The DNA of Things with Dr. Jeremy Koenig

Stuart McMillan has coached at 10 Olympic Games, helped athletes from 19 countries medal in Rio, and built ALTIS — one of the most respected human performance organizations in the world — out of a million dollars of debt and what he openly calls "straight-up chaos." In this episode, Stuart breaks down what speed actually is, why almost nobody — including trained athletes — can truly sprint, and why that gap between your engine and your chassis is exactly where injuries are born. He unpacks the most overlooked principles of sprint training, explains what "earning the right to sprint" really looks like for everyday people, and shares how decades at the tip of the spear with the fastest humans alive have shifted his focus toward something bigger: helping the rest of us move well, move fast, and keep doing it for decades to come.

🔑 What You'll Learn in This Episode

⚡ Why most people literally cannot sprint — and what to do about it before you try

🏗️ The engine vs. chassis framework — why raw power means nothing without the structure to handle it

🏅 What it took to coach athletes from 19 countries to the 2016 Rio Olympics — and what nearly broke ALTIS getting there

🐢 The counterintuitive lesson Stuart gives every athlete, coach, and entrepreneur: slow down to go fast

🧠 The "seek, sense, share" knowledge framework Stuart has used since 2010 to stay at the frontier of performance

🏃 What sprinting actually is — and why your Tabata workout absolutely does not count

🔧 How Dan Pfaff turned a long jumper with 17 hamstring tears in 3 years into an Olympic gold medalist

🎓 Why traditional coaching education is failing athletes — and what ALTIS is building to fix it

🌍 How Stuart is taking elite sprint science out of the track and into the hands of everyday people

🔮 What the next 10 years looks like for one of the most influential performance coaches alive

 LINKS:

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

What if your body already has everything it needs to repair itself — and the real problem is that we've been ignoring it? In this episode of DNA of Things, host Jeremy Koenig sits down with Christian Drapeau, stem cell researcher, neuroscientist, and founder of STEMREGEN®, for a conversation that genuinely shifts how you think about aging, recovery, and chronic disease. Christian breaks down how stem cells function as the body's built-in repair system, why that system starts declining as early as your 30s, and what that gradual breakdown actually looks like — from slower recovery after a workout to the onset of age-related disease. He walks through his 25+ years of research, starting with a blue-green algae that sparked an entirely new field of inquiry, and explains how specific plant compounds can mobilize your body's own stem cells to support healing from the inside out. Whether you're an athlete trying to bounce back faster, someone managing a chronic condition, or just trying to build a body that holds up for the long haul, this episode lays the scientific groundwork for why endogenous stem cell mobilization might be the most overlooked pillar of human health today.

Takeaways:

• 🔬 Stem cells are your body's repair system — not just a medical procedure, but an active, ongoing biological process happening inside you right now
• 📉 By age 30–35, you've lost ~90% of your circulating stem cells — and that decline is directly tied to slower recovery, tissue degeneration, and age-related disease
• 🌿 Plants can mobilize stem cells — Christian Drapeau's research identified 15+ plant compounds that stimulate stem cell release, with the top 5 now formulated into STEMREGEN®
• 💊 Endogenous vs. exogenous stem cells — why supporting your own stem cell production is a fundamentally different (and more sustainable) approach than injections or stored cord blood
• 🏋️ Athletes can feel the difference within 24 hours — post-workout recovery, soreness, and tissue repair all tied directly to how many stem cells are in circulation
• 🫀 Chronic conditions like congestive heart failure showed 10/10 recovery in a study where mitochondrial function was restored — pointing to stem cell mobilization as a root-cause intervention
• 🧠 The medical system doesn't ask the most important question — "Is this person's repair system failing?" — and Christian Drapeau argues that answer underlies almost every chronic condition past age 45
• 🤝 A collaboration with Dr. Jeffrey Bland (the father of functional medicine) is underway, bridging endogenous stem cell science with STEMREGEN®'s approach to regenerative health
• ⏳ Paradigm shifts take time — Christian draws a compelling parallel to handwashing in the 1800s: the science is solid, but cultural and medical acceptance lags decades behind the data
• 🌍 100,000+ people are already using STEMREGEN® — and the next frontier is getting this into the hands of healthcare practitioners who can document outcomes at scale

 LINKS:

