---

Listen: Apple | iHeart | Spotify

Imagine if you could hit the brakes on aging, not just by eating well and exercising, but by tweaking your cells to slow down the aging process. How would that shift your life goals and daily approach? Would you take things slower, speed up, feel anxious, or get more pumped about life?

It might sound like sci-fi, but guess what? It might already be within reach. That’s why I’ve got Dr. Alexander Paziotopoulos, aka Dr. Pazio, on board. He’s a pro in cutting-edge anti-aging methods, ready to dive into the realm of reversing aging as discussed by scientists and doctors.

---

Resources Mentioned:

• The Pazio Institute
• @thepazioinstitute
• www.GabrielleReece.com
• @gabbyreece

---

Show Sponsors:

---

Time Stamps:

• 00:00:00 – 00:06:00 – Meet Dr. Pazio: A Visionary in Longevity
• 00:06:01 – 00:12:00 – The Science of Aging and Medical Innovation
• 00:12:01 – 00:18:00 – Blending Eastern Wisdom with Western Science
• 00:18:01 – 00:24:00 – Barriers and Breakthroughs in Longevity Research
• 00:24:01 – 00:30:00 – Lifestyle Tips for Prolonging Health and Vitality

---

Show Transcript:

[00:06:59] Gabby: How would your life change if you could slow down your body’s aging? I’m not talking about eating a healthy diet and exercising like the way I do it. I’m talking about actually changing your body at the scale of individual cells in a way that truly slows down the pace at which your body ages. If that was possible, how would it change your life goals?

Would it change how you approach today? Would you slow down, speed up? Would it scare you or make you feel more excited about life? Well, while slowing down aging might sound like something out of a science fiction series, it’s not. It’s not. In fact, it may just already be here. And that’s why I brought on Dr. Alexander Paziotopoulos, otherwise known as Dr. Pazio onto the show. He’s an expert in cutting edge anti aging techniques, and he’s here to talk about what scientists and doctors actually mean when they talk about reverse aging. Welcome to the Gabby Reese show. Let’s go.

Well, Dr. Pazio, thank you for coming to my home. And I’m really excited to talk with you today. Uh, first of all, You know, in sort of doing my research, how do you go from, you know, living in a home, meditating, doing martial arts, and being like, aha, I’m gonna go into medicine.

[00:08:20] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Yeah, that’s pretty crazy.

[00:08:23] Gabby: Do you have doctors in your family?

[00:08:25] Dr. Paziotopoulos: No. My dad had a PhD, or an EED. Uh huh. And, uh, education. So, uh, he always just wanted to push us to have higher education. That’s pretty much all he wanted, but he wanted us to pursue our own dream. And he also would, it would really like push us to be like, find something that you’re good at that you also really love to do.

That’s also, um, going to be in the benefit of others. If you can do all three of those things, you’ll live a fantastic life. And, uh, it took me a while to find mine. Um, you know, from University of Illinois, I did a lot of like, um, environmental science. I studied primates in the rainforest in Costa Rica.

Really? Uh huh. And then, and then I came back and I became a builder of all things for a while. And then I decided to give that up because Girlfriend I was dating at the time got me into yoga. And of course, you must have really liked her. And it wasn’t this, it wasn’t just like, oh, let’s take a yoga class.

She was like, let’s do this yoga teacher training. It was like a year long, super intense, like from the get go. Yeah. Right from the beginning. And I’m like, all right, whatever. You know, it’s like your Kauai trek.

[00:09:43] Gabby: You’re like,how hard can it be? Right.

[00:09:45] Dr. Paziotopoulos: And they kind of cracked me open. But the coolest thing about it was that.

Um, some of the teachers that we were getting, the, the program that we went into, the guy who was teaching it didn’t feel that he was really qualified, but he was really good at setting up workshops for senior teachers to come in. And so what he worked out is he’d have the senior teachers come in for the weekend, teach the workshop and then work with us one on one.

And so we got to meet Sharon Gannon and we got to work with, you know, all of these amazing people. Over this year and a lot of them would just be like, you know Give us work to do and homework to do and Sharon Gannon gave us this one assignment. She’s just like Just look at everything that you do and everything that comes out of your mouth That’s all I want you to do and then just are you okay with all of that and That’s what led me to become a vegan.

[00:10:38] Dr. Paziotopoulos: you know cuz I was just like looking at this steak burrito once and I was like I don’t agree with this. I’m like, I don’t agree with the way these animals are raised. I don’t agree with the impact on the planet. I don’t agree with what this is doing to my health.

Right? And I’m like, the only thing I like about this is how it tastes and that it’s easily accessible.

[00:10:58] Gabby: Yeah.

[00:10:59] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Were you in your 20s? Yeah, I was in my 20s.

[00:11:01] Gabby: Was your girlfriend vegan?

[00:11:03] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Nope.

[00:11:04] Gabby: And you were in Chicago?

[00:11:06] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Yeah.

[00:11:07] Gabby: Interesting.

[00:11:07] Dr. Paziotopoulos: And uh, then it just started questioning all kinds of stuff. Cause when you’re a contractor, it’s like the guys that work for you are never happy.

They always want more money. They think they’re good at working too hard. The homeowners are never happy. Even if you do this amazing job, because it’s not fast enough and it’s not cheap enough, and the subcontractors are never happy. And so like, no one’s ever happy around you. And you’re trying to do this really great work.

And you know, I used to do like designs and the work and like all kinds of stuff. And then I started teaching yoga and everyone’s happy.

[00:11:39] Gabby: Are you naturally flexible?

[00:11:41] Dr. Paziotopoulos: No, I don’t think so.

[00:11:43] Gabby: Okay. So you’re, well, they’re happy too, because they’re breathing. Yeah, and they’re always so happy to

[00:11:49] Dr. Paziotopoulos: see you and they’re happy after class and it’s like, wait, I want to do something where people are happy, you know, instead of all this stress and having to deal with all this stuff.

And so I just sold the business and I packed up my truck and, um, went to Boulder. And then I lived in this place called the Chrysalis Cooperative.

[00:12:07] Gabby: Oh, you went super hippie. I mean, I mean, at that time, right, they’re all, I mean, even the health food business today is.

[00:12:18] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Boulder is magical, right? And back then, like, you could leave your bike on the front lawn, and it would stay there for a week.

No one ever locked their doors. I mean, I don’t think it’s like that now, but like, it was great. And, and the cooperative, like you had to be, you had to do Vipassana meditation every day with everybody. Um, we all like ate together and you had to have your own spiritual practice and then you had to be an activist. But not like an aggressive activist. We were not like that at all.

[00:12:47] Gabby:  You just had to have something that you were passionate about that you stood for.

[00:12:52] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Yeah, like we were always doing things to like, let’s help these companies see that if they do these things, they’ll get better in the public eye and their company will work better and it won’t be a big cost to them. Right? Never like picketing or anything like that, right? It’s not effective anyway. No, it doesn’t work like that, right? I don’t know why people still do that. You gotta hit them where it counts. Yeah. And we set up the Boulder, um, food co-op back then. So we had a lot of really great impact. And, um, that’s when I learned, uh, Shaolin Kung Fu.

So, back in those days, I would wake up in the morning, I would go to, um, Ashtanga Yoga with Richard Freeman.

[00:13:31] Gabby: Oh, wow.

[00:13:31] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Then I’d come back, and I’d do Vipassana with everybody. And then I didn’t really have a job, so I kind of did whatever I wanted to do. Go snowboard, mountain bike, rock climb, do whatever I wanted to do.

And then at night I’d go to Shaolin Kung Fu.

[00:13:45] Gabby: Were your parents worried about you? No. Yeah, a little bit. They’re like, what are you doing? Are you, are you in your mid twenties or even, or a little later? I

[00:13:53] Dr. Paziotopoulos: was like, I was like right around 30.

[00:13:54] Gabby: Interesting.

[00:13:54] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Right? And, um, I did that for a couple of years and then I was just like, I feel amazing. And I never, I still, I don’t feel that good.

[00:14:05] Gabby: Well, now you have a, cause you have an institute and I’m sure all your patients are happy.

[00:14:10] Dr. Paziotopoulos: I mean, like, if everyone could live like that, I mean, you feel amazing. I mean, I ended up throwing my bed away. I used to, you know, thermo rest that you camp on.

[00:14:20] Gabby: Yeah.

[00:14:22] Dr. Paziotopoulos: I found I’m like, Oh, this is the best because you’re just so open from all that practice and now I just lay like a vampire on my thermo rest and I would go to sleep at the same night or at the same time every night and then I would wake up like a minute or two before my alarm clock for yoga and I would laugh every morning. I’m like, why do I even set this thing?

[00:14:41] Gabby: Yeah.

[00:14:42] Dr. Paziotopoulos: And I would go to sleep in the same position. I would wake up in the same position. It was crazy. And then I’m like, I feel great, but I have no purpose. Right. And I’m like, what do I want to do? And so then I went back to school for, um, biochemistry and for neuro neuroscience.

[00:15:01] Gabby: Did you have something in your gut or something? What did, what was the whisper? Because those, those are very specific things to take up.

[00:15:09] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Yeah. I mean, the whisper was like, All right, here I can teach yoga. A lot of people can teach yoga. Right. And the people that are taking classes from me, like they get some benefit out of it, but like, I could take this a lot further and let me go into the sciences and, and kind of figure out how am I going to put like breathing and meditation and some of the things from yoga, some of the things from Kung Fu, how am I going to blend this together to help people become more aware and happier and healthier? And, uh, I thought I was going to go the direction of getting a PhD and one of my very best friends laughed and he was just like, you idiot.

And I’m like, what? And he’s like, you can’t do that. He’s like, what do you, what are you going to do? How are you going to get a PhD? What do you have to do? You have to write a dissertation, right? And he’s like, and you’re going to write this dissertation and then they’re going to tell you to rewrite it, that this and this and this is wrong.

And you’re going to say, no, it’s not. And then they’re not going to give it to you.

And he’s like, and then even if you do, he’s like, you have to publish or perish, right? And where are you going to get your money from? You have to get grants. And you’re going to say, I don’t like your company because you guys do this and this and this.

No, see, this is a good friend and he knows you. And he’s like, and so guess what? You’re going to get no money because there aren’t any companies that do what you want them to do. Right. And so I’m like, crap, you’re right. He’s like, just go be a doctor. And then you can do whatever the hell you want. You want to do research, go do research go help people, help people.

[00:16:46] Gabby: Yeah. So you go from this sort of very free wheeling to a very rigorous, I mean, how did you, I mean, cause that’s actually more realistic to what the people that you see at your Institute or people listening to this deal with as far as schedules and life, how were you able to piece together your own practices while in pursuit of Getting through, I mean, nevermind residencies and all of that.

Yeah. I mean the workload of medical school, did you have any tricks on that?

[00:17:17] Dr. Paziotopoulos: My grandmaster helped me out from kung fu a lot because when I was headed off to medical school and then when I later, when I was headed off to residency, he just kind of pulled me aside and he’s just like, you’re not going to have the same practice that you have now, but you need to have a practice.

And so he’s like five minutes, five times a day. Don’t ever stop. He’s like, you can always do that. Right. And he’s like, I’d rather you do that than have this like really long practice in the big morning or really long practice at night. Because say you have this great Qigong practice or this yoga practice in the morning and you feel fantastic.

And then two hours into your day, all this stress hits you and you’re dealing with all this stuff and you’re not in coherent breath anymore. You’re not present anymore. You’re like with all this, but if you take five minutes I’m going to the bathroom. And this is what I always tell my patients, right?

Nobody can stop you from going to the bathroom Right. And so you go to the bathroom. Except very small

[00:18:18] Gabby: children. You don’t have those yet. Let me tell you a secret They can stop you or they come in. Right. I’m just kidding. So what is what is five minutes? Is it just centering yourself? Is it breath breathing? Is there any, is there a body movement involved? What is that?

[00:18:35] Dr. Paziotopoulos: It could be anything, right? Um, mostly it’s mindfulness and getting away from your phone. So like I’ll give patients different breathing exercises they could do in the bathroom, right? Or they can do a qigong exercise, right? Something that’s going to get them to like, be aware of their posture.

Be aware of the way that they’re breathing. Be aware of the stress and the tension that they’re holding in their body. And be aware of the circulating thoughts that aren’t doing them any good. Right? And if you can just be aware of it, you don’t even have to fix it. You just have to be aware of it. And if you just are aware and you control your breath, you You’re better.

[00:19:22] Gabby: Yeah,

[00:19:23] Dr. Paziotopoulos: and then move on. All right, so you don’t I don’t really think you have to have these really hot Ritual like long practices. I mean, they’re great. You know, I mean, you feel awesome. You do like an hour and a half of a Shatanga, you feel like, you know, ripped open. It feels great. Right? Yeah. Or you do like a couple hours of Tai Chi or something.

You feel amazing, but it’s not necessary. And I don’t think that’s the whole point of everything. I think the point is like, can you put yourself into a state where you’re more present and you’re calm so that you can make the proper decision to do what you need to do? Right? Without, like, throwing off your anxiety into somebody or throwing your fear into somebody or throwing your anger into somebody, frustration, whatever it is.

And, you know, we all have it. And it’s not like we’re, it’s not like you’re not going to do it. You’re going to do it, but maybe you’ll do it less.

[00:20:12] Gabby: Yeah.

[00:20:13] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Andmaybe, and maybe you’ll be a little bit more effective at what you’re trying to do.

[00:20:16] Gabby: Yeah.

[00:20:17] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Um, and I don’t think there’s a person that can get by the day without doing that.

You know, all the people I know that are really highly effective are doing things, something like that. You know, all these, all these really people that I look up to that are, I call spiritual. And, um, you know, that word gets thrown around so easily and, um, it’s kind of a joke sometimes, but like, I always say, like, if you have a powerful spirit and something happens around you, You’re probably less reactive.

You know, like somebody with a really powerful spirit, it’s like, Oh, your daughter was just in this car wreck. And instead of like freaking out and flipping out, you’re like, tell me more. What’s going on? Did I get all the information so I can act appropriately?

[00:21:04] Gabby: Yeah.

[00:21:04] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Right. Versus somebody that doesn’t have that kind of spirit is going to fall apart.

[00:21:08] Gabby: Yeah.

[00:21:09] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Right. Same thing as like, you know, you have this disease or you have whatever it is, you know, so the stronger your spirit are, the less reactive you are. the more present you are and the better you can make decisions. I think it’s just, that’s what it comes down to.

[00:21:23] Gabby: And I can’t help it when you, when you talk about that, it makes me think about the immune system because, and you’re talking to people all day long about their immune system and your practice, but we’re going to be subjected to things, particles and toxins and, you know, plastic and, you know, The, the water we drink and every, you know, you can, you can really start to freak out, right?

Like the paint on this wall and you know, whatever. And sometimes I just go, okay, you know what? To the spirit. It’s like if I could just get reinforced my immune system. I have a better shot of managing dealing with it It’s still gonna come at me. But I think a lot of times people think everything has to be perfect.

It’s never, it’s never going to be perfect. So I really appreciate the idea of how do we enforce, build up, manage the spirit to handle all of the things just as you are going to, we’re going to talk about a bunch of things that we can do to support our physical health, our immune system. For that very same reason, because people do like to get, um, they like to get in the weeds.

What does somebody say? They major in the minors too, sometimes. And it’s like, Hey, calm down. Like we, we still have to just, let’s do the best with what we’re in charge of. And then you kind of got to not worry about it.

[00:22:43] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Yep. And it’s just, and it’s really old philosophy, right? Like, um, in the East, you always see these patient statues and they have the hand up like this.

Right. And you know, I didn’t know what that was.

[00:22:55] Gabby: It’s like, don’t give me a bad news. Stay away.

[00:22:58] Dr. Paziotopoulos: And what this means is that fear is the enemy. And if you want to climb this ladder, you know, like chakras or whatever you want to do towards enlightenment And who knows if that really exists, right? But like there’s different stages of it, right?

If you don’t get beyond fear, you didn’t get past stage one. And I really feel that most people are stuck in fear of something. And, um, it, it really, it gets in the way of their progress. And I don’t think that you can really be a healthy person if you’re anxious or fearful.

[00:23:36] Gabby: I think it’s, it’s an interesting thing that I, I’m always trying to manage, which is like to find that inner calm, peace.

