The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64

A lot of people ask me, you know, is AI going to replace physicians? And the answer is yes, if physicians don't change their mindset a little bit, because the majority of physicians using AI use them as research assistants. They're not interacting with the AI.
Evidence-based medicine has been valuable, but it's also reductionistic. And you can't treat a human in a reductionistic way because we're a complex adaptive system.
And psychedelic experience helped to open up possibilities for me because I started looking at things and I was saying, well, what if, instead of like, oh, there is no proof of that. I've seen some stuff that has been very consistent, but we don't have the measuring tools because we don't know what frequency it is or what part of the electromagnetic spectrum is occurring.
But you hear about these things. And so you say, well, what if? It's just like placebo effect.
People talk about that like it's just placebo effect.

And I'm like, are you kidding me?

That's the coolest thing that I have seen in so long.

I mean, what is the magic of the placebo effect that it's so effective?

I mean, when you look at brain mapping of people on psychedelics,

there are massive amounts of interconnections being made.

So the brain's communicating with areas that it normally doesn't communicate with. And it's looking for new pathways.
Today's guest, Dr. Dan Stickler, is a former surgeon turned pioneer in health optimization, leading groundbreaking clinical trials in human enhancement and longevity.
He's breaking down what personalized healing treatment could look like and offering insights into how AI and emerging technologies will reshape the future of healthcare. And so this conversation is really one that meets science and spirituality.
I can't wait to share it with you. I know that we just had an incredible four days together with four other couples for this peer led mastermind, which was so beautiful.
I fell in love with you and your wife and your love together and the work that you guys are doing in the world. And I think you're incredibly remarkable and unique in the sense where you are deeply rooted in your spirituality and you let your mind be in service to your heart.
And I think that is really such a beautiful definition of a doctor to bring the balance of this work together and to treat the whole person. And so thank you for being here, first off.
So grateful. Well, thank you for that beautiful introduction.
I mean, I'm used to people running through credentials and all of that, but I love that. That was perfect.
Yeah. Yeah.
And I'll share more of the credentials beforehand. And I know my audience is going to be really curious to hear about some alternative forms of and modalities of healing that you guys are working on.
I'm curious, how are, what are you working with and how is that really? Well, we, we try to delve into all of the leading edge types of therapies that are out there, you know, even the ones, you know, that you have your evidence-based stuff, but you have stuff that, you know, you've seen work, uh, anecdotally there's common sense behind it. And, and yet there's not the, the science to support it.
I think a lot of it is that we just don't have the available testing that can measure the responses that you get from it. I mean, just a lot of stuff with like yoga and meditation.
I mean, for years, everybody knew it worked. But how do you quantify that? And then comes along epigenetics.
And then we have scientific evidence that says, oh, okay, yes, we do have the scientific evidence that it works. And I think a lot of the modalities that we look into are the ones that are the meditation of 20 years ago prior to that.
So we'll do a lot lot of work with that we work with a lot of irbs so institutional review board studies that are early access to different forms of testing different forms of intervention that we feel might be promising for moving forward and so we'd like to really stay on that leading edge of the new and exciting therapies that are out there. Yeah.
And what are some examples of some of the therapies that you've done? Like we've been doing a lot of apheresis, which is the removal of a liter of plasma.

I did that, and I loved it.

I'm going to come to your studio and your center and do it on Monday because I love it so much.

I felt so cleansed and clear after doing that.

So just removing that old plasma, I've only done it once, but I'm a big fan.

Yeah, I mean, the plasma is carrying a bunch of proteins, exosomes, micro RNAs, but they can also be carrying a lot of like inflammatory things, things that are, these are, this is like the, the email system of the body. So it's sending out all of these messages to inform other cells of what is happening in the environment.
And we basically live in a fairly toxic environment. Yeah, it's like getting an oil change.
You want to upgrade that operating system, make it faster. Yeah.
So it made a lot of stress responses in there. A session of apheresis removes about 40% of that plasma volume.
And then we replace it with saline and albumin. And so that albumin has a bunch of clean binding sites on it to bind up toxins and other items in the blood.
And so it cleanses the blood, essentially. We're involved in a study that's looking at it with aging.
We're working with some stuff with people that have Lyme, people that have long COVID. And we're seeing anecdotally really good responses from it.
We can't say anything from a scientific standpoint quite yet because we don't have enough people involved to do that, but that's what part of this study is determining.

There have been some studies out of Stanford

that showed positive effects on aging,

cognitive decline in older people,

but in some of the younger people,

we're also seeing, especially with long COVID,

we're seeing really impressive results.

That's one area.

We're also involved in a study that's using young plasma to replace the plasma that we remove. This is really exciting because young plasma is plasma from donors that are between 18 and 24 years old.
And this is where our human system is at its peak physiologic optimal performance at that age.

That's our peak reproductive age.

And so all of the things circulating in that plasma is really pro-life giving at that point.

