The Longevity Mindset: A Mind-Body Roadmap to Healthy Aging

Podcast Highlights

• Dr. Halland’s journey from traditional to functional medicine.
• The relationship between NAD+ supplementation, mitochondrial health, & longevity.
• Psychedelics’ potential to help foster a growth mindset that promotes longevity.
• How psychedelics challenge conventional approaches to pain management.
• Dr. Halland’s personalized medicine program for health optimization and longevity.
• Considering AI’s role in personalized medicine.
• Peptides and biohacking.
• Heavy metal detox protocols.
• Healthspan vs. lifespan.
• The importance of mindset and intuition when it comes to healthy aging and living.

Show Links

1. Dr. Halland’s website
2. Dr. Halland on Instagram
3. Dr. Halland on LinkedIn
4. Dr. Halland on TikTok
5. (podcast) 207. Christian Angermayer - Democratizing Psychedelics: From Ancient Rituals to Modern Medicalization
6. (podcast) 195. Precision-Performance Medicine: Longevity, Holistic Health, & Optimization

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Podcast Transcript

0:00:00.0 Paul F. Austin: Hey listeners, welcome back to The Psychedelic Podcast by Third Wave, where we explore how psychedelics can be integrated into our cultural framework for the evolution of humanity. My name is Paul F. Austin, and today I am speaking with Dr. Halland, The Longevity Doctor.

0:00:16.9 Dr. Halland: I really believe that longevity is a mindset, again, with the tie into psychedelics, I think everything starts at the nucleus of where your heart and mind are, and so when you actually get into alignment with that, everything else that you do for your body then follows naturally in suit. The good news about technology is it brings us far in advance into things, the bad news about technology is that maybe it disconnects us far from ourselves. What I hope to do is to teach people how to reconnect with themselves and use the power of their mind to help improve their physiology.

0:00:50.7 Paul F. Austin: Welcome to The Psychedelic Podcast by Third Wave, audio mycelium connecting you to the luminaries and thought leaders of the psychedelic renaissance. We bring you illuminating conversations with scientists, therapists, entrepreneurs, coaches, doctors and shamanic practitioners, exploring how we can best use psychedelic medicine to accelerate personal healing, peak performance and collective transformation.

0:01:24.0 Paul F. Austin: Hey listeners, today's podcast is brought to you by the Apollo wearable. I first started wearing the Apollo in the midst of the COVID quarantine over two years ago. It helped my body to regulate itself, to calm down, to stay more focused and to meditate in the morning, and I use it to really regulate my nervous system in a time of incredible stress, and I've continued to use it on a day-to-day basis. It is indispensable in my daily routine. Here's the thing, the Apollo is a wearable that improves your body's resilience, distress by helping you to sleep better, stay calm and stay more focused. Developed by neuroscientists and physicians, the Apollo wearable delivers gentle, soothing vibrations that condition your nervous system to recover and rebalance after stress.

0:02:13.7 Paul F. Austin: I tell folks that it's like a microdose on your wrist that helps you to feel more present and connected, especially when in the midst of a psychedelic experience, it's a phenomenal complement to any psychedelic experience. In fact, Apollo is currently running an IRB-approved clinical trial in conjunction with MAPS to understand the long-term efficacy of the Apollo wearable with PTSD patients who have undergone MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. The Apollo wearable is the only technology with an issued patent to reduce unpleasant and undesirable experiences associated with medicine-assisted therapy, including psychedelics and traditional medicine, and you can save $50 on the Apollo wearable by visiting apolloneuro.com/thirdwave. That's apolloneuro.com/thirdwave.

0:03:09.1 Paul F. Austin: Hey listeners, this is Paul Austin, Founder and CEO at Third Wave. If you're interested in longevity, optimal living and how psychedelics play a part in living to our fullest, you're in for a real treat today. I sat down with Dr. Halland Chen, a double board-certified physician at the forefront of integrative medicine. This is another in-person interview that I got to record at the 2023 Wonderland Conference in Miami, and these in-person interviews are always so special because of the rapport and container that we are in, it just makes for a really special episode. So here's a little bit from Dr. Halland's bio. Dr. Halland Chen is a double board-certified physician, specializing in ways to help people heal faster and feel better.

0:03:49.5 Paul F. Austin: He's been featured on HBO, Forbes and L, and is an expert in longevity, NAD+, stem cells, anti-aging and non-surgical options for pain relief and repairing injuries. He's focused on peak performance, life extension and optimizing wellness by reducing inflammation, boosting the immune system and cellular detoxification by using regenerative medicine, biohacking and natural supplements. He applies his unique techniques and specialized testing for patients to address sport injuries, pain management conditions, longevity optimization, and does all of this for high performance clients. Dr. Halland attended the University of Miami's Honors program in medicine and graduated with honors and research distinction.

0:04:31.6 Paul F. Austin: He is the author of numerous scientific publications and also specialized in interventional pain management from Albert Einstein College of Medicine's Fellowship Program in New York City. In our conversation today, Dr. Halland shares his transition from traditional to functional medicine, emphasizing the power of psychedelics in promoting mental health for longevity and for a growth mindset. We unpack NAD+ supplementation and its role in longevity and health, we explore the use of psychedelics in pain management and hear about Dr. Halland's personalized medicine program designed to optimize wellness and longevity through regenerative medicine and biohacking. We touch on the potential of AI in shaping personalized medicine and also discuss the use of peptides.

0:05:15.1 Paul F. Austin: Dr. Halland gives us a look into his protocols for heavy metal detoxing and shares his insightful take on extending health span versus simply more lifespan. As always, follow the link in the description for the full show notes, transcript and everything that we mentioned today and follow The Psychedelic Podcast wherever you listen so you never miss an episode. And finally, if you have just one moment, we'd love if you left the show, either on Spotify or Apple, your honest review, it helps others find the podcast. And more than that, we appreciate getting to know what you think of these episodes and how these conversations are impacting your own journey in the world of psychedelics. All right, that's it for now. I hope you enjoy my conversation today with Dr. Halland.

