Cultivating a Longevity Mindset

Nick Engerer: [00:00:00] When you really boil it down to its essence longevity as a term, as a concept, it’s not a destination. It’s not something we can accomplish or that we get to. It is a mindset.

Peter Bowes: [00:00:16] Nick Engerer is the founder of A Longer Life. You’ll find him at NickEngerer.org where he encourages us to adopt and cultivate a longevity mindset. Hello again. Welcome to the Live Long podcast. I’m Peter Bowes. This is where we explore the science and stories behind Human Longevity. Nick Engerer and I have been on a few longevity adventures together, hiking in the Hollywood Hills and exploring Next Health, here in Los Angeles. You’ll find links to our past conversations in the show notes to this episode. But today, I’m delighted to welcome Nick back to the Live Long Podcast to catch up with some significant developments in his longevity quest and our shared aspirations to live the longest, healthiest lives possible. Nick to talk to you again.

Nick Engerer: [00:01:07] Peter always a real pleasure. You know, it’s a meeting of the minds you and I. We have so much in common in the way we think about longevity. Talk about it, even the name of the respective businesses we operate. So it’s a great kinship. And I’m really pleased to speak with you today.

Peter Bowes: [00:01:22] Yeah. Likewise. We do see, it seems, the world in the same kind of way. You’ve got a beautiful studio there.

Nick Engerer: [00:01:27] Thank you. Yeah, I’m here in the Byron Bay area of Australia. I’ve got a nice setup behind me. Got some good lighting. You can see back there behind me. I’ve actually got a little cap from when I did a triathlon back in Ohio. That’s a special one to me. So put a few goodies in there for you. As well as an hourglass, which is in the logo of a Longer Life.

Peter Bowes: [00:01:47] I noticed that, yes, that’s often a familiar theme, isn’t it? People in this sphere of longevity. It’s that the sands of time.

Nick Engerer: [00:01:54] Oh, it’s so tactile, right? It’s just right there in front of you conceptually. And it’s so widespread in different illustrations of the passage of time. And it’s also a powerful idea to think about flipping that hourglass over.

Peter Bowes: [00:02:08] Exactly. And in addition to my introduction there, I should also mention that you are the host of the documentary series Reversed the Race for longevity, which we featured on this podcast. Last year. We had a fascinating conversation with Doctor Robert Lufkin and the series director, Charles Maddox. What did you get out of making that show?

Nick Engerer: [00:02:28] I recently exited out of my previous business where I was working in the solar energy industry, and when I wrapped up that business and sold it, I had a real moment of wondering, what will I do next? And it didn’t take me long for that to land with a lot of clarity, because I’d been dabbling in this space of longevity. I’d been having a blog on the side. I’d made some great relationships. It was clearly the next step for me. And as I’ve thought about that, I really wanted to do something impactful and meaningful in terms of making this narrative about longevity and longevity future accessible to more people. It put it into a format that my neighbor, or my father, or a friend who doesn’t know very much about this movement already can access it, understand it, and walk away with some things that are meaningfully impactful in their life, namely, that they can intervene in their health future and change their aging destiny. That’s what we wanted them to leave with. And I think that that docuseries accomplished that.

Peter Bowes: [00:03:32] I think it did. And I want to dive into your current work and your sort of future aspirations in a moment. Let’s just do a quick reminder, though, in terms of what got you into the whole longevity thing in the first place, were there a few in your younger life, a few light bulb moments that really focused your mind on aging and healthy aging healthspan lifespan and living as well and as long as we can.

Nick Engerer: [00:03:55] I always point back to the birth of my son. He’s 11 years old now. To give you a sense of the timeline. And at his birth, it was a caesarean section and it was discovered that his mother had a rare form of cancer in the caesarean section, and she had to go through two major operations chemotherapy, a few years of treatment to ultimately end up in remission, which is a beautiful example of what medical technology can accomplish today. But that struck me with a sense of my own mortality pretty profoundly. And in that same year, I had two friends also be diagnosed with cancer. And for perspective, all three of those individuals were in their late 20s. So quite a wake up call for me. And as I explored the question, why do we have late stage disease diagnoses when we have all this amazing technology in the world? Why do we define why do we find/iscover diseases at very late stages when they’re not treatable, Even amongst the the wealthy and influential. Why is that still happening? And as I went down the rabbit hole of discovering we in fact have the technologies available to us already for a preventative health care system. It was actually a lack of awareness of that and a lack of demand for those services. That meant that we couldn’t access them. So I went on a bit of a quest to start changing that. And as I did, I also discovered this entire world around longevity and how aging is what drives the diseases of aging in terms of their risk, like cancer, like neurodegenerative disease or metabolic disease. And in fact, it is learning about the aging process, slowing it down, potentially stopping it in some respects and maybe in the future, reversing it. That will really mean the most for avoiding these diseases altogether, perhaps. And so that’s an exciting promise in the future. We’re not there yet. It may be some time before we get there, but most certainly we can go back to that narrative of detect disease early, live a long, healthy life, extend your health span, and be excited about what might be possible.