But then somehow to live life fully is bridging the gap between a level of detachment. But or being fully involved, but somehow not letting fear or ego be running the show. So it’s I always find I don’t know, because you you I’ve watched a lot of interviews with you. I’ve read a lot of stuff. You have this calmness.

And I wonder if you ever, because I think about this a lot is I’m fully invested, like my, my girls, my husband, how to, but how do I manage those two spaces is always like a dance too.

[00:24:21] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Yeah, right. And I think this is step one is, am I fearful? Am I anxious? Because if I’m either of those things, I’m spreading that.

I don’t know of anything more contagious than those things. And it’s palpable on certain people. And if you, if you feel that, I think you go to the bathroom. You go to the bathroom for your five minutes. I do this.

[00:24:51] Gabby: I always joke. That’s when I get eight feet tall. I try to somehow dominate their energy and keep it over on their side.

So how long do you have to go to school and And while you’re at school, you decide, okay, I’m going to sort of go also to sort of, to, to a natural preventative practice. Yeah. Um, I just am curious if you don’t have the support or not, not that you don’t have the support, but if it’s not a traditional path to take in your, where you come from. I mean, you’re not even from like, you know, you know, Monterey or something. You’re from Chicago, you know, it’s like, you’re not from Berkeley, and you have Greek, you know, probably a pretty traditional family. Your dad sounds pretty wise with his wisdom.

[00:25:36] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Yeah, he was.

[00:25:37] Gabby: When you’re doing that, where are you going, where are you getting the strength to say, yeah, no, I’m, I’m moving now into real adulthood and I’m in pursuit of sort of this unknown.

[00:25:52] Dr. Paziotopoulos: I wish I could just say it was like my thought patterns that took me there, but I really think it was just my personality as a kid, even. Um, I was always just in my head, constantly looking out the window in school and just coming up with things and just dreaming things up. Um, and I really didn’t like status quo anything.

Um, maybe a little oppositional defiant a little bit, right? Not really nasty or anything, but more like, uh, I don’t know, more subtle, quiet, right? Um, just, I’m not going along with your program, um, because I just never saw it as really being the answer to anything. Um, I think I’m more, I’m not one of those people that really likes to be a top expert or a master of something.

Um, Um, it was never really a thought of mine. Like, I remember when they asked kids, you know, like, what do you want to be? And, you know, it’d be this and this and this. And I just want to be like, I want to have like expert level of many things.

I don’t want to be a master of anything, but I want to experience like really high level of different skill sets so I can better understand like everything.

Um, and that’s kind of my approach to all of this. You know, like, I’m not a great yogi, I’m not a great martial artist, right? You know, I’m not like a physician that’s going and writing 60 papers on a certain subject, you know, but I like to look at the whole picture. And so like, how do we put this all together?

Because it’s all necessary for everything to work. And there’s no way I can know it all. But I can know a little bit about everything and then I can find other people to help fill in the details.

[00:27:37] Gabby: Yeah.

[00:27:37] Dr. Paziotopoulos: And um, that’s where the engineering comes in.

[00:27:40] Gabby: Yeah. I love that you talk about that. Maybe you can, you know, you, this engineering approach to health.

Yeah. Where it’s all these sort of variable systems.

[00:27:51] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Yeah. It’s like, you know, maintenance engineering is always something that kind of like caught my eye and um, You look at, and it’s been around forever, right? Like over a hundred some years. And, um, it came about because of the industrial revolution. So prior to the industrial revolution, we never really had all these complicated systems.

And then all of a sudden we have these complicated machines. We have these complicated companies, you know, we have really complicated systems. And so how do you maintain these things, right? And how do you maintain these? Machines where if they break or these systems, if they break lives are lost. Right?

Right. And so it was just easy for me to like look at, okay, who’s doing that? NASA’s doing that. The airline companies are doing that. Yeah, helicopter guys are doing that, right? Helicopter, guys like bridges, like all these things, right? And so it’s like, all right, so engineers are involved in all these people and then all these sciences have engineers to help them.

And then we look at medicine. And there’s engineers, like, helping make, like, artificial knees and all this kind of stuff. But, like, they don’t have the engineers in the hospital saying, like, Well, these systems are broken. And why do people return to the hospital after they’re released? And why do people end up here in the first place?

Right? Why, you know, and these things are single points of failure. Like, you know, we have heart attacks, more than one heart attack a minute. Okay, so that’s a big problem, right? There should be some solutions to that. And the current solutions are terrible. It’s not that we don’t have the technology. The technology’s out there.

There are systems to make sure that doesn’t happen, but they’re not being utilized.

[00:29:38] Gabby: But those systems, they’re also, they almost become like a warning system to your point. I think people don’t realize like their breathing ultimately will impact. their heart or their brain health, right? So I think sometimes we, we haven’t been raised, we have kind of separated everything.

Oh, your heart is not, is separate from your lungs, is separate from your brain, is separate from your pelvis wall and function. And, um, I think, What I really appreciate about this is this idea of not only kind of figuring out how one thing will impact another thing downstream But really continually putting everything always together as one whole system

[00:30:23] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Yeah, and you can’t separate them, right?

Like you can’t just like take one system out of the body and have the body work, right?

Right, so they’re all interconnected But yet, you know you look at medicine if you see the list of specialties

[00:30:38] Gabby: It’s insane.

[00:30:39] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Right. And one of the things that I find really odd is, you know, back, back in the day, like in the seventies, um, the physicians, they really liked their job.

It was like over 90 percent satisfaction with their job and physicians today, super low satisfaction with their job. And that’s a big problem. Cause if your doctor doesn’t like their job, like how good a care are you going to get? Right. And then back then it was like, well, internal medicine, family medicine, stuff like that.

That’s the hard stuff because you have to know everything and you have to be able to diagnose these people with what’s going on. And then you can send them to the specialist. And then the specialist uses like a couple of procedures and a few medicines. And that’s kind of the easy job. Right, because you’re narrowed and somebody already did the diagnosis for you, but right now all the money is in specialty and your best physicians are going into the specialties.

And so now they’re filling primary care With, um, the, not the top of the class, not some top of the class people still want to do primary care. Right. But, you know, they usually follow the money. And now there’s nurse practitioners and PAs that are doing all the primary care. Well, nothing against them, but they never did a residency.

And you know, I used to think, you know, after medical school, I’m like, I could just go and I could do everything I want right now. Why do I have to do a residency? You know, how long is residency for family practices, 93 years.

[00:32:18] Gabby: I heard that that schedule was created by somebody who was a coke addict. Did you hear that about staying awake, whatever the shift is, what is it? 36 hours. It used to be 36. Yeah, I heard literally, I’m not joking that the person was a Was a cocaine addict.

[00:32:33] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Kind of amazing. I mean, the way, the reason they called it resident is like, you basically lived there. Like, you know, now it’s not like that.

[00:32:41] Gabby: What was it? Trapper John, M. D.? He had his camper out from the, right?

[00:32:45] Dr. Paziotopoulos: The older doctors would say, like, they would get to the hospital, like, on Thursday, and they’d leave on Monday.

[00:32:49] Gabby: So what’d you learn in residency?

[00:32:51] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Everything.

[00:32:52] Gabby: Yeah.

[00:32:53] Dr. Paziotopoulos: And so, like, you don’t know what you’re doing. Like, when you get there in July, And if you’re unlucky enough to be thrown into an internal medicine round, like, wait, you’re like, wait, I do what?

Like, how am I going to help this person? You’re like, wait, I just took, you know, they call USMLE step one, one of the hardest one day examinations in North America. Right. And then you take step two and step two CS step three and you’re like, yeah, I have all this knowledge. Right. And I got to study and I know what I’m doing.

And then you get to the floor and you’re like, I’m going to kill somebody.

[00:33:29] Gabby: Yeah.

[00:33:29] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Right? And so like, and that’s where all the PAs and the National Recognitioners are, except they didn’t even have that much information given to them, right? And then they’re given the job that they should do all your primary care, but they’ve never been thrown into the trenches, right?

Like here’s this person. What are you going to do with them? Oh, how are you going to write the orders? What are we going to do though? What do you do if you do that wrong? Right? Oh, you missed that. You didn’t really see that in their family history, did you? Oh, you didn’t pick up on that symptom, did you?

You know, and like, you just get schooled. For years. Right? And you’re just like, oh, I’m an idiot. Oh, I’m an idiot. I’m an idiot. Right? And then you finally figure stuff out and you’re like, okay, I get it. Right? And so, you know, right now we’re throwing all these people into this mix where they don’t have that It’s unfair.

It’s unfair to the people that are relying on that for their diagnoses.

I think that’s the part that I don’t wanna say frustrates me, but it does frustrate me that it feels like the people with the least amount of resources. are not able to ask the questions and therefore they just are do what they’re told and You know like someone that could afford to come to your Institute to the Pazio Institute in Chicago Then you get this extra and you can ask questions and you’re gonna look out for different things.

You’re also gonna offer things You know preventative things. You’re going to do this maintenance and engineering of the, of the parts before they break down. Um, and even talking about, you know, slow aging or reverse aging or, you know, whatever term people like. And so I think that that’s, what’s so interesting for me is to watch that whole big hospital system.

Like you go to the doctor, you know, you’re a nail, they’re a hammer, you’re in, you’re in the game now. And so maybe we could go from, We could figure out, we could go low and high because I think again, a lot of people, someone that could have the opportunity to come see you, they’re going to get some guidance.

If someone’s coming off the street, let’s say they’re not sick, luckily, but they just kind of want to get a, get a look. How do they go to their primary physician and say, this is what I’m requesting.

[00:38:02] Dr. Paziotopoulos: They, they can, but they’re not going to get what they want. Um, a lot of it’s just a broken system, right? So, The system right now is driven from the insurance companies and from the pharmaceutical companies.

So let’s say I’m practicing family practice. And say I have a really good practice, I’m only going to see about 15 or 20 people a day. There’s people that are seeing twice that many, right?

[00:38:26] Gabby: What’s that, 15 minutes a patient or something?

[00:38:27] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Yeah, you know, a lot of these, a lot of these, um, the way that electronic medical records are now, there’s so much crap that you have to fill out so that you can get paid.

So, let’s say I spend five minutes with you in the room. I’m going to be charting for another seven or eight. Right? And then I’m going to go to the next patient and I’m going to do the same thing. And if I think that I’m going to do all my notes at the end of the day, I’m going to shoot myself because I’m not going to remember everything.

Right? Or I’m going to need a scribe to help me go from patient to patient so I can spend a little bit more time. Let’s even say I have 15 minutes to spend with each patient. How am I going to go through spiritual practice, diet, exercise, all these types of things in that amount of time? I can’t, right?

And so what they used to teach us in family medicine is one or two problems. And all of medicine, the way you get reimbursed is by putting down what’s called an ICD 10 code, which is what is the problem. Okay. If there’s no problem, you’re not going to get reimbursed. So you can’t get reimbursed because for saying like, I did diet training today.

[00:39:35] Gabby: And they’re going to laugh at you and you’re like, you’re not getting paid. You could say, you could say we talked about the guy’s stress level and that doesn’t count. You know what I mean?

[00:39:42] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Like, you know, maybe you could, you could code for some psych work that you did or something like that. Right. And you’d get creative with it and then they get audited and who knows what happens to you.

Right. Um, but it’s a dangerous game and that’s why we can’t use insurance doing this type of medicine because there’s just no reimbursement for it. And, you know, I do one hour consults, sometimes I do two hour consults, if they’re really a headcase, right? There’s a lot of information, right? And there’s a lot of, there’s so much teaching, there’s so many different things that we go through.

And, you know, I hate that we have to be cash and that we can’t use the system. And, you know, even my dad, he’s like, try to fix the system from within. And I’m like, I can’t. My hands are tied. But actually,

[00:40:26] Gabby: what I will say that I see a lot doing this show is people like yourself who have training and opening their own practices, at least it’s a start. Because it’s now people getting a different kind of care that eventually, I believe, We’ll trickle down to help more people to go this actually in a way is more cost effective because maybe we can keep people healthier

[00:40:47] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Yeah, I mean so what we’ve learned in the Pazio Institute and other institutes like that and you know, I don’t say that I’m not anti aging. I’m not functional. I’m not anything. I just use whatever tool works, right? Right, and so I try to use the engineering platform and you can buy this book. It’s called the maintenance engineering handbook It’s been around for like a hundred years. It’s gone through all that A bunch of different, you know, um, changes throughout the years.

Um, and the very beginning of it applies to anything. And then the rest of it is kind of more like what they do with engineering and systems and tools and things like that. But the beginning is everything can be applied to that. And it’s like, what are the single point failures you’re going to have?

Right. And so with humans, we’re like, okay. You’re going to have a heart attack, you’re going to have a stroke, you’re going to get Alzheimer’s, you’re going to get cancer, you’re going to fall and break a hip, like, and we know all these top 10 things and it’s all listed, like all that data is highly, it’s readily available.

Anyone can just do a quick Google search, right? And it’s like, what are you going to do to look out for each one of these and not just monitor before it happens, but what are you going to do to prevent it? Right? And so that’s step one. That’s like the very beginning. That’s not even going into optimization and all these other things that you have to do right for the system to work well.

So like they know like a good engineer is going to take a machine and the machine was made to certain specifications. And that engineer will make it work better. Right. And you always see it. And like, and it’s like in Star Trek, they always, you know, this engineer makes it work better than it was designed to do, right.

Or another great thing is like, you look at formula one engineers, right? So everyone gots the basic same car.

[00:42:31] Gabby: Now they do. Right.

[00:42:32] Dr. Paziotopoulos: And, but some cars run a lot better than other cars and you’ll see the car go around the track and you’re watching this amazing vehicle and you’re like, wow, that was incredible.

But then if you were to like stick your head in the, in the pit, when the car comes in and the engineers are there, I’m like, ah, we lost a quarter of a second, you know, or like whatever, a 10th of a second. And they’re like, that’s off. And this is off and we could do this and we could do that. Who’s doing that for you?

Right? Like, oh, you could be five pounds stronger in that lift, or you know, you could be lasting more, and your VO2 mass could be this much better, and your sleep quality could be this much better, and no one’s doing that. They’re like, oh, you’re fine.

[00:43:11] Gabby: Right, because, and even for people listening, like, if you get your blood work done, pretty much the stuff that says you’re fine You’re, you’re no, it’s, you’ve already headed towards a problem typically.

 

[00:43:21] Dr. Paziotopoulos: So, and they’re not really, they can see trends and it’s getting better now to be able to see trends in lab work. Um, and now we’re getting into the, uh, machine learning and AI to be able to look at a lot of this stuff.

[00:43:33] Gabby: Are you doing that, Oswald?

[00:43:34] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Uh, we’ve been doing that for a while. You have, you got, uh, We’re actually, You guys have secrets.

So the new thing that we’re doing, um, is we’re going beyond the Pazio Institute and we’re creating something called the Institute for Medical Maintenance Engineering. Um, and this is going to take it to the next level. And what we’re, we’re doing is the entire platform is based on an AI. And so we’re reworking the, uh, electronic medical record so that it’s not based on problems.

It’s based on optimization because we all still have to work within an EMR, right? But the tool doesn’t work for us when we’re doing optimization. So we have to rebuild the whole thing around optimization. For instance, if you go into a regular medical record, you see note after note, after note for every visit.

And so if I want to go through somebody’s chart, I have to read all of these notes and it’s like this storyline. That’s a terrible way to do engineering,

[00:44:30] Gabby: right?

[00:44:31] Dr. Paziotopoulos: I want to see in one page or one screen. I want to see you maybe in 3d or something like that. And I want to see every system of your body in at what, where is that system?

Like at a scale of one to 10 or something, you know, it’d be an arbitrary scale, but like, if I see one of your systems at three, like there’s a problem there, right? What are we doing about that? Right. And all the other systems you want to be able to see, what am I doing to make the system better? And if I click on that system, I should be able to see like, well, what scans have we done, what’s going on with this, where is it at?

Right? Instead of like looking through all of these serial notes, it’s just an archaic way of doing it. So we’re rebuilding that. That’s really exciting.

[00:45:11] Gabby: And what I like is, I can’t help but think you would, in one snapshot, especially someone like yourself who has this experience, intuitively you would see one number over here and one number over there and understand exactly why they would be connected.

