A Personal Conversation with Dr. Oz

So welcome, Dr. Oz. You know, we've known each other a long time. I remember first meeting you at the Obesity Summit. It was in. What's that town where they have all the old fashion?

Charlotte's somewhere in Virginia.

And. And Williamsburg.

You.

Williamsburg. You had this table. You were in your scrub. You had this table full of, like, formaldehyde Laden organs. disease organs like hearts and lungs and livers and you were kind of doing a show and tell about what a bad lifestyle does to your body. And it was very graphic, it was very compelling and everybody's walking by and it was a pretty wild thing. And you've kind of taken that show and tell story into your new life as a, you know, a doctor means teacher, right? So you're now really a teacher of America. You're Dr. Oz, but you're also America's teacher around health and nutrition and lifestyle and innovation. So it's very cool. So how did you switch from like being one of the top cardiovascular surgeons, which you still are, but into this new career of telling the world about health and nutrition and how to get to be healthier?

Well, it's a path that's interesting and worth repeating only because I think folks will learn in their own lives some lessons. But I got to say, I love.

Having you interview me.

Usually, you're asking me all the questions usually on the doc. Usually I get to learn from you. So I met those organs vividly. We had started a kids foundation called Health Corps. And Health Corps is based on the principles of the Peace Corps. You take young energetic people, college grads, you give them a little bit of education, but instead of putting them in Botswana to build dams, you teach them about health and put them in high schools around America, and you have them serve as mentors, big brothers and big sisters for high school students, and they bond, right? They culturally are a little different. They don't have the calcified neuronal processes like you and I have. They're young, flexible minds are allowed- Idealistic. Idealistic. They can teach about health, but in a broader context, it's not just about what you eat and what foods you put down or what exercises you do. It's also about mental resilience, right? If you can get your mind tough enough to figure out how to take care of your own body, you can change the world outside of it. Which is reason, the big reason why I think me, you and many others are engaged in health, 'cause it's an emblem of how a society is doing, not just what your blood pressure is. So in order to do HealthCorps and get kids engaged, I realized, you know, I can tell you about cigarette smoking a lot, But there's a lot of money making sure that you don't know what I'm about to say. Same goes for sugary foods, empty calories, soda pop, et cetera. But I just bring real organs in. First of all, it's sort of interesting 'cause you've never seen real organs.

Most Americans have never seen a dead.

Body, nor the organs inside of one. When you bring the cooler in, when the cooler comes in, the morgue, you know, we roll the body in. We call it man in a pan because you take all the parts of.

A man out and put 'em in.

A bucket and you can share them with people.

Man in a pan. I don't think that's a good brand though.

No, you don't hear it stated too often on national television. But it did work to get young people to pay attention to what a lung looks like after.

Smoking.

It's best history of smoking or frankly just living in a city which will also turn lungs black because of the air purification issues. You learn about liver and fatty livers, you saw atherosclerosis, what it really looks like that hardened arteries. And so all these pathologies became evident. It allowed me to tell the story a little different way. And much of what you and I and others are trying to do is just find different ways of beating back our biggest enemy, which is people think they already know it. And what they already know might be part of the story, but it's not enough of the story to either get them to do the right thing or get them motivated emotionally to act on what they think they know. And that's why organs were effective, because once a young person would go home and say, Hey, Dad, you know, I saw this, this organ lung that's no longer pristine and pink, but blackened and pot-barked and it's got moth-eaten areas, that's emphysema. Now, I don't think you should smoke anymore. That altered how pressure was placed on people who have addictions. Addictions are not just cigarettes and drugs, but food and work and sex and a lot of other things that we all acknowledge are problematic. If I can show you rather than tell you, it's better. better television, too. Yeah.

And so that led to you sort of writing about it and books and being on the Oprah Show. You did, like, 60 episodes on the Oprah Show over a bunch of years.