0:06:01.6 Paul F. Austin: So we're sitting here at the Microdose Conference, Wonderland, put on by Microdose. And I'm sitting across from Dr. Halland. Dr. Halland is one of the world's foremost longevity doctors, he's been featured on HBO, Forbes, and many other mainstream media publications, and I'm really excited to chat with you today about everything longevity and what that looks like. So thanks for joining us.

0:06:24.1 Dr. Halland: Oh, absolutely. Thanks so much for having me here.

0:06:27.1 Paul F. Austin: So I just wanna start with kind of an opener of what brought you to the conference here in Miami today to speak about longevity and psychedelics.

0:06:36.0 Dr. Halland: So it's very interesting because I have quite a few colleagues and friends who were here already presenting, and then I got invited to present just because I knew so many people, and then likewise, I was able to bring in some of my community who are in the biohacking performance space, so it just made sense. I have a lot of roots in Miami, I lived here for quite a while. Miami has become a real hot spot lately because so many people have actually relocated here, so we have clients here as well, so it just made a lot of sense to do this. I love the concept of basically, they pretty much put three platforms into one venue, it's psychedelics was the primary one, but they added longevity and mental health. And I really think those are the three hot topics these days in terms of what people are really looking for, what resonates, what's actually going on with people in terms of what they need for their health.

0:07:27.1 Paul F. Austin: So let's start, let's talk a little bit about your origin story, your back story, so you're a double board-certified physician. You have been running longevity and wellness clinics for 13 years now, from what I gather, you're also an entrepreneur in your own right, and you look like you're about 25, in a good way, you have beautiful skin and you're young and you're vital which I would expect being one of the world's foremost longevity doctors. So tell us a little bit about what drives you, what motivates you, what inspires you to do all the work that you've done.

0:08:07.3 Dr. Halland: You know, when you go to Med school, you have one vision of what your medical career will look like, and then as you go through it, you start realizing that the medical system is actually quite complex and even broken. Obviously, there are life-saving procedures that can be done, the hospital has its place, but when you think about the general population as a whole, preventative medicine never really took that front and center stage, and it also is more, I would say, very generic and never really targeted things that were more on the performance side. And so my background is I'm a double board-certified physician. My initial residency is in PM&R which stands for Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. We saw all sorts of things from stroke and rehab and spinal cord injuries down to musculoskeletal issues, sports injuries. I then did a fellowship in interventional pain management over at Beth Israel in New York City.

0:08:54.4 Dr. Halland: And that really, I would say, shaped large part of where I was practicing or what I decided to practice in. We were a very heavy interventional program, we did a lot of complex pain procedures and things like that, there was obviously some positive aspects to it because you're very highly trained, but then the downside is what I saw in that ecosystem is that people were just getting a lot of opioids or pain medications, things that just were band-aid solutions. And then sometimes people just said, "Well, look, insurance says you have to do surgery on this person." So I became very frustrated with the way that medicine should be practiced versus what we're being told, especially from a perhaps less innovative standpoint, the insurance says this, or the healthcare system has so much red tape.

0:09:39.2 Dr. Halland: So I would say my functional medicine journey actually began with my regenerative medicine journey, and that's basically things that help promote the body to heal. So I'm very much all about how do we heal the underlying problem, not just covering the symptoms. And so the traditional medical system is very much disease management, it's more reactive versus functional medicine is proactive medicine, we're really trying to get ahead of a problem and really just help people heal. So I always like to say my big focus is root-cause medicine, and how do I get people off their medications or avoid surgeries?

0:10:14.4 Paul F. Austin: Let's talk about NAD+, because this is something that you have talked a lot about, you've focused quite a bit of your at least public discussion on specific to cellular health, so I'd love if you could just... Let's start kind of with the basic foundations, what is NAD+ and why is it so beneficial for cellular health and what does that mean for longevity generally?

0:10:39.5 Dr. Halland: Sure, absolutely. NAD+ often referred to as just straight up NAD, it stands for Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide, and it's been very popular lately. Back when I was starting to use it, way back in the days, many, many years ago, it was mostly a detox molecule, and that was because it was so effective at helping people get off of opioids, alcohol, benzos, all sorts of medications that essentially, we're in the realm of more addiction medicine. I was very curious about it because I had heard about how it could help somebody go from basically having serious complications and problems being dependent on, let's say, opioids to back to normal. So I was very curious about doing research in that area, how could that help with basically regenerative medicine, things that help to promote the body to heal, stem cell technologies and things like that. So my journey really began on how to create peak performance in the body, and I was doing this almost really, really before a lot of people even hit the mainstream.

0:11:36.4 Paul F. Austin: When would that have been?

0:11:36.9 Dr. Halland: Almost 10 years ago. It's a long time, and back then it really wasn't as popular as it is now, because now we have all bunch of supplements and things like that, most of my focus was on IV therapeutics, so it did require quite a bit of intervention in the terms of most IV NAD drips can take anywhere from two hours to three hours or longer, kinda depending on your dose, right?

0:11:56.7 Paul F. Austin: And there's some recovery time, it can be...

0:12:00.3 Dr. Halland: Depends, right? Depends on what you're using it for, especially in the performance world, it's just uncomfortable during the infusion to a degree if it goes too fast. Now there's so many ways that you can administer NAD which is IVs, they have some subcutaneous injections, we have even patches, that was one of my ideas originally back in the days. And then obviously we have the oral supplementation, which is not... I think they function differently. Oral supplementation is great, you can get an increase in intracellular NAD levels, I think the IV version does a little bit something different in terms of what it does for the performance of the body, at the end of the day, what does NAD do?

0:12:37.7 Dr. Halland: NAD is essentially a, it generates energy in your body, right? Your mitochondria, which are considered the power house of your cells, use the NAD and convert it into ATP, ATP pretty much drives every cellular function. So when we think about DNA repair, optimizing DNA function, your brain performance, your liver function, your kidney function, all our body requires NAD, that's actually why we see aging happen because when your body is low on NAD, your repair functions go down, the cellular functions go down, your body doesn't have the ability to keep up with the demand. And so that's kind of where a lot of the theory came behind supplementation, we just don't really store enough and produce enough.

