Peter Attia ON: Scientific Ways to Slow Down Aging & How Your Emotional Health is Impacting your Physical Health

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
You talk to a person the day before they're going
to die, they would give anything and everything for more
chance at life. Best selling author and host.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
The number one health and wellness.

Speaker 3 (00:10):
Podcast On Purpose with Jay Shetty. Hey, everyone, welcome back
to On Purpose, where you're choosing to listen to become happier, healthier,
and more healed. That's our mission here to leave you
feeling happier, healthier, and more healed after listening to these
conversations these workshops every single day. And I'm so grateful

(00:31):
to you for your commitment and dedication to yourself, your
investment in yourself and lending your ears and your eyes
to me. I know some of you are listening every
single day, so thank you and keep those reviews coming,
keep all of that positive energy coming. It means the
world to me. And today's guest is honestly the person
that I've been waiting to talk to all year. Because
of scheduling, we kept missing each other. I was on

(00:52):
a world tour. He's busy traveling. He's launched an incredible
new book this year helping people, and I'm just so
happy that we finally have him here at our La Studio.
I'm talking about Peter Atier the founder of Early Medical,
a medical practice that applies the principles of medicine three
point zero to patients with the goal of lengthening their

(01:12):
lifespan and simultaneously improving their health span. Peter is the
host of The Drive. If you don't already subscribe, make
sure you do, a podcast covering the topics of health
and medicine. Peter is also the author of the number
one New York Times bestseller Outlive, The Science and Art
of Longevity. This is the book that I recommend if

(01:34):
you're going to read about your health right now. This
is the book I want you to go and get.
Peter Rezier, Welcome to on Purpose, and thank you for
being here. Thank you so much, Jack, And then everything
I said, I was really really looking forward to this conversation,
and I want to dive into many aspects of the book,
many topics. I've also sourced questions from my team, community people,

(01:54):
real real life questions that I think people are really
struggling with. But I actually want to start with your
journey in your story because I've gone through similar moments
in my life where at a young age, I've had
different health challenges when I started to get the right
help and support, I started to realize how detrimental those
health challenges could be long term if I wasn't to

(02:17):
shift things. And the problem is, I've always been a
fairly healthy guy and had healthy habits, and so when
you get that kind of news, it's kind of alarming
and scary and can set fear into you. Now, I
know that in your journey, you were a generally healthy
person doing pretty healthy things, only to find out that
actually you were prone or open to a terrible disease

(02:41):
down the road. So could you walk us through what
it feels like to think you're healthy, to maybe even
feel you're doing okay, but in reality there's something going
on behind the scenes.

Speaker 1 (02:51):
Yeah. I mean, I think there were two sort of
things that were a wake up call for me, and
neither of these things happen immediately. I think it's just
sometimes the realization that happens immediately. So the first one
is I'd always been an athlete my whole life, insanely active,
potentially even you know, active to an unhealthy level. And
you know the focus of that obsession had always shifted.
But at the point in the story that we're talking about,

(03:14):
at this point, I was sort of an ultra distance swimmer,
so I was you know, probably in the water swimming
twenty four to twenty eight hours a week, plus you know,
other types of training. Yet you know, I found out
this is probably around fifteen years ago, that well, actually
on top of that, I was sort of insulin resistant,
I was overweight. And again not that I didn't know

(03:34):
I was overweight, you sort of can realize that, but
that I was sort of insulin resistant, and you know,
that's sort of the first step on the way towards
type two diabetes. It was really at that time that
I also, i think, confronted my own family history, so
just within my genes, the acknowledgment that you know, basically
every man in my family died prematurely of heart disease,

(03:56):
and in some cases very prematurely in their forties. Those
two realizations in my mid thirties, which also happened to
coincide with the birth of my daughter, which my first child,
was a real wake up call. And the realization that
you know, I needed to figure something out so that
I didn't just you know, march down the footsteps of
what seemed to be my destiny.

Speaker 3 (04:14):
And even then you were in the medical profession right
or now.

Speaker 1 (04:17):
Although I had actually left medicine at this point, So
after ten years of medical training, including medical school, I
became sort of disillusioned with medicine and left. So at
the time that I'm having this realization, I'm actually in
the world of finance and quite far from medicine.

Speaker 3 (04:33):
What was your biggest fear at the time, Like, if
you could take yourself back to that moment, like, what
was the fear that you.

Speaker 1 (04:39):
Had, Yeah, that I wouldn't be around to, you know,
be with my grandkids and things of that nature, because
I think, you know, prior to my daughter being born,
I didn't really think I would be the kind of
person who would find any joy in having kids, and
that changed in an instant the second she was born.
I'm sure there are lots of people who can relate
to that, probably more so men than women, I think,
because this switch is a little more by when we

(05:00):
have kids, and then the thought of you know, I'm
not going to relive this in thirty years with grandkids.
I think that was probably the thing that was the
most motivating factor.

Speaker 3 (05:11):
Well, yeah, it needs that kind of incentive to get activated,
and the reason I asked that question is everyone who's
listening or watching, I want you to think about what
that fear, what that challenge is for you, because often
fear isn't a great motivator to keep going, but it's
a great place to start, and our health almost starts
there sometimes, Like I remember that, I remember feeling like

(05:32):
Superman when I was in my early twenties and then
all of a sudden having certain health challenges. I got
into chronic fatigue, I had polyps in my throat that
had to be lasered out. I lost my voice for
a few months, and that wasn't life threatening, but it
was life altering in the sense that I couldn't communicate
in the same way. It was different getting my voice
back and not feeling like it was as strong or powerful,

(05:54):
and then having gut issues and inflammation issues and acid
issues and all of these things again like they weren't.
It's not that my life was going to end that year,
but it's like, you start thinking long term, and you
start thinking about living a unhealthier, harder life. When is
the right time for people to consciously start actually investing

(06:14):
in their health. And I'm going to caveat that with
what is generally happening and happening in the different decades
of our life. So what's happening between zero tooten ten
to twenty twenty to thirty thirty to forty forty to
fifty And when is the time when you have a
bit more control and ability to shift the trajectory of
your health bar any of course, major complications or surprises.

Speaker 1 (06:37):
I've never actually been asked it that way, but the
way you asked it kind of makes me think about
different things the aging process. In some ways, there are
some aspects of it that are moving in the wrong
direction the moment you were born, in other words, the
moment of fetus comes into this world. There are certain

(06:57):
aspects of aging that are only getting worse. There are
others that are not. So you have to imagine. Now
they're talkquack about different things. So I'll give you an example
of each. Something that's getting worse the second you're born
is the damage to your arteries. So we call this
process athosclerosis. This is what leads to heart attacks and strokes.
Heart attack and stroke is the leading cause of death

(07:18):
in the United States for both men and women, and
globally for both men, and women, but it takes an
awfully long time. That's why you've never heard of a
baby having a heart attack. That's why teenagers don't have
heart attacks, and people in their twenties, it's almost unheard
of they would have a heart attack. But the disease
is starting right away. And we know this because when
we've looked at people who have died prematurely from other

(07:41):
causes car accidents, homicide, suicide, and you look at their
cornary arteries, you already see evidence of disease. So we
know that this is happening right away, and it's simply
a matter of time until it reaches a critical level
that results in disease. And of course everybody's accelerating at
a different rate based on many factors genetics, smoking, high

(08:02):
blood pressure, metabolic health, all these other things. But point being,
that's something for which you could technically argue it's never
too soon to start prevention. Then there are other things
in which we're actually getting better and better and better
until we reach a certain point and then we start
to demise. And an example there might be sort of
cognitive capacity, so we might have our greatest neuroplasticity in

(08:24):
the first few years of life. But we're also building
on that, and if we're in the right environment, we're
exposed to the right things, we're actually getting better and
better and better at our fluid intelligence, and that probably
reaches our peak sometime in our third decade. So that's
something where you know you're actually getting better and better
and better, and then it slowly starts to decline. And

(08:44):
then there are all sorts of things that are mixtures
of these things. So for example, your physical capacity, your
muscle mass, strength, power type two, muscle fibers, cardiorespiratory fitness,
all of those things are also increasing in capacity. Again
depending on which of those things we're taught talking about.
If it's power and explosiveness that probably peaks early in
the third decade, if it's strength that peaks a little

(09:07):
bit later, peak cardiorespiratory fitness again in your twenties, and
then those things will start to decline. What's undoubtedly clear
is for you and I were pretty much in decline.
So most people listening to this are in a state
of decline. And part of the objective I think ought
to be to slow the rate of decline as much
as possible. But there's another aspect of your question I

(09:28):
think is very important, right, which is like, at what
point should you start putting effort into this? And that's
a very difficult question because it encompasses a couple of things.
When you talk to a person, let's do this as
a thought experiment. You talk to a person the day
before they're going to die. I mean, they would give
anything and everything they have for more chance at life.

(09:51):
Despite how high their motivation is, there's no runway left. Conversely,
if you went into a high school and talked to
a bunch of freshmen and said I've got the program
for you that is going to add fifteen years to
your life, I mean, they couldn't be less interested. Right,
So there's a sweet spot somewhere where I almost think

(10:12):
people need to go through a little bit of decline,
kind of like what you described. It wasn't life threatening,
but you just need to realize that you're fallible to
sort of say, hmm, I can project this movie forward
a couple of decades. I've now mature enough to maybe
see my parents, see my grandparents, aunts, uncle's friends, people's

(10:32):
health deteriorate, and realize that's a bit of a reality
check that it's coming for me, but yet I still
have long enough to bend the arc of my life.
And so I think those are the two curves that
we're trying to intersect.

Speaker 3 (10:44):
Yeah, that's a great answer, and I appreciate that. I
feel the same way it. Unfortunately, it always comes through
some sort of pain or some sort of reality check
or wake up call that gets us going. And it's
interesting what you were saying about cognitive function and ability
as well. There were studies that I read that said
that the average age of most successful entrepreneurs is thirty seven.

(11:06):
And it's fascinating because we live in a world right
now where everyone wants to be a successful entrepreneur by
the time they're twenty one or twenty five, and we
put these artificial pressures on ourselves when actually there's so
much more to it in the genetics versus environment debate.
What you what's the latest in that space of like,
because I think we're not You said you dove into

(11:27):
your family's history. I think most of us are not
fully aware of our family's history, even though every time
I saw doctor growing up, they'd always ask is there
this in your family's history? Is there that? First of all,
how where do we need to be of our family's history?
How important is that for people to figure out? And
second of all, what is that breakdown between genetics and

(11:48):
personal environment and career and work?

