018- Nick Engerer PhD: Biohacking Longevity
Investigation into the mysteries of longevity is not just for academic medical researchers. Biohackers and citizen scientists can provide a fresh perspective on medical problems that may be overlooked by established researchers.
Dr Engerer is a longevity writer and self confessed biohacker. He earned a master’s degree from the University of Oklahoma and a PhD from the Australian National University, where he went on to be a lecturer until 2019.
Dr Engerer has a passion for helping others leverage technology to maximize their performance and prevent disease. He has collaborated with some large anti-aging businesses such as Human Longevity Inc and NextHealth LA. He is currently assisting Do Not Age with their next generation biological age testing.
https://www.nickengerer.org/
https://donotage.org/
At 15:00 we offered to link in the description to his interview with Joe Cohen at Self-Decode:
At 17:00 as we discuss epigenetics, Nick mentions this interview with the CSO of Chronomics:
https://www.nickengerer.org/longevity-and-wellness/what-is-the-best-biological-age-test
At 21:20 Nick mentions successfully improving his GlycanAge in a self-experiment, find that here
At 54:00 Nick mentions the NMN self experiment, that can be found here
At 1:04:00 we mentioned the resources page at:
https://www.nickengerer.org/longevity-healthspan-lifespan-resources
#healthlongevitysecrets #longevity #wellness #Ketones #lifestylemedicine #younger #ketosis #biohacking #acetone #RobertLufkinMD #nickengerer #longevityblog #donatage
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TRANSCRIPT:
Robert Lufkin 0:01
Welcome back to the health longevity secrets show and I’m your host, Dr. Robert Lufkin. investigation into the mysteries of longevity is not just for academic researchers, citizen scientists and other bio hackers can provide a fresh perspective on medical problems that established researchers may even overlook. Dr. Nick anger is longevity writer and self professed bio hacker with a Master’s of Science from the University of Oklahoma and a PhD from the Australian National University where he went on to be a lecture until 2019. Dr. Anger has a passion for helping others leverage technology to maximize their performance and prevent disease. He has collaborated with some large anti aging businesses such as human longevity, Inc, and next health LA. He is also currently assisting do not age with their next generation biological age testing. And now, Dr. Nick anger
Hey, Nick, welcome to the show.
Nick Engerer 1:11
Thanks. Thanks very much, Rob. I love that enthusiastic kickoff. This is all about being youthful and vigorous. Let’s go for it to
Robert Lufkin 1:18
keep the energy up. Yeah, I love it. But I’m so excited about talking about longevity. I mean, the great thing about longevity researchers is it’s unlike almost any other group that studied a disease if if we’re willing to admit that aging is a disease and I think we are but that’s a whole nother whole nother conversation. But I’ve I’ve never seen more passion and enthusiasm from the researchers even down to where they try the therapies on themselves. And and that’s a very common thing with longevity researchers and I, I guess if you think about it, it makes sense because unlike cancer researchers or anything else, longevity researchers can all be assured if they live long enough that they will eventually die of the disease. If I figure out something you are. I’m, I’m thrilled to have you on the show. You’re a self professed bio hacker and citizen scientists. And I love speaking especially to people like yourself, and really looking forward to it because you often provide a fresh perspective, looking at this problem that then many times we that entrenched researchers at the ivory towers may sometimes overlook just because they’re they’re kind of in the, you know, caught in the grooves of the traditions and the accepted philosophy. So I’m, I can’t wait, can’t wait to get into this. And so maybe just to start off. How When did you When did you know you wanted to focus on longevity? I mean, you’re not that all right now. So what happened?
Nick Engerer 3:08
looking young? Keep it keeping it looking good here. Yes, I’m 35. And, to be to be honest, I’ve always been interested in Yeah. I like I’ve always been interested in health as as a hobby, and something I’m focused. And in fact, I like to tell the story of when I was homeschooled one year in fifth grade. And my I was allowed to add one subject that many subjects I wanted, it could have been anything, I could have done pottery classes, you know, whatever I wanted. And I chose a health class, I wanted to do a health book and learn about the human body and learn how to change my diet and look after myself. And that was, you know, very early representation of my interest in the subject. But that didn’t come through for me in a powerful way until my late 20s. Actually, when I had three important people in my life, get cancer in the same year, all in their late 20s. All very close to the same age as me. And one of those was my wife, and she was actually diagnosed with appendix cancer 30 minutes after my son was born through seseri intersection. So you know, peak blow is a wild ride there. And I’ve been there right next to her, she’s gone through some pretty extreme treatments. And the same thing for this two other friends and all three of them, thankfully are here with us today in remission, but that encounter with mortality really got me thinking at a young age around what can we do to engage with this ever present risk that we have in the background of this medical diagnosis, that fear that you might end up with cancer and up with another age related disease and that stuck out to me is those those instances have experienced that in my personal life or were very profound. But as I started to get interested in this space, recover from that period of stress of going through that I started to realize there’s a lot of technologies around to enable proactive screening for health conditions of all types. And that there’s a big trend going on now that I’m sure we’ll get to talk a bit about today, with proactive healthcare technologies, being able to pick up diseases early on earlier, the costs and berries of those coming down further and further. And that that Nexus, that those two competing trends really caught my interest. And so I started experimenting with some of this stuff, some of this stuff myself, and of course, then you start wanting to share it, because I mean, it’s so incredible what you can do.
Robert Lufkin 5:35
Yeah, well, I, obviously you you, you have the longevity blog, which, which I love. And we’ll have the link to that in the show notes. And I love the motto for it. Stick around. It’s good. But great things in the longevity blog, I look, I look forward to reading it every time I do. What be maybe just stepping back, how do you view longevity? What is what is your concept of longevity?