0:13:19.0 Paul F. Austin: And so what is this relationship then between mitochondria health, ATP production and longevity, living longer, living healthier for longer. Why is it so important that we keep our mitochondria healthy?

0:13:39.2 Dr. Halland: So there is this very interesting... Well, you'll see it online in many different formats, there's these nine hallmarks of aging, and one of the key ones is actually mitochondrial health. And so they identified that in addition to things like gene regulation, protein folding, DNA. Mitochondria health is a huge one because essentially your body needs batteries, or your body needs energy in order to produce functions and mitochondria is... Because way back in the day, it wasn't as easy to study these things, now we have a lot more technology actually to characterize sort of the function of what's happening.

0:14:12.5 Dr. Halland: So I think it's actually gonna be a real key therapeutic probably hopefully one day in the pharma realm where they can actually say, "Hey look, this will help decrease mitochondria dysfunction, this will help, let's say, delay the onset of Alzheimer's." I mean, obviously, this is speculative, but I think it actually will go down that route because when your body has enough energy to heal or repair itself, essentially, your function is better, your mood is better, your performance is better.

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0:16:13.4 Paul F. Austin: So outside of NAD+ infusions, what are other practices, modalities, interventions that can help to support mitochondrial health?

0:16:22.4 Dr. Halland: I think what's interesting in the longevity space is a lot of us are saying very similar things, it really then comes down to the nuance, diet and exercise has always been quoted as...

0:16:31.2 Paul F. Austin: It's like 80% of it, right?

0:16:32.5 Dr. Halland: Exactly, right? And...

0:16:33.5 Paul F. Austin: And sleep as well, sleep is so important.

0:16:34.5 Dr. Halland: And sleep. And I think it's really coming down to what happens to be... I wouldn't say it's more trendy, what I see now is sleep is actually really a hot topic, right? Whereas before everyone would say eight hours of sleep, so it's not like anything changed from 20 years ago to now, everyone's still saying eight hours of sleep. I think because we can actually characterize sleep because we have things like Oura Ring or Whoop, and you can actually measure the sleep performance, deep sleep, REM sleep, HRV. I think because we have this data, we have this feedback system, people are now more in tune with their sleep. I have a favorite saying that I hear, it's a pretty famous quote, it's like, you can't manage what you can't measure. And if...

0:17:15.1 Paul F. Austin: Peter Drucker.

0:17:15.7 Dr. Halland: Yep, exactly. And so the fact that you can actually measure it means you're gonna have insight to manage it, and so when I think it comes to a lot of the longevity world, it's one thing to have some really key nuggets that are different, different, it's another thing to actually know how to implement it. And so I think that's where the key differential is gonna happen among what we see among providers, 'cause too, let's assume most providers have a certain level of baseline knowledge, the real IP, the real know-how comes into how do I sequence it for this person? How do I personalize this?

0:17:45.8 Dr. Halland: If this person needs to have more NAD levels, it's not just like go to the gym three times a week, eat organic and get eight hours of sleep, most people could probably read that. I always... One of the things that I teach about is the longevity mindset, and so that's basically saying there's a difference between knowing and believing. You may know something, but if you don't subconsciously believe it internally, you're not gonna do it.

0:18:11.8 Paul F. Austin: And that's where I was starting to think about, oh, what's the role then of psychedelics, 'cause it's not only knowing and believing, but it's also what's the difference between the theory and the practice.

0:18:21.5 Dr. Halland: Correct.

0:18:22.0 Paul F. Austin: In other words, I can know that exercise and diet and sleep and all these things, cold-plunging are important for me, but if I don't actually execute on them, integrate them in my day-to-day practice, then nothing's actually gonna change.

0:18:36.9 Dr. Halland: Correct.

0:18:38.3 Paul F. Austin: So with psychedelics and the impact that they have on neuroplasticity, and I think in a safe container, the way that they can sometimes help us to re-program our subconscious mind, it seems like it's an interesting catalyst for people to adopt healthier practices that help them to live longer.

0:19:00.0 Dr. Halland: Right. There's a saying, things don't change unless you change. And I think one of the things that psychedelics does that's so interesting is that it helps people change in a shorter time. I mean, people can go to years of therapy and I've encountered people who say they've had one psychedelic experience and it changed everything. And when you actually think about the quantitative amount of time that was spent, it's quite profound. And again, it is a neurochemical balance. And so people who take antidepressants and things like that, I think we can all safely assume that not everyone who's on antidepressants is actually feeling happy, they're just not as depressed.

0:19:38.5 Dr. Halland: And I think that's why there's some bite back where the people would say, "I don't want to be on antidepressants anymore, maybe I should consider something like a psychedelic," because the antidepressant in some of the interesting studies say that they actually don't really work unless you really just major depressive episodes. And so low grade depression or low grade anxiety, it's not going to be relieved by certain medications now. And whereas things with psychedelics, which is again, still a "newer science" in terms of the realm of what we're doing in terms of research and understanding the pathophysiology and the mechanisms.

0:20:12.5 Dr. Halland: I think what we're seeing now is that people are much more open to understanding how does this work on a biochemical level? I think psychedelics, we've seen a lot of clinical case studies, we've seen a lot of clinical efficacy. Now what's happening is in order to get that mass adoption, do you run it through the phase one, two, three trials and have this very hard empirical data. And that's where I think the regulatory will help accelerate things.

0:20:36.0 Paul F. Austin: So you're a visionary, you started a longevity clinic in 2010. You were well ahead of the curve when it comes to longevity, psychedelics are sort of this next cutting edge technology. Where do you see the overlap between psychedelics and longevity? And do you think psychedelics will become an integral part of longevity and wellness clinics as they become more legal, accessible, regulated?