Peter Bowes: [00:06:02] And this explains and you’ve touched on this already, but you have now sold your previous business. And to use your words, you’ve decided to go all in on longevity. And I think that really just illustrates what you’ve just been talking about, that there is so much to explore, and I think particularly so much to explain to people that to many, many of us is a mystery, you know, in terms of the aging process and what we can do to potentially slow it down. There’s, as you imply, a lot of science out there that still a lot of people don’t know about.

Nick Engerer: [00:06:35] That’s right. And I think once you get into this movement, I mean, people who have been in your audience for a number of years underestimate just how well educated they are, how much they are aware of that is well beyond the everyday person. So we are actually in quite a health epidemic in the everyday individual in the United States, in the UK and Australia as well. Most of the developed world, and we lose track of just how much we might actually know about this whole longevity thing and how much we care about it. So to be able to have a high level conversation like we do here is wonderful. But ultimately, if we want anything to happen with the promise of these technologies, we need more widespread awareness and demand for their development and adoption so that they can become mainstream. And that means making the message accessible. Preserving that excitement that I think is important, but not getting lost in the hype and making short term decisions. Having having a strategy that doesn’t look beyond immediate gratification. Because by definition, if you’re thinking about longevity, you’re talking about decades ahead in time in most cases. So we need to be thinking long term and making decisions on the long term ones that we can sustain. And that message isn’t as exciting. So we want to make sure we preserve some of that excitement about the really cool stuff that’s happening while we ground ourselves in some long term thinking.

Peter Bowes: [00:08:07] There is an excitement about what you do. But there’s also the the harsh reality that there needs to be a practical approach to what you’re doing. And so you you’ve set about starting this new venture or really a continuation of what you’ve been previously doing, but you’re going much more all in. And that started with essentially a new digital platform for you, a new website.

Nick Engerer: [00:08:28] That’s right. So I took what I was working on previously at Longevity Blog, which many of your listeners might be aware of given our previous collaborations.

Peter Bowes: [00:08:37] I hope so

Nick Engerer: [00:08:38] And I’ve, I’ve converted that over to a new project called A Longer Life, which I think matches really well with the Live Long podcast, because what I saw was a need to ultimately simplify and reduce overwhelm, because when individuals, when the listener here gets excited about longevity and wants to do something good for themselves, as soon as they begin to make even the most cursory glance at a given supplement on their Instagram, let’s say, or scrolling on Facebook or being on X or any other platform you use to get news and information, you become targeted by the torrent of marketing dollars for that and all related products, because these algorithms, they just simply know so much about you, and all they are intended to do is get you to spend money, not to make you have an informed decision making framework. So people get overwhelmed. They don’t know where to start. And in fact, where you start is free and you say this a lot, but I really appreciate that about your groundedness. And that’s where I take people back to in this new four part framework on A Longer Life is, here are the four pieces, the four pillars, if you want to call them that. Four parts of this framework that you can follow in a progressive order to get out of that overwhelm, not make short term decisions, but think long term and again preserve that excitement. I do promise you’ll get to work with the cool, exciting things like the supplements and the red light therapy devices and all the rest of it, but not before you make some important free changes in your life that help you have the right trajectory and long term thinking.

Peter Bowes: [00:10:24] Yeah, and I think we can’t repeat this enough. And you’ve kind of touched on it. The initial basic pillars towards longevity. Yes. There’s the the shiny new stuff, but there’s our nutrition, our exercise resistance training I think exercise every single day to the point that you’re getting out of breath. I think that can’t be emphasized enough. There’s also, of course, our social connections, the fact that we integrate with other people, which increasingly we understand as as very important. There’s reducing the stress in our lives and there’s getting a good night’s sleep. And as you’ve just said, all of these things are basically free if we approach them in the right way. And then on top of that, there’s the exciting new stuff that technology is bringing to us and that scientific research is bringing to us.