Nick Engerer 6:05
You know, I’m also a scientist, you know, you’re talking earlier at the opening around the need for non researchers and non scientists and non medical professionals to come into the space. And so while my background is not in medical science, I come to this thinking with a scientific view. And I find it really interesting that we have an increasing availability of ways to test our own body to gather data on our own body, and then form a view of how we interact with our health and specifically our longevity with that information. And when I think about longevity, as a problem space, as something that we want to engage with and maximize and improve as an individual. One of the really, really, really striking parts about it is that there’s simply so much that one can do. There’s there’s so many pathways, there’s so many influencers sharing the latest biohack there’s so many different diseases that might end up afflicting you that it’s simply overwhelming to try to engage with all of them. And it’s not possible. And so how do we really simplify that. And I like to think about it in terms of developing a strategy and a personalized strategy. And it’s something that I’m working to pull together content for on longevity blog and share through various various social media channels, my own experience of doing that, and trying to help others do the same. And I’ll give you a specific example about how to think about this. And this is really again against that specter of all the things that you can think about, that could be a risk for your longevity, there’s simply just so many so how do you go and engage with that in a meaningful way? Well, we can we can do a number of different exercises to actually personalize your risk. The most simple example is doing a family health questionnaire. What did your grandfather and your grandmother on both sides of your family what age related diseases did they experience? What about your parents, aunts and uncles, you get to be able to for free with a bit of work but elbow grease, fill out a picture of what diseases are present in your family. And that is a free easy way to start get a picture of getting a picture on your own health so you can take your doctor and start that discussion and see ahead of time that you know there’s early heart disease in my family, what am I going to do about that or there’s early onset Alzheimer’s in my family? What am I going to do about that and bringing it back to the things that are personalized risk elements in your own genetics which is also tools for that we can talk about that simplifies the picture down to some first actions that you can start take in some targeted ways to engage with this big problem space of how do I look after my longevity so that’s the way I engage it. And then of course, there’s all sorts of different tools along the way you can use and we tend to people tend to start at the optimizing end of the spear thinking about I’m going to measure my biological age and I’m going to take an ad booster and start popping supplements but really the work needs to come all the way back to the fundamentals first before you’re really ready to do that and I think that gets lost in the constant sell sell sell marketing space I also like to confront that challenge and help people navigate it
Robert Lufkin 9:14
yeah that’s such a good good point Nick that yeah it’s one thing to talk about longevity and and do the wrap Of Mice and then reverse Vera trawl but we all need to first look at our risk factors because we can boost our longevity with one thing and then get hit with a train with a cancer diagnosis is something else because we didn’t you know, get our colon screening or something. So it’s your your absolutely I totally agree with you. That’s a great concept at first, sort of take care of our particular personalized risk factors. And and you mentioned you mentioned your the screening that you’ve had done or you’ve talked about it in your blog for that medical imaging screening. You mentioned D DNA screening. And and and then the labs also maybe you could talk about that a little bit and how someone would put together that screening profile for themselves?
Nick Engerer 10:10
That’s a great question. And that’s actually part of my own obsession is trying to figure this out. So there, there’s so many tools at our disposal that we need to start again with that simplifying lens that brings the scope down. And I’ve played around with a lot of different technologies, some of which are a few $1,000, some of which are less than 100 bucks. And I tried to put together some examples of how to use these different tests, or different blood screens or biological age estimates to really formulate a way of creating self experiments that show what works for yourself. But even that’s a bit advanced. So how do we really bring this back to the basics, moving beyond that family health questionnaire, the place that I’m increasingly looking to, is actually my own genetics. And so now there’s really been a big spike in the development and the capability of analyzing the genome. And it hasn’t always been that way over the last 10 years, genetics and genetic analysis, single nucleotide polymorphisms, or snips and looking at individual ones of those to try to create genetic reports, there’s been a lot of missed opportunities. And there’s a bit of bit of been a bit of marketing hype selling these genetic reports that really end up not being super relevant to an individual or useful in their life beyond a few very specific disease risk. snips like the AP gene that has relations to Alzheimer’s disease, or the bracket gene, which relates to both breast and prostate cancer, there are not many single parts of the genome that we can look at to give us insightful information. But what’s happening is that computational resources and machine learning and data science are coming together with genetic information that’s being studied. Amazing numbers of studies being published every day about genetic variants and their connections to different populations and risks. And these things are coming together in a way where we can not just look at single parts of the genome, but look at hundreds to hundreds of 1000s to millions of parts of the genome and pull together a picture with that, using machine learning and data science approaches. So I just had my friend Joe Cohen, on longevity blog, and we talked about this, specifically through the lens of longevity and trying to think, Okay, how can we use this really powerful stuff that you guys are doing with your team itself to code 60 plus scientists and data machine learning data science folks who are really moving the needle on the capability of genetic analysis? And can we take these reports that you’re building and personalizing for your individual users, and actually use them to inform our longevity strategy? And through my own testing, and looking at this, I think the answer has finally become Yes, because what they’ve been able to do with the advances in the science is able to personalize analysis, and personalized suggestions based on not just a few points in the genome, but hundreds of 1000s to millions pulling together a picture. So now we can look at an individual and say, not just from something as simple as a family health questionnaire, well, that’s free and easy to do. But something as detailed as Okay, here’s your genome. And here are the specific diseases we can connect your risk to, for cardiovascular disease, or for neurodegenerative disease, or for metabolic disease. And these are the age related diseases. So if you can pull out these reports, and know, you know, my risk is moderate for metabolic disease, and I’m very unlikely to be overweight. As an example, however, my cardiovascular risk is elevated, and I have a tendency to have elevated levels of LDL cholesterol, or I find I have an LPA variant that gives me high levels of lipoprotein A, which is known to be linked to early cardiovascular events, this type of information can come out of the genome now, and we can look at that and you can use it as a simplifying lens and the overwhelming space of all the things we can do. And know I want to work toward avoiding this age related disease. And I want to start doing that 10 to 20 years ahead of time, if you’re someone as young as me, or even five years ahead of time, if you’re somebody who’s a bit older, this if you haven’t had the disease that you can still see that risk coming. And you can start being proactive in changing your lifestyle in a specific way. And not just a specific way but a targeted one that’s informed well, so I think the genome through efforts like self to code and I’m sure other companies will come along and catch up to that space because they’re really moving the needle, like I said,
Robert Lufkin 14:38
and with self make without excuse me, yeah, with self decode. Let me underscore that a little bit. Joe Cohen and self decode is the company we’ll put the we’ll put that in the show notes and they’re using machine learning to look at basically, snips and the massive amounts of data that we’re getting now from that. Just as curious,
Nick Engerer 14:59
I can link to The interview that I did with him, that’d be really nice. Yeah, Marie have the longevity potentials now.
Robert Lufkin 15:04
Yeah, that’s a great, great piece. And that I’m wondering, the the genome is is very important in influencing our risk for disease. And I’m wondering, have they started? Are you aware of any other companies that are looking at the epi genome for doing machine learning of the same thing with, you know, methylation clocks, that sort of thing, or even, even glycosylation clocks? Like, I know, you talked to Gordon louds. And he’s, we’ve spoke with him on the program to for the blind cans as well. But I wonder, seems like the same thing could be applied from what Joe’s doing with the genome to the epi genome, or the proteomic clock with the glycans as well.
