Yeah. So that was the that is the unique aspect of this very simple short chain fatty acid. In fact, what's popular now is beta hydroxybutyrate, gamma hydroxybutyrate. They are very similar molecules. There's just a few carbon difference between the two. And they have different effects, but they also have some overlapping effects as well. So you're right. You used to be able to buy this GHB off the shelf at GNC and it was

touted as a growth hormone promoter and sleep facilitator. And what's, so when you take any of the Z drugs, these are non-benzidiasopine drugs, that's what they call them, they will help you fall asleep a little bit sooner, not that much sooner, but a little bit sooner, and they will suppress the amount of deep sleep that you get into. So we go through different stages of sleep over the night. We have various stages of non-REM, and then we have REM, which is also called paradoxical sleep.

It's also considered the gateway to waking. So if you wake up right out of REM, you feel great, actually. And what's so challenging about addressing sleep from either a pharmaceutical or supplement is that we're dealing with such distinct stages as you go through the night, where during the day you just want to be awake, so you want to facilitate that state. So you're alert, you're sharp, you have enough central nervous system arousal where you can then do all sorts of cognitive activities like alertness, which so alertness means being able to stay aware of your surroundings so that you can, let's say, monitor for something that's

happening. Like people that had ADHD have trouble with that. So they have, their tired mind cannot filter out all the information that's coming in their perceptual field. So they're overresponsive to information that's coming into them. And they are reactive, right? They're hyperactive because their tired mind is overreacting to too many things. And they have very difficult time with impulse control. So anyhow, that's during the day, we just want to create this very, a unified state that helps you perform well in cognitive, task-oriented activities. At night, slow-wave sleep and REM sleep are almost very different in terms of their neurochemistry. So what you see is that when you promote one, it's usually at the expense of the

other. And that's really challenging. So what's unique about GHB is that with all the Z-drugs, they will put you to sleep, but you'll get into stage one or two, and you will not get very much slow-wave sleep. In fact, it suppresses slow-wave sleep. And it is during those times, just like you said, where you will release growth hormone. It's the most restorative aspect of sleep. You have these deep, they call it slow-wave, because of these deep, slow-wave sleeps, your brain is synchronized to these rhythms. It's a very active process, even though we think of it as this quiescent process. There are parts of the brain that are more active at night than there are any time during a 24-hour period.

Cool. Yeah. And so slow-wave sleep is really important for growth and repair, and And GHB will facilitate, like in narcoleptics, they would get about five times more slow-wave sleep than they would. Wow. Yeah. And as a result, their daytime quality of alertness and wakefulness was better than on 120 milligrams of dextroanphetamine the next day. Because you know that, right? A stimulant does not replace the need for good sleep. So you're taking these sleepy people and you're stimulating them.

And it works for a couple of days. No nootopic will power you out of a bad night's sleep, especially when it's chronic. That's right. That's right. It's a temporary patch, and ultimately it can facilitate an even worse problem. So, yeah, GHB is very special, and in narcolepsy, not only, it's solving all sorts of problems. They have deeper, better sleep, and they have better quality of wakefulness the next day. And they also have the suppression of that other symptom where you have the bilateral loss of muscle tone that causes the paralysis, which you see a bunch of animals in nature that express cataplexy.

So we see it in almost every domesticated species. I wonder if that's like a fight, fight, flight, freeze, or if it has to do with the nervous system overload. Because I think if you're not actually sleeping and that's chronic, you have no nervous system repair, right? Like our anabolic time is nighttime. And if that's deterred, then you're 23 hours of catapolism, right? So like that would be a real issue for the nervous system. It would make sense that just something small like that, seemingly small, could throw someone over. Yeah.

So that's right. So what narcolepsy really is a loss of neurons in the brain called hypochretin neurons. You'll also see it written as erexin because two labs discovered that same area of the brain within six weeks apart. And so in perpetuity from now on, every paper either has to refer to hypochretin, akaorexin or erexin, aka hypochretin. But that is a really special part of the nervous system. It's in the hypothalamus, which overall is only like 400,000 neurons. and the hypercretan neurons are essentially, the way to think of them is like a symphony conductor.

They are telling other parts of your wake network when to be on. So they'll communicate directly with the dorsal raffae, where you have serotonergic neurons, with the pinoceloponty neurons, where you have dopaminergic neurons. And all of our different neurotransmitter systems have specific areas that they come from,

and then they emanate through pathways to the rest of the brain to keep them awake. Locus serulius, which is part of your norepinephrine. And so Hippocretan is saying, okay, it's daytime beyond play. And at night, that goes quiet and all those wake neurons quiet down and the sleep processes are allowed to occur. Narcoleptics, probably through autoimmunity, have their body attack those special, those neurons, and also they're missing.

So if you... So you're like deleting receptor sites in a sense. Yeah, those neurons basically become ablated because the body attacks them thinking that they're foreign and we're not exactly we don't exactly know why but emmanuel migno had been working hunting this down for 20 years he's at stanford and they finally felt that they had enough conclusive evidence to say that this is indeed an autoimmune issue the problem with it is usually you'll develop like there's a at the time when i was working in this space there would be there was a 10 to 13 year delay in the onset of symptoms with diagnoses wow yeah so people there was no smoking gun you couldn't tell what was going

on. All you knew is that this person now had this neurological condition. So yeah, I mean, that was a fascinating bit of work. And while I was there, I learned a lot about sleep too, which is by itself, a super interesting stuff. And so I decided to go on to my PhD. I did it at Leiden University, one of the oldest universities in the world, and then Stanford. So I had two people at Stanford that were my mentors, two people in the Netherlands, and it was just an incredible crew. They were so supportive. And I knew from the beginning that I didn't want to become a sleep researcher. I knew I wanted to go back and work in public health, if you will, hearkening back to my time with Dean Ornish, thinking about how do we actually get people to

adopt and sustain health practices that we know for all the different determinants of health that you talk about and know how do we get people to adjust their pattern of living in a way that is going to help support their own health over the course of a lifetime. That really is what inspired me. But I also had specific sleep questions that I wanted to get into. And so I'm like, all right, I'm going to use this to sharpen my writing skills, sharpen my analytical skills. And the first six months of my program, my professors were very supportive.

I said, okay, if I'm ultimately going to try to affect human behavior, I need to understand it. And so I dissected several well-known behavior models. And then I built up my own behavior model called the loop model to sustain health behaviors. And it's very simple. So the idea is, in order for us to pick up a new idea and make it a part of our life,

we should know why we're doing it, how to do it, if we're doing it, and if it's working. And you can see just those four discrete buckets are all mutually reinforcing, but you can't, a person can't understand if they're doing the behavior or not just by giving them more information about why they should do it. They're all independent. And the way that a person can step into that model, by the way, a behavior model can describe why behavior changes, it can predict, this is when we think behavior will change,

or it can serve as a model. And so this model that I created became the basis of my work in human OS, where I trying to use that idea to operationalize, almost like a digital health coach, to then get people more aware of all these interesting. The more that we live from modern environment, askew from the natural setting, we have to learn about why these things are helpful so we can figure out sometimes strange ways, like a red light machine, because we're not out in the sun enough, to fulfill those requirements that keep our body working at closer to our peak.

And so that has been an interest of mine for a long time. And then I started to work on a book a couple of years ago, which I'm about 15 to 20, 15 out of 25 chapters into now. Oh, yeah, dude. I got to have you back on when it's done. Oh, thank you. Awesome. Absolutely, brother. Yeah.

Yeah. It's a book on health, which there's so many different health books out there. But this is a book about understanding what health is. And so I'm offering a new definition. And I'm going to talk about what does human health really mean. So a bit about evolution. How does health work as a complex network? What does health look like in society?

what does our healthcare system look like? What should it look like? And the whole idea is to vary within maybe 3,000 words per chapter unlock some of these really valuable ideas that are behind either jargon or complexity so that they're very intuitive. You're like, ah, I get that. So every chapter starts with a story

that illustrates that concept. I totally get that. And then I talk a little bit about the science. So that's the, that is the arc of the book. And I love working on it. It's really fun. That's right. And great job on it.

I know how hard it is to write a book and you got three awesome kids. So that's Jamie Wheels that he wrote Stealing Fire with Kotler and he said he easily could have done it himself, but he had his two kids. And then so he waited for Recapture the Rafter until he was an empty nestor. And then he put that up knowing how much effort that was going to take. So yeah, that's awesome that you're putting all that work in there with three little ones. I appreciate that. It's, I get so much joy from working as being around my kids.