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

Dr. Kelly Haston didn't take the traditional road — she left home at 15, has no high school diploma, and rebuilt her entire life through California's community college system before earning her way to Berkeley, UCSF, and Harvard. Now she's one of the few humans on earth who knows what 378 days inside a sealed Mars simulation actually does to your mind, your relationships, and your sense of what matters. As a stem cell biologist and commander of NASA's CHAPEA analog mission, Kelly brings a molecular lens to questions most people haven't even thought to ask yet — what does reduced gravity do to a developing human embryo, what will our garbage do to Mars, and how do four unconnected people stay psychologically intact for a year with no way out and a 22-minute communication delay? This conversation goes from a garage in British Columbia where a young girl pulled a leg off a salamander to the cutting edge of what humanity might actually look like when we leave this planet for good.

Takeaways:

🦎 The childhood salamander experiment that quietly predicted Kelly's entire scientific career

🎓 How the US community college system gave a high school dropout a path to Harvard and NASA

🔬 Why being at the start of a field — not the middle of it — is where the most important science gets done

🚪 The unspoken door rule inside the Mars habitat and what it reveals about human psychology under isolation

⏱️ How a 22-minute communication delay forces radical autonomy — and what that means for future Mars crews

🧬 The difference between cellular aging and maturation, and why it matters before we send humans to deep space

👶 Why having babies in space or on Mars is one of the most underexplored and urgent questions in human biology

🤝 What a year away from everyone you love teaches you about the non-negotiable value of human connection

😌 Why Kelly now takes urgent things less seriously — and why that perspective shift might be the most transferable lesson from the mission

🌍 The COVID parallel: why humans need common purpose to function, and what Mars colonization might finally force us to figure out about ourselves

 LINKS:

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

What do you do when the healthcare system fails you — for three years straight? If you're Denisa Kim, you build the solution yourself. A chemical engineer turned biotech founder, Denisa spent years battling chronic recurring UTIs before discovering a glaring blind spot in women's health diagnostics: every at-home microbiome test on the market only tests one person. So she founded Anteros Bio, the first platform to test both partners and compare their genital urinary microbiomes side by side — because vaginal health, as it turns out, has never been just one person's biology. In this episode of The DNA of Things, Dr. Jeremy Koenig sits down with Denisa to unpack her journey from Facebook support groups to pitch stages, from bubble-mailer MVPs to utility patents, and from bootstrapped solo founder to actively fundraising with a growing clinical network. They go deep on the science of microbial compatibility, the racial and ethnic gaps in women's health data, why AI alone can't fix what under-researched data sets broke, and what it really costs a founder to protect her own vision when everyone else has a better idea for your company.

🔑 What You'll Learn in This Episode

• 🧫 The Partner Blind Spot in Microbiome Testing — Why every existing at-home test ignores half the equation, and how Anteros Bio is solving couples' shared vaginal and urinary health
• 🩺 Chronic UTI & Recurrent Vaginal Infections — The real recurrence rates for UTIs, BV, and yeast infections that modern medicine quietly accepts — and why Denisa refuses to
• 💡 From Pain Point to Pitch Stage — How Denisa went from DMing strangers in Facebook support groups to placing 2nd in a startup competition with nothing but an idea and a voice
• 📦 Building an MVP on a Shoestring — Swabs in bubble mailers, DIY shipping labels, and what "ship before you're ready" actually looks like in biotech
• 🧬 The Science of Microbial Compatibility — What it means to compare two microbiomes at the same time, and why shared health data between partners changes the diagnostic picture entirely
• 🌍 The Gender & Ethnic Health Data Gap — Why women's health research is chronically underfunded, underrepresented, and why solutions built from one population's data don't translate across ethnicities
• 🤖 AI + Microbiome Data: Limitations & Possibilities — Why machine learning can't outrun biased or incomplete datasets, and what truly inclusive sexual health tech needs to look like
• 💸 Bootstrapping, Presale Memberships & Founder-Led Fundraising — Denisa's take on raising smart money vs. fast money, and why not all capital is worth taking
• 🪞 The Founder as Brand — How building in public as a solo founder created audience pressure that nearly pulled her away from her own use case
• 🎯 Protecting Your Vision — The cost of other people's playbooks, and the question every early-stage founder needs to ask: Who is this for — and who am I becoming by building it?

