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Most investors spend years building financial wealth—but what happens if your health can’t keep up?
In this episode, Dave Wolcott sits down with Dr. Ryan Williamson, 
neurologist, entrepreneur, and founder of Transcend Health, to explore why physical capital may be the most overlooked asset in your wealth-building strategy. Together, they discuss how functional medicine, advanced diagnostics, and proactive health optimization can help entrepreneurs and investors extend both their healthspan and lifespan.
Dr. Ryan Williamson is a board-certified neurologist, former Navy physician, entrepreneur, and founder of Transcend Health. After years practicing conventional medicine, he transitioned into functional and preventative healthcare to help high performers optimize longevity, cognitive health, and overall well-being through advanced diagnostics and personalized health strategies.
This episode covers functional medicine, longevity, health optimization, preventative healthcare, biohacking, physical capital, peak performance, wealth building strategies, and personal development for entrepreneurs and accredited investors.
In This Episode
- Why functional medicine focuses on root causes instead of symptom management
- How sleep, exercise, circadian rhythms, and lifestyle habits impact long-term performance
- The latest breakthroughs in preventative healthcare, AI-driven diagnostics, and longevity strategies
We are helping keep people optimized and keep their health optimized. And that way, if somebody starts to drift in one direction, we can catch it early and help them correct course rather than wait five or 10 years till it’s too late and make sure that we again, we understand where somebody is to help keep them living as long and healthily as possible.
How’s it going everyone? And welcome back to Wealth Strategy Secrets of the Ultra Wealthy. Today’s episode is a powerful conversation about the hidden connection between wealth, stress, relationships, and personal psychology. I’m joined by Dr. Travis Perry, author, entrepreneur, and financial hypnotherapist, who shares how the sudden loss of his father to a stress-induced heart attack completely transformed his perspective on success and fulfillment. We dive into why so many high achievers struggle with burnout, overwork, and financial conflict at home, and how true wealth requires alignment across your business, health, marriage, mindset, and purpose. If you’re building a business while trying to create a meaningful life, this episode will challenge the way you think about success. Ryan, welcome to the show.
Thanks, Dave. Happy to be here.
Yeah, really grateful to have you on—another veteran on the show. Really appreciate your service and what you stand for. And I’m really excited to share your expertise today with the audience on something that’s really near and dear to my heart, and that’s our physical capital. We often talk about financial capital being so important and talking about strategies and tactics to achieve financial capital in an alternative way. And similarly, we’re going to talk about this today, which is your physical capital, functional medicine, biohacking, and some really fun things on how people can truly look to optimize their own peak performance, optimize their health whatever age they are. And I think overall just really become more conscious and aware of your health, your lifestyle so you can feel better and you can really be that person that you want to be to your family, your business, and your clients. So with that, welcome, Ryan.
Thank you, Dave. And right back at you on my gratitude for your service. Thank you. I truly appreciate your time in the Marine Corps. As one who spent time with the Marines for most of my career, as we were just chatting about offline, Semper Fi.
Well, why don’t we begin, Ryan? Talk to us a little bit about your background because it is quite fascinating and I know you come from really, you know, the roots of traditional medicine, but, you know, just like in the financial world, healthcare is really being disrupted. It’s completely changing. And I think most healthcare as we know it is really sick care. People go and see a doctor because something is wrong.
And now the paradigm is changing and we want to actually preventatively start to work on our healthcare and gain access to these resources so that nothing does go wrong in the future. So kind of tell us how that evolved for you and how you got to where you are today.
Absolutely, yeah. So I’m a product of the conventional Western training pipeline. You go through your undergraduate studies, apply to medical school, hope you get in. I was fortunate enough to gain acceptance to go through four years of medical school, graduate as an MD, and then I became a neurologist—so a brain doctor, not a neurosurgeon. But we treat a lot of strokes and Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, things like this, seizures. Go through four years of that training. And this is such a long training pipeline or pathway that you don’t really have time to question what you’re learning.
