The Mystery of the 95 Year Old Track Star and What She Can Teach Us About Living Longer, Happier Lives

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Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield here and I recently Learned about this 90 something, I believe 95 year old or possibly 94 year old at the time that the book that I just finished was written. Track and field athlete. Her name is Olga and she not only looks and acts like a much younger woman, but she holds over 23 world records in track and field. And this book that I recently read goes into her diet habits, her sleep habits, how she scores on various personality traits, what she does in her spare time, her family history, her genes. Basically, the book details how she went through a process of participating in tests that, that were administered by some of the world's leading scientists. She offered her DNA to these groundbreaking research trials. And really what the book delves into is how you can learn to live a longer and happier life based off of what science and research and the author of this book has discovered about Olga and people like her. So the author of what Makes Olga Run, the mystery of the 90 something track star and what she can teach us about living longer, happier lives is my guest today on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. His name is Bruce Grierson and I hope I'm pronouncing your last name correctly, Bruce.

You got it.

And today we're going to delve into what you can learn about how to live as long as possible and be as happy as possible doing it based off of this fascinating story of Olga. So, Bruce, thanks for coming on the call.

Oh, well, it's totally my pleasure, Ben. Thank you for having me.

Well, I suppose a perfect place to jump right in would be to say, who is Olga? What's the story of Olga?

Alrighty. Well, Olga, you were close in 90 something. She just turned 95. Actually, I had breakfast with her a couple of weeks ago. She turned 95 and she was thrilled to be 95 because in Masters track you move up in five year increments. So every time you turn, you know, 95 or the next, every time you turn a five or a zero, you bump up a category and the competition thins out and you get to knock off some more world records.

She aged up.

She did. And so now she. And then since that breakfast a couple weeks ago, she's been off to Budapest to do the world indoor championships in the new category for her of 95 to 99. And as you can guess, competition's a bit thin at that level. There are a couple of people she competes against, but mainly she's competing against her own world records and her own age graded time. So she's competing against how people should be expected to perform if they're that age. So they worked out these age graded tables. You kind of take into account the expected decline of the human body time. And then you plug in your performance, whatever your sprint time or how far you threw the javelin, and then your age and your gender, and they spit out an open record, which would be equivalent to what you just did. And so Olga got back from Budapest with nine new world records. No surprise there, but I think seven of them were age graded. The best performance anyone has ever, any woman has ever done in that category. Right, right. So she's just, I mean, you know, that's why I wrote about her.

So how did you find Olga? Did you just hear about her?

I heard about her about five years ago when at that time she was still kind of a big deal in masters track. But master's track is pretty obscure field. I mean, I hadn't really heard much about it, and so I didn't know about her. She was just actually profiled here, and we both live in Vancouver in Canada. It turns out she lives not that far away. So when I heard about her, I thought that maybe she was kind of an interesting human interest story and maybe I'd like to meet her and maybe I would write something about her. And so she, you know, I called her up and she invited me over and I didn't, you know, really know what to expect. But in the first, you know, within a couple of minutes of having met her and sort of looking at her and watching the way she moved and kind of the energy coming off her now. She's, she's. So at this point, she's 89, about to turn 90. And it became clear to me within about five minutes that there was a. A different kind of story to be told through Olga. It was, you know, sort of the science writer in me said, wow, okay, this is not just about a woman doing a quirky thing. This is about how we age told through this person who seems to be defying a lot of the rules about it all.

So at that point, it looks like you delved in and just started to hook up with all these scientists. To study Olga. And this book. Did. Did this book take a long time to write, or how did you go about doing this?

Kind of. I sort of had to ask her at a certain point whether she was in. Whether she was up for a bigger enterprise, you know, whether she wanted. Whether she would take this journey with me and kind of be a guinea pig. And was she interested enough in herself and what was going on in herself to make this commitment? Because there's a lot of tests and a lot of poking and prodding and a lot of time commitment and some traveling and, you know, it was a big deal, but she went through a.

Very, very wide battery of tests in this book.

Yeah. What was cool is that she said when I asked her how old she felt, you know, just. I thought that was a good beginning metric. How old do you feel like you are? And she said, I don't know, 50. Then she said, no, maybe younger, because I still have the energy. More energy than I had at 50. And that part. Then she said, I don't know why it is. Let's figure it out. And so I thought, all right, here we go. We can. We're all in this together, and let's. And let's tap the contacts, some of the contacts we have in Canada, and then let's just go as wide as we can, as far as we can, as long as we can, and as deeply as we can to figure until we're satisfied that we have. We've really turned over as many stones as we can. You can't know every. You know, there's so many variables in human aging and human performance, but we're going to do all we can to at least get to the right questions and then set up, you know, sort of frame her in the context of how we age and how we can each better.

