The DNA of Things with Dr. Jeremy Koenig

At 34, pharmacist Dr. Kevin Tran took a routine consumer gene test expecting supplement tweaks — instead he found two copies of APOE4, a variant tied to up to a 33x higher Alzheimer's risk. When neurologists across three countries told him the same thing — come back when you have symptoms — he built his own answer: the Phoenix Project, a crowdsourced "N-of-many" self-experimentation community now approaching 700 members. In this episode of The DNA of Things, Kevin walks Dr. Jeremy Koenig through his own biomarker turnaround (HbA1c, cholesterol, VO2 max), the humbling truth buried in Phoenix's unpublished data (zero of 250 supplements hit statistical significance), a surprising creatine-and-sleep finding, and why he believes APOE4 carriers deserve their own lane in Alzheimer's drug trials.

Key Takeaways:

• 🧬 25% of the population carries APOE4, but most never get tested — Kevin didn't know until a random consumer swab test
• 📈 Two copies of APOE4 = up to 33x higher Alzheimer's risk; one copy is closer to 4x
• 🩺 Three neurologists, three countries (US, France, Singapore), same advice: wait for symptoms — which Kevin calls "insane"
• 💪 In 6-7 months of diet/exercise changes: HbA1c dropped 5.9% → 5.4%, cholesterol 115 → 70, body fat 22% → 13%, VO2 max 36 → 51
• 🔬 Across 250+ supplements tested by 650 Phoenix members over 6-7 months, none crossed statistical significance community-wide
• 😴 High-dose creatine (20g/day) disrupted deep/REM sleep in ~15% of members — a finding not reported elsewhere
• 🧊 Sauna use (4-5x/week) shows the strongest anecdotal signal in the community for energy and reduced brain fog
• ✂️ Kevin believes APOE4's single-base difference makes it a prime CRISPR target — but brain delivery remains the core obstacle

 LINKS:

https://www.drjeremykoenig.com/
https://www.instagram.com/drjeremykoenig/
https://www.youtube.com/@drjeremykoenig

How did life actually begin — and did it start in Yellowstone's boiling hot springs instead of the deep ocean? In this episode, astrobiologist Dr. Bruce Damer joins Jeremy to unpack the hot springs hypothesis, the origin-of-life theory he co-developed with biophysicist David Deamer that's reshaping how scientists think about where the first living cells came from. Bruce walks through the childhood vision at age 14 that set his entire career in motion, the wet-dry cycling experiments in volcanic pools that produce trillions of protocells, and why his NASA background in virtual worlds and asteroid mining eventually looped back into origin-of-life research. The conversation goes deep into the Drake Equation, the Great Filter, and whether complex life might be vanishingly rare in the universe — then takes an unexpected turn into consciousness, psychedelics, and whether humans are tapped into a larger energetic field none of us fully understand yet. If you're into astrobiology, space science, or just love a good "how did any of this even happen" rabbit hole, this one delivers.

Key Takeaways:

🌋 The hot springs hypothesis says life may have started in cycling volcanic pools, not the ocean
 🧬 Wet-dry cycling in hot spring analogs produces trillions of protocells in the lab
 👁️ Bruce's origin story starts with a literal vision at age 14 that mapped out his entire career
 🚀 Two decades of NASA work on rovers, space stations, and asteroid mining fed straight back into origin-of-life science
 ☄️ Meteorites carry prebiotic ingredients like amino acids and nucleobases that may have seeded early Earth
 🔭 The Drake Equation and the Great Filter suggest we might be genuinely alone in the cosmos
 🧠 Carl Woese's "progenote" theory reframes evolution before cells even existed
 🍄 A candid dive into ayahuasca and psychedelics as tools for creative and scientific insight
 💫 A closing theory on whether humans tap into a shared conductive energetic field
 👨‍👧 Why raising a child might be the most direct path to understanding "duty of care" in an AI-driven world

Connect with guest:

BIOTA Institute (his research org, Hot Spring Hypothesis): https://biota.org/

Personal archive site: https://damer.com/

Research profile / publications: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bruce-Damer