You just have to go do it. Because, I mean, this is, we’re talking about a decade and a half of just time in higher education. And I commissioned as an ensign in the Navy, so as an officer, my first year of medical school, but for the most part, kind of leave you alone in that scholarship, let you do your studies. So I wasn’t really fully active duty until after I graduated as a neurologist. And as we were just discussing, when I was in the military, it was all performance-based medicine. So it’s keeping inherently young, healthy people healthy. And it was great; I really enjoyed that job.
I just knew that a full 20-year career in the military wasn’t going to be for me. Just had a lot of other goals, a lot of other things I wanted to do. So I got out of the military in 2022 and then went back to civilian practice and did mostly travel medicine. So I start traveling around the country, you know, where I’m inserting myself into hospital systems, doing acute care. So these are really sick people in the hospital coming in with brain bleeds and again, intractable seizures and brain infections. Really scary stuff. And I quickly realized how insulated I had been from healthcare at large, from this broken system that you’re referencing. And you hit the nail on the head: it is so backwards.
And I think speaking with most of my physician colleagues, we all feel this way. I mean, we all have some early adverse life event. You lose a family member or just see something awful happen to somebody, perhaps go through something yourself, that drives us all to be called into wanting to take care of people. And it’s very disheartening to go through that. I mean, to make this massive investment of time, effort, and energy over years to then come out and realize you got one, if not both, hands tied behind your back to actually help people. It’s crazy. So that was disheartening. And after a year or two of that, I said, “You know, there’s got to be a better way.”
And I’m certainly not the first person to have this thought, certainly not the first person to come up with an idea around this. But I really got into this idea of functional medicine root-cause analysis, zooming out of just my specialty and really trying to think about how can I help people be healthier. And we haven’t chatted about this yet, but I put my thoughts into a book thinking that would be the way to go, which has done well. I’m very pleased with. People seem to have received the book well, and it seems to help, but it’s very focused on just lifestyle medicine helping people be healthy. And we’ve since pivoted that into a concierge practice that you and I were chatting about. But again, that’s sort of the high-level or CliffsNotes, but man, thinking about what it takes to get prior authorizations from an insurance company, or thinking kind of the merry-go-round of a drug company being involved and just marketing, or the fact that we watch drug commercials, like just things that we accept as normal are absolutely crazy to me because the answer is not keeping people sick. The answer is not more drugs.
It’s not more medicines. It’s just foundational basics that unfortunately most people hear all the time, but they don’t know what to do in practice or in principle. It’s diet and exercise. How many times have we all heard that? Yeah, I get that till we’re blue in the face. But really, I think having somebody to shine a light on this, to walk us through it, to help us understand how to put best practices in place, that’s my mission now. That’s what I’m really excited about.
Yeah, I love that, Ryan. So why don’t we really break this down for people? Because I think a lot of people may not even really know what functional medicine is, or frankly, whatever you want to call it. I know there’s a little bit of debate right now in terms of how you kind of label this type of medicine. But if you’ve been working with a traditional doctor in the traditional system, regardless of your age or goals like you, you certainly kind of have that perspective, but I think a lot of people have never quite been exposed to how a functional medicine approach even works. How are you different from kind of the traditional thing? So walk through what that really looks like for someone. How is it different, and how would someone really kind of take their first step into this world?
Yeah, so again, it really involves just zooming all the way out is the way I think about it. And I think it starts with the realization that our body is like a machine. It works in a very specific set of ways. And if we respect the manner or at least the operating mode in which we’re designed to function, stuff goes pretty well. The trouble is that modern society, in our modern world, does almost everything but ensures that that doesn’t happen. We’re constantly staying up all night stressed out about who knows what, about what our business is doing, or what’s our cash flow situation, what’s our position on our balance sheet, where are we going to go, or what travel are we worried about. We’re always on the go grabbing, I don’t know, food from here or there. There’s very inconsistent meal planning. And even if you get ahold of healthy or quote-unquote organic food, that’s not even a guarantee because now there’s microplastics in the food and organic is just a label. And then you got to worry about all that stuff. Exercise, I think, is an afterthought for most people or it’s unpleasant. And so we’re sedentary. We sit all day, we don’t move, we don’t get outside and get light, which turns out is pretty darn helpful. So for as connected as we are as a society, and as incredible as it is to sit two states apart and record a podcast in real-time and share ideas, we’re more disconnected and we’re more stressed than ever before.
