RX Podcast_Daniel Stickler: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

RX Podcast_Daniel Stickler: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

John Shufeldt:
Hello everybody and welcome to another edition of Entrepreneur Rx, where we help health care professionals own their future.

John Shufeldt:
Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Entrepreneur Rx! Today, I have the great pleasure of interviewing Dr. Daniel Stickler, who's co-founder and chief medical officer of Apeiron Center for Human Potential and chief science officer for the Apeiron Academy. Daniel, welcome to the show!

Daniel Stickler:
I glad to be here, John. Thanks!

John Shufeldt:
So this subject is near and dear to my heart, so for those that don't really have a sense of what epigenetics means and what what you do? Can you give us, give us the elevator pitch about what you're doing?

Daniel Stickler:
Aha. Elevator pitch, yeah.

John Shufeldt:
It's a long elevator ride.

Daniel Stickler:
Yeah, the long-short of it is we practice what we call complexity medicine, and it's kind of taking medicine and looking at the human system as a complex system rather than as a complicated system or a simple system, like most of medicine has done since the time of the Greeks, where we shifted, the Greeks had it right. I mean, they had the the human system as complex, and it requires complex thinking. And the classic example of this is root cause. There is no root cause in a complex system, and I challenge physicians all the time and I say, you know, give me one thing that you think is a root cause and we can take them down the rabbit hole of understanding how, one of the sayings is that when you focus on the on the roots, you've missed the contributions of the soil. And this is what's happened in a lot of medicine is we have drifted off the idea of a human system that is based on probabilities, that's based on patterns and responses, not on cause and effect, which is what most of it's focused on right now. So epigenetics was one of the things that started me down that path in understanding the complex adaptive nature of the human system. And what I mean by that is that, you know, we have this fixed code of genetics and we select portions of that code for every cell that's going to be used. But on top of that, we also have this really fine control over the expressions of these genes and we can control upregulation, we can control down regulation, we can turn genes off, we can turn them on, and throughout our lives, this system adapts. And so what was easily predictable based on input A, B and C that would equal D, no longer follows that same pattern because the system has adapted and changed in that time frame. And this is why, you know, the quantified self stuff, which is another piece of what we do is so important to measure the patterns that are occurring and the adaptations over time that we can see in the human system. So epigenetics really was what started me down thinking in a more complex nature because I realized the standard system didn't work very well when it came to the epigenetic expressions.

John Shufeldt:
All right, so let me, let me back up a little bit. So here you are, you're a board certified vascular surgeon, you're doing an aorta by FEMM and then one day you say, ha, there may be something more to this. What was the genesis of you? That's a big leap. I mean, vascular surgeons are an odd bunch, and all of a sudden you're doing this. What was that leap?

