tyler panzner podcast copy: Dr. Panzer, we all have our own genetics. Why is it important to test them and what can we actually learn from these kind of results? I just think of it as it's just stops the guesswork with things. A lot of people can think of genetics why you and I have blue eyes, right? Will our children have blue eyes? What color hair do we have? But it's really so much more than that. And we can figure out which types of foods may be better for us. And this can be on a spectrum of things, such as, I'm sure now in the health and wellness space, the carnivore diet, right, gets a lot of hate. Some people love it and it falls on a spectrum. You know, people ask me all the time, Tyler, is this supplement good or bad? Is this diet good or bad? And it's not that glamorous, but my answer is pretty much always it depends. So it's it's not a sexy answer, but it depends. You know, some people with their genetics, they have that red meat, they have that saturated fat, their LDL will skyrocket. They're the people that really want to be mindful, and then there is a time and place. Maybe if those people don't want to eliminate the red meat, maybe they do need a statin. people, I'm one of those people, I have red meat every day, I don't respond negatively to it. So my LDL is fine. So we can see which foods may put you at a longer term risk for diseases down the road, which types of foods maybe you can't digest as well. I had a client, she she was having her mango goddess smoothie she would have every morning and she was putting mangoes, pineapples, bananas, and she was spending thousands on these gut tests. And turns out it wasn't a gut infection. She had something that's called a sucrose Isomaltase deficiency. Long story short, that enzyme that chews up these fruit proteins, these fruit carbohydrates, doesn't work as well. So I had to tell her, you need to rebrand your mango goddess smoothie because you gotta get rid of the mangoes and the bananas, and they totally change your gut overnight. So the foods, but I really like focusing on the supplement side of things because supplements are highly concentrated. I feel like so many people nowadays, people are waking up to being careful or bounding. on their diet, the foods they eat, the people are less careful around the highly concentrated, you know, they're basically food nutrients that are highly, highly concentrated. So I see, you know, the risk of benefits, risk of side effects and the potential benefits can be higher with the supplementation. And then the last one is like future-proof in your body. Are you more prone to blood clots as you age? We can see these things. And when I see that in someone, I ask them, do you have a history of strokes or embolisms in your family? And they'll say, yeah I do. I like w how how can you tell that? Well, you probably got that from mom's side. Her side of the family has those things. Funny story, I my mom's side of the family has a lot of strokes and embolisms. I didn't get the gene, my brother did. So when we like do a finger prick His doesn't come out. He has to squeeze it. So you put our fingers next to each other. You can literally see in live time, my blood doesn't clot as quickly. So all these aspects, it's so much more than just the blue eyes, the brown hair, the blonde hair. And it it's not everything, which I'm sure we'll dig into. There's a lot of overpromising and predatory marketing, but it's create that blue pin. Dr. Tyler Panzer, thank you so much for joining me on the business of longevity, where we dig into the business side of the longevity space. You are an expert in genetic testing and is a big part of what you do in your practice. So I'm really looking forward to getting into the deep end of this and understanding how you built your business around that. So you said that understanding your own genetics has changed your life. What changed exactly? Yeah, so my life was a lot of mental roller coasters. Meaning a lot certain days I'd feel a lot more anxious, I'd eat certain foods, I'd just feel wired, I couldn't sleep at night, I didn't really know why. Always been prone to being an overthinker. And I found out that I break down adrenaline and dopamine slower than most people. So that explains why I'm very outgoing, I'm creative, I'm excitable, but I'm also prone to that stress. And I realized, once I dug deeper, a lot of the natural stuff Supplements I was taking. We're talking about curcumin, resveratrol, EGCG, the polyphenol from green tea extract. These are very evidence-based, right? There's a lot of great data that could help with things. I was taking those things. I didn't realize that same gene, that same enzyme in my body that doesn't break down adrenaline as fast, it blocks it even more. So I like to think of these as I call them adrenaline trappers. Not to sound dramatic, but that's how it feels to me and a lot of sensitive people. So that was of the of the main shifts for me that what's a stimulant for most people, maybe caffeine, there's a lot of supplements that aren't classified as stimulants that can definitely rev up the nervous system. So that was one of the major takeaways that I took from that. Interesting. So when did you do your first genetic test on yourself? Yeah so I did the 23andB test. This was probably 20 12 or so, I'd say something like that, I got it. And you know, I didn't do much with it initially. I thought I'd get all this cool stuff and back in the day it was more likely to think that cilantro tastes like soap or more likely to have your peas smell like asparagus. So it wasn't necessarily these super amazing life-changing insights, but during a period of poor health with myself, really burnout through my doctoral training, brain fog, headaches, sleep issues, then I went back into the raw data and started Started manually