Conquering Cancer 101 - Full Class

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living 101 Masterclass Series. Today we have an unexpected class, conquering cancer 101, how I'm helping my brother fight cancer and what I'd share with you if you or someone in your family is fighting or does fight cancer in the future. So quick context here. My brother Rick, I've mentioned in a number of our classes here, he's been one of my biggest supporters throughout my life. Older brother Rick coached me as a little kid playing baseball and is our biggest investor in our business. So you can imagine how I felt when I heard that. He was admitted to the hospital a couple of weeks ago with stomach issues, which led to a major surgery, which led to half of his stomach being removed, which led to a cancer diagnosis. We're still met with the oncologist yesterday and understanding exactly what's going on, what the protocol is going to be. But before we went into he went into surgery, I was in the surgical room with him and some of our family. Rick playfully introduced me to his surgeon. He said, this is my brother. He's my coach. And as you can imagine, over the last two weeks, I've spent basically all of my energy wrapping my brain around how to best support my brother. And I literally created this class for him. And I walked through this class with him early Saturday morning last week. And as I did so, I realized we're not alone, unfortunately. So many families around the world are going through the exact same thing. And this class is basically me sharing the best that I know. I went back and looked at all of our notes. We have dozens of references to cancer in our philosopher's notes. I called one of my smartest and wisest friends, Pilar Gerasimo, who started Experience Life magazine I know has gone through similar challenges with a dear friend of hers and said, what do we need to be thinking about? She recommended a great book called Anti Cancer, which I highly recommend. We're going to be pulling a lot of ideas out of there for this class, but basically, I'm obviously not an oncologist. I'm not a cancer specialist per se, but I am committed to supporting my brother. And I consider you an extended part of our family. And I'd like you to consider me your brother, helping you out here, your friend, your coach, however you want to frame it. But that's where this class originated from. As always, we've got 10 big ideas, and as always, I'm excited to share. Then we'll start at the top, and then we'll Drill in. Right. Our first big idea is genes versus habits. Genes versus habits. A lot of us think that we're just cursed with bad genes, but the research is unequivocal. It's not genes that are driving the show, it's habits. We're going to talk about one research study in particular done in Denmark with adopted kids, over a thousand adopted kids. And we look at what happens if their biological parents got cancer before age 50 vis a vis their adopted parents. And what you're going to find is it's the habits that matter more than the genes. Some researchers say less than 15% is genetic, others say 2 to 3%. So we're going to talk about the importance of habits. And it's really important that we wrap our brains around this so we feel a sense of empowerment, which will be a theme throughout this. And I want to state, of course, each case is unique. Every situation is going to be unique. But I think these general principles will be helpful and apply throughout the second Big Idea statistics. One of my favorite classes when I studied at UCLA is statistics. We want to understand that statistics provide information versus a condemnation is how David Sirvan Schreiber describes it in Anti Cancer. We're going to talk about Stephen Jay Gould, one of the greatest 20th century scientists who was diagnosed and decided that he was going to play in the long tail of that statistical curve. Statistics are interesting on a high level abstraction, but they are not anywhere near as interesting on an individual basis. We're going to talk about the power of that. The third big idea is empowered mindset. We need to know that helplessness feeds cancer. We're going to talk about some research out of Martin Seligman's lab. The guy who started positive psychology, learned optimism, etc. Some pretty amazing stuff that shows the power of maintaining a sense of empowerment. Our fourth big idea is the terrain. We need to cut off cancer supply lines. The terrain is a phrase that's used to describe the inner environment that is either hospitable to cancer or inhospitable. We need to cut off cancer supply lines. Cancer feeds on certain things. We need to cut off those supply lines. We're going to use a battle from World War II as a metaphor of how to go about attacking cancer. Our fifth big idea is nutrition. This is our first line of defense as we're cutting off cancer supply lines. We got to get that terrain optimized. We're going to look at three facets here. Number one, sugar plus flour. Number two, omega 6s, and the ratio of omega 6s to omega 3s. Those two things are creating inflammation. If we don't have them dialed in, then. The third facet is protein. We need to get this optimized and that's related to something called mtor short story here. We want to get the promoters of cancer out of our diet. We want to install some fighters. Cancer loves sugar. Cancer does not love cruciferous vegetables. We'll talk about all that a lot more. The sixth big idea moves plus exercise plus sleep. We talk about our fundamentals in all of our classes. It's particularly important now, of course, to optimize the terrain. We need to continue to move our bodies, exercise. Of course, every situation is going to be unique. My brother's got a green light to do his walking, to do all the things that he wants to do, and to get ready for a spartan race. We're going to do as a goal the end of this year. Get him in the best shape of his life is the target that we're looking at. Use this as a wake up call to optimize. The third facet here is sleep. Again, this is so important for us to get that terrain right. We've got to recover, we've got to rest. Our number one tip here, as always, turn off your smartphones. Quit blowing yourself up at the end of the day. Your circadian rhythms have been fine tuned, delicately fine tuned over millions of years of evolution. Not helping ourselves by disrupting that. The seventh big idea. We need to alchemize stress. We've got to optimize our stress response. We can't be in fight or flight constantly. We're going to look at the Serenity prayer, which could also be called the courage prayer, and cultivate both our serenity and our courage to accept the things we cannot change and have the courage to change the things that we can. We're going to talk about how to do that. Mastering our breathing. Worked on my brother's breathing before he entered the surgery as I was driving down that morning. He officially became a meditator that morning. We're also going to talk about bringing it on. I'm seeing this as a challenge vis a vis the threat. Alchemizing stress. Our eighth big idea is our environment. We need to reduce the toxic load. And in fact, this is David Sirvan Schreiber's number one tip. Our environment is packed with toxins and any one particular thing might not be that big of a deal, right? But when you aggregate them into a cocktail, it creates something extraordinarily toxic. We're talking about cleaning supplies, cosmetics, deodorants, soaps, shampoos, cooking in plastics, etc. We're also going to talk about the environment for your new lifestyle. We need to create an environment where we ruthlessly purge your pantry and the rest of your house with things that no longer belong in your optimized lifestyle. Our ninth big idea is the team. We're going to practice Love 2.0 and Grateful Flow, appreciating the people on our team, the professionals, and of course our family members and friends. But the professionals who have dedicated their lives to to becoming experts in their domain to serve us. But we also want to ask a couple of questions and see do we have an integrative MD that we can get on staff? This is one of Pilar Gerasimo's things. Ask two questions. One, is there an integrative MD on staff that we can bring on the team? And two, what's your nutritional philosophy? We'll talk more about that. We also want to look at the difference between acute issues and chronic issues. Western science is incredibly good and at dealing with acute medical issues, whether that's a broken arm or a blocked stomach. Whereas with the chronic issues, we want to step back and see the limitations of current modern