Daniel Stickler:
Yeah. What happened, though, is I actually chose surgery because it was an area of medicine that I saw was not postponing death in a stepwise fashion. I went into medicine thinking that it was something where we could work with people to, to work, to get them healthier, to make them better at what they're doing, better functional, and I realized this after medical school that it was all based on disease, model and pharmacology. And I was just like, this isn't going to work for me, so I couldn't do, I had a choice. I was pediatrics or surgery, and I went down the surgery road because I liked working with my hands and then I got into that, and in, especially doing vascular surgery, you realize that everything that happened in vascular surgery could have been prevented years and years ago, and we're just fixing the problems that we've caused with our lifestyles. And so I started, doing I actually went to ... eugenics and trained in 2005, and that was just to learn hormones at that time. But then I realized that they had a model that worked for healthy people, too. And I said, wow, this is really game-changing for me, and I started doing it as a hobby. And over time, when my wife joined the practice, she has 30 years of work in the Air Force, she was a colonel and worked in human performance, and she worked with stress in the brain in the Air Force, and we started adding pieces, so we started off with just let's optimize the human body, the physical body itself. And we started getting into stress and mind after that. And then we progressed into more of psychosocial and really the spiritual aspect. I mean, I hate the term spiritual because it's so, people have their own definitions of it, but you know, in reviewing the last 20 years of working with high performers, I realized that there were five categories that people looked for that would explain why they had an exceptional life or why they had not, and the five categories were one body, so how do we optimize the body, you know, how do we create a body that can function so that any time we have a thought that we want to do something, some experience we want to have, we have the physical ability to obtain that. And you know, you can take that too far, though, too, because I can, before COVID, I spent probably 20 years maintaining about 8 to 12 percent body fat, the 20 years prior to COVID. And it took a lot of work to do that, not only from a fitness standpoint, but from a really strict nutritional standpoint. And with COVID, I realized priority-wise, I started looking at things that I was doing and I said, you know, do I need to keep that 8 to 12 percent? Or could I really step back just a little bit on the time commitment that I'm doing with this and maintain like a 12 to 15 percent body fat and still be able to do? I mean, what was my purpose of keeping that 8 to 12 percent? And I said, you know, it's the functional aspect of it, but can I maintain that functional aspect at a higher body fat? And I realized I could. So I step back from being that aggressive with it, but also in the body, I mean, you've got to look at even how the brain functions, the neurochemistry, the neuroelectric aspects of it. So we do work with, we map the brain, brainwave patterns, we do psycho-physiologic stress profiles to see how the autonomic nervous system responds to stress and things that we can do for that. Body composition is obviously important for multiple areas, but it's more around being functional and being able to do those things. The second area is what we call mind, and mind includes mind and mindset because a lot of people we found had deficiencies in the mindset. You know, we think about Maslow's pyramid and we say, you know, we have these basic needs met and we're, and we're all good, but it's no different, if you have a financial deficiency, if you feel like you need to make more money and that's deficiency thought in your head, then it's going to occupy so much of your bandwidth that you don't have, as Maslow said, the freedom to explore the self-actualization aspect of it, it's just like the starving man on the street. I mean, he's not going to go out and learn the violin. I mean, his whole focus for his entire day is I've got to get food. We have this with these other things that we don't consider like the financial and I work with people with 14 digit incomes and people with, you know, in the hundreds of thousands. But when I looked at it, it was like the magic number seems to be 500 million-net worth is the point where people don't care about the money anymore, which was really strange to me because I had people with hundreds of millions of dollars in net worth and they were still focused on, well, I've got to have this just in case, I've got to do this just in case. And we started working with these financial deficiencies in a lot of clients, and it made a huge difference. So when I say mindset, that's what I'm referring to. But we also look at patterns that occur in the brain over time, especially with a default mode network of the brain. We get locked into these patterns that they're designed to conserve the energy of the brain, but they also lock us into things they're actually seeing now that there are patterns of depression and anxiety that are coded in that default mode network and those are hard to crack. We actually started doing it using ketamine and brain stimulation. The ketamine seems to take the default mode network offline briefly and allows the brain to experience patterns that it hadn't experienced before. So while we're training and in training a pattern with the electrical stimulation, the ketamine is on board and disrupting the default mode network, allowing them to have that plasticity to learn something new. So the mind was definitely one of the areas that we really focused on. Another area is purpose, and I know this is another cliché, but people that don't have purpose, they really flounder. I mean, you look at the number of people who die shortly after retiring from work, they no longer feel like they have a purpose. But purpose is easy to find, and it's also something that's dynamic, it's not a fixed thing, like this is my life's purpose, and it's always going to be there. I mean, it changes over time, but in identifying that has been a real key for a lot of our clients. The other area that we look at is peak experiences. We call these all experiences or experiences of profound gratitude, and we would ask people, you know, when was the last time you had a real awe experience or a real experience of profound gratitude? And these are, I mean, these are exceptional people coming in. I've got philosophers, I've got authors, I've got business leaders, military people that reach the top of their game and they're having trouble thinking of the last time they experienced awe. And to me, that's, that's very sad because I feel like I experience awe on a daily basis or some profound gratitude almost daily, but we would ask them that as part of our autonomic stress system analysis, we wanted to see what their system did when they were feeling that awe experience and I would sit there with people and I'd say, well, when was the last time? They're like, I can't even remember. I was like, well, do you have a child? And they're like, Oh yeah, yeah, when my child was born, I'm like, the kid's 18 years old, you've got to, you've got to have these peak experiences at more regular basis. I mean, we spend all this time in life working to save money for retirement, and we don't experience life, you know, we're being in life and not doing life. I tell them, look back at your childhood and what experiences do you remember from childhood? What do you what are your fondest memories of childhood and it almost always a trip or event that occurred with the parents and the, and the other kids? They don't remember the gifts and all the, you know, the Christmas presents and all of that. Nobody recalls that, but they do recall the experiences. That's what sticks. And my wife and I, we have five boys, and we have always tried to create peak experiences for them. So we take them on the trips that we go on and on the trips, we always do something that's just spectacular, that just puts them in that awe state. And they remember all of that and they love that. And now it's a regular routine for them. But the last one is love and love's a tough one because this is, I had a, one of my billionaire clients who was sitting doing one of the autonomic nervous system announcements, 72 years old and he looked at me and he said, you know, I would give up everything I have to have a relationship like you and your wife, and I mean that just, he was very serious about that. And you don't think about those kinds of things, but love for people is very fleeting, I think. They always have doubts about love, they wonder if they're actually feeling love, and this is the other issue is that we all intellectualize, especially doctors. Doctors are notorious for this, they intellectualize feelings because it's hard to empathize with every person that you encounter. So you learn to kind of shut down that those feelings and you focus on intellectualizing, and just in the last three years, I realized I intellectualize everything. I mean, as a surgeon, you kind of don't want to have empathy, especially in trauma surgery, and doing that, you just the empathy would be too painful. So you kind of shut that down. But it translates into the other feelings. When people would ask me, what does love feel like? I'd be like, oh, that's like when you do this and this happens and they behave like this. Well, that's not how it feels, it's what it looks like, that's an intellectualizing of love. And I realize I never felt love, is ironic, because my wife and I, we've been, been married for years and it wasn't until four years ago, and we thought, well I mean, we had a great relationship prior to that, but four years ago, when I kind of came online with feeling love, I was just like, OK, this is all new to me. And it was like falling in love with her for the first time and the relationship is just gone crazy after that. But it's not something that we expected, and this is again something that we're working with our clients in the medical practice now. So those are the five paths that we've identified.

