Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Fasting, Creatine, Brain Performance & Longevity Breakthroughs | PBD #740

I'm 47 years old. I want to feel 30 by the time I'm done talking to you. The cells in our body have a biological age, and that biological age can be younger, if you're leading a really healthy lifestyle, or they can be older. Give me three things you'll say. These are three crazy, wild things we may see. Yeah. So this is where you can basically take this old skin cell and make the cell young, so essentially reversing the aging. But also we can grow organs. Like, that's a new thing. So you can basically take someone who has a disease and completely wipe that disease out. It's really kind of cool. It is. The tuning up you can get. Will we get to a point that people will choose what their kids are going to look like? Because that's pretty scary if you can get to that point. I mean, that's the ethical question. I mean, what does the world look like in 50, 100 years if we're able to do that? We're living in the shortcut era. Serena Williams, she did a GLP-1 commercial. The average woman looks at us and says, if she couldn't do it naturally, why should I try to do it naturally with exercise? Doing intermittent fasting or counting calories does require effort, whereas taking a pill does not. The pill does it for you. Exercise is the key, and not just any type of exercise. You have to get your heart rate up. You have to move faster. Being sedentary is a disease, and when you start thinking about it as a disease, at the end of the day, I'm excited about healthier living. I'm excited about, you know, yeah. Yeah. So it's not often I do an interview and I take six pages of notes while the guest is speaking, but that's what happened today with Dr. Rhonda Patrick. Fascinating. We talked about chemotherapy, the effects of it. We talked about GLP-1. She reacted to what Oprah Winfrey said a few weeks ago, that being fat is a gene that she has. It's not her fault. And her reaction to it was very detailed, very thorough. We talked about diet, exercise, what causes 13 different types of cancer that you have control over, which when you're not going through it, you don't think about it, but if you can prevent it, you may as well. Talk about a lot of different things. What's healthier for you? Being married with kids, being married or staying single, simply what is healthier for you to do? So the tie between being bilingual and reducing Alzheimer's, why would being bilingual, lower Alzheimer's, some of the effects of your gut has with inflammation, just a very fascinating conversation. It's going to feel like a five, ten-minute conversation when you listen to it because by the time you're done listening to Dr. Rhonda Patrick, you're going to be making a few different lifestyle changes that is going to positively impact you, probably the same way it's doing it with me. So having said that, enjoy this interview with Dr. Rhonda Patrick. Did you ever think you would make sure it? I feel I'm looking so excited when you did so. You know this life meant for me. Adam, what's your coming? The future looks bright. My handshake is better than anything I ever saw. It's right here. You are a one-on-one? My son's right there. I think I've ever said this before. Really? You can be pushed out of California. Maybe that's something we'll talk about. Okay, so I got a couple goals to date. I'm 47 years old. I want to feel 30 by the time I'm done talking to you. Specifically, what things I can do to feel 30. Number two is I have a four-year-old daughter who loves candy. And I have my 84-year-old dad, 83-year-old dad that lives with us that is our dealer, him and our nanny, Melba. And so maybe we'll talk about that as well, candy, kids, cereal. I know we talked about cereal a minute ago. But for the people that don't know you, I've seen you. You've been on Rogan 10-plus times. You've been all over the place. We've been consuming you for many years. My wife, the family, we watch your content with the things you've talked about, creatine, you know, a bunch of different things that you discuss. But if the audience doesn't know, if you don't mind taking a minute to introduce yourself, that'd be great. Well, first of all, thank you, Patrick, for inviting me on the show. It's a pleasure to be here. For those people who are wondering who I am, my name is Rhonda Patrick. I have a PhD in biomedical science. And classically, you know, I trained as a lab scientist doing research in the field of aging, cancer, metabolism, nutrition. So I've really got a broad range of different types of research I've done over the years. But my true passion is public health and trying to educate people using science and evidence-based science in terms of like what they can do with their lifestyle, their diet to really, as you said, improve the way you age. So, you know, there's our chronological age and number. You're 47. I'm also 47. but what what's what what's different here is that even though we have this chronological age number depending on how we live our life the cells in our body have a biological age and that biological age can be younger if you're leading a really healthy lifestyle or they can be older accelerated if you don't lead a healthy lifestyle so if you're overweight and you smoke you drink things like that right so you really want to have a younger biological age relative to your chronological age. And so there are a few things that we can talk about that really do help people get there. But I will say that, so you asked me who I am. So I love public health and I decided to start a podcast about 10 years ago. So I have a podcast called Found My Fitness where I interviewed guests that are MDs, PhDs, all about, you know, how, what kind of research they're doing and how it's basically showing how people can live a healthier life by doing a variety of different lifestyle changes and dietary changes to improve the way they age. And I love it because I left science. You know, I left science. I left doing research in the lab. And the thing that I missed most were the conversations I would have with other scientists because you learn so much. It's so intellectually stimulating, much more than reading a scientific publication. In fact, that's one of the reasons why I started the podcast is because it was like, well, I learned so much from, you know, these little conversations I have, you know, in the coffee room or at my cubicle or in, you know, some professor's office. And it's like, why not record these conversations for the public so that they can learn? And it's really been great ever since. I love it. By the way, for people that are not in it, I think the movement of, you know, the health podcasts that are, there's a lot of them, but there's good five, 10 of them that you will consistently keep hearing about that they're fair, you being one of them that are being interviewed. But it's good for the average person. Instead of going to the doctor, sometimes you're driving, listening to a two, three-hour podcast. You know what? Let me change my lifestyle and this and that. I got a question for you I wanted to open up with. This just came to my mind. It wasn't on the plan. The day ChadGBT came out was revolutionary to everything. Everybody looked at, we used to Google. Then, you know, I think it was first week of ChadGBT. Hey, do me a favor and create a song in Tupac's voice, but the way that the president speaks. and then you saw that one clip came out. Wait a minute. That's amazing. Chad, GPT, I want you to take this research and then all this data started coming out. And like this, things have changed. Two, three years, however long it's meant. How quickly do you think we're going to have new advancement the next 5, 10, 20 years that will be just as shocking as OpenAI? I'm super excited about how, you know, these language models, He's basically like LLMs and how AI is going to help really advance science and particularly science in the field of aging. You know, because at the end of the day, you can do everything in your capacity with your diet and your lifestyle to really give yourself that, you know, edge in terms of like aging better and living longer. But at the end of the day, you do have a certain genetic potential. Like you could eat healthy and exercise and still not live to be 120, right? There is a genetic component to living to be 100. Eat healthy and exercise and still not live to 100. Living to 100, believe it or not, is largely genetic. But that doesn't mean that diet and lifestyle don't matter. They matter a great deal. It's a matter of basically your quality of life and not having Alzheimer's disease and cardiovascular disease and diabetes and things like that later in life, really degrading the quality of your life. And perhaps giving you an extra five years, right? But you're not going to live 25, 30 years more by just being healthy, right? So this is where gene engineering comes in. And that's where I think the AI also comes in because it's really going to, I think, exponentially move that field forward. Whereas it's been kind of like, you know, it's been progressing but at a pretty slow rate. What do you think we'll see? Give me three things you'll see. These are three crazy wild things we may see. Yeah. So there's this, you've heard of stem cells, right? Of course. And have you heard of, do you know who Shinya Yamanaka is, a Japanese scientist? He won the Nobel Prize in 2006 for basically discovering that you could take any cell from a person, an 80-year-old person, an old cell. You know, we're constantly getting, skin cells are falling off our body constantly. You can take some of those old skin cells from an 80-year-old woman, for example, and you could put four different, what are called transcription factors. It's basically just, you know, a gene that basically is a master regulator of many, many different genes. So it activates genes or it, you know, silences them so they're not active. And you could put four of them on this skin cell, okay? And you could revert that skin cell into what's called a pluripotent stem cell. So that would be a cell that could become pretty much any type of cell in the body. And so this is induced pluripotent stem cells. And this is what Dr. Yamanaka won the Nobel Prize for because it's really the ultimate reversal of aging. If you take an old cell and turn it into a stem cell, that can become any type of cell or neuron, an eye cell, a heart cell, right? But this is where it gets really exciting. You don't want to basically – if you want to reverse aging, you don't want the cell to lose its identity, right? You want to take a cell and reverse its aging but keep it that same cell, right? So I just told you the skin cell becomes a stem cell, and then it can become any type of cell. So now we have some new data. This is all animal data where you can basically take this old skin cell and just kind of pulse those four different, you know, those big genes, those transcription factors on the skin cell, and you can epigenetically wipe out. So epigenetics is like those factors that are sitting on top of our DNA, like, you know, methyl groups, and they're activating genes or deactivating them. you can wipe them out and make the cell young but still keep its identity and this has been done in animals so essentially reversing the aging no one's been able to i mean there's a lot of hurdles to overcome in terms of like how do we get this into humans you know the delivery system is kind of questionable because what they're doing in animals is giving it this virus and it's like well the virus could potentially integrate into the genome and maybe be oncogenic so you have There's a lot of things to overcome before it goes to humans, and I think that's where AI is going to come in and help us figure out how we can translate this data into humans. And I don't know if that made sense to you, but it's kind of this futurism type of stuff, but it's very exciting. It is. But I guess what I want to go more to is I watched a movie yesterday, Saturday, called Mercy. It just came out with Chris Pratt. And it's like – it's one of these movies. What was that movie back in the days where it could predict somebody committing a future crime minority report? And Chris Pratt, who's a cop, comes in and this software, this judge is AI. Her name is Mercy. And he comes in and all of a sudden he wakes up. He doesn't know what's going on. And Mercy says, you just killed your wife and you stabbed your wife XYZ. I was like, wait, what? I would never do this. and the AI convinces him that he did. And then eventually you have 90 minutes to make the argument that you didn't do this. So pull up this file and put up that file and pull up. You become the lawyer for yourself. Very interesting, futuristic. And the way it ended, the story, I'm not going to tell you what it ended, but the line that he says, he says, here's what we learn, that both humans and AI can make mistakes. but when you watch it it was kind of like and this is very realistic we can get here very soon it for the average individual if you say okay what are some things people want to do we want to live a healthy life enjoy it live long pain-free right enjoy ourselves to the point where you know i can still move my body in my 90s in my 80s maybe make it to 100s what massive resounding you know innovation could happen that'll shock everybody is there anything because we've heard about stem cells right we've heard about stem cells i went to beverly hills one of our clients invited me i got 80 million stem cells on my back they said this is going to fix your lower back problem nothing happened is there anything that you think could happen that's revolutionary well i think that stem cells could be part of that i would say equation so we can have you know stem cells then that are tuning up every organ in our body right and not just for regeneration or recovery but also we can grow organs like that's a new thing where people scientists are now growing like even 3d printing human organs and so it's like oh your heart's giving out we're going to grow a new organ it's from your own cells so you're not going to have that rejection you know that rejection type of phenotype that happens so this organ regrowing thing is really cool where you're basically going to get a tune-up oh i need a new liver you know it's not working at the end of the day i need to inject some some neural stem cells in my brain because i'm losing you know brains my brain's atrophying i'm losing cells in my brain so uh i do think that's all on the horizon can that be measurable like can it be done in a way where i instantly can see results like let's just say you know a system's attached to my brain and it says okay what we just did it took you from this number to this number look where you're at now just by doing this test instead of it could work 52% of the time it works. Like, will there be things that I know for a fact will work? Well, if you're looking at, for example, brain mass, yes. I mean, if you see that you're injecting stem cells and now you're growing new neurons in the hippocampus part of your brain, which is involved with learning and memory, then that would be something that you can measure. By the way, exercise can regrow brain cells in your hippocampus as well. So that's one of the things that we do have control over right now. We can talk about that. And then gene therapy. So, like, we do know there are a variety of what are called longevity genes. Like, these are genes that are found in people that live to be 100, so these are centenarians, or semi-supercentenarians, so these are people that live to be 105, or the supercentenarians, so these are people that live to be 110 and older. There's a common denominator of really highly active genes that are found in these individuals. And these genes happen to be genes that are involved in basically the cellular stress response, which is essentially when you stress your body, your body adapts and responds and goes, uh-oh, there's stress going on. I need to respond to this so that I can stay alive. And it does things like increases antioxidant genes or anti-inflammatory genes or genes involved in making stem cells. all kinds of these like stress response genes are really highly active in people that actually do live to be a hundred plus and so gene therapy can then deliver those genes to the right organs in humans and then again you'll be able to you know now deal with the stresses of aging better and i think that's another thing on the horizon so for example dr george church he's really the godfather of gene engineering played a role in discovering the human genome he's done studies in rodents and mice where they took you know three or four genes and made them you know soluble injected them in mice and it extended their life expectancy it reversed aging of their organs he's now doing clinical studies in dogs um it's much easier to get fda approval to do this sort of things in dogs but it's like you know once you get to the dogs you have humans that are like of course i want my dog to live longer and so they're gonna you know start to approve approve those sort therapies for dogs and then it's easier to then start them in humans so i think again ai is going to play a role in getting some of these gene therapies you know from bench side from you know this pre-clinical data into humans and all this is super exciting because i'm excited and my optimism is the fact that you guys are going to figure things out that's what i'm relying on i think the the speed of using ai and gene what was that one company video that we saw uh was it CRISPR? Was it called CRISPR? Was it called CRISPR? Yes, CRISPR. So is that kind of what you're talking about, that that's the direction we could be going? CRISPR is one of the directions. So gene therapy versus gene editing. So gene editing would be CRISPR. That's a technology that's used to change just like a single nucleotide of DNA, which can change the function of a gene. So, for example, some people have these variations in our genes that make us not have them work as good. Some people have diseases because of it, right? cystic fibrosis being one, right, muscular