Nick Engerer 15:49
Yes. And in fact, this is where things are going now. And the epigenetic understanding in science is really accelerated over the last five years, again, because of the ability to sequence and be able to do the types of real in depth analysis to pull the data out of the epigenome which is changing over time, which is responding to the environment. And again, for the listeners who like to be refreshed on that the epigenome is basically telling the genome what to do, it tells an individual cell which parts of the genome to use to build that cell, it’s what changes when we give ourselves cold exposure or heat exposure, to adapt the body to those things. It’s what responds to exercise, it is what’s changing as you age to express the aging phenotype. So that Yep, epigenome is really, really important. And what’s happening in that space is, is a bit behind, you could say it’s 10 years behind genome sequencing, and that we’re still connecting what’s happening in the genome to outcomes. And so I’ve spoken with the CSO of credit omix, which is one of the leading companies in epigenetic analysis with their CEO, CFO, Danny, I interviewed him talking about how they make biological age estimates using the EPA genome. But I’ve had a number of other informal conversations with him around, okay, we get in biological age number, but how do we know what our genome is saying, to then advise what we should do to improve that biological age. And the fact is that the data is not there yet, the science isn’t there yet to say this is what the epigenome is showing us. This is what you need to change to be more youthful or to solve a given problem. It is there with a few areas, maybe alcohol intake with air pollution, but we’re still needing to bring along the understanding of the epigenome which will happen given the union of computational power and data in the sequencing coming out of the epigenome. And we’ll start to have information around what we should do to improve the expression of the EPA genome. And again, it’s extra challenging because it’s behaving differently in different tissues in the body, because that’s part of its job. So it’s an even thorny er problem than simple genetic analysis, but it will increasingly inform us on our health journey, particularly our longevity journey, as it’s becoming central to understanding some of the aging process itself. So when we look at size experiments with Yamanaka factors and changing what a cell actually expresses itself to be, we’re talking about changing the epigenome, we’re talking about resetting a cell back to a youthful state by altering and re expressing the EPA genome so it holds great promise for cure for treating diseases and also informing our health journey. I expect we’re going to be there in the next five years
Robert Lufkin 18:36
yeah that’s so exciting with the Yamanaka factors and Dave Sinclair’s paper on the on the mouse visual acuity changes with that this year that came out and and certainly the the biological clock see you know, with Steve Horvath famously starting off with the DNA methylation clocks and then his first generation clock was was really good at biological age but and chronological age really which matched up which is pretty much just good for forensics, but the the you know, you could tell the age of the corpse or something but you don’t really need to tell my or your age, we can just go look at our driver’s license that way but, but biological clocks like the second generation clock, like his grim age, which didn’t tell your chronological age, but showed your biological age based on the risk factors like you’re talking about and other things that they could pull off in the DNA methylation, but even that seems to be nuanced. You know, with Morgan Levine and some of the others from Yale and other places, they’re, they’re finding that depending on what you train it on, the clock is going to be biased towards cardiovascular risk or dementia risk or other risks like that. So we have we have a lot long way to go, but it’s certainly an exciting time. We just had gilina Buddha skya on They’re on the program with from two h where they have a $99 consumer version of a of a methylation clock. It’s available. But obviously we’re just at the beginning of this area. So, so
Nick Engerer 20:15
one of the areas I’m really interested in Robert, if I can add a few things there, and yeah, please is the challenge that, like Dr. Levine has talked about. I’ve watched several of her lectures and they’ve done some great collaboration with National University of Singapore talking about biological age clocks. And what are we doing because really what we’re what’s happening biological age clocks is trying to express risks in the mortality space over time, you know, you get a biological age, which actually represents your risk for a disease outcome. And you use the inputs that might be your blood work, it might be your glycans, it might be your EPA genome, I’m sure we’ll see other ways of doing this, it might be your telomeres, and you pull that together, and you get a number at the end. That number at the end is nice for a consumer because it’s a nice, easy story. But what’s more interesting to me and where I think we’re going in the future, this connects to the previous little bit of discussion we had around the epigenome is increasing dissection of those results to give useful information. So you mentioned Gordon lock from glycan age, I’ve also interviewed him and collaborating with like an agent actually just successfully improved Mike, like in age, he was on 35, it was 30, I got it to be 24. Now, by eating in a diversity of plants in my diet, so being able to use these tools to improve an age result ultimately does seem to suggest an improved health outcome. But what’s really interesting about the glycan age product is they actually break it down into three indices, which represent it as one that represents youthful glycans, there’s one that represents inflammatory glycans that are not good for you. And you can actually look at this index and see where you improved and trying an intervention. And then seeing the results or trying to self experiment, as I like to call it and seeing the result. And then you can start to, when you start to break down that result beyond just an age, you start to see okay, I’ve increased my performance by reducing the number of inflammatory glycans in my body, which are causing chronic inflammation, and increasing the number of good glycans on my body, what you’re saying to the rest of the body is systemically toned down inflammation, you don’t need to be inflamed, the immune system can be chilled out right now. And that’s better for your longevity. So these details behind the indices are what are becoming valuable. And it is challenging that there’s a lot of marketing a lot of different biological age tests out there. But I’ve now successfully twice use biological age to inform that my own biology that hey, what I just tried to work, it improved an overall picture of my health that’s reflected in the biological age number. So in that way, for the everyday wellness warrior and bio hacker, they can be valuable if you control an experiment where you just change one or two things at a time. And maybe we can talk about that. If you don’t do that, you won’t know the answer, but they can be valuable if you use them in a targeted way.
Robert Lufkin 23:02
Well, they’re so exciting. I mean, the kinds of things that you’re doing and we had Luzzi, ironic on the show, she’s at Stanford using low carb diets to reverse biological DNA methylation clocks, as your specialty and Kara Fitzgerald has done a similar trial. The one question that that kind of pops up still, is we have a beautiful marker for aging, and we’re able to reverse it with lifestyle interventions or you know, any number of things. The question then becomes, is the biological marker primary or is a secondary? In other words, I live in Los Angeles, you know, people have wrinkles, it’s a biological marker. The older they get, they get more wrinkles. Well, they can take something called Botox, and they can reverse the wrinkle clock. But, you know, it doesn’t
Nick Engerer 23:56
just me I’m interested. you’re approaching the aesthetic age is different than the biological age, how old do you look? versus how old are you inside for a given measure? We want to optimize for all these things.
