Interview: The Paleo Manifesto with John Durant

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time.

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with John Durant, who wrote the great book the Paleo Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health. He's up to all kinds of awesome stuff. You can learn more about him at Hunter You. And I'm excited to unpack some of my favorite ideas. John, I appreciate you taking the time, and I'm looking forward to exploring.

Yeah, same, Brian. Thanks for having me on.

All right, so let's start at the top. I want to hear just kind of the origins of even the word Paleolithic. I had heard it a bunch of times, but I like the way you articulate it. And then I also want to chat about the five stages of existence, because you make the really important point that it isn't just about being Paleo per se. It's about kind of transcending and including everything that's come before. But can you start from the very top and talk to us about what it means? Paleolithic, and then we can walk through those different stages.

Yeah. So Paleolithic. Paleo means old. Lithic means stone. So it means old Stone Age and refers to the roughly 2.6 million year period when we first. It starts when we first see stone tools made by sort of pretty proto humans in the archaeological record, and then ends with what's called the Neolithic Revolution or the Agricultural revolution, roughly about 10,000 years ago. It's an interesting period of time because a lot of what makes humans who we are today, a lot of human nature evolved during that period. It doesn't mean that evolution has stopped. It doesn't mean that we can't adapt to new things. It doesn't mean that life was perfect in the Paleolithic, but in this era where there's so much madness and confusion about how to be healthy. It's a good starting point. But it's funny, people hear the title of my book, Paleo Manifesto, and it sort of sounds like manifesto sounds sort of ideological, like it's an ideological treatment of one era. And I think you'll agree it's actually not relative to other books. Paleo books, definitely. I actually sort of downplay the Paleolithic and talk about what we can learn about evolution as it impacts our health. That came before the Paleolithic and that came after. So I will tell you that when I had initial meetings with publishers in New York around the book deal, in the very first meeting, I said the Word diet will not appear on the COVID of the book. And if you want it to, this is not the book for you. I can't. Diet is such a negative word. People have such negative connotations. And I love Michael Pollan and none of his books have the word diet on the COVID And so that was sort of inspiration from him and homage to him. So here's how I structure the book. I have five ages of existence. The animal age, so sort of pre human, Paleolithic age, agricultural age, once we start domesticating plants and animals and become farmers and herders. The industrial age after the Industrial revolution and machines and all that, smokestacks and all that. And then the information age, the digital revolution, the computer age. I tell stories about what we can learn about human health, both in the past and as it relates today from those. So in the animal age, I take a field trip to the Cleveland Zoo to learn how to keep western lowland gorillas healthy in captivity. If you start with human health, everybody has opinions. It's very religious in nature. It's very hard to have an honest conversation. Very few people have opinions about how to keep a western lowland gorilla healthy. And so I got to start the conversation with these obese gorillas with heart disease in sort of a blue sky territory where I could bring people together rather than separate them. The approach that the best zookeepers in the world take is to start by mimicking the natural habitat or the natural diet of a species. It doesn't mean that it can't be improved upon. It doesn't mean we have to get rid of hygiene or antibiotics if an animal has an acute infection. But it's a good place to start. They actually shifted the diet of these gorillas from these processed, basically processed pet food bars, fiber bars from hell, as I call them. I tried them. They, they're gross, very bland, chalky. But they shifted them to a biscuit free diet of plants and stems and roots and things like that, and a little bit of fruit, not a lot. And miracle of miracles, all these health problems went away in the gorillas. The cool part of it is, first of all, they didn't use the word paleo. You didn't have to have a PhD in biochemistry to get good results. You could use sort of a hacker's mentality and say, huh, we might not get everything right, but by making this switch we stand a decent chance of seeing some results. And they did. And not just with obesity and blood work and signs of heart disease and things like that. They also had behavioral improvements. The gorillas previously would pluck their hair obsessively to the point where they would have bald spots and that behavior receded almost entirely. And then they also had a regurgitation behavior where they would, once they were done eating the biscuits, which only took them about 15 minutes, they would regurgitate them onto the ground and then eat them again. Gorillas in the wild spend almost all their time foraging and eating. They are evolved to do that. They are adapted to do that. If you are meant to be munching on stuff all day and suddenly you don't have that option, the wiring gets screwed up and it's like, what's going on here? So that was sort of my way of introducing people to this evolutionary approach to say, like, here's a reasonable starting point. And then I get into the. I'll give you sort of a brief summary of the other four a little bit shorter than that. In the Paleolithic age, I had an opportunity to go to Harvard's five fossil archives. Harvard has this incredible fossil collection. Most of it is just for scientific research and it's not on display to the public. And I got a tour of the archive by Professor Dan Lieberman. Some people may have heard of him because he was the professor who did some of the studies around minimalist or barefoot running. Really thoughtful guy. And I actually have to give some credit to him because he pushed me to be less dogmatic around some of the paleo diet stuff and that was helpful. But I got to hold this 80,000 year old hunter gatherer skull from modern day Israel. And that was an experience in itself. And I was just like, do not drop this. Yeah, exactly. It was over a table and I was wearing the appropriate protection and gloves and things like that. But what was so amazing about this skull was this guy had an almost perfect set of teeth. All of his teeth came in, including his wisdom teeth. They were straight and no cavities. He had lost one tooth due to an abscess. So things weren't perfect, but remarkably good and much better than most people would think. I gave a talk at my old high school and half these kids are wearing braces or retainers, things like that, and they think it's normal to have all your dentition a little bit messed up. And I used that to introduce this idea that there's a difference between normal and common. Just because something is widespread doesn't mean it's necessarily biologically normal. But we looked at this skull and so this guy was robust and healthy and about 5 foot 10, 5 foot 9, and a half, something like that, which was remarkably tall for that era and would be a normal height today. And then we went and looked at some skeletons of early farmers and it was painful just to look at them. I mean, just brutal teeth that are worn down, lots of teeth missing. Adult males that were five feet tall, five foot one, just. It looked absolutely painful. And that's one of the ways that archaeologists just on sort of first blush, if they come across an ancient skeleton skull, if there's horrible dentition and signs of disease and is short, that's sort of their rule of thumb for, okay, this was a post agricultural revolution skeleton. You know, again, doesn't mean that everything was perfect before. Wild animals aren't perfectly healthy, but they are well adapted to, you know, to the lives that they lead. You know, So I tell that story, then we get into agricultural and by the way, interrupt me at any point you want.