Speaker 1 (11:50):
You know, I think actually family history is such an
important thing. It's one of these things that we stress
to the ends degree with our patients, so much so
that you know, it takes them weeks sometimes to gather
information that we want to know because we want to know,
and we give them ten questions for each member of
the family. So your parents, your grandparents, your aunts and uncles,
your siblings, Like, we want to know everything. Do they

(12:13):
have high blood pressure, do they have high cholesterol? Do
they take this medication? Did they take that medication? What
was their cognitive function like in the last decade of
their life? You know? What type of cancers did they have?
Did they have low bone density? You know, do they
have osteoporosis? I mean, we really want to understand every
detail about it. And I think a big part of
the reason why is, contrary to what maybe people believe,

(12:36):
a genetic test does not give you that information. So
if you and I went out and got a genetic test,
and I don't just mean an you know, over the
counter genetic test like twenty three and meet. But I'm
saying if we went out and got the best whole
genome sequence money could buy, we spend thousands and thousands
of dollars and literally looked at every one of our
you know, twenty to thirty thousand genes, we still wouldn't

(12:57):
be able to impute from a standpoint what you can
gather from a very well collected family history. And the
reason for that is most genes by themselves are not deterministic,
which really gets your second question. So if most genes
are not deterministic, they need something in the environment to
sort of trigger them. Furthermore, most conditions that we care

(13:18):
about are polygenic. It's easy to think of the sort
of Mendelian monogene type conditions. They get a lot of attention,
and they're important, to be sure, but the vast majority
of things that people care about, cancer, heart disease, dementia,
they are not really just related to a single gene.

(13:39):
And in many cases we don't even know what the
collection of genes look like. So genes matter, But I
think we're going to get the majority of our information
by understanding our family history in terms of susceptibility, and
the environment matters greatly. And the extension of that is,
of course you have great agency over that.

Speaker 3 (13:53):
Yeah, and what is the best methodology for getting the
family history in a complete comprehensive way that's actually going.

Speaker 1 (13:59):
To it can be hard if members of the family
are deceased. So for people your age and my age,
you know, our grandparents, I mean, at least for me,
my grandparents are long gone. Yes, so it's you know,
do your parents really remember? And part of it just
comes down to are they being prompted by the right
questions now? Again, to be honest, in my family history,
I have very limited understanding of grandparents because you know,

(14:21):
they just died long enough ago, and frankly, I don't
think my parents were necessarily great historians of this. In
my case, where the bulk of my understanding came from
was that my dad came from a very large family.
You know, there were ten kids, two that died young,
so eight that survived to adulthood, and there I was
able to elucidate really good information and really understand that

(14:42):
there's something very bad going on with respect to heart
disease on my mom's side, I could also see some
issues with her two siblings as well. That also gave
me a sense of you know what some predispositions might be.

Speaker 3 (14:53):
Where can people find those questions? Well, how can they
connect with that approach?

Speaker 1 (14:58):
No, that's a good question, I don't We We have
a program that we've developed called Early, which is like
a digital product that is our practice. I know that
it is within there, got it? Yeah? Yeah, So if
people like look for EARLY, I don't know if you
I should know how to do this. If you go
to like earlymedical dot com, there's a way to find it.

Speaker 2 (15:17):
Got it? Got it? Okay? Perfect? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (15:19):
No, I think that that kind of practical step is
so needed because one of the biggest things when I
was talking to my team and talking to the community
about health, one of the biggest things that came out is, Jay,
we're just stuck on where to start. Like, I don't
know where to start. I don't there's just too much
information out there. It's oversaturated. Everyone's telling me to do
this and that, and it's almost like, let's figure out

(15:40):
your genetic history. Like that's a great place to start,
because that's where we came.

Speaker 1 (15:43):
Yeah, this program Early is divided into twelve modules. We
think each module would take you about a month to
get through, and that's the first or second module. I
think the first module is setting your goals and going
through kind of this type of exercise, and then the
second module is, Okay, how do you get your family history?
How do you take that information and extract what the
implications are for you and then go from there.

Speaker 3 (16:04):
What's your take on like full body scans and that
kind of testing and how often should it be done?
Because I think, again, what's happening. I was talking to
some younger people in our audiences gen Z and it
was just like, going to see a doctor has become
like not even a thought.

Speaker 2 (16:21):
And I could see that.

Speaker 3 (16:22):
In my generation, but I remember my parents' generation, like
my mom will still call me up and be like,
have you seen the dentist every six months? Like have
you been to the doctor every twelve months? Like you know,
my mom will still do that with me. But I
find that that kind of culture is diminishing day by
day because of a lack of trust, because of a
lack of transparency. So many different things could just be
laziness and complacency. What is your take on getting checks

(16:46):
which checks how often, And I guess the question is
how do people know how healthy they are? And early
is a great plan, But from the other point of view.

Speaker 1 (16:54):
It depends on the type of scam. So, for example,
there are certain scans that are going to be very
helpful at predicting risk from heart disease. So for example,
a coordinary calcium scan for the heart or a CT
angiogram for the heart. Those are tests that I don't
think are absolutely essential, but they can be very helpful.
If you're trying to further stratify risk, you refer to
a whole body scan. So the best example of a

(17:15):
whole body scan that I think provides value is an MRI.
The reason being as an MRI doesn't have radiation, whereas
a whole body CT scan or a PET scan would
have staggering amounts of radiation. We would never want to
do that just from a screening perspective, But of course,
not all MRIs are created equal, and anytime you're doing
a screening test, you have to be aware of something

(17:37):
called sensitivity and specificity, and these are really important parameters.
We've put out a lot of content on this because
I think it's very confusing for people. So sensitivity is
the capacity of a test to detect something if the
something is present. So if you're looking at a sensitivity
of an MRI scanner for cancer, the sensitivity is how

(17:58):
likely is this to detect cancer if cancer is present. So,
on the topic of whole body scanners, MRIs are very sensitive.
And again not all homeris are critic equal, but I'm
assuming we're talking about the best of the best. YEA, yeah,
that's good news. Means, if you go into an MRI
scanner and you have a cancer, the MRI is quite
likely to pick it up. Now, it does have some
blind spots, and every screening test has a blind spot.

(18:22):
So a blind spot that's worth acknowledging for an MRI
is a small calcified breast cancer that's easily going to
get missed by an MRI, And that's why it's not
a substitute for mimography. A woman would need to do both.
The next parameter of a screening test is the specificity.
This says, how likely is this test to give you

(18:42):
a negative result if indeed the condition is not present.
So it's the mirror opposite of sensitivity. Here is where
those whole body scanners are abysmal. They have very low specificity.
What that translates to in English is they have a
lot of false positives. I always tell patients, look, if
you're going to go and get the scans, and we
advocate that our patients do, but they we do it

(19:03):
in a much more kind of robust way where it's
part of a multiple system of screening tests, so that
we're covering the bases of everything and trying to attach
to the strength and weakness of each study. But when
it comes to that MRI, we say, look, there's a
really good chance you're going to come out of this
test and there's going to be some false positives we're
going to need to chase down. So I always feel

(19:25):
bad when people sign up to do these scans and
they aren't aware of that, because it generates sometimes more
stress on the back end. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (19:32):
Yeah, I went through that. We had an MRI done
and they found like almost like a group or a
cluster of things in an area and they're like, oh,
that could be cancer. And I had to go and
do a endoscopy as well, and luckily they found it
was nothing. But I remember for that week before I
was like, that's it.

Speaker 2 (19:53):
It's all over here. It is, you know, I need
to well, I think.

Speaker 1 (19:55):
Sometimes if you're told up front, hey Jay, there's like
a fifteen percent chance I didn't I was not told
about that, and we want to make sure our patients understand.
And by the way, a subset of a patient's probably
ten percent decide I don't want to have the scan
because I don't want to cope with that stress.

Speaker 3 (20:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (20:11):
Yeah, And it was real.

Speaker 3 (20:12):
I was like, all right, I'm going to have to
get focused on figuring this out because it sounds bad
and I didn't have that lay up, as you said,
And it's really interesting. And that's what I find so
fascinating today, right, Like, there's managing your health, and then
there's the stress and the pain that comes with figuring
your health out, whether it's the overexposure to too much information,

(20:33):
whether it's bad information in the past, and then we're like, oh, well,
just forget it. I don't want to do any of it.
I mean, that's what I feel your book does, and
that's what your work does is trying to help people
figure out, well, let me give you all the information.
Here's how you can know what's good for you and
test it for you and write for you. One of
the things that I love that you talk about is
you talk about the need to get rid of, you know,

(20:54):
just focusing on a random diet or following a random
diet and actually looking at like eating habits and patterns
work for you, and so just putting a little footnote
for everyone who's listening. The book will walk you through
how to make sense of how to know what is
right for you, what is wrong for you, whether you
should do something, which I think is like the biggest

(21:14):
anxiety driver for so many people when it comes to
their health, when it comes to food. I think fasting
has become trendy. It's become a big thing that everyone's
talking about. You know, we hear so much about every
single diet in the world. There's always a new one
that's coming on the surface. How have you helped people
one on one actually discover what's right for them because

(21:34):
I found that my eating patterns are very different to
the trending habits of how to eat food and even fasting.

Speaker 1 (21:41):
Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing is, as
you said, it's just letting people understand that the less
you can pay attention to social media fads and your
news feed on Google or whatever, the better acknowledge that
there is surprisingly little known about the relationship between nutrition
and health, and people are going to be shocked to
hear that, because I think most people think the exact
thay opposite. Most people think that nutrition is the most

(22:03):
important pillar of health, and the reality of it is
outside of very extreme states, that's really not true. And
the very little bit we know about nutrition just frankly
speaks to the challenge of scientific inquiry into something as
difficult as nutrition to study. And the reason for that

(22:23):
is you can't study us as humans very well. We're
very messy subjects, so we're not like mice where you
can put us in a cage and control what we're
eating and follow us through the duration of our lives.
It doesn't work that way. So when you're trying to
make inferences about nutrition in humans, you have to rely
on poorly controlled studies called epidemiologic studies, which are fraught

(22:46):
with all sorts of limitations that I talk about in
the book. Or if you're going to control the study,
you can only do it for a very short period
of time. There's only a short period of time in
which I can control exactly what you're eating. So as
a result of that, we don't know a lot. I
always want to start with what do we know. Well,
we know that protein is a very important macronutrient. There
are four macronutrients, carbohydrates, fats, proteins, and alcohol. People kind

(23:09):
of forget alcohol, but some import of understand it's very
caloric and so it constitutes a source of energy. It's
the worst macronutrient, but nevertheless it's you know, you'd be
amazed sometimes people are going to think fifteen to twenty
percent of their calories from alcohol if they drink enough.
So protein is really important, and it's not a source
of energy the way carbohydrates and fat is, but it's
a structural macronutrient. And so I always start with that

(23:31):
and say, look, rule number one is you have to
make sure you're getting enough protein. And this is especially
true if you're over fifty because if you're over fifty,
you start to become resistant to the effects of protein.
That's called anabolic resistance, and loss of muscle mass in
people over fifty is a significant driver of mortality and
a significant driver of a poor quality of life. You know,

(23:54):
if you really start to think about it. Even if
a person is of sound mind and they're not not
suffering from some intractable disease later in life, a great
source of misery is simply being physically unable to do things.
After that, it really comes down to what do we
understand about energy balance. Well, we understand that too much

(24:15):
nutrition I call this over nutrition is bad and that
the body historically developed lots of tools to store energy
because that's what allowed us to evolve the way we did,
and up until I don't know, one hundred years ago
or so, that was a great skill to have. It's
now thwarting us in an environment of too much food.