 LINKS:

https://www.drjeremykoenig.com/
https://www.instagram.com/drjeremykoenig/
https://www.youtube.com/@drjeremykoenig

At 22, Kyle Hulbert was doing everything "right" — clean diet, eight hours of sleep, daily workouts — and still found himself standing on a 27th-floor balcony in Dubai, depressed and suicidal, with doctors telling him nothing was wrong. It took a functional medicine physician to uncover the real problem: rock-bottom testosterone and chronic mercury poisoning. That diagnosis didn't just save his life — it became the blueprint for Longevity Clinics of America, a functional medicine model built to be affordable instead of another concierge health perk for the wealthy. In this episode, Kyle sits down with Dr. Jeremy Koenig to unpack how pharma funding shapes medical school curriculums, why testing for root causes shouldn't cost thousands of dollars, and how he's scaling a business that runs consults at a loss because he believes access, not upsells, is what actually saves lives.

Key Takeaways

🧠 Suicidal at 22 despite a "perfect" lifestyle — until testosterone testing changed everything
 💉 His testosterone came back at 159 — ten times lower than normal for his age
 ⚡ Mental health cleared up in just 7 days after starting hormone therapy
 ☠️ Chronic mercury poisoning was the hidden root cause behind years of fatigue, brain fog, and joint pain
 🏥 Why medical schools are funded by pharma — and what that leaves out of doctor training
 💰 Functional medicine testing can cost thousands, pricing out everyone but the wealthy
 🩺 How Kyle and his business partner built a pricing model that undercuts the concierge health industry by 10x
 📉 Clinics intentionally operate consults at a loss because "treatment gives value, not the consult"
 🌍 The goal: 10-20 clinics across America to make functional testing accessible, not exclusive
 🏠 Simple home heuristics — mold, water filtration, movement — that can catch problems before they become a crisis
 👨‍👩‍👧 Why parents should get their kids tested for the same toxicities they struggled with
 📺 The "Netflix test" — a surprisingly simple gut check for whether your lifestyle needs an intervention

 LINKS:

https://www.drjeremykoenig.com/
https://www.instagram.com/drjeremykoenig/
https://www.youtube.com/@drjeremykoenig

Dr. Jeremy Koenig sits down with Dr. Andrew Brandeis, CMO and co-founder of OK Capsule, for a wide-ranging conversation about the real reason personalized supplements fail: it's not the science, it's the logistics. Andrew shares his journey from naturopathic physician working alongside MDs in San Francisco urgent care to building a manufacturing-as-a-service platform that pre-sorts and drop-ships personalized daily vitamin packets for supplement brands worldwide. The two dig into supplement quality scandals, the psychology of adherence, and how AI — specifically Claude — is quietly becoming a diagnostic thought partner for both doctors and patients. Andrew even tells the story of how an AI chat uncovered the real root cause of his decade-plus psoriasis flare-ups after dermatologists came up empty. The episode closes with a look at OK Capsule's new MCP integration (basically an AI-native API that turns weeks-long tech integrations into a single click), plus a teaser for Andrew's upcoming satirical novel on how blockbuster drugs actually get made — through marketing, not medicine.

Key Takeaways

• 💊 Supplements only work if three things line up: the right formula for the right condition, verified label-accurate quality, and actual consistent adherence — most plans fail on that third one
• 🏭 OK Capsule isn't a supplement brand — it's an API/MCP-driven platform that lets other supplement brands offer personalized, private-labeled daily packs at scale
• 📉 Independent testing has repeatedly found a shocking number of Amazon supplement products don't actually match their label claims — brand trust exists for a reason
• 🤖 AI tools like Claude are becoming a "second opinion" layer for both patients and physicians — pulling years of labs, wearables, and raw genetic data into one context window no human doctor could hold in their head
• 🧬 Andrew's real-life psoriasis case: 15 years of dermatologists saying "it's genetic, here's a steroid cream" — until an AI-assisted deep dive into his raw 23andMe data flagged a specific immune overreaction to a common skin yeast, and treating that actually resolved it
• 🔌 MCP (Model Context Protocol) is being called "the new API" — reducing what used to be weeks of engineering integration work down to a single click for AI-to-AI systems
• 📊 Function Health and its wave of copycats nailed the "here are your results" part of personalization — but most stop short of actually delivering a physical product or solution, which is the gap OK Capsule fills
• 👨‍👩‍👧 A fascinating tangent on where this is all headed: "family LLMs" that hold context across a household's health history, habits, and dinner-table conversations
• 📚 Andrew's satirical novel Pillars: Science and Other Profitable Lies (out early 2027) pulls back the curtain on how pharmaceutical "blockbusters" are really built — through marketing narratives, not necessarily medical superiority
• 🎯 Big picture theme: stop waiting for better information and start building better infrastructure — make the healthy choice the easy choice, and behavior change follows automatically

