Iconic at 80: Exploring a Life Well Lived

We can start explaining these things through the leverage of science. We don't have the science of pharmacology and then the science of life. They are interwoven. It's the same receptors on the same cells of the same tissues and organs that are responding to these things. And so, we gotta wipe away this kind of differentiation between pharmacotherapy and lifestyle and see where they blend together to produce outcome called our health.

Dr. Jeffrey Bland, we are here this week, which is an auspicious, important week, your 80th birthday week. And I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that you've probably been on a couple of podcasts, done a couple of interviews in your day. So my hope for today is that we are given the opportunity to get a little bit deeper into some of what shaped you. Maybe I get to ask you some questions other people haven't before, and that we get a little bit more insight into who you are and what has made you who you are. So does that all sound okay to you?

Sounds like fun. Sounds like up close and personal. We'll see how That's the person we want to get.

Exactly.

That's good.

So just setting the stage here, we're talking about 80 years of experiences. And so when you were born roughly 80 years ago, we're talking about the end of the Second World War. And so you're born in 1946, right? So World War II had just ended. American values and norms are a little bit different, we could say, than what they look like now. Your dad was a World War II veteran. Your family settles in California, which looks very different than it does now. And you have kind of this unique potential setup, which people like me have seen in movies and in TV shows, where I think we have this idealized version of what it looks like in that era. So you have this post-war time where you're growing up in California. You have this land that is being actively converted from farmland into Something that is still far from what we see now. But what was it actually like from that time in American history? And what are the things that maybe people get wrong about that idea?

Yeah, thank you. You know, the book The Greatest Generation, which was about my parents' generation and the fighting in World War II and the whole industrialization of America and making us a global power, You know, you don't realize it when you're living through that time as a youngster, that that is a time of history that's kind of epic. Because things that are going on in the belief systems and the values and the norms and the technology. You know, TV didn't actually really exist commercially when I was young. It wasn't until I think I was 4 that we got our first TV set. It was this enormous box. I don't know, probably weighed 200 pounds. It had just a small little 14-inch screen in it. We watched a lot of test patterns, because what would happen is the TV would only work for a while and then it would break. Then you'd go to this Indian Head test pattern that you'd watch for half an hour until the station came back on. It was a very interesting time. I was actually born in Illinois, because my father was from Illinois. He married this Hollywood girl, my mother, that he had met in his training as an Air Force pilot in California when he came over for training before going overseas for the war. They got married. My mother was 16 on her first date. They were married when she was 18. I was born when she was 20. She lasted a couple of winters in Illinois, and then she said, Stu, I love you dearly, but I can't take another winter in Illinois. I'm a California girl. My dad moved the family then— the family was me. My sister was then born later in California. We moved down. My grandparents, my mother's parents actually, were originally in ranching in the San Fernando Valley. The area of the San Fernando Valley was pretty much chicken ranches at that time and other kinds of agriculture. It was very, very rural. If you think of what the San Fernando Valley is now, just an extension of LA County and all the freeways and all the population. It was a really interesting time for me because My father then and mother were able to get a VA veterans home. All these homes were springing up, tract homes, and there would be, you know, 1,000 homes that all looked the same on very geometric blocks. And the cool thing for me was on my block, which was LeMay Place, we had 16 other boys about the same age. And then the next block over, Kittredge, had another 12 boys. And then the next block over was so and so forth. So you had all these clubs that were really— You just go out of your house. Of course, in Southern California, the weather was great, and you just hang out with your friends on the same block. So you played sports in the street. You had a lot of empty lots that you could go and play and explore. You had the LA River, which was never really a river, but it was a place we could go down and prospect crawdads in the mires of the swamp. And it was pretty much a free-ranging situation. I mean, there were no such things as boundaries. You could go anywhere. We built foxholes. All sorts of different forts and treehouses. Sports were very important, Little League baseball and basketball. My dad built a basketball court in our driveway that was kind of the place the kids would get together during basketball season. It was really a very interesting melting pot because we had kids from all denominations and from all ethnicities and religious persuasions that lived in our neighborhood. And it was all— I recall my best friend next door, closest friend, Bob, and we would sit out on our front lawns. Everybody had a lawn. And they had these trees that had been planted all geometrical on this tract. If you can imagine, like 1,000 homes all looking the same. And we'd sit there and say, I wonder if these trees will ever grow up. You know, are they going to be this same kind of tree if we were to come back here 50 years from now? Would there even be these trees? Would these houses even exist? So it was not too many years ago that my wife Susan and I then decided we'd take a stroll down there. We came off the freeway in San Fernando Valley and we went down to, down Reseda Boulevard to LeMay Place where I grew up. And lo and behold, here are these trees and now they're giant magnolias.

Hmm.

And it's really— and these houses are, you know, which my father and mother bought for, I think it was $10,500. And now they're like 3/4 of a million dollars. They're the same homes. They're very expensive.

Yeah.

So it was a really interesting time. And there was one other feature that I thought was fascinating, because it was early TV. Some of the early shows that were on were all a reflection of the political time. And this was the time where people were starting to consider building bomb shelters in their backyards and in school. We'd had these drills of going under our desks to hide in case— From the atomic bomb. Yes, from an atomic bomb. It was always on our minds that nuclear holocaust was very imminent, and it would be talked about. There were these TV shows that were always kind of tilted a little bit towards the political side. There was this one called I Led Three Lives. It was a series on every week, a half-an-hour show about this guy who lived in a tract area like my family, that was a 3-way spy, a spy for the Russians and a spy for us. He was transmitting all this secret information. Well, it's kind of ironic because my father was a radio operator. He built radios and electronic equipment. It was his hobby and ultimately became his profession. He decided that this was a great place to really be able to communicate with the world through shortwave radio. So he put a 40-foot antenna on top of our home.

Oh no.

Now, if you can imagine hundreds of homes all looking alike, except this one home has these guy wires and this very tall antenna at a time where the TV show I Led Three Lives is all about spies. So we were always, I think, kind of thought of as very weird. You know, we were questionable. You know, what was my dad talking about and what was he doing? And, you know, what was this spy down there on the honor block? But that for me was very good because I grew up then with the birthing of the transistor. I started with vacuum tubes with my dad teaching me about coating of resistors and building simple circuits. We built a 6-meter radio that went on my bike. So I gave one to my friend and we could talk. We had the only bikes that had radio transmitters on them. But I think this gave a reputation. of us being a little bit different, probably.

You know, there's a lot of stories that you have, and anybody who's met you knows that you have many, many stories you could tell about all these different periods in your life. But I think especially now, looking at this 80-year block of time, certain themes seem directly replicable in terms of you have insights that will translate over to people who are going through those stages in their lives now, and certain things have just completely changed. And so, as you're describing this childhood, I think about, on my end, I think I'm the last generation of people who grew up, millennials, without everyone having a smartphone in their pocket, without social media being the part and parcel of growing up. And as you're talking about these things that seem, of course, what you'd expect for an upbringing where you're spending time outside, playing with other people, some of those things don't necessarily exist in the same way that they did. And it's not because they couldn't exist, it's that we've chosen, we've built the technologies and the other things that are just— more, I guess, interesting for our brains. I'm also curious about— we'll get into your narrative arc, but you and I were down in the same area. We were going down the highway. You were telling me, this is where I grew up. And we were down there to do a tour of some of the wellness spots and some of the wellness stores in the Los Angeles region. And we'll get into this in a moment, but just thinking about how these versions of what now exists were so different back then. So, what used to be wellness culture and what wellness culture is now have changed so dramatically. Before we get to all that though, I wanted to pull out one theme, which is for people who have seen you in person, you know, you've probably done more lectures for doctors and other people than almost anyone on earth. Maybe there was a time in those early years where you were up on stage, you had some butterflies, you were a little bit concerned, but I know that early in life you were performing. So whether it was music, or I guess even playing sports, you were in front of other people. One of the things that I hear a lot of people talk about today is getting over that hurdle of feeling comfortable on a stage and doing lectures. So I'm curious on your end, was there ever a time where you were uncomfortable in front of other people, or was it always something where you recognized that that was a place that you were happy to be in the spotlight?

