#409: How to LIVE YOUNG for a Lifetime: The Real Secrets of Mindset, Medicine & Longevity | Personalized Health Explained With Dr. Jeffrey Gladden

Welcome to Longevity. I'm your host, Natalie Nidom. I'm a nutritionist, a human potential and epigenetic coach, and I created this podcast to bring you the latest ways to take control of your health and longevity. We cover it all from new technology and ancestral health practices, to personalize interventions, and a very special interest of mine, peptides and bio-regulators. Enjoy the show. Hi, I'm Natalie Nidom, your host, and we are back with an amazing episode today. Have you ever heard these words before? Everything looks normal for your age. Those words change the course of Dr. Jeffrey Gladden's life and his medical career. After decades as an interventional cardiologist, he hit his own health wall and refused to accept decline as inevitable. In this episode, we talk about why most medicine still treats sickness instead of health, how insulin and nervous system stress quietly drive aging, and why the same diet can help one person and harm another. 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Welcome to the show, Dr. Jeffrey Gladden. It is a complete honor to have you here today. Thank you for taking your time. Well, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Let's get people oriented around who you are and where you come from and all the things. And you know, you spent over 25 years as an interventional cardiologist. Yeah. We were just talking about this a minute ago. And like other people in your field, you woke up one morning. It seems, and I'm going to invite you to share with us how this happened at one point. At some point, you woke up one morning or maybe we're standing in the OAR with somebody's heart in your hands thinking there's a better way, you know, there's a better way to do this. Maybe we don't have to get people don't have to get to this stage before somebody intervenes as an interventional cardiologist. So. Okay. Yeah, we can get into that story. I think, you know, I loved being an interventional cardiologist, right? I did a lot of things in that space here in Dallas, Texas, North Texas, Southeast Oklahoma. It turned out that I was kind of entrepreneurial as well, right? I put myself through college with my summer painting business and some things like that. And so anyway, when I got into medicine, I kind of circled back in. So I ended up building my own heart group. I co-founded a heart hospital here. I was involved with medical device companies. I was building cath labs. I was, you know, involved with lots of different things. And I really enjoyed it. However, I was always struck by a line in the cath lab when we would go in and put a stent in or open up an artery. And the crew in the lab would always say, oh, it's like a new artery, right? Because when you look on the angiogram, you would see this, you know, perfect silhouette of contrast going through an artery. It's like, oh, it's a new artery. And yet I was always so skeptical of that comment because it's like, no, it's not a new artery. It's an artery with a stent in it. And because we were using intracoronary ultrasound to lactoseurilup inside the arteries, which most cardiologists don't do, didn't do, still don't do, we could actually see they were full of plaque. The arteries were full of plaque. So there was nothing remotely close to this was a new artery, right? This was not a new artery. So I had a level of skepticism about what we were doing even then, even though, you know, it was interesting work, and it was good work. And we felt like we were helping people. And then with some genetic testing came along right after, I don't know, 1999, 2000, somewhere in there, I jumped on the bandwagon that because all of a sudden it's like, oh, well, let's see what your predisposition is for heart disease. Maybe we can make different decisions based on what we see here. And an actual fact we could. And so we found that if people would implement what we found based on some of the genetic insights we had, and even whether they would benefit from a statin or they wouldn't benefit from a statin or these kinds of things, it was like, oh, this is interesting. And we were getting better outcomes for people with that. But what really flipped the switch for me was not an insight standing in the catholic per se, but it was my own health journey. So what happened to me in my 50s was that all of a sudden, you know, I found myself putting on weight being exhausted all the time, even when I got a couple of good nights sleep, I would, you know, I was doing a lot of things. So there was stress in my life. And I would find it if I got overly stressed, I would become anxious and then I would go over a cliff of depression. And I struggled with some depression earlier in my life as well, going through a divorce and things like that. I think I spent most of my 20s actually being somewhat depressed. And so I'm concerned about all these things. And my father died with dimension. I'm developing brain fog. So I've got brain fog. I've got exhaustion. I'm losing muscle mass. I'm putting on fat, right? And not looking good. I'm getting depressed, right? And it's like, okay, there's a problem here. Now, the interesting thing is my grandmother, my mother's mother, I was very close to my mom's parents, had always told me as a kid and teenager in Puerto Baros, Jeff, it's healthy, get old. You don't ever want to get old. Jeff, it's healthy, get old. You don't ever want to get old. And initially it was like, oh yeah, grab them. Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob. Now here I am sort of like feeling this stuff. So I go in and I'm tested by one of my colleagues. And what I'm told is, you know, all your tests come back looking normal, free or age. You're just getting older. Why don't you take an antidepressant? And I think it was that moment in time that was really the most one of the most existential moments in my life. It's like, oh my gosh, I'm looking right down the barrel of this aging process. And it's all going to be downhill from here, right? And it's like, really, I've hit the scene. It's in my life. I'm 52 or whatever it was. I was like, this is it. This is the peak. It doesn't get any better than this. Yeah. And I couldn't make peace with that, of course. So I've always been very athletic. You know, I grew up playing soccer, basketball, running, you know, I do a lot of athletics to this very day. Snowboarding, mountain biking, all that kind of stuff. But the point is, I couldn't believe it was all going to be downhill. And that I wasn't going to be able to keep up with my kids anymore, right? Which is also a big deal. And so I basically, at that point, through myself, the functional integrative age management medicine space, and it took me two and a half years. And I had some help, of course, but I figured everything out, right? So clinical hypothyroidism, the blood work looks fine, but it's by reflexes were very slow. Rest in metabolic rate was low. Genetically, I don't convert inactive T4 to active T3 in my brain. I'm homozygous. I had to snip a DIO2 snip that decreases my ability to do that. That'll be me out. Right. So if you've just given me centroid, typical T4, you know, it wouldn't done that much for me. But I got on the right combination of T3 and T4, and all of a sudden inside of a week, the lights came back on. It's like, oh my gosh, I can bounce out of bed again. Then I was hormonally depleted, right? 20 years ago, that was a newer thing that it is today, but testosterone was down. DHA was down. Things like that. Got some of that repeated, lost 20 pounds of fat, put on 10 pounds of muscle. And then the anxiety, depression, and brain fog are all related to the fact that I don't have Alzheimer's genes, even though my father died with dementia, but I don't make certain neurotransmitters efficiently. So once I figured out the methylation cycle, and it was beyond the methylation cycle, some other things that factor in there, I got on the right set of supplements, and I also learned how to meditate, but I could come under lots of stress and I get depressed. And all of a sudden, I'm like, gosh, I feel great again. I've been practicing sick care, not health care. I can't do it anymore. I don't want to have sick care conversations anymore. I want to actually help people that are going through what I'm going through to optimize their life and get back what they think they've lost irrevocably and actually get that back for them. So I left in 2012, and I kind of based jumped out of a very successful practice into a world where I had no idea how to make a living. And simultaneously, I was putting a couple of girls through school and then went through a divorce and everything else. It was heavy lifting, lots of things going on. But the point is that when I started to feel really, really good again, I started to ask the question, gosh, I wonder how good I can be, how strong, how mentally sharp, how many years and decades can we carry forward. And that was really the initial question that kind of drove me forward. Because in the process of reclaiming my health, what I learned is that it's the questions we ask that we get the answers to. If we're not asking the right questions, we're not getting the right answers, right? You and I were talking about a couple of things about diet prior to just jumping on the podcast here. And we can circle back to that. The problem is people are asking the wrong questions. And I can I'll show you how that works. But anyway, it's really, really interesting to go through that journey. And so really initially it was it was a concierge cardiology, then health optimization, then it was, you know, really what's grown into glad and longevity, which is really focused on this concept of when we're 100, we want to have a 30 year old body or pick whatever age you want, 27, 26. Already would work. 40. 