John Shufeldt:
Well, that was a lot to digest, but it sounds like if you had to, but I loved it, but it sounds like if you narrow it down, much of this is mind set.

Daniel Stickler:
It's a huge part of it.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, because love is mindset, the awe experience of gratitude is certainly mindset because, you know, so I fly a lot, and you know, I'll be flying through the clouds and I'll be thirty thousand feet in the sun will be setting in, I'm like, I am so incredibly blessed and lucky to see this, few people get to see and it's awening. I mean, it blows me away every time, I've done it for 30 years, but that's kind of a mindset and I realize sometimes I'm flying, I'm like, I can't wait to land, and then the other part of my brain goes, are you an idiot? You're doing something that you love that a few people get to do what is wrong with you? And then I, I can flip back and say, oh, duh, yes, this is amazing. Can you fix mindset?

Daniel Stickler:
Yes.

John Shufeldt:
And change, how?

Daniel Stickler:
Very.

John Shufeldt:
Because I think I was born with it.

Daniel Stickler:
Yeah, a lot of people were, honestly, for me, it was psychedelics. I don't know if you want to go down this path.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, I know, it's awesome. No, please.

Daniel Stickler:
You know, it was experiences with psychedelics that allowed me to feel, you know, within pathogens, you can, you have this amazing feeling like MDMA is a pathogen, it's not really a psychedelic, but it allows you to actually feel emotions when you don't or even when you do, it just amplifies what you've gotten out of that. I did ayahuasca back in 2012, and that was my first foray into it, we were in Peru and I just thought, you know, I want to do this.

John Shufeldt:
That's ... foray.

Daniel Stickler:
Yeah, yeah, it was quite the foray.

John Shufeldt:
... You, you. You went zero to one hundred.

