How To Boost Testosterone Naturally? 🤔 Dr. Joy Kong Podcast Interview with Brad Kearns

Here's a quick tip to know if you are offensive here. If it has a fragrance, it has estrogenic influences on your body, guys. So if you're smelling your laundry detergent, it's fresh smelling tide, the things you hang in your car, the Christmas tree from the car wash, anything with a fragrance is causing a disruption to the chemicals. And so what happens is the body interprets these and estrogen like chemicals to be estrogen. And so to keep that balance right, it can't do it because it's being confused. And then EMS is on that list too.

Oh yeah, there was this dramatic study of these, these rats. They put a cell phone next to rat's cage. I think it was only two hours a day for 60 days. And at the end of the 60 days, the level of testosterone in these rats have dropped to 50% of what it was. Action.

I'm so glad to be back in the Dr. Joy Kung podcast, Dewey.

I always have so much fun with you. So, okay, just to give our listeners a brief overview of who you are, Brad, do you want to talk a little bit about, you know, what your essence is?

Oh, what a nice startup question. Where can I take that? Anywhere I want.

I don't know.

At the start of my podcast I say I'm an author and an athlete. So I've been writing books and in the health scene for a long time. But I started out, you know, I immersed into this world pursuing a career as a professional triathlete back when I was young. So I was a runner in high school and college, competitive athlete. And I got into this amazing sport of triathlon that led to a nine year career on the pro circuit a long time ago. But it was a great journey because it's so graphic and exposed and real and honest. And so when you do well, when you succeed, it's because my mindset was right. My, my lifestyle, my health practices, everything was in balance. I was able to train, I was able to love the process. I wasn't overly fixated and stressed about results or attaching my self esteem to the outcome. And, and that's when I got better and better as an athlete and enjoyed it and was confident and fearless on the race course and all these great things. My very best. I was national champion. I was ranked number three in the world. It was great. I was people clapping for me. I was on the magazine cover, on tv. And then I also made all these different mistakes and a lot of them were driven by an overly competitive, tightly wound mindset, as you might see often in the world of triathlon because you have to train so hard, it's so grueling. And so I was one of those guys that really liked to push my body and compete really hard. But when that gets out of balance in life, you tend to suffer and struggle. You're not enjoying the process. And maybe in business you can still be successful and be an asshole on a private jet and you're rich, but all your employees hate you. You can still be successful, but not as an athlete because everything's so fine tuned. And so when I push myself too hard, that's when I fell off balance and learned these super hard lessons of getting my butt kicked and having to re, you know, recalibrate, retool and say what's wrong? What's wrong with me?

Or kind of the imbalance.

Did you notice it's mainly it was over training and then did you just.

Have a lack of energy or you overtrained energy what you were performing as well?

I needed those stem cells back in the 90s before they, they came about. But this over training has so many aspects to it because, and we're going to talk about this when we talk about hormone optimization. It's like when your real life is out of balance, if you have whatever a relationship dysfunction or financial pressures, especially as an athlete, when we're trying to make it in this small sport. Like you could make a lot of money when you won races and then when you got seventh, you didn't make very much money as a professional triathlete. And so when these things kicked into gear and it got me out of balance, just in a normal hectic, stressful circumstance of life, of course that's going to show up in my race results. And so it took a lot of discipline and took a lot of courage to kind of break free from this regimented type A mentality where I thought if I just push the gas pedal hard enough, I can win the races if I can do as much training as I can and never give up and not let anyone pass me and all these things. And those really don't serve you in the long run because you have to kind of understand your body as a dynamic organism. And sometimes like the discipline people would say, oh, you have so much discipline. You train swimming, biking and running every day. Wow, that takes a lot of discipline. The discipline came when I'd wake up and have to go, whoops, today's a rest day. And even though I want to get better at my swim and beat that guy that beat me at the last Race. I need to sit back, let the shoulder rest.

So basically, you came a expert at optimization in the very holistic sense to be the best athlete. Right. So. So coming from being an athlete and to coming into a optimization expert, you know that that's kind of the essence. Correct.

That's nice to drive this story forward because I'm mentioning my athletic background because that's informed everything I've done in the health and fitness space. And so I'm not a PhD nutrition researcher that can proclaim this is the best diet, but the things that I learned from competing at the highest level as elite athlete, I think are just as relevant as what any science comes forth and presents. And this message or this idea is now getting more and more traction where Mark Bell talks about this a lot, like, we're not robots. So you can't apply scientific research to a dynamic human that has peak performance goals or wants to live a long time. It's just not going to work, no matter how hard to try.

Yeah. So, I mean, today I really want to focus on hormones because I've had another podcast about testosterone. I know it's an important topic. You know, I know we had. We could talk about so many things, but I want to give people a little bit more, you know, kind of dialed in information about how, you know, for you, you know, where did testosterone come into play and how were you able to manage your level to the point where you have excellent testosterone level even though you're not taking testosterone replacement. Right. Which is very impressive. And that's something a lot of people may be interested and they want to enhance their testosterone naturally, but they had no idea how. And a lot of doctors don't know exactly how either. So they're prescribing just, you know, injections or cream or a pellet. So I want to want you to share a little bit of, you know, how did even testosterone even pop up on your radar and just your experience with it?

Yeah. Good. This is so funny that we're talking about this now. Here I am at age 58. So I retired as a professional athlete at age 30. And so the rest of my adult life, I've had all these fun peak performance goals. I still like to compete in the old man track and field high jump competition and speed golf and my fun stuff. But of course, the, the process is different because I'm not living and breathing and trying to get every ounce of my body into peak performance. And now my goals are to feel great, delay the aging process, age gracefully, continue to compete, and Pursue peak performance goals and of course, optimize my hormone status and look at all these markers that represent disease risk and try to, you know, correct that stuff and maintain my, my youthful energy as long as I can. The funny thing I'm smiling about is like back when I was racing, you know, we're competing in these sports that have drug testing as you're familiar with in the Olympics. And you know, athletes can get a massive advantage by doping. And in the endurance sports it was doping with epo, the red blood cell making drug, as well as taking extra testosterone. Because what happens when you train really, really hard and is you deplete your hematocrit, you deplete your testosterone, you suppress your immune function and then you have to go and rest on the couch and sleep a lot and try to recover and then maybe get another workout in a few days later and build back up. But if you're overriding that with hormone replacement, we call that hormone replacement now. But like doping and hormone abuse would be more like what you see with the bodybuilders or the guys in the Tour de France who are doped off their ass. And it has nothing to do with health, where hormone replacement is trying to optimize your health and look at it a safe therapeutic level. So it's funny because here I am, you know, years later now realizing how popular hormone replacement is, especially for guys my age, and I have never tried it. I'm completely open to the subject. I have people that I really respect that are 100% in all the way and they think it's great and it's fantastic. But my philosophy has always been to be as natural as possible and go through life with as much, you know, feedback and natural approach with sleep, with diet, with athletic training, with fatigue. If I'm feeling tired, I don't want to override it with a non steroidal anti inflammatory or even a shot of caffeine because I don't want to take that message and say, oh, you need to take it easy for a while. And that was really important as an athlete because like I said, I've made all these mistakes with overtraining. And if you start slamming three espressos before your planned 80 mile bike ride, you might feel pretty good. But maybe that day wasn't meant to be an 80 mile bike ride, it was meant to be a rest day. So I kind of hold on to this belief that when you override the body's natural metabolic and hormonal functions with an outside agent, you are paying some Kind of a price. You talked about this when I interviewed you, where we're getting peptides and stem cells and things that are not doing the drug like effect of overriding genetic function. And so ideally these are getting our body to work better, to heal and become stronger and delay aging. But when you override it with a drug therapy, you're kind of taking a different route and a different choice. And, and like I say, I'm completely open to the subject and we might check back in three years or five years or eight years and I'll say I'm doing everything I can and I'm still experiencing adverse consequences related to chronological aging. And I want to be stronger and fitter and I want to get my six pack back. What can I do, Dr. Joy? Stem cells, peptides, hormone replacement. I'm open to all of it because we know modern medicine is going to help. But right now I think, and I want to make this message to everyone. Listening, watching is like you're obligated to do absolutely everything possible with your lifestyle, behaviors and those variables before you should even look to outside intervention. And I'm not sure that theme is promoted quite enough.

And I'm not sure how many people are actually going to do it here. Clinic is real life, real people. People want effects, want to feel better and quickly. And they may not want to change their dietary habit. They not want to change when they go to bed. They may not want to change the fact that they're drinking coffee or drinking some alcohol. So, you know, can you still help them get better? So that's, you know, it's, do we want a purist approach or do we want to be more practical?

Yeah, so it's a good question.

But for people with discipline, which I assume a lot of people who, you know, who are interested in health optimization, a lot of them have the discipline. So do you feel that to naturally. I don't even know if your testosterone level was ever reduced. Have you ever checked it when you were.

Oh my gosh. I tested it all the time when I was a young guy between the ages of 20 and 30, supposedly in my hormonal peak. And it was very suppressed. It was, it was, it would be diagnosed as hypogonadal when I was within my print because I was training so hard. Yeah, it was, it was between 200 and 300 almost every time I tested. And that was purely because of the training load. And I think probably all my peers, except for those who were doping, would be having all kinds of suppressed markers and in elevated Inflammatory markers, suppressed immune function, all kinds of crap is wrong with an elite athlete because they're, they're right on the edge of health all the time. And I would get cold like five times a year. I'd get a cold easily at that. Up times 10 years. I had 50 colds in a decade. And you know, the last decade I think I've had three or two. You know, it's like it was, it was rough going out there. And so, yeah, my, my serum Testosterone was between 200 and 300 all the time. My hematocrit would go at 42, 44 at, at the best. And then it would go down to 36 or 38, which is anemic. And you feel horrible and you have to rest and eat a lot of hamburger and steak and then come back two weeks later and you can get back into your routine. That's why the red blood cell drug is so valuable. If you can peg your hematocrit at 50, you're, you're overflowing with oxygen all the time. And we, we talk about that health.

The thing, what the testosterone can do can increase your red blood cell count. Did you make it your mission to improve your testosterone level? I mean, that, that's pretty bad.

Yeah. For a young guy. Yeah.

So, yeah, would that sounding alarm to you and you started going on a path to.

Well, that's funny because when you're racing, all you care about is, you know, what place can I get in the next race? And I, you know, not, not deliberately, but of course I was putting my health on the sideline for those 10 years. And I kind of compare myself. I might as well have been a rock star partying and putting crazy shit into my body for those 10 years because I was similarly unhealthy. I was not a healthy guy. I was super fit. I could do three things really well, swim, bike and run.

But if you saw your testosterone levels being so low, you're going to know it's going to affect your performance.

Yeah, yeah, we didn't care. Well, I mean, I, I did the best I could to try and balance the stress and rest of training. And that was the whole, that's the whole game is like, how fast can I get without crushing myself and getting tired. But even at my best, my testosterone was still suppressed due to all the, you know, the chronic overproduction of stress hormones that's required to train 30 hours a week. So you're, you know, you're doing the best you can. That's why the dopers win Olympic gold medals. But, you know, back in, back in my day, I had this assumption that everybody was clean and I was really close friends with everybody. So I didn't think about, like, hey, can I fix this with, you know, outside regimen? Because I would have tested positive and destroyed my career. And so now thinking about it now, you know, no, it's where I'm not worried about the doper, the drug testing, knocking on my door and asking for a urine sample. I can put whatever I wanted to my body in the name of health and staying strong.

