Dr. Michael Roizen Interview: What Should I Ask the RealAge Doctor?

I have another one booked. Dr. Michael Roizen is coming on the podcast.

If the name does not land right away, the idea will. Roizen is the physician who invented the RealAge test — the thing that told an ordinary person in 1999 that their calendar age and their body's age were two different numbers. That was a quarter of a century before anyone was mailing you a spit kit and charging you for an epigenetic clock. He got there first, with a questionnaire and a research team, and it turned into a #1 New York Times bestseller and a website millions of people used.

The whole premise of what I am doing here — that the number on my driver's license is not the number that matters — is a thing he put into the culture.

Who He Is

Roizen is board certified in both internal medicine and anesthesiology. He did his medicine residency at Harvard's Beth Israel and his anesthesiology training at UCSF, and he served in the Public Health Service at the NIH in the lab of Nobel laureate Julius Axelrod.

In 2007 Cleveland Clinic made him its Chief Wellness Officer, the first job of that kind at a major American health system, and he was founding chair of its Wellness Institute. He is Chief Wellness Officer Emeritus there now, and a professor at the Lerner College of Medicine. Along the way he has published more than 175 peer-reviewed papers, chaired a Food and Drug Administration advisory committee, and co-invented an approved drug.

His books are the part most people know. RealAge in 1999. YOU: The Owner's Manual, written with Mehmet Oz, in 2005. Four of his books have hit #1 on the New York Times list. His most recent, The Great Age Reboot, was written with two economists — Peter Linneman and Albert Ratner — and argues that longevity is the next great economic disruptor, and that you had better prepare your bank account for a long life as carefully as you prepare your body.

You can read his full Cleveland Clinic profile here, and a good recent interview with him at NutraIngredients.

Why I Wanted Him on the Show

I met him last year at the DaVinci 50 mastermind, where he was one of the speakers. That is the same room where I met Richard Rossi, who founded it. Roizen stood up in front of that group and made the case for a much longer life in plain language, and I have wanted him on a microphone of my own ever since.

Gary Leland with Dr. Michael Roizen at the DaVinci 50 mastermind — Dr. Michael Roizen and me at the DaVinci 50 mastermind.

Two Reasons

The first is that he is 80 years old and still working, still writing, still practicing. I am 71 and building a life around getting to 200. He is nine years further down the same road than I am, and he has been measuring himself the whole way. That is not a theoretical conversation for either of us.

The second is that he is not a supplement guy or a gadget guy. He is a mainstream, credentialed, hospital-system physician who nonetheless says out loud that living to 100, 120, even 130 is going to become ordinary, and that 90 could be the new 40. When somebody with that much institutional standing says something that aggressive, I want to know exactly how much of it is evidence and how much of it is hope. I intend to ask him.

He also sits on the other side of a fence I keep running into. I track my biological age with an epigenetic test. He built the original questionnaire-based version. I want to know what he thinks the newer clocks actually measure, and whether he trusts them.

What Should I Ask Him?

This is where you come in.

I did this before my interview with Aubrey de Grey and you sent questions. So I am asking again. Leave a comment, hit reply on the newsletter, or post it in the Facebook group. Anything you have wanted to ask a doctor who has spent forty years on this and is now living the experiment himself.

If you want to see the kind of conversation these turn into, I have already sat down with telomere scientist Dr. Bill Andrews and with Liz Parrish of BioViva.

I will record the interview on September 22nd and post the video here once it is locked in.

If you want to see what I am doing with all of this, my full daily regimen is in my protocols, the training side is under fitness, and every number I track is in test and stats.

Stay sovereign, stay healthy,
Gary

A note from Gary: I am not a doctor, and I am definitely not your doctor. I am a 71-year-old man running a 129-year experiment on himself in public. Nothing here is medical advice. Talk to your physician before you change anything about your medications, your training, or your supplements.

Applications Are Open

The 200 Year Life Mastermind

If you would rather do this alongside other people than alone, I am opening a small group. One year, live on Zoom, working through the protocols together.

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