0:21:02.4 Dr. Halland: Yes. I believe that psychedelics, it will cover probably two to three phases of things. In terms of mental health, psychedelics obviously is very well known in that space to help with mental health. So if you really actually look at one of these Harvard studies, it was an 85-year study. So like eight decades of basically following people and seeing what they're doing. And they said, what is the number one predictor essentially for health? And it was basically positive relationships. So when you think about all the things that they could have narrowed it down on, was it heart disease or liver dysfunction, GI problems, diet, everything that could be medical, it was like, nope, positive relationships.

0:21:43.6 Dr. Halland: So if you take that psychedelics creates a positive relationship with yourself, which therefore then you have more positive relationships with others, easily you could correlate and probably even do some research on the fact that psychedelics is a great longevity molecule because it enhances your own interconnected with yourself. You then show up for others better. Are there cellular physiological effects that could also promote longevity? Sure. In terms of like dementia, Parkinson, things like that. If psychedelics, it's one of the proposed mechanisms is increasing neurosynaptic transmissions or new neuron formation, that'd be good too. And then I talk a lot about this is, in order to execute longevity in your own personal life, I have this five H's of mindset.

0:22:27.6 Dr. Halland: And it's basically, it stands for a few things like home, habits, hobbies, harmony, et cetera. I really talk a lot about this because what I want people to understand is that mindset's not just about thinking positive. Your mindset actually does have a framework and it's hard because we're not taught how to have a positive mindset. There are things that we can do, there are certain affirmations that we can read about but if you actually can have a framework towards it I think in the realm of how psychedelics creates that essentially positive mindset for you, that's where I think a large part of the overlap is. So it's definitely 50-50 in terms of, I think there's a physiological effect and psychological effect.

0:23:07.3 Paul F. Austin: Yeah. And that growth mindset of really believing that I am capable of changing, right? 'Cause so oftentimes when people are in depressive states or they struggle with anxiety or they just feel stuck, they feel like they're in a rut, they feel like it's really hard to shift out of this. And so it feels like psychedelics can be that catalyst. But I think they're not necessarily a thing to be doing all the time every day necessarily. Like even I talk a lot about microdosing and sort of the role of microdosing. And I think it's great to start an initial protocol where you might do it two or three times a week for a month or two and the intention that you put behind it I think has to be back to these lifestyle habits that we're talking about, integrating better sleep, more exercise, better diet. That's where a lot of the tangible shifts happen in the actual longterm.

0:24:01.3 Dr. Halland: Yeah. Again, it's just a resource tool. And I think that's the big thing. The more something's accessible, the more we realize what this tool can do. And I think that again, back to regulatory, when the regulatory opens up, which I think it probably will happen. We're already seeing it in some states, like for example, Colorado. I think was one of the more pioneering entry states where things became more legalized, we're going to see a lot of shift in it. And I think also the research dollars will follow it. I love research. I think it's very important to back up any type of science with research. It doesn't have to be always big pharma sponsoring it. I think we're familiar with those types of studies but I think if clinics can get involved, some university centers can get involved, there's a lot of great ways to produce great literature, especially in this realm.

0:24:45.9 Paul F. Austin: And even back to, you were talking about how a lot of what you initially focused on was pain management.

0:24:50.0 Dr. Halland: Correct.

0:24:51.1 Paul F. Austin: And what's interesting is they did some research a couple of years ago on microdoses of LSD and they found it to be just as effective at pain management as opioids.

0:25:00.3 Dr. Halland: Yep.

0:25:00.8 Paul F. Austin: So I think there's also some of these interesting elements about pain is, can be psychosomatic.

0:25:04.7 Dr. Halland: Oh, yeah.

0:25:05.3 Paul F. Austin: And psychedelics can really help to relieve that. And that's not really been researched much. We hear a lot about depression and PTSD but there's so much from a physiological perspective, whether it's chronic inflammation, whether it's pain management, whether it's things like shingles even. Like certain, what do you call it? Diseases, lifestyle diseases. Psychedelics are looking like, oh, they open up that capacity for us to feel like, again, this isn't a life sentence but I can actually do things to change how I am.

0:25:33.3 Dr. Halland: Yeah. I think what's interesting if you, 'cause some people might compare the psychedelic world to what was happening in the cannabis industry. I think the cannabis industry has more of a narrower scope in terms of what it can do. Now, it's by all means still very intriguing, they have probably different modalities. I think the fact that psychedelics does cross both that emotional state and then also the physiological state of things, I think that makes it a very unique molecule. And because it's a totally different experience than most medications. Now, whether or not the hallucinating part is considered a positive thing or negative thing, or that's all subjective, I think that's where it will even get more interesting is like, well, can those states help people feel better?

0:26:20.1 Dr. Halland: Can those states help people get more insight? 'Cause I think kind of back to the original question about, we all know that diet and exercise is important, it's really going to come down to the nuance. And so I think when we talk about medicine, I'm really thinking about personalized medicine. And then the other aspect is what are the nuances where it makes it different for you? 'Cause we now know that you may want to be on a certain diet but some people, it's not good for them to be on a pescatarian diet or vegan diet, and they might need to be more paleo. And that's okay. It's now coming down to what is specifically going to be good for you.

0:26:55.1 Paul F. Austin: And I want to talk a little bit about that because I think what's core to what you do is you are a concierge medical doctor. So you really, you work with high level clients who come to you who are looking for a lot of support in that process. So just bring our audience a little bit through what that process is like, what type of clients that you work with, who is reaching out to you, what process do you bring them through for this transformation and longevity and health? Kind of bring us into the nitty gritty of that.

0:27:24.3 Dr. Halland: Sure. Typically clients who find us, it's often by referral. The client that usually wants to work with us, it's a year long program. And so we really bring them on a whole journey because if you really think about trying to fix somebody's health and optimizing it, it's a year long journey because you're doing all the functional medicine testing from microbiome, heavy metals, hormones, environmental toxins, things like that. And then once you're there you have to then optimize it. Now, we do a few things that are regenerative medicine in nature. Obviously I love doing NAD, they usually come in once a month for that. So that's pretty much the process. Sometimes some people have complex medical cases.