You know, how one thing is impacting the other. It’s incredible.

[00:45:27] Dr. Paziotopoulos: But like, you know, how can, if you’re doing primary care and you have just a few minutes in the room to work on a problem, you don’t have time to work on optimization. Like we put time aside to do chart reviews for each patient so that we can like, okay, what are we doing with this person outside of here?

What can we do next? Right. What are we missing? Right. Let’s take a look at this again, we’re going to get AI to start doing a lot of this stuff too. And then the one thing that we’ve, we’ve noticed with. Just optimization training in general is you have to retrain humans. So there’s maintenance engineering and that’s awesome for an airplane because the airplane is not going to talk back to you.

It’s compliant, yeah. Right? And you know, if you want to work on the hydraulics, you’re gonna work on hydraulics. If you’re gonna x ray something, you’re gonna x ray it, right? But when you have a human, it’s a big difference. And so we have to work on behavioral modification. And so we have, we have patient liaisons that reach out to people on a regular basis.

[00:46:27] Gabby: So, is this for accountability? Is it, is it,

[00:46:30] Dr. Paziotopoulos: It’s not just accountability, because I don’t want to like, like, point fingers and, No, no, I don’t mean it. It’s just more about creating a through line that keeps people, You have to keep people engaged.

[00:46:38] Gabby: Hey,

[00:46:39] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Yeah, people need to be engaged.

[00:46:41] Gabby: Is it someone with a really warm and sunny voice and like, Hi, Mrs.Smith, just checking in with you today. See if you got your walk in. I mean, How is it?

[00:46:50] Dr. Paziotopoulos: So, um, there’s There’s texting, there’s phone calls, and then there’s automations. So we have a whole project management suite for each patient. Each patient’s a project in the project management suite, everything from their medications to what tests are next to things that they’re supposed to be doing and information they’re supposed to be relaying to us.

So all of that’s in project management. Eventually that turns into a, um, a patient app. And so their app and my medical record will be very similar in the way that it’s set up. So you’ll have your dashboard. And you can see your scores and you can see what you can do to make those scores better and what you’re accountable for.

And then in the morning, you’ll see like, okay, this is my, this is what I have to do this morning. And then just really easy stuff like yes, no. Right, because people aren’t going to be really engaged. It’s got to be really quick. Yeah, one or two clicks. Otherwise you lose everybody. Yeah, and that’s going to really help a lot.

And what I try to do also is this thing. There’s automaticity and there’s self regulation.

[00:47:52] Gabby: Mm hmm.

[00:47:53] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Self regulation is very difficult. Right. Automaticity is easy. Automaticity is like when something’s just become so rote. That you don’t think about it,

[00:48:03] Gabby: right?

[00:48:04] Dr. Paziotopoulos: And that’s what we’re trying to create with people.

And so something as simple as like a cold shower in the morning, if you have to think about doing the cold shower and if you have to think like, I’m going to do this cold shower today or not, you’re probably not going to do it. But if you just make it that, like, I never leave the shower without blasting myself for two minutes all the way cold.

[00:48:28] Gabby: Yeah.

[00:48:29] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Right. Right. Right. Right. Then it’s automatic. And you don’t have to think about it. Just like tying your shoes. Like, you don’t have to think about it. You just do it. Right? Same thing, like, we give all supplements to patients in pre packaged little

[00:48:41] Gabby: bags. They don’t have to open jars No jars, no stuff.

[00:48:44] Dr. Paziotopoulos: And then we can also see, like, how good they’re doing. Right? Cause patients will call up and be like, Oh, I don’t need my supplements this month. I’m like, Hmm, Hmm, I wonder why. And so then like, if they go two months and they haven’t ordered their supplements, then somebody calls them and says, Hey, what’s going on?

Like, are you having trouble? Are you forgetting? Like, how can we help you here? Like, you know, how can we create a routine in your life? So it’s easy. And you know, it comes down to the nitty gritty where like, some people are like, Ah, I can’t swallow. And so one of the, they can’t swallow. Yeah. Like, you know, like, Oh, they do one little pill at a time and then they take a little sip of water and they people all the time.

Right. And so, um, I try to train people on how to swallow. So I’m like, put two or three ounces of water in your mouth and swallow it at once. You know, just gulp down. And if you do that and you put your pills under your tongue.

[00:49:39] Gabby: So here you are in your practice teaching people.

[00:49:41] Dr. Paziotopoulos:Yeah. Right. And I’m like.

Think about like the circus, um, like the person that swallows swords. Yeah. Do you think they did that in one day? Right. They practiced. Right. But you can learn how to do it. And so we just have to keep encouraging people to learn new skills.

You know, I, I, I can’t help but think because you are in the middle of the country, you’re in the Midwest, you’re actually with the perfect group to know everything. Meaning cold weather, a lot of alcohol consumption, wild diets and nutrition. It’s not like, you know, The worst place to put a clinic of mine.

[00:52:22] Gabby: I’m just saying, I think it’s genius.Because if you can figure out how to wrangle those people, that culture, it’s just, you know, even the fact that it’s cold for several months of the year and it’s unmotivating, um, you know, yeah. So my million dollar question that I, I ask, especially people like you who see patients is what is it is that they weren’t, they didn’t grow up in a house.

They didn’t receive the culture of, Um, gathering or, you know, around a certain kind of food, like real food, let’s say unprocessed food. Um, they didn’t have a movement, uh, practice at all. Maybe they didn’t play sports at all and have no movement practice. What is it that shows up over and over with patients on how they can get their houses clean, their cars cleaned?

Gatherings, nails done, makeup on, new clothes, but somehow the self care practice has not really made it to the place that it’s important.

[00:53:24] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Yeah, it’s a really good question. I mean, it’s just, it’s not a priority in the school system, and it’s not a priority among just people in general. It’s not how you’re judged.

Right? Like, you’re judged by like, whether or not you have money and whether or not how you look and you know, what job you have and what’s your status in society, all these things. But the other stuff you’re not like, you know, and, and no one taught you in school, like, these foods do these things to you.

Non movement does this to you, right? All this kind of stuff, you know, and like,

[00:54:01] Gabby: but don’t you think we intuitively know? Don’t you think we’re

[00:54:05] Dr. Paziotopoulos: I think there’s blocking.

[00:54:06] Gabby: Okay, because I just you know what I mean? Like when you when you don’t move?

[00:54:10] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Yeah,

[00:54:10] Gabby: forget food because that’s even more complex. But this idea of not moving, of not having, and I’m just talking about walking.

I’m not talking about banging iron and being all radical or go rock climbing. I’m talking about just being sedentary. You don’t think in our spiritual, intuitive self, it’s like, Ooh, I should probably go do something.

[00:54:35] Dr. Paziotopoulos: There’s something that happens to people where they really block what they’re feeling.

Um, cause I’ll ask people, I’m like, um, What do you think about your posture of, you know, and they’re like, Oh, I’m all right. And then I’ll measure it. And I’m like, Oh, you know, your head’s two inches forward at the center of your shoulders. Yeah. And they’re like, huh? And then I show him a picture. Right. And I show him the math and like how much stress that’s putting on their neck and how it’s changing the shape of their spine.

And you know, they’re like, ah, and there’s one thing I always do with everybody. I put them against a wall. And I have them do what I call wall angels. So it’s kind of like a snow angel on a wall. Most people can’t even do that. They can’t keep their head up against the wall without tilting it back. You know, because they can’t, they can’t translate their head this way.

[00:55:20] Gabby: You see that when you do, you know, this from teaching yoga. Sometimes with Laird and I, if we do XPT, we’ll do breathing, you know, 20, 45 minutes of breathing. Yeah. So many people are laying And they’re being pushed from their upper mid back off the ground. And that’s just all those muscles, you know. Hyperdeveloped,

[00:55:40] Dr. Paziotopoulos: yeah. You have like tone, right? Everyone has a certain tone in their body. So like, certain muscles have a certain tone to them to hold posture. Except now people are this way and this way. Right? Um, you know, there’s a, there’s a point here that we’re always stimulating in Qigong. And for everybody that’s like this, like, you’re actually like inhibiting that energy from flowing.

[00:56:02] Gabby: By your heart.

[00:56:03] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Right. And so we want this openness, but you can’t just crank somebody open. Yeah. Like they have to learn how to let go. And it’s not just, you can’t just stretch somebody because they have to, they have to learn neurologically how to change that tone. And that comes slowly over time with breathing and with movement practice, but they have to kind of want to do it and they have to also experience something wonderful from doing movement.

Otherwise, I’ll never do it. And most people, when they start to do movement, they experiment with static stretching. And static stretching is a really terrible place to start, um, because you’ll go into a static stretch and you’re going to find resistance immediately. And then like the Golgi apparatus and all these things are going to just go into, they’re going to tighten up.

They’re going to protect you and you’ll feel tighter. Right?

[00:56:55] Gabby: It’s more like, plus you’ll be feeling he failed. Yeah. Right. You just don’t feel

[00:56:57] Dr. Paziotopoulos: good. Um, even in my yoga classes, I used to teach them pendiculation. So pendiculation is what animals do. And the Shaolin monks, a lot of their stuff was based on watching animal movement and then trying to emulate the spirit of that animal.

And when, if you see like, Oh, the dog’s doing down dog. Not really. Yeah. Kinda, right? Watch them, right? They move around in there, it doesn’t really look pretty. Right? And then, you know, you see like Krishna Namachari and some of the old yogis from like, you know, 80 years ago and stuff like that. Look at their poses.

They don’t look so pretty. I guarantee you they’re doing real yoga. Like whatever you’re doing on Instagram that looks all pretty isn’t close to what they’re doing. Right? Because they’re channeling energy and they’re moving and they’re feeling what was inside their body and they’re doing whatever movement was necessary to let that energy flow and to release.

Thanks. Um, we’re, we’ve lost a lot of that.

[00:57:56] Gabby: How do you ignite somebody when they, they are blocked? How do you, what is it? And I know for maybe people, all people, it’s different. Maybe if, is it a health scare that finally gets somebody into it? Or if you have somebody who’s just kind of in the middle.

They’re not here nor there. How do you ignite them? What’s the, what are the paths of, uh, of inspiration?

[00:58:22] Dr. Paziotopoulos: My answer is that you don’t, um, you need the right person. So there’s some cool, like old stories. You see, like if you wanted to get into the Shaolin Monastery, say when you’re younger and there’s like cool movies about this and stuff, like you might have to sit outside the walls for two weeks. Nobody’s going to talk to you, maybe they’ll bring you something.

And you’ll just see, like, what kind of patience do you have? What kind of burning desire do you have? You hear these stories, like, Oh, I wanted to study with this yogi. And they ignore him for days and days and days. And they’re trying to get their attention, they just ignore him, ignore him, ignore him. And then one day they hand him a shovel, and they’re like, go dig a well over there.

And they’re like, but I came here to learn yoga, go dig the well, right? They didn’t, not trying to be mean or a jerk or anything like that. Are you sure you want to do it? They’re like, you have burning desire because like, it won’t work.

[00:59:17] Gabby: Do you have a mean receptionist? Like what’s going on? So when, uh, when patients, what gauntlet to your patients?

[00:59:24] Dr. Paziotopoulos: So we, when patients call, we tell them this is an institute, right? And I don’t want to take your money. You know, just because it’s expensive and then, you know, you fall off after a year, right? This is a lifelong thing. So do you have the burning desire to do this? Right? Um, you know, and it, you know, they use this term radical willingness.

Kind of taking it from the Burning Man community, right? Do you have that? Do you have that radical willingness to do something so different than you’ve done your whole life, right? And do you have faith in it? Right? Cause, you know, faith is a weird word, but like, it’s a powerful thing. And we know about it in so many different ways.

There’s a doctor, her name’s Dr. Alyssa Rankin. She wrote this book, Mind Over Medicine, and she did all this work in the nocebo effect. And it’s really fascinating. So like if you’re sitting there and you’re looking at your supplement pills or a pill that you’re taking or practice that you’re going to do, and like, you think it’s going to help you like, yeah, I’m grateful for this.

And it’s really going to help me. 50 percent of the time, it’s going to help you. Could be sugar, right? And then opposite. If you look at this thing, you’re like, ah, these damn supplements and these medicines make me feel, and I don’t want to do this practice 90 percent of the time, it’s going to bite you in the ass.

Yeah. Right. So you have to have radical willingness or it’s not, not just that going to work, it’s going to cause harm. So we have to interview everyone and see if they have that. And you know, we turn away a lot of people, right. And then, you know, from a business perspective, it’s a terrible idea. Right. But, um, That’s not the whole goal, right?

In this field right now of longevity, there’s so much money going into like these different machines that people are making, different pills that people are making, and a lot of these clinics that are being set up all over the place, and it makes me want to vomit. Almost none of them are open source. So the IMME is going to be completely open source, and we’re sharing our data, um, with a bunch of different institutions.

And we wanted to look at our protocols, look at our data, give us feedback, let us know what’s good, what’s not. We’ll change things as we need to, right? Not that like, oh, here’s, here’s our little cocktail and you’re going to spend a hundred thousand doing this, right? Um, I just, I want to be completely separated from all of that.

Um, Eventually, we’re going to create, um, and hopefully later this year, we’re going to have a conference on medical maintenance engineering. And maybe next year what we’re going to do is we’re going to do an accreditation. So that physicians and other people that want to be accredited in this and learn how to do that can do that.

And then they can set up their own little place to do it. Um, and then we can gather even more data. So this whole software is going to be built on an API that’s going to be able to share all this information to these third parties to evaluate. And the more people doing this, the more data that we have, the more machine learning we get, the more training that these other people look on it.

And so it’s just going to get better and better and better. So like, we already know like what we’re doing works, but we don’t know exactly which parts work. We don’t know to what extent and now there’s so many new things coming. When do we add these things? When do when do we take away old things? So without this type of a platform, it won’t work.

Right? It’s just going to be like, Oh, this is what I think.

[01:03:13] Gabby: Yeah, this is this is one I you know, I’m a I’m a foot dragger when it comes to technology. Cause of my generation and also a human human contact. But when I hear this, these kinds of scenarios on how to use it, it really excites me like in an unlimited way.

Like I just, it almost feels like we, we, we have to have that because of what we’ve created in our system, that this is the by product of something so exciting. Yeah. So, talking, can we, maybe we could just talk about a few of the, cause you do a lot of sexy things at your, at your institute. You do. I mean when, you know, you talk about reverse aging and obviously everybody knows like chronological versus biological.

I have a friend that I do, um, my friend Elijah, I do a technology, cause he’s always convincing me, trying to convince, he’s in his thirties, technology’s a tool. And we have these conversations at my counter, so every other week we do a bonus episode around technology. Oh, cool. you know, AI and medical and all these things.

Um, but, uh, you know, he’s 35 or six and I think he, you know, he’s 21. He’s always showing off about his, uh, you know, and, and what Brian Johnson, you know, Brian’s experiment. So is that, when you talk about reverse aging, I’d love to hear, you know, some of the ways that, uh, it’s possible. And then, you know, just even a story that, of a patient that, uh, is exciting.

Cause I, I think hearing it real time is, is more interesting than the hypothetical.

[01:04:52] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Yeah. Um, there’s, it’s not black or white, right. Um, there’s different ways that you can change the way that your body works. Can we really reverse age? Probably not right now. But what we can do is we can make things work a lot better.

Right? And we can also use regenerative medicine to repair things that were broken. Right? But the big problem that hopefully will be addressed in the future, and it will be done most likely genetically, is that there is this thing called the Hayflick Limit. And so, cells divide, and you know, different cells divide different amounts of time, but about a hundred times.

And then after about a hundred cell divisions, you don’t get any more. And there’s different factors for that. One of them is telomeres, um, and so we work on different ways to slow that down. And then there’s other things that we look at, which are senolytic cells and these senolytic cells, they call them zombie cells, stuff like that.

And so the older you get, the more you have. So there’s this thing that the older you get, the faster you get old because they kind of get in the way. Right. You kind of see that, right? Like, yeah. You see somebody go from 20 to 40, like, eh. Kind of a change, like, when I think, like, what was my performance like as a 40 year old versus a 20 year old?

