Discover the Secret to AGING BACKWARDS & Living Your Healthiest Life NOW! | Dr. Mark Hyman

I kept learning about this pattern and until I really healed that I was, I wasn't able to just be ready for love.

Wow.

So you kind of have to not find the right person. You have to be the right person.

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You know, relationships then Sound like a massive part of longevity and. And you're the person you choose to be with intimately. Sounds like it could play a big part in you living longer or also dying quickly if that person's not there, if you don't have the tools to recalibrate once that person is gone, or if something happens to them.

Right?

Yeah, but what happens? We're also part of a society where when you're like nuclear family, meaning your primary partner goes, you're not embedded in a network of people. Right. So in Sardinia, Nicorea.

Yes.

People died and spouses died. So Carmine's wife died, but he was living with his family and his kids and his brother and his. Like, he had a whole ecosystem, a.

Community of tribe, where it's like, okay, one person's gone and it's really sad and you're grieving, but you've got grandkids, you've got kids, you've got parents, you've got uncles and aunts involving you in the community still.

Right.

Creating a process of integration in life.

Exactly.

Meaning, purpose, community. So in the Americas, what I'm hearing you say is we isolate ourselves more totally.

Right.

It's like, find your house in the suburbs and your parents go here and your kids go away and they go.

You know, they're neighbors, you know, they look out, they've witnessed to somebody for 20 years. They don't even know who they are, you know?

Sure. What do you think we could do differently? And is it. Do you think American society will ever change with this? You know, parents leaving and. Because I hear about some of the. I think it's a. In India, it's like they fight over who's going to have their parents sometimes is what I hear. It's like, which siblings are going to get to have the parents stay with them. Yeah.

It's like this argue debate is the same thing.

Really?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a hard society we live in, and it's such an individualistic society. It's not a communal society. And I think it's cost us a lot. And I feel like there are little pockets of people who are building community, whether it's online communities, whether it's in person communities, whether it's communities that are in cities. So there is a sense of people trying to build community. And I'm involved in a lot of these, and I'm starting to see it pop around, but I think it's definitely not mainstream yet.

I talked to one doctor on here, and he said he got sick two different times in his life. He's an older guy in his 70s and 80s, and then he recovered from it. I said, what happened? How did you recover? He said, I found love.

Yeah.

He's like, I found love and it gave me that sense of meaning, that belonging, that purpose again got me back in shape. It got me making better decisions, you know, it got me living life to the fullest. Why is love such a strong healer?

Love is medicine. I mean, I think, you know, it's the same reason that community is the same reason belonging is because, you know, when we have a deep connection, relation with someone, it literally changes our gene expression. So if you're in a loving connection with someone. Yes. It's this whole scientific field of sociogenomics. Right. How our social relationships affect our genes. And we know if you're in a conflictual relationship, you will turn on genes of inflammation which cause disease and aging. If you are in a loving, connected, heart centered relationship, you are activating all the repair genes. You literally, through cuddling, can change your epigenome. Mm, right?

It's amazing.

So stay in bed for an extra five minutes and cuddle.

I love cuddling. I got home, I got home last night and I just like laid there with Martha, just like hugging her for like 30 minutes. I was like, just want to relax. And it feels healing because your body relaxes, right? It feels like whatever's going on, you can calm it down and just be peaceful.

Totally.

It's a beautiful thing. So you've been married a few times, right? Married and divorced a few times, yeah.

I'm an expert in relationship.

Expert in relationships three times. What would you say is the biggest lessons from marriage and divorce that have taught you about health and longevity?

That's a great question. I think, you know, everybody's different. And for me, the key to really finding happiness and the key to finding love, that is a really good, healthy, solid love, which I have now was really dealing with my original traumas and wounds. Really? Yeah. And I think, you know, you wrote a book about toxic masculinity and I think we all, whether we're men or women, throughout our childhood, have big or small traumas. Gabor Mate talks about micro trauma, macro trauma, micro trauma, could just not being seen by your parents and not being loved well enough or neglected or not actual abuse, whereas there's actual real emotional or physical abuse or sexual abuse. So all that registers in our nervous system. And for me, I had corrupted love software and I had to heal that.

A corrupted love software?

Yeah.

What did that, what did that mean? For you?

Well, you know, I'll tell you the brief story is, you know, my mother was a child of deaf parents.

Deaf.

Deaf. They couldn't hear. So she was their ears and their eyes. Wow.

That's a lot of responsibility.

She became a parent to them. Yeah. She became somebody who thought that love was taking care of people who needed help or were broken.

Wow, that's interesting.

Right. So she picked my dad and my stepfather, who were very broken, and they were very, you know, damaged emotionally. And that was because, you know, that's what she knew.

That was her familiarity.

Familiarity. And my dad was broken because his mother was a child of 13 and accidentally killed her sister when she was 2, pushing her off to swing. And it was the pariah of the family. Had to sit at a different table, was completely neurotic and anxious. And that epigenome goes in through. It's translated through generations. And so it all makes sense. And so then my mom was super depressed and unhappy, and she used me to be her therapist.

Oh, man.

As a little kid. Which is.

You repeated the pattern.

And I thought, oh, love is taking care of someone who's needy and broken.

Right. Who needs me.

