EPI 240: How To Feel Better At 60 Than You Did At Age 30. With Anti-Aging & Longevity Expert Dr. Jeffrey Gladden

Welcome back to another episode of the Peak Performance Life podcast. Today, I am very excited to have on the line with us one of the foremost experts in anti-aging and longevity. His name is Dr. Jeffrey Gladden, and he's the visionary founder of the Gladden Longevity and Advanced Performance Center. And I know this is a really hot topic that a lot of people are really interested in as we get older. How do we stay young? Can we feel younger at age 60 than we did at age 50 or 40 even. And that is what Dr. Jeffrey Gladden is an absolute expert in and has helped so many people in. So it's such a pleasure to have you and so much looking forward to this conversation here today. Oh, it's allure. Thank you. And so it's a pleasure to be here with you. Appreciate the work you're doing. Absolutely. Yeah. So why don't we start with a little background of how did you get into the work that you're doing today? Yeah. So, you know, my background is interventional cardiology, right? So that's the kind of cardiologist that is going in and stopping heart attacks and putting in stents and things like that and pacemakers and whatever else, as well as doing the diagnostic work. I ended up doing that for 25 years in Dallas and surrounding areas. And I also became someone entrepreneurial in that field. I basically started cath labs and own cath labs and started a heart hospital, co-founded a heart hospital with another cardiologist, which has become, you know, nationally recognized and very prominent. Also got involved with medical device companies. I still sit on the board of one. So I had a lot of things going on and was really loving the work. I love the innovation that was occurring in interventional cardiology at the time that I came in in 1988. And then, you know, through the nineties, This was actually even prior to stents and all the other therapeutics that have come on since. But what happened to me is that in my 50s, I kind of hit a brick wall. I've always been athletic. I played sports in high school, basketball, soccer. And then in college, I played soccer on the freshman team. And then I couldn't continue really because of my chemistry labs, right? They competed with practices. And so they wouldn't let me do that in my sophomore year. But anyway, I did play. I played some intramural basketball and then I've always been athletic. And so I in my 50s, I basically will I'll tell you this also in my 40s. I had done something that many people do, which is leverage my health for the sake of building my practice. And I decided, you know, I was putting on weight at that point in time. And I thought, oh, gosh, I'm going to I'm going to go for a run. Right. And when I was in soccer camp, right, I mean, we could run all day. I ran two blocks and I had to stop. And I'm like, oh, my gosh, this has gotten so out of control. And so what I did at that point in my 40s was I basically started taking every opportunity to perform physical activity. I started riding my bike to the hospital, which was only about a mile and a half away. I climbed the stairs every chance I had. I would go for bike rides on the weekend. I started running again. And, you know, within about three months, I was running three miles and I lost 10 or 12 pounds. And I started to eat better as well as I knew back at that point in time. And and I started to feel really good again. Right. And that that worked well for about a decade. And then in my early 50s, I started putting on weight again. And I was also noticing that I was exhausted all the time. So even if I got a couple of good nights sleep three nights in a row, I would still wake up really, really tired. And I also noticed that when I was in stressful situations that it could lead to anxiety. And if I had anxiety, it could lead to depression and not the kind of depression that like, oh, I'll go for a run and I'll feel better. But the kind of depression like I actually want out of here. Right. And I had experienced deep depression in the past going through a divorce and some things like that. And so I knew depression and it was very concerning to me. And on top of that, my father ended up dying with dementia and my mother had macular degeneration. Ultimately, you died from that. And so I'm very concerned. Right. And I'm also developing brain fog at this point in time. Right. In addition to the other symptoms. So I go into my, you know, one of my local colleagues and I get I tell them about all this and they run their tests. And they come back and they say, well, you're just getting older. All your labs look normal for your age. Why don't you take an antidepressant? And if you're listening to this, I have to tell you that for me, that was one of the most existential moments in my life. It's like, oh my gosh, really? It's all downhill from here. I'm like 52, 53 at that point. It's really all downhill from here. And I had grown up, my mother's, I was very close to my mother's parents. I knew my dad's as well, but super close with them. And my maternal grandmother had always told me, Jeff, it's hell to get old. You don't ever want to get old, right? So my mother picked up that mantra also. So now this is echoing in my brain and I'm sitting there, it's hell to get old and I'm getting old. It's like, oh my gosh, what's happening? So I rejected the idea of taking the antidepressant and Jeffrey Life was in magazines at that point in time talking about the Cinegenics program and things like that, which is one of the early kind of pushes into the, let's call it health optimization space. So basically I went out and I got involved with them and I started attending conferences. Actually, I started attending conferences and reading prior to joining them. That probably joined them maybe a couple of years later, but I basically in two and a half years, and it took me two and a half years then we could do it in 10 minutes now quite honestly but it took me two and a half years and i figured out everything that was that was wrong um and i had subclinical hypothyroidism meaning that all my blood work was normal it was only when we tested my reflexes which were very slow that we realized i wasn't getting enough thyroid activity thyroid hormone activity in the cells right and thyroid is the master hormone right it's like the thermostat in the body, it regulates everything, right? If that's slow, then everything