dystrophy, right, things like that, where you have just a little one nucleotide or two nucleotide change in a gene, and it completely alters the function. So CRISPR can come in and actually change that gene. So you can basically take someone who has a disease and completely wipe that disease out and reverse it so they don't have it anymore. Or perhaps you can alter the DNA of a gene and make it work better. Gene therapy is where you're basically just putting more of a gene there. So let's say we all, we have these longevity genes, for example, FOXO3 being one. This is a major transcription factor. Again, it's regulating multiple genes involved in everything I just said, antioxidant production, anti-inflammatory production, you know, stem cell production, all these things, the response to all kinds of different stressors that happens throughout our life as we age. And you're basically able to handle that stress better. So what you do with gene therapy is just give you a boost. You get to boost more of that gene that's going to make everything else work better, kind of like a genetic tune-up. So there's a little bit of difference between gene therapy and gene editing, and I think they can both work. And it really depends. It'll be more of an individual sort of personalized type of approach because everyone – we have different genetic makeups, and we have different benefits, and there's things that we aren't as good at depending on our genetic makeup. And so it's really kind of cool that the tuning-up you can get. It is. And I think I saw an article a few months ago where it said, you know, there's going to be a time we can go in and say, you know, I want my daughter to be 5'11". I want her to have blonde hair. I want her to have blue eyes. Will we get to a point that people would choose what their kids are going to look like? Because that's pretty scary if you can get to that point. Well, I mean, that's the ethical question because, yes, you could potentially do that with the gene editing technology and CRISPR and some of the, you know, some of the other types of technology that come out and a little bit more precise that are part of CRISPR. I think that, you know, right now, I mean, think about IVF, right? You go and people are getting screening. You're screening for genetic diseases. If an embryo has a disease, you don't do it. So at a certain point, like where do you draw the line? Okay, well, I don't want my child to have cystic fibrosis. Okay, that's acceptable, right? Because that's like obviously. But that's the risk versus this is exactly what I want it to look like, right? Right. I mean, that's and that's where it's like, well, what if you want to make, What if you want to make an embryo that is smarter, that is more resilient to disease? You know, these things are probably going to be more acceptable in the community than phenotypes, than looks, right? So it's like it's hard. It's like this blurry line and what's ethical, what's not, and how do you define that? And it's going to be hard. There's going to be all sorts of questions and, I would say, problems that are going to arise as this technology advances. And it is very exciting, right? I mean, you're talking about what if we could tune up humans where we're smarter, we're more disease resistant, we live longer. I mean, who doesn't want that? What would you take? What would you do? You're in this world. Like, what would you want to see? Because for me, when I think about, you know, kids, what you would want it to look like, what you would, you know, how smart you would want them to be. Then it gets me to go think about, you know, the whole, I don't know if you saw the article came out last week about Chinese billionaires doing birth to tourism. and dropping off surrogates with hundreds of girls and, hey, I want you to go to the U.S., become a citizen, then come back in. Okay, so now let's take it even further. And then now we're making superhumans, 150 IQ, strong. They can jump 48 inches. And, I mean, what does the world look like in 50, 100 years if we're able to do that? Right. I mean, it's a really good question, not to mention the fact that, you know, if you start to screen for intelligence and, like, how do you define intelligence, right? Because we have this, like, neurodivergence. You know, people are so different, and some people are very analytical. You have that engineering type of brain, and then you have the more conspiracy type and maybe a little more paranoid. But those people also play a role in society. They can connect the dots real easy, and maybe sometimes they're making conclusions that might be not correct. But sometimes they find things that people that are really super, super analytical don't. And so it's a good question because, like, then you have to ask yourself, like, well, am I screening for a certain personality type? And how is that going to change society, right? I mean, because it's hard to draw that line. And I know we're getting into these crazy ethical questions. At the end of the day, I'm excited about healthier living. I'm excited about, you know, yeah, like intelligence. Again, how do you define intelligence? Like, that's a whole other question. We do know some genes that are involved in intelligence. One actually is called Clotho, and that gene is also involved in living longer and protecting against Alzheimer's disease. It's very interesting. Some people have different variations of that gene that makes it more active, and those individuals don't get Alzheimer's disease. They do have a higher IQ. They are smarter, and they live longer. And so there is an initiative now for some researchers that are really trying to make a type of clotho that people can sort of inject and take and get to the brain and help protect them from Alzheimer's disease, help make them live longer, perhaps be a little smarter. And that's actually research that's going on right now. So it's not like this stuff is like totally futurism stuff. This is research that's happening now, and I do think that with the help of AI, it will advance it. With that said, you said something that I think is key, and that is AI makes mistakes. And I can't emphasize that enough, and certainly with each model that has come out, you know, over the past couple of years, it's gotten better, especially if we're talking about the science, the field of science and research. But I will say this. It depends a lot on your prompt, what input you're putting in, because what I've noticed about AI is it also likes to kind of appease you. So if you're biased it a certain way with the way you're asking a question, you might get a very different answer, and I've tested this. It also depends on the model that you're using. I think that the free models don't ask science or research questions. It's not going to be accurate. If you're wanting to actually get a science, really evidence-based answer, you have to have the paid version for one and really a deep research. And that's something that's able to go out and look at the scientific literature. And that is something that I would trust much more than just using like a GPT 5.2 free version of it. So I'll say that. I'll leave it at that because you can definitely get wrong answers when it comes to asking a science-based or medicine-based question. Yesterday, my CTO came to me and said, hey, look, they measure every month which language learning model is the most accurate. And right now, for the last month, it was showing me that Gemini is at the top at 38.5% accuracy versus a lot of other things. So even until today, it's still making mistakes. And they're openly saying, we don't know it all. We are making mistakes, but, you know, in regards to brain, right, the way we think, back in the day, so maybe even still today, we would say, oh, my God, he's got a photographic memory. He just remembered. How do you remember that? You know, how do you read a book and you retain so much of it, right? how impressive will that be in 10 years 20 years where we can all you know people choose to put a wikipedia and hear all the facts that are in the world the facts like the day you were born the day i was born the day you know world war ii or such and such person died or this happened once that's in there what do you think will be impressive in two 20 30 years with human beings what would we look at and say man she's pretty impressive he's impressive what will impress us I know. It's an interesting thought experiment because it might be something that is unexpected and surprising, like more just empathy or human qualities or arts or being able to make something really creative that you're not really going to be able to do with AI, right? I don't know. Or like being able to sing a beautiful song. Like, AI can make that music. You were talking about Tupac. Right. I mean, my husband and I make AI music for my son to help him. He's been learning Mandarin. And it's, like, amazing. Like, the music that AI can make, it's almost frightening because you might go, wow, like, you know, what's going to happen to the music industry? Yes. But I do think that at the end of the day what's going to happen is as we get more, you know, advanced with AI, And as you mentioned, perhaps we do become smarter maybe through gene engineering and all sorts of other techniques and advancements. I think it's going to go back to the human condition, and that's going to be more impressive. I think that's – I don't know. That's just a guess. What do you mean by human condition? I mean, you know, the arts and empathy and just, you know, being creative and creating something that you're not going to be able to get, which is facts. Right. Yeah, I guess in bodybuilding, they'll say, you know, this is the natural Mr. Olympia competition. Right. They put nothing in their body. And this is open. You know, this guy is, you know, you can use anything and everything. And he's the Mr. Olympia champion. I wonder if we're going to get to the even today. I think we have an Olympic Games today that they're talking about called the Enhanced Games or something. I don't know. Have you heard about the Enhanced Games? It's literally called Enhanced Games. And in this Enhanced Games, they encourage you to do PED. Everybody's on PED. And just let's find out what does it look like if we're freely able to use everything, right? So I wonder if it's going to be like, you know, he naturally looks like that. That's natural beauty. You know, she's done no surgeries. He's done no surgeries. He hasn't put the stuff in his brain to be interested in what he has to say. Or else podcasts are going to be what? But then are we going to watch AI podcasts? Is there going to be two personalities like Gemini's Mary is doing a podcast with OpenAI's Bobby, and they're debating politics. And we can program one to be a leftist, one to be a conservative, and go ahead and debate this issue and state the facts. Will we be going there? Are we going to be like, man, I would much rather talk to, listen to these guys because they're regular human beings making mistakes. And is it going to be attractive to be dumb? Is it going to be attractive to make dumb comments? I really wonder what's going to happen in 20, 30 years. Because it's going to be a commodity if you're smart. So what? I can have the same thing you have. I just put a chip in my head. You're no longer competitive to me. So why go study? We would hear people say, I knew how to study for two days, memorize everything, go ace the test, and forgot all of it. And that's what college is really all about. I really wonder what's going to happen and what will we be turned on to. Mistakes. I love it. We all make them. I think so as well. I think so as well. Yesterday I'm talking to a guy who's a very successful business guy. He's telling me he's got a $100 million EBIT on all this other stuff. And he said, hey, how come my content is not doing better? How come my podcast is not doing better? And I watch him. I'm like, okay, he's a billionaire. He's done this. He's done that. He's done this. And everything. He looks good, bodybuilding, physique. I said, you're too perfect. I think the audience likes imperfection. the audience likes to see flaws in people passion yeah realness vulnerability sincerity i i think again we don't know i think in 20 years as this advances we're going to want to see human error we're going to see we're going to want to see that again just like today you see a lot of companies rely on ai on customer service some companies are like clients are like i don't want to talk to a machine i want to talk to a human being i want to talk to somebody with service so So anyway, so we'll see what happened with this. I'm just wondering sometimes where you're at with it. Yeah. I feel the same way when I get an email in, and it's so obvious when it's AI generated. I crave the real authentic email, not AI generated, right? Yeah. So Brian Johnson, have you heard about Brian Johnson who says he wants to live forever? He says he's 47 years old. He looks good. He says he's got a body of an 18-year-old when he does his tests. Do you follow what he talks about, Brian Johnson? I don't know. Maybe you've not heard of him. I've heard of him. Okay. He's our age. I think he's a year older than us. And his claims are his entire idea is anti-aging. I think he wants to live forever. And he sets his body as an 18-year-old body. What do you say about that? I say that right now the tests that are done to measure biological age, and I did talk about this a little bit without going into detail, They're done on a population level. So it's a very biostatistical test that's done that really, really relies on large, large sample numbers. And so there's these tests that are done. They're measuring epigenetic changes, and they can basically measure your biological age. But the standard of deviation is about four to five years. So when you have, you know, hundreds of thousands of different people coming into that, you know, sample size, it's a lot more accurate. You can actually do a large study and figure out, like, what someone's biological age is and what different lifestyle factors can regulate that. When you go down to these consumer-available tests at the individual level, it's a lot of noise because, again, the standard of deviation is four to five years on average. and so the test isn't really that accurate on the individual level so you could do that test and then do it again in two weeks and have five years difference right so my take home from that is you can claim all these things being 18 biologically 18 i don't think that's accurate i think that they're that you know brian johnson's doing a lot of things right with his diet and lifestyle and he is, you know, improving the way he ages, it's a lot easier to reverse accelerated aging. So in other words, if you were doing things bad in your diet, if you're eating a lot of ultra processed foods, if you're overweight, if you smoke, if you drink a lot, if you're sedentary and don't exercise, you're kind of accelerating the way you age. And it's a lot easier to slow that acceleration, which makes it look like reverse aging. But if you're already doing everything really that you can to live as healthy as you can, it's really hard to reverse that biological age by 20 years because you're already doing sort of everything, right? And that's where these new technologies come into play. So I would say I don't believe that Brian Johnson's 18. You don't believe he's 18? His biological age is 18. No, not at all. I do believe that he is healthier because he does a lot of things right. He exercises a lot, which is the number one thing you can do. He eats very clean. He's dialed in a lot of really important metrics in terms of aging healthy. But I think it's a very sensational statement to say that I'm biologically 18 even though I'm 47. I don't think that's accurate at all. It's attractive to men as age, right? People hear and they're like, wait a minute. I'd like to be 18 again. What does it take for me to be 18 again? Is there anything men can do today to get their body to be that much younger? So I'll tell you about a study that was done from Dr. Ben Levine. He's probably one of the world's leading experts in exercise physiology. Ben Levine? Ben Levine, Dr. Ben Levine. He's out of UT Southwest in Dallas. He's got a big research lab there. And he did a study on middle-aged adults. So these are adults that are age 50 years old. They had no diagnosable diseases. So they didn't have type 2 diabetes or cardiovascular disease, but they were sedentary. So they were not exercising. And I would argue that is a disease, being sedentary is a disease. But what I'm saying is they didn't have any of these other classical diseases. And he took these individuals and asked a question. Can I put them on a pretty regimented exercise program for two years and reverse the aging of their hearts? Now, your heart aging, you can accelerate it if you are smoking, if you are sedentary, if you eat a lot of added sugar. All these things accelerate the aging of your heart. So as we age, our hearts get stiffer and our hearts shrink. And that really predisposes us to cardiovascular disease, the number one killer in the United States, as well as many other developed countries. So he took these individuals and put them in two groups. One group was going to get the exercise treatment, and the other group was a sham control, sort of a placebo and they were doing sort of stretching yoga-ish type of exercises enough to make them think they were getting the intervention, right? So the individuals that got the treatment, the exercise treatment, I mean, this is a progressive program. It's two years long. You can't just take someone who's never really exercised and just immediately make them start doing five hours a week of exercise, right? It's too much. So it was a progressive loading. These individuals over the course of six months sort of worked their way up to actually doing five hours of exercise a week. a large amount of that exercise was cardiovascular exercise where they were jogging, they were on a stationary cycle, getting their heart rate up to the point where they could have a conversation, but it was very, very breathy. And then they