(24:39):
So now this ability that we had the superpower basically
to store excess energy has become a liability. In the
United States, certainly, the vast majority of people, probably over
seventy percent of people are over nourished, and that's the
thing that's driving a lot of their poor health. If
you're over nourished, you have to correct that problem. The
way to correct that problem is to eat less, and
there are three strategies to do that. One of them

(25:01):
is to deliberately go about cutting calories. That's called calorie
restriction or cr The other one is called dietary restriction
that means limit certain things within the diet and if
you are restrictive enough, that will indirectly also reduce total intake.
And then the third is fasting or time restricted eating,
where you create a narrower and narrower window each day

(25:23):
in which to eat. All of these things can work,
and all of those things have significant limitations that you,
as an individual practicing this need to know.

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(26:40):
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Speaker 2 (27:00):
Yeah, it was incredible.

Speaker 3 (27:01):
I was looking at the just history of the design
of plates and cups randomly.

Speaker 2 (27:07):
I don't even know how I got there.

Speaker 1 (27:09):
How much bigger they're getting, just how much bigger.

Speaker 3 (27:10):
They're getting, And it was insane for me to think
that the way plates are designed, the way cups are designed,
the way anything's designed, transforms how we consume. And it's
fascinating to think that just because of a larger plate, size.
We're now eating larger amounts and we think it's normal
in our time, where someone else would have think we
were feasting.

Speaker 1 (27:31):
I'm sure you still get back to Europe all the time,
but like, look at the difference in portion sizes when
you're in you know, Italy versus the United States. It's
comical what a difference it is.

Speaker 2 (27:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (27:41):
I remember as a kid coming to the States, and
obviously when you're a kid, everything that's big is better. Yeah,
And I remember like pulling over at the gas station
and I'd see like this massive, like you know, jumbo
thing to fill your drink up in and like you know,
forever refills whatever it is, and just that as a kid,
I was like, this is the coolest thing of the world.
And now you look at it and you're like, wow,
that's you know, there's no need for that. So it's

(28:04):
fascinating also how these cultural shifts and cultural changes have
made some of these things harder for us today. So
you said, cr, DR and TR those are the three
that people need to experiment with.

Speaker 2 (28:15):
Each of those.

Speaker 1 (28:16):
Yes, Basically, if you are in that over nourished camp,
you need to employ some combination of cr DR and
or TR and if you're adequately muscled, that's you just
you can just focus on that. If you're inadequately muscled,
you have the added challenge of needing to boost protein
intake to match strength training while engaging in cr DR. Try.

(28:42):
But the route of it is that's it. Yeah, you know,
the rest of it, the alphabet soup of diets is
just it's all noise. I just encourage people to not
fixate on the trend and just think about those different
things because you know, look, each of the alphabet soup
diets fits into some form of DR. I mean, and
that's true whether you're talking carnivore or vegan or everything
in between. Those are just forms of DR and they

(29:05):
can all be effective, but you have to be aware
of the limitations of each and make sure you're circumventing them.

Speaker 2 (29:11):
Yeah. Absolutely absolutely.

Speaker 3 (29:13):
I think that one of the things that there's a
lot of question marks around as well from the community
that they were asking was nutrition, which you've beautifully clarified there,
but nutrition versus supplements and the need for supplements, and
I think I would love to hear your takes on
supplements that are working, types of supplements, types of ingredients,
types of chemicals that are making a difference natural supplements too.

(29:34):
I'd love to hear your thoughts on neotropics because I'm
just hearing about neotropics everywhere right now. Adaptogens as you
just tried as well. We've been focusing on adaptogens. I'd
love to let's talk about your take on great supplements
that everyone needs to take. Not not a brand, but
I mean yeah, and then you take on neotropics and adaptagens.
That would be fantastic.

Speaker 1 (29:54):
I mean, I definitely do take some supplements. I'm always
careful to kind of make disclosures. So one thing I
do supplement, I take something called AG and I'm an
investor in AG, but I've been taking it long before
I invested in it, and I know the founder very well.
I'm very under the hood of exactly how their products
are made and sourced. And for folks who aren't aware,
AG is like a green that you you know, just

(30:16):
mix in with water. I drink it every morning.

Speaker 2 (30:18):
The ones of the podcast are they okay?

Speaker 1 (30:21):
Cool? And my approach to that is, if you buy
the thesis that we need to be having x amount
of vegetables a day, and let's be clear and be transparent.
I can't guarantee that that is true because we don't know.
That's another example of something that the epidemiology tells us
is true, but there are many confounders there. But my

(30:43):
view is that it's better to err on the side
of that's probably true than the counter. So if you
buy the thesis that you need X amount of vegetable
a day, I actually find it very difficult to do
that without exception. There are lots of days I can,
but there are enough days that I can't. So my
view of a supplement like AG is it's my belt

(31:06):
and suspender's approach. It's it's basically my way of guaranteeing
that by seven o'clock in the morning, I've met my
needs and then if I have a salad for lunch
and dinner as well. Perfect I went a little overboard,
but that's better than the reverse to me.

Speaker 3 (31:19):
So that's one and age specifically talking about that kind
of a supplement. That's a vegetable focused supplement, that's right,
not all supplements that's right, specifically focused on that specific age.

Speaker 2 (31:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (31:29):
Yeah, there's another supplement I take, which is a probiotic. Now,
no one has been a more vocal critic of the
probiotic space than me. I have generally viewed it as
a space that has demonstrated no efficacy despite all the
intentions in the world. In the past year, I have

(31:50):
sort of changed my take. So there was this study
that came out that looked at a certain type of
probiotic and noted that a certain type of bacteria in
it would help with the production of then called buterrate,
and this was actually helping with glucose disposal. The results
of the study actually were pretty impressive. It was a
relatively short study of three month study, but it demonstrated
in the group that was actually taking this probiotic, and

(32:12):
this was in a blinded randomized trial, that these patients
with type two diabetes had a significant reduction in blood glucose.
Even though I don't have type two diabetes, I sort
of subscribe to the idea that everybody benefits from lower
blood glucose, including those without diabetes. So that's a probiotic
that I take. I don't have any involvement with the company.
The company is called Pendulum, but I take their glucose

(32:32):
control probiotic.

Speaker 3 (32:33):
Can you walk us through a bit on glucose control,
because I think that's still an area that for people
who are not as well informed that that's an area
that I learned about probably in the last year and
a half. That has changed what I eat first thing
in the morning. It's changed what I'm meeting at different times.
Like to me, I was just like, oh, if I
need a boost of something, as long as it's a
healthy sugar, it's fine. Not only to realize that, you know,

(32:56):
causing spikes in my blood blood glucose level. So could
you us through that a little bit.

Speaker 1 (33:01):
You know, Glucose is this essential, very simple carbohydrate. It's
kind of the final common pathway of most carbohydrates. There
are other simple carbohydrates as well, fructose being one of them.
So sugar, for example, table sugar is a is a
molecule of fructose and a molecule of glucose. But glucose
is the is the most abundant carbohydrate final breakdown product,

(33:24):
and it's very highly regulated. At any point in time
you're walking around with you know, if you haven't eaten
that day, somewhere between four and five grams of glucose
in your blood, maybe say four to six grams of
glucose in your blood, which is just over a tablespoon
or a teaspoon rather so tiny, tiny amount, but you're
using it constantly, and therefore your liver is constantly putting

(33:47):
more out into your circulation, ever so delicately, and the
balance of that is so fine that if that level
were to be just twice as much, if you were
to go from one tea spoon teaspoon to two teaspoons,
that would be consistent with having type two diabetes. So
type two diabetes is a condition where an individual can't
control the amount of glucose in their blood. This is

(34:09):
very problematic because glucose, when it becomes too high, starts
sticking to proteins, and it starts causing damage all over
the place, but primarily to small blood vessels, so blood
vessels in the heart, blood vessels and the kidney, in
the brain, if you're if you're in the extremities of
the toes. That's why people type two diabetes are more
susceptible to amputations, kidney disease, heart disease, strokes, Alzheimer's disease,

(34:33):
all of these things, anything that compromises blood flow and oxygen.
So it turns out that even if you don't have
type two diabetes, and that today is just defined by
a threshold of average blood glucose above one hundred and
forty milligrams per desolater. Even if you are not in
that category, it still appears that your mortality goes down

(34:55):
the lower your average blood glucose, so, meaning within the
normal range of glucose, lower is still better. People sometimes say, well,
does that just mean you know, you should never eat
a food that raises blood glucose. No, that doesn't necessarily
mean that at all. What it means is you need
to be mindful of matching your glucose consumption to your

(35:16):
capacity to dispose of glucose. And those are factors that
are of course highly impacted by how much you sleep.
So sleep interruptions in sleep dramatically reduce your capacity to
put glucose into your muscles, which means glucose levels get higher.
It also has to do significantly with how much you
exercise and how much muscle mass you have, so people
can have completely different tolerances for glucose. And I think

(35:39):
I write quite a bit about this, which is, you know,
basically trying to understand your glucose tolerance level comes down
to matching it with your insulin sensitivity, muscle mass, activity levels, sleep, stress,
et cetera.

Speaker 2 (35:52):
Absolutely, thank you so much, sorry, and I cut you
off from moving.