So we're taking older individuals, especially individuals with early dementia, and we're replacing their plasma with this young plasma. We take off 40% and we give them one, two, or three liters of this young plasma.
I mean, it's very impressive. And again, we can't say anything about it because it's a study in progress.
And I just say anecdotally, it's pretty impressive right now. That's exciting.
Yeah. And I also know you guys do alternative forms of medicine in terms of, I think you work with ketamine.
Is that right? Right. We do ketamine therapies in the clinic.
Not so much from the psychotherapeutic standpoint. most of our ketamine therapies are designed around where people are waking up and they're going through some existential crises.
You know, what's it all mean? Why am I here? Is there purpose to any of this? And we can help guide them through that process with the ketamine therapies.

And that's been really rewarding. And are there other modalities that you guys work with as well? So we take a systems-based approach.
And that has been the key differentiator for us in the outcomes that we see. We look at the human organism as a whole, and not as these individual puzzle pieces that we have to put together.
You know, the people that are experts in the heart, people that are experts in the liver, and that's what they focus on. But that's not the way the human system actually exists.
We are a whole system. And so when we approach things, we want to assess where the whole system is in this moment in time.
So we collect as much data as we can on an individual. We're getting extensive amounts of blood work.
We're getting QEEG brain maps. We're getting psychophysiologic stress profiles.
So we see how their autonomic nervous system responds to five different stressors and does it return to baseline, full body MRIs, coronary CT angiograms. I mean, P300s on each individual, microbiome, full genome.
I mean, I could go on and on with this, but it's a massive amount of data points. And we look at how all of these interact to create the wholeness of the system.
It's just like, you know, if you have somebody come in and they're early insulin resistance, they've got a little bit of high blood pressure, great deal of stress in their job. The traditional treatment is, okay, let's put them on a medication that lowers their glycemic response.
Let's put them on a blood pressure medication. When you look at it and you say, okay, well, this is a business executive that's working 50 hours a week, 60 hours a week, catching flights to different time zones at regular intervals, you know, eating fast food when they can get it, getting stimulants like caffeine and all this, staying up late, going out to social dinners and drinking, giving them medication to lower glycemic response and the blood pressure medication.
It's only going to do so much. Yeah, it's probably not going to do much there.
So what we have to look at is, you know, what's their motivation? You know, why are they coming in for this? How can we, you know, we could give them a list of a diet. This is the diet you should eat.
Okay, well, how are they going to do that when they're traveling like this? And so you've got to look at all of these factors that will drive them to make the changes that they want to make, but feel like they're incapable of doing because of the requirements of life. Yeah.
I love that you're working with the whole system and also helping set them up for success. And, and with some of these alternative modes of, of healing, you know, through medicine, ketamine being one of them, do you guys also do any work with psychedelics? Uh, with the ketamine.
Yeah. Okay.
Yeah. I mean, that's the only legal one that's available right now.
Okay. I know there are some people here in town that are working with MDMA therapies, which, I mean, I can't wait for MDMA therapies to become legal.
Well, they used to be. Like when I was a psychotherapist, part of the work that we would study is that that was used in therapy back in the day.
And I think that that is really exciting where we can go with some of this work, knowing the set and setting, the dosage, how to really set people up for success. In terms of the ketamine or psychedelics, give me like a breakdown or a treatment plan, like one way that you might work with somebody so that we can ground what that would look like.
We do an extensive intake in basically six domains of the human system. So we look at the physical or physiologic domain.
That's the blood work, the microbiome, the genetics, the EEG of the brain. We then look at the psychological realm.
I guess the EEG kind of crosses over into the two. A lot of questionnaires like quality of life inventory, cognitive function testing.
We'll look at the social domain. You know, what is their social connections like? What is their family situation? What is their work situation? We look at their environment, not only their home environment, but their work environment.
I mean, work environments are some of the worst environments to be in. We look at their exposure to things like how much plastic do they use? Are they using things like black plastic cooking utensils? I mean, some of the most toxic fire retardants are in those because the black plastic is made from recycled electronics.
Oh, wow. Yeah, so that was a more recent study that was quite impressive.
You know, what kind of water are they drinking? What's their home environment like? You know, just getting environmental monitors for the home has been hugely valuable for a lot of clients. Then we look at spirituality.

And when we talk spirituality, you know, everybody has their own idea of what spirituality is. For us, it's their beliefs, their ideas around meaning and purpose.
That's really important. I mean, I think I saw a study that said that only about 30% of people actually have a true understanding of what their meaning and purpose in life is.
And that other 70% are so prone to depression and anxiety that it's becoming a major health metric. Yeah.
I mean, I do think that the, the egoic structure needs something to look

forward to, to have some hope or purpose. And, and then there's when you're connected with something bigger than yourself, I think there's a different orientation besides future.
And then the last domain, energy domain, that's the one that, you know, kind of gets into the unknowns. But if you look