is slow. On top of that, I was getting hormonally depleted, right? Testosterone, DHEA, very common now. Back then, a little more on the cutting edge of things. And then the other thing I figured out was that genetically, I don't convert inactive thyroid to active thyroid in my brain efficiently. I have a a homozygous mutation at the DIO2 gene that gives me a significant decrease in my ability to do that. Then on top of that, genetically, I also don't make certain neurotransmitters efficiently. I don't make serotonin. I don't make dopamine. And the receptors don't work as well as they should. And so that was the reason that I would go into fits of depression. So once I basically had deconstructed what the problems were, then I came up with very specialized solutions for me. I got on a combination of T3 and T4, active thyroid and inactive thyroid. I got on the right amount of testosterone and DHEA. I got on the right supplements to help me make those neurotransmitters efficiently. And if I started to feel depressed, I knew exactly what to take to boost my ability to make serotonin and dopamine, right? And so all of a sudden, I had lost 20 pounds of fat, put on 10 pounds of muscle. I was bouncing out of bed again. I felt great. I was running, you know, three to five miles, mountain biking, you know, back doing everything I wanted to do instead of worrying about whether I was going to be able to keep up with my kids. I was back to, oh, they're not going to be able to keep up with me, which is really where I always want to be. Right. So I realized at that point, oh, my gosh, I've been practicing sick care. Right. That's not health care. You only got to see me if you were sick or had a problem. But I thought I can't do it anymore. I can't I can't focus on that. there have to be other people out there struggling with the same thing that I went through or variations of it. And I basically base jumped out of cardiology, right? I had 10 offices, 12 doctors. We flew around a little plane. We had the heart hospital. We had cath labs. We had all kinds of stuff going on. And I base jumped out of that into health optimization initially, uh, that's grown into what's become glad and longevity, which is, you know, really an all absolute all in. And we can talk more about that. But that's kind of how I made the transition from where I started to where I am. Yeah. Amazing. What an amazing story. And I'm sure so many people listening can relate to getting older and feeling, you know, is, you know, what can I do here? Is there something wrong with me? How can I change my situation? There's also been so much noise and different opinions about hormone replacement therapies and things like that. So there's a lot of different angles we can kind of go down and a lot of things I want to ask you about here. But I guess I'll start with people might be wondering, how did you figure out you had low dopamine and serotonin? How did you figure out you had this thyroid thing? Because probably your traditional doctor, if you go for your once a year checkup and blood work, they're probably not testing so deeply into each of these things, right? A thousand percent correct. That's a thousand percent correct. You know, as physicians we're trained to take care of symptoms, right? You come through medical school. And unfortunately, we're also brainwashed. We're brainwashed to believe that we have been trained at, you know, high-powered institutions, that we're smart, bright people, that we have all the answers. And if we don't have the answer, then anything else is kind of hogwash, right? So if you go to see your doctor, unless they are an open-minded, curious individual, you have to understand that that they've been shot out of a cannon with that mindset. And so when they do their blood work, they think that's the only thing to be done. But what I learned in my own process was that there are literally thousands of answers out there and thousands of diagnostic tests that are so much better at actually deconstructing a situation to allow you to understand what's happening. So for me, as I mentioned, it was reflex testing that showed that I had slow reflexes. Now we actually test it with resting metabolic rates, which we do for everyone. And that's simply done by wearing a mask where we measure how much oxygen you consume and how much CO2 you produce. And from that, we can calculate what's the set point of the thyroid in the cells, not what's just the blood level, but what's actually going on in the cells. We combine that with the blood work, very extensive blood work, of course, but that's how we get to the thyroid part of the equation. When it comes to the neurotransmitter piece of it, But the way I got to that was doing genetic testing. And so we like a company called Intel X DNA out of Austin. And they have some very good mental health profiles, if you will, panels. And it was in going through those that I realized, oh, I actually do have a risk of dementia, even though I don't have Alzheimer's genes. And it's based on my decreased ability to methylate and make certain neurotransmitters efficiently. once I could see what the problem was. If you don't know what the problem is, how are you going to fix it, right? And how are you actually, how are you going to live young for a lifetime, which is, you know, the book I wrote, 100 is the New 30, how playing the symphony of longevity will enable us to live young for a lifetime. How are you going to live young for a lifetime if you don't know the cards you're holding? So you've got to know your genetics. If you don't know the cards you're playing with, you know, how are you ever going to win the game? So once I got a hold of that and then was able to make changes simply based on the genetic inputs as to what would modify gene expression and compensate for decreased expression and get me on the right thyroid, then that made all the difference in the world. And then the hormonal piece is super important because hormones are a two-edged sort. You actually cannot make 100 to new 30 without them, right? You can't. And yet, if they're done inappropriately, they do increase your risk for potential cancer, right? Depends again on your genetics, depends again on whether or not you have cancer cells in your body already or that kind of thing, right? So super important to be tested with a very and GRAIL is not that test It a terrible test quite honestly The gallery test is a terrible test It almost