Western science. The tenth big idea is crisis plus dose effect relationship plus life force Crisis. In Chinese there are two symbols that make up the word crisis. Danger plus opportunity. And this is what's most inspiring for me is my brother is all in. He's seeing this as a wake up call to change his life. Danger plus opportunity. Then we have a dose effect relationship. The research on these interventions on cancer and their effects on cancer are clear. There's a dose effect relationship which means the more you engage in this lifestyle modification, the better the results. And then finally, life force. Back to David Sirvan Schreiber. He says the number one protection against cancer is a reason to live. Is that life force within and connecting to that. He talks about Aristotle's idea of entelechy, that force within us that's pushing everything in nature from seed to fruit and fruition in the tree. We have that best version of ourselves, latent within us. And cancer, perhaps more than anything else, is a wake up call to, to express that best version of us. When we talk about conquering cancer, we're talking about conquering it not primarily on a physical level, but on an emotional, energetic, spiritual level. Tapping into and connecting that life force, expressing the best within us, moment to moment to moment. So that's the quick look at the top 10 big ideas. 1 more quick note before we jump in. This class is about conquering cancer. But we want to keep in mind that the best way to conquer cancer is to prevent cancer. Having said that, let's jump in and find all the ways we can conquer it. Our first big idea is the first myth we need to tackle. Genes versus habits. Which one do you think is more influential, genes or habits? Let's look at what science has to say. Most of us think it's genes. Science says it's habits. Here's the study that provides some pretty compelling evidence. Imagine you're in Denmark and and you're researching 1,000 kids who were adopted at birth. Kids who were adopted at birth provide a very interesting sample for data like this. Right? So imagine this. Imagine these kids were adopted and we want to look at whether their parents got cancer. And the question is, do you think that the biological parents getting cancer before age 50 would have a bigger impact? Or they're adopted parents, adoptive parents getting cancer before age 50. Which one do you think would have a bigger impact and influence the kids themselves experiencing cancer? The biological parents getting cancer before 50 or the adoptive parents? What would you guess? Well, here's what the research says. The research shows that if the biological parent gets cancer before age 50, but they never lived with the adoptive parent, the adoptive kid. Right. There's a zero increase in likelihood of the kid getting cancer. Zero. No correlation. But if the adoptive parents get cancer before age 50, the risk of the kids getting cancer goes up fivefold. Why is that? Because these kids or these parents pass on their habits. Not their genes, their habits. So David Sirvon Schreiber says that cancer is at most 15% of the equation. The rest, habits, lifestyle choices. Colin Campbell, author of the China Studies, researched this stuff a ton, says it's more likely 2 to 3%. Habits outweigh genes by a huge factor. And this is important that we bust this myth because otherwise we're going to feel powerless. We're going to think we just kind of got cursed by the genetic gods. That's not the case or our lifestyle choices matter. Genes versus habits. Alright, so before we move on to the second big idea, a little PS to that last one. Another way to think about it is that genes load the gun, but the environment pulls the trigger. I learned this actually at UCLA studying abnormal psychology where we talk about things that can go wrong. Right? The same basic idea. They call it a stress diathesis model. You might have a genetic predisposition to something that loads the gun, but it's your lifestyle choices in the environment that impacts that genetic vulnerability that actually creates the psychological disorder. And the same basic idea applies to the cancer side of things. Our lifestyle matters a lot. Genes again versus habits. Alright, so our second big idea is statistics. We want to target the long tail. So this is another myth we want to bust. Oftentimes we hear statistics and, and rather than hearing it as information, we hear it as condemnation. This is another great distinction from David Sirvan Schreiber in Anti Cancer. Statistics is not condemnation, not a combination. It is simply information. He uses an example of Stephen Jay Gould to bring the point home. Stephen Jay Gould was a Harvard scientist, a zoologist at Harvard, known as the second Darwin, who extended Darwin's ideas and evolution. Powerfully brilliant guy who was diagnosed with a very virulent form of cancer. He was given eight months to live, right? And his oncologist, who was otherwise straightforward, told him, no, you don't need to read anything in the research. There's nothing useful to read in there. Stephen Jay Gould was a scientist. He was an academic and a researcher. And he jokingly said, telling someone like me not to read the research data is like telling Homo sapiens that they can't have sex. They're just going to want to have it, right? They're the most sexy animal on the planet, he says. So he dove into the research and then he quickly realized why the oncologist didn't want him to read about it, because it was horrific. So he had about 15 minutes of panic, he says, and then he put his scientific hat on and he said, look, if the median is whatever it is. And for him, his prognosis was eight months, right? He said, if that's the case, first of all, that data is old, alright? So we've already improved our treatment plans, right? And there's a long tail. So if you have a distribution, you're always going to have a distribution. Sometimes it's normal where it's just a nice bell curve, right? And you get your median in the middle. Half the people fall below, half the people fall above that curve. But there's always a distribution and there's always a long tail. And Stephen Jay Gould said, why can't I end up in that long tail? Maybe some people live less than eight months, but a lot of people, or at least a certain number of people live longer than eight months. Long story short, Stephen Jay Gould lived for 20 years. He lived for 240 months. He was told he lived for eight months. Thirty times longer is how long he lived. And then he wound up dying from a different disease. So when we hear statistics, when we hear data, we want to run it through a very, very strong filter and realize that data does not account for you. And as an individual who's committed to practicing these different lifestyle changes, you're different. You walk out of the hospital like my brother did, and have your oncologist and team tell you, you don't need to change anything. Just come back and we'll deal with it via the surgery and the radiation and chemotherapy, all of which are incredibly important in many, many cases. So I'm not saying those things aren't important, but so is the terrain. So are all the other things we're gonna talk about in this class. And when you choose to adopt those behaviors, you. You completely leave the normal statistical curve. One other little story I shared with my brother was about our grandfather. So once I went after graduating from ucla, I was recruited into this leadership thing with the old Arthur Anderson. And at the time, I didn't know what I wanted to do. First generation college student, you know, the idea of being a partner at Arthur Anderson at that time felt really appealing, right? But we went to this training, and they were telling us, hey, only one out of x hundred of you will become a partner. And at that stage of my life, I took that in and I said, oh, I'm not so sure about that. And I came home, and my grandfather happened to be visiting, and I told him what I just told you, and my grandfather laughed, and he said, how many of you are there? Those sound like great odds to me. How many of you are there? One in whatever. He didn't care. So we want to have a really healthy, courageous attitude. We want to embrace reality, and then we want to choose to create our own reality, not ignoring the facts of the matter, but realizing that we cannot be accounted for within that mass of data. That's how we want to choose to approach, I believe, the statistics. We want to focus on that long tail, right? Our third big idea is an empowered mindset. This is another idea from Anti Cancer. David Servon Schreiber tells