Everything You’ve Been Told About “Being Healthy” Is Wrong… | Dr. De

The interview took place in Miami on the School of Hard Knocks podcast, hosted by James, Jack and Josh, with Dr. D as the guest. The conversation moved between his medical views, personal health history, Biohacks, entrepreneurship, longevity, family and faith.

The hosts opened with the claim that roughly 80–90% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy and asked how poor health became normalized. Dr. D’s answer was that modern society has adopted what he called the “wrong technologies,” creating environmental and dietary conditions the human body was not built around.

Dr. D specifically blamed the rise of pesticides, GMOs, highly engineered foods, 3D-printed food and other modern interventions for increasing people’s exposure to what he considers harmful substances. He argued that the problem is increasingly the environment surrounding people rather than simply individual bodies.

He summarized his environmental view with a “fish tank” analogy: the fish are becoming sick because the tank itself is dirty. In his framing, improving individual health therefore requires changing exposures and surroundings as well as treating symptoms.

The hosts contrasted American and European food, saying they felt able to eat similar foods in Europe without the same physical effects. Dr. D agreed that food regulations and permitted ingredients differ between the United States and Europe.

Dr. D strongly criticized highly processed breakfast cereals, comparing products such as Froot Loops to “dog food” rather than real food. He argued that consumers become desensitized to processed products because familiar packaging and health-oriented marketing make them appear normal.

He cited titanium dioxide in products such as Skittles as an example of an ingredient treated differently across jurisdictions. He also said it had appeared in products such as Centrum vitamins, using the comparison to argue that American consumers routinely encounter ingredients restricted elsewhere.

Dr. D did not portray Europe as healthy overall. He jokingly graded European health a “D+” and American health an “F minus,” arguing that Europe may perform relatively better without solving the underlying problem.

His break from conventional medicine resulted from two developments happening at once: dissatisfaction with what he saw professionally and deterioration in how he personally felt. Those two experiences pushed him toward functional medicine and eventually biohacking.

After medical school, Dr. D conducted research at Cleveland Clinic in Florida, including work around its metabolic program. He described encountering extremely obese patients weighing roughly 800–1,000 pounds, which deeply affected his view of America’s metabolic-health problem.

One roughly 1,000-pound patient died during surgery, and Dr. D recalled a senior doctor jokingly responding to the difficulty of handling the body by saying, “Chop them up.” Dr. D said he did not know what ultimately happened, but the remark disturbed him and illustrated how repeated exposure to severe cases can desensitize medical professionals.

At the same institution, Dr. D said his attempts to pursue research into fasting were repeatedly rejected. He contrasted this with meetings where leading metabolic physicians discussed national metabolic health while drinking Coca-Cola, eating hamburgers and, in his view, neglecting their own fitness.

Those experiences made him decide he did not want his own life or medical career to resemble the physicians he was observing. His dissatisfaction was therefore as much cultural and philosophical as it was about particular treatments.

Around age 30, Dr. D was also experiencing fatigue, poor energy, reduced focus and concentration problems. He said he eventually stepped away from the conventional medical path and began investigating his own health more aggressively.

His mother is Brazilian, and his personal health search took him to Brazil, where he became interested in natural remedies and physicians working outside the conventional American approach. His mother was also the person who first asked him whether he had heard of functional medicine.

After learning the term “functional medicine,” he began researching it and became particularly interested in doctors he encountered in South America. He described that period as the beginning of the “rabbit hole” that eventually shaped his current approach.

Dr. D’s central criticism of conventional healthcare is that chronic disease is handled poorly while medicine excels more visibly at acute intervention. He argued that many emergency-room crises, including heart and metabolic events, are exacerbations of chronic problems that were never adequately addressed upstream.

He distinguished technological sophistication from genuine improvement in population health. Robotic surgery systems such as Da Vinci may be technically impressive, he said, but their existence does not prove that medicine is succeeding at preventing chronic illness.

Dr. D said his discussions with conventional physicians sometimes become heated because he believes they are working from fundamentally different models of disease. He described the disagreement as sufficiently basic that it can feel like one side saying the world is square and the other saying it is round.