0:28:03.1 Dr. Halland: Those are evaluated case by case depending on whether or not we have the bandwidth and then other clients that we see, especially when we get involved with certain podcasts or talks on stage, some people have more isolated incidences. A lot of people know about my pain management background, so they may say, "Hey, I'd love to avoid a knee replacement," or, "I have a failed lumbar back surgery. Is there a way to avoid having a further operation?" Those are the type of cases which I call more regenerative, you're actually just trying to fix an isolated problem. But our overall thing that we really see is how do we create a customized longevity program for you so that over the next 12 months we bring you on a journey and basically fix a good majority of your problems or even optimize your health.

0:28:48.7 Dr. Halland: Most people I say have one thing they want to fix and it might be even just sleep. But if you're not sleeping, that's like one of the number one biohacks that can increase your health. Your brain basically dumps all the toxins during deep sleep, there's so much repair that happens in sleep. Your hormones and levels like that are affected about your circadian rhythm and sleep. So even sleep alone is pretty complex as a science and now we're finally acknowledging it as something that we can measure and we can take action on. So that would be the majority of what we see in terms of like fixing people's health concerns.

0:29:22.7 Paul F. Austin: Would you say sleep is maybe the most common kind of one thing to fix?

0:29:27.0 Dr. Halland: No, I mean, it's many things. I would say the big common thing is gut dysfunction, GI, leaky gut. Sleep, it just, sleep just always happens to be a byproduct of people having inflammation. I would say that, energy levels, I'm very focused on how to help people have more energy, think more clearly, feel stronger, I would say that's our big thing that we focus on. I have a book coming out. It's going to be actually quite interesting in terms of...

0:29:51.6 Paul F. Austin: First book?

0:29:52.3 Dr. Halland: Yeah, will be my first book, basically taking all the 10 years of experience, a lot of the research that we've done, what we see in the clinical side of things, put it into a nice basically user manual for people to read, understand more about their health, how to have more energy, feel more vital, know what to do in terms of things of like, what could they be anticipating? And so we have a few things that we really want to expand on. I'll be introducing the concept of, again, the longevity mindset. We talk about the five H's, we talk about the four horsemen that take away your mindset, we talk about the...

0:30:23.7 Paul F. Austin: What are those four horsemen?

0:30:25.1 Dr. Halland: So the four horsemen basically is chaos, you don't have structure. There's things also like being detached. We have a thing called harmony and if you're detached from it. And so we basically let people know if you're not in alignment with your five H's, there's a counter horseman that basically goes against it. So obviously, if there's a way to show some of the graphic, we actually did keynote on this yesterday at the conference, we can kind of share some of that content as well. And I think this is some of the stuff that we'll be doing master classes on because at the end of the day, I think it's super helpful for people to essentially take care of their own health.

0:31:04.2 Dr. Halland: I think it's great to see a functional regenerative medicine doctor like myself but I think ultimately there are millions and millions of people out there who are really interested in their health. They want to be proactive about it. I'm all about just empowering people with tools. I'm really big that Internet, with Internet being what it is now in terms of post-COVID, everyone's so used to e-learning. And so we're really focused now on a lot of the e-learning modules for people to sign up for.

0:31:29.7 Paul F. Austin: Well, that was going to be my next question. Before we went live, we were talking a little bit about Bryan Johnson who invests $2 million a year in his own health and wellness. I imagine to work with you for a full 12 months as a personalized concierge doctor is not inexpensive by any stretch of the imagination. And yet writing a book, creating courses, makes a lot of this information much more accessible and available. And with how free education is today, whether it's podcasts or books or online courses or whatever it is, it's slowly happening.

0:32:03.6 Paul F. Austin: And so the sort of question that I have for you is, when do you think personalized medicine, although in our circles it's been talked about for years, we wear Oura rings, we do blood work, we have a sense of what intuitively we need. When do you think this will become more commonplace, more mainstream? When and where do you see that sort of phase shift happening? Is it this decade? Is it 10 years from now, 15 years from now? What should we be looking out for?

0:32:31.1 Dr. Halland: I think the next three to five years will be very key. If you really think about what happened even five years ago, the landscape is not even remotely close to this. I think in terms of timelines, three to five years is we're going to see a lot of what I call self care. People will be empowered with knowledge. There'll be more doctors like myself who are producing content or even, you know what, I always love to interview other doctors to find out what they're really good at. I think what we'll see is everything getting very super niche, we're going to see doctors getting ultra specialized. And I think AI will actually play a major role in that because I think with the advent of AI, all these even ChatGPT, Open AI models, they're already in multi generations and it's been less than a year.

0:33:14.0 Dr. Halland: So it evolves very quickly. I mean, will the doctor ever be replaced by AI? I don't think so but I think the quality of access will become more uniform because AI will now be a great support tool. I think in 10 years, AI will be a really incredible thing for medicine. It can be scary, no doubt. I think even amongst the other worlds of who are not in medical, AI can have potential problems. And that's where I think people are trying to figure out, where do the safety standards go? How does it influence the learning models? But I think we're in an era now, it is a thing to actually want to take care of your health. It is a thing to actually be mindful of your bedtime and eating right. Because our world is growing so rapidly, even with "organic food," the nutrient density is not there.

0:34:02.9 Paul F. Austin: The soil is so depleted at this point, yeah.

0:34:04.7 Dr. Halland: Soil is depleted. You know, I gave a talk, the other day I was showing my heavy metal levels. I had super high arsenic and mercury levels.

0:34:11.7 Paul F. Austin: You personally?

0:34:13.3 Dr. Halland: Yeah, me personally. Yeah, I'm always sharing stuff of what I do. Like, I was doing some biological aid testing and I was showing like, well, here's my physiological age versus my chronological age.

0:34:22.1 Paul F. Austin: What are they?

