Dr. Greg Carder is a board-certified Doctor of Oriental Medicine. He has owned and operated Multi-Disciplinary Clinics consisting of MD, DC & Physical Therapy with Acupuncture & Oriental Medicine added to focus on Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation, Pain Management, Family Practice, cosmetic medicine and Anti-Aging Medicine.
- Discover the 4 Bridges to Immortality
- The Future of Technology and Biology
- The Difference between the Passage of Time and Degradation of Time
- Telomere and Oxidation Theories of Aging
- The Most Important Decision You Have to Make…
- What Makes Us Human?
- How Nature and Technology Can Come Together
- And Much More
Click the link below to access the complete transcript.
[spoiler]Logan: Welcome to another exciting episode of The Vital Way podcast. I’m Logan Christopher here along with Dr. Greg Carder. He is a board certified doctor of Oriental Medicine and he has owned and operated multi-disciplinary clinics consisting of MDs, chiropractic, physical therapy, along with acupuncture and oriental medicine, added the focus on different aspects like physical medicine rehabilitation, pain management, family practice, cosmetic medicine and anti-aging medicine. Now we have some exciting stuff to talk about today. We’re going to be talking about immortality. So welcome to the call, Dr. Greg.
Greg: Logan thank you so much, I’m humbled and honored to be invited to The Vital Way podcast. I genuinely and sincerely mean that.
Logan: Excellent. Well, can you give us a bit more background on yourself for people are not familiar with your story? What led you to getting involved in anti-aging medicine and so much more?
Greg: Absolutely, it’ll be my pleasure. Well first of all, specifically what led me to anti-aging medicine is I think aging is a mistake. I don’t know who came up with it but I don’t want to participate. I’ve written numerous strongly-worded letters to the management and nobody’s responded. But the fact of the matter is we have all been convinced as a population that aging is inevitable and when you really get down to it, Logan, aging is a measure of the passage of time. It is a chronological metric and with regards to un-alterability, you’re right. That does not change. We will pass year after year after year and we will accumulate a new addition to our “age designation.”
But what people seem to take along with that idea is that with each passing year, we must just passively accept the fact that the degradation that typically goes along with the passage of time is an inevitability and it’s simply not true. The velocity and intensity of degradation, what we consider aging has been shown time and time again from layman to Ph.D., to be absolutely modifiable, dependent upon how diligent you, as the individual, want to take your personal responsibility of your health into your own hands, doing your due diligence, finding portals of credible information and ultimately you’ll have to do an N=1 experiment, which means you’ll have to see what works for you.
The reason for that is people have certain common denominators and while that is absolutely true, people are engines of infinite possibility and along the grading of the bell curve of humanity there’s going to be some generalized and predictable outcomes to exposure to a toxin, a nutrient or a medical treatment but there are going to be outliers along each edge of the bell curve, people who will have unbelievably fantastic, noteworthy outcomes and people will have no outcome or a bad outcome.
I myself am approaching my 50’s. I’m in Brazilian jiu jitsu. I’ve been in jiu jitsu since UFC 1 and everybody in there today is in their 20’s. They’re all trying to murder the old guys. So in order to remain competitive, I alter my nutritional intake dependent upon what is my goal. I alter my nutritional supplementation, my herbal supplementation and if necessary and if it’s going clinically indicated, I submit to medical treatment when necessary. I tell all of my patients look, if I get hit by car, please call an ambulance, don’t call someone some until after I’m stable. And it’s funny and its tongue in cheek and I mean that sincerely. How I got into complementary alternative medicine is another story, and integrated medicine. I’m not sure, is that what you’d like to hear about?
Logan: Sure, I guess briefly.
Greg: Sure. In brief, I grew up in regular medicine. I’m half-Filipino and you may or not may be aware of this but apparently it was practically a federal law if you grew up in the Philippines, you either went in the Navy or you went into medicine. My family went into medicine and I have a long line of allopathic or traditional medicine relatives and I grew up in that traditional health care model. It’s a great model when it comes to disease management. When it comes to chronic disease or dysfunction or just I want to feel better, it falls short in many areas.
As an example, I was in the Marine Corps. I got out of Desert Storm and I had kind of an understandably violent outlet. They didn’t really debrief marines back then and they really apparently don’t really debrief them too well now. Listen, killing in the service of your country, okay. Having homicidal ideations because somebody cuts you off in traffic when you’re out in the real world, not okay. Recognizing that I needed kind of a controlled violent outlet for my tendencies, I joined a judo class at USF. My third year of judo, a kid flipped me. I injured my back. I went to my mom, a board-certified Internal Medicine doctor and no lie, Logan, she gave me Motrin, two Motrins. As cliché as it sounds, see me in the morning. Shockingly, it did not work.
After that, she sent me to my Uncle Dan, also a relative and an orthopedic surgeon, a guy who was at my baptism, for Pete’s sake. He had no financial reason to say what he said. He told me after shooting an MRI, “Without question, Greg, you have screwed the pooch on your back and you need me to operate on you.” Now this guy wasn’t going to get a dime from me. He just believed that the only solution to my thoracic pain that I’ve been saddled with for six weeks was to cut me open when I was in my mid-20’s. I said listen, thank you; I’m going to take it under advisement.