Now, one of the things that you got into initially was genetic testing and looking at Olga's genes. And in the book, you talk about a superstar gene, a warrior gene, and a warrior gene. How does this relate to aging and the genetic testing experience you had with Olga?

Well, there's sort of two things I was looking at in terms of her genes. Well, I guess I should back up and say the question sort of at the heart of this, this whole book, and what's the question everybody has is, okay, so this woman's interesting, but she's got to be just a freak of nature, right? She's got to just be the lucky recipient of a good genetic. And if that's true. So that was the question we Started with, is that true? And if it is true, then, you know, it's still interesting. She's still interesting, but she's not. But it doesn't mean as much. She's not as useful to the rest of us if that's the case, because then that would suggest there's nothing we can do to be more like Olga. And so I wanted to know, you know, how does it slice up what part of it is just lucky jeans, both in terms of performance, how she's able to do these things, and. And the fact that she seems to be aging more slowly than most of us. So it's the performance and the aging dimension that I was curious about with the genes. So the first thing with the aging, the first thing that a doctor will ask is, well, let's find out about your family history. If you come from a long line of Methuselahs, then you're likely getting a ton of genetic help in that respect. But it turns out that for Olga, she's the seventh of 11 kids and she's outlived them all. And her mom and dad weren't that old when they died, and their mom and dad weren't that old when they died. So right away you start to suspect genes aren't the whole story here for sure. And then we did some genetic testing, some hot spot testing. At one point we thought about trying to map her whole genome, but that can end up being not as productive a thing as you think, because you can map it, but we still don't really know how to read it very well. And so there'd be a lot there that we just. That's not useful to us. So we did the hotspot testing, which is about a million places on the genome that are thought to be significant in some way. And there are certain genes that I looked at that are relevant to various aspects of this story. And so, yeah, the one you talked about, the so called superstar allele, is one that just about every Olympic sprinter who has been tested has had two copies of this particular allele that creates sort of explosive energy. And so Olga had that. Not surprising because that's her main thing. She's a sprinter. She's not an endurance person. She's a sprinter and sort of a power thrower of things and runner of short distances. So that's where she favors. She's a fast pitcher. And then the other one I was interested in, well, there were a number, but one that we looked at was a gene or set of genes that helps. That gives us the proclivity to respond well to exercise training. So some of us can do the same amount of exercise as others and actually get fitter faster just because of that genetic advantage. And I thought that this was going to be really significant. So I got tested for that one too. Just as a comparison, neither of us had all the full suite of genes that would make us a super responsive athlete. She had about half of them that you need and I had, I had almost none of them, which was kind of discouraging, but explained a lot about why to me why my own fitness has kind of cratered after age 40, even though I keep going out there and trying just as hard as ever, but I can't keep my, seem to keep my fitness up. So I'm starting to explain it partly. I didn't get the genetic cards for that, which is no reason not to keep doing it. You just don't, you can't expect the kind of gains though somebody who had the, who had the cards anyway. That was the, that was our advent, part of our adventures in the genetics. But there's so much. Sorry, Ben, you go.

I was going to say, I think it's interesting that you mention in the book how you have this double warrior gene, which technically would mean that, you know, you might have more horsepower or perhaps a greater propensity toward athleticism, but that you tend to fade faster when you have that double warrior gene.

Right, yeah. And there's a certain level of impulsiveness, I think, connected to the warrior gene. I think I summarized this as ready, fire, aim. I mean it tends to be people who are fast out of the gate and make decisions, make strong decisions, but may not have to staying powerful for the long run. So.

Yeah, whereas Olga was, was half warrior and half, half warrior. So she's more likely to kind of like hang on to her, her, her, her hardiness later on in life.

Yeah, I think that, that, that's sort of what they think that's like if you're drawing it up, if you're drawing up the perfect person, you would give them one, one of each of those alleles. So they have the advantages of each.

Now if someone's listening in and they wanted to do that same type of genetic testing that's out there. Okay.

Yeah. Now somebody was telling me 23andMe doesn't stop doing some of the health reports that they did when temporarily they did.