Oh, yeah. So I would had the savior complex and I would try to fill this hole that I had, this emptiness that I had, because I thought that if I did that I could kind of feel this emptiness that I have picking these people in a way that filled me up because I was serving them or taking care of them. It wasn't always exactly like that, but I kept learning about this pattern. And until I really healed that I wasn't able to just be ready for love.

Wow.

So you kind of have to not find the right person. You have to be the right person.

That's so true. What allowed you to heal it and what allowed you to recognize it and then start the healing journey?

Yeah, well, which is a journey. Yeah, no, I've been doing it. I intellectually understood it, but, you know, it's a physical. Yeah. But I really went through a process of using psychedelics to heal a lot of the trauma, which, you know, is now emerging as a really valid way to start to re pattern your neurology that literally changes the structure and function of your neurons in your brain, these compounds. And I began to sort of do some inquiry. I decided to take like a break from relationships and really do a deep in dive looking at my own mind, my own thoughts, my own beliefs every day, writing them down, kind of rewriting it, the story from my higher self. And then I kind of unpacked my whole life with a friend of mine who's a coach, really amazing woman, Lauren Zander. And I was able to kind of see my whole childhood very differently and you know, talk about incest that happened to me and things that I just had buried for 50 years. And then I. I saw this movie Coda, which was a best picture academy award winning film last year about children of deaf adults. Coda means children of deaf adults. And it was my mother's story, not actually her story, but it was the same. She was a child of hear of deaf parents and could.

Because the child in the. I still haven't seen it yet, but the child is. Got a deaf family, right? Yeah.

She's hearing and it's about her struggle to become disentangled from the dependency her parents had on her. Right.

Holy cow.

So what opened up for you to sell that? That was like. That just like hit me like a lightning bolt and I just was sobbing and sobbing. It took me hours and hours to watch the movie because I had to stop because I was just being like on the floor just in this cathartic process. And it never really happened to me like that before. And after that happened, I kind of got what happened to my mother. I got what happened to me. I got what was going off in my own nervous system. And then I just felt free and like I felt light and I healed a lot of that. So it took me a while. I'm a slow learner. I'm good with medicine, but it's not.

We all have our things.

It took me a minute. It took me a minute. But now I just feel like I have such a different wiring and a different nervous system and I feel way calmer and way less anxious in relationship.

I mean, where would you be had you not talked to that therapist friend and kind of looked back at your entire history of your life and assessed it. If you didn't watch that movie, if you didn't do the psychedelics kind of all those medicines in one. Where would you be had you skipped it after your last relationship?

Maybe still, you know, I always made joke. I said I had a broken picker. You know, I still have a broken picker. I still would try to find someone who isn't really the person that's going to be able to meet me, that's an equal and you know, have a healthy attachment style. It can, you know, be independent but come together and you know, just like it really. It really was powerful. So. Yeah.

That's incredible.

Yeah.

This all happened in the last couple years.

Yeah.

There's hope after 60, even if you keep choosing poorly.

Totally, totally.

That's incredible.

Yeah. And it just got me free. And I think, you know, a lot of these cultures don't have to deal with this stuff. I mean, of course there's always family drama and this and that, but I think, you know, there's such a level of connection and community and mutual support and happiness and joy as part of living that we've sort of lost. And I think that was a big learning for me.

And how did you feel beforehand? Like in the previous four, 40 years of different marriages and relationships, did you. You said you feel free and lighter. Did you never feel free?

No, I didn't. In marriage or in relationship, I didn't. I always felt what was the thing? I didn't know until afterwards. You know, you don't know a horse is standing on your foot until it gets off. It was kind of like that. Like, wow. I was always so anxious and kind of trying to hold on to love and keep love and be afraid of losing love and want someone to love me. And it just was like such a weird dynamic that I was embedded in that I didn't even fully see. Really? Yeah. And this is.

I'm so excited you're sharing this. This is powerful.

Yeah.

I think a lot of people need to see this and hear this from you, Mark, because they see you as this. I don't know, what are you, 30, 30 time New York time best selling author? You know, this. This individual who's done so well and been so successful in many areas of life. And I'm not saying that, you know, the marriages and the relationships you in were all, like, failures. I'm sure you had great love and connection and moments and things like that, but they weren't, you know, it sounds like the right fit and you didn't feel like you were free inside. And maybe they didn't feel the same thing either. So I'm not saying they were bad and wrong or something, but to hear you talk about this, this healing journey at this stage, as someone who studies healing and as someone who studies medicine and studies all these things, even you had to learn how to heal relationships. You knew about the body stuff and food and medicine, but it was the healing, the relationship and the childhood wound that you carried with you all those years.

And what's interesting now, Louis, is in our culture, we're starting to have the language for this and the acceptance of this and, you know, the sort of not seeing mental illness as a Stigma, but as a consequence of a lot of cultural and personal trauma. Right. I mean, just living in our culture today is traumatic. You open the newspaper, listen to the news, or the amount of conflict and strife and, you know, just economic inequities and all the things that we're dealing with. Climate change. I mean, it's a very psychologically stressful moment of history. But, you know, we also can shift a relationship to that by understanding how our brains work and our nervous systems work and start to actually not necessarily get caught up in all that and kind of reset our systems. So one of the key things I talk about in the book is mindset is how our minds really play a role in our longevity. And if we don't get that straight, we're screwed. When people kill themselves by their thoughts. Right. Literally.

