I've Had 6 Back Surgeries And Almost Died: Here's What 40 Years of Medicine Actually Taught Me

That last surgery, Hail Mary surgery, was, I was pretty sick. I couldn't move, I couldn't sit up in bed. I was, I'd lost 25 pounds. I was just a skeleton. And surgeon was like, look, we don't really know if we can help you, but otherwise you're gonna die. And they were like, well, you have a 5 to 10% chance of making it through the surgery.

Now that you've kind of had a second life, has it changed your view on like longevity, what that means to you?

The things that really matter come to the forefront, like family, friends, community, your health. These are things that are just the most important things in life. Hey everybody, today we're going to do something different. I'm joined by my producer Emma, and we're going to do a little Q&A for Dr. Mark.

Mark, you spent your career helping other people figure out what's wrong with their health, but you've also had a pretty extraordinary health journey yourself. You've dealt with mercury poisoning, chronic fatigue, Lyme disease, mold exposure, multiple injuries, and now you've had 6 back surgeries. So you've experimented with everything from functional medicine and supplements to some pretty cutting-edge longevity therapies. Today, instead of you answering questions about our health, I wanted to turn the table and ask you questions about yours. So what you've learned from being the patient, what you've changed your mind about, what you've tried that worked and what didn't, and what 30+ years in medicine has taught you about what actually matters for health.

So after spending— 40, actually.

40, is it 40?

Well, next year I'll be 40 years being a doctor. Wow.

After spending decades obsessed with health and longevity, what actually matters to you now? So, I want to start out by you taking us back to when your health journey first really fell apart. I believe you're 32, you're living in Idaho. Kind of take us back to that moment and tell us what was happening then.

Well, I was a family doctor. I was working in a small town. I lived at the end of this dirt road up on the top of a mountain, and there were 5 family doctors in this small town where we had a catchment area of about 10,000 people. And, I was the one who did the C-sections and I ran the ER one day a week. It was just a lot. So, I delivered lots of babies, ran the ER, worked full-time, had 2 little kids. My wife at the time was not mentally very well and I took the burden of it all literally on my back. And, I was chopping wood and getting wood ready for the wood stove for the winter. And, I was tired, exhausted, working really hard. I hadn't been exercising as much because I was just working too much. And I was carrying a lot of heavy, heavy logs, pieces of wood into the house. And I just carried them in a way that was really biomechanically bad. And I herniated, really ruptured a disc. And the next day, that was like on a Sunday, the next day I had a baby that I was working to deliver that was a mother who was quite sick with preeclampsia. And I noticed that I was limping and I had no motor function in my foot. I didn't have any pain at the time. And then within 2 or 3 days, I ended up like being rushed to the hospital, had a kind of pretty emergency surgery to relieve the compression of the nerve. And that was my first back surgery. So it was pretty rough and I was left with a permanent residual weakness in my calf. And so I've managed okay with it, but it was the beginning of a long journey of back issues.

And you're only 32 at that time that that happened.

Yeah. Yeah.

Wow.

So at that time you were a physician. Did you assume like being a doctor meant you'd be able to figure out what was wrong with you? Did it take you some time to kind of seek external help? Yeah.

Well, I mean, at that moment I was, you know, I had motor weakness. I was very, it was, took it very seriously. And I then went to see the neurologist in the local town, which is about 50 miles away in Lewiston. And they immediately saw that I had a herniated disc on MRI and And had the surgery. But the thing was I re-herniated the disc like 10 days later and I went back and they weren't listening to me. And I said, listen, something's wrong. They weren't listening. And that's why I ended up with a permanent disability because they didn't go back in and operate. So it was my first experience of doctors missing the ball and actually causing a permanent lifelong problem that I've had that they could have easily relieved if the doctor had been attentive, had listened to what I said and paid attention. And it's kind of unfortunate because doctors sometimes can be, you know, very stuck in their ways. And, and, and this, this time it left me with a problem. So I learned very quickly that I can't rely just on the experts to have all the answers.

What do you think when that happened, like, was your scariest symptom? I know you said you had lost function. Would you say that was the most concerning bit or did you kind of see the future that you might've had in front of you?

No, I mean, I, it was, you know, I, I clearly was very alarmed by losing motor function. So that not being able to walk was a big thing. So that was my biggest concern. And I didn't even know how to navigate the aftereffects because the surgery went well, but then I reherniated the disc and that led to permanent issues. And I should have had that handled right away. But when I went back to the doctor, they just sort of ignored me. And it's fine.

It's just, you're just fine.

Don't worry about it. It'll be fine. And then it wasn't fine.

How did you re-herniate the disc? Were you just like going about life as usual, not kind of taking time to recover?

Yeah, I was in recovery. I was home for 6 weeks recovering, but the truth was I picked up a log like 10 days in and put it, just one piece of wood and put it in the wood stove. And I think that, that caused a re-herniation. And that was just sort of, it's like one moment in time that shapes your whole life. But I managed to continue to be active and ride my bike. I ran for years, I played tennis, I ski, I do whatever I want to do. And I have a little bit of a handicap, but I don't let that stop me.

I'm probably going to circle back and jump around a bit, but that's one surgery. Can you kind of lead me down to the other surgeries, maybe like 2 through 4?

Well, yeah. I mean, I think I did well from 1992 until 2020. And then, I always had a little bit of back pain here and there, but I didn't really have significant disc issues. And then, I was chopping wood again. There's a theme. It's a theme. Yeah, it was Memorial Day. We were making a fire and we just want to have a barbecue, whatever. I don't remember exactly. And then, I I was like, oh shit, something's wrong. And I herniated L4-5 and I had L5-S1 before. And I was like, oh, I really, I did something. And I started feeling tingling and numbness and weakness. And then again, I had to have another surgery in June of 2020 in COVID in New York City, which was very intense. And right after the surgery, I was in the recovery room And I said they were about to send me home because it was going to be like an outpatient procedure. It was a microdiscectomy. And he said the procedure went well. When he came back in to see me, the surgeon who was the head of neurosurgery at Cornell said, look. I said, look, something's wrong. I'm in a lot of pain. Something's really wrong. And he's like, no, it's fine. It's fine. I said, I think something's wrong. We got to check. And so we did an MRI and they did MRI. There was a hematoma, in other words, a big blood clot that had just formed in my spine, which was very unusual. He said, he's a 60-something-year-old neurosurgeon, head of neurosurgery, said, last time I saw this was in my residency. So, it's very uncommon, but I got bad luck. So then, I had to be rushed back to the surgery again. And, it was a very hard long recovery after that. So, I had worked with Tom Brady's system of training bands and I worked on physical therapy and really kind of committed to it. And then I built myself back up and ended up getting really fit after that and going to Maui and working out and riding my bike and getting back in my body again. So that was really amazing. But it just was like, wow, that was a big one. And that was like the second and third surgeries. And then fast forward to 2024, had another herniated disc, L3-4. Because my back was just sort of degenerating and had to have another surgery, which went okay, but I still had a lot of pain. And then, I ended up having an epidural injection to relieve some of the pain and that got infected. And then, I had an abscess and I had another surgery. They left me kind of for dead, honestly. And, it was really quite bad. The surgeon didn't really know how to operate on me, didn't know the technique, and wasn't willing to kind of tell me to go somewhere else. And, I finally found another surgeon who's a top neurosurgeon in the country on complex spine surgery in California, UCSF. And they took me and they did another surgery. So those are all the 6 surgeries. It was a lot.