looking at all, you know, like the matrix code, all the numbers and letters, and that's when I really started picking up on these patterns. And that's what kind of catapulted me to build my career path out of this instead of going down the cancer research path because it was hidden. The reports are just what they want to show you, but how you interpret it makes all the difference. Very interesting. And that's probably something to do with again the consumer having to deal with a genetic test. That's so much more complex than Your pee smells after asparagus, right? Because we are all complex beings and your genetics are very, very complex. And that's why having fantastic practitioners like yourself being able to analyze the genetics properly and giving a consumer a very detailed analysis of this and guide them in the right direction is is what I think is very important. So You experience 23andMe and you start looking at the raw data. Ha when do you start going in and actually creating a business around genetic testing? Yeah. Yeah, so after I changed my life, I started doing it for friends and family, but not as a business, right? after my PhD I knew I wanted to be in personalized medicine. So I worked as a genetic test analyst at an oncology company. and that's when I started my Instagram. I was on a podcast and my buddy said Do you have a Dr. Tyler Panzer Instagram? I'm like, no, I don't. He's you should make one. The first several months, I wasn't really posting, I was posting some stories and stuff, but I wasn't really doing too much with it. That's when I connected with Self Decode, the company that I associate with now that did handle a lot of my testing. And they basically said, well, you know, you can be a practitioner. I thought I had to be a medical doctor. So me with my PhD back in, I'm wait, wait a second. You're telling me like my dream job that I didn't think I could do unless I was a medical doctor, I can use the platform to do that. They're like, yeah, absolutely. We'd love to have you be a part of it. I'm like, I'm in. So I started, I mean this was I was doing it what, I think it was $50 a console. I had no, you know, notoriety, nothing like that, and just trying to help people. And you know, my perspective on how I look at the genetics combined with pharmacology and advanced supplement science, person after person I was let me put it this way. I ch I changed my life. Help my parents, friends, but they all have a little bit of bias, right? So it was a little nerve-wracking once people, strangers on the internet, you know, were paying me some money. Was it still gonna work as well, right? Because my mom will always say, you know, help me out, right? That that's a good mom. but then person after person, as they felt so much better, they didn't realize how the supplements were messing them up, just kind of really snowballed from there, and then here we are. It's been what, maybe three or four years since then, and it's been over a thousand clients sent. So it's just stumbled into that and snowballed from there. Fantastic. So I really want to pick up on on what was just said there about the nerves as a practitioner to start working with people that are actually paying, that are putting their faith into you as a practitioner. So we at Nordic Laboratories we have thousands of practitioners because we distribute functional testing and genetic testing all over the world. And we meet a lot of young people and I think this is what's very interesting. because a lot of young people want to help peop other people. They think functional medicine is really exciting. But what they don't understand is they're actually also on a journey to start a business. And What would you say to this kind of person to just kind of get going? Like how do they get going? How do they find a customer? How do they it it's a challenge because your mindset might be more medical than it might be going out and buying a customer? Well, yeah, so that that was a transition for me, you know. For me the main thing was just trying to add value to people, you know, and just sharing, my approach, right? and from my unique background in pharmacology, cancer research, mental health research. coming, bringing that over to the supplement space, it was a benefit for me that my lens through I view this is so unique. So I was able to talk about things that really got people to think. And the way I think of it now is, especially nowadays at the age of AI, I mean, anyone can sound like an expert, anyone can make a cheat sheet, but it's really about making people question things. It's about shifting perspectives. And for me, my perspective is so different than most people's, including practitioners, that for me I think it was a bit easier to stand out because it's not that I'm trying to be contrarian. It's just me in the world where people are saying again carnivore's great or it's horrible for everyone, I'm the one saying you're both right and wrong. It just depends on who's the person listening to it. I it's it's it's really fascinating because we live in an era where AI is going in there and recommending supplements on the basis of symptoms. Yeah. How can genetics, if we take that again, h how can j d your genetic understanding give you better insights? Yeah. I'm so glad you mentioned the symptoms, right? So people think that supplements work based on symptoms. So if you have a symptom, you better believe that someone or some brand has a supplement with your name on it to address the symptom, right? Let's just say anxiety, right? But supplements don't work on symptoms. They work on pathways, they have specific targets in the body. So does that supplement help work on adrenaline? Does it work on cortisol? Maybe it helps with glutamate, another molecule. That really overstimulates the brain. So