Biohacking for Optimizing Human Performance, Physician Dr. Mohammed Enayat, Co-Founder of HUM2N

Hello, dearest listeners, and welcome to the Longevity and Lifestyle Podcast, where I invite pioneers and thought leaders in their respective fields to give us the strategies, tools, and practices to live better and help reach our human potential. My guest today is Dr. Mohammed Enayat. Dr. E, as he's also known, is a trained physician, founder, and health futurist at the intersection of human performance, longevity, and personalized healthcare. Dr. E founded Human Wellness Clinic, which brings together biohacking with applied longevity science and a real-time physiology approach to engineer vitality, longevity, and early disease resolution. During his 10 years of medical training, including in microplastic and orthopedic surgery, Dr. Enayat recognized the lack of emphasis on longevity and performance in the healthcare system. This led him on his journey of adopting innovations and curating cutting-edge menus into medical wellness that help clients regenerate their body and feel their best. In this episode, we discuss biohacking, the future of personalized medicine, why the current healthcare system is broken, how to navigate through all the mixed messages and misconceptions in an unregulated wellness world, and much more. Before we begin, please subscribe to the podcast to get your weekly dose of longevity inspiration and leave a comment to let me know what you think. I would love to hear from you. Please enjoy.

Welcome to the Longevity and Lifestyle Podcast, Dr. E. It's a pleasure to have you on today.

Hi Claudia.

Hi. Thank you. Great to have you on.

Great to be on.

Thank you so much. I believe we share a view and excitement about a fundamental shift occurring in healthcare versus disease care and getting to the root cause and solving for issues before they become debilitating diseases to enable us to live better and reach our true potential. Why, in your view, is this shift occurring and how do you think it could be used to redefine primary care?

Why is the shift occurring is because the need has evolved. Humans were plagued by diseases, acute, initially acute conditions. And so science developed, we innovate as humans, we're remarkably intelligent. And we developed structures to, to drive innovation, really, and we innovated in understanding more about the human body, and what drives those acute conditions, whether it's heart attacks, strokes, etc., etc. We reached a point where we could manage those conditions. And we've reached a point where we can manage and extend life through managing some stability of those conditions to a certain degree. However, science has continued to progress. And the understanding of the human body has become more granular. We now understand more about the cellular processes that go on, and the interconnected nature of our biology, which has meant that we can now look at health slightly differently. And it means that we can push for a revolution, or evolution of the global understanding of health, starting at the very definition of the word. And, you know, we know it's traditionally— it's defined in the Oxford Concise Dictionary as the absence of disease. However, we believe, and we share this amongst, you know, our cohort of passionate and self-experimented, you know, but also this is why we're passionate, because we feel the difference ourselves, that health can be redefined away from this proxy to disease status to a state of vitality.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And, and so this is what unites us, this is what emboldens us, this is what empowers us, this is what gives us our raison d'être belief that we need to spread this more and more amongst lots of people. We need to help people understand that this definition of health and the associated systems that deliver this nirvana of definition need to be outdated. Right? And not saying we need to replace traditional medicine, we need to augment traditional medicine, we need to evolve traditional medicine, so that alongside traditional medicine, we can deliver healthcare around a state of vitality. Because better health, better consciousness of your state, engineers more conscious humans, more conscious humans, like ripples turning to waves, develops conscious communities, which can develop conscious societies. And this is ultimately what, when I speak to anyone that's in this space, I really enjoy it because we are all united by these— this belief that reflected on our own personal journeys, which is the most, you know, this is why we're also passionate, profound, right? Yeah, when it's reflected on your own journey and what you've been through and how you've utilized science, the innovations in science to evolve yourself and to overcome the challenges of life, then you want to share that. And when you've shared that and you've seen other people transform, you want to share that even more. And you've seen how the individual transformed, but they can become these beacons of knowledge and empowerment for their children, their families, their friends, and inspire.

Yeah, the ripple effect, right?

Ripple turns to waves. It really can do. And, you know, we hope to to kind of just inspire with some, sometimes just little tips and tweaks that people can do to just notice a little bit of a shift of state that will encourage them to want to learn more. Or at the other end, we can give them a transformative experience in 90 minutes where it's like a lightning shock to their system that, wow, I didn't realize I could feel like that. And so Yeah, that's a little bit about— yeah, just to answer your question. And people listening might notice that I go off on a bit of a tangent, so Claudia, you have to reel me back in.

I do too, I do too. So yeah, no, but I agree with you on— it's such an exciting space and there's so many exciting topics that we're going to dig into in our short day, so looking forward to that. But maybe before we do that, we can take a step back and talk a bit about your background and training, because you come from a traditional medicine perspective. Do you remember the moment you decided why you wanted to become a doctor and What was your earliest memory in healthcare that influenced the way that you see the healthcare world now?

So my earliest memory of why I wanted— I actually wanted to be an astronaut when I was a child. I really did. I wanted to go to space.

You and Elon Musk.

Yeah, it's still a dream to go to space.

Well, me too. I'm going to go with my 5-year-old. We've made a pact. So yeah.

Wow. Fantastic. Maybe I'll join you.

Well, Richard Branson's heard it this week or last week at the Brussels event.

Yeah, of course. And so I actually wanted to be an astronaut, and I remember as a child coming across a fact— maybe I was like in pre-10, 8, 9, 10, I can't remember how old I was— where you had to have 20/20 vision. I was told that 20/20 vision to be an astronaut. Yeah, yeah. And then that just killed my dreams at that point. I was like, I remember going for an eye test and not having 20/20 vision, and, uh, and it just like killed my dreams. But no, I think I've always been fascinated in science. And I actually went to school in the City of London, in the Square Mile of the city. People that know London, the City of London is like the Square Mile of the city, we call it. Where all of the— Yeah, like Wall Street, where all the financial institutions are. I was going from 11 years old, taking the tube, you know, getting into the Square Mile, just being surrounded by financial services businesses. And we're kind of groomed at that school to go and work in the city. And the two options were going to work in finance or following a passion for science. My parents were really keen for me, my mom particularly was very keen for me to become a doctor. My dad was a bit more, you know, he was like, you know, finance or be a doctor. And he said something that at the time when I was choosing, because you have to choose your A-levels which dictate where you're going to go, he said something to me which stuck with me at that time, which was, you can choose a career where with your money you can do good, or you can choose a career just by doing your work, you're, you're getting blessings from people without even trying. And it's those blessings that will carry you forwards to a happier life. And it was just that, that made me say, okay, yeah, okay, look, maybe I should be a doctor.

Wow. Those are wise words from your dad. Well done.

Yeah, he's quite a philosopher.

Inspiration, right?

Yeah. Yeah. And so, yeah, then I went to study medicine at King's College and Imperial College in London. And actually my first lens into an alternative or progressive approach to health was 2007. I did a health management degree at Imperial and my topic of the thesis was how to drive innovation into the health system. And the focus was the stem cell industry. At that time it was probably one of the most emerging, novel, interesting spaces within medicine for a while and showed so much potential the way it was described, you know, this pluripotent potential of regeneration and self-healing. And when I went to go work in San Diego for a while in the stem cell facility, I just became absolutely immersed in the idea, the concept of this self-regenerative potential of the human body. And we're kind of academically taught the principles of it. Very superficially. Yeah, very superficial at medical school in the first 1, 2 years of medical school, which is the academic time. But then we're not applying that lens to treating people, to appreciating the human body. That makes sense, right? And so for me, it's seeing that and understanding the regenerative capacity of the body and taking that lens that we're actually a balance between generation regeneration and degeneration. And when we're a child and baby, where generation is stronger than degeneration, and we come to a fulcrum in our 20s probably, and then late 20s, and then that starts to— that shift starts, the imbalance starts to go the other way.

Unless you biohack yourself.