Oh, that's a really good question. I think that Obviously, when you start off and you're standing up in front of an audience, you're going to have some nerves. And, you know, I can recall actually very vividly being on KTLA, the Los Angeles TV station. This would be 1955.

Mm-hmm.

In which I was brought over with a bunch of schoolkids our age— I was 9 years old— brought over to teach the public about transistor radios. Can you imagine that? And so here I was on TV holding a transistor and speaking about how these were semiconductors and how these replaced the vacuum tubes and how we built this radio. And I was describing it. I was so nervous that I wasn't sure I was even speaking English.

Wow.

When I think back to that moment, it was like, I know I said something and I held something up, but I couldn't even tell you if I had composed any words that made sense. It was definitely exploring that edge of stage fright. But I think over time, and you said it, I think, very well, you know, then there's the music part. And I had a number of bands when I was a kid that performed in different places. And then sports, of course, where you're in athletic visibility. And then there was also just this excitement about expressing ideas. And, you know, this concept that—

Mm-hmm.

Because I found that when you're expressing ideas as a presenter, You're provoking people to respond. You're provoking communication. You're provoking dialogue. And it was for me like an instrument or a vehicle to get engaged in discussion. Because once you're in discussion, then you're really learning. And that served me well when I was doing a lot of travel later and I was going to different parts of the world and I would give a presentation, but it was really a vehicle to kind of engage in discussion with the people in that area.

I want to comment on the thing you described because I've had this exact experience where You're on stage, you're in the spotlight, and you're speaking, but you're almost not aware.

Yeah.

You know, people might call it you're blacking out or whatever, but it's such an interesting thing. It's where hopefully you've performed the thing in your head enough times that if you memorize something, it still comes out right. But that's such a unique experience. The other thing I wanted to comment on, as you're describing this feeling of, well, I have this information, I have this interesting stuff to talk about, and it kind of flows through you. One of the things I've heard described is for people who have anxiety about getting on stage or really anything, if you can look at that instead as excitement, it's the opportunity. And so part of what you're describing feels like it falls within this. You know, there's this chance of getting to describe this content or getting to teach people about something that matters, and any sort of nervousness is really just the opportunity that is presented by what comes next.

Yeah, I think that that's a very good kind of summary of my thought about how I've used the opportunity to be a presenter in my own personal development and growth because it's through that I came to recognize you never want to be completely emotionless when you give a talk.

Mm-hmm.

If so, you probably should not be giving that talk. You ought to have some welled-up energy, some kind of adrenaline buzz that's It's pushing you to do better, to find a different way to communicate or a more effective way to communicate. And I think there's that really interesting boundary between being excited and being promoted and having your mind working at a very fast processing speed to the next level where you're out of touch with your body.

Right. You have to be pushing yourself in some way to make it exciting for you. I like that. So let's talk through now, you're moving From high school into going to college. Initially, planning to go to UCLA and then last-minute pivot over to UC Irvine, which was at the time just barely started. Plan was to play college basketball. Then I'm curious in particular about, obviously you have some scientific background with the work that you were doing with projects in the garage with your dad. You were on— this is something I didn't know— you were on TV at age 9 telling people about how radios work. But when you go into college, was this something where you were pretty well set on, here's my trajectory, you're one of those kids coming in saying, I know exactly what I want my life course to look like, or were you thinking, I'll try some stuff, I'll find something that is interesting to me, and then we'll go from there?

Yeah, I think I've always been interested in understanding how the body works. So this has been a kind of a driving force. My mom, if she were around and you asked her the question, she'd say, yeah, as long as I can remember, even when Jeff was in grammar school, It was always a million questions about how does the body work. And in fact, my parents ended up buying, probably at some pressure to their finances at that point, a set of Encyclopaedia Britannicas. This is well before we had digital information, because they recognized they couldn't answer all the questions. So, we had this deal where we would spend an hour a day going through Encyclopaedia Britannica, and I'd ask questions, and we'd look it up. And then my sister was brought into that as she, 4 years younger, was brought into this as well. And so I think that there was this engagement process. Every time I showed an interest in something, if it was electronics, my dad was interested, so he would help me. If it was photography, he said he would build me a darkroom if I would earn enough money in my first job at 12 to buy the basic equipment. And so I was able to earn enough in this first job in the summer of my 12th year that then he built a darkroom and we did a lot of photography together. It was that kind of progression of learning, I think, that got me as I finally got into college to say, I really like the sciences. I tend to be inclined towards liking chemistry. I'm not sure what it was about chemistry that struck me as really exciting. But then my father, who at that point was an aerospace engineer working in the defense industry, arranged— this was very fortunate— that I get a summer job at the company he was working at. in the research lab.

Mm-hmm.

And it was in developing new materials like carbon fiber materials and things. So I was actually doing, you know, grunt work in the area of scientific development around technology. And I really found that was very, very exciting. And then that led me into a connection with one of the individuals, the older guy that I was working with, a full-time employee, who then had his wife working in a medical lab, you know, in Orange County, California. And he said, you know, you really like this chemistry and you ought to get involved with what the chemistry of life is. So I went and did a lot of proctoring in med labs and really found that interesting, the application of chemistry to biology. So that kind of then got me into, I should be going to medical school, this would be a place I would really probably be able to enrich this. But then medical school led me to say, maybe I have more questions that need to be answered than the traditional medical school curriculum. So then that led me into the PhD.

So just to double-click on that for a second, I think a lot of people go into maybe college at this point, or maybe even just out of high school, without a concrete sense of, here's what I want to do next. A lot of people, I feel like, have their ideas. I want to be an astronaut. I want to be a marine biologist. These days, the number one goal is to become a YouTuber. But let's imagine that somebody listening to this is still at an early stage in their career, and they don't know exactly. From what you're describing to me, it sounds like the goal would be to go and experiment, right? Have some real-life experience in various different domains of what a vocation might look like, and then allow that to guide you. But coming back to where you were at going into college, did you feel like you had a couple of career paths ahead of you that you felt relatively good about, or was it more, I like this general field of learning about science, there's some interest around chemistry, there's some interest around engineering, And we'll go from there as we progress through the curriculum.

Yeah, I had a pivotal moment, and I bet you would say in your life you've had something similar to this. I bet most people have. Mine was pretty dramatic. This would have been my freshman year in college, and so I was just 17 years old, and I had gotten to be pretty good. I was a trombone player, and I'd gotten to be pretty good. I was first chair in the all-state band, and I had my own bands, and I did records and played in various types of stage bands in California. There was a lot of music around the Hollywood industries. My best buddy in music, a guy by the name of Tom Lupo, was a trumpet player, and he was very, very good. I thought he was much actually better than I. And he said, hey, I want to try out for the Righteous Brothers touring band. which is taking tryouts. But I'm a little bit kind of feeling insecure about going. Would you go with me? And why don't you try out as a trombone player? And I had no real thought that I would ever aspire to go on a professional music tour. But then I thought, well, you know, yeah, I'm actually moving towards— and I was actually taking a music minor. I was doing composing and stuff in college along with my science. And so I said, yeah, I'll go to the audition with you. So we both auditioned, and because they had a lot of trumpet players, he didn't get chosen, but I did.

Mm-hmm.