So, so did you, what did you do? I mean, at what point did you actually want to address your testosterone?

I stopped trading my ass off. And So I turned 30. I was, you know, bombed out. I was exhausted. My career was over, even though I was a young person. And then I started to raise a family, work in an office, long hours like everybody else, commute a really long commute to the Bay Area from where I lived. And so I was, again, piling a lot of stress onto my plate. It just wasn't that crazy athletic training stress. It was getting seven hours of sleep a night instead of 12 every day like I did when I was an athlete. But of course, I got healthier in many ways, and I tried to maintain, like, a reasonable level of fitness as I went into my 30s and 40s. And then I formed this really important goal when I was coaching my son in hugh sports that I want to, I want to dominate these little kids in every sport and be this participatory coach where I brought my A game every practice. And so I played hard from ages 5 to 15, but just, you know, these poor kids are like, what's this guy doing? But I, I, I learned this from another dad. He said, oh, no, you got to go hard and show them what it's like to be a competitor. And you can't, like, play half speed and soccer and oops, I missed the kick. I, I could have scored a goal. I was like, let's go, it's four to one, My team's winning. Let's go. And so I got really fit because I wanted to be a good basketball soccer player and a track athlete, running the sprints and doing the high jump. And so that this kind of ushered in a new era of my life where I want to be fit. I want to beat the little kids in soccer. But my main goal is healthspan, longevity, wellness, wellbeing, feeling good throughout the day rather than feeling like I need to crash every afternoon for two hours, like I did when I was a triathlete. And then frankly, I wouldn't say those decades were optimal health either because I'm commuting, I'm raising little kids. And now at this age, I have a chance to dedicate more time and energy to an appropriate fitness regimen, an ideal sleeping environment, ideal diet. And so now my recent test results as we talk about my serum testosterone last year was 1008, which if you look on the charts, that's 95th to 99 percentile of males in their 20 to 30. But when I was 20 to 30, mine was 200 to 300.

This, I'm sure give a lot of people hope to, to know that your body can bounce back that fast.

There's probably not too many people out there like me to say I feel better. In many ways, I'm healthier and fitter than I was when I was this skinny freak athlete. Because now I have a more broader perception of fitness. I try to maintain my muscle strength and my explosive fast twitch ability, which is what goes when you age. So it's been a lot of good awakenings there. But of course I'm nowhere near. I couldn't even compare to this guy that was out there training all day when I was a young person. And nor do I care to, but I am, I am aging and I want to do it the right way.

When do your testosterone level actually start to write that?

Well, as soon as I quit probably and quit triathlon racing. You know, as soon as I retired from the circuit and went home and sold all my bikes and all my equipment and got a job, it starts to get probably into a normal, healthy range of I have all the results. Maybe I was 500 or 600 for a long time. But, you know, now it's like, okay, there's no more babies crying in the house. I don't have to commute like crazy. My stress level is, you know, more appropriate. So now it's like, let me figure out everything I can do to optimize my health, which is, you know, hand in hand with male hormone status. Maybe the entry into this conversation is like, there's a really cool scoreboard that we can use and you don't have to pay a lot of money for expensive tests. And this would be the spare tire scoreboard. So it's normal and common and average for especially males, but females too, to add a little bit of abdominal fat as we age. And this is the beer belly, or you call it the spare tire, I don't know well, but it's no. No one likes it, but it's so commonplace that people just assume it's normal. And so when you start to accumulate this visceral fat around the midsection, around the organs, it's different, as you know, than regular subcutaneous fat that we store all over. And we're. We shouldn't have that much of that either. But this is a special health concern because the visceral fat, it's classified technically as an organ because it has the capability of secreting these inflammatory cytokines into the bloodstream. So just like your thyroid secrete something into your bloodstream or your adrenal glands, this visceral fat is inflaming you in a chronic manner. So we talk about chronic inflammation. A lot of experts say this is the root cause of all disease and evidenced by overly stressful lifestyle or driven by an overly stressful lifestyle. So when you overproduce the stress hormones, you fail to balance your stress factors, and you lose fitness, lose all these attributes. You start to get a little bit of a spare tire. And here's the bad part is when you start to get a little spare tire and start secreting these inflammatory chemicals into the bloodstream, it causes you to get a bigger spare tire. You will convert testosterone into estrogen in the presence of these inflammatory chemicals, as evidenced by the spare tire. So even people that are rubbing on the cream or taking an injection once in a while, if they're not healthy to start with, this is where my big sales pitch is. It's like, do the best you can. It's like the knee surgery people, they say, get in shape, and then we're going to replace your knee. Right? I mean, they say lose 20 pounds. I talked to someone. They said I couldn't get the knee replacement until I lost £40. It's really painful now, and I'm trying to get ready for surgery. Pretty good doctor to say that, you know, like, dude, I'm not going to put a nice new knee in there and you're going to squish it. Okay?

You want to optimize the best you can before you ever consider.

Right? So that this aromatization concept is where, especially if you get a huge outside dose of testosterone, that your body's not, you know, naturally producing, You'll. You'll convert into estrogen. If you're an unhealthy, inflamed, overly stressed person, and if you're not taking testosterone, but you're just building up this little spare tire, the deal is we have to get healthy first. Before we can benefit from these lifestyle changes and goals that we have. Dr. Tommy Wood, one of the leading ancestral health physicians, he says, in regard to weight loss, no one should think about losing excess body fat until they get supremely healthy first. So if you have leaky gut or you have, you know, a sluggish thyroid and you're gonna eat less food and exercise more, guess where your thyroid's going after that. It's going to tank. This is the topic of L. Russ's book, Paleo Thyroid Solution. She did everything right. She was doing hot yoga, she was swimming laps, she was hiking two and a half hours on the weekend. She was cutting back on her carbs and getting worse and worse and worse because you're not healthy to begin with. And now you're putting more stress on the body that you can't handle because you're not healthy to begin with. So how do we get healthy first? Sleep, rest, recovery, downtime would probably be the first category to talk about. We could throw a fancy graphic on bomb Sleep, rest, recovery, downtime. Because if you're not in stress, rest, balance, your workouts aren't going to work for you. Your dietary changes, where most people are cutting back on calories or cutting on carbs or trying a keto thing, I talked to so many people where they're stressed out, they're unhappy with their body composition, and so they go into the crash diet mode and add more stress to the equation. So if we could maybe take the first step of, like, get more sleep. And some people that I've done private coaching with, here's my regimen. I work out every morning. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I do spinning Tuesday, Thursday, I do boot camp. And I eat this, I do this and I do that, and I say, okay, how about we'll take like four or five of those hours that you're putting into exercise and just sleep an hour extra every night, that would be the first intervention, is to get that sleep as top priority. And everybody knows this, we know about it, we pay lip service to it. But if you're, you know, if you're, if you're not well, when you wake up with energy at rest, the exercise is not really going to matter. And then it's also going to be really hard to, like, adhere to a dietary change. When you're not manufacturing energy smoothly yourself, you're going to be reaching for Ben and Jerry's pint. Because, because your energy is dropping, because you're inflamed, and all these things are.

You know, I feel as a Culture, there's not enough respect for sleep. People basically think it's almost optional, right? If I can go out and just have fun and, and party late, you know, until late at night, or just, you know, just, you know, putt around in the house, you know, or watch movie, they would rather do that. They think sleep is somewhat optional. So, so that that kind of attitude will have to shift, you know, to gain more respect for sleep. And you put it as number one, number one thing to do if you want to naturally improve your testosterone or your overall health. So seven hours will be the minimum. I would, I would assume that's.

Well, I'm not a sleep expert and I've read the books and tried to learn a lot about it, but it seems to be like highly individualized. And there's research that 1% of the population has the genetic SNP to be what's called a short sleeper. And so they really can thrive on six or seven hours of sleep. And then there's other research saying that like 15% of the population believes that they're one of those 1% that could get by. As a fork, they were those chronically.

Probably sleep deprived, but thinking, I just don't need as much.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean if you hit these checkpoints, like you wake up alert and energized near sunrise without an alarm, and you pop up and go, sounds like you're getting pretty, you're getting sufficient sleep. What I've learned over time and I'm still like, like you just spoke in the back of my mind, I feel kind of like insecure, guilty about it because I had such a huge requirement for sleep and I always did. I was like that guy in high school. I couldn't get to class. I fell asleep in second period because we used to run at 5:30 in the morning. And the teacher at Taft High School here in the San Fernando Valley, like she sent me to the principal because she thought I was on drugs because I was just passed out in her English class. Luckily, the principal was an official at the track meets. And so I walk into his office, he's like, hey, Brad, what are you doing here? I fell asleep in second period. He's like, oh, wow. How far, how many miles did you run this morning? So I didn't get in big trouble. But like during my career as a triathlete, I slept 10 hours a night, absolutely rock solid every, every night and a two hour nap almost every afternoon. So for this period of time from age 20 to 30, I was asleep for half of My life. And that's what it required to get, you know, to get as much out of my body. And even today, I'm finding that I need eight and a half to nine and a half hours. And the nine and a half comes when I push my body hard with a track workout, which I'm inclined to do frequently. But I too, at this age, trying to be Mr. Jock Guy. Oh, my gosh, you know, you have to rest and you have to recover. And there's a fine line there. Sometimes I ask myself, what am I doing? Like, why am I pushing myself with, you know, sprinting as best as I can around a track? I know it has a lot of health and longevity benefits, but then I have to, you know, put in all this sleep time after just to recover.

Okay. So if you work out really hard one day, you are going to make sure you're going to have more time to recuperate by sleeping.

Yeah, you know, I always wake up without an alarm. And I am very good about going to bed at a consistent time, which are two of the biggest things on the scoreboard. And then we always talk about hours, but there's that other element of what quality is your sleep.

Yeah, I think going to bed at the same time is pretty important because it does sets up your biological clock. It teaches your body how to live what you expect.

Yeah, I mean, we're, we're influenced by the rising and setting of the sun for two and a half million years, as are all creatures on Earth. And only in the last 120 years or something have we royally messed with this. Thanks to Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs and Joe Netflix and all the leaders of, you know, bringing us into the industrial era. But before that, our great great grandparents, whatever, it got dark out and they probably had candles and a lamp and they sat by the fire. And these are sources of orange light, so they don't interfere with melatonin production like we call blue light, but we think as, as white light, indoor lighting. And so we had this natural ability to wind down when the sun set in our environment for millions of years. And now we are able to stimulate cortisol production. Stay alert, energized, because we're watching a great thing on Netflix and pay the price over time because of this ability to override the body's natural circadian rhythm.

Right. I think one reason I mentioned it is I realized, you know, listening to some experts talking about even timing of eating may be better for you to start your, you know, to break your fast every day at A similar time because I was guilty of trying to push my fast for as long as I can, even if that makes me miserable. But probably I was confusing my biological clock. My body never knows when the next meal, you know, when the meals come so all the system can wake up, right, the next phase of, you know, of absorbing nutrients. So if you can stay on a more consistent regime, you know, including sleep and eating, I think that probably is going to be helpful for this biological system.