Nick Engerer: [00:11:12] Yes, Peter, you’ve said it well. And and this, this type of long term thinking that I emphasize for people is not something that is very sexy to sell. So it’s not one that’s often entering the conversation, but when you really boil it down to its essence, longevity as a term, as a concept, it’s not a destination. It’s not something we can accomplish or that we get to. It is a mindset. Longevity is a mindset. It is a way of looking at our future. It’s a way of setting our goals. It’s a way of making decisions in the here and now that we know will benefit us in the long term. So if we have a longevity mindset, we inherently understand that exercising until we’re out of breath each day has a long term, very positive impact that’s worth doing. And in fact, when we start thinking of it that way, I’m going to do this every day for the rest of my life. We make sure we’re not doing something we don’t like. We instead try to focus on getting that exercise from something that gives us pleasure, perhaps with other people whom we can share a social connection because we think, oh, I’m going to be doing this for decades. It’s not just something I’m doing to get fit for summer. It’s not just something I’m doing to lose a few pounds. This is my longevity mindset. It changes your relationship with all those things in a way that makes them more powerful for you in terms of motivation to adhere to them, to keep doing them.

Peter Bowes: [00:12:51] And you could, I wonder if you agree with this. You could perhaps substitute the word habit for mindset that essentially they result in the same thing, that if the mindset of longevity is a habit that you get into without really thinking, so you get up in the morning and you do all of these things. You do the exercise that will make you out of breath and all of the other basics the essentials, the, the nutrition, the sleep, the good sleep overnight. And as you say, the social connections. It’s a habit that you don’t have to get up in the morning and look at your calendar and say, I’ve got to do this. It’s just part of you.

Nick Engerer: [00:13:29] Yeah, you you actually build this into your worldview. And that’s another thing that I think you can substitute mindset for is the way you’re seeing the world, the way that you perceive reality. And baking that into your response to that is, is those habits you just mentioned. So yes, mindset contains an awful lot, which is again why I think it’s such a powerful word and why I’ve made it the first part of that four part framework to adopt and cultivate a longevity mindset. And I love that word cultivate because it gives me the image of a garden. It gives me the image of building something over time, and taking care of it.

Peter Bowes: [00:14:07] So let’s dive into some of the components as you have identified them, of the longevity mindset. What goes into it?

Nick Engerer: [00:14:16] So I see this in terms of framing it as first, what type of mindset are we talking about? Because mindsets and easily wishy washy word. But we have some really good science on mindset. In fact it’s it’s been studied for several decades. And I think most powerfully, the concept of a growth mindset has emerged through work by Carol Dweck, who’s a professor who looks at mindset and its implications, how it’s formed, how it helps us throughout our life, and the consequences of having what she calls a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset. And one of the things that I realized when I looked at this model that she had is that we are stuck in a fixed mindset about our aging future. We believe that we are going to be weak. We believe that we are going to be sick. We believe that we will be less relevant, a less happy. All of these things as we grow older. And that’s a pretty dim view of your life. And the reason that we have this is actually not nefarious. No one’s making you have this perspective. It’s simply subconsciously programed by what we observe in our culture and in our society. And in fact, we have departed from traditional cultural values that support a longer term, healthy view. We know that many traditional cultures actually have individuals who are still integrated into the family. They’re healthy. They’re part of taking care of the children. They have mission. They have purpose. Versus modern societal values have shifted toward productivity, consumption, achievement, and ultimately into an economic system that fractures those traditional family units into separate ones. And the result of that, as well as all this marketing and cheap processed food and sedentary lifestyles, has been that people are getting sick as they grow older, mostly because they’ve neglected their health for decades. And that is in fact commonplace. The obesity rates in overweight rates in the United States are shocking. I think it’s about three and four right now. People are at least overweight. There’s there’s one in approximately 1 in 5 people, maybe pre-diabetic or diabetic. These are shocking statistics. But that means that the commonplace position for an individual in their aging process is one that takes them to being weak, takes them to being sick. It takes them to dying earlier. And that is what we begin to observe and think through our peer group, through our family group, through the broader representations of aging in our media. And these things are one way, one path forward. But they are not the destiny for you as an individual. And so this is why we have to be really careful with this fixed mindset, thinking this is the way it is. This is where I’m going. That’s how it’s going to be. Disease is destiny and adopt a growth mindset. Now, a growth mindset differs from a fixed mindset because it believes that your actions can change the outcomes. It believes that by taking on new skills and knowledge, you can change your future. It’s looking at a talented athlete who we might just say, oh, they were born with such talent and instead seeing that they have spent years of their life working toward that goal. Coaching, investment. Training. Competition to become an elite sprinter. They put in the work and effort to be there. It’s not a natural born talent. It’s something they have cultivated. And when we look at that growth mindset outcome and apply it to our health, would begin to see the power of having a growth oriented mindset for our long term future, for our long term health future. I mean to say, and that is where a longevity mindset starts to become possible. And there’s a few more characteristics about that we can explore.