A little different, not a ton, right? Tell me about it. But the difference between a 40 year old and a 60 year old, now that’s a huge difference, right? And you still have 60 year olds that are doing really well, right? I’m not too far away from that. But like, um then 60 to 80. Massive difference. It’s like a cliff, right?

And so like, that’s this whole, you know, logarithmic change in age. So what we can do is we can slow down this senolytic growth. And now we’re able to start killing off some of these senolytic cells. And then with some of the strategies that we have, we can slow down metabolism. And it’s like really funny because a lot of these optimization people, like they’re throwing all this, um, protein at people.

And I always see like my athletes are like, Oh, I’m getting two grams per kilogram and all this stuff. And they’re just like, you know, and I’m all jacked and all this stuff. And I’m like, yeah, you mean you’re aging really fast. And they’re like, what, what? And, and I’m like, look, we already know that there’s this one, it’s called the molecular target of rapamycin. MTOR. If you’re a bodybuilder, you want to turn mTOR up really high. You want to turn cell up. You want to jack your metabolism. You’re going to run really fast. And I’m like, it’s the same thing as like taking a candle and burning it at both ends. It’s really bright. It’s just not gonna last very long.

[01:07:32] Gabby: Yeah.

[01:07:33] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Right. Um, we want to slow metabolism down as much as we can. It’s like round. I want you to put like on a low protein diet, like maximum I’m at like one milligram per kilogram, you know, which most people are like, Oh, you can’t be an athlete at that. Right? And I’m like, well, you know, my deadlifts are still about 80 percent of what they were when they were at 20.

Right? And like, all my lifts are still high, my sprints are still decent. Right? So like, I’m good enough. Right? I don’t want to like, at the expense of that extra 20%, I don’t want those senolytic cells and the cancer risk and, you know, Alzheimer’s risk and all that. Right? I’d rather just be a decent athlete, right?

And, you know, have a really nice healthy life and, um, like, we can measure all these things, like we can measure your mitochondrial health.

[01:08:24] Gabby: Yeah. What? Tell me about that. Cause, uh, that’s, that’s, that’s pretty new.

[01:08:29] Dr. Paziotopoulos: It’s really new. Um, it’s not new in the PhD world.

[01:08:35] Gabby: Yeah. Well, you guys have secrets, but then your mitochondrial function test, you have a test.

[01:08:40] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Yeah. There’s a test. It’s called the MiScreen. Yeah, um, Dr. Hemal Patel out of UCSD, he developed it.

[01:08:46] Gabby: Yeah, what’s going on down in San Diego? They have a lot of anti aging longevity. Yeah. They have all kinds of really cool stuff going on down there. I love San

[01:08:54] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Diego. But it’s like a hub for It’s definitely a hub because they’re also close to Tijuana.

[01:09:00] Gabby: Oh, so they can practice down there. They can experiment over the line.

[01:09:04] Dr. Paziotopoulos: In Mexico, we can do all kinds of stuff that we can’t do here. We can do cancer vaccines. We can culture expand natural killer cells in your body. So they can go after senolytic cells and they can go after pre cancerous cells. You can use embryonic stem cells.

[01:09:19] Gabby: Yeah, but wait, how do you do the killer cells? How do you do that?

[01:09:22] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Um. What does

[01:09:23] Gabby: that entail? Are you allowed to talk about it? Yeah, yeah. Oh.

[01:09:26] Dr. Paziotopoulos: So, um. You know, I’m not

[01:09:28] Gabby: too far from Tijuana myself.

[01:09:30] Dr. Paziotopoulos: And most of these scientists are on our advisory board. Yeah. So we have a really nice scientific advisory board for the IMME.

And, uh, so Dr. Rafael Gonzalez is our, our cell guy and, um, he can take your natural killer cells, which are circulating in your blood. So natural killer cells, those are the ones that are killing cancer. They’re also going after senolytic cells. So they’ll take out your cells, they grow them outside the body, they culture expand them, and then they can re infuse them at really high numbers.

And when they go through your body, They basically just wreck havoc on all these bad cells in your body, because they can recognize a cell that’s healthy versus a cell that’s not. And they can target those cells that are not and turn them off and get them to basically go through this apoptosis, you know, or, or a different mechanism where those cells are recycled so it doesn’t create a lot of inflammation, right?

And so you’re basically recycling all those contents and replacing them with healthier cells. Um, have you done this? Yes. Okay. It’s really expensive. I haven’t done it yet. Come on.

[01:10:31] Gabby: Can’t you do some kind of trade?

[01:10:33] Dr. Paziotopoulos: I will one of these days, um, but yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s quite expensive right now. Um, a lot of these things.

 

[01:10:39] Gabby: Are we going to make it? Are you and I, cause we’re, we’re probably close to the same age, are, are we going to, is it all going to happen in time?

[01:10:45] Dr. Paziotopoulos: So this is, I think we are, um, I think that we’re at the age where a lot of us that do this are going to see this incredibly long life. Ahead of us, but most of our peers are not so it’s going to be kind of tragic that you’re going to lose a lot of Friends and then it’s going to be really cool that you’re going to be able to stay alive for a lot longer and so I always tell people this we’re doing all of the practices today So that we can live five more years with really good health and then in those five years we’re going to have better practices And those five years we have better practices.

And so we might be able to ride this wave To where we get to this point You Um, and at that point, then we can actually reverse age. That’s what we’re living for. Now, if you’re 80, we don’t know if we can get there, right? But the cool thing is that cryonics is here and So many people really don’t understand how good cryonics is

[01:11:47] Gabby: But who wants to do that? Who, would you, you would do it? You would do it? You’d have to, if you, if you end up staying with your girlfriend, you’d have to get her involved in the program too. No, she doesn’t want to.

[01:12:01] Dr. Paziotopoulos: There’s other girlfriends. No, she’s great. I don’t know, maybe she wants you in, I don’t know, right? Um, but, What about that, I mean, Like, my mom wouldn’t do it.

I can’t get my mom to do it. I couldn’t get my dad to do it. But you would do it? Right, but I would do it in a heartbeat because, um, you know, A lot of people think like, Well, what’s going to happen to my soul? And all these types of things. And I’m like, well, what about the people that they’re in a coma for 20 years?

And then they come back. Did they lose their soul? No.

[01:12:29] Gabby: What’s the difference? Right? But it is, it is a very, there’s something philosophical about it. Oh, for sure. It’s not just, so you would, like, when would you choose though? Would you want to not be too old? And then who do you trust to go, like, turn the lights back on?

[01:12:45] Dr. Paziotopoulos: The coolest thing about some of the cryonic studies is, um, Oh, God. So there’s this one where the, um, the med students, they went and they gathered pigs that were slaughtered.

[01:12:54] Dr. Paziotopoulos: And the heads were like off in a corner somewhere for a couple hours, and they’re like, can we take these? And so they took them, and they hooked them up to like heart lung machine, you know, hooked the blood supply back up and the oxygen.

They put all the electrodes around the brain, and they got a normal brain signal. Normal Q E E G out of the pigs. But the pigs are dead for hours. So we have this thing, if you’re dead for five minutes, oh, you’re dead, your brain dead, right? Everything’s done. But then, you know, you’ll donate a kidney and then that kidney goes into a cooler, a primitive cooler on ice, gets shipped across the world, and then that kidney goes back into somebody, they hook everything back up, and boom, the kidney is just fine.

Wait, that kidney’s been dead for 24 hours, right? On ice, but yet it just popped right back up. So, our, what we think is dead is not dead. Cells go into this like protective phase where they can reduce how many reactive oxygen species they create. And they kind of go into a dormancy. And they just kind of hang out there for a while.

So this person, you’re calling them dead, but really they’re not. Right, so they could be revived. So even though you technically die, as long as like, They go through this process and now the cryonics institutes, they all have their different little like formula that they use of this, um, cryoprotectant.

It’s basically biological antifreeze. Right, so. You know, a frog can freeze solid for the whole winter. Right, right. And then, you know, all of a sudden, boop, jumping around, right? So it’s not like it’s new to nature, right? And where did this frog’s soul go, right? I don’t know, or when it’s, you know, it’s chi, it’s energy, right?

So like, I feel that you could just be frozen. And when you’re frozen, you’re just outside of time. Because in these institutes, you’re at like four degrees above absolute zero, you’re basically outside of time.

[01:14:45] Gabby: How are they test? So they’re testing it with animals. Is it like, how does it just for somebody who really knows, I mean, only seen it in like pretend in sci fi movies, right?

[01:14:54] Dr. Paziotopoulos: So here’s where we’re at with the technology for the last 50 years. They’ve been trying to figure out how do you freeze tissue without causing damage to the tissue? Because normally if you try to freeze a higher level organism with all the cells that we have and the density that we have You get all these fractures So you get like, you know, cracks basically through the cells, through the DNA, all this kind of stuff.

So if you were going to try to revive that person, like, you’d have to have crazy nanotech to go in there and repair all this stuff, right? Most likely that’s never going to happen or it’d have to be like way, way in the future, right? But now they have the ability where they, when they look at this tissue.

It’s not damaged. Right, so they got the biological antifreeze down part, and they could probably improve it a little bit, but like, they’re at the point where like, we’re getting at the point of like, where their turn is not going to be that great. Now all the, all the science is going into, how are we going to revive these people?

But the really important part about cryonics is can you be frozen without damage?

Because thenthe future is going to be able to pin you back, right? And we don’t have to worry about when in the future because you’re outside of time. If it takes a thousand years, two thousand years, you don’t know the difference, right?

So as long as you’re preserved in that state. Now, some people are like, I don’t want to come back into a world without my friends and all this kind of stuff. Well, make sure your friends get frozen too.

And you know, here’s a really cool thing is, I think you have children. And so I tell all my patients with children, I’m like, if you buy a life insurance policy, does it insure your life? No, somebody else gets the money.  Right. But if you buy a life insurance policy and you put that towards your cryonics, you write it over to the cryonics company.

Well, then you did. Now you have life insurance. Are we going to trust those guys? What if they go out of business? They have, there’s, they’re pretty cool. They’re pretty well funded. And, um, a lot of these companies have really thought themselves out, especially like Alcor, where like their facility, like they’re like, okay, when there’s global warming and the sea comes up this high, we’re going to be above that.

And we’re outside of these tornado areas. And they like found all these right, great places. And they have these bunkers and like, okay, what if all the power goes down? Like, where do we have extra power from? I don’t know. Pretty much thought like if there’s an apocalypse or world war three, you’re going to be frozen Just fine.

[01:17:24] Gabby: Okay. So they have these places, right? And no one’s any who’s, is anyone in there yet?

[01:17:31] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Oh yeah. There’s thousands of people, but it should be way more. They actually like built and he’s the CEO of life extension. He had to fight really hard. Against the government because it wasn’t legal to be frozen.

Like you could be cremated, you could be buried, you can have all this stuff, but there’s no, there was no like legal way to freeze it. It’s just a bunch of old people that are frozen. Oh no. Young people. And that’s the cool thing is that like they had an accident or something, so like, or they say the greatest stress in life is if you lose a child.

[01:17:59] Gabby: Oh yeah.

[01:17:59] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Right.

[01:18:00] Gabby: I do.

[01:18:00] Dr. Paziotopoulos: So think about this. Say you had a life insurance policy on a 5-year-old. How much is that going to cost?

[01:18:06] Gabby: Yeah, nothing. Like, nothing.

[01:18:07] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Yeah. Right? And that life insurance policy, you write it over to Alcor. So like, say something horrible happened to a child, and you got the chance to freeze that child. Now what do you have? Hope.

[01:18:21] Gabby: Yeah.

[01:18:22] Dr. Paziotopoulos: But if you put them in the ground, there’s no more hope. All you have hope in is that they’re in another place with your God or whatever you want to believe in. Amen. I’d rather him know that, like, my cat is frozen and he’ll probably come back.

[01:18:37] Gabby: Will you write him a letter or send him a video? So when they wake up. Just get frozen next to him.

[01:18:44] Dr. Paziotopoulos: And then it’s a lot to think about. It’s a lot to think about, but like, this was never available to anybody before us. And now that it is available, people are like trying to find something wrong with it rather than saying like, well, what is the possibility here?

And this is such a cool technology and like. I think eventually it’s just going to be an extension of emergency medicine. We’re already seeing in emergency medicine, especially with little kids. Um, say a little kid is born in somebody’s house. And, uh, they swallow the meconium. Right, and now they can’t breathe, and they turn blue, and they’re about to die, right, and the EMT, they can’t save them, and they try, and they get to the hospital.

Certain hospitals are set up where they induce coma, and they drop that body temperature to near freezing, and they keep the kid there for days. Then they do this slow warming back up. And there’s no brain inflammation and the kids are fine. Where normally they would have been either a vegetable or dead, right?

So this is already an extension of emergency medicine and cryonics is just taking that to another level.

[01:19:53] Gabby: Have they put in like a mouse to sleep and woken it up? Like six months later, or what are they doing? Or they’re just not there yet.

[01:19:59] Dr. Paziotopoulos: That’s where all the, that’s where all the technology’s at right now.

It’s like, how do we bring things back? They’ve gotten it frozen. And so we’re just, we’re just worked on it. It’s frozen. And I know we went down a whole rabbit hole. No, no, that’s amazing. Um, but that’s like something I try to tell people, but really people are quite resistant. So that’s just that whole mindset thing.

Like people aren’t really ready. For all of these things, and

[01:20:20] Gabby: Well, because you come into the world with this idea of you’re here, if you’re lucky, you get old, and then you’re gone. I mean, death is a, it seems like the, the most definitive thing about being a human being. Yep.

[01:20:35] Dr. Paziotopoulos: But it doesn’t have to be. I think that everything’s changing now. You know, where like, Just even with layered, like, you know, Indian surfing, right? Mm hmm.

[01:20:46] Gabby: Mm hmm.

[01:20:48] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Say guys, 20 years older than him, 30 years older than him. When they were his age, were they riding waves like him? Not even close. No, because they didn’t have the practices set up, right? They didn’t have the medicine.

They didn’t have the supplements. They didn’t know about the diet. They know about the kind of training, right? All the breath work. So like he’s already extended. You know, everything out and it’s just going to go further and further and further, but only to the people that want to adopt it.

[01:21:18] Gabby: Yeah. Do you, do you like this going back to a philosophical question?

Because in a way you only want to extend it if like, if, if you can bring something positive like your dad saying, Hey, and also do something to help other people in a way there should, I wish it was sort of like we could only freeze people that when they come back. They’re gonna. Be kind and helpful and help out and yeah help the group below them and all these things because It feels like to keep more, you know more people alive that already Were because it makes me instantly think well very but only billionaires are gonna be frozen, right?

And I don’t know. It’s just a it is very it’s a really interesting

[01:22:01] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Yeah, you know, Elon Musk is a lot he’s really against a lot of longevity because he thinks that like the old school is gonna stay in like The old school politicians and the people that are running the road and like all these people that are causing the problems are gonna stay there Yeah, and continue to cause problems because they’re not open.

No, and they’re a lot of them are unhealthy I think it’s a little different right? So I think that The same method that he did that Elon did so he started off like did he make a Model 3 first? No, no, he made a really expensive roadster Right? So it’s the same thing that we’re doing. So we’re using the people that have the resources to prove out the model.

And then in the future, we’re going to be able to figure out, well, what is the most important things of this model? What’s the most bang for the buck, you know? So then we go from these really expensive to maybe not so expensive to finally, we get something that many people can afford. And then hopefully when we prove out the model, we can start infiltrating regular medicine.

And they’ll start adopting, Oh, yeah, you know, and then they’ll say like, Oh, yeah, we figured out medical engineering, right? Oh, yeah, yeah. But who cares, right? Like it gets done and then the people get the benefit of it all.

[01:23:15] Gabby: So What besides, uh, and if I’m making a note, um, if we’re not allowed to talk about this, we can cut this out, uh, the, the, uh, glycogen age test that you have can, so this is here now, this is here now, just like the, the mitochondrial functional tests, the Me test, the screen, me screen.

Sorry. So what is the glycan, the glycan age test that you have? Cause that’s pretty new also.

[01:23:43] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Yeah, they’re all, they’re all giving us, you know, the glycan age test is giving us a window into these residues, like how these types of sugars affect these immunoglobulins. Right. And by looking at the different ways that they’re doing that, we can see like how different systems are aging.