He went so far as to say the conventional chronic-care model appears either profoundly misguided or knowingly dysfunctional. His stated concern is that it costs the country heavily while managing downstream symptoms rather than the causes he believes produce disease.

Dr. D cited a dramatic change in autism figures as evidence that something important has changed environmentally or biologically across generations. He claimed a figure of about 1 in 10,000 children around 1970 versus 1 in 31 now, with roughly 1 in 52 several years earlier, and said he was drawing the figures from CDC material.

He connected those autism figures to a broader argument that parents’ environmental and dietary exposures may influence future generations. He presented epigenetics as one mechanism through which lifestyle and exposures could affect biological expression beyond the immediately exposed person.

The hosts contrasted a medication-first doctor visit with an investigation of sleep, food, habits, hormones and other underlying factors. Dr. D agreed, arguing that conventional treatment often moves too quickly toward a drug or procedure.

Dr. D said his approach considers exposures such as tick-borne illnesses, mycotoxins, infections, food additives and other environmental inputs alongside standard medical variables. He also placed long COVID and persistent spike-protein exposure within this broader framework.

He specifically mentioned food dyes such as Yellow 6 and Red 40 as examples of substances he worries can add to an individual’s total biological burden. He argued that a person can appear normal on routine assessment while more detailed molecular testing tells a different story.

His team uses epigenetic information, including patterns of gene expression and methylation, as part of its effort to understand patients beyond conventional laboratory results. He regards those measurements as a way to investigate biological effects that ordinary testing may miss.

Dr. D argued that the financial model of medicine rewards pills and procedures while solving root causes can remove the need for continuing treatment. He invoked pharmaceutical and medical-industry incentives while stopping short of claiming he could prove whether participants were ignorant of the problem or deliberately preserving it.

One of Dr. D’s most unconventional beliefs is that the body is best suited to substances it biologically “recognizes.” He claimed repeated exposure to unfamiliar chemicals can provoke immune activity, chronic inflammation and eventually autoimmune problems or cancer, while acknowledging that many physicians would reject that explanation.

The conversation repeatedly contrasted modern processed diets with the whole foods consumed through most of human history. Dr. D and the hosts used that historical comparison to question whether newer ingredients and industrial food systems contribute to contemporary chronic disease.

Dr. D said there are roughly 10,000 monogenic diseases and used genetics to distinguish inherited sequence from environmentally influenced gene expression. His larger argument was that having a genetic predisposition should not automatically be treated as having an unavoidable outcome.

He used Alzheimer’s disease, first described in the early 20th century, as part of an argument that the modern disease landscape differs from that of earlier societies. He contrasted historical deaths from infection with today’s metabolic and chronic conditions, attributing much of the shift to modern exposures.

Dr. D encouraged comparing maps of industrial development with cancer incidence, arguing that less industrialized communities eating more whole foods often show different disease patterns. This was presented as part of his environmental-health argument rather than as a formally demonstrated causal analysis within the interview.

He advised looking at processed-food ingredient lists as if every listed chemical were physically placed on a table in front of the consumer. His point was that many people would be reluctant to ingest those substances individually even though they routinely consume them inside packaged foods.

“Natural flavors” was singled out as an especially broad labeling category. Dr. D said the term can cover dozens of underlying designations and argued that consumers may not appreciate how much can sit behind those two words.

Dr. D strongly rejected the idea that patients should simply be told a serious illness is “in your DNA” and therefore unavoidable. He argued that this can create helplessness and that epigenetic and environmental interventions can alter at least some risks even though the underlying genetic sequence remains unchanged.

He specifically asserted that cancer should not be reduced to a single gene that directly determines the disease. His broader message was that gene expression, exposures and biological context matter and that patients retain more influence over their health than deterministic language suggests.

Dr. D described fasting as one of the highest-value health interventions he knows. He pointed to the prevalence of fasting across ancient cultures and religious traditions as evidence that the practice long predates modern wellness culture.