Daniel Stickler:
Oh yeah. Yeah, it was pretty intense and I brought it, I brought the feeling back with me, but it was fleeting, got back into my routines, and it just kind of disappeared, you know, with COVID and being able to be out of the country more and other things, you know, people say, how can you be out of the country more with COVID? It was easy for me because I didn't have to be around anywhere, I could do everything remotely, which is pretty much what I do anyway, but I was able to try all different things so psilocybin was, was pretty profound. It, again, is one of those ones that breaks up the default mode network, so it allows you to have these experiences, and when you're with somebody who's a good facilitator with that, you can really use it to work on mindset issues and deficiencies that you didn't even think you had. Now all of a sudden you're like, oh my god, I do have that. Ketamine also pretty wonderful, we do some ketamine work in our clinics with clients, and we do in some like low dose, we use the nasal spray, we do the brain training, we'll do a very low dose for what we call a lucid ketamine session where we can talk. And ketamine allows you to access memories that have been stored away that you don't have real good access to normally, or even the journey dose ketamine for, we use it for PTSD, but it also works for people that don't perceive their PTSD, nut we actually all have some degree of it in some way within us. Those have all been very profound in allowing me to understand myself more, and I think that was the whole thing is, I just didn't know who I was. And a lot of that mindset changed with that. I mean, certainly most people can work on mindset stuff when they start to identify what it is, and this is one part of our intake. I mean, I spend four hours with every client when they first join us and we have a lot of psychosocial questions in there and we start to identify deficiencies and we can point these out to them. And suddenly they realized they have those deficiencies and we tell them how that can limit them in different ways. And so we put in practices that can help them to really work on that and really expand their life experience, for sure.

John Shufeldt:
So, this is so interesting, as I use ketamine all the time, obviously on patients in the emergency department, and I've yet to have any of them wake up and say, you know, it really anything. But, you know, I've read a lot more about microdosing psychedelics and the benefits, and frankly, I've just been terrified, ... I've never taken a drug in my life, not even a legal drug in my life, would be terrified to do it. How did you make that, an ayahuasca, you know, as the major leagues, how did you go from vascular surgery to ayahuasca? Did you just say, screw it, I'm going to try it because I want to see what it does?

Daniel Stickler:
Yeah, I've always been the curiosity guy. You know, I read about something and I learn it as in-depth as I can, and then I experiment with it. So ayahuasca was one of the first ones that somebody had told me about their experience, and I was like, OK, that doesn't sound right, so I started reading on it, reading on it and looking the studies that have been done on it. And it fascinated me and I was like, OK, it looks pretty safe, and the experience can be pretty profound, that seemed like, and so I did that. I mean, I'm always like that, though, like, like peptides, you know, five years ago, I started really diving into peptides. I hadn't really paid any attention to what peptides were at that point. And when I dive into something, it is always a deep dive. I even created a physician course to teach them peptides, and I became kind of a peptide guru for some people. We teach it in our academy even. But that's the way I do things, is I dive in, I read everything, learn everything I can about it, and then I experiment on myself with a lot of things, and I'm around a lot of people that also do the same thing. And then we translate that into clinical care when it's an approved substance. We did the same thing with the community we hang out with around the psychedelics is really finding out all we could about it. I mean, you know, I can pull up my documents on like MDMA, where I've got probably 600 research papers on MDMA, actually had an hour and a half call with Gold Dolan, who is the MD PhD that leads the MDMA research at Hopkins. I just, that's just what I do is I want to learn absolutely everything I can about something when I'm looking at it in, in the sense of human enhancement in some way. I want to learn all about that, anti-aging I mean, I can tell you everything you want to know about, about rapamycin, about ..., and about a senolytics, even formulated a synthetic formula. I just go all in on anything that I have an interest in.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, I clearly need to stay away from you. So, I'm joking. So I think anybody who listens to this will be, the next question that we're going to ask is, all right, Dan, what do you take like, what is your go to daily regimen of the rapamycin? The metformins, the, what do you take it on a daily basis after all your research? Because none of us, many of us won't want to go take the deep dive you did for, like I told you, I read the book Lifespan, a lot of us will not have the time, energy or intelligence to do that.