Robert Lufkin 24:07
Yeah, no, exactly. And then the question is, do we if we reverse DNA methylation? Have we reversed our risk of aging? I we know that the biological age is is associated with our risk of of these chronic diseases, but if we reverse it does that, does that change things but I think Dave’s paper with with the Yamanaka factors reversing, you know, dialing back the DNA methylation on the mice, at least showed a functional improvement with that. So I mean, it’s a really exciting time, but go ahead. Yeah, you were you were about to expand on that a little bit. And
Nick Engerer 24:47
I think what you’re saying is important and they didn’t cut you off. Don’t worry, Rob. It’s what you’re saying is important because we got to get this out there for the consumer. There’s a lot of different biological age tests. They will give you A result that comes out of a model that is trained that has some value with its absolute value. Meaning, if you get a number that says you’re 40 years old, and you’re 50, you’re biologically younger on that metric, which is probably better than your peer who is 50, but gets a biological age of 60. So there’s some merit to the absolute value here. But what’s more interesting to me, and I’ve talked to Professor lolcat, quite an age about this is that changing our biological age for our individual number, the relative number, taking it from a value where it started to a lower value is indicative of making a positive health change wherever that model is trained. So for glycans for glycan age is the overall inflammation, your body. And we’re not talking about a single marker like C reactive protein, which is are a number of other things like homocysteine, or a few things you can do blood borne markers on, we’re talking about 24 different glycans that track and tag the individual molecules that we’re talking on the body to tell the immune system what to do, before any of those markers go up. So getting into that detail and knowing what you’re trying to change which biological age test you’re using, and what it represents is important, and then trying to implement a positive change to that number. And testing again, some months later. And knowing how long that marker takes to change with glycan age, it can change in just three months, with an epigenetic age, it might take six to 12 months. So understanding the set the science and tech behind the biological age tool that you’re going to use is part of what I try to communicate them longevity blog and make accessible for the audience. Because there’s a lot of marketing in there, you might think biological age is biological age. But no, it’s actually different. If you use your telomeres, if you use your epigenome, if you use your blood, if you use your glide cams, they all are a little bit different. And they’re not giving you an actual picture of your true biological age, they’re giving you a number based on a model that’s trained for that datatype, which does give you some information about where you sit relative to your peers. And your overall risk profile, higher age, higher mortality risk, lower age lower, but more importantly is how can you change that number by trying an intervention, trying to supplement trying a diet change, trying to start exercising, losing some weight, measuring it again, and then being able to say, hey, that worked for me. And I can see that in this number improving. And now I know that needs to be a part of my stack, I need to keep going that that was a good thing for me and my biology. That’s what’s the most valuable thing about this. And I think it’s also one other thing I’ll add there’s don’t get caught up in calling it reversing biological aging reversing age, there, there are different biological ages being misconstrued as something that’s saying, if you improve it, you’ve reversed your age No, you have improved your risk, because at age has gone lower. And that’s a great thing. But we’re not at a point, we’re at a point where we can reverse biological age, in terms of turning that number down with interventions. We’re not at the point where we can systematically say this body is rejuvenated and younger than it was at a whole level. And we’re simply not there yet. And I think that’s where some of the scientists get bit upset about discussing biological age, but they missed the point. The point is we have a new metric, a couple new metrics that we can use to run some experiments and improve the longevity outcomes for our body, which is fantastic.
Robert Lufkin 28:31
Yeah, no, that’s a great point. Let’s let’s set the reversing. Aging aside till we get to rapamycin a little bit later. But before we leave biological clocks, I wanted to get what’s your take on several several people, several authors have experienced with biological clocks when they when they especially in particular, DNA methylation, clocks, epigenetic clocks, when they’ve measured, extreme athletes, they’ve noticed sort of abnormally, or rather than shortening of their age they’ve they’ve noticed lengthening of their age. have you encountered that at all? Or?
Nick Engerer 29:12
Yes, yeah. In fact, glycan age is a great example of this. And I’ve spoke with Professor Locke about that. And it’s very interesting to me, because look, I am convinced far and away the best, the most powerful longevity drug you can take right now is exercise. Now exercise is an interesting drug, and that it’s doses are widely Varia. And they’re highly personalized. And I, I’ve actually, since I did a deep dive on exercise and its profound benefits for longevity. I decided that I wanted to really up my fitness game, and, and I actually became a triathlete. So now I’m training for triathlons. And it’s been a huge change for my body. I’ve seen so many positive things that have resulted from that, but I know that I’m that curve. of him going from being sedentary to being an exerciser, and my risk is going lower that there’s a so called j shaped curve, which is well known in the sports medicine industry, that once you exercise too much, you start increasing your risk, particularly for health conditions like atrial fibrillation in the heart, where your larger heart chambers and your heart gets some scar tissue in there that electrical signals don’t shoot right through it correctly anymore. There’s risks that athletes face. And really, it’s because when it comes down to a real true athlete, these these individuals are pushing their body so hard day after day after day. And it’s one of the reasons they can’t keep doing it once they hit 35 or 40 years old, because the they’re the evolutionary pressures of adaptation are decreasing as you age, and their body just can’t adapt to the training as much anymore. So why would an athlete end up with a worse overall health score for a biological age measurement with something like glycan age, for example, it’s measuring inflammation in the body. And exercise produces a profound amount of damage and inflammation in the body that the body that needs to recover to become stronger. But over time, continuing to push your body really, really hard, like a professional athlete does, isn’t actually probably good for longevity, in terms of really looking at your body in a balanced way. I don’t know where the bottom of that curve is. But it’s somewhere around 415 intensity minutes of exercise a week, according to a big cohort studies. So there’s, you can do a lot of exercise. And you should, because it’s a really good drug and it keeps improving your health outcomes. But professional athletes are on the far end of that. And this is why we see, you know, decreased benefit to high levels of really intense exercise, it’s just simply too hard on the body for it to recover all the way.
Robert Lufkin 31:56
Yeah, I wonder if that’s a that’s a great point. I wonder if that’s similar to the effect with, you know, like you mentioned with inflammation, but also with with stress that, in other words, chronic stress is very harmful raises our cortisol levels, all sorts of problems, but acute stress is actually beneficial, you know, hormesis, ice baths, saunas, and even, you know, the acute stress of exercise, I wonder if the acute inflammation from short amounts of exercise is a positive thing and acute inflammation. For you know, the body responding to infectious infections is valuable, but it’s just the chronic low grade inflammation, inflammation, that that can be the problem, you know, and so if that little bits are good, but but chronically turned on all the time is a bad thing maybe correct. And
Nick Engerer 32:48
let’s be very clear, this does not mean exercise is bad for you, and that when your muscles are sore, or you’re working hard, you’re not doing a great thing for your body, pretty much at any age, you need to think about how well you can recover and be attached to your body and take it slow because the body particularly the older you are, the slower your body adapts. But just because athletes who train 40 hours a week don’t have improved health outcomes for their biological age or overall inflammation levels is not an excuse not to exercise.