Well, I tell you, the, my meeting with Oprah is probably because those organs as well, because I, my wife, Lisa, who, you know, is, she was the, in the Visine commercials, the bloodshot eyes, those are her eyes. Oh, wow. And so she was a producer and an actor, and she understood the business, but I Being in media was never on my vision board. I was a very happy heart surgeon doing 500 cases in this city of New York, probably the most of anybody at the time, and having a great time and learning a lot and doing what I thought I was destined to do. And Lisa was the one who said, you know, take those darn organs, get out of the hospital. People aren't learning about their illness. They're not advancing their own lives because they don't know. You haven't told them. American medicine hasn't told them. I started taking those organs like a, you know, like a professor that I'm supposed to be and sharing them. And one of the places we shared them was on a series, a documentary series on Discovery Channel called Second Opinion. My first guest, Oprah Winfrey. And how she came on is still a miracle. It's pretty amazing. I owe that to Gail King, who was willing to put her hands up and say, Hey, you know, Oz is a neophyte, doesn't know how to host a show, but he doesn't know about medicine. Oprah, you like to teach. Let's put the two together and we can make something that works. And after I had her on my show, her team reciprocated kindly, and I, as you said, did dozens of shows with her. And I learned a lot about how to tell the story. And I still remember putting on my $14 cotton scrubs and bringing those organs out. But it had an impact because it was fairly raw. It was pretty authentic. It's literally what you and I learned in med school, but most people who are watching right now have never seen. Or at least hadn't seen till we started doing that.

Yeah, so then you decided you wanted to do this more full time and started the Oz Show, which has been extremely successful. I've been on it dozens of times.

Many times. Many, many, many times. It's not my fault, he's good.

He wasn't good, I wouldn't care. I would say a lot of stupid jokes. It's an extraordinary show and it's had an impact in America and it's helped people to shift. Have you found that doing the show, you hear stories about how it's impacted people people's lives and how they've changed their behaviors and how the information has really transformed them.

That's the most rewarding part of the show by far. By far. It's very insightful for you to ask that because a lot of people think it's, you know, get to have all the celebrities on. I mean, it's nice. I mean, it's nice to call William Shatner up, who I idolize. They, we come on the show, please. Captain Kirk. Captain Kirk comes on, who's a wonderful guy, by the way, Bill Shatner. But that, you know, that, that's a thrill. Very selfish one for me.

Yeah.

But the real reward is when you walk down the street, and I tell my team this all the time because they, you know, People on the street don't know they're my producers. But when I walk down the street, people do recognize me and they'll say, you know, you shared some insight about my life that completely changed it. And I usually say, well listen, first of all, I want to thank you for saying that, but more importantly, it's you who changed your life. I may have given you a little kernel of knowledge or insight or a reason to believe that you matter, but fundamentally, it's just lighting the ember, the kindling to get you going. that is incredibly rewarding. And we're finishing our ninth season. I don't know, 16 years. And you just went on an Emmy. Yes, my ninth Emmy, which I'm also very proud of because it means our brethren respect what we're doing. And I've always believed that the show's real brand was trust. So it's especially important in health issues because you want to trust what you're hearing. You want to trust that you're being told the right thing and that we're competent to figure that out, but also that we'll say the right thing.

If it requires taking some heat because.

You want to be brave about messaging. Like the arsenic story you did on Apple. Arsenic and Apple Juice is a good example, which is not an easy story to tell because we were under a huge amount of pressure not to go with the story. And we had spent a long time getting our numbers right, doing our own studies, trying to just make sure what we'd heard. It had been published elsewhere in smaller magazines or newspaper articles, but we actually elevated it and went to the government and said, Share with us your data and we want to see what's going down. It was, it's uncovered. People don't want to be pushed, especially when it's not easy to fix the problem. But just to give you two seconds on apple juice, the reason it was important is because America outlawed the use of arsenic in our pesticides and our apple trees because we were worried about arsenic in the soil but also in the apples. And so we got rid of all the arsenic in our apples. That sounds great, right? Except because of that, our apples got a little more expensive because the other pesticides are a bit more. and other countries therefore did not get rid of their arsenic and their pesticide. So their apples still had the arsenic. And guess where we get our concentrate from? They make apple juice mostly overseas. So people smarter than me figured out that there should be a concern there. Started studying it, assaying it, and we did the same and replicated what they found. It turns out the US government results is very similar to what we found. The Consumer Reports summary of this whole episode is pretty indicative of how it worked. We didn't have all the facts, but we had them almost all right. And when that Consumer Reports article hit, and I finally realized that this is really a much bigger problem that we just didn't own because we didn't want to have to audit all the food coming into the country. And that's the real pain point. It's not that you have bad people in Washington trying to hurt you, it's they realize they can't possibly look at all the food from other countries. And so when we start saying, well, if you're going to do the right thing in America by getting rid of Arsenic in our apples. What about the arsenic that we're not planning on? You got to also check for that. And by the way, now they do do it. They set standards. The companies, all the companies, and I've seen this over and over again, companies are generally trying to do the right thing, but you got to give them the rules to play by. I had this guy, Justin Kohler, on the show. You know who he is? One of the biggest, Fake news writers. And I say fake, I'm not talking about fake news, political fake news. I'm talking about like literally made the.