genetics can help us figure out well, which systems are involved here. I have to think of it as when it comes to mental health at least, a little bit of a simplification, but we have gas pedals and brake pedals of the brain, right? We have things like adrenaline, a lot of people are familiar with GABA. It's the brake system, it calms down the brain. Well, genetics can help us figure out not only which system doesn't work as well, so are you overthinking because the brakes don't work as well, or is the gas Petal very sensitive? Or is it a mixture of both? And to go one step further in that pathway, let's just say the GABA system, that brake pedal. Do you not make it as well? Maybe you break it down too quickly. So that enzyme, that gene that breaks down GABA in the brain, if that's mutated to work too quickly, it's linked to anxiety. It can be linked to things like epilepsy. So lemon balm extract, everyone says it's calming, but it's calming because it blocks that exact enzyme, that work. That breaks down the GABA. So when I talk about precision supplementation, it's we want to find the key and lock fit. In this case, the lock is that enzyme that's working too quick, the key, we want to quiet that down specifically with the lemon bomb. So we want to think instead of symptoms, we want to think of mechanisms and pathways. The right pathway, and then that right key and lock fit mechanism based on your body. So there are lots of genes in our body, right? there's a there's a long, long, long list. And if you got results on every gene variant that you have, I think everyone will be overwhelmed. You'll be young you can never, you will never ever have the perfect stack to address every variant. You know, when I when I meet with clients, a lot of times they're like, wow, is this normal? Is everyone else that's messed up? But I'm like, listen, my job is to find the things that are the most messed up for you, but everyone, everyone here, everyone on earth has millions of genetic variants. That's not up for question, right? It's where are they stacked up, where are the most severe ones located. But you're right, y and that's the problem with these tests nowadays. Either they're very surface level, very big on flashy marketing, fear mongering, and it's overpriced for five genes, which is nothing, or there are these now it's like a pissing contest. It's our report is a hundred pages, two hundred pages. More information isn't necessarily better for the consumer. It's great data, but too much. So that's why Yeah. My business model, I spend some time going through that to bridge both because I don't want to overwhelm you, but I also don't want to just give you a couple quick little tips that aren't really gonna help you think about your health. I just don't want to give you pills and say, here's take them. I want you to understand the philosophy of your body. So now just to simplify a little bit, let's say what are some of the SNPs that are the first things that you look at? Because they are, let's say you get your results back. You have a handful of SNPs, but you must quickly go in and pick a few that you think, okay, these are very important for me right now to understand the baseline of this person. Yeah, so there's the individual SNPs, but then also the system I use does the polygenic risk scoring as well. So the SNPs, some of the main ones I look at, like I always look at methylation, of course, is very important. Vitamin D is very important to me, particularly the SIP2R1 gene. So that's the gene. that converts regular vitamin D that we supplement into the form that shows up on blood work. That one conversion right there, if that doesn't work as well, these people, their vitamin D's are in the gutter and they don't respond to regular supplementation. So the people that say I take it, it doesn't go up, then the doctor starts, okay, we're gonna up your dose. Then they start injecting them, but it's not an absorption issue. You keep injecting this form more, more, more, but you can't convert it. So taking a preactivated form, that that's one of the biggest single shifts I've seen for people because vitamin D, in my opinion, I think it's the most important hormone in the body. You it's not just the vitamin. But beyond just the SNPs, it's about looking at I call the risk buckets. So are you prone to lower blood pressure based on a couple thousand SNPs? You know, with the AI modeling, that's where we're moving to now. Are you prone to another big health fed, not fed, but debated thing is like the oxalates. You know, carnivore people will say, well oxolates are you know plant defense chemicals, they ruin their gut, they cause leaky gut, they cause kidney stones, so don't eat it. Well genetically how well do you handle that? The report I use for that, I think it's 817,000 SNPs that all go into that risk assessment, right? So it's a lot more powerful than just here's one variant, right? Because what if you have a variant that makes you better at at something and worse? Where does that net effect lie? Right? I also match it up a lot with people's individual goals, right? So I'm not gonna be diving into your mental health genetics if you don't have mental health issues. So you've had to build a personal brand around this. Yes. Or you've managed to. Yeah. And how has that changed the way you you communicate? what I could say is I don't think it's so much that it's changed how I communicate. I really just show up when people meet me in person, you're just like how you are in the content, you know what I mean? Like I just always I think authenticity is king, you know, and you know, I didn't even think When I got started, I didn't even think I was like building a personal brand, if that makes sense. You know, I was just sharing things that could help people, and then I turn around and