And so I came home. I recall it's a classic moment. I came home and my parents asked me how'd it go, and I said, well, I think it went well. You know, they've given me this opportunity, but if I do this, I'm gonna have to drop out of college, and I'm gonna have to, you know, make this my career and go forward. And so I fully expected my father would say, well, you know, Jeff, you can't drop out of college. I mean, this is ridiculous. You know, you've got all sorts of opportunities ahead. You're very young. Don't stop your opportunities here. But rather than that, he said to me— and it was pivotal— he said, you know, you're 17 years old. You've got a number of experiences. You're becoming an adult. You've got this interest in music. You've got other interests. I think you need to seriously Consider these options and your mother and I will support whatever you want to do. It really threw me for a loop because I thought he was going to make the decision for me.

Mm-hmm.

And so I went in the music room where I did a lot of my playing and I had albums from different records that I had been involved with performing. And so I spent the whole night listening to them. And I made the decision at the end of the night, which was really, I thought, the right decision, was I was a very good technocrat. On the brass instrument side of music, technically, I was very good. Was I an artist? Was I really the next level up, a professional? And I came to the conclusion, no. I would have been a very good technocrat, but I wouldn't have been flourishing as an artist. So I came back in on the next Monday and I dropped my music minor and I took more science. And it was a change between my sophomore and junior year then.

Let me just ask you about this philosophy, because I'm not sure— maybe you would say it does, but I'm curious if it applies across your life. So, at any given moment, there are a number of different paths you can walk, and some of those are the natural progression of something that you're already doing, and some of those are things that you, in the past, thought you were interested in, and may be interested in again. But if you keep them all open, it's very hard to move forward on any individual path. So, you seemingly had a very concrete, moment of reflection, which was, I may be good at music, but I'm not going to be great at music, and therefore I'm going to not continue on. Even— you probably could have done the music minor, right? And then you could have had the experience of what that might be like. But you said, I'm going to funnel my efforts into something that makes more sense. Do you feel like that's emblematic of your decision-making in general, where you analyze a situation, you come up with an answer, and then you don't go back and reflect on it perpetually? You're able to move forward?

Yeah, I think that's a very good observation. I think that if I was to roll forward from then, say, being 20 to being 80, there are many illustrations of where that's been true, I think, over those additional 60 years.

Well, this is something that strikes me about you, which is I feel like not only do you have these pivotal moments that other people would say, okay, of course that was pivotal because here are the circumstances, but you also make them pivotal, right? You create a structure around them that allows you to see them as seminal instances in your life. That makes the general arc of your narrative make more sense. And I think that's something that most people don't do, even if they have potentially significant events that occur on a given day. They just kind of become part of the background noise because there isn't the conscious pause to reflect on it and allow that to become part of the story. So this is— you're talking about something that happened when you're in your teens in terms of making some of these decisions, and now here you are at 80. And so I guess that's just part and parcel of how you make choices, but it seems like that's been relatively successful as a strategy to allow you to be very thoughtful but also not getting caught up in the perpetual loops of weighing things for decades.

Yeah, I think that this plays out in a lot of different ways, probably in different people's lives. So when you're talking, I'm thinking of 2 really important transition points later. So ultimately then when I started pursuing my PhD degree, I was doing very well, had a good research project, had a very good advisor. I was studying tetrodotoxin, the very powerful nerve toxin, its chemistry and biology. I had this class in advanced organic synthesis and it was taught by a very well-known organic chemist. And he and I didn't get along. I guess maybe I was a student, so I guess I didn't get along with him. And his class was very demanding. He had a specific way he wanted to teach. He was very talented in his discipline, no question about it. But I was laboring, and I think I was laboring in that course principally because of an interpersonal thing that was getting in the way.

Yeah.

So I didn't do well in that class. In fact, I did as poorly in that class as I'd ever done in any class I'd ever taken in school. And so my advisor, my thesis advisor, said, well, you know, this class that you took and you didn't do well in is not essential. You have plenty of other good courses that you can use. But, you know, I recommend that maybe you consider going and taking this class again. Because I think it would be good for you, good, to see how you could deal with it a second time through. And I think it would leave also, given that he's on your PhD committee— It might give a better opinion when you came down to your thesis. So I thought, you know, okay, well, that— we'll see how I could do. Well, then the second time around, I became extraordinarily competitive with myself. I said, okay, I'm not gonna allow this interpersonal difference in opinion about his style and me to be the decider. I'm gonna really nail down and get into this. And I did get into it. And I really enjoyed it the second time through. I was able to kind of put some the interpersonal issues. And I was the best student in the class the second time around. And then he was hailing how, to other faculty, that I was this high-performing student from his experience. In fact, he told my thesis advisor that somehow I had had a brain transplant. And he actually used that terminology in the year following. So that was a really important lesson plan for me about staying to task and not allowing something that was kind of getting in the way, a stumbling block that you could overcome if you just changed your attitude. That same thing happened later. This was probably the most, maybe the most pivotal learning curve in my younger adulthood. I was able to, during the latter portion of the Vietnam War, get an opportunity. I actually had 3 offers to be a professor in different chemistry departments. I chose to go to a chemistry department in Tacoma, Washington, at the University of Puget Sound. Because they were just starting an environmental science program, it was a dual appointment to start the environmental science program and also be a professor of chemistry at the same time, which was perfect for me. I was 25 years old at the time, and this was like a treasure trove of opportunity. I was extraordinarily energetic. I probably was hyper—

Hyperactive.

frenetic. And I was able to accomplish a lot of things in the first 5 years of that professorship. But what I didn't recognize is I was rattling the cages of some of the tenured faculty. They didn't feel I was fulfilling kind of the stereotype of a traditional chemistry professor.

Mm-hmm.

Whatever they thought was a chemistry professor. Because I was teaching in other departments. I had broad-ranging engagements with different research things going on outside. with the hospital in town. I was involved with the environmental movement in trying to change our local smelter to be less arsenic and sulfur dioxide emitting. All sorts of different things were going on. They took exception to this, even though my students coming out of my classes that I was teaching on national exams were testing out The best of any of the professors. So I was producing a very high-quality, I think, student product, but I wasn't fulfilling kind of the criteria that they held for a tenured faculty member. So they asked the head of the Division of Sciences to have a special meeting, which he held at his house. This was a very interesting moment in my life. I had a young family at the time. And so I went down to his home, and he I have great respect for him. He's a physicist. And we got along well. He was a senior member of the faculty in his 60s. And he was very uncomfortable for hosting this get-together with my faculty in the chemistry department. Then he went around the room and asked, you know, what were the opinions about me as it relates to a potential tenured faculty member. And there were 2 members of the faculty— it was a small faculty in chemistry, only had 8 members, of which I was one of the 8. 2 of them, which were my biggest antagonists, just— one of the guys had actually a list I called the fecal roster that he unfolded as like the Magna Carta, which he read off all these things that were abuses of what he thought an individual should have if they're going to be a tenured member in his department. Things like he was late for 2 minutes for a department meeting, or he missed a certain student appointment by 5 minutes. And he was proctoring my life very, very closely. And so he didn't talk about any things I accomplished. He just talked about these things that he felt were deficiencies. When that meeting ended, as we all know, the most important learning times you have are during the times you're being critically evaluated.

Mm-hmm.

It really gives you the opportunity to dig in deep and ask, you know, what is the truth versus what is the non-truth based on your perception of those observations. And there's always some truth. Even in things you think are ridiculous, there's something there you should learn. So I remember driving home that night back to my family, and I said, okay, if I'm not tenured, then I'm going to leave. And so what am I going to do if I leave? Where am I going to move this family? What will be my— And this was in the height of really difficult times to get academic jobs. It was Pretty— people would apply to hundreds of jobs and be rejected. And so I gave up a concept, and I thought, okay, well, I'm just going to go back and finish up my medical school. That's where I'm going to go. I'm still young. I could easily do this. Let's see, what would I have been then? 30.