0:34:22.7 Dr. Halland: So chronologically, I'm 43 now but biologically, I was under 30. So I had over a 12 plus year gap, which is great. So that means internally my body is doing really well. Externally, well, obviously externally, I can't change the date I was born.

0:34:38.5 Paul F. Austin: Well, you look great.

0:34:39.6 Dr. Halland: Oh, thanks.

0:34:40.4 Paul F. Austin: You look like your biological age.

0:34:41.7 Dr. Halland: So basically... Yeah. Well, I mean, look, if I can be in my 20s forever, that's a compliment.

0:34:46.1 Paul F. Austin: It's pretty cool, right?

0:34:47.3 Dr. Halland: And I always say the cool thing about longevity is that you live a long time. The hard thing about it is that sometimes it takes a long time to prove that you're right. But if I can look like this until I'm 50 and 60, then people say, "Oh, yeah, back in 2023 when he was talking about this, it really made sense." And so I think that's where the science now is really catching up to being clinically implemented in terms of like the science is always there. I think it's really more so people are open to exploring these things. Like NAD, five years ago, it's like not that many people, I wouldn't say not that many people knew about it. But like now, when I did a survey of the audience, like 80% of the people in the audience knew about NAD. And that's great. Because five years ago, you kind of had to explain it and whatnot. And it just shows the shift in the consciousness of where people's health is.

0:35:38.3 Paul F. Austin: Peptides. What are your thoughts on peptides and the utility of those?

0:35:43.1 Dr. Halland: Yeah, I think peptides are great. There's obviously some regulatory stuff happening right now. I think a large part of that came because of the whole semaglutide and a lot of the GLP-1 peptides in the market to help people lose weight. I think, biohacking is meant to be an adjunct in my opinion. It's not meant to take too much of a shortcut. That implies a shortcut. I think that's important. But like, for example, with let's take like semaglutide, there are people who probably shouldn't have been on it and they just wanted to lose a little extra weight. That's diet and exercise. So I would say there's some aspects where I really do believe in trued and tried methods.

0:36:18.3 Dr. Halland: Like peptides, I think, straddle that gray zone, not that because I think they're bad but I think some people might overuse peptides when they could actually just do something else. Now, to some degree, if you're trying to recover because you're working really hard, you're training really hard and you need that extra boost to help your body produce let's say more growth hormone, testosterone, etc, I'm not against it. I would say peptides, that's not an area that I focus on, I focus on different aspects of functional medicine, regenerative medicine, but I definitely respect the area of peptides and I know that there's a lot of people who really enjoy it. And I think there's great clinical efficacy.

0:36:56.4 Paul F. Austin: And I think just in the last few weeks, the FDA is really cracking down on peptides.

0:37:00.8 Dr. Halland: Yeah, they really did. For whatever reason that it became on their radar...

0:37:05.7 Paul F. Austin: I think with Ozempic and the semaglutide.

0:37:08.2 Dr. Halland: Yeah, exactly. And I get it because I think there were probably compound pharmacies making versions of it, copies of it. And obviously, that's not always great for big pharma. They want them to only have their version. So fine, I respect that. And I think because of that and then the FDA then said, "Hey, look, well, what else is being done?" That might not always be the best way to do it. Now, who knows? I think there's many sides to that debate. That's kind of why to some degree, I didn't choose to really focus on peptides and I really focus on more like the things like NAD. Obviously, many things that we do from a functional medicine standpoint, I'm a very big believer of detoxing your body. So heavy metal detoxing, environmental detox, because that alone can achieve so many effects that peptides may not be able to do on its own. I had high mercury and arsenic levels, like I was mentioning...

0:37:56.6 Paul F. Austin: Was that just from eating a lot of fish or from...

0:37:58.5 Dr. Halland: Yeah, fish. The arsenic came from basically plants that were absorbing it. For example, rice is a super common source of arsenic because of the way it's grown in certain soils in certain states. So, that's just stuff like when I... I actually detoxed my levels, it was like I had a profound, like more than 60, 70% reduction in my heavy metals, I felt great. My energy levels felt higher, my clarity felt better. So it's like these are things that again, it's back to the subtleties, everyone knows we should probably do detoxing, we just don't do it 'cause if we don't believe it, it's again... It's one thing to know it, it's one thing to believe it. And then after you believe it, it's one thing to do it.

0:38:39.9 Paul F. Austin: What is the protocol for heavy metal detoxing? What does it look like?

0:38:42.5 Dr. Halland: So there's several ways you can do it. There's a lot of great oral supplementation programs out there. Most of them, I think the good ones take three to six months. I did a three-monther. I'm now doing like a four, six-monther one 'cause I just felt so good. And so it just uses a combination of pills. And there's like so many, like I actually have to take more than like 10 a day. And it varies every month. But the gist of it is this, it takes time to pull the heavy metals out of your tissue. So a lot of people have heard about IV chelation.

0:39:08.8 Dr. Halland: I'm not really the biggest fan on that because it's too much, too fast, too soon, and you don't really pull it out. I feel it's like more of a superficial detox. Whereas if you actually go deeper into the tissue and you actually then pull it out of the tissue, have it secreted out in the bile duct, bind it, it's a process, right? So it's like you're prepping for a marathon. I always say real heavy metal detox is like preparing for a marathon versus IV chelation is just more of an Olympic sprint, right? I mean, they're both beneficial. But from my personal experience and also from what I've seen with my clients, they get really good benefits if you do it low and slow.

0:39:47.7 Paul F. Austin: And I'm noticing that's a common thread in our conversation, right? Sustainability over the quick fix.

0:39:54.5 Dr. Halland: Yep.

0:39:55.3 Paul F. Austin: And how we're really changing ourselves for the long term and not just looking for the next thing that might fix us quick or be the silver bullet. Undoubtedly in longevity with NAD+, with peptides, with stem cells, exosomes, there are a lot of tools that are becoming available and they, I think, are tertiary compared to these fundamentals that we can continue to come back to around sleep, diet, exercise, relationships, even sunlight, sex, right? All of these sort of fundamental human things. The stem cells, the exosomes, the NAD+, great add-ons, but they shouldn't be necessarily the central. Just like supplements shouldn't be the central thing. Right?