This is called the digestive circadian rhythm. And that emerging research, especially Dr. Panda at Salk Institute, San Diego, they're so intertwined and we didn't really think about this for a long time. But like I like the research saying, hey, when you get up, consume some, some calories and get some energy going. I mean, this is, this is just an argument saying that eating something in the morning will help you kick into gear, just like drinking a coffee does. But say the same with consuming the calories. And so it's out there that people can say, so I don't have to fast until midday to get, you know, on the scoreboard as, as a, as a health enthusiast. But then I think the one that's less disputed and more agreed upon is the strong recommendation to not consume any calories after dark. Because after dark is when we want all systems to kind of start winding down. It's called dim light melatonin onset dlmo, and that's the cue is the darkness in the environment. We start to produce melatonin more and more and more and that's what makes us sleepy and has all these other hormonal functions and repair functions. But you can interrupt that with one message on your screen. There's a great book called Lights Out, Sleep, Sugar and Survival, talking about like the interruption caused by one glance at your phone in the middle of the night is enough to like arrest melatonin production dramatically. And so you can. People get super freaked out about, you know, the biohackers with their lenses and their completely dark environment. But I'll tell you, my friend's house, he has a completely pitch dark experience in the guest bedroom. And there's nothing like sleeping in that cave. It is a big difference from what I would say is my mostly dark environment most of the time. Oh, there's little cracks here and cracks there and there's LCD screen over there in the corner. So if you have trouble sleeping, that's when you go hard on some of these things like don't eat food after dark, make your environment pitch dark. If it's possible, you know, get rid of all noise and distractions. If there's like physical clutter in your bedroom that the research shows that this will prompt a stress response, it'll prompt a cortisol release because you're looking over there in the corner that your, your lazy ass boyfriend didn't finish the windowsill that he was painting. So there's a can of paint, a drying paintbrush, and then there's a stack of bills over there on your temporary desk because you had to get working at home during quarantine. All these things can mess up your sleep just by walking in and looking at them. So we can go online and look at Google like minimalist bedroom or you know, the Asian style decorations where they have the low bed and two little nightstands and everything's austere and minimal, minimized. That will kind of welcome the body to say, hey, this is the place where you can come and rest rather than the desk over there. And oh my gosh, if there's a TV in your bedroom right now, get rid of that thing. That is like, that's a, that's an F score on sleep hygiene and sleep prioritization.

Right? Okay, so we cover sleep. That's first foundation. Yeah, I want to hear all your tricks.

Okay, we're going to work through this long list. But going hand in hand with sleep again, for the first time in the history of humanity, and this is now 20 years ago, not 120, we have the mobile device. So now we have the ability to stimulate our brain strongly all time from the moment we wake up. 84% of Americans, first thing they do in the morning, you know what it is, they reach for the mobile device. That's a big number. And then half of that 84% do it while they're still in bed. So as soon as we wake up, our brain is going into high reactivity, fight or flight type of mode. And then we're going off to work, we're driving, we're getting constant brain stimulation. And previously we had all this kind of built in downtime. Like I remember, I'm old enough to remember standing in line at the bank over there on Sherman Way. And resed of the headquarters of bank of America.

It's your time to show.

Oh no, Today's the longest line. Look at this. It's going out the door and you just stand in line at a bank. Andrew Dice Clay had punchlines in his, in his stand up routine about standing in line at the bank, if you know what I'm talking about. You know what I'm talking about? But like we had all this time where we'd sit on the porch and chat with a real live person and then some time would go and then we'd say something else or you'd read the newspaper every evening when it was delivered. All this kind of stuff that's now like we're still the same humans. We're not any like more adapted than grandpa or great grandpa or great Grandma, but we're throwing in major gigabytes of information every day. So we have sleep and then we have this critical obligation for rest, recovery and downtime and turning off devices, which boy, I mean, when I was an athlete, I had all this downtime every day because I trained and I ate and I slept and I got my nap and my sleep. And so I was asleep half my life. And then there's another huge chunk of life where I wasn't doing much. Maybe I was consuming digital entertainment or renting three videos. But that's the lifestyle that's required for, you know, putting all your energy into physical output. So that's the sleep category. But it's not just sleep, such that evening block of sleep that you want to nail. It's also, do you have seven minutes to go outside into the courtyard and close your eyes and look up into the sun and do a meditation or a breathing exercise and then go back to work, especially when you're feeling stressed and overwhelmed.

Okay, so getting proper rest and allowing your body to recuperate, and that's going to be one of the essential things to, to boost your testosterone level naturally. I want to keep us on track so, you know, avoiding overstimulation. Right. That can affect the quality of the resting undertone for your body.

And what else the low hanging fruit would be? Diet, I would say is next. And so we're looking at that scoreboard again, that spare tire scoreboard. How did you mostly accumulate the spare tire is from consuming ship food. There's also other contributions like chronic lack of sleep and chronically over exercising. It's the chronic overproduction of stress hormones. But when you're eating a lot of processed food, you start to interfere with your body's ability to generate cellular energy naturally. And you become dependent on more and more processed food. You mess with your, the appetite center in your brain. As good books like Stephan Gag's the Hungry Brain and Rob Wolf's Wired to Eat we'll talk about in where, you know, we become literally addicted to the Ben and Jerry's ice cream pint because It's a dopamine flooding. And we also are low energy when we're craving and overeating the bag of potato chips or the ice cream. So why are you Low Energy at 4 o' clock in the afternoon or 9 o' clock at night? Not taking care of yourself, not sleeping enough, not eating enough nutritious food to give you the energy that your body needs and then not exercising enough or exercising too much. Like in my story, I was exhausted every afternoon, I needed a nap. It's not a great thing to say. This guy needs to go down for two hours every day. It was a, it was a symptom of over exercising, under exercising and sitting around too much. We have research showing that you become insulin, you become slightly less glucose tolerant and more insulin resistant after sitting for 20 minutes. You start to mess with your metabolism after 20 minutes of stillness. So yes, we need to bounce up, go down, get, say hi to somebody, get a, post it out of the drawer and go back to work and take a break every 20 minutes where we start moving again. Then we start getting better at burning fat again. We have more refreshing to the cognitive function. Taking those down times out in the courtyard and having the brain neurons calm for a little bit doesn't have to be a fancy meditation session with the app. It's just sitting back and turning things down and then going back into all these peak performance activities that we're going for. So with diet, of course, we've had a whole show talking extensively about this and that and all the controversy and confusion. So I'm getting really good at like backing off, letting people have their, their wars and their, you know, controversial high impact statements. But really what it comes down to is if you can go home and clean up your ad, you will make these incredible leaps and bounds with your health and almost nothing will compare besides if you're really sleeping poorly and you can start getting good sleep. But if you could just eliminate processed foods, you'll be so far down the road to health optimization. And I think that's where we can all agree where, you know, your next guest might be the greatest whole food plant based advocate. And it's, you know, don't eat the meat or the eggs, those will clog up your arteries. And then the next week you'll have the carnivore experts saying just eat meat and eggs, don't eat anything else. But what everything has in common, that's a successful nutritional intervention, is getting rid of the, the processed foods. And I put them into these three categories. So it's like the big three would be refined sugars, grains, and industrial seed oils. The seed oils being number one for sure because they are known to have an instant disturbance in your healthy metabolism.

So industrial argument. A lot of what people don't know about seed oil because still even in supposedly healthy food and when you flip on the ingredients, you see all these.

Seed oil, it's tragic.

Even though people think they're buying something extra healthy. So that, that is a huge blind spot for people. We get list some of the bad oils.

Here's a list. Restaurants. Every freaking restaurant uses seed oils. Fast food, of course, you're getting your fries and your crappy food and you're going into the convenience gas station and getting whenever the the pie or the chips or the things that are laid with seed oils, there's stats like this many percentage 55% of the items in the grocery store have seed oils in them. Most of us are aware of that, especially listening, watching the podcast. But when you go and dine out from the worst restaurant to the medium, the chains like Olive Garden and whatever you want to talk about. Cheesecake Factory. I got into a dispute at PF Chang's and I wrote corporate headquarters. They didn't answer me. So then I. You don't answer me when I read a thoughtful. I go, you get a lot of emails like this that you, you ignore, do you? So anyway, I felt like talk to somebody. I said, why are you making. Why are you putting seed oils in your Brussels sprouts? And then I asked, can you please cook these in butter? And the waiter came back and said, I'm sorry, we can't do that. I'm like, you don't have butter in this giant restaurant with the big horses and the decoration. So anyway, I'm raising hell out there. But the finest restaurants. My son worked in one of the best restaurants in Los Angeles. Extremely high price, $100 steaks. They got that crap in the kitchen and they're making their sauces and the stuff they're cooking in with these inexpensive oils. So dining out is your biggest risk and then being an idiot and buying stupid stuff is your second biggest risk. So don't you know, you can go to a quality superfoods or natural foods market now and find some ice cream and some potato chips and things that are free from snacks and crackers and treats or whatever. We're not trying to completely disrupt your lifestyle. Not that any of those things are recommended, but you can clean up your act a little bit without this huge deprivation where like what can I eat now?

So I think as far as oil, you almost can't only talk about what it's okay to eat because the list for bad oils is so long. So what are the oils that are actually good for you?

Here's a good way of thinking about it where we're looking at the original food. Like an olive. If you press an olive, it's very oily, it's a very high fat. Same with an avocado. Avocado oil, olive oil. These are rated as, you know, approved because it's so simple to extract the oil from the original food. Now when you have canola, corn, soybean, sunflower, safflower, you need heat, you need high temperature processing methods, you need chemical solvents because they're not nicely yielding a bunch of oil, soybeans and all that. So these are chemically refined agents in industrialized food. And when you're making oil and you heat it up, you oxidize it. So even with olive oil, they call it a smoke point in the restaurant or avocado oil. You don't want your oil smoking in your stir fry, otherwise you've messed it up. So you want something that's more temperature stable. So saturated fats, like the Chinese cook.

The oil is always smoking.

They're probably using sesame oil, which a lot of times. Right.

Not the stir fry, unfortunately. I grew up on vegetable oil, you know, the. Or peanut oil. Yeah, whatever. Cheap oil. I think that.

Yeah. I wonder, you know, like, did your great, great grandmother cook with lard or something? Or ham or hard goat?

I remember my mom loved getting the lard.

Yeah, yeah.

When she was, you know, kind of reducing the, the fat strips and then saving that and using that.

And look at, you know, like no one thinks anything of this, this change. But what it would a disaster when a tragic. What a tragic shift into more, you know, efficient. Now you can buy the bottle and pour it in the pan. So we want to stay away from all.

Yeah. So as far as oil. Coconut oil. Yeah.