You're on a roll. This is fantastic.

All right.

What I was hoping to do. And then, okay, this is great.

Yeah, so. But the story doesn't end there. And there are so many paleo books, many of which are very good and I like them, but they say that the story just ends right there and it doesn't. Things happened over the last 10,000 years, important things. And so I transition into the agricultural age. And this chapter is very religious. It talks about religion as a form of culture and particularly as a cultural adaptation to infectious disease. So let me unpack that a little bit because it might not make sense yet. People domesticate plants and animals, we become farmers, we settle down and sort of harvest our crops. You know, we have to be in the same place all year to do that, pretty much start living in cities. And the greatest health risk in an early city, it wasn't diet. This is where initially I was being a little bit dogmatic because I was so focused on paleo diet. Lieberman said to me, he's like, no, really, for a lot of people, it was infectious disease. They didn't understand hygiene, they didn't understand that germs existed. You have all these new hosts, domesticated animals, vermin that are living in close proximity. And all these people are just dropping dead. And the thing about germs is that they're invisible or usually invisible, and they spread via all these different mechanisms. You can get it from a slight touch or from bodily fluids or from a sneeze or from eating something that's spoiled. It's really hard to figure out if somebody drops dead of disease. It's actually remarkably difficult until the last hundred years to figure out what caused that person to die. It was mysterious. And a lot of people back then attribute it to the gods. And they said, you know, this person was struck down maybe for doing something sinful or evil. They're being punished by God or the gods. And what's interesting about this era is you start to get a few different religious groups that develop these cultural traditions around hygiene and purity codes. I talk a little bit about Zoroastrianism, which was an early Persian sort of monotheistic religion. And then I spend most of my time looking at Judaism and then offshoots of Christianity and Islam. But it's really remarkable. I went back and I was raised in a Christian family, and a lot of Christian families, they sort of read Genesis and Exodus and then they sort of jump to the New Testament. And so I went back and I read. It's sort of odd for a guy that's like, I'm reading Darwin, I'm reading the Bible, I'm sort of all over the place, some contradictory impulses here, which makes life interesting. So I go back and I read the first five books of the Bible, the Hebrew Bible, the Torah, and there are three instances of where God commands either Jewish priests or Jewish people to wash their hands. And we sort of take that in stride as if it's kind of obvious. It was not at all obvious to people that washing your hands was a beneficial activity. In fact, if you go back and look at a lot of hunter gatherers, there's this interesting piece on the Hadza in Tanzania where after they would slaughter an animal, they would, they would actually cover their hands and their forearms with the intestines and sort of the gut of the animal that they killed to try to get the good back, basically, we think to try to get the good bacteria from some of those animals. But they didn't have the disease risk that later people had. This idea of washing your hands is Nobel worthy. It is a very profound insight. It is the simplest thing, thing that people can do on a daily basis to avoid contamination and infectious disease. If you read the rest of the disease really gets going in Exodus and Deuteronomy, Numbers and Leviticus, Deuteronomy and numbers. Boy, these people were grossed out by a lot of stuff back then, right? It's like there's a lot of talk of bodily fluids and corpses and sex and washing your hands and, you know, vermin and plague and pestilence. And you realize this was like a very real threat to them. And when you go through there's actually a very large and old scholarly history of rabbis and other scholars who have looked at how different aspects of the Jewish tradition and what's called the Mosaic Law relates to hygiene and infectious disease. So I'm not the first one to point this out. I do sort of aggregate it in what I think is a novel way and sort of describe how some of these laws and rules emerge and sustain themselves. But hand washing, bathing, not eating anything that died of its own accord, farmers know this. We sort of forget if we're not living on the land, but farmers know that if an animal drops dead