there's hundreds of thousands of people now, and I'm like, wow, I i it it's it kind of snuck up on me in a way. You know what I mean? I was never too, too caught up in like the follower count or anything. I just wanted to make things that people found useful. You know, the things that really get me going are people in the DMs that tell me, you know, I didn't realize this supplement was messing me up. My doctor didn't know. So it's not so much that it changed how I communicate, but the one thing I'm realizing now is the big shift that's happened in social media, I think the last year or two now, with the AI, with the short form, you know, it is changing how you need to show up at least on short form social media. I'll be honest with you, I missed the days where I could just grab my phone and I could just rant and don't have to optimize my hooks and the psychology of, you know, now they're just so So many marketing teams, I don't have a marketer, I don't have any, so to reverse engineer the psychology to get people to watch more for the algorithm, that's the game we all have to play now with personal brands. But I honestly miss the days where you could just share something of value and people would share that, but those attention spans just get shorter and shorter and shorter. It's unbelievable. So one word I don't actually like, but I'm gonna use anyway, and the reason why I don't like it is because we're in a health space, so I really try to identify what makes a difference and I know for a fact that genetics has a huge impact on on how we can change the lives of humans. So I don't like the word leads because leads are it sounds like a negative thing you're trying to catch people on. But let's use that word anyway to say how important is your social media channel for leads. Yeah. I mean for me it's everything. You know I don't I I don't really have like I said I don't run I never ran a single ad. You know all of mine is just all or A good bit of its word of mouth as well, you know. So that and then going on podcasts, you know, that that's it that's a big outlet as well because to do what I do, you know, it's it's not cheap, and people need to really understand and consume more of that content. And those podcasts are a great way because otherwise you're getting that 90 second snippet like a couple quick tips. But you know, you can really tell if someone's a real subject matter expert in these types of longer content. conversations again anyone can say make me a smart sounding post like I'm a doctor for 90 seconds you read from the script and teleprompter. Yeah. Yeah no that's easy today. So I I see and you you might have a different future but I see a future with the social media with your ability to communicate so sh so well that you're going to experience a list that's going to grow of people that want to get involved and want to learn more. So What if of all of a sudden you experience ten times as many patients that want to come through with you? What are you what would you do? Yeah. Do you envision yourself growing into having a team around you or what is it you're kind of looking for in the future? Yeah, so yeah, that would be wild. I definitely could not could not handle that, you know. you know, I feel like there's two routes. There there's going training people, you know, underneath me to handle that, but then there's building tools and systems, you know, because, you know, I'm not a medical doctor. I never claim I'm a replacement for a medical doctor. I always recommend my clients converse with their physician if they're on Medicaid. You I'm not trying to be a rogue vigilante, you know, anything like that. But, you know, at the end of the day, I was trained to run cancer studies on mice, do cell experiments, and I wasn't trained to work with people, but again, I'm doing all over-the-counter supplement type things, but again it's Do I want to train people? Because what I do, it's a very important layer, but no doctor, very, it's very hard for one doctor to give the complete level of care, spiritual, emotional, supplements, medical, altogether, right? So there's training people underneath me, but or building tools for people and practitioners to be able to parse through the supplement interactions, the genetics better. For me, I think building the tools is how I've been able to help the most. people by getting that in the hands of practitioners and consumers. because even trying to build a team, you're gonna hit that bottleneck eventually as well have to hire more and more and more. Is there a way to get what's up here down into a system that the regular person could utilize? I think yes, especially with the technology we have today. Absolutely. I'm kind of curious because as a genetic testing expert as you you are and I I want to say that because you you absolutely are. How many genetic test results do you think you've looked through? I know I work with over a thousand people, so at least a thousand of those, but then some people also have some other genetic reports I'll look through as well because Like I said, I even there's a company that I think is pretty minimalistic with their testing. I'll always look, I'll kinda peek over, see what they're doing and see maybe there's sometimes an angle, I didn't you know, no one can know everything about everything, right? So I mean I've seen at least a thousand of them. I'd say probably I'd say probably at least twelve or thirteen hundred at this point. I mean, because some people have multiple of them, right? and Yeah, again, it's trying to find what's the most actionable for people. You know, information, we're in an information overload, right? Most people come to me with all these tests. They do all these cheap little tests and they have no support and no guidance and you know, I think one of the biggest