Daniel Stickler:
Well, and here's the issue I just spoke at the biohacking conference. Dave Asprey's bulletproof conference. I was talking about this very subject, the problem we have is that everybody wants the fix for each thing and they're not organizing it into a real organized solution for what you're trying to achieve. And you can't take something and say, OK, everybody should be taking this and everybody should be taking this. I mean, it's individually based. I mean, yes, I take rapamycin. Yes, I take metformin. I take several different peptides, but from a supplement basis, I'm pretty minimalist. You know, I take a low dose multivitamin, omega 3s, vitamin D, B12 injections, and that's my foundation. And everything else is what I call more bio-specific. So they're designed to create some response in my particular bio-system. And I take I take a senolytic formula, but not on a regular basis and because you don't want constant senolysis going on in the system and a lot of people misunderstand that and they take it all the time. Rapamycin is not really a senolytic, but what it works really well for is it mitigates the SASPs, the senescence associated secretory profile of the senescent cells. It mitigates it super well and it's got it's got other mTOR effects with it. So it's hitting the aging system from probably five of the nine hallmarks of aging, which is really cool. But even with the nine hallmarks of aging, even if you addressed all of them, you still miss the fact that aging is not a disease with cause and effect, aging is a complex process. And so trying to find one thing that's going to change this isn't going to work. We've got to like, look at your system where it is. I mean, I look at people and I see, I have clients that are, you know, 60 years old that they have an epigenetic age of 52, and then I have others that have an epigenetic age of 66, that are the same age but from the standpoint of how I'm going to address their system, it's going to be very different with each one.

John Shufeldt:
Right. So would you say peptides? What are you referring to? Are you referring to NAD and NMN?

Daniel Stickler:
No, no. What I'm referring to is the one that the U.S. government doesn't like too much, which is thymus and alpha. I like using thymus and alpha intermittently just to feel a boost to the immune system. And you know, there's pretty good research data out there right now, but it's been taken off the U.S. market here in the last several years or several weeks because of the all of the people that were using it for COVID, which I still think it was a valid, a valid intervention to do, but we can't recommend it now for COVID. And that's why the compounding pharmacies kind of lost their access to it at that point because of all the use in that regard. There's stuff like ... on which is available through one compounding pharmacy here in the United States, but it doesn't have a lot of updated research on it. I mean, ... studies, 6 year and a 12 year study and ... pretty well respected for his, his credibility overall and his really adherence to protocol and studies, and the 6 and 12 year study were pretty convincing. But we don't have follow up. So with ..., I'm just like, well, maybe, it looks good from what we've seen so far, but I can't tell you anything for sure. There are peptides for hair growth that work very well. There are peptides for healing the soft tissue, which are nice to do intermittently, just to kind of boost the system and kind of reset the system like BPC 157 and Thymosin Beta 4. I mean, we've got hundreds, we've got access to hundreds of peptides that work really well. I mean, I love growth hormone releasing hormone peptides, they have such a nice natural feedback system that you don't, even if you took too much, the system would just say, no, we're not going to respond to that because they're familiar. Peptides are, peptides are generally a biologic that the body is familiar with, it's not like a supplement or a medication that's foreign where the body has on target and off target effects. Generally with peptides, you get very specific laser focus on target effects with what you're trying to achieve.

John Shufeldt:
Well, very little or no off target effects.

Daniel Stickler:
Correct! Yeah.

John Shufeldt:
They're human derived. What do you think, going back to this, the mindset issue, what you said really struck me about empathy in physicians. It almost seems like we're trained out of that. And I think, you know, because if you're an empath and a physician, you know, you've got a hard physician wrote ahead of you because like you said, your trauma surgery, emergency medicine and hospice, you'd be eaten alive every day.

Daniel Stickler:
You would be. But what happens is we turn it off in every part of our life.

John Shufeldt:
Exactly.

Daniel Stickler:
That's the issue.

John Shufeldt:
And that was my next question. When you're treating physicians or working with physicians, what do you see as our biggest challenge? Because I see that as one of them, I, it seems to me that it's hard to turn on and turn off empathy that's situational dependent.