And but I joke too. So I'll wake up, let's say, on a Saturday morning and I've got so much energy. for them and it's like dad look at this watch this look at this you know they can't do anything without you having to watch them as you know and so then by the afternoon I'm like I need 20 minutes by myself they're just like but I love the enthusiasm to involve you in what they're doing and it's I feel like with children the more you put in the easier it is yeah and the longer that relationship stays that way right because all people say enjoy it now when they're teenagers they aren't going to give a shit about you and it's maybe not maybe we'll still have a good

parent-child bond you know and their attachment will still correctly be there you know have you have you checked out um hold on to your kids by garbamate and his son no it's a really good one but he talks about the lack of the parent-child attachment is what's leading to peer-to-peer attachment right and so we see it where that can go really wrong is in gangs or other things like that but even to a lesser scale and leonard sacks you're familiar with him yeah he's great PhD in psychology family medicine doctor written a ton of books collapse of parenting being one of my favorites but he talks about that on a lower scale

you end up getting a peer to peer attachment but the child knows inherently that is a fragile relationship. There's no blood bond there's no familial bond and so they behave differently and they don't have radical honesty with each other because they're always nervous oh Becky could

just cut me out and then I'm done and it's like that's something you they would know your kid would know I can talk all kinds of shit to my dad and he's still going to love me he should hopefully know that and hopefully they don't talk all kinds of shit to you, but that's there because of the fact that there's a safety net of, I'm never going to leave you, your mind, and I love you forever. There's nothing you can do that'll change that. Yeah. Right. So, you know, as I think about that stuff, you know, in most people

living in the modern world would say, enjoy it while it lasts. And I really feel like it's going to last. And that just is a matter of how we work together going through those things together, through that upbringing. I feel the same. I give them a lot of respect. And I try to guide them. I try to be somebody that they want to come to versus something that just tells them what to do. I've got a challenge in my life or I'm working on this problem. Of course there are times where you have to, for their own safety or for whatever, you have to step in and be a little more authoritative in what you expect for them from them in a moment. But they, you know, I reward them from doing it.

My mom had an interesting style. So she would reward me for being a good kid. And then she was harsh as hell. if I did anything wrong. So she made being not a good kid, painful, and doing the right thing, like the obvious choice. And she also spoke to me in a really interesting way. So like if my room was messy, she wouldn't say, like,

you have a messy, you know, you're a messy kid. She said, oh, that's unlike you. You're such a clean kid. Your room is not looking like it would for such a clean child. She always spoke to me in that positive way about who I was, even though it wasn't being so in the moment. And then I was like, oh, I need to live into my identity and clean my room. That's great.

Yeah. I like that tactic. That's a good one. Yeah. All right, guys, quick break to tell you about what I've been up to. This year has been a year of transition for me with a fit for service making huge changes. I've been working to create my own community. I still don't have a name for it yet.

That is in the works. I'm brewing on it. But one of the things that I have come to understand is what this community is about. And so I want to give you a little hint here. and let you guys drop in. I'd love to get your feedback. And there's a link at the top of the page here if you guys are interested at all.

All right, so join in a transformative journey with our exclusive community where a like-minded individuals come together to explore the realms of body, mind, and connection. For $150 a month, you'll gain access to a treasure trove of wisdom from hundreds of podcast guests, a lifetime of learning and human optimization, and the teachings of legends like Paul Chek,

James Clear, and so many others. Reconnect with your inner compass and discover the freedom, health, and sovereignty that await. Embrace the journey to excellence because we are what we repeatedly do. If that interests you, peep the link in the show notes for the community, and we will get you guys locked in. All right, back to the podcast. Let's talk about, you mentioned a few things here, some of which are smaller that I want

to tease out. The first thing on my mind is GHB versus BHB, right? Because I think that's a really cool, it's a really cool little rabbit hole we can break down quickly. But then I want to dive into some of the bigger schematics around orange. and stuff like that and just like where you're at now, especially with neurohagic collective and trying to see things more holistically. Yes.

So first, let's dive into this because BHDB, beta hydroxybutyrate is one of the more commonly known ketone esters that many people are taking. If you're taking ketones, you're likely taking beta hydroxybuterate. When this stuff first started coming up for me, it was 2014. I was listening to Tim Ferriss's podcast. He had Dr. Peter A.T. on. This is when Pete was going through, you know, his year or two stint with it. Yep.

Dominic Augustino came on. And Dominic's awesome. I mean, I'm buddies with both those guys, but he really cemented in for me, you know, retiring from fighting in that time. I was like, I need to experiment with this if it can help heal the brain. Yeah. And, you know, having Bear in 2015, a year after I retired, I remember Dominic de Augustino saying, like, if you're going to have a lack of sleep, being in a natural ketogenic state

can help mitigate some of the issues there. Yeah. And I, to this day, I don't know why. But if there are that, the GHB and BHB are similar in that way, that would make sense. I also remember hearing some later years later that when you're in a nutritional, traditional ketogenic state that the microbiome shifts in a way where it produces more GABA. And so if our if our gut second brain is producing all of our neurotransmitters or a big chunk, 70, 80% of them, then that higher production of GABA would make sense, right?

Gaba hydroxybutyrate, why we're going to get more of that sleepy, relaxed state when we go to bed at night and maybe improve the quality of our sleep, even if it's lessened. I've spoken with Dominic about that a few times. And I don't have as much experience with it as he does. but few people do because he's like a world expert on ketones. But just from his personal experience, he feels like not all versions of beta-hydroxybutyrate. So there are different chemical formulations of it that not all of them have an

equivalent effect on beta-hydroxybutary, but excuse me, on sleep. But butyrate in general is something that both beta-hydroxybutyrate and gamma-hydroxybutyrate share. And so that is really important for your gut health because buterate is used by your enterocytes, which is a single cell lining of your intestinal system, and it's their food. It keeps them healthy. And we have buterate producing bacteria in our gut. However, because of the modern diets and things that are impairing, not everybody has the same complement of commensal bacteria, right, the bacteria that are actually keeping you healthy.

So whether you have pathogenic microbes in your gut that are heart being harbored, they can interfere with your colony. If you did a lot of antibiotics when you were younger, then what you'll see is a simplification of your gut biome. That will lead to a higher inflammatory state in the body because more things are making it through that protective barrier. Yeah, you get the leaky gut issues and inflammation at the sites. Yeah.

If you think about it, that tube is outside of your body. And it is guarding what gets into you and what doesn't. It's a weird way to think of it, but it is true, and the good news is that you can, so when you eat a lot of fiber, then if you have the right bacteria, you will start to produce more buterate. That is, the gut biome will consume that fiber and it'll poop out buterate and other short chain fatty acids, which then have a broad range of health effects on the body. And you're speaking about the differences of bacteria is key here because you'd get guys like

the carnivore dog Paul Saladino saying, you can live fine without fiber and Sean Baker and all and while that's true, and while it is helpful for some extreme circumstances, like Jordan Peterson's daughter who did very well, that is, to me, it's a form of fasting, right? It's not meant to be done your whole life, but it can be a way to heal in a sense and then come back to reintroducing these things. And environmentally, right? Like, we want to have some degree of these foods coming in that are prebiotic and work in different ways. I'm not a fan of, like, cillium husk and shit like that. Like, pounded metamusel before bed just makes me gassy and it doesn't work right. But But if I eat cruciferous once or twice a week, we all do really good.

And the first test is to see, what does my poop look like? If it's solid and it looks good and it's uniform and it doesn't smell foul, then I'm on the right track. If it smells like I'm at a truck stop, that's something my body disagreed with. Yeah. This brings up like a bigger conversation. But the conversation around like what is optimal, what is ideal is challenging because humans are a complex system.

And what that means is that our bodies are always going to try to respond to. the immediate circumstances to do the best job they can. So if you start eating fiber, there will be considerable changes to the gut biome that doesn't automatically mean that it is going to be a huge problem, given our understanding of the importance of adequate fiber in supporting them, because the gut biome itself will change and will start to produce other compounds that ultimately will serve similar purposes, but in a different way. And the whole diet conversation is similar to that as well. You can now see people on a very low-fat diet and a very on a high-fat diet, and they're about as healthy as one another. And so those are diametrically

opposed in terms of the thesis by which you would start doing them, and yet a person can do comparably well. So going back to the gut biome, the nice thing about butyrate is that you can actually take things like tributerine, which is a supplemental butyrate form. and what you're always concerned about when you're doing anything to try to manipulate your own physiology is are you actually shutting down your body's ability to do it itself or is it restorative is it are you facilitating restorative physiology where once you actually start to make more butyrate in your gut then your body actually starts to make more of it itself it's like you're like fueling the the genesis of more butyrate production in your gut and that's what we see with tributyrin and other butyrate supplements so if you're not making a lot if you feel like you're having some gut issues you're like you're having some gut issues. There's a couple of different things we're dealing with. Do you have too many pathogenic bacteria, which going back to something I said earlier

is highly likely. You're more likely to have that if you did a lot of antibiotics when you're younger, you have a simplification of your colony, which means there are fewer species. When you have fewer species, it's easier for a pathogenic grouping to get a foothold.

And then it's, so you have the bad players and then you have the good players. And yeah, so sometimes when people, that's why people will react quite, differently. Like you take buterate and you're like, I feel really good. Other people take it and they start to get gassy. It takes a, it's not as easy for transition. But generally, those substances like Beterate not only will affect the interic lining, but they'll also get into the body. They'll affect blood pressure regulation, glucose regulation, epigenetics. Those have an impact on inflammation.