And it comes down to, again, understanding that this is not how we’re designed to live, it’s not how we’re designed to operate. So that was probably a little all over the place. Yeah.
Let me just add a little bit about my experience. And fortunately, I got exposed to functional medicine 15 years ago through a good friend of mine. And it was all under the premise that I was looking to really optimize my health. I wasn’t just waiting for something to happen; I wanted to be proactive about my health. And that approach and that journey really started with a diagnostics of looking under the hood. So a lot of people will always say, “Well, sure, I’ve had blood labs drawn and, yes, the doctor checks my blood.”
I mean, but I’ve literally had like 150 different markers checked and things that have never really been checked before. And then I kind of think about it, Ryan, as like it’s almost like an orchestra with all of these different players having different notes at the same time. So the clarinet may be off, but if you just look at it in isolation, that might not be the right approach to it. But if you understand that the clarinet and the oboe and the cello are all really working together, and if you can optimize those together and you can understand patterns and trends and everything, then you can optimize for something and truly identify maybe what the root cause is of what’s causing those imbalances.
No, I think that that’s a perfect analogy. And yeah, symphony orchestra, however you want to put that, because what we’re trained to do in medicine, unfortunately—at least conventional doctors are trained this way—we go through all this training and then we end up not just being a specialist, but oftentimes a subspecialist. I mean, to take my field of neurology, for example, there aren’t just general neurologists, but there’s the stroke guy, and there’s the Parkinson’s guy, and the headache person, and whatever; that’s all they do. But you’ve got cardiologists, you’ve got kidney doctors and nephrologists, on and on and on. And people just get the runaround of, to your point, one lab marker is off or one thing is out of whack. And rather than taking a look at how everything fits into context, as you so eloquently put it, as part of the symphony or the orchestra, people just get the runaround and they get bounced from specialist to specialist. Medications pile up, and before you know it, people are on five to 20 different new medications that they don’t need.
And we end up chasing our tail, dealing more with side effects than actually finding out what’s wrong in the first place. And I do—I have sympathy for my physician colleagues because, again, it’s not doctors, I think, bear the brunt of this a lot, but it’s really the system that’s the problem, as I mentioned a minute ago. And part of that problem is that physicians don’t have enough time to sit down and go through all of this. If you surveyed the average doctor, at least the average generalist primary care doctor, they’d love to do this. I think everybody would love to be a functional medicine doctor. We’re all naturally pretty curious. People generally have a good understanding of the body and the physiology and like to work our way through this. But when you’ve got a panel of, I don’t know, 30 to 50 people and you spend more time filling out paperwork in the waiting room than you do actually with a provider for three to five minutes—whatever the average visit time is now—there’s no way that you can have any of this done in a reasonable amount of time or get to the bottom of this because there’s simply not enough time in that system to do that.
So again, to your point, having a foundational approach, being able to zoom out, being able to look at everything through a holistic lens together, having a preventive, proactive stance is absolutely the way to go. I mean, take heart disease, number one killer around the world, kills millions of people a year in every country. We have still not gotten a handle on this. Almost half of the initial presentations of coronary artery disease is sudden cardiac death, meaning there are no symptoms, there’s no warning sign. People just die of a heart attack. And in my opinion, that is nearly 100% preventable with the right lifestyle interventions, with the right workup, with the right approach, identifying disease early before it strikes. And this is tragic. I mean, we all know people that have either gone through this or, unfortunately, we’ve lost people.
And it’s preventable with a preventive lens, as you said.
Who would you say is this for? And when is the right time for someone to explore this type of approach for their health?
Well, it’s never too early and it’s never too late to adopt a healthy lifestyle, period. It does not matter who you are; it does not matter where you are in life. I’ll give an example of an older person who’s near and dear to my heart. My grandfather was a World War II veteran, also an orthopedic physician, orthopedic surgeon. His medical partner is still alive, and let’s see, he’d be about 89 this year. And a few years back he started having balance issues; his legs were getting weak. He’s had a couple falls, and he’d never really exercised his entire life. He’s an 86-year-old guy.