Chapters List:
00:47 Transitioning Roles: From CEO to CMO
05:50 The Journey to OK Capsule: Foundational Insights
09:34 Building a Platform for Personalized Supplements
13:04 Navigating Quality and Compliance in Supplements
16:06 AI in Healthcare: Opportunities and Challenges
19:00 The Rise of Personalized Health Solutions
21:30 Innovations in AI and Health Integration
25:29 The Impact of MCP on Health Management
28:47 Personalized Supplements and Health Outcomes
32:40 AI as an Augmentation Tool for Doctors
39:02 The Future of Personalized Health and Family Dynamics
41:41 Closing Thoughts and Future Directions 

 LINKS:

https://www.drjeremykoenig.com/
https://www.instagram.com/drjeremykoenig/
https://www.youtube.com/@drjeremykoenig

Chris Burres has spent over three decades chasing a molecule most people have never heard of, and the story behind it sounds almost too wild to be true. In 2012, a French toxicity study accidentally discovered that Carbon 60 (ESS60) extended rat lifespans by 90%, making it one of the longest mammalian longevity results ever recorded in peer-reviewed research. On this episode of The DNA of Things, Dr. Jeremy Koenig sits down with Burres, co-founder of SES Research and founder of My Vital C, to unpack the science of oxidative stress, mitochondrial health, and his own BOSS Theory (Buffering Oxidative Stress System). From the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of the molecule at Rice University to real-world testimonials on sleep, energy, and mental focus, this conversation dives deep into carbon nanomaterials, biohacking, and what it actually takes to buffer aging at the cellular level.

Key Takeaways

🧬 The 90% Longevity Study — How a 2012 French toxicity study on Carbon 60 accidentally became one of the longest-recorded lifespan extensions in mammal history

⚗️ From Nobel Prize to Supplement Shelf — The 1985 Rice University discovery of the C60 molecule and its 11-year path to a Nobel Prize in Chemistry

🔋 Mitochondria & Oxidative Stress, Explained — Chris breaks down the BOSS Theory (Buffering Oxidative Stress System) using his now-famous Mardi Gras/bumper cars analogy

😴 The Sleep-Energy Connection — Why the most consistent testimonial from ESS60 users is better focus and energy during the day paired with deeper sleep at night

🧪 The Messy Supplement Industry — Why Chris resisted entering the supplement space for years, and what finally changed his mind

💊 Real Protocols & Dosing — Olive oil vs. avocado oil vs. MCT oil, and how Chris personally stacks his morning routine

📊 What's Next: Ongoing Research — Upcoming studies on headaches, HS-CRP inflammation markers, sleep, and skin aging

🎁 Free Resources for Listeners — Chris shares an 18-tip biohacking guide from his Longevity Summit interviews with 57 experts, plus an exclusive discount link

 LINKS:

https://www.drjeremykoenig.com/
https://www.instagram.com/drjeremykoenig/
https://www.youtube.com/@drjeremykoenig

Jeremy Malecha spent his career building cloud-connected medical devices at ResMed before functional medicine pulled him in through the side door — literally, as his wife's first patient. What he found was a mess: lab results in one place, wearable data in another, supplement protocols scribbled into a Word doc, and zero way to connect any of it. That frustration became Biocanic, a platform now used by thousands of practitioners and over 270,000 patients to turn raw biomarker data, wearable streams, and intake forms into structured, repeatable protocols. In this conversation, Jeremy and Dr. Jeremy Koenig dig into why functional medicine is data-rich but action-poor, how AI changed the speed of building personalized care tools almost overnight, why "death by five-minute paper cuts" is quietly burning out practitioners, and what it actually takes to scale individualized health without losing the personalization that makes it work. They also get into the bigger shift happening post-pandemic — from "doctor knows best" to "I'm responsible for my own health" — and why that shift, not better algorithms, is what's actually going to disrupt healthcare.