And so through a variety of different types of signaling, I spoke with John Newman at the book about this. And they are very interested in how Buterade might. have a positive impact on how well we age. And he gave me a really cool example. So typically we think about age-related memory decline in humans as though that was an unavoidable part of getting older. And he talked about how his mice that were on a buterate-fed diet, so they were getting artificial sources of buterate in their diet,

not only did they not have a decline in their memory, but there was an improvement in their memory across their lifespan. And they live longer. Damn. I know. That sounds amazing. Yeah, that sounds amazing. Yeah.

You know, what's going on there? Was this always a part of, was this always a fuel source that we had more present when we were on a more natural diet, probably? More fasting, higher fiber diets. Going back to fiber real quick, what we know about fiber is, at least from epidemiology, there seems to be the lowest, the lowest mortality when you look at fiber's impact on mortality. when you are getting around 40 grams of fiber per day. The average U.S. intakes around 15 per day. The recommended intake is closer to like 30, 35.

So a little bit above what is recommended from the Institute of Medicine. We see that these levels have the best association with living longer. And, yeah, it's both the gut and it's also the postbiotics and the metabolites that the gut creates. Yeah, creating that environment. I think with what you just said there, I've already thinking about these, the holistic thing, like the people that are getting 15 grams a day, the average are probably eating fast food, TV dinner, shit like that. The people that are getting, just to get 40 grams of fiber, you probably have to cook

a decent amount or have raw veggies and things like that that are going to complement that and your plates. They're always going to look different. I follow how to eat, move me healthy, Paul Check, metabolic typing. Dr. William Walcott, I think is a great place for people to start to figure out what should my plate look like. How much of the things with eyes should I have? How much fat should I have?

how many greens or other things should I have? And that's worked wonders for me and my family. But that said, you know, like these things over time can start to shift, right? That's why it's important to go back through and see what it looks like. You know, like, oh, how do I test? You know, now, you've taken these questionnaires, you know, I've done them a dozen times because over the years, I'm a different person now. My body's different.

I've aged different. My demand is different and all that influences as well, you know. But maybe the, I think in the 40 gram is probably somebody who makes their own meals. I don't know many places you go out to eat. We're going to get a good amount. of healthy sources and potentially you could even get into the organic versus the inorganic argument of lower income going out to eat you're going to get glyphosate all over the place which is going to get rid of the good guys support the bad guys cause leaky gut and you got people making

their own food hopefully it's organic they're going to get less glyphosate load and all that's going to it's one spiraling up one spiraling down yeah that's right you brought up some really interesting points that we could we could go off some very cool tangents I think I think we should Okay, I'm in. So just to go back to one very quotidian comment around fiber, it just takes a long time to eat. If you're sitting down with a bowl of vegetables in the morning or at lunch, kind of like protein. If you want to get an adequate amount of protein, you have to make sure that you've getting protein at every meal. And it's the same thing with fiber too.

You actually, it's hard to get 40 grams of fiber in one meal. So you have to be thinking about it for all your eating opportunities in the day. And it doesn't fit neatly into modern society because we're in a rush, you know, we're trying to get to work, whatever it is. And I always have a lot of empathy for people. Sometimes we can put so much expectation on people to do all these things that are healthy. And we're causing a lot of stress, right? And so I'm always about, like, to me, optimization is about calibration.

So how do you calibrate, be informed about what we know is healthy? And then how do you calibrate it to work into your life and not be stressed if you're not like, you know, Brian Johnson, who spends all of his waking moment measuring and tending to his health. It is his hobby, and he has the resources to do it. So I'm not anti-Bryon Johnson, but nobody should feel like they need to be like him in order to be taking good care of themselves. If they're not doing what he's doing, they're not doing enough. That's not true.

All right. So you said some really interesting things about how we change over the lifespan. That is incredibly true and more true than most people know. A person who is more of a mentor, Michael Rose, one of the smartest people I've ever spoken with my life. He's got like 175 IQ. He's a distinguished professor of evolutionary biology. He recently retired.

He's probably the top living evolutionary biologist alive today. And his work looked at how recent forces can act on our genome in a way that makes us more adapted to things that are, you know, decades or hundreds of years. old or sometimes even a thousand years, and not the Darwinian time scale where you'd have to have thousands of generations in order for those, that novelty to fully penetrate our genome. So what he showed is that he did some work with fruit flies to, and you ever asked the question. It's like, yeah, how much do fruit flies apply to us? Don't worry about the details of the diet they're on. Think about how genes are responding to novelty over the course of

multiple generations. Why do we study fruit flies? Because in two weeks, that's their lifespan. So you can study them a lot, right? That is a great model to study evolution. But what he showed is that we, the way to extrapolate the knowledge that he generated from his decades of work is that it was the equivalent of, we do very well on an agricultural diet up until the average age of first reproduction in the society, after which we start to do a lot better on what he would consider a paleo diet. So that, in fact, when you're young, you do equally well, if not even a little bit better on an agricultural diet. How many people have you spoken to and you're like, gosh, right around 30, 35, I just,

the same good stuff that I've eaten, all of a sudden I'm starting to get gut issues or I am getting a skin rash. Like, all of a sudden, the body is not responding the same way as it had. Talk about a mind fuck, right? Yeah. You're not even changed your diet. You've just changed your age. And now you're not doing as well as you were previously.

And that can really throw you off. So his argument is that once we make it past that average first age of reproduction, which is around 2730, at an increasing rate up until like mid-50s, we will do increasingly well on what he calls a modern Trader Joe's version of the paleo diet. And things that were healthy before, like grains and legumes, we're not going to do quite as well with as we were previously. That in my model of what health is, it's not only how resilient and robust are you, in the environment you inhabit,

but also what age are you? And both of those are going to determine what environment is right for you. And of course, when I'm talking about environment, I'm also talking about the food that you're eating. The closer, as we get older, the closer we live to a natural setting, you're going to get better feedback.

And that's one of the nice things about aging is that although when you do things wrong, you will feel it, but when you do things right, you'll feel it. You're protected when you're young. You can act like a jerk. And you're going to be okay. I've seen young athletes in jiu-jitsu and stuff like that. Gordon Ryan, different people.

I'm forgetting the guy that was real skinny, but literally eating Big Macs and shit on the competition day. You know, like, I eat whatever I want. It doesn't matter. And it's like, you're fucking 22. You know, like I talk to me in 20 years and see how that's working for it, you know? Exactly. Yeah, I mean, I ate like a total jerk my whole life.

And there's obviously an argument you could make on like when genetically modified foods came in and how big of a difference that made because now they're instead of just spraying. and like Bobby Kenny talked about that. Glyphosate was used at the very beginning of the season just to knock down weed so that corn could get a head start or we could get a head start. And then once it got the sunlight it needed, that was the only spraying.

And then, oh, we're going to modify the seed so it can take more. Now we're getting like five, six times that we're spraying it during it through the course of his life cycle. Oh, and then, hey, if we spray it at the end, that'll dry it so we don't have to worry about losing the harvest. Right? So let's give it one last good blast of toxins,

which will help us, you know, make sure we get the maximum, you know, return on investment from this, right? It's a totally different ballgame. But, yeah, I think that it really makes sense thinking about that. I was talking with my son, you know, I'm going to do a vision quest here, no food and water for four days. And I've done two, five-day water fasts and a bunch of fasting mimicking diets.

I feel like staying in long-term nutritional ketosis is not ancestral, and it's not, you know, certainly for me, maybe for the Inuit, but it's also more of a pain in the ass. And I love carbohydrates. So, like, let me just, if I do once or twice a year, a three-day water fast or a five-day water fast or five-day fasting mimicking diet, you know, when I optimize metabolism, bring back insulin sensitivity and all the things that, you know, I might take for granted when I'm 20, my body's able to handle carbohydrates and everything perfectly. And obviously, there's different carbs that do better than others based on my personal body. But having a CGM

helps you sort through all that shit. You know, it's like, oh, okay, cool, I can eat this, I can eat that. And it makes sense that as we age, we would come into this more ancestral type and need to just to recycle things and I think fasting is such a huge way to it's such a huge button to push yeah that helps with that not only from a longevity standpoint which is super important but also for the fact that like just the foods that I'm eating I'm going to actually process and deal with better if I have metabolic flexibility at least once a year B3 sciences is a phenomenal company I've had Dr. Mike to board on this podcast a handful of three times at least I'm going to have them back on coming out in the fall the reason

for this is blood flow restriction has been studied for at least 20 to 30 years out in Japan, and the science from it is remarkable. The science from this has actually led to a lot of studying in altitude training. What happens to our bodies when we train in an oxygen deficit? This is a big part of the education that I got in my fight career and gave me a leg up on my competition. Truthfully, our hormones respond dramatically more so when we train in an oxygen depleted environment in a very short period of time. In fact, just 22 minutes is all it takes to boost growth hormone by four to six times the levels of a normal workout. That is absolutely incredible. I've loved working with these.