So he decides to hire a trainer, get in the gym, go do some leg presses. And we met for dinner about a year ago, so it’s been about that long since I’ve seen him. But he walked up to me like a 25-year-old kid, shook my hand, and it was an 88-year-old guy that just started training in his ninth decade. Unbelievable. So never too late. On the other end, never too early—never too early to think about a healthy lifestyle, proper sleep, proper nutrition, proper training plan, all of that. Because all of our health, just like wealth, our health habits compound. And it’s these minor adjustments, especially in building healthy habits early on, that make a massive difference in our life arc. And that trajectory when we get into our 50s, 60s, 70s and beyond, that’s what makes the difference between who makes it to healthy 90 years plus or not, or at least has earlier debility and a handful of chronic medical conditions that they end up chasing.
So that’s, I guess, both ends of the spectrum. Never too early, never too late. But as far as who needs this sort of maybe a more comprehensive workup, I certainly think by the time we’re in our mid to late 30s, that’s when risk starts to creep up for most people, especially on the cardiovascular disease front. The stats aren’t great for adults anyway. Based on what you read, there’s a set of data called the NHANES data that suggests that about 93% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy. Dave, that’s not some of us, that’s not most of us—that’s all of us that have something that we need to improve. And it’s back to that mismatch between our lifestyle in our modern environment, or at least how we’re designed in our modern environment. That’s why I like to spend time on that.
So if you’re a high schooler, if you’re a college student, if you’re a young adult, I mean, this is—it is never too early to build healthy habits. Do you need, I don’t know, at 18 or 20, do you need a ton of advanced imaging and all kinds of peptides and biohacking stuff? Probably not. That could probably be reserved for maybe, again, 30s, 40s or beyond, but in general, no. I mean, we all need to be thinking about this and the repercussions are massive.
Our health habits compound, just like wealth. It’s never too early and it’s never too late to adopt a healthy lifestyle.
Yeah, I see it as kind of like death by a thousand cuts. All of these little things that you do, these negative habits that you do day after day after day really compound, as you said, over time to negatively, adversely impact you and really create that dis-ease in our body that actually turns into something. So it is really important to flip it from a negative habit into a positive habit and start to kind of truly build those changes and kind of stop it at the source, I think is the best approach.
Nailed it. That’s exactly right. And again, happy to spend time on some basics there or pivot, whichever way you want with this.
Yeah, let’s talk, Ryan, a little bit about some strategies that I find interesting. And I think what we just talked about, it’s interesting because in this day and age, it’s a lot easier said than done. I mean, let’s face it. I mean, just these simple things that we used to have, say, 100 years ago, like morning light—morning light, being outside, getting your circadian rhythm dialed in, going to bed when the sun goes down—maybe we were in the aggregate age and really living in much more harmony with the earth and the cycles and things like that. And now we have LED lights on screens, devices kind of pinging us at every level. We have Wi-Fi devices and radiation that’s going on like at all times. And that’s really significantly impacting the nervous system. So I think a lot of things, this disruption of our systems across the way, how can you be proactively on top of those things and really try to manage those? Like, so I know for me, some of the things I do like in the evenings, I’ll wear red-light glasses to manage my melatonin and really limit any type of bright screens at night—I mean, definitely off screens, I think that’s an important one.
But sometimes these unseen ones, like we said, like the Wi-Fi and all of those cells, those are really impacting you. Or even just think about the water. Maybe you’re even drinking bottled water, but there’s BPA coming from the water in there. So it really takes education and knowledge and really some persistence to start figuring out, hey, maybe I should be drinking hydrogenated water—hydrogenated water or structured water—or doing some of these other things much more proactively. And maybe you don’t necessarily feel a change, but if you can be making those micro-adjustments that compound over time, that can really help. So give us some ways that people can really kind of think about that to build some habits and structure into their lifestyle.