In kind of a mental fog, I drove around town trying to think what am I going to do. Now if you can imagine if you grew up in a traditional medical paradigm your whole life, you would have heard nothing but terrible things about doctors of chiropractic, naturopaths, etc. and I was no different. I had heard horrible, horrible things about them. But I knew they had something to do with the back and I snuck into a chiropractor’s office just a couple of blocks down the street from my family’s office. I ran in there like a man possessed. I ran up to the front desk. I said hey listen, I need to talk to the doctor.
The lady thinking maybe this dude’s a serial killer or something called the doctor up to the front. He came up, brought me in the back, asked me what my problem was. I said look, three doors down, Dr. Linda Carder, that’s my mom. We’re medical doctors and if anybody in my family finds out I’m here, there’s going to be real ramifications for me. I hurt my back. I heard you guys do something with back; is that true? That’s how ignorant I was as to complementary alternative medicine. The guy brought me to the back. He gave me my first adjustment and this excruciating debilitating pain that I’ve been saddled with for 6 weeks was eliminated in 30 seconds.
I decided right then and there that maybe it’s not that I’m being lied to but there’s something else out there and I’m going to figure out what that something else is. That’s what started my quest along the gradient of searching for evidence-based, efficacious therapies that our outside of the traditional medical paradigm. And again, I don’t want anybody to think I’m throwing traditional medicine under the bus. I think we’ve got the greatest medical system in the world when it comes to chronic injuries, catastrophic illness, disease, etc. In an emergency situation, you want Western medicine. But to deal with chronic disease and disorder or to just want to feel better, complementary alternative medicine in many cases has proven to be vastly superior in its ability to create effective change, noticeable, statistically significant change, your pine pollen as an example. Does that answer your question?
Logan: Yeah, absolutely. There are so many cool things off of that and I agree with you. There are some great things about Western medicine, what they can do as far as like life-saving in dangerous accidents. It’s pretty amazing but yeah, in many cases herbs or other alternative medicines work very well in chronic diseases. You’ve got to change lifestyle and those things are really going to work better than a pill or replacing an organ except where it’s needed.
Greg: Absolutely.
Logan: So yeah, let’s get into immortality. How did you get more into this field of anti-aging and then what are the four bridges to immortality?
Greg: Sure, absolutely. Well, let me back up a bit. The original thrust of my practice was physical medicine rehabilitation. I wanted to be under an integrated, multi-disciplinary model. How well would chiropractic, oriental medicine, physical therapy and traditional medicine work kind of as a team or co-joint effort to bring a patient from where you are to where you’re wanting to be? Along the gradient of that is all of the doctors who joined this group, we all started to age, we all started to not be able to recover from illness or injury. We all started to get kind of interested in testosterone replacement therapy.
Anthony Robbins has a quote, “You get what you look for.” We started looking for solutions on this new thing called Google back then and we stumbled across the American Academy of Anti-aging Medicine. The American Academy of Anti-aging Medicine is the spearhead of longevity and rejuvenative medicine in the United States, probably even the world. We immediately went to our first conference in Las Vegas. We all joined and we’ve been hooked ever since.
Since that time, in the dark ages of the early 2000s, we have experienced greater of things that medicine and health care in the first 14 years of the 21st century than in the entirety of human history. These advancements happen in conjunction with advancements in technology. The reason I got into it is purely selfish. I’d love to sit up here and say altruistically, I wanted to help my patients. That’s a given. I want to help my patients Logan. Ultimately, you can only help people after you helped yourself and nobody is going to listen to a doctor about the health of his bones if the orthopedic surgeon talking to him has got a hunchback as a result of degradation to his osseous and cartilaginous structure that he brought about himself. So if we’re going to be talking about health, if we’re going to be talking about longevity, if we’re going to be talking about rejuvenative medicine, we wanted to be certified in that. We want to be on cutting edge and we wanted to apply those things to ourselves and to that end we did.
As time has passed, the myth of immortality has come down out of the stratosphere into tangible reality. Now you’ve got to look at two unrelated fields in order grasp this concept. The first field is technology and by technology, I’m talking about the type of technology that we’re talking on right now and that everybody is listening on right now, which is computer technology. Then we have to talk about biology and I’m going to address technology first.
In the 20th century before the 1950’s, technology was advancing and doubling in price, performance and capacity maybe once every three years. After the 1950’s, it was doubling in price, performance and capacity maybe every two years. Towards the end of the 20th century, it was doubling in price, performance and capacity every year. In the first decade of the 21st century, it was every ten months. Now we’re down to every eight months. While all that knowledge in technology is shrinking at 100% in 3-dimensional volume per decade. What that means is when I was born in 1966, if you wanted a computer that had essentially the processing power of the watch that you’re wearing, that computer was the size of a building and you had to be a Ph.D. student in MIT in order to access it.