They're phenomenal way to recover, to rebound, to lose fat, to get in shape, but they're also incredible for athletes. If you want to build speed, power, explosiveness with endurance at the same time, this is one of the few instruments on the planet that can actually train slow twitch and fast twitch simultaneously. And it does so in a very acute, short period of time. I throw these on while I play in pickleball. I throw them on when on boxing and kickboxing and I throw them on for various workouts and I think they're absolutely incredible click the link in the show notes it'll be next to the top of the page as you scroll

if you guys want to learn more and pick up a pair of these bands for yourself get the arm bands and the leg bands and you can one click it there b3 sciences dot com it's interesting to watch how like almost every other health trend fasting burst onto the scene and became the next thing that was going to really solve our health problems and then it felt lot of favor and what it's like the pendulum swings the equal way and then usually when something does have real efficacy it lands back at maybe the place it should have been in the first place like there's overhype about it then people push back on that and too much and then should we do it i've played around with fasting mimicking diets myself quite a bit it's an interesting experience

to see you know how you do across those couple of days and your body makes instantaneous adjustments you start to make more ketones, all of a sudden you start to feel better. And then after that, how you respond to going back to your normal diet. And I've also played around with just narrowing when you're eating window. Unfortunately, what the research suggests, which is a little frustrating, is that the better way to diet with a shortened eating window is to have a huge breakfast and then stop eating around two weeks. I remember Rob Wolf talking about that.

And I was like, oh, you're a dad, father or two, and you got a wife that doesn't feel like it fits correctly socially. You know what I'm saying? Like dinner is like the one. even Leonard Sacks. He talks to, you know, he shows retroactively looking back on like families who had, I think, six, six nights a week of dinner or more. Yeah. Together had better outcomes than even three to five. Yeah. And then that was better outcomes than the one to two. Yeah. Right. So if you're eating dinner at a friend's house or whatever, you're all over the

place, like those kids don't do as well as all the way up to six or seven times a week, it being that important for dinner. Yeah, it's funny to think like, I'm going to load up in the breakfast and then I'll just sit and watch you guys eat and talk. Like, how does that work? So I think you nailed the main point in my mind is that breakfast is an independent act, right? Usually we just grab something as we're getting started with our day. And dinner is a social event. And you don't want to miss that social event. And so much of life and health is about tradeoffs, right?

You can't do everything right all the time. You have to make tradeoffs and you have to be okay with those. So let's say you do believe that a short eating window is really good for you, but all the benefits do seem to be on a, eating window that is an early time restricted feeding and you want to have dinner with your family you want to go out to friends and not sit there and drink water that's okay you there are other things you can do to maintain your health right and so that's where i've landed more recently and i'm very interested in you know like fasting mimicking ingredients and how they might stimulate certain pathways so that you might get more benefit with a little bit less extreme effort i've also noticed

that when I was changing up my diet a lot, I felt like I was in a little bit of a war-soft place versus now having more regularity around my meals, maintaining my energy. And another trade-off that we have to make is the one for like longevity and vitality. So those who go into, you know, severe calorie, or not severe, but like they try to employ calorie deprivation, which to this day, that is what extends lifespan as much longer than anything else. And a lot of science is trying to manipulate those pathways. However, we hear the science about how something like fasting might increase lifespan in a mouse or some sort of rodent model by 20, 30 percent. In humans, at best, we might get a year or three. Is it really worth

it to spend your life grinning and bearing hunger all day long? Or maybe you just want to accept that. Pursue vitality. How robust can I feel every day? And I don't, at person, Personally, and I think everybody gets to make their own choice on this. I would rather feel robust and die earlier than feel not as robust and have a couple more years of life. And I say that now. I'm at a sort of a privileged position being 51. I'm not closer to the end, but I feel like that's when I hear of like stories, Morgan Levine talks about she's a Yale scientist who's really, she wrote a book about aging and measuring it. So she does a lot with epigenetic aging.

And she created the pheno age, which is essentially looking at common blood biomarkers as a way that correspond very closely with what you get. Telomeres, things like that. We explain some of those because it goes around on which things are most important to look at. I'd love to hear your take on that.

Yeah, so Elizabeth Blackburn won a Nobel Prize through her work mostly at UCSF on telomeres. And yes, they are, so there are a lot of ways to measure biological age. and what you care about and what is biologically Thomas Kirkwood came up with this idea probably in the like the late 80s

I mean some of his work you could see earlier than that was illustrating this concept or talking about it but not naming it but the idea is that it's how many how long how much you're aging in the years that you've lived so you can imagine there are models now that will look at somebody who is, let's say they're 35, but there's a version of that person who is 10 years older,

and there's a version of that person that's 10 years younger. And it's really striking to see what those predictive models look like when you're looking at the 25-year-old version and the 45-year-old version. And wow, this person is 35 years old. That is their chronological age, but the amount that their body and their cells have aged in that time is not the same. And so that is the concept. Now, it is a latent variable, kind of like IQ.

You can't measure it directly. What you can do is look at creating a model that is predictive of whatever outcome you care about. So you might say time to death, like how well is our model predicting when this cohort would die? So the way that they usually will test these models is they will grab a bunch of data from where they know. We're going to start here in 1990, but we have data all the way up until 2020. And we know when people got disease, we know when they died, and then we're going to apply our model in a blinded fashion to the early data to see how well does it predict what happens.

That's how those models work. And now they're being applied clinically. So you can go get a epigenetic age test where they look at these markers in your epigenome and it'll say, all right, you're 50 years old, but you're actually 48 is your biological age or 52, right? It'll give you a number of your estimated biological age. age. And that's been a really good trend because with all these aging therapies that are out there, we can't wait for everybody to live a full. It's going to take hundreds of years to try to figure out what works. So we need to figure out what are some predictive biomarkers so we can assess what's working now so that we can take part in those things that actually are slowing

our aging pace or reversing biological age. And those are two different ideas. Yeah, I did I did the tello years was a company I did early on when I got to on it. And it was, you know, three years after I had retired. So I put my body through the grinder, not just from fighting in football, but through all the parting at the issue and staying out until 5 or 6 a.m. watching the sunrise on bad drugs. Like, I'm sure that took, I got to say that for sure took more of a toll on my interior than getting punched it. And I know what getting punched did.

So factoring all that in, tell years when I first took it, I was 35 and it said it was 43. So it was eight years older from a telomere. standpoint. And I was like, oh, man, that's a tough spill to swallow. Remember, Greenfield is a buddy. He had said that he was older as well from the Ironman stuff. And he wasn't beating himself up with alcohol and drugs like I was, but just the Ironman stuff alone was taking its toll. And so I started rethink. He rethought it as well. And gosh, this is another company that I used. Let me see if I can find it. Yeah. It's right over here. I got a second one. It doesn't matter. Actually, if it comes up, I'll talk about it just because I want people to be able to try it. But yeah, this other company was a different one. I ran it. a year ago. Yeah. And I think it was like a home blood test. Okay. So I think telomere might have been the saliva test, if I'm remembering correctly.

Yeah. This was blood. And one of the cool things that they did that was different was they're looking at DNA snippets via blood, right? And so they could supposedly tell the aging of each system. Yes. So the heart, the lungs, the liver, the kidneys, the brain, your endocrine system, your reproductive system, your skin, your bones. They could really look at all those different pieces.

and categorically, you know, see where you're at biologically versus chronologically. And I was pleased to know I was much better. Overall, I was only, I think, 1.7 years over biologically. Yeah. But the interior story was that my heart is close to seven years older than it should be. And the reason why it's skewed only a little bit is because my liver and kidneys are reversing my age. They're like the only thing that was blue in my body.

They're like 30-year-old liver and kidneys. Wow. Which is awesome, considering what I put them through in college. Yeah, totally. That is the trend. So telomeres were like the first, they were sexy for a while. Turns out it's a noisy measurement. What you do is you measure the telomere length, which I'll explain what telomeres are,

from leukocytes or white blood cells. So you get a little spot of blood and then you can see. So a telomere is an end cap in your DNA. And every time your cell replicates, the telomeres shorten a lot. little bit. So Leonard Hayflick at 1961 with a colleague he at the time they thought cells in a petri dish were immortal. They'd live forever. And what he found is that they would actually replicate around 40 to 60 times. And that is and then they would go into replicate of senescence. And so that's called the Hayflick limit. So cells can only replicate a certain number of times. And then

they can't do it any longer so they're not immortal and one of the reasons one of the things that's happening every time that they will replicate is those telomeres are shortening shortening telomeres are these repeats i think it's like a a t t gg there's it's a sequence that repeat repeats and then we also have an enzyme called telomerase that can add them back but the science there i'll just go a quick tangent you know cells have their life's their lifespan and if you keep them alive for too long, you might actually cause more problems than you're solving, right? So there are some compounds that will amplify telemerase, but cells die for a reason because they're usually accreting, they're building up over time damage to them. And you actually don't

want those cells to continue to survive because they can, bad things can happen. So anyhow, telomeres fell out of fashion and then around the mid, like 1910s to 2020, there was a line of work mostly, like the person whose name associates with it most is Steve Horvath from UCLA, and he did this brilliant math looking at epigenetic sites and found that there was something like, I think in his first assessment, maybe 241 sites that were predictive of aging, like highly predictive of what your biological age was, which means that it's highly predictive of when you are likely to get a disease or all sorts of markers of how healthy you are.

also then created one called Grimm Age, which is predictive of time of death. It's a time of death clock. It was scary, accurate. That's gangster. So many people claim they don't want it, they wouldn't want to know. And then I bet there's a whole market for that where they're like, fuck it. I want to know. Tell me. Yeah. It's a cool thing about it is that it is maybe predictive of what you look like now, but it doesn't mean you couldn't change things. Yeah, it's not set in stone. And that's, you know this too, but for all the benefits of Western medicine, in Western science, it is comical how many people still tell you the story of your genetic. Your genes are like your prison.