Give me some examples. What do you mean? How do they kill themselves? I mean, if they have suicidal thought, they'll lead themselves to killing themselves.

I mean, it's all about belief, right? So when you look at voodoo, for example, I mean, you put a voodoo hex on somebody, boom, somebody can drop dead. You know, like, one of my mentors who very much inspired me in primitive medicine was Bernie Siegel, who I love medicine and miracles, who's this kind of Yale oncologist, bald guy, so cute, writes with a purple pen, letters. He used to write me and that before email. And he talked about these studies where they would tell this cancer patient that they found this great new cure, and they gave them this pill that was a placebo, and their tumors shrunk overnight. And then they told them, like, a month later, two months later, oh, they found it didn't work so well, and the tumors came flying back. So, like, that's the power of the pharmacy in our mind.

This is fascinating. I'm so. I'm still kind of amazed that this all happened in the last couple of years. So after the movie, you had this Cardiff catharsis experience. Right. And you felt lighter after that?

Yeah.

You felt like you released.

I felt free right after this.

On the floor, sobbing moment.

Yeah. It's hard to explain it, but I just felt like I was flying. Like, I just felt like I'd been carrying this weight my whole life. They just gone.

Do you feel like it was completely. You feel like your body has. Your nervous system was fully healed after that, or has there been moments of, like, triggers and kind of the PTSD feelings in your nervous system?

Or like, I think it's echoes and shadows more that come back now, like, that I can recognize and Go. Oh, all right. Whatever. It's not like it. It grabs me like it used to.

Wow.

Yeah.

This is fascinating. This all happened in the last couple years.

Yeah. Pretty cool. And as you know. And then I began to think about, you know, just aging and longevity in general and how do we build a life that creates healing in our body, whether it's healing or trauma. And I have a whole section in the book about healing trauma, because that's a key part. And some of the things that are now available, like ketamine and ganglion blocks, and increasingly, probably by 2024, MDMA will be available legally for psychedelic assisted therapy and maybe psilocybin, I think was legalized in Colorado now and Oregon. So it's all coming. And I think there's. There's so many different modalities for people to choose from that we never had before.

Sure. How important is expressing your emotions, crying, laughing, and living longer and healthier?

Well, I do a lot of laughing, and I do some crying. And I think in my current relationship, I'm the crier. Like, if we're watching a movie or show, whatever, where we were listening to a speech at a wedding, I'm the one crying. Right.

It's so funny because yesterday I was on a flight and I watched Coco the movie Coco. Literally, there's an older guy next to me, and I'm literally. I kid you not, I cried four times watching Coco. The music and the storytelling. I'm like, this is a cartoon and I'm crying. But it was so beautiful. And I was telling Martha about it, and she was like, yeah, it's such a beautiful. Because it's all about family. It's all about connection. It's all about, like, sharing your music with the world and this, you know, beautiful story. But so you feel like you're the crier in the relationship.

That's right.

But how powerful is crying as an emotion and laughing?

I think it's being able to be free and expressed, whatever it is. Like being able to not have to shut down and shut off and to learn how to do it in a way that's not destructive. Right. To do it in a way that's loving and kind and thoughtful. There's always a way of getting expressed without hurting somebody else.

Yes.

So I think we tend in our culture to lash out and to be reactive, and that's not good.

So it's like.

It's sort of like. It's like Viktor Frankl's idea of slowing things down. Like, in between stimulus and response, there's a gap or a pause. Right. And then that pause lies the choice. So you can choose to slow down the whole process. And I'm friends with Tom Brady, and he's like, you know, when I snap the ball, everything's in slow motion. Like, everything just slows down. It's like, it's amazing. You think it all happens, like, in seconds, but, like, he's like, all the time in the world. Right. Because everything just goes in slow motion because he's so present. So we can do that in every moment. It just takes practice. It's a skill. You know, if you want to lift 50 pounds, well, you have to work at it. Right. If you want to train your mind to work differently, you have to work at it. You have to investigate your mind. That's what, you know, all these practices, ancient. You know, we. We in our culture are really good with outer technology, but places like Tibet, they. They were really experimenting with inner technology for thousands of years and. And learned all sorts of skills about mastering the mind. So mastering your body is key, but mastering your mind is also a key to longevity.

Right.

And sounds like mastering your emotions and your heart is a key as well.

Yeah, but your mind is what regulates your emotions, and people have argued with me about this. But what happens first is your thought and then the feeling. Right, and then the emotion.

Sure.

Right. Because you have. Even if it's an instantaneous thing, there's some thought that precedes it, even if it's a subconscious thought that precedes the feeling or emotion.

So you never have the feeling first unless you don't have the ability to think. But then you probably want to be here.

So it's like some people don't have that. But. Yeah.

So it's always a thought.

Yeah.

Or it's a. So it can't be a feeling, huh? Because you have to think it first before you feel it.

Yes, I think so. I think always whether it's.

It's like if you smell something that brings back a memory.

Right.

Is that a thought?

Or if you. Yeah. Or if you see you're about to get in a car crash, you have the thought, I'm going to die. And then your body goes into reaction, and it can happen in a millisecond, but, like, you could have a millisecond thought, but it's always going to precede whatever it is.

Sure, sure.

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About relationship stuff because I think, because I think you don't talk about this a lot.

I do a we can do it.

