Live Beyond the Norms

Before Jeff Maier became an inventor in the health and wellness industry, he was writing software for GPS satellites and developing video games for the Commodore 64. He even helped create a surfboard controller that let players experience surfing through a video game. So how did someone who spent his early career developing software and gaming technology end up creating a device designed to help p...

What would you do if your son suddenly stopped speaking, lost skills he'd already learned, and the doctors kept telling you everything was fine? How long would you keep asking questions? According to the CDC, approximately 1 in 31 eight-year-old children in monitored U.S. communities has been identified with autism, compared with 1 in 150 in 2000. Behind those numbers are families trying to unders...

Why would evolution give us something as terrifying as a panic attack? Couldn't be for no reason, right? The fear response that once helped our ancestors escape predators is still hard at work, even when there's no obvious danger. Our brains want to keep us happy, sure. However, they're a lot more concerned with keeping us safe than satisfied. Dr. Nicole Cain joins me to explain how fear becomes a...

Imagine waiting months for a clinical trial that could give you your life back, only to hear a doctor say they don't expect you to recover. That's what happened to my guest, Brandy Gillmore. After a car accident and a serious fall, she spent years battling severe chronic pain, struggling to walk, and searching for treatments that might help. When the clinical trial failed to bring relief, one ques...

Ice baths, prolonged fasting, extreme diets, and uncomfortable biohacking routines. You don't want to do these things. No one does. And you know what? You don't have to. Chocolate, laughter, sunshine, vacations, and spending time with friends sound much better. And surprisingly, these simple pleasures may help you live longer. There's even research to support some of their health benefits. Dr. Pat...

Human life expectancy has increased dramatically over the past century. In the United States, the average has risen from roughly 47 years in 1900 to around 77–78 years today. We can thank advances in medicine, sanitation, and public health for much of that progress. But what's the point of living longer if you spend your final years struggling with illness or disability? My guest, Dr. Bob Rakowski...

What happens when someone who built her career around intermittent fasting decides to stop doing it? That's one of the questions I explore with Cynthia Thurlow, a nurse practitioner, bestselling author, and women's health expert whose TEDx talk on fasting has reached nearly 16 million views. Cynthia's own experience with midlife changes has reshaped her approach to health. She now prioritizes buil...

Every 20 seconds somewhere in the world, a person with diabetes loses a limb to amputation. For many, the path to that point begins with diabetic neuropathy. Sensation in the feet fades, so injuries can go unnoticed long enough to become ulcers. Some of that lost sensation may not be as irreversible as patients are often told. Podiatric and peripheral nerve surgeon Dr. Stephen Barrett argues that...

Americans love their supplements. After all, they spend up to $70 billion per year on supplements, according to some estimates. But supplements can only do so much if your lifestyle keeps exposing you to the things that are affecting your health in the first place. Chemical Free Body founder Tim James believes supplements have their place, but reducing that exposure has to be part of the equation....

The rise in human life expectancy is one of medicine’s biggest achievements. In 1950, the global average was just over 46 years. Today, it has passed 73. But living longer has also given us more time to accumulate the cellular damage behind many diseases of later life. That brings me to my guest, Aubrey de Grey. A biomedical gerontologist and creator of SENS, Aubrey sees accumulated damage as some...

You can feel healthy, stay on top of your numbers, and still have something serious developing beneath the surface. I know because many of my standard markers looked good when I learned I had a 50% blockage in my widowmaker artery. I wanted to know what else could be contributing to it. Preventive health and longevity physician Dr. Gregory Burzynski joins me to review my Toxin Zoomer results and p...

Your mouth is home to somewhere between 50 and 100 billion bacteria. We’re taught to get rid of bacteria, but many of the microbes in a healthy mouth are supposed to be there. My guest, Nadine Artemis, explains why oral health depends on a healthy microbiome, how this changed her approach to dental care, and what led her to the “invisible toothbrush.” Our discussion doesn’t end with dental health....

Telomeres shorten every time many of our cells divide. Once they become too short, those cells can lose their ability to keep dividing. But what happens if you can lengthen them again? Dr. Bill Andrews explains how research into telomerase opened that possibility and what happened when scientists restored telomerase activity in experimental cells and mice. He also discusses where gene therapy fits...