Key Takeaways:

🧬 How Biocanic turns scattered labs, wearables, and intake data into one trackable health record
 ⏱️ Why "death by five-minute paper cuts" is the real bottleneck stopping practitioners from scaling
 🤖 What changed for health tech builders once AI tools caught up to what Jeremy was doing back in 2018
 📊 Why functional medicine is data-rich but action-poor — and what closes that gap
 🔁 How practitioners build repeatable protocols without sacrificing personalized care
 💍 Using wearables (Aura, Whoop, Garmin) and self-experimentation to catch health shifts before they become problems
 🩺 The difference between functional medicine patients, health optimizers, and longevity biohackers — and why practitioners serve them differently
 🏥 Why healthcare disruption is coming from outside the system, not from insurance or hospitals
 🧠 The "teach a person to fish" philosophy behind personalized health coaching
 ❤️ Why the real metric of long-term health might be relationships, not biomarkers

 LINKS:

https://www.drjeremykoenig.com/
https://www.instagram.com/drjeremykoenig/
https://www.youtube.com/@drjeremykoenig

Kate Wilson has spent over twenty years watching the genetics field move faster than the people it was built to serve — patients in rural communities who didn't know their tumor could be tested, payers drowning in $60,000 EOBs with no answers, and clinicians too overwhelmed to keep up with next-gen sequencing as it was happening in real time. In this episode, Kate — certified genetic counselor, former product director at Quest Diagnostics, clinical instructor at Emory, and host of the award-winning All Access DNA podcast — joins Dr. Jeremy Koenig to pull back the curtain on what genomic medicine access actually looks like on the ground, why the research-to-clinic handoff still takes up to 17 years, and why the future of genetic counseling lives in primary care, not specialty clinics. From the Angelina Jolie BRCA moment that shifted public awareness overnight, to the quiet dismantling of the CDC's public genomics program, Kate traces the thread most people in the field haven't noticed — and makes the case that data alone has never changed a life. Story does.

🧬 Key Takeaways

🧵 The thread nobody's pulling — Kate spent 20+ years connecting clinical genetics, industry, payers, and the general public — a role that barely had a name when she started

💸 The $60K EOB moment — a single panel test, a patient in shock, and a lab with no answers — the story that pushed Kate out of clinic and into industry to fix the system upstream

🧪 Sanger → NGS → panels → AI — how the pace of genomic innovation outran clinician education, payer policy, and patient awareness all at once

📣 Why data doesn't move people — stories do — Kate's philosophy on science communication and why All Access DNA was built around human narratives, not lecture slides

🏥 The primary care gap — why genetic counselors belong in your family doctor's office, not just specialty clinics, and what a few pioneering practices are already proving

🌍 Access isn't just about cost — rural communities, under-informed clinicians, and outdated insurance guidelines are the real barriers to genomic medicine reaching everyone

⚖️ ELSI in practice — the ethical, legal, and social implications of DNA testing including life insurance blind spots and why Huntington's disease is still the clearest test case for voluntary genetic testing

🤝 The three-legged stool — why academics, industry, and government genomics programs have to work together — and what's at stake now that the CDC's public genomics group has been cut

🔬 Genetic counselors in industry — the surprising skill that makes GCs invaluable in boardrooms: translating between bioinformatics, C-suite, and payer policy in the same room

✨ Room for miracles — why Kate, after 20+ years of reading genetic data, still believes a result is never the whole story