Speaker 1 (35:54):
That's okay. So so just to go back to this
other point quickly. So, there are lots of other supplements
that I think can be really valuable. I think be
vita are very important, especially methlated B vitamins. Vitamin D
is very important. Many people, I think don't have sufficient
levels of vitamin D. I think the data on vitamin
D we could do an entire podcast on that. The
clinical trials looking at vitamin D levels are really poorly
done clinical trials, and so I think if a person

(36:15):
looks out at the literature and the literature says there's
no evidence that vitamin D really helps, I would argue
pretty strongly that those trials haven't asked the right question
and weren't designed correctly. So my view is it's better
to probably err on the side of caution and make
sure your vitamin D is probably somewhere between about forty
and sixty And if you're not achieving that through natural
exposure to sunlight, which many people are not, then you're

(36:37):
probably better off supplementing. There are a couple of other
supplements I really believe in, and I think magnesium is
a very important one. And I think you have to
be thoughtful about the form in which you take magnesium.
So you can take magnesium in a slow absorbing form
or a fast absorbing form that's poorly absorbed technically, and
I think we need both, right. So I think that
like a poorly absorbed magnesium would be like a citrate,

(37:00):
glyconate or oxide, and those actually really help with bowel regularity.
So for anybody who's a little bit constipated or just
you know, kind of needs to be a little bit
more regular, we always want to have in anywhere from
two to five hundred milligrams of one of those forms. Conversely,
I think virtually everybody also benefits from a slow absorbing

(37:21):
form of magnesium. The brand that I like is called
slow Magaga. And I don't have any affiliation with any
of these companies unless I'm disclosing it as I did
with ag that Actually, you know, so most people if
they notice, oh I have a little bit of cramping sometimes,
or you know, I'm getting little palpitations called PVCs, sometimes
those get a lot better with magnesium supplementation, so I

(37:42):
think most people benefit from that. There's another type of
magnesium that I'm a fan of, called magnesium L three
and eight, which is magnesium paired to a transporter that
gets the magnesium into the brain. I think there's reasonable evidence.
I wouldn't say it's incredible, but I think it's quite
good that MAGNESISL three and eight is beneficial to the
brain and might even have some capacity to reduce the

(38:05):
risk of dementia. Before bed, I tend to rely on ashwagonda,
which I believe you said is in there. So I
take a big dose of ashwaganda and glycine, and again
I take that magnesium L three and eight, and those
are kind of things that I think help with reducing
cortisol and making it a little easier to sleep. Then

(38:26):
the final supplement that I do think most people benefit from,
and there are probably many others, but I'm just sort
of going through a few that I can think of,
would be fish oil. So most people probably don't consume
enough marine fat to get what I think are ideal
amounts of EPA and DHA, which are two very special
types of fats called omega three fatty acids and EPA

(38:52):
and DHA. I think the balance of evidence is quite
strong that they're both beneficial to the heart and the brain.
EPA probably a little bit more for the heart, DHA
probably a little bit more for the brain. I take
a brand that I've had tested because you always want
to be careful about contaminants here, and it's made by
a company called Carlson's. Again, I have no affiliation with them,

(39:15):
but I take their EPA and DHA daily as well.

Speaker 3 (39:19):
That's a fantastic summary for anyone who's looking. I take
all those things. Yeah, you know, I think that's a
brilliant summary. And I really hope everyone who's listening and watching,
you know, get those checks and tests done and grab
those supplements, because again, I like what you're saying that
it's all about erring on the side of caution rights.
It's almost like protecting yourself being safe, rather than assuming

(39:41):
that A you get this or B it doesn't really matter,
you know. Is it that we used to find these
supplements in other forms before or as humans? If we
always ignored this and now we've suddenly figured it out,
or has our lifestyle just got so stressful and intense
that we're needing more of all of this to to
support the pace at which we're moving.

Speaker 1 (40:02):
That's a great question. I do think that the supplement
world is such a slippery, dirty world that I always
want to throw out a disclaimer, which is when I
talk about these things, I'm also very diligent about the
brands that I buy, So again, I have no affiliation
with any of these entities, but having looked at third
party testing, I find the brand Jerro Jarrow the brand

(40:26):
Pure Encapsulations to be two of the most reputable companies
out there. So I'm basically always going to try to
buy from them if I can, even if I'm paying
a little bit of a premium. Your question is a
very good one, and I don't know how much you've
paid attention to kind of the field of regenerative agriculture,
but it's a topic that interests me quite a bit,
and the more I've read about it, the more I've

(40:49):
come to realize that I actually think part of the
problem is our food today is far less nutrient dense
than it once was, and so I do think that
many of us don't get the same quantity and density
of nutrients today that we did for the same caloric intake,
say fifty years ago. And the proponents of regenerative agriculture

(41:12):
would argue that a big part of that has to
do with soil health. So as the health of the
soil has deteriorated with more tillage, more fertilizers, less crop rotation,
all of these things, the net result of that is
the plants themselves are less healthy. So when you're eating
a plant, you're getting less nutrient density. And of course

(41:32):
when you're eating meat if you're an omnivore, the meat
is also less healthy and less nutrient dense because it's
eating a less nutrient dense plant, which is growing in
a less nutrient dense soil. And so the old adage
that you know, it's hard to be healthier than the
animal you eat, which can't be much healthier than the
plant it eats, which can't be much healthier than the

(41:54):
soil it grows in, brings this whole thing full circle.
And so I suspect that that is a pretty significant
role in it. Coupled with the changes in our lifestyle. Right,
so many of us would have got sufficient vitamin D,
for example, in the past because we would have been
outside more, and we would have been active more, and
you know today we aren't.

Speaker 3 (42:11):
As one example, are you seeing the rise of more
regenerative farming and places to buy regenerative vegetables.

Speaker 1 (42:20):
Or yeah, I mean yeah, no, it absolutely is and
and there there, there are, there are some great places,
you know. Certainly, one of my sincere hopes is that
you know, we see we see a greater and greater
movement to scale this because I do think regenerative agriculture
is not only what I think of as one of
the most important ways in which we can improve human

(42:41):
health through nutrition, but but for folks who are also
concerned with with climate change and the effects of anthropogenic
CO two, regenerative agriculture probably has more potential to attenuate
that than anything else, inclusive of electrifying the entire transperrotation grid.
And that's a pretty bold statement.

Speaker 2 (43:02):
It is.

Speaker 3 (43:03):
It's very bord and this so I want to dive
into it too, Like what gives you confidence to make
that bold stimula? What have you seen that has given
you that conviction.

Speaker 1 (43:11):
It really comes down to understanding the capacity for plants
to fixate carbon. I'm sure everybody understands, you know, the
basics of how how CO two works, right, So, why
why is there a concern with the combustion of fossil
fuels Because when you're combusting a fossil fuel, whether it
be coal or natural gas, you're taking carbon that was

(43:31):
sequestered billions of years ago in the form of fossilized
you know, organic matter, and you're now liberating that carbon
dioxide out. So how do we get carbon dioxide back
in the system? Well, plants do that. So plants have
a capacity to do something that no animal does, which
is they fixate carbon. So they fix Fixing carbon literally
is just the chemical process of taking a carbon out

(43:53):
of the out of CO two and attaching it to
another hydrocarbon. The way that regenerative agriculture works is by
storing more and more CO two and carbon specifically in
the soil. So right now, the way conventional agriculture works,
when you're constantly tilling the soil, you're leeching carbon out

(44:13):
of the soil. And so you know, when you look
at the mathematical models that look at how much carbon
could be brought back into the ground and sequestered ie
brought out of the atmosphere, it's more significant than the
carbon that's being put out through the combustion of fossil fuels.
The reason I'm particularly excited about that is you're basically

(44:34):
getting two winds for the price of one, right, so
you're reducing atmospheric CO two, but doing so in a
manner that's also very positive for our health because in
doing that, you're increasing the soil health and by extension,
than the nutrient density of plants and ultimately animals and ourselves.

Speaker 3 (44:52):
What's your take on regender agriculture versus lab produced.

Speaker 1 (44:58):
I have yet to see any evidence that laboratory produced
meats and vegetables can be done really well at scale,
or that they are particularly certainly any more viable in
terms of the nutrient density. I think in part it
comes down to the complexity of soil. There's a great
book I would recommend for people who want to go
really deep on this. I believe. The book is called

(45:21):
What Your Food Ate, and it's a wonderful book. It's
a bit of a deep dive. It's a nerdy book,
it's not light reading, and they go into incredible detail.

Speaker 2 (45:32):
About David Montgomery.

Speaker 1 (45:34):
Yes, and there's another author as well, Afe and Beekley yep,
once you get under the hood of how complex soil is.
So for example, many people talk about the human gut biome,
and you know, we talked a minutes ago about probiotics, right, Well,
the human gut biome is really complicated, and we haven't
figured out a way to perfectly model it. I mean,

(45:56):
maybe we're just getting to the point where we can
figure out, if we add a little bit more of
one bacteria, can it make a difference in the direction
that this thing goes. Well, it turns out that soil
is probably even more biodiverse and complicated than the bacteria
in our gut. And so again, I just think it's
very difficult for us to sort of play super farmer

(46:16):
and think that we can kind of replicate what nature
has figured out for you know, literally a billion years.

Speaker 3 (46:23):
Well, so, yeah, so your understanding is actually that we
don't know enough about the complexity of the soil, which
is actually what is impacting the quality of the vegetable
or hence the all the way the chain. Hence, even
if we can produce a vegetable or meat in a lab,

(46:43):
it won't have that same.

Speaker 1 (46:45):
That that's my take on it, which says nothing about
which says nothing. By the way, about the scale factor.
I think at the end of the day, scale matters,
like I mean food. I think it's safe to say
agriculture is the second largest industry in the world just
in terms of like the magnitude of what it takes.
You have to have solutions that work broadly, and by

(47:08):
the way, I think that's still There are certainly proponents
of regenerative egg who say it can be scaled, but
I think that's an open question.

Speaker 2 (47:14):
Still regenerative agricultures.

Speaker 1 (47:17):
Can it be scaled to meet the needs of the
entire world?

Speaker 3 (47:20):
Yeah, what are the challenges with scaling that?

Speaker 1 (47:22):
It's a totally different infrastructure too, truthfully, right, it's not
going to rely on as much automation, so for example,
like you're not going to be able to rely you know.
So one of the hallmarks of regeneraveagg is you're not
using fertilizer, so you're not using the nitrogen of a fertilizer,
you're actually using the nitrogen of the animals. Another one

(47:43):
is you're not using pesticides, so you're crop rotating instead
of using pesticides and allowing you know, the crops themselves
to generate resistance by cycling them and not letting the
pests get used to the same crop, not to you know,
belabor the point, but all of a sudden, the industry
that is now dominant by the pioneers, the Cargills, the
Monsantos of the world, it's going to have to look

(48:04):
very different. So I think that's a big challenge, is
going from big to little and then scaling little, if
that makes sense.