useless for detecting cancer So there are other tests out there that are better. And you can talk to us about that or go on the website and look at some of those things. But the point is that if you know that you're cancer free, then it's very important also to not only optimize your hormones, but optimize the way they're metabolized. So the hormone is made in the body or given to the body, estrogen, testosterone, et cetera. And then the body metabolizes those to get rid of them because they're not going to stay forever, right? There's a metabolic pathway and they go through a detox pathway actually. And you can look at the genetics of your detoxification capacities. So genetically it's like, oh, I'm going to actually make more estrogen from my testosterone or less estrogen from my testosterone. I'm prone to not be able to get the estrogen out through one of these optimal pathways. It's going to go a different way. And it's like, oh, now let's measure it and see what's actually going on. We put the actual measurements with the genetics. It's like, oh, here's how we manipulate the pathways so you can actually get the benefits of hormones and not have the side effects. And right. And this is not done in tea clinics. It's just not. They give you testosterone. It's like, oh, oh, well, you need more tea. We're going to give you an astrozole to block your conversion to estrogen. And now you're good to go. All right. That is like the worst thing you can possibly do because men need estrogen just as much as women do. And if you have an APOE4 gene for dementia, oh my gosh, you need estrogen in a big way. So it's the lack of understanding of deconstruction that leads to so many problems. So anyway, that's what we've learned. So yeah. That's amazing. Yeah, that's amazing. I love that. So combination of really in-depth blood testing with DNA testing, with looking at doing the oxygen and seeing kind of different things regarding the thyroid. Yeah, that's really the way to do it is to kind of look at everything holistically like that. And there's very few people that are that are doing that and doing it right. You're absolutely right about the T clinics. I've seen it firsthand. I mean, you literally don't even have to meet with them or talk to them or, you know, you can just, you know, get a blood test. blood test. And if you're even just a little bit lower, or they'll just they'll just send you testosterone. And then you know, there's nothing else even, it's like, Oh, should I do anything else with this? Should I? Yeah, there's a whole the whole long story there. So this is a really interesting point. I'll just add to your comment there. And that is that when it comes to testosterone, there are a lot of people that have low T, right? A lot of men in their 30s, or even 20s or 40s that are being considered for testosterone replacement therapy. You know, what we found is that, and this is true for longevity and health optimization in general, is that when people come in and we test them, the first thing that people want to know is, what should I do? What should I take? What should I add? And yet, in many times, what's the most important thing is what to remove. What do you stop? What do you actually remove? What toxins are in your system? What are things that are actually blocking your ability to have normal hormone production, right? So if you if you don't, again, deconstruct a situation thoroughly, you so you know what to stop, and then what to add, and then what to start. That's really the way it should go. And that's how we go about it. Yeah. Yeah, that's amazing. That's amazing. I definitely want to get into maybe as well jump into it now. Hormone replacement therapy, such a big topic, so much noise about it, so much fear around it, a lot of fear around it. And maybe just maybe rightly so based on what we just talked about with clinics, just writing prescriptions, if you're not doing it the right way. But I agree with you that, you know, like, like your book title 100 is the new 30, you're not gonna be able to feel like 30 at 100 or even 90 or 80. If you're not, if you're if your testosterone is, you know, for men, you know, less than 100 or whatever, whatever it can be, right, you're just not going to feel the same, You're not going to have that zest for life. I mean, I have seen people who were low testosterone and then went on testosterone and they're like, this changed my life, my mood, my motivation. You know, I'm more successful. I have better relationships. I mean, everything can change. So, yeah, we'd love to hear a little bit more for people listening now. Maybe they're like, I don't know. I don't want to get on these hormones. Or here's what I always hear is, well, you know, I don't want to do it now. you know, maybe later when I have to or something like that. But meanwhile, their levels are low, they're suffering, they're having maybe other health issues. What would you say to people that are thinking like that? Yeah, I think this is a really interesting point. It kind of dovetails in with several different things. Let me start by saying that in the process that I went through, one of the realizations I had was that in life, we really only get the answers to the questions that we're asking, right? And so it's really, really important to be asking the right questions. And so when I started to feel great again in my 50s, you know, two and a half years later, mid-50s at that point, whatever it was, I just, the first question I asked was, geez, I wonder how good I can be. I wonder how good I can be. How fit, how strong, how mentally sharp. For how many years and decades can I carry that forward? How good can I be? And if you're listening to this, you should ask yourself, how good can I be? Right. The second, the next question was, how do we, how do we crack something called the Hayflick limit? How do we live beyond 120, right? Which is genetically programmed, our telomere is short and the cells die. It's hard for us to live past 120. How do we live well beyond 120? Not just make it to 120, not just look like the pictures you see of people at 110, but actually live well, right? Which means young. So how do we live well beyond 120? Then how do we live, how do we make 100 the new 30, right? How do we make, how do, and if you ask these questions for yourself, how am I going to make 130, right? Right. Then how do I live young for a lifetime, right? Which is all the curiosity, all the mental flexibility, all