Um, There are so many of these new tests that are looking at little windows of your health. And so what we’re finding is like, say you’re looking at glycon age and it’s giving you like, oh, this is your biological age, this is your chronological age. And then I go look at like an epigenetic test and it’s telling me this is your biological age, this is your chronological age.

And then I look at this other test, they’re, none of them are the same. They’re not. So we, they’re not really accurate in that way. Cause we don’t really know how to measure it yet. And so. It’s kind of like all lab testing. It’s not like, oh, you know, I shoot a laser over there and I can figure out what the temperature is that with really, really accuracy, right?

But like, even with like doing a lab test on your first test in the morning, like we do this huge blood draw, right? And we look at all these markers. Well, if I drew you an hour later, they’d be a lot different.

[01:24:51] Gabby: Yeah.

[01:24:52] Dr. Paziotopoulos: And if I drew you in the afternoon, they’d be different. And so ideally what we have is we have implantable sensors on you all day, and we can like see all this stuff long term.

In the meantime. We have to interpret everything.

[01:25:04] Gabby: Yeah, you’re getting snapshots. And we have,

[01:25:05] Dr. Paziotopoulos: you know, what they always call, what I always hated, but now I kind of like it, is the, uh, the art of medicine, right? And so it’s like, I’m going to go off all the things that I see. I’m going to look at your family history, look at your genetics, and I’m talking to you, I learn a little about you, I’m looking at your labs, you know, and we kind of put it all together and we make a plan, you know, and eventually the tools are going to get better and better and better.

But what I’ve learned over the years is, This is not black and white. You don’t just look at that lab and, oh, that’s an absolute truth. Right? Now, there’s certain labs that like, oh, shit, right? Like, better do something. Right? But, you know, overall, like, you gotta look at things, especially hormones, because they fluctuate so much.

[01:25:48] Gabby: Right?

[01:25:48] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Um, You know, when I first started doing functional medicine, I just started reacting to all these labs all the time, and I was like, oh god, now I’m like, I’m an idiot, right? And so, a lot like what Elon says, you go back to first principles. Do you understand the underlying mechanisms that are happening?

Do you know the basic science really well? Because then you’ll know how to interpret these things, and you’ll be able to know, like, when to react, when not to react, Right? When to see like, oh, that’s just a glitch, right? Or that’s just a variable that’s outside the range. Like, don’t worry about that. It’s going to come back.

Right? And so, over time, you kind of figure out how to do that. And I’m sure the machine learning and the AI is just going to really help us even more with that. And Lab tests coming down, implantable devices, you know, coming around, wearables, right?

[01:26:41] Gabby: Wearables are kind of touch and go though, right? Like they’re, they’re sort of, there’s, there’s only a few metrics that they’re really actually catching.

When you say implant, would you put something inside your body? Would you put an implant? Sure. You would?

[01:26:53] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Why not?

[01:26:54] Gabby: Yeah. I don’t know.

[01:26:55] Dr. Paziotopoulos: It just depends on where it was and what the danger was and It’s not even

[01:26:59] Gabby: about danger. I just feel like being. I don’t know the idea of being Watched. I guess I have my if I have my phone on me. I guess I’m trackable pretty much. That’s how it is

[01:27:10] Dr. Paziotopoulos: We’re also. tracked. I mean we couldn’t escape Yeah, so we’re done even if you tried to drop off the grid like good luck

[01:27:21] Gabby: I know right

[01:27:23] Dr. Paziotopoulos: I mean, really, I mean, with facial recognition and everything else and everyone’s cameras everywhere, like, good luck.

[01:27:28] Gabby: So, yeah. So I think a lot of people are obviously concerned with, you know, you, the big ones are probably diabetes just because it feels like it’s prevalent dimension Alzheimer’s because not only for the same reason, I think it really scares the shit out of people for, for, Yeah. Reasonable ideas.

[01:27:47] Dr. Paziotopoulos: And now we have ways of actually like predicting.

[01:27:49] Gabby: Right. Like you can, cause some of this stuff can be beginning in your twenties. Like people don’t realize. Um, and I think the important thing with Alzheimer’s and dementia, these, these are things that happen over a long period of time. You don’t wake up and two years later, all of a sudden you have it. So you have these, you know, things that make that pretty predictable if you’re heading in that direction.

[01:28:11] Dr. Paziotopoulos: And there’s like certain genes, like ApoE gene, right? Like everyone should have that gene run, right? Cause I mean, if you’re homozygous ApoE 4 4, you’re 16 times more likely to have cardiovascular and Alzheimer’s risk. So, um, it’s not, In functional medicine, it’s like everyone gets it, right? In regular medicine, they almost never get it.

And you would think every cardiologist would order that test. Very few of them do. Even in cardiology, there’s a newer test. It’s called the CLEARLY exam. And, you know, every guy that’s like 40 years old should get it run. And, you know, um, In Vietnam War, when those guys were coming back, they were like 18, 20 years old.

And they had to do the Y incision to do the autopsy. They found that those kids had like 20 30 percent blockages in their arteries, in their coronary arteries. Right? So, don’t you want to know that? Yeah. Right? And, you see, I mean, I’ve already lost friends of mine from high school and college, you know, before they got to 50 from heart attack.

Had they had a clearly heart test run, I mean, we didn’t have the tech back then, but like, if they had it run, you know, late 30’s or something, it They would have known, right? And say like, Oh my gosh, you’re in your thirties and you have 50 percent blockages. Well, there’s things you can do to stop the progression of this and to even slightly reverse it.

Um, the really cool thing is, um, there’s a new company that’s going to be coming out really soon. Um, and they’re going to be able to reverse atherosclerosis.

[01:29:49] Gabby: How?

[01:29:49] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Um, their, their technology is going to come and it’s just kind of like Drano.

[01:29:53] Gabby: Really?

[01:29:54] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Yeah.

[01:29:54] Gabby: I like you and all your like household pipe and car analogies.I love it. Really?,

[01:30:00] Dr. Paziotopoulos: So yeah. So, um, but it’s not here yet.

[01:30:03] Gabby: Yeah. But it’s, they’re moving in that direction. There’s a

[01:30:05] Dr. Paziotopoulos: scientist, his name’s Reason and he’s, uh, one of the head scientists. Dr. Reason? His name’s Reason. Yeah. You can look him up. I love it. Uh, he’s just a brilliant dude. And, uh.

[01:30:14] Gabby: Did someone in his family pass of that?

[01:30:16] Dr. Paziotopoulos: don’t know. I don’t know Reason’s story, but, um. The last time I saw him was at Alcor for, um, the conference, the 50 year conference for, um, cryonics.

[01:30:28] Gabby: The cryonics. That, that one threw me. I, I don’t know if I’m, that one I’m going to be thinking about. That’ll be a dinnertime conversation with Laird tonight for sure.

Um, things that are here now. I mean, you, peptides and I, you know, all of these things. I love the idea of peptides. I’ve done, you know, of course, some of the basics, just from your experience and snapshot of what’s here. And I know they sort of have peptides for very specific things. You know, what do you, what do you do?

Are you liking peptides? Do you think they have a place in all of this?

[01:31:05] Dr. Paziotopoulos: They definitely have a place. They’re not my first tier. What is your first tier? My first tier, number one is spiritual practice. Cause if you don’t have a strong spirit, you’re not going to make it right. Um, I used to see it in the hospital.

Like, um, when I was a resident, I’d walk into somebody’s room and it’d be like some 70 year old lady and slight pneumonia, not really terrible or anything. Her counts were not so bad. X rays weren’t that bad. And I’d be like, you’re going to be okay. And then she’d be like, I lived a really good life. And I called.

Yeah, you’re gone, right? And gone, right? And then I walk in, there’s this 90 year old and total white out of the lungs, right? And she’s screaming at the nurses when she can breathe, ripping off the mask, pulling the IVs out of her arm. She goes home, right? And that’s powerful spirit, right? And If you have powerful spirit, like, you’re gonna do alright.

And it’s really hard to give that to somebody, right? They have to want to work for it somehow. I don’t know if it’s part of personality. So, like, personality testing, I use the Big Five. Um, I love Jordan Peterson’s, um, toolkit that he has for everybody. Cause it’s so cheap. 10 to do your big five and 25 to do your self authoring,

[01:32:24] Gabby: you know, and maybe just for people who don’t know explain Just you know your big five.

[01:32:30] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Yeah, so The big five breaks down into 15. Mm hmm, right and you know it shows you how you’re set up and Really the big ones I look at is what is your level of neuroticism? Yeah, right. And if you’re really high on neuroticism and you’re really low on openness, we’ve got some problems, right? Because all these personality traits, what they do is they change your ability to see the truth.

That’s your filter, right? So there’s this truth in front of you. And now I got this neuroticism filter and so it’s making everything a lot worse than it really is. And then I got this low openness filter and it’s showing me that, Oh no, don’t do that. Cause that’s outside the norm, right? And so we’ve got to learn about where are we and we have to believe when we do the test.

And so like, you know, he, Dr. Peterson, like say, it makes it really clear when you do this test, be brutally honest, right? Do not answer these questions the way you want to answer them truthfully. And then you’ll get a truthful personality test and then you’ll be able to see like, how much are you changing the truth in front of you?

Right? And then when you’re aware of that, well, now you’ve got a chance of seeing what really is. Right? The whole country could use that right now. Everyone could. I mean, I think And we use it, I use it as a tool in my practice, because then I know how to talk to people.

[01:34:01] Gabby: Have you seen someone who really came in? And, you know, some of it is just exposure. They just never had a friend or mentor, anybody talked to them about this stuff. or family member. Have you had people that they really make a significant, and I’m talking maybe they’re 50 years old, these are in, they’re in their personality. Yeah. Have you seen them Wildly different.

[01:34:25] Dr. Paziotopoulos: I see them not wildly different in their personality. I don’t know if you can really change your personality all that much. But what you can do is you can become aware of how you perceive things differently and how you’re going to emotionally react to things.

And then you can change that. You know, um, there’s so much work done in like when your personality is set. You know, and it keeps going younger and younger and younger. And now it’s like three, by three years old, your personality’s set, right? And so like, you know, I’m always like, you know, people, and I don’t have kids, but I’m always really like, when I’m talking to my friends that are having kids, I’m just like, be home, be around those kids because, you know, their personality is being set in those first three years.

Right. Try to be around as much as you can. You see like residents getting pregnant and I’m like, that’s a really bad idea. Right. Um, not, you know, against anybody cause they may be, they’re older and they want to have kids and stuff like that. But like, you know, sorry, like this is just the personality set in those first three years and then they have a lifetime of that’s where they’re set and then they can learn to deal with it, but they can’t change that very much.

[01:35:33] Gabby: Yeah.

[01:35:33] Dr. Paziotopoulos: You know, psychologists, they, they’re taught that when you’re dealing with somebody with a personality disorder, you have to tell them. You know, proper ethics and morals is you tell them that you cannot help them change their personality. But if they find it beneficial to talk to you that they can work better in life, then that’s one thing.

But like, you can say like, oh, I can help you with your depression. I can help you get out of that. But your personality disorder? Eh. You know, there’s very, very low chance of being able to help somebody with a personality disorder.

[01:36:03] Gabby: That, that makes me think, I read somewhere that um, I don’t know. , speaking of that, uh, ketamine psychotherapy, I just, it seems like a good opportunity to bring that up because Sure.

You know, I, I personally, um, have sort of, as far as, uh, substances have been really conservative my whole adult life. Mm-Hmm. , um, I used exercise and, and other things. I did start microdosing a couple of years ago. Nice. And I, I really, if it just, I, I liken it to having had a cement helmet on my brain. Mm-Hmm.

To one that just feels a little softer and I’m not reaching for words as much just in a homeostasis. Sure. So as far as like that, but I have a lot of friends that have been uh, Have talked about the ketamine psychotherapy or even their micro dosing ketamine So I you do you have a you have an experience with this?

[01:36:55] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Yeah, i’ve been doing ketamine psychotherapy about Six years now in the clinic

[01:37:00] Gabby: trying to change people’s personalities. No, i’m just kidding

[01:37:05] Dr. Paziotopoulos: I’ll tell you what though. Um So there’s different ways to do ketamine. And there’s clinics all over that are doing things in ways that I don’t think are all that beneficial. Um, so there’s lower dose ketamine, and then there’s really high dose ketamine. Say you were to do low dose, and a lot of the research is around this kind of lower dose IV or intranasal, and you can do it maybe twice a day. a week. You have to have a little break in between or like you don’t get the neurogenesis that you need and you don’t get all the brain changes.

Those people will feel better. They really will. You’ll break their pattern of depression. Um, but they won’t have a mystical experience. They’ll feel better.

[01:37:49] Dr. Paziotopoulos: And then you take the ketamine away and they kind of go back to where they were.  And so what’s happening that they feel better and then they go back because what you’re doing is so like.

Your body is, you know, they call it, they hope your body gets into homeostasis, right? There is no such word.

[01:38:09] Gabby: Right, you float in and back and through.

[01:38:11] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Right, your body’s always like trying to make changes, trying to find balance, right? And so, the way your brain’s set up is, you know, how you’re sleeping, how you’re interacting, what your thoughts are, what you’re eating, like, how much sun you have, like all these things, like, kind of balance you out.

And so when you start doing ketamine, you’re starting to like change, right? Right. Right. How that pattern goes and you’re creating a little neurogenesis, you’re creating a little bit more neurotransmitters. And so you’re going to feel a lot better, but then you’re going to go back to your ways and everything’s going to reset.

What I like to do is I have people do their personality tests so they can kind of figure out where they’re at. I have them do their self authoring. So they have to deal with their past. They have to deal with their present and they have to create a future for themselves, which is their purpose. Their purpose.

Why do you want to live in the future? What do you want to do? Right, and then I have them make their intentions for why they want to go into quote unquote the spirit world or into their subconscious mind or You know to talk to the divine. However, you want to look at it, right? And then I have them make three suggestions to themselves Right.

I’m like look at your behavior You Look at the three worst parts of your behavior, and make a suggestion to change each one of those for the better, from your perspective, in your words. And then, um, we talk about everything for a while, and then I get them ready for the experience. And they come into the clinic, and we put some binaural beats on, and they’re laying in zero gravity, and they have an eye mask on.

And, um, I have them follow more of like a shamanistic way from, um, Michael Harner. So Michael Harner, um, he studied a lot of shamans all over the world and he tried to distill down, like, what was the saying between all of them. That was the science of shamanism. Right. Right. And he came down to that. It was the journey.

Right, and how do you use the journey to find answers? And so we use that, and so I have them kind of read, you know, Way of the Shaman and do some of the work on shamanism. org before they come in. And then we do the session, and it’s a higher dose IV, and they go off into that space. While they’re in there, every five or ten minutes, I’ll read them their suggestions.

Because when you’re under the influence of ketamine, you’re highly suggestive. So I don’t want to tell them anything from my view, right? That would not be ethical.

[01:40:38] Gabby: What should I be investing in?

[01:40:41] Dr. Paziotopoulos: I’m going to hop on one foot all the time, right? You know, like, whatever.

So, um, I’ll read that to them and then, um, and it’s kind of controversial of like, whether or not you guide somebody or whether you let them have their own experience. From doing this for a long time, I find that guiding is helpful. And I don’t like overly guide, but I’ll be like, so where are you at? And they’re like, ah, I’m at this waterfall.

It’s beautiful. And I’m like, why are you there? Uh, did you have an intention? Oh, yeah. Why don’t you go find that? Okay. Right. Because you can get lost in the beauty and all this stuff. Right. But that’s not why you’re there. Right. And so, um, I go, I don’t know if you’re going to find what you’re going to looking for, but looking at the waterfall, I know you’re not going to find it.

Right. Right. So move it on. Move on. Move on. Right. Keep going. And then they keep going. And like people have had these really amazing interactions, right? Like I’ve had people that were complete atheists. That were met like by archangels and then taken to God. And then they had this experience of God talking to them and take God, taking them into the past of these horrible experiences that they had in the past and they overcame them.

[01:41:55] Gabby: Right.

[01:41:56] Dr. Paziotopoulos: And they confronted these people while in their, in their trip. And, um, basically had a mystical experience, you know, and that’s what all of this meditation and all this stuff was for, is to have a mystical experience. And it’s like the exact opposite of religion, right? Here, you’re going to follow this pattern.