He linked fasting to autophagy, describing it as the body consuming or recycling its own material, and cited Nobel-recognized work around that process. He also referred to calorie-restriction research and epigenetic aging clocks while arguing that restricted eating and fasting are associated with longevity.

He said different biological-aging algorithms vary widely in quality and that some are unreliable. Nevertheless, he believes the general ability to measure biological rather than chronological aging is becoming increasingly useful.

When asked which deficiency he sees frequently, Dr. D singled out magnesium. He associated low magnesium with issues including headaches and blood pressure and discussed magnesium’s established medical use in conditions such as torsades de pointes while making broader claims about its importance.

The hosts raised Dr. D’s own episode of atrial fibrillation, which he said lasted roughly two to three hours while he was sitting in his office. It occurred a few months after he had COVID.

Dr. D said he ultimately viewed his atrial-fibrillation episode less as a simple magnesium deficiency and more through the lens of lingering post-infectious effects. At that time, roughly four years before the interview, he was also highly stressed, sleeping little, studying for a board examination and adjusting to having his first son.

He said he has personally undergone interventions including plasma exchange, stem-cell treatments and peptides. These experiences form part of his own intensive approach to tracking and modifying health.

Dr. D said he had discussed his cardiovascular experience with Dr. Thomas Levy, whom he described as an established figure in metabolic cardiology. According to Dr. D, Levy immediately recognized his story as resembling cases he had seen before.

On the day of the interview, Dr. D said he had also spoken with a prominent person who had experienced atrial fibrillation twice and was being advised to undergo an ablation. Dr. D instead helped connect the person with a Johns Hopkins-trained, triple-board-certified metabolic cardiologist he knows before the person made that decision.

Dr. D considers long COVID a genuine and underappreciated medical problem. He argued that persistent viral or spike-protein effects can contribute to neurological and cardiovascular symptoms even after the obvious acute infection has resolved.

He also claimed that parts of the SARS-CoV-2 virus show similarities to parts of HIV and described COVID as an unusually significant pathogen. He connected persistent spike protein to continuing nervous-system and cardiovascular injury; these claims were presented as his medical interpretation in the interview.

His interest in infection-related neurological problems predates COVID. At age 26, while in medical school, he woke up with half of his face paralyzed and was diagnosed with Bell’s palsy; he said his face later returned to normal.

That experience reinforced his belief that infections can produce neurological effects that are easy to overlook once the obvious infection has passed. He argued that clinicians should investigate such mechanisms before automatically proceeding to interventions such as cardiac ablation.

The conversation then shifted from disease treatment to the health cost of entrepreneurial “hustle culture.” Dr. D rejected the idea that sleeping four hours while remaining constantly busy is evidence of discipline or high performance.

He drew a strong distinction between being busy and being productive. Long emails, constant social-media use, endless networking and low-value conversations can consume an entire day, he said, while creating very little genuine output.

Sleep and fasting were the two interventions he repeatedly described as providing unusually large returns relative to effort. He associated adequate sleep with mental clarity, energy, productivity and long-term health rather than viewing it as time taken away from work.

Dr. D said his access to highly successful athletes, entertainers and entrepreneurs has shown him that sustained performance requires recovery. People can remain intensely driven, he argued, but years of continuous exhaustion eventually produce burnout.

He described burnout as the end of a performance curve in which greater effort eventually stops creating greater output. His point was that long-term ambition requires deliberately alternating high-intensity performance with genuine rest.

Dr. D monitors his own sleep physiology and said nighttime heart rate and heart-rate variability are particularly useful to him. He has also been sparring before work consistently for about three years and uses his recovery data to judge how hard he should train.

He explained heart-rate variability as variation between heartbeats and said he generally wants his resting heart rate lower and HRV higher. He associated better HRV with the parasympathetic, recovery-oriented side of the nervous system.

Dr. D framed the autonomic nervous system as having two broad gears: sympathetic “fight or flight” and parasympathetic “rest and digest.” His criticism of entrepreneurial culture is that people are encouraged to remain in the first state almost continuously.

He described modern America as “wired and tired.” He cited insomnia, prescription stimulants such as Adderall and Ritalin, heavy caffeine use and energy drinks as examples of people forcing themselves into alertness without adequate restoration.