So coconut, you know, the original product is high in fat, high in saturated fat. Monounsaturated fat is olive oil and avocado oil. And so those, you know, those few oils are approved. And then there's another talk that, you know, you don't need to be making this the centerpiece of your diet and most people are. But, you know, you can have a dressing on your salad that's really high quality, extra virgin. First cold press only olive oil grown domestically or grown fresh. Because when you go to the Big box store, and you see extra virgin olive oil. There's no regulation on that term, and a lot of that stuff is crap. It's super dated. It's been in there for months and months. It's been exposed to heat, light, and oxygen, which is how you oxidize oil. And even though it says extra virgin olive oil on the label, it's highly suspect. Here's how you can tell you're getting a good olive oil. You take a spoonful, you taste it, and it will burn the back of your throat. If it's fresh, really strong, it's like, whoa, you need to take a drink after. That's real olive oil. And you can get it from, like, the olive oil club. I think if you Google olive oil club or olive oil growers, there's like a monthly thing, and they ship you this bottle of oil, and it's handwritten on the side like a fine wine or another product that's quality and says, you know, harvest date 922 or whenever. And, you know, you're getting something fresh and not adultered by outside oils. Avocado oil, the great new sensation of the, you know, the evolved food marketplace. They tested, like, 130 products. I think this is on Dr. Saladino's fundamental health podcast. They tested, like, 130 products containing avocado oil. And, like, almost all of them failed. Like, it didn't really have it in there. It had a blend of other oils in there because they can just get away with saying, avocado oil. Potato chips, try these. These are better. And people respond because we're trying to do the best we can. And so it gets to be. Now we're talking about really high refinement. But the first thing is, like, go in your pantry, throw out those bottled industrial seed oils. Throw out those snacks that are made with that. And then be careful when you're dining out and ask politely, can you cook my meal? And something else. And. And we're starting to make progress with this total eradication of the seed oils. And then all the processed carbohydrates would be the. The other tandem. And that's, you know, all over the place. And mostly, we've been talking about insulin in the progressive health space, talking about eating too many carbs, producing too much insulin, getting insulin resistance, getting heart disease, getting cancer. The seed oils are now coming into the forefront, saying this is, like, the true cause of insulin resistance because it interferes with your body's ability to burn fat. So you become reliant on processed carbohydrates as your main energy source. And I'm kind of simplifying here because we're not going, we're not going deep into this stuff, but there's so many great books and podcasts about this where if you can take this takeaway, that the big three toxic modern foods are most likely going to kill you. They're going to be the driving factor in why you get disease and die. It seems like sufficient motivation to say, yeah, I think I'll clean up my diet. Yeah. And then so I was starting out saying the visceral fat is a sign that something's wrong with your metabolism, driven by mostly diet, possibly sleep, possibly over exercising, possibly overeating. But I think we make, you know, too much of that where it's like, why are you overeating? Our satiety and appetite hormones are highly refined and they have been throughout evolution. We're overeating because we're not generating energy internally properly, because we're not eating real foods. And so instead of thinking about cutting back, it, just eat as much healthy, nutritious food as you can every day and we'll see how that works for you in three months or six months. Not many people are raising their hand saying, oh yeah, I listened to Brad and now I eat too many eggs every day and I have too much steak at night and I overdid it again on the broccoli stalks and I'm getting fat and out of shape. It just, the human can do it. I mean, have you ever overeaten too many steaks and feeling terrible? Not likely. As much as, oh yeah, I did kill a pint of ice cream one time after I was jet lagged and there was no food in the house. And you know, we do that all the time when we're deficient on energy and on nutrition. That's the diet one and the diet part two is like, what are you going to do now? Is you're going to go and find the, you know, most nutrient dense foods on the planet and emphasize those in your, in your dietary practice. And you can contend that you love these foods. These make you feel good, these are your favorites. You're more on this plant side and someone else is more on the meat and eggs and fish side. And so to put us put all that dispute aside, we do want to find the most nutritious. It's called nutrient dense as opposed to calorie dense. So the Twinkie is calorie dense, nutrient deficient, and a slice of liver that often regarded as the number one Superfood or oysters or salmon eggs or pasture raised eggs or a kale, a seaweed salad. You know, all the superstars that you can read about if you Google Top 10 Nutritious Foods. These are the things that we want to come into center stage now.

So that's the, the diet portion. I mean, there could be so much could be said about it because that's, that's the obsession for, for the public and for, for all these experts.

Yeah, I like this guy, Dr. Lane Norton. Have you heard of him? Oh, yeah, he's like a PhD nutrition and he's also a big hetero apartment, you know, people's favorite, super, super hard hitting, controversial. But he does make this point about the big problem in the modern diet. And he calls it energy toxicity, which means you are consuming and storing too much energy and not burning enough. And so the exercise component gets a nice little cameo here to say that's, that's the essence of the problem is energy toxicity. So anything you can do to change that, which includes going and exercising and moving more and includes eating less, is going to be a huge win. And you can. There's funny stuff out there like the Twinkie diet. Some guy lost 20 pounds eating only Twinkies. Why? Because he calculated, I burned this many calories a day, I'm going to eat this many calories of Twinkies. And Indeed he lost £20. You're not going to sustain that. You've got no nutrition. It's a stupid thing. But he proved a point. And this goes to Lane Norton's contention is like, if you improve your metabolic profile, you will have a tremendous improvement in your health, no other questions asked. And that's, you know, starting yourself on The Biggest Loser TV show and losing 80 pounds and weighing in and getting a new blood work and everything's better. That's great. Then it comes to like, how can I sustain this? Because I can't starve myself like a bodybuilder or a fitness model for the rest of my life. How am I going to find meals that are actually enjoyable to me, that I eat as much as I feel comfortably and satisfied? And that's where we can go do our personal preference and personal experimentation. And I'm going to argue strongly also that most of the indulgent foods that we say are so important to us, it's possibly driven by unhealthy lifestyle patterns that are causing you to reach for that sweet, disgustingly sweet food. Once if you've had your omelet in the morning, you've had your nice salad or whatever you like to eat and you've had a nice steak and something that's really rich and satisfying and nutritious, you're going to be much less likely to fall victim to the, the dopamine triggering foods that are surrounding us everywhere.

Right, right. Diet and exercise. That's usually the, that the main advice that any doctors I remember, you know, being trained as a conventional medicine doctor. I mean that's pretty much it. It's that, that, that's our mantra, eat healthy. Never mind exactly what that means that eat healthy and exercise and then sleep. So sleep, you know, sometimes mentioned, sometimes not. But so if a person can dial in these three aspects, do you feel that they have a pretty good chance that their testosterone level is going to start rising?

You know, it depends, I guess what, what the, what the current state of affairs is. But I think we can make baby steps and improve really well and we can, we can bring in a fourth category which would be like lifestyle and especially your romantic relationship. Dr. John Gray says this is like making or breaking your, your hormone status for males and females. And so if you have a dysfunctional love relationship, you will take your testosterone to the level of having horrible sleep habits and eating junk food because you feel diminished. You get into arguments. The arguments are, you know, extremely energy depleting and depleting your essence as a person because you feel undervalued, diminished and not heard and not poor communication and all these stressful things. And the book Beyond Mars and Venus goes into a lot of detail about how the female hormonal needs from a relationship and the male hormonal needs from a relationship. I think we should go into those because they're short but they're life changing takeaways.

Let's talk about.

So we are going to hit both sides people and not, not taking on no, no females out there nor males. And of course the attributes apply to all manner of relationships including same sex. So it's the same dynamics, but just for simplicity, we'll talk about like John Gray's essential relationship assignment for the male. And the male is to remain calm, cool and collected at all times. Do not speak if you are experiencing a negative emotional charge. So you never take it to your romantic partner. When you are lit up, you always speak from loving kindness anyway. But by getting into engagement and arguing sometimes the females have this need to verbally work through things with great intensity and that's how they get to their relationship wholeness. But whenever a man goes into it and starts getting into it with a female, he will experience this diminished testosterone level because that's not how the male biological drive. And again, I don't want to offend anybody in today's modern culture, but he's talking about the male species deepest biological drive is to conquer one's environment and serve as a protector and a hero in the story. So the male's deepest biological drive in the relationship is to be the hero in the story. And if you start to get dysregulated, you're no longer the hero. You're just an asshole who's venting and having an argument with your female. The female deepest biological drive. Again, I know you can make your way in life and have a career and not need anybody and not even need to date or beat or whatever. The female's deepest biological drive is to nurture and feel protected and cared for and serve that need. And the biggest fear and the biggest danger in the old days was getting eaten by a predator. And so the physically stronger male generally would serve that protective role. In the primal example today, John Gray says, you know what the female's biggest fear and biggest danger is the anger from the male partner. That's what takes. That's. That's the most destructive thing that you can do to your female partner is to unleash anger and, you know, emotional instability and all these things. That's when the female really gets diminished. Her hormones get tanked and she feels terrible.

Interesting. If people ever want a good example of how everything that you mentioned that could go wrong, that has gone wrong, just read my memoir, Tiger of Beijing. Oh, right here. Tiger of Beijing. Talking about the male unleashing the anger and staying, you know, basically untethered. How. How to just unravel at the face of dissatisfaction and then the destructive force of what it's doing to the female. Because I literally felt if I had stayed in that relationship, my spirit would have died literally a internal death. So I knew that, and that's why, you know, I had to get out. But that's really interesting hearing you talking about that, because I never. I mean, never. I knew it was extremely destructive and unhealthy and. But I didn't know somebody analyzed it to. I mean, it's a perfect demonstration.

It's like to awaken to some of this information is important because I think now we're getting confused where now the relationship we want all. We want it to be everything. So I want. The female wants the male to serve all of her needs, including someone to chat with in extreme detail about Whatever. And so the John Gray male relationship assignment is to engage in what's called Venus talks. And that's when the female needs to vent her energy and talk and talk through what happened in the day. And so the male assignment is to sit there and listen intently without offering advice or solutions. And it's a real challenge because the male's primary biological drive is to solve problems, conquer one's environment. So the female comes home, she needs to vent. Her boss was a jerk. Again, I don't know what we're going to do about this. Do you know what? Here's what happened in the conference room. And the male says, you know what you should say to your boss? You should say, and then all of a sudden the potential for relationship wholeness and wellness gets blown out because the man's trying to be the hero of the story rather than just satisfying this need for the female to vent without solutions or advice. And so just to get this advice clear, number one is keep your cool at all times. And if you are experiencing a negative emotional charge, you know what you're supposed to do. Instead of engage, go off and do testosterone boosting activities, which are physical challenges. It could be anything that's a challenge that where you're trying to solve a problem. So you can go tinker with your motorcycle in the garage, you can play video games. That counts on the list of testosterone boosting activities, because that's why it's so popular for young males. And those peak, you know, hormonal years is they get that, they get that that need met with conquering and scoring the video game. Of course, a workout would be a fantastic example. Go and lift some weights. If you're slightly frustrated in a relationship interaction, go away and come back feeling whole and ready, for example, to engage in a Venus talk without offering advice or solutions. Interesting, right? And this is what I was going to say is like we're confused now because were told that to be the evolved male, you need to be open and honest and vulnerable and share your feelings and tell me what you're thinking and tell me in detail, tell me more. You know, I'm not, I'm not getting enough from you. And that's a common complaint in the relationship. But when a female needs to bond in that way, and that's where oxytocin comes in, the bonding hormone, you best get that from your book group where you have a few glasses of wine and you guys can talk about whatever you want. And you don't need to get that from your male partner because he's not going to supply it. As well as your female companions. So the male's assignment. Stay calm, cool, and collected at all times. Don't engage. Don't speak when you have a negative emotional charge. John Gray is looking at me through the zoom call going, how many times do I have to tell you guys this? Shut your effing mouth. If you are lit up, it's just. It's just going to damage everything. Okay. And engage in these Venus talks. Females, did we give the female advice yet? I can't remember. Let me look at my notes. Don't think so. So it was the female essential relationship assignments. You must do this in order for the relationship to have a chance. It is express everything as a preference and never nitpick. So nitpicking is telling that male that he's no longer the hero of the story. Now you're going into your mothering role or whatever role that you're doing, or you're a boss lady in the workplace. And so now you're bringing that into the home and saying that, why'd you load the dishes this way? I prefer it this way. This kind of thing. And so if everything comes down as, like, first thing in the morning, oh, my gosh, the kitchen spotless. You did that last night. Oh, you rock. I love a spotless kitchen in the morning because then I can get started on my. My coffee machine and making my omelet. And so if it's compliments and preferences, because it can't all be popcorn candy and gut bubble gum, you're gonna have some shit going down, you know? So if someone is a backseat driver, you can express the preference that you allow me to operate this moving vehicle that weighs 2,000 pounds with minimal. I prefer minimal input in case of emergency. Of course, you can scream and tell me to watch out, but that's my preference. When we drive and then you get somewhere, it's like, how did I do? And I do pretty good. Thank you so much for, like, you know, I hope you were comfortable. You didn't say much, and I really appreciate that that's going to work. Rather than nitpicking. You didn't do this, you didn't do that. You didn't do this. Yeah. Or like, you know what I like is, like, I love looking out in the yard and seeing all the leaves raked into a big pile. It's so nice to go through winter with the leaves taken care of every day. That's going to get your leaves raked. Rather than, hey, it's been three Days I asked you on Sunday, what's going on with that, you know, what's your problem? And so when the male starts to discover that they're not the hero in the story, then they check out, then you've lost the guy and now he turns into classic everyday dysfunctional relationship jerk who's doing testosterone boosting activities like video games and going out and bowling and staying out until midnight instead of coming home at 9pm to wash the dishes that you prefer are not in the sink.