I didn't realize that the majority of them had happened in the last 6 years as well. So that's a lot.

5 of them happened in the last, yeah, 6 years.

Yeah.

I mean, 2 of them were within very quick succession in one day. And then the last 2 were a month apart was like, but I finally had a fusion and hardware in there. And I actually am pretty good. I'm hiking, I'm riding my bike, I'm working out. So, I feel like I'm not 100%, but I feel like I'm doing pretty good.

I will probably come back to that Hail Mary surgery, as you call it, that you had, that kind of last one. But, I want to jump backwards kind of in time now. When did mercury enter the picture within your health journey?

Well, I don't exactly know, but I lived in China for a year in 1994 and I ended up in the middle of the winter, breathing in all this soot and black air and ended up accumulating a lot of mercury. Plus I think I ate a lot of fish. I had fillings. I mean, who knows where I got it. I ate tuna fish all the time when I was a kid. So I think there was a real buildup and I don't have the genetics to detoxify properly. So I was doing really well. I came back from China, I was working in the ER, and then one day I was up in Maine, I I don't know what happened. I ate something or I got something from the lake there, was swimming in it, and I got a severe stomach infection, severe bloating, pain, just unbelievable. And, from that day on, it was like I just went into full chronic fatigue syndrome and I didn't know what was going on. My gut was a mess. I had severe brain fog. I couldn't sleep. My muscles were aching. I was exhausted. And, I just didn't know what was happening. I started getting rashes, all this autoimmunity, weird symptoms. And nobody could help me. And I went to doctor after doctor. I went to Harvard. I went to Columbia. I had all these crazy symptoms, fasciculations and twitching of muscles.

I had ALS.

It was just quite bad and I could barely function. And I ended up having to really discover a different world of medicine, which was functional medicine. And that helped me understand what was happening. I met a doctor who said, maybe you have mercury issues. So, I tested myself and he was right and I had very, very, very, very high mercury, one of the highest I've seen actually in my practice doing this for 40, 30 years. And then, I was able to chelate myself, treat myself, work on fixing my gut. And basically, it was how I learned functional medicine, which from the inside out because every system I had collapsed. My gut collapsed, immune system was dysregulated, my mitochondria weren't working, I had elevated muscle enzyme CPK.

Wow.

My muscles were breaking down. I had hormonal dysregulation, adrenal dysfunction. I mean, sex hormone dysfunction. I mean, everything was just completely screwed. So, I basically learned functional medicine because chronic fatigue basically touches almost all aspects of your health and all of your biology. And it really helped me to understand not just on a conceptual level, but on a cellular level what actually people are suffering through and was able to heal myself and use that knowledge to really help my patients.

I have a couple more questions back there. One, I'm curious, what were you doing in China?

In China? Yeah. Well, I studied Buddhism in college and majored in Chinese and spoke pretty fluent Chinese and ended up kind of connecting with this guy who was building health clinics for foreigners in China because they had no health clinics for Westerners. So I was there to help develop relationship with the hospital and design and develop basically a primary care clinic for expatriates. And that's what I was doing there.

And so how long were you in China for?

I was there for a year. Yeah, I was there for a year. And then—

And then you came back to America and you said the first symptom was severe stomach bloating. Is that correct?

No, no, no. I came back to America and I was fine for a couple of years. So my body was able to cope a couple— my body was able to cope with it until some big insult happened. And so the insult was some stomach infection or gut infection, and then everything just collapsed. So I literally collapsed from one day to the next. I went from riding my bike 100 miles a day and remembering 30 patients without notes to not being able to walk up the stairs and not remembering where I was at the end of a sentence. So, I had just complete breakdown and I knew that it wasn't psychological. I mean, there was a lot of stress going on. I was going through divorce and getting custody of my kids. It was a lot, but I ended up really in a situation where my whole systems just collapsed and I had to figure out what was going on. And, I was given Xanax, I was given Prozac. I was given all these drugs for everything. I never took most of them, but the doctor was like, you've got depression, you've got irritable bowel, you've got this, you've got that. I'm like, no, something's going on. And, they just weren't able to find it through their normal channels of traditional medicine.

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You said there earlier as well that you had found a doctor that had told you to get tested for mercury poisoning. Was that Jeffrey Bland? Like, where does he kind of enter your story?

No, actually, I was a doctor at Canyon Ranch and I met a nutritionist who said, you've got to come hear this guy speak. And I went to Boston and heard Jeffrey Bland for the first time and I realized, oh, either he's a genius or he's a quack. If what he's saying is true, then it's really incumbent upon me to dive in and learn and figure out if there's truth in it because it's such a radical departure from what I learned. And, at that point, I was just desperate for help. So, I basically went down that rabbit hole. And then, I went to a conference and I was flying to a functional medicine conference in Maui and ended up meeting this guy on the plane. He said, hey, you know, he was a naturopath and I started telling him my symptoms and what's going on. He's like, oh, maybe you should check. So that was what happened. And I was really, serendipity, otherwise I would not have known. But it took me, it was a good year plus of being sick until I really actually found someone who said, maybe you should look at this. And, you know, no, no doctor that I saw, traditional doctor ever said to me, oh, just maybe you have, I know, something going on that's underneath that's causing this, whether it's an infection or whether it's mercury or toxins or who knows what. I mean, there was so much, you know, so.

As a, as a doctor and knowing all the information, you know, how did you navigate that? Like knowing there was more to it, there needed to be answers, you know, just being kind of that patient in a clinical setting. What was that experience like?

Yeah, well, I, I really, I was a patient and I had to, and I understood the helplessness and the fear and the anxiety around not being able to get answers and what that felt like. And it was terrible. It was a really lonely, terrible experience to try to navigate all that on my own without any guidance or support.

Mm-hmm.