40. Yeah, it's your old body. Great. Yeah. 40. I just finished the call with the guy out of Atlanta that wants to be 52. So that's great too, whatever you want. But develop a 300 slash 3000 year old mind. All the inside equanimity, wisdom, tranquility, transcendence, and being able to resonate in a very powerful, strong vibration of creativity and from a loving place creating joy. And so when we're able to do that, it's like, gosh, all of a sudden longevity is like the most exciting prospect on the planet. It's not about living longer, just that. It's not about more gall for more grandkids. It's about, gosh, we get to actually step into a life that nobody's been able to live before, right? Use the body, all this wisdom, and then bring that forward. So that's that's kind of how it's evolved. You know, that is the most appealing articulation of living a very long life that I've heard from ever from anybody because everybody talks about I want to live to 150 or 180 or 200 or I've had a guy on the podcast who said, I'm never going to die. Like they're dying as a natural. He tells me. Yeah. And I'm sitting there going, it sounds exhausting. Like this just sounds exhausting. But this this idea of a youthful body with a with a 3000 year old mind, which is both of which are founded on principles of resilience that right that we need with that resilience is how we now can ebb and flow. And and I'm still not convinced that 200 years is is a good runway. But I you know, to hang on to that, to have that concept for as long as we're on this earth for whatever reason. Yeah. Is a much it's a it seems like a much more mature approach than I don't want to die. Right. Yeah. I'm not I'm not an immortalist. I will say that. And if I get hit on a by a bus on the way home this afternoon, I'm actually fine with that too. Right. It's been an amazing journey. Right. I don't really have a fear of death. I think I'm just on to the next adventure really. So it's not about that for me. It's really about how do we actually step into a higher level of what it is to be human, right. Create better relationships, all these sorts of things. To me, that's exciting and fun. So I think about that. And I think it's such an abstraction to think about what does it mean to be 150 or 200, right? Every person every picture I ever saw of somebody 120 or 110 is like, geez, I don't know. That's not really what I'm going for. Yeah. Right. So there's a lot of appeal to that. So I think I like the target that we have. And it helps us to really reference things and stay on track also because I'll tell you this when I when I wake up every morning, I wake up 27. I was born in 1954 and February 54, right. So but I wake up 27 every day. And the reason I do that is because if we say, well, I'm good for my age. I'm better than most people. My age will react, reacting to aging, right. So it's like, no, pick the age you want to be. And then reference that. And if I don't feel that age, it's like, well, what do we need to do to get back there? And that drives so much of asking the right questions. What do I need to do? What do I, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you get back to where you go. So yeah, yeah. No, I love that. And I think the big question, the piece of the question that a lot of people live, leave out and we'll talk about some of the consequences of this for me because it is about the individual, right. So like you said to me, you know, well, if you want to be 40, because maybe that's the time in my life when I felt the most amazing. Like in my 30s, I was a hot mess. In my 20s, I was like, well, don't even talk to me about it. But when I hit 40 man, I was crushing it. So, you know, so that's where, and that's exactly like your patients who said, I want to be 52 because that's probably in his mind when he finally got it together and felt his best. So, yeah. And so, you know, we often talk about physicians personalizing medicine or, or, you know, personalizing this, that, and the other thing. But our people really getting their heads around, how do I personalize everything for me, myself? How do I create my own so critical journey? And, and you talk about longevity mindset. And I think this is what you were, you were alluding to just now the longevity mindset that, and maybe you want to talk about it and get into it a little bit more, that is rooted in wisdom and equanimity. Equanimity is not a word we hear very often. But it inherently is probably the missing ingredients in the world at this very second. Yeah, there's several missing ingredients that I think equanimity certainly one of them. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, where would you like me to start? What's, what's, there's just described what this longevity mindset is, right? Because maybe it's a place of wanting less, but, but doing more or whatever, however you. Yeah, I'll, I'll tee it up for you by giving you the construct that we've created. So, the, you know, what are the handicaps? I think that we have, and I will just echo it is individual. So, just as I'm saying this, understand it's individual. But one of the problems that we have with the aging process is that we perceive it to be linear when it's actually exponential. Every year is on the birthday. I don't feel that much different. It's a linear process. And yet we know people age a lot more between 70 and 80 and 80 and 90 than 20 and 30, right? So, and, but wait, if we ask ourselves, what are we going to be like in 20 years? Right? A few and I do that. What are we going to be like in 20 years? It's virtually impossible to imagine we're going to be any different than we are today. Now, the human brain doesn't do that. It doesn't go there. It doesn't go there. Right? So, so we're basically in an exponential game that we relate to from a linear perspective that we can't really feel. Right? That puts us at a big disadvantage. Right? And so, understanding that it's an exponential game and then understanding that many of the solutions that are offered in the quote-unquote longevity space, it's all about diet. It's all about exercise. It's all about VO2. It's all about this. It's all about that. It's all about peptides. It's all about stem cells. Ultimately, all those things are great in the right place for the right person at the right time. But they're actually linear approaches to an exponential problem. They don't actually get at the real root cause. So, in our world, what we did was to think about how do you actually develop an exponential response to an exponential problem? What's the exponential strategy going to be? And so, for us, there's really five circles, five areas that need to be addressed. The first one is life energy. The second one is longevity itself. And these are the actual hallmarks of aging, the biological processes that drive aging, right? Which are not typically addressed directly. But there are things like synes and cell formation, immunosynescence, shortened telemures, decreased autophagy, produced proteostasis, mitochondrial dysfunction, inflammation, oxidative stress, these things. So, going at those becomes important. And then all the health things, right? Every organ system and all the subsystems. And then performance. So, when I'm 100, I want to be fast, agile, strong, quick, balanced, great cardiovascular capacity, reserve capacity, you know, anything I want to do, flexibility. So, I can do that now. I can do anything I want to do, right? But I have to train for that. When you're 18, you lift some weights and go for a run, you know, as you go through the decades, it takes different training, right? You've got a train and you, one of the biggest insights about training is it's not about your muscles, it's about your nervous system. You're actually training your nervous system. The muscles come along for the ride, right? How you move, how quick you are, etc. So, so that's the fourth circle. Then the fifth circle is really understanding the environments we reside in. We all live at home, work, business travel, vacation. And when you optimize those and what I mean by optimize, let's make it as easy as possible to do what you want to get done. Keep the toxins out, whether it's mold or chemicals or whatever else or toxic relationships for that matter. Or it's also where your sneakers, what's in the refrigerator? What's in the freezer at 8 o'clock at night? When I know I'm going to eat whatever's there, no matter, you know, how disciplined. No matter exactly. So, so it's about architecting those spaces to support the mission, if you will. So, when you put all that together, then you can actually start to create an understanding of what the levers are that reside on each of those circles, how to test for those, and then how to basically take action on them. And that becomes an exponential response with the feedback loops of follow-up testing and wearables and things. So, that's how we think about that. Now, back to the