also incorporated what's called high-intensity interval training. Have you heard of this? Of course. This is where you're getting, you know, you're doing, you're pushing yourself a little bit harder where you can't have that breathy conversation because you're working so hard, you're getting your heart rate up to 80% max heart rate or more, and then you recover for a period of time and then you do it again. And there's a lot of different types of protocols out there. They were doing one called the Norwegian four by four protocol. This is where you are for four minutes going as hard as you can and maintaining that effort for four minutes. You're not going all out the four minute intervals. So you going hard but you pacing yourself It still a HIIT workout It a HIIT workout And then you have a three recovery where you going very light You really wanting your heart rate to come down And then you do that again four times So it's four by four. And that workout they were doing twice a week and then went down to once a week. Okay. So after two years of this five hours a week, and I would say they also did some resistance training. They added some of that in there as well. the aging of their hearts was reversed by about 20 years 20 years so their hearts these were 50 year olds 52 at the end of the trial their hearts looked like a 32 year old in terms of the structure 52 to 30 yes and this is the structure so i'm talking about the hearts grew remember i told you it shrinks with age they grew and the hearts became more flexible right something every year at certain point your organs what did you say decreased by percent to two percent or was that the heart you were talking about? So that's the brain. We can talk about that because exercise also affects that. But the heart, you know, it does get stiffer and it shrinks over time. And depending on how much you exercise, the percentage can change. And one of the biggest reasons for the stiffening of the heart is actually taking in a lot of refined added sugar. So sugar, if it's not immediately taken up into your muscles, which is what exercise does, it really opens the gates and allows glucose to come into your muscles. If you're not exercising, even after you make insulin, and of course you're going to take some into adipose tissue, some into muscle, you're going to have a lot of glucose around in your vascular system. And what happens is there's a reaction that happens on the molecular level where the glucose interacts with collagen that lines the myocardium and the pericardium around your heart. And that collagen becomes stiffer when it reacts with glucose. and that collagen is there forever this is something that's around forever and so that's why exercise is so so important for increasing the flexibility of your heart because it's getting that glucose out of your vascular system out of reacting with the collagen surrounding not only your blood vessels that causes hypertension but your your heart right and so i i just think that's the most compelling and just really encouraging study for individuals that are middle age and really have never exercised, that they can actually reverse the aging of their heart by 20 years. And this is what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about doing the DNA test, the epigenetic test that has all the statistical noise. I'm talking about actual structural changes in the heart, right? So that, to me, would be the best thing that you can do. And I said five hours a week. Now, for someone that doesn't exercise at all, that probably sounds like crazy amounts of exercise. And it is. I mean, I do about six hours a week of exercise. But, you know. Does that count cardio or no? Cardio and resistance training. I do both. I do both. But I think that what's really important here is that people need to think about exercise as part of their personal hygiene. Something you have to, like, can you imagine, do you wake up every morning and brush your teeth? Do you brush your teeth before you go to bed. Why? It's a routine now for me. It's a routine. Right. And you do it because you don't want cavities, right? I don't want cavities, breath, cavities. You don't want to go to the dentist, a bunch of different things. Right. It's part of your personal hygiene. Exercise should be thought of as the same way where it's like I exercise because I don't want to get cardiovascular disease because I want to reverse brain aging. And we can talk about studies showing that as well. It's something that you really need to think about as part of your personal hygiene and as you start to develop a routine guess what it is a routine you just you start to do it it's not there's no question about it it's not an add-on it's not if i have time you're right but then the the if you think about today's era we're living in somebody will listen to this okay and they'll say give me a break i know i need to exercise tell me what the shortcut is right because we're living in the shortcut era if you think about you know serena williams i think she did a GLP one commercial for Ozempic. No, it wasn't Ozempic. It's a different company she did, even for Super Bowl. You see her when she played tennis. You see what she looks like today. The average woman looks at us and says, if she couldn't do it naturally, why should I try to do it naturally with exercise? Oprah Winfrey, don't know if you saw this clip on The View. Rob, can you pull this clip up on The View of what she said? She's on The View, and she says, it took me this many years to realize that being fat is not my fault. It's my genetics or it's my DNA. And by the way, you may agree with her. Go ahead and play this clip, Rob. Go for it. All these years I thought I was overeating. I was standing there with all the food noise, what I ate, what I should eat, how many calories was that, how long was it going to take? I thought that that was because of me and my fault. Now I understand that if you carry the obesity gene, if that is what you have, that is what makes you overeat. You don't overeat and become obese. Obesity causes you to overeat. Obesity causes you to have all of that food noise. And what the GLP-1s have done for me, and I know a number of other people, is to quiet that noise. Do you agree with her? No. Okay, tell me why. Okay, so this is going to be a very long-winded answer. Please. Because there's a lot of components there to unpack. Because the average person watches this, she's 72, 72 years old, looking like that. They're going to say, why wouldn't I do it? Right. So there's a lot of things to unpack here. Okay. First of all, there's no just obesity gene. Okay. There are genes that are associated with predisposing someone to gaining fat easier and affecting satiation and things like that easier. Right. But it's not like there's just one obesity gene that makes you obese. With that said, what she's talking about here with it wasn't my fault, you have to realize that we have studies now where you can take – there's healthy men. They're not overweight. They're not obese. And you can put them on a high-caloric, ultra-processed food diet for five days. And what I mean by that is they're consuming 1,200 to 1,500 more calories per day, predominantly from processed foods, the cereal you were talking about. This is the food that's high in added sugar and saturated fat. And what happens is it causes their brain to become insulin resistant. Yes, you can cause your brain also to become insulin resistant. We usually think about, you know, our cells in our body becoming insulin resistant. What happens when your brain becomes insulin resistant is the following. For one, insulin in the brain plays a very important role. And that role is to basically tell the body how to store fat and how to use energy and whether or not you're satiated after eating a meal. And what happens is when you're insulin resistant in the brain, it all gets messed up. And so your body starts to store fat, not as what's called subcutaneous fat, that kind of fat that you can pinch and eat. It's visceral fat. This is the belly fat. This is the fat that's deeply surrounding your organs. This is a very dangerous type of fat because this fat is metabolically active. It is generating inflammation. It is constantly being metabolized in what's called free fatty acids, which then cause insulin resistance, right? And so what happens is that you can, these individuals, these healthy young men, all of a sudden, even though they didn't really gain much weight on the scale, they gained visceral fat and they were no longer, you know, satiated. So what happens is when you become insulin resistant, both in the brain and in the body, so visceral fat gaining, they were gaining fat around their liver. I mean, they were gaining fat, this visceral fat that is really, really dangerous. that visceral fat what happens is every time you eat you know a meal that's got a lot of glucose for example refined ultra processed meal your body makes insulin but you're insulin resistant so you're not able to respond to that insulin and so what happens is your body overcompensates and produces your pancreas causes more insulin to be released as an overcompensation to help your body bring that glucose into your muscle or into your adipose tissue and then what happens is your blood sugar crashes and so that tells the brain oh i'm in a i'm in a crisis i need energy right now and you crave these high energy you know high calorically dense foods and it's a vicious cycle where you start to overeat more you can you can totally reset that system by decreasing your calorie intake and there's a variety of ways of doing that and also by including high intensity interval training any type of aerobic exercise is good it causes you to lose visceral fat even if you don't shed the pounds on the scale the losing of the visceral fat is the key because that's the whole cycle of basically disrupting your satiety hormones how you feel you know satiated after you eat or like hungry you know all of a sudden you're hungry even though you just ate a meal right that's all part of insulin resistance and visceral fat and so if you reduce your calorie intake and there's ways you can do that counting calories is one a lot of people like intermittent fasting intermittent fasting is something that I do and it's really, you know, I'm middle-aged, right? I told you I'm 47 and I've realized that everything that I do, even though I've been doing it for years, all of a sudden as your hormones start to change, you know, you do start to kind of get more visceral fat and that's something that's known to happen with women as they're aging, right? I had to cut calories. That was the main thing I had to do, even though I was doing high intensity exercise all that stuff calorie cutting is the number one way that you can actually lose visceral fat and ultimately lose weight and essentially the glp1 you know receptor agonist these drugs that are ozambic and all the other next generation ones are essentially doing that you're you're causing yourself to be satiated right so you're it's essentially doing what intermittent fasting is doing but it's also doing other things it's slowing gastric emptying right so you're basically the food sitting around in your intestines longer, which... It sits there longer. Yes. It's not... It doesn't accelerate the immune system. So the GLP-1 receptor agonists, like Ozembeck, so, you know, semaglutide, they're slowing what's called gastric emptying. So the food takes a long... It stays in your intestines longer, which is part of why you're satiated. There's a lot of, of course, side effects. But intermittent fasting, basically, you can also lose weight and also reset your hormones. You can lose visceral fat. When I say reset your hormones, I mean so that you're satiated after a meal, so that you're not feeling hungry immediately after you ate because the visceral fat does start to lose. It's the first thing that's lost. In fact, many studies have shown that. If you calorie restrict, that's the first thing that goes, and it really does help reset the system. When people first start an intermittent fasting protocol, if they've never done it, it can be challenging because they're not what's called metabolically flexible. So that means that essentially your body is really capable of using fatty acids as energy to make ketone bodies. This is something that's a very sort of clean source of energy that's used. It's great for the brain. um but if you're if you're never if you've never really fasted if you're constantly grazing you're eating and you don't exercise because exercise also can make you metabolically flexible then your body isn't used to it and it's a little bit of an activation energy you have to kind of push past it it's a little bit more challenging but your body adapts and so after a couple of weeks guess what like if you're if you're intermittent fasting and there's a lot of ways to do that so you know say you skip a meal then you're not you're not like i haven't eaten anything today you know yet and i usually eat my first meal around noon do you do this every day seven i do even sundays i i do mostly every day yeah and but it's it's i'm not hungry until noon because your body adapts and ketone bodies which are what are made when you when you're basically metabolizing fatty acids for fuel rather than glucose is those ketone ketones like beta hydroxy butyrate there's they're they're satiating like you're you're satiated and so um it takes a person We can store glucose in our liver as glycogen, and you have to be fasted for anywhere between 12 to 36 hours for your liver to deplete all their glycogen levels. And that all depends on – 12 to 36. It all depends on your diet. If you're eating a lot of carbs, refined carbs, it's going to be more like 36 hours. If you're eating more of a whole foods type of diet, like protein, lean meats, poultry, fish, vegetables, glycogen is going to be depleted after like 12 hours. and then you know anything about beyond that you're going to be in what's called like ketosis so for me i usually stop eating dinner 6 p.m usually sometimes you know social obligations push that a little bit later and i don't eat my first meal to until around noon so for me i'm fasting for about you know 18 hours right um now there's the there's the 16-8 where you basically stop eating your meal around 8 p.m. and don't eat your first meal until noon or or no I mean if you 8 p.m. or you could start if you stop at 6 p.m. and it depends right so like whatever works for you some people like they have to wake up in the morning and eat breakfast like I said there is an adjustment period for me it works really well other people like to do you know they're gonna they're gonna skip lunch or something and that that's a way of reducing your calorie intake and And at the end of the day, calorie intake is what causes weight loss. And that is something, again, that you're not going to lose the weight as rapid as you would on a GLP-1 because it really causes you to not get it. So why would she, 72 years old, access to all the money in the world, one of the most famous people in the world, she can call any doctor she wants. Who convinced her that she was right about the statement that she made? She knows millions of people are going to see it. Yeah. Well, I think for one, it's easier to take a pill to help you lose weight. And that's something that people like her know. How am I going to affect the masses? You know, because not everyone's going to do intermittent fasting, right? Exercise, you can exercise your way out of obesity. You have to change your diet because imagine how much, do you know how hard it is to burn, you know, 1,500 calories by exercise, right? It's incredibly hard. You exercise because of the anti-aging effects. Like there's a lot of different things happening with exercise that are good for the heart and the brain. But to lose weight, you have to stop eating. You have to reduce your calorie intake. And that does require effort. And so I think that it's easier to say, oh, it's not my fault. There's these genes. And, yeah, genes can make it where it is harder for a person who has certain variations in genes to lose as much weight as someone who doesn't. But that doesn't make it impossible. It just means you have to put in more effort. And, you know, doing intermittent fasting or counting calories does require effort on your part, whereas taking a pill does not. The pill does it for you, right? And so, you know, it all comes down to risk versus benefit, right? Like if you have someone who's obese, obesity itself accelerates the aging process. It increases the risk of 13 different types of cancer, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease. If you are obese, you are on a bad trajectory, and anything that's going to help you lose that weight is going to be beneficial for both. Including GLP-1? Including GLP-1. Really? Receptor agonist. Yes. So you're more for – so if I'm 320 pounds, 5'8", okay, and if I exercise and keep a decent diet, it will take me a while to get to 180 where I need to be, let's just say, right? But if I get on GLP-1 and if I can get there faster in three months and six months, whatever the timeline may be, you're supportive for me doing GLP-1? No, no, no, no, absolutely not. That's not what I'm saying at all. I think it's better if you can do it yourself. I think that you're going to avoid any adverse side effects. When you lose a lot of weight really rapidly, you can increase the risk of gallbladder stones. GLP-1 receptor agonists are associated with, theoretically, an increased risk of thyroid cancer. All that's preclinical data, though, so there's not really human studies showing that. But it's still a thing to think about, right? If it's causing it in animals, like, we just may not have that longitudinal data yet. I don't know. There are pancreatitis risk. I mean, there are risks associated with it, right, with losing weight. Too much weight loss too fast. Now, if you're someone that's willing to calorie restrict either through intermittent fasting, which is a great tool, or by counting calories, and you know at that point you know people on average can lose if you're doing a really strict calorie