And so I feel like, you know, I'm in this moment where I was just having to kind of navigate almost in a vacuum. And what I learned really wasn't helping me and I needed to go in a different direction. And that's really where I dove down the rabbit hole of functional medicine. That's where I understood the body was designed differently than I learned in medical school, that really deeply understood the map of the human body in a way that I never learned. And then I was applying it to my patients and they were all getting better. And I was like, damn, this stuff works. People with autoimmune diseases, with gut issues, with mood issues, with metabolic health issues, with skin problems, with autism, with ADD, with dementia, with— I mean, just you name it. It was quite incredible to see the dramatic changes that happened in people's health. And I was like, what? Because it was like, I was sort of shocked anytime someone would get better from doing the things that I said and following the principles of functional medicine. I was like, well, how did that happen? But once you begin to understand human biology, which we don't really in traditional medicine, then you can really start to use that map of this new biology to really help people get to the root cause of their issues and help them, you know, help them actually where traditional medicine can't.

As devastating as I imagine and challenging your health journey was, that was pivotal, I guess, for your career and the work that you do now with your patients as well.

Totally.

Okay. I want to jump back to the, to the back situation and your back surgeries. I want to go to that last one because I'm guessing that last surgery you've, again, you've You've called it yourself, the Hail Mary surgery. Was that the most challenging one? Because I want to get into recovery and kind of hear about when maybe the most challenging point with your back was throughout your whole journey.

Well, I mean, clearly that last one was the worst. And I think that I really didn't understand at that moment, like how sick I was. And it all happened very fast. I mean, when you have a small space in your back and you get an infection and an abscess, it just Takes off like wildfire. And so, that last surgery, Hail Mary surgery, I was pretty sick. I was septic, had infection, fever. I couldn't move. I couldn't sit up in bed. I had lost 25 pounds. I was just a skeleton. And the surgeon was like, look, I'd already been in bed for a month. And he was like, look, we don't really know if we can help you, but Otherwise, you're going to die. So we should do the surgery. And I was like, okay. And they were like, well, you have a 5 to 10% chance of making it through the surgery. And I was like, wow, okay. So I really had to see my family, say goodbye, my wife, my friends, wrapping up loose ends in my business. It was quite an intense experience. And then they went in and they, they did a full fusion. They removed the abscess, they cleaned it all up, washed it out. They, you know, put in big drains. I had a scar that was like, you know, probably a foot and a half long on my back. You know, I was pretty weak. I couldn't walk. I couldn't literally walk. Uh, the first day I got up after surgery, I had a walker and I had a physical therapist behind me holding me up because my legs couldn't support my weight. And I had to literally build myself back up from that. And I put on 25 pounds of muscle in about 8 or 9 months of working really hard and recovering was really hard. I mean, I needed to use all the tools at my disposal. And at 65, I had no idea that I could actually recover at that age. It was something that actually was doable. I didn't know. I mean, I knew if I was younger, I'd probably be fine. I'd been around the block and I was like, am I going to get back from this? And the truth is now I'm healthier than ever. I'm stronger than ever. I have no pain. I'm really doing well. I have a commitment to me. Some people say, oh, I don't exercise, whatever. I have to do it. It's not like a negotiable for me. I have to move my body. I have to stretch. I have to get strong every day. And I put that time in. It's just compounding interest. It's like anything you put in half an hour a day, It makes a difference over the course of a year and a half. And so that's really, that's really important. And then that taught me a lot about what it takes to actually heal, recover. I took a lot of protein that I needed, a lot of nutrients that I needed, but I gave myself the time to rest. I mean, I slept 4 hours a night for 6 weeks, so I had to recover my sleep. It was a lot, but I think it taught me that the body has this incredible repair capacity, this incredible renewal capacity that all we have to do is really just do the right things. We need to understand how the body works and provide the right inputs and the body can thrive.

Going back to that moment when you were told, okay, we're going to go into this last surgery, we don't know what the outcome is going to be. Are you, if it's not too personal, are you kind of able to share what was going through your mind in that moment? Just kind of potentially facing your own mortality and saying goodbye to your friends and family. What was that experience like for you?

I mean, it was weird because I was quite at peace with it all. I mean, I've lived a really good life. I've made a great contribution to the world. I have, you know, done well with my friends and my family, and I feel like I've, I lived a full life. And so I was, I was at peace and I was okay with, with pausing whatever it was, this incarnation and moving on if I had to. Um, I didn't want to, obviously, But I was really quite at peace and I thought, you know, this could be it. This really could be it. And I just had to surrender to it. And it was very peaceful. I wasn't scared. I wasn't sad. I was a little sad, but I wasn't, you know, it was, yeah, it was an interesting thing to recognize that I knew I wasn't my thoughts. I wasn't my emotions. I wasn't my body. That there was something else that was inside of me that I felt like true, that I felt at peace. And so I didn't, I wasn't attached to this whole physical reality that we're in.

That's beautiful. Do you think that your experience with like spirituality, psychedelics, do you think those experiences kind of helped you come to that moment?

Absolutely. I mean, I've been, you know, on the spiritual path most of my life and, you know, studied Buddhism and use psychedelics and things like ibogaine and really understand myself and my brain and my mind. And so it was really, yeah, really very, very powerful and very deep experience. So I feel quite empowered and at peace for how I went through it all and taught me a lot about how to think about life.

Now that you've kind of had a second life, you're like a cat that has 9 lives coming out of that experience. How do you think that Has it changed your view on like longevity, what that means to you, what a healthy life means to you? I know you had said that exercise is now like a non-negotiable. Is there anything else?

Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, the things that really matter come to the forefront, like family, friends, community, your health. These are things that are just the most important things in life and we get distracted and we get pulled in a million directions. But the reality is that Every day is precious and we don't know how long we're going to be here. And to me, it's really about just savoring every day and being in gratitude every day and actually meeting the moment fully as opposed to just being distracted and jumping around and chasing something. So it's just made me way more at peace and also much more committed to the things that really matter in my life.