Robert Lufkin 33:19
Absolutely. Well, now that we’re talking about some we’re going into some lifestyle things like exercising, and and the value of that it it needs to be emphasized there. What about since since the three major longevity genes or at least, you know, mtorr and EMP kinase and all are it’s really interesting that they’re also strongly nutrient sensing genes, they respond to nutrients. What about diet? fasting, we hear so much stuff about that, and longevity, what’s your what’s your take on on that is as far as influencing longevity.
Nick Engerer 34:02
Look, this is a this is a fascinating discussion. And once again, when we start talking about diet, we start talking about fasting. We’re really getting onto this question of what will work for you and you need to be able to measure before and after and take that health journey into your own hands to determine whether this thing is working for your health. Let’s take fasting as an example. Fasting refers to many different types of restricting your diet, it might be calorie restriction, eating a fewer number of calories overall, it might be dietary restriction, removing a certain part of your diet. For example, keto diet, the ketogenic diet, it’s an extreme example. It might also be something where you change the times that you’re eating, you might only eat in the evening, you might only for a few hours a day or maybe eight hour window. Fasting fits into all these buckets, and then there’s a course the true fast is a real fast Build all these things have merit where you go for a few days of time, with just some water and electrolyte, maybe a multivitamin. I’ve experimented with all of them. And so I’ve had to go through that experiment and learn for myself what works best for my biology, and do that through testing my bloods, looking at how I feel, what are my energy levels, like, what is my skin look like? And also pulling all that information together and deciding what’s overall doable for myself, you know, I have a son, I have a wife, we have a family we eat together, and how much can I change the diet and mess around with things before, it’s not actually good for my family. So there’s a lot of things to balance in here. Now, coming back to the point, somebody who is extremely overweight, maybe morbidly obese, and really needs to lose some weight. Fasting is a powerful tool for that person, they should absolutely consider it through medical advice in there and have some new watch them along the way. But they might be able to go for extended periods of time and not eat and lose incredible amounts of weight and be okay because their body switches into that ketogenic mode burns the fat for energy, and they lose tremendous amounts of weight. There’s, there’s all sorts of examples in there, there might be just the average person who needs to lose 20 pounds, and they so they decide they’re going to skip breakfast, eat in a smaller window, make sure they’re not overcompensating for missing breakfast by eating more calories at lunch and dinner. But finding that time restricted eating works for them to improve their weight, which we know actually improves things like inflammation in your body will improve your glycan age, if you’re overweight, just prove your biological age just by losing some weight. So it’s a real personalized journey that we have to go on and learn which tools are going to work best for us. I mentioned earlier that I’m now a triathlete, so I wake up and eat and then I eat again, and then I eat again and then I eat again. And it’s because I’m working out two times a day, to adapt my body to be more of an athletic one. Because I’m convinced that over a decade old timescale, the most important thing that my biology can have is better mitochondria, stronger muscles adapted body with great angiogenesis and fresh blood vessels, circulating nutrients and clearing waste throughout my body. There’s all these benefits that I cite for why I’m doing this. Now, that means I’m not necessarily getting the benefits of restricting my calories, which we know does provide longevity benefits. calorie restriction is one of the most powerful tools for actually improving lifespan outcome in primates. And we think that that applies to humans. And we have some evidence that that’s the case. But that’s not the only knob you can turn to improve your longevity, there’s several so you have to try to pick a strategy and implement which one we think is going to work best for you and your biology. And put your cards on the table and place your bets. I’m going down the exercise route, I’ll probably eat less as I get older overall, but now I’m finding that the eating small meals throughout the day is powering exercise, which is making my body stronger, my heart stronger, and leaving me feeling pretty fantastic.
Robert Lufkin 38:11
So So what are the other knobs for longevity? We touched on exercise and, and diet. So what other what are the knobs? can we can we turn there?
Nick Engerer 38:25
Well, when it comes down to something like thinking about your biological age, and thinking about your overall aging factors that are important things you can change, we have diet, we have exercise, we have stress, and we have sleep. So exercise, again, we’ve talked about there, there’s a lot of benefits all the way up to around 450 minutes a week of intense exercise will give you good benefits in your body. We’ve talked a bit about diet and diet against personalized you know, for someone like myself, when I did the ketogenic diet, my cholesterol levels were out of whack my LDL C was too high. My particle count for the lipid proteins was too high. And I looked at that and said, Look ketogenic diets, not the right thing for me, I’m going to come back, pull off that and eventually, I’ve come around to eating low amounts of saturated fat, pretty much eliminating dairy, and still eating red meat still eating fish still eating chicken, still eating some meat, but balancing that out with eating a lot more plants, and I’ve improved my inflammation levels, and I’ve reduced my LDL c cholesterol and my a Poby number representing the lipid protein particles counts and their sizes down. And that’s a healthier thing for me to do. But that’s not necessarily the thing that’ll be right for everyone. So you have to back that up with blood testing. How you feel your overall goals. So exercise, diet, then there’s stress, and then there’s sleep. We can pick whichever one you’d like, Rob, where do you want to go?
Robert Lufkin 39:55
Well, yeah, those are great. And I before we do that, just want to underscore what you’re saying. It’s it’s personalization that whatever our risk factors are family history, even our diet, you know, the diet that works for you may not work for somebody else. And we need to pay attention to our labs and pay attention to our bodies and see what works. But yeah, we could go with diet. And I mean, we could go with sleep, and we could go with stress. And also, you’ve done some great experiments on mn and some other things. If you want to talk about those that that would be interesting as well.