Daniel Stickler:
Yeah, I mean, it's feeling emotions. They don't, we don't tend to feel emotions. It's just the way, way it's happened. And over time, I mean, you know, you get beat up in medical school, you get beat up in residency, I mean, you know, it's just designed to get you out of that, that feeling mode and it translates to other parts of life is my feeling. I don't think it's that we, we are not empathetic and that's why we go into medicine, I think it's that, that medicine trains out a lot of that in us. It only happened you know, for me, when I got out of surgery and started doing real concierge practice, I was able to reduce my hours of clinical practice a week to about 20 hours. The rest of my time I spent studying, researching, having a peak experiences, all of that, but I wasn't driven by the money. I mean, I was making I was making probably $800,000 a year at the time, I just walked away from surgery, and I think my first year doing this concierge stuff, I made about 53,000, I think was the number, which was shocking to me. But what was not shocking to me is my lifestyle didn't really change that much. I adapted my lifestyle to the income and this is what happens over time is, as we make more and more money, our lifestyle adapts, so we can't even imagine taking any reductions. And we're just like, we've got to make more, we've got to make more, you make more and then suddenly your lifestyle adjusts and you're back stuck in that same mode.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, I had this discussion with physicians all the time. Quit trying to match your lifestyle, match your income with your lifestyle. Keep your lifestyle the same, and hopefully your income goes up. It's interesting that you said that you had this peg number, peg, that you know, half a billion dollars worth that's that, you know I was watching the show, I just started watching a show billions and they talk about the FU money.

Daniel Stickler:
Yeah.

John Shufeldt:
It's one of these says, you know, it's nice have because then you can actually say it. And so from your vantage point, about five hundred million is that time when the switch turns off and they're like, OK, I got it, doesn't matter what happens.

Daniel Stickler:
Yeah. And it's a very small sampling. You know, I've got like, I think I have like 10 clients that are over five hundred million, I think five of those are in the billions, and then I've got probably 30 clients that are, you know, below that five hundred million mark. But there's not much difference in the ones that are in that 300 to 500 million as the people that are in the, you know, 800,000 to five million mark.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah.

Daniel Stickler:
I mean, they're, yes, they have a different lifestyle aspect of it, but they're still striving to make more, to have more, to have more safety in that they have enough that they're comfortable with.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, it's funny. I've, you know, I've had this thought a much more lately as I'm getting older, like I've been really busting it for years, at some point I want to slow down and enjoy it, but then you're like, well, gosh, if I do that, then all of, you can just see how the wheels turn in people's head and then they never stop or they stop and then they, you know, they're airline pilots who are high likelihood of being dead five years after they retire because, as you said, they've lost their purpose. So if you had to tell physicians collectively now, this would be a large sample size, what would you say to us and say, OK, guys, if you do these five things, you will improve a lot of aspects of your life and these are the slam dunk. So one for me was sleep. You know, I read the book Why We Sleep, it was a aha moment for me because I was always the I'll sleep when I'm dead sort of mentality.

Daniel Stickler:
Yeah.

John Shufeldt:
I'm like, no, I have sleep apnea, oh, know, lately it's been, you know, breathing through my nose and being concentrated on, and after reading the book Breath, what would you tell us as a collective, what we should be doing that we're not, generally speaking?

Daniel Stickler:
Well, the first thing is self-monitoring. We give all of our clients Garmin Fenix Watch and we monitor them constantly. You got one on.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah.

Daniel Stickler:
We monitor them constantly. I've had this off my wrist for one day in the last five years that I didn't have data. And so I'm always looking at the things that I do in life and how it impacts my stress scores and my sleep, my body battery, my resting heart rates, all of this. I mean, I was able to predict three of my clients getting COVID based on their metrics that they were showing up on there. They would text me and they're like, hey, my stress level was like super high, off than normal, and I looked and the resting heart rate was going up and I was like, are you feeling OK? And they're like, oh, I feel fine right now, but, and sure enough, in the next day or two, they would come down with COVID. But I track, so I get on a video call with my clients every month and we go through their data on their dashboard and I ask them about all the things they're doing, like a lot of them didn't realize how impactful just the one glass of alcohol in the evening was with how it shot the stress up, but the biggest problem was having it in the evening, it shoots the stress up, but it interferes with the recovery time of the body when it needs to have the really high HRV in order to get the body recovered from the day. And when you're getting like four to five hours or even six hours of elevated stress from one alcoholic beverage it carries into the night. So I have this one guy who's a, he's a Formula One racer from London, you know, in London, they, they socially drink on the weekend, so he go out on the weekends and he would drink with his friends and he'd say... You know, I only had two drinks, but you know, sure enough, on Monday morning, his body batteries tanked and Monday and Tuesday he just felt like crap. Every week it was the same thing. And finally, I said, OK, well, if you're going to drink, do it before about 3:00 p.m. So you can have from noon to three p.m. It's like we're in London, nobody drinks in the midday. I was like, well, this is what you got to do if you want to have your drink. He started doing that and sure enough, his recovery completely rebounded, and he was just amazed at how telling those metrics were and how he felt. Same with sleep. I mean, we can see how each thing interferes with the different, different sleep structures or the time. And for me, I go to bed at no later than 9:30 every night, most nights it's before 9:00 and I get up at usually 4:30 in the morning. That's my normal wake up. I haven't used an alarm and probably 10 years, but that's how my body wants to do it. It's not how everybody's body wants to do it. So we just help people to identify what their patterns are and what pattern maximizes that, that health span for them.