restriction like 800 you know or fewer calories per day people lose on average between like two to five pounds um per per is it per week so you know you really could get 800 yeah two to five a week so if i'm 320 800 if i'm 320 what do you think my intake is it depends it i mean probably i mean you just you have to cut out a lot of calories right so that's why people turn to these these that's it yes so so so the the the control the discipline to control and say i'm not going to eat it versus you know what just give it to me i'm going to take the shot and i'm going to go the faster way uh instead of doing it the old-fashioned exercise way the good diet way yeah i i don't know by the way you also speak a lot about creatine i remember back in the days when I was 14 years old, 15 years old, we're all bodybuilding, lifting weights, and EAS came up with creatine. Everybody was using creatine back in the days. And then it kind of went away for 15 years. It looks like creatine is making a comeback. Tell me why you're so pro-creatine. Well, I started taking creatine. I got really serious about resistance training a couple of years ago after having a lot of experts on my podcast that really was compelling to me that muscle mass is very important to maintain as you age right and being being someone that was so cardio focused it was like okay i got to start really focusing also on resistance training and so creatine were you an athlete back in the day like did you compete i i did i was like interesting athlete so so i was a competitive jump roper and ice skater i know not like the most common thing yeah i was i i started a jump routine with my best friend when i was in second grade and um second grade yeah yeah yeah so So San Diego Sandskippers was the name of the jump rope team, and it was part of the International Rope Skipping Organization at the time. They have a different name now. But essentially, there's teams that were all around, not only just the U.S., but it was global. It still is. And we would jump rope, and we would compete. So we would go and compete every year. There was a camp in Boulder, Colorado. Everyone would come from around the world, and we would compete. Wow. Yeah. And listen, it's hard exercise. It's really hard. Right. It's shoulders, it's arms, it's forearms. It's a full body exercise. And weight bearing, so you're getting the bone density benefits, which thank goodness. So I was a competitive jump roper from the age of about 8 to 16, and that was a big part of my life. And not only just a competitive jump roper, but also a very leadership role because I would travel around and start teams at different schools. So I was going to schools, doing demonstrations with my team, and then starting teams for them. And so you get this very leadership role. Early on. confidence building early on so it was really great in san diego in california yeah okay yeah the team was very cool anyways that was a complete i wasn't taking creatine then but um fast forward you know a couple of years ago i was you know probably about 45 44 when i really started getting serious about resistance training and creatine came into that equation for me and why is that well when you when you take supplemental creatine in the form of creatine monohydrate it's the most well-studied form creatine then in the body it gets converted into creatine phosphate and it's basically stored that way in in your muscles for example and it's the major source of energy so you need creatine phosphate the phosphate is used to make energy and so what happens is that when you've taken creatine and you're doing training like anything that's resistant training any kind of explosive training any kind of high interval you know high intensity interval training even anaerobic exercise the creatine allows you to make energy faster and so it basically affects your training volume you're able to do one to two more reps per set because you're recovering faster you're making energy faster and so it plays a role in that you know exercise volume and that's why if you if you look at many many different studies of people doing you know resistance training versus resistance training with creatine they'll gain more muscle mass or lean body mass including muscle, they'll gain strength benefits if they're also adding creatine, not because creatine itself is anabolic. It's not. It's because it's able to, you're able to do more work, right? So it's allowing you to do more work. Therefore, you're getting the muscle adaptations, right? So I became very interested in creatine because of that. And it was very clear to me after looking at the scientific literature, after talking to experts like Dr. Karen Kandao, he's out of the University of regina he does a lot of creatine research that if you do five grams a day that's about what it takes to saturate your muscle tissue takes about three weeks to get there where five grams okay muscles are ready and and so that was that was what i was doing initially and then i started really getting deeper into the creatine research and i was like wow from the neck up is where it's really interesting the effects on the brain so creatine yes okay yeah so we make creatine we can make it from our liver well yeah so we make it we can make it without any steak without any meat our liver can make it one to three grams and our brain can make it again and then we can have a dietary source of it as you mentioned the major dietary source is meat muscle meat being of course the highest because it's stored in muscle right poultry fish also has higher amounts of creatine So as you can imagine, vegetarians and vegans really in trouble if they're not supplementing because they're only relying what their body can produce. With that said, you know, studies started coming out looking at the effects of creatine on the brain. And it's really, to me, very exciting. This area of research is new. I think it's the new part of creatine research that's kind of exploding now. A lot of creatine researchers were previously only looking at muscle. Now they're also looking at the brain. So the brain, as I mentioned, also makes its own creatine. But obviously, the brain's using a lot of energy as well. And so creatine being, you know, stored as creatine phosphate is a great source of energy. The problem is if you're only taking in five grams a day, your muscles are consuming all of it. It's saturating them. And so research out of Germany has shown that if you take 10 grams a day, you can actually increase the creatine levels in certain brain regions by twofold. Okay, that was the first study to me that was convinced. 10 grams a day, right? Because you have to go above that five to get spillover to the brain. Okay, again, these are preliminary studies. A lot more to do, but I'm just telling you, you know, why I now. You're going to get everybody using creatine now. And now I take, this is why I take 10 grams a day. You take 10 a day. So creatine, let me just tell you. So creatine for the brain, now the question is, well, if it's getting into the brain, what is it doing there, right? And so there are studies showing that really creatine in the brain shines under a stressful condition. Okay. So that could be psychological stress. That could be sleep deprivation. That could be brain aging, neurodegenerative disease, Alzheimer's disease, anything that's stressing the brain. That's where creatine shines because stress is an energy consumer. It is taking energy away from normal brain function. And so when you give yourself more energy, you know, in the form of creatine, you're now allowing that energy to go to cognition, right? So there are studies showing, for example, sleep deprivation being the classic way to stress your brain, that if you take someone who's healthy and you sleep deprive them for 21 hours, but you give them 20 to 25 grams of creatine, their cognitive function is not only not compromised like it would be if you didn't sleep for 21 hours and then did a battery of brain tests right it was better than their baseline cognitive function so it improved their cognitive function even more than their baseline which is before they were sleep deprived there's also studies showing that alzheimer's disease people with you know mild cognitive decline early alzheimer's disease if they're given 10 or 20 grams of creatine it can improve cognitive function as well so do you drink it just with water do you mix it with grape juice well you know i don't know if you've seen the studies it's better if it's with grape juice what do you what do you mix it with i'm not a big fan of juice because it's really high in sugar without the fiber matrix the fiber matrix like if it was a fruit slows the glucose response juice no bueno i would say don't mix it with juice um i actually put my creatine in first of all i do 10 grams a day and i usually split it up between five grams and five grams and i usually do the first one in like my cup of coffee don't be worried about coffee negating the effects i talked to the expert dr you know darren kando unless you're consuming massive massive amounts of caffeine like if you were doing like caffeine pills or something then maybe i would be worried but not with a normal like you mix it with coffee i mix it with coffee morning and night or i do it all in the morning you know that's when i want my brain to function optimally so today for example i came from the west coast i'm now on the east coast so i am completely in a different time zone three hours behind i had to wake up three hours earlier than my brain wasn't working as you know it was sleep deprivation so i actually took 20 grams this morning and i do that when i travel when i'm sleep deprived i up my usual 10 grams to 20 grams a day because I've noticed it's not like a stimulant like caffeine, but I am better cognitively if I have that 20 grams after being sleep deprived. And, you know, again, maybe it's placebo because I know about the studies, but you know what? Placebo works, so I don't care. And there's not a real downside. That's funny. That's where I'm at with creatine. I get my mom to take it. I think, you know, aging itself is a stress on the brain. And like I said, it's the same thing as training. Creatine, if you're not training, isn't going to make you gain muscle mass or strength. It carries water weight sometimes. It can sometimes cause you to carry water weight. Like I said, creatine was something that EAS brought to the market in 1992. You know, Bill Phillips, I don't know if you're familiar with this guy named Bill Phillips or not. Have you ever heard of Muscle Media 2000? This guy had like the number one magazine in bodybuilding that every bodybuilder would read. because they had muscle magazine they had flex which was all the pictures and you would see the people muscle media was the science so anybody that wanted the science of bodybuilding this was the guy uh he wrote a book called body for life yeah that guy right there he was one of the first guys that openly came out and talked about you know i do steroids this is what i use and he went through the whole thing and creatine monohydrate was introduced and then they brought out vanadol sulfate and then he brought out HMB. HMB was massive in the early 90s, mid 90s. But it's interesting to see Cretan making a comeback. Makes me want to think about getting back on Cretan. I haven't been on Cretan for 20 plus years. Oh, really? Do you exercise? I do. Yes, I do. 20 plus years. Oh, you should be doing 10 grams a day. Yeah. Well, try it out and let me know. I'm going to. For one, your training volume and recovery, you should notice an effect there where it's like you'll like i said one to two more reps per set recovery is easier but i'm really interested in the brain because brain and what it does i'll tell you for me and again i am totally like could be placebo if i don't get my 10 grams in the day i will have an afternoon slump if i get my 10 grams i am good i am good this is what makes you likable you said even if it's placebo because your space the health space is filled with a lot of overly confident people that speak in this is it guaranteed you know and it and it makes the audience but what makes you attractive is you'll say test it for yourself see what happens we'll see let's look at the both research when we set out to create a shoe that blends comfort function and luxury we had the choice to make it fast, we had the choice to make it cheap. We chose Nike. Instead, we chose Tuscany. We chose true Italian craftsmanship, each pair touched by 50 skilled hands. We chose patience, spending two years perfecting every detail, and we chose the finest quality at every step. Introducing the Future Looks Right collection. Not rushed, not disposable, not ordinary, rather intentional, luxurious, timeless. By the way, do you follow Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong? Do you follow him? No. Okay, so Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, he bought the LA Times, I don't know how many years ago, many, many years ago. That's him right there. 8 billion dollar guy. he came out and he's been talking a lot about okay i'm sorry i was up by four billion 12 billion auto guy very successful south africa first 24 years never once watched tv he was all about reading and learning and he's been critical about chemotherapy he doesn't say it's not good to never use it he said there's places for it but he calls it it's like a nuclear bomb when you do chemotherapy in your body right and sometimes it also kills off the good things that you need that are fighting you know so what is your position with chemotherapy cancer and the progress we're making with cancer so i by the way i did my phd at saint jude children's research hospital which is the leading research center for pediatric cancer and you know they've done phenomenal work in in lowering you know the the death rate of pediatric cancers which are predominantly leukemias lymphomas, glioblastomas. And I would tend to agree, depending on the cancer type, different chemotherapies are more effective. Now, I would say for leukemias, lymphomas, things that are blood cancers, that's where it's effective because it's easy for the chemotherapy to reach those cells in the blood. It's easy for it to reach the cells. When you're talking about a solid tumor in the liver, in the pancreas, you know, in the breast. It's a different story because tumor cells become hypoxic, so they cut off the circulation to get to them. And so chemotherapy, it has to be delivered through the blood and circulation to get to the tumor site, right? And so that is probably what Dr. Sun-Chiong is referring to, to some degree. It is a blunt tool in terms of cancer treatment, but it's been very effective, for example, with pediatric cancers and leukemias and lymphomas. In terms of what we can do to lower our cancer risk and also improve effectiveness of cancer treatment, there's, I think, a lot of evidence out there showing exercise really the key. I mean, exercise, for example, and not just any type of exercise, but more of that vigorous intensity exercise. In fact, there was a recent study in Nature Communications that came out. And the study was a very, and we're talking like over 100,000, I think it was close to 200,000 participants that were wearing what are called accelerometers. So these little devices on their wrist, they're not measuring heart rate, but they're measuring like how fast you're moving. It's an accelerometer, right? And so it's empirical data where you can actually measure people's physical activity based on their movement. And then you can look at outcomes, for example. Almost like a Fitbit, but except it measures. Movement. Electromechanical sensor that measures proper acceleration, the range of change in velocity. That's right. So, for example, you're working out, you're running, you're moving your arms. It's measuring the movement. So the faster the movement is sort of considered to be more moderate to vigorous intensity exercise depending on how fast the movement is. So if I'm walking versus running versus sprinting. Right. So if you're very, very light walking, like walking around the house, that would be considered light exercise. If you are, I would say, fast walking, that would be more moderate intensity exercise. If you're jogging, that would be vigorous intensity in this study that I'm referring to. The key here is that we have empirical data that was calculating, and I am going to bring this back to cancer, I promise, that was calculating how the types of intensity of exercise, vigorous versus moderate versus light, and outcomes. So all-cause mortality, cancer-related mortality, cardiovascular-related mortality, type 2 diabetes. And what was found was completely astounding. Very much different than what the normal current exercise guidelines are. So, for example, you may have heard, well, the guidelines say that we should do 150 minutes to 300 minutes of moderate intensity exercise per week to be, quote, unquote, healthy, or 75 minutes to 150 minutes of vigorous type of exercise to be healthy, right? So you basically cut it in half, one to two ratio. By the way, that was all based on caloric expenditure, right? We're not talking about losing fat. We're talking about wanting to prevent cancer, cardiovascular disease, dying from all causes, including respiratory causes of illness. So that number is out the window. This new data shows that if you're doing vigorous intensity exercise, the type of jogging, for example, swimming, tennis, that's all vigorous intensity. that for every one minute you do of that, if you're wanting to lower all-cause mortality, you have to do four minutes of moderate intensity or an hour and a half of light. So talk about efficiency. One to four for every one minute is four or hour and a half of light? So for every one minute of vigorous intensity is four minutes of moderate intensity. You have to do four minutes of all-cause mortality. Light is an hour and a half. Stop it. That's for all-cause mortality, dying from all non-accidental causes. It gets better. If you're wanting to prevent cardiovascular disease, cardiovascular-related mortality, for every one minute of vigorous, okay this is cycling this