Nick Engerer 40:28
We’ll get there. Let’s do that. So okay, let me tell you what I think about sleep for one. Sleep is highly again, highly personalized, like all this stuff, as some people will hit the hit the hay and just knock right out and sleep through the night. You know, good on them. I wish I was one of them. I’m not. And in fact, through analyzing my own genome, I mean, something like the 98th percentile for insomnia, right? So I’m a bit of a Thrasher, when I sleep, I have to really think about my sleep and get myself on my a game. You know, I can’t, I’ve just pretty much eliminated alcohol altogether in my life. But more importantly, if I’m going to have a drink, it’s going to be a day drink. Because if I even have a single beer or wine for dinner, I can already see resting heart rate increases my heart rate variability drops, I don’t sleep as well for the first part of the night till my body clears that out of its system. Same thing for eating meal too large of a meal late at night, I’ll see elevated heart rate for a few hours before it finally comes down. And that’s reducing the amount of recovery that I get from my sleep. So look, it’s it’s fairly in vogue to do sleep tracking, I get a lot of data from the aura ring. It’s it’s got its limitations. I wouldn’t say I trust its sleep stage data very much. But what it does tell me is it tells me how much I’m moving around. It tells me what my heart rate is my heart rate variability, my body temperature, and just looking at those metrics alone, you can already start to collect and infer to collect data and infer outcomes, like I was just saying, so I’ve learned about alcohol, I’ve learned about eating too much. And I’ve also been been able to experiment with sleeping with sleep stack supplements. So for example, I was just trying, valerian root, I tried valerian root and put it in there, I thought I felt like I was sleeping better. But when I went back and looked at my data, I couldn’t see any evidence of that. So I stopped, I’ve stopped taking it now and I’m gonna try something else. I’ve experimented with other sleep related supplements like magnesium l three, and eight, or mag teen is its typical name. But that turned my brain on too much. So actually, one of the only things I found that works for me was magnesium glycinate. So take around 340 milligrams, probably good, because I’m exercising a lot probably helps me out. But that tends to relax me a bit and actually help my sleep. Whereas something like valerian root, or Gabba, or a few other ones I’ve tried, they’re slipping my mind at the moment. But the point is that you can try these things one at a time, objectively look at some data and see whether or not it’s improving your sleep outcome and know what kind of sleeper you are. And I think some people can get away better with eating a big meal and go into sleep. I’m not one of them. I think some people can get away with a nightcap and sleep better than I am. I’m not one of them, I have a hard time even getting to sleep if I’ve had even one or two drinks. So again, personalization, get a format for collecting data, the most important thing in my view, is being able to see movement in heart rate, and your heart rate should drop off fairly quickly and lower out into a nice plateau and then pick up when you wake up. And if you don’t see that, if you see the heart rate staying up or you see it spiking throughout the night along with movement. These are signs that you’re not sleeping as well as you could. And so you can gather that information from a smartwatch, you can gather that stuff from a ring or a whoop band or any other mechanism you want. But being able to then take it and inform your personal strategy is the most important part. So it means changing one thing at a time collecting some data coming back and looking at it and deciding very objectively not just what you think but seeing it in the data yes or no did trying that thing improve my sleep Yes or no? Can you determine that over and over again until you know what works for you. That’s how I would approach sleep and blue light blockers. That’s the other one I couldn’t remember blue light blocking and staying away. Blue Light blocking, keeping, particularly if you got a screen at night or you’re in a bright environment. Light control is huge. So I take all the blue light out of my environment I turn I got LEDs that light up my home and I turn them down to a warm tone and then turn them down to a red light as we’re reading go to sleep in the house and controlling the lights really, really important for sleep as well. Great,
Robert Lufkin 44:38
great very point. And And how about stress then same type of thing.
Nick Engerer 44:45
I stress is is is absolutely something that we have a pro proclivity to in modern society. You know I actually intentionally live what we call in the bush in Australia just meaning I live in a rural area and every time I Go to the Big Smoke down to Sydney where my company is missed and visit with my team. I’m amazed at just how many cars are trying to kill me this the noise that is in my ears, the pollution, I’m breathing in the light that’s coming at me all times of the day. And that learning to understand that your body has having stress response to everyday activities, even what you’re seeing on your phone, as you’re scrolling through the news you’re reading, these things have impact on your subconscious and raise your stress level. So being able to be thinking about noticing what personally will increase your stress level. And noticing what is causing you to have a stress response, which can often be quite subtle, is really fine tune thing that is important to figure out in your in your own objective awareness. And I think the most powerful tool for just even being able to notice is mindfulness and meditation. So I’ve done a lot of meditating in my life, I’ve done a lot of self reflection, and meditation retreats, all that good stuff. And it’s become a powerful tool much like fasting that I know when I need to use. And it’s also given me a baseline awareness to be able to see in my own mind what I’m experiencing what I’m thinking what I’m feeling. And that’s what you need to do in order to understand stress, because until you can take that step back and observe the things that are making you feel stressed, you won’t know what to eliminate. But once you can see that, then you need to eliminate and control. And I’m actually doing a bit of experimenting with some of the results from self to code on stress and anxiety supplements that have been recommended to me in a personalized way by my genetic reports. And I’ll put that up on longevity blog and share my experience. So it might even be able to find some supplements to help us along the way. And that’s important because not the same thing won’t work for everyone. CBD oil makes me feel anxious. Yeah, right. Yeah, I feel good for the first hour. And then I feel anxious for the three hours after that. So that’s not the experience that most people have. But figuring that out for yourself. Again, by self experimenting, adding one thing at a time keeping a journal, particularly in the stress space, because it’s hard to measure with your blood. That’s the way to approach this. And so mindfulness first learn about your perspective, and then try taking things away or adding things in to then control that stress more effectively.