Speaker 3 (48:11):
Where are the places, like if people are fascinated to
have you been out to any regenerative agriculture farms?

Speaker 1 (48:17):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's one outside of Austin. There's actually
one here in California.

Speaker 2 (48:22):
So it don't be many.

Speaker 1 (48:24):
I mean there's so the one out in California is
called there's a documentary made about it called I think
the documentary is called Biggest Little Farm. It's not too
far from here, by the way, and my kids were
obsessed with this, so we like watch this documentary like
I don't know, fifteen times, but you'll get a sense
of what it looks like. But yes, no, I mean
I think everybody can find regenerative farms near them, So

(48:46):
really it's just a question of helping farmers understand why
ultimately it is in their best interest to do this,
so economically it makes more sense. But look, it's going
to require the government completely changing incentive structures and changing
the way they subsidize certain crops today. It's a big shift.

Speaker 2 (49:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (49:03):
What's your take on people trying to create little farms
in their home, like they're like mini growing.

Speaker 1 (49:09):
Yeah, I mean, look, I think it's wonderful. I think
if you can grow your own vegetables, I mean, we
have a vegetable garden, and there's no question that the
vegetables we grow taste infinitely better than anything we're going
to buy at the grocery store.

Speaker 3 (49:22):
And how do you take care of the soil in
your area? You're saying because it's untouched, it naturally.

Speaker 1 (49:27):
Has Yeah, I mean we compost our own stuff, so
but it's you know, look, it's not even big enough
to completely feed us. So you know, there's work that
goes into this. And I have friends that do have
the time and effort to at least, you know, support
themselves fully.

Speaker 2 (49:44):
That's beautiful. Yeah, yeah, I love that.

Speaker 3 (49:45):
You know. My wife's really my wife's really big on that.
She wants to build a little vegetable garden on the
back right now in the same way, because that's one
of her core beliefs as well.

Speaker 1 (49:54):
So just this past weekend, I was I had to
put all this chicken wire around the fence where our
garden is because these squirrels are figuring out a way
to get under the fence and they're like eating all
the tomatoes and the peppers and stuff. And it's like
my son who's eight, this is his project, and it
just drives them nuts when the squirrels are getting them.

Speaker 2 (50:13):
So what a great age to like get connected.

Speaker 1 (50:17):
So it's so great.

Speaker 3 (50:18):
Yeah, it's the land and to the soil into growing.
That's so beautiful.

Speaker 2 (50:21):
I love that.

Speaker 3 (50:22):
Yeah, We've had a gopher problem for years here and
it's like it's always ruining the lawn and I'm like, well,
if I plant vegetables here, those vegetables are going to
be gone.

Speaker 1 (50:30):
Yeah. You have to you have to be smart about it.

Speaker 2 (50:32):
Yeah, yeah, incredible.

Speaker 3 (50:34):
I want to make sure that everyone knows the book
dives into cancer Alzheimer's. We talked about we were going
to dive into exercise in a second. We talked about diet,
you know, eating less, eating patterns. I want to make
sure because I don't want to either repeat things that
are already in the book or repeat things you've talked
about in other interviews, and so I just want everyone

(50:55):
who's listening to know that that you know, it dives
into multiple key diseases that were all struggling with today
and the biggest challenges. One thing I wanted to talk
to you about, which I think you really wonderfully highlighted,
was this challenge between physical health and emotional health. And
you talk about the need for prioritizing emotional health as well,

(51:16):
and I've found that so much of my subtlely emotional
health was so based on physical health. So what I
mean by that is I found at one point in
doing all of my checks and tests that and by
the way I was doing I was functioning at like
a really optimal level. I was just feeling tired, and

(51:37):
when we did my test, we found that my vitamin
D was at a ten. This was around two three
years ago, and I realized the majority of the challenges
I was having was because I was sleeping. We rented
a home during COVID. We moved from our apartment, and
when we rented this space, I never slept well in
that space because it was just the most like noisy,

(52:02):
loud area, because there were it was it was in
the middle of too many animals, too many things at night,
like going through the floorboards, like it was an old,
old space, and so there was like I was waking
up multiple times, which I don't usually go through. And
so I started to find that a lot of my
emotional challenges, whether it's fatigue, irritability, you know, stress, because

(52:24):
of that environment was causing emotional challenges. But it was
actually all coming from a physical space, if that makes
sense for sure. And I think so often these days,
I find a lot of us are just trying to
solve everything in our mind rather than recognizing that often
it's a chemical, it's biological, it's it's physical. So I
want to just point that out to people because I
think a lot of us are like I could have

(52:45):
done anything to change. I was working out, I was
trying to sleep right, I was doing everything I possibly could,
but because my vitamin D was at a level ten,
there's not much you can do. And instead of apart
from taking vitamin D supplements, how where are you saying
this relationship? Where are you seeing this relationship between emotional
health and physical health.

Speaker 1 (53:05):
Well, they're absolutely linked. And you know, I think that
one of the things that I've observed, you know, my
therapists will always ask me at the beginning of a session,
is how are you doing physically? So are you in pain? Right?
Is you know, is your shoulder bugging you? Is your
back bugging you? Do you have like an ulcer in
your mouth or something like like literally something like that,

(53:27):
How are you rested? And how much stress are you under?
And the reason I think is those things exacerbate vulnerabilities
that we have on the emotional side, on the mental side.
So if you take an individual in two the same
individual in two parallel universes, but in one situation, they
have lots of issues going on physically, right, so they're

(53:50):
not well rested, their vitamin D is low, they're in pain.
And you have another individual for which everything is physically
firing on all cylinders, and you present them with the
same emotional distress, You're going to see a completely different response.
That's a big part of why I think it does
matter to keep your physical health in order to optimize

(54:11):
your emotional health. But I would also argue that you
could still have your physical health in perfect order and
not becoming close to addressing your emotional health.

Speaker 3 (54:22):
When you use the term emotional health, what does that
constitute for you?

Speaker 1 (54:27):
I try to distinguish it from mental health, right, I
think mental health is a subset of emotional health, but
it's the perhaps the more medicalized piece of it. So
in medicine we use something called the DSM, the Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual. I think we're in version five, and
that's the one that codifies psychiatric illnesses, right, everything from depression, anxiety,
different personality disorders and all sorts of things like that.

(54:50):
And those things clearly matter, But I'm talking about something
that is applicable to everyone, whereas those things might only
be applicable to people who would meet diagnostic criteria. So
emotional health, in the sense the way I think about it,
kind of encompasses your relationships with other people, your sense
of purpose, fulfillment, happiness, joy, spontaneity, all of these things

(55:14):
that every human should be thinking about, because every human
is a part of those things. In my case, you know.
So the book is written basically at seventeen chapters. Sixteen
of the chapters are me, you know, writing about it
as the doctor, the scientist. And then the last chapter,
which is about emotional health, is me actually just writing
about my personal experience and my own well transformation, I

(55:36):
think would be an understatement. You know, I think that
the most important lesson for me in the past decade
has been that all the health stuff that makes up
most of that book, how do you reduce your odds
of getting cancer? How do you reduce your odds of
getting heart disease, Alzheimer's disease? How do you make sure

(55:58):
your muscles work better? In the la last decade of
you know, all those things, they're very important. But if
you're miserable, none of it matters. Right, If your relationships suck,
none of it matters. And I can't state that enough.
But I couldn't have understood that a decade ago. You know,

(56:20):
I had to personally experience things going really wrong. I
had to nearly lose everything to realize I've really missed
the plot here and if I don't get this stuff addressed,
then the rest of this outliving doesn't mean anything.

Speaker 2 (56:35):
What was the wake up quote for you or what
was the I mean?

Speaker 1 (56:38):
I think you know it was essentially almost losing my family, right,
it was just being so selfish and so such an
awful person that, you know, I finally woke up and
realized how much I was hurting everybody around me, and
I was confronted with that, and confronted with the reality
that I had no choice but to go away and
get help to sort of address my own reasons for

(57:01):
why my coping mechanisms were so negative.

Speaker 3 (57:05):
What made you so selfish and awful? Like, where did
that come from?

Speaker 1 (57:08):
Well, I mean, again, at the time, I had no clue.
But also at the time, I don't think I was
even privy to understanding what I was doing. But obviously
as I as I talk about in the chapter, and
I what I basically learned is I think a lot
of my adaptations had to do with, you know, certain

(57:28):
things in my childhood, some of which were, you know,
I describe as kind of big T trauma and some
of which are frankly just little TA trauma. But collectively
they just produced a response, an adaptation. I talk about
this sort of model of trauma where wounded children become
adaptive children, and adaptive children are there to protect the
wounded children. And I think that's a remarkable trait of

(57:50):
us as humans, right, we are very resilient. The problem
is that a lot of those adaptations become maladaptive in
adult life. And I think that's really what I was
dealing with, was so many of my adaptations, you know,
for example, control, drive, perfection, anger, All of those things

(58:10):
served me quite well as a child, but as a
husband and as a father, they were not serving me
well anymore. And all of the good that came from
those adaptations, for example, a strong work ethic, a desire
to do good, was more being done for the wrong reasons.

(58:30):
It was I'll show them, I will you know, I
will matter, my self esteem will be based on performance,
et cetera. And I think all of that had to
be turned on its head. For me. That was sort
of my journey, was learning how to undo all of
the maladaptive behaviors, to try to keep the good parts
of the adaptation and then shed the harmful ones.

Speaker 3 (58:54):
Why do you think it takes us? Thank you for sharing,
by the way, and I know you go into a
more depth in the book, and I find this fascinating,
and I think people I'm so happy that you address it,
because I think people find it especially fascinating From coming
from you, because often they've just seen as such separate
things and separate pursuits, but for you to unify in

(59:14):
them is really really interesting. Why do you think it
takes so many of us so long to address the
very root cause of so much of our problems? And
you partly covered it there that some of these things
become superpowers in the material world, like they're phenomenal at
you know, manipulating the outside world through control and perfectionism, etc.

(59:38):
But then in the inner world and the family tends
to suffer from that, Why does it take us so
long to look backwards almost to look forwards in both
our genetic background and are also genetic trauma in that sense.

