DO THESE 5 Things Everyday To REVERSE AGING & Live Longer! | Lewis Howes & Matthew Walker

All stages of sleep are critical. That's probably one of the biggest messages that we've learned. Different types of sleep do different things for your brain and your body at different times of night. All of them are important. But it seems as though if you want to ask the question of death.

Risk.

Which problems are each case more prone to have? Perfect eating, but not proper, half the amount of sleep, four or five hours a night, but you're taking care of physically, you're taking care of spiritually and nutrition versus you sleep perfect, maybe you won't be able to sleep perfect if you're eating that bad, but you sleep eight hours a night, nine hours a night, but you're eating horrible.

Who has it worse off? So firstly, I think you should be a sleep scientist because it's a fantastic question. It's a great study and it's an incredibly complex but important study to do, the first answer is that no one has actually done that type of experiment. We've done a diluted version, a kind of, you know, diet, a light LIT version of it, which is we look at sleep and we ask, what is it in terms of the mortality risk and the health consequence risk when you're not getting sufficient sleep? And then we take all of those other factors that you've described smoking history, diet history, mental health history, et cetera, et cetera. And we add those as additional factors into the analysis and we absorb them and control for them so that we can say independent of those things or in spite or in the face of those things, sleep still carries a significant vote in determining your mortality, your rate, your date of expiration, as it were. So that's the only evidence that we have right now where you can at least control for those, but we haven't done what you're describing, which is the much more elegant, smart thing to do, which is, you know, can we put them sort of almost in a Coke Pepsi doctor challenge kind of Dr. Pepper challenge phase and see which one wins out, you know, diet, exercise, or sleep, when those two other things are held constant, but you manipulate one of those, then Hold the other two constant and manipulate one of lovely experiment, love to do it, but it's not been done.

So we don't know. What would your hypothesis be?

My suspicion is that sleep will still probably carry a larger influence than those two other factors. Now, there's a lot of assumptions I'm making there, but I'll give you another quick example. A study done back in the 1980s, which will probably never be repeated because of the moral and ethical issues, they took a group of rats, and what they found after sleep depriving the rats was that rats will die as quickly from sleep deprivation as they will from food deprivation. So sleep is that essential. Those rats were dying usually within 20 days. So sleep seems to have a deathly consequence to it. What was also fascinating, however, is that they then, and maybe I'll back up a little bit, human beings and most mammalian species will have two main types of sleep, what we call non-rapid eye movement sleep or non-REM sleep and rapid eye movement sleep or dream sleep. And what they found was that total sleep deprivation will absolutely kill a rat. If you just selectively deprive the rat of either deep non-REM sleep or REM sleep or dream sleep, they found that the rats would still die of either one of those two. So both of those types of sleep are essential. But rats were dying almost as quickly from dream sleep deprivation as they would from total deprivation. Well, they died within about 40 days, whilst the rats who were deprived of deep non-REM sleep, they died after about 60 days. So, you know, we can almost then, not that I would wish to, pit the different types of sleep head to head and ask, which is more important. Now, I should say all stages of sleep are critical. That's probably one of the biggest messages that we've learned. Different types of sleep do different things for your brain and your body at different times of night. All of them are important. But it seems as though if you want to ask the question of death risk, dream sleep may be more important than deep sleep. on the consequence basis of how quickly you die, but you need all of them. Bad things happen when you don't get any one of them.

Gotcha. Can you talk about dreams and the importance of dreams?

Yeah, we've done quite a lot of work in this area and the belief maybe 20 or 30 years ago was that dreams were just an epi phenomenon. They were just a byproduct. and so the analogy would be, you know, think of the light bulbs that I think I can see behind you in that lovely background. You know, when you create this apparatus called a light bulb to produce this thing called light in the same way that the brain has been created to produce this thing called dream sleep called REM sleep, when you create light in that way with the light bulb, you also produce this thing called heat. It was never the purpose of the light bulb. It's just what happens when you create light in that way. And the belief was the same thing for dreaming that when you create this thing called REM sleep, which serves lots of different functions, one of the conscious spinoffs, one of the byproducts, is this thing called dreaming. And that never made sense to me for the simple reason, which is this. When we are dreaming, it is more consciously, energetically demanding than not dreaming is my assumption from a brain-based perspective. And anytime Mother Nature burns the most valuable unit in your body, which is called an ATP molecule, an energy molecule, then it usually has some evolutionary advantage to it. In other words, if dreaming is metabolically more active, and you could have REM sleep without dreaming, but she still added dreaming atop of REM sleep, then it must serve some benefit. And we've now discovered that it serves at least two vital functions.

Really?

The first is that dream sleep provides a form of almost overnight therapy. That dream sleep is emotional first aid.

Interesting.

And it's during dream sleep at night that your brain takes those difficult, emotionally charged experiences, sometimes even trauma, traumatic memories and it acts like a nocturnal soothing balm. And it just takes the sharp edges off those painful, difficult experiences so that you come back the next day and you feel better about those experiences. And in that way, it's not time that heals all wounds. It's time during dream sleep that provides emotional convalescence. as it were. And it's not just dream sleep, it's also even what you dream about, not just that you dream. In other words, I'm talking about your dream content being important. Because there was a study done several years ago, and they looked at people going through a really tough time, a traumatic experience, such as a really painful and bitter divorce. And at the time when that was happening, they were recording their dreams. And then they tracked those individuals for a year. And one year later, about half of them had clinical resolution to their depression, and the other half did not. And then they went back and they separated the dreams of those two different groups. And what they found is that those people who were dreaming but not dreaming about the emotional events themselves, they didn't get clinical resolution one year later. Those people who were dreaming but dreaming of the event, they got the clinical resolution. So in other words, dreaming is necessary, but it's not sufficient. You need to be dreaming of what those events are to process those.