Peter Bowes: [00:18:33] And all of this falls into our understanding of genetics and the view by some people that we are in fact limited by our genetics, in other words, how we were born. Now there’s something called epigenetics, which essentially means that what we are born with isn’t rigid, and that it is our lifestyle that can influence our genetics. In other words, if we live a certain positive lifestyle with all of these pillars in mind, that it is possible to to bloom no matter what the genetics say. Yes, genetics is part of us, but it isn’t everything. And I think to understand that is important. If you’re having this certainly positive mindset about improving and looking to the future.

Nick Engerer: [00:19:18] Peter, I’m so glad that you introduced that concept because as I build forward on this growth oriented longevity mindset, I want the audience to come to two key realizations. The first is that disease is not destiny. You do not have to grow weak and sick as you get older. And the second is that the longer you’re alive, the more technology is here to keep you healthy. And so there’s a positive feedback cycle available there. And when we look into that first realization, the most powerful resource we have is in fact our understanding of what you just described, epigenetics. And again, some of that subconscious programing that we have around aging is this whole idea of good genes versus bad genes, right. It’s not that there aren’t bad genes that might predispose us to a genetic disease or in fact give us a disease no matter how healthy we are. We try to be because there’s an actual genetic defect like sickle cell anemia, for example. This is not that. This is that. The whole idea that my grandmother lived to 105. I have good longevity genetics. So I’ll live a long, healthy life versus another person who lost their grandfather at age 56 from a heart attack. And they think, oh, I have bad genetics, so I’m not going to live very long. That’s not how it works. What we have learned is that the role of the epigenome, which is the organizational framework for our genome, our DNA, that this is actually the most important part of how we’re aging. In fact, we look at the epigenome to measure biological age because that signal is so powerfully built into the epigenome. And so the epigenome is actually the chromatin from your DNA is actually wrapped around these nucleosomes, which are broken up in these quadrants of histones that have these little tails hanging off of them, that have methyl groups on there that are actually signaling to your cells what type of cell they are meant to be. This is how you can have the same DNA and have different cells. Have a skin cell. Cells in your eyes. Heart cells. Skeletal muscle. Bone. That’s because the epigenome is carrying that information, that organizational information. And we know that through the longevity, lifestyle factors, nutrition, fitness, sleep, mental health and environmental factors like the air we breathe and the water we drink, that we can change the expression of our epigenome. We can actually have a healthier expression or a more unhealthy expression of the same DNA based on our lifestyle. And this is precisely why we can have identical twins. Same genome but very different aging outcomes. And in my Longevity Mindset course, a free course on my website, I bring up the illustration of identical twins, where there is a twin that has smoked for more than a decade, longer than the other twin. And you can just simply look at them and see. Advanced collagen breakdown, cloudy eyes, receding hairline, visibly older a very, very tactile example of this same genome, different lifestyle, different epigenetic expression. And in that, the most important thing we can take away is that this is why disease is not destiny. This is why we can change our health future even if we have, quote, bad genetics. Genetics are really just our vulnerabilities. It’s the epigenome, the lifestyle that allows us to have a different health future.

Peter Bowes: [00:23:10] And I think it’s important to say that while disease isn’t destiny, that we’re not talking here about preventing every single disease. Tragically, we’re not talking about that. I wish we were. But there are some things that will come along despite us living a longevity lifestyle that simply science doesn’t understand yet. And those things are, at least in the foreseeable future, are always going to happen. But what we can do through the longevity lifestyle is optimize our chances of living the best and the longest life possible, putting us into the best state possible to fight those diseases that we understand that will sadly, inevitably come along at some point. Those chronic diseases that affect most people at some point in life. And the goal here, and I know this is what you are talking about, the goal here is to push back the time that those diseases happen and to extend the healthy years. The healthspan that we talk about.