at the science right now, I mean, energy domain, we're measuring energies of the body all the time. You know, we get EKGs of the heart.
We get EEGs of the brain. I mean, we're measuring frequencies in the body the ancient wisdom wisdom of things like chi and prana, all of these, the kundalini movements, these are really important.
And they do have an impact that we have seen. And working with these energy aspects of the body, the flow of energy, is crucial, I believe.
The science side of it, I mean, just recently there's been a lot of work done on what's called the electrum. Michael Levin out of Columbia University is mapping a lot of the electrum.
And, you know, I think a lot of people have seen that electrical spark that occurs when a sperm fertilizes an egg. But they're also identifying that there is a coordinated electrical sparks that guide embryogenesis.
So guiding how this egg starts to differentiate into different organ systems. And they're mapping the energy that's occurring with that.
The other thing is like limb regeneration in various animals. They're seeing that it's like there is an electrical map of that limb that's being followed.
So I think we're starting to see that these measurements are coming online. And I think it's exciting to find out what this actually shows.
It is exciting. Yeah.
And we seem more open like we used to be back in the past. And I think things got closed down for lots of different ideas.
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I'm trying to have a sense of what it was, maybe because I've never done it. Yeah, preparation is super important.
I always recommend people do a little bit of parts work before jumping in, a little bit of shadow work before jumping into ketamine therapies or even any of the psychedelics. It's, I love that you say that because I, you know, my dad is a shaman.
So I, and I did ayahuasca with him in Peru when I was 20. And I just, I feel like the foundation of that work to accelerate it and not get lost because medicine work can really exaggerate or highlight what's there.
And sometimes you'll have an insight, but sometimes you could also loop in your own misunderstandings. And so having the foundation of doing personal development work or having a guide to help you integrate or make meaning and have a deeper understanding of what was being revealed in the session, I think is really important.
So I love that you speak to that work as the foundation before, during and after. Oh, yeah.
Yeah. I mean, and before you have to be careful, because you don't want to pre frame people either.
Right? I mean, you can create an experience for them by the way you do it. And a lot of these, the shamans that are out there that they became shamans because of their success with the psychedelic that they're promoting they tend to take people on their journey rather than take people on their own journey and so pre-framing can be kind of problematic you also have to you know kind of find out because i've seen this happen where people can wake up and experience emptiness in a session and their psyche is not ready to experience emptiness in true existential crisis there it's a powerful tool yeah and you want to have you want to have a for me the consciousness of the is most important.
Yes. And also doing the foundation of having psychological tools, knowing how to navigate your inner world so that it can accelerate.
I think it's great to accelerate the work and help integrate, but to make sure to not depend on it so there's right relationship with it. I'm interested.
You mentioned MDMA. I know that that used to be used in couples therapy.
That was a primary way. And then it became a drug.
And now I think people are really looking at different ways and that it can support people in healing. And I'm just curious what your knowledge or experience, like, what do you know about the MDMA work now? Yeah.
So I've had a lot of, I've done a deep dive into MDMA, and I'm excited for what's happening with it right now. I mean, you're right.
I mean, 500,000 therapy sessions prior to 1984, when it was classified as a scheduled drug. And the therapists and researchers at the time were outraged.
They're like, you can't take this away. This has been so successful with our treatments, with what we're seeing in the research.
And they even appealed it up through the executive courts. And they won the appeals, but the DEA refused to overturn their decision.
And then DEA has that right, which was not the best way to do it. I'm hoping RFK has some new say in this.
But yeah I mean it is a super effective drug and we're at a crossroads right now because medicalizing it has some drawbacks to it. legalizing it has some drawbacks to it.
So what route are we going to go with this? I mean, we saw, you know, look at medicalization when it comes to like ketamine. It prompted all these ketamine clinics to come up all over the country.
And they've been effective, but they could have been more effective had they been set up in the right way. I mean, we know with psychedelic set and setting is like a huge part of the effect you're going to get.
And walking into a sterile looking clinic, having an IV put in your arm, and you're laying there on the table and somebody comes by and checks your vital signs periodically is not a setting I want to be in. You know, it's just not conducive to the benefits of the medicine.
And I think MDMA therapy can potentially be problematic in that way. I've had long talks with Gold Dolan about this.
And with MDMA therapy, I mean, it's like all these rules, you know, don't touch the person. I mean, if somebody's taken MDMA and they have to lay there and not be touched, you know, but you also have to have that, the legal aspects of that.
And then legally with touch, what comes with that? Yeah. I mean, it's such a tricky area right now.
But it is a medication that is, I mean, you saw the results of the MAPS study. And I'm not sure what the FDA committee was thinking.
Yeah. Share for people that didn't see the results of MAPS.
The FDA committee said they couldn't believe that there was this lack of side effects with it. They couldn't believe that it was this effective overall.
I mean, it was just like it met the perfect outcome and they just refused to believe that that was possible without some kind of manipulation of the data. And I just recently found out about that there's research and studies done that there is a way to do it without side effects, without having the next day having the serotonin come down.
The Tuesday, blues day. The Tuesday, blues day.
Yeah. Yeah, that's been pretty much debunked by a lot of the researchers.
Because prior to allowing it in research, the researchers had to rely on recreational users to get their data. And a lot of it was this occurs because people are using MDMA out partying, they're drinking with it, they're taking other drugs with it, they're not eating, not hydrating or over hydrating.
And because they're partying with it, they don't sleep well the night before or the day after. And that's the perfect formula for having that, the symptoms of the neurotransmitter deficit.
And when they actually looked at people who did it the right way with just, you know, sticking with the one, one drug, eating while they're taking it, which is hard to do because it's an appetite suppressant, but making themselves eat something and getting a good night's sleep especially that people didn't have to take supplements or anything like that, that they were just fine. That's incredible.
Yeah. And to really, what I'm excited about is like, as more people do this research with the right setting and really look into it, veterans and who can we use this with, with what dosages to help accelerate healing on the planet? I mean, between, we'll talk about technology and things like I'm just excited about learning more.
And I know science takes longer to catch up to what most of us intuitively and then experientially realize. And it's important to have it.
And also for me, it's important to really honor what my own experience is and what I see and what I, but I'm excited about where we're going and being able to use this to help people heal and really integrate and have peace in their nervous system if they've had a lot of trauma or PTSD. I'm wondering if there's a story of a client that you've worked with around helping accelerate their healing through alternative medicine.
Yeah, we had a female executive. She was with a Fortune 500 company.
And she was noticing that her edge was dropping off. She was around, I think, 52 years old.
She had started losing her hormones, but she wasn't really being symptomatic. So her doctor said, you know, we're not going to put you on hormones if