And it was not based on that because all of these saints and stuff, they didn’t do that. They had a direct mystical experience.

[01:42:22] Gabby: Yeah. They were by the burning bush tripping out.

[01:42:24] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Yeah. We want to have that direct mystical experience. And then people that have the mystical experience. One time having an IV make massive changes in their life.

[01:42:36] Gabby: I was going to say, can they, you know how sometimes you, you learn something in your life. We’re so funny humans, right? And, and our neuropathways and the grooves, I always say, got to jump the track. Cause I, you know, I catch myself and I go, how do I jump that track? Because it’s just the groove, you know, but you’re, you’re saying that people can actually do this experience and then Okay, I was heading down the right, I make a left turn and I’m on in something new.

[01:43:00] Dr. Paziotopoulos: And it’s just so profound to them. It’s not like they’re even trying, right? Because I had this mystical experience. Now here’s what’s really important is integration. You can have this mystical experience and I’ve had patients do this, right? Have this amazing mystical experience. Everything’s awesome. And then they do none of the integration.

Right? Cause they’re supposed to come back and meet with me, they’re supposed to do this journaling, you know, I give them the whole transcript of what they said, right? And then I also do this like debriefing at the end because you’ll forget a lot. Ketamine kind of makes you forget. So like right after the drip, you know, when they’re just laying there, I’m just like, remember when you were over by that waterfall and you told me blah, blah, blah.

What else happened? And then they tell me like a paragraph and then remember over here you had this and I only get like one a hundredth of what they experienced right but I have like these key moments throughout the Thing. And then I asked them all these questions over about two hours. And then I get pages and pages of transcript that they’re telling me all the stuff that happened.

And if they just went home, they would probably forget almost 90 percent of it.

[01:44:07] Gabby: Yeah.

[01:44:08] Dr. Paziotopoulos: But now they have this transcript and I don’t know how accurate it is. It’s just what I wrote down. Right. So I go here, take this, go read it and add to it every day for the next week. And then at the end of the week, you’re going to, we’re going to sit down and we’re going to figure out what did you really learn that you need to change in your life.

And then you got to do it, right? Because, you know, God or this entity or whatever or this experience you had said that you have to go this way. Right? And you believe it. But if you don’t do it, you’re just going to go right back to the same things you’re already doing. And so, it’s a tool. Right there. It’s not like oh, I’m gonna do ketamine and everything’s gonna be great.

You’re landing on the bullseye, right? Like you’re just it’s just another tool, but you still have to do all the work Yeah, but the people that do they have profound experiences and they change their life drastically

[01:45:00] Gabby: I always think it’s interesting. Like, imagine if you go home to your partner, if you have one, or your kids, and you’re like, no, I’m different, you know, and they’re like, we’ll see, you know, because imagine you have to, everyone has to catch up.

Um, okay. So I, I departed. So you, you’re talking about first for you, it’s, It’s, it’s your life force. It’s your spirit, your, your, your will, your desire to be here. That’s your, your spiritual self is the number one. Number one.

[01:45:28] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Where do you, where do you go from there? Okay. From there. So you got your spirit, that’s, you got a solid practice and maybe it’s not, you don’t have a solid spirit yet, but you have a plan for it.

[01:45:37] Gabby: Yeah.

[01:45:38] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Right. And then we just keep watching, you know, are you moving along that? And then we look at your lifestyle. We got to change your lifestyle. Right, because we already know if you have a powerful spirit and you have a really good lifestyle You’re probably gonna live to be a hundred and you’ll be really healthy without anything else

[01:45:56] Gabby: Amazing, right?

[01:45:56] Dr. Paziotopoulos: I mean look at all these blue zone people like they’re doing it.

[01:45:58] Gabby: Yeah,

[01:45:59] Dr. Paziotopoulos: like they don’t have senolytics. They don’t have hormone replacement They don’t have pharmaceuticals. They don’t have any of this stuff. They just have those two things and they have community Yeah. Right? So let’s do what we already know works, right?

So we have experience from the Blue Zone people. We have experience from the people like living in Shaolin Monastery. We have the people from all these other monasteries that we know how to live, right? So let’s do that first, right? Now we can ensure that, you know, we’ll have a fulfilling life and we’ll be healthy most of our life and be able to move appropriately.

Our whole life. Now let’s add to that. So, one of the first things we add, hormone replacement.

[01:46:39] Gabby: Yeah, and you’re a big proponent of that. Oh, it changes people’s lives. If you’re a 50 year old guy, testosterone is probably going to be a friend. Yeah. So, uh, if somebody wants to explore, and obviously everybody’s different, and you’re getting your blood work done, but, um, You like pellets.

Is this right?

[01:47:01] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Yeah, and you know people, you know, you’ll have people that like this or like that. Yeah, um, In my experience, the, the people that are doing other forms of testosterone, their numbers are all over the place. Mm hmm, right? You know, and some people are like, well natural testosterone is going up and down.

It’s like, yeah, it goes up and down like crazy all day. We don’t have tech to do that. Right. Um, but giving somebody an injection, peaking their testosterone up and then letting it crash and then giving him another injection, I just don’t think that that’s the best way to do it. Plus, um, when you do a pellet, what you’re able to do is you can mix that with a little bit of anastrozole.

And people think that that anastrozole is going to go. systemic and it’s going to like block all your estrogen and stuff like that. It doesn’t work like that. Like you’re just keeping it really local. It’s a super low dose. You just don’t want a lot of that testosterone to get turned into estrogens and you’re not really keeping estrogens all that low.

You’re just not letting estrogen go up that high from the conversion of testosterone to estrogen.

[01:48:00] Gabby: Right.

[01:48:01] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Um, and you’re getting a much better Kind of like every three months, you know, you’re getting a little peak and a little trough. But not crazy up and down. When you go up and down really fast with testosterone, you change mood drastically.

Um, there’s these clinics that will do a testosterone injection once a week. Those guys will go like up to 2, 400. And then they’ll crash down to like four or five hundred and then they go all the way up. And then like, these are the people that like, they lashed out against somebody and then, you know, they got a little rage and stuff like that.

And I’m like, I’m just not a big fan of that. Right. So I’m just like, if anything, if we can just keep your mood dialed in, Right? And we give you some testosterone so you don’t lose your muscle mass and your bone mass and your brain mass and things like that. We’re doing a great job. And I don’t like giving super physiological levels of testosterone.

It’s like, if an 18 year old didn’t need it, you don’t need it.

[01:48:58] Gabby: Right.

[01:48:58] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Right? You know, and you know, uh, If you let guys do what they want,

[01:49:06] Gabby: yeah, they will take as much as they can get. Because I think they’ll get like this and right. And you

[01:49:11] Dr. Paziotopoulos: see the guys that, you know, have been on testosterone when they’re younger and they don’t have testicles. You can’t barely find them in their scrotum.

[01:49:17] Gabby: Oh, really?

[01:49:18] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Right. They’re just gone. And like in our clinic, we measure testicular size over, over time. And we use different methods. You know, we use inclomiphene, we use caspeptin, sometimes we use HCG, whatever it is. And we use that in conjunction and we like to rotate.

So your body kind of gets used to certain things after a while. And in the feedback loop, we’ll Kind of not work as well. So as long as you keep confusing it and switching it up and you have people stay active sexually, um, a lot of people just don’t. And if you don’t use it, you kind of lose it. Right. So, um, and your body, if you’re not active, so that’s, you prescribe, you’re like, yeah, go home and have sex.

You know, it’s like when animals are no longer reproducing, there’s like certain mechanisms and we don’t understand all of them. And it’s just like. You’re useless. Right. And so you should, you know, downregulate all this stuff and let another person take your place. Take the resources.

[01:50:15] Gabby: Yeah.

[01:50:16] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Right? And so like, it’s, it’s ancient bio biology, so you gotta keep that going.

[01:50:21] Gabby: Yeah.

[01:50:22] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Um, so that, I like pellets for that. I even like pellets better for women. You do. Oh, yeah. Uh, Dr. Rebecca Glazier has tons of data. You can go to her website, um, hormonebalance. org. Her and Dr. Dimitrakis, they have pretty much laid it all out. Um, they treat breast cancer with it. Another Greek. There we go.

[01:50:39] Gabby: Hey.

[01:50:40] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Greeks are all over the scientific literature. I don’t know how, from such a small country, how they’re all over the place, but they are. Um, when you give women testosterone, this is pretty much unanimous for most women, is like, you gave me my life back. I was in brain fog. Yeah. No, I’m not.

[01:50:58] Gabby: I, I, I am 54 and I do, I take a pill though. And it’s every other, every third day. Yeah. Um, I never went off a cliff. Um, but it was, it was sort of said what was happening to is I was also getting AFib a little bit and it was kind of like maybe the load, my load, my workload, my workout load. Um, so it feels So far so good. I should probably look at everything though.

 

[01:51:29] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Well, you know, I just don’t like the way that certain hormones get metabolized by the liver. Yeah, that makes sense. Um, everything you take orally will hit the liver first before it hits your circulation. It’s a protection mechanism. Right. Right. And we know that metabolites of hormones can cause harm if they’re not in balance.

And when you’re, whenever you take a hormone orally, you’ll make more metabolites. Right off the bat because you can have less in circulation. So it means you have to take a higher dose Right when you do something like a pellet It’s bypassing that, and it’s that very slow release. Go straight in. Right?

And um,

[01:52:06] Gabby: What about for men, their hair? Cause I get that question a lot.

[01:52:09] Dr. Paziotopoulos: So a lot of hair loss isn’t really testosterone, it’s inflammation.

[01:52:14] Gabby: Oh.

[01:52:15] Dr. Paziotopoulos: And, um, you will get some hair loss from testosterone, mostly if you’re converting to dihydrotestosterone, DHT, and how much you’re converting and whether your body’s even sensitive to it or not. Cause I’ve seen people all over the place, you know, where they have low ADHD, but they don’t have any hair or they have high DHT and they have hair. So like, it’s not, it’s not, it’s not straightforward. Um, and a lot of it is what’s your nitric oxide production like? You know, do you stimulate your scalp, right?

What’s your stress like? Like what’s your inflammation like in your body? Like there’s so many factors that go into hair and like, just think about like you’ve seen people that like had a really stressful event and all of a sudden they have a gray streak or a white streak through their hair and it stays for the rest of their life.

[01:53:02] Gabby: The stress patch. It’s crazy.

[01:53:03] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Or you look at every president except for Trump. Like what happens to their hair?

[01:53:09] Gabby: I call those presidential years. You see if it’s four years, but it looks like 12.

[01:53:13] Dr. Paziotopoulos: It looks, yeah, they just age so much, so much, right? And I wouldn’t, I mean, what a horrible job that is.

[01:53:19] Gabby: Oh yeah. And they say really only like sociopaths want that job anyway. So you, so you have your life force, your lifestyle, and then are we getting into this to the sexy little fun thing? Yeah. So

[01:53:30] Dr. Paziotopoulos: then we’re doing, then we’re doing like hormones and we’re doing pharmaceuticals.

[01:53:35] Gabby: Oh, pharmaceuticals.

[01:53:35] Dr. Paziotopoulos: And you know, it’s really funny cause a lot of patients be like, you’re going to give me pharmaceuticals.

Yeah. I thought you’re holistic. Right? And it’s like, we use whatever tool works.

[01:53:46] Gabby: Yeah.

[01:53:47] Dr. Paziotopoulos: So like, if you look at there’s a bunch of meta analysis have been done for Alzheimer’s. And one of them is they look at all of these people that had statins And all these people that didn’t have statins. Well, the people that didn’t have statins have a much higher incidence of Alzheimer’s disease.

Yeah. Right? And I get people that are like, Oh, I’m not taking a statin. Right? And they think that all statins are the same. And, you know, I like to break statins down just to make it easy. There’s fat soluble statins and there’s water soluble statins. I like fat soluble statins for cancer. Because it can block some of these pathways that cancer can use energy for.

I like water soluble statins for, like, controlling cholesterol and for decreasing inflammation. And then there’s high dose statins and there’s low dose statins. High dose statins tend to have a more negative effect on mitochondria. Right? And they also can raise liver enzymes and things like that. Low dose statins don’t have that effect.

So I like, and there’s only like two really important water soluble statins, there’s Crestor and there’s Pravastatin, or Rosuvastatin and Pravastatin. And I like them at low dose. And the odd thing is that like, at 5mg of Rosuvastatin, you get 85 percent of the effectiveness. But people dose all the way up to 40mg.

[01:55:03] Gabby: Why?

[01:55:05] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Right? So, I like to use low dose medicines, and then I will use another medicine. right, in conjunction with it, and so that you get these synergistic effects. by working in different systems. And so I like a lot of medicines. I like, you know, angiotensin receptor blockers. I think they’re awesome. They work on, you know, there’s one called telmisartan and it protects your kidney and it works on PPA or gamma.

So it helps your metabolism work better. Right. And so it has all these, you know, lowers your blood pressure. So it does all kinds of really great things. And at low dose, it works fantastic.

[01:55:36] Gabby: Yeah.

[01:55:37] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Right. And you know, low dose statins, they work fantastic. Um, you know, I like Zedia. It blocks the absorption of saturated fats.

[01:55:46] Dr. Paziotopoulos: So, like, there’s a lot of, You have a lot of tricks, too. There’s colchicine. You know, colchicine is like one of the oldest drugs on the planet. Like, you know, the ancient Greeks knew about it. Um, and, uh, What does it do? It drops inflammation. Oh. It’s fantastic. They used it for all kinds of stuff in the past.

Now we just use it for people that have gout flare ups. Oh, you know,

[01:56:05] Gabby: but like, yeah, it is a beast. Yeah. And you know, that’s mostly lifestyle. I know I have my, I have a family member that has, it’s like the craziest thing you’ve ever seen. Right. It’s horrible. Yeah. So, so going back. Cause I think a lot of people, sorry to circle back to the peptides.

So how would somebody, if they were going to explore taking, uh, peptides, what would be the, you know, kind of the reasonable way to approach it? Make sure all the priorities in line.

[01:56:41] Gabby: Yeah. You’re doing your part.

[01:56:43] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Yeah. You know, get your spirit in line, get your exercise, get your sleep, get all that, get your diet, get everything lined up.

Get your hormones balanced. Get your nutrition on point. Like, you know, get lab work done. Make sure you’re not inflamed, right? And your cholesterol is in control. Your sugars are really well controlled, right? You have your hormones balanced. All this stuff, right? And then you look at, like, What are my vitamin levels like?

Take a look at that. Do I have the right supplement regimen, right? Okay, now we can start playing with peptides. Right? Otherwise, it’s like, you’re trying to hack. Yeah. I don’t like hacks. Like, I’m, I know they’re, I like the biohackers, it’s cool, but like No, I’m with you, I’m with you. Hacking’s a really bad idea, right?

It’s just like, okay, I’m gonna be the one that’s running the show on this whole thing, but I don’t have all the knowledge, and I didn’t put all my ducks in a row. Right. It’s kind of like, you know, oh, I don’t need the formula one engineers. I can tinker with that thing just as good. Right. Yeah, sure. You can.

Right. And maybe you’ll do some things that are cool, but overall,

[01:57:49] Gabby: you might make it around the last track once,

[01:57:51] Dr. Paziotopoulos: right? So like, you know, just, it’s better when you have a really good system and, you know, I like algorithms, you know, like do this first, do this second, they work really well. Right. And there’s exceptions to everything.

But if you don’t know how to do it, then you don’t know how to break the rules. Right? And so, um, I like all that stuff. And I just like putting it in raw. As far as peptides, what I do like? I love BPC 157. Yeah. Right? It’s just fantastic. Right? And it’s never going to harm anybody. I’ve never seen it do anything negative.

It’s just made people heal faster. Right. Um. I like Thymosin Beta 4, and now you can’t really get that, so it’s called TB 500, it’s a smaller peptide chain.

[01:58:35] Gabby: Yeah, what do they got going right now? They’re going for some, a lot of interesting stuff. I’ve seen Because I know Conover a little bit and there’s conversations around kind of the FDA sort of coming in on some of this stuff.

Even NAD I was hearing, like they’re doing some wild stuff, huh?