Yeah, yeah, unless you biohack yourself. And so yes, that was my first opening as a lens and a perspective. And I think combined with that, the appreciation that there is a massive adoption lag between science and medicine. So medicine is the application of science through systems and protocols in a learning-based environment on humans, obviously. And there was, at that time, there was a known 7-year adoption lag between an innovation in science to when it actually reaches a patient. And that's probably widened.

It's probably because of like FDA approvals and things like that, or why funding trials and then education as well.

So by the time it's approved, you then have to educate doctors on how to utilize that test, that therapy, that intervention, and you have to build it into a system. So actually, I think it's now become much bigger in 7 years. Just looking at it, I feel like around disease it's 7 years, but around prevention, it's probably closer to 30 years, 20 years. Yeah, because it's traditional medicine.

Yeah, a mentality. And I think the conversation I had with someone, you know, based on the West Coast, U.S., it's very much medical schools financed by pharmaceutical industries, so very much a certain way of thinking, right? And preventative medicine would really require from the medical school is a fundamental shift in actually thinking about how medicine is taught, I would think, right? So it's a much longer process.

Yes, the education piece is absolutely critical. And, and going even back to how we— it starts at the very definition, you know, how we define health. If we define health as absence of disease, okay, let's define disease. Disease is a cluster of these symptoms, pattern recognition. You train doctors and students around, and not just doctors, the whole healthcare, allied healthcare, nurses, physios, etc., around these clusters of symptoms that have diagnosis codes, right?

Yeah.

And then off that, this is how you test, this is how you manage, and then the kind of algorithms of care according to those patterns. If we start redefine health and say actually state of vitality, what takes us away from slight vitality? A bit of brain fog. I'm not sleeping as well. I'm not waking up energized. You know, these are the new symptomatology that we need to create to then create new diagnosis codes.

Yeah.

You know, let's just say detoxification issues or methylation, etc., etc. We test for them, then we can manage them. Right. And so, yes, we have patterns of care based around that. We can then develop a new system of delivering healthcare that is an adjunct to the disease-based system that teaches doctors how to deliver personalized preventative medicine that has reduced down the 7-year and probably longer adoption. Like, and this helps you conceptualize it very easily. Look how long it takes us. We go from, you know, we grew up at a time when it started being fat-free. Yeah, yeah. And then it went to sugar-free. Right.

Yeah.

And it's only now we realize that actually we need healthy fats as a society.

Yep.

We're educating that. But how long have we in those 20 years been driving people towards having cell membranes without healthy fats in? And then we wonder why they get vascular dementias and strokes and heart disease, obesity, type 2 diabetes. Yeah. That's true.

Yeah.

And now we understand sugar-free is really where we need to be. So when we look at preventative health, long-term health, and sometimes it falls under public health, you know, this health prevention falls under public health. But public health also look after things like COVID and management of the public from a safety perspective, which is absolutely critical, reducing spread of disease, etc. But they also look after the prevention, the adoption of science from a preventive model is based around a retrospective analysis over 30 years where you have many confounding factors and you can't isolate them. And so it becomes very bland, generic advice. Okay, eat more fruit and veg, exercise more, and don't stress. Yeah. And don't smoke. That is lifestyle medicine as it's taught in medical school. Right.

And I'm sure it has a following of about 1,000% by everyone who hears it. They're like, yep, I've heard that before. Yeah. No, it, it needs to be much more personalized and I'd love to touch on that in a moment. And can you talk a little bit about your journey from traditional medicine to becoming recognized as the UK's number one doctor of biohacking?

I don't know who recognized me, but yes. Yeah. I mean, I think there's not many physicians in the UK that are in the space, but also in the space integrating therapies with this deep type medicine. I started my career wanting to be a surgeon. I started core surgical training. I did some placements abroad in trauma and orthopedic surgery, and a lot of my junior doctor training in central London and other teaching hospitals were based around surgical rotations. I soon realized that I didn't want to become super specialized. I'm more of a generalist, a polymath, and having done a health management degree and become really interested in how to drive adoption of innovation into the system, I did a further kind of fellowship in health management called a Darzi Fellowship, which essentially gave me some time and space to go work within the design and development of the health system from a public health system, the NHS, the commissioners, the academic health science networks that spread knowledge and drive innovation into practice. During that time, I worked on some really interesting projects. We're connecting up Pentonville Prison to Whittington Hospital through telemedicine. I worked with expert patient groups where patients would teach other patients on how to manage their diabetes far better than doctors would teach other patients, right?

I guess they just say it black or white. Like, you know, when you get up in the morning, you do this and whatever, you are able to explain.

Experience of living with something, right?

Yeah, true. Yeah.

Is allows you to connect with someone more, allows them to ask you more questions. We as physicians don't even think about, you know, you know, when you wake up, do you do this first or do you do that first? You know? Oh, if you do this first, I found ABC. So there, there was something really that shifted my mind about who is the expert. Is it me as a physician, you know, or is it actually the patient, you know, who lives with the symptoms?

You know, that's actually a really interesting point. And I'm just thinking about that now because, you know, would you consider that almost like the future of preventative but also of healthcare? Because having the opportunity to talk to someone else, if you were to say have a certain disease— this isn't, I think, normal medical practice that you speak to other patients, right? Would that not be, you know, the workaround, or like building those communities where people share that? 100%.

Expert patient groups are doing some excellent work, self-management programs they're running in diabetes, where it's about empowering the person that has that disease to develop tools to understand their body better. They can intervene better. Now technology has moved at such a pace where we can really empower people to do that, right? Yeah. Continuous glucose monitors. Yeah. Health wearable rings. Et cetera, et cetera, right? Yeah, exactly. So yes, short answer is that empowering patients to be comfortable and creating safe space and boundaries for them to be able to hold these groups and forums is only a good thing. So that was a real eye-opening for me in many ways, that experience. And that led me to the point where I was like, okay, actually I do want to finish my training and become a consultant in the UK system. So it gives me the freedom to practice. With a certain degree. And so I finished my general practice training and also I was interested in chronic disease and managing communities. And so I did my primary care GP training in Royal London Hospital and then the attached Tower Hamlets area. I worked in really deprived, I wanted to work in somewhere where there was a big need and complex general practice because disease present late in a city, urban areas where access is more limited in understanding and education is less. And so that was thoroughly enjoyable and also thoroughly frustrating at the same time. Not the area, but just seeing how you delivering care is managed ultimately, how the health system manages you to deliver care, how it limits your ability to think about the human body in a more holistic, interconnected way. In a regenerative, and how it does it, you know, lots of challenges. And so where I was managing patients who were coming in with the same problems, whether they're 25-year-olds living with lifelong eczema, debilitating, and all I could do was give them a steroid cream or antibiotics and the same cycle over and over and over again, or seeing the gradual decline, sometimes steady stepwise decline of patients that had a whole list of medications, and my toolkits were more medications or referring into a specialist within the hospital who prescribed more medications or give more drugs usually, or end up down a kind of investigative route. And really just feeling that patients are disempowered, you know, we're disempowering our patients. With this type of healthcare. And actually I've done a TEDx talk and my TEDx talk, coming back to your question earlier, what is my earliest subconscious memory that I've kind of put together afterwards was being a child. One of my youngest memories was at my uncle's funeral and being in a room and hearing from everyone around me, when it's your time, it's your time. And that paradigm, you're healthy until you're sick. And seeing that manifest as a doctor was really like, okay, this has to be more. It has to be more. And that led me on continuing that learning journey that I started when I started looking at stem cell medicine and to look at alternative approaches around outside of the UK to really inspire and understand what else is out there. And alongside this time, my sister cosmetic dermatologist, UK-US trained, wants to bring the medical spa concept to the UK about 8 years ago. So we founded LMS Wellness and really just looked at from the outside in how to reverse aging, the effects of aging from the outside, longevity of your appearance, really.

Yeah.