us about research done in Martin Seligman's lab. So we know Martin Seligman is the father of positive psychology. We have notes on three of his books. Learned Optimism, Authentic Happiness, and Flourish. Right? Incredible scientist who studied learned helplessness. So learned optimism is all about learning optimism vis a vis learning helplessness. So get this. In his labs back in the day, they were able to take rats and inject them with a tumor that they knew would basically result in a 50% likelihood of the rat rejecting the tumor and a 50% likelihood of it not rejecting the tumor. However they did it, they came up with this strain of a tumor. With these rats, 50% would live and 50% would not live. Right? So anyway, they took these rats, and they had three different conditions. The first condition was a control group where they basically injected this tumor, then didn't do anything different. The second group was the learned helplessness group. In this group, they did what they normally do to induce helplessness, which is shock the little rat in such a way that they can't escape it. So shock can't escape. Shock can't escape. Eventually, that rat will learn helplessness. They'll curl up in a little ball, and they won't do anything. That's our second group, the third group. And they got the tumor injected, of course, as well. The third group gets the tumor injected, and they receive the exact same shocks as the second group, but they also receive at the end, these additional shocks, extra shocks. And those shocks they learned how to avoid by pulling a lever or doing whatever they needed to do such that they could avoid those shocks. Right, that I'm going to call the empowered group. So we have our control, the learned helplessness group and the empowered group. Okay, so we have our three groups. Here's what happened. The first group, the control group, 54% of them rejected the tumor. We would have expected 50, 54% rejected the tumor. Right? Now, what happened to the learned helplessness group, the second group? What would you guess? How about this? Only 23% of that group rejected the tumor. Almost twice as many died than the control group. But here's what's crazy. That's pretty powerful when you think about it, right? Only 23%. But here's what's crazy. The group that got the same number of shocks, but then learned how to control their environment a little bit more, right? Got a little bit more empowered. 63% of that group rejected their tumor. They were even more empowered, more powerful, more healthy in their response to that tumor than the control group. 63% versus 23%. And this research has been replicated in different ways with humans as well. And we know that helplessness feeds cancer and all the other things we don't want. A sense of empowerment that these rats demonstrated in this creative study engenders a sense of life force and a sense of power that heals. It's really that simple. The question for us is, what levers do we need to pull? And believing that we can pull those levers and then going out and taking control of the things that are within our control while we accept those things that are not. And of course having the wisdom to know the difference. This class is all about that empowered mindset and then those levers that we need to pull, right? Our fourth big idea is the terrain and cutting off cancer's supply lines. So again, the terrain, right, we have this inner environment in which cancer either thrives or it doesn't. And the way we want to address that is by cutting off their supply lines. And David Servon Schreiber gives the perfect metaphor for how we want to approach our fight against cancer. He brings us back to World War II. We have the battle of Stalingrad. So imagine Hitler amassing an army of a million soldiers going to attack Russia. Russia is completely overwhelmed and they have this heroic stand, right, against this million men force, this heroic stand where they have adolescents and school girls who have never fired a firearm fighting to defend their city and their country and their homeland, right? So they were able to heroically resist for a brief period of time, but there was no way they were going to be able to endure the continued assault. So what they did was they changed their strategy and their marshal decided to go back through German lines and define an attack and cut off the their supply lines. And what they did was they were able to do that, they were able to get in and attack the supply lines and cut off the supply lines. Well, guess what? When the supply lines were cut off, the front of the army couldn't be nourished, couldn't be supported. So what did they have to do? Retreat. He says that's the exact metaphor we want to use for Cancer. We need to, we've got this million soldier army coming after us. We're putting up this valiant resistance, but we need to, we can't do that, sustain that frontal assault fight. We've got to go and attack the supply lines. We've got to pull those levers from our last idea, right, and cut off cancer's supply lines such that it retreats. We don't have the terrain in which it can thrive. How do we do that? A number of ways. Nutrition, stress management, movement and sleep, our environmental toxins, etc. Let's go talk about them in some more detail. Alright. Our fifth big idea is the first lever we're gonna pull, which is nutrition. We have three facets we're gonna focus on to create an anti cancer environment within our terrain to cut off the supply lines for cancer. Number One, we're going to reduce and eliminate sugar and flour. Number two, we're gonna focus on Omega 6s vis a vis Omega 3s, getting that balance right. Number three, we're going to look at protein and how that turns on mtor, which is something that is associated with nearly all cancers. So sugar and flour, omega 6s and protein, MTOR. Let's start at the top. Sugar and flour. So where to begin here? Cancer loves sugar, period. And this is a quote that the head nurse who is awesome at my brother's hospital said to me as we were chatting. The dietitian said the same thing, and I had them repeat it out loud to my brother and his wife. Cancer loves sugar. You want to feed your enemy, right? So we go back to our metaphor, the battle of Stalingrad. You want to feed your enemy. Rather than cut off the supply lines, why don't you just feed them? Continue to consume sugar and flour. Cancer, heart disease, diabetes, all these are metabolic disorders. And the number one hormone that's driving that metabolic disorder or optimization is insulin, right? So when your insulin is disrupted, you have a metabolic disorder. What drives insulin being disrupted? Sugar. Check out our note on a case against sugar. Read Robert Lustig, the great UCSF researcher. His great book Fat Chance the Telomere Effect by Elizabeth Blackburn and Elissa Epel. Elizabeth Blackburn won the Nobel Prize for her research on telomeres. She says the same thing. Eliminate sugar. That's rule number one of our nutritional approach. Rule number two is to get our omega 3 to omega 6 right. And what happens when we have sugar and flour over consumption and we have too much Omega 6 in our diet is we have a ton of inflammation. Cancer loves inflammation. Again, cut out the supply lines by reducing, eliminating the sugar and flour and then getting your omega balance right. So here's the quick overview of Omega's 3s and 6s. Omega 3, generally speaking, is anti inflammatory. Omega 6s generally speaking, are inflammatory. Now, we need a little bit of an inflammatory response in our body. It's obviously not inherently bad, or it's not necessarily obvious, but it's not inherently bad. The way that Chris McDougall describes it in Natural Born Heroes is that you want a fireplace in your house, a little bit of inflammation, but you don't want a bonfire that consumes the entire house. What we have is a bonfire that's consuming our entire bodies and feeding the cancer. So back in the day, pre civilization and certainly pre industrialization, we had a ratio of something like 1 to 1. Omega 3 to Omega 6. These days it's something closer to 1 to 16. There's different ratios there, but 1 to 16, it's totally off balance in Omega 6s, which again creates that bonfire of inflammation which is supplying cancer as it charges against us. So where do we do, what do we need to do in order to cut back? Are omega 6s. Two primary things. Number one, vegetable oils, vegetable oils, things like safflower oil, canola oil, soybean oil, etc. Are super high in omega 6s. These oils now constitute a huge percentage of the standard western diet. And guess what? They didn't exist at all pre industrial revolution. We've