in the middle of the field, it's probably infected and it's a bad idea to eat it. A lot of people, when it comes to the kosher laws, to kashrut, they focus on pork and shellfish. But pork and shellfish, they're not actually singled out. They don't necessarily have pride of place in the actual Mosaic Law. What the Mosaic Law gets right, that's even more important than pork and shellfish is don't eat anything that's died of its own accord. Stay away from corpses, don't touch them, stay away from most insects and all vermin. And insects and vermin are great ways to. That disease jumps from host to host. A lot of the animals that are also prohibited from being eaten, like vultures, birds of prey, eagles, four pawed animals, so like bears, lions, these are top tier predators and top tier predators in the wild. And again, farming people would know this, but top tier predators in the wild will eat corpses that are lying around, they'll eat vermin, they'll eat a lot of the things that can potentially transmit disease. Like I said, farmers know this. If something drops dead in a field, farmers know what animals come along and pick it clean. It may sound a little conspiracy theory esque to us, but it wouldn't have to them it would have seemed more pragmatic. Even, you know, this is a little bit more controversial, but I like digging into some of those issues. Even when you get to traditional sexual codes, religious sexual codes, I mean, we live in an era where a lot of attitudes on that are changing. But think about it from a woman's standpoint. Three or 4,000 years ago, there's no, there aren't condoms, there are no antibiotics. And if a woman were to catch something, then she wouldn't be able to cure herself and she could become infertile for the rest of her life. And so one decision by her or some rapacious man could completely end her line. If she were to get infected with something. So the reality is, in that era, we can have a separate conversation about today, but in that era, lifelong monogamy or something close to it, you can think of it as an effective way to avoid infectious disease and STDs. When you realize that the downside costs are so great, you could see how some of these traditions might evolve and emerge. There are parts of sub Saharan Africa, it's actually been improving. But there have been parts of sub Saharan Africa where over 15% of women become infertile during what are typically childbearing years due to STDs. There can be a enormous selection pressure for behaviors and attitudes that help people avoid these things. I could talk. We could have a two hour podcast just about that chapter. I love it. I spent more time on it than the next three chapters in the book combined. Because if you're talking about religion, particularly other people's religion, you better get your facts right. But here's the point, here's the lesson that I wanted to draw from that chapter. In addition to sort of, you know, evolution doesn't stop at the end of the Paleolithic. Culture is very powerful. And I sort of use the word culture in two different ways. There's the culture of ideas and beliefs and traditions and practices, but there's also the culture of bacterial culture, like when a doctor takes a throat culture. And those two things are remarkably intertwined. Ideas and beliefs, they change quickly. They sort of behave like they're alive sometimes, but they're not actually alive. They're invisible. They flourish in dense networks like cities. And so as infectious disease rose to prominence in this era, it stands to reason that ideas and this other form of rapidly evolving culture would be the way that we would fight it. So it's from this era where we get all these really interesting cultural traditions. And so what I emphasize to people is just because a cultural tradition is old doesn't mean it's necessarily out of date. Even if we don't understand it, we. We should pause for a moment and see if there's a reason for it. So fermentation practices. Fermentation is a great way to harness the power of microbes to create something healthier, whether that is fermenting wine, which in early cities was safer to drink than water, which was often polluted and infected, or, you know, ways of fermenting milk into dairy. And even there are a lot of forms of dairy that even if you're lactose intolerant, that is more edible than drinking milk. Cultural traditions like spices There are all these papers showing how spices have an antimicrobial effect. And so you get a lot of these dishes in sort of hot equatorial quiz cuisines like Indian cuisine, very spicy, particularly in meat dishes. Well, those spices had a function. They helped kill any germs or pathogens that might