Whole thing up news. Yeah.

And he did it for clickbait. Like the Martians, the Martians, New York. But his-- The war of the worlds. But he realized that conservatives were much easier to con than liberals. So he started writing articles in the last election about how Hillary Clinton was stuffing the ballot boxes in Ohio. You should know that Justin Kohler is a lifelong Democrat, by the way. He's not a conservative guy, but the money was for the conservatives. So he went that way. It's all about money. And he would write these articles. So I had him write articles for me. For this is fascinating. Two different articles. Let's see what your viewers think, or listeners think about this. The first article was about a wall beneath the Mexican-American wall. Where, I mean, it was like a tunnel. And then all these people walking through it, that's literally coming with no borders of control at all. And they all looked like they were from Ethiopia because they were from Ethiopia. It was completely made up article. There's no tunnel besides the Lincoln Tunnel going under the wall. Maybe tunnels were not that big. There isn't a wall yet. There's no wall. And Mexican Mexicans look Mexican. They don't look like they're from Ethiopia.

Right.

Right. So that's the first one. And we showed that to a bunch of women. Then we had another article written about Trump putting this big time climate change activist in jail and not letting him talk to the press or anybody else. Couldn't even get a lawyer. Also made up. So show that to two groups of women. And then we look at their brain scans, their quantitative EEGs to see how their brains responded. Fascinating. So the women who saw, who were liberal, who saw the climate change activists in jail, like firecrackers their brain lit up. Conservatives, didn't bother them so much. Flipped the switch, same thing. Conservatives went psycho over this wall. I mean, the realities of how crazily irrational it was never dawned on any of them. But the climate change thing, you know, it's okay. Right, right. And then most profound part of this, I brought them on the show, I confronted them with the reality that they were all fake. And I showed this, we were at the Vatican conference recently with the Pope and all the cardinals, and I showed the video of this. And here's what happened. The women looked at, they were confronted with what they had been conned with, and then one of the women said, well, the article was fake, but what they were saying was true.

Wow. So she still believed it even though she knew it was a lie?

Well, not just she, that is the general consensus. People want to believe what they want to believe. If I feed that already existing preformed idea and give you more ammo with it, you want to believe it. So even though your rational mind is saying, looks improbable to me, you will still go with it. And you don't think any harm is done because the general narrative is correct. But there is, because the general narrative probably isn't correct enough at the time for you to really believe it as firmly as you do. And that creates this split, which is why I'm gonna be clear on this. Much of what's happening online is hacking our brains in a very profound and very important way. That's why-- I want to hear more about that. Well, if you look at the whole nexus of this was fake advertising, which I'm the poster child of. I don't sell any products online. I don't have any weight loss products.

I don't sell any vitamins.

I don't have-- and people have the perception that you do. Skin creams that I own, none. I mean, there are companies that come on and talk about these different things, then we disclose that.

And then they put your picture on.

The website acting like you're promoting it and you're not. Right. But companies I'm not involved with, I mean, people aren't involved with it. We only work with the top companies in the country. And these guys never do that stuff. And they're, you know, like a top line skin cream that just legitimately is a moisturizer. I mean, it's not going to turn your life back. It's just a moisturizer. But people will take those pictures and they'll pretend like I'm selling their cream, which is going to make you look 50 years younger. It's 10 times the price. and da-da-da-da-da. And you start to look at these stores and you say, how is that possible? It's possible because it's legal right now in America. I can take your name, Mark, right now. I can claim you've got a weight loss product, put you associated with sawdust pills, sell the sawdust pills, get your credit card, continue to charge your credit card even though you don't want the sawdust pills from Mark Hyman. Hyman's cures, right? And then you're sitting here saying, my name is being sullied and why can't I change it? You can't change it for a very important reason. The big companies, that take the ads are unwilling to tell you who's giving them the money. Yeah. Now, in traditional media, that's not legal. If you, if I run an ad on my show pretending that I'm, that I'm selling Mark Hyman's sawdust. Right. You know, for aging. Yeah. And you come to me, I have to take it down, and I've got to tell you who gave me the money.