Well, sounds like supreme diplomacy to preserve the ego integrity.

I'm like a lot of people disagree with this and I've talked to other therapists, relationship experts where it's like well John Grace, not all, you know, that's not all up to modern standard. But every time I think about it and every time I think over the course of my life when I've gotten into it, I feel exhausted and drained and worse from taking someone down with whatever people do when they, when they get into it. And one of big simple examples like oh yeah, oh, you know, like how I chimed, well how about when did it, we're going tit for tat and tit for tat. No one can raise their hand and say that feels good at the end. And that part really hits home because it's like take care of your own shit. And when I've had like dysfunctional interactions and relationships, when I go back and reason what happened, it's like 97% me bringing my shit into a relationship and then now the relationship has it same with, I mean I would venture to guess that we're all probably around that 97% mark, right? I mean unless things become super one sided and you're doing everything you can and you say everything with loving kindness and you're expressing all these preferences and you're getting ignored or the su back then you're probably at the point where there's, there's no saving this but to, to have that best chance. I love those things. John Gottman weighing in here too. Where a healthy relationship. These are the guys that have studied relationships the Gottman Institute in the laboratory setting like they had an apartment with hidden cameras and they studied couples for decades and they can tell who are that couples that are going to make it and being loving after 20, 40 years. And then they have 94% success rate predicting couples that will get divorced soon. So they say a healthy relationship has a 20 to 1 ratio of positive to negative comments. And when in conflict they have a 5 to 1 ratio of positive to Negative conflict. Even in conflict. Hey, I love how you fit so much into your busy day. And you're so excited to wear the best outfit out on our date. And you picked the greatest restaurant. You really took my feelings into consideration when you said sushi. And finally, man, when we miss a reservation deadline, it's. It kind of. I prefer if we can get to places on time. Are you more open to hear that then, like, what the hell is going on? We're going to blow it again out of the gate. You're going to be like, screw you. I was cleaning up your dishes in the sink. Right. So if we go 5 to 1, then we have a tiny chance of, like, progress otherwise, you know. Yeah, it's just tit for tat again. So this is back to the hormone subject of the show here. Right. This is huge because there's a lot of occasions of people overly stressed while doing everything right. They're working out like crazy. Maybe they even have super fit booty body on Instagram. And they look like a picture of fitness, not necessarily a picture of health, I promise you that. Because I was a picture of fitness who had testosterone of 200 at six colds a year. But if, unless you nail all these objectives, it's going to be. It's. It's going to be difficult when you just focus on logistics.

Yeah, yeah. So the stress management, I mean, in relationships, I. I assume it's really important everywhere, basically, not just between, you know, in a romantic relationship, even in work situations.

Oh, sure, yeah. It's like everybody you relate to is gonna, you're gonna have a hormonal experience. Dave Rossi, my frequent podcast guest author of the Imperative Habit, he says everything we do in life is driven by the pursuit of a hormonal experience. We're all familiar with dopamine, and you reach for the text message because you're going to get a reliable dopamine hit. Or you reach for the potato chips or the prescription drug or the street drug or the pornography or the fill in the blank. Where do you, you know, what are you going for? That's out of balance and a perfect example of this. But when we're having a conversation or trying to raise children, it's all, you know, it's all in pursuit of this hormone optimization again. But then we're bringing in the other hormones, like the connecting hormones, oxytocin, vasopressin. John Gray talks about that, how it relates in a relationship. But mostly testosterone and estrogen are really familiar examples to understand where the female needs to come down off this competitive side that we demand of the modern female in the workplace and, and being the busy body who can handle the soccer mom chores, whatever, where really they're stepping out of their basic biological drive to nurture and care for and protect and also become a badass and kick ass in the workplace. Kind of like a male testosterone driven behaviors. And then on the male side, we don't want them just to kick ass in the workplace and come home and pop open a beer and relax. We want them to share their feelings and listen to our stories and do all these things that are not natural to the male biological drive. And so we have to kind of like understand where we're at with our balance and go off and do testosterone boosting activities and females go off and do estrogen boosting or oxytocin boosting activities like book club and having fun with the girls and talking about stuff you would never talk about with your partner. So that's the relationship aspect. I think we should jump a little bit because we just said exercise is important. And if I go through these three different ways really quick, this is the optimal exercise program for testosterone optimization in particular. And the number one category, probably most people are not going to be happy to hear this, but it's movement. And emerging research is showing that just moving more in everyday life is in many ways more important to your long term health longevity health Spanish than adhering to a devoted fitness regimen. There's a concept called the active couch potato syndrome, which is people who are fit and stick to a workout plan and they go to the gym every day. But they have similar biological disease risk factors as sedentary people. Because they ride the subway for an hour, they sit at a desk, they go home and sit on a couch for leisure time. And so that hour a day, 168 hours in a week, right? Any, any medical resident will know how many hours in a week because you're working most of them, right? If there's 168 hours in a week and you're only exercising and moving for seven and then doing not much otherwise you're, you're an active couch potato, it's called. And so the human has a critical obligation to move throughout the day. The guys are going down studying the Hadza in Tanzania, one of the last remaining hunter gatherer primitive living populations on Earth. There's a book by Dr. Herman Pontzer called Burn with a Lot of Hadza research. But these people are moving almost all the time. So humans have been moving throughout the day for two and a half million years until we got our first screen. And if you're not getting up after 20 minutes, you're messing with your metabolism. And it doesn't have to be crazy workout, burn calories and sweat. It's just a life of increased general everyday movement. That's a big challenge. Like you talked about with early on, like why don't I just take a needle and get some more testosterone because now I got to get up all the time and move around. But here's like the, the counter argument is if you can nail some of these pretty simple objectives, you're going to have more cognitive power, you're going to have more focus, discipline, resilience against distraction, you're going to be a more productive person anyway, when you put more time into sleep, movement breaks things of that nature. And so to hit this movement objective really quick, my favorite thing to do is a morning exercise routine. And I have this whole thing on my website, I have an online course, but it's changed my life in the last six years because now when I wake up every day, I hit the deck immediately and start doing my leg exercises. You can see, and I'm a lifelong athlete, fitness has not been a problem for me. But this is a different category where now I know how I start my day every day. And it went from a little thing to now pretty long and impressive, sort of a workout looking thing. But started out really small and it was just because when I reach for the device instead and I get distracted, I don't have my prioritization, I don't have my big picture thinking. So now I do something. You could compare it to a form of meditation because I'm hitting the deck and I'm counting to 40 with the leg swings this way, 40 that way, 20 scissors, 20 back. And so my mind is just going into something that's focused, it's self disciplined and then arguably it rolls into everything else I do in daily life. Maybe not necessarily. I'm still working on my email inbox distracting me from writing my book. But I start my day in a wonderful manner and it sets me up for an active day because I am teaching my brain and my body to be active as soon as I wake up. Guess what else it does better than coffee or any other stimulant is I feel alert and energized when I'm done. And I don't always feel that way when I start. I promise you, a lot of times I feel like crap. But when you start, you hit the mat and Start moving your legs, you're going to feel better. So that's number one, is a morning routine. Number two, Marxist and calls it jfw. You know what that stands for? Just frickin walk.

Oh yeah.

We have to find ways to actually walk, which is the quintessential form of human locomotion of the animal to move through space. And we hardly even walk anymore. There's research from different countries. Australia is really good and Switzerland and we're pretty pathetic, but we walk like, like 1.7 miles.

We think the highest amount of walking is in Japan, but yeah.

Oh, and as far as the states rank, this is a funny one. New York is one of the highest ranking states for fitness. And they're like, why is that? You know, I got all these people in the big city and you know, it's because so much of the population lives in New York City and New Yorkers in the city walk an extreme amount. On average, they're walking miles every day, almost every person there.

They have to get to the subway.

They have to get everywhere. It's not like California where like I have to drive. You know, Mark Sisson talks about in Malibu, he never walked anywhere because you're on, you got pch, you're not walking anywhere, you're driving. And in Miami walks five miles a day because you walk in south beach and everything's, you know, everything's within walking distance. So we have to manufacture opportunities to walk unless we live in New York City. So we have jfw, we have the morning exercise routine, we have a thing called micro workouts which I believe is like the biggest breakthrough in the fitness industry in decades. And it's taking this concept of what a workout means and demystifying it and making it less complex to actually realize that a one minute effort at your desk during the workday counts as a really awesome contribution to your fitness. So if you just stand up and drop for a set of 20 squats, down on your chair, back up, down on your chair, back up. If you're fitter, you can do other things. I have like a staircase in my home and the staircase to me means sprint up the staircase. So whenever I go up or up that staircase all day long, it's a sprint. And that's on my list. I also have a pull up bar, I have the cords hanging down and so maybe once a day I'll do one set of pull ups. Takes 30 seconds to do 10 or 12 or whatever. Now let's talk three years from now when this is part of My life several days a week and I'm doing 12 pull ups in one set. It's not part of the workout. Maybe at the gym I'm going to do this many sets of this and this many sets of that. That's fine. If you're interested in that and you have time and energy, that's great. But just sprinkling in opportunities to get a fitness experience, ideally something explosive that gets you a little out of breath and is challenging to your muscles. These are micro workouts and these are within reach of everybody. So if it's not sprinting up the stairs, grab the railing as a senior citizen and hustle up the stairs there, there you go. Make that part of your day. And it adds up over time to be tremendous fitness benefit. And for fitness people who are already going to the gym and doing this stuff. And Katie Bowman says we get a hall pass and it's like the lazy athlete mentality she calls it. So like, yeah, I did my 6am spin class. I'm sitting here on this couch for the whole Saturday. I'm gonna watch the super bowl and I'm gonna watch the commercials and I beat chips and avocado because I did my 6am workout. So take that lazy athlete mentality hall pass and think, gee, I can improve my fitness tremendously and launch all my workouts from a higher platform if I just sprinkle in some micro workouts here and there.

And so they've done research on these micro workouts.