How do skin cells age? How do, how do the tissues anatomically move? How does hair follicles go through different phases? And then designing protocols based on that, adopting innovations in science and putting them together in protocols and stacks to reverse the signs of skin aging. Like what happens in the skin— thins, pigmentation, redness, pores, laxity. And then doing like really, you know, treatments and then seeing that, wow, this stuff works. That's really interesting. Hair, okay, I can get new baby hair to grow out in your 40s. That's really interesting. Having gray-haired people turning a bit less gray, that was really interesting. And so I actually really enjoyed aesthetic medicine because it allowed me to apply principles of regenerative medicine, which is around stem cells and using that cellular approach to health, and see the objective results with the eyes, you know, that's really quite powerful.

Yeah.

And then that kind of said, at the same time with those patients, I would see, because we would fly around the world and see those patients. We would understand that those patients wouldn't actually go to the NHS for their health. They'd be flying up to wellness centers in Germany, Austria, Spain, Italy.

Yeah.

For 2 to 3 weeks of wellness, feeling great, and then coming back to life, their jet-set life. And then the effect's not lasting very long. That was probably about 2014, '15. I started to get exposed to this. Now remember, I'm a, UK-trained NHS, blinkers on. Yeah, doctor, right? He's had a little bit of exposure to stem cells, but that's about it. And then I started to see people going to Germany and Austria and then understanding they use a very diet and detoxification-based approach to health. I said, wow, that's interesting, you know, that's really interesting. Then I came across functional medicine, 2015. I went to study in the US at the IFM, um, and then started— I went to a conference first medical conference I've been to where I was in a room with osteopaths and nutritionists and other physicians, and I was like really out of my comfort zone. I was like, this, you know, bringing forward that kind of entrenched, arrogant kind of traditional mentality. Yeah, yeah, it trains you to be very arrogant and like that, you know, all— yeah, very dismissive. And I'll come back to the dismissive point in a second. And then sat there, listened. I was like, wow, there has to be some truth to this. Like, you can't have this many people saying that they're reversing diseases like eczema, psoriasis, and, you know, and mild rheumatoid arthritis, et cetera. And I was like, they can't all be. And then one of the faculty teaching there, Mark Minilacino, you know, true internal physician. And I just loved how he described it. And then he was giving a series of talks. And I asked if he would mentor me and I sought out different mentors, came across around that time Molly Maloof.

She's coming on the podcast in August. Yeah.

Great. Yeah. So, you know, we did a project together where she was one of the early adopters of this type of medicine. And so she kind of coached me a little bit and did a project with us and we started to develop with Mark, et cetera, and within my team programs for our patients that we were recruiting through aesthetic medicine. Who were interested in this type of— who were going to Germany, Austria. So they already had their eyes open a little bit, understood that health can be delivered slightly differently. And then from there, it was just double down. It was just double down. It was just seeing patients get results and just being blown away. This is it, you know. This is my new vision for the next 10, 20, 30, God knows how long, but this is it. Yeah, I want to continue and replicate these results. So I want to roll it out to other autoimmune conditions. And other conditions. And what was really nice was the ability to converge functional medicine, which is root cause medicine into drivers of inflammation and state of health, alongside longevity medicine, or science, I should say, which is more about the long term, you know, what happens as we age, as we talked about earlier. And then finding the sweet spot in the middle, which is probably performance medicine, and healthspan optimization.

Yeah, right.

Which is like, actually, okay, beyond just extending your life, you know, what about kind of helping you feel superhuman or helping you outperform and outlive your dreams? And that became this like really, for me, it's just like, wow, like this is it, you know, this is what I want to do.

Yeah. I mean, similar for me as well, because people are like, oh, why longevity? Like, why do I want to live longer? And I was like, you know, what's your perception of longevity? And typically it's, you know, being perceived, let's say, 85-year-old. Like, why would you want to extend that type of life for another 20 years? Well, it's like, no, wrong. What if you could go skydiving at 95? What if you can be out partying, which is always my thing at 94, right? Having lots of fun climbing mountains and having a great time into your 90s and even 100, right? So why should age stop you if you can optimize yourself and you can really enjoy life more? And What does it free up? It frees all the time. I mean, you know, I see my parents' sort of generation, how many doctor's visits— like, that's kind of the week plan, like which doctor's visits do they need to go to. Imagine you had all that free time to like go and do, you know, great sports and having a great time, hang out with your friends and really enjoying life, optimizing things and reaching your true human potential. So I think that's more the why and getting people to understand that it's not just about living longer, it's actually living really well longer and doing really cool fun things. And that I think is, you excitement behind it, for me at least.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it's strange how the most of society, they outsource their health to the health system.

Yeah.

And that's what the NHS is for. That's what, you know, funds sick coverage. That's because we haven't really been educated around the ability to control our destiny from a health perspective.

Yeah, yeah.

We can all get run over by a bus. But we can control if we're going to get diabetes to some degree, especially type 2 diabetes, and how that extends now into vascular dementia and strokes, et cetera, and other kinds of chronic conditions. But more and more people and physicians and healthcare teams are beginning to understand that, that long-term thinking is hard, isn't it? It's hard to even coach people in long-term thinking sometimes.

Well, I agree because we're all so used to that. I have a headache, give me a pill. I want the headache to go away. I think for me, when I spent a bit of time in China and— this is back in 2005— visited a traditional Chinese medicine pharmacy, and I had the doctor looking at my tongue and checking my pulse. And I'm like, you know, what are they really going to figure out from here? But she really picked up on a few things, which I was, you know, of course they do, right? This is a very old medicine, but you know how they treat things, right? So if you have a headache, it's getting to the root cause. So we were talking about functional medicine and root cause medicine and solving for the root cause. And so it takes 3 days of having maybe a headache, but then it's gone forever because you've solved for that versus the whole just taking the pill and it keeps coming back again and it doesn't make you any better. So I'd love to talk about some of the exciting and very cool treatments that you have at HUMAn. And I was last week now, or 10 days ago, in your very cool NASA hyperbaric oxygen chamber. But I'd love for you as the expert to talk about the different therapies that you offer and why they are so amazing for the body.

Our approach to therapies is based around a self-regenerative approach to health. It's about how do we fine-tune the human biology and the processes that go on to make them work better? How do we support them to work better? Rather than an interventional approach, which is more of a traditional medical approach— drugs, synthetic drugs, or surgery— it's about how do we just make your cells work better or make your biology more connected. And so we started with hyperbaric oxygen therapy. I came across that, I think around 2015 as well, '16, when I just went on this deep exploration around the world, Germany, Austria, America, Japan. Yeah. Japan pioneered a lot of hyperbaric medicine actually. And, and we came across hyperbaric and in this approach to health with that lens that we are healthy. At the state of vitality in our 20s, and then we're in a gradual decline, and then the diagnosis of that disease fits in when we have those structural issues within the organs. I started to look at therapies that I found interesting in a disease state, and an obvious one was hyperbaric oxygen therapy. From a cellular perspective, it's a simple, simple science.

For people not familiar, can you explain what it actually is?

And for sure, yeah. It's optimizing you to get better quality oxygen. At a very simple level, we are a bag of trillions of cells. Our plumbing, which is our blood supply in our heart, is the pump, takes the oxygen from our lungs, from our environment, from air. We have 21% oxygen. We take that out of our lungs into our blood supply and it gets delivered to our cells. Each cell has an engine, which is the mitochondria. Which takes energy and makes fuel. Like all vehicles, we take air and oxygen, it combusts with a spark to make energy. Same thing happens at each cell to make energy. And with that energy, we use that energy, the cell uses that energy to do what it needs to do, different functions, replicate, create proteins, hormones, enzymes, kill senescent cells, maybe old cells, etc., etc., fight inflammation. And so if we give better fuel to a cell at a very simple level, the cell will work better and it'll do its job better. And because you're improving the delivery of oxygen to all of your cells, it can affect and impact every single organ, every single part of you, from your skin to your hair follicles on the outside to your brain tissue, preventing the shrinking of the brain, etc., etc. So it has a massive longevity effect in maintaining the structure of the organs, the blood supply to those organs, and the nutrient oxygen delivery. Also, at a cellular level, through the energy effect, you will heal better, you will replace your old cells better, you'll fight your inflammation better. So from a longevity science perspective, it's phenomenal. And that's why we call it the time machine. There's been studies coming out this year from Israel, some excellent studies showing the biological aging markers reverse from a course of hyperbaric oxygen treatments.