the adaptations, all the ability to learn and grow and experiment and try, right? How do I live young for a lifetime? And then the last question, which I think is actually critical, is how do I develop a 300 slash 3,000 year old mind, right? Where I develop all the insight, all the equanimity, heal all the traumas that I've gone through. How do I develop that so I can live my life unencumbered by all those things and bring all my gifts forward for the well-being of the planet, our relationships, family, community, right? So those are the five questions that we wake up to every day. So that is a backdrop. When people are facing something, and everybody's faced something, right? It can be a reflex. And even if you go to see a doctor, they'll reinforce this reflex of, well, you don't really need that knee replaced right now. You don't really need this done right now. You don't really need that right now. You don't really need hormones right now. You don't really need thyroid right now, right? Let's wait and see. And when it gets to a point, then we'll do the following. In my experience, what I've discovered is that when you have a problem or an issue, if you're asking those bigger questions, how good can I be? How do I make 100 to new 30, et cetera, et cetera. What you want to do is you want to intervene as soon as possible because biology has a way of compounding itself in a negative direction the longer you let an issue linger, right? And one of the big misconceptions about aging that we have is that it's linear, that it's chronological, right? Because every year it's another birthday. I don't feel that much different. So it's a linear process. But in actual fact, it's not. It's exponential. We age so much more between 70 and 80, 80 and 90 than between 20 and 30 and 30 and 40. So you are playing an exponential game. And when you acquiesce to the fact that that, oh, I don't feel right, but I'm going to ride it out. You're simply compounding the exponential aspects of aging by doing that, right? Whether you're losing fitness in your legs or cardiovascular fitness, or your tissues are depleted because you don't have enough hormone or your brain is going downhill, you're actually contributing to the exponential decline that you face anyway. So my point is to answer your question, if you're feeling something like that, And you want to intervene as early as possible, not at the last possible second, because it goes the other way, too. Not only is aging exponential, but it's also bidirectional. You can get younger and you can get older. For example, if you get COVID, you get older. You get over COVID, you get younger. If a woman carries a child to term, she's getting older during the pregnancy. She delivers the baby. She gets younger again. So aging is bidirectional and it's asymmetric in the sense that you age a lot faster with COVID or a pregnancy, but you can undo it. So it's ultimately exponential, but it has a lot of movement inside of it. Right. And we tend to think, well, it's just chronological, so it's linear, but it's not. And so if you understand that, then you understand, oh, I'm playing a game. I'm playing for keeps here and I don't want to accelerate the exponential aspect of what's happening. So let me intervene early. Let me understand deeply and deconstruct a situation so I actually know what to do. So I'm not actually making something worse by doing the wrong thing. That's why the deep understanding, the deep testing up front to really understand what's going on is absolutely critical. Yeah. Yeah, this is great stuff. I've never heard it described like that. I really like that. And one thing I want to point out, because I'm also obsessed with positive psychology and belief systems and the way people think. And what you said was really important in the questions that you're asking, compared to what are most people doing when they get into their 40s, 50s, 60s? They start complaining to their friends. Oh, I'm getting old. I can't do this. I get that. Well, this is what are you going to do? We're all going to die. We're all going to get old. And this negative talk is really detrimental to your health because you're just perpetuating this belief system. So I absolutely love how you're kind of reframing this, asking the right questions. And it's 100 percent possible. I know many people who feel better in their 50s and 60s than they did in their 30s and 40s. This is actually a pretty, pretty common occurrence. So I absolutely love this. on the topic of what would you on the topic of hormone replacement therapy, there's a lot of fear around it still, right? I think, I think only recently with regards to even women, which by the way, I know a woman recently, who started going on testosterone, obviously at much smaller doses than men, completely changed her life. And the way she feels as well. So it's not this is not just a conversation for men as well. This is just as much for women. But there's a lot of fear around it, right? Women have this fear of getting, you know, oh, is testosterone replacement or hormone replacement therapy going to cause cancer? I think only recently did they finally come out and say that's not the case with women, which was some perpetuating belief for a long time. For men, I think it's been proven that everyone always says, oh, I don't want to do that because I don't want to get prostate cancer or something like that. I think that's been proven wrong. Talk a little bit more about these fears and what the reality is and what you've seen. Yeah, I think it's great, right? The Women's Health Initiative really got everybody revved up about hormone replacement therapy being associated with cancer, when in actual fact, they were using the wrong kind of progesterone. It was not bioidentical progesterone. When you have synthetic progestin, it increases your risk of breast cancer. It increases your risk of endometrial cancer, right? And that's what they were using. When you get on bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, when you're on progesterone, it actually protects you from breast cancer, protects you from endometrial cancer. That's been shown over and over again, right? So my point is that we look at population studies and then we try to apply it to ourselves. The world has moved beyond that. The world that I live in has moved so far beyond that. The population studies are like, oh, okay, well, that's interesting. Let's take that into account. Let make