 LINKS:

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

Roma Van der Walt didn't stumble into women's health — she was forged into it. Raised by a Kenyan father who never owned a car, Roma was logging long-distance walks by age four, quietly building a resting heart rate that would later make elite coaches take notice. By 12 she had found the coach who would shape everything; by 17 she was writing a university-level thesis on anaerobic threshold training using herself as the test subject; and by her mid-twenties she had retired from Germany's national modern pentathlon team, carrying with her a master's in sports science and a lifetime of data-driven training most athletes never get to experience. But the chapter nobody talks about — the UN desk job, the 40-plus pounds gained post-retirement, the sciatica, a pregnancy complicated by thyroiditis, then a hernia — turned out to be the real research. When the medical system couldn't give her the coordinated, personalized support she knew was possible from her athletic career, she stopped waiting and built it herself. Now, as CEO of Vitelle, Roma is building the health operating system for women — confronting a reality the longevity world has quietly accepted: that 90% of the data driving our health algorithms was collected from male bodies, costing women an estimated 75 million life-years every single year.

• 🧬 How Roma's Kenyan roots and data-driven coach shaped her elite athletic foundation
• 📊 Threshold training vs. VO2 max — and why one is trainable and the other isn't
• 🏅 What modern pentathlon actually demands across five disciplines in a single day
• 🧠 The psychology behind elite performance and knowing when to ditch the data
• 💔 The post-athlete identity crisis — weight gain, sciatica, and losing yourself after retirement
• 🤰 Pregnancy, thyroiditis, hernia — and how Roma rebuilt herself back to marathon PR shape
• 🏃‍♀️ Running an ultra marathon four months postpartum to study her own physiology
• 🤖 Why AI health tools are hallucinating women's health with male benchmarks
• 🚨 The 90% male data gap that is structurally failing every woman in the healthcare system
• 📉 75 million life-years lost annually to poor female care pathways
• 💡 Healthspan over lifespan — why quality of life matters more than the number
• 🏗️ What Vitelle is building and why the world needs a female health operating system

 LINKS:

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

In this insightful conversation, Dr. Jeremy Koenig sits down with Dr. Stuart Phillips—one of the world’s leading muscle physiologists—to explore why resistance training isn’t just for athletes anymore. As the first Canadian to lead the American College of Sports Medicine’s position stand on resistance training, Dr. Stu Phillips shares powerful insights on building muscle for healthy aging, longevity, and staying independent well into your later years. From his epic first meeting with Dr. Mark Tarnopolsky (one limping in on a broken leg, the other riding a bike with a halo bolted to his skull after hitting a moose) to leading the renowned PACE program, they dive deep into the real science of protein, creatine, strength training, and why the biggest longevity hack might not be the latest supplement trend. Dr. Phillips dismantles the “longevity illusion,” outlines the four essential pillars of healthspan, and explains why the strongest thing you can build might not be your body—but your community and consistent daily habits. Dr. Jeremy Koenig and Dr. Stu Phillips deliver practical, no-nonsense advice every “mere mortal” needs to hear.


Takeaways

💪 Resistance training isn’t just for jocks — it’s essential for healthy aging and staying independent, says Dr. Stuart Phillips
🧬 First Canadian to author the ACSM position stand on resistance training shares the latest science with Dr. Jeremy Koenig
🥩 Protein needs explained: why the hype is overblown and the realistic daily target (1.6g/kg)
🧠 Creatine benefits go far beyond muscles — including brain and cognitive support
📉 Why chasing longevity often misses the mark — focus on healthspan instead
🏋️ The 4 big levers that matter most: move your body, eat real food, sleep well, and stay socially connected
👴 Inspiring stories from the PACE program: how community and strength training help people thrive at 100+
🪑 The most important strength exercise for older adults? Simply being able to stand up from a chair
🧹 Why “sweeping the floor” and lab culture reveal deeper lessons about mentorship and grit
⚖️ GLP-1 drugs like semaglutide: what they really mean for muscle loss and sustainable results

 LINKS:

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

When college hockey player Garrett Salpeter tore ligaments in his wrist and was told he needed surgery, he discovered a radically different path using targeted direct current electrical stimulation to work with the nervous system instead of fighting it. Weeks later, his wrist healed completely without surgery — and a new mission was born.