Yeah.

But that's not true for the big internet companies. Interesting. And so it creates an uneven playing field. And the first crack, the first opening happened a month ago because there was this thing called Section 230, which remember that number everybody, Section 230. It was a law passed in 1996, a simple easy concept. It said, listen, the internet is brand new. We gotta nurture it a little bit. So don't hold it accountable for everything written on it. Let's just treat it like a dumb pipe, like it's a fax machine. We're just faxing pages. You don't blame the fax machine maker for the pages that are being faxed. So that law is still enacted right now. So if the big companies, Facebook, Google, etc., if they run fake ads, they're not held personally liable for it. Now the break happened because of backpage.com. Do you know the story? No. So backpage.com is the main site in America where children are sold into sex slavery. And you might say, well, how's that possible? It's only possible because it's legal. And when I say legal, I mean like went to court, and backpage.com wins all the time. So then you say, well, why isn't there a law passed that stops that? Well, because the biggest companies in America, the internet companies, protected backpage.com, not because they like those guys, they hate them. They're disdainful, distasteful, horrible people. However, the principle of protecting the ability of the web to be immune to anybody criticizing websites for hosting bad content, that's really important. There's a lot of money there. It is changing finally because we just have this new law that that now is making that kind of behavior illegal online. And that is the one little bit of hope I have. The rest of America needs to keep pushing harder for transparency. At least this is true for election ads, it's true for completely scam news pieces, and it's true for scam ads, fake ads as well. At least let's find out who's paying the money and making the money off these fake pieces. Yeah, it's transparency.

I think it's key. Okay, we're gonna switch gears a little bit. You invited me years ago when you started Health Corps to be on the advisory board. went with you to, I think it was Coachella, maybe it was way, that's right.

California was a-- Not to the concert.

No, not to the concert. And I was so moved when I went to see these kids in high school who were, you know, very overweight before, who were down in, you know, jugs of soda, literally transformed by the work you're doing there. And most people don't know about this. They know it was Dr. Oz on TV, but they don't understand that you are also a social activist, that you're also trying to transform communities, that you're also trying to empower kids, not just people on television, but kids in schools where it matters most through mental resiliency, through nutrition, through physical activity. And I think it's one of the most important initiatives. In fact, I had someone in Cleveland yesterday who was a pediatrician saying, I want to go into schools. What can we do? I said, well, you should check in with HealthCorps because they're doing great work. You have to reinvent the wheel.

So tell us a little bit about HealthCorps and why it's so important and how people can support it. I still remember that Coachella trip. And you probably Remember seeing the eyes of the students when they realized that someone actually cares about them at that level. Health Corps works because we took the basic concepts that we know work to change people and we branched to put them in a syllabus so that we could give as a toolkit that syllabus to teachers in schools and to our volunteers. We call them volunteers but like Peace Corps volunteers, we pay them, we put them in school systems, they're well thought of individuals. They begin to change the culture of the school. Now, sometimes you do it because kids can ask questions in the back of the school yard or in the hallway that don't normally get addressed in school. Sometimes it's because you get the English teachers, start having kids write essay questions about health issues. So it doesn't have to be on the nose, how many calories are in a gram of fat.

It can be much more subtle than that. But you do have the sugar bag trick where you have a bag of sugar, right?