have been present, making the food healthier. And people didn't have to understand how these traditions worked. They didn't have to understand that germs existed. They just had to follow them. And so there may have been stories that were, got people to follow them, but were otherwise extraneous. But we know today, like, okay, maybe there was some wisdom in that tradition. So that was really the big picture point of that chapter. And you start, and later in the book, whenever I talk about sort of cultural traditions, a lot of them have to do with things that help us avoid infectious disease. It could be sweat bathing and saunas. It could be fasting traditions, which were also incorporated into many religions. So that was sort of the thrust of that chapter. The next chapter was the Industrial age. And that one was really fun. I did a lot of work on, I focused on the uk. Great Britain went through the Industrial Revolution first. Machines and factories and fossil fuels and things like that. And you know, this radically, radically changed how people lived in just a few generations. And you know, we got indoor lighting, we moved indoors. A lot of our work eventually became less laborious. Our diet changed. We started to get industrial processed food. And because Britain went through the Industrial revolution first, they actually faced a lot of health problems before other cultures. So people like to joke about the British people having poor teeth and ha, ha ha, you know, but the reality is if you actually look at the dentition of people living in London in the 18th century and things like that, just absolutely horrid, horrid dentition. And it was a major public health issue in Britain before other places. Because in part, Britain had large amounts of industrial processed sugar in their diet before other people. And their diet became heavily concentrated on cheap processed grains and cheap processed carbohydrate before other people. To give you another example, the British were, they were the first to really get a lot of rickets. Now rickets is a disease of vitamin D deficiency. And people probably have images in their head of sort of small children living in tenements and they have these really horrible looking twisted bones. And it's very, it's a very sad image. And it was, rickets was actually caused called the British disease because it appeared there before other places. It actually appeared first, you know, we have these images of these poor tenement children. It actually appeared first among the rich because the rich were. Could afford to stay indoors all day and not have to go work in the fields and. And they had these nutrient deficient diets of pastries and sweets and things like that, which at the time were a luxury. And so they were the first to get chronic vitamin D deficiency. And so it started as a disease of the rich concentrated in the uk. So you can sort of imagine everything's accelerating with the Industrial revolution and the British are right at the forefront of it and they get destroyed, you know, in many ways because of it. So that chapter is a lot of fun. I take some shots at the British, but you know, at the same time it's really remarkable. They're also known for a sense of fortitude and having a stiff upper lip. And I don't think that's an accident. I think it's because these people went through so much before everybody else and sort of came out on the other end. I think, I think that's why they developed some of that reputation for stoicism and their sense of humor. So that's that chapter. And then we get into the information age and I start with the story about Watson and Crick and discovering the helical structure of DNA. And what's really remarkable about this, I mean, the story's been told many times, but we suddenly realize that at the heart of all biological life is this digital code, right? It's a digital code. It's not analog. It's something that can be read into a computer database very easily with basically ones and zeros and you've got AGCT as your nucleotides. And isn't that remarkable that sort of at the core of life is this sort of digital code. You know, it's like the coolest Da Vinci Code conspiracy theory ever. And the lesson of this chapter is I talk about hackers and I get into biohacking, which has sort of become all the rage these days of empowered amateurs who tinker with machine or with their body to try to learn about it and improve it. Hackers sometimes have this image of being these rogue sort of criminal black hat types, but that's really incomplete at best. Hackers have this hands on philosophy of tinkerers. You don't get your smarts from getting a PhD and a bunch of book knowledge. You get your smarts