mindset of aging. I think, you know, people can get into longevity for many different reasons. They don't want to die. They don't believe they should die. They're afraid of dying. They've got a lot to live for. They want to do more, you know, they want to sell this company and start for more. They've got a lot of grandkids. I want to have great grandkids. There's many different reasons. But at the end of the day, I think because longevity represents this opportunity for us to be expansive in terms of our psychospiritual development. The life energy circle is really focused on that. And it starts off with a gross mindset. So, we've all heard that term, but what does it mean, actually? Right? So, for me, the way I've defined it for myself is, are you married to your answers? Are you married to your questions? Love that. Right. Love that. Because many people married to their answers, for sure. Right. They get married to their net because we were talking about that before the show started. And so, the thing for me is that, even if you have strong beliefs, all of your growth is going to come from the questions that you're asking, not the answers that you have. And I think that's so critical to understand. And so, in our world, we have thousands of answers in this practice, literally thousands, right? And we'll happy to apply them in the right situation, but we're not married to any one of them. We're only married to five questions. How good can you be? How do you make 100 to new 30? How do you live well beyond 120? How do you live young for a lifetime? And how do you develop a 300-year-old mind? Right? So, every day we wake up asking the questions. So, it's like, there's something new. It's something new. Interesting. Good. New insight, new insight, new insight. Right. So, we're learning at a massively accelerated pace here. The other thing about gross mindset is, are you a binary thinker? Or are you a quantum thinker? Right. When you look around the world, there's so much binary thought. Right? We're right. You're wrong. We thought about it for 2000 years. Let's do it for another thousand years. Somebody should shoot a nuke because, you know, ideal, you know, I mean, it's just total BS. Right? So, humans are not very smart. We have intellectual capability, but we don't have much wisdom. Right? And so, moving from binary thinking into quantum thinking, like a quantum computer, zero to one, right? And when you flip a coin, if it's spinning in the air, that's like a quan. That's like a qubit. It's everything at once. It's all when it runs in your palm that it becomes. That's right. And so, when you have the ability to look at something rather than a binary, it's got to be this or that, but it's a field of all possibilities. How do we get the best solution at this time for the people involved in this situation? Now, it opens up the creativity. Now you're asking the right questions about how do you actually do that? Right? Now, you can actually move the planet yourself, the planet, your community, your family, whatever else forward. So, I think that growth mindset, those elements that would become really, really critical. And I could walk you all around the circle, but that's a piece of it. Well, I just, you know, the death of curiosity is the death of humanity. And I think that even if we go back to even alopathic medicine, I think the biggest failing is that in training doctors, when they're young, I've always kind of believed that they crushed the curiosity out of them. Like they, they discourage it, they beat it out of them, they exhaust them until they can't ask another question, you know what I mean? And it's, it's because, you know, people like to just to put down alopathic medicine. And I, I don't think anybody's out to most 99% of doctors are out to do good. It's just the toolkit that they were left with by the end of their training was lacking in this one very, well, two critical ingredients, which is humility and curiosity. I agree with you completely. The way I characterize as we were all brainwashed, right? Yeah. We all went through a brainwashing school. And at the end of the school, what we were led to believe was that you now hold all the answers. There's no other discipline that can hold the candle to the knowledge that you have. Everything else is really not of much value. And you, you are the, now the, the holders of, of health, right? And that's how we were brainwashed, right? And so you come out out to your point of four years and sleepless nights and thousands of hours of work. And, and, you know, you are now in that system. Yeah. And it wasn't until I realized the failings of that system that I was able to leave it. I was always curious, like, oh, I couldn't do this better. How about if we did that? You know, I even remember a medical school wondering, she said, what if we could do labs and see if we could optimize a person, not just make, you know, better, right? But the point is, yeah, we, all of us are brainwash. And then what we do is we get married to those answers. So, right? And then that's that's now of everybody. I don't care if you're a chiropractor, a naturopath, an MD, you know, whoever you are, psychologist for that matter. If you're married to your answers, it's not really that helpful, right? So, and I think it's the reason why we're seeing powerful healers come out of all of those disciplines. That's right. Right? Because, and, and I think what's, what I think is really exciting is, and I've interviewed some really powerful healers who aren't medical doctors, but who are healing people in ways that are so incredibly powerful. So helping people to kind of break through that paradigm, but also, you know, the other thing with the amplification of social media and what, not everybody becomes an expert, helping people to really cut through the chave. And I think it's when you, it's that thing that you said about people who take, and I don't know, I don't remember how you said it, you said it way better than I'm about to. But when, well, no, you just said it, you said, when you're married to your answer, which means they've took in their flag and they've staked it in the ground. And this is the only way. That's right. Because they needed to write a book, and they needed to pitch an idea. And the publisher needed that idea, constructed in a certain way. I'm like, so now what do you do when you find out that wasn't right? Or that there's something else? Or that that's not the whole truth? That's right. And, and so, yeah, I mean, there's not even a question there. It's just like, no, it's a good, it's a good comment because I think if you're listening to this and you're wondering, you know, the field is so full of many voices, right? And who do you quote, unquote, believe? I think the person you can believe the most is the person's actually asking the questions that isn't married to the answers, right? And so one of the things that we do in our, in our practice here in the clinic here is even though we literally have thousands of answers, the first thing we want to do when we're working with somebody is actually deconstruct their situation and understand them incredibly deeply, you know, genetics, testic, biometric testing. I mean, you name it like we're literally sending things around the world to get the results that we need. So that we deeply understand this individual. And then the psychospiritual piece of it going through conversations with them about that. Why do they want to do this? What's important to them? Personality profiles, many, many layers of decoding and deconstructing the individual is like, oh, okay, so now we can actually start to make recommendations, right? A classic example is food. Food is, everybody needs to be a corner whore, everybody needs to be a vegan, everybody needs to, you know, eat this, you know, eggs are good, eggs are bad, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So the problem with every diet, the way I see it, is that it always starts with the food, right? Kale is good, Kale is bad, right? It turns out that we think diet or diets are actually very, very personalized. And so you really have to start with the individual. How are they built? Genetically, what do they do? How do they process carbs genetically, right? What's their gut bio? What's their digestive track? You know, what's their immune system doing, right? You get all that stuff together, you know, whether they like what actually tastes good to them. You get all that together and then you can actually put together a diet that works for them. But we pull from all kinds of stuff for one person, it feels great for another person, it's not. But you have to figure out who fits you, right? So I think also one of the most, when I was practicing as a nutritionist, one of the most powerful questions I felt I needed to get clarity on from someone. And it comes very fast. Yeah. Is are you a person who eats to live or lives to eat? Because that is going to really inform how you help that person to adopt the diet that's really going to nourish them, right? Because that person who lives to eat, man, it better tastes good. And it better be around pretty often, right? Yeah. And the, and the, and the, and the eat to live person is like they can eat the same four foods every day for the, for eternity. They don't care, right? And so they're going to build, it's just other, it's another set of challenges and constructs that they need to