Okay.

Wow. So that's the application for longevity. Then you have the application for disease state at the other end of the spectrum. So people that have post-surgery or healing, wound healing after strokes or mini infarcts, within the brain to help reperfusion and keep those cells alive. It helps with post-disease age fractures, etc., etc., burns, dermatology. So that was an excellent adjunct for the aesthetic medicine stuff we were doing and for post-surgery for a lot of patients that were coming for surgery, orthopedic surgery, etc., etc.

So it expedites the healing process basically massively. And just for people who aren't super familiar, it's like going into a little space capsule almost with very cool lighting, and you have an oxygen mask on, and the cabin or the vessel, the pressure changes, right? So I think it's down to like 85 meters below sea level, which is beyond like a tech diver, right? So I'm a scuba diver, but I've only gone to 30.

So yeah, so the hyperbaric chambers for nitrogen sickness, so for deep scuba diving and basically for diving medicine, go down to those pressures. And traditional ones for disease management also used to go down to those ones, but now the chambers in science, we realize that they don't need to go down to as far as 85.

Okay, yeah, because I didn't feel like that when I was in them.

Yeah, this one goes down to approximately 20, 25, which is about 2, 2.5 atmospheric pressure. Yeah. And the science behind it is that if you double the atmospheric pressure, right, then effectively your body will take in double the amount of oxygen from— if it's just air, from the air. So instead of it being 21%, it will receive it as if it's 42% oxygen.

Yeah, yeah.

And so if you're giving someone 95% oxygen, you obviously just flood the body of oxygen because you also start to carry oxygen not just in the red blood cells but also in your blood plasma, which is the liquid within which your different types of blood cells are carried. And so your reservoir The total amount of oxygen you can carry just increases by 20 to 30 times. Yeah. So it's really powerful. It should be the mainstay for good longevity practice. We would love to see it much more widely available. So you can use it for longevity, for healing and disease states, and you can also use it for optimizing the state. And that's why we can also call it the think tank. A lot of the blood flow goes to the brain. So if you're optimizing the blood flow to the brain, you think clearer. Yeah. Right. And people often go in there, do one-to-one meetings, and I wanted to create a chamber that was— you could actually go and sit inside and be comfortable. That's fun. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, you can— people do their one-to-one meetings in there, some of our members. Even I do some of my stuff, and yeah, it's brilliant.

Um, do you do your brainstorming creativity sessions in there?

100%. Yeah, I mean, I'm in there probably 2 to 3 times a week on average.

Yeah. Amazing. Oh, hence you look so young still. So, and what other cool therapies do you also offer at, at HUMN?

Okay. So we also do whole body cryotherapy. It's taking you into a freezer that goes down to -140 Celsius.

Which is so insane.

Yeah. It's crazy, isn't it? It's so normal to me now, but when you think about it, it is crazy. And the cold exposure at that level with your head in, your whole body in. Has a number of benefits. It stimulates your body in a number of ways. Your body's like, I need to survive, I need to regenerate, I need to heal. You know, through that skin temperature drop, you get pulsing or production of growth hormone and regenerative hormones and testosterone for men, both which decline as we age. From a metabolic perspective, we know metabolic flexibility is very important for longevity. How agile your metabolism is to respond to sugar is very important. If our bodies are lazy, our metabolism becomes lazy.

Yeah.

And then it just stores sugar very quickly as white adipose tissue or white fat cells, which sit centripetally around your stomach, you know, low-fat hips and stomach. And that's lazy fat. And that's actually pro-inflammatory fat. So that in itself drives cascades of inflammation, which then age you even more. So when you do something like this, your body needs to create energy because it needs to bring your temperature back up. It's like, I'm freezing, this is warm again.

What it's like, so you have this freezer, right? And there's a glass thing, so at least you can see out. But will you have anything on you? Like, how does it work? And does your brain not freeze? How long do you stay?

We need to get you in the chamber. So essentially you wear thermals to cover your periphery. So your hands, yeah, your ears, your feet, up to your knees.

Okay, what about your nose?

You have a face mask.

Face mask, okay.

Yeah. Have you heard of percussive therapy? Whole body percussive therapy? It's like a type of massage, the Theragun, or— ah, okay, no, there's different types of guns that massage nodules on the end, and it's just high frequency.

Okay, after stimulating.

Yeah, yeah, right. So we do that on your whole body, focusing on your tendons, which are very— don't have a very good blood supply. So if you want to, especially for those people that have been training a lot or have any muscular aches and pains after training, we want to loosen up those inflammatory complexes, get them circulating, get blood supply back into the tendons before we put you in the chamber. Okay, so then we'll put you in the chamber. So yeah, it's nice, you loosen up the muscles, you get the blood supply going. From an experience perspective, you're going to go into the chamber And you're gonna feel extremely cold and you're gonna have a gasp reflex as if you go into a plunge pool of ice. Have you ever done that?

Yeah, I've done that. And you were talking about the German places or you go into, you know, the sauna and then go outside in the snow or into a plunge pool. Yeah. It's a quite a shock to the system.

Yes. And you have a reflex. You, one of the reflexes is a gasp or get out of it and gasp, can't breathe reflex. So that's the first thing you experience. It's not as uncomfortable as an ice bath because you haven't got the pressure of cold water on you, it's just cold air. So it's much more comfortable. However, it's so cold, and you have like the snowflakes flying around you while you're in this.

Uh, so it's directly -140.

We start at -90 and build you up to -140.

Yeah. And over what period of time?

Up to 3 minutes, but you can leave the chamber whenever you— and we tell you on what's your situation, you might need to leave the chamber, which is extreme shivering. And it's normally driven by a mental reflex, right? So this is helping people understand the sympathetic parasympathetic nervous system, how they can control their state. It's brilliant. You go in there and anything you're thinking about is gone because all you care about is surviving those 3 minutes and conquering that fear. It's a bit like many people experience it a bit like bungee jumping.

Okay.

That kind of overcoming that fear because it looks a bit intimidating. Yeah. Mentally it's like, can I do this or not? And we coach you through it. So that's really nice in itself, just overcoming a fear and yeah. Alone.

That is already a huge achievement.

Yeah. Yeah. And appreciating your physical body's endurance capacity and how you can control the urge to just get out of there, you know?

And then also, I guess with breathwork, right? I mean, look at Wim Hof who climbs Everest in a pair of shorts. So I think through certain breathing techniques, although at a -140 for the lungs, is there any issue doing deep breathing?

No, it's fine. You can do deep breathing.

You have the face mask, I guess, on as well. Yeah. Very, very cool. And just to touch on a few other ones, what are the other therapies that you have from the kind of biohacking sense that you see huge exponential results from?

Intravenous ozone therapy. I really like that. So this is again tapping into the power of oxygen, but in a different form. Oxygen comes down to our atmosphere as O2 from the ozone layer, which is O3., it's really unstable as O3, so that's why it comes down as O2. However, if we give you O3 into your blood, mm-hmm, that dissociates into oxygen. So you get increased blood concentration of oxygen and a reactive oxygen species or an oxidative stressor. And you'll hear about antioxidants as one of the most important ways of anti-aging. Mm-hmm. Vitamin C, glutathione, resveratrol, alpha lipoic acid, etc., etc. However, when I give you an oxidative stress, your body then creates and upregulates its production of antioxidants. So again, it's another form of a hormetic stressor, or a stressor designed to make your own body stimulate good things. Just like cryotherapy, it's a hormetic stressor, extreme cold environment. Okay, you go inside and your body regenerates, your body improves metabolism. With ozone, what does it do? It has a massive anti-aging effect, helps self-repair, anti-infective effect, supports your immune system, reduces inflammation through the antioxidant effect, and supports detoxification through the liver, and energizes the mitochondria through the oxygen effect. So massive cellular benefits from doing it. And I love ozone. We do it high dose, high concentration We do everything at the medical end and we're trained by some of the world's leading, probably the world's leading physicians or experts in each of those disciplines. And that's very important to us. So I love ozonotherapy. And then the other one that we have at the moment is intravenous or systemic. So systemic is the application within your body or not locally. So whenever you're applying a therapy, it can either be local from the outside on your skin, injection into a joint. Or systemic into your blood. Okay, so the systemic application of photobiomodulation or low-level laser therapy, right? You know, there's red light panels, we see it all the time, infrared and red light, red light beds, but we give it into the vein, into your blood. We activate all of your plumbing, and that has a different effect to doing it from the outside.