from getting your hands dirty and grasping it and sometimes breaking a computer or a radio or whatever you're working on. That's how you really get an in depth knowledge of a system and how it works. It's actually very empowering for everybody listening to this. You might not have a PhD in biochemistry, that's okay. You can still become an expert in your health and your body. Even if you're not poring over the statistical details of every new study that comes out. You can run experiments on yourself where you change one variable and you look at the outcome. If on different measures, you feel healthier, look healthier, perform better, then guess what, you're probably healthier and you are engaging in a form of the scientific method and you're a scientist, right? So this is very cool. I feel like the sort of like cheesy 6th grade science teacher getting all excited about it. But it's true. We can all be scientists, we can all participate in the scientific method and run experiments on ourselves. And the other lesson from that chapter is that information, if you think about the body as this information processor, sort of like a computer, sounds a little esoteric, but we have to remember that the body has sort of been programmed by evolution, by our experience. And we need to understand that programming. We're not just a factory burning fuel for energy. People have this notion of energy that's sort of like a fire burning inside of you. Your metabolism, it's speeding up or slowing down. It's a motor in a car, it's a factory. If you notice, these are all sort of like mechanical industrial era metaphors. But if you step back from it and you think about it, okay, what are two of the ways that reliably cause people to feel like they have a lot of energy? One is sun comes in your room in the morning and you wake up, hopefully you've gotten a good night's sleep and you feel energetic. Well, it's not that the factory is burning hotter at that point or you put another log on the fire. It's that the sunlight signals to your brain it's morning. And that information signal kicks off this whole sort of cascade of hormonal effects in your body that basically utilizes energy and wakes you up. It's not about drinking an energy drink or eating some sugar. Another way that people get a lot of energy is if there's a threat, if you're attacked, or if you're scared. Suddenly adrenaline flows through your body and you're rearing to go. And they have These stories of 45 year old mothers who lift the car off of their child or something like that in an accident and things like that. What's really going on Here it's not that suddenly they had a power bar and energy bar. It's that a perceived threat. So information comes in through our senses. It gets interpreted by the body as, holy cow, we need to get moving. We need to energize. We need to lift or run or sprint or fight or flee. And the body responds to that information with the appropriate hormones and everything else to give us a lot of energy. So we need to start thinking about the human body in terms of information and what signals are we sending. So many people, they go to bed or try to go to bed and have difficulty, but all this light is coming into their eyes from their computer screens and our phones and our TV screens. And when that light comes into our eyes, it tells our body. Our body thinks it's daytime. It's a signal, right? It's information. And our body interprets that as daytime. And so it's hard to get to sleep. And then in the morning, we struggle to wake up because our circadian rhythm is out of whack. So this chapter is really about challenging us to think about the body in a more sophisticated way, sort of like a computer. We need to send it the right signals. We need to put in the right inputs so that we get the right outputs. And the way to interpret a lot of those signals is often going back to the Paleolithic. And then it's this story of empowerment, of experimentation. And everybody can be a scientist and a hacker and find ways to improve their own health and customize their health. I mean, experiment, maybe. Perfect Paleo diet isn't perfect for you because of your genome or gut, microbiome or allergies or injuries or tastes or preferences or budget or anything. And that's fine. You could use it as a starting point if you want to try it, but then customize it and make changes and see what results you get. And if you end up on something that includes grains or includes dairy, like, you know, fine, great. That's wonderful. And, you know, so customize something, and if it works for you, that's, you know, wonderful. You've succeeded. You know, everybody doesn't have to end up eating the exact same way.