0:40:37.1 Dr. Halland: Yeah, it's all part of the program. I have a saying that I'll say, it's gotta be practical, it's gotta be effective. You have to build a program around it. And when you start thinking of these three things, something I also like to always say, it's like the answers are in the questions. And so what we need to then ask ourselves are better questions. What are some things that actually then produce the energy we're looking for, create the clarity that we need? And so when you actually start circling around it, it comes, again, back to the nuance.

0:41:03.8 Dr. Halland: If sleep's the most important thing, what do I need to do about sleep? And giving the answer of eight hours of sleep, well, that might not be it, right? It really comes down to, again, how do I get enough sleep that actually will then create more deep sleep? So now that we have a better question, we got a better answer. I need more deep sleep. The deep sleep is actually what my body needs to repair my hormone levels, decrease my inflammation in my brain.

0:41:26.0 Paul F. Austin: So a couple of days ago I interviewed Aubrey de Grey, who is a scientist and researcher who looks a lot at, initially I think it was mitochondria and free radicals and now he's getting and has been pretty deep into medical rejuvenation therapies. And he coined this term longevity escape velocity. You're familiar with the...

0:41:47.3 Dr. Halland: Yeah. He has like the SENS institute that...

0:41:50.3 Paul F. Austin: Right. So we haven't gotten that deep into it in this conversation yet, but I wanna like start to open this up. When we think about longevity, when we think about living longer, sometimes the question is, will we be able to live forever? I mentioned the word immortal with Aubrey and he's like, "I hate that word, I don't ever use it," like irrelevant. I interviewed Christian Angermayer a few months ago, and we were also talking about longevity and living longer. And he made the point, it's not a matter of not dying, it's a matter of choosing when you get to die.

0:42:27.5 Paul F. Austin: And he thinks, just like Aubrey does, that maybe in the next 10 to 15 years that we'll sort of cross that path and be able to live longer and longer. What are your general thoughts about longevity, lifespan? Do you think that will become more accessible, more available, more possible in the next 10 to 15 years? Or do you think this is just another sort of iteration of the human pursuit of the philosopher stone, which has proved to be fruitless for the last 1000, 2000, 3000, 4000, years?

0:43:04.5 Dr. Halland: A term that's very popular these days is healthspan. And so healthspan basically means the number of years you have quality health. So unlike lifespan, lifespan's the duration of your years, healthspan is the number of quality years. And I'm a very big fan of quality over quantity. Do we need people to be living to 150, 200 years old? I mean, that's, again, a philosophical question on how long you wanna be on this earth. But I would say universally, most people would agree you would probably want to spend a majority, if not all of your years, in good health. And then towards the end of your life, it's more of a rapid decline. You know? 'Cause I think what we see now in the nursing home setting, it's actually quite sad.

0:43:44.3 Dr. Halland: There's a lot of lifespan but not healthspan. So there's a lot of chronic suffering. So from my perspective, I think, can we extend life? I think that's one aspect of the thing. Maybe you can extend the life, but the quality of it is not that good. I think what's gonna happen is the quality of life is going to increase, right? Because it's gonna be, if someone's working out, eating right, they're doing all these things that might be cellularly helpful or rejuvenating certain aspects of their mitochondria, I think that's going to definitely lead to some longer life. But I think the idea of like having more disease and problems that are chronic will be less.

0:44:17.6 Dr. Halland: And so maybe on the philosophical level of this, the real problem of living to 200 years old is do we have enough resources for it? Does the person who even lives to that long, is he gonna be working when he is 102 to sustain his lifestyle when he is 180? These are like, again, fundamental things that I think will become more of a problem. So I think when you think about healthspan, something that's at least a real more direct correlation is that the more someone spends their life in healthy healthspan, the less of a burden they are, let's say, in terms of financial resources, right? 'Cause if you're 80 and you have disease for 20 years, most of the healthcare dollars are spent towards that end of life care.

0:44:58.9 Paul F. Austin: Exactly.

0:45:00.2 Dr. Halland: And so you kind of don't want people living to 200 and of the 200 years, 40 of those years were like chronic medical care, right? Debilitated and things like that. And again, this is all postulating but I would say that's just sort of exaggerating out like what the possible scenario will be. I would hope that what we focus on is more healthspan. I like the idea of living longer, as long as it's quality, right? And as long there's enough resources to sustain that.

0:45:28.4 Paul F. Austin: I read a book recently about this sort of fear of dying that we have in Western culture. And so it talked a lot about, it's written by this guy Stephen Jenkinson who spent a long time in nursing homes and elderly care. And so the book is all about how much people are scared of sort of crossing the other side. And so what's interesting about psychedelics is they often, especially with the clinical research coming out of places like NYU for end of life anxiety, these high dose psilocybin experiences allow people to relax a little bit more into it and not try to extend lifespan, even if the health during that time is awful. Right?

0:46:08.4 Paul F. Austin: And so I think there is this sense of no matter where it plays out, whether it's how do we extend lifespan to 200, or how do we just help people towards the end of life accept the inevitable, it feels like there is this recurrent thing of wanting to live longer without really paying a lot of attention to the quality of health, as you've mentioned. And so I think the sort of the ultimate is, as we were talking about how could we have the health and vitality of our 20s potentially 'till we're 150, 170, 200, and so I'm curious from your perspective, what advances from a scientific perspective have made this possible whereas it wasn't possible a 100 years ago, 200 years ago, 300 years ago, why now? Why science? Why are we now having this conversation about living 'till 200 in a very legitimate and possible way?