is jogging swimming you have to do eight minutes of moderate intensity okay moderate so that would be like you know speed like walking with more intent right so you more uh speed walking so eight minutes of that or again you're getting into like the hour to two hour range of light of light exercise so that would be just walking around the house basically for cancer However, if you wanted to prevent basically cancer mortality for every one minute of vigorous intensity exercise, you had to do almost four minutes, so three and a half to four minutes of moderate intensity or two and a half hours of light walking. Okay. And so the point here being is we have a lot of control over our disease risk, including cancer. Exercise is the key and not just any type of exercise. You have to get your heart rate up. You have to move. Right. faster you have to have this you know more intent type of exercise and this kind of goes i would say along those lines we have what are called the vilpa studies the vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity studies and these are studies also with accelerometers where people are doing vigorous intensity exercise but they're not it's not a structured type of exercise so they're not just getting up and doing one minute of body weight squats or you know a minute of high knees or jumping jacks, all these things I did this morning, by the way. What time? They're doing – What time did you exercise this morning? Right after I woke up. Here? Yeah, here in Fort Lauderdale. Okay, got it. So basically they're doing – they're sprinting up the stairs to get to work. They don't take elevators. They're doing that sort of everyday situation, right? Individuals that do – let's say they do three minutes of that just brief burst of getting their heart rate up, moving, you know, walking really like faster, you know, sprinting up the stairs. And they do that three times a day. Okay. So it's a total of nine minutes of vigorous exercise a day. That's associated with a 40% lower all cause mortality and a 40% lower cancer related mortality compared to not doing it. And a 50% lower cardiovascular related mortality. Okay, this is phenomenal because it really shows that you don't have to go to the gym and spend an hour at the very least. You can accumulate these short bursts of exercise. They have to be at least a minute long to have an effect, three minutes if you're really going for that robust effect. If you're only doing three to four minutes a day, it's still associated with a 30% lower cancer-related mortality. Again, to bring it back to the cancer, you know, there are things that you can do to lower your cancer mortality risk and to lower your cancer incidence as well. Diet, obesity, obesity accelerates 13 different types of cancer. So weight loss is also something that's critical and really does lower your cancer risk. Okay. But let's say there's this scenario where you get cancer and there is a genetic component. Let's say you just, you know, the genetic jackpot, you unfortunately got it, right? You have cancer. There are now studies, and I had a researcher on my podcast. It's a new field. It's called exercise oncology. So Dr. Kerry Kernier, he's also from Canada, he's one of the leaders in this field of exercise oncology. And what he does is he does studies with individuals that already have cancer, a lot of prostate cancer he looks at, also colon cancer and breast cancer. And these individuals that are undergoing perhaps a classical type of standard of care treatment like chemo or radiation or the combination of the two. But he adds on exercise to that therapy. And those individuals, it's dramatic how much they respond to the cancer treatment much, much better. Where they're killing the cancer cells, the tumor is shrinking. They're dramatically improving their cancer survival. So the mortality goes down and their recurrence goes down. So every possible metric is improving if you're adding the exercise onto a classical cancer treatment therapy. So again, I think exercise is that toggle, and it's so, so important. And I know I talked about a lot of things. It's a lot of unpacking here. No, I mean it's interesting. Again, for you, it goes back to a process of something I can't control, right? in a society of living in short term um you know when you're talking about obesity all the obesity stuff that we talked about earlier with glp1 i can take glp1 and be at a body weight that i'm okay with right let's just say i'm 5'6 135 and i'm a female 45 years old but if i don't exercise that doesn't prevent me from the risks i have of here i still have to exercise to prevent this from happening. 40% lower cancer, 50% lower cardio if I'm doing three minutes, three intervals of three minutes of HIIT throughout the day. That's insane to look at how simple that is because we have that time. We can do that. Totally. You have that time in here, and the reverse is also true, Patrick. So for example, a really good biomarker of whether or not you do cardiovascular exercise is something called cardiorespiratory fitness. It's often measured as vo2 max have you heard of this of course it's maximal oxygen uptake during maximal exercise okay all you have to know is that cardiorespiratory fitness is a biomarker of your health and longevity so for example there have been studies showing that people with a high cardiorespiratory fitness are 80 less likely to die from all cause you know early all whatever that is fill in the blank cancer cardiovascular disease respiratory disease right than someone with a low cardiorespiratory fitness. But what's even more compelling than that, well, that's not surprising. We just talked about that. If you're physically active, you're going to be healthy. You're going to lower your risk of, you know, dying early from any of those diseases. What's interesting is that people that have a low cardiorespiratory fitness, that predicted their early mortality the same or even, like, more than smoking, than type 2 diabetes, than cardiovascular disease. So in other words, having a low cardio respiratory fitness was like having those diseases in terms of early mortality risk. Showing you, and this goes back to what I said earlier, being sedentary is a disease. And when you start thinking about it as a disease, it's a disease. You need to be physically active. And to avoid that disease, you have to get up and move. And it doesn't have to be an hour in the gym. It can be these short, brief bursts of what are called exercise snacks. Now, this is the more, you know, I would say structured type, like I did this morning. You get up and you do three minutes of bodyweight squats. You do three minutes of jumping jacks. You do high knees, something that gets your heart rate up, something that makes it where after you're done, you're breathing. You're sweating. You get sweat on your brow. That stuff you can do and make it part of your personal hygiene. You still jump rope? I do. It's part of my routine. Every day. I don't do it every day. So I do a lot of what's called CrossFit types of exercising. So I do Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, I do an hour-long sort of CrossFit type of workout, what includes oftentimes jumping rope. It includes a lot of explosive types of working out. Buy yourself a wood for you. I have a trainer that comes to my house twice a week, and the other two times I do it at my friend's house with my friends. And so, you know, whatever works for you, you know, if you don't have access to it. Trainers help because there's accountability, and they're really, like, helping you just kind of get that structure and that routine. but I think you know in addition to the reason I work out is actually for my brain to be honest like I know all these other benefits that's like the positive side effects you know in terms of like lowering cardiovascular disease type 2 diabetes like cancer all that is I do it for my brain like I absolutely need to work out to function and to feel happy so you know and this kind of goes down this I don't want to go down this whole like rabbit hole of happiness but that is a component of longevity and some people if you're like me and you're more prone to anxiety you're more prone to obsessing over things that can that can is your birthday what month june june what 26 so cancer june 26 we got married on june 26 our youngest daughter is born june 26 and one of our good friends is born on june 26 their daughter so june 26 for us is a big day oh that's hilarious so anxiety so you're saying prone to anxiety why because you're competitive prone to anxiety because of your own personal standards and expectation of yourself why prone to anxiety i think all of the above okay yeah i'm definitely very competitive i also you know it's you think about a lot of things a little bit like you kind of obsess about a lot of things and details and you kind of go down that rabbit hole and when you start to like go too deeply about too many things that can make you start to see things and then worry about them you know are you more the engineer brain or the conspiracy brain you were talking here you're more the engineer brain yeah logic systematic step-by-step why do we do it this way definitely got it predictable are you like data-driven type of decisions being made yes okay so that's why let's talk about the anxiety and panic and and all of that right for people who are in high intense environments like you're debating you know you hit the stage like i remember the debate stage first time trump went on i'm like i wonder how he's going to be the first time he gets on with hillary and if you pay attention the first seven minutes you can hear him breathing even trump he's breathing hard it's like wow he's breathing hard and you watch some of these guys get on debate stage they get fully nervous and the arguments going back and forth or you're doing a show cameras are all on and they're an audience, live audience, you're speaking. How do you manage your imagination from not going wild so you can stay stable? There's a lot of different, I would say, little hacks that can be done that I use, and I can tell you about them and why I do them in terms of the evidence. I'm curious. So first and foremost would be the exercise, and that's why I did 10 minutes of vigorous intensity exercise before I came here. For one, it's been showed to improve cognition, which I want. You're going to want that in a debate. You're going to want that in any type of public speaking sort of engagement, right? You're going to want to be cognitively sharp. And study after study have shown that just 10 minutes of that, especially the vigorous intensity exercise, does improve reaction time by, you know, a few milliseconds, which translate to about 14% improved cognition, right? And that's a big change. So that is one reason. The other thing is with the anxiety and, you know, the basically like filtering out a lot the sensory information that can help you focus more. That's also been shown to be improved after, again, just even 10 minutes of vigorous intensity exercise. The other thing is that what happens is, you know, public speaking, whether it's debate, which is another level, it's challenging, right? It is challenging. It's taxing. Exercise, if you engage in exercise, it's also hard. And that's why the hardness comes into play. You're doing something really hard at the start of your day. it takes mental effort to do something hard it's not just working your muscles it's also working your brain your brain is working hard and what i have noticed from my own experience is that when i do hard exercise whether that's high intensity exercise or for me just resistance training weight lifting that is hard for me everything else is easier everything else is easier and so it makes it easier to handle other types of stress mentally. Okay. So one is exercise. What's that? One is exercise. One is exercise. And not just any, it's more of the hard, hard five. Yeah. Two, and this is, this is why I'm fasted right now is the ketones that are produced during ketosis. So again, you have to be fasted for anywhere between 12 or more hours to start to really use fatty acids as energy and that energy you're making ketones and the ketones is actually what's used as energy well the ketones are not just a clean energy source they're also a signaling molecule it's a mode of communication between your body and other parts of the body like the brain so it's basically your body's way of telling your brain hey this is a stressful situation I don't have any food. By the way, humans throughout, you know, like however, you know, many thousands or millions, whatever you believe, however old the earth is, you know, we were always, you know, we were subject to periods of no food, right? We didn't always just have Instacart and Postmates and things that were easily available to just get food. So it's an adaptation that's in our genes. And what happens is these ketones that are produced signal to the brain, it's a stressful time. you know i need to for one make more brain drive neurotrophic factor you know this is a neurotrophic factor that's involved in learning and memory and producing more neurons but also in what's called neuroplasticity the ability of your brain to change and adapt to a you know changing environment very very important it also is anxiolytic ketones are anxiolytic meaning they help lower anxiety they help increase increase something called gaba that's an inhibitory neurotransmitter. So for me, what the ketones do is they sort of calm the extra noise in the back of my brain and help me just focus on what the task is. And that's really important for that situation. I'm talking about like a debate is you want to be able to like calm down the extra noise in the back where you're thinking about all the little things that can be distracting. So you're not like on your game. For that reason, I also take exogenous ketones. Now, exogenous ketones are something that you can ingest, get those ketones in your bloodstream to have similar effects, but not have to be fasting to get them. And that is something else I do use. BHPs. Yes. Okay. And it's something that I used before, like I had some this morning before I came here. I do that usually in situations where I'm on a podcast, I'm doing a presentation. anything public speaking where, like you said, the anxiety does go up. And even if you've done it a lot, I mean, it's still part of human nature, right? I mean, the stress response happens. And so that's something else I do. By the way, I want to tell you that taking exogenous ketones, if you are fasting, it's going to stop you from actually using more fat and basically losing that fat because exogenous ketones are a signal to your liver that there's enough energy there. You flood your system with this, you know, BHB, this beta-hydroxybutyrate. And so if you're wanting to lose weight, if you're fasting to lose weight, the exogenous ketones are not going to help you, but they will help you be more cognitively aware. So that's another thing to do. I would say another little protocol or hack that I use to lower my anxiety in high-stress situations, another one would be cold exposure. um so deliberate cold exposure is also something that for one it's hard like no one wants to go sit in a 49 degree fahrenheit cold water bath for two minutes i mean it's very hard it's uncomfortable so you're getting that you're getting that same effect that you get from doing hard exercise where you're getting the hard thing done that way everything else is easier but the other thing that it does is it increases norepinephrine and to some degree dopamine but particularly norepinephrine. That is both a hormone and a neurotransmitter that helps with focus and attention. It helps kind of lower some of that background anxiety. And so that's another thing that people can use. And I used to do a lot of cold showers before I would go like on a podcast or something. I haven't been doing that lately. Now I go to the beta-hydroxybutyrate because it really kind of checks the box for me. You do the cold plunger now? I do have a cold plunger at home and I am embarrassed to say that I very rarely use it. I'm a summertime cold plunger, I would say, more seasonal than, for example, my husband who really likes doing the cold plunge every day. What does he do? He likes to do it, interestingly, at night. Before he goes to sleep. Before he goes to sleep because it cools his body down. Interesting. Which is funny because sauna or deliberate heat exposure is something that I use to improve my sleep. And, you know, I've talked about this. I did a little short video on it. There are mechanisms there that explain why heat exposure would help improve sleep and deep sleep, that kind of restorative sleep that you want. Because when you're exposing yourself to heat, you're making somnogenic cytokines. These are, you know, when you get sick, you're tired, right? You're tired. Part of that is, one, because the activation of the immune system is sucking all your energy away. You don't want that. Two is because activation of the immune system, they're releasing cytokines that are called somnogenic. They induce sleepiness. And so the sauna can also do that where your sauna or I would say hot bath, deliberate heat exposure, whatever modality you're choosing to use, also can increase. Extreme heat or extreme cold? But extreme, I wouldn't go up to the 200 degree Fahrenheit. I'm talking more like 180 degrees Fahrenheit. But yes, exactly. So although some people feel like the cold wakes them up, you know, and so my husband, I don't know if he's an outlier, but he likes to cool his body up. Before you go to sleep. Not like right before. I mean, we're talking like a couple of hours. Okay. But then it will settle down and you're – okay. Yes. And the same goes with the sauna. You want to do it a couple of hours before your bedtime because you want to cool down first. And so what I like to do is I'll do a hot tub or a sauna a couple hours before bed, and then I hit the cold shower to cool myself down. And that's something that – Sauna, cold shower. That's interesting. Yes. Okay. All right. So we got anxiety. We got exercise, proper fasting, ketones, right, BHP