Robert Lufkin 47:16
Right. Yeah, I mean, again, I’m hearing the theme of personalization and being aware of your own body and what works, what works for each of us. It’s such a, such an important important message. What about then, things like like supplements you mentioned a couple like resveratrol or an Amen, you did this study on anything there you recommend, or so personalized thing, of course to write
Nick Engerer 47:47
I’m happy to I’m an open book I share. It’s to a fault even. So I won’t start talking about my bowel movements, don’t worry. I actually get to be in a strategic advisor to a supplement company. It’s not really a supplement company. We’re a research organization. Do not Ah, and it’s been one of the great privileges of being involved in the space because what we’re doing at that company is actually trying to take the forefront of these supplements that are being found to have longevity benefits, and then making them available with like the reputation of brand and the credibility that comes with third party testing and being a trusted source for being able to get things that are pretty new, like apigenin, for example, which is a parsley extract, or nicotinamide mononucleotide, which is an ad potential and ad booster, or trimethyl glycine, which is meant to be paired with an ad booster to protect the methyl pool groups that you have in your body not deplete them, being able to make these tools available to this growing population of people who saying, Hey, I think there’s something here in this space for me, I want to look after myself as I age and improve my longevity outcomes. And I see that there’s some pretty interesting products out there they’re coming out in the research like our cert six activator, which is another type of
it’s similar to a resveratrol and that you’re trying to interact with there are two ends and there’s there’s still more research to be done in that space. But making that work that very over Nova was another strategic advisor to do not age that she’s done to to isolate that compound and shows benefits in humans, making that sort it’s available very quickly after those outcomes are produced. And making it so that people can have that subset available to them so they can run their own self experiments and figure out what works for them is a part of my passion. That’s one of the things that I really enjoy getting to be a collaborator, advisor to a supplement company on and a supplement company that comes along and actually takes the viewpoint of a research organization has the mission of improving that healthspan for millions of people around the world by allowing them to self experiment with these products and bringing really cool things to the table, like na D testing, being able to actually test your cellular energy levels and your blood with the fingerprick. And then see, hey, if I decide I want to take in an ad booster does it improved my energy levels, therefore suggesting that will lead to positive health outcomes, that’s not really been available before we help push the envelope of making that possible biological age testing is another example. And so working in that space, it gives me a very clear view of what’s coming. And it also creates opportunities to run some experiments like the one you’re asking about. So let’s briefly go into that. I was very interested in nicotinamide mononucleotide. It is a na D booster as a simplified term that most people are familiar with. And it was popularized by the work of David Sinclair. And you can see and I’m showing this on the blog. And as soon as his book lifespan came out, and he hit the Joe Rogan podcast, you know, the interest in this molecule went went through the roof. And at first it wasn’t available, and the products that were out there, and many of the ones that are still out there are not actually pure versions of this molecule. And that’s because it was at first it was a laboratory product meant to be put into rodents for experiments, not for consumption by humans. So at that age, we had to go clean up the supply chain, bring in 33rd party testing, an innovate to get the price down because it was also very expensive. So through my work with them actually did a self experiment where I said, Alright, I want to see if this stuff works. Because clinical trials for humans, the pipeline is getting really fat. But when I started looking at this 18 months ago, there was it wasn’t very much we didn’t even have grass status mmm yet, which means it’s recognized as safe by the FDA for the listener. And so I’d set out to design a self experiment where I was going to test my biological age before. And after taking this molecule, pairing it with trimethyl glycine, which is a product that brings along It’s also known as betaine, it actually brings along methyl groups which taking in any D booster, or any B vitamin supplement at a high level can actually deplete your methyl groups, you’re replacing those it’s more of a risk management safety concept. And then also keeping resveratrol in my stack because I was working with it at the time, it wasn’t a change. And what I found is that after taking this for six months, and then 12 months, I saw around a three and a half year improvement in my biological age, as reported by my blood tests, and during this time, I didn’t change my exercise load, I didn’t make any significant changes to my diet, I didn’t add any other supplements. And my stress was straight up sleep were relatively similar to what they were, of course of that experiment. And being able to know that and to also do a questionnaire before and after that they use in the clinical trials that were actually looked at what they’re doing for clinical trials, they have an SF 36 questionnaire you look at before and after focuses a lot on your energy levels and your mental clarity. Doing that before and after, it was clear that taking this supplement for me, led to better levels of energy, it seems to improve my muscle recovery during exercise, which is actually something that’s starting to show up in human trials. And it improved my black biological age outcome. And putting that all together. Now I know I want to keep that in my stack. And mn is a part of my health journey now. And I get that. And I was lucky to test it from an early stage with do not age. And since that time, we’ve just kept innovating on the price and making it as accessible as possible where we’re almost thinking about nn as like how, how affordably can we price this and and stay afloat. It’s not a profit maker for us to do not age, it’s like let’s make this available. Because we believe that it has tremendous benefits as a potential outcome for humans. And the things that we hear back from people after they start taking it are profound. And so I really look forward to clinical trials backing this up. But my personal self experiment biological age before and after controlling it fairly well, which I put on longevity blog, and people go read about that told me it’s a good thing for me even at 35 and I’m gonna keep doing it.
Robert Lufkin 54:31
What dose you’re taking per day of mmm,
Nick Engerer 54:35
ah yes, so I started off pretty low at 250 milligrams, but I was given some advice by an expert in the field who said really, you should at least go to 500 even that’s pretty low compared to what we do in the road models. And I eventually settled on gramma day. So I’m taking gram of n mn a day. I match that with a gram of TMG and I’m no longer taking resveratrol and the reason I’m not doing that simply connects back to the exercise load that I’m under. And exercise has all sorts of benefits that actually compete a bit with with resveratrol, I don’t need to add any more cellular damage to my body to recover from. So I’m not doing the resveratrol anymore. But I continue with the lemon to this day. And my biological age, since I started actually dropped down to around 25. And it’s stuck there ever since. So we’ll see how long we can keep it down that route.
Robert Lufkin 55:28
It’s a good place to be stuck. Yeah. Well, those are some supplements. What about in the last couple minutes here? What about prescription drugs for longevity? There’s a couple that are the dissented for several xenolith x, which is insanely expensive, but more affordable is Metformin, or rap or bison? Any thoughts on those?
Nick Engerer 55:55
Yeah, I think that you know, something like Metformin is a brilliant, brilliant opportunity for us to understand pharmaceutical intervention and aging. And so for example, the team study with Nir Barzilai actually looking at this in detail is a really exciting journey. And you know, the, again, if you’re gonna be somebody who’s willing to put in the work to exercise, I don’t think you’ll need something like that for men. But if you’re going to choose the less active route, and, and not don’t have necessarily had the discipline to watch your diet, and you’re getting in your 50s, or 60s, I think Metformin is a tremendous opportunity for you, because it’s really helping you push back against the metabolic stressors that start to come as you age, and your insulin sensitivity is decreasing, and your fasting glucose levels are starting to rise. And by intervening in that space, with something like Metformin, which pushes that fasting blood sugar back down, even reduces appetite a bit, it actually can be really powerful, I think, for improving health outcomes, even by getting ahead of some of the diseases that are associated with decreasing metabolic function as you age. And that’s one of the big killers. metabolic disease is one of the top four killers that leads to diabetes, it leads to decreased insulin sensitivity and fasting blood sugar rising, which then increases risks for neurodegenerative disease and cardiovascular disease and increases inflammation. So getting ahead of that with something like Metformin is potentially very, very powerful. Coming down to the Senate linear side of things with something like we said, when you mentioned,
Robert Lufkin 57:35
the Sat Nav decided, yes, yeah, it’s like a core setting only to prescription only one.
Nick Engerer 57:42
Yeah, coming over to that side now with with that form, and you can see this in your blood sugar, so you can get a continuous glucose monitoring and fingerprick device and measure the before and after and see the benefit. But we’re not quite there yet, with stuff like the Sat Nav or some of the analytics and in terms of being able to see whether or not taking them actually causes the analytic behavior to get rid of those senescent cells. If it triggers cell autophagy, we can’t quite measure that at a consumer level yet. It’s not even very accessible in the laboratory setting, we have to use some different proxies to get there. So we don’t necessarily have the ways to produce self evidence through self experiments, whether or not these things will work in ourselves. But I said the same thing about NHD testing, just about 18 months ago, and then that testing quickly became available because of the demand. So I suspect something similar will happen in the future with things like selinux, with behaviors that supposedly trigger autophagy, which is what we hear about fasting all the time, that will soon be able to measure these things in a consumer setting like we can with many other things in our body. And that will then enable us to get a clear answer on whether or not it’s working for our biology, which is a again, as you said, is all about that personalized journey that I really advocate for. So I think I don’t think we’re there yet to know on an end of end of one basis, but we will be soon if the NIT testing and the biological age testing and ordering your own blood tests, which you can do now. Just by backing your credit card into an online web platform and walking into a lab with a printout. This empowerment strategy and theme will continue to be the case.