And I think I'm starting to believe more and more that the relationship you have with yourself is massive. The way you view yourself, your beliefs, you're talking about this now. How you think about yourself, how you feel about yourself is key towards living a healthy life now, but also extending your life totally. And the way you view and think about your intimate relationship. I used to feel like I was trapped all the time. You know, I was fearful and I felt like I was trapped and there was no way out. I couldn't be myself.

Yeah.

And that would make me feel unhealthy inside. It made me feel like I was a six out of a ten every day. Yeah, I felt like trapped. Right. No, I'm doing that to myself. No one is trapping me. It's my fear and insecurity of like leaving the relationship or whatever it might be or having the courage to communicate all these things that I needed to learn the truth.

Right.

And so the relationship we have with ourselves and with our intimate partner, I'm starting to learn is the most powerful, one of the most powerful things for longevity because we're going to, it's going to shape the actions we have, the decisions we make on a daily basis, how we show up, what we eat, the environment, all that stuff. What is the. Some of the conversations you're having in your relationship about longevity and about, you know, you're entering a new relationship from a different space, a healed space. Are you having different types of conversations than you never had before? If so, what are.

Yeah, I think they're really different. I mean, I think, you know, and.

Are you showing up as your whole self finally? Is that what's.

I think I'm able to. I think I'm able to be free and independent and still fully connected all the time. So as opposed to feeling dependent or needing.

So you're unattached, you're highly engaged, but you have low attachment.

Fully committed, but not like low attachment. Yeah, I'm securely attached. What they say is securely attached as opposed to being insecurely attached or avoidant or like there's all these styles of attachment, but there's a healthy attachment style. A lot of us have attachment disorders because if we weren't loved well as kids or we had various kinds of traumas, so we have these attachment disorders. And I think I had more of an anxious attachment disorder. And I think that through healing that I'm able to sort of be able to just be present to whatever is and not be in reaction. And that's such a powerfully different way, whatever it is we're doing. And my partner is also extremely self aware and extremely talented at communicating.

That's beautiful.

And you know, she has her own stuff that she works through, but we do it together as if it's a, as if it's a gift that we are able to unpack together as opposed to something that's oppositional. Like, you have to fix this, you have to do this. You did this, you did that. Like, that's terrible. So we go, oh, here's a trigger. I felt triggered by blah, blah, blah.

How do you handle it if you're in that if space?

We really deeply listen to each other. We don't react. And then we take it as a third entity. That's something for us to take care of together as opposed to something, you better fix this or I'm out. And it's like, oh, you know, like today I was like, I learned from my partner that she doesn't like hosting parties. You know, we're having a party and I asked her, you know, to help with something and she was like, I don't like Oz, Brian.

I was like, okay, now I know.

But like, it's like I could have reacted and got upset and mad and it's like I kind of told a whole story in my head. It's this. But I'm like, oh, okay, well, she, this is what she needs. She's like, I don't like doing this and that. So like this rather than having to like fix it or figure out why or she doesn't like chocolate, or she doesn't like strawberries or whatever, it's fine. I don't like doing everything either. I don't really like, you know, whiskey, but I like tequila. It's fine. Who cares?

You know, do you think you'd be able to analytically heal, like just thinking, if you would have just thought about these things versus the, the physical releases that you had as well?

I think it's somatic. I think a lot of this is burying our tissues. You know, the body keeps score about trauma, and I think if we don't learn how to somatically release this stuff, it just is an intellectual exercise that doesn't happen.

It doesn't work.

It helps, but it's not enough. Wow.

I'm curious about the. In terms of the things that will decrease your lifespan at night. A lot of people talk about the morning routines, but I'm curious about the evening routines that decrease.

Holy cow. Well, that's a great question. You know, there's a really amazing book I read years ago called Lights out. And it was a book that was looking at the research on the harmful impact of the light bulb on human health. And it was pretty convincing in showing that because we're not following the natural rhythms of the sun, we're actually altering our biology in ways that damage our health. So when you're exposed to LED nights at light, to fluorescent lights at night, to full spectrum light bulbs at night, incandescent light bulbs, it's not normal for our physiology for 200,000 years.

Sure.

And all of a sudden, the last hundred thousand of the last, I mean, the last hundred of the 200,000 years, we're all of a sudden exposed this light bulb. Our brains don't process it properly. And so we inhibit melatonin, we don't sleep as well, we increase cortisol. And there's really crazy studies on how this increases obesity, heart disease, cancer, dementia, and that's just being exposed to light at night. So now there's this advent of an understanding of how we might block blue light, which is what you need in the morning. Right. You want to be exposed to bright light from the sun first thing in the morning, 20 minutes with no sunglasses, that's great. But at night it's not a good idea. So there are now red light bulbs that only have red light and a blue light. There's blue blocker glasses where you can put on glasses at night and wear those at night around the house. Screens are the worst thing at night. So that's a horrible thing that people do. They go to bed with their phone, they wake up with their phone. It's like they Spend more time on their phone with their partner. My nephew's like, look, my screen time is only five hours today. I'm like, five hours. Imagine what you could do in five hours if you had five hours, right? You could make all the food for your week. You could exercise, you could write a book, you could make a song, you could whatever, you know, every day. And I think we also are not actually winding down. So we go, go, go, go, go, then hit the bed, expect to sleep, but we can't do that. So having a routine and I talk a lot about the power of sleep and longevity and, and the power of sleep in the brain, but we're probably sleeping a couple hours less than we did throughout most of human history, and some people even less than that. And that has a huge impact on our cognitive function, especially at night. We have a brain cleaning system called the glymphatic system, which is like the lymph system for the brain. So it's like the cleanup crew comes at night and cleans up your brain from all the garbage that accumulates from metabolic waste and stuff for the day. Well, you can. If you don't sleep, that's not working. And you get that. If you, like, go to bed and you wake up and you don't sleep enough, you feel foggy and tired. If you get a good 8, 9, 10 hours sleep, you wake up, you're like, boom. Everything's crystal clear and your brain's working. And I mean, it's not rocket science. So it's not just because you haven't slept. It's a biology of what's happening. So you're producing nasty proteins and inflammation and all kinds of stuff. And also, I think we are exposed to way too much sound and light and stimulus at night. Temperature regulation is not good. So there's a lot of really cool devices like the eight sleep bed and another one, I forget the name of it, but cooler or whatever it is. And basically you can put in your bed and lower the temperature. We do better sleeping in about 65 to 68, 75, 67 degrees. And if we do that, our bodies work better, we sleep better. I know for me, if it's hot, I don't sleep well.