ketones, cold exposure. Now, what if I'm an athlete? What if I play high-level sports? I already exercise. I got a good diet. but you know i know if i'm a quarterback i want to be able to make that pass i want to find a way to lower my anxiety as an athlete how do i do it well i think for example the the um beta hydroxy butyrate might come into play there and also again the cold exposure so for for athletes that are like high level elite there's studies showing that cold exposure even done before for example like tennis players or kayaks another one if they do cold exposure before like a race it actually improves performance as well and that's probably because it's lowering inflammation there's an acute response of lowering inflammation inflammation can also play a role in cognitive function anxiety in focus and attention you know all these things but i i would say the the beta hydroxybutyrate is sort of the the health hack that i would go to because again it's being used as a really clean source of energy. You also want to be able to make fast decisions, right? Whether you're a football player or a tennis player or whatever, you want your brain to be able to make those decisions quickly. That's something that's going to happen. And then lowering the anxiety as well. So I think all those sort of point to why, you know, taking it inside just keep telling me health. I'm going to ask you a question. I'm curious what you'll say about this. You're married and you have kids. How many kids you guys have? I have one. Okay. So what is healthier? Being married with kids married no kids or staying single i would say there are any ties to health absolutely being married with kids i think that's on like unanimously like why is that because happiness is really linked to longevity and health and happiness a very very big component as dr arthur brooks who does research out of harvard i recently had him arthur c brooks he's amazing he's phenomenal he's amazing he's phenomenal yeah i mean glasses he wears glasses yeah he's amazing yeah but his you know he's done research he's written two new york times best-selling books and he's got a third one on the way coming in march he's amazing what he calls the macro nutrients of happiness one of that is enjoyment right and enjoyment is something that you get by experiencing something with another person it's not something that you're doing alone It's experiences with people that you love, right? And if you're not married and you have no kids, I mean, you really have to really put in a lot of effort to try to have that enjoyment, right? Married with kids, you've got your spouse. You've got your kids. I mean, anyone that's a parent knows the love you feel for them is unmeasurable. I mean, it's just – and the joy you get from being their parents, sure, there's, like, hard times. But the joy is also – I mean, you can't describe it. You can't measure it. It's amazing. And there's also studies showing that, right? That, you know, married couples and having children is associated with a longer life. Like having that family tie, having those relationships are so important. Now, I'm not just saying, I'm not saying all those single people out there. I know it's like a thing now. There's like younger people. They're like, oh, I'm never going to get married. I'm not going to have a thing. No kids. I'm going to live for me. I don't want to ruin my body. And, you know, I don't want to lose my time, my freedom and all this stuff. You hear a lot of that. And by the way, the U.S. is at the lowest birth rate in the history of America. I think we're at 1.58 right now. And you know this. The replacement rate needs to be at 2.1. We're at 1.58. So it is a trend that people go in that direction. It is. It is. And I waited until later in life to have my son, and that's because I was pursuing academic pursuits in my academic career. And it is something that – I mean I don't regret. I have like an amazing son. And I love him more than life itself. But and it gives me a sense of purpose. Right. But I will say I wish I'd started earlier and had more more children. And all I can say to people out there that are in that mentality is that as you get older, things change. And it's harder to have relationships if you don't if you don't establish them early. And a spouse and the love that you have for your spouse is so incredible. And then when you bring a child into this world, sure, there's layers of complexity. Sure, there's going to be times, you know, that are more challenging and it takes work. Every relationship takes work. But it's really – these relationships are really important for mental health, long-term health, disease risk. I mean there's all this – the Harvard, you know, longitudinal aging studies showed that. You know, these individuals with relationships, spouses, children, you know, family, friends, like those individuals not only were happier, they lived longer. You know, it's very important. Loneliness is a thing. You know, as you get older, I mean, if you're someone that's single, never married, don't know kids, and then you retire and you haven't really put a lot of effort into maintaining friendships, it becomes harder and harder, and you really do have to put effort in. Loneliness is independently associated with early mortality, and it's just not fun. And people that are lonely then oftentimes will seek out that kind of pleasure and reward by themselves, and they'll turn to, like, alcohol or they'll turn to gambling or things like that where it's, like, the short-term, you know, pleasure you get. But it's really not – it's trying to feel the void of that enjoyment that you get from the relationships that are meaningful in your life. I saw a clip the other day. Rob, can you ask Alicia and Humberto about the clip of two women were debating – I said, where is this interview from? If they can find that clip and send it to you, one lady is like, who wants to have a kid and be an underpaid Uber driver for your son that wants to go to taekwondo, a sport that he hates? And the other lady just flat out, I mean, if you got this clip, I'll give you a second for you to find it. It's a fascinating clip. But it is becoming common of people not wanting to have kids, not wanting to have families. Did you find it? is becoming an unpaid uber driver for someone who doesn't want to go to karate and hates you anyway and it's hard hard work that is a narrative that i'm going to push back on which is part of the problem which is that it's the narrative of misery which has been promoted and it's not miserable to have children it's joyful it's the most incredible love you'll ever experience in your life but it's also really hard and i think we have a bunch of pussies actually we are producing women and men who are pussies and I'll tell you what I mean by that they cannot deal with discomfort they cannot deal with frustration they cannot deal with sacrifice or hardship or responsibility they want it to be easy who said raising children was easy you don't get the good stuff unless you put in the work and it's the same if you're out in the world of course it's easier to go to a job than it is to stay home with a child because a child demands more of you but it also gives back more what do you think about what you said well i definitely agree with the second woman in terms of it being incredibly rewarding but also challenging but i think it comes down to you know not everyone has that negative outlook on the world the pessimistic look it's hard you know i'm taking my child to jujitsu and they hate it i mean you can focus on negative things in life and not have a child like that same person with that sort of mentality guess what take the child out of the equation, take the spouse out of the equation, they're going to focus on the negative things in their life as a single individual. What a great point. Right? What a great point. So it doesn't matter. That's how they are, period. It doesn't. It's the way they're there. It's their personality type, right? And if you're that person that's focusing on negative all the time, you're going to be miserable. You're going to be unhappy. And you have to find a way to change your thinking. I do think, again, exercise is part of that because it does help you do that hard thing and things, everything else becomes easier. But also do, there's other things like being grateful, like think about what you're grateful for in life, right? Like what are, what, what do you have that, you know, you can be thankful for? Because everyone has something, even if you're the Uber driver that doesn't get paid a lot, you have your health, you know, until your health goes bad, until you get a cancer diagnosis at the age of 40 until you have, you know, a heart attack at 55, until you get type 2 diabetes at the age of, you know, I don't know, perhaps 39, you don't realize how important your health is or your parents come down with a cancer diagnosis or your sibling. Let's say you don't have kids. You know, you have something to be thankful for. And when you start to focus, have a daily practice of that, what to be thankful for, it does help train your brain. And there's studies showing that helps train your brain to not be so pessimistic. And so that's one thing to do. In addition to the exercise, it's like the best thing that you can do, I think, is really daily exercise, physical activity, because it is hard. It is something that trains your brain to do hard things and other things become easier. But also there's a lot of endorphins that are released that make you feel better. and there's also some evidence that like doing that hard thing when you're uncomfortable when you're exercising hard or working out hard or even doing a sauna when you're sitting in the sauna it's hot and you're uncomfortable because sauna does mimic moderate intensity exercise those things are that uncomfortableness is your brain's endogenous opioid system that is being activated and you're making something called dynorphin this is the opposite of endorphin endorphins the feel-good opioid dynorphin is the thing that's uncomfortable you're like oh this sucks i hate it right there's a neuropeptide being made called dynorphin and guess what when you make that dynorphin there's an adaptation that happens that adaptation is your brain going commonly known as heroin not dimorphine dynorphin rob what are you doing P-A-N-O-R-P-H-I-N. Dynorphin. You're about to confuse people, right? Yes. So what happens is it's binding to a kappa opioid. And when that happens, it's basically telling the brain, oh, I'm uncomfortable. I'm uncomfortable, whether that's from exercise or deliberate heat exposure from a sauna or a hot tub. That uncomfortable feeling is good for you. You have to experience that uncomfortableness because what happens is then the brain adapts and the receptors that bind to endorphins that feel good opioids, they're called new opioid receptors. They become more sensitive to the endorphin. So after that uncomfortableness of exercise or deliberate heat exposure, every endorphin that you make is going to feel better. whether that's you know a kiss or a hug from a loved one or a joke that you're laughing at whatever it is that's causing you to feel good for the moment that endorphin you're going to feel it more and you're going to feel it for longer so there are things that you can do and exercise being really a you know a key but also deliberate you know heat exposure from like hot tub or saunas is another one that really can help with your state of mind your mentality your your mood in fact there's actually studies by dr charles raison dr ashley mason some pioneering studies showing that if you do deliberate heat exposure, and this was a very tricky machine that they used, which was essentially raising people's core body temperature to a feverish state, where it's essentially like, you know, going in the sauna, they're raising people's core body temperature of one and a half to two degrees, or they're doing a sham control. So they're getting people hot enough to think it's a placebo, like a treatment, right? But it's a real placebo. And they took these people with major depressive disorder, gave them this treatment one time. This was the pioneering study one time, and they had an antidepressant effect that lasted six to eight weeks after that, just from one sauna exposure. Now, Dr. Ashley Mason, she's at UCSF. She's now done follow-up studies using infrared saunas that are sort of like these heat beds where people are laying in them. Their head is out, but she's also raising their core body temperature to 1.5 to 2 degrees, and they're doing it multiple times, four to eight times. These guys? That's right. And she's also shown that it really, in combination with cognitive behavioral therapy, dramatically improves a battery of tests for major depressive disorder. I mean, these people, like, just to give you a sense of how potent this effect was, if you – there's a Hamilton scale that, like, this battery of tests that's done to basically assess people's mood, their depressive symptoms. if you have like a three-point change that's considered clinically relevant these people were having a 16-point change after doing cognitive behavioral therapy which is talk therapy with the heat bed so with the the sauna exposure all this is to say to get back to the the clip of the person the mom saying why do i want to be a mom when it's like so hard basically you're you're you're dealing with these hard moments is that you know what life is full of hard moments whether or not you have children it's going to be full of different kinds of hard moments right and so the reality is is you're missing out on that joy and the relationship that who's going to take care of you when you're older too right i mean there's there's all sorts of reasons that to have a family it it's i promise you if i had my way i'd have 20 kids i'll never forget we had a private equity guy in santa monica his name was john morris and we were part of this vistage group and once a month you would meet with them i said john how many kids do you have He says, two. I said, why two? You're smart. God, why do you have two kids? He says, biggest mistake of my life. I said, mistake of your life? Why? He says, tell me what we do in life that the moment we get good at it, we stop doing it. He says, I barely learned how to parent after two. I wish we would have four. I said, really? Yeah. You know, my wife and I, when we first started dating, I had her read a book called 101 Questions to Ask Before We Get Engaged. And in the book, one of the questions is how many kids do you want to have? I wanted to have five. She wanted three. We ended up with four. Okay, so we got four kids now, two boys, two girls. Life-changing. I would do 20 if I could, like I said earlier. Patrick, it's my biggest regret in life is not having at least another child, you know. And, again, I try not to focus on that regret because that's the wrong mindset, right? You don't want to be focusing on the negative because it's the same thing. Is it too late? I mean – It's not too late. It's not too late, and I may be trying to explore opportunities, but, you know, sort of a personal question but but what i will i will what i will you know say is that for people out there that are younger and they have that mentality where they're like i don't want kids i don't feel like i want to be a mom or a dad mostly moms because they're the ones that expire earlier in terms of being able to have kids later in life i mean there's options out there now like freezing down your eggs you know very important i think i think that's like if you're if you're one of those women right now that are like i'm pretty sure i'm never going to want to have kids I would say to you, like, you may change your mind in 10 years, and it will be very heartbreaking if you don't take steps right now to make sure that you can have children later in life, you know, because you might not be able to. So there's always adoption and stuff, and that's, of course, another option as well. But being pregnant and experiencing the whole process, it's amazing. I loved being pregnant. I loved it. Love being pregnant. I do. Oh, yeah. I mean, you get... I hear that sometimes. I'm like, tell me why. Well, sure, there's like hard times. I mean, like you gain 50 pounds and, you know, you can't sleep well sometimes. And there's all sorts of like you're feeling aches and pains because all the relaxants that your body's making to help prepare for childbirth. But you're also like the oxytocin and the bonding and knowing that you are preparing, you know, everything that you're doing, what you're eating and you're preparing this child. and you're trying to give this child the best, you know, opportunity that you can to set them up right, right? Like, it's all, like, I guess a matter of, like, how you – your outlook, right? It's better to try to focus on positive. Yeah. No, listen, my respect for my wife went to, you know, of course, I love my wife, but when you watch her have the baby and you're sitting there, like, once, twice, you know, this is incredible what the women's body does, you know, God's creation to be able to do that and go through the pain, and it's amazing. It's amazing, but I appreciate you for being vulnerable here and talking about wanting to have more kids. Okay, question. In regards to, I don't know if you've seen this story. The story came out about the 49ers, okay, and how they have a field, that's their field, and their field is right next to an electrical substation on the bottom left. If you go to the bottom left, right there to the left, and they're showing numbers that came out that Achilles and ruptures of about .75% tears per season for the 49ers since 2014 compared to .08 per season for the average NFL team. Rob, if you want to play this clip by Paul Saladino, you know which one I'm talking about. I send it to you If you don have it I can send that to you as well I wonder what you think is the impact of this if you have anything to say on this Go ahead Rob 49ers are the best real example of how EMFs can be harmful to humans Since moving to Levi's Stadium in 2014, they've become the most injured