deal with. But let's go back to the personalization of diet, because I do think that's really fascinating. And one of the conversations we had before we turned on the mics was the, and I don't want to name names or anything, but even in, and we'll talk about cardiology because that's your roots. In the world of cardiology, we have, we have cardiologists who believe that a carnivore high fat lifestyle is the path and any carb is really going to destroy your arteries and create that situation you described with the plaque. And versus we have leaders in the field who believe that plant-based diet is the only way to go that those animal fats are just going to clog you up and kill you. And I think that what, before we get into the conflict, which is the sad part, I think that both sides help people. We have, both sides have success. Both sides help some people. Correct. Exactly. They help some people. And, and of course, everybody who talks about the people, they help. They don't really talk about the litter of people in the background that didn't get hurt. So, that's exactly right. I'd love to invite you to kind of weigh in on this whole, and it repeats in all different areas, right? That's right. Sea Doyles, you know, are sea Doyles really the product of Satan put on this source to destroy ourselves, or is there some nuance that we need to pull out of there? Yeah, yeah, no exactly. Well, again, I think it really comes down to the fact that, you know, one man's food is another man's poison, so to speak, right? And so it's important to understand who you are, how you build, what you digest the systems doing, what your immune system's doing, what you're gut biomes doing. And, and also what we have found empirically is that people's guts do better when they're exposed to a variety of foods, so people were to eat the same foods, the most people eat about 14 or 16 foods a day, or you know, that's sort of a thing. They just cycle through, yeah. Exactly. So, what we've found is that when people only eat certain foods, their immune system starts to react to those foods, and so that can set up inflammation and other problems. So, we like people to have variety in their foods, right? They expand it to 40 foods, right? And so each time you go into the store, buy something a little different. Well, we got beats last time. Let's get turnips this time. Let's get, you know, just switch it up. So we find that to be helpful. We also find that people really don't understand the whole carbohydrate scenario. And one of the things that we do is we measure how many copies of the amylase gene they have, which is basically an idea of how how, so this is a redundant gene just for the audience. This is a redundant gene. You have many copies. You can have one copy or 20 copies of this amylase gene. And if you have more copies, you basically secrete in your saliva more amylase, which helps you start to break down carbs. And it turns out that people that can break down carbs more efficiently can carry more body weight and have become diabetic. They can, you know, tolerate more carbs if you will. So knowing that is helpful. One of the things that we do for everyone is a two hour glucose tolerance test with an insulin curve because it is stunning to see how many people have insulin resistance, even though they have a normal hemoglobin A1C of 5.3. They have a normal fasting blood sugar of 90 or 89. And yet when you challenge them by giving them 75 grams of glucose, oh my gosh, there are a lot of genetic factors, right, that decrease somebody's increase in creatin levels to where they don't get the signal that sugar just hit the system. And they could go from 90 to 180 in the first hour, right? Yeah. They're insulin, they lag way behind. But their insulin may come out at the end and crush it. Now they have a blood sugar of 49 at the end of two hours, right? So there's that process. And then there are people where they control a sugar perfectly, but they're taking way more insulin than they should to do it, right? If you have an insulin level of three at rest or two, it should go up maybe four to five times. So call it 15. We just had a guy in here from Virginia, 40-year-old guy, healthy guy, had a resting insulin of 10. It was up over 130 at one hour. Wow. That's intense. Exactly. And nobody would have picked that up. And did you crash on the other side? No, he didn't crash. No, he didn't crash. His system was still over 100 at two hours. And he just controlled his blood sugar normally, right? And so is that a good thing? It's good to control your blood sugar. It's terrible to have high insulin. To need to need to have those insulin levels so high. Yeah. Correct. Because the insulin drives aging, just like an ITF-1 drives aging, right? So it basically increases senescent cell formation. It's stiffens arteries. It does all kinds of things. And sugar itself will destroy the glyco-calix, which aligns the arteries, which keeps some healthy. And so, unless you're, my point is, unless you're deconstructing the situation, unless you're looking behind the curtain, behind the curtain, you really don't know. And this is one of the problems with most practitioners is they really don't know what they're prescribing. They're prescribing into a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial where more people did better on this particular diet. Well, yeah. Okay. But how many people were excluded from that trial, right? And then are you going to really generalize that back to a population that wasn't really represented in that trial? And now you see what I'm saying. So we have all the... And who are the outliers? And who are the outliers? We have all the skewed data. So what we believe is that everybody is an N of one. Everybody is their own system. And yes, they're similarities. But even if you know what mom and dad were, you still don't know yourself. Because the genetic profiles get mixed up. I mean, it's really, it's like a lottery, right? I mean, it all gets... All the balls are spinning, and you don't know how they're going to come out. So just because somebody at Alzheimer's doesn't mean you have any Alzheimer's genes, or just because they didn't, doesn't mean you don't. So it's interesting. Yeah. Well, and I think the overlay there, no matter what your genetics are, because... And this is why we talk about genetic predispositions. Yeah. Yes. Where's your... Where's your environment right now, which is going to impact how those genes express? And the microbiome has been impacted by the environment, has been impacted by your life, by your diet. And that too. So your genetics may... And this is where I think the genetics card gets overplayed by so many people is... Yeah, it's great to know what that blueprint is. But unless you have real clarity on how those switches are set right now, they mean nothing. That's right. Well, they still mean something, but they are... Because of your point, genes are a set of tendencies or proclivities, right? They're biases. And if you put them in the wrong environment, they'll cause certain problems. Right. To be important, the environmental impact, as much greater... Can be much greater than the genetic impact. And that's, I think, the point you're making. But even so, when you're looking at the environment, you kind of want to know what change are most susceptible to that and what change are most resilient related to that, right? So you get the whole picture and then you can bring somebody back in the back. Well, I mean, environment could even be your diet. To your point on the amylase gene, if somebody has 20 copies of the amylase gene, they may have a... You know, I must have half a copy because if I eat rice, I can come diabetic instantly. I must have like missed the amylase stop. Well, there are more issues than that too. There could be that you're not getting the signal that's coming in, right? The TCNF7 and some of the other genes that we look at. So, yeah, I mean, it's all... It's all indivisible. Right. It's all indivisible. Yeah. Do you have an example of where improving environment overlabs kind of really made an impact on a single person or created the biggest downstream? Like, do you have an example in your... I'm sure you've got a million examples in your head, but where tweaking the environment was the thing that really moved the needle for someone. I think the biggest environment too, to tweak. You know, there are several really heavy hitters out there, right? Mold can be a very heavy hit or lime can be a very heavy hit or some people really don't detox hydrocarbons very well genetically. They don't and that can be a super heavy hitter for them. But I really think the environment that matters the most is the internal environment, the psychological environment. I think so many people spend so much time stressed. There was an interesting study showing recently that people that are able to get into a deep meditative state, like a theta state. If you're familiar with the EEG, there's delta waves which are sleep. That's like the slowest wave. Then there's theta which pre-sleep, hypnagogic state if you're being hypnotized. It turns out young children between about zero and five, for most of their life and theta. Interesting. Then you have alpha, which is normal meditation. Then you have beta, which is this conversation. Then you have gamma, which is a flow state, a higher frequency. But it turns out that if people can get into a theta state