[01:58:51] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Yeah, you know, the FDA is a really crazy group.

[01:58:56] Gabby: Do you have to be careful?

[01:58:57] Dr. Paziotopoulos:  Uh, no, I don’tthink so. I mean, like,

[01:58:58] Gabby: I mean, it just seems like, is it working too much?

[01:59:01] Dr. Paziotopoulos: I wish the FDA was there to really do good science and protect us. It’s just influenced too much by the people that have interest in things.

[01:59:09] Gabby: Yeah.

[01:59:10] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Um, most of the people that work at the FDA in the higher levels, when they retire, they are so set up. Yeah, they’ll have another job on the board. Yeah, sure. Um, whenever you incentivize people like that, how are you going to get them to stay ethical? Like, it’s just

[01:59:24] Gabby: because they are even, I heard even, uh, like, uh, not tumeric, but like curcumin, they were trying to regulate even having access in here in California too.

They’re really, you’re really having a hard time getting a lot of these peptides and things.

[01:59:36] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Oh, and all you have to do is like go Google Bill Falloon and all the money he spent fighting the FDA. Right? I think he spent something like five or six hundred thousand dollars of his own money over the years.

Plus a lot of his friends have thrown in money. So it’s probably over a billion dollars fighting the FDA. If they didn’t, you wouldn’t have an acetylcysteine. You wouldn’t have b12. You wouldn’t have all of these things that are just regular supplements available to you. They would be pharmaceutical. And, you know, if you have somebody on a really robust supplement plan, they could be spending upwards of 1, 000 a month.

[02:00:17] Gabby: Yeah.

[02:00:17] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Right? Yeah. Imagine if those were pharmaceuticals, how much that would cost. It would just, no one could afford it.

[02:00:23] Gabby: No.

[02:00:24] Dr. Paziotopoulos: I mean, who can afford 1, 000 a month? Right? Not a lot of people. Right? And, you know, and you don’t have to spend that. Right? That’s for the people that are trying to really like push the limit.

[02:00:33] Gabby: Yeah.

[02:00:33] Dr. Paziotopoulos: But, you know, everyone should be taking like an omega 3. You like, you like the algae ones, right?

[02:00:39] Gabby:  More than a little bit or, no, listen, I’m in, I’m in talking to you. It’s not about, I’m just interested in your point of view.

[02:00:48] Dr. Paziotopoulos: So I’m vegan for, since 97. Yeah. Right? Right.

[02:00:52] Gabby: Right.

[02:00:53] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Right. And, um, and it’s for my own reasons.

It’s mostly like what I was talking about with the, with the burrito. Right. Like it wasn’t in. Yeah. And also all the res, uh, all the work I did with environmental science. So I really know the impact on the planet and I know the impact on these animals. Um, you know, they’re not in these pretty little farms, you know, um, unfortunately.

So, um, and the other thing is toxins. So that’s the one thing that our ancestors had over us is they didn’t have all these toxins to deal with. And the one thing I’ve noticed with people that eat a lot of fish is they’re the most toxic patients. My patients that eat tons of sushi. They’re loaded with BPA, mercury, lead, organophosphates.

Because it bioaccumulates. Yeah. Right? So when you, there’s one ocean.

[02:01:46] Gabby: Tony Robbins talked about how when he was trying to be super healthy and ate a ton of fish. Yeah. And he had to go through an intense, uh, detoxing. Detoxing, yeah.

[02:01:56] Dr. Paziotopoulos: So, um, The fish oil you can get today. It is molecular distilled. A lot of the good stuff.

Mm-Hmm. . And so you don’t have to really worry about that stuff. Um, I use the algae stuff, but in the end it is just, are you getting eco soap, andic acid? Are you getting doco, soic acid? Are you getting doco IC acid? And you can measure these. We measure ’em every three months.

[02:02:17] Gabby: Mm-Hmm. .

[02:02:18] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Right. And we measure the ratio between the omega threes and the omega sixes.

So it’s not cut or dry, but like. Most of the omega 3s are anti inflammatory. Most of the omega 6s are pro inflammatory. And we try to keep that ratio high on the omega 3 side. And, you know, there’s a saying in functional medicine, if we could give everyone in the world omega 3 and vitamin D, about a quarter of all diseases would go away. It’s kind of crazy, isn’t it?

[02:02:46] Gabby: It’s nuts. Like the vitamin D thing really blows my mind on how simple and old, old fashioned it is and how much it can protect us.

[02:02:54] Dr. Paziotopoulos: And it’s really not that old, right? So, um, I gave my grand rounds on vitamin D and, um, most of the people didn’t know any of that information. I had like a hundred and 20 slides or something on it and I went into the kind of the detail and if you look at wild animals running around Their vitamin d levels anywhere around 150 100

[02:03:15] Gabby: 150

[02:03:15] Dr. Paziotopoulos: And if you look at hunter gatherers that are usually like 80s or above Something like that just from living out in the wild and stuff like that and then your average american Below 30.

[02:03:27] Gabby: Yeah,

[02:03:27] Dr. Paziotopoulos: and if you have dark skin I’ve seen like seven, six, and if you look at meta analysis of vitamin D levels compared to cancer risk, if you’re lower than 60, your risk of cancer is much higher than the people that are above 60.

[02:03:43] Gabby: Yeah.

[02:03:43] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Because vitamin D is not a vitamin. It’s a psychosteroid hormone and it works on over 200 genes of your immune system.

So if it’s, it’s a hormone replacement, right? And it’s just as good to take it orally as it is to go get sun. And I don’t want to look like a hunter gatherer. Right? I don’t either. I have vanity. I’ve

[02:04:04] Gabby: already been outside quite a bit. I mean, you know, it’s interesting, you know, so Laird, you saw Laird earlier.Yeah. And, um, He still has to supplement with vitamin D, and I don’t know a person more outside than Laird. Well, he probably uses sunscreen. He does not use sunscreen. He doesn’t? He never has used sunscreen. Well, in the beginning it was because you don’t want sunscreen in your eyes, burning your eyes when you’re in a giant wave.

That makes a lot of sense. And then when we got information about how toxic sunscreen was, Laird was like, Forget it. Right. Um, and then it’s even like when you’re out in the sun, I heard that if you even wash your skin with soap, sort of within a certain period of time after being inside, you don’t allow your body to even make the vitamin D.

[02:04:47] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Right.

[02:04:48] Gabby: So sometimes I’m like, okay, privates and pits try to let the skin do its thing. Um, so, okay. So fish oil, vitamin D.

[02:04:56] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Those are key.

[02:04:57] Gabby: And so the, I’m, I’m happy in keeping it simple because they talk about vitamin sort of, you know, fatigue and after kind of two, two and a half pills, I think the drop off is like 80 percent or something and saying like that.

So we’ll get, we’ll get people to keep it simple. Um, you, what about skin? I mean, listen, even from a, you know, From a vanity point, I think we feel better when we look better, when we’re, we’re radiant. And I know a lot of that is, it sort of takes care of itself with exercise and food and feeling pretty good.

You project that, but do you have anything that you’re doing at your institute for the skin specifically?

[02:05:38] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Yeah, we’re doing a bunch of things. I bet you are.

[02:05:41] Gabby: That’s the core. That’s a lion’s share of your business. We’re crazy.

[02:05:44] Dr. Paziotopoulos: What can we say? I really never wanted to do. Anything with aesthetics. I just didn’t.

Right. It’s part of the deal, but it’s part of the deal.

[02:05:53] Gabby: It’s part of the deal and you’re telling us to have sex. So we have to try to stay attractive to our partner.

[02:05:56] Dr. Paziotopoulos: If you can get somebody in the door for aesthetics and then you start educating them.

[02:06:02] Gabby: Mm hmm.

[02:06:03] Dr. Paziotopoulos: And you’re like, you really want to look good.

You have to work on the inside. Right. Otherwise, you’re gonna look like plastic Barbie over there. Yeah, that’s right. Um, So, vitamin C is huge. Most people are really deficient in vitamin C. Um, vitamin C is water soluble. So, if you’re not taking, um, a source that’s going to stay long term in your body, and like, um, which is, you know, bound to a fat, um, it’s not going to go.

So, another cheap supplement you could take is vitamin C. And that’s how you make collagen. You need to have vitamin C to make collagen. And then you need to have like, proline, lysine, and glycine. And And so you’ll see people taking a lot of collagen extracts, right? And basically all it does is it gets broken down into those amino acids and then your body uses those amino acids to make new collagen.

As long as there’s a stressor. For your body to make new collagen. And that’s the huge thing is there has to be a stressor or nothing gets done. Like say you went on a high protein diet, but you didn’t work out. Are you going to get big muscles? Right?

[02:07:08] Gabby: So what’s the stressor for getting your body to make more collagen?

[02:07:11] Dr. Paziotopoulos: So, um, just exercise. Is gonna do it, right? Um, moving the skin around, like stretching and things like that are gonna help. Um, you see people like, um, there’s like all that face yoga stuff, right? Oh yeah, yeah. Um, it actually works. Really? Right? But who’s gonna be diligent enough to do stuff like that, right?

And then like, if you do, uh, RF microneedling, and there’s a bunch of different devices, Morpheus 8, different things like that. There’s even just standard microneedling. Yeah. Which is just giving the skin, um, a stressor. So that it can grow back. Um, really basic things like that. And then there’s um, There’s all these topicals you can buy, right?

And you can go to the dermatologist and you can buy like on all these really expensive stuff. Most of this stuff works on the dead skin. It makes the dead skin look better. Right?

Some of this stuff works on defensins. And that allows your body to, like, increase the quality of the stem cell layer. So we like that kind of stuff. There’s also certain peptides, which is another thing that helps you make more collagen. What

[02:08:15] Gabby: peptide? Come on. Do we know? Do you remember?

[02:08:18] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Um, there’s, there’s a few of them.

There’s copper peptides that work really well. Um, there’s PTDB, DBM that makes your hair grow, which is also another stimulant. Um, there’s a bunch of them. And, um, We have them in a cream so that you can put them on your skin and it does help, but you have to be consistent.

[02:08:35] Gabby: Yeah, right. Imagine that.

[02:08:39] Dr. Paziotopoulos: And then, you know, now there’s like some new lasers that have come out.

There’s a company called Photana. And their laser is not like the old CO2 lasers. It’s like, it’s nasty. Right? Like you’d sit there and like, you’d just see smoke coming off of people’s skin. And then they’d have to like put all these like, you know, moisturizers and stuff all over them and they’d be out for a while.

Now, now you don’t have to do that anymore. Right? So now these new layers, there’s, they actually work really well. And so the future is really in, in a lot of these new lasers. And in this RF microneedling because it kind of tightens the skin up and it stimulates the skin to grow.

[02:09:15] Gabby: Can I avoid a facelift?

[02:09:18] Dr. Paziotopoulos: I would think so.

Like, you know, a lot of the plastic surgeons would say no. Right. They’re going to say like over time you’re going to have to pull some of the skin up, right? Yeah, I think that the future the technology is getting better and better every year That you won’t have to do that Like if you were 80 and you never had any work done and you weren’t keeping up Maybe you would need something if you wanted that drastic of a change Right.

[02:09:40] Gabby: I’m just talking about For somebody for people because there’s a lot of people who they try to do the right things Yeah, and time is what it is. And you know who wants to fight time? I have three daughters I don’t I don’t need to look 20. Yeah, I sell I celebrate being but the idea of like well Maybe you could just kind of keep things rolling I mean you have good skin.

[02:10:05] Dr. Paziotopoulos: I don’t really do any of that stuff. I just got lucky.

[02:10:10] Gabby: Oh my gosh.

[02:10:11] Dr. Paziotopoulos: And I really think it’s from the inside. It’s really big about if you have an anti inflammatory diet. I agree. And you have low toxin intake.

[02:10:20] Gabby: Yeah, because even like people don’t realize those spots and things, you can avoid pushing that off for a long time if you’re not highly inflamed.

[02:10:28] Dr. Paziotopoulos: And just work on, I like regenerative techniques like those things. Uh huh. Um, you know, you can do plastics, there’s really good plastic surgeons that make it look natural. They do, I know. Right? There’s some really good ones out there. I’ve done some research, I’ve checked it out. And there’s some real botch guys out there too, right?

I live in LA. Um, then there’s, you know, there’s facial fat transfers that work really well. Um, they don’t last super long, but I like them better than filler.

[02:10:50] Gabby: Yeah, I don’t, filler scares me.

[02:10:52] Dr. Paziotopoulos: You know, you take, uh, fat and you mix it with PRP, like real PRP.

[02:10:56] Gabby: Yeah, what’s that, what do you mean when you say it like that?

Real PRP. Come on, what’s the fake PRP? So,

[02:11:02] Dr. Paziotopoulos: if you ever go anywhere to get PRP done, and they pull out these little yellow tubes.

[02:11:07] Gabby: Oh.

[02:11:08] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Just run.

[02:11:08] Gabby: Okay.

[02:11:10] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Um, it’s how PRP was done before we had these advanced kits. Um, those tubes, if you read on the, on the label, It’s from the, the BD makes these tubes and it says, do not inject this into a human.

[02:11:24] Gabby: Oh, wow. Right?

[02:11:26] Dr. Paziotopoulos: But it’s just for lab use. Um, and, uh, but it’s used all the time because they’re cheap, like they’re super cheap, these tubes and you can draw a bunch of these tubes and you throw in the centrifuge and you pull the plasma out and you’re like, here’s your PRP and you look at the tube and if the tube looks like this color.

You just have plasma, really expensive plasma. You don’t have platelet rich plasma. So like the good kits, like we’ll have in the, in the office, like we’ll take 60 CCs of your blood and we’ll concentrate that down anywhere from seven to seven CCs down to like three. So we’ll take all the platelets that were in 60 cc’s of blood and we put it down into that tiny little amount. And the platelets are what’s doing all the healing basically on you um, some of the other cells are a little bit helpful, but and when you when you Get it down to that concentration.

It looks like fruit punch Um, then you have real prp and when you put it through a blood analyzer, you can actually see how many platelets are there Right, and if a lot of the docs have never trained anywhere to like extract and measure and do all this kind of stuff you know, they’re just Oh, this is how I was taught.

[02:12:34] Gabby: Yeah.

[02:12:35] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Right. And that’s what they do. And, you know, nothing against them or anything, but you’re just not going to get the healing component. And so there’s a lot of people that have come to me like, Oh yeah, I did PRP, it didn’t work. Yeah. Right. I’m like, well, what did it look like? Yeah. Right. Did they draw this massive amount of blood out of you and then like concentrate it down to this tiny little bit?

And then how bad was the damage? Cause like, let’s say you had a really bad knee.

[02:12:57] Gabby: Yeah.

[02:12:57] Dr. Paziotopoulos: You know, like I was just sitting with a patient of mine who’s, you know, I’ve known him a really long time and he’s like, um, I want to do some regenerative medicine. And like, I’m like no. He’s like, well, you know, this is what you do.

And I’m like, yeah, you need shot, dude. Like you need a knee replacement.

[02:13:14] Gabby: I am one of those people,you know, I tried everything and I have a knee replacement now. So I think sometimes too, it’s knowing when what’s you know, what’s for what? right?

[02:13:21] Dr. Paziotopoulos:Like, you know, I’m lucky I’ve I’ve torn my ACL, I’ve torn vastus medialis oblique off the bone, I’ve ripped my meniscus, but like, I can still squat all the way down, I still snowboard, I still do everything, because like every time I had an injury, I did a rehab, and I’ve done some regenerative on it, and I’m able to keep that going, and I don’t know how long I’ll keep my knee.

I’m hoping that, like, the new technology will keep there, and I can keep doing shockwave therapy on it and things like that, and keep it strong, and I’ll keep my knee, right? Um, it doesn’t cause me any issues, and I think a knee replacement for me would be overkill.

[02:13:56] Gabby: Yeah,

[02:13:57] Dr. Paziotopoulos: I get it. would actually, like, put me back from the, uh, abilities that I have now.

But, like, you know, you see somebody and they have, like, 90 degrees of motion in their knee, like, they can’t bring their heel to their butt. Right.

[02:14:10] Gabby: Yeah.

[02:14:11] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Right? And they can’t extend their knee all the way and they have pain all the time.

[02:14:16] Gabby: What’s the pain and the lack of function?