His preferred performance model is a limited period of genuinely intense work followed by genuine disengagement. He suggested that eight to ten very productive hours can be more valuable than a much longer day spent distracted, exhausted and half-working.

One host described a personal experiment in which he woke up, avoided his phone, went outside for a walk and then began work. He noticed that the usual 5–6 p.m. energy crash did not occur and that he still felt capable of several more hours of productive work.

Dr. D used that anecdote to argue that immediate exposure to notifications and problems puts people into a stress state from the moment they wake up. He compared modern electronic communication with the far simpler set of immediate concerns humans would historically have faced.

For people unable to disengage, he proposed having two phones: a private number known only to close family and another for work, social media and outside communication. His example was to leave the work device alone until about 9 a.m. and put it away around 6 p.m. for several months to see the effect.

Dr. D linked relaxation and social connection to longevity, pointing to communities known for unusually high numbers of very old residents. He named Okinawa in Japan, Sardinia in Italy, Costa Rica and Loma Linda in California.

He argued that the valuable behavior in such communities is not necessarily formal meditation but ordinary relaxation and social life. Sitting with people, talking, eating slowly and spending time together were presented as meaningful health behaviors.

The hosts singled out Italy as an example of a culture where meals remain substantial social events rather than quick refueling stops. They described meals lasting two or three hours and being integrated into daily life.

Dr. D said Biohacks was expanding into Europe with help from a prominent Italian family whose name he did not disclose. He described a New York meeting with them that lasted about 12 hours and included extended meals and relationship-building before anything resembling an American-style business meeting occurred.

An American business partner accompanying him found the Italian meeting style unusually slow and kept wondering when the “meeting” would start. Dr. D interpreted the conversation and eating themselves as the relationship-building that made the business possible.

Dr. D’s father is from Portugal and his mother is from Brazil. He said his grandparents raised him around a culture of sitting together at the table, which made the Italian approach more familiar to him than it was to his American partner.

Despite being highly driven himself, Dr. D said he has deliberately become more protective of time with no phone, fresh air and simple inactivity. He believes constant communication, environmental exposures, electromagnetic exposure and psychological stress combine into an unhealthy modern environment.

Biohacks began after Dr. D abandoned his conventional residency trajectory and decided he wanted to build a different kind of medical organization. Rather than personally remaining the sole practitioner, he assembled a medical team and developed the operation into what he described as a telehealth company licensed across all 50 states.

He said there was no sophisticated business plan behind the earliest version of Biohacks. He was simply intensely interested in the medicine, reviewing cases with clinicians and enthusiastically explaining possibilities to patients.

Early patients repeatedly told him he was a good salesperson, which initially bothered him. He later noticed that an even more common description was “passionate,” and he concluded that people were responding to his genuine excitement rather than a conventional sales technique.

Word of mouth eventually began bringing him unusually prominent clients. Managers and intermediaries would contact him saying they had a “special person” to bring in, and the clients increasingly included celebrities and powerful figures.

The rapid rise in demand forced Dr. D to become a business operator rather than simply an enthusiastic medical founder. Scaling required him to introduce systems, processes, procedures and organizational structure so the company was not dependent on him seeing every person.

Although Dr. D has an MBA, he does not credit formal business education with teaching him how to build Biohacks. He recalled questioning why he was learning business from professors who did not themselves operate businesses.

He said he had no single business mentor. Instead, he learned through books, organizations, podcasts, trial and error and courses, including attending Tony Robbins’ Business Mastery more than once.

Tony Robbins’ program was particularly useful in helping Dr. D connect his passion to the mechanics of operating an organization. He joked that early on he barely understood what “operations” meant outside the medical meaning of an operation.

The hosts referred back to a February 2024 interview with Dr. D aboard his yacht, where he had identified obsession as a common trait among unusually successful people. One phrase from that earlier interview—successful people are “always scheming”—had stuck with them.