Absolutely. I love that you started with circadian rhythm because that really is the conductor of your symphony or your orchestra. All of these bodily processes—or at least most of them—rely on this diurnal or sort of twice-daily rhythm that we call the circadian rhythm. And kind of a funny thing that I tell my clients and health members all the time is that great sleep starts in the morning. And that sounds a little counterintuitive, but you can modify, manage, or cue your circadian rhythm with the right lifestyle. I mentioned getting outside. I think early morning light is one of the best things we could possibly do. It’s easy, it’s quick, it’s free.
So having an intentional morning routine—I’m big on morning routines. Shocker, military, right? But there’s something to this. So getting outside, getting light in your eyes, you don’t really need more than about 15 minutes if it’s direct, low-angle sunlight. If you live in a climate that doesn’t allow for that, or it’s wintertime, you can buy a device like a Happy Light on Amazon for 20 or $30—10,000 lux. Lux is the dose that provides the right stimulus to the hypothalamus, which is where that master pacemaker lives, that sets our circadian rhythm. But by getting that light exposure, you’re telling your brain it’s time to wake up, it’s time to get all my endocrine function going, it’s time to move, it’s time to start digestion, it’s time to start everything, prime my immune system, all of it.
And if we don’t do that, then again, to your point, when it’s bedtime in the evening, if we’re doing all the red light and perhaps we’re pushing away from screens, but we haven’t anchored the daytime part of our circadian rhythm, it can impact melatonin secretion, it can impact sleep. And that’s the time when we repair, we rest, our brains grow, we form memories, we heal, our immune system is regulated, our blood pressure is regulated, on and on and on. So again, just a quick investment early in the day to get light. I mean, it sounds simple. And people, maybe your audience has heard this a hundred times already from a Huberman or somebody like this or Matt Walker or pick your person. It’s really important along with that movement early in the day. So something that my wife and I try to do every morning is go walk our dogs—get your light, get movement, get going.
After that, I mean, I’m pretty active. So I have a training plan, whether it’s a lift day, a cardio day, whether it’s high-intensity interval training, low-intensity zone two, whatever people want to do. But get moving, ideally in the early part of the day. There’s a big article that was published last year in Nature, which is a big peer-reviewed medical journal, in conjunction with WHOOP users. So I wear an Oura ring, but WHOOP is a strap, a wearable device that a lot of people have. And this looked at something like 14,000 people and over a million or million and a half sleep nights—it’s a pretty large data set.
And people that did intense physical activity within four hours of bedtime actually had worse sleep relative to those that didn’t. And it’s interesting because I think about this, these cues that we’re talking about to prime that circadian rhythm. And if you’re telling your body, you’re telling your brain, “Hey, we’re going to do some really intense activity late in the day,” your brain and your body are going to want to wake up naturally and be available for that. You’re going to want to anticipate that. So what’s the natural question that comes up, at least when I’ve discussed this with people before, is, “Well, should I just not train at all then?” And well, no, probably. I mean, if it’s train later or don’t train, I’d say probably train. But if you have the choice, or you can work it into your day, really try to make it earlier if you can.
I mean, ideally in the first part of the day, ideally certainly before four hours before bed or earlier. Not to mention, we know that training hard for a lot of reasons has a massive impact on your sleep. So again, like I said, sleep is the time that we repair our muscles, especially deep sleep. So intense activity, especially in the early part of the day, helps with deep sleep, so it helps you maintain healthy sleep cycles. And we can pivot into exercise in a minute here, but lifting heavy—so doing this safely, but getting to 80% of max or above—actually sends these little chemical messengers called myokines, little signaling molecules that can leave the muscle, cross the blood-brain barrier, and tell your brain that it needs to grow and form new connections. But you have to lift heavy to actually do that. And a lot of people, they just don’t understand.
Again, back to the system. We operate in a very specific way. We just got to know how to take advantage of these systems. But early light, early movement, I love the red glasses at night, push away from the lights. Even if people just did those basics, that’s pretty high yield. I mean, we could go through dozens of more interventions, and I’m happy to keep going if you want me to, but just to keep it simple, that’s a really solid starting point for most people.