Nick Engerer: [00:24:06] That is right on the money. Peter. We’re we are not in a position now where we can avoid those outcomes altogether. We are all going to die. We are all going to die of something. However, what we can observe in many individuals and I call them longevity legends, and this is our first generation of longevity legends, are individuals who are able to achieve great things in very high quality of health and life experience in their 80s and 90s. And we know that there is an entire demographic of people who don’t develop the chronic diseases of aging and then die from them. They instead have a fall, break a hip, get pneumonia, and die in the hospital in a matter of two weeks. And they don’t do that with diabetes, and they don’t do that with Alzheimer’s disease. And they don’t do that with multiple forms of cancer. And this pathway is possible. And it largely in my belief the science for this is too early to say is coming from a very high quality longevity lifestyle and the right mindset. And that leads us into the second part of the growth, the growth oriented longevity mindset, where there’s that second realization that the longer you stick around, the more technology is here to keep you healthy. And that is a very, very powerful part of this mindset, because if you haven’t noticed, technology is accelerating or our understanding of disease and aging itself is accelerating, and our ability to intervene in that is becoming more powerful every day. So I’m not saying to you that you’re going to live forever, but do I think that the first person who’s going to live to 150 is alive right now? Absolutely. Do I think that I will live well beyond 100? Absolutely. So there is part of the excitement there that we want to make sure we don’t lose and we lean into a bit because it can help motivate us to achieve that 5 to 10 extra healthy years that we can earn now, because that might turn into 20 to 30.

Peter Bowes: [00:26:20] Well, let’s talk about some of that exciting technology that you refer to. We’re all wearing, or many of us are wearing the rings and the watches and using that technology to gather data about ourselves. And I think for me at least, that is one of the most exciting developments in the last five or so years. The amount of data, the amount of big data that is available about not only ourselves, but the way that we can compare our data with the rest of the population, which can give us some very valuable insights into where we are in terms of our everyday health. Just explain to me how you’re using that technology and what you find the most exciting at the moment.

Nick Engerer: [00:26:58] Well, you’re making a really important point about our ability to measure our biology. And and that’s how I’ll respond to this question because that’s what wearables are enabling us to do. An Oura ring is so good at what it does that it can track a woman’s fertility and in fact, tell her when she’s pregnant. Maybe even a day before pregnancy test might tell her. This is pretty profound. What’s starting to happen with our ability to monitor our biology? And other examples include things like being able to do a blood test. We’ve had that capability for quite a while, but we now can use our blood or saliva to estimate our biological age, to estimate how fast we are aging, to perhaps even measure the aging process in individual organs, because all that information is in our epigenome. And once you can start to measure something, then you can begin to try to intervene and change the thing you’re measuring and measure again to see what has occurred. And so this is where we start to get into some of the more speculative territory, some of the more novel technological territory that has a lot of questions that aren’t answered yet. So I say them all with quite a caveat. I am a strategic advisor over at Do Not Age, and so I have a special relationship with them, and I like to test their supplements on myself and measure before and after in my biological age. And there have been two supplements, longevity technologies that I have used that have resulted in positive improvements to my biological age. The first was nicotinamide mononucleotide NMN and NAD booster. So-called NAD booster. And the second, and more excitingly, was calcium alpha ketoglutarate, which I introduced to my supplement stack. It was the only change I made over 12 months, and I measured my biological age three different ways, and I improved my biological age by a median value of three years in that time. So, look, is that hard science? No. Is it a demonstration of this biological measurement and optimization process? I believe that it is. And just because that’s what it did for me is not what it will do for you. And so really, my ultimate goal there is to demonstrate how to do something like this. I call it Self-experimentation. I’ve talked to your audience about it before, and the ability to do self-experimentation with wearables, with blood tests, with biological age tests is opening up a new era in terms of health optimization. And the thing you asked me, what gets me excited? What gets me excited is the final arrival. Finally, the arrival of personalized guidance through artificial intelligence. And I don’t say that lightly. I’m invested in a business that’s doing this. I know what the capabilities are. We are on the cusp of finally having personalized guidance for optimizing our health, because AI is so good and will be so widely and low cost level available to so many people that it can interpret this data for you and help you make changes to optimize. And as one final tidbit on that, I noticed just last week, it was I noticed that Oura has our Oura Ring has already integrated an AI agent in their app to talk to you about your sleep. This is just the beginning of that process happening and it’s incredibly exciting.

Peter Bowes: [00:30:41] It is exciting. It’s actually quite addictive, isn’t it? Looking at that data from Oura.

Nick Engerer: [00:30:45] Oh, I love looking at my Oura data. I check my my heart rate variability is the most important thing to me. I check it every day. in fact, I didn’t have a great sleep last night. My HRV was a bit low today, and I was feeling a little bit foggy, and so I didn’t go on the hard trail run I was supposed to go on today. I’ll probably do it tomorrow instead if my metrics recover. So it helps me make decisions in my everyday life.

Peter Bowes: [00:31:07] And you mentioned self-experimentation where the n equals one. In other words, you are the experiment. So there’s no real control. And it’s not going to convince the scientific community generally speaking. But it’s still valuable at a personal level, isn’t it, because you’re comparing yourself with yourself. And if you look at that data over a period of time, whether it’s body temperature, HRV, whether it’s body fat, you know, the many, many different biomarkers that we can measure of ourselves. And look at the graph, look at what we were doing, perhaps the night before that we didn’t get a particularly good night’s sleep. Were we drinking alcohol? Did we eat too late? All of these lifestyle factors that go into how we feel, there’s a huge value in that, isn’t there?