The School of Hard Knocks hosts used their own company as an example of obsession producing scale, saying the brand had reached about 18 million followers and more than $1 million a month in revenue. They attributed much of that growth to constant focus on improving interviews and maximizing distribution.

Dr. D said the same extreme hunger remains visible even among people who already possess enormous wealth, fame or accomplishment. He recalled speaking with a major musician who seemingly had everything yet was still intensely focused on figuring out the next move.

That pattern helped Dr. D understand why so many elite performers sought him out: they were looking for an additional edge. Some clients explicitly told him they did not want him publicly identifying them because they did not want others to know where that edge came from.

The hosts referred to Dr. D having a joint venture with John Matson, which Dr. D acknowledged. The point arose during discussion of the widening set of businesses and verticals around Biohacks.

The earliest Biohacks offering was essentially a relatively simple blood-based evaluation. Dr. D traced its beginnings to Dr. Richard Silva in Fort Lauderdale, whose door he said he knocked on when he was 23.

Dr. D described Richard Silva as a deeply important early supporter who backed him when the concept was still small. Early consultations were inexpensive by the standards of what Biohacks later became—he recalled roughly $200 including blood work, though he was uncertain of the exact amount.

His early office reflected how little infrastructure he had. Because he could not afford the writing boards he wanted, he stood on his desk and covered the glass windows with marker notes; one woman recognized him as “the crazy guy that writes on the windows.”

A major engine of Biohacks’ expansion was Dr. D’s appetite for new forms of measurement. Whenever a new test became available, he wanted to try it on himself first, validate the laboratory and methodology, and then consider whether it should be offered to patients.

That process gradually produced a much larger data operation rather than a simple medical consultation service. Environmental exposures, blood measurements and eventually epigenetic information became central to the company’s approach.

Dr. D regards epigenetics as one of the most important emerging fields in medicine. His basic distinction is that the underlying DNA sequence remains largely fixed while the expression of those genes changes in response to biological and environmental conditions.

He used the comparison between humans and rice to dramatize the importance of gene expression. He said humans have roughly 22,000–25,000 genes while a grain of rice has about 52,000, arguing that the complexity of a human cannot therefore be explained simply by raw gene count.

Dr. D also referred to the Human Genome Project and said the surprising human gene count became clear around its early-2000s completion. For him, that finding strengthened the case that regulation and expression of genes are at least as interesting as the number of genes themselves.

He explained epigenetic regulation with a light-switch or volume-control analogy. Methylation and acetylation were described as mechanisms that can reduce or increase expression, allowing one underlying genetic structure to produce many different biological outcomes.

Dr. D said the unusual amount of biological data Biohacks collected began attracting attention from established laboratory and pharmaceutical figures. He recalled the president of what he described as the country’s largest peptide pharmacy asking who he was, where his high-profile patients were coming from and who was backing him.

His answer was that there was no hidden sponsor producing the growth: the reputation was emerging from the work and data itself. Recognition from more senior people in the field became an important stage in Biohacks’ development.

Dr. D said the next major Biohacks product was scheduled to launch on January 15: supplements individualized using epigenetic information. He described the initiative as a way to make something resembling the company’s high-touch medical value available to a much larger population.

The testing component was being developed with TruDiagnostic, which Dr. D described as the leading epigenetic-testing company and holder of an exceptionally large epigenetic database. He said his work had led to a relationship with the company’s principal scientific personnel.

According to Dr. D, a finger-prick sample can produce information on nearly 2,000 markers without a conventional full blood draw. He said the technology can infer patterns associated with lifetime smoking and alcohol exposure and may eventually help identify geographic exposure through toxins associated with ZIP codes.

The planned individualized supplements would be packaged in small espresso-pod-like containers, though not actual coffee capsules. Dr. D said the goal was to deliver a personalized product for only a few dollars, making this his primary global expansion initiative.

When asked what health test every American should obtain, Dr. D’s first answer was a measurement of biological aging. He wants to know how quickly a person is aging and how much biological damage appears to be accumulating rather than relying only on conventional markers such as glucose or vitamin D.