and then they have a stem cell, peptide, bio-regulator, combination of things on a rejuvenation procedure, they actually do much, much better than if they come into that stress. That makes so much sense though. You've started in the landscape, right? You've come down. You body can't heal when it's in fight or flight. I think that landscape is the most important. Interesting study I've done on Buddhist monks who were meditating and about 10 or 15 minutes into going into a theta state, a deep meditative state. They were releasing their own stem cells to heal themselves. I think the biggest environmental challenge we have is actually regulating our own internal environment. Then yes, all of the other things we talked about. We live in a toxic environment. Elf filtration, water filtration, whatever you have to do to try to combat it, we can treat long haul everything. We've done all that. But the piece you can control is this how stressed am I all the time? Is your mind running all the time? Can you turn it off? So what are your thoughts on all these vagal nerve stimulates? I'm better out there right now. I feel like maybe they're just a bit of a trying to go at a big problem with one thing. But what are your thoughts on them? I think the vagal nerve stimulators can be helpful. What they're doing is they're stimulating this nerve that carries the sympathetic and sympathetic nervous system tone. It's tends to amplify this healing slow down the system parasympathetic signaling. I think that's helpful. It also increases HRV, heart rate variability. When you have more parasympathetic tone. So I think when you're meeting people, it's another tool in the toolbox. However, it's not the actual answer because really the actual answer is how you're perceiving life. I've gotten into this thing recently where I've come to understand that we spend a lot of time efforting. It's like we're going to try to make things happen. We need to get this done. There's things to work at this. I've got to try this. When we're working out, I've got to push harder. I've got to, you know, whatever it is, right? So there's this kind of go-go-go mentality. What I've discovered is that I can flip the entire script by going into a situation, even this podcast, for example, rather than coming in from an efforting perspective, I can come in from, I'm here to receive. I'm actually here to receive. And if I say I'm here to receive, then all of a sudden, my whole system comes down, it's like, oh, let me be aware of what it is I'm receiving. All of a sudden, it makes me incredibly present. It's like, oh my gosh, what a beautiful day, what a beautiful conversation. I'm so glad to be here. What a beautiful planet we live on. Right? So now you're looking at life through this very sort of transcendent space of, this is what a gift. What a gift it is, right? Instead of all this effort, oh my gosh, everything is not the way it's supposed to be. And I think being able to control that, if you combine something like that perspective and the ability to meditate, which we use a lot of brain tap to do that, photo biomodulation, binaural beads, and if you use a vagal nerve stimulator, now you're getting into a trifecta of things to where you can have a massive impact. So I think that's how I think about it. If you've ever thought, am I just lazy now? Why don't I have energy anymore? Let me stop you right there. Look, most people blame motivation with what's really happening, maybe at a cellular slowdown. Your mitochondria, the engines inside your cells naturally decline with age, which means less energy, slower recovery, and more effort for the same results. Might opure longevity gummies support that exact issue. I take them daily because they help renew mitochondrial function. And yes, I love that it's a gummy and not another pill. Might opure contains the most research form of uralithane on the planet. Timeline has run more than 25 human clinical trials and holds over 50 global patents. This is longevity science, not wellness fluff. So stop blaming willpower, support yourselves. Go to timeline.com forward slash knack 20 for 20% off might opure gummies. You know, it's funny. I was just with Dr. Porter at a conference this past weekend and he, you know, he shows up at every one of these conferences. And you gotta know the guy doesn't need to do that anymore if he doesn't want to. But he's so committed to this, to this mission of his. And then and the brain tap tool to me, what's so fascinating about it is it is it makes accessible something that would take years to develop a skill that make a year's like meditation. Like let's face it, in this world that we live in right now, if you weren't, if you don't have that right mindset, which so many people by the time they're 40 or 50 and frankly with these things and social media and whatnot, it's going to become even more elusive as we go. We need a tool. We do. We just need it. I just don't think most people are going to be able to get there on their own. Some people will, but not everybody. Not not everybody. Not everybody. I learned how to meditate actually by reading Eckertolle's The Power of Now and then just having things hit me and then kind of go into a meditative state. To your point though, I think meditation becomes a little bit of a black box because it's for me, it's like writing a bike. Once you once you know how to ride a bike, you can just you not ride for five years, you can jump on a bike and ride a bike. Yeah, you drop in. Right. You can drop in. And you get to a point with meditation where you can actually drop in anytime you want. The interesting thing though is that then the point you're making is that it's difficult to get that initial feeling like what am I supposed to be doing because, you know, I'm trying to do this right. I'm doing this. I'm breathing. I'm focused on this. You know, what am I doing? Right. And then what is it supposed to feel like? And so the beauty of and there are different devices out there too, but the beauty of something like brain tap is that it entranges your brain and actually pulls your brain into a meditative state. And so the fact that holds you in there, then if you actually couple that with, oh, okay, let me just be present. Let me not let me be receiving. Let me go into a receptive motor, set a run effortate mode. Then it's like, oh, I'm feeling the sense of calm. It's like now I'm feeling the glide on the bicycle, right? It's like, and once you feel that glide and then you tip over, it's like, oh, okay, but I felt the glide. Let me go back to the glide and then you learn how to ride it, right? Now you can ride it over different terrain. And you can get you a point, I will say this about meditation, that the goal is not to meditate in the morning for 10 minutes and meditate at night for 10 minutes. The goal is actually to go through your entire life in a meditative state. That's pretty intense. But if you go into every situation in a receptive mode, you put yourself into theta, you can actually go through life in a meditative state. You actually, your life is much more effortless and there's much more joy in it all the time. And just think of all the stress you're taking off your system. Yeah. Well, you're going back to that concept of efforting, you know, working through everything, like pushing as opposed to moving into flow. I mean, that's a, and the physiological benefits of that would be massive, unbelievable. Wow. Okay. So I was going to ask about mitochondria, but it all seems so irrelevant now. What's your internal environment, right? The internal environment? That's our biggest challenge and also our biggest opportunity. We want to focus on the thing outside. The enemy is always outside, but actually, you know, we are, we've seen the enemy as in us, right? So just be careful. Well, I think when you, and this might go into weird territory, but when you look at people who come out of the worst situations on the planet, so people, someone let's say who's been taken hostage, someone who's lived through a horrifying experience, yeah, even Holocaust survivors, right? So people who've been through the worst that humanity has to offer and quite often those people end up being the most remarkable people. Not everybody. Not everybody. Some of these people find a way in those situations to turn inward and to find this equanimity, this resilience or be resourced enough that they're not eternally damaged. I mean, they'll carry scars maybe with them, but they, but they somehow, I mean, I had a neighbor who was a Holocaust survivor and she was the most resilient person. She was the most positive person. Yep. And she was the strongest, most resilient person I had ever met. And the word knows the universe was not done with her after the Holocaust. She went through all kinds of other crap. And yet this woman just, she kept on going. And she was kind, and she was intelligent, and she was wise. And that, and she lived to 97. And that is a, and that is a, that's a contradiction in our life because we tell people stress is going to kill you. And man, the stress that she lived through, she had to kill her along. And there's always been this conflict, this conflict in my mind going, well, if stress kills you, then all these people should be dead. And sometimes they're the longest lived people. Yes, yes, and yes, and yes, I'll give you a little bit of insight around that if you'd like. Sure. Bring it. There's, yeah, there's