I can't sleep well. Yeah, we put it at 67, 68, the AC, but then it's like your face is like cold. So you have to figure that's why the cooler. The chili pad or whatever. Yeah, the chili pad allows you to.

Yeah, and that's great. And the eight sleep, you can have One side that's hot for your, for your partner and one that's cool for you.

Is that what eight sleep does? It's like cold on one side and.

The other one, you can do whatever you want. It can progress. Like put on a king size bed. You can. It's divided in half so you can control your half. That's pretty nice. And you can. And also you can control it through the night. You want it cooler in the morning, cooler at night, hotter in the middle of the night. Whatever. That's cool. The best sleep I ever have is when I go camping and I'm like winter camping.

Really?

I sleep like, I just feel like I, you know, slept like this.

Because you probably go to bed at like 8:00 clock at night.

Yeah. But you say like 10 hours. Yeah. It's like you watch the stars, you.

Have a fire, you, like, tell some stories. Well, this is what we pass out.

Exactly. That's what we always did. Historically, you know, we were just like, work, work, work, watch tv, go to bed, or be on our phone or write emails the last minute and text and then go to sleep. It's just our brain, our bodies are not designed for that. So in the book, I talk a lot about evening routines and what you can do and, you know, the temperature, the sound, the light, hot baths at night, Epsom salt, meditation, whatever works for you.

Warm bath at night works well too.

Oh, yeah, Hot bath, Epsom salt brings it right down.

Boom. What about in the book, you also talk about the seven core biological systems and how we can use them to stop and reverse biological aging.

Yeah.

What are some of those?

Yeah.

So functional medicine is a very important paradigm shift in healthcare, which looks at the body as an ecosystem, not as a bunch of different separate parts. So as I was talking about earlier, the hallmarks of aging. Yes. Are what scientists are now saying underlies all disease. That's a huge advance because instead of like 155,000 diseases, there's like 10 things that go wrong. And if we fix those 10 things, we get rid of all the rest. Right. But then the question comes, what's the cause of those hallmarks of aging? So functional medicine is the medicine of why not what disease you have and what drug to give, or even what hallmark is there? But why is there a problem with this particular hallmark? Why are there epigenetic changes? Why are your mitochondria not working? Why are your nutrients not being sensed properly? Why are you making zombie cells? Why do you have inflammation? Why do you have damaged proteins? Why do you have stem cells getting pooped out. That's the important question, right? So in functional medicine, we think that there are really simple answers to these questions. You're either dying of too much of something that's bugging your system that you need to get rid of, or too little of something you need for health. What are the ingredients for health that we need to get and help us thrive? Like I said, I took the class on what causes disease, but not what causes health. So functional medicine is about the science of creating health. And in the framework of science and functional medicine, there are seven biological systems, or networks. And it's a network of networks. They're not all separate. Right? And these seven systems, again, underlie all disease. And the imbalances in these systems cause disease. And it's either too much of toxins, allergens, bad food, stress, microbes, microbiome stuff, and not enough of the right ingredients for health. Right? Nutrition, nutrients, balance of hormones, light, air, water, sleep, exercise, deep rest, community, meaning, purpose, love, relationships. These are all the ingredients for health, right? When those are too much or too little of those things, it causes disturbances in these seven systems. And what are they? Well, there's your microbiome in your gut. There's your immune inflammatory system. We call that defense and repair. Your energy system, how you make energy in your cells and mitochondria. And by the way, these are also, in a way, some of the hallmarks of aging. Right, right, sure, sure, sure. And then detoxification, which isn't really talked much about in the hallmarks of aging, but it's key because toxins cause a lot of the hallmarks of aging. So how do you detox your body? How do you process your metabolic toxins, environmental toxins, then your transport system, which is your circulation and lymph system. And then there's communication systems, which is your hormones, neurotransmitters, the nutrient sensing systems, how it all works. And lastly is your structural system, what you're made of, from your subcellular structures, your mitochondrion, your cell membranes, all the way to your bones and muscles and everything else. So that's what we think of. And so my job as a functional medicine doctor is to understand what's causing the imbalance in this particular person. So if you have imbalance, just because you know the name of the disease does not mean you know what's wrong with you. You could have, you know, 10 people with heart disease or diabetes or Alzheimer's or rheumatoid arthritis, and each of them might have different causes. You know, one person with rheumatoid arthritis might have gluten sensitivity. Another person might have a parasite. Another person might have mercury poisoning. Another person might have a problem with their microbiome. Another person might have some other factor. So it's really about looking at the personalized approach to understanding the root cause of each person's dysfunction. And yes, there are certain ways the body manifests dysfunction, and there's a limited number of ways. Right. I always say there's only so many ways your body can say ouch, but there's a myriad of causes. But from this functional medicine perspective, we look at what are the root causes of the hallmarks of aging? How do we get these seven systems in balance and that will fix those hallmarks of aging? Because a lot of scientists now in the longevity space, and by the way, there's billions of dollars flowing into this space because a lot of very wealthy billionaires don't want to die. So they're putting billions of dollars in, like Jeff Bezos and, you know, Calico, Google and, you know, Yuri Milner. All these people are just pouring money in.