John Shufeldt:
All right so, so if we have health physicians, anything that's de minimis alcohol after three p.m., if any. So this is me, I have a glass of wine nearly every night. And it's funny, lately I've noticed exactly what you're talking about. Like, I really love red wine, like good red wine. And I don't know, I'm getting, I don't think it's worth the cost. I mean, not financially, obviously physiologically. So number one, the minimum alcohol after three p.m., number two, sleep as much as you need, and that varies for different people, that was a big one for me. What's number three? How about diet?

Daniel Stickler:
From a dietary standpoint, just clean eating, I mean, you know, we modified diet for everybody's preferences unless they're like, yeah, just like junk food. But you know, if they if they prefer to be vegetarian, if they prefer to be carnivore, if they prefer, you know, the, I've found from genetics and epigenetics, the perfect human diet seems to center around a Mediterranean style diet. That's, and we can modify that Mediterranean style diet to fit most people's preferences and then supplement them to make the diet a more balanced, healthy one. But it's just eating real food. I mean, getting away from any of the processed foods, getting away from the sweets and too much simple carbs and focusing on just real foods. I don't minimize meat too much, although I'm starting to lean towards less red meat intake for sure, and focusing on seafood, just because of the longevity aspect of it, I think it's pretty clear cut now that the red meat can be detrimental in the long term.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, no, I agree. It's, it's funny. For a couple of years, I was pretty hardcore weighting, very keto. I mean, very little carbs and I've probably lost twenty-five pounds and I was running a lot and I kind of slipped back and I had a hot fudge sundae, which I want to see you fit that into your diet because I love them, and like, oh my god, I felt like crap afterwards. So and I'm a little bit like, give a moose a muffin, you know, if I have one almond M&M, my wife, gave me the bag, so I've got to really be careful, I don't even have one. OK, so diet, Mediterranean, less processed, sleep, what's next?

Daniel Stickler:
Actually, mindset. And that's really a critical piece because you've got to get to the point where you don't look at things from a deficiency standpoint because that anything in a deficiency standpoint distracts from life for you. It's going to be something that will occupy your brain in too many moments that you can't actually enjoy life. So the biggest one typically is financial, another one is respect in the community, you know, are you somebody who has peers that actually value you? This is a big one for some people that we've, especially in this, the community I deal with, is they're always looking for external validation of people having this and trying to be comfortable with where they are and really be comfortable with the people that are around them that they respect. I mean, I was just reading something about, you know, even a small amount of disrespect from people within a community has an enormous impact on person's self-esteem versus, you know, even nobody's looking. You don't get as big a boost, if you're like the most respected person in the community, just as long as you have a little bit of it, that people value you in some way, and this is a lot of, a lot of it is people are trying to figure out how they have value for others. So identifying that love is another big one. People are just so deficient in what they, they see as their love going out and the love that comes in for them. They question it all the time and you've got to get beyond that and just really, you know, start to feel that and understand that it's there because you'll always be looking for the evidence that it's not. I mean, I talk to one person and she was saying that, you know, somebody can show me love 99 percent of the time, but that one percent that they don't, tells me, oh, see? I knew that wasn't real. You know, that's evidence.

John Shufeldt:
It's everything.

Daniel Stickler:
Yeah.