So today, let’s say we have a patient who is a Parkinson’s patient and that Parkinson’s patient is suffering from the debilitating disease of Parkinson’s. He’s suffering from the tremors which results in loss of function and personal embarrassment, etc. Twenty years ago, we really couldn’t do that much about it. Ten years ago, really not that much. Today, we can implant a chip about the size of a pea inside their brain, about the size of a post-it stamp, about the thickness of a post-it stamp and that patient while sitting in Starbucks next to you drinking a mocha latte can be on his laptop wirelessly downloading updates to his chip and uploading them into his brain while we’re all just hanging around. That’s today, okay?
If somebody had a heart attack, as an example, 20 years ago they’d suffer from something called reduced injection fraction or heart failure. We really couldn’t do that much about it. Five years ago, we really couldn’t that much about it. Today, in certain countries, we can scrape that patient’s skin cell, take them in a petri dish, add four genes to it, create something called an induced pluripotent cell, add a couple of heart healthy cells to it, watch them replicate, stick them in the patient and around six weeks later, brand new heart. That’s happening right now.
Let’s say somebody was born or lost their hearing, a little 7-year-old for example. What could we do about it in the 20th century? Nothing. Today, we can give her a cochlear implant, basically a bionic ear. So we have a cyborg walking among us. You wouldn’t think of them as cyborgs because we think of cyborgs as Skynet/terminator. But they are cyborgs nonetheless and the more that we can merge our biology with our technology, the closer we’re going to get to what we call radical life extension and radical life expansion.
Now all of this sounds very futuristic and kind of like science fiction. Time magazine has done no less than half a dozen cover articles on immortality by 2045. Peter Diamandis, the founder of the XPrize, has funded this and Google has sank billions of dollars into the immortality project. So it’s not part of the vernacular or the cornucopia of the common man because it’s out of reach of the common man in terms of reality. But so were airplanes before we created airplanes. So was the concept that the Earth wasn’t the center of the universe. All of the things I’m saying seem very unreasonable. They seem very futuristic and space age but they are happening. Because of not just the advancements of technology, Logan, but the compressed velocity of the advancement of technology, we will be able to access radical life extension and radical life expansion by 2045. Your life expectancy will escape at a velocity of a year for every year of life. That is the fact of immortality, unless you get hit by a car or you jump out of a window. If you are breathing and you have the money to pay for it, in essence you’ll be able to live forever. Does that answer your question?
Logan: Yes, and it opens up a hundred new ones.
Greg: By all means.
Logan: I’ve heard of the Hayflick limit. Are you familiar with that?
Greg: I’m sorry, the what?
Logan: Hayflick limit. It was a scientist and they were looking at extending the life of the cells. There was sort of a natural stop to aging at like 120. They couldn’t keep going beyond that but using the technology, we should be able to surpass that. I guess other question, immortality, people live as long as you want or is it just a radical extension like maybe 250 years? I guess who knows at that point what might happen. What are your thoughts on that?
Greg: That’s a great question. Let me address the first point and I’m going to speak in general terms because of the limitation. I don’t want to create a bunch of citations. We could do that later. Fundamentally, mankind is programmed to start dying around the age of 30. It is not in the evolutionary interest of the species for a person to exist much longer than that. The reason for that is because our operating system, which we call DNA, and its computer program, which we call genes, haven’t been updated in the last 10,000 years. Our bodies don’t know that we’re not walking around the savannah barefoot, running away from saber-toothed tigers. So it is in the interest of the species for us to start to die around the age of our 30s so our 12- to 15-year old kids who are having kids of their own can enjoy the resources of the tribe.
Now what’s interesting about that is when you look down into the genetics of the human, it’s theorized based on telomere length that we can live to about 148 years old. Well, why the dichotomy? How do you juxtapose those two? How do you reconcile those two facts? Here’s how you do it. Mother Nature wants you to do around 30 so that your kids, who are having kids of their own, can enjoy the resources of the tribe. Father Time, like any good dad, has given us a backdoor and that backdoor is if you eat organic fruits and vegetables and you walk barefoot and absorb the human resonance and electrons of the Earth, and you detox and you drink mineral-dense water as if you’re living in Vilcabamba, then you have the genetic potential to make it till your telomeres run out, which is about a 148.
What technology is going to allow us to do, Logan, is add telomeres to our degrading telomere line. If you Google age-reversed mice we have today—this isn’t the future—we’ve taken the equivalent of 70-year-old mice and reverted him back to 17-year-old mice, utilizing very similar technology. Now Logan, if we can do that in mice, we are right on the cusp. We are on the verge of being able to do that in people. Does that answer the question?
Logan: Yeah. Probably for people that aren’t familiar with telomeres, would you mind explaining what those are and how they work and I guess also the process of extending them?
Greg: In general, every time a cell replicates, the DNA which looks like a twisted ladder splits apart and then is copied and two new strands of DNA are formed. When that happens, there’s a little ribbon at the end of the DNA and on that ribbon there are these little pearl-like structures called telomeres, one of those telomeres will drop off and when you get to the end of those little pearls, there’s no more replication and you’re dead. There’s no more opportunity for biology to replicate.