Mm-hmm.

So in a couple more years, I could have finished my clinical work. And so I went home to I described to my wife, you know, this was not a good experience. And she said to me, well, you know, Jeff, look at all the things you've done in these 5 years of university. I mean, you've done this, you've done that, and gee, I don't see anyone else doing these things. And, you know, the president of the university really seems to acknowledge you. You've spoken to the Faculty Senate, you've spoken at different meetings, he's called you out in different, you know, meetings of donors. It seems like he understands what's going on. Maybe you need to go to a bigger theater. than just these 2 people that are criticizing. So I made the decision, okay, if I'm gonna be— if I'm gonna lose my job by not being tenured, then I'm gonna give it a full fight to the end. So I made myself as visible as I possibly could on campus. I engaged in all sorts of activities and purposely said, okay, I'm gonna be present for everything.

Mm-hmm.

Well, of course, the end of the story was I was a tenured faculty member. And I ultimately became department chairman. But it was a very, very powerful learning experience for me about how you handle adversity, how you look inside yourself, because there were things that I did learn through that that have paid dividends over the years.

Right.

It wasn't totally a negative experience. But it also had me better understand sometimes when you're a person making changes that you're going to be criticized and people aren't going to understand. And it's easy for her to say, that's not usual and customary. And so you have to find how in yourself that you're going to just say, hold it. I've learned what I need to learn from that, but I'm not going to follow their path.

Yeah, there's some strong statements about you learn more from your enemies than your friends. And I think there's a lot of truth to that. So just to fill in the gaps here. So you finish up your undergrad training. Then you wind up in Oregon for your PhD. Then you wind up in Washington. as eventually a tenured professor in Puget Sound, so Tacoma, Washington. I've never exactly asked you this, but you're a California person, right? So granted, you were born in the Midwest, but you spent your entire childhood in the sun. Other than obviously the opportunities, was there a reason to go to the Pacific Northwest and spend the rest of your life up here?

Well, I didn't know if I would spend the rest of my life because I'd never actually been here. And it was more like I love the concept of hiking. I love the concept of getting in the mountains. I love the concept of backpacking. I love the concept of water. And I looked at the things about rivers in the Northwest and the coast of the Northwest, very different than what I used to. I was a surfer in Southern California and there was not much surfing in Washington at that point. And I thought, wow, this would be cool. I mean, I could just put a backpack on.

Mm-hmm.

I could just go out in the woods and learn all sorts of things. And so I think it was the draw of and the allure of wildness that brought me here. And then when I went to Oregon, you know, I would spend a lot of time in the Sisters and on the Mattole. I built a riverboat. I used to do drift boat and fly casting. And it just— I just more and more I hear it was here, the more I liked it. And I found the rain was really my friend. And, you know, I'm of the skin coloring and complexion, that probably being out in Southern California sun— I'd have been a lifeguard in Southern California, I was constantly sunburned all my life. We only had CNC and zinc oxide back in those days. So, all these things probably led me to stay in the Northwest.

A longevity intervention right there.

Exactly.

So, let's now go a little bit further. So, you're a tenured PhD, you're working as the chair of the department of chemistry at University of Puget Sound, you're in your mid- You're in your 30s or so at this point.

Mm-hmm.

There are several other videos and interviews where you go deep into the work you're doing with vitamin E that led to Linus Pauling that then led to some changes, but tell us about this specific moment where you decided that you're going to put your academic work on pause and then move out into something new, because I feel like that's a very specific instance of, again, you having this thought pattern of there are 2 options in front of me, and you definitely dialed it in on one.

Yeah, so I'll compress this really, hopefully, quickly. So, the vitamin E research got me invited for the first time ever to give presentations at medical organizations about what we were learning about vitamin E. That then led me into being recognized by, at the time, probably the most prominent medical doctor in the Seattle area that was doing nutritional medicine in his practice. He had been a I think a chief of staff at Cabrini Hospital in Seattle for a number of years, and his wife had developed MS, and he then went out to find ways that he could help her, and it led him into other avenues of nutrition and health, kind of the different alternative medicine. So he dropped out of Cabrini, put a clinic in Bellevue, and Bellevue, Washington at that time was very new. It wasn't yet Microsoft.

Yeah.

And so he was out there on the east side in Bellevue and built what was the most substantial I guess you'd call it an integrated medical clinic. It was all that was the term was not available at that time. This was the '70s, and his name was Dr. Lee Bowles, and he had patients flying in from all over the world, dignitaries, and was quite prominent. He then formed with his chief of staff of his clinic, which had eight doctors and a staff of about thirty nurses and other people in it. He he formed the Northwest Academy of Preventive Medicine. And he invited me to speak there.

Mm-hmm.

And I spoke, and then his chief of staff came up to me, Bill Correll, and said, so, you know, Dr. Bowles really thinks that you are very, very interesting, and people find your presentations very interesting. And, you know, why don't you kind of come to our meetings more regularly and see if you can make a contribution? The next meeting I went to, and this is kind of a seminal one, I was sitting in the audience and I didn't like the way the program was going at all. I thought to myself, I think I could have done a better job putting this program together. It was pretty audacious. I mean, I was this 35-year-old guy and I thought, no, I wouldn't do this program that way. I was sitting next to another guy about my age that I didn't know who was at the meeting. We went into the foyer and we were having a discussion. I said, you know, How do you feel about this meeting? He says, oh man, I'm really, I think it's not really going the way that I would've expected. And I said, yeah, same with me. I think we could do, I could do better. He says, I think we could too. He says, why don't we join together and see if we can't get them to change their curriculum? His name was Dr. David Jones, a new family doc in Ashland, Oregon, just come up from the Bay Area in California.

Wow.

And so David and I, Then I went back to Lee Bowles and his group and Bill Carell, and it led me to become the president of the Northwest Academy of Preventive Medicine. So, okay, if you think you can do better, good, then do better. You're now the president. And I got Linus Pauling to come up and speak, and we then got a bigger engagement of doctors around the area. And David Jones came up and he formed the Southern Oregon Academy of Preventive Medicine. So we then started down this road collaboratively with he being the the clinical, really, zeitgeist, and me being the biochemist mechanistic guy. And we would go back and forth between our 2 places, and we started growing up this— we had people like Jonathan Wright that was in, and Joe Pisorno, and a whole series of very interesting people in this. And Pasteur was not yet formed.

Mm-hmm.

So then I'm gonna rush and finish this story. So that comes up to '78. In '78, was a sabbatical year for me. And I had students come up from Evergreen State College down in Olympia, Washington, saying, Jeff, you know, we've gone to your lectures, we've heard you speak, and we want to put together a program in nutritional biochemistry at Evergreen State. And that school was very like Antioch of the West. It was very non-traditional. The students could petition for a curriculum. And if you got so many students together that were committed, They would then put that into the curriculum for the next year and make it a— it could even become a major. They didn't have like formal majors in that university. And so I then agreed I would take my sabbatical at Evergreen State College with these 32 students to spend the whole year. And the way that curriculum was designed is I would be responsible for all 32 students. I would know them well enough to know what other courses they needed. Could be in math or science or humanities or something. And I would make connections with the other faculty members to fill in their education. But I was kind of like their sole guide down this year program, which for me was a huge learning curve dealing with all sorts of interesting faculty members. And these students turned out to be very talented. I mean, I had one of the students who was a guide on Mount McKinley who, with his colleague, were the guys who developed the drug for the treatment of acute mountain sickness. And then they did the early investigations and saved lives. on McKinley. And so it was a very, very talented group that ultimately led— there were 7 women that lived together in a teepee off campus, and they were activists. And so I asked Joe Pizzorno to be a team— Dr. Pizzorno to be a team teacher with me in a course called Is There a Healer in the House? In which each week we brought a different healing discipline and we studied it. And those women were in that class, and they ultimately became then the first class, the majority of them, in Bastyr University.