had olive oil forever, but we have not had vegetable oil until very, very recently. Yet it now constitutes a huge percentage of our daily intake of calories. You don't need to think about that very long to realize that makes no sense. That is driving a disruption in Omega 6 balance. We need to go to our pantry and throw out everything that has vegetable oils in it and the trans fats that come in refined processed packaged foods as well. But there we go, that's the omega 6 in vegetable oils. The secondary contributor to our omega 6 imbalance is animal products. So when you think of old school animal consumption, our animals that we ate, ate what they were supposed to eat. These days they don't. The factory farmed animals are fed corn, soy, etc. Which does a number of different things. First of all, it makes them sick, so they're pumped up with antibiotics, right? Which we're then getting into our system as we consume those factory farmed animals. And secondly, it disrupts the animals, the cow or whatever's omega 3, omega 6 balance, so they get all wonky, right? And their omega 6s go up. Then we consume them, so ours go up even more. Which is why grass fed beef is so important. Why? Because then you get a healthy balance of omega 3s which we want to pay attention to. So that's our second facet here, Omega 3s, Omega 6s, we want to pay attention to that, reduce the inflammation. Now obviously I'm giving just a high level overview here, but think about that. Sugar and flour, vegetable oils, and then our third facet, protein consumption, which is related to MTOR production. Mtor. Mtor. MTOR is short for mammalian target of rapamycin. Rapamycin apparently is a cancer drug used to fight cancer. Rapamycin. MTOR is named after that. What activates? You want to decrease that, Right? But the question is, what activates that? What within our terrain and what we're doing in our lifestyle, what we're eating is activating the production of mtor. The answer is overconsumption of protein, specifically animal protein. So we want to pay attention to that and if we're facing cancer, we want to pay a lot of attention to that. Dr. Mercola tells us we want to think about adequate protein. A lot of people, and my brother and his wife in particular, his wife is concerned about enough protein consumption. And so to shift it from look, we don't need to worry about getting enough protein. We do need to have enough protein to rebuild and to do all the things that are necessary to keep us healthy. But the reality is it doesn't take a ton. We want to make sure we hit the adequate level and then there's the moderate, then there's over consumption. And it's really easy to over consume if you aren't paying attention to it. The quick math that Mercola for example shares and different people share different ratios, he shares 0.5 grams of protein per day per lean body mass. 0.5 grams of protein per lean body mass. So my brother for example, roughly 160 pounds. Let's say he's 20% body fat. 160 pounds. 20% body fat is what? 32 pounds of fat minus 160 pounds is 128 lean body mass. If we did 0.5 of that, what would we have? 64 grams of protein a day? 4. According to that model, 0.5 grams of protein per lean body mass. That's how many grams of protein we want to have a day. So you can do something like my fitness pal, which is what I encourage to my sister in law Kristen, just to keep track. How many grams of protein are we getting? Let's get an adequate amount, but let's make sure we're not going too far. Why? Because we're going to stimulate mtor. Nearly all cancers are associated with MTOR activation. Therefore, to get our terrain right, to cut off the supply that cancer needs to thrive, we want to reduce that mtor. We do so by reducing our protein consumption. Again, particularly the animal protein consumption. The way I've coached my brother is 4 ounces of animal protein max. No red meat for the foreseeable future. As he's going through what he's going through, you can find substitutes in hemp protein, eggs, work for him, find other solutions to get that adequate protein. But again, think adequate, not excessive. So those are our three facets of nutrition we want to think about. We had sugar and flour, we had omega 6s vis a vis omega 3s. Then we had protein and MTOR. Now I'd like to talk about cancer promoters, which are all the things we just discussed. And then cancer fighters, or anti promoters as they're known in the literature. What do we want? We know we want to reduce or eliminate those things. What do we want to add? So if we're going to take up arms and go to battle, we first cut off the supply lines, but then we show up with this ammunition. The number one thing that we can do, our top cancer fighters are. Can you guess? Would you guess? Are the top cancer fighters? Well, here it is. Cruciferous vegetables. Cruciferous vegetables. Things like broccoli and cauliflower and brussels sprouts and cabbage and kale and chard. These are all cruciferous vegetables. The research on it is astonishing. You can consume over 20 kind of normal vegetables, right. Or you can consume three cruciferous vegetables and have a similar reduction in cancer risk. It's astonishing how powerful cruciferous vegetables are. They are known as cancer fighters, which we want to increase them in our dietary intake. Other things that are great cancer fighters include garlic, onion, leeks, things like that are going to help the cause. Green tea has been shown to reduce cancer. Raspberries, blueberries. Although we want to moderate our consumption of fruits, keeping my brother at one or two servings per day, some places would have you go to zero fruits for a period of time. Again, we want to reduce the sugar. Fruit has fiber in it, which is going to slow the consumption of it. And the raspberries and the blueberries and blackberries and whatnot. Have a lot of phytonutrients, which have been shown to be powerful cancer fighters. We want to do it in moderation. And again, I've limited other fruits with my brother, but you need to figure out what works for you. But think about those three elements we want to get rid of. Quit fueling the promoters and. And get the fighters getting to work. All right, So a little P.S. here before we move on to the next lever we're going to pull. I didn't mention huge salads, so huge salads are fantastic. Again, every case is going to be unique. So work with your dietitian, your doctors, et cetera. But huge salads. Romaine, green leaf, red leaf, escarole, beets, carrots, that sort of thing. Fantastic. Throw in some onions, et cetera. We want to focus on that to provide the phytonutrients, the fiber, et cetera. And then three things that I found most astonishing as I've gone through this process with my brother. Number one, walking into that oncologist's office and seeing a bowl full of candies, still wrapping my brain around that disconnect. Number two, we're sitting there in the waiting room, and of course, there's a TV on, which is a whole other conversation. We can't go five minutes without having some sort of stimulation coming in. But I'll save that for another time. But I'm sitting there watching it after the Dr. Oz show is kind of there. I'm noticing in the corner of my eye these different things. Arisa's peanut butter cups commercial comes on. Sitting in a hospital dealing with the effects of overconsumption of the standard American diet. And there we go. It's just ubiquitous. And then finally, my brother checked into the hospital with a glucose level that was in the high 140s diabetic range. And yet he comes out of his surgery, which we know contributed to the issues that he's facing, particularly in his pancreas, which is responsible for producing the insulin to deal with all the sugar in his blood system. And then as he's getting fed through his IV after surgery, what are they putting in there? Pure sugar. The nurse herself said it's basically twin pops. Makes no sense. We had that adjusted. But again, the disconnect between the amazing, heroic work that our doctors can do via the surgery and then via the other therapies and then the disconnect of the terrain and all the things we're talking about nutritionally is truly astonishing. So we want to step back, have our eyes wide open, and choose the most effective means forward. Our sixth big idea. We're going to pull a few different levers on this one. Quickly. We've got movement, exercise, and sleep. Movement and exercise go together, but they're different. Right. Remember, in Movement 101, we drew a big circle and said there's movement. Within that, we have a smaller circle, which is exercise. So exercise, in my brother's