0:47:08.1 Dr. Halland: I think it comes down to testing and having the right set of data. We didn't really have the type of tests we do now. Even like 10 years ago when functional medicine, like let's say a gut microbiome test, it was pretty limited. You didn't really know how to interpret the results or there wasn't enough of a sample size to really make a lot of... Well, to some aspects, good interpretation data. So I think the fact that there's more data, more testing available, that makes a big difference. The fact that there are more therapeutics now that you can actually use to treat certain things, like increase your mitochondria function, improve sleep, I think those are all things that allow us to actually search for that innovation.

0:47:46.7 Dr. Halland: I think with technology really advancing as fast as it has, that's probably why this pursuit is now possible. Like anything, right? It's like look at space travel and electric cars. It wasn't like electric cars were a new thing, right? But then Tesla kind of really changed the game, right? They said, "Hey, we're gonna make it a really amazing experience." The battery is ultra long life, the car has a very nice digital interface. And that really made a difference in terms of like, hey, people enjoy Teslas over other EVs. I'm sure other EVs are really great too, but I think Tesla did make a name for themselves in that.

0:48:19.5 Paul F. Austin: Do you drive a Tesla?

0:48:21.4 Dr. Halland: No, I don't drive a Tesla, but when I do drive...

0:48:23.4 Paul F. Austin: Do you drive an Audi?

0:48:25.7 Dr. Halland: No, I have a... One of my past cars was a BMW and then I have a gas guzzler Land Rover. But...

0:48:32.7 Paul F. Austin: Oh, nice. All right. Land Rovers are great.

0:48:35.2 Dr. Halland: Yeah. But I wouldn't mind an electric version of that if they put a Tesla battery in it.

0:48:38.4 Paul F. Austin: They're coming out. I just... I was at a conference last week, there'll be a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter van that's electric.

0:48:43.4 Dr. Halland: Oh, I see. I would like that. Yeah, I did pre-order a Tesla truck. I do want the...

0:48:48.4 Paul F. Austin: Oooh, the Cybertruck.

0:48:49.1 Dr. Halland: I do want a Cybertruck.

0:48:50.5 Paul F. Austin: That's cool. That's very cool. I've had a Tesla for the last few years. It's fast as hell and it's fun to drive.

0:48:55.3 Dr. Halland: It's a fun experience. I think it all comes down to user experience at the end of the day, and maybe that's why we all wanna live longer. We all wanna have better experiences, right?

0:49:04.8 Paul F. Austin: Yeah. More rich experiences. And it is a very life affirming thing, right? A lot of us who are in this longevity conversation, in the psychedelic conversation, we enjoy life to such a degree, most of the time. There are periods of stress and difficulty, but most of the time that we're like how do we continue to play in this way and explore it because it just is what we know and what we love, and how we want to be around.

0:49:26.8 Dr. Halland: I think the community's a big component of it, right? So when you think about living longer, I think what happened in the fitness community is massive. I would say, let's go back to 2010, quite a bit ago. Fitness community back then is nowhere where it is now. Everything's... You have so many new organizations that popped up and things that became popular, like Spartan and all that, and those type of races. And so when you think about what longevity is doing now, it's like the preventative medicine thing never became a community.

0:49:57.1 Dr. Halland: No one's like, "Hey guys, I'm in the not smoking club and don't drink club." It's just, because like really, even when we're taught preventative medicine in medical school, or if you're going through residency, it's like okay, healthy diet, don't drink or drink certain amount and no smoking. It becomes... It's literally a one line question in the medical history and physical. But beyond that, it's not much there. And so when you think about where... I mean, aging was only recently recognized as a disease by the World Health Organization as of last year in 2022.

0:50:29.9 Paul F. Austin: Wow.

0:50:30.4 Dr. Halland: So it took that long to say, "Hey guys, we believe aging is a disease." So, at least in my opinion, there should be a residency in that, a training or some sort of fellowship program in that, because really aging is the absence of disease. And because medicine's not taught, what do you do in the absence of disease? There is no specialty for it. The specialty of medicine is treating disease. And so I think that's why we have this community where it's about longevity, anti-aging, peak performance. And it does... It's very medical based, right? You're actually, you're working with people's physiology, but that's actually why I think it's really gone to more of a consumer front where people are empowering themselves, you have a lot of great technology that are very direct to consumer products.

0:51:15.3 Paul F. Austin: Exactly. Well, Dr. Halland, this has been informative, it's been insightful, super interesting. I just appreciate you sitting down with us at the conference to share so much of your thoughts and wisdom. Any final parting words on longevity, functional medicine and healthspan?

0:51:38.3 Dr. Halland: Yeah. I really believe that longevity is a mindset. So like I mentioned before, we have some masterclass type of content. If your audience wants to check it out, we'll go ahead and put something special for them. They can always reach out to us on Instagram and we'll probably put some links there. So if they're searching for that, or if you can put something in your show notes...

0:51:57.7 Paul F. Austin: We can put something in the show notes. Absolutely.

0:52:00.3 Dr. Halland: Yeah, that'd be great. I'm a really big believer of it because I, again, with the tie into psychedelics, I think everything starts at the nucleus of where your heart and mind are. And so when you actually get into alignment with that, everything else that you do for your body then follows naturally in suit.

0:52:15.6 Paul F. Austin: It's getting back in touch with that deeper intuition. Right?

0:52:18.5 Dr. Halland: Correct.

0:52:19.6 Paul F. Austin: And balancing that with data that can help to create the structure necessary.

0:52:22.0 Dr. Halland: Yeah. I think the good news about technology is it brings us very far in advance into things. The bad news about technology is that maybe it disconnects us far from ourselves. And so what I hope to do is to teach people how to reconnect with themselves and use the power of their mind to help improve their physiology.

0:52:42.3 Paul F. Austin: I love it, thank you, Doctor.

0:52:43.4 Dr. Halland: Of course. Thank you so much.

0:52:50.4 Paul F. Austin: Hey, listeners, Paul here. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Dr. Halland. Remember to follow the link in the show notes to dive deeper into this episode. You can subscribe or follow the podcast to get episodes like this each week. Leave us a review and continue on this journey with us. As always, thanks for listening. Until next time.