you're not having any symptoms. That's going to increase your risk of breast cancer and

all of this. And this is one of the failures of evidence-based medicine.

Evidence-based medicine has been valuable, but it's also reductionistic. And you can't treat

a human in a reductionistic way because we're a complex adaptive system. And the Women's Health Initiative truly set women's health back for the last 20 years by taking hormones away from women.
And it's resulted in, there's going to be increase in dementia rates, quality of life just deteriorated over those 20 years that women were denied the hormones. This was based on evidence-based medicine of the Women's Health Initiative and the sensational headlines that it created.
Physicians were all buying into evidence-based medicine. That was the new medicine, you know, have the evidence of it.
But it's reductionistic in the fact that it groups everybody into the population. And, you know, we saw this happen with the Women's Health Initiative.
We saw this happen with the low-fat craze of the 80s and 90s where everything was healthy as long as it didn't have fat. I mean,

you know, sugar corn pops got the heart healthy label on it because it didn't have fat in it. And, you know, that resulted in a lot of metabolic disorders and cardiovascular disease because of that, but that was our evidence-based medicine approach.
The statin issues, even the opioid epidemic where pain became that symptom that had to be addressed and treated rather than looking at individuals from an end of one basis. I mean, you can use the evidence-based medicine to guide what you look at with the individual, but you've got to look at the individual there.
So we, this woman, instead of getting hormones, she was placed on a little bit of Adderall to help with her brain fog that she was having. And then it wasn't quite enough.
So they added a little bit more Adderall. Then she couldn't sleep.
So they put her on some benzodiazepines to help her sleep. And this crazy ups and downs threw her into some depression.
They put her on SSRIs, which those were the hardest to get people

off of. So when she came to us, she was looking at just retiring because she could not function

anymore. And what we did is we set her on a gradual waning protocol for the polypharmacy

that was pharmacy to treat the pharmacy side effects of the other pharmaceuticals and got her on hormones. And it took us about six months to finally wean the last of the SSRI off of her and the benzodiazepines.
And during that time, her hormones were coming up, we were working with

her lifestyle, her exercise, relationship aspects with her family, relationships at work, her work

environment. And by the end of the six months, she was at the top of her game again.
And she

actually got a promotion. It was beautiful to see the transition that happened.

But we weren't taking a pharmaceutical approach.

Well, with the hormones, we were using hormones, but they were bioidentical hormones.

And overall, it just really turned her life around.

That's incredible.

I mean, creating the right environment, the body wants to create harmony and homeostasis and health and healing. We are the pharmacy.
We can do that with the right environment. I think the same is true for physical and psychological.
And so I just love that. Yeah, because then there's just like one side effect and another drug and a side effect.
So it's just coming back to what's natural and supporting that so that it function. I'm so happy to hear that and the work that you guys are doing.
And I'm curious in terms of science, I know you've talked about some exciting research that's encouraging. Where is science behind that you're hoping that we get to? Well, system science, you know, system science really started

coming on in the early 90s. Even though I think in the psychological world, with IFS, it was actually in the 1980s, it was being recognized.
Then in the 90s, systems biology, systems science, this all started to pick up.