Going back to the recovery piece, I know you had kind of given us some broad ideas about the things and the tools that helped you out, but I want to get more specific. I know you said you increased like your protein intake and you really learned a lot about that, sleep. Were there any other specific tools that you used coming out of that final surgery? I mean—

I mean, yes. I mean, I was using all the things that I knew from a nutrition perspective to improve my overall muscle gain again, which was a higher protein intake. I used creatine. I also used a lot of phytochemically rich foods that are anti-inflammatory. And I also made sure that I was working on my microbiome because I'd been on a lot of antibiotics. I was taking a lot of prebiotics and probiotics and trying to restore my gut health. Those are the main things that I focused on: food, exercise, sleep, And, I also did a lot of physical therapy, a lot of bodywork, a lot of dry needling just really to kind of get my tissues and body moving again. So, at first, I couldn't even do anything. I could just lay on the floor and put a band around my knees and open my knees up and that was it. That was my whole exercise routine. I could lift a 5-pound weight and then now it's like I'm doing 50-pound weights or more. So, I feel like your body has the capacity to kind of slowly— rebuild itself after being even in a catastrophic situation like I was. And I think most people would give up. I think I have a very strong will and I have a very strong mind and I was like, I know that I can climb out of this. And the truth is that for most of the first 6 to 7, 8 months, I was still in severe pain. I was still really weak. I was still really quite tired. And no matter how bad I felt, no matter how sick I was, no matter how exhausted, I would just make sure I got my physical therapy and I worked, went to the gym and I did what I had to do despite feeling so badly. It was absolutely critical. So I think for people who often like, oh, I stubbed my toe, I'm not going to exercise. I think there's always a way. There's always a way. And there's always something you can do. And whether it's just sitting in a chair or laying on a bed, or there's ways you can move your body that actually will help you recover. So I think people often are too quick to just give up. For me, it was just really this sort of desire to get my body back. And it was quite amazing to see the transformation. It took a while. I lost half my blood volume. I was super anemic. It took a long time to realize, make sure I had plenty of meat in order to actually get my iron back up because I lost half my blood. And so I think, you know, just all these things work together to synergize. I took the right supplements. I took things that helped, you know, my inflammation. So yeah, it was a comprehensive plan, but I was able to actually repair myself.

You've mentioned in that kind of recovery period that you navigated depression. I imagine like being your body having one experience and then knowing in your brain, you know, the vitality you still have, the passion and the drive for life. How did you kind of navigate through those darker moments of your mental health?

That's a great question. I had physiologic depression. So I wasn't psychologically depressed. And it was really interesting to see the distinction because you can be depressed, but there's also a part of you that's not depressed. How do I explain that? So the part of me that felt exhausted and depressed, no desire to do anything, but I also had this other part of me that knew that that was just It was like having a sprained ankle. Like I knew I couldn't quite walk, but I knew it was going to get better. I knew that it wasn't me. Like it wasn't, I didn't identify with the depression and it was physiological. So my thyroid was messed up, my hormone, my testosterone was very low. You know, all the things that my nutrient, I was very anemic. I mean, all the things that were going on, inflammation in my body, all drive depression. So it was a physiological depression. And I, and I was able to really just have this other part of me that was aware and that knew, and that wasn't afraid of it and knew that I would just have to keep going to walk my way through the rest of this recovery to get to a place where I could feel good again. So it took, it took quite a while. It took, you know, 8 or 9 months of really just hard work and feeling like crap all the time to start to feel better. Yeah.

I imagine then knowing the reason kind of, and like knowing it was situational, was one helpful to, as you said, separate yourself from it, but then also 2, do you think that contributed to your drive and your motivation to be like, I gotta get through this. I gotta show up every day. I have to exercise.

I mean, it was really, it was really just, you know, being steady and consistent and focused and, you know, it was a, it was a powerful, yeah, it was, it was really a powerful moment of just like, you know, locking into what I had to do and I just had to do it. And it just, I was lucky I had support and I had people helping me, but it wasn't simple.

Switching gears slightly now and thinking more about longevity and future and our bodies changing and time passing. As you have gotten older, how has your relationship with your body changed?

Yeah, I'm much more focused on taking care of it well. I think, I don't think there's any realm for kind of going off the reservation or letting myself go. I can't go more than 2 days without exercising. I make sure I eat really well. I take my supplements. I'm focused on basics, stress reduction, sleep habits, all the basic foundational things. They're sort of non-negotiable. And for me, it made me realize that at any age, we can recover, we can get healthy. And I've done this with so many patients who are in their really in their late 60s who are obese, diabetic, heart failure, kidneys going, liver going, and these people get better and they lose 100 pounds, lose 150 pounds. I mean, the body, it's quite amazing when you see putting in the right inputs in how resilient we are. But most of us are just burdening our bodies and our minds with things that cause us to be sick. And that's all optional for most of us.

Okay. You've called yourself a bit of a guinea pig in the past. I know you're always trying new things. I've seen your house. I've, I've seen all the fun experiments you get up to. I'm thinking back to when we were in Austin and you walked into the recording room with some device on your head. You were trying some sort of red light therapy.

Yeah.

I want to quickly rapid-fire mention some experiences, tools.

Sure.

And I want you to let me know if you do actually personally use it. Cold plunges.

Absolutely. Absolutely. I use them. I think they're great for inflammation, for mitochondrial activation, for increased mental clarity, focus. I mean, so they're, I think they're, they're really, it can be a useful tool. Not, they're not great for everybody, but I personally use them and like them.

What do you mean they're not great for everyone? What would be an example of someone they wouldn't be?

Well, if you're ill or you're, you're thin, or some women in their, you know, in their luteal phase or second half of their cycle, you know, it can be challenging. And some women don't actually feel that great from it. So you have to pay attention to what your body likes and doesn't like.

And when do you do it around your training? Do you do it before? Are you doing it after?

Usually 4, you can do it before in the morning or you can do it after, 4 hours after. If you do it right after, you're going to reduce any muscle gain that you're trying to achieve. So you won't get the hypertrophy or the increased muscle size.

So in contrast to that, what about the sauna?

Saunas are great. You can do a sauna after workout. I do saunas again almost every day if I can. There's a lot of science on the benefits of saunas and the increased increases heat shock proteins that kind of gets rid of all the damaged proteins in your body. It helps your immune system, your innate immune system. It helps your heart variability and metabolic health, cardiovascular health, helps you relieve, you know, a lot of toxins are excreted during sweating. So there's a lot of benefits to it.

And so is it a dry sauna you're in? How long are you usually in for?

I usually do like a couple of rounds of 15 minutes. So 15 minutes cold plunge, 15 minutes cold plunge. So if I can do half an hour, I like that. Sometimes you can do more, but that's kind of a fair amount of time.

What about continuous glucose monitors? Do you use them?

I have used it in the past just to see as an example, just to learn about it. I'm really metabolically very healthy. I have low insulin, I have low blood sugar, I have low A1C. I don't have any poor metabolic health markers, so I don't really need to track it. And I don't really eat much sugar or starch anyway. So I think for people who are learning about their health, who have metabolic issues, who are overweight, I mean, look, 93% of Americans are in poor metabolic health. I'm not in that 93%, but that doesn't mean that everybody else isn't. And they probably would benefit from knowing what's going on, like at least a 2 or 3 week tracking of, okay, well, gee, I know if I eat a banana, my sugar spikes, or geez, if I eat apples, I'm fine, or gosh, I'm eating pasta and my sugar's fine, but if I eat bread, it's off the chart. So, you really want to know what's happening in your body. Everybody's different. And you have to sort of find out what's right for you.