To speak to how science is adding telomeres currently, I can’t speak to that because I’m not involved in research and development. I’ve read the studies. I’ve read the literature. We know that it’s happening. It’s not a secret by any stretch of imagination and if you were to be the kind of person that is personally interested in optimal human performance, taking supplements that you know are going to create and enhance physical and mental and emotional state in this moment, you are, by extension, extending your life. You are by extension engaged in longevity and rejuvenative medicine.
I’m just engaged in all of those things with the idea of making it to 2045. I don’t need to live forever, Logan, but a couple hundred extra years would be nice. There are some books I’d like to read, maybe earn a type of so I could see what all the hype is about. We live in an incredibly busy world. Who has time? The most valuable asset we have is not money. It’s not real estate. It is time and our technology, both the synthetic computer side and the biologic side is coming to a nexus point, a singularity where they’re going to meet in a way that allows us to, in essence, to live forever. So I don’t think that and I haven’t read anything suggesting that we’ll enjoy immortality to the point where if you cut off somebody’s limb, we’ll be able to grow a new one like a salamander. But we have theorized and we have shown in lower level animals that we can reverse aging and by reverse aging, I’m talking about the degradation associated with aging. Does that answer your question?
Logan: Yeah. So I’m curious there. In what I have sort of research or read or heard in different places, there are kind of some different theories on aging. The telomere, that’s obviously one of the bigger ones but there’s also some other areas that I guess people are looking at in order to be able to stop or reverse the aging process. Could you explain some of those areas of importance may be?
Greg: Absolutely. That’s a great question and thank you for bringing it up. Telomere shortening is one component of aging. We tend to think of aging as people as one thing – we’re aging. We’re getting old. Hey man, what’s going on with you? My back hurts. Well, you’re getting old. Hey, go run after that ball. I can’t run as fast as I could. Well, you’re getting old. We think of getting old as just one thing. It’s not. It’s a combination of different things and we don’t know what all those things are.
We know that the oxidation theory somewhat plays a role in degrading human tissue, in essence aging people. We know that telomere shortening has a component in aging people. We know of about ten to twelve different hypotheses that contribute to the aging process. There are entire teams who are well funded by huge multi-national conglomerates all designed to study one or two aspects of the aging process. So it’s important to know that aging isn’t one thing. It’s a conglomerate of different things and of the conglomerate of different things, telomere shortening and telomere lengthening is probably some of the most well-studied, followed by oxidation and anti-oxidation. So those are the areas that a person would want to focus on. With respect to that, Logan, there have been elucidated three or four bridges to radical life extension and radical life expansion de facto immortality. It just depends on who you’re reading. It depends on who you talk to. I like the four bridge explanation. I think that it resonates with people more. Certainly, it resonates with me more. I could address that if you’re interested in it.
Logan: Yeah, that would be great.
Greg: Fundamentally, four bridges of immortality have been elucidated in the literature. Bridge number one is essentially lifestyle. Changing what you eat, changing what you drink, stop smoking, stop drinking so much bourbon, Greg, and getting sleep when it’s appropriate that you, yourself, can personally control. We can control our thoughts and we can control what we put in our mouths for the most part.
Bridge number two is proper medical care when it’s clinically indicated. You need surgery if it’s absolutely necessary and what isn’t really thought of but equally is important is utilization of proper nutritional supplementation and herbs in order to extend your life. As far as human history has gone, that is as far as mankind has gotten. We’ve gotten to bridge two.
We are now at bridge three where we’re merging our biology with our technology at the cellular level, the cochlear implant as I mentioned earlier, the Parkinson’s implant, technology called grounding that’s forwarded by Dr. Clint Ober, Ph.D. and Dr. Stephen Sinatra, M.D., Ph.D., where a person lays on a sheet and can absorb electrons from the human resonance of the Earth into their body. These are in essence mechanical anti-oxidants. You can absorb more anti-oxidants utilizing grounding technology in the same setting than you can orally ingest something like a bottle full of vitamin C. So by merging our biology with our technology at the cellular level, we have in essence bridged the gap into bridge three.
Bridge number four is going sub-cellular, into the nucleus, utilizing nanotechnology to repair DNA at the level of DNA and the telomere. Once we have accomplished that with regularity and reproducibility and efficacy, we will be at bridge four and we will be at immortality. Again, lest anybody thinks this is my personal opinion, you could go to this little known publication called Time magazine and look up Immortality by 2045. It is a cover story. It looks like Neo from the Matrix with a plug in the back of his neck and all of the articles that they’ve written surrounding that.
Logan: So an interesting thing, you were mentioning the grounding. What I’m seeing in a lot of different health circles is that a lot of our technology or different things that we’re doing is trying to mimic what’s actually happening in nature. So you mentioned yeah, naturally we die. That’s kind of the natural part of human as well as any other creatures in existence. But by earthing, which we can do just go outside and stand barefoot on the ground or you can create some technology so we can enjoy that inside of our homes, another example would be I’ve started wearing amber shades of glasses at night which block the blue light spectrum which normally if you’re getting that into your eyes, it’s suppressing melatonin so it’s affecting sleep—the amazing thing was I sleep really well but I’ve noticed the difference just in wearing these glasses. The idea was many years ago, we didn’t have blue-light emitting devices that were around us 24/7 and even if we stared at things like the starlight or the fire, it’s not the intensity of light or the same spectrum color of light that would affect us negatively.