Outside of that, what I’ve found really interesting in this approach is that I’ve identified particular blind spots that I have. So even though I’m doing everything right in terms of lifestyle, exercise, diet, all of these things, what’s been really fascinating for me is I’ve uncovered a few blind spots. So one for me personally is cholesterol. I literally have really high cholesterol markers; my LDL markers are just high. And I’ve tried a lot of things to try to fix that prior to going onto a statin and things like that. But it’s really not until you start to do functional medicine type work to really figure out, A, do you have something like that, even though you feel great and everything’s okay—do you have some kind of blind spot there? And then B, once you’ve identified that, how do you actually solve the root cause? So one of the things I did, for instance, was take a cholesterol balance test to find out, hey, am I an overproducer? Am I an overabsorber? It turns out that I’m both. So working on a preventative plan to try to work on that. Another one I found by taking a DUTCH test, which was super informative and really sad to me, quite frankly, was I found out that I’m a low metabolizer of caffeine.
And if there’s one thing I love in this world, it’s espresso. It’s absolutely one of my favorite things. But my two double shots had to get shrunk down to two single shots a day. I would have never known that. If you’ve ever wondered how the wealthy use energy investments to reduce their tax bill while generating cash flow, we just answered every question on camera. Go to pantheoninvest.com/energy to find out. And now, since I cut back, less than about 100, 150 milligrams a day is my sweet spot, and I just feel so much better.
And then that now impacts all these other markers that I have going on. So it’s kind of interesting that I think all of us have some of these blind spots that we don’t even really know about, so we can optimize our performance, but it’s like you don’t know what you don’t know. So how are people supposed to uncover these things or ask the right questions to figure this out?
Yeah, that’s exactly right. And to use your cholesterol example, I mean, espresso is one that’s really interesting if you drink unfiltered coffee. So Turkish coffee, pour-over, espresso, French press, that kind of coffee—which I’m with you, that’s one of the most delicious types and one of my favorites as well. But we did kind of a French press style for a good part of a couple years, and my cholesterol was normal, quote-unquote, but it was higher than it should be just based on my labs and my physiology. And I’m sitting here going, “What in the world is up with this?” And I didn’t know this myself until a few years ago, but if you drink unfiltered coffee, there are compounds—kahweol and cafestol are the two big ones, if I’m pronouncing those correctly, but they’re diterpenes is what they’re called. They actually interfere with bile production, and it backs up cholesterol in the liver, and it bumps up your cholesterol markers 10 to 20%.
So there’s one of those micro-adjustments that even if you’re dialing down the espresso, but you’re still drinking unfiltered coffee, that’s just one more thing that if you don’t know or don’t know to ask or don’t have somebody who’s optimized to help you through this, you don’t. There’s no symptom when your cholesterol is high. You don’t feel bad or achy; at least most people don’t.
And it’s the same thing with—I think about Alzheimer’s, I mean, God forbid, but this is something that’s just part of my world as a neurologist, and I’ve had countless family members, friends, et cetera, et cetera, patients, obviously, who’ve gone through this. But we used to think—or at least we used to think about Alzheimer’s—once symptoms start, we don’t know, that’s not the case at all. I mean, Alzheimer’s starts decades—I mean decades—before the first symptom appears. Our brains have this massive what we call cognitive reserve.
So just think layers of resilience built in where we can sustain pretty substantial insults and keep functioning at a pretty high level until we cross that threshold and then problems show up. The problem with that approach, the reactive approach, is to your point exactly: we have missed this massive window to do something about it and correct course. Whereas if we do some basic tests, we go looking for things, we’re more informed, we can either prevent or certainly massively decrease the chance that we’re ever in that situation. Two good examples for Alzheimer’s: one, I think everybody should know their APOE genotype if they’ve never had that checked. Excuse me. So we all have one of three of these versions.
There’s a low risk, a medium risk, and a high risk. About 97, 97.5% of us have at least one or two copies of the medium risk. And we’re either on the medium-to-low risk side or maybe medium or slightly increased risk. But 2.5% of the population is at a pretty markedly increased risk, but that’s worth knowing. I mean, that’s worth understanding where you are because at least with the APOE genotype, this actually ties into cholesterol production and blood vessel health and neuron integrity and all of these things, then we are more or less sensitive to different changes in our lifestyle. If we understand that there are now blood tests that you can order to examine amyloid burden in the brain—amyloid being one of the two major proteins that are deposited in Alzheimer’s.