How is the light injected into the vein?

How does that work? We have a 3-way cannula and a fiber optic cable that you pass into the vein. So fiber optic cable transduces the— and it's attached to the laser module, and that goes into the vein. And then you have all of your 5 liters of blood passing through that vein, all of it, in an average once a minute. So all of that 5 liters of blood will get activated and then take the energy around. Remember, we go to sunlight, we produce vitamin D. Yeah, we know that light energy affects our biology. Science has shown different wavelengths of light have different biological effects. Blue, immune system. Red, energizing at cellular level. Green, increasing oxygen carrying capacity of hemoglobin, so great for performance in athletes and recovery. Yellow, upregulating production of neurotransmitters, calming neurotransmitters. Like serotonin and vitamin D synthesis. That's the same wavelength of light. And this is why many people get affected by seasonal affective disorder. Yeah, because there is more to it than, you know, light also affects our neurotransmitters, not just our vitamin D. Yeah. And then UV, which is against pathogens. Now we use it as an adjunct, so as a supportive therapy. We don't use that as a kind of interventional therapy, we use it as a supportive therapy. Does that make sense? Yeah. And then because we combine that with nutrients, great food in a liquid bag like an IV drip, right, which is basically great food that's been processed. So we take those at the right concentration, so it's bioavailable, and we make them on site according to what we're looking to achieve. When you combine the two, you get compounding effect. And that's been really interesting because I love to stack therapies and we created this and we're the only place in the world that do this. We call it Superhuman because we're trying to make health accessible, make it fun, right? Because we believe health should start when you're healthy and when you're healthy, you're usually down the pub or usually at the— in the UK, that's where we grew up in, right?

Like when you're healthy, you're at the bar.

Yeah, exactly. That's why I created the bar. You can see behind me.

I know. I'd love to talk about that in a minute.

Yeah. And so we created this Superhuman Protocol, which is, can we make people feel superhuman compared to when they come in? And what does it mean to feel superhuman anyway? It means best energy, best focus, best digestion, your best movement, suppleness of your body, best recovery. Based on the science, we combine this, okay, giving you the right nutrients into your veins with these laser lights, with the oxygen then, and then followed by a whole body cryo, which has this kind of massive endorphin effects and other things, followed by topical red light therapy. It's like a 5-step, 90 minutes. And we're doing experiments with some of our members who are now beating their personal bests. You know, CrossFit guys are going in by 20%, beating their personal bests the next day. People preparing for the triathlons, athletes that were preparing for boxing camps, working with a couple of boxers. I'm the head of medical for the World Boxing Council in the Middle East. We're introducing these kinds of therapies to support recovery and enhance performance in natural regenerative, non-doping way. Why can't we apply them? So I'm really blessed and fortunate to be able to apply this on disciplined athletes and bring that onto everyday people. This is what we're about. And so that's an example of that, where we compound therapies to get much more of a lasting, all based on science, just based on good core understanding of science.

Yeah. I guess a few questions from that, but the typical person who comes to him, and you have the professional athletes and things as well, and we were talking about, you know, how to bring this to the larger audience, right? So how to let more people know that you don't need a co when you're really sick. So obviously start earlier, and you don't need to be the top athlete. You can actually just optimize yourself day to day. And can you walk through, you know, say I come off the street, Dr. E, I want to have more energy, I want to feel better. What can you offer me, what would that sort of treatment plan look like from maybe testing to how you would come up with a program, which is obviously highly individualized, but for people listening, maybe you can just walk through a typical case of not the triathlete and not—

Yes, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, everyone is human, right? And wherever you're at in your journey of optimizing your health, whether you start at a higher end or a disease end, you know, more imbalance or less imbalance, It doesn't matter. Everyone deserves to have better health to help them achieve the things they want in life. Always starts with what their why is. We spend about 60 to 90 minutes just getting to know a person in front of us. You know, what is their why? Why are they even here? What's the why behind their why? You know, you're coming to see me because, you know, you want to lose some weight. Okay, why do you want to lose some weight? Because I've just come out of a relationship and I'm really stressed. Okay, now I understand what's going on in your environment more. I understand what's going on in your home environment more. I understand what's going on with your children more. I understand what's going on with your generations above and how your career is impacting you. And that is all so important. And so it starts with the why. And we start with the why, then we dive into the history of health, starting generational history and then from their health as a child, infancy, in the womb, all the way to now. From that, you can start to learn patterns just from that deep dive consultation. You start to learn patterns and understand patterns where things could started to go wrong. And we may just be seeing a tip of the iceberg with this symptom, but actually we need to be looking at A, B, C, D, and E. So that's always the beginning. From there, we personalize for them. Mm-hmm. A journey through data collection. What data points are most important? Step 1 for you, for us to understand and triangulate how you're feeling with objective measurements.

So what does that look like? Granularly, is that like blood tests or what type of data?

So we start with— we have a panel of 100 markers, right? We call it the foundational and cellular integrity. That's step 1 of testing that looks at hormones, micronutrients, kidney, liver, blood test, immune system, inflammatory markers, indications of methylation, and then also fatty acid composition. But we use a narrow interpretation index of narrow normal ranges to identify certain things, imbalances.

Wait, you look at it like from a functional health though, right? Like, cause you say the normal ranges, but what's normal, right?

Exactly. Exactly. From a functional health or personalized health. Yeah, range perspective, right? And that shows you imbalances and it gives you pointers and directions. Okay, someone might have digestive enzyme production insufficiency, someone might have assimilation issues of their nutrients, someone might have ABC, and that will direct further testing. Yeah. So we do that step one, then we attach with you, we have an integrated care team approach. So you have a physician trained in this type medicine, a dedicated health coach who actually starts as a nutritional therapist, but we train them up in coaching. We have an in-house education program where we train our team in different roles. So a dedicated health coach who holds your hand through a journey and touches base with you every couple of weeks, uses techniques of NLP and motivational interviewing to set goals that are realistic, that you can do, that understands your context and educates you and empowers you each step of the way. And they're also supported by an expert nutritionist who loves to get into the deep nitty-gritty and science of nutrition and how to optimize you from a nutrient perspective. Right.

Which is the medicine you give your body every day. Right.