Speaker 1 (59:54):
I don't think we want to uncover painful things less
the pain that we're confronting is greater than the pain
we're going to encounter by doing so. That's probably my
simplest thought as to why. I just think that, like,
how many people without ever having experienced dental pain would

(01:00:15):
go to the dentist right like you do as a kid,
because you're sort of told. But when I think about now,
like why do I put so much effort into taking
care of my teeth? It's because I've learned how miserable
it is when I don't. I think, until you experience
enough discomfort in the present, and in my case that

(01:00:39):
came through the circumstances. I write about the pain of
turning around and going back and exploring what happened and why,
and then embarking on the corrective steps and learning a
whole new language and a whole new set of skills.
I mean, there's in chemistry we call that the activation energy.

(01:01:00):
You have a chemical reaction, right, so you know every
chemical reaction has to overcome some sort of activation energy,
and the higher that activation energy, the less likely that
reaction is to take place. So enzymes, which people have
heard what's an enzyme? Do an enzyme or a catalyst
will make that reaction more likely. It lowers that barrier

(01:01:22):
to activation. So I think what we need in our
life are catalysts. We need something, and unfortunately, I think
sometimes it often has to be painful a loss to
force us to do that. I make a point when
I showed up in the first rehab place I went to,
there was this There's a woman that I met there
who could sort of see from the look on my
face that I wasn't happy to be there. She just

(01:01:43):
said to me in a manner that was just so perfect.
She said, Hey, nobody shows up here on a winning streak.
This is just one hundred percent true.

Speaker 3 (01:01:52):
How did you help the people around you that you
cared about be patient as you went through your own
gen Because I feel like it's really interesting when we
are trying to solve our own wounds and pain, it's
already so hard. But because we've taken on responsibilities or commitments,
whether that be in a marriage or as a parent,

(01:02:14):
or even as a CEO or a boss or whatever
it may be, it's like, all of a sudden, you
have so many other commitments that you had taken on
even before you realized you had to work on yourself.
Did you find yourself helping them while you helped yourself
to be around and be supportive as opposed to like
tap out and say, you know what, we don't want

(01:02:34):
to be around? Because I think we often look at like,
how are people helping us in our time of struggle?
But sometimes it's like we already committed to them, and
then we realize that does that make any sense?

Speaker 1 (01:02:45):
It makes a ton of sense, And I will tell you.
I think it just speaks to how fortunate I am
and perhaps why I feel I have an obligation to
talk about it, which is I just think I was
really lucky and that the people around me stood by
me and let me go through this and gave me
the chance to do it and stood by me because
I don't I don't think many people would have. I really,

(01:03:07):
you know, I've said this to my wife many times.
I describe her as like, you know, sort of hall
of fame wife who didn't really need to stick by me.
I think she had enough reasons to leave and take
my kids away and just say to hell with that guy,
and that she didn't. I will forever pay that forward.
And I think the same is true of people that
I worked with who knew I was struggling. I think,

(01:03:28):
deep down believed that I was not a bad person.
I was a good person who did very bad things,
and that I deserved another chance. I wish I could
say I was supporting them on that journey, but I
don't think I was. I think I was just reeling
in pain and lucky that they stood by me.

Speaker 2 (01:03:44):
Well, thank you for sharing that. That's that really hit me.

Speaker 3 (01:03:47):
As you know, don't expect people to catch you when
you're falling, but if they stand by you, never let
them leave you aside, because I think most of us could,
probably the fortunate ones attest to that. I would say
that about my wife too, I'd say that about my parents.
I'd say that about the people that I'm surrounded by,

(01:04:07):
that sometimes I haven't had the capacity to help them
as I help myself, even though I intend to. But
the problem sometimes is we do the other extreme, where
we demand.

Speaker 2 (01:04:17):
Them to help us. That's the balance.

Speaker 3 (01:04:19):
It's like the gratitude that you're displaying right now is
actually like the right, I think a wonderful balance, because
we do either all We either go I'm going to
solve this myself and I don't need anyone, or I
want my family to solve my problems for me, And
like we live in one of those extremes, and you're
actually saying, well, I had to help myself. I'd to
admit I didn't have the capacity to help them at

(01:04:41):
the time. But now I'm just grateful and I'm humbled
by the fact that they stayed here. Like there's some
beauty to that and that that really resonates.

Speaker 1 (01:04:51):
It's probably four years after one of the events that
I write about in this book, which was when my
son almost died. I was talking to Esther Parrel and
I was just saying, I don't think I could ever
forgive myself for what I did. And she said, that's okay.
I think it's okay that you remember this for the
rest of your life. I think there's a degree of

(01:05:13):
humility you need to carry with you forever. And I
think that was a really wise thing to say, right, Like,
I think it would have been easy to have said no, no, no, no, no,
you should just forget about this and move on. But
she's like, no, you should remember this forever. This is
the humility you need to remember. And she described it
in a very eloquent way, which was you need to
understand that there's a monster in you and he's never

(01:05:36):
going to go away. I'm confident you will keep him
in the corner for the rest of his life. But
don't ever take an eye off him. Yeah, and don't
ever think that just because you're better now, you're better
for life. This is a constant process.

Speaker 3 (01:05:50):
Yeah, And remembering that there's a monster in you, but
you are not that monster.

Speaker 1 (01:05:56):
That's right. Yeah, he's over in the corner, and you
have the you are the one in charge of whether
he stays in that corner.

Speaker 3 (01:06:01):
Yeah, it reminds me. I remember in my early experience
of living as a monk. I said to one of
my monk teachers, I said, I just feel like I'll
never overcome my ego, Like it just is too big,
Like there's two mutch to deal with. And it's not
that it's coming out in an externally gross way that
it's manifesting. But I know it's there. You know, we've

(01:06:24):
trained in self awareness and I can see it. And
he said to me, yeah, it's always going to be
there because it's not going anywhere, And he said, it
will always act as your anchor and ground you and
humble you even when you saw to new heights or
whatever else your life brings to you. That you knowing
that it's there is actually what will help you, right,

(01:06:45):
you know, stay grounded, which is such a beautiful reminder
as opposed to like ego death and we're going to
crush it in. It's interesting with health too, right, with
emotional health and physical health. That from what you said,
the first thing you said today was you know there
are certain things from the moment you're born that that's it.
It's already going in the wrong direction, and we often
think of like, how do I end this? So how

(01:07:06):
do I start this? How do I finish this? And
it's like, well, most things are just in motion. They're
not beginning or ending, they're just already happening. And as
you said earlier, we're trying to slow it down, or
we're trying to be aware of it, or we're trying
to monitor it. When you were speaking about your family
there and you were talking about that emotional wellbeing, there
was something that came to mind. There were these two

(01:07:28):
beautiful words you used, which one of them is used
a lot, but one of them not so much. We
talked about joy and spontaneity. And I love the word spontaneity.
I think it's not used enough when we talk about
emotional health. Joy is used. But the challenge I find
today when I'm talking to people is that we're so
overexposed to it's whether chemically we're talking about dopamine or

(01:07:52):
whether we're just talking about like fun, pleasure, instant gratification,
which we've talked about for such a long time that
every thing feels boring almost it's hard for people to
get to a state of joy or spontaneity. I find
that a lot of people have a sense of like, well,
what's there to look forward to? It like, oh, well,

(01:08:12):
nothing's that great, It's okay, like you know, whereas before
and now it's like it feels like you've got to
up the.

Speaker 2 (01:08:21):
Results so hard.

Speaker 3 (01:08:23):
And the problem is even when you up it, like
you're thinking that happiness is in Europe on that yacht, right,
and it's like, even if you got there, it won't
actually even live up to that experience that you put
in your mind, because it was never about the physical
manifestation of it. It was it was the idea that
you've overexposed yourself to so much pleasure that now even

(01:08:46):
the highest pleasures don't satisfy or suffice. How do we
work on that? Like, what is the health and emotional
version of approaching that problem?

Speaker 1 (01:08:55):
I wish I knew? I mean, and I think you're
addressing one of the most important questions. And this is
something I really struggle with because you know, for me,
I and I was just talking about this with someone
earlier today. I think about the next decade of my
life this amazing time where I get to be with
my kids the most. Because you know, as you're probably aware,

(01:09:17):
the data are pretty clear that once your kids leave
for college, the amount of time you will get to
spend with them is quite small. I think it works
out to basically, you have a total of nineteen years
with your kids, eighteen of which occur until they leave
for college, and then one year is the sum total

(01:09:37):
of time you will spend with your kids the rest
of your life on average. So I look at that
and I think I regret the time I've wasted so far, right,
But so that's the stuff I talk about, and now
I'm here in the future, I think, Wow, the greatest
source of joy I really experience is with my family. That,
to me is what spontaneity is. Right. Spontaneity for me

(01:09:59):
is an important and the reason I brought it up
is I'm a very rigid person by nature. Like part
of control for me is rigidity. Deviating from my plan
is a very hard thing to do, but I also
realize it's a very important thing to do. So, like
I'm the kind of guy who makes lists on weekends
me too, right, Like there's just like there's a list

(01:10:21):
of twelve things that have to be done on Saturday
and eight things that have to be done on Sunday.
And you can imagine that that rigidity takes any spontaneity
out of life. And one of the great things I've
learned is how to screw the list sometimes. The other day,
when I went to get you know, I had to
go to home depot to get all the chicken wire
to do the thing like that wasn't on the list

(01:10:42):
that day, but I could see that my son was
upset that the squirrels were eating his tomatoes, and I
was like, you know what I'm supposed to be doing, X, Y,
and Z, let's go to home depot.

Speaker 3 (01:10:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:10:53):
I think interestingly anyone who does that, which I'm sure
is everybody listening to this at some point, can experience
that those are probably the things that bring more joy
than the yacht and Abiza. It doesn't mean that you
should never go on the yacht in a Biza. Yeah,
I think it just means that.

Speaker 2 (01:11:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:11:08):
I think it just means that don't dismiss the stuff
that's right in front of you. And again, for most people,
I really do believe connection is that thing like just
having intimate connection with friends and family probably provides more
of that than any of these other kind of material things.