But you can still, you can export your 23andmere results and then import them into a free website called geneticgenie.com and you can get quite a bit of results. And I actually had a physician on the show a few weeks ago named Dr. Tim Jackson, and he specializes in just basically getting on the phone with people and walking them through their genetic results. So even though 23andMe doesn't give you detailed health data anymore, if you've tested with them in the past year or so, you could still harvest the data and then hook up with someone who could explain it to you.

Cool. I did not know that. That's good to know.

You have an entire chapter in the book devoted to this concept of the adversity hypothesis. Can you explain what the adversity hypothesis is and why that's important when it comes to longevity?

Yeah. Well, people think that you want to live a stress free life, or some people think that if you want to live long in a certain age, stress is a killer. Right. But the truth is that what you want to avoid is chronic stress. It's the kind of stress that you get in a job that you have no control at, or the kind of thing that you're dealing with an elderly parent that you have to take care of, or a special needs kid. Something over the long run that just is relentless and doesn't give you a chance to rest from it. But the other kind of stress is acute stress that things you have to face and you really have to muster a strong stress response and then you punch through them and you get to rest. Those things toughen us up in a way that exactly the opposite way that chronic stress breaks us down. So even at the cellular level, we can see that those two different kinds of stressful experiences work on our immune systems differently. And I argued that. Well, I sort of tested it first of all by just looking at Olga's story. What has her life been like? What has she gone through? And it turns out like many people of her generation, she had a. Had a fairly vigorous, difficult upbringing on the farm. A lot of work, a lot of challenges, a lot of physical exercise that is a kind of acute stress for the body. Things you have to do and punch through them. And then she had other stressors in her life that were really difficult. Like a very kind of a terrifying marriage that she had to endure and escape from. And then she lost a daughter to cancer and then she had to get through that. And so there were just ways that I think she's tough by nature as well. But there's also a lot of things that she had to deal with and just solve and get through and get beyond that that made her tougher still. And so a combination of her natural temperament, which is she's really a persevering person by nature, but you know, what she went through in her life. And it's the kind of stuff that people of our generation, I mean, we think we're tough, but man, those people of her era are just generally, they're made of strong stuff and it comes through in what she's able to do now.

I think it's really interesting how you get into this concept of acute stress ultimately being good for us. One of the examples that you use in the book is the, you know, kids growing up on the Canadian prairie who get toughened up by the wind chill that freezes their exposed flesh. And how some of the research that's been done in rats has shown that rats that are given the ability to develop cold tolerance can have increased emotional stability and that may have this anti aging effect.

Well, it's funny, you know, you talk a lot about cold thermogenesis and it strikes me as interesting that a lot of sort of the technical hacks that people pursue these days are so much like the kinds of things that somebody like Olga naturally was exposed to. It's almost like through technology we're trying to simulate the kind of experience that people, you know, naturally had. And I think that there's a lot, there's a lot of wisdom, accidental wisdom in the kind of life that somebody like Olga lived, you know, with, you know, eating real food and getting those kinds of, getting the kind of exercises she had and just, just the things that science now bears out as, these are really, really sensible things to do, she did by instinct.

It's that classic. I live out here in the Northwest. It's kind of that classic aged Montana rancher gene. Both my wife is from Bozeman, Montana and her in laws have lived to extremely. They're up in their 90s and they're working out in the field. And I think it's that type of daily stress versus. You talk about the new class of telomere activating drugs in the book and these things that might potentially lengthen the telomeres. And I think it's interesting how we have all this technology going towards hacking aging when in fact, I think a big part of it comes down to just trying to live more naturally and almost a little bit uncomfortably.

Yeah. And it's funny how a lot of the things we try to do to sort of improve on what evolution built in us instead of sort of looking to the past and let's, let's What. How should we be living in a way that sort of our bodies evolved to live? We try to find ways to, like the drugs you just talked about. Let's. Let's extend our telomeres, sort of forgetting that nature built in a mechanism that you don't want your telomeres to be too, too long. There's a sweet spot in there beyond which, you know, you become vulnerable to certain kinds of cancers and stuff. So we monkey with this stuff at our peril. I mean, not just. Not to be a Luddite about it, but there's obviously cool things that we can, that technology has made our lives better in. But there's a lot of wisdom in the body, contained in the cells in the body itself, that we need to just honor, you know, and so that, to me, was sort of a subtext of the book as I learned more and more about how Olga does it, you know.

Now, in addition to genetic testing, Olga did some brain scans. And it's interesting that her and some of the other folks you talk about in the book who have been observed to live to very long ages, but stay pretty sharp from a cognitive standpoint, they actually still display some evidence of plaque formation. How can that be? That an aging person can have plaques in their brain and not actually get some of these Alzheimer risks or cognitive decline that you see in other members of the population?