several things around it. First is that back to our genetics, certain people actually handle stress, much better than other people, some are much more impacted by stress. So you can have two kids that grow up in the same family, same abusive parents or whatever, physically, psychologically, whatever. And they will come out with completely different experiences. One will be sort of, you know, really unciil and kind of living in reaction to that in a very powerful way. The other one will be, have been impacted by it, but not, not significantly in a way, right? And so there's a genetic predisposition to it to start with. Then to your point, I think there are people that are more introspective and people that are less introspective. And you have a guy like Victor Frankl, right? Right. And so talk about Holocaust and Mansearch for Meaning. And, you know, obviously a very introspective, reflective in the context of what he was experiencing, but he was that way in every context he was experiencing, not just in the Holocaust, right? And so this woman that you're speaking about probably had some good genetic robustness to her. And then also probably had some introspection and some sense of purpose beyond that, right? And that can pull people along ways. The way that I tend to think about it is that all of us have suffered trauma, right? All of us. And I think almost all of anxiety, depression, you know, PTSD, addiction, a lot of it is trauma-based. And so I want the audience to understand it even though, and maybe some of you did go through the Holocaust, but if you didn't go through the Holocaust, we've all gone through traumatic experiences. And I think one of the key things of developing the 3000-year-old mind is to acknowledge that we've all had traumas. And we all live in reaction to those traumas, right? Something that we're aware of, like you're a little skittish about doing something because of something previously, but some just put you on tilt and you just have normalized its way. No, the world is everybody's like this, but in actual fact they're not, right? So there's the scene and the unseen reactions that we have. And I think one of the real goals in our own personal development is actually to dissect into those traumas and understand them. You know, when I actually went down, what happened? Who did what? What was my contribution? What was their contribution? And how was I impacted? And you know, how were they impacted? Whatever, who were they, right? Because you get to a point, I've been able to get to this point where you can forgive everybody involved, including yourself, right? My mom had her own stuff. My dad had his own stuff, right? You know, everybody's got their own stuff, right? And so you can get to a point where you can forgive everybody involved, and that's the healing process. And then from there, you can actually go to a transcendent process where you actually become grateful for everything that ever happened. And I think the people that went through the holocaust that actually did the best had the ability to realize that this ultimately was a gift to them. Not because it was terrible and not because it was horrible, but because of what they learned about themselves. Their own resilience, their sense of robustness, their sense of being able to care in the worst of circumstances, the insights that they got about what's important and what's not important in life. You know, and so in all of these traumas that we experience, there's a plethora of lessons for us to learn, so to speak. And when we actually are open to learning those, we are become more empathetic, more loving, more caring, and we can bring more joy into the world because of those traumas, once we've healed them and transcend of them. So then we become grateful for them. And then when you're grateful for them, you're no longer living on till, you're no longer living in reaction, right? And now you can show up as you're fully express self with all of your gifts and say, oh, well, let's let's go do something really cool and fun and creative, right? So I think that's part of the 3000 year old one journey. Yeah, I think this is all, I mean, it's so interesting. This is a completely different conversation than I had planned for us, which I don't care. I actually think this is way more powerful than talking about, you know, well, how should people, whatever, you guys, what kind of fat is healthy and unhealthy? I think that how much do you think, and I mean, I have my own beliefs in this, but you will have seen this clinically in your work with patients, how much does this help? Like that person who gets that place, who's resolved the trauma, accepted it, moved past it, like whatever, however, and guys, you know, it doesn't like, like Jeffrey just said, like it doesn't have to be the Holocaust, it could be any experience that you were self, took on as a trauma. It could be anything. It could be a teacher who was mean to you, like whatever. Yeah. How much does this set the stage for, I don't know if transcending is the right word, but transcend, I'm going to use transcending anyway, the assault, the physical assaults and the chemical assaults that the world throws at us. You know what I mean? Like people like someone who can smoke and not die of lung cancer versus someone who doesn't smoke in dies of lung cancer, like there's things in the world we can't explain every, like my video producer who will howl when I say this because I've said this about, he said this to me a long time ago. He talks about his grandmother, you know, she's in her 90s and she drinks and she smokes and she's cantankerous and he could once refer to her, she's like a cockroach, you know, like she just, she's indestructible. Right. And those people defy because you know, now you're sitting there across from patients saying, you know, well, you got to cut back on the booze and you got to quit drinking is smoking and they're like, well, he's drinking and smoking and he's 95. Right. That's right. And is it that internal environment, do you think that, I mean, part of it is going to be genetic, right? You've got superhuman detox pathways, you've like whatever. And once it's internal, yeah. But this internal environment, how much, like do you think it can really offset so many of these other things that we all worry about, like eating on native EMFs and pesticides and what not that we wouldn't work towards diminishing the load. But when you get that internal environment set, like, can it, can it be our superpower for longevity? I think the internal environment is a superpower. And at the same time, if there's a lion in the room, we need to take the lion out of the room. Right. Exactly. Both are true. Physical reality. Physical reality, right? So, you know, all the toxins and all the other stuff, right? And yes, there are people that are genetically gifted to where they can smoke. But actually, if they didn't smoke, they probably would have had a new, even better life, quite honestly. Yeah, 100 percent. And better friends. So that's true too. Which brings up the concept of robustness and resilience. And I know resilience is a term that you have an affinity for. So the way that I think about robustness is it's the ability of something to withstand an unexpected challenge. It's minimally impacted robust. It's robust, right? Yeah. And then resilience is the actually the ability to be impacted by an unexpected challenge, but to actually recover from that. Right. And that's resilience. And we know that resilience has cut in half in biological systems like ours, about every eight years, it's cut in half. Interesting. And see exponential decline, right? This is why older people with COVID tied. They didn't have the resilience to come back, right? Mm-hmm. So resilience becomes incredibly important. One of the best ways that we can actually maintain, build and grow our resilience is through increasing that sets of equanimity, the parasympathetic nervous system tone, right? Our ability to heal ourselves, our ability to receive the healing from other therapies that we may take in and rebuild. In our world, we have kind of an anti-fragile position on life, which is, right? Yeah. Being anti-fragile, I think it was nice. I think the era that wrote the book, anti-fragile. And his contention was that there is no word that's the opposite of fragile. And we talked about strong, we talked about sturdy, but what he was saying was that, no, something that's anti-fragile, instead of being broken, actually comes back stronger when it meets and unexpected challenge. And so that's what we think about. How do we make ourselves anti-fragile physiologically? And I think, so if I, you know, I heard my knee the other year, right? And it's like, okay, I'm going to make it stronger than ever. And I have, right? My ankles were weak from twisting them. My ankles are now stronger than ever. How do you make yourself anti-fragile? This is part of identifying with more youthful age, but also this concept of anti-fragility. Well, how do you do that emotionally as well? Or you meet the other person that's now bullying you the way somebody else used to or whatever, but you're not impacted by it, right? Yeah. So this is, I think, to your point, when we can create this resilience in ourselves, and really it's in the psychospiritual space that it occurs, we have control over it, it does filter into all the physiology, and it makes us much more