And I mean, Dave, I’ve taken patients through this where we just go looking and say, “Okay, maybe there’s a family history or maybe you’re late 40s, early 50s, no symptoms,” but this blood marker—so P-tau217 is the blood test for anybody interested. P-tau217. But if that’s through the roof or that’s elevated, we know there’s an increased amyloid burden in the brain. And if somebody maybe has some increased genetic risk because of a family history or they’ve got an APOE genotype that’s high risk, and they don’t have an appropriate lifestyle, we know we’ve got to get ahead of this thing. We can now combine that with, for example, say an MRI brain with volumetric analysis. So through my training and through my radiology colleagues, we look at these pictures and we go, “Well, there’s a stroke or there’s not a stroke or things look good or they don’t.” It’s pretty qualitative and it’s like, I don’t know, somebody who’s got a PhD in art describing the Mona Lisa to you—that’s about as good as it gets. But we now have these AI-based systems and programs that will look at an MRI brain and it will take a volumetric analysis down to the percentile.
This is so interesting—compare an individual brain to thousands of age-matched controls and give you on a percentile basis where you are in the middle of the bell curve or increased or decreased. And we go through these functional workups all the time where somebody has a pattern that looks like Alzheimer’s, they’ve got decreased temporal lobe volume, or maybe they’ve got some frontal lobe atrophy or whatever’s going on—that’s interesting, but they’re totally normal clinically; they’re not at the first symptom. So we go check a P-tau217, we check an APOE, we go through the rest of the workup and come to find out, “Oh shoot, we really got a problem here that we’ve got to correct.” But we have time, we have a runway, and this stuff matters.
So I’m taking you down the rabbit hole here because that’s just one example of something that we can really stay ahead of now with lifestyle, with medication, etc., that we just simply didn’t have even just a few years ago. So a really exciting time to be in functional medicine, to be in the space and see where we’re headed.
It is an amazing time for sure with the advent of AI and let’s hope some of these big diseases—the top four that are out there—can start to get handled or mitigated a lot better with AI. And just, I think there’s going to be some massive shifts that happen in the healthcare industry for the good, which is really exciting and it’s interesting. Peter Diamandis talks about this a lot as well. I mean, we’re literally just at the beginning of this AI acceleration and adoption. So think about where you are today in terms of your age and in 10 years from now where the technology will be. So I think it’s totally possible that people are living 10, 20 years beyond and the vitality is just so much greater when they get into their last decade.
Consider this. I’m with you 100%. I agree with everything you just said. The average human lifespan up until about 1900 was 30. That was it—lived about 30. And man, you got the first infection or broken bone or a woman died in childbirth and unfortunately, wife and kid gone. I mean, just horrible things that would happen routinely that since the advent of antibiotics and modern antiseptic techniques and some advancements in surgery, we’ve over doubled that in the last 80 years.
Really the average, I think worldwide lifespan is about 72, 73. In the US it’s about 76. We are likely going to see more than 100 years’ worth of technological change in the next decade. Looking backwards, what we had in the last hundred years, in the next decade, and I can’t even fathom—we talk about compounding. I mean, we’re on the hockey stick part of that technology curve, especially in healthcare, robotics, AI. I mean, you talk about robotic surgeries, they’re going to be better if you follow Neuralink and what Elon’s doing with brain-computer interfaces—the options there that you’re already having people that are paraplegic that can control computers with their brain. I mean, just wild stuff. And if nanotechnology comes into play and we can repair ourselves in real time—I mean on and on and on, drug development, tailored precision medicine.
I think you’re right, truly think that at minimum, we’re going to see a markedly improved health span or again, that vitality curve is going to be higher. So rather than getting into our 80s, 90s and sort of falling apart, I think we’re going to be much more active, much healthier, much more capable, and probably see a meaningful extension in human lifespan as well. I just don’t see how that can’t happen with where we’re headed.
So tell us about your concierge service. So if someone wants to explore functional medicine and really start to be proactive with their health, what does that journey look like?