I think people forget that. Right. 100%. And so then when we do that, then this journey begins. Then we start to take you through coaching your personalized lifestyle strategies across movement, mind, breath, sleep. We give them an Oura Ring usually because that's the most comfortable one for our patients. And then we coach them on what internal stress responses, heart rate variability, deep sleep, REM, how to drive those according to their lifestyle and what's going on and their goals. And then nutritional strategies. And then from there we go into more testing. Now obviously everyone is different, so we might prescribe someone to do a comprehensive stool analysis looking at prebiotics, microbiome, parasites, etc., etc., fungi, viruses sooner, depending if they've got big digestive system symptoms or they've got a history of small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, SIBO, etc. So you've got stool or digestive intelligence, covers stool testing, really understanding what's going through your digestive tract and what you're excreting, food sensitivity testing, Looking at your immune response to food, we find that we can do without it. And many patients, we don't prescribe food sensitivity testing, but for those that we want more compliance to, those that will help them have an aha moment, oh my God, I'm developing antibodies to apple, but I have apple all the time and I feel fine. You can help educate them around leaky gut and how if foods aren't broken down properly, they can drive an immune response if you've got leaky gut. Gut to become more compliant. And that's quite nice. And then alongside that, organic acid testing. So the metabolomics approach to health, right? So looking at your urine. So we look at your stool, we look at your blood, look at urine. In your urine, we're looking at things you excrete, metabolites, or breakdown products of cellular processes that go on all the time, whether it's energy production cycles or production neurotransmitters or recycling of hormones. And that gives us a kind of systemic understanding of you at a cellular level, metabolomics. And that's usually, you know, a good 4 months with patients. And by that point, they're seeing just leveling up every month. It's constant improvement, right? We're not throwing everything at the kitchen sink in one go because we feel like testing should be phased. And you build the foundation of a house, you start with the structure in the foundation, the important things like hormones, micronutrients, inflammation, methylation. Then you move on to optimizing the assimilation of nutrients through digestion. Then you look at the cellular metabolism processes and then maybe environmental toxins and then maybe genetics, right? Some would argue genetics can come earlier and we do, we can. And for those patients that can afford to and want to do a longevity panel approach, which is, you know, more comprehensive, we would look at instead of replace the Foundation with a much more comprehensive panel of testing that we send to the, you know, most of the labs are in the US apart from the Foundation test, just because that longevity panel work with the Cleveland Heart Lab in the US to do the testing. It's just not available here. Some of those markers, look at advanced inflammatory markers, looking at how your blood vessel, the earliest determinants of the thickening of your blood vessels, right? Things like myeloperoxidase, Lp-PLA2, you know, tests that should be throughout cardiology and will be over time. But we want to know the earliest changes happening in the intimal wall. We want to understand your breakdown of your LDL cholesterol, not just to HDL, LDL, triglycerides, but let's break that down even further because science allows us to. Lipoproteins, small density lipoproteins. And what are they? Lipoprotein A, lipoprotein B, your ratios of A to B. Because when we know that, we can be much more targeted from a nutrient and nutrition perspective, we can also manage your cardiovascular risk much better. Yeah. Someone that has high cholesterol because of— 1 in 4 people because of lipoprotein A— there's studies to show, big studies to show, that if you give them a statin, which is first-line therapy, you increase their cardiovascular risk.

Yeah. And also increase the risk of brain plaque, right? And Alzheimer's disease. Dr. Pam Mutter has a great book on that, Grain Brain.

Yeah. Exactly right. And so, you know, that for me was just like, this helps people quickly understand the difference between public medicine and personalized medicine. I don't mean public in a negative way, I just mean that the way that we deliver our care is based on the general population. Like, 75% are going to be great on a statin, right? So yeah, okay, we'll give everyone a statin. As first-line therapy. But it shouldn't even be first line. We know it shouldn't be first. There's things you can do with food and diet and movement, lifestyle, that actually— like Jeffrey Bland, Dr. Bland, one of the first cardiologists who did a study around lifestyle intervention versus bypass or drug therapy, and actually lifestyle intervention was the best, right?

It wins every time. Yeah, I think it touches on one of the points you said before, is that You know, I think we're still learning more and more the power of the human body and also the mind to influence the human body as well. That's why I like with your approach that you have with the different therapies and the coaching as well, because it works on the mindset to actually help people to change. Because it's one thing you go to see your doctor, they say, here are 5 things you can do, you know, and come back in a couple of months' time versus actually holding hands and helping a little bit more, especially for people where it might be a more fundamental shift in lifestyle to actually make the change.

Yeah, and empowering people through that, right? Like teaching people how to cook, teaching people how to shop, you know, like things that I wasn't— how to read labels when you go to a food shop. Like, what difference does it make if I buy organic and non-organic and like, you know, grass-fed, etc., etc.? Yeah, seasonal fruit or non-seasonal fruit, you know, these are the simple everyday things that we can do, decision choices we can make every day that can influence not just the long term but how we feel in the current state. Right, our relationship with food, you know, how we're setting behavior patterns around the dinner table, our relationship with our phones, you know, our relationships with things that go into our head and affect our state constantly. This is why the coaching element is actually more important than the doctors and the science part, you know, like in many ways, right? 99% of moving the needle with people is through understanding them and their environment and meeting them with recommendations that at their level, and then supporting them, touching base with them frequently and saying, hey, look, how can we support you? How can you support yourself? Helping them identify their blockers and challenges, whether it's mental thing or otherwise. And so the power of coaching is about transformation, isn't it? And it's about helping people transform. I think the coaching element has really unlocked this type of medicine for us, you know, where it started prescriptive. Yeah. And, you know, realized very soon that the prescriptive model of care doesn't work, full stop. We know that, studies have showed that. And so, you know, how do we, how do we support people is by meeting them through a coaching model. So wish us luck, we're introducing that now with Hooman.

That's exciting. It's like the human approach, right? So it works really well with your name because You know, everyone needs that coaching. If you look at professional athletes, they have coaches. Even, you know, professional musicians, they all have coaches, someone kind of in their corner helping and supporting them. And, you know, more and more we're kind of left to our own devices if you don't actually have a coach. So why not have one that helps with the mindset, with the lifestyle changes, fundamental changes? You feel better after, you're basically a whole nother person afterwards as well.

Yeah. And, you know, having developed and iterated these kinds of programs on patients We've seen over about 300-400 patients over the last— through LMS Health and LMS Wellness, developed these programs and worked with our patients. We've just iterated it and developed it to be able to democratize the expertise that is allowing us to then hopefully get this out to a lot more people through HUMN, through the virtual health programs that we're going to be delivering with you. So we're excited for it and we're excited to be hopefully the first integrated care model in the UK delivering this type of medicine and care out to more people. And yes, of course, we have the physical center, which is, I would say, is more like my laboratory where it looks like a science lab.

You can see it behind you there with all the cool colors you were talking about and all those bottles and potions. Can you talk a bit about the space and the design and the thought that went into it?

Yeah, 100%. I mean, I think my background in appreciating user experience started because I worked in retail for many years since I was a teenager, really, because my parents were in the business of retail. So in the '80s and '90s, even before I was born in the '70s, my dad had market stalls and that was the base of trade market. So I remember in the '80s as a child going to market stalls and see that kind of retail experience. Meeting someone at their level and trying to give them something they like, you know. And then from then, you know, worked in retail and fashion stores just to get me through school and, you know, just other side jobs and stuff. And then through university, I worked in a mobile phone shop for years, Carphone Warehouse. And again, that was providing and understanding the retail experience to meet someone at their level. And so for me, giving the experience was very important, creating a place where you can experience health, which I hadn't seen anywhere. I'd never seen somewhere as a traditional doctor, seen somewhere where I could go and experience something cool and fun and get health as output, as an experience. And so that's why I created this bar. And I believe that we're all scientists to some degree, and we all use our environment, and we're conscious of how different things affect us. And people drink different types of alcohol to get different types of effects, as an example, and In the '90s, it was always about work hard, play hard, that people were taking Adderall and Ritalin and other drugs just to stay up and keep going. And I'm glad we've kind of turned that, and now it's about restorative alongside working hard, but also like, you know, yeah, able to restore. And so this is what this bar is about. It's about coming, if you're not sure, coming and experience a change of state just from using plant medicine. So we have curated and created different herbal potions in tincture form and tea form to change your state, whether it's you want more euphoria, better energy, cognition, focus, you know. So we created all these blends where people come and experience that as a starting point. We also have like adaptogenic smoothies, things like bulletproof coffees, etc., etc. So that's what this concept was about— coming to a space where you experience a change of state and a fun place where you can meet the team also. So we do speaking events and stuff like that there. We have a DJ that plays every now and again. We'll do like a little health party for our members. And then you go downstairs to the lab, and you've been there. It's more like an underground cave where we have the therapies— hyperbaric and the cryo and the IVs and the laser— and the different treatment rooms where you can go into, do body scan assessments, and then go a bit deeper with your health. Ozone therapy, et cetera, et cetera. So that's the concept behind it. And thank you very much. I mean, yeah, it looks cool, especially on this background. It's not actually in the space right now.