But we also didn't have the the ability to i mean in systems looking at relationships and massive amounts of data on an n of one basis is daunting for the human brain to do so you can dabble in it and computers can only hold so much data but their ability to see these things and predict is limited ai now is a whole different story especially with agentic models of ai and and knowledge graph systems that you can develop where the agents can communicate with each other and interact with each other. And you can create agents to do each individual thing, but then interact with one another.
So agentic models in AI have opened a whole new world for systems approaches. Yeah, that's exciting.
And I see you as a doctor of the future. I think of you as very revolutionary.
And you really marry ancient wisdom with modern science. And I'm curious where you see the future of healthcare using AI or technology.
A lot of people ask me, you know, is AI going to replace physicians? And the answer is yes,

if physicians don't change their mindset a little bit, because the majority of physicians using AI use them as research assistants. They're not interacting with the AI.
And this is where, you know, we don't want to give up all of our agency to the AI. We don't want to give up all the decision-making because there are aspects of the human, just empathy, intuition, all of that, which you're not going to get from the AI.
And when AI is used in that way, it's going to change the landscape dramatically. I use AI throughout my day in treating my clients, just asking it the questions.
Am I missing something here? You know, based on these symptoms and these labs, is there something that I could potentially be missing that's interconnected in this? And it'll find these things for me. So being able to interact with the AI, I think, is the future of medicine.
Yeah, we're in an exciting time. It feels like before the industrial revolution, like that we're about to see so much that we don't even know what's going to happen.
But yes to adopting it. And yes, for using it for good and accelerating healing.
We'll see where we go. But it's exciting time.
Yeah, I know that when we're talking about some of the healing work, you were talking about the default network in the brain. And I know that that sort of measures psychedelics.
Is that right? Yeah. The psychedelics have a big impact on the default mode network.
I mean, when you look at brain mapping of people on psychedelics, there are massive amounts of interconnections being made. So the brain's communicating with areas that it normally doesn't communicate with.
And it's looking for new pathways. Someone once described this, and I thought it was the best explanation.
I'm sorry, I can't give them credit for it. But they said the default mode network is where patterns are created to kind of conserve brainpower.
We use a lot of brainpower on a daily basis. We're faced with massive amounts of decisions.
But the default mode network is this steady flow of a routine that we have. So the brain says, I don't have to do much thinking power on this because this connects with this, this connects with this, and this connects with this.
And imagine it like a steadily flowing riverbed. And you have all these rocks in the base of the riverbed.
And water flows and it's flowing at the same rate. So you get the same eddies, the same whirlpools and the same flow patterns.
And so, you know, if I'm doing this on a daily basis, it becomes a routine. I don't have to think about doing it anymore.
You have things, patterns of like

depression and anxiety that can become a pattern in the default mode network as well. Oh, interesting.
And it gets locked in there. That's why the medications aren't that effective with it.
But what happens is when we take like a tryptamine, like the psychedelics, or even MDMA will slightly disrupt this.

Ketamine does a really good job of it.

But it... like a tryptamine, like the psychedelics, or even MDMA will slightly disrupt this.
Ketamine does a really good job of it, but it will temporarily shake up that riverbed and the rocks get dislodged and they're trying to fall back in place. But the brain all of a sudden has this option to look at alternatives to that pattern.
You know, is this the best pattern? Is this working for me? And those rocks settle back in. Some of them are going to go back into their same positions, but others are going to say, wait a second, maybe this is a better way to look at things.
And this is what we see. I mean, these default mode patterns mode patterns that people have, they, they suddenly change after a psychedelic experience.
This is exciting, because then that means that after having a ceremony or a journey, then having any type of session afterwards, then you're way more easily to be reprogrammed. Is that right? Yeah.
And Nicole Dolan did a lot of work with MDMA on this where she found, so we have this social reward window of development. And this comes online, I think around age nine, and then kind of shuts down in the late teens, early 20s.
So we're basically learning our social interactions that are going to kind of lock in on us and that that window of plasticity closes down and what she was finding is that a single dose of mdma reopens that social reward window for up to two weeks where you have the neuroplasticity reprogram

that social reward system. That's exciting, especially if we've been in some really deeply

ingrained patterns to be really intentional to reprogram those ways of being afterwards