What about wearables? I believe there is at least one that you use. Can you share?

Yeah, I have wearables. I think they're important to track. You know, I think people can get obsessed with them. They can kind of overtake your life and people get, you know, kind of all anxious about their numbers. But as a way to see what's happening, what's impacting you, like for example, you know, I went and had sushi last night and I had a little sake and I don't really drink very much, maybe once a month or every couple of months.

And yeah, I had a little bit of sake, but it definitely affected my sleep.

And I'm like, oh, you know, that's interesting. I see that my score from 93 to 70. And I'm like, oh, okay, that's not good.

So is Mark Hyman hungover today?

Maybe.

I didn't see. I was like very restless. I had a very restless night. So I don't know if I'm hungover, but I am. I only had enough to get hungover, but I'm very sensitive to it.

What about biological age testing?

Yeah, biological age testing is a big complex field and there are many, many ways to check your biological age through epigenetic clocks, through something called DunedinPACE, through calculated derivative calculations, through organ age. And, there's just so many different clocks. They're all different. There's a lot of science going on to determine what are valid, what are not. If you use the same clock over and over again and you see changes in your health, you'll see. For example, I got 10 years older on Function Health's biological age, which is a calculated number based on your biomarkers. So if there's inflammation, other things, it'll go up. So my, I got 10 years older after my surgery, but then over the last year, I've been able to get 10 years younger by reversing it. So you can, you know, as long as you're using the same measurement, you can, you can kind of rely on the delta. It's really about, are you impacting it for the better or worse?

Another hot topic that everyone's talking about right now, especially online, is peptides. Do you use any peptides?

Yes. I think, you know, peptides are are really not something new. Peptides have been around for a long time. Insulin is a peptide that's been used since the '20s, 1920s. GLP-1s are peptides. So, Ozempic, those are peptides. And, there's other peptides that are FDA-approved, for example, for female sexual arousal disorder called Pilese, also known as PT-141. So, there's a lot of peptides that are in the market that are FDA-approved, that are prescribed by doctors, that are part of medicine. What's happening now is sort of this upsurge in interest in peptides for many different uses. The data is limited to mostly animals. There's safety data, there's animal data, there's not a lot of large clinical trials. So, you're really kind of experimenting with yourself But, I can tell you that I do use them. For example, I use thymosin alpha-1 often when I travel. I don't get sick or if I'm getting sick, I use that. BP-157 is another peptide I'll often use for injury or repair of tissue. And, there are mitochondrial peptides, there's growth hormone secretagogues that help growth hormone release, there's ones that help testosterone, there's ones that help libido, there's ones that help inflammation, there's ones that help fight infection. So, there's so many different peptides, thousands and thousands of peptides. that the body makes. And these are things that the body uses to regulate itself. So, they're not new, but there's this interest in them and the way they're being prescribed is new. And the problem is there's compounding pharmacies that now make them that can be high quality. There are gray market sites which sell it, which is not great, which is kind of unregulated, and those are getting shut down. There's a black market, which is sort of totally underground peptide market from China and stuff. So, I think you want to work with a doctor, you want to work with someone who understands peptides, you want to work with a compounding pharmacy that's reputable, and you want to do this judiciously and understand that you're experimenting because we just don't have the data on how these things work long-term. Are they safe? The animal data is limited. We need more human data. So, that's really key. And, the problem is these often are not patentable, so there's not a lot of interest and investment in them like Ozempic was because they modified it to make it longer and they put in a a pen and they were able to kind of tweak it. So it's like proprietary, but it's, yeah, it's important to understand that there are many risks to it and there's not a lot of data. And you want to, if you want to use them, be aware of this and also use them with a trained practitioner who can help guide you.

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I know you just did a really great valuable episode with Dr. Tina Moore, where you also went into this as well to speak specifically about like GLP-1s, which we can also link in the show notes as well too. The next one we have is IV therapy. Is that something you personally use?

Yes. I mean, I think, you know, IV therapy was a really key thing for me in order to actually recover from my chronic fatigue. I use a lot of glutathione, vitamin C, B vitamin cocktails. I use a lot of things to help me detoxify. So IV therapy was quite helpful for me. I think there's lots of IVs that people can do. There's different therapies that you can do. There's minerals, there's vitamins, there's amino acids, there's phytochemicals, there's phospholipids, there's glutathione, there's chelators. I mean, it's a whole field of intravenous medical therapy. It's been around for quite a while. It's not in traditional medicine, but I found it very helpful in a subset of patients who really do much better when they get IV therapy as part of their overall plan. But it's not just a standalone treatment.

Is there something people should be mindful of, like if they are going to explore those kinds of therapies?

Yeah. Again, you want to make sure you're working with a reputable doctor, that they check your blood work. In other words, if you get a high-dose vitamin C IV, you want to make sure you check something called G6PD, which If you have this genetic variation, it can make IV vitamin C quite harmful. So, you need to know what you're doing. You need to have a practitioner who's trained in this. You need to do it in a reputable clinic or center where they follow sterile technique, where they source materials from the right pharmacists. So, it's important to do it right. Next Health is actually a great company that we're affiliated with through my practice. I don't have any direct involvement, but they're There where we work with the Ultra Wellness Center and our patients to help, you know, get therapies that we don't offer there. And because they're in many, many cities, we're just in Massachusetts. And so we work collaboratively with them and they do a lot of IV therapy and they have a really great, great model.

The next one is red light therapy. And I do know you use this because I remember after your bike accident, we would meet with you and it was fascinating to see how quickly you'd recovered. And I remember you mentioning at that time that was a huge marker in it. So can you Explain your experience with red light therapy.

Yeah. I mean, red light therapy reduces inflammation, activates mitochondria, increases ATP production, and tissue repair and healing. And so, I used it when I was in an accident and I had a lot of bumps and bruises and scrapes and it really accelerated wound healing tremendously. So, I think for many, many purposes, it can be helpful, but it's a great rejuvenative technique. And photobiomodulation is a well-established medical procedure now and it's There's a lot of literature about the benefits of it.

So do you just have the panels? How often are you using it? How long do you use it for?

Yeah, I have a big panel that goes over most of my body and I usually go for 20 minutes or so. You don't even have to do it that long. It could be very helpful.

The next one is stem cells.