It's a picture of the space, but the virtual. And you mentioned about, obviously you have the physical space and there's a few different spaces across London actually, if I understand that you're rolling out. And you talked about also virtually that you're able to treat people around the world.

Can you talk a bit about that? Yeah, absolutely. You know, we wanted to be able to give people access to this type of healthcare. Many of the tests are remote self-testing kits, for example, stool, urine, fingerprint, blood. We're introducing saliva swab testing that you can do for biological age. For example, GlycanAge is one of the testing markets we're looking at.

Yeah, I did mine recently and mine came back 11 years younger, but I'm so, I'm keen to get farther down. But I hear you had a very low one as well. What did you get to?

I got to 15 years, 16 years young, 16 years younger.

Yeah. Wow.

Okay.

The best I've read so far is Dr. Raffaelli, who has, I think she was 84-year-old patient who has a, like an age of 37. That's phenomenal. Yeah, exactly.

I love seeing that as a data point. Maybe it's just like, okay, you know, it's cool seeing that because, you know, it's hard to quantify and objectify if what you're doing is working. That's really nice to see. So for my patients who are like, okay, I really want longevity. Yeah. I want to reclaim some years where I've been burning that candle and I've worked my ass off. Mm-hmm. And I want to be able to ensure that getting to my 50s, 60s, 70s, I could spend time with my children, my grandchildren, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. And they like doing that test before and after. I like to do, you know, the standardized testing before and after. So it motivates us. And the incentives are aligned as a team and with the patient to reach those goals. I one day hopefully see a future where we have enough wiggle room to be able to incentivize patients even more and more to be able to reach those targets and to gamify health a bit more.

That'd be fun.

How would that look like? Yeah, just like whether it's kind of they unlock experiences and we're kind of doing that with this performance coaching model that we're looking at right now. We're still in development, we're exploring it, but we're looking to create a fearless experience. So they self-identify something that they actually are petrified to do, and then we build them up to actually support them to do it through a mindset and all the biology approach.

And I think that's totally possible. I mean, one person that I interviewed as well is an EFT, Emotional Freedom Technique, tapping, and I did a trial session with her as well, and it's unbelievable. I was like a levitating Zen Buddhist monk after 90 minutes of this thing. And yeah, and I think there's so many amazing hacks you can do away from synthetic pills. And I love the fact that you bring those all together to optimize performance on many different things, from fear to just better energy, sleeping well, and all in one sort of very cool container with potions and DJs and all the rest of it.

Yeah, thank you. I think it reflects— I would like to say reflects my cool personality, but that's just me. That's probably, that's probably coming from my ego a little bit.

Rainbow on the inside and outside.

Yeah, not always. I mean, you can ask my team, you know, that's just the reality of the human experience, right?

Yeah, exactly. We all have our moments as well.

Dr.

I'd love— because we could talk forever, I think, and I definitely would love to do a part 2, but I'd love to flip over to a few rapid-fire questions because I'm sure some listeners are dying to know a little bit more about you and if you have any particular morning routines to set your day up as a success. How are you energized like you are?

It depends on my state, right? So it depends on how I'm feeling and how I want to feel. So most mornings I start with some nice, just simple breathwork, some box breathing. I try to get out into nature and do a little bit of grounding, skipping for 5 minutes. I don't do anything too aggressive. It depends. It depends if I have the time as well. Sometimes I'm time for, especially with the launch phase right now, then I have to deprioritize my morning routine or limit it, which is not always a great thing, I know. But so for me, what works is breathwork, cold shower, trying getting outdoor whatever the weather, a bit of skipping, get my heart rate going. Then I'll come back and do a cold shower and start my day. I try not to look at emails straight away. Everyone says that, you know, I think that's a really good practice, trying not to look at my emails. Creativity killer. Yeah, yeah. And if I sometimes even taking the train into work, I will have my notebook out and just be journaling, preparing for the day, reflecting on the day that went, at least once a week. That's some of the things that I do. Yeah, that sounds like, uh, not every single day, you know, but yeah, you know, there are elements of that I do every day.

Yeah, if that makes sense. Yeah, no, exactly. And I have a particular morning routine, and I really notice if I don't for whatever reason, manage it or do it, what a difference in the day. And it's almost like you become addicted to actually doing it because it just sets you up to win, right? So I love that. Do you have a favorite quote or piece of advice that's been a real game changer for you?

I like the quote, Rome's not built in a day. And another one, which is not really a quote, but just the concept that, you know, just give it your best shot and let the universe take your intention and do what it wants with it. And that kind of takes us— maybe I don't want to go into another conversation, but for next time, we can talk about the spiritual evolution, which I found has been an unintended side effect of working on myself in this way. I became more physically conscious of my state physically, which allowed me to then think of my spiritual state which I was not expecting as an outcome of this journey. And that's been a really beautiful evolution. And I find that a lot in people, longevity practitioners and people who are interested in the space, that they're just more conscious once they see their body as a vehicle and they can control it. Like, okay, what about my spirit? Yeah.

Am I behind it? Yeah. And does that mean like a daily meditation practice or are there certain practices that you have around that?

I really enjoyed Vishen Lakhani's 20-minute guided 6 phases of meditation.

I did that this morning, actually.

Did you really?

Yeah.

So I really enjoyed— I found that at different points I will use that. So there's times I've done that. There's some soundtracks that I listen to which are just, you know, call them epic sounds. They're like the Gladiator soundtrack, a couple of concerto, some nice ones. Then I have also kind of like binaural beats. So music for me is like also helps.

Are there some learnings or insights that your clients you work with have found the most valuable? What are some of the big aha moments or excitements that your clients have realized?

That they don't have to live with the symptoms that they didn't identify as having. And we try and deliver aha moments because they're really powerful. You know, if we can give someone an aha moment, then they can say, wait a minute, that's my physiology, that's my reflexes, that's not me in control of my state, that's not me at my best self. And I've just experienced a bit of my best self, of what it's like to be at the best self. I want more of that. And that's what this kind of therapy's approach is all about, is about helping people experience how much better they can feel and then giving them motivation to want to experience that. Not just do therapies, but just actually just doing kind of lifestyle medicine and targeted supplementation and coaching, etc., etc. So that engineering aha moments is really important to us as humans. It's like I say, experiencing is believing.

I say that a lot.

Yeah, we want people to experience that change of state.

It's so powerful when you, when you've actually done it, because you can listen to somebody's, you know, amazing story and it's touching, but until you've actually gone through it yourself, then you're a walking mission statement, right?

So yeah, yeah. And you don't need to be at the darkest— a lot of people talk about their darkest disease-based story, right? It doesn't need to be that. No, yeah, at all. You know, don't wait for that. You know, it can just be like, it can be not sleeping as well.

I've got—

yeah, or just tired. A lot of women actually, you know, with this type of medicine, we're unlocking a lot of women's health because I feel like medicine, the normal ranges, the way we deliver health is very patriarchal. It's designed for men. And when we start to look at hormone recycling, detoxification pathways, try to and nutrients to support women's health, women start to unlock that, wow, I don't need to be that mildly irritable. I didn't realize that was mildly irritable in my cycle. You would ask me, I'll get a bit defensive, etc., etc. Like, you know, these states that women don't need to be, particularly around the cycle. Yeah. And understanding how to periodize nutrition, movement, and lifestyle strategy according to your cycle for women has been a real revelation. For me as a physician and for our patients. And that's been really nice, actually.

That's really exciting. Yeah. And actually, Dr. Jennifer Garrison of the Buck Institute, she's pioneering research around actually eradicating menopause because it's not clinically necessary and the longevity effects that that would have in youthfulness in women, not necessarily around reproduction, but just in general, that, you know, falling off a cliff effect that's typically been happening for women around menopause, just to eradicate that. So yeah, I'm going to be having her coming on as well to discuss that.