They want to live longer.

I think it's great. I think it's great because the government isn't funding it. They spend like a couple hundred million dollars a year on aging, studying aging, which is ridiculous because that's, you know, we spend 6 billion on cancer. And. And yet if we cured cancer, we'd have a couple years life expense. If we fixed aging, we'd get 100, we'd get 30 years. And it's not just about this hedonistic pursuit of living longer and this selfish idea, I don't want to die. It's about. Think about a society where you have the value of the wisdom and experience and the knowledge that comes from living a while. Now, not everybody gets wiser as they get older. I found that out for sure. But a lot of y' all do. And then any contribution they could make if they're fit and healthy now, if they're sick and disease, it's going to be a huge drain on society. But the truth is that these studies have shown that if you are taking care of yourself, you live a lot longer and your health span equals your lifespan, meaning you basically don't spend the last 20% of your life decrepit and disease, which is what is average now. So let's say you live to be 80 less, you know, let's say 20 years of your life, you're on the downhill. Whereas with the studies on healthspan if you. And this was one by James Fries I talked about. The book was published years ago in the New England Journal of Medicine. They basically looked at three habits. Keep your ideal body weight, don't smoke and exercise. Right. Not a ton of stuff. Right. And they found that when people did that, they not only lived longer, but they died quickly, painlessly, and cheaply, really. And didn't cost a lot to the healthcare system.

Wow.

Whereas people who didn't do those things died earlier, but died long, painful, expensive deaths.

So three things. Keep the ideal body weight, don't smoke and exercise. And exercise and you'll die better.

Exactly. So, you know, I want to have my health span equal my lifespan. I want to be able to go for a hike on my last day of my life at 120. Like you said at the beginning.

That's amazing.

You know, make love and go to bed, and that's it.

And then just don't wake up.

Say goodbye.

That's amazing. And do people do that in the blue zones? Do you see that? They're maybe. It's like.

Yeah, it's very. It's very interesting. I mean, my friend Jeff Blaine is the father of functional medicine. Tells the story of his grandfather, who was, I think, almost 100, and they had a big Thanksgiving dinner. Everybody was here, happy. He's like, hey, everybody, it's been a great life. I love you all. This is it. I'm gonna go. And he, like, went to bed and like, after a great dinner and walked to bed and went to sleep and never woke up.

Come on. He was happy and everything was good.

Great. Yeah.

I think he didn't want to be like, I'm done.

I'm done. No way.

Yeah. And I've heard this story many times.

Come on.

I've heard this story many times.

Really?

That's incredible. He was healthy, though.

He was fine.

Healthy enough.

I mean, he was. He seemed healthy. Like, I mean, you know, he was able to get up at the table and do his things and hang out with his family.

And he was like, thank you for the last great dinner and see you pretty much. That's incredible.

So, yeah, your health span can equal your lifespan. That's what the point of this book is. If you keep working on your biological age through all the strategies and the tools and very practical application of the science in the book, Young Forever, you can increase your health span. You can reverse your biological age. And we know how to do this. It's not hard.

Yeah.

What do you think is something that you're going to learn in this next decade. You know, you've learned so much in the last decade. With all the new research and science and studies that have come along in the last decade now, going from 60s into, you know, decade from now to your 70s, what do you think is going to happen for you personally?

Yeah. Or in science and medicine?

Both.