Right on. Well, thanks for the tour. Through our five stages. Animal, paleolithic, agricultural, industrial, information. That is awesome. And John is a great storyteller. Now, now, and in the book, kind of walking us through all those experiences from you holding the skull through Moses's code, right, all the way through. It's been fascinating to read and now hear your perspective. I'd love to Touch on a few of the my favorite kind of practical applications for a moment. One of the biggest ideas I think you make is the fact that when we. Why is it that certain various approaches will work? Right. And you talk about when you head into a forest, you won't find a fountain of youth, but you will find some poisons. Right. In. Eliminating stuff is often more important than adding stuff. Can you talk to us about that? And then I want to drill in a little bit more from there, but can you give us a high level on that?

Yeah. Again, part of this insight only comes about because we're distanced from nature and living in nature. But if you are in the woods, if you're in the forest, if you're out in nature somewhere, you can eat one thing that will kill you. You can eat some poison berries. A lot of plants can give you an upset stomach, and some of them can kill you. Plants are nature's chemists. They are the source of our medicines. They're the source of our poisons. They can be really good or really bad, depending on which one you have. There's stuff out there that can kill you, but there's really nothing out there that you can eat that is going to immediately make you perfectly healthy or add 10 pounds of muscle or help you get rid of the spare tire around your waist. There's no fountain of youth. It's asymmetrical. So there are things that can give you big downsides, but there aren't really a whole lot of things that can give you an equivalent. Equivalent, massive upside. When we think about being healthy and what a healthy diet means, a lot of times it means getting rid of some of these poisonous may be a strong word for some of these things, but unhealthy foods that can have a severe negative effect on your health, whether it's tons of sugar, high fructose corn syrup, things like that. But I think that people are a lot of times mistaken around superfoods, where people pay all sorts of money. There are foods that have a lot of nutrients in them and have more nutrients than others and are more nutrient dense. I believe in superfoods in that sense. But eating one superfood on one day, usually for people today, if they don't have any micronutrient deficiencies, it's not going to turn you into Superman or Superwoman overnight. So a lot of different dietary approaches often work at the beginning, whether it's Paleo or vegetarian or something like that. Because if it gets you off of all of these poisonous foods or A standard industrial diet, you're going to get good results. That's one perspective on poisons versus the fauna of youth. What was the second part of your question?