and to question our beliefs or to use affirmations or to change the environment that we've been in. You know, I just think about even subtle things like shifting where you sleep and where you work and just making some changes so you don't go to sleep in those old grooves.
And I think some of it is really healthy and helpful. So like the things that we do that are habits just to save us time that are great like we can continue doing but is there anything you guys do in in terms of your center to support people after a ketamine session to integrate yeah we we spend a lot of time in the in the follow-up sessions for integration so we'll do the immediate integration work We'll do the day after and then generally a week after assess how they're progressing and decide whether any more sessions need to be done.
That feels really empowering, you know, especially for people that have been dealing with things for a while to be able to shake that up and reevaluate what's true. What's my truth? How do I want to move forward? Yeah, it's a great new opportunity for a lot of people.
And your journey from more traditional medicine to really being a leader in health optimization and systems biology is a really beautiful journey. I'm curious, what was the shift? What kind of woke you up to, or have you always been forward forward thinking I became disenchanted when I first got into medical school because I used to love my pediatrician he was he was great because he when I would go he would always ask me about you know the sports I was playing and he would give me guidance on how I could be better at doing these things you know I didn't care about it didn't mind about the shots or anything because he was such a cool guy.
And so I had this impression that this is what medicine was, making a person better at something. I didn't have any medical people in my family.
So from third grade on, that was all I wanted to be. It was a doctor.
And I got into medical school, and it was all about disease and pharmacology to me. And I was like, well, you know, what about like nutrition and exercise? And there just wasn't much of it.
And then I had to decide what I was going to do. And I didn't want to do family medicine or internal medicine because I saw it as, oh, it's a stepwise postponement of death.
I mean, you just accumulate diagnosis and medications over time until you die. And that didn't resonate with me.
I ended up choosing to go the route of surgery just because I could take someone who had a quality of life that suddenly dropped for some reason. I could intervene and at least bring them back up to baseline.
And that was something that I enjoyed doing. I loved working with my hands and there was some reward with it of bringing people back to baseline.
And then I discovered age management medicine. This is about six years into my private practice of surgery.
And it was about optimizing the human system. I was like, wow, this is a new concept for me.
They were using hormones and nutrition and exercise. I thought, that's really cool.
So I started doing that as a hobby on the side just because I enjoyed it. And over the next five years, I was fully convinced that it was the way to go.
And we had added stress and genetics. And I started seeing the complexity of the human system.
And I was like, this is the problem. We've been looking at it in a reductionistic way, and the human system is complex.
Epigenetics opened that up to me, and we started teaching people epigenetics. I walked away from surgery in the end of 2009 and said, this is what I want to do.
And so I dedicated myself full time to this. And I've been learning systems biology, systems health over these years.
And I am fully convinced that this is the new paradigm of health. We actually started that way, though.
I mean, ancient medicine, you know, you look back at Ayurvedic medicine, and you look back at traditional Chinese medicine, it was all about balance and harmony in the system. It wasn't about the parts and pieces, it was truly the harmony.
And even the early Greek stuff was about the balance and harmony of the four humors. And then along comes the later Greek period where they started getting into the parts, breaking things down to understand them based on the parts of that.
And then Descartes and Cartesian dualism really started to solidify. And then you had the germ theory, and then you had the Fleckner Report.
And I mean, we just solidified reductionism as this is the way everything works and how it should be done. And we lost that initial understanding of the harmony and balance of the system.
And now systems, medicine systems, health has, I mean, this evolution is like a spiral. We keep coming back around to it.
And so now we're coming back around to the harmony of the system. I mean, just think of something like inflammation in the body.
Everybody looks at it as a bad thing. It's the body trying to balance.
It's the body trying to get back into harmony. And we take anti-inflammatories to treat it, but we're treating the response of the body to get us back.
Understanding the human system in this way really has changed the way that we look at patients

and the way that we treat them. And it's made a dramatic difference in the outcomes we see.
As you're talking, I'm really hearing the parallels with the work that I do, but from a psychological perspective of not judging inflammation, not judging fear. Like there's some wisdom in it.
And how do we extract that wisdom and not judge it, but then use that to support greater overall well-being? So I love the through line of the work that it can show up in all these different domains of our life. Oh, for sure.
Yeah. And I'm curious about spirituality.
Just what role you feel like spirituality plays in health and well-being? Oh, I mean, we work with a lot of executives and high achievers. I mean, these are these people who have built their kingdoms, basically a lot of entrepreneurs that have exited companies, and suddenly they have lost meaning and purpose in life.
They know, they built this for the last 20 years and now what? So a large portion of our clients, that's one thing that they don't realize is missing, but it's a piece that is impacting them across all different categories of health. And so we help them to identify meaning and purpose in life.
We work with belief systems and expose them to various belief systems that may resonate with them, give them some perspectives. It's an important area to work with.
I mean, even in designing interventions for people, understanding and respecting their belief systems is so important, and it's ignored in a lot of the medical community. Yeah.
What would it look like to design an intervention for them? We get a detailed questionnaire on spirituality.

So we've developed one that... What does it look like to design an intervention for them? We get a detailed questionnaire on spirituality.

So we've developed one that it's a 30-question questionnaire that asks them about their meaning in their relationship, their purpose in life. Do they feel in touch with a higher power?