I mean, I think, you know, it's the most exciting time right now in medicine science because even as we're all getting sicker and dying younger and life expectancies going down in America, the acceleration and pace of scientific advances and the convergence of a number of different phenomena from systems biology to artificial intelligence to the genomic revolution to functional medicine, systems biology to big data computing is just blowing up. How we're going to be understanding the body. So imagine a future where you'll be able to get a panel of lab tests, but put your body through a whole body mri, sequence your entire genome, your microbiome, have a biosensor implanted that will track everything in real time over thousands of biomarkers and give you feedback in real time about exactly what you should do, how much you sleep, what you should tweak, what you should eat, what you shouldn't eat. It would be so mind blowing to completely keep track of everything all the time. Your computer has billions of sensors, right? And if your tires are low, oh God, my tire's low on the left back tire, how great is that? We don't have that, right? You go to your doctor, you get a checkup, he does your exam and checks a panel of blood tests. It hasn't changed in 100 years. You know, like it's like, go on. You know, like we are in a very different era of medicine and it's happening at such a pace. So the clinical practice of medicine today is not that, but it's coming very fast. So I'm excited about that. I think I'm going to learn a lot about more about how the body works through the use of, of these big data analytics and artificial intelligence and machine learning applied to literally gigabytes and gigabytes of your own personal health data, which we're soon to be able to access. It'll be in the cloud and you'll be able to sort of learn so much from it and compare it to others. So I think that's really exciting on a personal level. I'm sort of excited about continuing to experiment with my own biological age and my own well being and my own health and my own spiritual growth and to feel like I'm Just beginning. I honestly feel like I'm 20 again. Wow. I feel like, you know, when you're 20, you go, God, what am I going to be when I grow up? What am I going to do? Really? Kind of, yeah, because I kind of checked the boxes, you know, I had my family, had my kids, you know, have meaning and purpose, have a great relationship. I'm like, career, career is good. I'm like, I don't have any more mountains to climb in the way of proving anything. And yet I have the health and the vitality and the resources to actually reimagine the rest of my life the next 60 years, right?

It's incredible.

What does the next 60 years look like? What do I want to do? Where do I want to go? I want to be so like, I'm getting better at surfing, I'm going to go heli skiing this year. I'm going to go, you know, we're going to go climbing the mountains in South America and Patagonia. I'm going to, you know, just, I just do whatever I want to do, you know. But the truth is now I'm 63 and I think back when I was a kid, man, 63 was fricking old, you know, 63, they weren't doing too good. The pot bellies and the gray hair and the puffy face. I'm like, I'm like, no way. Like, I'm like, it just doesn't have to be that way, you know. And you know, I had friends over in Hawaii visiting me last year and I was riding my bike every day, working out and you know, I had like 30 year old friends. I'm lettings go for a bike ride, like, okay? And like, and these are not people who are out of shape or overweight or unhealthy. These are really healthy people. One of them was like a, you know, like a college, you know, college D1 soccer player, you know, and I'm riding my hill straight up, seven miles up the hill and she's like, you know, and one of them had to turn back and I'm like, wow. You know, it's amazing to see that if you learn the science of how to create health, that you can continue to evolve and improve and optimize your health at any age.

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That'S beautiful, man. Exciting. I'm going to be, I'm going to turn 40 next year.

Oh wow.

If you could go back to your 40 year old self and give me advice for three things to focus on from 40 until 60, what would those three things be that you would tell me or tell your younger 40 year old self that you wish you would have done?

I would say really, really, really invite play and joy in your life. You know, don't wait. You know, I'm reading this book called Die with Zero, which is a great book meditating on the idea that we save our money and we squirrel our nuts away and we don't have all these experiences. And you know, in my life I haven't done a lot of stuff. You know, I have one house. My car is five years old. I paid for it. It's a little Volvo. I mean like I don't have a lot of stuff, you know, but I love experiences so I will spend money on experiences. You know, I'll go on safari or I'll go, you know, learn how to surf in Costa Rica for a month or I'll, you know, go, go to do some, you know, incredible backcountry skiing experience with friends. Or I'll, I'll invite, you know, I'm inviting like 30 of my closest friends to Italy to go in a villa for a week and you know, have all kinds of, you know, fun experiences together. So experience is really what matters and what brings the joy to life. So building relationships, building connections, building community. It's so central to health and well, being in life. I did that, but I definitely worked too hard. I definitely did not give myself enough time for that. The second thing is I probably would have started working out sooner I mean, I always had bike riding and tennis and yoga and I just, I was like, gyms are stinky. I don't like weights. If I do 10 push ups, it hurts the next day. I don't like this. So when I was 50, I couldn't do 10 push ups.

Wow.

And now I can drop and do 80 without a stop.

Incredible.

Yeah. So it's like, you know, it took me a minute, but I actually didn't think maybe that long. And I use The Tom Brady TB12 sports training bands, which is a lot easier on the body and it's amazing. So I feel we, you know, I would have probably doubled down on that a little earlier. I think I also would have probably done more work on my own. On my own trauma that I couldn't really identify then, I think. So we didn't have the language for it. It wasn't in the zeitgeist like it is now. There weren't people talking about it. The world of psychedelics wasn't really, you know, a thing. So I think, I think there's a bunch of stuff that I probably would have done around that. I think I've always eaten healthy, I've always done well. I think the other thing, I definitely did that. And you can see from the picture that I was vegetarian, vegan, and I was kind of thin, but I had no muscle and I was active. I could run five miles, I could ride my bike 100 miles. I wasn't unfit.

You weren't strong.

I didn't have the kind of muscle mass that I think is so essential to longevity. So the sooner you start building muscle, the better off you are. It's really a key part of longevity.

Yeah. This is beautiful. Mark, I appreciate you. Your book. Young the Secrets to Living youg Longest, Healthiest Life. You guys can get this. It's got a step by step program.

The book's not all about relationships and trauma, just so you know.

It's not about that, but I think.

It'S an important component of it definitely includes that.

And I love how, you know, I've got a. I've got a book coming out as well after yours called the Greatness Mindset. And the first section of it is about healing. I think it's really, you know, for me learning the lessons of healing and how it's set me free as well. I feel like now I can go much higher in every area of life with. That was before it was like this. It was like grinding it to get there, you know, and it was harder.

Yeah.