Well, this is great. That was exactly what I was hoping to shine some light on. And then from your experience and research and perspective, what are the things that are just kind of those universals? Look, asterisks next to this food. You mentioned sugar, for example, and high fructose corn syrup. Everyone's going to agree that we don't want to increase our sugar intake. What else falls into that list of things that people who may not be in paleo yet should be thinking about as potential toxins?

Yeah, so my framework for food recommendations actually follows some of those ages. What we call processed food is really industrial food. It's these foods that came into an existence with the Industrial revolution. So it's not just sugar, it's this refined flour, these industrial vegetable oils, seed based vegetable oils like canola, which only basically came into existence 25, 30 years ago. These are the foods that we have had the least amount of time, just a few generations to potentially adapt to. And it's just not enough time to adapt. This is where pretty much everyone agrees you go an age earlier to the agricultural age. This is where there's a lot of disagreement in among different dietary gurus and things like that. This is where Paleo folks say remove grains and dairy, which were the two biggest novel additions to the human diet. There are a lot of Paleo people who flex more on dairy. We're also in America and a lot of people have European heritage and are lactose tolerant. It's part of their culture. They can probably digest it better. But those are. Grains and dairy are the two big novel additions from the agricultural age. But I really recommend that when it comes to cultural practices, going back to what I talked about before, that we really pay attention to traditional cultural practices around food preparation and cooking because there's often a health reason that we neglect. It could be pairing wasabi with raw fish. Well, wasabi has antimicrobial properties and it's a good thing to pair with raw fish. If you're eating it, it could be fermentation and all this new science coming out on the gut microbiome and the benefits of having a diverse gut health or microbes in your gut. I'm drinking kombucha and I'm eating live culture foods and sauerkraut and kimchi and I occasionally take a probiotic. So I'm doing that. And then you go Back another age to the Paleolithic. And that's where I sort of base the foundation of my diet. The types of food groups that would have been available in the wild. Meat, fish, leafy vegetables, roots and tubers, nut seeds, eggs, honey, things like that. Of course, the foods in the grocery store have changed since then. They are not exact replicas of what exists in the wild, but it's practical and it's close enough for most people's purposes. So that's sort of my sort of approach to. To dietary choices.

Yeah, that's awesome. And again, we could talk about that not only for hours, but for weekends. What's your favorite practical tip that you kind of applied to your own life that you think people might find really useful in your research and experience?

I love cold exposure. It could be a polar bear swim, it could be a cold shower, a cold plunge. I call it my reset button. And I try to develop my life is plenty stressful as an entrepreneur and author. Excuse me. And so I like to have things in my life where if I'm stressed out, I can get back to a good place and try to develop those habits and rituals to sort of recenter myself. And. And cold exposure does it for me in the morning if I'm tired, if I haven't gotten enough sleep, 30 seconds in a cold shower and maybe I've already had part of a hot shower. It brings me right back to attention if I am in a bad mood. When I was in New York, I'd go to the Russian baths and I do the sauna and the cold plunge if it's New Year's Day and I've done this. The Coney island polar bear swimming. Many people have had a little too much to drink the night before. Taking a dip in the Atlantic in January is a great way to get over a hangover. I love cold exposure. I think it's great to work out when you're a little bit cold. You can just remove one article of clothing relative to what you would typically wear. Always pay attention to fingers and toes and your appendages because that's where your circulation is worse and you need to watch out for. But cold is really important and most people aren't cold anymore. A lot of people, the coldest parts of their lives is when the air conditioning is on too cold. It's a really important part of our physiology. And really heat production is the top source of energy expenditure in our bodies. People talk about exercising all the time, but producing heat is actually requires more energy than movement. Cold's really important. I think intermittent fasting. I know there have been articles about it and some media about it over the last three, four, five years. I still think it's underrated. I still think it's underrated. Not necessarily these long extended juice fasts or whatever. 18, 24 hours, nothing but water, water, tea, a little bit of coffee if you're an addict and drink it regularly. But I see a new study coming out every week showing some, you know, previously unheard of beneficial effect of like a little bit of fasting and, you know, not eating. We think of it as nothing, but it's really something. It's a period of time where our body goes through a lot of repair mechanisms and that's really important. I also find that it helps me once you start to. Initially, the first time people fast for a little bit, they get a little bit lightheaded because a lot of people are addicted to sugar without really realizing it. But I find I have incredible mental clarity when I haven't been eating. I usually don't eat much or anything in the morning. Funny story, I was on Colbert a few years ago and that was a very intimidating experience. I had never been on TV before and then going right into the hot seat with Colbert, he gives one of the hardest interviews on tv. And I didn't sleep well the night before and I didn't take a sleep aid or anything like that. I got about four hours of sleep and they tape at about 7 o' clock in the evening. And so I was concerned that morning because I thought, boy, I don't really know the timing of all this. And if I try to drink a bunch of coffee, maybe I mistime it and I'm coming down or I'm a little sort of scattered and on the fritz. I didn't want to rely on coffee, but I knew that if I was going to be eating a lot, I'd be sleepy. And so I fasted that day. I had a little bit of pastrami at about 8am in the morning. Then I didn't eat anything until after the show. I was in the green room and it was treating me like a celebrity and I'm eating it up. This is so cool. And they have this fruit and cheese and cracker tray and they immediately got all embarrassed because they're like, oh, you don't even eat most of the stuff on here. And I was like, it's fine, I'm not, I'm not eating anyways. And I had a little green tea and went on. But I was used to this I had done it before. I was doing this regularly and I was clear headed and alert and awake for the interview. But you tell most people don't eat for 12 hours and then perform on national TV and people would freak out. But I was actually more comfortable in a fasted state.