So it seems a lot of our technology is trying to get us back in nature, albeit in sort of a roundabout way. So I’m just curious on your thoughts. It seems though, of course, if we’re going to nanotechnology, it really has to be in alignment with our nature, with our biology but at the same time should allow us to go much further in the direction of anti-aging.
Greg: Yeah, you’re 100% right, Logan. The fact of the matter is technology since our first technology of fire has always been a double-edged sword. That fire technology that we utilized to warm our caves, hearts and hearth was the same fire that we utilize to burn down the villages of our next closest competitor. The thing is how a person utilizes technology is what outcome they’re going to get. The example that you used, grounding, what’s better – walking barefoot along the savanna or lying on a grounding sheet while you’re sleeping? Well, the answer is our soles are better. You should be able to at some point in your life, walk around barefoot in your backyard without fear of absorbing xenoestrogens from the Roundup ready grass. But at the same time, some people are busy to the point where they are just walking around life, existing in a state of suspended animation over the Earth and they never come in contact with the Earth. You have rubber-soled shoes. We live in a concrete jungle. Some people never come in contact with the Earth and those people they need a grounding sheet.
I agree with you. Moving yourself towards a more naturalistic state seems to be more efficacious. We were, with very good intentions, seeking to improve the lives of humanity with this single phrase post-World War II, “better living through chemistry.” I don’t think it’s malicious in any way. I think that the intentions of those scientists and those government agencies at that time were rooted in the benefit of humanity in general and Americans specifically and we just didn’t know what we didn’t know. Take a look at the lipid hypothesis in the seven-country study. There was a little bit of a shell game there but ultimately, given the science of the day, was it really such a stretch? Was it really such a leap? You look Dr. Atkins book in the 80’s. I think Dr. Atkins book in the 1980’s given the science of the day, I think Dr. Atkins came to the most logical conclusions he could come to. He didn’t know about gluconeogenesis the way we know about gluconeogenesis. And nutritional today is really the modern day culmination of what Dr. Atkins was attempting to achieve in the 20th century.
So technology, yeah, it’s a double-edged sword, Logan. We should seek as naturalistic of lifestyle as possible in order to live in alignment with our naturalistic self. At the same time, we’re living in the 21st century. We’re taking a bath in EMS every day and I for one am not prepared to move to Vilcabamba and just so you know the technology. Right now, the question you’ve got to ask yourself is: given the exposures that I’m faced with on a daily basis, what is available to me within my grasp in terms of technology like grounding sheets, as well as herbology, something like pine pollen if you’re a guy, and nutritional supplementation that will take from the state that I’m at currently that I’m not happy with to the state you want to be at, which is optimal physical performance?
When you look at your frame of reference from that perspective, that you are responsible for you and you to a large degree can control your physiologic outcome, then a person will start to take a different tactic. He’ll start to do more investigation. Well, what is this pine pollen? What is this ashwagandha? What is the proof behind it? What is everyone else saying? Some people will just go read the reviews and because the reviews are positive and they come from a credible source, they’ll go ahead and they’ll try ashwagandha, they’ll try the pine pollen and the majority of people who are looking for those things, who are looking for them because inherently, they are in need for what those things can treat and supplement, they’ll probably get a good result.
Does it mean everybody will get a good result? Absolutely not, because as I mentioned earlier, people are engines of infinite possibility. Humanity lives along a bell curve gradient. Nothing works for everybody and nothing doesn’t work for everybody. You’ve got to have a readiness and a willingness and enablement to do your research, feel confident in what you’re reading and take the next step, altering your diet, utilizing nutritional supplementation, taking herbs that are consistent with the goals that you are attempting to achieve and giving them a shot. Most people are going to find that these outcomes they’re looking can be readily achieved with just a little bit of effort.
Logan: Yeah. So let’s get into a little bit more the practical, all these technologies coming, just got to survive till 2045 then we all become cyborgs and everything is good. I’m kind of joking but obviously, I’m with you. Yeah, the technology that’s around today is pretty crazy if you’re looking at some of the things. It’s exhilarating. The future is going to be exciting if nothing else. So what are some things that people can do to 1) preserve their telomeres at this point and I guess lower oxidation so that they’re not over-oxidizing? What are some of the practices that you recommend for people?
Greg: I think that practically, the first thing is you’ve got to decide to be healthier. You’ve got to make the decision to become a healthier person. When you do that then you’ll start looking for those things that are going to bring you to that state of health that you want. Let’s just, since we’re already started talking about it, talk about the bridges. Once you make the decision to become a healthier person then look into your immediate surroundings and say, what can I change? The first thing is recognition that it’s very likely grains do not belong in the human body and the elimination of grains, especially gluten-containing grains, is probably a key component to a person regaining control of their health. Just as an example, most animals that ingest grains are ruminating animals. They have plates, not teeth. They have four stomachs, not one. They walk around on four legs, not two. There’s really nothing in the human frame that suggest we’re supposed to thrive on grains.