context right now is walking 10,000 steps a day. We got him a new Fitbit. I send him a picture of my 10,000 steps. He shows me a picture of his 10,000 steps. Boom. And we're working toward him, doing that Spartan race. End of the year, we've gotten the sign off from his oncologist, and let's keep them fit and strong. Cancer doesn't like that. So we want to create that terrain that is as powerful and strong as possible. Again, each case is going to be unique. Check in with your team, etc. But we want to move our bodies via exercise, but then we want to move our bodies throughout the day. So I shared with my brother some research done by Joan Vernikos, who was the head of life sciences for NASA and responsible later in her career and responsible for bringing the astronauts home from the moon safely. Now, the astronauts happened to land on the moon on my brother's eighth birthday, so that was a particularly relevant data point for him. But the basic idea there is we can be active, we can exercise and still be sedentary, right, by sitting all day, every day. And she says you need to break it up at least every 30 minutes, every 20 to 30 minutes, get up, even if it's simply standing up and sitting back down. That simple effect, it may not seem like a big deal, but it is. So my brother is now doing that every 20, 25, 30 minutes. When he's not napping or otherwise resting, he's up. He's going to stand up and walk around a little bit, sit back down. We want to do that throughout the day, movement and exercise. And then finally we have sleep. Sleep. We've evolved over millions of years to respond to circadian rhythms. And these days we blow up that sensitive, delicate, fine tuned system with bright light stimulation basically all day, every day, including at night, when we should be winding down. So again, my big tips here for my brother, sleep is so important, I don't feel like I need to stress how important sleep is. But again, the research shows just how important that is. The two practical tips for him used to go to bed watching tv. No more. No more bright stimulation. I wanted to get his TV out of his bedroom. He's not quite ready to go there yet, but it's off at night. Reduce that stimulation, that bright light load. And then of course, our smartphones, right, or the Internet, but most of us are on our smartphones until right before we go to sleep. Not a good idea. As I told him, when you do that, you're going to have a, it's going to take you longer to get into deep sleep. Then you will spend less time in less deep sleep than people who are able to shut off or choose to shut off their smartphones more than an hour before they go to bed. I practice something called a digital sunset. Hours before I go to bed, all electronics are off. We've got no blue light in our house after the sun goes down. We've got all these funny little orange lights around the place. Figure out what you want to do, but you want to optimize your sleep. Find some levers you can pull that are with the smartphone, the tv, the Internet, turning that off as soon after the sunset as is right for you. Get your exercise on and get your movement on. Pull those levers, create the terrain. Alright. Our seventh big idea is to alchemize stress. Obviously we all live in a hyper stressed world and when we're diagnosed with cancer or someone in our family is that just jacks up the stress. But we want to find a way to reduce our constant fight or flight stimulation. Which by the way is one of the reasons we want to shut off the smartphones and the TVs and allow our nervous system to relax so we can get a good night of sleep. But we want to alchemize stress and create both serenity and courage. So serenity and courage. I taught my brother and his wife the serenity prayer. You may know it if you don't, yet I would highly encourage you to memorize it because it perfectly captures the essence of how we can alchemize stress in this crisis situation that is cancer. So do you happen to know it already? I quizzed my sister in law on that and she almost got it right the first time out. And remember, quizzing yourself is a great way to deepen your recollection of it and strengthen your memory of it. But here it goes. God grant me this serenity to accept the things I cannot change and the courage to change the things I can. And the wisdom to know the difference. So we have serenity, courage, wisdom. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. We can't change a cancer diagnosis. The courage to change the things I can. We can change our terrain, we can change our lifestyle, we can pull those levers and the wisdom to know the difference. So serenity and courage. Serenity. Let's talk about that a little bit more. How do we cultivate our serenity? Again, the research is unequivocal on this. Training yourself to breathe deeply and to meditate and to practice mindfulness has been shown to reduce our risk of a recurrence of cancer, et cetera. As I said before, my brother became a meditator shortly before he was wheeled into surgery. Hadn't meditated before. On my drive down walked him through the basic idea of optimal breathing. So what we know is that your breath is one of the few things that's automatic, right? So your heartbeat, your digestion, your breathing, these things occur automatically. You don't need to think about it, yet you can influence it. And influencing your Breath is one of the most powerful ways to calm yourself and to get out of fight or flight and into what's called a relaxation response, where again, the research is unequivocal. That's the healing response. So we want to train ourselves to master that process. There's something called coherent breathing. Coherent breathing occurs when you're breathing at a rate of about five breaths per minute. And when you do that, you tend to create a heart rate variability that is optimal where your mind is slowing down, your breathing pattern is slowing down, and, and your heart rate rhythms are optimized. Breathing in five breaths a minute is ideal if you are less than six feet tall. If you're over six feet tall, it's about three and a half breaths per minute. What that means, practically speaking, is you breathe in to a count of four or five, you hold for a count of one, and you exhale for a count of six or seven. Right. So as I train my brother, who was new at doing this, it was really the first time he had practiced this. It was a new thing, right. But he told me it immediately brought him into a state of calm. And this is what he was doing while he was literally going from saying goodbye to us right before the surgery into his surgery, and then on the other side of it, and he said it totally helped him out. So you can think about practicing that now. Breathing into a count of four, holding for a count of one. Then the challenging part is exhaling a little longer than your inhale. Depending on where you are with your current breathing practices, you'll be able to kind of lengthen your inhale, pause and lengthen your exhale, whatever the ratio is, that works for you. You want to find a rhythm where you're breathing in briefly, pausing, exhaling a little bit longer. That exhale is a great way to calm down the nervous system. When you're super stressed, you're not exhaling completely and fully. So simply doing that, breathing into your belly, I should say deep diaphragmic breathing, which is going to work out the most underappreciated muscle in your body, which is the diaphragm right below your ribcage and your lungs. Training yourself to breathe is a huge way to cultivate our serenity. So my brother at this point has a one minute meditation practice, which is roughly five of those deep breaths. We'll be building that up as we go. If you already have a meditation practice, that's fantastic. Continue to cultivate that and deepen that. That's our serenity. The courage to change the things we can, we can talk about this in the context of what's known as a threat or versus challenge response. We can go back to those rats who learned helplessness. When you don't feel that you have any ability to exert control over your environment, you're going to feel overwhelmed, you're going to give up. Everything is a threat. When you look at your environment and say, look, I'm going to accept the things I cannot change, including my diagnosis, it is what it is and I'm going to have the courage to step forward. Then we see the diagnosis and all the other challenges that come with that as a challenge for us, as my brother has said, as a wake up call to step up and do the things that he knew he could be doing, that he's now committed to doing with an intensity that is deeply