So I think it's all about our beliefs and our healing and the mindset of it first, about longevity and about relationships and life and everything.

Yeah, you look. You look brighter and happier and younger than I see.

I feel good, man.

Yeah?

Yeah, I'm a little tired. I was on a trip, but, yeah, I feel good in general, but, yeah, it's good to be alive, man. Every day I'm grateful. There's so much joy, peace, love, affection, you know, freedom feels incredible.

I think it's also. Also key is, like, living in the moment, like, as much as possible. Whatever you're experiencing, you know, whatever you're doing, be in it. Because we live so much of our life distracted and disconnected. And so whether you're, you know, washing the dishes or making love or, you know, working or climbing a mountain, like, do that thing. Yeah, you know, Absolutely.

I want people to get your book Young Forever. Make sure you guys pick up a copy. Where can we go to support you for it?

Every way. Go To Young Forever book.com if you want to learn more and get goodies, come along with the book. Go to Dr. Mark Hyman, social media, drhyman.com any bookstore, online, offline, you can get the book.

It's exciting. We're going to throw up a photo as well. You have to send me that photo of you now. We'll put it up on screen for you guys to see the process of this. But this is amazing. Make sure you guys get a copy for your friends as well. Powerful book, powerful information. I want to acknowledge you, Mark, for your transformation. It's incredible because I think healing is one of the hardest things to do, especially, you know, healing the wounds of our past, the inner child wound, whatever you want to call it, but especially as men, I feel like it's hard, harder for us to go back and address the things we're most ashamed of or afraid of or insecure of or guilty around or whatever it might be and start doing the work. So for you to do that in your early 60s is really inspiring.

Well, I'm a little slow, but it's.

Inspiring to see that it doesn't matter what age you are.

It's true.

You can go back, you can revisit, and you can start the healing process and the journey.

That's true.

It doesn't mean you're a perfect human being. And I'm sure you're gonna have, you know, challenges and flaws and things like this in the future. But to do that work and give yourself more healing energy for a longer life and A happier life. It's a beautiful thing. So I acknowledge you for that, my friend. It's inspiring. Thank you for the wisdom, for what I need to do when I hit 40. It's really doing it right now. But from 40 to 60, where are you spending the most time on social media these days? And how else can we be of service to you besides getting the book?

I have a great team and we put out tons of content that's free about how to upgrade your life and your biological software. So I think Instagram and the podcast. Podcast, Doctors Pharmacy podcast I have, which is, you know, always up there with yours, back and forth. It's great to see up there.

So it's.

I think that's a really beautiful form for exploring ideas in depth like you do on the podcast here. And I think it's a. It's a. It's. For me, it's a labor of love because I don't find it work to sit with extraordinary people and learn things that I want to learn and hear, you know, things that expand my mind and in my heart. And it's like, it's the best job in the world.

It's amazing, right? It's so much fun. I love it. Well, final question. What's your definition of greatness?

My definition of greatness is freedom. If you can be free physically, spiritually, emotionally, in your community, if you can have a free mind, you know, it's like that Bob Marley song, you know, I can't remember the exact line of it. I'm bad with lyrics, but it's like only ourselves can free our minds, you know, and it's like we have to free our minds to free and unlock all this stuff.

Absolutely.

What I'm telling you is not hard. I mean, there's some things that are really easily inexpensive and great to do. There's something that's a little more advanced, but these things are not difficult. And it's step by step and you can follow it. But if your mind's locked up, you're not gonna be able to do it. Sure you're gonna want that donut?

Exactly, man. It's my challenge. Actually, I have one more question for you, since I've asked you this before, but I feel like you're in a new space in your life with the healing process you've been in. So it's the three truths question. Imagine it's your last day on earth. You live 120, maybe 150.

I'm not sure. I'm not sure exactly however you wanna.

Live you live that long off.

Yeah.

You have the Thanksgiving dinner with all your friends and then you go to sleep and that's your last day. Yeah.

Yeah.

But for whatever reason, you got to take all the work you've done with you or go somewhere else. All your books, your podcast, everything you've created for whatever reason, that's gone. But you get to leave three lessons behind to that table of people into the world. What would those three truths be for you?

That's a beautiful question. I think. I think the the first one is. Learn how to love yourself and to love others really well. I think it seems like it should be obvious and easy thing to do, but it's not. Most of us have lack of self worth and self love. Most of us struggle to fully be present and love others. So I think that's really the core of life. I think the second thing is don't wait to do what you want to do in life. Just go for it. Whatever brings you joy, find those things and follow them. Because that will not only make you live longer, but actually make your life way better. And the third is kind of work on understanding the owner's manual for your body because it's the chassis that you carry around with you to be able to do all the rest of it.

Yeah.

So you can't love, you can't serve, you can't do all the things you want to do unless you understand how to care for this human frame that we were all gifted that has the capacity to have ecstatic extraordinary experiences. But only if we take care of it. If we're in a fog from eating crap and sitting around watching TV and mind numbingly scrolling on social media or binge watching Netflix like we're not going to be living the full human experience. So learn how to elevate your biological software. Which is really why I wrote the book Young Forever to help people get a roadmap and a very practical step by step guide to activating all of their ancient healing systems, their longevity switches and being able to have the opportunity to be a contribution to the world.

Mark, Appreciate you my man. Thank you so much.

Helpful.

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