Well, sometimes what brains do is they create these workarounds. I always think of it as like, if you could cut open the brain of a person who's got a proclivity to something like Alzheimer's or dementia, but has also been doing things to combat that, then the brain starts to figure out ways to work around the plaque so that you don't. You wouldn't notice from talking to them that the wiring in there is as jerry rigged as it really is. Our brains are so plastic and malleable and responsive to what we're giving them that they find. Often they find a way, if we give them a lot of aerobic exercise over a long time, for example, that really helps them find a way to. To surmount some of the natural problems that they've inherited. So when we looked at, when we give Olga a brain scan at the University of Illinois at Champaign, at a clinic called the Beckman Institute, which is really at the forefront of the nexus studying where physical exercise and cognition meets. And so we went in with the hypothesis that she's as sharp as she is, partly because of a lifetime of exercise. Now, it's impossible to prove that unless you have taken scans of her brain all the way along. And unless she's one of a big data set of people who are age matched but have lived differently, you can't know for sure. But the sort of strong circumstantial case that her exercise has helped her is that her brain looked pretty good. It looked really good in some respects. The hippocampus, which is the part of the brain that's responsible for making and consolidating memories, which is the thing that you really want to hang on to as you get old so that you don't become a daughtering idiot. Her hippocampus looked fantastic. And that part of the brain we know is very responsive to exercise. And if her whole brain looked like that, then you couldn't say, well, geez, that's probably, that's the exercise talking there. But the fact that she had shown decline elsewhere in other parts, normal age related decline, such as sort of shrinkage in other parts of the brain, that they haven't found a link with exercise. So that made the director of the institute there, Art Beckman, Art Kramer, I should say, made him say, you know, that's strong evidence that she's built part of this brain herself from some of these good habits, like her lifelong exercise habits.

So you have these white matter tracks that carry information through your brain and these ventricles in the middle of the brain that have your cerebrospinal fluid and everything in them. And even if you have plaques in your brain, if you've got these vessels almost like big rivers throughout the brain, a lot of times it's almost like a workaround to allow you to. Even though you have much of the plaque formation that naturally occurs as you age, to kind of work around that.

That'S sort of the idea that your brain finds all sorts of ingenious ways to still function. And you know, something like Olga still function pretty optimally, even though, you know, systemically, it's heaven. It doesn't look like our brains. I shouldn't say you. It doesn't look like my. You're probably a lot sharper than I am. But it doesn't look like the brain of somebody who's 35. There's plaque up there now when it.

Comes to neurogenesis and kind of expanding your hippocampus in this way. In the book you say that for building cognition, something like Sudoku or that, and crossword puzzles and these brain games and all these things we see recommended to us, you say that those type of things are a shovel, but Exercise is a bulldozer. And what do you mean by that? Is there evidence to show that exercise somehow beats out all these other things?

I think the way what exercise does, the other things are good too, and actually Olga does them. She's a real Sudoku fiend. But exercise, what they're finding is. Goes way wider than the improvements that you can make with the brain games. The brain games make you better at doing things like the brain games that you practiced, whereas exercise bolsters every part of the brain. And the cool thing, though, is that, I mean, not to sort of diss the brain games, but when you do both, when you have some sort of a regime that you try to stay cognitively sharp by pushing your brain intellectually, reading and games and that sort of thing, and you add that to a fitness regime, so you're getting your aerobic and your resistance training at the same time. When you do them both, you seem to get a multiplier effect, and you get more than the sum of those two things individually.

So, basically, if you can figure out a way to make exercise not just exercise, but also something complex that's challenging you mentally while you're exercising, that's the best of both worlds.

I think if you're a dancer or you're a skater or something, that. Where you're getting the pretty significant aerobic and anaerobic challenge just to your. To your system, as well as you're forcing your body to move on all these different planes. And you're really kinesthetically pushing it, too. I think that there's some evidence that that's where you really get the best possible outcome in cognition.

So maybe there really is something to those Zumba classes at the gym.

I think that there's something to moving in ways that you haven't got used to moving, like, confusing. Your body is good on so many levels. It's not.

Just so many of us don't do it, though. It's so easy to go out and just ride your bike, right? Or go for a run.