In this episode, Garrett Salpeter, founder of NeuFit and inventor of the FDA-cleared NeoBie (NewFit) device, joins Dr. Jeremy Koenig to explain why traditional rehab often falls short. He reveals how the nervous system’s protective “brakes” keep people stuck in pain, weakness, and slow recovery — and how recalibrating those patterns can dramatically speed healing from acute injuries, post-surgery rehab, and even support neurodegenerative conditions like MS.

From the Mayo Clinic and over 100 professional sports teams to everyday athletes and longevity seekers, this conversation dives deep into neuroplasticity, movement readiness, the mind-body connection, and why addressing the body’s “software” is the missing link in both performance and healing.

Key Takeaways:

• 🏒 The Hockey Injury That Started NeuFit – How a simple wrist tear exposed the limits of traditional care and sparked a neuroscience-driven company
• ⚡ Nervous System First, Tissues Second – Why guarding, inhibition, and threat perception often slow healing more than the actual damage
• ⏱️ Cut Recovery Time in Half – Turning 4–6 week injuries into 1–2 weeks and accelerating post-op results starting day one
• 🧠 Neuroplasticity for MS & Neuro Conditions – How NeuFit helps rebuild pathways when the body can’t generate enough input on its own
• 💪 Performance Without the Brake – Using “digital weight” and mapping to remove nervous system governors and unlock hidden speed/power
• 🔄 The SAID Principle – Why we’re always adapting to exactly what we do and how to hack it for better movement and longevity
• 🧘 Mind-Body & Psychosomatic Patterns – How physical tension from emotional stress mirrors injury compensation — and how releasing it changes everything
• 📈 Movement Readiness & Future Consumer Tools – The coming era of daily nervous system scans and at-home NeuFit solutions

 LINKS:

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

Dr. Nathan Jones is an ER physician, SWAT medic, and NASA CHAPEA Mission 1 medical officer — and his life reads less like a résumé and more like a dare. In this episode, he traces the thread from a rural Midwest childhood shaped by his father's international eye missions, to overnight shifts in central Illinois, to practicing medicine in the jungles of Honduras, to 378 days sealed inside NASA's simulated Mars habitat with 22-minute communication delays and no hardware store within 140 million miles. It's not a story about credentials — it's what happens when you spend a lifetime saying yes to hard things, guided by four words: do the hard thing now.

Key Takeaways:

• 🧬 Resilience is built, not born — forged through repeated exposure to high-stakes, low-resource environments
• 🚑 The Golden Hour mindset — ER decisiveness and knowing when not to act both translate to deep-space isolation
• 🪐 378 days of silence rewires your brain — and that rewiring turns out to be a gift
• 🌿 Scarcity is the best teacher — no help coming means radical creativity kicks in
• 🛠️ The tinkerer's brain is a survival tool — curiosity and problem-solving are repeatable resilience skills
• 👨‍👩‍👧 "Do the hard thing now" is a family operating system — not a motto, a method
• 🔄 Epigenetics shapes performance — individual and family-level signatures may be tuning biology in ways science hasn't mapped yet
• 👁️ Perspective is a survival skill — seeing through someone else's eyes might be the most urgent thing we can practice right now

 LINKS:

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

What happens when a Bell Labs engineer who built a $90M software business, raised $70M in wireless tech, and watched Intel acquire his company decides to walk into a hospital — and can't unsee what's broken? In this episode of The DNA of Things, Dr. Jeremy Koenig sits down with Dr. Asif Naseem, CEO of GenoPalate, to trace one of the most unlikely journeys in health tech. Asif pulls from decades of systems engineering — fault-tolerant networks, broadband infrastructure, Oracle enterprise — to argue that the next trillion-dollar company in healthcare won't look like a hospital. It'll look like a telecom network. With 180,000 customers and a multi-omics vision on the horizon, Asif breaks down why healthcare is still stuck in the 1990s internet era, why point solutions are failing patients, and why the future belongs to whoever builds the intelligence layer — not the app on top of it. If you're a founder, clinician, or just someone who wants to actually understand their own biology, this one will rewire how you think about personalized nutrition, genomics, and what "precision health" could actually mean at scale.