team in professional football. For 10 out of the last 11 seasons, they've been in the top five for games lost due to injury. Since 2014, the 49ers have had seven full Achilles and patellar tendon ruptures. The most recent example, George Kittle's Achilles tendon rupture on January 11th, 2026. The NFL average is two to three for the entire league per year. 49ers have had over 40 hamstring and calf tears in this time, while the NFL average is 12 to 15 per decade. What's going on here? The players joke about the electrical substation curse, but in 2014, the 49ers moved their practice field to Levi's Stadium, which is right next to a huge electrical substation. The levels of magnetic fields where the 49ers practice have been measured to be over 100 times higher than background levels, where the 49ers are spending 20 to 30 hours a week. Can EMFs like this from magnetic fields be harmful for humans? There are medical studies which show these fields can potentially damage collagen structural integrity. Collagen is what makes up your tendons and ligaments. You've been told that EMFs are benign. You talked earlier about collagen, right? Do you see a correlation here? I have a question. this field what was it called the name of the field electric magnetic field no no no i know what those levi electric magnetic anyone trained at levi field before the 49ers it was just an empty field this is the practice facility right that's a great question because i think one of the articles says that uh can you pull up to see if the 49ers trained at the levi practice facility at all previous to that or any other team like whoever yeah exactly like it did so what the article also says is no other nfl team is next to a major electric substation or utility grid no other yeah so here's the thing okay as an analytical person as an evidence-based person like this is an observational data where you're looking at correlation sure right and so i want to i'm asking the question whether or not you know because there it could be something about the way the field is designed, the way they're running on it. Like, I don't know. Or did any other team there also have this problem? Before 49ers, the 49ers trained at the summer camp, not at the Levi because it hadn't been built yet. Historically, their camps were hosted at different places, different colleges that they had. The 49ers from 1988 onward had their headquarters and practice facility in Santa Clara already well before Levi's Stadium was constructed. But this was separate from Levi's Stadium and its practice fields. July 2014 is when they opened, I believe, I Stadium, and the 49ers had began using the stadium in adjacent practice fields for training camp practices this summer. So you're saying there may be no correlation. Well, what I'm saying is it's hard to identify the cause of what's causing their Achilles tears, right? It could be the fact that they're next to this station that's emitting a lot of EMFs, or it could be that there's something about the way the field is designed that makes them move. Like when they're using it, it's causing weird movement. I would assume they would probably, a team that big would probably build the field flawless. They're spending hundreds of millions of dollars. So here's my analysis of the EMF literature. I think that people that are occupationally exposed, So that would be maybe perhaps being that close to this sort of place where you're getting 100 times more background level. That's where you do have more concern is those occupational types of exposures, people working in them, where you'll see cancer rates, for example, going up. Or the other thing that I'm worried about is, for example, like a cell phone in your pocket if you're a male and it's affecting sperm, for example. Or perhaps something in your ear all the time, AirPods constantly infecting brain. It's like the closeness of it is another thing. So it's exposure, concentration, and also location, right? So in this case, they're not really close to the person's, you know, Achilles tendon, right? It's not like they're wearing something on their ankle. It's the volume of exposure seems to be high. Is there a potential there for inflammatory oxidative processes? Like, yes, but why would it be, you know, perhaps it's because they're exercising and they're putting a lot of wear and tear on, you know, that specific tendon, and the background inflammation is high that it's basically pushing them over the edge. So I do think the possibility is there. Can we conclusively say it? No, but I think it's definitely something that should, you know, alarm us. You know, why are these people getting these Achilles tendon tears at a rate that's, what did you say, how much higher? It was pretty significant. Significant. Yeah. On the amount of tears they're having. And 49ers, that's a very big team. They were locked in to potentially go to Super Bowl, way too many injuries, Brock Purdy, Kittle. And the Super Bowl this year was in San Francisco. So a lot of the fans wanted to see the 49ers go to the Super Bowl because it's a local favorite, right? It would have been San Francisco. So it is a topic of discussion that a lot of fans are talking about. Right. And the other thing to keep in mind is with these correlations is did something else happen where they had their trainers changing their diet? They're changing something else. We don't know at the same time as they move fields. I'm not saying that that's the case. I'm just pointing out the flaws of this type of correlation where it's like, well, there could be other things that we don't even know about that's happening. With that said, I will say the occupational types of exposure, like who's working in that facility? What are they experiencing? That would be another question. Great question. Because you would imagine they're in that facility, individuals working there. Are they having sorts of problems? Obviously, they may not be working there. Run it like the way you've got to run it. If they fall in, they get 20% of employees have Achilles tear up. That would be a terrible situation on the field. But maybe something else. Cannabis are falling. Yeah, maybe they're getting cancer. That's the right question. And by the way, it's not like this article was written by some blogger or something. NBC published this. This was a few days ago by NBC. So it is a story that's getting, you know, the right kind of criticism to see because these owners are spending God knows how much money. Yeah, so Dr. Alan Stiles, the NFL's chief medical officer, directly addressed the theory that the team's injuries are linked to nearby electric substation and rejected it as unsupported by evidence. He said there's no data in the sports medicine literature that backs the claim that electric fields cause injuries. He also specifically refuted the idea that the 49ers lead the league in certain injury, calling the claim simply not true. So there you have it. That's the chief medical officer that responded to this. I don't know that anyone in the sports literature is looking at that correlation. So he said that there's no literature to support it, but maybe because no one's actually looked at it. You're pushing back on what he's saying as well. Yeah. Look, I'm saying I don't think I would go out and make the video that Paul Saladino made because I don't think it's strong enough evidence. I wouldn't say it conclusively. I'd maybe be a little more cautionary. But I think it's something to absolutely consider. And certainly, like, if I was, you know, the owner of the 49ers, I would either move them back to another training facility and see how that affects their injury risk. Or I don't know if this station can be turned off. I guess not. If it's making electricity, then I probably can't do that. But I certainly would move them to their old training facility to see if that changed things. Because then you'd have it, you know, well, we're moving them back to the other training facility. I would change them in a heartbeat. I mean, even if there's a – sports is very superstitious as well. Let me tell you because what did you say? Placebo, right? I don't care if it works or not. Even if it's placebo, I like it. I have to take it. Even if the athlete is thinking about it, it's in their mind. I don't even want you to be thinking about it. So if I'm the owner of the 49ers, I'm moving them to whatever other place I'm going to, and I don't want my athletes to think about that because they spend a lot of money on these guys. You just brought up such a good point, Patrick, because there's something called the no-cebo effect, which is the opposite of the placebo effect. And that is if you think something bad is going to happen to you, if you're a 49er and you're like, this story comes out, my teammates are getting these Achilles tendon tears, oh, my gosh, it's a facility, and you think it's going to happen, you can actually cause bad things to happen. And there are trials showing about this. Like this is a real thing. And, again, it goes back to the personality type. There's actually genes that are linked to a placebo effect and genes that are linked to a nocebo effect. It's the pessimistic viewpoint versus the optimistic viewpoint, right? And that's really a phenotype. It's a personality trait. And so you're absolutely right. If these football players are thinking perhaps that this is going to negatively affect them, your body makes inflammatory things. You make oxidative stuff. Like your brain controls that. And so you can make yourself more predisposed to tears and stuff because of the inflammation generated from the nocebo effect. Did you ever read the book Psycho-Cybernetics? No. Never? Never. Okay. So this is an old book. It's a psychiatrist who decides to become a cosmetic surgeon because he wants to make people feel better. By the way, this book, Rob, can you type up how many copies did Psycho-Cybernetics sell? Psycho-Cybernetics. Right there. How many copies did it sell? No, no. Go back and just ask because it's not going to tell you on Amazon. It's been around since the 30s. Oh, really? No, no, you will love this book. I think it sold 35 million copies. It's like one of those. There you go. Yeah, 35 million copies. 1960, okay. 1960, yeah. It's one of those books, a cosmetic surgeon who observed how self-image affected patient success, and eventually he realized even all the cosmetic surgery didn't fix the issue that was internally, and whatever the mind believes, you know, you can kind of convince yourself it can become a reality. Anyways, I think you would enjoy the book. You can always find something negative to focus on, and that's the bottom line. How do you manage that? So how do you control that? So, you know, for me, I came from a very low-income, nobody's winning, family, divorce, finances. We had nothing, you know, food stamps. My dad was a cashier at a 99-cent store, and I read a book called The Genius in All of Us that said, you know, the average low-income kid is raised in a family that is rejected 600,000 times from 0 to 18 years old, more negative affirming than positive affirming. Then it was middle class was 100,000 more negative than positive, and then upper class was 100,000 more positive than negative, right? So you have to reaffirm yourself to beliefs or power of positive thinking, and you read these types of books to kind of elevate yourself and read the right affirmations. How does one go if you're raised in an environment that there's so much negativity about that'll never happen to us oh we don't have a chance there and you want to make it out of that environment how does one do it yeah so i mean that obviously i'm not a psychologist so i wouldn't say that i'm the pretty positive the right person to to really answer this question you would probably talk to someone like dr arthur books by the way you should he's amazing yeah i read the book the road to freedom the road to freedom i don't know if you've read it or not 2012 i skimmed i couldn't put it down wrote to freedom when he came out i told everybody my office guys got to read it phenomenal book please continue you know so i mean i think there's there's people respond differently to that type of negative like you're talking about negative background where you're you're never you're never going to be able to achieve something or like it's a very um what's the the the term for it where you you basically you're it's like a you're defeated you know where you're just constantly defeated and it's like almost like this self-fulfilling prophecy right um i think that it depends on you know you have to kind of like train yourself to like realize that you actually can do things and it's i don't know if it's an affirmation you do every day um exercise is something that also helps with that i think positive thinking where it helps you kind of just get out of that negative thinking where it's not going to work out but you also have to realize that worshiping things like power or money or fame i mean these things are also trying to fulfill a void that happiness void right so like there's plenty of people that are very successful very wealthy very powerful that are not happy you're right why is that right because it doesn't bring happiness it doesn't bring happiness and i think that's that most of us out there that do know people like this or we see like look at hollywood actors. I mean, their marriages are constantly breaking apart, right? I mean, they're wealthy, they're famous, they have what by anyone's standards would think, oh, they have everything. But there's always this treadmill of it's not good enough, it's not good enough, I need more, I need more. And it's a very, it's a slippery slope to get on that, you know, that treadmill of, let's say you start to get some success, but then you're comparing yourself to everyone else and you need more. And so you're not happy because you're not getting those things. And I think that's what It comes back to, you know, those macronutrients of happiness that Dr. Arthur Brooks talk about, where it's the enjoyment and the relationships. It's the sense of purpose. Like, what is it? You have to have that sense of purpose. Are you a mother? Are you someone like me who I love helping and educating people to live healthier? I feel like that's a purpose, my sense of purpose. And you have to have satisfaction, right? Satisfaction of doing something, accomplishing it. Whether it's a 10-minute workout in the morning, you know, whether it's reading a book, you know, finishing reading it, whatever it is, you have to have the satisfaction of doing that challenging thing. And all these things help you maintain happiness and have happiness. And I think that's – I love it. Yeah, you know, in 2008 when the market crash happened, the next year in 08, 09, I don't know what the study was, there was more books. They measured what word it was. There was more books, 2,000-plus copies, I believe, where the word happy or happiness was in it because everybody wanted to find out how to be happy. So think about this run that we have in mind. I just want to be happy. And then you realize even happiness is temporary. It's fulfillment. It's what am I doing that there's a deeper purpose to what I'm doing. You go through the survival phase. I'm just trying to pay my bills. Then maybe you get some status or look at me. I'm a doctor. I'm a professor. I'm an entrepreneur. know i'm making six figures i got an mba i got a master's i'm you know and i got 100 000 followers on twitter i'm somebody then you go to you know what i want to be free then you're free you have some money in the bank then you're like now what do i want to do and then eventually comes back to what you're talking about the purpose and you feel it when somebody is in pursuit of something bigger than just money and somehow somewhere when you're in the pursuit of purpose money shows up i don't know why money tends to show you know what you know what work you know what was something that i did And it's funny because after I talked to Dr. Brooks about this, I realized it's something that, like, the Tibetan monks and people like Buddhists do. I was dwelling on my mortality. Like, I know it sounds morbid, but I think it's actually a good practice and experiment for people to try. Because when you think about life being, you know, it's finite, right? You are going to die someday. and when you are in that phase of of you know the end of your life what is it that's going to be important to you at that moment is it going to be another hundred thousand followers can't take those with you is it going to be another you know million dollars can't take that with you is it going to be another podcast no what is it going to be that's meaningful to you And for me, it was the time I was with my family, the experiences that, you know, there you can't put any value to them. And it's something that if you again, if you it's called mortality dwelling. But I mean, if you think about it, because for me, as a high achiever, being being a parent, I mean, my productivity went down and I struggle with that for a while. And it wasn't until I really started thinking about what was most important to me. And again, I think people can really tap into that by thinking about their death. And when you think about it, you'll find what's important to you. And it's not going to be the money. It's not going to be the fame. It's not going to be the followers. it's going to be the memories and the experience and the experiences and those treasure moments with your people that you love your family your kids your friends your parents yep those are the moments that are so precious and you know that also brings me back to like a lot of people like they're searching for this higher power right like there's like god or something you know spiritual right and um you know for me i was raised catholic so i had a baseline to go back to and you know as i got older i kind of drifted and became a little bit too analytical and and it wasn't until i became a mother that i found god again why because the love i experienced becoming a mother and the love i had for my son not that i didn't love my husband as much because definitely love my husband too but there's something