You do what? Yeah, well, and I'm guilty of that, too. I like, you know, I know in my runs that I get my fix. You know, I get my little. My endocannabinoid head at 35 minutes. And it's so easy to just take that. Go take that pill. Because I know, I know. I know what I'm getting. But there's lots of evidence, so we need to mix it up. We really do need to confuse our body, because that's how you force the adaptation And I think that with Olga, like, she does 11 different events and her body moves in just whatever way a body can move if you add them all up. And so I think that that's contributing in some way. That's. I think that that's contributing to how, to her staying sharp and staying fed and staying resilient in ways. I'm not sure I can prove that in a court of law yet, but I'm pretty convinced.

And for those of you listening in, you don't have to necessarily shirk away from this stuff if you're 40 or 50 or 60 or 70. I know that you go, Bruce, into the book about how they compared the old mine mice and the young mice and found that when either of them were put into a treadmill program, that exercise rebuilt their brains. And that was true even in the older rats, who actually, I believe you said that the older rats were building neurons at an even greater rate than some of the younger animals.

Exercise was introduced possibly at a greater rate. Well, that's one of the sort of the uplifting, for me, messages of all the research was that, yeah, I mean, there's no. You used to think that there was no hope for us. If we had been sedentary up to our 50s and 60s, if we'd been sitting on the couch. And then we decided we wanted to reclaim our health at 65. It seemed like such an unlikely prospect. But we now know that you can make huge gains even very late in life when you start to do this stuff. As long as you start slowly and don't get injured very deep into old age, you can still show improvements. And as you say, in some ways, you get on a road that starts to converge with the road that you would have been on had you been fit all along. I don't think you ever quite get there. If you were a total couch potato for the first half of your life, you never will. Those two roads won't meet. But you will, by some measures, make faster gains. You start to catch up in a way that's pretty heartening. Now, the question I asked a few scientists, is Olga at her age now, I mean, is she actually improving? Can she make gains? Or are we just talking about stemming losses now? And nobody has a clear answer for that, But I think that probably at this point, beyond maybe 85, you're. You're stemming losses. So she's not getting worse as fast as she would if she weren't doing all these things. She's hanging on. But it's still amazing to look at Some of her results at 95 and they're not that much worse than they were at 90. And a lot of depends on what she brings on a particular day. And if she senses she's having a good day, then she just, she will go for it. And what happened in Budapest is she went for it on one particular day and she got, I think it was high jump or long jump. And every successive attempt was a better world record than the last one. They kept having to bring the guys down and do the measurement and make the announcement and make a lot of clapping. And then she did it again in the same routine. She did it again. She just, she's opportunistic that way. When she thinks, when she's really on the beam and it's happening for her, she really goes for it. And that's kind of cool, kind of temperamental faculty, which a lot of us don't have, realizing when it's your day and when it isn't. And a lot of us try to push through days when we're exhausted and we're just. Or whatever, when the fact conditions just aren't right. But either our coach is telling us or we're telling ourselves, got to do it. And you can get injured and discouraged under those conditions if you stop listening to your body and just listen to your coach. Yeah.

And I know that you get into some of the personality traits that correlate very well to longevity. And if we have a chance later on, I'd like to ask you about those. But. But while we're on the topic of exercise, there is a relation that you talk about in the book in terms of the growth of the hippocampus and the actual intensity of the activity. And I think this would be interesting for folks to hear because there's kind of this debate out there is the long slow aerobic stuff best? Is the high intensity interval training best? It turns out that exercise intensity actually does play a role. What did you find that you talk about in the book?

Yeah, I think that there's more and more evidence. I mean, it is a controversial. It's a controversial area, but I think that on balance the evidence is shifting more toward the kind of high intensity interval training over long slow aerobic. The lsd, long slow distance. So the LSD group, there's still a bunch out there who say. Who maintain its. But I think that they're starting to lose the argument. I think in intensity you can get the same. I mean, you've talked about this before too. You can get the same kinds of benefits in a much shorter workout that's more intense. And in terms of one thing, kind of a study that I set up was just looking at two fantastic athletes, masters athletes, runners. One was Ed Whitlock. He's a marvelous long distance runner in his A80s. Have you talked about him on the show at all? I don't know. No.

But he's a marathoner, right?