So a lot of what we’re talking about, so we take an individual and put them through a very extensive battery of testing. So it’s advanced full-body imaging—MRI brain, chest, abdomen, pelvis. You mentioned all the biomarkers you’ve had done. We do a very extensive blood biomarker panel. So a lot of the routine stuff that maybe you might get checked at an annual doctor’s visit with a primary care doctor, but we add in a bunch more. I mean, for the sake of time, we’ll skip the whole list, but it’s comprehensive and in my opinion not excessive. So I try my best to practice evidence-based medicine and know what we actually think is going to move the needle rather than just ordering stuff willy-nilly.
But in addition to that, we do oral and gut microbiome. Peter Diamandis is big on this. I actually do like the company Viome—we have a relationship with them. I think Peter’s maybe part of them, reason I mentioned that. But their technique is a little bit different. They actually look at live RNA as opposed to DNA, which is—so you’ve got to have living bugs to produce RNA, whereas there can be dead bugs that produce DNA fragments. So it’s just a more accurate assessment in my opinion.
But either way, oral, gut microbiome, and then we do a whole genome sequence. So this is again, we’re at the nascency of I think where this is going, but there are some potential risks here that people need to be aware of. Meaning that you could uncover something potentially scary if somebody has their genome sequenced. But again, it’s an informed consent conversation we have and in my opinion it’s worth knowing just like the APOE genotype, etc., because we’ve just, we’ve got data, we’ve got actionable information we know what to do with. We collect all of that, we put that into a system essentially. So I mean, I know a medical record that I review and then we use a proprietary AI platform that helps trend and extrapolate this. And along with wearable technology—along with either an Oura ring or a WHOOP, a smart blood pressure cuff, smart scale—we can continue to trend data. So sleep data, activity, nutrition, exercise, blood work, imaging, all of it. And rather than waiting every year, every other year, really on a continuous basis, we are helping keep people optimized and keep their health optimized.
And that way if somebody starts to drift in one direction, we can catch it early and help them correct course rather than wait five or 10 years till it’s too late and make sure that we, again, we understand where somebody is to help keep them living as long and healthily as possible.
If you could give just one piece of advice to the audience about how they could accelerate their own health trajectory, what would it be?
I’d say get clear on what you want out of life. Have a strong understanding of your purpose, of why you’re doing what you’re doing. Because we talk a lot about the how—the what and the how anyway, right? And we were talking earlier that most people have heard diet and exercise over and over until they’re blue in the face. But I think we skip why we’re doing all of this in the first place. You were telling me earlier that you just, you really wanted to have freedom, right? I mean, total freedom—freedom of time, freedom of money, freedom of health. I think we all want that to a degree, but really understanding what’s your mission in life, because once you have clarity on that and you know the target, you then quickly realize that you are a machine.
And you have to have systems to optimize to getting you towards that goal, or at least if you’re there, then preserving what you’ve built or what you care about to be able to do it for as long as possible with who you care about for as long as you can. And if this isn’t optimized, that’s not possible.
Love that, Ryan. Yeah, couldn’t agree with you more on that. And I think, sadly, more people spend more time planning the summer vacation than they do actually building their life and designing that ultimate life that you want to live. But that’s where it all starts with, right? Creating that vision. Once you have clarity there, you can break through any walls where you know where you’re going.
But if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re basically following someone else’s plan, just reacting.
Couldn’t agree more.
Yeah. Awesome. Ryan, I can’t thank you enough for your time and your expertise today. If people would like to connect with you or learn more about your programs, what is the best place?
Absolutely. So transcendhealthmedical.com would be the link. We can provide that, certainly. And I’d be happy to give your audience some free resources, too. We’ve got a free sleep guide, a free brain optimization guide, so we can certainly give you that to provide with the show link as well.
If you don’t know where you’re going, you’re basically following someone else’s plan. Once you have Clarity, you can break through any wall because you know where you’re going.
Awesome. We’ll make sure we put it in the show notes. Ryan, thanks so much. Really appreciate you.
Thank you, Dave. It was a pleasure.
Thanks for listening to this episode of Wealth Strategy Secrets. If you’d like to get a free copy of the book, go to holisticwealthstrategy.com
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