Because we’re the highest evolved life form on Earth, because we have an omnivorous capacity, we can survive on grains, sure, and grains are technology. Like I said that, technology is a double-edged sword. The loud, nomadic hunter-gatherers have settled into societies that will provide for art, science, literature and infrastructure. But as a mechanism of your health, making different choices culinarily is probably the most important thing a person could do to enhance longevity in the long term as well as just enhancing your day to day outcome. You cannot believe how many that we see on a daily basis who have a willingness to eliminate grains from their life and experience incredible, super physiologic outcome in terms of their own health picture.
So I would suggest to your listeners that the avoidance of clearly not physiologically-appropriate is critical. Unfortunately, Logan, there is no such thing as pizza plant. I have yet to be able to find a macaroni and cheese bush. There’s no spaghetti tree. I just cannot find these things and it’s because they don’t exist in nature. And because they don’t exist in nature, your body has used them as a de facto in its infinite and in its innate wisdom, it will take what you give it and it will do the best it can. But it doesn’t mean that in doing the best it can, that you’re going to enjoy a good outcome and.
When you ingest grains, especially gluten-containing grains, you’re going to experience the same symptoms that our forefathers experienced when they started to utilize grains, which was the introduction of rheumatoid and osteoarthritis, loss of just height and dehydration, decreased bone density, osteopenia, osteoporosis, autoimmune disorder, all of these things happening at the end of their fork. So if a person were to just eliminate processed foods or attenuate processed foods to the greatest degree possible, they will probably slow down the degradation of the ageing process exponentially. That’s the first thing that I would do.
I would solidly investigate the amount of sleep and the quality of sleep that you need. The purpose of sleeping, which is the rebuilding of the body can best be effective by utilizing something like a grounding technology. You cannot believe the absolute difference in your best outcomes when you sleep on a grounding sheet. Now I myself have not used amber glasses at night but I’m familiar with the theory behind it and I agree. When you take these steps to change the lifestyle and do the things within your grasp, changing what you eat, changing what you drink, changing your sleep pattern to a more physiologically appropriate manner, avoidance of smoking.
Now listen, I think, Logan, because I’m a guy, I’m not a monk, before any of your listeners think, you’re going to see me slamming down a cigar and a small batch bourbon because I’m a regular guy and I live in the real world. I just don’t do it with a great degree of frequency. I do it, limited it to special occasions. I think Bill Murray said it best. “Smoking a cigar is a perk of being a man.” I couldn’t agree more. Smoking cigars are wonderful. Why are they wonderful? Because they contain addictive components in in that secrete supraphysiological amounts of dopamine. But you know that then you can make the decision, I’m going to choose to smoke this cigar and drink this small batch bourbon or I’m not going to. Without question, it is the person that allows those intoxicants to rule their life that are going to age faster than the guy who only uses them sporadically or doesn’t use them at all. So the avoidance of smoking, the avoidance of alcohol, the avoidance of other intoxicants is going to slow the ageing process.
Probably the biggest culprit of all is going to be sugar. Sugar is apparently eight times more addictive than cocaine. The average person when we evolved into Homo sapiens was exposed to maybe 1.5 grams of sugar a week. We have kids cramming down pounds of sugar every day. The human physiology was never designed to deal with this level of sugar and the inflammatory exudates that results from it.
So those are the things that you can do right now. Do those things. Change your eating habits. Change your drinking habits. Smoke less or stop altogether. Avoid whenever possible, except on those rare and special occasions like the holidays that are coming up. Then move yourself over to bridge two. You will hear many people in complementary alternative medicine who crucify traditional and western medicine and will have nothing to do with it. I just don’t think that it’s an absolute mistake. There’s a time and a place for each technology and there’s an appropriateness and an inappropriateness for it. Look, if you had a catastrophic illness or injury that is life-threatening, you need to seek traditional medical emergency care. That’s really just it because complementary alternative medicine, so called weeds, and seeds does not have answers in many cases for these things and certainly those answers aren’t standardized where you can save a life with the same reproducibility you could do in traditional medicine. Taking medication because you have drawn yourself into an emergency state where without this medication, you basically aren’t going to be able to function, that’s just the fact of life.
Now your doctor is not really able to take you off this medication. You’re wanting to get off this harmful medication because they create long term, secondary, tertiary and quaternary side effects, that’s a good desire but that’s up to you. How you do that is by becoming more healthy. Along the gradient of becoming more healthy is learning how to use nutritional supplementation and herbs so that you can achieve the health goals and parameters that you want to achieve – feeling better, performing better, performing optimally.