problems of genetic testing now is we put so much focus on the genetics, which of course it makes sense, it's a genetic test, but most genetic tests recommend supplements. And these tests don't know the supplement interaction. My background really is my PhD was in pharmacology, not genetics, so it's like. How are those supplements interacting together? an example I like to give is you've probably heard of the curcumin supplement before, right? From the turmeric group. Great anti-inflammatory, very well published for knee pain, inflammation. And you'll see on a report, it'll say, you have this certain inflammation genetic mutation. Take curcumin. Then the next line will say, you're prone to low iron, eat more red meat. And I go, wait a second. They clearly don't know. Curcumin is an iron chelator. So you're taking Telling someone to take an iron lowering supplement, and then the next line you're telling them they're prone to low iron. You see how that doesn't so much have to do with the genetics, it has to do with the supplements. What else are the supplements doing? They do so much more than what's advertised and what's on the label, and how many people are taking one supplement, how it was studied. People are taking five, ten different supplements, they're all interacting together. This one from a podcast, that one from a newsletter, this one from a TikTok shop. This is green be. Exactly, exactly. Buy one, get one, you get this, and you've got no idea what you're taking. You have no idea. And the people that sold you each of these, they don't know what you're taking. So it's the why like I love supplements, but this is why I don't have a supplement company, at least not yet, because I want to be educating people how to utilize them properly. There's an ab a plethora and an overabundance of all these supplement companies that are trying to tell you this one thing is great for your symptom, right? But is it great for your body? I I'm Well, I might be calling out some supplement brands right now, but a lot of supplement brands have shown up having a questionnaire online and you kick in all sorts of stuff, how your world looks, how what you do, how you move, how you eat, and then from that they make a supplement pack that's unique to you. And I'm just going, my god, do not fall in that trap. Because you need to understand your underlying biochemistry for you to actually take a decision on that and not just some. Questionnaire from someone who wants to build a company. And then I I wonder with those two, do they all just lead to the same thing? You know, let me put it this way. I've actually seen, I'm not gonna name name some genetic testing companies. Every single person gets put on the same multivitamin that they're branded. So it's their brand of multivitamin. No matter what your genetics say, everyone gets the same one. You know, same thing with that. It's a questionnaire, i it it's There's so much more than meets the eye with that, right? And I've seen it, the quizzes, like that gets people engaged, the dopamine, the psychology. And as a scientist, but also a business owner, that's honestly where I struggle sometimes because you know a lot of business comes down to psychology and psychologically manipulating people that think that, you know, they need that thing. And again, it's people that don't know better, you're leading them down this path and make them think that, you know, that's the solution. Versus I'm trying to say, hey out of all this information you have what really applies to you what's a waste of your time and money and what health advice is not good for you but it's it's really the wild west. Yeah. fantastic. So as we round off the business of longevity, I always have three questions for my guests and try and get a sharp, sharp answer back on it. What's your number one recommendation for someone building a business in the longevity space? I have to say the personal branding around it. especially if you're especially if you're a solopreneur, right? I mean there's different I didn't go the route of, you know, raising money, building that whole side of it, but if you want to go for it, it all comes down to just standing out, speaking your voice. And I think really Being authentic and don't be afraid to be controversial. But I think also don't go too hard being controversial just for the sake of views, right? Like be authentic. I think people can pick up on that, even if it's through their phone screen. And what's the one personal habit that you never miss? Gotta get my eight hours of sleep. Eight hours is. Except last night we had the dinner, so it was close to seven-ish, but n normally, no matter what time I'm going to bed, my wife will ask me what time are we getting up. I'm like, we work backwards when I'm going to bed. Like eight hours at least in there. That's the non that and the daily movement for me, whether it's weights or a walk in the morning, those two. Fantastic. Where can people find yourself and learn more about the work you do? Yeah, I'm at Dr. Tyler Panzner. I'm on pretty much all the socials, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, www.drtylerpanzer.com. And yeah, I'm here to be an unbiased voice in the supplement space, helping people figure out this crazy, overwhelming, contradictory world where you're marketed like crazy, and these apps are meant to farm you of your dopamine and your attention. to really help people think for themselves and not spend another $80 on this supplement, that supplement, and add more to what I call the supplement graveyard. Your pantry with a bunch of stuff, thousands of dollars, you have no idea what's doing what, and really help people sift through that. Tyler, thank you so much for joining me on the business of longevity. It's been a pleasure to have you on. Thank you for having me.