That's awesome. So good. And again, it's another one of the fun stories in the book. What have we not talked about do you think is a highlight from a practical perspective?

Well, the social stuff I talk to all these people who are trying to make changes and I see it with myself is your social network has a profound influence on who you are as a person and, and the changes that you try to make. And there are some people who are very disciplined and can sort of make a life change in themselves and not change anything around them. And that's great. And people do do that. But so many people who, a lot of people who try to quit smoking, they have much more success if they're changing jobs or moving homes or something like that. When you embark on a journey to become healthier, pay a lot of attention to who you spend time with. I don't mean this in a negative way about people in your life, but it really is true that you are an average of the five people that you spend the most time with. Surround build relationships with people who care about the things that you care about. And that's not just true about health, it's true about career, it's true about values, it's true about everything. So if you're trying to make a change, think about, okay, let me meet some people at a CrossFit box or some coworkers are going to do this spartan race with me and we're going to all be in it together or have a conversation with your spouse about trying to support you in these things and have other people go along with it because the social side is just, it is just so, so important. So that would be my big takeaway.

That's awesome. Right on John. Well, thank you so much for taking the time and doing all the work and sharing the wisdom. I mentioned your site before. Is that the best place for people to follow you and to stay up to date on what's going on? And do you want to tell us anything else that's going on?

You know, I actually don't blog very regularly. At huntergatherer.com people can. I'm doing some venture work. People can find me at Wildventures vc. I am on Twitter though. I do sort of shoot from the Hip and it's not always pg, but I'm ohnderant J O H N D U R A N T so be forewarned. But you know. But that's where you can usually find me.

Right on. All right. Well, I'm thrilled to be connected.

Yeah, this was a blast. Thank you for having me on the show. Thank you for really caring about a lot of these ideas and not just tell me exactly what to eat. Because you need some of this framework and the ideas to click into place so that it becomes a lifestyle change, not just a one off failed experiment.

Yeah, right on. Well, you mentioned just to continue that thread for a moment, we're really big in my work in our community on experimenting. It's all data. Just do the work, figure out what works and what doesn't. And for me, there is no one path. Right. It's what is your path and how do we explore all these ideas and put them into the lab, see what works and continue to cultivate our own optimal kind of practices. So I appreciate your exploration and how clearly you articulate these fascinating ideas and then thread them together in a novel way and then ultimately shared in a practical way. So good stuff. Look forward to much more in the future.

Yeah, same. Thanks, man.

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