Six months before having a widowmaker heart attack at 34, Dr. Stephen Hussey had a coronary calcium score of zero. He exercised regularly, ate a whole-food diet, and says his other health markers gave him little reason to think a heart attack was coming. After surviving it, he started questioning whether the usual markers tell us enough about heart health. That led him to look more closely at bloo...

Over the last four decades, obesity in the U.S. has nearly doubled. Research has found testosterone levels in American men declining by around 1% per year since the 80s. Most alarmingly, global sperm concentration has fallen by more than 50% since the 1970s. For people struggling with their weight, hormones, or fertility, figuring out what’s contributing to the problem can take years. Dr. Wendy My...

There are roughly 650,000 full-time sworn law enforcement officers in the United States and more than a million active physicians. But how many people have spent decades in law enforcement, served on a SWAT team, and then become a doctor? Probably not many.  My guest, Dr. Mark Sherwood, is one of them. That career change gave Dr. Sherwood an unusual perspective on stress, health, and aging. He exp...

Nearly three in four women with moderate-to-severe menopausal symptoms report feeling tired or worn out. Add hot flashes, brain fog, anxiety, and bloating, and suddenly it’s hard to know what’s causing what. These symptoms are often treated one at a time, but Lisa Smith believes there’s an important connection between them. The functional medicine dietitian points to the gut, where bacteria can ev...

A 2016 study of 800,000 children found that antibiotics or antacids in the first six months of life significantly raised the risk of eczema, asthma, and life-threatening food allergies by age four.  Dr. Elisa Song walks through that data, plus a Finnish study of one million births linking early antibiotic exposure to anxiety and mood disorders later in life. She also covers how to spot the differe...

Most people think stem cells are unregulated overseas, dangerous, or something you can only access by flying to another country for treatment. Even the ones who believe in them often assume more cells always means better results. But what if none of that is actually true? That's the case Dr. Joy Kong has spent years making. As a UCLA-trained, triple board-certified physician, Dr. Kong has seen it...

Cholesterol, blood pressure, and family history are the usual predictors doctors check for heart health. What most don't mention is that nighttime erections can predict it too. It turns out that tracking this single signal can flag cardiovascular risk years before symptoms show up. Doctors have known this for decades, yet no one outside a sleep lab has ever actually tracked it. Well, no one, excep...

Self-discipline matters more than IQ for your success. According to research from the University of Pennsylvania, it was more than twice as effective at predicting students' final grades. That same discipline can carry you through school and into a successful career. But health and fitness play by different rules, and sheer willpower often isn’t enough. Ben Brown, head nutrition coach at BSL Nutri...

Roughly 7.4 million Americans are currently living with Alzheimer's disease, and by the time symptoms show up, the disease has often been building for 10 to 20 years.  Add in the roughly one in three Americans carrying the genetic marker tied to higher risk, and the scale of what's coming becomes hard to ignore. Despite the stats, Dr. Ken Sharlin doesn't order a test unless it's going to change wh...

As you get older, you start to notice that aging doesn't move at a steady pace. It picks up speed. And the tools most people reach for to fight it - peptides, hormones, the usual stack - are built to fix a problem that moves in a straight line. A top interventional cardiologist for decades, Dr. Jeffrey Gladden watched his health collapse in his 50s. When a doctor chalked it up to age and offered a...

In America, sudden cardiac death kills roughly 300,000 to 400,000 people every year. And in nearly half of those cases, there was no diagnosed heart disease beforehand. Meaning, the person looked fine right up until they weren't. Dr. Kevin White spent over two decades in the emergency room watching that pattern repeat itself, treating people his age for problems that had been building for years wi...

In the early 80s, a 14-year-old picked up a magazine and read an article that said if you want a Lamborghini, you should become a neurosurgeon. And if you want more than that, become an entrepreneur. Jeff Gross wanted more than one. After becoming a board-certified neurosurgeon, he spent decades in the operating room before deciding surgery wasn't always the answer he wanted to give his patients....