Yeah, because the, what is it? The, the CDC or the, the, the resource, The American Council on Healthy Living, whatever it's called, they have always said this, this recommendation to get. It was like a 60 minute workout three times a week or something like that. It's been for decades as part of the food pyramid. And then get, you know, vigorous exercise three or four times a week for 60 minutes. Which is a ridiculous ask because people, I mean, are you kidding me? That's like high fitness category. If you're going and banging 60 minutes three or four times a week, that's not the average person's life experience. There's just, it's, it's kind of like intimidating. Same with 10,000 steps a day, which is. A Japanese company like in the 70s made this up to sell pedometers and they said you should get 10,000 steps a day. There's no research, there's no rhyme or reason to it. It's funny. Yeah. And we've all heard this now, but you know how many 10,000 steps it's like that's like walking five miles. So I'm going to say like how about a thousand steps a day as a great starting goal and if you like to count them, that's great. Or just find ways to walk more instead of drive and go out of your way to integrate these experiences. Kelly starred the author of many books like Becoming a Supple Leopard and one of the leading fitness and mobility rehab CrossFit experts. He had little elementary school kids and he says, yeah, you know, we do, we park a mile, we live five miles from the school. I'm on the freeway and get off the exit. A lot of people, I can't walk my kids to school anymore. They park a mile away, walk it in. They don't get into the Congo line with the, the drop off, which takes 12 minutes in the stupid lineup because the, because the traffic jam at the elementary school, it's like walk your damn kid the last mile. You'll get there before the people on the line.

So I'm wondering, let's say someone does 60 minutes in one lump sum. Another person does 10 segments and each one is only six minutes.

Yeah, they would have. I read some things on that too. It's kind of interesting. Like Deepak Chopra says, with meditation, it's better to do an hour a day than, you know, four hours on faith. And this is like my personal opinion is people kind of get too caught up in which one's better and they're both awesome. And so I'd rather answer that way. Even if some fitness expert is going to say, well, that, you know, ten six minute bursts of thing is not going to get you fit. You know, if you sprint up the stairs from now until three years later, you're going to be doing great. So if you do a bunch of one minute workouts and that's all you got right now because your life's, this is what it is, it's going to be a huge improvement from the zero. Now there is really good research showing, Peter T. Has mentioned this recently, that if you go from like zero inactive to moderately active, you can imagine a curve, your fitness and your health skyrocket. Then we start looking at the bell curve where Joy, you're talking to me. You're concerned that maybe you're doing too many of the hard Zumba classes and you should switch one out for stretching. You'll get, you know, these kind of things are like, what's my optimal? You're way up here on the bell curve somewhere, we don't know where, but you're up Here, but to get from here to there, it's so easy, it takes so little time. So we have those movement objectives and then when it comes to, you know, the other categories quickly, like resistance training, sprinting, and these are things that will have huge health, fitness, longevity benefits and they really are within reach of anybody. My mom's 86 years old, she pedals a bicycle hard in the morning and I'll go in there and say, why don't you go fast for 30 seconds and then rest and then fast for 30 seconds. Do something that's challenging. I see a lot of people on the gym going down the stair climbing and watching tv. It's much, much better to throw in something hard once in a while because we want to challenge those muscles, the brain, the heart and lungs, to push beyond our normal baseline level and even our normal baseline workout level. So a lot of people exercise too hard and a lot of the classes are too hard. But we do have this critical objective to do brief, explosive efforts to the body and that will stimulate testosterone production like nothing else. I mean a sprint workout is one of the biggest, you know, direct association with skyrocketing testosterone.

Do you do a lot of sprinting? Yeah, I've seen your posts. So maybe that was really.

One time. I got the blood test right after this and that was my highest one. So I think I gave it to beyond it. That was, that was when I got that 1008. The most recent one was 806 and so I'm in that. Well, this is a good point to bring up. So I test myself obsessively. As you can tell, I've had like 25 tests in the last five years. They know me in the lab by name, I'll put it that way. It's great. You can go online and for, you know, a few bucks you can get a test. And I go to Mari Calth and they do a one on one consultation to look at my result and suggest supplements. We can talk about that a little bit. But I love putting that stuff at the bottom before we talk about supplement. And the fadosian and the long fenugreek and the long jack and the tribulus. Get your sleep okay, right?

Yeah.

But yeah, that was funny because right after the sprint workout I had a fake revolt resolve. But over time my range has been like 563 to 1008. So it's usually 750, 800, 720, 698, whatever. But that's quite a range. That's double and 560 is not bad for a 58 year old or I'd say it's probably in the good category or whatever. And when you're down the 200s, 300s, that's when you're a candidate for hormone replacement. But it's very sensitive to lifestyle behaviors. So I contend that those lower results that I had was a cycle of training because I pushed myself pretty hard and I tend to overdo it sometimes and that's probably will give you a dip in testosterone. Same with any other of lifestyle factors sprinkling in there. Like one of my most unhealthy periods in recent years was doing the ketogenic diet. Still sprinting like a crazy. And doing a lot of fasting as well as a ketogenic diet and going through a divorce and finding a new place to live and getting a new fresh start and, and dealing with this and dealing with that. And so I was, you know, tired. I wasn't recovering from workouts well. And just as an, as an offshoot or an aside, the ketogenic diet I've written books about, it's wonderful with all kinds of health benefits and you know, healing and repair and hormonal benefits. But for me at that time it went on the scoreboard as a stressor because of all the other stressors. And so we have to look at things like restrictive extreme diets or heavy duty exercise programs as stressors requiring a proper and healthy balance of sleep, rest, recovery, downtime. How many things can you count on a hand? I can probably do one hand on the things that I do to restore and rejuvenate and rebuild energy. I take naps, I go to sleep, I'm trying to meditate here and there a little bit. Eating a healthy meal I guess could count and having healthy entertainment and social whatever over here. You know, fasting is a stressor. Cold plunge is a stressor. Sauna is a stressor. You know, your workouts are a stressor. Your workday, when I flip open the screen, flip open the laptop, it's all stress.

You know, I do wonder because sauna is supposed to be extremely good for you, right? And they do research that people were getting the most benefit when they were doing it almost daily, they were doing the finished study that, you know, comparing to five days or three days, you know, a week, you know, every day seems to give you the best benefit. But I do recognize that when I do a sauna session before I went to bed, my sleep score is a little less, is less optimal. My readiness was less. So that is really interesting.

Yeah, right before bed would be possible interference. Same with cold plunging for different reason. But it's really important to now we'll kind of address the people who are really going for it and hardcore and nodding their heads throughout the thing that the biohackers we have to envision this scoreboard and look at that stress, rest, balance and understand that sauna the reduce all cause mortality was like 40% or some unbelievable number with Finnish people who did sauna regularly. However, it's still a stressor and if it's a mild appropriate what we call hormetic stressor, that's great because human body responds to these things just like fasting is a stressor. But guess what happens when you're fasting you up regulate immune function, anti inflammatory hormonal function, all these great things happen. But then you gotta eat at some point. And it's so easy to overdo fasting and overdo keto when you pair it with busy hectic day at work and a hard workout session and all that. So when I was doing my sprint workouts and researching the ketogenic diet and testing my blood levels throughout the day after long fast after a sprint workout, I had some weird stuff coming up. Speaking of biohacking would be like these high glucose levels. 131, 133, 118, 142. I'm fasted for 30 hours, have done a hard sprint workout and haven't eaten a carb, you know, had a hundred grams of carbs in the previous 48 hours. Again, this is when I was deeply immersed in a book project and going forward so I could say when I.

Run the level probably was really.

How do you get a 131? I'm busting the muscle tissue into sugar to get through the day and finish the workout. And so that would be an example if you're. If your glucose is spiked while you're doing fasting and keto, you're asking too much of the body in a simplified terms that's great.

Were you tracking with a continuous glucose monitor?

Is that why you knew they didn't have that?

Oh, you're right.

Yeah. So I was testing ketones and glucose in the same meter at the same time. And then I never really got super high ketone levels either. I had to go and talk to the experts about this and go, I haven't eaten a carb in two days. Why is my ketones 0.4 instead of 0.7 or higher? And there's this concept called ketone Flux where if you need the ketones, you make them and your brain burns them. So I needed them because I. And then if you're kind of an unfit, metabolically unhealthy person that goes right on the ketogenic diet, you're going to have these giant numbers that you might see people used to post on social media. 3.6 today, that's better than 2.4 yesterday. That was a complete misinterpretation of what's going on. And the body is putting all these ketones into your bloodstream that you're obviously not using. And so you're going to pee them out where you're going to breathe them out. So if someone has bad ketone breath, that means that they're in ketosis and they're not using them, they're breathing them out and the breath smells like acetone. And like Kate Shanahan said this Dr. Kate, author of Deep Nutrition and other books, she goes, yeah, you want to see like ketosis in action. Go to the ER for someone with the flu that hasn't eaten in a couple of days and they're, they're, you know, sky high ketone levels because they're all dysregulated. It's not a healthy state. But again, another aside, I think the big takeaway picture here on this topic is like watch out for all your little stressors that you throw into the mix in the name of health. And I've had to learn this the hard way, combining cold plunging and sprinting on the same morning. Yeah, not right, right after, but I, you know, I do my sprint workout and then whatever, hour two, I'm eating whatever and then I'll go for a nice cold session. And then later that afternoon this happened on three separate occasions. It was like crash and burned. So the hormetic stressor of the sprint workout and the hormetic stressor of the cold launch is still fight or flight. It's like fight or flight. Fight or flight. Again, that's too much. And I bombed down. So now I have like therapeutic cold exposure would be my favorite term so that you don't have to set a record and see how long you could last and how cold adapted you get. You go in there for 20 seconds. The most prominent reference finished research is a 20 second immersion into 40 Fahrenheit water prompts a 200 to 300% boost in norepinephrine lasting for an hour afterward. So that is the cold plunge where you wake up, you're alert, you're energized you're focused, you get all these benefits in 20 seconds. And I was doing my practice trying to last up to four minutes and now five minutes and now I can do six minutes. And you know, I could post that on social media. What am I doing in this freaking freezing cold tub of water for that long? I'm stressing my body and so I'm learning not to overdo it. And here's a good to go back to testosterone optimization and my view of living long healthy Life. I am 100% focused at this point on performing and recovering and performing and recovering and that's it. So performing in the fitness sense and in the cognitive sense really, but minimizing all other factors of stress in my life. And I want to allocate all those resources to physical athletic performance. Peter T's got that popular book out now called Outlive about longevity. Long awaited book and it's going to be the comprehensive resource on longevity related matters. He says exercise is the single greatest intervention ever seen, ever known by research for longevity. And nothing else even comes close. He used to put diet first and now it's like if you maintain preserve lean muscle strength throughout life, that is your path to a long, healthy, happy life and nothing else comes close. And so like functional muscle mass is my term that I like to use and functional like a bodybuilder has way more than functional muscle mass. So what I want to do is get through like my 20 mile hike coming up next month or my track meet where I want to run fast around the track and I want to do this goal and that goal and if people have more reasonable goals, like I want to pick up my grandkids when I'm 85 and play with them and I want to be able to ride my bicycle, you know, 10 miles on the weekend and I want to be able to make it through the Zumba class. Okay, those are, you're going to need a certain amount of cardiovascular fitness and functional muscle strength to do that. And that's probably all you need to maximize your longevity potential, not to mention your hormone optimization. So getting back to that, you know, how can I get that highest number? Can I peg myself at the highest number forevermore? Maybe so if I just back off, you know, 10% on every single workout. Yeah, but I want to be a competitor. And then we have on the list of my style behaviors. Doing something that lights you up and that you have a sense of competitiveness and drive and challenge to accomplish that is a huge boost for both males and females. Testosterone Levels. I don't know if we talked about this too, but like, the female needs to have optimal testosterone level or you will suffer similar symptoms to a diminished male. It's just that the ratio is 20 to 1. So you don't need this huge amount. But you better nail that sweet spot or you're going to have low libido, low energy, poor recovery from exercise, all the same things as the male. Okay, so there's a book, Ashley Merriman, Top Dog. Ashley Merriman Pope Bronson, authors of Top Dog. And they talk about the influence of testosterone not just on macho fitness performances, but on all manner of peak performance challenges to the human, including cognitive challenges. And they've done research on chess masters in the chess matches, and they take their testosterone levels. The person with the higher testosterone level wins. No, the match. It's crazy because testosterone is the thing that's going to get you to your peak performance. And here's Ashley's clear discussion about this. Whatever that peak performance may be, if you're a grandma knitting the, the. The. The thing for your grandchild and you have to finish it before her birthday, you're going to get a surge of what we call adaptive hormones in group to focus and do something that you're lit up and challenged and excited and enthusiastic about.