Right. It's like, no, dude, I did by 23 and me years ago and outsourced the raw data to Rhonda Patrick, find my fitness.com, and she run it through her algorithm thing and spit back out what 23 and me would originally tell you before the FDA shut them down and said, stop telling people too much information here. And now you can find out so much freaking information. There's plenty of other sites that do it. But at the time, it was like a $10 donation to her website.

It was a real steel. And I found me and my wife, Tosh, who were incredibly fit, and Arby Marcus, one of my best buds from on it. All of us had the same polymorphisms for type 2 diabetes. We're like almost guaranteed to be diabetic and guaranteed to be obese. And I was like, this, I'm never going to see that. My body's genetics tell me I'm fully capable of experiencing that if I let myself fall into a disease state. But I'm never even going to sniff being close to that. And, you know, at first I was in such disbelief.

I was like, how is that possible? I'm thinking of all my family. Oh, man, I start thinking all my relatives. I'm like, yeah, it must be there. It has to be there, right? So it is true in the sense of like this is a possibility. But the way doctors talk, so many doctors talk about that as like your death sentence. Yeah.

Yeah. If you look at even the most consequential snips that are predicting risk for diabetes, it's like less than 5%. That's like the most impactful one. If you have this, the FTO gene, you're going to be obese. No, you're increasing your risk about 5%. it's tiny. So back in the, you know, not that long ago, the estimates were that genes were contributing 25% to how long you live. And then a really interesting study was done by Graham Ruby at Calico, who, which is Google's company on aging. And he assessed 400 million ancestry

records. So just the data crunching alone was like a story unto itself. But the main idea from his work is that your genes only accounted for less than 7% of how long a person lives. It's environment. It's environment and how we are interacting with our environment. You're being a great example of that. And yeah, so you have examples in your family, it sounds like, of people that are overweight. You're probably not living in the same environment as them. Right.

Like you've chose a different path in terms of how all the different factors that you're on top of them that are going to help keep your body healthy and you're totally lean. Yeah, it's good for people to, I mean, I guess everybody gets to decide how much information do they want. I like information, particularly when there's something you can do about it. Yes. Yeah. And was it true diagnostic? Was that the measurement company?

True diagnostic. That sounds familiar. Let me see here. I don't want to lose the cord here. I'm positive. I have another box here. I remembered an X being on it. Okay.

God, I know I have a second one here. Index? It's funny because I remember the name true diagnostic, but I thought I was. I had a giant X on it. It's in this damn room somewhere. It's going to drive me nuts. And I will find it and link to it in the show notes that people want to try it. Oh, here it is.

Generation Lab. Okay. Okay. I'm less familiar with them. I'll show you the box after. You can pick it apart if you want. I'll send you my PDF actually to see you can take a look and see what that is. And you know, things are changeable.

Right. And so that's something that I appreciate is seeing that my heart of all things was the oldest. Yeah. I was like, well, what do I know about the heart? All right. Well, Zone 2 exercise is going to be good there. I'm already doing the recommended weight training and high intensity intervals and all that.

I'm like, I'm hitting those boxes every week. That's not a problem. What am I missing? Yeah. I don't do any jogging. I don't do any zone two stuff. Yeah. Let me get some zone two stuff.

I'm doing that daily. I've run at least two miles a day for the last three weeks. Awesome. I enjoy it. It helps my brain. You know, like, have you ever read Chi running? No. Basic concept is that you do a workout that leaves you with more energy than when you started.

I love this concept. Right? Yeah. And so I've really appreciated that because I don't want to kick my ass first thing in the morning and slug through work and the kids later, I need it to raise me up. Let's get my brain on point and allow me to build off that. Then if I need to hammer myself in the early afternoon or something, I can go do that. But I appreciate that type of running, doubled my EPA intake or quadrupled it actually.

Great. So Thorn makes a good super EPA product that doesn't cause me to burp or anything. Most official supplements cause me to burp. So it was nice having something like that just to get a little bit more of that in. And then, you know, sunlight as well. getting more sun, just trying to do everything that I can that will help mitigate that. I'm excited to see what the next round looks like. And also, this dry fast is an experiment in and of itself.

There's not a ton of scientific literature on vision quests, no food, no water, that we've got plenty of data on water fast and other things. So is this causing more harm than good? I don't know, but I'm going to run it for four years. And I'll be able to see with testing after testing which direction I go with it. So I'm excited for that as well. That's really cool. The one problem with testing is like when you test,

to be employing a healthful technique that temporarily causes an aberration in your blood markers that makes it seem like it was unhealthy. And you test three weeks later. And now you actually see that you're in a better place. So that's important. One thing I'll say, too, because you said you lived hard when you were younger, like many people did. So there's biological age is different than aging pace. And I think the most helpful one to focus on is aging pace.

So imagine, and Ataka gave at the Institute for Human Machine Cognition, I talked about this exact thing. Imagine that you're like an EMT in your 20s and 30s and you smoke and you drink and you're working night shifts. And that is causing you to age faster, right? So now in your mid-40s, you discovered health and you're no longer doing that job and you're living well or you're trying to. So let's say you just got a biological age test and you're 48 years old, but it says you're 52. That might take the wind out of your sales for your health routine because you're like, it's not working. I'm older. Both can be true, where if you did an aging pace test, that shows how fast are you aging now?

And it gives you, I'm aging 10 months out of every 12. So these two things can be true that, yes, my biological age as measured by now multi-omics, which means they're looking at epigenetics, they're looking at blood biomarkers, they're looking at metabolomics. The field is wide open, like who can create the most predictive model? And every year the tests change because they're up. and that's not going to stop. That's a cool thing.

But then, yeah, if you then see like, all right, I'm older than my chronological age, but my aging pace is less than one year, I'm going to stick with my routine. Yeah. Yeah. That's phenomenal. What do you recommend for the pace as far as tests? All right, guys, quick break to tell you about one of our longest running show, sponsors, lucy.com.

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They do a lot of collaboration with Yale and other reasons. I think they've been a part of over 120 different studies. And they make the whole process pretty easy. So you can get both your biological age test on and your aging paste on. Cool. Yeah. And you can then get one where I think they have some version where it's one test and you get both. That's awesome.

Yeah. All right. We'll link to that in the show notes. There's definitely something I want to test out. All right. Getting back to this bigger picture, you know, in the work with Ornish, and I love this because people will say, you know, like the one reason I like, how do you move me healthy is that it's a way to figure out what diet's right for you at this time.

Yeah. Right. And that there is no one size fits all. but I'll constantly get people over the years that are like, well, what about the blue zones? What about this? And it's like, or what about the French paradox? And the first thing that pops in my mind is, how much are they walking? What does their community look like?

Do they live multi-generational or have giant dinners with all their cousins and everybody? Right. All those things start to come into play. Even like, you know, the Okinawans, you could say they're living on white rice, but they're also eating more shellfish than most cultures. And understand shellfish and just oysters alone, there's nothing. not even liver, right? There's no organ meat that can mess with the power of those bicuspids.

Like, they are just loaded, absolutely loaded with micronutrients we need for sex hormone management and all the other things, right? So even just having, if he ate oysters twice a week, you'd have a leg up over most people touting organ meat and things like that. And I love organs too. But you're so right. So many factors there, right? Yeah.

So I'd love for you to, because you're writing about it now. I'd love for you to break down holistically. What are those factors? Where do you feel if we understand our inner mechanics, kind of like inside out? where you've got a keyboard here. I'm going to pull this lever, I'm going to push this button, and I'm getting the most ROI back for the decisions I make and the time that it takes to do that.

What would that look like? Yeah, so there really is no one perfect human diet, and that sounds like, I don't know, platitudes or evasion. But I think that even a paleo diet is not what the modern conception of what the paleo diet was touted as. That was a version of it. But my mentor, Hanopal, who's the head of diabetes at Leiden Hospital, he wrote, this is why I got into it, he wrote a paper on the Paleolithic diet as a cure for modern obesity prior to its

rise in popularity. So it got me interested in it really early on. And it made a ton of sense. Just tying in real quick, like where we evolved was always by waterways, whether it was rivers or by the ocean. And the food sources that we would either hunt or gather, in fact, always, you know, oysters and things like that, muscles were considered gathered foods. So in ethnographic studies, but they are remarkably useful for our health.