💡 Key Takeaways

• 🏗️ Systems over solutions — Healthcare's biggest problem isn't a lack of innovation, it's a lack of infrastructure. Asif argues we need an intelligence layer, not more point products.
• 🧬 Your DNA is a starting point, not a verdict — Genetics is static, but when you stack it with blood biomarkers and microbiome data, you get a living, dynamic metabolic health profile.
• 📡 Healthcare is becoming a telemetry application — Continuous glucose monitors, home diagnostics, and longitudinal tracking are turning the body into a real-time data network — the same way we monitor cars or telecom traffic.
• 🍎 Food is medicine AND poison — Nutrigenomics reveals that what's healthy for one person can be inflammatory for another. Personalization isn't a luxury; it's the baseline.
• 🌐 The next trillion-dollar health company looks like Cisco, not a clinic — The winner won't sell individual tests or reports. They'll orchestrate the whole network and sell the intelligence layer.
• 🔄 Multi-omics is the future of metabolic health — Single data streams (genetics alone, blood alone) aren't enough. The industry is moving toward integrating multiple omics sources for accurate, reliable health predictions.
• 🤝 B2B is the scalability unlock — GenoPalate's pivot from direct-to-consumer to a B2B platform means coaches, clinicians, and wellness providers can now embed precision nutrition into their own offerings.
• 🧠 Agency over your own biology — The end goal isn't another report you file away. It's giving people the tools to query their own biology — no PhD required.
• 🏥 Healthcare in the 90s — Just like the internet before Google and Amazon built on top of it, healthcare infrastructure is being laid right now. The intelligence layer is still up for grabs.
• 🎓 Go learn what you don't know — Asif left Oracle to do clinical rotations at MIT/Harvard Medical School. Sometimes the best competitive advantage is intellectual humility and a willingness to start over.

 LINKS:

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

Most healthcare innovation never makes it to the patient — not because the science is wrong, but because nobody figured out how to plug it into the real world. In this episode, Dr. Jeremy Koenig sits down with Mariano Bendersky, Head of Innovation and Digital Healthcare at Sanofi, to dig into the messy, human side of healthcare transformation. Mariano brings a rare combination of private equity instincts, CEO-level operating experience, and front-row seats to some of the most ambitious AI-driven initiatives in digital health — including cutting specialist wait times and building early disease detection programs for Type 1 diabetes. Together, they explore how we've moved from Digital Health 1.0 (connected devices and chronic disease apps) into the AI era, where the bottleneck isn't the model — it's the workflow. From physician burnout and fragmented health data to the cultural divide between how Argentina and the US think about healthcare access, this conversation gets into the real friction points that innovators, investors, and entrepreneurs can't afford to ignore. If you're building in health tech, funding the next wave of digital health companies, or simply paying attention to where medicine is headed, this episode is your reality check — and your call to action.

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

🤖 AI needs legs, not just a brain — A great predictive model means nothing if it can't plug into clinical workflows. Operationalization is the missing piece most health-tech startups skip.

⏱️ Wait times are a systems failure, not a capacity problem — Reducing specialist access from 9 months to something manageable is often an administrative fix, not a clinical one.

🔥 70% of physicians are burning out — Admin overload is crushing clinicians, and AI has a real role to play in reducing documentation burden and giving doctors back time with patients.

🌎 Healthcare is culturally wired — How a society defines healthcare access, who gets what, and what's considered "fair" differs dramatically between countries like Argentina and the US. Innovation that ignores culture will stall.

💡 Digital Health has entered its AI era — We've moved past connected devices and basic apps. The new frontier is using AI to find non-obvious disease markers, predict earlier, and act faster.

🏗️ Selling into pharma and health systems is its own skill — Startups need to understand buying cycles, budgeting windows, and who the real decision-maker is — or their best idea will never get a meeting.

🧠 Critical thinking is more important than ever — As AI surfaces counterintuitive findings, human judgment is what separates a breakthrough from a dangerous black box.

💰 This is the win-win-win moment — When bold innovators, aligned investors, and evolved regulatory frameworks come together around early detection and prevention, everyone wins — including the bottom line.

🚀 The call to action: now is the time — The tools exist. What's needed are innovators willing to take calculated risks and investors ready to back a more humane, proactive healthcare system.

more on: https://www.sanofi.com/en 

 LINKS:

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