How much sugar is in it? Exactly. A can of soda. We definitely are provocative about nutrition advice and we also get, listen, the big messages, don't let the man take advantage of you. Don't get conned by industries that are hurting you. Support the industries that are there to help you. So fresh produce is around, how can you get local produce into the community? How can you go to your local bodega or store and say, hey listen, if you stock 100% whole grain bread in here or products, we'll get our parents to shop here. Make these kids into activists. This is about service learning. How do you get the high school kids to go talk to the middle school kids or their siblings or their parents? That's how Health Corps has made its impact. We have boots on the ground and that gives us the ability to take ideas, whether it's Goldie Hawn's meditation program, which we love and been supportive of or other meditation mindfulness programs or other initiatives that people have, we just insert them into us. We've got a big digital textbook initiative now because the city of New York we're taping now, spends $700 million a year in textbooks. Now most of those are STEM textbooks, right? Science, technology, engineering, math, and they're out of date by the time you get them half the time. And they're not able to do testing. They don't really give you feedback on how fast you're able to learn. They don't adjust how fast you can learn. I mean, we have an 1830s agrarian model of education. We ought to be able to mature that to make it what it can be. And I think that's right. And so digital textbooks work. So we work with CK-12, which is a great group. It's free, like everything else we offer. And it allows us to go into school systems and get young people to learn at the pace they're ready to learn at. It eases the teacher's burden of the bureaucratic stuff so they can focus on mentoring and actually teaching the kids where the issues are, as opposed to trying to talk to everybody at once. Let's just do schooling the way we know we can do it. And by the way, this is not novel. There are other countries, some countries we don't think of as too progressive or.

Doing these programs right now and it's working. So how has been the impact of this? What data have you collected How have you seen how these kids respond, how it changed their lives?

You mean like peer-reviewed journal publications?

No, just have you tracked the data at all in terms of how people.

Respond to these kids going to college, are they doing better in school, is.

The school score better? I'm baiting you.

We do have peer-reviewed data. Okay, good. All right. I haven't read those, but yes. So we have actually three papers published, and let me just walk you through it. The hardest thing about changing or proving that you're changing kids is that you can show that kids are learning, But you don't always have the ability to show that that learning changed their lives. So here's what we did. We gave them a bunch of lesson plans, which we knew would be impactful. And then we quizzed them. And we didn't know, did you learn? But what we were trying, did you learn that soda pop is not good for you? And that from day one, we've been able to prove. Then we asked the second question, now that you know that, did you actually change your behavior? Did you drink less soda pop, as an example? And the answer to that is yes. And then we asked the third question. If you know that Sorta Pop is not good for you and you acted differently by consuming less of it and you wanted to lose weight, did you lose weight? And the answer to that is yes, and we've proven it. So we've done the three things that proved dramatic direct connection between teaching young people and getting them to act differently and then benefiting physically from it. And we don't have data on how many of them became doctors, but I know that it's going to reflect in everything they do. And the basic price is a dollar per year of life lived. that's what it costs us to get a young person to realize there's a new path to their well-being, to appreciate the power of food from everything from their complexion to their energy level, to their ability to perform in school, and let them believe that for the rest of their life.

There's a lot of data on the achievement gap, which is this gap in learning that happens when kids are unhealthy and eating poor food. And it's just, and how many schools have you reached?

Oh, dozens and dozens. But that, you want to scale this, right? Yeah, we touch hundreds of thousands of kids lives. And we also, in addition to the individual schools that we're in, we teach large groups of teachers at once. And the reason digital textbooks mean so much to me is we're in thousands of schools with digital textbooks. So we can take our lessons and just give them to you. And the best part is the teachers, all they have to do is get the kids to start watching and then they can go around and answer the questions. They don't have to teach the same thing they've been teaching every single month, every single class. Teachers and the students. Exactly. And if the kids really fast, you go quicker. And if the kid's not having trouble, you slow down, let him process it, and you adjust according to where the child is.

That's how everything else works in the digital world. Any school can take this on, right? It's free. If you're listening, go to healthcorps.org.

Go to healthcorps.org and learn about how to bring this in your school. And even more importantly, we're trying to get entire states to convert over. Working on New York State aggressively now, and my hope is that you'll have school systems, because school boards oftentimes are.

A little bit fearful of big time change.

We want school boards to feel the comfort of political protection.

Our future depends on us, our kids. So two more questions. You recently were appointed to President Trump's Council on Fitness and Nutrition. And of course he's very controversial on all sides. And I was at Cleveland Clinic and there was a Council of CEO executives and Toby Cosgrove was on there and that all disbanded and that happened many times according in his sort of tenure. What sort of motivated you to sort of take the position and what do you hope to get out of being on the council?

I love kids. I love kids more than any criticism people can lob at me and more than any political agenda. And I've been passionate about it my whole life. And through HealthCorps, I've made enough inroads and learned enough that I think I can advance the process.