Yeah, he's a marathoner and a 10,000 meter runner. And he's all about long, slow distance. He does his training runs. He actually runs around the local cemetery for three hours every day. And training season, very slow. And that's. He thinks that that's the way. And it's very hard to argue with his results because, you know, he ran a 253 marathon at age 73. So, you know. Oh, no. Am I right? I think so, yeah. Yeah. Anyway, he's by far the most sort of the most impressive athlete marathoner among the really old folk. So I kind of compared him just in terms of his kind of youthfulness, just how old he. Well, how old he looks to another guy who has a completely different strategy of high intensity interval training. And that's a guy named Earl Fee who runs shorter distances and trains differently and never puts in that kind of miles. And the two guys, I mean, they're both sort of the best at what they do, but they look 25 years different. Ed looks old. He looks like Father Time himself. And Earl looks like if you just cover his face and just look at his body, he looks like he's 50 years old. Something. Well, it's muscle.

Kind of like muscle is youth type of thing.

Well, it's partly muscle, but I think that there's something you could say that the Ed Whitlocks of the world have done from all that mileage, have done some oxidative damage that has aged them more quickly. People will challenge me on that, but I think that there's. I think I could build a case with that.

Yeah, I won't challenge. I mean, I've seen not the bodybuilder athletes. I think that's an unhealthy, but just like the strength, power, muscle type of folks. And I've had some of them on the podcast like Art Devani and Kerry Nosler and these guys lift. They don't necessarily run long distances. And compared to some of the guys who may have lived just as long as them up to this point, but who did more of the running, these guys look amazing. They just look good, you know? Yeah, you cover up Their faces and they look like, you know, 30, 40 year old guys. Now you actually talk about this a little bit. You have this thing that you describe in the book called the Vampire Effect about these old mice that received blood transfusion from young mice and suddenly started performing better on memory tests. Now how does the blood actually play a role here?

Yeah, well, I think this is, I think you're talking about Saul Aleda's work out of California. They think that the blood of certain people and a lot of people who have had been lifelong exercises and so on have certain ingredients, certain immune system boosters and circulating proteins and other things in the blood that almost serves, it works as kind of really rich soil for the other tissues in the body. And so Olga actually gave a blood sample and so did some of the other masters athletes in one of the tests that we did at McGill. And the idea is. They're going to cultivate those cells in a petri dish and they're going to put muscle cells from age matched controls who have been sedentary their whole life in, in that rich soil and see if those old muscle cells grow again. That is the theory that there's something about the components of the blood of young people and people who've been living right that can rejuvenate not only their own tissues, but the tissues of other people that they're injected into. So, so that's what they found in the mice. And to me it wasn't, it was the most interesting kind of the crazy thing was not just that it, but not just that it improved sort of physical performance of the other of the old mice that got the new young blood, but the cognitive performance, the fact that they could now run maces better. Yeah, I mean to me that's a promising, promising dimension of the research.

It's really interesting. And I think that the fact that the blood serum is full of all these things like circulating proteins and growth factors and immune system boosters that age kind of tends to deplete, should give folks, especially who are aging, pause about what you can put into your bloodstream that might help you from that standpoint. I think that as I get older I'll probably start to think more about, about ways that I could potentially use things like supplementation and nutrient dense foods. And you know, I even right now I get a blood test four times a year to actually see what's in my blood. And I think that if someone's listening in and they're into anti aging into longevity, just this idea that what's in your Blood can keep you young is a pretty important consideration. I think the research that you talk about in that, you know, the vampire effect effect that you talk about is just. It's crazy that what's in your blood really matters.

It's cool. The flip side is some people are for sure gonna say, hey, if we can figure out what's circulating in Olga's blood serum and synthesize it in the lab, then we can inject that back into the rest of us and we won't have to have a healthy lifestyle. We'll get the benefits without having to get off the couch. You know you're gonna get that.

Yeah, yeah, that's, that's, that's kind of the same argument. The same. If you take enough fish oil, you don't have to exercise. Now you go into some of Olga's habits. Fascinating chapter on her habits. And I just wanted to ask you about a couple of them. Even though you go into a ton, Olga's sleep habits are interesting. Can you talk a little bit about her sleep habits? Because they actually aren't. It's not that deep sleep, eight to nine hours through the whole night that I would have expected to see.

Yeah, well, Olga fell into something like so many things that she does, they're things that she routines that she kind of fell into because they seemed to be what her body wanted to do. And so what she does is she goes to sleep at around 10 at night and then naturally wakes up at around 2 and she's awake kind of, but she doesn't get up at that point. What she figures out is the best thing for her is to keep the lights dim or dark and do a stretching routine right there in her bed in the middle of the night. You would have guessed she lives alone. You wouldn't want to do it with a partner beside you. And she does this sort of stretching and self massage routine that she made up for herself. And it takes 90 minutes. And so she does it in the middle of the night and then by the end of it, she's enervated and sleepy and she goes back to sleep for a second sleep about three and a half hours. So in the end, through this weird.