You're right. They're loaded with zinc. They're loaded with other nutrients. Seweed has a bunch of bioactive compounds that are good for our health. Oysters are, or muscles and sea squirts, which are like kind of another gathered type of shellfish. those are loaded with plasmalogens and those that's probably you're going to hear a lot more about those over the next couple of years in fact i spoke with a cambridge scientist you said there is a remarkable correlation with plasmalogen consumption by the mother and later IQ of the

child cool yes so what they do is they stabilize neuronal membranes and that helps with connectivity neurogenesis and really healthy brain tissue so what will probably be hearing more about is two things you know the cognitive performance midlife if you have an adequate consumption to plasmalogous and then later on the you know the thwarting or delay of cognitive decline because we're keeping those neurons healthy cool yeah i like that yeah and one of the problems when you have unhealthy cells is there they are subject to something called veroptosis which is like apoptosis is another form of cell death but it's iron mediate and so we have women suffer from this less because of menstruation, but then during postmenopausal period, they, just like men, can deal with

hemachromatosis and excess iron overload. That can then drive these cell death in the brain and elsewhere. And so you're not feeling any of that. That's one of the, we don't get great feedback with disease, right? These are multi-decade processes. And one day you just get a biomarker test. You might not feel anything. And you're like, well, I'm in this bad state. And hopefully, I mean, the good news now is that a lot of people who are health conscious thinking health forward, they're getting tests earlier. So there is earlier detection. Right.

And that means that that is just another opportunity to help people do what they should be doing anyway, right? You don't have to have a diagnosis in order to start trying to do the things right. Yeah. But going back, if you looked at it like in a very analytical way, you want to make sure you have an adequacy of nutrients, micronutrients. I love the protein leverage hypothesis from two Australian research. researchers. David Rubenbauer and Steven Simpson, and they basically talk about how we have a protein

appetite in the brain. So we will continue to eat food when we're not getting enough protein, and that causes overeating. And they've demonstrated this in human trials multiple times. But they've also, it's probably even more compelling to me, is they've actually shown this in crickets. They've shown it in other animals as well. Like we need protein to rebuild our structure. It makes a lot of sense. And so we're now having an appreciation that like the protein recommendations that had been given were probably less than they should be 50 grams a day huh yeah a lot of what we a lot of recommendations are like the baseline the floor of fending off near-term health issues but they're nowhere near optimal we've not done a great job assessing what optimal is a great analogy

is the national guidelines for exercise which recommend 150 minutes of moderate activity or 75 minutes of vigorous activity a week. But when you double that, you still see a linear increase in improvements of health. So, yes, they've established a floor that everybody should try to target, even though only 22% of America is actually hitting those guidelines. But it doesn't mean that the benefits stop there. We see that with magnesium. You know, the Institute of Medicine recommends 410 milligrams of magnesium for men, 320 for women. There are studies that show 550, 600 dramatically different rates of cognitive decline compared to an adequate amount. So, yes, we still see a lot of benefit beyond, and that's why I love looking at hunter-gather estimations of what our

nutrient loads were. Hunter-gatherers were taking in, for example, on average, 6 to 900 milligrams of magnesium per day. When you get into farming and modern practices, I think that's probably the single most depleted nutrient we have from our soil. Yeah. So, like, people would be like, oh, you know, you just eat more of this and that. It's like, well, when? Because 100 years ago, that probably did have the adequate amount of magnesium we needed 50 years ago, maybe. But it's, you know, you talk about like testosterone drops. Our magnesium from our soil is damn near gone. I mean, I don't even think of that as a, there's supplements that I look at for optimization and there's supplements I look at as this is modern living. You have to have it.

Magnesium, you have to have it, period. Yeah. I do, I do amazingly well when I take magnesium. I can, and I can, I have a magnesium rich diet theoretically, because what you're talking about with the depletion of our soils is real. It is real. So we are probably not getting as much magnesium and other micronutrients as we think we are given the estimates for how much magnesium would be in this batch of kale or whatever. We're just not getting as much as we used to. And of course, it depends on where you get your food, so it's not uniform either.

But that is a real thing. And so, you know, supplementation is definitely an interesting, possibly necessity in modern life. But when I take magnesium during the day, I'll have, if I take it before working out, we wrote an article on this for human OS, 400 milligrams of magnesium citrate has a very profound impact on next day soreness. I've experienced that after a hard workout. And then at night, you take different forms of magnesium and it can help with facility. I would wonder on that one, and you guys may have the answer to this. but if I, there's performance versus training effect, right? So if I have a marathon to run, I can have baking soda or something that's going to help me with that.

And there's, but there's a company that makes a lotion that you can put on that gets that into the skin without disrupting the GI. But if I do that every workout, it actually takes away from the training effect, right? High dose vitamin C before a workout, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory is a pound ibuprofen before a workout. Yeah. It might get rid of my pain so I can work out harder. but my body's not going to, because there's no inflammation, it's not going to recognize having kicked my ass in a need to get better.

Yes. So I'd wonder with the magnesium, it seems like that may be a benefit, like sauna after a workout is still going to benefit you without taking away the training effect. It seems like magnesium may fall in that category. What are the thoughts there? So I wrote a how to guide on this exact subject.

So ergens, and you're right. So things like high-dose antioxidants might have a conditional benefit if you're trying to mitigate the environment, amount of damage that your body's doing and you're doing a three-day competition, right? Then selective usage of it is smart. If you're trying to train so that you can perform at your very best, you're training hard to generate a stress that is then going to facilitate the training effect and make you more fit. Years ago, I spoke with a Swiss professor, Michael Ristow. He had done work showing if you give, let's say, 400 milligrams of vitamin E and, you know,

sort of a higher dose of vitamin C prior to doing a normal exercise training program. So the placebo group during this couch to, you know, whatever, 4K, whatever, they go from their baseline, they measure their insulin sensitivity, and then the placebo group, after training for six weeks, had all the benefits that you would expect in their insulin sensitivity. The group that took the high dose, the doses of vitamin C and E, squashed the reactive oxygen species that then drive the benefit from the hard work. so it was like they were getting no benefit at all from the work that that's wild super important

to know right but i'm i am interested in things like creatine another another topical which is really interesting to me is uh lactigo have you heard of that one no so it's a it's a transdermal magnesium carnacine carnesine is less known what like people think of carnitine carnetine helps to facilitate fatty acids into the mitochondria for energy usage carnacine does a ton of things so it's in skin care products but what um you will have heard of beta alanine so people so what the reason you take beta alanine is because you're trying to increase your inner muscular stores of carnacine carnesine is an intercellular ion buffer so when you're generating when you're working out really hard you're generating energy at a fast pace right

your body can't keep up with it with oxidative phosphorylation so it has to then generate more energy from glycolytic mechanisms and eventually as a result of that there is this buildup product of lactic acid, and the acid part is what's problematic, right? Lactate itself, when lactic acid separates into hydrogen and lactate, the lactate is just a fuel, right? That's not a bad thing at all. It gets recycled back in, correct? You can, in fact, it's probably one of the most efficient fuel sources that your heart can use. It's a very efficient fuel source. The hydrogen raises the level of acidity, which then will do a couple of things to promote fatigue. It is interfering with the contractile apparatus of your muscles of your muscle tissue so it's actually interfering with

actinomyosin so you can't flex your muscles you can't contract them but even more importantly is the rate the raising of acidity will then tell your brain to reduce the maximum voluntary contraction stimulus so you you most fatigue is central fatigue yeah and then you that's and you feel it and so whether you're taking beta bicarbonate that's working more extracellularly or carnesine or beta alenine, that's working more intracellularly, you essentially buffer that response and you can get another 20% fitness. And whether is that actually blunting the training effect?

I'm not totally sure, but the positive case for that is because you're blunting the hydrogen, you're able to generate more lactate, and that in itself is actually driving a type of fitness that helps you process lactate faster and also serves as an epigenetic regulator that helps to put on more muscle. but lactate itself actually will serve as a transcription factor that adds muscle, which is cool.

Super cool. Yeah, I had Dr. Mike DeBoard on the podcast a few times who's big into blood flow restriction. Yes, love that topic. And detox just so much on the science of that. But get in the burn, stay in the burn. Yeah. As a rule of thumb, if you've got a 10-minute workout, make at least five of it where you're on fire. They'll actually have a training effect.

And that's mind-blowing to a lot of people. But most of the science is like 22 minutes coming out of Japan, 22 minutes. You want to have 22 minutes. You don't need to go past that. Through your warm-up, throw them on and go. And that's really recruiting fast-switch and slow-twitch, but it's also push the lactate threshold. Let's put, let's get the pump.