about having a child that this your overwhelming sense of love and I and I would go on these long runs and think about it and think about my think about my mortality and never seeing my son again after I die and I think it just can't be possible you can't experience the bonding and the closeness and the love that you do as a parent and then it just go away and and for me I found God again and and you know for other people it might be something that's very traumatic sometimes there's you you get to your lowest point and that's how you you basically can find God or whatever your spirituality is but but for me it was becoming a mom and the love that I had for my son and thinking that it can't just be gone like it's too powerful it's too powerful so i'm all getting at you know happiness and i think part of that component is is finding you know finding your spirituality um you know whatever your your religion is some people find that through meditation and eventually find god but um you know i think it's all part of of happiness and people do sort of seek that out did that also get you closer to mom and dad? Everyone. It got me closer to everyone that I love, everyone that I love. And it also helped me prioritize those relationships because it's so easy for people that are high achievers to get caught up in the productivity loop. I have to work. I have to do a podcast. I have to go give a presentation. I have to do this work and get that satisfaction of like achieving and accomplishing those things. And there's a little bit of ego there and you have to separate that. And I realized that, no, I'm going to take time to do the family vacation. I'm going to take time to spend, you know, a few hours with friends that I care about. I mean, you have to put in that work and that effort, but it's so rewarding. And this is the year, like as I was doing a podcast prep for Arthur, Dr. Arthur books, I know I've come to some of this realization on my own, but reading some of his books, like skimming some of his books and his material everything was like it was like this moment where it was like this is so true and i really need to focus on it you know you need to make the effort to really be happiness doesn't just come to you i think a lot of people are sort of it's like they have this misconception that happiness is something that you just experience it just happens to you no it's just like it's just like a good diet you have to like give yourself the right components You have to work at it. You know, it's work. Have you read Outwitting the Devil? No, I need your book list. It sounds like there's... Yeah, no, no. But the more you're talking, it's prompting books in my mind. Outwitting the Devil is a book Napoleon wrote in the late 30s, early 40s. And he said, 1938, there you go. And it was set aside. And then eventually it came out. I read this book at a P.F. Chang's in Woodland Hills, California. And I sat there. My sister recommended it. I'm like, oh, my God, what a powerful book. How so many different institutions when we're kids use the concept of fear to scare the crap out of us. And we're raised in such a confined, you know, no, I can't do that. And then you finally realize, no, no, that's a business model. And you have to kind of let it go. Anyways, I just think you would enjoy this book as well, Outwitting the Devil. Two other things before we wrap up. I got questions for you. One is, do you see a correlation between being bilingual and delaying Alzheimer's? Because I see people saying there's the benefit of speaking multiple languages. What is the benefit of speaking multiple languages? Yes, there is a correlation between delaying brain aging. How? Because, you know, when you are experiencing, when you're basically doing novel, having novel experiences, novel being things that are different, so learning a different language, something that you're not used to, right? That takes a lot of work, a lot of cognitive power, and it's also novelty as well. I mean, that is absolutely stimulating a variety of pathways in the brain that are protective from brain aging. So, for example, brain drive neurotrophic factor is increased, and that's been shown in people that do learn other languages. And it's not just languages. It's even like, for example, like taxi drivers in London, you know, where they have to use their before GPS. I mean, these people like use their brain to have mental maps of the city. Yeah. And there's studies showing that even that is correlated with reducing the risk for Alzheimer's disease. I can see that. It's like a workout, right? It's a workout. You're working your brain out. It's very important. And again, it comes down to like when you stimulate your brain, you are increasing dopamine. You're increasing trophic factors in the brain that are causing, you know, strengthening synapses, the connection between neurons. They are growing new neurons. It's doing a lot of stuff that even exercise can do. So there's other roads to improving brain aging besides exercise. And one of them is really mental stimulation. And that can be in the form of learning a new language. It can be in the form of, I mean, I am constantly analyzing science. I am using my brain all the time. That's for sure. That's for sure because you have to break that down. But the idea of language, you know, is it how to communicate? Is it, you know, different dialect? What is it that delays Alzheimer's? You know, that correlation is very interesting to me. It is. But it's, again, not just language, right? So that's the other thing that's interesting. But, yeah, is there something unique about language? There might be. Yeah. To me, I play games. So let's just say we're done with our conversation today. I'll get in the car and I'm going to the other property. I'm going to play the game of how many facts I can restate from the conversation we had together. And we try to see if I can remember how many. I'm like, okay, she said this, she said that, she said this, she said this, she said that. This is a form of an exercise to see if the memory is getting stronger. You said, oh, okay, I just talked to this person, you walk away. And, you know, some of these exercises can help you out, but the language is definitely one that's interesting to me. Last one here, gut microbiome, okay? Okay. What does the gut tie to? Is there stress? Is it aging? What does the gut tie to? It ties to everything. I mean, so the gut is the first organ that sees the food that you take in, right? So it's really prone to inflammation because that food is inflammatory. Even if you're eating a healthy diet, when you put food in your gut, it is forcing the gut to work. And so you do cause some amount of inflammation in the gut no matter what. If you're eating an unhealthy diet and you're overweight or obese, that inflammation gets worse. And what I mean by inflammation is your gut epithelial cells open up and they release something that's in the gut because you have trillions of bacteria in there, the gut microbiome, as you mentioned. Well, the gut microbiome, those bacteria aren't always living. Some of them are dying off constantly. You're making new ones. You're having them dying off. Well, bacteria have something on their outer cell membrane called lipopolysaccharide, or LPS for short. And that gets released in the blood system when you eat a meal. And when that meal is really, really big, more of it gets released. When that meal is high inflammatory, if it's refined sugar or saturated fat, more of that gets released. When that LPS gets into circulation, it activates your immune system, and it causes inflammation. That affects the brain. There's studies showing that if you inject LPS into a normal healthy person or a placebo saline control, they get inflammation in their brain. They get depressive symptoms. They get, you know, their cognitive function is depressed, all coming from the gut, right? LPS is coming from the gut. So it does affect, you know, inflammation in the brain, which then leads to Alzheimer's disease. And then the gut microbiome itself, which is specifically what you're asking about, is also there's a direct line, you know, there's like neurons actually in the gut. And so there's like this vagal nerve that's connected, you know, from the brain all the way to the gut. And the bacteria in your gut communicate with that, with the brain through this vagus nerve. And so the different types of bacteria also seem to play a role. Like certain types of bacteria in the gut can cause more anxiety. And there's all these studies that have been done in animals where you can take a mouse that's more of an anxious phenotype mouse and take their gut bacteria and transplant it into a mouse that doesn't have anxiety. And you can cause them to have anxiety, right? And then vice versa, you can take bacteria from a really robust stealth. Like they're, you know, they don't have that anxiety and put it into a mouse with anxiety and lower their anxiety. And that all comes down to, you know, there's neurotransmitters that are being stimulated with respect to the types of bacteria in your gut. How does one find out what they have? That's an emerging field. So there are a variety of tests that are consumer available out there. I would say that those tests are, it's hard to know what to do with that data. So you can get a test done and get some data back, and then you might think you need to eat a certain diet or whatever. I would say we're in our infancy of really, truly, accurately being able to do a test at home on an individual level and figure out what to do with that data. What I will say is that what we do know is that there are certain foods that you can eat that are known to be beneficial to promote the growth of healthy probiotic types of bacteria. and decrease the growth of more of the pathogenic type of bacteria. I know you're a broccoli person, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, broccoli is great. I would say fermentable types of fiber are really good. So those are the types of fiber that are found in mushrooms, like beta-glucans, oats, berries. The skins of fruits are really, really, these are the fermentable, soluble type of fiber. The skin of fruits? Yeah, so like you eat like a blueberry. The fermentable fiber is in the skin of the fruit. Got it. Believe it or not, vegetables are mostly the insoluble type of fiber. That's the kind of fiber that's important for moving stuff through the system. You want to get stuff out, which is also important. But the fermentable type of fiber is the stuff that's actually viscous, and it's fermented by bacteria. And this actually allows the beneficial type of bacteria, the probiotic type of bacteria, to outcompete some of the pathogenic type of bacteria. So you're having a better gut microbiome, which is going to basically help you lower inflammation when you eat food because it helps lower that, you know, the gut from opening up and releasing lipopolysaccharide into your blood system. It's called the postprandial inflammatory response. It's after you eat a meal, inflammation. That's why people feel sleepy after a meal. Inflammation is generated. Inflammation makes you feel sleepy because it's taking energy away from your brain, and it's also increasing these cytokines that make you sleepy. So you want to lower that post-inflammatory response after a meal. So that would be, again, you want to basically have the right types of foods. Exercise also, by the way, helps strengthen the gut so that it's less likely to be what's called leaky gut, right? That permeability of the gut is another thing to do. Some people can supplement with probiotics. I would say that it's kind of flow through. If you supplement with healthy probiotics, the minute you stop supplementing with them, you're going to be back. It doesn't take residence there. It's a flow through effect. So it is having a beneficial effect, but it's a flow-through effect because there's really no residential space to occupy. It's kind of like California. There's nowhere to build, right? The bacteria are all there. It's just like California. There's nowhere to build? Well, I mean, there's places to build. San Diego, there's nowhere to build. Yes, yes, yes, in the cities. Yeah, that makes sense. But what I'm saying is that the real estate is limited, right? And so there's not a lot of places. That probiotic bacteria. You can always move to Florida, by the way. It's a beautiful place here. We love it in Florida. Dallas is great. Where do you go in the summer? Here? New York, Hamptons. You go up. You have so many options. And it's easy. Three hours. I live 24 in L.A., five years in Dallas. And officially, I've lived more in Florida than Dallas. We love it in Dallas. And when I was building a national business, what I liked about Dallas was it was a three-hour flight from anywhere. L.A., it's six, New York, so it's a mess. And in Florida, it's also easy. And in L.A., there's nothing to do to go west. It's just Hawaii. But here, if I go east, the world is east. So if I'm going to go to Europe, if I'm going to go to Germany, Italy, it's this way. There's nothing this way. So that was a little plug for Florida. If you guys ever think about moving, we love it here. My daughter's four years old, Brooklyn. She's the best in the family. She is a fireball, nonstop. but when it comes down to kids we got rid of cereal for the kids life-changing for us we haven't had cereal for three years so the kids are now eating better their exercise and they're all in shape physically they do well um but at four years old you know it's something just eat a little cookie give a little candy it's okay it's sugar-free it's this how do you manage candy cookie with kids at that age four years old you'd be surprised so when my son was four I mean, I was explaining to him the negative effects of added sugar on the brain, on the body, how it makes you die sooner than you would. And you'd be surprised how much these children can actually understand. And in kindergarten, you know, he was reading nutrition labels of his friends' lunches and telling them that's too much sugar. You shouldn't have that because it's going to – I mean, he did say make you die sooner. But now he's got his friends that are cutting them to figure out. The son is going on telling people they're going to die. The point is that education, I mean, obviously they're going to love the sweetness and there's a dopamine response and it is addictive. However, education and explaining things to them like you would an adult really does help because kids can understand a lot. And I think that people, you know, parents underestimate that, that education, like knowing, like don't just say, no, it's bad for you. Like, what does that mean? Like they want to know. They want to know why. And when you can say, hey, do you want mommy and daddy to live longer? They're going to say yes. Well, if we eat this, you know, added sugar and the cakes and the candy and the cookies, that's going to make us like die sooner. And guess what? When you start earlier in life, it's going to affect you too. And they get it. You know, and so that's been my trick. Now, of course, they're going to want some sweets. We have it figured out with the three. The other three, they're all in top-notch shape. You see them. They're very athletic. With the fourth one, she is a very good negotiator. She goes, Daddy, this is low sugar, Daddy. This is low sugar. It's okay. I'm just going to take a little bite. No, baby. Here's why. But she's a great salesperson. Maybe she's going to do very well in business later on. Who knows? She knows how to close Grandpa and the nanny and Mommy. not mommy as much, but grandpa and nanny definitely. By the way, Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt. I'm sure you've read it. Yes. Have you had him on in your podcast? No, I need to. That would be a good conversation with the two of you. Agreed. That's another one of those good ones. This has been a blast talking to you. Thank you for this. It was awesome. How can people find you? Well, as I mentioned, I have a podcast. It's called Found My Fitness. It's on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts. My website, foundmyfitness.com. I have a great newsletter. Every week I send out a really good email. email on the latest science behind health, nutrition, aging with actionable takeaways. So that can be, that's free. You can sign up for that on my website, foundmyfitness.com. Beautiful. Flash newsletter. Yeah, that's, that's, that's, I'm on social media. Dr. Rhonda Patrick, Found My Fitness. You can find me everywhere. Is there anywhere people can ask you questions or no? I do have, so I don't have sponsors on my podcast. I don't, you know, have any ads. I'm sponsored by listeners. So it's kind of a crowdfunding kind of, I would say, way that we're supported. And part of the membership that people get for $15 a month, if they do want to join the membership and support everything I'm doing, they get extra perks where every month I do a live Q&A and they submit questions. And I answer the questions based on top voted, based on interest, based on what I want to know, what I think other people want to know. And it's recorded and they have a private podcast that it's put out on. They also get a private podcast that only is special for members. So that's where I really answer questions a lot is through my membership and Q&A. But I do sometimes try to get on social media. I would say less now than before because I actually don't think it's good to consume social media. As much as that hurts my business to say because I am on social media and I post on it, I don't consume it. I just think it's become unhealthy. So anyway, that's a whole other conversation. Maybe another time we'll do that. Gang, if you want to learn more, click on the link below. We'll put it below for the website, the channels, everything. Thank you so much for coming up. Thank you. I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed it as well. Take care. When we set out to create a shoe that blends comfort, function, and luxury, we had the choice to make it fast. We had the choice to make it cheap. We chose neither. 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