Wow.

We formed Bastyr University out of that concept of Bill Mitchell and Les Griffin, Joe Pisorno, and myself from that Evergreen 1978 experience. So all of that was a very robust time of change. So then I went back to my traditional tenured position at the University of Puget Sound in '79, and then it rolled into '80 where I was now the medical director of Lee Bowles Medical Laboratory and the president of Northwest Academy of Preventive Medicine. And lo and behold, in the waiting room, our receptionist comes back and tells me, sitting in the waiting room of our medical lab is Dr. Emil Zuckerkandl and Dr. Linus Pauling that want to talk to you, which just blew me away. And then they invited me to come and spend a sabbatical period at the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine. So that was how I ultimately got to To saying, okay, I'm going to make a change.

There are a lot of tangents we could take here, and I'll just put out for people who are listening to this, if you haven't heard all of Jeff's stories, there are probably many other places you can go for deep dives into each of those little pieces. You're one of these people who kind of needs a breakdown episode of every 1 to 2 year period in your life to actually understand all the details. But there's kind of a— there's another parallel series of events that's happening. And you alluded to, you know, you had started doing kind of some consulting and expertise around your vitamin E research that got you connected to different people, some of whom were celebrities, some of whom were in California. So tell us a little bit about how you saw the natural products industry growing up, if it existed at all. What was, you know, the granola hippie culture like in California when you were a kid? And then, when did you plug back into that after you'd started doing your academic research, and what did it look like then?

So, when I was first introduced to the field of what we call the natural products industry, that term wasn't around. We called them health food stores. And I did grow up, my sister and I grew up in a culture that was kind of a health foodish culture. My mother was a big devotee of nutrition. We never had white bread, we never had soft drinks, we never had desserts, we never had sugar.

Were you okay with it at the time, or did you hold a grudge?

I don't think it was a grudge. It became more of a badge of courage after a while. Because I would always come to school, you know, elementary school, with my brown bag that had my cut vegetables and my whole grain cereal lunch, I mean, sandwich. I never ate in the cafeteria. At first, I was weird, but then after a while, I thought, oh no, this is kind of interesting. I like this identity.

That's good for you, because for those who are out there listening and you've had this experience where your parents pack you special lunches, you have to deal with some degree of the other kids mocking your behavior. It's so funny, just a quick tangent. I was on a panel 2 weeks ago with the CEO of Amy's Kitchen, and he was talking about, we try to do everything we can do to make healthy food accessible to people. And I told him, you know, growing up, my mom would pack me the Amy's macaroni and cheese each day when other people were having their more processed versions of food. And at the time, I thought to myself, well, this is okay, but, you know, Fruit by the Foot, all these other brands that everyone else was eating. But it's companies like that that made it accessible to have a variant, a healthier version of the food. And you can just see how decades later that matters.

Yeah, I think it's so fun that for you I bring that up because now you've rolled forward in my mind to my college basketball coach, who— in one game that we played, it was against Sacramento State College, and I ended up— it was actually one of my better games, and I ended up with leg cramps at the very end of the game. And I was playing very well.

Mm-hmm.

And so he was very mad to take me out of the game because my legs were cramping up. And so after the game, I went back to practice the next week, and he said, so I understand that your mother feeds you, you know, a bunch of weird stuff. Is that contributing to your late cramps? And so I was being discriminated by my athletic world for my eating habits. There you go.

People always jump on that. Anyway, so let's go back to this. So you grew up in a culture, in your home, let's just say, where healthy eating was just normal, at least Mm-hmm. At the time though, it was probably a very small subculture of people who were thinking about eating healthful food, natural food. By the time you came back into that universe, you know, and you're starting to do a little bit of consulting, you're back in California, it sounds like now it's still natural food stores. There's not a big industry around this, but is there any unification? Is there communication happening between the stores that triangulates some of these concepts around— I mean, was organic even a thing at that point?

No, no, organic was not. We had the National Nutritional Foods Association, NNFA, which was the trade organization for health food stores. And I started going to those meetings. It was always in Las Vegas at the Hilton Hotel, Elvis Presley back in those days. And it was, it was an event. I mean, it was the event you had to go to if you had any kind of relationship to the nutritional products industry. There was kind of a bifurcation between the dietary supplement group and the food group. So, we had the blackstrap molasses and whole grains and wheat germ and sprouting and all that stuff on one side. But there was no organic agriculture at that point that was in the field as part of a theme. So, what happened, I thought it was really a major transition, was Some young men and women started— these were all kind of post-hippies, and I say that in the best sense of the word. Mostly were highly educated, college-graduated people that didn't want to take on the standard affair. This was, again, the '70s, post-war, post-Vietnam War. And so they started saying, I want to form a natural food store.

Mm-hmm.

I don't want it to just be a vitamin shop or to be a off the beaten track. I wanna make this accessible to people. That actually gave birth to the organic movement. And I recall at those early meetings, this was pre-having a Natural Foods Expo, there were rumblings that the food people ought to get together and start talking about standardization of agriculture.

Mm-hmm.

With more or less pesticides and herbicides. I would credit Doug Green as being the force that saw what was going on and decided that he would take the remarkable entrepreneurial risk of forming another organization beyond the NNFA. The NNFA, when they heard that he was going to have his own meeting in Anaheim, to be called the Natural Foods Expo.

Right.

They said they were gonna blacklist any of their members that went and attended that. They would be dropped from their membership. Well, he then, Doug, rattled the sabers. He was a smart guy about restraint of trade, and eventually the first expo, 45 years ago, was held. That brought together these people that had these young, kind of fairly well-educated, well, pretty well-educated people that had their own little shops that were saying, hey, we have some similar values, and so let's start working towards government advocacy. These were much more politically savvy people. One of the scions of that time was Sandy Gooch. Sandy Gooch is this remarkable force of nature woman who had just about died from— she had a very severe peanut allergy. Was always very aware to stay away from peanuts, but she found that there were foods that were not properly labeled that had residues of peanut oil in them, of which she got one and almost had an anaphylactic response. And so she said, well, this should not be. We had to have truth in labeling. We had to be able to form better foods that are made out of different ingredients. So she formed Mrs. Gooch's Ranch Food Market, and that became the first kind of properly marketed with a fem— I would say a female artistic touch to marketing. Moving away from kind of a health food store-ish to more of a really properly marketed and merchandised environment. And that was because of the success she had and where she originally put that first store in Hollywood. It really started to build an image as to what this new field could be. And so now you couple that with Doug Green and forming the first Expo. And then you have Stan Amey, and you have all these originally interesting individuals that have Nature's Food and Tool, had the start of Whole Foods with John Mackey, Alfalfa's Market in Denver, Colorado, Fresh Fields in Washington, D.C. All these people that had this vision started to get together. And I recall going to those dinners in which they started talking about, we could ultimately become an organization that was as large as retail food companies. And it was an undying commitment to this concept of changing agriculture, food production, and the way nutrition was viewed that ultimately led into the Food Is Medicine kind of revolution of today. So that really, I think, was born— well, it was. It was born out of the Expo. It wasn't born out of the NNFA. The NFA then kind of went away over decades. It got dissolved and it got reabsorbed into the broader tent of the natural foods movement.

Thinking about the nutrition component of what you've done, one thing that strikes me is going back to your advocacy work for decreasing heavy metal exposure in Tacoma. That's obviously a little ways away from being a nutritional biochemist and the expertise that might come from being the world's foremost expert on how, let's say, riboflavin works, or just pick your molecule, but you're doing a lot of these different things. Clearly, if you're teaching chemistry, most of that has nothing to do with food, right?