He argued that the biological-aging industry contains many weak algorithms but that newer generations of epigenetic clocks are much more sophisticated. He specifically praised TruDiagnostic’s academic work and cited collaborations or published research involving institutions such as Harvard, Yale and Duke.

Dr. D claimed that advanced epigenetic measurements can estimate mortality timing with roughly 92% accuracy within a window of about five years if a person continues the same lifestyle. He presented that capability as evidence that biological aging can now be measured in ways that are much more actionable than chronological age.

He also emphasized that interventions should become increasingly individualized. While some habits such as routinely eating highly processed fast food are broadly unhealthy in his view, he argued that even particular vegetables or other foods may be more beneficial for one person than another.

Asked to choose a single major longevity intervention, Dr. D said sleep would probably be near the top. He repeatedly returned to sleep throughout the interview despite his enthusiasm for much more technologically advanced testing.

When a 23-year-old host asked for five pillars that could maximize his chances of reaching 100, Dr. D’s first recommendation was roughly eight hours of sleep. He later described the useful range as approximately 7½–8 hours.

His second pillar was eliminating processed food. The hosts translated that jokingly into giving up McDonald’s and similar fast food, which Dr. D broadly endorsed.

His third pillar was fasting, including periods longer than ordinary intermittent fasting. He mentioned physiological changes associated with roughly 72- and 96-hour periods but explicitly acknowledged that he did not know of evidence establishing one universally perfect fasting schedule.

His fourth pillar was taking a detailed inventory of toxin exposure. He pointed to food, water, plastics and compounds such as BPA and other endocrine disruptors as exposures he believes can alter hormones and contribute to falling testosterone levels.

Dr. D specifically did not recommend giving testosterone to a healthy 23-year-old simply because testosterone is fashionable. He instead said a young person with problems might need evaluation for environmental exposures and what he called detoxification before hormone replacement was even considered.

His fifth pillar was measuring and correcting micronutrients—vitamins, minerals and antioxidants. He highlighted vitamin D3 and magnesium and emphasized what he considers high-quality supplementation.

Dr. D disclosed that he has never consumed alcohol. Although this came up during the five-pillar discussion, he did not formally make alcohol avoidance one of the numbered five items.

Despite criticizing ingredients that have appeared in Centrum, he also cited research suggesting multivitamin supplementation can modestly affect measures associated with aging. This illustrated that his criticism is directed at formulation and exposure rather than a blanket rejection of supplements.

The conversation then turned explicitly to COVID vaccination after one host described visiting a cardiologist for exercise-related chest discomfort. The host said this doctor was unusually willing to discuss possible vaccine-related health effects, unlike other conventional physicians the hosts had encountered.

The host referred to research he had heard about from Japan suggesting worse long-term outcomes among vaccinated people and asked Dr. D how he approaches new vaccines. The anecdote was presented by the host rather than established or examined in detail during the interview.

Dr. D said he personally did not support the COVID-vaccine approach and believed its development and approval occurred without the level of study he would normally want. He also criticized what he sees as a medical culture in which physicians accept institutional guidance without asking enough questions.

He was particularly wary of mRNA technology because he regards it as a relatively new platform whose long-term effects deserve more scrutiny. He said his instinct is to “pump the brakes” whenever a medical narrative discourages questioning.

Dr. D argued that COVID vaccines did not ultimately prevent or mitigate problems to the degree initially expected. He also said alternative approaches were used in other countries, citing Bolivia without naming the particular treatment he had in mind.

He criticized Anthony Fauci’s public rhetoric, particularly the idea that questioning him amounted to questioning science. Dr. D viewed that style of institutional messaging as a reason for greater skepticism rather than greater trust.

He also made a distinction between possible vaccine effects and effects from infection itself. Whatever his objections to vaccination, he said the spike protein from SARS-CoV-2 itself can also create continuing problems and should not be ignored.

A host then asked about regenerative medicine because he has a bucket-handle meniscus tear that remains functional enough for walking, running and sport. He wanted to know whether stem cells might eventually replace surgery for injuries of that type.

Dr. D described stem cells and exosomes as among the most exciting advances in medicine and said he expects regenerative medicine to play a major future role. His enthusiasm extended to peptides and other techniques he believes can reduce the need for some conventional procedures.