That would be great. That'd be great. And as doctors, we propagate that problem, right? We're giving oral contraceptive pill to 16-year-olds who've got it for 25, 30 years. We potentiate, we enable, we empower those issues. And this is where there's one thing I do want to say on this podcast, because I had this moment the other day where someone came in and they were telling me a story, and the story was basically explaining this concept of the worried well, how in private medicine we see a lot of the worried well. Have you heard of that expression before?

The worried well? I have, but maybe explain it for people who haven't heard it.

So we hear it thrown about in the UK a lot, particularly in the health system, where if you have a patient, you're not sure what's going on and they're worried about something, but that you classify them as the worried well because they're actually, you say they're well, they're well. So people will write it in their notes as physicians, or or they'll talk about it with the, yeah, he was a worried well patient, or that's a worried well kind of patient. And just dawned on me how dismissive that is. Yeah. And how wrong that is. And almost like the extension of how arrogant we are as physicians to label someone that's presenting to you with a symptom that they're worried about, and then you telling them and dismissing them, say, no, you're well. And then afterwards saying, just worried. Well, what it really shows is a lack of understanding from the physician side, right? And it's a plaster over the crack. The crack is there. The crack is obvious, you know. The healthcare system is broken. Yeah, in many ways, right? The more we skirt about it— we should be challenging our physicians in many ways to look outside of the box, to look at nutrition, to look at the studies that are out there, you know, that show massive improvement in women's health by using nutritional strategies or supplementation. And that's what part of our big mission is, to show that data and evidence and help change the mind of the healthcare system around this.

And it's such an exciting space because you're benefiting your body in so many different ways of doing this. You're also reconnecting with your body in terms of trusting yourself that when you feel like something's off, that actually your body's telling you something, right? Instead of that dismissive, as you were saying, worried well person.

Yeah, you know, we are— this body is a power plant of energy production. It produces energy on a daily basis, takes food, makes fuel, you know, it's constantly regenerating, it's adaptive, it's self-healing, you know, and let's treat it like what it is, you know, this beautiful vehicle that we've been given, rather than dismissing it into, you know, just a bag of bones and a set of organs, you know, and the disease that's going to take over, right?

Yeah, exactly. And optimize it and keep it healthy and functioning, right?

Give it the right— look after our cars more than we look after our bodies.

I know, that's the joke, right? You have a sensor in a car that will tell you already in 100 kilometers you might have an issue, go check it out, and we go straight away. Whereas, you know, the human body, it's like, well, become completely destroyed and then like, oh, actually, you know, I'm completely destroyed.

Then we'll replace your parts, we'll put a bypass graft, and you go through major surgery surgery.

And it might work.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Like potential side effects, right? And this is in a nutshell. I love the car analogy because people understand it, you know, they understand the MOT to kind of keep the car roadworthy and stop it from breaking down any moment. And that's what the traditional health system is great to do. If your car's broken down, go there. And if it's about to break down, go there. However, if you want to identify how efficiently it can run, don't go there. Because they were just going to bring the hammers and saws out. I don't know, just that they're not equipped for that. They don't have those tools. They will hopefully over time. But you have to look outside of that traditional healthcare model to get to optimize your body.

Yeah. Which is why it's so amazing what you've built there and what you're doing is that it is possible to do that. Right. And really pioneering the way. So thank you, Dr. Yi, for that. A couple of last quick questions before we wrap up. What's been your most exciting purchase in the last 6 to 12 months? I love specifics.

My most exciting purchase in the last 6 to 12 months, I think my VO2 max machine. It's like, I call it the modern bleep test. Do you remember the bleep test from school days where you would check your kind of exercise capacity? Athletes use it in sports science a lot and sports physiology, but we want to apply it to everyday people, understanding your physical capacity, endurance capacity. VO2 max is a marker of your lung capacity, and then attached to that you can do your lactate threshold and things like that. So we've just started to introduce that to our team and to others. That's been my most interesting purchase, and it was by a company called PNOE that make it, American-based company that do portable VO2 max testing. So it doesn't need to be done in the lab anymore. It can be done in the clinic or on the sports field or in your gym with your trainer. That's my most interesting one.

Oh, I love it. Very fun. For listeners interested in understanding more about biohacking and optimizing health better, what are some resources or books you recommend to start with?

Okay, so I really like a book called Juvenescence: Investing in the Age of Longevity. I don't know if you've read that by Al Jilabi and Jim Mellon. I like that book because for those people that are interested in what's the convergence of biohacking and longevity science, It's written a few years ago, but it summarizes it very well. Like, where does biotechnology fit? Where does gene therapy fit? It's written from the perspective of a biotechnology perspective rather than a biohacking perspective, but it gives you that lens of perspective, which is quite interesting. Another book I really like is by Acker Hinsa, who's— rest in peace, he passed away now. He wrote a book called The Call.

The Call, C-A-L-L. C-O-R-E.

Sorry. Yeah. And he actually started a center called the Hinza Performance Center, which they do coaching around basic principles of health as well as mindset. And you can see the evolution of that where you apply a bit of kind of basic health coaching with how to control your state. But he's worked with Formula 1 drivers and some cool people. So that's a, that's a really cool book and inspired me a bit as well.

And where can people follow you, see what you're up to, social media, websites, anything particularly you'd like to share with people?

Yes. So the best place is @hum2n. And so that's @hum2n. It's called human with the 2 in it to denote the upgraded version of yourself.

The software upgrade is like squares. Yeah. The exponential upgrade. So it's and then H-U-M and then the number 2 and N.

Um, there, and then myself on Instagram at bydr.e. I'm starting— I haven't started to use Twitter yet. I will start to use that at some point. So mostly just on Instagram, and then my team on the Human page. Website is www.hum2n.com, and we have blogs and email, you know, EDMs that go out. We're building this education portal So that's the best place to find it. We want this brand to help people, whether they're just coming to get education or they want a few supplements or they want to go all in. So it depends wherever you're at on your journey, you know, you can come and just learn, you know, that's the starting point.

Just get inspired and then, and have some fun doing it, right?

Yeah. Experiment a little bit and have some fun for sure.

Yeah. I love it. Do you have any final ask or recommendation or parting thoughts for my audience?

I would just say don't accept the norm. The more we accept the norm, the more it will remain the norm. Like, you're all part of this. Don't leave it to Claudia von Boeselager and myself and all the other speakers. And, you know, you're all part of this. Yeah. Having listened to this, please take 30 minutes of your time, start with 5 minutes, and just write down a couple of things that you want to do. And a couple of thoughts that you want to try, and then share that. At the minimum, share it with a friend or a loved one. You never know how these tools can help them at times of need, because it's in the dark places that we will inevitably all face. This is part of life. It doesn't matter who you are, part of life is to face your own personal dark places. These tools come in remarkably handy. Remarkably, these tools will help you bring yourself out, a stronger version of yourself. That's my ask for anyone that's managed to stay until the end, because we spoke a lot and that's mostly my fault. Please don't accept the norm. Yeah, like, you know, don't accept the normal what's out there. Challenge your physician, challenge your healthcare practitioner, challenge yourself in the way you're thinking. I'm feeling tired. Why are you feeling tired? What did you do yesterday? Etc., etc. Look what's out there, they try it. Yeah, so that's what I would suggest, you know, be part of the wave. Don't let the wave pass you by and miss those opportunities to feel so great.

Oh, such wise words. Thank you so much, Dr. E, for coming on.

It was such a pleasure to have you. I really enjoyed it. Thank you.

Look forward to part 2. Hi everyone, this is Claudia again. Before you take off, thank you so much for listening to the podcast today. I hope you learned as many valuable insights on living better for longevity as I did. I'd love you to join our longevity tribe so we can learn and grow together, as well as hear your feedback. So please subscribe to the podcast cast and leave a review to let me know what you thought. Thanks so much and take care.