Right.

As your time went on, both in terms of your academic work and in terms of your consulting, it seems like you were pulled into nutrition, and you became known as a nutrition expert. You know, so I guess at what point— maybe it happened before you made the decision— but at what point did you realize or recognize this is kind of going to be the place where I want to spend the majority of my time, where I want to build my expertise, and where I feel like I can contribute most in educating others?

Yeah, thank you. I think that's a question that has a lot of depth in it as it relates to my life. Without being overly dramatic, I'll say that I had— my wife and I had an that really changed my whole philosophy as to where I wanted to take my career. When I was within the first 2 weeks of my new job at the University of Puget Sound, we lost our second son to sudden death. That really redirected my whole sense as to what I wanted to do to direct whatever knowledge I might have to help facilitate maybe some child never going through that or some set of parents never experiencing that. And I didn't know what that meant. But it didn't seem like it was just right down the center of the alley as it relates to teaching chemistry. It seemed like it had to be a broader array of things to understand and to put together. So that made me a universal seeker. And I think it's because of that that my faculty members in the chemistry department, some of them took exception to me because I wasn't following the standard path that a chemist should take. It ultimately manifested itself when I was a professor in— I decided I would teach an extension course at night, principally for women, probably homemakers, on nutrition. I had written a book by that time called Nutrition Against Disease, and it was my first book. This was a book that This was a class that was going to be a 6-week class in which we would be talking about applying the concepts that were in Nutrition Against Disease.

Right.

And so, I decided to do something which made my faculty members in chemistry very upset. I went across the campus to the home ec department that had these beautiful food labs. And I asked them if I, as a chemist, could teach a course at night Using their food labs on— so it was really a how-to course that we were going to be making recipes and menus as a laboratory. And they were very gracious, and they said, yeah, we've never had a chemist come over here, but that would be fine.

Wow.

Well, it turned out that was a very, very popular course, and for me, it was a huge learning experience. And I got into sprouting and all sorts of things that I would have not necessarily have gotten into This would have been like '73, '74. And I think what it showed me is that I could collateralize my training in chemistry to these other areas, and it had application. So that then led me into clinical chemistry and into clinical physiology. And so I think these all started to broaden the base of what it meant for me to be a chemist, basically.

Okay. That makes a lot of sense. Let's fill in now a gap. So you've done your work with Linus Pauling. You are reflecting on what that meant to you, what opportunities come next, and you make this decision which leads to you leaving your post at University of Puget Sound and entering all the other things. So becoming an entrepreneur, doing a whole lot more education, writing more books. And that feels like, you know, obviously a very central moment where you decide to detach from A pretty well-circumscribed dynamic of what your career might have looked like had you stayed teaching, continuing to do the reps in a university, to everything else. Again, I would recommend for people who are interested, there's a whole story there, and there's a lot to get into. But I'm curious, in this next phase, so now you're going out, you're doing probably more travel than anybody else Yeah. You are spinning up companies, you're consulting for companies, you have involvement now with some of the largest natural products companies in the United States, both in terms of helping to create guidelines. You mentioned, for example, organic, as well as helping to inform the creation of the Natural Products Expo, which, for those who have been to it recently, it's 70,000 or so people, so it's obviously grown up. And then working with and eventually within some of these large companies. So here we fast forward a little bit further and we get to the development of perhaps the thing you're best known for, which is functional medicine, which feels like, again, we're compressing down a lot. All the learnings you had in those decades from both academia and then all the way through the entrepreneurial work gets converted into this system of thinking. Functional medicine. People have nowadays, many people have heard of this, whereas obviously at the start it didn't exist. But from your take now, what is the series of kind of understandings as to what functional medicine fills in that doesn't exist with the combination of various forms of thought processes that already existed? And also, what is it?

Yeah, thank you. I think that the definition of functional medicine in my mind is a way of applying this emerging concept of systems biology into a healthcare setting so that you could leverage the extraordinary discoveries that are being made about how the body works as a system and not just as a collection of organs. And when I say this, I wanna be very mindful of the fact that especially medicine that is really focused down on the knowledge of organs individually has been a hugely valuable component of our disease care system. I would not want to criticize that at all. But there is a point, and I'm using this somewhat as a facetious statement. There is a point where you can know more and more about less and less until you know everything about nothing, and where you lose the broader picture of the difference between speciations of plants in a rainforest versus understanding the rainforest as a whole, the system.

Mm-hmm.

Because I had studied ecology extensively in my work as an environmental science professor— that was my other identity, and I'm very proud of this environmental science program that we built there. We graduated a variety of people that became ultimately the head of the Department of Ecology for the State of Washington. It was a really good program, but it was a really great learning program for me, because I had the chance to invite all these lecturers to come in that were world-renowned people. Lester Brown and Buckminster Fuller lived in my house for 2 days.

Wow.

These are just remarkable experiences I would have never had if I would have been strictly in the chemistry side. When you put all of that concept of, what do you learn from environmental sciences? The Odums, the brothers that were from Florida, Gainesville, that really started the concept of field ecology, that were lecturers and guest lecturers for me in the university. What I learned were systems. There was a book— I wish I still had it, actually— that was produced by Eugene Odum and his team from work they'd done in the Brazilian rainforest. about the ecology of the Brazilian rainforest. That book was this thick.

Mm-hmm.

And it was energy maps of how energy travels through these complex ecosystems and where each plant or animal plays a role based on all this work that had been done by scientists over the years and trying to assemble that into a coherent, you know, understanding of what is a rainforest. And that was a bible to me.

Yeah.

I mean, I didn't understand everything in that book. I would've spent lifetimes probably to understand everything. But I got, taking away, the broad picture of how important systems are as a contrast to understanding everything you wanna know about one organism in the system. And that, I think, guided me a lot in the thinking about how systems biology relates to medicine. So, coming out of Linus Pauling, who was a systems thinker, And then moving into this whole new era of where the technology was starting to develop as to where organs were seen, how they talk to one another chemically or through signals, I said, this all relates to the function. It's not just the pathology, but the function of the organism. And so, maybe we ought to be focusing on the function and how it relates to the system's integrity.

So you bring together a group of people that think similarly about these concepts, roughly 1990, let's say, to create and flesh out what functional medicine is. And at the time, ragtag group of people that most people hadn't heard of. And time goes on and the Institute for Functional Medicine starts up and start bringing in training clinicians. You're flying all over talking about these things. If we were to fast forward to now, so 2026 at the time of this recording, now we're seeing the United States government use these terms, functional medicine, talking about more research funding for this. Why, or I guess the first question is, do you feel like the progression towards where we are now was in any way linear or was it very much jerky in terms of public awareness? And then the other piece is, why is it so big now? What were the things about it that have led to it becoming such a popular way of approaching healthcare at this point?

Yeah. Well, certainly, it has not been linear. I think it's been jerky. It's been fits and starts for the movement as new things come available to augment the learning. For my contribution, I think, was to say, we can start explaining these things through the leverage of science. We don't have the science of pharmacology And then the science of life. They are interwoven. It's the same receptors on the same cells of the same tissues and organs that are responding to these things. And so, we gotta wipe away this kind of differentiation between pharmacotherapy and lifestyle and see where they blend together to produce outcome called our health. And I think that that science model, I'm not saying I was the first guy to teach it because Certainly that's an exaggeration, but I think I was the first person to spend the time necessary. Every year I would do the same 24 cities for 16 years, and I would have a different syllabus every year with a different focus on a different issue that would build around the same model, around this architecture.

Mm-hmm.