Polyphasic and you say how she actually uses a wine bottle for the deep tissue work that she does. She keeps a wine bottle?

Yeah, she doesn't. She didn't even know that you can go and get a foam roller that kind of costs 50 bucks. And why should you do that? Because she had a wine bottle that did the same thing. So she pulls it over from her bedside table and she rolls out on the works those muscles in her back with the wine bottle and then she does the rest of her body sort of gudgeon very systematically. And at the end then she falls back asleep for her second sleep. And that's this polyphasic sleep that we're learning is, I mean one form or another was the way we used to sleep way back, way back when, before the industrial revolution and everything forced us into a kind of unnatural routine of eight hours at a block and no more. There's lots of different kinds of polyphysics that people do, you know, breaking it into naps and things.

I think it's important though, she's not reading a Kindle or checking emails. She's doing massage and stretching and you know, I think there's a big difference between that and working. You know, the massage piece is interesting because you look at aging people and they get this issue with cross linking of collagen fibers and the wearing down of fascia. And they also basically you've got what you describe as a shrink wrap around your body, this fascia, this nerve rich net of connective tissue. And I think that it's a lost art almost people not, not paying attention to just something as simple as deep tissue massage as an anti aging and longevity technique. And I love how you also get into the primal appeal of it, how you know, we've got this mother's tongue licking that a lot of mammals do, which is almost a massage that animals get from the get go. And how studies have shown that preemie babies who get massage grow and develop more quickly. There's all these benefits of this type of deep tissue work and she's just waking up in the night and doing it.

She's kind of figured it out for herself. I mean, in some ways, you know, I bet if she could afford it she would probably have, I mean maybe all of us would have an in house masseuse to do it for her. But. Yeah, but she, but she's, she's worked out a way that she can get some of these same benefits just, just, but just by herself. And, and she really does think that the, and you know, if for nothing else, if somebody, a hard skeptic is going to say, well you know, there's not really that much evidence that massage works. And there are people who will say that you can't deny that just for stress relief and the relaxation and that just feels good. And that itself has redounds down in the immune system and it does matter, you know, it's going to have long term benefits.

You get into Olga's diet. And I'm actually going to let people read about that themselves in the book because we talk about diet a lot on this show and I think there are some other interesting things you get into in the book. And I wish we had two hours to talk here. But rather than focusing on the diet component, which is actually a fascinating chapter and again, I think folks just need to go grab the book and read through that if you want to see some of Olga's little diet things that she's doing. I thought even more interesting than that was the personality traits. You actually go. You have an entire chapter that goes into the personality traits associated with longevity and how if you score high versus low on certain traits, it can influence your longevity. Now what would you say? I mean, you go over a bunch of them, but what would you say is the most important personality trait that you could have when it comes to living longer?

Yeah, well, I mean, there are personality traits that correlate with longevity and there are personality traits that correlate with performance, and then there are some. So if you can be sort of in the sweet, sweet spot there and have the sort of like the perseverance and, and those kind of traits that all high performers have, and then the kind of traits that correlate with longevity are things like the ability to, like to quickly relax. It's sort of almost. How do I frame this up?

I think you describe it as almost like conscientiousness.

Well, that's one aspect of it. Yeah, I was gonna say the other one is sort of a non. Like one of the dimensions they measure in some personality tests is neurotic versus non neurotic. And non neurotic people do better. Generally, they live longer. It's just a stress management thing.

Non neurotic people live longer.

Non neurotic? Yeah, you don't want to be. Woody Allen won't live as long as Jack Johnson. You know, probably all things being equal. But you're right, there's a conscientiousness and an openness to experience that strangely correlates with longevity too. And openness is one of the prime dimensions in some of these personality tests too. That just means when you encounter something you haven't seen before, you tend to naturally view it as a challenge rather than a threat. Right. It's something that you can grow from rather than something you need to worry about as an opportunity obstacle. And that's a pretty deep seated temperamental Trait that we can develop to some degree, but I think we're born with that to some degree too. There are certain novelty so called novelty genes that we can be born with.

It seems to correlate well to something you hear thrown around a lot right now and kind of like the ancestral primal movement. And that's this concept of play, of just basically being open to going out and exploring your environment, learning new things, kind of even if something might seem intimidating to you, still being open to trying it out.