Nick Engerer: [00:31:51] There is. And the beautiful part about the linkage with AI is that it can help you find those signals and suggest things that you might try to see further improvement. So that is where the real power comes in, because right now, in the current paradigm, you might need a functional health coach or practitioner, a doctor, somebody who can help do analytics on your data. It’s just prohibitively expensive. But for some low level subscription fee, an AI tool is going to be able to do that for you. And very powerfully, I’ve seen this start to occur, and I see the promise in this occurring with women in terms of cycle tracking, tracking their their fertility in particular, and also helping them make it through the very challenging changes that occur in perimenopause and menopause. And so I’m a co-founder of another business called Sage Women’s Health, and I know about menopause way more than the average 30 something year old man very familiar with it. And it is a very, very N of one journey. Every woman is different and they have to figure themselves out and what works for them out. And this is where this personalized insight is going to be particularly powerful. It’s in those things that are very individualized, that are going to otherwise be missed by clinical trial, placebo controlled studies that look at widespread statistics which have their place, which are useful for safety, etc. and by no means should be dismissed. But we’ll never quite narrow down to you individually what will work for you. It’s always going to be part of the process, even if it isn’t hard science.

Peter Bowes: [00:33:35] Just for fun, tell me something that you’ve changed about the way that you live as a result of looking at data about yourself. Is there something that immediately comes to mind?

Nick Engerer: [00:33:45] Well, I have completely stopped using alcohol. You made that example before with sleep, and it didn’t take me very long of looking at my Oura data. A few years ago, when I first started using the device to see that it increased my resting heart rate, it disrupted my REM sleep and my deep sleep. It reduced the quality of my sleep and it was out the door. Not long after. That’s a very practical example, and many people will know that they wish they would drink less alcohol. Or maybe they shouldn’t drink as much alcohol. Some people are less sensitive to it than I am, but often it’s the data, the insight that drives that point home so that we can see. All right. That’s something I want to eliminate from my life. I gave you another example with HRV and body temperature, in terms of seeing whether or not I might be fighting a virus, whether I have not recovered enough to do my next workout. But I’ll tell you, the one thing that I’m really enjoying doing is uploading my blood tests into AI and asking it to analyze and find things that I should be working to improve. And that’s been so powerful that I’ve actually invested in a business that’s starting to do just that, because it can provide a level of insight that my health coach, my functional health practitioner, my doctor have missed because they can make some connections that they might not otherwise have the capacity or focus to do for me as an individual. And that gets me quite excited. So I’ve tweaked my supplement routine from input from AI. For example, I’ve swapped out one supplement form for another because of insights from AI, for example. And that’s again part of the reason why I’m leaning heavily into that space, because I think it’s bringing that personalized promise to us. finally.

Peter Bowes: [00:35:36] Yeah, I think that’s really interesting. I would just say one thing, because I’ve been doing exactly the same thing with AI and blood tests and very respected doctor that I spoke to. Good advice. Don’t take advice from AI based on your blood tests because it can still make mistakes. It’s fascinating to see what the analysis is, but then you still need to have a conversation with a health professional if you plan to make some changes to your lifestyle, or maybe your medication because of what I tells you. We’re not at that stage, at least not yet, that it’s going to become your doctor. It’s a tool, an interesting tool that has to be used with some caution.

Nick Engerer: [00:36:12] Thank you for your very responsible guidance on that, Peter, and keeping us grounded. I absolutely agree, and we say that to anyone who’s using these tools in the businesses that I’m working with, very clearly that this does not replace your doctor, but what it does do is give you some additional insights you can share with them, or some options you can share with them. And you can also bring in some pre analyzed data to share with them, because in many cases, you might not have that long of a visit to get through all the details and it can really help you there.

Peter Bowes: [00:36:42] Now I smiled Nick, when I heard your answer to my last but one question, which was. What changes have you made to your lifestyle as a result of the data that you’ve been looking at? Because I thought, well, I’ll give my own example as well. And my own example is exactly, exactly the same as yours. And that is giving up drinking any alcohol based on the reams of data that you’ve just gone through in terms of what it does to your sleep in particular, and how sensitive your body is to even small quantities of alcohol. And I’ve been someone who has to use the phrase never had a problem with alcohol, but has enjoyed a drink or two over the years like many of us have. But now I’ve got to the point where I understand the negative implications for my health, and have actually got to the point where I enjoy not drinking alcohol. And there isn’t a second thought to it, even the the social implications, which can be awkward. I think you’re in Australia. Yeah, lots of people drink there. I’m sure they do around you all the time. And it can be awkward not to have a drink in your hand. And I’ve kind of got over that as as well that it just doesn’t matter to me anymore.