sure that not the case for the individual But we moved in really to an N of 1 right In other words each person is their own system You know in medicine the way we were trained was that the double placebo trial is the gold standard for what is truth right This is truth in medicine, right? What we've learned is that that approach is total bullshit, and I'll use that term. It's total bullshit. And let me tell you why. because first there's a big selection bias to see who gets into the trial. So they exclude a lot of people that they don't think they're going to respond in a positive way. Then they perform the trial. Then they do high-level statistical analysis, slicing and dicing all of the different subpopulations to try to find some group that responded to some element of what was done. Then they say, oh, we improve this by, you know, some percentage. Actually, it went from we improved it by 100 percent when actually the incidence dropped from 2 percent to 1 percent. That's 100 percent improvement. So, right. So so really it's a 1 percent improvement. We improved it by 100 percent. And now we're going to because of that, we're going to generalize this across the population. You see the fallacy in that? Yeah. It's so fallaciously done and it's fueled by, you know, lots of dollars in pharma and people trying to maintain their tenure and, you know, all the other stuff. But the point is that it's really we've so far moved beyond that. What you really want is you want to know what what's appropriate for me. Right. If you're listening to this, you don't care about the study. What you care about is what's right for me. And if you're if you're going to figure that out, then you have to do the end of one studies. you have to, okay, well, what is my genetic risk for cancer? Do I have any signs of cancer in my body? You know, what are my hormone levels? What are my, what are the metabolites of those hormones, right? You have to ask all the right questions. And if you're asking the questions of where do I stand and how would I benefit? What's my bone density? What's my muscle mass? What's my strength? What's my VO2 max? What's, what's my brain function? What are all the things that are likely to benefit, right? Am I already showing signs of estrogen deficiency or testosterone deficiency, right? It's like, oh, okay. Vaginal dryness, you know, lack of erectile or libido, very common, all these different things, right? If you actually put that together and now we have a complete story of the individual, it's like, oh, okay. Now we understand the risks for that person. We understand the benefits for that person. And now we can thread the needle of how do you get your hormones where you need them to be? Maybe it's just taking some supplements to help boost them. Maybe it's doing something to modulate them. Maybe it is actual hormone replacement, But if you're going to get that, let's do it safely, measure the metabolites to make sure they're being properly handled because we can manipulate those pathways also with certain supplements. Right. So now it's like, yes, I'm an end of one, but I'm getting what I need. And I have the confidence that I'm getting what I need. I think the fear comes from a lack of confidence that this is actually going to be helpful, that I actually know what I'm getting, that I know I'm going to be avoiding the side effects, so to speak, the negative sides. but I'm going to get the upside. What I'm trying to say is that when you go in and you do the testing, this is how you actually provide yourself with confidence. It's not by looking at a study. It's not by talking to your girlfriend. It's not by talking to your neighbor. They're a different person. It's not even by talking to your sister or your brother. They have different genetics too. It's really all about you, which is, you know, kind of reassuring because you, that's the one thing you can control is you, you just have to take control of it. Yes, yes, absolutely. And we, That's one thing I've learned doing over 200 episodes of this podcast. In the beginning, I was like, well, everyone should do what I did because I was in pain and inflammation and I went paleo and it worked for me. And everyone, you know, why is everyone not doing this? This is this is the answer. And then, you know, you have other people on the guests who did something else and someone else did something different. And this person's even having success as a vegan. And this person went miserably horrible when he went vegan. And it's every it's so individualized. visualized. And that's one thing that I've really learned here. And one thing I'm trying to be aware of is like, hey, I can't be dogmatic and saying, hey, this is what worked for me. So everyone else should do this. Everyone has to find their own thing. So I think that's a great point. Yeah, I appreciate hearing that. That really is wisdom. You have so many people on the internet saying what to do, right? And really, the thing to do is to understand who you are. That's really, that is the universal truth here is I need to understand who I am, right? And that means, you know, risk, benefit, all this stuff. Once you, once you make that your dogma, then everything else you can select and choose appropriately. Without that, you're just, you know, you're just basically being tossed about by every new, everybody needs this and everybody needs that. Right. And that's, you know, now you're just chasing, you're chasing an admirable goal, which is, I want to be youthful and live young, but you're going about it in the wrong way. Yeah. Yeah. And just to close the loop on, on hormone stuff, and then we can maybe get into a couple other things as well. But again, for people who have that fear, fear of hormone replacement therapy, causing cancer or things like that. And, you know, versus all the benefits that they could potentially have, like, and is there is there people are there people that should be waiting? Or I guess, I mean, look, I guess it's individualized, and we need to test and all that as well. So it's really kind of hard to give a blanket answer there. But I guess more addressing the fears? Because that's the common thing I hear over and over. People are suffering, but they have the fear of, oh, hormones. I don't know. I don't want to really mess with my hormones. It's not natural or it could cause cancer. What would you say? Well, what we know is natural is that your hormones are going to be depleted over