So those are the types of things that I would encourage people to do right now. Not everybody is going to be a candidate for a Parkinson’s implant. Not everybody is going to be a candidate for a cochlear implant nor should they be. But for those people who are, they should allow themselves the luxury of taking advantage of it. So the question really becomes, how many implants does a person get before they stop being human and start being artificial? It’s a philosophical question. Maybe it’s not limited to the scope of this discussion but it is one that I have an answer for. Does that answer your question?
Logan: Yeah. You do have an answer for that one?
Greg: Yes, I do.
Logan: All right, I’ve got to hear that.
Greg: Well okay. The question really is what is human? Let’s start out with what is the purpose of life. The purpose of life really can only be answered three fundamental ways. It’s religiously, philosophically or biologically and it turns out that the first two, religious and philosophical, are esoteric. Because they’re esoteric, they’re really unanswerable because there is no quantifiable test proving the validity or non-validity of those frames of reference. Biologically, there is only one reason for life and that is the propagation of DNA along the along the gradient of time and that’s really it.
Now when you look at what is humanity, you’ve got to ask yourself, is humanity this fleshy substance that we’re walking around in? According to Yoda, no. I only say that because I’m going to go see Star Wars tonight. But Logan, let me ask you something. If you are a teenager, say 15, and you take a picture of you, assuming no real radical changes to life, around the age of 16, do you pretty much look like the same person?
Logan: Yeah.
Greg: Most people would say yeah. You look like the same person. The question is are you the same person and the answer to that is, it depends. What it depends on is how you define person because every single one of that kid’s ten trillion cells have been replaced one by one every six months. So a year later that guy materially is a completely different entity than he was the year before. Every six months, you as a human are a completely different mechanical machine that you were six months ago. So it’s not the machine that makes you human.
What makes you human is your mind and we don’t know where the mind exists because the mind is a brain’s subconsciousness. We don’t have any quantifiable test where we can stick a guy like you in a box and say yeah, the green light came on, Logan is conscious, he’s a human and then stick me in a box and the light turns red and they go oh no, Greg, he’s a robot sent from the future, he’s not conscious though. We don’t have to worry about his rights. What makes a person a person is their mind and the mind is a pattern of thoughts that exists along the gradient of time. But the body itself, that’s alterable.
So to suggest that if more than 51% of you was replaced by synthetic replacement parts so that your mind can continue to exist along the gradient of time, that once you’ve had the threshold from 49% to 51% of synthetic, you’re no longer human, that’s not an accurate representation because the mind hasn’t altered in my estimation. So would you walk up to a seven-year old girl and say because you have this bionic ear and you’re a cyborg, are you less human than your twin sister who doesn’t have that? Would you walk up to that Parkinson’s patient and say, because you have that chip in your brain that you update with downloads from the internet, that you are less human than your brother that doesn’t have the Parkinson’s implant? These people are still human. They have synthetic components but they’re still human.
So the test of what is a human is coming under pretty significant scrutiny. An author, Dr. Martine Rothblatt—I’m not pronouncing it correct—used to be a guy, had a sex change, now is a woman is at the forefront of what defines humanity and intelligence. I don’t know if you’ve seen this movie Her with Joaquin Phoenix in it. It clearly shows that by 2027 to 2029, artificial intelligence will become sentient and that sentient artificial intelligence is going to demand the same rights as a biological human. There are going to be significant battles in the court system as to what makes a human a human. Is it that we’re spraying neutrons or our biological fluid around or is it that we’re sentient? So when you apply that to the people who are existing today, it’s those people who existing today—and there’s a guy on YouTube, he’s a scientist, he lost most of his legs in a skiing accident. He has these two bionic limbs that perform equal to or superior to that of human limbs. Is he less of a human? So the definition of what is humanity really needs to be addressed more closely. The most compelling arguments have to do with the mind and what is the mind and what makes you human. So I would suggest to use that. Replacing your parts doesn’t invalidate your humanity. It allows you to live longer.
Logan: I’ve just been curious. I wonder somehow if some of those machines may change the mind, depending on how we define that so that the person would act differently than another live 100% human being would. That’s an interesting question.
Greg: Well Logan, think about it, okay? Let’s say that you’ve had a guy that joined Super Man Herbs and he’s a fat roly-poly. He just was exposed to wrong foods. Nobody ever taught him how to work out. Nobody ever gave him a mindset of conquer your surroundings. Nobody ever gave him the way or make one speech. But he stumbled across Super Man Herbs. He reads your literature. He starts those supplements. He alters his diet. He starts working out. A year later, he’s got a six-pack. His machine is completely different. He’s going to respond to the world differently. But does that invalidate who he was?
Logan: No.
Greg: I would suggest that it doesn’t invalidate who he was. He has evolved, in a manner of speaking. Humanity is about to evolve. The last major evolutionary leap that we took was our frontal cortex. Let me back up. 105 million years ago, there was a massive extinction event. We believe it’s because a meteor hit the earth and dinosaurs etc., they all died and mammals took over their ecological niche. One of the reasons that mammals could do that is because they have this thing surrounding their brain. There’s an old brain and a new brain. The new brain is called the neocortex and only mammals have a neocortex. It allows for hierarchal thinking and complex computation and pattern recognition. These mammals are what evolved into the mammals of today and eventually into humanity.