Speaker 3 (01:11:28):
Yeah, and I think what you're saying is actually true.
And I want to clarify that point too, that I
actually think that when you are not missing the simple
things that are right in front of you, then when
the big material thing is right in front of you,
you won't miss that either. That's the point I believe, Like,
I think that if someone is grateful for where they're

(01:11:49):
at and what they see and what they experience, and
are able to immerse themselves in it, then the same
happens on vacation, the same happens on the yacht as
are thought exper like. The idea is is that the
ability to experience a flower as a thought experiment in
the most immersive way allows you to experience a garden,

(01:12:10):
which allows you to experience a forest, which allows you
know it's it's that you can't really fully experience the
forest if you didn't know how to experience a leaf.
That idea of that much immersed and I've and I've
personally experienced both the presence and absence of those experiences
where sometimes I'm walking up and down here or doing

(01:12:32):
my morning hike and you completely miss the view because
you're on your phone, or even if your phone's not there,
you're thinking about something and then and then second you
look up and you're, oh, wait a minute, like this
was right there. And so I think we all experience
presence and absence, and I found that beautiful. We think
beautiful things will make us more presence, but actually will

(01:12:55):
be absent even in beautiful things if you're not present
for the small things. And I've seen that again and
again and again in your example, and I'm just I'm
only picking at this because I think there's so much
lived experience and what you're saying, and the scientific backbone
helps too. It's like, how have you also not ended up?
Because it sounds like your kids and your family is

(01:13:15):
just so important to you, which is beautiful, and I
think that's true for so many people. But again, I
find that a lot of the people that I'm talking
to are living at the other extreme where they're like, Jay,
I am so giving in to everything.

Speaker 2 (01:13:27):
My kids want to do, what my family wants to do.

Speaker 3 (01:13:28):
That I don't even have any of my own habits
and disciplines. Right Like for you going to get Chicken
Wire was a spontaneous moment of love for your son
who's worried about this project that he loves, Whereas for
some people, all they're living in is not spontaneity, but
in urgency, and then they're not getting I was speaking
to a friend the other day and they were telling me, Jay,

(01:13:50):
I wake up at six am, but what happened? And
then I was kind of walking through their schedule with
them for the day and helping them map habits, and
they were like, I don't know why. And I was like, well,
when do you start cooking lunch for example that they
as part of their day they have to do. And
they were like twelve. And I was like, so what
happens between six am and twelve noon? They're like I
don't know. And I was like, what do you mean,

(01:14:10):
Like you don't know, Like that's six hours a time.
Where does it go? And then they were like emails,
phone calls, random people, call random things up and it's
all like I'm like, Wow, you're waking up pretty early,
which is amazing, but now all of that six hours
is just lost in kind of moving. How have you
found that balance between like I love my children, I
want to be there, but I also need to do
everything I say in this book, which takes time and energy.

Speaker 1 (01:14:33):
I don't want to necessarily use myself as an example
because I also realize like I have some really good
things going for me, which is I have like an
amazing spouse, and I have an amazing team and all
of these things. But what everyone around me has figured
out is if you want to get the best out
of me as a husband, as a father, as a friend,
as a boss, as a colleague, whatever it is, if

(01:14:55):
you want the best version of Peter, he also has
to be well rested, be eating well, he has to
be exercising, he has to be doing the things that
he has to do every day for his mental health.
I am actually quite structured when it comes to that stuff,
so I'm very routined with how I do things. So
I do not take a single call or meeting, with

(01:15:18):
very rare exceptions once a month. There's an exception to
this rule. Before eleven am. I am scheduled without a
break from eleven to five every single day, So I
have six hours of pure scheduled that I consider that
not my time, that's my patient's time, that's my team's time.
That's me giving thirty hours a week to everybody. I

(01:15:40):
get up at about six. From six to eleven is
really sacred time. So six to seven is just coffee
with my wife and playing with the kids. So my daughter,
of course, no, she's still sleeping, but the boys we're
playing board games, doing puzzles, having coffee, doing whatever. From

(01:16:01):
seven to eight is work, Just get the emails done,
read whatever I need to read, et ceteratcetera. From eight
to eleven is hobby plus exercise, So every day I'm
either in the simulator, driving or shooting my bow and arrow,
and then I'm exercising. From five till about seven is
family time, so I'm usually cooking dinner, playing with the kids,

(01:16:24):
going to you know, jiu jitsu, whatever it is. And
then seven till ten is some combination of family time
plus work. And that's where there has to be some flexibility,
like how much more work do I need to do?
And the price I pay for that is I have
to work on weekends too, right, Why because like I'm
forcing the time to be spread out, and so that

(01:16:47):
means like, yeah, there's just you know, there's other things
I'm going to have to make sacrifices around. But I
guess my point of that is you have to kind
of try to take hold of the schedule a little
bit and sort of say, like, there are certain things
that are non negotiable. So not exercising is a non negotiable.
Not having some time with my family is a non negotiable.

(01:17:07):
I rarely travel anymore. I used to travel twenty days
a month. I travel two to three days a month now.
Just very deliberate and conscious decisions about how I want
to spend my time and the importance of, you know,
taking care of my body in an effort to take
care of everything else.

Speaker 3 (01:17:25):
Absolutely no, and I definitely I agree. I don't think
we want to use ourselves as examples or you know,
as the way to do it, because everyone's so personal.
I think it's just useful understanding that that structure is
needed for that spontaneity.

Speaker 1 (01:17:40):
What might be more helpful for people to understand how
I communicate this with my wife. So my wife is
that person who will put everybody ahead of herself. So
what I have to help my wife do is realize, hey,
like you need to go for a run too, because
that matters a lot to you, and you need to
go out with your friends and have drinks once every

(01:18:01):
two weeks because that matters, or you need to go
and get a many petty with your daughter and actually relax.
I'll pitch in and do this other thing because I
really feel strongly about you doing that, and that's not
something I would have done before. Before I would have
just sort of said, hey, it's awesome, you're doing everything. Great. Yeah,
So I think as a spouse, you want to sort
of really understand that as true as that is for me,

(01:18:22):
it's just as true for her.

Speaker 3 (01:18:24):
I think that's the key thing in a and we
don't have kids, but I can definitely say on a
relationship level, it's like, just because your partner can do
something and is doing something doesn't mean that you should
just accept that as reality for the rest of the time.
And I see that that's one of the biggest challenges
in relationships is people feel like their role is assumed

(01:18:45):
because of what they've done in the past, but no
one checked with them as to whether they were okay
continuing to do it or whether they felt good doing it.
And we think, well, they should tell us if they
don't like it, they would tell us like I would
tell them. But often you find that someone so ingrained
in playing a role that they've even forgotten that they

(01:19:05):
have needs or who they could be or can be,
or they feel this overbearing burden or urgency and their
role that they just can't disconnect from it. So yeah,
I think that's a great point to highlight, Peter. I mean,
there's so many I really do want to talk to
you if you still have the time. I really do
want to talk to you about cancer, and maybe Alsamer's
as well, because we went on a different direction which

(01:19:27):
I wanted to go into and which I loved. But
I want to talk to you about cancer just because
I lost I've lost three people in my life to cancer.
I lost my uncle, who was my mother's brother, when
I was around gosh, maybe I was around maybe just

(01:19:47):
about to be eighteen or something like that. He had
throat cancer and it was tough to see him go
through that. It was the first time someone in my
direct circle i'd kind of witnessed the journey of someone
and like struggling, going through pain and then you know,
dying at a young age. He was like fifty seven
years old. And then I saw my one of my

(01:20:10):
probably my closest friend who I lived as a monk with,
and he was still a monk when he passed away,
and he had colon cancer and he was like my age,
like he died two years ago now, so like that,
he was a bit a couple of years older, so
like thirty five around around thereabouts. I believe some of
that was genetic, which we found out afterwards or like

(01:20:33):
during the process, and he went through tons of cycles
of chemo and like he tried everything. Like that guy
had spirit and resilience and everything, and it you know,
it was tough. And then I lost my spiritual mentor
to brain cancer in the same time frame, during the
year of COVID. So I also missed both of these

(01:20:54):
people's funerals because I couldn't go back to London because
you couldn't fly at the time. So anyway, all of
that to say, I've just lost so many people of cancer,
and I think that's just not uncommon, which is even
worse in one sense, like I think everyone who's listening
is like, yeah, Jamie too, And so I think it's
so important to talk about because I don't know, is
it one in three, one in two? I don't know

(01:21:15):
what the stats are, but because it's so common, because
it's so normal now and just someone having cancer. But
at the same time it's the most painful news in
the world because you kind of feel like you know
where it's going to go. What have we seen as
proven ways of preventing and confronting cancer, both holistic and

(01:21:37):
you know, traditional medicine.

Speaker 1 (01:21:39):
You know, the way I sort of think about it
is there are three things to be thinking about, three
three categories. So the first, as you said, is what
steps can you take to prevent cancer? The second question
is if you get cancer, how can you catch it
as early as possible. One thing we really do know
is that if you treat a cancer earlier, your chances
of beating it go up. And the longer you wait

(01:22:02):
to treat it, meaning the later you catch it, the
worse your odds. And then the third question is if
you do find cancer, what are the ideal treatment strategies.
Let's start with the first question, and this is the
least satisfying because we don't know a whole lot about
what's causing cancer. So we know two things for sure.

(01:22:22):
We know that smoking is a big driver of cancer,
and we know that obesity is a big driver of cancer. Now,
obesity is a bit of a misleading term because it's
just kind of an overly simplistic way to think about
what's actually happening. The data say obesity, but really what
it means is insulin resistance and inflammation. Those are two

(01:22:44):
hallmarks of obesity that are present in seventy eighty percent
of cases of obesity, and if you look at the
data more closely, that's what's actually driving cancer. So it's
not actually how much fat you have on your body,
it's more how much fat is in certain parts of
your body that are metabolically problematic. But after those two things,

(01:23:06):
smoking and instead of obesity, I just prefer to say
poor metabolic health. We have some one off examples. We
know that there are certain types of exposures pesticide, you know,
certain types of pesticides for example, certain type of toxins,
but those don't account for the significant majority of them.
So for many people, cancer is still a mystery. In
other words, whatever it caused, whatever caused the initiation of

(01:23:29):
the genetic mutations that ultimately led to a cancer that
the body was not able to on its own remedy,
is still a bit of a black box, and some
very prominent cancer biologists actually just argue that it's bad luck.
In other words, it's a stochastic process. So our genes
are constantly replicating, but when mistakes are made, mutations occur,

(01:23:50):
and some of these mutations derive cancer. And there's broadly
speaking two types of mutations. There are mutations in tumor
suppressor genes, so these are mutations in genes that are
there to stop cancers when cancers appear. And then there
are mutations in what are called oncogenes. These are genes
that propagate cancer. So mutations in any of these things

(01:24:11):
can actually lead to cancer. So once you sort of
accept that you're going to do everything in your power
to not get cancer, which is to say, you're not
going to smoke, you're going to be as metabolically healthy
as possible, You're going to exercise, sleep, do all those
things right, the next most important thing is thinking about
your strategy for cancer screening. You know, this is where
I probably differ significantly from the mainstream, you know, establishment view,

(01:24:33):
which is actually kind of, you know, not that aggressive
on cancer screening. I would argue that we have to
be very aggressive on cancer screening, provided we can get
our minds around the problem we discussed a little while ago,
which is we understand that there's going to be the
harder you look for something, the more like you are
to find something that isn't relevant. But if you understand
that going in, and you're willing to accept that risk

(01:24:57):
and evaluate each finding in a thought way, I think
that for most people psychologically and physically, the benefit is
a net positive one. And so that means looking at
things that are for example, with a colonoscopy, doing it
earlier and more frequently than is the standard recommendation. The
stander recommendation is not to begin till you're forty five.

