Brett Kotlus, M.D.: How to look younger while you live longer

**Peter Attia** (0:04)
Hey, everyone, welcome to The Peter Attia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Attia.
The Drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top performing individuals in the world. And this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics at peterattiamd.com.
In this podcast episode, I'm speaking with my friend, Dr. Brett Kotlus.
Brett is a New York City based eye and facial plastic surgeon who specializes in cosmetic and reconstructive surgery of the face, but particularly specializing around things to do with everything with the eyes, including the skin around the eyes. He's trained both in general oculoplastic surgery and general cosmetic surgery. I met Brett about three years ago, and I still remember our first meeting. We met for the first time when he just came by my office at some point, and we sat around having coffee, and as he walked me through not just his training, which is actually quite unique, but also his particular approach, I realized we were kind of kindred spirits in our appreciation for nuance. As you'll learn in this episode, I know pretty much nothing about looking good and skin and eyes and all that stuff. And in many ways, to spend time with Brett is to spend time with someone who thinks a lot about how to make small and subtle changes over time that lead to long lasting effects. And I think the reason that resonated so much with me is my belief in longevity, of course, is that it's a compounding issue, and therefore making small but consistent changes that lead to seemingly small improvements over the short run is actually what leads to amazing results over the long run with respect to the reduction of risk of disease, et cetera. Brett's approach to cosmesis is the same way, and I suspect that my bias is probably what has me thinking that that's really the right way to do it. And once I got to know Brett better and we started to collaborate and work together and I've sent a number of patients to Brett, I was always amazed by the responses because to me the right way to, for example, do Botox is to be able to look at a patient after the procedure and say, I didn't know you had Botox. And so things that we talk about here are a bunch of things that you can do to make a huge impact on the health and vitality of your skin. And he does get into a number of these things specifically around Botox. He also gets into a growing list of sort of all the facial treatments and cosmetic procedures that are out there. Lasers, peels, all of these sorts of things. And most importantly, I think he also helps you as the listener think about how to pick someone. Because again, many of you listening to this might find this stuff interesting. And sure, if you happen to be in New York and you wanna meet Brett, that's great. But most likely you're not. And so the more important question is how do you sort of separate the good from the great or even the great from the not so great in this space? So again, like I said, I don't think a lot about this personally. I realize I should probably think about it more when I look at pictures of myself today versus pictures of myself when I was 30 I am sort of surprised at how much I feel like I look like I've aged. And I guess part of this was a bit of a wake up call for me that I might need to pay a little more attention to that. If for no other reason than just to have the optionality to look a little better when I'm 80, then I'm probably on the course to looking. Brett does a great job here explaining why our faces change over time, what he considers the three most important tools for skincare and rejuvenation. He gets into all the procedures, as I mentioned, the lasers, the peels, the needles, the devices.
I really enjoyed his discussion of the right way to do Botox, because I'd heard this before, because of course Brett and I had discussed this a lot, but I'm glad we were able to sort of revisit that for people here. And he also talks a little bit about the current trends and future trends of cosmetic and plastic surgery. You can follow Brett on Instagram. He's DrKotlus, D-R-K-O-T-L-U-S, where he puts up lots of before and after photos, especially around the eyes, which I find particularly interesting. That's something about myself that I've always been curious about making better.