Now what separates humanity from our next close cousin, who is also a mammal, is even though all mammals have a neocortex, we are the only ones that have evolved this secondary computer chip called a frontal cortex, which is why our forehead is concave and not convex. That evolutionary leap combined with the precision and a power grip where we can manipulate our environment has allowed for art, science, literature, the internet, Google, this conversation over a conference line. Just imagine what the next evolutionary step is going to bring. We’re on the cusp of that and the cusp of that is—take your cellphone for example. Most people have smartphones now. I was in Columbia. I wanted to talk to a pretty girl who was in Columbia. I don’t speak Spanish. I pulled up Google translate and we had a lovely conversation for two and a half hours using Google translate.
What’s interesting about that is everything interesting didn’t happen within the confines of this rectangular box. My rectangular box, my iPhone, accessed for a few milliseconds the cloud or the internet cloud’s consciousness. They did additional computation, was able to translate my words from English into Spanish and her words from Spanish into English. We’re at a point in the very near future where we’re going to be able to have our brains access the cloud and that next evolutionary step is going to allow for an advancement in mankind, an evolution that world has never seen and isn’t prepared for and it’s referred to by many as the singularity.
Now the question to ask yourself is, are you going to be one of the people that accesses the ability of elevated computational speed by merging your biology with your technology or are you going to stay completely biological? It’s a difficult question to answer. The knee-jerk response of most people is no until they realize what really makes me human and those questions start to be addressed. So there you go.
Logan: Fascinating subject there and I hope people enjoyed that. Coming up on the hour here so time to wrap up. Where can people go to find out more about you and your services?
Greg: Well, I’m in private practice right now. I don’t have an affiliate website or anything like that. I can tell you that for the first time in history after discovering Super Man Herbs, I’m motivated to create one of those so probably in the very near future, I’ll be talking about longevity medicine, immortality, the bridges of immortality and ways a person can achieve a higher quality of life today utilizing supplements like Super Man Herbs offers, changing your lifestyle and once that happens, maybe you’ll give me a bump or something and tell people where I am.
Logan: And you’re located in Florida?
Greg: I’m located in Orlando, Florida right now.
Logan: Okay. So anyone in the area can definitely look you up. Well, thank you so much for this. Go ahead.
Greg: I was just going to say yeah, everyone can look me up. You can Google me. I’m online and listen, thank you so much for this kind interview, Logan. I really, really totally appreciate your time. I really appreciate you and the guys over at Super Man Herbs are doing. I absolutely believe that one of the best things a person can do for themselves is find out how these herbs and these supplements can enhance your life and start to use them. I mean that genuinely and sincerely.
Logan: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Greg. It was a fun call. I think we definitely touched on some new ground we have not covered in any of these podcasts before.
Greg: Well, it was my pleasure. Have a great day.
Logan: All right. Thanks everyone for listening.
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Mary Trego says
I enjoyed the podcast with Dr.Carder!!!! He’s doing amazing work!! you guys at LOST EMPIRE HERBS are very fortunate to have him on your team!!!! He’s helped me realize that I can do any thing I set my goals to be.
Nancy P. says
I began treatment with Dr. Carder in November of 2015 and within 3 months I was off poisons (prescription medicines), all 30+! One by one he resolved fibromyalgia, lupus, asthma, migraines, irritable bowel syndrome, chronic fatigue syndrome, sleep apnea, arthritis, acid reflux, etc. If you live within an hour of Lake Mary, Fl you need to go see him and get your life back.
John Guzman says
Great interview and very informative as he brought up some aspects
of staying healthy I had not heard before. Keep up the good work of
bringing us these great interviews on these podcasts.I have learned so much, thanks.
Dr. Greg says
Thanks for the kind words John.
Greg says
Hey Seth, thanks man, that’s very kind of you to say.
Seth Wahlton says
Dr Greg Carder has been the most resourceful and helpful medical professional I have ever had take care of me. His multi-perspective approach to medicine gives a dynamic diagnosis that he then greats with supreme confidence. I love hearing him on this podcast sharing more of what he does through this network too :D I highly advise anyone to take his advice and guidance because it will lead to a healthy and happy lifestyle
admin says
Glad to hear it!
JC says
I know doctor Carder and he is always making a difference in our world, explaining people how to be healthy, humble in his teaching and a great guy
Thanks for sharing this podcast
DB says
Do you provide transcripts for the podcasts? That would be very helpful.
admin says
We definitely do, although it does take some time to get the episodes transcribed. All the previous episodes have a transcript below the player.
admin says
Yes we do. They do take some time though so they often get posted a week or two after the podcast. We’re working to get ahead so that they can be simultaneous.
Vergie-Genie says
Thanks Logan for doing all these podcasts; I love the breadth of different people you interview, the detail and honesty you go into with them, etc. Great!
Ess says
I’ve became friends quite recently with Dr. Carder and strolled along after hearing he did a podcast. Everything he has said is very accurate from my personal experience and I would love for him to pursue his practices along with influencing many others. Great podcast