ONE Tiny Blood Spot = HUNDREDS (!) Of Biomarkers, Age & Disease Prediction With Dr. Matt Dawson

**Ben Greenfield** (0:00)
My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Boundless Life podcast.

**Dr. Matt Dawson** (0:05)
Your DNA makes up about 20% of your health outcome, but the other 80% is what you do, what you eat, how you sleep, your stress levels. With epigenetics, you're measuring that. That other 80%, you're actually looking at how much every gene is turned up and turned down. What we can predict with epigenetics is limited by our imagination and the size of the data set.

**Ben Greenfield** (0:24)
Welcome to the Boundless Life with me, your host, Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist and nutritionist, and I'm passionate about helping you discover unparalleled levels of health, fitness, longevity and beyond.
I guess today, Dr. Matt Dawson, physician, entrepreneur, I don't know what you call yourself, man. You kind of both. And also an athlete now, a competitive endurance athlete by the sounds of it. Tell people about this adventure you just got back from.

**Dr. Matt Dawson** (1:02)
Well, first off, I love your sweater. Your sweater says, Dad. I think I'm just gonna call you Dad for the podcast, cause that'd be fun.

**Ben Greenfield** (1:09)
Maybe, actually, I'll just throw this in right now. This is the most expensive sweatshirt I own. I was at a spa in Portugal and the weather was colder than I thought the weather was gonna be in Portugal, and so I went downstairs and I'm like, I need to buy a sweater from the spa at this hotel, and I just grabbed this one cause it looked like the cheapest sweater in the joint and put it on my hotel account and as I was checking out, realized I'd spent 350 bucks on a sweatshirt that says Dad on it.
So this, and it literally feels like a cheap champion sweatshirt. I think I just paid for the brand.

**Dr. Matt Dawson** (1:48)
It was like $50 for the sweatshirt and then $100 per letter for your DAD there, so that's great.

**Ben Greenfield** (1:52)
Yeah, exactly. But you had a more exciting adventure than a spa sweatshirt.

**Dr. Matt Dawson** (1:57)
Yeah, so the Kilimanjaro. So it was almost a year ago, probably nine to 12 months ago, somebody reached out to me and said they were going to try this Guinness World Record group speed attempt of up and down Kilimanjaro. And I thought, I am definitely not that fit. I am no Ben Greenfield, but that sounds fun. So I haven't really trained for, I've done a couple Ironmans, but I'm extremely slow, kind of barely finishing. But it was like so much fun. I spent nine months really training and seeing how my body would respond. I basically built an AI coach for myself that I would feed in all my TruHealth data, all the stuff that we're going to talk about, all my training data, my lactate threshold stuff. And it was just cool. Yeah, I had a blast. Watching my body respond. And in the end, I think there were 34 of us that tried. We needed four of us to finish under a time to get the group world record. And five of us did. I think there are a couple more that may have came under.
But yeah, I was I was part of that group. So I got a new Guinness World Record for Kilimanjaro up and down.

**Ben Greenfield** (2:57)
Congratulations. The the AI training thing is interesting. So did you just kind of like upload all of your data and say, here's the fitness level I need to be at and the mountain I need to climb in X number of months. Tell me what to do every day.

**Dr. Matt Dawson** (3:13)
Yeah, the exact route, the exact kind of set. We did seven days of kind of acclimatization before. The first week, we subbed it twice. So the first route, the second route, which one we're taking, where my fitness was at. I had it give me tests to do. Like, where's my muscular endurance? Where's my cardiac drift? Where's my VO2 max? And I got all that in there, all my biometrics, my health stuff, and then come up with a plan, come up with a supplement plan, come up with everything, and every day, I would upload my workout that I did. It would adjust. Every couple weeks, we would do tests. We would readjust based on how I'm doing.
And it was the first time I've ever trained for something or went through a sports season without getting injured, without overtraining, because I just really listened to it, followed the plan. And in the end, even the climb was a science experiment. Like, I still was not... The people who were on the climb with us, they were Army Rangers, Special Forces, Delta Force guys, like famous ultramarathoners and adventure folks. And they were way stronger than I was. But I was actually the first one to the top because I was so dialed in to the science of... I knew... It's really an eating contest with a lot of hiking. But I was dialed in to what calories I could take, how many, which macronutrients, at which heart rate. Like, what could I take in at 125 versus 135 versus 145?