John Shufeldt:
So, OK, so someone's going to say me right now, OK, so love and the ability to have empathy are two huge components of this balanced person. It took you, the vascular surgeon using psychedelics to have your aha moment, for lack of a better way to say it, so what are the rest of us do who don't have your courage and ability to do this? So you had to go out of the country to do that, correct?

Daniel Stickler:
Yeah. Well, actually, there are some places, MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Sciences, I think I can't remember what the S is, they have certified practitioners that are actually using MDMA therapy now. They're very small numbers, but they're growing very quickly. And there's also some churches here in the US that can do psilocybin and MDMA therapies. I mean, you've got to remember MDMA prior to 1984, was used in over five hundred thousand counseling sessions by counselors in the United States, five hundred thousand times.

John Shufeldt:
I did not know.

Daniel Stickler:
And they had huge success, huge success with this. And it was taken off by the DEA and it was challenged in court, the judge said, yes, this should not be a schedule one because it does have therapeutic value, it was overruled by the DEA, they still kept it as a schedule one, it was challenged, again, the judge said. This does not need to be a schedule one, they nixed it, so it cut all the research for like 15 years, I mean, we just lost all those years of all the benefits that MDMA had, but it's not like you have to have MDMA. MDMA was what kicked my ass to let me know without having to explore it that this is a problem for me. You can work with people that understand this. I mean, there's a lot of counselors out there that really understand this aspect, and most of them have been through MDMA therapy, and they, they know how to use this. It's just, you know, MDMA can fast track things so you don't need, you know, two years of therapy. You can do it in two hours with MDMA. It's just amazing how it does that. But the counselors also said, you know of anything out there, the best thing for couples counseling is MDMA. It's, will fix it in no time at all, the relationship issues. And I've actually seen that in some friends of ours that have gone through that, and there's a lot of underground counselors using MDMA here in the United States. I don't know how you find them. They're just people tell me that they've, they've seen somebody so, but it's amazing the results that they get. And you know, this stuff is going to be approved probably in the next year. It's already decriminalized in many cities. So getting access to it, you know, the nice thing is, as it becomes more common, you're more likely to get the stuff that isn't laced with something so like ecstasy and molly are the same thing as MDMA, but they're not, because they're typically laced with bath salts or methamphetamine, because they're for partying. MDMA doesn't make you feel like you want to party. MDMA is, you know, the common thing is you have love puddles with MDMA. It's just people lay around and they hug on each other and they spill their heart out to each other, and they're very heart centric. I mean, they say things from the heart, even though it can be challenging for the person who's hearing it. But the person that's on MDMA hearing it are very heart open too, and they'll take it and understand that it's not meant to be a challenge. It's just a really something that they've, they've noticed. And so it keeps ego out of the interactions, which is the coolest thing ever to watch is when that's removed and how people can communicate after ego is removed. Just amazing.

John Shufeldt:
Wow. So Daniel, where can people find out more about you and where can they sign up for your, your programs? I mean, I'm, you know, just speaking person, I'm, you know, I'm into this, so I'm really interested in it. Where can people learn more about this and more about you?

Daniel Stickler:
You can go to ApeironCenter.com, its A P E I R O N Center.com or our parent corporation is ApeironZOH.com, ZOH. Apeiron ZOH means limitless life.

John Shufeldt:
Very good. Well, I'm going to post all this in the feed, on the podcast, and I think you're going to have a lot of people reaching out to you because I know a lot of physicians will be very intrigued by this and very intrigued by you and what you've done. You know, you don't, we've had some really cool podcast guests that have literally been top of their game, cardiovascular surgeons, neurosurgeons, vascular surgeon, have said, you know, there's something better out there that makes more sense to me like this did to you, so thank you for being on the podcast. This is inspiring and super interesting.

Daniel Stickler:
Well, thank you. I love talking about this. I want to get more people to actually understand that how much better life can be, you know, when we give up these things that we're, that are patterns that we're stuck in.

John Shufeldt:
Totally true. Well, thanks. Thanks again, Daniel.

John Shufeldt:
Thanks for listening to another great edition of Entrepreneur Rx. To find out how to start a business and help secure your future, go to JohnShufeldtMD.com. Thanks for listening.

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