Let's go for it. That's a really fun way to get to something very quick without having the same volume. Yes. Of a workout that would require normally to get there. So that's exactly right. And you know what population, what population of people, scientists are excited for,

is older people because you can generate. There was just a study that came out. out this last week that your blood flow restriction training can facilitate hypertrophy in older people, which is hard to do when you get older. But you can do it with a lot less training loads. So if you have achy or stiff joints, what you do is use a lighter weight. And what the blood flow restriction does is it's preventing blood flow from, it keeps it, you keep the pump. And you have a buildup of acid, you have a buildup of these metabolic products, and it burns. but that's driving adaptations and facilitating strength and size

without having to use really heavy weights. So it's efficient and it's probably a little bit safer. And the other really good thing about it, because there's cool ideas that are out there, but if people can't do them, then it's cool but not useful. And people can stick with this. Older people can stick with this.

So it's good for athletes. It's good for older people. I think we're going to see a lot more on blood flow of restriction training. Yeah, I think so too. Yeah. What else should we cover here? I mean, we touched on some of the pieces, you know, from a holistic standpoint in terms of things that can shit.

I mean, it's red. I didn't realize you had that deep of a sleep background because, you know, that is one of the most important bases to cover. Yeah. When you think about health and wellness and most people that get into it are thinking, oh, maybe I just need to work out better. Or my diet's solid, but I eat a couple things I need to get rid of. And they really look at movement and diet as the main too. Yeah. Whereas this anabolic window that's setting the table for everything.

the next day, not just from a fitness standpoint, but from a cognitive standpoint as well and a longevity standpoint. So it's rad getting to dive deeply into that. Is there anything else you want to dive into on these topics of health? Yeah, I'll mention this because you asked about diet. So getting a sufficiency of micronutrients is one thing. But what it really excites me is this pharmacopoeia of phytonutrients that are out there in the world. So there are 80,000 edible plants. And hunter-gatherers would consume up to 700 different types of plants in a year and 20 to 30 in a day. So even if you're eating a plant-rich diet, we're eating the same things, cucumbers, carrots, tomatoes, right? It's a limited

pool of phytochemicals that are coming into the body. And that world is fascinating. There's so many things that these plant compounds are doing. And it's actually one of the reasons I was excited to join qualia because I think it's a perfect opportunity to help people add diversity of phytonutrients to even a good healthy diet. The way that we look at it is as a company, we're always trying to complement the wisdom of the body. So instead of finding one thing that we think is interesting and that overloading the body with that one thing, it's like, all right, how does this system work? What is our goal? We're going to try to affect this system in a particular way with a analytic or stem cell health, how do we do that? And a form, there's the art of formulation.

So you look at all the science and then you try to put that, you say, okay, which ingredients and compounds have an impact on stem cell health, for instance. And then the art of it is like putting it all together and saying, okay, we think that this is actually going to really make an impact positively. But stepping back to the main idea is that what we're really doing is helping people get exposure to things that are really good for you, but are not part of a common diet. And we're making it a lot more accessible. It's not, I could tell you to go eat Okinaw and seaweed. And you probably would, but is it going to become a regular part of your diet? And so that's one of the ingredients, for example, in the stem cell product. And it does really cool

things in terms of helping to keep our stem salt selfie. So there's 15 different ingredients just in that formula. And a lot of them, people are not. not eating regularly. Let's talk about that. First, let me just say one thing. I bet James Schmockenberger on a couple of times, I think at least twice. But I really appreciated this. When I was getting into more of, what I say, when I was coming online as a speaker

and somebody in the health and wellness space, speaking at PaleoFX and stuff like that, I remember Qualia coming. And I remember looking at the booth and, you know, I'm working on it. I'm doing my own supplement formulation with those guys. So I've got my head in that space. and I remember thinking about this and I talked to James like one of the things that I appreciated about

quality was that from a neutrophic standpoint is that it wasn't just a let's get the brain to work better right now it's what are the nutrients necessary to help the brain be extra healthy through longevity and so really it was like a kitchen sink but an incredibly well formulated kitchen sink

that was trying to cover all the bases and to me uniquely there was nothing else like that same really cool right and you guys had an analytic has now become stem cell, is that correct? So those are two different things. Those are two different things. Cool. Okay. How's your life been lately? It feels like mine is a never-ending hustle. The

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I love their powdered form. They are sweetened naturally. I give that to my son, who's a little older. And because it's seven different forms, there's no GI stress on the body. Like if you were to take just the single form, you're going to get at Whole Foods, your kids are probably going to shit their pants or shit the bet. That's just plain and plain and simple. So all that said, the seven forms is far easier on the stomach.

It's getting a better absorption, more bioavailability. I like it as a drink. I like it as a capsule. This is a must have in your supplement pantry. All right, back to the show. So I was recently at a mind chair conference, which is a conference for doctors that are basically branching off of conventional medicine and trying to create their own practice, doing a lot of functional medicine, maybe longevity medicine, and how to help the. The purpose of the conference is like how do you create a business? How do people find you?

Do you want to do a podcast? What should your website look like? It's actually really useful for that community. When I was there, I was always talking about synolytic and stem cells together as though it's like one product. So quickly, senesin cells are basically like the analogy we talk about with the stem cells like a zombie. So typically when a cell is at the end of its life, it'll undergo a program cell death called apoptosis. these cells evade that process and they will they have three different characteristics they have they will release a lot of inflammatory molecules into the surrounding space they resist cell death

and and so those two things they're they're not quite dead they're still alive they're not contributing functionally and one senescent cell out of 10,000 healthy cells can still cause enough damage to raise chronic, to facilitate or contribute to chronic inflammation, which is one of the hallmarks of aging. And the way to think of inflammation is we tend to think of it as a bad thing, but it's another communication system in the body. And what happens when you have the level of inflammation rising in the body is that it's harder for the body to hear those signals.

Like it's being in a room with a person who's hard of hearing. And if you were just to speak at the volume that we're speaking now, the message isn't getting through because they can't hear it. And so now the analogy is that now I'm having to talk at a higher volume just to get the message across. And that's why inflammation rises. It's trying to get the, it's trying to do its job. But as a result, it's also wreaking havoc in the body in terms of how effective all of our tissues

are. So it's like this. It's bottlenecks, the resources everywhere else. Like we're exposed to germs all the time, but maybe you keep getting sick because the chronic inflammation is. high that your immune system's tax to begin with. Exactly. You don't sleep as well.

You're not maintaining because of inflammation. You're not maintaining your blood glucose levels as well. You're not fighting infections as well. All of those things have chronic inflammation as a contributor to that effect. So the reason why senescent cells, like we don't want to prevent senescence because when a cell is getting older, we want it to actually flip into senescence so it doesn't become cancerous. So when it, preventing that would be problematic.

But then once they're there, we want to get rid of them. And their natural mechanism is to release all these inflammatory molecules, which then tells your immune system, hey, come clear me out. It's like their beacon. A little signal. Yes. But when you get older, you undergo what's called thymic involution. So your immune system stops producing beta cells, T cells as effectively.

Your immune system is not as effective. So it doesn't clear them out as much. So when you're younger, every time you make. a senescent cell, you clear it, and your net senescent cells stays even until you're at 30s, at which point it starts to rise a little bit. And then it goes up, it's like exponential. And so by the time you're in seven, your 80s, you know, you might have quite a few senescent cells. And not only are they not contributing functionally, but they're really creating this internal stew that is going to make everything else harder to do. So if your immune system isn't clearing

them out, is there any other way to do that? And in the mid-2010, a couple of researchers started to look at what are called synolytics. And synolytic means compounds that actually destroy or kill senescent cells. So one of the characteristics of senescent cells is they have this, these upregulation of these survival pathways. And with these targeted flavonoids, these beautiful natural compounds, like facetin, which you'd see in cucumbers and strawberries, at a high dose, you know, you'd have to eat like a truckload,

but high doses of that with quercetin and curcumin, Piperlongamine, you're targeting these receptor tyrosine kinase, or they're on the cell, and they, because they're upregulated, only those cells are affected, right? Your healthy cells are not affected. They're not, you're not giving your healthy cells a die signal, only the ones that have dramatically upregulated systems that are promoting their survival. And what we've seen is that you can kill those senescent cells and all sorts of beneficial things happen.