resilient there as well. That would be my take. Yeah, no, I agree with that. That's a great way to put it. I think that, you know, when we talk about chronic stress, lowers your immune system. Chronic stress will increase, which increases inflammation, which is at the front. You know, we'll go back to the hallmarks of aging, inflammation, that whole nine yards. That's where it kind of sets in. So, okay, let's get a little more concrete now for the audience just before we finish up. So if you had, what are the three performance markers in your experience that best predict health span five years out? What would you be looking at? Well, one of the things we're here is measuring, measuring parasite and nervous system strength. So I think having a really high, you know, parasite and nervous system tone and the ability to have equanimity, I think that's one for sure. Another one is VO2 max. So we've been measuring VO2 for over 20 years. I did it back when I was a cardiologist. I sort of do it and then carried it on as what we do today. And, you know, the data on VO2 is incredibly strong, probably stronger than any other predictor. And so there's some underlying things though with VO2 max that a lot of people don't look at. And that has to do with, as the workload increases on the stress test, what is the left ventricular, the left ventricle, the main pumping chamber in the heart? What is its ability to continue to increase the amount of blood that it pumps each beat as that workload goes up? It is a very, very subtle indicator of cardiac dysfunction. And so even though you can have a high VO2, you can have a left ventricular curve that actually tapers off as the workload goes up. And that is a telltale sign that there's a problem. And if you rule out structural things like there's not a valve problem or the sac around the heart, the paracardium is fine, or you know, you don't have a thick muscle from hypertrophy. You rule out a lot of the, you know, kind of, what should we call it? Clinical findings that would cause that to happen. Then you get down to the blood vessels that are bringing blood to the heart are not working as efficiently as they should to supply blood to the heart so it can continue to beat stronger. Or potentially there's a mitochondrial issue with a heart where it just can't generate the energy, right? So one of the things that we go after is looking at that curve in people, even with high VO2s, to see if we can optimize that for them. Because we can improve it, my improving the glyco-calix, we know with scope, we can look under the tone and actually measure the glyco-calix, which is this sort of fuzz that lines the inside of the artery that's negatively charged and repels bad things and also senses blood flow and triggers the artery to make nitric oxide to dilate, right? Which is good for brain function, sexual function, cardiovascular function. So when the glyco-calix is healthy, you're healthy. When the glyco-calix is not, you're going downhill. So there are ways to measure that and then improve it with a couple of different supplements out there, Ravaska, Artero-Sil, things like that. So that's super important to look at also. I think when you're talking about VO2, I think one of the other things that I see critically important for people is hormone optimization. Hypothirorotism is missed all the time. People come into us and their thyroid are off. They may be on thyroid medication, but they're not anywhere close to being optimized, even though their blood work is normal, right? So it's the fact that people aren't testing biometric testing to actually see where things are set. And they're not looking at the genetics to see what kind of thyroid they need to get it into their brain properly, right? And then the other thing is hormone replacement therapy. You really can't stay youthful without hormone replacement therapy, but you don't want to get cancer either, right? And so when you're, you know, testosterone and prostate cancer can be there, certainly estrogen and breast cancer, you know, testosterone. I actually prostate and breast cancer embryologically come from the same tissue. So they're both, they're kind of male expression and female expression of the same embryologic tissue. So you really want to make sure that that people are safe if you're going to do hormone replacement and the way to do that is number one, do the genetics. What is their predisposition for cancer, right? And then two, do they have any cancer, right? And so there are tests out there where we're looking for circulating tumor cells to see because that's a much earlier sign than, you know, what you'd see on a scan. And then beyond that, you've got to know how are those hormones being metabolized? Are they being safely metabolized and excreted? They're actually detoxed by the body to get rid of them. Or are they, is this person accumulating too much dihydrotestosterone in a male or too much for hydroxyestrone in a woman or a man that could lead to one of these cancers? And so you want to make sure it's done safely. But with hormone optimization, you know, bone density, muscle mass, you know, sexual vitality, intellectual capability, there was a large study for women done at Kaiser, 500,000 women. And they looked at women that got any form of hormone replacement therapy, which mean they could have gotten testosterone, estrogen alone, progesterone alone, they could have had it for three months or three years. They could have been just one dose, you know, it was crazy. And they took the people they got any hormone replacement and compared them to those that didn't. And the ones that did at the end of a decade had like a 40% reduction in dementia. So for people with histories of Alzheimer's having estrogen for men and women in their brains is super important. And one of the travesties of male hormone replacement therapy, testosterone replacement therapy is that they crush the estrogen to try to get the guy more testosterone, which actually shorten in life and robbing their brains and their blood vessels and their bones, quite honestly, estrogen, which they need for bone density and brain health, right? So hormones are critical and it's critical that they be done well. But I think there are another super important piece between thyroid and sexual hormones. Yeah. I love the way you explain that because this, you know, every time I come out with a podcast with an interview with a hormone specialist, you have the raging, the raging people who are like, well, you know, I did hormone therapy, I got cancer or, and it's a very lightning rod subject. And it just, there's just this ultimate lack of nuance and the way that you just, you know, like, you, I mean, no, we're not going to take you back to your 18 year old raging hormone self. We are going to get you to a place where your brain can function. And this is, you know, I talk to so many women who are like, oh, well, I don't have hot flashes. I don't need hormones. I'm like, okay, here's the thing. Just because your head's not on fire. Doesn't mean your bones aren't melting and your brains not atrophying right now. Never mind the rest of you. That's right. Yeah. It's, and it's, and it's this expectation, right? It's the expectation, our expectation as we move into our 70s and our 80s and our 90s are very different than the expectations of the people who came before us. Like we expect. Right. We expect to be good. I'm 27. So yeah, I'm 27. And I expect to be 27 for this whole decade, right? I know we 28. The next one. So, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, it's good to be young. It's good to be, you know, it's good to be everything, right? So I'm 42. Well, good for you. You look great. So as do you. All right. So, let's, I mean, I honestly truthfully, I say this a lot, but I really need this good, really dog for a long time here. And I feel like you probably have other things to do. Another traffic chance to get stuck in. So for, for people who are, let's say self-directed listeners and outside Dallas, who can't come to you to your practice. What do you think is the most cost-effective starter path to proactive longevity that avoids shiny object traps? And Lord knows there's a lot of those around. Yeah, there are a lot of them around. I mean, if you want to learn more about us, you know, glad longevity.com. We have a podcast also, the glad longevity podcast. We've got, I don't know, 200 and some episodes out there now. I think maybe 250. I don't know what it is. We record a couple of weeks now. And then the book is out there. 