 LINKS:

https://www.drjeremykoenig.com/
https://www.instagram.com/drjeremykoenig/
https://www.youtube.com/@drjeremykoenig

Most people know Sleep Cycle as the app that wakes you up at the right time. Erik Jivmark, CEO of Sleep Cycle, is here to tell you it's something much bigger than that. In this episode, Erik breaks down how a shift from motion tracking to audio-based breathing analysis turned a consumer sleep app into one of the most valuable passive health datasets on the planet — 82 million installs, four billion nights tracked, and 11 million hours of sleep analyzed every single day. We get into the science behind contactless sleep apnea risk detection, why 80% of the estimated one billion people living with sleep apnea remain undiagnosed, and how Sleep Cycle is working toward FDA clearance for a one-night, no-hardware screening tool that lives entirely on your phone. Erik also pulls back the curtain on their B2B SDK strategy, their partnerships with Ultrahuman, Carnegie Mellon, and the UK Health Security Agency, and why he believes the real barrier to solving sleep apnea at scale isn't technology — it's access.

EPISODE TAKEAWAYS:

• 😴 Why sleep is the single most underrated lever for mental health, weight loss, athletic recovery, and cognitive performance
• 📱 How Sleep Cycle detects sleep stages, snoring, and respiratory rate using only your phone's microphone — no wearable required
• 🌍 The story behind 4 billion nights of sleep data tracked across the US, UK, Germany, Japan, Brazil, China, and Australia
• 🫁 What breathing patterns during sleep reveal about your overall health — and why breath became the key signal
• 🚨 The sleep apnea epidemic: 1 billion people affected, 80% undiagnosed, and why primary care can't keep up
• 🔬 Inside Sleep Cycle's clinical validation study for FDA-cleared sleep apnea risk detection using a single overnight recording
• ⌚ How Sleep Cycle's accuracy stacks up against Apple Watch and Samsung's wearable-based sleep apnea tools
• 🤝 The B2B SDK strategy: how companies like Ultrahuman integrated Sleep Cycle's full tech stack in under two weeks
• 📊 CoughRadar explained — how anonymous cough data tracked nightly is helping public health agencies monitor flu and respiratory illness across entire countries
• 💊 Why progressive doctors are now prescribing better sleep before medication for depression, anxiety, and metabolic conditions
• 🏃 The biohacker's shortcut: why fixing sleep delivers more growth hormone and testosterone than almost any supplement or training protocol
• 🏠 Beyond the phone — how Sleep Cycle's audio SDK is being embedded into smart home devices for passive, always-on health monitoring

 LINKS:

https://www.drjeremykoenig.com/
https://www.instagram.com/drjeremykoenig/
https://www.youtube.com/@drjeremykoenig

If you've ever rehabbed an injury only to watch it come back six months later, this episode is going to change how you think about your body. Scott G. Livingston — Master Neuro-Reconditioning Practitioner, Athletic Therapist, Strength & Conditioning Coach, keynote speaker, and host of the Leave Your Mark podcast (now in its 9th season, nearly 500 episodes strong) — joins Dr. Jeremy Koenig to break down exactly why the traditional medical model keeps missing the point. With 35+ years in high-performance sport, 11 NHL seasons with the Montreal Canadiens, New York Rangers, and New York Islanders, and multiple Olympic and World Cup medalists trained personally, Scott has seen every version of how the industry gets it wrong. His methodology, neuro-reconditioning, starts where most practitioners stop: the nervous system. Scott unpacks why patellar tendinitis, ACL tears, and chronic pain aren't the problem — they're the symptom. The real driver lives in walled-off movement patterns, outdated threat responses, and the long-standing communication breakdown between rehab and performance that almost nobody is trained to bridge. Now stepping into his newest role as Head of Rehabilitation for injured touring performers at Cirque du Soleil, Scott brings that same philosophy to some of the most extraordinary athletic bodies on the planet. Whether you're a clinician, a coach, or an athlete tired of being reactive, this conversation will push you to stop treating the vibration and start asking what's wrong with the alignment underneath.