And eventually— at first people thought I was speaking some foreign language, and I mean, I'm amazed that even when people came back again, they said, you know, I know he must be saying something important, but I just don't understand him. But over time, Over time, it started to filter down. People started to pick up the speak, the concept, and started to weave it into their own formalism. And I think that took about 10 years to kind of develop that fertility of the ideas where they could connect to other people and how they would use them. Now, I think the value proposition was that we started to be able to provide better explanations, maybe, at a mechanistic level for things that were already seen to be right in integrative medicine.

Mm-hmm.

And so, for the first time, we were giving more credence to the validity at a physiological systems level for these things that were being seen phenomenologically.

Mm-hmm.

And there's no question in my mind that integrative medicine phenomenologically has value. We didn't have really good explanations. And so, some people would say, we don't need explanations. All we need is just to understand how this works, but I think knowledge often grows on better understanding of— at an explanatory mechanistic level. So, I think that's what the functional medicine movement did, is to try to really build an architecture of how we didn't need to have some system that was not connected to the rest of what we understood about anatomy and physiology and biochemistry and cell biology. They were all interconnected together, and we could teach them as a whole.

So obviously some things have changed probably since the time that you came up with this concept and where we are now, both in terms of our understanding of the human body, maybe more interestingly how our sociology has been altered. You know, again, I grew up even, as did you very clearly, without social media. And now all of a sudden we find ourselves in a world where not only does social media exist, but AI exists, and it's kind of hard to know what's real anymore and what's valuable anymore. So I guess as much as you can consolidate this, social media and AI, these are from my perspective 2 of the most important drivers of how people consume content and what's actually in the content these days. What is your take on the pros and cons of these 2 tools, and how has that, if appropriate, influenced how concepts like functional medicine are disseminated out to the public?

Well, I think to even provide a landscape answer to that question, in my life, I'm kind of doing a Jacob Bronowski, Ascent of Man type of review. I'd have to start in my life going from the telephone to the fax machine, where we start to distribute information in a digital way that people can read across long distances, and then you tie that next to the internet, and now you start to have a mechanism whereby you get less— you start to democratize the availability of information in a different way than existed before. Information was owned by certain pedigrees and certain pedagogies and was very loath to give it over easily. But as we started to democratize information through this transition, which occurred in my life, and you talked about the development of the smartphone, that's a tool that really made all of this accessible to everyone. I mean, probably the singular most important individual in the history of our life culturally is Steve Jobs. I mean, interesting to think about because in some ways he was not a technocrat. He was— but he was a visionary that had whatever the genius is to convert ideas of many other technocrats into implementable, executable reality so that it became magnetically attractive to use these tools.

Mm-hmm.

And that you couldn't get away from them. They became part of your lives and you were Touching on a part of human psychology that had not previously been explored, that now we're starting to understand. So I think that this development of this whole lineage really is what's now translated into the machine learning and artificial intelligence that we're witnessing evolve right before us in real time. That is a tool that has unbelievable capabilities to help us address questions more efficiently, maybe more broadly, maybe more democratically. It breaks down walls. It also opens the doors to disinformation, misinformation, contrarian information, and That is the nature, I think, of how information in its sense evolves. It's, it's never a linear coherent path. It used to be in guilds. Certain guilds would get information and they would just keep processing and processing it until something flowed out that became an axiom.

Mm-hmm.

And then we, the rest of the world, would learn that axiom and we would memorize it or whatever. And it was, it was a rule, it was a truth. But it generally had emerged out of a guild that had spent a lot of time Digesting and processing. And many of those things were very vitriolic. They were not friendly conversations. People committed suicide, and it was to death, these ideas. Now those ideas are being broadcast and being debated en masse in the whole of society.

Right.

They're not just in guilds. They're not closed. And now we've got people that are not even really prepared to know how to address those things. That are part of the evaluative process.

So this is a really interesting conversation, and I'd be curious for anybody who's out there watching or listening, if you want to learn more about this, let us know, because I think we could do another conversation on it. But it feels like there's an interesting theme here, which is previously when data originated from a guild or a group of experts, it would go out and it would either be useful or it wouldn't. And if it wasn't useful— now granted, some things were false but still useful. You know, sun gods and things, but still useful to have some explanation for. There's a reason why these things happen. But if they weren't useful, then they would get tossed aside. And now it feels like because it's so algorithmically driven in terms of what becomes popular, there's no longer much of a tether to the information being true or useful. And so it's just information being distilled down to things that are no longer super factual and are often actually the exact opposite. So if I think about something like functional medicine, right, as a framework of looking at how the human body interacts with everything from meditation to a supplement to a pharmaceutical and trying to be thoughtful about how all these pieces play together, if somebody is going to distill it down to a statement that's going to get the most airtime, it's probably not going to be directly in line with how something that was originally conceptualized. So I think there's a lot of liability, but it is just so fascinating to see how, you know, when you started all of this, there were certain people who had the information because they had the training. And unless a person had access to you, who was going to do a lecture in some city in the United States, they might never hear about this. And now if you were to plug into, pick your favorite social media platform, you will hear an incredibly distilled-down, compressed version of whatever it was you were talking about, that maybe has lost all actual value except for it makes a person think they understand the topic.

Mm-hmm.

Where they're still very much on the superficial level of it. I do want to jump forward to, you know, because I know there's a lot more we could talk about, something very specific that is, I think, unique to where you're at right now in your life, which is you were recently interviewed by a news publication on kind of your rules for life, I guess, to use terminology that may have some, you know, perception based on certain books, but Jeff's rules for life. And I know that when you talked about this on social media, there was a lot of viral traction. And so maybe we could just go through those, and maybe you've changed these in the last year since they came out, but let's just go over those, and maybe I could just read them out and you could give your take on why that matters to you.

Good. Let's do it. Okay.

So the first one you said, which I think is already controversial, is that you don't have relationships with anybody you don't like. How has that one gone?

Again, I think it depends a little bit on the context of some of these words. Like, what does relationships mean? Is this like a deep, abiding, lifelong relationship, or is it superficial, we had a conversation at the bus stop relationship? So when I say I don't have relationships, I'm really referring there to long-term interrelationships that we invest our time and energy in. Clearly there are going to be relationships you have that are not going to be things that you're going to pursue. But those that are worthy of pursuing, those are the ones you need to stick on and you need to invest in.

So to keep pushing on it, let's say you have this person in your life that you feel is not a super high-quality relationship. What do you do next about this? Do you talk to the person about it? Because I think a challenge that people have, just to press in, is there are certain relationships that you're given, right? Maybe it's family would be the best example. There are certain relationships you can choose around friendship. And there are certain relationships that are functional in terms of these are people that you need to work with that is, you know, they serve a role in your life.

Mm-hmm.

And you have to redefine the structure of how you choose those relationships based on those criteria. So how would you go about approaching, you know, if it's a relationship that you feel like is not a healthy one for you, how do you work through the social challenges that come with Yeah, that's a really great question.

So my first premise that I have that I think goes way back in my life is I assume any new person I meet is a valuable person. So I always start with the premise that even if at first there appears to be something that may be off-putting, there's probably something if I learn more about that person that is really redeeming and I could have a good lesson probably from it. But there may be a time where you have that conversation and you find whatever the value proposition is, is far exceeded by something that's either antagonistic or not valuable. So then you say, well, so what's the utility value of this relationship? Like, if maybe— if it— let's use a fictitious example. This is not one in my life, and I'm just making it up. You have a plumbing problem. I'm not a plumber. And so you hire a plumber who is actually an expert plumber, but he is doing all sorts of things and saying things maybe he's You know, saying— treating your animals badly in the house, or he's saying things to your wife that are not nice. So the question is, what are you going to do? Are you going to fire the plumber, or are you going to just live with the experience and probably not have him back again? So I think there are certain utilitarian ways that you have to judge where you're going to invest and not invest in that relationship. But I think there are also some benevolent and then less benevolent ways of dealing with that. You can either see that person as a bum and give them the bum's rush, or you can say, I'm going to transition out of this. That person probably has some redeeming characteristics, but I'm not going to spend the time to find them, and we're just going to kind of fade into the woodwork here. So I think it's part of the social skills of knowing how to turn up or down the rheostat. Okay.