Okay, I could see some women maybe gardening. I mean, that may get them.

If it's, if it's. We want to throw in some type of competitive aspect to it. Because my plant grows bigger than your plant commercially.

That's right.

My plant's bigger than your plant. I felt like immersing in nature is going to give you a whole bunch of other serotonin, oxytocin, all these great things, but in particular, this competitiveness or drive or challenge, that's where you get the testosterone boost. She calls it the social status hormone because it's mainly about social status and rising up. That's where the testosterone boost comes from. And she draws this interesting picture of the firefighters and the paramedics are called to the burning building. So you got the guys with the axes and their mask and they're ready to go in and hack that door down, rush in there, grab the injured body and rush them out of the building with all that bravery and energy. Their testosterone is through the roof. When they're called to a challenge like that, then the patient goes into the ambulance and the paramedics there and they have to calmly insert the IV and write down the number of CCs that they've given and be clear thinking and none of this frenetic energy of the guy with the ax. They are in their peak performance state because they are being asked to perform their role as the paramedic. And then they go to the VR and the surgeon has to be calm, cool, collected, which helps you rise your testosterone to perform the necessary surgery. So name the challenge and testosterone comes through to kick you in.

This is why pure filling work is good for you.

Right.

Find a profession that you are passionate about and you enjoy. Yeah, that's going to raise your testosterone.

Exactly. For sure. Yeah. John demartini calls it pursuing your inspired purpose in life. And the definition would be what do you like to do spontaneously every day that requires no motivation? That's your inspired purpose. And if it's not your job right now, that's okay because if you're into art and you painted this beautiful thing in your spare time and you didn't have to motivate to go into the garage and fire up the paint after a long, busy, stressful day at work. But we have to discover things that, you know, light us up inside. And I like that distinction. Like, requires no motivation because a lot of things we know are good for us and luckily we've locked into habit. Like you get up and you go to the gym because, you know, it's good for you and you have this long term payoff that you're going to be a healthy, fit, lean, athletic person, whatever. But sometimes it's not so easy. But when I think about the things that bring me the most joy, like, you know, going and practicing my golf shots or going to the track and practicing high jump, it requires no motivation whatsoever. In fact, I, you know, I can't stop myself from going sometimes.

That's you, right?

Yeah.

That's you. Yeah. So are you. Have you finished your list?

Let's see, we got that, we got that lifestyle stuff. Oh, and then there's, there's a couple more. And one of them is, and this is probably pretty important, is the disruptive influences of the modern environment. There's a lot of research emerging now that the average level of male testosterone has declined at a steady rate since the 80s at around 1% per year. Not one person declining as they get older. That's normal and natural. And you can arrest that decline to the extent of 0.2%. Well, look at me, I've gone 800% better than when I was 20. But you can arrest the natural age related decline in testosterone if you do all the healthy lifestyle habits. This is talking about society as a Whole and research from Japan, USA, Denmark, 1% per year lower than it was in the 80s. So that means dad and grandpa had 40% higher levels than the average guy now who's 26 or 36 or 46 or 56 compared to dad and then compared to Grandpa. Badass. Way more than that. So that is a huge crisis for modern society. There's also the sperm, the rate of decline. It's now 50% from previous sperm counts. But if we continue at this rate, and you can Google this, like we're going to be sterile in the year 2060 or something. Oh, that's not far off because the sperm count is going, going, going, going, which is associated with testosterone, of course, obesity epidemic number one around the globe. And then possibly the endocrine disruptors in the environment. So now we have plastic water bottles and we have Styrofoam that we're eating our food out of. And we have cosmetics, as you know from Chara Omni. Getting this crap out of your cupboard. Talk about going to the, the pantry and cleaning out the bad foods. Go to your cosmetics and see what you're putting on your fricking body. And your skin, your skin is an organ when you put on, goes in and all those chemicals and they're called endocrine disruptors in the cosmetics and skin care and home care, personal care, detergent, because they're going on your clothes, clothes are going on your skin. So this effort to clean up a little bit and buy the appropriate, you know, brands that are supporting this Chara Omni, you can read the ingredients, you can pronounce them. There's no chemicals or weird things that are going to have an adverse effect on your hormonal health. Because these things are estrogen, like, so they're kind of estrogenic influences in the environment. There's a book called estrogeneration by Dr. Anthony J. And he talks about how all this stuff's in the water supply in municipal water. So you get in that shower, you're getting some estrogen, like chemicals, molecules that are being integrated. Most particularly, though, to focus on the objective here to do get away from plastics, touching your food or drink. So those plastic water bottles, those disposables or whatever people use, some people are claiming, you know, the hardcore water bottle is safer than the cheapy, cheapy plastic. Which is true.

A lot of people are really scared to drink tap water.

Yeah.

So I'm wondering, you know, what's worse, drinking tap water. Depending on the city, of course. And drinking plastic bottle.

Yeah. If you get the plastic bottle and, you know, drink it. One use. It's certainly a lot better than reusing a plastic bottle would be the ultimate low score. And then the other really tough one is eating food that's touching plastic while heating it up. So if you microwave some plastic container, the plastic chemicals are going right into the food. It's bad enough to have the food served on the plastic. So if you get takeout and dump it onto a plate, enjoy yourself. You know, you order takeout, sushi, whatever, take it out, put it on a nice plate or whatever it is, and then you can heat it up on a ceramic or glass or things like that. Or stainless steel would be the recommended water bottle. And now you can carry it to the airport and refill and try to stay away from plastic water bottles as much as possible.

So when did you become pretty hardcore as far as avoiding these environments?

2017. I went to Nourish, Balance, Thrive and got a whole bunch of comprehensive blood. They do blood testing and consulting. And they came back with this blood report. And there's some weird stuff on there. They said, yeah, you have residue of plastic and petroleum in your blood stream.

Okay.

The plastic was probably from drinking water bottles, riding bicycle, or having the stuff in my car. And a lot of times we forget. Like, it heats up during the day, and then overnight you get in the car in the morning, you finish your water bottle that was 100 degrees in the sun the previous afternoon. So I had plastic, and then I had petroleum byproducts in my bloodstream. And I talked to some functional medicine experts, and they surmised that it was growing up in the San Fernando valley in the 80s when the smog was so bad and breathing that shit in when I was running and taking in a lot of oxygen. You know, it's one thing to live in the valley or in a smoggy area back in the old days when it was super smoggy. It's not anymore. It's fantastic here. But I couldn't see the Santa Susan Mountains in the old days from my home eight miles away. The mountains were obscured by smog all summer. Yeah, so that was an awakening to kind of know I'm eating healthy and exercising and sleeping and all this and then bombarding my system with crap. So we want to keep the get away from food and drink that has plastic. And then anything you put on your skin and try to focus on those appropriate brands, like Dr. Bronner's is a good example. The Castile soap. Yeah, I do that. Shampoo soap. I Brush my teeth every once in a while.

Everything that's in my house is natural. And yeah, absolutely none of the toxic ingredients. It just. Yeah, not worth it. It's not even. It's not worth. For my. For my pets.

Oh, my God. Care about your pets if you're a caring pet owner. And then here's a quick tip to know if you are offensive here. If it has a fragrance, it has estrogenic influences on your body, guys. So if you're smelling your laundry detergent, it's fresh smelling Tide, or your Irish Spring with the minty smell. Anything with the smell, the things you hang in your car, the Christmas tree from the car wash, Anything with a fragrance is causing a disruption to the chemicals. And so what happens is the body interprets these estrogen like chemicals to be estrogen. And so to keep that balance, right. It can't do it because it's being confused by estrogen coming in from more than the small amount that you want. And so those are bad. Yeah, so that's the protect yourself category. And then EMS is on that list too. And the biohackers know that this can also adversely influence testosterone and other hormones.

Oh, yeah, there was this dramatic study of these, these rats. They put a cell phone next the rat's cage. I think it was only two hours a day for 60 days. And then another cage, they put a sham cell phone. So look like a cell phone, but there's no signal. There's nothing that they're receiving. So they check the testosterone level before the experiment and then 60 days, two hours a day.

Right.

Of softening exposure. It's not that much. Two hours a day. Look at how much time people are keeping the cell phone on their body. And at the end of the 60 days, maybe it's only 45, you know, is in that range. The level of testosterone in these rats have dropped to 50% of what it was. It's. Yeah, it's astounding.

Yeah, it's. It's heartbreaking to think, you know, I have, I have a son who's 25 years old and, you know, he's a statistic because of his age. And we gotta, we gotta take charge now because I know there's like people that blow this out of the water and most people are too busy and don't have time to get deep into this. But if you can do these simple things like buy a different brand of detergent or cleaner, it's so easy. It's. It's painless and that, that's where I think we can all do a lot better, especially like pushing back on the massive marketing forces that have convinced us to. To buy this crap we put into our bodies our whole life, so.

Exactly. Yeah, well, yeah. So the environmental toxins, I mean, that's a big portion for anti aging medicine. Of course, anti aging medicine came from the professional athlete realm because these doctors started to try to optimize these already pre optimized people, but they're not. Everyone had their own issues because none of us is perfect. So what can you tweak? And that's, that's how the whole anti aging discipline came about, is to tweak you guys.

So cool.

Yeah.

Yeah. I really wish I had been tweaked back then. And like, something interesting comes to mind, like when we. The public perception of doping in sports is so screwed up because what we see is like, Lance Armstrong, he cheated. What a disgrace he let down. But like, the whole entire sport was dirty, so there really wasn't any cheating in the traditional sense. Like Tom Brady cheated when he deflated the footballs and gave them to his team and keep the other team. You know, that's cheating. That's like, are you serious? He got off easy for that, even though I like the guy, but he cheated. Lance Armstrong was in a very, very dirty sport where every athlete on the starting line was doped off their ass with EPO and steroids and testosterone and everything they could take to get better. And so it was kind of like a level playing field in that sense. So I kind of look at the fence in a different light than most people. But here's the big one that I want to. I want to throw at people is like, if you're doing that crazy stuff to your body like I did for so long, it would arguably have been healthier for me to peg all my hormone levels to optimize through doping because I was so. It was so. It was so destructive to the body to train at that level. So I would have gone a lot faster and I would have been healthier and been, you know, less worse off for the wear today. I might even have 100% blonde hair instead of gray if. Because the whole entire experience would have been less stressful because you wake up the next day. If your red blood cells is pegged at 50, you wake up the next day and you say, what are we doing today? How hard are we going to train today because you're recovered? And now maybe we could kind of transition to a closing where now we talk about, okay, gee, you know, If I can go on a regimen of stem cells, peptides, and hormone replacement, I can put myself at age 37 forever. And it's extremely compelling to think about that now. We've been steered away for a long time. Like, with testosterone therapy, they're saying, oh, it could increase the incidence of prostate cancer, which is the big killer. And it's not true. And, you know, my father died with prostate cancer. Not of prostate cancer, but he was taking antiandrogenic hormones for 11 years. And so that was killing him more than the cancer, because they're trying to shut down the cancer. This is, this is proper medical treatment.