🎯 EPISODE TAKEAWAYS

• 🧠 The nervous system runs the show — chronic and recurring injuries almost always have a neurological root cause that the traditional diagnostic model completely ignores
• 🔧 Treat the alignment, not the tire — pain and injury are symptoms (the vibration), not the actual problem; the worn tire is not why the tire wore out
• 🏒 11 NHL seasons across three franchises — Scott's elite hockey career with the Canadiens, Rangers, and Islanders gave him a front-row seat to how world-class bodies break down and what it really takes to bring them back
• 🥇 Olympic and World Cup medalists trained personally — Scott has worked at every level of sport, giving him a uniquely broad lens into how different athletic profiles move, compensate, and recover
• 🩹 Rehab and performance are still siloed — most practitioners speak only one language; Scott built Reconditioning HQ to give clinicians and coaches a shared vocabulary and methodology
• ⚙️ Reconditioning vs. rehabilitation vs. performance therapy — these are not the same thing; Scott breaks down the critical difference using the F1 pit crew analogy
• 🔁 Previous injury is the #1 predictor of future injury — without addressing the neurological compensation patterns left behind, you're just replacing the tire again
• 🧬 Your genetic profile is your stock vehicle — DNA informs whether you're built like an off-road truck or an F1 car, and no amount of training fully rewrites that blueprint
• 🤸 Artistic athletes changed how Scott sees movement — working with freestyle skiers and aerial performers revealed how the body can do extraordinary things without conventional gym training
• 📋 The prehab revolution is overdue — the tools exist to be proactive, but the industry is still largely reactive; Scott argues for identifying "skeletons in the closet" before they ever become injuries
• 🎪 Cirque du Soleil as the ultimate reconditioning lab — elite performing artists present a unique challenge: genetically exceptional movers who still need intelligent load management and long-term return-to-performance care
• 🎙️ Leave Your Mark podcast — 9 seasons, nearly 500 episodes — Scott's platform interviews people from all walks of human performance, exploring the personal stories behind their excellence
• 🤝 Apprenticeship still matters in the AI age — shared information and technology are powerful, but 30–40 years of practitioner nuance can't yet be replicated by any algorithm
• 💡 Pain is a messenger, not the message — the body walls off movement it no longer considers safe; the goal is to understand why, not just silence the signal

 LINKS:

https://www.drjeremykoenig.com/
https://www.instagram.com/drjeremykoenig/
https://www.youtube.com/@drjeremykoenig

Most health tech companies are racing to build the insight — Marco Benitez went and built the thing underneath it. Marco is the co-founder and CEO of Rook, the API platform that normalizes and standardizes data from 400+ wearables into one clean, usable signal. In this episode, he breaks down why dirty wearable data is silently corrupting health decisions across insurance, pharma, remote patient monitoring, and clinical trials — and how a biomedical engineer with a fourth-dan taekwondo black belt and a background in big pharma saw the problem before anyone else wanted to admit it existed. From a hardware pivot during COVID to landing Fortune 15 clients, Marco's story is a masterclass in building the boring, hard infrastructure that the entire longevity and digital health world quietly depends on.

What You'll Learn:

🩺 Why your Apple Watch, Garmin, and Oura Ring don't actually agree — and what that means for your health data

🍍 The pineapple vs. apple problem — how wearable data looks similar but is fundamentally incompatible across devices

🧬 How clean data is the real bottleneck in digital health, longevity, and clinical research

⚙️ What it actually takes to build the infrastructure layer beneath digital twins, remote patient monitoring, and wearable analytics

💊 How big pharma's clinical trial standards shaped Marco's obsession with data accuracy from day one

🔄 Why Rook pivoted from hardware to software — and how that decision unlocked Fortune 15 clients

🤖 Where the digital twin is today vs. where AI is taking it in the next decade

🚗 Why Marco compares the future of health AI to Tesla's self-driving — and why that analogy actually holds up

🥋 What 15 years of taekwondo taught Marco about building a company, a team, and a life

 LINKS:

https://www.drjeremykoenig.com/
https://www.instagram.com/drjeremykoenig/
https://www.youtube.com/@drjeremykoenig