So bringing HealthCorps to every school in America would be a a great goal would happen out of this.

If I can just deliver the information, I don't have to be the messenger. I just wanted to share the reality that it works. The biggest challenge we face in health in America is nihilism. People don't think they can make a difference. And when it comes to public school system, I remember in the city of New York approaching Mike Bloomberg and saying, I've got this plan, can we get it out to the schools? And he said, the crazy thing about education is people who have private sector jobs who are doing their best at every other walk of life, they know we've got a problem education and we don't give them a way to help. Yeah, well now we have a way to help and I think we should take advantage of that as much as possible so that if you're sitting at home right now and saying, well geez, I'm a, you know, a banker or a teacher, not a teacher, a secretary or assistant in some completely unrelated field, but I know I can help education get better, give me a way to help. Yeah. Health Care is one of several that exists now.

That'S great. I hope you get to achieve what you want with that. I think it's important and I think we need more initiatives around that.

So I'll fight the battle.

So last question. You know, I don't know anybody as busy as you, even me. And I'm pretty busy. You know, I sometimes feel like a slacker next to you. Even though I've written 14 books and.

You know, I don't know if that's... I feel the opposite.

And, you know, staying healthy in the context of that kind of life is not easy. and knowing what you know, you know, how do you stay sharp and healthy? And what are those three to five non-negotiable things you do every day to keep yourself mentally fit, physically fit and emotionally and spiritually healthy?

Well, people often ask about time management, but it's not really the right question. I don't think. I think it's really about energy management.

Yes.

And what are the things that you do, I do and everyone else is watching, is able to do that gives them more chi, more life zest and force. And then I love talking about things we're talking about now. This does not work to me. When I make a show, it's not work. Sometimes rehearsing for the show is work, but the actual making it is never work. Yeah. And I feel that for most people watching right now, that's probably the first question they have to challenge themselves with. What do I do to make my life more percentage wise about things I love doing and less percentage wise about things that are drudgery? And you know what? There's always drudgery. There's always homework. There's always things you don't want to do. So I'm not trying to abdicate the responsibility of coping with that. And, you know, if you've got to drive an hour to work, you know, that's a pain in the neck. There's no way around that. That's not going to be pleasurable, although things you can do to hack the system a little bit. But all that said and done, the things that I've found personally to be beneficial is make the big decisions when you need to, when you no longer feel you're chasing your life goal. And for me, I'm in the change business, so are you. Yeah. So if I'm no longer changing things for the better, then I got to change what I'm doing. I surround myself with the smartest people possible. Never compromise on that. And when you find a good person, you just don't let them go. if they change so they don't want to do the job they're currently in, try to change the job to suit them, shift them to a different part of the organization, but try to find a place to keep them. And if you let them go, which you have to, because it's their freedom that you're supporting, I always say, listen, you put, you know, a lot of wind beneath my wings. I want to return the favor, go off, do great things, and I'm sure we'll meet at the top. When it comes to personal health issue, I'm, I'm jealous of my sleep.

I fight for it.

I'm a great sleeper. It drives my wife crazy.

I prioritize sleep.

Big time. I just shut things down when I need to. I focus as much as I can on. Then that's not just, you don't just fall asleep. You have to work at sleep. So I'm very thoughtful about what I consume in terms of content late in the evening. I don't deal challenging emails or fight big battles 11 30 at night. You know, at 10 o'clock at night, I sort of shut down for new big ideas to fight about. And I just try to do some of the things that I take pleasure doing, you know, I'm studing a lot of my consciousness now. So I'll read something about that. I don't get all worked up about that. And then I'm pretty religious if I get in the bed between 10:30, 11:00, because you want to get to sleep early enough that those hours before midnight are important. Because I get up pretty regularly at 6:00, 6:15 in that morning. And then I usually nap. I know it sounds weak and spineless.

But eight hours after I go to bed, what do you mean, Dr. Oz?

Surgeons don't sleep or nap.

That's right. We were taught that.

Lunch is a weakness, as I was told when I was in surgery rotation. Asking for help was a weakness, a sign of weakness. Of course, said it tongue in cheek because your most creative moments will happen because you're rested enough to create. And if you don't sleep, then you're gonna satisfy the brain's craving for sleep with carbohydrates. That's right.

So there's many reasons to sleep. It's probably the single most underappreciated problem.