Yeah. In the ancestral context, they sometimes called that novelty gene, the migration gene, because that was the people who tended to explore. Some of them died en route, some of them found America, they tended to have that novelty seeking gene. But I think of when I think of Olga's personality and that nexus of staying power and longevity and high performance, I think of her as a warrior mensch. And the warrior part is the proclivity to have all the high performance part of your personality. And the mensch is the unlikely partner of that. And that sort of quite a giving nature and having a high dimension of service. And so you don't think of warriors being thoughtful like that. But when you have a high dimension of a will to serve and to be helpful and not just self centered, that correlates with longevity too. For reasons I'm not sure we know why, for sure, but it does.

I just finished a book actually called the Workaholics Cure for Anxiety by one of my friends, Charlie Howen. And in that he has an entire chapter devoted to kind of practical ways that you can engage in giving and how that's one of the best things that you can do for anxiety and stress, whether it be charitable giving, whether it be, whether it be volunteering, whether it be giving of your time to children or family. But yeah, giving seems to rank really high.

Wow. There's another book called Give and Take by Adam Grant, who's a business Prof. At the Wharton School. And it's all about that too, the power of giving rather than taking. And it seems counterintuitive, but I like when you can put some hard science behind it and say, gee, people who give live longer, they're healthier. Even though we don't know necessarily what the mechanisms are, we know that that's, that's, that's the outcome. And so if you have that as a dimension of your personality and it's. And also I said something that can be developed. It's not like you're a good guy or you're not, you can be better. Yeah. So we can.

Yeah, just. Just a quick note for folks if you're listening in. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com no matter when you're listening to this interview and just do a search there for Olga O L G A you'll be able to see some of the shownotes for this episode. And in those show notes I have a video where you can see Olga and see what she looks like and see what she's doing and head over there and check it out. But while I still have you on the call, Bruce, I actually had one other question for you if I could, and that. Is that what you talk about towards the end of the book, where you discuss how the future would look like if we wanted to change our environment to maximize longevity, we wanted to change our culture to maximize longevity. What are some of the things that would kind of change compared to how things are now?

Yeah, well, I often with a lot of the people, the gerontologists and so on that I spoke to, I always ask them, how would you, if you're designing the nursing home or extended career facility of the future, how would you design it? And some of the answers to that kind of speak to what you've just asked. And one of them is people need to have more control of their environment. More of a sense that they're not a cog in the wheel or a rat in the maze or whatever, but they have some sort of sense of personal agency. What they do matters in some bigger sense sense in the world. So they have more of a sense of purpose, that they're not just working what we used to say, working for the man, but they also have a certain degree of freedom to do what they want and what their conscience tells them to do. So they need to have that level of control. And then on a more sort of mundane level, they need to be able to move around. I mean, so much of our environment, our work environment particularly, we just sit, you know, and we sit and then we think that. Then we think we can take the pill of a one hour run or half hour run in the morning and that will be enough to counteract the other 23 hours of total inertness that we experience. And we now know that that's just not, that's not a paradigm that can work. So we need to find ways that people can be in motion a little bit more throughout their day. And you see it now with people trying to do things like standing desks and treadmill desks and they're trying to, I think there's enough evidence now that we can't just be, we can't just be sitting somewhere. We've got to sort of try to be alive in the world and moving around and using our, using our bodies. So there's two things that I think that the world is our environments have to have to look a little bit different and we have to set up different conditions for how we get through our days. Otherwise we're going to get sick. Sicker.

Are you standing right now?

I am. Good.

Me too.

Just because I got tired of kidding.

Me too. Well, this is fascinating. And again, folks, I actually, I mentioned Bruce's book. It made such an impression on me. I mentioned it in my recent primalcon presentation down in Mexico. I mentioned it over at Paleo FX to a couple of questions I got on anti aging and longevity. I've recommended it a few times on on the show before. And when I recommend a book that many times, that means it's probably one you should go check out. So give it a read. It's a fun book. It's not so scientific that it's going to make your head hurt, but it still delves into some of the genes and the science and the brain scans and some of the really cool stuff, along with the personality traits and some of the more qualitative things that you can do to maximize longevity. So excellent book. Again, it's called what Makes Olga Run. I'll link to it in the show notes. You can check it out. I'll also put it video in the show notes. And this will all be over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com where you can see a little bit more about Olga and Bruce. Thank you so much for coming on the call today.

Well, it was really my pleasure. And let's hope we can both be a little more Olga like in our lives here.

That's right. All right, folks. Well, until next time, this is Ben Greenfield and Bruce Grierson signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com in the book what Makes Overrun. Have a great day.

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Sam.