Robert Lufkin 59:24
Yeah, yeah, it’s very good. And any thoughts on rapamycin as a as a prescription drug or anything?
Nick Engerer 59:32
Yeah, you know, I like I like that. It’s it’s got so much traction in that we’re really starting to see meaningful work in the space that will answer the question and think it’s Matt caper line. Is that right back down the line doing a study with dogs, dogs, and yeah, that’s right. So starting to see how and how to measure and figure out the dosage for something like randomize and whether or not it’s working in more calm clinics, biological organisms like dogs is occurring now. And that will be really encouraging for health outcomes. I do not personally take rapamycin, it would interfere with the strategy I have of having a high level of athletic activity, which is one of the strategies I’ve chosen. But there is merit to the concept of changing the behavior of mtorr by using rapid myosin so that we have less cell turnover. If you’re, if you don’t suffer poor immune function outcomes from that, if it’s not reducing your ability to recover from a healthy amount of exercise, it could theoretically on the basis of the fundamental theory of changing how often cells are turning over and turning that knob down to say, hey, stick around a little bit longer. It has the potential to really produce longevity outcomes. We don’t have the evidence for that yet. So people want to go have a go themselves, I’d be really curious to know how they’re measuring the benefits, because again, I can’t see how to do that yet. But I do think we’re starting to get to the point where there’s enough critical mass, there’s enough interest, there’s the studies, like Matt cave, your line is doing that will start to answer those questions. So let’s stay tuned on that one.
Robert Lufkin 1:01:09
Yeah, it’s very, very exciting time with with all these all these things you’re mentioning you’ve you’ve had a long journey in in longevity, but it’s only beginning. I’m wondering as you look back on that is, is there anything you wish you’d known when you started this journey that you did that you that you know, now
Nick Engerer 1:01:27
that’s that’s really a fun part of it, really, because one of the things I’m trying to do is throw money, throw money at things and see what sticks and then tell people, hey, that wasn’t worth it, or that was definitely worth it. So I’ll put my money where my mouth is, I think we’re going to get a full body MRI checkup, scan for any presence of possible tumors, or brain aneurysms or cardiac dysfunction. I put my money on doing that every year, I spend a few 1000 bucks on that I’ve done it, I’ve gone to the health nucleus twice, I want to continue doing that on an semi annual basis to stay ahead of any cancerous developments, or any of the things I just mentioned, that’s worth your money. I would say I spent too much money on crappy genetic testing at an early stage, because I was getting reports back that told me based on just a few snips, whether or not I was going to be a great athlete, or I should eat less carbs, or whether or not I’m more prone to weight gain. Or if I have any serious genetic diseases, this isn’t really value add information. And so I would stay away from that simple, high price point consumer testing of genetics, the only place that I would recommend going to, and you could check out my interview with Joe Cohen on longevity blog is South Dakota, because they’re ahead of the pack on this one, they’re actually producing personalized outcomes. But otherwise, I wouldn’t spend too much money on that. And I think the other thing that is important to think about is if you see so many biohackers, who have just giant amounts of supplements, and yes, there’s a great one of the guy in the UK who had him like in his dishwasher, and I won’t pay the Navy’s biohackers for doing that. Because they may have good evidence for why they have all those supplements. Don’t do that don’t go throw your money at tons of supplements, add one thing at a time that you can measure a benefit for even if it’s as subjective as taking a journal and writing down every day certain certain metrics, you know, this is how I feel this is my energy level, this is my mental clarity, or whatever you’re trying to engage with when you take that supplement to see if it’s working for you or not. And do things one at a time so that you because you’re doing this for life, right? You’re doing this as your longevity strategy, which means it’s gonna happen for years and decades. And you want to know that that investment is worth it. So being able to do that in a controlled fashion and patient and disciplined fashion is challenging, but it is the way to not throw your money away. And it’s something that I started off grabbing all the things off the shelves and trying to be a bio hacker like that, because that’s what I thought it was. But really a true bio hackers measuring the before and after and can tell you exactly why they’re taking something for their biology. That’s it. That’s
Robert Lufkin 1:04:05
a great point. And that, I want to again, emphasize how great your blog is you have a great resource section to that I want to refer people to and maybe for, for our listeners, could you tell, tell us what the website is so that they can go to it? We’ll put it in the show notes also. But if you could just tell us online now.
Nick Engerer 1:04:23
Yeah, with pleasure. So it’s going to be moving domain the future. It’s called longevity blog right now. And you can always go to this URL to find it. It’s just Nick angerer.org. So and I c k, e n g e r er, that’s my name.org. That’ll take you to the longevity blog. And there you can launch off into whatever you find most interesting. I’d love your feedback. And I’m very active with users on Twitter. So again, it’s at Nick Angerer on Twitter. Same thing on Instagram. I respond to all my messages, and I really enjoy learning what listeners in reading care about because that’s who we’re trying to talk to. And the questions that they have are often so informative, because particularly when you’re, like you or myself, Rob, we’re really well on this journey. And we’ve got all these structured ideas and what we’re doing and why. And many people are coming to this for the first time, and they don’t know where to start. That’s exactly the person that I want to learn to speak to, and exactly the concerns that I want to help address because we need to get more people on this longevity bandwagon and be excited to have them come along. Because the more people who are voting with their dollar smart in a smart way and informed way in this space, the more we will see the businesses that are trying to push the envelope in proactive health care testing and genetic testing in providing at home consumer tests for detecting cancer like you can do with colon cancer. Getting those to be available depends on consumer demand to create those business opportunities. So the more people that come along and demand that they want access to longevity related services, the better and I’m here to support that journey.
Robert Lufkin 1:06:03
That’s That’s such a great, great point. Nick, thanks. Thanks so much for spending an hour it’s been great getting to know you and hearing about all the great work you’ve been doing and I can’t wait to hear about your your next experiment. But thanks, thanks so much for being on the show.
Nick Engerer 1:06:22
Oh, Real pleasure. Thanks for bringing that energy and the opportunity to help communicate and inform your audience from so many experts, it’s really been a pleasure to be a part of it.
Robert Lufkin 1:06:32
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