inspiring for me. But then when we move from the threat to the challenge, that energy that we feel, that stress response can actually be good stress. Like that experiment with the third group of the rats that got that tumor right, they actually outperformed the control group. That stress catalyzed a strength within them. It was as if they were antifragile. They got stronger in response to that stress. That's the type of response we want to cultivate, to cultivate that courage. To go back to Elizabeth Blackburn in the telomere effect, she literally says, bring it on. That energy that you're feeling, that stress, we want to say bring it on, bring on this challenge. I'm going to do my best, exert control over the things that are within my control. And my sister in law actually said, I'm excited. She said after she digested this over the last several days, she's been feeling excited about the opportunity here. And I get goosebumps as I say that for them to change their lives, she is excited. And I was hesitant to suggest that because that's actually the phrase that the researchers say is the fastest way to alchemize the threat type of response to the challenge response is to say to yourself, I'm excited. Now it's easy to talk about being excited when you're giving a talk in public and you're feeling the nerves bubble up. The research says say I'm excited and you alchemize that and it helps you perform at your best. So I was hesitant to share that phrase, but that's what my sister in law said and what my brother echoed. I'm excited. This is scary. It's a crisis. As we talked about in the intro, there's danger and there's opportunity. But we want to exert as much control as we can with remembering the serenity and the courage and the wisdom Prayer. Right, let's do it one more time. God, grant me this serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. That's how we alchemize the stress at our eighth big idea. And the next lever we're going to pull is the environment. There are two facets to this I want to talk about. One, we want to reduce the environmental toxins, the toxic stuff we have in our house that we're exposing ourselves to, perhaps unconsciously, and then also our environment in terms of creating the willpower, we're leveraging our willpower to best change our lives. And this, the environmental toxins is actually the number one thing that David Sirvan Schreiber tells us about. In terms of optimizing the terrain. He tells us this is the number one threat is our environment. We take it for granted. But those shampoos and soaps and cosmetics and deodorants, all the other things, the cleaning supplies in our house, those are toxic unless you're using non toxic equivalents of them. And David makes the point, he shares research with us, that yeah, if you look at your cleaning supplies, any one thing, or your soap or your shampoo or whatever, anyone might not hit the limit. It might even be a fraction of a small fraction of what's allowed in terms of what's defined as top toxic. But when you add it all up, the cocktail of those environmental toxins is significantly toxic. So we want to be aware of that. And again, if you're threatened by these challenges or experiencing these challenges, we want to be even more aware of it and we want to, depending on your approach, eliminate them, remove them, replace them with healthier alternatives. And again, go through your whole house, find an app that looks at environmental toxins, find the healthier alternatives. And then one other thing in the environment, plastics. Cooking and plastics. Not a good idea. We want BPA free plastic. And again, it's easy to ignore this or not realize the impact of it, but when you aggregate and compound all these negative little microtoxins, they become significant. The second part of this idea is to create your environment in such a way that it supports your lifestyle changes. This is willpower 101. The best way to deal with lifestyle changes and create new habits is to have an environment that supports it. So the first thing you do to go back to our nutrition scenario is to look at what's in your pantry right now. And anything that does not belong in your body that you've decided no longer belongs in your anti cancer fighting body, Anti cancer and cancer fighting body is eliminated. Ruthlessly purge it. This is rule number one of all nutritional philosophies. Whatever you follow, that's always the first rule is you need to go into your pantry and literally donate, throw away, give away, whatever, return if you can, all the food that no longer belongs in your body. And then things like for my brother, the TV in the bedroom, he's keeping it in there, but he's turning it off at night, right? The smartphone, disciplining yourself to put it somewhere that you're not going to use it at night. For us, we turn off our wifi at night, the phone is buried in the closet, et cetera. You want to make your environment conducive to support your new habits. That's the quick look at the environment. We got to get rid of the toxic stuff and we want to optimize it such that we can do what we know is best for us. Our ninth big idea is the team. We have three facets to this as well. We're going to talk about love 2.0 and grateful flow and appreciation. We're going to talk about two questions and then we're going to talk about acute versus chronic disease and medical challenges. So first, we have love 2.0 and we have grateful flow and appreciation. So as I said in the introduction, we want to extend open our hearts and appreciate the people who are involved on our team, from our family and friends. And really obviously this provides the context for just a deep, deep connection. But also find that those micro moments of positivity resonance is how Barbara Fredrickson puts it. Those little moments when we can appreciate and connect with the individuals who are serving us. The staff from the nursing staff and the doctors, the dietitian and everyone else who has dedicated their lives to becoming an expert at serving us in their capacity. In this current context, we want to take those moments to connect, appreciate and really see them as the beautiful human beings they are and open our hearts in that regard. That's the first idea with the team. The second is kind of nuts and bolts. Pilar Gerasimo said. Look, two questions to ask your team. One, is there an integrative MD in the hospital or in the network that we can connect with? And oftentimes they're not on the primary team and they're kind of hiding somewhere? She said. But you ask about it and then they can be invited onto the team. As it turns out, with my brother, they used to have someone and they don't anymore for various reasons. Right. But we want to ask that question. And the second question she said is, what's our nutritional philosophy? Right. And when I asked that to the head nurse, she laughed. She had her own nutritional philosophy, but as an institution, that they didn't have a nutritional philosophy, which led to that IV being full of sugar and just looking at his menu and what they were serving him, disheartening. We want to get clear on what's the nutritional philosophy. Different places are going to have different approaches. And then that leads us to the third facet of the team. We want to look at the team and I think we want to constitute it where we have the acute individuals and experts and then we have the chronic disease experts. Right. So when you have an acute issue, as I mentioned before, if you have a broken leg or you have a stomach blocked that you just can't unblock or you can't fix in any other way, you want the trained, traditional western scientists to do what they're absolutely amazing at. Right. But the reality is cancer is a chronic disease. So its symptoms may show up in an acute fashion that we need surgery for. We need the other things to deal with it. But underlying the surface, it takes years and decades for cancers to grow. Years and. Or decades, depending on the cancer that we're talking about. Right. That's a chronic condition. And the reality is that oncologist who is so powerfully serving my brother, who has an incredibly difficult job to look at the data and then to communicate with the patients, My heart goes out to him and I literally, we were fist bumping each other and practicing grateful flow and appreciation with him of he's amazing. What he's doing is absolutely amazing in his domain of specialty. Right. His specialization. But yet in that same office, we have a bowl of candy. There's a disconnect outside of that zone of mastery and expertise. He hasn't been trained in these integrative approaches, in