[02:14:17] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Right? And it’s bone on bone.

And I’m like, you need a knee. Yeah. Just do it. And like the new knees, like if you go to somewhere like the Steadman Clinic in Vail, like the patients that I’ve had that gone there, like, you know, months later, they’re like, Oh, I just had the best game of golf. And you know, like I feel totally stable. It’s crazy.

You know, it’s quality of life.

[02:14:38] Gabby: Yeah, that’s true. And the emotional part of being in pain all the time. So maybe we can just round this out with stem cell, uh, because that’s also, you know, you hear people going to stem cell, they’re going to Mexico, they’re going to here, going to there. If someone wanted to explore stem cell therapy, um, I think they’re in Utah, right?

They’re making certain things kind of more legal.

[02:14:58] Dr. Paziotopoulos: They’re making it a little easier in Utah, um, for things, um, you know, some of the states are making some changes. The only cells that we’re able to use here in the U. S. are mesenchymal, um, so you have three types of tissue, endoderm, mesoderm, and ectoderm.

All the mesenchymal cells come from mesoderm. So, they can basically work the best on that type of tissue. But there’s three types of tissue in your body. Right? Now, that’s not to say that those cells can’t help the other tissues. Because what we find that a lot of these stem cells do is they don’t take up a residence and start growing.

They communicate signals to the damaged cells on how to repair themselves, or they can tell those cells to, you know, recycle themselves, go through apoptosis. Um, and that’s basically the technology that we have for stem cells. Now, in the lab, you can take these stem cells and you can pour it over, like, uh, a matrix.

Like, they can take, like, a heart, and they can dissolve all the cells off, and you just leave, like, a skeleton. of the interstitial matrix and then you pour stem cells over it and you can basically make a new organ, you know That’s the kind of the future of like making organs

[02:16:10] Gabby: Right,

[02:16:11] Dr. Paziotopoulos: and so then you could take your cells and pour it over this matrix and give yourself a new organ kind of right We’re not there yet, but we’re getting there, right? So stem cells have all this potential but right now the potential that we’re using them for is for reprogramming and And it can do really wondrous things, like you can use mesenchymal stem cells, they’re showing like you can help people that have, um, gone through paralysis or partial paralysis, and you know, they do it intrathecally, which is in the spinal cord, right into that, into that fluid, um, you know, they get headaches and all that kind of standard stuff you do when you do a lumbar puncture, but like they’re showing some benefit there, and the past When they tried to do stuff like that, and they did it with embryonic, like they called teratomas and they got more damage than they did good.

But now we’re learning like a lot more, like how many cells can you give? You know, what kind of cells can you give? That kind of stuff. The benefit for embryonic, which is completely shut down in this country, um, for non scientific reasons. Um, the reason that we really want to explore embryonic cells or what we call pluripotent cells is they can express Yamanaka factors.

And we’ve already shown that if you take it, if you want to reverse age, you take one of your cells, fibroblast, and you expose it to Yamanaka factors, and you can reverse that cell all the way back to its embryonic stage. Now, when you do that in the lab, that cell is more likely going to kind of create cancer in its line as it grows.

So we don’t really know how to control Yamanaka factors yet. Mm. But we’re learning and probably in the near future. We’re going to be able to do IVs of Yamanaka factors Now if you use embryonic stem cells, they already express Yamanaka factors and they know how to communicate to a cell so that they don’t cause those kind of problems Right, and even if you inject a The embryonic cells, they don’t take up residence, they just communicate.

Now, if you put a whole bunch of embryonic cells together in one confined space, well, they’re going to try to make a baby. Except they’re not going to be able to do that very well, they make a teratoma, and that’s a really bad idea. But if you distribute them, then they work really well. So, I mean, once there’s changes in the government, Um, and worldwide we are accepting some of these embryonic cells.

I think they’re the ones that they’re going to be using the most. And even beyond that, what you want to be able to do is you want to take an embryonic cell and you want to encourage it down one line of cells. So that you can use it for whatever tissue that you want it to fix. So we have a lot of work to do in the stem cells, but right now they’re, we’re showing promise, you know, like people with really crazy inflammatory conditions, you know, regenerative medicine, all this stuff for sharing stem cells work and their stem cell byproducts.

So when a stem cell talks to another cell, it’s using these things, these packaged. Um, little balls of fat and they’re called exosomes and inside of their, their, um, basically micro RNA and other signaling peptides that tell that cell what to do.  And so you can get exosomes now and the FDA doesn’t really care so much about exosomes.

They’re not going after people. You’re still not to really use them IV. Although it’s widely.

[02:19:25] Gabby: Yeah, I’ve had that done.

[02:19:27] Dr. Paziotopoulos: How’d you feel?

[02:19:29] Gabby: I felt okay. I mean, I feel pretty good. Yeah. My biggest thing is repetitive trauma, like, you know, knees and stuff. And also, like everybody, I probably packed all my, um, any emotional stuff down in like my, I’m a, you know, some people put it in different places.

I put it in my hips. Then being a jumping athlete, I think my, from my knees to my hips, I could probably use just not only external work, internal work. You know, trying to figure out how to get some of that stuff out. I’ve been trying to do that.

[02:20:04] Dr. Paziotopoulos:And a lot of that’s vagus nerve.

[02:20:05] Gabby: Yeah.

[02:20:06] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Right? Yeah. I send a lot of people for, um, pelvic floor physical therapy.

[02:20:11] Gabby: And that’s a breathing component too, right? Yeah. Often times?

[02:20:15] Dr. Paziotopoulos: So like, you know, uh, the longest cranial nerve is the vagus nerve.

[02:20:19] Gabby: Mm hmm.

[02:20:20] Dr. Paziotopoulos: And it innervates all your organs. And it goes all the way down to your tailbone. Right? Down to the, um, place between the genitals and the anus. And You know, in yoga, we always talk about mula bandha and people get it wrong almost all the time.

And it’s taught wrong all the time. There’s a really great book, um, mula bandha, the master key, it’s an autoprint book. But if you want to really learn about bandhas, you’re going to need to read that book. Um, bandhas are supposed to be energetic, not physical. And so in yoga class, I’ll say, Oh, pull up on, you know, your perineum, right?

Okay. If you pull up on your perineum and you do that all the time, you’re going to cause a lot of issues because you’re going to be like over stimulating that nerve. Um, and you’ll cause all the problems that you’re trying to get away from. It’s just, you’re trying to like stimulate the energy to go up your spine.

[02:21:12] Gabby: Yeah.

[02:21:13] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Right. Um, in Qigong we do this breathing, um, And we breathe down the front of the body and we breathe back up the back of the body and go through all the major points. Um, it’s, it’s, uh, there’s a large circle of heaven and a small circle of heaven. Um, yoga does similar stuff, they just don’t get into the nitty gritty like that.

Um, and if you really understand Bandhas, you start releasing all of this issues and all this really tightness. Um, That muscle tension in the perineum causes all kinds of issues from anxiety to just fear Um, it’ll shut down your um digestion. You’ll get bloating You’ll have slow con you’ll have constipation You know, and then you know, sometimes you get this mixed like diarrhea constipation all these issues your immune system gets slow um So that’s really when we try to get people to like, pay attention, right?

Get into your breathing. And I send a ton of people to one of our practitioners. It’s Dr. Eugenie Pabst. She’s biofeedback specialist, and she hooks you up to all this stuff, and she shows you like, is your breathing in coherence? Is your heart in coherence? How do they look together? Right, and you know, she hooks you up to all this machinery that Beyond like when an aura ring, you know, you see your heart rate variability on the ring, But her stuff’s like much better and you can actually really start affecting heart rate variability You get yourself into coherence.

You get real good control of your vagus nerve That’s pretty much a must for everyone and the resistance I get for doing that training is massive

[02:22:51] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Yeah, especially among people that are um high functioning

[02:22:56] Gabby: Oh, yeah, because everything that makes it work for you is what’s not working for you. So you have to figure out how to separate what’s working and what’s not working.

And um, and then, and, and trust, you know, you know, I was told that I, you know, that I power through everything. He’s like, why don’t you try using your wings a little bit, you know, and I understood what that meant. Um, so I, I couldn’t agree with that more. I said, you know, I’ve stretched, I’ve done this stuff and my quads are like brief jerky.

He’s like, those are emotional locks. Those are not, you know, and I, and you know, it, everybody knows when somebody says something to you that is true about yourself. Yeah, of course. You’re like, yeah, you’re right. You know, so it’s a, it’s a great thing. So we’ll listen, Dr. Pazio, I could go on. on and on. Um, because there’s so much to learn.

I, uh, if so, obviously not only do you, you know, probably can’t take a ton more patients. Is there a way for people to work with you, even if they can’t be a member of your Institute or to connect with maybe some of the things that you guys are offering?

[02:24:03] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Sure. Um, The big thing is, you know, the Institute for Medical Maintenance Engineering is just getting launched now.

And that’s going to be able to handle a lot more people. And it’ll be the same protocols. It’ll actually be a lot better. Because we’ll have better software, and we’ll have better trained engineers. Uh, practitioners, and the liaisons will have better tools, and the patients are going to be, um, empowered by the app, right?

And then they’ll also be able to educate themselves just by going to the conferences. And um, you know, knowing that what they’re learning is open source, and that it’s not just some proprietary thing that I came up with. I think that is going to really empower them and give them more faith into doing that.

Um, so yeah, I mean, that’s where to start, you know, and, um, and just doing the basics that we talked about, right? Like, well, figure out something to make your spirit strong, right? Get all, get all your ducks in a row as far as, you know, all the things you need to do. And you don’t have to come to me for that.

It’s readily available, right? Do your zone two cardio.

[02:25:07] Gabby: You like sprinting too.

[02:25:08] Dr. Paziotopoulos: I love sprinting. Um, you get massive changes in your mitochondria when you sprint and when you lift heavy things, um, and I don’t want to toot my own horn, but I just wanted to kind of show like, um, Dr. Hemopatel did a mitochondrial test on me in December and, uh, he hadn’t joined up with us yet, um, and I had just met him.

And, uh, when my results came back. He’s just like, what are you doing?

[02:25:41] Gabby: Because you got half your mitochondria.

[02:25:42] Dr. Paziotopoulos: And he’s just like, we’ve done like almost 400 of these tests and you have the highest mitochondrial score. But I’m 56 and he’s done like 30 year olds. Sure. Right. And so I’m like, well, I’ll show you the protocol.

And so I think that these I think it’s everything that we’re doing. I don’t think it’s one thing. Right. Because, you know, we’re doing so many different things on so many different levels. And I also think that, like, I didn’t just start in my fifties. Right. I think that all those years in Boulder and doing all that stuff, like I’m had a pretty major impact.

[02:26:15] Gabby: When you’re five minutes, you’re five, five, five minutes. Don’t kid yourself. All those little things, even maybe when you’re in a very stressful time.

[02:26:22] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Yeah. And now like, you know, my days are really crazy because we know I’m doing the Pazio Institute and I’m building the IMME. And so I’m traveling a lot and I’m speaking a lot and you know, we’re, we’re building, we’re writing a book.

Oh, you’re doing a book now. And, you know, so there’s a layperson’s book and then we’re also making medical maintenance engineering handbook, you know, for practitioners and, you know, we’re working out like how do we do this, um, uh, basically accreditation for people. So it’s a lot of work, but even with all that, you can still find ways to stay calm.

So, and, and keep your mitochondria working because, you know, your mitochondria are the energy and you can have an awesome factory and if you don’t have enough energy to make the product. You’re screwed.

[02:27:11] Gabby: Yeah.

[02:27:12] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Right. And so I really think that the mitochondrial testing is really important to start really implementing.

It’s just expensive. And so we’re trying to get it in now. Um, and, you know, educating people why they want to spend the money on it and things like that. But, uh, When you sprint, you blow through all your ATP and you blow through all your creatinine kinase or creatine kinase. And, um, you have about eight seconds of top fuel, right?

Your mitochondria can’t keep up, right? You keep up for about eight seconds and then you can’t keep up. Then you go into glycolysis and you can see it like in, you know, a hundred meter dash, right? You can see just acceleration, acceleration, acceleration, and. They just top off. Right. And anybody who starts doing sprints starts feeling it.

And, you know, I always warn everybody, don’t go out and do a hundred meter sprint and you haven’t done one. You will wreck your body. Like you’ve never wrecked it in your life. Cause if you have muscle memory, especially if you were an athlete, but you haven’t been doing it, your body knows what to do and it can put out a ton of power, but your tissues aren’t used to that.

You will rip your hamstrings apart. Like you’ve never done it. Right. So you just got to work yourself back up, but the high you get from sprinting is so insane. And when you’ve depleted your mitochondria throughout your body, they’re like, what just happened? And so then they start multiplying and they start getting bigger and they start getting more effective.

And that’s what you keep needing to do. Like if you just kept doing like low level cardio and like, you know, I’ll lift some weights, but I never really push it all that hard. Your mind and country don’t care. Yeah. Right? Because like, they can keep up. And it’s just like everything, we have to have high stress, right?

Not too much stress, but enough stress to get something to change. So, that’s my two cents on that.

[02:29:14] Gabby: When you’re down,

[02:29:15] Dr. Paziotopoulos: because you do a lot, you’re doing a lot. I’m doing a lot, yeah.

[02:29:20] Gabby: And you know a lot. And sometimes that’s dangerous. Yeah. Well, no, meaning

[02:29:24] Dr. Paziotopoulos: I feel like I don’t know enough.

[02:29:25] Gabby: But you, you, you know, you could have this for that and this for this, like you have it at your access.

It’s, it’s all there. What do you do to just strip it back to a baseline?

[02:29:44] Dr. Paziotopoulos: To me, it’s qigong.

[02:29:47] Gabby: Yeah.

[02:29:47] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Um, when I went to residency, I’ll never forget it. Um, I had just tested the third black and, um, Grandmaster Tave hold me aside and he’s just like, you know, you’re not going to be able to practice like normal, right? Your life’s going to be upside down. He’s just like, do your qigong.

Right? He’s like, do your qi gong every morning, do it whenever you can during the day. Make sure that your qi is flowing. You know, and it’s kind of like an esoteric thing to say, right? But like, you know when you’re balanced, right? You know when you’re like, in your good space, and when you’re healthy, and you’re not like nervous and all that stuff.

And he’s like, make sure that you touch every one of your patients with your qi. Right? And hold yourself accountable to having good chi. And don’t give them the part of your chi that strips you of your energy. Give them the chi that you generate on a daily basis. Not that core stuff.

[02:30:50] Gabby: Not the core, yeah.

[02:30:51] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Right? And um, I would be super tired cause like, sometimes 30 hours.

[02:30:58] Gabby: Cocaine addict.

[02:30:59] Dr. Paziotopoulos: And um, My cocaine was, I would go up on the roof of the parking garage, and there’s internal styles of Qigong, and there’s external styles of Qigong. And I would do an external style of Qigong, so called Sannichian. And it’s really dynamic and like you tense your whole body up really strong.

So like, and it was, it’s called like iron shirt training. And so like when you’re doing it, somebody could like break a stick over your neck or like, you know, snap something over your shins and you wouldn’t even feel it. Um, you just turn yourself into iron basically. And you’re breathing really like strong.

It’s kind of like almost a Valsalva maneuver. Right. And, um, at the end of it, you can do this sequence where you let all your energy out. And, um, what I was taught is like when you’re low on energy, you do the whole sequence and then you hold it and you just breathe and you let it sit in your body. And then I would go run down and I would do my, do the rest of my work.

And that was my little, like, and that wasn’t even five minutes. I would just like do it for a couple of minutes and then just run back downstairs and I’d be like way better than a cup of coffee.

[02:32:11] Gabby: Yeah. I think people don’t realize the power of the breath too. And when you know how you’ve trained in how, so yeah, uh, Dr. Pazio, thank you. You know, when I talk to people like you, uh, and I have the good fortune. Um, I always just feel more hopeful that, uh, there’s caregivers and, and people who are helping other people be as healthy as they can. And um, Um, and also the exciting things about technology. I really appreciate that. Thank you.

[02:32:40] Dr. Paziotopoulos: Oh, you’re so welcome. Such a pleasure to be here. Thank you.

 

---

About Dr. Alexander Paziotopoulos