Just to get an idea of where they are in five different categories of spirituality that we have. And that is so illuminating in people because you're like, wow, I really thought that this person was really in a solid place with this.
but they're obviously not really connecting well with that aspect of their life. Yeah.
And even as you're talking, and I know you're about wholeness, you and Mikra, just really like seeing people's inherent wholeness and working with the whole body system that is very aligned with the way I orient as well. And, you know, I think even just looking at it from that point of view helps and doing these assessments helps see where if you think of it like the wheel and it looks at different areas of your life.
And if you are deficient in one area, that's going to throw everything else off and be lopsided. And so I hear that there's an assessment to help them sort of question the limitations to wake up back to who they are from a bigger context and then to treat the whole system from there.
Yeah, I mean, it's just, it's like a rainforest. You know, in a rainforest, you can't treat that in a reductionistic way like we repair a car.
In a car, we know what each individual part is responsible for, and we can predict what a failure in this one part creates in the outcome of the overall car. In the rainforest, I mean, it is a complex ecosystem that relies on feedback loops and emergent properties, and the human system is the same way.
Looking at the human system as a whole allows us to look at the human ecosystem and say, you know, what are these feedback loops? What are the feed forward loops? What are the interconnections that are being made between these systems that create the outcome? Instead of going, oh, okay, they have high blood sugars, they eat a poor diet, so we need to change their diet and put them on an insulin-lowering drug. Well, what if their socioeconomic status makes it so that they can only afford these foods? What if they just have a lifestyle that they're following that they think is healthy, and we can educate them on these changes that can be made? What if they don't have access to safe nature space and they can't get out and walk for the day? I mean, we've got to look at all these things that can intervene before the medications and make it work for them.
Yeah, and I think it's so important, that holistic perspective, because it could be just something practical, and it could be something energetic. And I think as AI takes over some of the more mental, like if you're using AI in your work as a doctor, then it frees you up to develop more of your intuition and mental downloads.
And I get excited about that. And working things energetically, because the energy is also going to show up in the body, the emotions are going to show up in the body.
And so I'm curious in terms of also where you see the future where you hope to see people go with more alternative forms of healing, you know, maybe doing energetic work, or I know science is far behind in terms of measuring this, there's a lot we would need to do. But I, I worked with a woman when I was in my 20s, who did psychic surgery, and Don Miguel Ruiz, it was his mom, the four agreements, I worked with his mom in San Diego.
And, you know, there's healers from all over the world, ancient practices that have tapped into something. I'm just curious your thoughts on that or where you would, I think it's incredible and I hope more people learn to download and listen to a deeper wisdom that guides them into alternative healing.
The approach that I have taken with that, that really changed my world, I was the atheist scientist.

I mean, that was me.

Psychedelic experience helped to open up possibilities for me because I started looking at things and I was saying, well, what if instead of like, oh, there is no proof of that.

And the other thing was, okay, if that were true, how could we prove it? And so I started looking at things from a whole different perspective of, okay, what if this is something that is out there? I mean, you know, the fact that we know nothing, we just need to accept that. Yeah.
And be comfortable with uncertainty. Yes.
That's the key. And just say, wow, maybe there's something to this.
I mean, there's an electromagnetic spectrum out there that is massive, that we have no idea what's going on in it. We have no idea if there's some people that have special perceptions of it.
And you can say, well, they can't prove it, but can't they? I mean, I've seen some stuff that has been very consistent, but we don't have the measuring tools because we don't know what frequency it is or what part of the electromagnetic spectrum is occurring. But you hear about these things.
And so you say, well, what if? I mean, just like placebo effect. I mean, people talk about that like it's just placebo effect.
And I'm like, are you kidding me? That's the coolest thing that I have seen in so long. I mean, what is the magic of the placebo effect that it's so effective?

Right. And that's our power, the power of our belief.
Yeah, it is. And then what is that doing? Is it working for us or against us? Yeah, and I even think about, you know, in the military, remote viewing and how they've used that and why don't we talk about that more? And so I love your ability to have such a brilliant mind, but also have an open mind to ask, well, how could that be true? Or what else is here that I'm not talking about or seeing? I think that's very healthy.
And I love the skepticism. I think, you know, and obviously the science is so important, but having that open mind in addition, I think is the sweet thought.
Yeah. I mean, I was trained to be closed minded for sure.
You talked about this complex adaptive system that we are this complex adaptive system in terms of embracing this perspective. How does that change healthcare? How does that change relationships or even making decisions? It's getting comfortable with uncertainty, I think is truly the best way to put it.
Accepting the fact that there's nothing we know for sure. And even reality itself is not real.
But for me, that getting comfortable with uncertainty was the hardest part i mean i was just like oh but i

am certain about this and then i realized i'm not certain about anything and so i can be comfortable

with being uncertain but that also opens up possibilities for everything when you're like

that i mean when you think about a complex adaptive system it's it thrives on the edge of chaos