time. Men go through andropause and women go through menopause. And we know that a loss of hormone signaling in the body correlates to a loss of function. So we know that that's a natural history. We don't need to do a study about that. You know, we've been doing that study for the last, however, 250,000 years or whatever it is. Right. So, um, yeah, we don't need more information about that. So you don't need more information to know that you're going to decline without hormones. Right now, the question is maybe philosophically, it's like, you know what, this is my life. This is how I was built. this is how I want to go and this is what I'm going to do. Well, that's fine. That's your choice. There's no harm in that if that's your choice, right? Perfect thing. On the other hand, if you're listening to this and you want to be youthful and you want to be able to, you know, I was born in 1954. I'll have a birthday in February, the last day of February, and I can do anything I want. I can go run three, four miles. I can body surf, mountain bike. I can do anything I want to do, sexual function, whatever it is, I can literally do anything I want to do. And that's the life I want to live. So if you want to live that life, then you're going to have to have to start asking the question, gosh, what do I need to do to be as good as I can be? Right. And I will tell you this, that another incredibly powerful tool that I've found is that I wake up 27 every day. So I wake up 27 every day and this decade, I'm going to be 27 every day. Right. And then the next decade, 28, the next one, 29. And when I'm 100, I'll be 30, right? So there's a little bit of logic in that, a little bit of humor in that as well. But I wake up 27 every day. And I can tell you that, you know, you were talking about friends in their 40s and 50s and even late 30s complaining to each other. I never complain. There's a flip side to that coin. If I'm 27 every day and I don't feel 27, what do I need to do to get back to 27? That's the question. In life, you only get the answers to the questions that you're asking. Be very clear about what you're asking, because that's what you'll get. So if I'm going to be 27 and I don't feel it, it's like, no, what do I have to do to get back to 27? Hormonally, right? Exercise wise, brain function wise, you know, any capacity. So in doing that, I think if people embrace the idea that they want to be younger, then start asking the question of what do I need to do to optimize my hormones? Maybe it's as simple as removing the toxins that are in your, in your system, all the, all the things that are actually blocking your estrogen receptors related to plastics and toxins. And maybe that's the answer. Maybe, maybe you don't need to add anything. Maybe you just need to take some stuff out. And then, you know, maybe starting using a sauna to detox, but get on the right things. So your detox pathways work better. You don't know what your detox pathways are. You don't even know how they work. But if you know, you can actually, maybe that's all you need for right now, right? Or maybe you need more. Maybe you need some supplements to help boost production or to boost receptor function or something great. We'll do that. Or pathway manipulation. Or maybe you actually need hormone replacement. But the other thing to know is that if you have a family history of cancer, or if you've had things that make you think about cancer, you should get a cancer test, right? You can get things like Signaterra has a really good test. There's a new one. coming out from a company called Tzar that's not available yet. That is going to be, I think, incredible. We've been using some testing out of Europe to look for circulating tumor cells. There's a lab in Dallas that does that as well. So you can actually, way before an imaging study would ever show you, you have cancer, you can find evidence of malignancy developing and you can nip it in the bud. And if you do find that you have malignant cells circulating, it's like, well, let me do the DNA sequencing on those cells. Are those cells being, are those flames being fanned by hormones or are they not? If they are, then I would avoid hormone replacement therapy, right? I totally would. If on the other hand, you don't have any signs of cancer, even with you doing advanced testing, it's like, well, then I'm going to actually protect myself from cancer, probably by optimizing my hormone, my fitness, my function, my brain function, and everything else, right? And we also are constantly screening for cancer to make sure that if something were to develop, we could nip it in the bud, right? So that's kind of how we think about it, right? Yeah, yeah. That's amazing. And what was the name of that, the one that you recommend for the cancer blood testing? I actually want to get one of those myself. Yeah, Signatera. You can go to Signatera and check it out. I don't know if you can get it as a layperson. You have to go through a practitioner. A lot of these cancer tests, you know, you have to have a doctor order it so the doctor can actually interpret it to you. um and that kind of thing so yeah right right yeah and that's the that's the proper way to do it yeah a lot of these even like if you try to get a dna test on your own and you get the results to the dna you're not gonna know what the heck it's talking about unless you have someone interpreting you don't you don't really know what to do and um although ai is very good and we use ai a lot you still need somebody with some clinical experience to say look you know this is this is a safe way to to go about this kind of thing. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very good. Very good stuff. So in addition, and by the way, another great point you made was, you know, again, yeah, should everyone, with regards to hormone replacement therapy, sometimes it's what you eliminate, right? So if you're eating, eating like crap and drinking alcohol every day and haven't been in a sauna in months and, you know, some just simple things like that could change your hormonal structure just by doing that, right? A thousand percent. That's right. Getting adequate sleep. You know, all the things that everybody talks about, right? Exercise, movement, sleep, meditation for that matter, right? Decreasing stress. What we find, you know, this 300-year-old mind concept is not, that's not a joke for us. That's a big, big deal. And what is really important and has a massive impact on your aging rate is how in equilibrium and calm your nervous system is, right? If people are stressed all the time, they're accelerating the aging process, the oxidative stress, the inflammation. So training your nervous system, getting the vagus nerve, empowering the vagus nerve very high so you can actually control your nervous system, be at peace, be at calm. This is a psychospiritual space, right? And there are many tools available here. We like one called BrainTap. It's basically a headset that does binaural beats and photobiomodulation. And you can dial yourself into a very deep meditative state of theta state. You can go to a lighter meditative state, like an alpha state You can go into a gamma state which is a flow state and you can put yourself in delta which is the slowest waveform in the brain to actually help you sleep better So there are tools like that right And then you know there all kinds of counseling and things like that. Psychedelic-assisted therapies can be super helpful for people dealing with trauma, PTSD, addiction, things like that. So there's nothing off the table for us. We are, you know, we're married to the questions, not the answers, right? We have thousands of answers. We're only married to the questions. We're always looking for the next thing. And yet we found many things that are working, you know, amazingly well. So that's all good. Yeah. So good. So good. What, uh, what else in terms of, I want to, I want to feel like 30 when I'm a hundred, what else in addition to, we talked about hormones in depth, we talked about maybe eliminating toxins. Obviously people know, you know, eat a little healthier. Is there anything else like, you know, getting sunlight or, you know anything else that you kind of think is a big thing yeah i think one of the big things is energy production in the cell right um so being able to activate mitochondrial function is a big deal and everybody's talked about nad a lot and people are getting nad infusions and they're putting on nad patches and they're doing lots of different things what we've figured out is that your body is actually able to upregulate mitochondrial function dramatically. Again, if you test for it, if you understand what's going on, if you remove the toxins that are blocking energy production and all the other things, right? So once you've actually seen what the issues are, now you can address them. But if you use things like a bit of methylene blue in a red light sauna, and then maybe take some NAD precursors like Vitality or New Cheeto Time, and jump in an ozone sauna to oxidize NADH back to NAD. And then you're using some molecular hydrogen to balance out the oxidative stress. Oh my gosh. I mean, you can literally feel like you're 16 for the next three or four days. It's like, you know, you wake up the next day, it's like, geez, where is Mount Everest? You know, is it over there or over there? Right. Because I think I'm going to go climb it. So it's, it's remarkable. And what we found is that when you boost ATP production and energy production, not only do you feel great, but if you're trying to heal from something, you actually need a lot of energy production. Like if we're trying to heal someone's brain, we're trying to heal their heart or heal their shoulder or whatever. And we do a lot of regenerative procedures. What we found is it's really important to take the trash out, things like plasmapheresis, things like that, eBOO to remove toxins, and then basically getting people primed, having them hormonally optimized, thyroid optimized, things like that, then moving them into the regenerative process, you know, coupled with peptides that are super supportive, then basically going forward from there with additional peptide support. But really, one of the things that underlies all of that is boosting energy production for the individual. So So they actually have the energy to heal. And so that's super important. But again, we know their thyroid's optimized. We know their hormones are out. We know that all the other pieces are in place because there is no one thing. Biology is complex. You're like a Formula One car, right? And a Formula One car pulls into the pits and the lap times are down by two seconds. Well, you don't just add air in the tires, right? It's like, no, what's actually going on? We need to deconstruct all the systems, understand them, So we can actually optimize all the little tweaks, the camshaft profile, whatever it is, right? And make it, and then you get the two seconds back. And the body is the same way. It's not like, oh, I read something, I heard something. That guy said something about methylene blue. I'm going to take that and that's going to cure everything. It's like, it's a piece of the puzzle, right? And so you've got to be, you've got to take that mindset. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, one of the things I've found, and it's actually, that's why the peak performance mission is to inspire people to prioritize and transform their health. That's our mission. That's something that and I find that that's probably the hardest part here because, you know, people may be listening now and they're like, oh, it sounds like a lot of work and this and that. And I'm just trying to like, do you understand if you don't have your health, you don't have anything, you must prioritize your health. And for some reason, it doesn't really hit home for many people until something bad happens, unfortunately. Yeah. I mean, you know, I was thinking about this just the other day that, you know, the interesting thing, the difference between your car and your body, right? Your car is more sensitive, right? If the spark plug goes bad or the tire pressure is low, you know, it's starting to pull to the left or, you know, something breaks, right? The body, interestingly enough, has so much physiologic reserve. It's able to tolerate a lot of dysfunction, if you will, before it actually shows up as a symptom. And then as humans, we tend to normalize what is right to the point where it's like, well, my knee was bothering me, but I've kind of gotten used to limping. Right. Or, yeah, that's it's not what it used to be, but I've kind of adapted to it. Right. So we have this psychological adaptation as well as this physiologic reserve that enables us to actually tolerate a lot of dysfunction. And the next thing you know, things are really broken. This is why it's so important to identify with