I think, in health in America. Absolutely. So sleep. And what else do you do to sort of maintain your energy management? I have a pretty good morning routine. I do seven minutes of my morning yoga, which is basically sun salutation with push-ups and sit-ups and simple things of that nature. And then I don't usually have breakfast. breakfast, I'll start eating around 8:00 or so and have some blueberries and yogurt. And then just before he tapes shows, which we tape our first show at 10 in the morning, I might have some nuts. And then I'll have lunch, take a nap, and then in the afternoon, if I need energy, I'll have a piece of dark chocolate. I don't drink much coffee. That's more of a treat if I ever do it. I'm not a big late drinker. I do try to eat my meals within a 12-hour window. So it's not as-- It was like intermittent fasting. It is intermittent fasting, not by accident.

I mean, good friends of mine who do that religiously.

Yeah, it's powerful. Yeah, it does work. And it seems to overcome a lot.

Of the other mistakes you might make. And that means eating in an eight.

Hour window or 12 hour window.

So I do the 12 hour window. Give yourself a finishing dinner before too.

Late and then not eating till. Yeah. The biggest problem with a rigid lifestyle is, is loneliness. Yeah. If you're only allowing yourself to eat eight hours a day, you can't do certain social things because you can't go to dinner, not eat. Right. So 12 hours usually works, but if I go to dinner, I'll eat at six. I know again, it's like a little old man, but if I go to dinner at 6, 6:30, that much better, I'm done by 8. I go home, process what I'm doing, read some stuff. I don't have to be up at 10:30 at night finishing my soufflé.

Well, you know, what you talk about energy management is so critical. People don't realize that. And it's simple things like it's sleep, it's eating right, it's a little bit of exercise. It's also something else, which I think people don't know about you, but I've been in your home, I've been with your family, I know your kids. and you have such a deep love and connection to your family and you have such beautiful kids and a beautiful wife and I think that is something that actually probably sustains you too. Well, the connections we have with each other are the most powerful tool we have.

People are always saying, is it okay if I have chocolate cake for my birthday? And the answer is always the same and I suspect you agree with it. There's nothing healthier than having fun with people you care about. That's true. Just nothing. It's easy to love the people that are dear to you and you can keep them close and just like the people that work with you, you know, you don't let them run away and just because you're fighting with someone doesn't mean you gotta let that linger. That's great. Which is why you never want to turn the lights off at night as.

You go to bed mad at someone that you care about dearly. So the messages I'm left with here.

Are that your life is about love and service and kindness. Kindness. And ultimately kindness probably becomes, because you can do just about anything you do in life and be kind about it. You and I can have a horrible argument, but I can be kind about it. And you can, you know, feel that passionately about something that you know, maybe hard to fix, but the words you have are constructive and kind, even though the message is pretty tough. And I think in medicine we learned that, right? You don't walk in and beat someone up because they have cancer. You go in there and tell them with the most love you can in your heart that there's a problem. You'll be there with them. You're gonna fight through it. You don't lie. But you're real. You realize deep down that what you really want is respect. We all do. And when you say things with respect and recognize that people might love you, if they respect you one day, but they'll never love you if they don't respect you.

Yeah, and kindness is so beautiful. As my grandmother used to say, how are your friends? Are they kind? Was this person kind? And that was the value she said.

When you make relationships. That's the old aphorism that you can either be kind or not kind. It's always easy to be kind.

That's so true. And next time I want to talk to you about consciousness and what you're thinking about that.

Oh, my goodness. Is the single biggest unanswered question It's when we overlook on purpose because we can't get our minds about it. It's probably the place where religion and science will have to meet because it's the one place we'll all agree that it is the most mysterious element of our existence.

And it's actually where I started. That's what I, my major was in Buddhism and the study of consciousness. Thank you, Dr. Oz, for being on the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Really appreciate you being here and sharing.

Your life and your story and giving so much back to the world. I love that you misspell pharmacy, by the way. F-A-R-M-A-C-Y. Yeah, food is medicine. Thank you, Dr. Oz.

Bless you.

Don't forget, there's a way to listen completely ad-free. With Hyman Plus on Apple Podcasts, you can enjoy every episode without any breaks. Just open Apple Podcasts and tap Try Free to start your seven-day free trial.