By depleting his life force.

Right? And right before he, right before he went, he had a great run at 97. So I'm not saying this anything with, like, a tragic note. I'm just saying, like, what we could all wish for was like 95 outstanding years and then a quick slide that, you know, nice, nice departure. But right at the end, there was research coming from Johns Hopkins Medical School, wherever he went, and they were, they were like doing mega dose testosterone on advanced prostate cancer patients and having tremendous results. And so what they're doing is, like, any positive results, making things positive results. They're making these guys stronger by doping down with, you know, strong male hormone so they could actually fight off the disease. So what about if we start like Mark Sisson started in his 50s, Mark Bell started in his 30s. A lot of young guys are on TRT now, which is a little bit disturbing to me. But if you start and stay strong and fit and six pack, like, Sisson is showing off. And Mark Bell jacked a tan on the COVID of his book. He's a fitness freak. He's running the marathon now. As well as being a champion powerlifter. He's like, hell, yeah, I'm on steroids. I have been for 20 years. I feel fantastic. His blood levels are good, Everything's checking off, and he's super fit. So that's when I'm like, all right. And like, I'm on a power project podcast. You can watch it on, on YouTube. It's a great show. And like, in the first few minutes of the show, and there's three hosts and then me, you know, and they're all big jacked guys. And so, like, little Brad is there and they're like, brad, why aren't you on hormone replacement? And then. And Seema's like, yeah, Brad, why aren't you on it? And I'm like, I don't know, you know, So I think.

Was that a philosophical objection?

Yeah. It's funny because like, as an athlete I had this completely squeaky clean mentality. Like I'm not going to put anything into my body ever. No caffeine, no. No Advil. If I have a stiff lower back, I want to feel every inch of that pain so I can make the proper decision the next day. And I had a long career. I was consistent. I think it helped me rather than taking this and taking that. Same with a person, anyone out there who's got a pill, a medicine cabinet full of pills, I will probably contend that I sleep better than you. I'm fitter and I'm, I'm, you know, I'm getting benefited by taking the hard way rather than the easy way. Then it's like, is it okay to age gracefully and slow down? And you know, I've heard this argument too, like, what do you do with or telling myself, Brad, what are you doing out there running around the track? That's what I did in high school, college. But I love it and I want to perform and so I'm wide open to anything that's going to work. I've gone to Uplift, Longevity center and tried the peptide courses. And I'm like wanting to learn more about, like how can I recover faster and perform better because this is the essence of aging gracefully. And we don't have to settle for the traditional notion of slowing down and shuffling along and visiting grandpa in the nursing home and all that crap. And I'm going to do everything.

The whole philosophy of anti aging medicine is that how can we replenish you to the most useful state? Not over replenish, but replenish you just.

At your peak level or over replenished if you're a celebrity or something.

And then so you can function at that peak level for a very, very long time. You know, physiologically, if that's the level you're functioning, then you're preventing yourself from getting into all kinds of disease states. So that's the whole anti aging, you know, it's the quality of staying at a more useful state. You have other ways of getting there. Great.

Yeah.

But are you able to address all of those factors? You know, could a little testosterone extra, you know, have helped you? That's a question, you know, when you were younger, like when you were your 20s.

Yeah.

What if you did a little testosterone across?

I have the, the race or the very result in my file, but if I had taken EPO, yeah, it delivers a confirmed 6% advantage. Some people think 10%. So if I had had a 6% advantage in my performance, I would have won every single race. I could have showered, had had an oatmeal and come back and congratulate in second place. Yeah, I mean it's, it's a ridiculous. Wow. Performance advantage. So when you see the Tour de France, all these guys climbing up the mountain really fast, they're all on EPO and Lance Armstrong was winning. And guess what? If it was all cleaned up and no one took drugs, he would have been further ahead because he was the greatest natural, talented athlete. He was a professional triathlete at 15. That's when I met him and started racing. This young kid who was at the high level on the world level as a teenager, there was no athlete like him and trained as hard and was as competitive and disciplined and focused on all that great Lance stuff. And then everyone's doping. Mike himself. It's like going into the gym and you see all these jacked guys. If you took the drugs away, one of those guys would look like that, you know, and the rest of them would be skinny freaks or they have a spare tire, whatever. And so it's kind of like that's all good right now. And I guess I want to ask you, like, do you see like a delineation from all the stuff that you offer and that anti aging medicine offers and then kind of crossing a line into like overriding physiology with, you know, prescription testosterone or something versus a peptide course or something? That I have a understanding that's a little different. Different pathway.

Yeah, there are, you know, we do offer a peptide that actually helps enhance your body's production of testosterone. So. So I think that may. Some people may prefer that way. Yes. When you put a hormone directly into your body, there is a feedback loop, so your body's gonna not produce as much. That's why there's this.

Testicle bubbles.

Yeah. Pruning up. Yeah, so that's a possibility. Some people may not care about that, but some people really want the full natural mechanism. So either you do it a hard way, like you did, or you take a peptide that can enhance production. So I do see peptide therapy as the frontier of medicine because you can target so many different systems and biological processes by, you know, putting it a very precise, you know, signal in the body. Yeah, the studies has been really good, you know, as far. I mean, the Russians have been doing studies of peptides since the 80s, so that's almost 15 years. A simple peptide, pineal gland peptide called apitalon. When they did research on these patients in their 60s with coronary artery disease. They only took them for six courses in three years, twice a year, and then they followed them for 10 years. So three years of injecting, you know, twice a year, 15 days each time. By the end of 10 years, the people who got injection versus the ones that got placebo, their cardiovascular system was nine years younger and the death incidence from cardiovascularly related diseases was reduced from 83% to 46%. So I mean, that's a powerful benefit. So this is one reason I think this is the frontier, right? Talking about long term benefit. It extends your telomeres, it prevents all age related diseases. So it's very exciting. The combination of this and then doing things naturally to, to enhance your body's ability to rejuvenate is going to be, is, it's going to, it's going to transform human health.

I mean, yeah, for example, if you are getting your testosterone levels optimized, it's not going to do a whole lot until you go and lift some weight or go jockeying or perform a chess match that you like where you get to do something with it. But we were talking about the, the long, the long standing dialogue that hormone replacement was dangerous and now this is kind of getting debunked. Debunked?

Yeah. If you're using biological, biologically identical hormones, right, Then your body can recognize. Because the whole, you know, supposition that these hormones are dangerous is because when they were doing the studies, they were using synthetic hormones. So you use synthetic hormones, then there's all kinds of unforeseen consequences because these molecules will have different portions on them that can interact with different receptors, you know, different in your system in a very unpredictable way. Right. You don't know how they're going to, what kind of problems are going to cause. That's why we have a long list. Any medication, I challenge you, you know, to look up their side effect in the long list of 20, if not 60 different potential side effects. Because the body's that complex, throwing in one unknown molecule and you can have this vast array of, of problems just because your body doesn't recognize. What, what is this, what's, what's this new thing you just put in me? But when you put back what the body had lost before, right? The body knows the molecules bioidentical. So it had, let's say it was at 100% and now it's down to 50% and you give it back to about 80%, the body's not gonna say oh my God. You just poisoned. The body's like fantastic. You just, you know, gave me the juice that I needed. So that's the difference. Most people, maybe some doctors, still think that formal replacement is bad. Actually, it's probably a lot of hip doctors, including with estrogen toward women who had history of cancer and then testosterone with men who had prostate cancer. There's a lot of misguided apprehension and warning toward patients and scaring a lot of patients. So patients suffer. And I seen that firsthand. People were doing fine off hormone replacement, but because of some diagnosis, a doctor said, no, off your hormones. And they feel horrible. The quality of life dropped to just really abysmal state. It's all because the doctor is putting that fear in them. So anyhow, and let's summarize the things that can be done.

Okay, let's summarize who's full faster. Yeah, yeah. So good sleep, good sleep plus rest, recovery and downtime. And time away from the mobile device.

Right.

That's the sleep objective.

Right. And diet, stop eating junk.

That is going to be the biggest return on investment. So simple. The big three toxic modern foods, refined industrial seed oils and refined grains and sugars. And all the foods made with them, of course. Yeah.

And then exercise.

Exercise has three categories and actually I should mention the fourth one too. But the three we discussed are increase all forms of general everyday movement. I might talk about my morning routine. I talked about jfw, find ways to walk. I talked about micro workouts. Then we have the resistance training where you put your muscles under load and you do that frequently. But these workouts are short in duration, but they need to be intense. So you need to be breathing hard and getting your muscles to near failure. And then the same with sprinting. These are brief sprints. You can do it on the exercise bike. If you're not adapt to do it running on flat ground, you can running up the stairs. But something that's short, 10 to 20 seconds is the sweet spot. Four to eight of them is plenty for one workout and you have a long rest period between them. Six to one rest to work ratio. So if you're sprinting for 10 seconds, you rest a minute, you sprint again, you rest a minute. Short duration workout, but it's difficult, you're challenging yourself. So that's, that's three. And then the number four on the exercise list is don't do too much. Can that crush your testosterone like nothing else. Cortisol antagonizes testosterone. Cortisol is the most prominent stress hormone. Fight or Flight mechanism that we talk about a lot. And if you produce too much cortisol from during workouts that last too long, are a little bit or a lot too hard and are performed too frequently without enough rest, you are going to turn into a skinny, tired, exhausted freak with low testosterone. So that's the exercise.

Okay. And then relationships.

Then we have get away from toxic.

Ways of relating to each other.

Mend, shut up when you feel charged, go off and do something else and maintain your composure. Calm, cool, collected at all times. Females express everything as a preference. Men listen to the female, allow her to fend without offering advice or solutions.

Right. And then avoiding environmental toxins.

Avoiding environmental toxins. Also doing something that you get lit up by that you're excited about, that feels like a challenge that has a competitive aspect, even if it's competitive with yourself. But finding that throughout life, especially talking to the, the dudes out there that back in the day had their thing going on because I see so many males of my age that maybe were champion athletes back in their day and now they sit and watch the NFL on Sunday for 11 straight hours and they don't do anything but observe other people perform. And that is, that's not going to be aligned with being the best you can be. And like you described from that, from that eastern influence, like your, your male essence is there. You know, we're trying to be heroes, we're trying to be recognized, we're trying to copy our environment. We're trying to compete with others. That's natural. So find something that lights you up to compete in wonderful.

Yes. So you have a podcast. Where can people listen to your wisdom more and learn more from you?

You can, you can hear some great interviews like Dr. Joy Kong got de the anti aging medicine world. So start with that episode, the Be Rad podcast. We have it on video, we have it on all the podcast channels. So you can engage with me there. Go to Brad Kearns.com I got 5 free ebooks you can download to learn about all kinds of things from dark chocolate to barefoot living. And I have one ebook that's called Long Cuts to a Longer Life. So taking the long way and enjoying and appreciating it. Fun stuff. Thank you for.

Yeah, thank you for being here. It's been a really fun chat and I hope everybody has learned a lot from this and good luck with your testosterone.