100 is the new 30, which is a really. I need to get that. Yeah. And it's also on Audible. If people like Audible books, I read the entire thing myself. But it's actually a really good dissertation, quite honestly, on many, many topics related to longevity, all from the perspective from which I'm speaking, right? So if that resonates with you, you'll find more of that in the book. Then I think from the standpoint, we also have supplement shops. So we have in the supplement shop, we have things that are focused on particular categories of things that we find to be typically good. Now, you know, I'm a big fan of custom fit, right? When it comes to longevity. So I would say the other thing to really go after is, is to work on your mindset if you're listening to this, right? Don't become a binary thinker. Don't get married to your answers. Identify what questions drive you. I shared the ones that are driving us, right? How good can we be? How do we make 100 to new 30? How do we live well beyond 120 live young for a lifetime and have the 300 year old mind? But you may have your own questions. And it's really important to do that because if you find those questions, it'll actually start to drive your purpose. And the other thing I think is really work on the psychospiritual space. We find that that is the circle, the ring that binds all the other circles together. Right? Without that, people are self-sabotaging. There's no meaning. There's no purpose. There's toxic relationships. There's no lack of self-love. Everything goes to heck. Yeah. So in the context of psychospiritual having been handled, I actually have a question for you. In this world of now emerging gene therapies and peptides. And what do you think about those things? Because some of them are not. Everything's a gift, right? It's just a question of how you apply it. So, yeah, we love peptides. We've been using peptides and we like bioregularies and we like exosomes, we like stem cells, we like PRP, we like ozone, we like all kinds of things. All the things. Yeah. All the things. But, you know, red light, etc. But, you know, what we find is it's really about preparing the individual to receive the therapy. So the mental elements of receiving the therapy, but then also doing plasma-feresis for people to kind of clean out all the trash, right? Do the senolytics, do the plasma-feresis? Maybe a couple of rounds of that. Before you start putting in the regenerative products to try to heal whatever you're trying to heal. What we're really trying to do is orchestrate a symphony of healing for the individual. And it's taking out the trash, then putting in the good stuff, then supporting the good stuff, with ongoing peptides and supplements, whatever else they need, right? And then you never get away from the psychospiritual space. So we'll put in a plug for Patrick Porter. If you want to go check out brain tap, brain tap, TAP, that's a very useful tool. It's a powerful tool. All right, lightning round. Last three questions of the day. Okay. One mitochondrial supplement, the internet overestimates, and one mundane intervention in underestimates. For the mitochondria? Yeah. Yeah. We like uralithane a lot for mitophagy. We also like NAD. I think however, NAD is really going down an odd route. Yeah. We don't need a time for that. But yeah. That's a whole other Pandora's box. We feel like we figured it out quite honestly. But it's only because we're deconstructing stuff here and figuring it out, putting it back together. But the point is that we think that a lot of the NAD stuff out there is not really what you need. You don't really need IV NAD and that kind of stuff. It doesn't even get into your cells. 97% doesn't even get into your cells. So we're big fans, however, of improving the NAD to NADH ratio. And we're actually giving you the precursors to make it. And also to recycle it, and the block CD38, and enzyme that as we age accumulates and basically siphons it off, because you do need an ID. It's critical. But you have to do this well too. It's like hormones. It has to be done well. It can't just, oh, I'll get a patch and slap it on. Or the people subcuing it every day. I just, I kind of, oh, my gosh, you're killing me right now. All right. A test that almost nobody needs as often as they think, and a test almost nobody is getting enough of it. Or soon enough, actually, maybe. Is there something people should be looking at sooner than they think, and a test that people are just grossly overestimating? Grossly overestimating. I think what gets grossly overestimated is when people go to their doctor, or even so long, Jeviti Clinic, and they get a comprehensive blood panel. I think they are way, way overestimating what that comprehensive action includes. From our perspective, those comprehensive blood panels are really child's play. They're useful. They're useful, but they're so inadequate at actually really helping you to understand what's going on. So, and the reason for that is that a lot of them were adopted from a sick care mindset. This is this is a panel now we're going to apply it to you, and if we don't see much, then you're fine. And so that's why these comprehensive tests, I would be very skeptical of people offering comprehensive tests. We're going to check 200 markers. Okay, well, that's nothing. We check thousands of the work. Right. So, I think just be just be, you know, buyer be aware of that, what you're getting. And so what should people be looking at sooner than they are typically? Do you think? Man, it really depends on who the person is where they are in their life. So, it's really what I would do as I would say, you know, if you're a young person, what would actually be useful would be to actually mark, you know, what are my levels of things now? Yeah. So, I have baselines on my youthful markers, hormones, thyroid, you know, whatever else. Resty Metabolic rate. I think, what about a 50 year old? Like a 50 year old. Yeah, 50 year old, I think the thing that gets missed the most is what I would call the biometric testing. So, we do a lot of biometric testing here. What do I mean by that? Well, it's not a blood test, it's not a stool test, it's not a saliva test, it's not a urine test. You come in and we actually test your body in some way, either by measuring it or having you pedal a bike or sit in a chair and wear a mask or do something. Those biometric tests are full of real world, really personalized information about you. And they are so, so important, whether you're trying to optimize your parasympathetic nervous system or understand your cognitive abilities or understand how your mitochondria are working through several different lenses. They are so incredible useful. So, the biometric test like VO2 max testing, Resty Metabolic rate. Did you know we, that one? Yeah, we know, we know, we don't use it. We get all everything we need from our VO2 max testing that has a preliminary function test in it. And then, you know, there are things where you can, we use actually brain tap makes a computer called a neuro check where you can actually measure the balance of the sympathetic comparison that's super helpful. Then personality profiles, right? How are you built? Like we do use culture index. We see that people are built one way asking themselves to show a different way at work and create tremendous stress for them. So, we've had people sell companies, you know, higher systems to all kinds of stuff based on that. So, these are tests that don't require a needle, but can be super, super enlightening. Yeah. Cool. All right, last question. Would you get some misconception about biological age numbers that you want listeners to stop believing today? So, I think, yeah, this is a good one because, you know, everybody has a chronological age, right? Everybody agrees to that. Yeah. How many times around the sun have you traveled? Period. That's it. That's it. So, but for biological age, I think one of the greatest disservices to humanity has been the concept that we have a single biological age. And we actually are a mosaic of many, many, many, many biological ages. Every organ system, every hallmark of aging has its own biological age or biological age equivalent, right? And so, the way that we think about it is if you really want to know how old you are, you have to look at the entire mosaic and then understand that you're really only as young as your oldest age. Yeah. And so, when you basically deconstruct it that way, it's like, oh, well, we need to go up to the mitochondria. We need to go to inflammation for you, but for you, it's all about telemairs and it's about, you know, something else, right? You know, senescence in your immune system. So, you really, this concept of, I want to get a biological age test and I came back five years younger, eight years younger, I'm good. That, that is like the worst lie. That's the worst thing you can possibly perpetrate. I'd be like saying, I'm going to bring my F1 car into it for a pit stop and they're going to check the tire pressure on the front right tire and everything's good. We're good. Let's go race, right? It's about that silly. That's how it is. Yeah. Love it. Dr. Gladden, this has been a fantastic enlightening conversation. Thank you so much for being here for your time. Let's just let the audience know where they can learn more. You kind of did a little bit before, but let's close off with connecting them to all your resources and your book and all the things. Yeah. So we're, we're, I'm not, but the company is on Instagram and Facebook and all those places. But the easiest place to get to us is just gladdenlonggevity.com. You'll have access to everything through that. If you go to gladdenlonggevity.com, that would be the best spot. So yeah. And if you'd like to talk with us about being a client, you know, people fly in from literally all over the place to work with us. We happy to have that conversation too. So I'm sure they do. Thank you so much again. Yeah. Really. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Hey folks, just a quick reminder that all of the information presented in this podcast is for information purposes only. No medical advice, no diagnosing, no treatments suggested here. Before you try anything that you hear about or learn about here, make sure that you check with your medical provider.