Thank you. But that also opens up possibilities for everything when you're like that.
I mean, when you think about a complex adaptive system, it thrives on the edge of chaos. I mean, you think about the measures we use like heart rate variability.
What is heart rate variability? It's basically chaos. It's on the edge of chaos.
It's the interval between heartbeats, that timing that is just so different. And the wider that gets, the healthier the system is.
They've also proven that in breath rate variability and gait rate variability, that the healthiest systems have the greatest variability. And so, wow, a healthy, complex, adaptive system thrives on the edge of chaos, not being metronomic and regular, which is what most people try to focus on.
And so that was mind blowing to me. Yeah.
I'm, I'm, as you're talking, I'm even thinking about kids, you know, going through the emotional range and like the tantrums are the parts that actually develop the brain when they're younger. So I think there's so much we get to reevaluate and look at based on what's being proven and what we're also intuiting.
My favorite philosopher was Nietzsche. And in his book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he was talking about man was given two options.
He could be the Ubermensch, where he would experience the highest of highs, but also experience the lowest of lows going through life. Or he could make the choice to be what they call the last man, which was choosing the greatest comfort with the least pain.
And he was so disappointed that everybody chose to be the last man. When he saw the Uber Mensch as this person that really lived life, that life of excellence, because, you know, you can't experience those highest highs if you don't experience the lowest lows.
And that full spectrum human experience is what makes life grand. That's right.
Yeah. And learning to have a healthy relationship with the full piano range, and to play those lower keys and how they sound with the higher keys, like that's the tapestry of this human experience and that i know it's hard to feel that full range for a lot of people mainly because we haven't learned how to open to our emotions but neuroscientists have found that it just takes 90 seconds to feel a feeling fully before it moves through the body and so then it's like oh i can feel grief or sadness or anger and and there And there's something really beautiful in that.
And that creates more of the tapestry of the beauty. We don't go to a movie just to see the happy ending.
We have the full experience. And so I think I used to try to heal away from some of the negative feelings.
And then the orientation shifted to how do I welcome all of this and like find my center and peace through all of it.

And to me, that feels way more, less anxiety driven, because then I know I can just regulate and be with, say yes to my full, whatever is presenting itself in the moment. So beautiful, Dan.
There's so many things we could dive into. But just in closing, I just want to ask you, is there something that we haven't explored in this conversation that would be either a game changer for people to know about or to touch in on that you think would really impact or benefit people? Yeah, I mean, some of the stuff we talked about this weekend in relationships.
I mean, that is something that is not talked about. And we were with couples that have the most spectacular relationships, I mean, truly transcendent relationships with their partners.
And if that could be taught and bottled, I i mean wow that would change the world i agree yeah and i just see the way that you and me girl love each other and are so devoted to each other and to a higher love it's beautiful to witness and it also it feels like it's permission to keep diving deeper into my love with my husband and to just dive fully into that experience. And I just, I have so much love and respect for both of you.
And it's been such a pleasure to get to meet you and drop in and have this very beautiful four day immersive experience with you guys. Yeah.
And the co-creative couple, I mean mean we see that in you guys we have it as well and that is such an exponential transformer in life and not enough couples are are entering that co-creative dance yeah should be and one of the things that i got from this four days was the collaboration as a couple. So Emilio and I haven't needed to collaborate that much.
He'll do it and then or I'll do it, but less working together. And that was one of the themes that got brought up.
How do you collaborate? Maybe it takes a little bit longer, but what you create as a result is more beautiful by coming together. Absolutely just in the last few days, we've been collaborating really beautifully.

It was one of the gems of not just like, he'll lead or I'll lead and then we'll share back and forth.

But to really slow down the perspective, like appreciate the differences, right?

We attract somebody who's different so that we can develop those parts of us.

And to really meet in the middle and create real beauty in the world and something that's better than we could have created on our own. I love that.
And just deeper intimacy. I think one of the things that I felt like I walked away from those four days was I could feel an edge of because one of the assignments was to claim to each other.
this is my forever partner. And Emilio was like,

oh, I have some anxiety about sharing that. I'm like, wait, what? We're married? I had that before we were going to get married.
And after he shared that, I could feel what my edge was in loving him deeper. And I met it and I was like, oh, I didn't know it was there.
I was unconscious. And I could hear a subtle saboteur judgment being projected onto him as a way to protect me to not fall deeper in love with him.
And because of the work that I've done, I know that he is a reflection of me. And so I got to really love that part of me that I was projecting onto him.
And in that, not only did I experience more self-love, but I got to go drop deeper in love with him. And I just, I love that you bring that forward because I think leadership as couples and doing this work together and supporting each other's healing and from that work, being able to create something that genuinely serves the couplehood yourselves but

also your communities in the world is everything and we wouldn't proclaim i mean that was that was important for us because we believe in the the ultimate reality of we we do love eternally but change happens

and a commitment

is worth the words. And that's about it, as we've seen in most of the commitments that are made on a daily basis throughout the world.
So, you know, we just, we want to show through actions, our commitment in each moment. Yeah.
And I love that. And I love that each couple got to speak their truth and find, because I was inspired by that to the commitment to love fully, but that doesn't mean the form of that love will stay.
And I, that also feels true for me. And there feels like a, it's a, it's a more mature love to keep my heart open, no matter

what, and honor your truth to let you, obviously that you will anyway, but to let your partner and

support their truth, even if that's away from you, that was part of our vows.

And yet there is such devotion in your relationship and in mine and all of ours. And,

but that feels like a freer, also more mature love. No formula.
There's no formula. Yeah, but honoring truth and keeping our hearts open and speaking that to each other lovingly.
What a gift you are, Dan. Thank you for being here.
Thank you as well. So grateful.
I know that people are going to want to stay connected. Talk to us about what you're up to, where they can find you most of my stuff is linkedin and a little bit of instagram um and um our clinic is the appear on center uh here in austin and we also have a nationwide tele-wellness program that is all about optimization called clotho wellness beautiful i will put all put all the links in the show notes below.
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