these nutritional philosophies. He's totally open and of course, adding people to the team, but we want to be aware of and celebrate the strengths, but recognize where we need to cover some weaknesses with individuals who might have a better sense of how to deal with the systemic issues, the terrain that we're talking about. Those are some thoughts on how to deal with the team. And then if you're part of the support team, take care of yourself. My schedule, my daily routines, you know how committed I am to all those they've got somewhat blown up necessarily. Right? I'm sitting here, I'm more available than I've ever been. My iPhone isn't buried away all day, every day like it used to be. I've got it blocked off when I'm doing my deep work. But things have just changed and it's even more important for us to have that foundation laid so we can show up as powerfully as possible. And it's easy to let all the fundamentals that are going to keep us strong over the long term go. When we have this acute issue rise up in our lives, we want to make sure we're taking care of ourselves as a core part of that team so we can give ourselves most powerfully and fully. All of that leads us to our 10th big idea, which has three parts as well. We're going to talk about crisis, the dose effect relationship and life force. So first, crisis, as we talked about before in Chinese, that word, that character has two symbols in it that represent danger and opportunity. So a crisis like a cancer diagnosis, has both danger and opportunity. And as I described this to my brother, he said, absolutely, this is a wake up call and that opportunity for a new way of life, which is the subtitle of David Sirvan Schreiber's book, A New Way of Life. And he talks about the fact that for him it was a wake up call. And he became healthier than he had ever been in his life after that wake up call. And he lived for 19 years after his initial diagnosis and he passed away. And before doing so, he said that he failed to follow his own advice. He rushed himself too much. He was so passionate about sharing this message that his travel schedule and his lecture schedule was just too packed. He didn't create that serenity, that sense of calm. He was in a state of fight or flight. That didn't help him create the optimal terrain, according to his analysis of what went wrong. Which leads us to the second part here, which is the dose effect relationship. He makes the point that research shows there's a dose effect relationship, which basically means the more you're engaged in these lifestyle changes, the better the results. And again, they've tracked meditation individuals or exercisers, or a combination of the two, and looked at the amount of engagement and then the response that was seen in terms of the cancer fighting ability. So the dose effect relationship. And my brother has said a number of times, I'm all in. And I keep on asking him you let me know what you want from me. I honor you and I want to support you. However you want me to best support you. Right. Which is always a challenge as an individual in a supportive capacity is we need to honor where the individual is. It's easy for me to say this is a crisis, danger, opportunity when I'm not experiencing it. So having that perspective of you tell me how I can best support you. We've got a spectrum of what we can do. His take is I'm all in. And his level of all in ness gives me tears in my eyes of just the intensity with which he's approaching this literally a near 180 degree turn. And it's unbelievably inspiring for me to see that which leads us to the third facet here, which is the life force. So David Sirvan Schreiber again says that the best protection against cancer is this sense of life coming through us. And he references Aristotle and the Greek philosophers told us that that force within us, the life force, they called entelechy. Entelechy. It's that force that brings a seed from its seed state to. To its actualization as a tree or whatever it's destined to be. For me, we just had the fires burned through Ojai, the mountain that I hike every single morning, completely charred, absolutely humblingly black for as long as you can see. And we got a little rain and X weeks later, I'm out there on a hike. Every single day, these little sprouts come up. I literally got down on my hands and knees and just celebrated them. The life force that was coming out of that destruction, it's there. And in fact, the ash from everything that burned is now the best fertilizer for that life force to come through. And now it's just so green and abundant and beautiful. It's different. Doesn't still have the landscape with the trees, but there's that life force that wants to come through. David Sirvan Schreiber likens that to Abraham Maslow's idea of self actualizing. I said if I had to summarize my philosophy in one sentence, it, it would be what one can be, one must be. This need Maslow says we can call the need for self actualization. And oftentimes it takes the crisis of a cancer diagnosis to just clear our eyes and our perception and see, wow, there's so much more that I could be doing to embrace and allow that life force to come through me. And again, as Schreiber says, that ultimately is the best protection we have against cancer, because that's gonna drive all the behavioral changes. That's what's going to drive that all in ness to realize life is precious. None of us are guaranteed any amount of time. None of us are invulnerable from that diagnosis. I could get hit driving to my next hike tomorrow morning. I shared this coin that, you know, I carry in my pocket. If you've watched many of these Memento mori, the stoic philosophers told us. And I shared the story that ancient Roman times with my brother and his wife. Ancient Roman times, you got the emperor or a general returning from battle, and the entire city of Rome is cherishing them. They're all lined up, and the emperor or the general is cruising by in his golden chariot or whatever he's in, right? He's accepting all this adulation. Life is amazing. Yet he has an advisor sitting behind him who whispers into his ear, memento mori. Remember death. Remember that all of this is fleeting. And again, it's easy for me to say in an abstract sense that we're all going to die. That is inescapable. Most of us never want to think about that. But the question isn't whether or not we're ever going to conquer death. And in fact, it's not even conquering cancer on a physical level. It's conquering on a psychological, spiritual, energetic level and saying, I commit to living, whether that's for decades or for years or for weeks or for days. None of which do we have control over. But in this moment, will I tap into and allow that life force to come through me, to live with more love, with more gratitude and more commitment to the ideals and the values that we believe in. Ultimately, I think that's the challenge and the call and the pathway to conquer cancer and all the other challenges we're going to face. Well, there we go. That is a quick look at some of the ideas that I'm sharing with my brother. One of the most touching things anyone has ever said to me in my life came from my brother a few days ago as we were going through this on that Saturday morning I mentioned before. He and his wife like to talk about how lucky they are in their life. And he said, I've never been luckier in my life than to have you helping me right now. And as I prepared for this class, just imagined you as your family. And the fact that all of us are going to experience this almost certainly either with a cherished loved one, a best friend, a family member, or whoever in our lives And I just had this strong feeling of wishing that I could be there for you in this same context with the same intense charge. This class has been an attempt to deliver that for you. Let's go quickly through these 10 ideas again, starting with the intro. Check out our notes. We have a lot of different perspectives on how to deal with cancer from various experts and different nutritional philosophies, etc. But as always, I've tried to kind of triangulate around the things that they all agree on. So check out those notes again. Every case is unique. There's the beauty of Western science, the beauty of the integrative complementary functional medicine that continues to come out. And then ultimately it's each of us being willing to be our own experimenter, being willing to be our own scientist and to take control. I didn't mention Bernie Siegel in his book Love, Medicine and Miracles, but that's another great book. Check out the note on that. He says it's the feisty ones who