a youthful age, picking age 16, 18, 25, 27, 32, 54, wherever you felt your best. identify with that age and say, no, what do I need to do to stay at that peak level? Because that's how you get back there. You don't want to acquiesce to the aging process by saying, ah, yeah, but I'm good for my age, but I'm still good. I can still function. I can still play golf pretty well. I can't run now, but I can still, you know, go for a good walk. You know, you don't want to start saying those things because that's a massive act. You're actually accelerating the exponential decline with that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I absolutely love how you're bridging these kind of the questions and the mindset and the attitude with the testing and figuring out exactly holistically what a person needs and then kind of giving all these things. And you have so many tools in your tool belt that you kind of mentioned here as well. So, I mean, this has been absolutely amazing. Dr. Gladden, where can people follow you, find you, learn more from you? Do you do virtual as well? Or do people have to come into your clinic in person? Or do you work with people all over the country? We work with people all over the country. We work internationally as well. You know, medical legally, to be a client of ours, we don't really have patients, we have clients, right? So we do need to see them in Texas, right? We're just outside of Dallas, between Dallas and DFW in Las Colinas. And that enables us to establish a physician-patient relationship. And then from there, you know, since COVID, things have tightened back up. We're licensed in a lot of different states. But if you're in a state, we're not licensed in, it kind of handicaps us. But we're licensed in almost all of them except New York, California at the moment, and maybe Alaska, maybe Hawaii, something like that, maybe Maine. But most of the other ones we are licensed in. So then we can do telemedicine with people. And when people come into work with us, it's usually for two or three days to get all the testing done. It's one of the best investments you can make. Right. It does cost some thousands of dollars to get all this done. But now you actually have it in hand. Now you actually know what you're dealing with as opposed to guessing. Right. So so that's one way to work with us. You can go to the website, gladdenlongevity.com. There's a new website coming out probably in March, but you can go to the one that's there now. We're putting on webinars. We have one that's coming up on Tuesday. this Tuesday. I don't know when this will be released. That's probably going to be historical at that point this comes out. But we're doing that. The book is out. 100 is the new 30. It's a really great book. I get lots of great rave reviews on it. It's also on Audible, if you like Audible books. I read the entire thing. It was published prior to AI, a little over two and a half years, not quite two and a half years ago, but it's a great framework to think about all this. And then we have a podcast also, the Glide and Longevity podcast. I think we've got close to maybe 315 or 20 episodes now. So I've been doing it for a minute and a half. And there's some great information there. And then I did a whole thing on doctor talks on exponential longevity, where I interviewed about 30, 33 other experts in the field. And there's some really wonderful talks in there that are really, really great. And some of those have been repeated on my podcast as well, uh, in a, in a more long form, uh, format. So yeah, those are ways that people can get ahold. Yeah. And the social media, all the social media stuff. I don't, I'm not on there, but my people, you know, have me out there apparently. What's your, uh, what's your social media handle? Uh, well, it's all about glad and longevity, anything that if you just put in glad and longevity, it'll pop up. So amazing. Amazing. This is so great. Uh, I've really loved the work that you're doing. Can tell that you're extremely knowledgeable and really working holistically with the individual. And again, I cannot stress this enough to everyone listening. There is nothing more important than your health. There is no better investment you can make. Go to someone like Dr. Gladden, get all your, figure out exactly what's going on in your body and how to get yourself feeling young again. Dr. Gladden, thank you so much for joining us. And I hope we can do this again sometime. Yeah, I loved it, Tyler. Thank you so much. I really appreciate the opportunity. Right. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, it would really mean a lot to me if you would forward this episode along to any friends, family members, anyone that you think that would get value out of it and learn something important. The mission at Peak Performance is to help people prioritize and transform their health. And so if you think someone will get value, please, please, please do forward this episode along to them. Also, if you could please rate and review and subscribe on whatever podcast player you are listening to this on, we would greatly appreciate that as well. It means a lot. And I want to tell you about a couple of new products that we just released. You can get 20% off your first order at buypeakperformance.com. That's B-U-Y peakperformance.com. We just released a brand new grass fed beef protein isolate. 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We have organic mushroom that also organic mushroom coffee with lion's mane, reishi, cordyceps, turkey tail and shaga mushrooms blended with the high altitude organic coffee that we've been using and that we've been famous for for years. So that's been a big hit that one as well. You can get on our website or Amazon any of our products. And of course, we're always famous for our organic green superfood powder that has almost 5,000 reviews on Amazon with a very high star rating. We're known as the best tasting USDA certified organic green superfood powder with over 25 plus organic ingredients. Again, we also have the organic red superfood powder. We still, of course, have the organic plant protein for those who do prefer the plant protein, but I'm really excited about this new beef protein isolate and all of our other products. We do have over 100 products. So just Check us out if you type in Peak Performance Supplements on Amazon or if you go to buypeakperformance.com. Thank you so much, and we'll talk to you again soon.