Yeah, I mean, stem cells are something that are, again, part of medicine that are undergoing a lot of research. They're being used in clinical practice in America. They're also being used in other countries in a different way. because it can expand the cells, which we can't quite do, although some of the laws are changing around that now. So, I think they're basically a regenerative part of what we call regenerative medicine, which is using things that are the body's own repair systems to optimize your health. So, for example, it will help to activate your own body's healing system and reduce inflammation and increase tissue repair and kind of an improvement in overall health. So I think for select patients, it's expensive, but it can be helpful. I've had it in joints. I've had it intravenously. And I think I'm willing to experiment myself. I don't necessarily recommend it to all my patients, but I've noticed a difference and it does help improve my overall well-being and health.

The last one we have is exosomes.

Exosomes are part of stem cells. They're the active little packets of information and repair factors that are basically produced in stem cells. And the exosomes then are excreted by the stem cells and then gets distributed throughout the body. So you can actually just take the exosomes directly. The benefit of that is you're not getting any of the DNA of the stem cells, you're not potentially creating an inflammatory reaction, you're using your own stem cells. You often will— they're older, or if using umbilical stem cells, sometimes there's a risk of an immune reaction. So there's always some downsides, but the exosomes are quite safe and are actually, you know, very helpful for inflammation. I remember when I had COVID and I had severe brain fog and I couldn't focus, I couldn't think, and I was just struggling for weeks after. And I did some intravenous exosomes and it went away immediately. It was like quite amazing.

I want to switch gears now and I want to talk more about like the wellness industry. So you mentioned you've been in the industry for Almost 40 years now. Is that what you said at the start?

Yeah. Well, I've been a doctor for 40 years. I've been doing this for 30 years, functional medicine.

Yeah. So I'm sure you've seen many things over the decades and you've seen it go from functional medicine not being as popular and it being more of a niche movement to it becoming now a massive industry. I want to hear your thoughts on where it's going, what worries you, et cetera. So to start out, what's something that you are seeing in mainstream media, the culture on social media that's making you cringe?

Well, that's a great question. I mean, just to be transparent before I answer that is, you know, I am in the industry. I have co-founded Function Health that is helping people access their own biology and bring it online. And, you know, there's something I believe is important that people get empowered with their own data. You know, I have this podcast, I have sponsors. I, you know, I'm definitely part of it. So, I just want to be transparent about that. As far as the things that makes me cringe, I think what I think I kind of see is this sort of over-indexing on the things that are secondary to health, not primary. And so, the basic things of good nutrition and exercise and sleep and stress reduction and management, taking your basic supplements is minimized while things like peptides or exosomes or stem cells or red light therapy or whatever is overemphasized. And, I think that's a problem. So, that kind of makes me a little concerned where people are looking for a quick fix like Ozempic, just take a shot but don't bother learning about nutrition, don't bother working out and building and maintaining your muscle. So, I think it's important for people to really understand that if they don't deal with the foundational things, all these other secondary enhancements around health or biohacking, it doesn't make any sense. And it's kind of a waste of money. You know, McDonald's every day and doing red light therapy. Well, it's not going to help.

One of the questions we were going to ask you is, is there such thing as people kind of going too much the other way now of overtesting, oversupplementing, over-restricting their diets? And kind of maybe losing sight of, I guess, those main principles, I guess, is kind of— you've answered that question for me.

I think it's true.

I think the diagnostics are different. I think people need to know what's happening under the hood. And I think we're finding things that people have not known about their health and are saving lives. It's real. And I've been doing extensive diagnostic testing on tens of thousands of people for decades. And there's so much that is being missed. that is directly impacting people's quality of life, their health, and their risk of future disease. And there are things that are modifiable, that are fixable, that are treatable, and they're often totally ignored by traditional medicine. So I co-founded Function Health in order to empower people with their own data to make it very affordable. It's $1 a day. You get a really deep dive on your health. A lot of the competitors say they're doing 100+ biomarkers. They're not. They're doing derivative biomarkers. So they're calculating a triglyceride to HDL ratio and counting that as a biomarker. We're doing literally 160 different blood tests for $365, and that's for a year membership. And then, of course, you can add on things, you can do imaging, but it empowers people with their data. And so, I think that for me, I recognize that traditional medicine is not going to solve people's problems, that I believe functional health with the help of AI and with all of a person's data, including their history, their family history, their EMR, their lab testing, their wearables, imaging, you put all that together, their genomics, their stool testing, it creates a picture of health that's never even possible before. It still is important for people to focus on the foundational principles of diet, exercise, sleep, stress management, and optimizing their nutrient status and balancing their hormones. But, you know, there's so much more that can happen when you really know what's going on with your body. And people are walking around with all sorts of stuff that they don't need to, that if they knew what was going on under the hood, they could, they could really address and fix.

I'm fully with you that it's been so great to see the awareness of the wellness industry grow. And we are very involved in it. We believe in it. We're very passionate about it. But I do know there's also the rise with that of many different trends, or maybe individuals who are not doctors that are claiming they're experts on things So when something new emerges, when are you personally willing to experiment with it, be the guinea pig of it? So how do you decide when there's enough evidence to experiment on something that's new and maybe cutting edge? And when does it kind of cross the line into maybe just like a trend or hype?

Yeah. I mean, there's different bars that I set for myself or my patients. So I may be willing to try things that are a little on the edge because I'm willing to be a guinea pig. I think for me, it's like, you know, what is the evidence? What is the basic biological mechanism and plausibility? Does this make sense? Is there some data on it? Is there safety data? Is it animal data? Is there some directionality to it? You know, what are the risks of it? You know, if there's something that's higher risk, then I, it's, it's no different. For example, I will happily take vitamin D and I know there's no really downside risk unless I overdose. I know it has a lot of benefit. I know there's evidence to it. Same thing with creatine. I know there's really no significant downside if you're healthy and can exercise with that and it'll help your brain, it'll help your muscles. So, there's things that I use that I feel are pretty solid. And then, there's things that are emerging that we just don't know about. And for example, peptides are one of those things. So, will I experiment with those things? Yes. But again, I'm very aware that what's the risk-reward? If something has a high risk, then I'm probably not going to do it. For example, metformin has been talked about as a drug to help with longevity. Now, I've really looked carefully at the research, and while it does do a really important thing, which is help with insulin resistance and blood sugar control, and it works on a particular enzyme called AMPK to activate it, which is good in longevity, it also inhibits something called mitochondrial complex I, which makes it hard to build muscle. So if you're taking metformin and you do strength training versus taking a placebo and do strength training after 12 weeks, the metformin group won't have built muscle and the other group will. And so to me, there's a risk there. Now, I don't want to impact my ability to maintain or gain muscle as I age. So for me, I would never take metformin even though a lot of people are doing it for longevity. I don't think it's a good idea given that that particular mechanism and mitochondria is so important. So, that's kind of how I look at things. I try to understand what is going on, what are the risks, how do I navigate this, and what makes sense? For example, getting an IV of vitamins is very low risk other than just the injection site or getting an infection or bleeding, which can happen, but it's very rare. So, I think I do a hierarchy of risk. And, if something has got a potential benefit, and risk is low, cost is okay, you know, I'll do it. If something's going to cost me $100 grand and it's safe, I might not do it. You know, there's not a lot of evidence, but if it costs me, you know, $100, I might do it.