are the survivors. The ones who are willing to simultaneously embrace and cherish and appreciate the expertise that they're blessed to have in their lives and to challenge and to say, you know what, but what about this and what about that? We want to maintain that spirit as we go through and again, honor. Every single situation is obviously unique as we navigate this. So the first idea was the first myth we needed to get rid of genes versus habits. That's an astonishing study. A thousand adopted kids. The biological parents getting cancer before 50, no effect. The adoptive parents getting cancer before 50. Five fold increase in their likelihood of having a cancer mortality. They passed on. The adoptive parents did not pass on genes. They passed on habits. Habits are unbelievably important genes. Experts say 15% max, some say 2 to 3%. We have more control. Which leads us to statistics, right? Very interesting in an abstract perspective. Not so interesting when we're talking about you and the choices you're making living on that long tail. Being, as I said to my brother's oncologist, he's going to be a case study. He's going to be your case study in what's possible. That's what I want to know. I want to know about the exceptions to any rule. I didn't care what we prepared ourselves for the diagnosis. It could be, you know, anything from great, it's all gone to something much more negative than that or much more frightening to that. But in any scenario, we knew how we were going to approach it, which is, let's be the case study. Scott Adams cured himself of one issue. It had never been cured before. The issue that he had focal dystonia or something in his hands. People told him to quit trying to do cartoons. He's the guy who's done 10,000 dilberts. He said, I don't care about statistics. I'm going to be the first one to conquer this. And he was the first one to conquer this. We want to look at those exemplars who have proven that they can win the battle and use them as our inspiration again while we're grounded in reality. We we're doing the right next best thing as our family decides, integrating our alternative practices and integrative medicine practices and the traditional. But have that perspective on statistics as you enter those conversations. It's information, not condemnation, as David Sirvan Schreiber would say. The third idea here was an empowered mindset. Remember that fascinating study in Martin Seligman's lab? The tumor with a 50% rejection rate control was about that. The helpless group, 23%, twice as many, couldn't reject the tumor. Whereas the empowered group that learned how to get out of the shocks, pull the levers, 63% rejection rate, significantly better than the control group. They had a sense of empowerment, hope, optimism. Empowerment is super, super important. We want to pull those levers. The first thing we want to do is, is to step back. See this strategy? Our strategy is we've got that million army force coming against us. We don't go head to head against that. We sneak around and we cut off the supply lines of cancer. Right. How do we do that? How do we optimize the terrain? The first thing is we talked about in the sixth idea, nutrition. We talked about three areas there, inflammation and the MTOR. The first three were sugar and flourish. Get rid of them. Two was our omega 3, omega 6 balance. I obviously just scratched the surface of it, but dig deeply into that if you're feeling called to do so. Vegetable oils, factory farmed animals, gone. Third thing was the protein and the mtor. Nearly all cancers are connected to MTOR activation which is associated with high consumption of protein. We want adequate protein. We're not saying no protein, but when. Adequate protein but not fueling the cancer fires there. The sixth idea was move. Exercise and Sleep Fundamentals 101 get up, move every 20, 25, 30 minutes. We don't want to be sedentary. Huge effects might not sound like a big deal, but it is. Exercise to the extent you can push yourself, train to the limits that your team supports you on and then our Sleep, simplest thing there. Smartphones, TVs. Allow yourself to recover. Get that good night of sleep. Then we talked about how to alchemize stress. We had the serenity and the courage and the wisdom prayer. Have you memorized it yet? It's worth contemplating. I've been doing that while I'm rowing. I'll say, God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Serenity, we can optimize that through our breath and, and through the acceptance of what is. And then we had the courage, the threat versus challenge response. Bring it on. My sister in law and her. I'm excited. This is an opportunity for us to recreate our lives and to connect more deeply than ever. We had our environment in the eighth Big idea, reducing the toxic load in our environment. Right. So again, these little things add up. You've got all those household cleaners, if they're traditional, they're toxic. You've got your soaps and shampoos, same thing. You've got your cosmetics, your deodorants, the plastic you're using perhaps to microwave food. We need to eliminate those environmental toxins. And then we need to create an environment that supports our behavioral change. Willpower 101. Remove the things from your house that no longer belong in your body and figure out ways to structure your environment to create these new great habits. Then number nine, we had our team, we had that love 2.0, appreciation, grateful flow for the people who are so amazing and supporting us through this process. The professionals, the family members, etc. We also talked about making sure our team has both acute experts, disease experts and the chronic perspective, chronic disease experts. And looking at the terrain, etc, etc. Etc. And that beautiful combination of the traditional approaches with the cutting edge that science is showing that it's working. David Sirvan Schreiber again, his intro quote is by a guy named, I believe Rene Dubose, who won a Nobel Prize. And he said, look, the problem with western science is it's not scientific enough. If you go deep enough into the natural healing abilities of the human body and you actually look at the statistics of what works when you make these lifestyle changes. If the changes that we get through, the lifestyle modifications we're talking about, if we could package those as a drug, every single oncologist would prescribe the drug. They would have a fiduciary responsibility to do so. Right. It just, it'd be a no brainer. Yet we know that these lifestyle changes have Even greater effects many times than these drugs, yet they aren't being advocated for. And that's something that, as that feisty patient and family, we need to be willing to look at and say, it makes no sense to have the sugar candy in the bowl on the way in. And I politely, respectfully chatted with the oncologist about that, and he said, you're right. But we need to be willing to challenge these norms and to do so respectfully and powerfully as we figure out what our ideal path is. The tenth idea was crisis, dose, affect, relationship and the life force. So again, crisis, danger, opportunity, being willing to tap into that life force, go all in and show up as powerfully as we can. And again, none of us know how long we have in this precious journey of ours. Period. Memento Mori and remember to live again. I'm honored to be able to share this with you. I hope that this was resonant and made sense and is empowering for you and your family. I'm sending tons of love and I'm excited to support you and I'm also excited for us to work together on an individual basis with the challenges we have in our immediate families. But then also think about this on a societal level. The whole idea here is let's optimize our lives so we can actualize our potential in service to the world. And a little ripple here. Back to my brother and his wife who works at a school. She works in the food services for a local elementary school, and she's conflicted now that she knows all this stuff. Her life has changed in the last two weeks and she looks at what she's feeding and the school is feeding her kids and she can't believe it, and she doesn't know how to reintegrate that into her life. And this is the conversation we need to have both within our own lives and within the macro system in which we live. And as each of us step up and courageously engage in the behaviors we think make sense, I think we're going to be able to make a difference on that macro level. And ultimately, I think that's what it's all about. Again, sending tons of love to you and your family. And look forward to sharing more soon. See you.