He cited Dr. Joshua Hare as a close friend and major scientific figure in stem-cell medicine. Dr. D said Hare had been cited roughly 67,000 times on Google Scholar and helped pioneer work involving stem cells injected into the heart for cardiac regeneration.

Dr. D said Florida had begun permitting certain stem-cell treatments under defined conditions. He contrasted this with the earlier situation in which American patients often traveled to countries such as Costa Rica for treatments unavailable domestically.

For a localized orthopedic injury, Dr. D said a physician experienced with regenerative treatment would generally inject the cells near the damaged tissue. Intravenous treatment also exists, but he said a local injection makes more sense when a clearly defined structure such as a meniscus is being targeted.

He cautioned that he is not a meniscus specialist and noted that parts of the meniscus have limited blood supply. Even with that limitation, he believes the regenerative capacity of stem cells, exosomes and peptides may eventually prevent some surgeries he regards as unnecessary.

The discussion of success then moved to Dr. D’s marriage and family. The interview occurred just after his wife’s birthday, and he said he had become emotional while writing a birthday post for her while simultaneously caring for and showering their son.

Dr. D said he had deliberately imagined and prayed for the kind of woman he wanted to marry before meeting his wife. He believes people waste substantial emotional energy by remaining with the wrong partners rather than waiting for a genuinely compatible one.

He said his wife ultimately exceeded the person he had imagined, and they had been together for about a decade. The most important benefit of the marriage, in his view, is not simply what she does for him but the person her expectations push him to become.

Dr. D sometimes tells his wife that she behaves like “the wife of a billionaire,” while immediately acknowledging that he himself is nowhere near being a billionaire. He meant that her standards, confidence in him and way of moving through life continually challenge him to live up to a bigger version of himself.

He said the unspoken expectations and energy between them have enabled achievements he does not believe he would have reached alone. He called his wife “the elixir to the formula” and said he could not imagine having built the same life without her.

The hosts returned to an earlier interview in which Dr. D had named the Bible as the book that most changed his life. They asked how faith influences his medicine, business decisions and overall worldview.

Dr. D said Christianity is playing an increasingly important role in his life and work. He believes he can remain at the forefront of medicine by continuing to examine what he calls the Creator’s blueprint in nature.

His fascination with epigenetics is partly religious rather than merely scientific. He interprets changes in gene expression associated with lifestyle as evidence that what he calls a “holy” life aligned with God can improve health, quality of life and longevity.

Dr. D said he mentally filters scientific ideas through whether they appear consistent with his understanding of God and nature. He described trying to live through Christ and relying on spiritual guidance rather than treating published science as the only source of direction.

Personal reputation has also become increasingly important to him as his public profile grows. He expects some people to reject him because of his medical and cultural views but said he wants his underlying motive to remain service to other people.

He summarized his values as “God, family and country.” He believes people are beginning to reconsider modern cultural assumptions and return toward older values that he associates explicitly with Christianity.

Dr. D deliberately specified Jesus Christ rather than using the more ambiguous word “God.” He said his faith in the Creator and Christ sustains, fulfills and guides him.

He views earthly achievement as temporary and the afterlife as the more important destination. He described life on Earth as a passage and his efforts here as, in effect, an investment in eternity and the Kingdom of Heaven.

Dr. D was 40 at the time of the interview. Asked what he would tell younger people if he were to die the next day, he said each person has a God-given design and desire that can be obscured by the noise of ordinary life.

His final advice was to quiet the mind and life enough to recognize that underlying calling and then pursue it intensely. He described God as whispering rather than competing with the constant noise surrounding people.

Asked how he wanted to be remembered, Dr. D invoked the idea that a person dies once physically and a second time when their name is spoken for the last time. He said he wants his own name and work to continue echoing long after his physical death.

His stated life mission is ultimately religious rather than merely medical or commercial. He wants his health message to lead people toward Christ, reasoning that serious illness often makes people search for God, and said helping them see that connection would make him feel his life had fulfilled its purpose.**