Nick Engerer: [00:37:48] That’s right. Because something matters to you more, Peter. Because you have a longevity mindset and you’re thinking in the long term and you’re willing to make those changes. And as you said earlier, you’ve built that into your life as a habitual response. And that is very powerful. And there is a big shift in younger people, the younger generation in their late teens, early 20s, to not drinking altogether because they don’t like how it makes them feel. It’s not good for their health. They find pleasure and excitement in other ways, so it is possible to shift that culture. I don’t know so much here in Australia. There is a pretty strong culture for driving to the bottle-o and grabbing a case of VB. That’s a type of beer and that’s where you buy the beer at the Bottle-o. It’s for anybody who needs a translation, right? But we’re right. We have to make a countercultural decision. And that’s exactly what a longevity mindset helps us do.

Peter Bowes: [00:38:37] Yeah, it’s really interesting. So you mentioned the course that you’ve developed a few minutes ago. Just tell me a bit more about that for the longevity mindset.

Nick Engerer: [00:38:46] Yeah. Peter, thank you for that. I you mentioned my website at the beginning. NickEngerer.org and on that website I have a section there on mindset. There’s there’s four sections. In fact there’s mindset strategy, lifestyle and technology. Those are the four parts of the framework and they’re progressive. And if you go into the mindset section I have a free longevity mindset course that’s there. It’s broken down into four chapters. So far I’ve completed the first three chapters. The fourth chapter will be coming after I move house and complete that work. And what it does is it brings people through an introduction to myself. It helps us break down this fixed versus growth mindset and why a longevity mindset is a growth mindset. And then it focuses on those two key realizations and the evidence behind them, which I actually have introduced a significant amount of to two already. The first being disease is not destiny and the second being the longer you live, the more technology is here to keep you healthy. And we really break that down all the way to the limiting beliefs that keep us from adopting these realizations in our life. The evidence that shows that they are in fact true, and how we can be inspired by other individuals and evidence around us to begin to really put into practice what those two realizations mean. And we talked a lot about the epigenetics. I introduced that as well in the course and explain it at an elementary level so people can understand it, and that it really links into those longevity lifestyle factors that allow us to live healthily for much longer than we may have thought was possible. And that becomes some tremendous motivation. And so this longevity mindset course is really my gift to you, the listener, because of my mission and passion for this topic. Because I believe that the more of us who have a longevity mindset, the more this starts to snowball. The more there is a market for health optimization, the more there is hope in our life. For our long term health, the less we believe subconsciously that we have to get sick and weak as we grow older. And that is part of a bigger counterculture shift that I think is starting to happen, particularly right now in the United States, to say, you know what? Our state of health is not good enough. This isn’t okay. We need to shift our trajectory because we’re headed somewhere that’s not sustainable, and it’s causing a tremendous amount of suffering. So it plays a small role in that as well.

Peter Bowes: [00:41:20] I had a fascinating interview with Doctor Darshan Shah, who I know that you know of. Well, from Next Health, Next Health, the I suppose you could call it a high street health optimization clinic that is expanding around the country. We went to Next Health here in Los Angeles about a year or so ago, and certainly his vision of the future is an entirely new paradigm, isn’t it, for healthcare that doesn’t stick rigidly to the framework as we know it?