You mentioned there metformin and overhyped is not the correct medical professional word, but you kind of mentioned essentially it was overhyped at the moment, or you saw, I guess, reasons to not do it. Is there something to counter that that you think is underrated right now that people are not pursuing enough or science isn't leaning into enough that you think they should?

Is there a treatment or modality you think would be helpful for people?

Yeah. That's kind of overlooked and not as popular at the moment.

Yeah. I mean, I think, I think, you know, helping people really understand how to reset their gut is important. And I think it's not well understood in traditional medicine. People don't really know how to do it. Functional medicine has a whole methodology called the 5R program that's really about resetting the gut and the microbiome. So it's really important to really help people get the right kind of gut health in order to help their overall health. So that's kind of one thing I think is quite important that's often ignored. I think there are some other treatments out there that I think are quite interesting that need a lot more research. One is called phospholipid exchange. And all of our toxins end up in our cells, our mitochondria are very stressed by our lives and it's very hard to repair and rebuild our cells and tissues. And this is more like a cellular repair methodology that's been developed called the PK Protocol. And I've used it with a number of patients. I've used it myself. It's quite profound, I think, in terms of its ability to detoxify all the environmental chemicals we're exposed to, to rebuild our cell membranes, to improve our mitochondrial function, to reduce oxidative stress, inflammation, And I found it very clinically useful. It's not something that is patentable. There's no big pharma company behind it. Nobody's putting a lot of money into researching it. But I used it with patients with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and all kinds of health issues, chronic fatigue. And it really can be a powerful modality. So I think that's something that I think is out there that doesn't have enough data or research that really should be focused on.

So, we've kind of gone into— we've been talking a lot to Dr. Mark Hyman, and I want to switch gears now, and I want to learn more about Mark. Who is Mark when he's not being Dr. Mark Hyman? So, I want to know, what are you up to when you are not busy working? What are you doing in your spare time?

What am I doing? I'm living. I'm trying to enjoy life. I exercise. I like to ride my bike. I like to do yoga. I like to be with my friends. I like to cook. I like to read. I like to dance. I like to travel. I like to ski. I do a lot of things. I like to spend time with my family. My new grandson, I just saw, he's very cute. Congrats.

Yes.

I never really lack for things to do or to enjoy. I think community is very, very important to me. Connecting with people, building relationships, having the time to really invest in the people you love is really important. And I think that's something we neglect in our society. We don't spend time and prioritize that. In Europe, they're much more about social connection and time together and enjoying life. And we're all just so driven and focused and on everything and on our devices. And I think for me, I just had an amazing trip to Greenland with, you know, a whole bunch of friends and we got to dance and play and have fun and see part of the world that no one had seen. And, you know, nobody had their devices on all the time. There was no service or anything. We were out there in the middle of nowhere. And I felt like so happy, you know, just to be. It was just a time to be.

That's beautiful.

One of the things I talk about constantly with patients is the idea that the body isn't broken. It's just not getting what it needs to do its job. That's really the whole promise of functional medicine.

We're not playing whack-a-mole with symptoms.

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So you mentioned there that you were with some of your closest friends. We want to know what is something that your closest friends might tease you about?

We had a very, we had a very fun thing on the boat where, where we were going to do the 10-day detox for the whole boat, about 150 people. And then after the first day, there was mutiny on the boat. And people were freaking out that they couldn't have their wine or their bread or whatever they wanted. And so, there was a whole buffet line and there was just the healthy food and there was the not Dr. Hyman-approved food. And so, I had these signs in front of all the food that said, not Dr. Hyman-approved. So basically, people were making fun of me all the whole thing about not Dr. Hyman-approved. And, uh, and it was pretty funny.

Once they found out what the 10-day detox actually was, they, they got a little cold feet, I guess.

Well, yeah. Well, we probably wasn't marketed the best way to them.

We want to know what's something that you would say you're terrible at?

Uh, singing. I can't play an instrument. I, I like to sing, but it doesn't sound great. And I, and I, and I, you know, I don't have it. I don't play an instrument. I could probably play a few chords on the guitar, but I wish really I was, I was able to do that. It makes me so happy to hear the musicians.

Yeah, music is an amazing thing. What is something that people assume about you that's actually completely wrong?

That's a great question. I actually don't know the answer to that one because I don't pay too much attention. I think people project onto me a lot of things and I think people idolize some idea version of me and they don't realize I'm just a regular human. And, you know, I think they don't realize that I also eat ice cream and cookies.

I still like that answer though. It's a good one. What's something you've become less serious about as you've gotten older?

Less serious?

You mean less focused on or less—

You could take it either way, but let's say less focused on.

I was quite obsessed with bringing functional medicine to the world, and I'm not any less obsessed about it, but I did it in a way that neglected my own wellbeing and drove myself really hard for a long time. And so I'm in a place now where it's much more important for me to just be at a pace that is sustainable and that I can focus and do good work, but not have it consume my whole life. So in some ways I'm less serious about just working 14, 16, 18 hours a day, you know, settle for 8.

I imagine too, when you're passionate about something, when it's had an impact on you personally, I remember talking to you, you, you had said, 'cause we had, I kind of asked you like, you could have maintained being a doctor and practicing functional medicine, but at some point in your career you decided to become more public. You decided to write a book. You decided to start sharing it more broadly. And I kind of asked what that turning point was. And And correct me if I'm wrong, but you had kind of mentioned you were just so, it had had such an impact on your life. You almost wanted to like scream it from the rooftops. Am I correct?