Again, we could probably get into that in a bunch more detail, but I like that. The second one is similar, which is Not engaging in conversations that are degrading.

Yeah, I think that one's really easy to me. There are so many ways that you can be pulled into what I call fraternity speak, and maybe I'm being disrespectful of fraternities, but, you know, there's something where you take well-meaning, good young men and you put them together in a group, and then it forms the worst kind of aggregate behavior you can imagine. How does that occur? Because if you were to ask each one of those individual people, would that be something they would do by themselves? They would say no. But in the group, it's now acceptable and maybe even condoned behavior. So for me, ever since my high school initiation to the athletic elite club, in which we had to go through some kind of a hazing environment, which I said, I'm never doing this again.

Mm-hmm.

I'm never putting myself, nor I'm going to put anyone else in that kind of an experience. So that's what I really mean about making those decisions.

I'm going to push you on this. So tactically, you're in a conversation with a person and they start saying things that are disrespectful. In that conversation, do you pause them mid-speak?

Yeah, I do.

And what would you say?

I either say, well, I don't actually agree with that point of view, or have you thought of that from the other way around? Or Why are you taking that perspective? Because it seems like it's not honoring a person who deserves— you use a general description of something of a class rather than of an individual. When you start aggregating into classes, you can make all sorts of decisions.

So point though, you will stop the conversation in order to interject and make a break, which is, hey, this was going okay until this point, but this is not something that I will abide without a challenge.

Yeah, I think you said it probably a little more forcefully than I would normally do it. I would say, I would ask a question. It would be a transition question to get away from that saying, you know, that's nothing, something I support nor do I believe in. Okay.

Third one, I don't go places I feel I shouldn't be or do things that are not in my long-term best interest.

Yeah, I think what I've learned over time is that, you know, the most precious thing We have other than our genes is time. And because we don't get it back, it's a one-way street. And so if there are ways that we see our time being pulled into things that are either detrimental to our being or not consistent with what we are feeling, doesn't give us that feel-good experience, then we, we have to ask, how long am I willing to invest in this? Now, some things You're gonna maybe getting your teeth filled, you're gonna say, I'm gonna invest it even though it's not so enjoyable. But I'm not gonna stick around and have my teeth filled for the next 6 hours. So I think that there are these decisions about where you put your guidelines and your decision points. But it becomes an operative principle that you're always reflecting back, I could use this time in a different way. I could use this time in a more effective way. I could be having more fun or I could feel more bliss or I could feel more love.

Yeah.

If I was not doing this.

So I feel like what you're saying is being a little more conscious of the opportunity cost and being willing to act on it as opposed to just ruminating over what could be.

That's right, because I think what happens, you can get caught into do loops in which you're caught into that cycle and now it becomes your hour or your day that you've woven into something that didn't— you didn't escape from it, you got pulled into it.

Number 4 is, there's no excuse to say that I'm having a bad day because I'm completely in charge of my day. Instead, I ask what I can do to make it better. Which again, I think will be a little controversial.

Yeah, I think that again, stuff happens. I don't want to be naive and it's super silly. Stuff does happen. But the majority of our life, just like we now recognize that a majority of our health is controlled by our decisions. It's not controlled by the givens. It's not controlled by the genes. It's not controlled by the way the sun is in the sky. Or the seasons. It's controlled by the way we're responding to the environment, to the moment, to the opportunity. And so I think keeping that flexibility alive, knowing that there's generally multiple paths that one can take out of a decision-making moment.

Uh-huh.

It's not generally just one solution. And then how do you form a path that's consistent with what you think your life principle is all about, what you want to stand for, how you want to be seen. So when you look back, you say, well, that was an awkward time, but I evaluated the principles and I made the principles that were consistent with my manifesto as to what I want to be as a human being.

There's some interesting data around optimism in terms of predicting better health outcomes. But from my perspective, there's even more interesting data around purpose and meaning in being a stronger predictor of how we do in the long run. And so I think What you just said for that last one dovetails really nicely to the last one, to number 5, which is, I try to remember that my presence here is to be of service to others. And some reframing of there is a reason for what I'm doing, there is a purpose, there is significance beyond just pursuing the lower levels of filling my own cup on any given day. So that's your number 5, I try to remember that my presence here is to be of service to others.

Yeah. And I think that that actually is the overarching guiding principle of all the other 4. Because the other 4 are kind of operative principles that underlie number 5.

Mm-hmm.

And so how do you operate on the principle that you're here for service? So your service could be to your partner, it could be to your children, it could be to your family, it could be to your— I mean, it goes on and on depending on where you want to apply that That objective. But I think to always feel yourself as having value, number one, and your value can be applied to the principle of service to others to produce joint positive outcome, both for you and for them. It's reciprocal. It's not like a sacrifice that you're getting nothing out of it. And I think that weighing those things on a real-time basis then sets a trajectory of what your life will look like over time. I like that a lot.

So we didn't get to cover everything that you've done in your life in this 1-hour and 20 to 30-minute interview, but I'm sure there are many opportunities for people if they want to weigh in on this video to learn more about different things. We could always do a follow-up. I want to bookend this a little bit by saying, here you are coming into your 80th birthday, and there's obviously a lot that you're still involved with. So there's this large research study we're doing. There's multiple companies that you're involved with. You're writing a book. You're staying incredibly active. And for those people who have kind of heard of you or interacted with you at various points along your life journey, I'm hopeful that this conversation will give them some context as to how things have come together and some of the underlying thematic ideas that have started at a very young age that have informed you all the way up until this point to continue to drive you towards pushing forward in the things that bring you joy and help other people. But I want to give you the last word here as we're coming into this meaningful period in your life where there's obviously a lot of opportunity for reflection. But what would you say in terms of what the 80th birthday means to you, and what are you looking to carry forward and maybe leave behind as you go into this next decade of your life?

Well, thanks, Austin. I think that is the principal question which I'm and my wife Susan, who is also turning 80 this year, are really working on very, very diligently. And it's interesting when I think back of the stages of life. I won't belabor this, but to say most of your stages of life are associated with some form of building. And so when you start with your youth on up, you're building something.

Yeah.

And so you can say, well, what could I be building? There's all sorts of different things you can build. Well, when you get to be 80, I believe— now this may not be the case for some people, but I think for most people— it's not building, it's legacy. It's, did I leave something behind in these all places that I was building over the previous 79 years that have some value proposition that can help others going forward. Because I think the pattern of energy that we as human beings have in our short period of a century on this planet never goes away. I believe in the conservation of energy. It morphs into different forms. It sees itself in different realities. We often just think of it as a Amorphic form of our body, but the energy that we've transmuted is really what stays in the system at some level. So it's like the footprints on the sand. You know, you think they get washed away by the incoming tide, but yet the energy that produced those is still there. So how does this actually manifest itself from 80 on? Because you're going to move on, you're going to leave behind, and then what is that energy? Because it is in some form in the universe. It's, it's, it's had some kind of entropic form, either dis- or positive entropy.

Yeah.

So I think that to me, 80 On is all about tidying up the things that you felt were important parts of what your building process was all about that you think can be given over to the system, to others that might have some value in their building process, because you would like to think time has an unbounded opportunity going forward. So I think that's where I am in '80.

I love that. What a great spot to close it. Thanks so much, Jeff. Really appreciate it.

Thank you, Austin. It's really been, been a blast.