So one study was fascinating. This is where I could really set the world on fire. for this topic, but there was a gentleman who was undergoing cancer treatment with something called Navidaclachs, and he was an older gentleman with completely white hair, and his hair completely turned black again. I know. I'm certainly not promising that effect with people, but that individual, I remember looking at that back in the early 2000s and seeing the before and after photos. They were not expecting that. That was not the purpose of the trial. But it certainly ignited the interest

of the research community. That's wild. Yeah, so that's what Cynolytic does, and our product, you only take it two days a month. So you take these high doses of these natural compounds that are causing cellular stress, causing them to actually die. And you do it,

what I do is I put in my calendar, I do a Saturday Sunday, and then I wait, and then with our new stem cell product, stem cells is a whole cool line. Essentially, it's our body's regeneration system. And the way that stem cells work is we have all these niche of stem cells in the body and stem cells can become different things they they are like a lump of clay

and when they divide they make these two daughter cells one of which stays a stem cell so it can divide and be right the other one is now destined to become some tissue in the body and we have what are called levels of potencies so a potency if you're if you have a pluripotent or toty potent stem cell it can become anything in your body if you have a multipotent cell it can become a few things. It goes down only certain lineages. And the way that I think about it, it's an imperfect but useful analogy. Think of a college freshman being a totipotent or pluripotent stem cell. You haven't taken any classes. You haven't declared any major. You can become anything, right? And then, but as you get into your like junior and senior year and you've taken a bunch

of science classes and you're aiming towards medicine, you've now gone down a lineage and you become, you can become less things, but you can still become any kind of doctor. And so, for example, mezenkimal stem cells which you know are used in medical therapies those can become uh they can restore your blood they can restore so like oxygen carrying molecules in your blood or your immune system they can become one of several different tissue types but stem cells typically are quiescent they're quiet they're in they should be in their bed sleeping and if we over stimulate them then you will facilitate one of the hallmarks of aging which is stem cell exhaustion you'll tire down that system. This is a fair point to bring up because as fasting hit its high, you start to see even guys

like Peter Atia doing seven-day water fast quarterly. Yeah. And I was like, well, that doesn't kind of pair well ancestrally. You know, like we might have had it. If you have white skin and you're closer to the poles. Yeah. You probably had a harsh winter where you might have had to fast once or twice, maybe even a longer stretch during that time or, you know, maybe you only had, you know, some, some leftover animal stuff to go with and you were severely calorically restricted. And still had a good amount of fat, and so you were in nutritional ketosis most of that time. Yes. Doesn't make sense, though, that in July.

So I think the quarterly thing, that was a question that I had. Yeah. People really became gung-ho about that was like, can you overdo that? And if so, like, maybe we only have a certain amount of stem cells. So you're tapping into an idea that we're discussing and leveraging. So with several of our new supplements, you do them periodically. The synolytic product, you do it once a month. it's our most popular product we weren't sure if it was going to be a success at all and it took off people get the idea right and I think the fact that you just get it on subscription and then you take it two days and then you have to wait a month is actually really helpful yeah and then with stem cells it's four days on and then you wait to the next month so it's a bunch of ingredients that are if you look at the stem cell cycle so they're sleeping in their bed and they're quiescent and when they get the signal you have to wake them up out of the mom wakes them up out of their bed right and then they prolifer prolifer

so they duplicate, make more, and then they are then get into the bloodstream. And through these different homing signals, they are able to figure out what tissues need to be repaired. We talked about the hayflick limit, right? A cell can duplicate, can replicate, but eventually it stops. When that cell, we got to replace that tissue. Now it's no longer replicating. Now we need to get in there, replace it with new tissue. And really aging can be defined in a lot of ways by the balance of your repair processes going from always repairing and maintaining the full, your full body to it tilting in a way where you're not regenerating as fully over time. And one of the reasons why stem cells exhaust is because of the inflammatory environment. They're there, but they're

not hearing the signal and they can't do their job. So over the four-day period, we're modifying the inflammatory state. We're stimulating more stem cell proliferation and activation. We're helping them in their homing process, which is the process by which they find the tissues where they need to go. Is that through the ingredients themselves or through like dietary guidelines while you're doing? As James was telling me, you know, it's a good idea when you take Cynolidic to have like a fasting window or if you can do a 24 hour dinner to dinner type thing where you skip skip everything for 24 hours if you can, right? And I think that's great too. You know, like as a periodic, boom, I'm going to just reset everything. And that also seems like it could

have been more of the case during the year when foods are plenty. They're still like, I'm going to take a day off and just let my body reset. Yeah, for sure. So when I do Cynolitic, I have very low protein the night before and then fast the morning of and then I'll have low protein for the rest of the day for those two days. And the reason why is because MTOR, right, we know that's mechanistic target of rapamycin. It's stimulated by protein. That is going to protect. That is actually a growth signal. So you're now sending conflicting messages. We don't want to help protect and strengthen the cells when we're trying to kill them, right? We're trying to damage them. So another thing that another lifestyle accompaniment to the product would be to do a 20 minute high intensity training or

blood flow restriction training. That is going to also send some stress signals that's going to amplify that process. And I'm all about like what are all the things that we can do in that moment to get the best results, right? The supplement can play a part of that. But let's not stop there. Let's use it as a catalyst to get the best results that we can. And at the same time, that's not complicated too much so that only few people can do it. Yeah.

Right. So start with the supplement, but then do these extra things if you want to get the most out of it. And I think that's a great approach. I'm creating protocols on this now. Very cool. Yeah. And then, yeah,

with the whole idea, then with this whole differentiation process is fascinating too. So now you have this like lump of clay that's arrived at like a muscle, right? How does it know to become that type of cell, right? And we have all of our genetics. We have our entire gene in every cell, our genome in every cell. And then it undergoes this very beautiful symphony where it's hearing messages from that the extracellular matrix and growth signals that will then activate ancient pathways

that are 1.2 to 700 million years old. There's only 7 to 10 of them, right? We didn't read, when we, when humans evolved into existence, we didn't reinvent cells. We built on top of every layer that came before us. And so these layers are super, super old. And what happens then is the stem cells receive those messages and it initiates the signaling cascade, which creates these transcription factors that say make these proteins and not these. And it's this reinforcing loop that locks in cell fate so that it becomes the right tissue.

You don't want a neuron in your muscle or a fat cell. You want a muscle cell. And that process is so enamoring to me. Like it's incredible that all this stuff is happening in the backdrop. And so, yeah. So then during those four days, I'll do more steady state, more zone two type of training. I'm not trying to create more damage. I'm trying to facilitate blood flow.

I'm eating before I was fasting. Definitely taking our NAD product, which is, you know, helping with cellular energy. that is a fascinating conversation probably too much for today but think of NAD as cabs in a city right and when you're as you get older by the time you're 50 you have half of the cabs that you did when you were younger and so it's harder to just move people around the city and so the science is the reason why NAD has garnered a lot of attention is because you can with precursors and other types of nutrients that affect the enzymes that are involved in the regulation of NAD production, you can make, you can actually increase your NAD levels quite a bit and back towards youthful

levels. And that is going to help with the energy of the rebuilding process. So what do we, you know, we think that, you know, we might be able to, you know, with health span, it's extending the level of health farther into the lifespan, right? Yeah. That we might be able to positively affect that. And I think ultimately it's going to come from a combination of products, not just one. You have to understand different mechanisms. You have to understand timing and you have to sequence them together. And we're looking at even other products for other hallmarks of aging. That's where the future is going to be, I think, is a, you know, a multi-targeted approach to keeping our youth longer. That's it right there. I don't want to live to 150. Yeah. I don't need

to upload my consciousness to the machine. I don't give a fuck about that. But I do want to live well into my 90s, you know, if I die at 90, but I've lived well all the way through my 80s, I want my 80s to be awesome. I don't want to be bedridden or, you know, an old curmudgeon. I want to have use, right? I want to be able to use my body and the body is ultimate freedom or it's its own prison, right? Depending on how you treat it. Yeah. We, you know, evolution favors. We still have a role when we get older. There's less emphasis on maintaining our peak form, but we can do surprisingly well when we give it all the factors that we, that it needs so that we can continue to contribute to the tribe and share our aggregated wisdom of living longer to help younger generations

be more successful, steer clear of problems, help them solve their problems. That is the evolutionary reason why we live as long as we do, where Sam and die hours to a week after they mate. There is no aging. There's maturation, there's reproduction, and there's death. And we have a protracted aging period. And even though it happens, we don't like a lot of it, we can also be grateful for it. Yeah, especially if they have the opportunity to give back.

Yes. To people we love. Dude, it's been so awesome having you on the podcast. We will do this again for a certain. Where can people find you online? And then we'll link to all this stuff too with Qualia, the senolytic, stem cell, all that good stuff. Yeah.

So we're qualia life.com. Jenny on my team. So we're at the health science department, a newer department. She's working really hard writing blogs that go into one of the ingredients in detail. What is all the science? that we know on the cyanobacteria that we use to stimulate stem cell proliferation. So we cover both the science and the therapeutic areas of areas that we're trying to make positive impact and also other areas.

Like, what are the effect of the one she's working on right now is the value of letting your mind wander. So the attention restoration theory, going in nature, letting your thoughts just move through you without any sort of task on, like thinking about something, just let that default mode network just clear out all your thoughts and how valuable that is yeah that's it's a huge one for sleep absolutely i tell a lot of people if the first time you're alone with yourself and you're thinking is right before you go to bed good luck nodding off you got it you have to set a set aside time for the ability to just let shit move and and reflect even on the day and then not reflect and just

let it go that we're gonna i think we're going to discover that the with cell phones and everything there become it's going to be another issue that we face which is the lack of mind wandering and you're right you know so much of your day gets the process but we're always getting information in and we're not processing it enough so i agree with you yeah we'll talk about sleep another time too hell yeah brother can't wait we'll go deep good it's so great thank you oh man absolutely