Yeah. I mean, you know, when I got sick and I was so ill and then I discovered a model of medicine, a way of thinking that provided a different map for the body and helped me recover and help my patients recover. I was simultaneously both excited and angry. And I was angry that I didn't learn this in medical school. I was angry that the system was so resistant to this way of thinking. And I know it's true. Yes, we need studies. Yes, we need more research. Yes, we need better data. But I can tell you from treating thousands, literally tens of thousands of patients with this approach, That it works. It doesn't work all the time for everybody completely. And yes, there's things that are hard to manage and deal with. But for most of the things people suffer from today in the modern world, we have a much better roadmap with functional medicine and a much better way to help people recover from things that are often incurable. And we're doing a whole podcast series called The Incurables where people had things that were impossible to recover from, like MS, and they get better. So, these are things that are really important for people to understand that there's actually a methodology. And so, when I first sort of realized this, I was like, I have to tell the world. I can't just do this and sit in my office. I have to write a book. I have to tell the story. And then, I have to write another one and another one. And, the more I learned, the more I learned. And then, I was learning about metabolism, so I wrote Ultra Metabolism. And my second book. And then I was seeing all these people with mental health issues and neurodegenerative issues get better from autism to Alzheimer's to ADD to depression to OCD to bipolar. I was like, what the hell is going on here? And I wrote a book called The UltraMind Solution, which was really important. And part of our Brain Shaping Academy is about how do we take all that and bring that back into our discourse around how to help people with any kind of psychiatric or neurodegenerative issue because we now have the knowledge of how to do this. And, I wrote this book just out of seeing the phenomena. Albert Szent-Györgyi, who's the guy who discovered vitamin C, he said, discovery consists in seeing what everybody else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought. So, when I see a patient, with MS, I'm not thinking this person has MS. I'm thinking this person could have Lyme disease, could have mercury poisoning, could have gut issues, could have infections, could have a lot of things that are causing it. And my job is to really not just take it at face value. So that's really the thing that's driving me is I think we have to move forward and get people the solutions to these problems that they They really have mostly been badly treated by traditional medicine. Not that they're not trying to do a good job, they are, they're using the best tools they have, but it's the wrong tool. You can't open a can opener with a— I mean, I can't open a can with a spoon. I mean, maybe you can, I don't know, but it's tough. I have to jam it in. But I think we just don't have the right tools. functional medicine is a whole different set of constructs, of lenses, of a map for the human body. It's really focused on the laws of biology and the tools are agnostic. It can be anything, but it can be drugs, it can be surgery, it can be a vitamin, it can be probiotic, whatever. Food is medicine, but it's really understanding how to apply those from a root cause perspective.

So we just talked about something that you have become less serious or focused on. I want to counter that with what's something you've become more serious or focused on as you got For my personal health or for my work in the world? Whatever comes to mind first.

Well, the first thing that came to mind, I mean, other than doubling down on strength training, which I'd never done my whole life until I was 59, is for me— no, I'm 66 and I've spent my life trying to bring functional medicine into the world. I think it's happened in an incremental way, but it's not really still accessible to people. And I think that the thing I'm most excited about is how Function Health can really bring democratized healthcare at scale based on root cause medicine to millions, if not billions of people, and using AI to help navigate massive datasets into a coherent map of your body and what's happening now and what you're at risk for in the future and how to work with all that. In a way that it really will transform medicine and healthcare in a way we've never seen before. So to me, this is as big a discovery as the internet, as discovering bacteria or just penicillin. I mean, this is a huge, huge paradigm shift in medicine. It's as big as the Earth is not flat paradigm shift. So to me, it's never going to happen from the inside the institutions that hold onto It has to happen from the outside. And that's really what Function Health is. It's like a way for people to access healthcare and health and their own health in a way that's never been possible before in human history. So that's what I'm most excited about.

So I want to kind of wrap up with a couple final questions here. After more than 30 years, nearly 40 years of practicing medicine, what do you understand about health today that you didn't understand when you first became a doctor?

I mean, it's quite simple. I think when I first became a doctor, I sort of learned the body as a bunch of different discrete organs and specialties. And now I see the body as a network, as an interconnected web of functions that are in this beautiful dance and that get imbalanced when there's different insults. And that's really how we need to think about health. So That for me, that's, that's the biggest shift.

Piggybacking off of that, you, if correct me if I'm wrong on this, but you began as a family physician in rural Idaho. That was your beginning, right? Once you graduated. Okay. So were you around 30, 32 at that point?

30.

I was 30.

Wow.

Okay. If 30-year-old Mark Hyman were sitting across from you right now, what would surprise him the most about what you believe today?

Around medicine?

It could be a personal realization or—

I mean, for me, the biggest thing I would say that would surprise the 30-year-old would be that I would have been able to be part of something that is just transforming all of healthcare and medicine in a way that I never dreamed possible. I think just, it would've astounded me to think that I could be part of a movement and even a company like Function Health that can really transform medicine and healthcare at a way that is as big as anything we've ever had in medicine.

You've recently become a grandfather, which is a big chapter in an individual's life. Has that changed what you want longevity for or what you think about your legacy should be?

Yes. I mean, I think it's important to think about how do I keep myself healthy so I can show up and be there for my grandson and how can I be a model for How to live and how to be in the world and how to love and how to just be a good human. And so for me, keeping myself in good shape and keeping my body working and taking care of myself is this huge priority because now at this point in my life, I get to enjoy all the blessings that come after living a full, good life. And I have tremendous abundance and friends and community and family, and I want to be able to show up for it. So for me, it kind of reminded me last night, I had the sake, I liked it, it was okay, but I don't really need to do that anymore. It's probably not worth it in terms of the cost. So I think it's just trying to just think about what are those things that really matter and how do I want to spend my time?

Yeah. Okay.

I have 2 more. First one is, of everything you've accomplished so far, what are you most proud of?

I think I'm most proud of the persistence that I've had to stay true to what I believe and what I know is true, which is that we got the wrong map for the body when I was in medical school. And there's a different map, there's a different understanding of human biology that That we had these laws of biology that were really not taught to us. And to me, that's the thing I'm most proud of, that this whole field has advanced, that has moved forward. And then now people know functional medicine. There are people all over the world doing functional medicine. And it was sort of a nonexistent thing when I was 30 years ago. And that also that we were able to take function from nothing, an idea a few years ago, to you know, a substantial company that's changing people's lives.

Amazing. Our final question is, what are you still most curious about?

What am I still most curious about? I mean, I'm just fascinated by human biology. I'm just fascinated by the mystery of how we're built and how we're made and how we work and how things relate and connect to one another. And I just, I'm just sort flabbergasted by the magic that's really the human body. And I just, I still kind of want to learn all the time. How do things work? Why is this happening? What about this biology? And just kind of going down the rabbit hole of, it's kind of nerdy rabbit hole of like functional medicine and biology.

Well, after grilling you for over an hour here, I just want to say thank you for your time, for your honesty, your openness, um, and for your willingness to answer all my questions, Mark. That's all I have for you today.

If you love that last video, you're gonna love the next one.

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