Nick Engerer: [00:41:50] This is one of the reasons I like Darshan so much, because he knew the entry point. He knew the entry point was a high level clinic. That’s on the more expensive side for most people in Los Angeles, but then has started to grow that and expand its presence around the world. And this is where the entry point for a lot of this longevity shift occurs. And we have a brilliant example of that in the cosmetic industry, in the plastic surgery industry, because we can see very clearly if we look at many of the rich and famous, who are your neighbors, that it is quite possible to preserve preserve the youthful appearance much further than we initially thought. And sure, you can say some of that is negative because it might be just chasing vanity. But I like to argue that your esthetic age, how old you look, is far more than vanity. It’s actually an asset to invest in it. Most importantly, because your skin health is quite indicative of your overall health and in fact, your age. And because our skin is the front line of our really many of the damaged driving processes that result in aging, because we have UV damage, we have environmental exposures that create cellular senescence, that start inflammation, that can often form malignant cells and cancers. They all start with the skin. And keeping our skin healthy actually keeps our whole body more healthy. And that’s where this industry, this longevity technology shift in the industry has been most evident Because it’s, you know, chasing something people are willing to invest in. And therefore it is the most advanced. And it starts off being the most expensive. But now it’s quite possible to go to esthetic clinics all over the world for treatments that are quite affordable. And again, you can say what you will, you can judge that however you would like, but it is an evidence based view to see that starts with the rich and famous. It starts as expensive, it starts as more out there. But these things then trickle down into the economy to become more accessible. And that’s precisely what I like about next health. Darshan’s vision that I’m seeing to start happen now is that this whole idea of optimizing your health used to be expensive and less accessible, but progressively it’s becoming more widespread. It’s becoming more accessible. People can order their own blood tests now. They can get a full body MRI for $500. Five years ago, it was us $5,000 though. So these this progressive deployment of the technology. The market’s response, the lowering of cost. That’s a big part of what Doctor Shah has helped accomplish that I think is quite remarkable. And my hats off to him. But the long term vision that he shares with many other others in this space is a complete shift in how we look at health and how we treat disease, and I’m here for that. I believe that’s part of the longevity future and the promise of longevity technologies.

Peter Bowes: [00:45:03] Well, in terms of your long term vision, where do you see yourself in this longevity sphere in, say, a decade’s time?

Nick Engerer: [00:45:12] That’s a fun question, Peter. I like to think of myself first and foremost as a communicator, just like you, where helping to tell stories. We’re helping to, to share, a new narrative. And I want to keep shaping that. And so in ten years time, I’ll be on the cusp of turning 50, and at a personal level, I plan to be doing my triathlons, be doing my trail runs, still be very bouncy, explosive, strong, lean, healthy, and increasing my level of influence in terms of the number of people who are listening to this positive message about a longevity mindset, helping their friends and family adopt it to make practical changes, and to just grow the size of that megaphone louder and louder until we are having a meaningful impact on ultimately, what we started talking about at the very beginning of this conversation, which is reducing human suffering. We don’t have to live in a world with late stage disease diagnosis. You know, I often reference Chadwick Boseman, the actor Black Panther actor who died. He’s actually died at my age, 39, from a colon cancer that if he had been able to detect even maybe just 6 or 12 months earlier, he may still be with us today, and we have a world available to us where we can provide preventative screening and proactive health care that ultimately reduces human suffering. And that is what wakes me up in the morning.

Peter Bowes: [00:46:40] And when you hear about people dying in their 30s, that is why we should be grateful. We shouldn’t talk about anti-aging because aging is a privilege. And to be in ten years time, I’ll be well into my 70s, and if I have the same health that I have now, I’ll be very grateful for that. And I do all similar things to what you do to try to achieve that. But growing old isn’t something that scares me. Growing old but not having my health is something that scares me. And that’s at the root of what you’re talking about.

Nick Engerer: [00:47:10] I think that you’re hitting on something that’s really important in terms of a longevity mindset, and that is gratitude. And you are very right to point out that growing older, particularly with your health, is a privilege. And you say it’s a privilege because it’s valuable. It’s a valuable thing. And that is why I think this concept around a longevity mindset and what it can begin to do for us, is a reflection of the type of values that are an ideal for many of us to be able to preserve our health and function as we grow older, to enjoy our time with our grandchildren and our great grandchildren, to continue to feel relevant to society, have mission and purpose. Those things, those desires, do not fade as you age. And in fact, in our last collaboration, we closed off on a very similar point. And I’ll say it again, I often ask people, do you want to be alive tomorrow? And you know what? That answer’s seldom changes. It doesn’t change as long as you have your health, as long as you have something to live for. And just because you might grow older, you might have this idea that, yeah, I’ll be okay, and I can, I can leave. That’s all right. I think you’re probably still going to want to be here. I think it’s going to continue to want to. You’re going to continue to want to live a fruitful, meaningful life as long as you can. And it is a privilege to do that. It’s valuable to do that. And it’s part of why adopting a longevity mindset is so powerful, and why it’s so also a privilege to sit here with you and talk about these ideas together. I hope your audience has enjoyed the conversation.

Peter Bowes: [00:48:44] Nick, always an honor. It’s a privilege to talk to you. It’s exciting to talk to you and long may we continue to do it

Nick Engerer: [00:48:51] A privilege Peter. Thank you. Take care.

Peter Bowes: [00:48:53] The Livelong Podcast is a Healthspan Media production. I’m Peter Bowes. You can contact me through our website, LiveLongPodcast.com where you’ll also find show notes for this episode.