(01:25:19):
We would recommend that everybody, even without a family history,
begin at least five years before that. It also means
repeating colonoscopies more frequently, especially in the finding of certain
types of polyps. Whole body screening you talked about with
certain types of MRIs. We also use something called the
liquid biopsies. It's a blood test that looks for really
really small fragments of DNA and the blood and can

(01:25:39):
identify the presence of cancer and the tissue of origin. Now, again,
none of these tests are perfect. So each of these
tests have things that they're going to miss. But the
idea is that the more you're layering these tests, the
better your odds are refinding something earlier. And then the
final point is, okay, well, what are the strategies you
know if should you have cancer? And this is where
I think we just have a little bit more promise
now than we did decade ago. So a decade ago,

(01:26:02):
because this is the first time I did this analysis.
In the previous fifty years, so from you know, sixty
years ago until ten years ago, the overall survival improvement
in cancer was about three percent. Wow, it was abysmal.
But in the past ten years it's been about another
eight percent. And while that doesn't sound remarkable, and the

(01:26:23):
implication of that is half the people who are diagnosed
with cancer today will still die from cancer. It's the
biologic insights and the trajectory that we're on right now
that gives me much more hope. And that is primarily
based on a couple of things. The first is the
field of immunology has really taken off. The tools that
we have to harness the immune system to attack cancer

(01:26:47):
have become so dramatic.

Speaker 2 (01:26:50):
Immunotherapy R that's right, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:26:52):
That it really is. I think within the next decade,
which I know seems like an infinite amount of time
for someone who's got cancer. Right now, we're really seeing
changes that I think are going to allow immunotherapies to
go from the niche place that they occupy in only
working for certain types of cancers like melanoma and kidney cancer,

(01:27:16):
to being able to go after the holy Grail of cancers,
which are what we call the solid organ, epithelial tumors, breast, pancreatic, colon, lung.
These are the big cancers that do the majority of
the killing. Fifty percent of cancer deaths are just five
cancers lung, colon, breast, prostate, pancreatic. That's more than fifty

(01:27:39):
percent of all cancer deaths. Until you have a solution
for those, we don't have a solution for cancer, and
I do believe that we are really moving in that direction.

Speaker 3 (01:27:49):
We've touched on this point a few times of almost
the stress about stress for health, and that's a really
interesting way of thinking about it. It's like the stress
of Oh, I need to work out today, I need
to have my supplements to the stress of I can't sleep.
Why am I not sleeping?

Speaker 2 (01:28:04):
Right?

Speaker 3 (01:28:04):
Like, we stress about the things that are good for us.
How have you helped your patients, How have you coached
them through that? How do you guide people through that?
Because I think a lot of people go, well, then
I'm just not going to do anything, because at least
then I'm not stressed. I don't think that's the wisdom
and what you're saying. I don't think you're saying, well, yeah,

(01:28:26):
it's better not to have any stress at all. How
do you help people to engage and you know, use
that stress in a healthy way, or how do you
guide patients through that stress?

Speaker 1 (01:28:35):
I mean, I think every patient's different, and I think
you have to sort of get to know the person
a little bit and figure out what's the underlying issue.
So I do think that there are a lot of
people who frankly self sabotage, going back to kind of
like where I was. I mean, my self destructive behaviors
weren't coming directly at the expense of my physical health.
They were coming at the expense of my emotional health.

(01:28:56):
But I actually think there were a lot of people
who have very similar stories to mine, but their manifestation
is it's coming at the expense of their physical health.
They are sabotaging their ability. They are coming up with
a million excuses why they can't eat well, they can't exercise,
they can't do this, they can't do that. And so
you have to be able to get to the root
of the problem. And so there are many patients where

(01:29:19):
we just think, look, you're not going to get better
without trauma based therapy until you come up with a
way to care enough about yourself to stop punishing yourself
in this way. Because I think people punish themselves in
different ways. You could almost argue I used to punish
myself by overdoing all of those healthy things, like some
of the exercise I was doing was actually a form

(01:29:41):
of punishment. So on the surface, you'd say, boy, that
guy's really healthy, but no, he wasn't. Another thing I
always think about is when we're in the spirit of
trying to build new habits, sometimes perfect is the enemy
of good. Typically, what I want is a win, and
I think that what people just need is a win,
and it doesn't have to be the biggest win, and
it just has to be a win. So if you're

(01:30:01):
looking at a person for whom nothing is optimal. Don't
try to fix all things at once. Pick the one
thing that you think they have the greatest odds of
being able to make a difference on, and just work
on that and accept the fact that the other things
will continue to be suboptimal. But you develop their confidence
in that one thing. How about for twenty minutes a
day you do something active. You go and walk for

(01:30:23):
twenty minutes a day. If you're talking about a person
who's never lifted a finger, that would be a huge win.
And you might do that before you get into the
details of this type of training or that type of training,
or we're going to tweak your nutrition and optimize your
protein intake. I mean, that's just overwhelming, and you're probably
just more likely to fail at everything and create kind
of a compensatory negative reaction. But again, I don't think

(01:30:45):
there's a paint by numbers approach. I think you in
the way we do it with patients, I think you
just have to treat everybody individually and by the way.
When something's not working, you have to accept it in
pivot and try something that is.

Speaker 2 (01:30:55):
I think that's the keyword. Pivot. Yeah, that's a keyword
everyone to.

Speaker 3 (01:31:00):
The book is called Outlive The Science and Art of Longevity.
If you don't already have it, please go and grab
a copy. I highly recommend it. Of course, today's conversation
has been fantastic. I've tried to touch on topics that
Peter may not have been asked about in a million
different interviews. He's got fantastic interviews out there on so
many awesome podcasts as well, so if you're more interested
in the parts we didn't cover, please do go and

(01:31:21):
watch those and get informed. Peter, It's been such a
joy sitting down with you today. Honestly, there's been moments
where I've been mind blown and moments where I've been
taken aback and felt really in my body and really
present where my feet are. And I'm just really grateful
that we got to have this conversation. We've got to
share so much incredible insights with our community today, and

(01:31:42):
I want you to make sure that you tag me
and Peter on Instagram, on TikTok, on threads with what
you're learning, what you've taken away, what are the things
you're going to apply and practice with, what's something you're
going to experiment with this week. That would make me
really happy is that you just take one thing away
from this. I'm going to try that out. I'm going
to figure this out for myself. That would be an

(01:32:03):
awesome place to start, Peter. We end every episode with
a final five a fast five, so these questions have
to be answered in one word to one sentence Max,
So Peter, these are your final five or your fast five.
The first question is what is the best health advice
you've ever heard or received?

Speaker 1 (01:32:21):
Exercise every day?

Speaker 3 (01:32:22):
Second question, what is the worst health advice you've ever
heard or received?

Speaker 1 (01:32:26):
Do a cleanse?

Speaker 2 (01:32:27):
Ah? Interesting, Why that's it? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:32:29):
Okay, Oh, I just think that, you know, I've seen
I've seen some of those things go really bad where people,
you know, get really mucked up and dehydrated. And I've
seen people actually take in some chemicals and compounds that
dramatically alter liver function tests and things like that.

Speaker 3 (01:32:45):
Wow, Okay, all right. Question number three, what's something you're
currently trying to.

Speaker 1 (01:32:49):
Unlearn continuing to work on perfectionism, unlearning or detuning it.

Speaker 3 (01:32:56):
Question number four, what's something that you're a very big
proponent of but a lot of people may disagree with you?

Speaker 2 (01:33:02):
And they're like, I'm not sure about it.

Speaker 1 (01:33:04):
Maybe the importance of very heavy strength training in postmenopausal women.

Speaker 3 (01:33:12):
Interesting, let's dive into that, because that's that's fascinating. Really,
how specific you one?

Speaker 2 (01:33:18):
That's great.

Speaker 1 (01:33:18):
Women postmenopause are so unbelievably susceptible to osteoporosis and osteopenia
with the loss of estrogen. Unfortunately, many women in that
situation are not getting hormone replacement therapy and so they're
doubly susceptible to it. I think there's just a cultural
belief that, you know, women don't need to lift weights,
and if they do, it's very light. But the truth

(01:33:39):
of it is, you really need to lift heavy things
to make your bones stronger. And that doesn't mean it
has to be complicated stuff like squats or deadlifts or
things like that. But you know, one of the most
important things is carrying, doing a farmer's carry, so holding
very heavy dumbells in your hands and walking so important,
and it doesn't matter how old you are.

Speaker 2 (01:33:58):
Got it great.

Speaker 3 (01:33:59):
Fifth and final question. If you could create one law
that everyone in the world had to follow, what would
it be?

Speaker 1 (01:34:05):
You must go into nature for at least an hour
a day with no electronics and just be just be outside,
be in nature, but be untethered to electronics or obvious distractions.

Speaker 3 (01:34:22):
Beautiful, Peter, that's fantastic. Thank you so much again for
your time, your energy, your presence today. I hope this
is the first of many times that you'll come back
on purpose. And again, if you don't already follow Peter. Peter,
where's the best place you'd like to be able to
find you? I know you're on Instagram and YouTube and everywhere, but.

Speaker 1 (01:34:38):
Yeah, I think everything is Peter and Ta MD is
all the handles everywhere, and so thank you very much.
I really appreciate this.

Speaker 2 (01:34:45):
Thank you.

Speaker 3 (01:34:45):
If you love this episode, you'll enjoy my interview with
doctor Daniel Ahman on how to change your life by
changing your brain.

Speaker 4 (01:34:53):
If we want a healthy mind, it actually starts with
a healthy brain.

Speaker 2 (01:34:59):
You know.

Speaker 4 (01:34:59):
I've had the blessing or the curse to scan over
a thousand convicted felons and over a hundred murderers, and
their brains are very damaged.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Peter Attia ON: Scientific Ways to Slow Down Aging & How Your Emotional Health is Impacting your Physical Health