How do we influence dreaming what we want to dream? And not nightmares.

That's right.

Yeah.

Well, this moves us into the territory of what we call lucid dreaming.

Yes.

And for most people, lucid dreaming from within my field, within the scientific field, is actually a more simple definition. It's simply the moment that you become aware that you're dreaming. That you're dreaming whilst you're dreaming. Correct.

Does that moment exert more energy when having the dream creates exerts more energy. If you're conscious and aware while dreaming, is that another level of energy that you're exerting?

You need to be a sleep scientist.

This is absolutely... That's why I've got you on here.

You don't need me, actually. So the answer is in part, yes. But what we've... So for most people, though, lucid dreaming really means not only I'm aware that I'm dreaming, But now I can control what I'm dreaming about.

Do you often have lucid dreaming?

Do we often, as a group, you individually? No, I personally, I've only experienced lucid dreaming probably six or seven times, and it's great when it happens. But right now we know based on the population statistics, about 80% of the population does not lucid dream. 20% of the population does lucid dream. which then brings us back to your astute question, which is, can we control our dreams? And is that a good thing to gain lucidity and to gain control and to give over the driving seat to me, the individual, rather than to Mother Nature's blueprint that she's worked out? And I can play both sides of the theory equation here. On one side, I would say, If lucid dreaming was so beneficial to you as a human being, as an organism, then many more people would be natural lucid dreamers than there are now. That statistic would be reversed, if anything.

Well, I mean, if sleeping an extra couple hours a night is more beneficial, which it is, then more people would also be sleeping more.

Well, that's the hard part, is that with lucid dreaming, it's very difficult to control. But to choose not to sleep, that's unfortunately very easy to control or society.

A lot of people think it's difficult.

Well, we'll come back to it. I mean, there's really two separate things with insufficient sleep. There is you either not giving yourself the opportunity to sleep or society not giving you the opportunity to sleep despite you being able to sleep very well versus you giving yourself plenty of opportunity to sleep But just because you have a sleep disorder or you have sleep issues, you cannot generate the sleep. So the difference is opportunity is present, but you can't create the sleep versus you can create the sleep, but you don't have the opportunity to do so. And those two things are quite different. But from the lucid dreaming perspective, I could come back and argue the other side, which is to say my assumption there, the belief that Mother Nature would have had us all doing it if it was good, makes the wrong conclusion that we've stopped evolving. In other words, what if that 20% of the hominid population who are lucid dreaming is the next wave of evolution? They are the superhumans who will come next and succeed people like me who aren't natural lucid dreamers. So I can play both sides of it.

Interesting. Is there a way to train your mind and body in order to lucid dream more?

There have been some attempts. So, there's a scientist called Stephen Laberge who actually has an Institute of Lucidity, and he's got different courses and classes, how effective they are, it's a little bit unclear. And there are some simple techniques where you can, firstly, before you go to bed at night, and it sounds hokey and strange, is just repeat like a mantra to yourself, I am going to try and become conscious in my dream. I'm going to try and become conscious. And then you can do virtual reality testing in the dream. And you can do this when you're awake. So right now, you know, I am looking at my laptop. And, you know, if it's a physical entity and I'm in the real world and I'm awake, if I were to tap my screen, I can feel it physically. And you can go around and keep reminding yourself, you know, I can go over to the light switch and turn it on, turn it off. Do I have voluntary control of what's going on in my environment because often you don't have in your dreams. And then by doing that in your waking day, you can try to train yourself to do that during your sleeping, dreaming life. And at that point, when you flick the light switch and it doesn't change anything or you tap the screen of your laptop and your hand goes completely through it, then you think, oh, hang on a second. This isn't waking. You know, this is clearly a dream. So, there's different ways that you can test the reality of waking life versus dreaming life and adopt that mindset. The other thing is just to simply start trying to remember your dreams some more. So, in the morning, when you wake up, that's the first step towards a path of lucidity. Don't jump out of bed and sort of just close your eyes and try to remember your dream. Instead, wake up and then keep your eyes closed and don't try to write the dream down, don't try to dictate it, just rehearse the dream. Because dreams have this funny nature to them where as soon as we wake up, they almost evaporate so quickly from our brain.

And so if, yeah, yeah, if you don't feel it right then in moments or minutes, it's gonna be gone.

It's gonna be gone. So just wait there and try to crystallize it, try to set the dream in amber. by sort of, you know, going over it and rehearsing it, rehearsing it in your mind, build that picture, build the memory, ingrain the memory, and then pick up your pad of paper and your pencil next to you on the bedside and write it down. And gradually, as you start to remember more of your dreams, there is some evidence that that can also increase the probability of lucidity. But in truth, I'm not really, and I don't know anyone who is truly an expert in being able to.

Increase.

The frequency with which you can lucid dream from a scientific perspective. There's lots of people out there who claim, I've got this course that you can do, but the science doesn't support it that well. But the science now has proven without a shadow of a doubt, by the way, that there is a thing called lucid dreaming. We used to think it was a charlatan science, that it wasn't real. And we can go into the details as how you prove it. But it has been proven lots of different ways. Really?

Yeah.

And what is the, do we have any research on what lucid dreaming is, does for healing the body or hurting the body or the brain?

We haven't found evidence that it either hurts or helps right now. All we have is evidence understanding what happens when you become lucid as a dreamer. And this comes back to what you were asking about, which is, is there an additional metabolic consequence of going into lucid dreaming. One of the fascinating things when we go into dream sleep, well, there are many, but I'll give you just two. The first is that when you go into dream sleep, your brain paralyzes your body. You are utterly incarcerated in physical lockdown. And the reason is very simple. Your brain paralyzes your body so the mind can dream safely, so that you don't act out your dreams.

So you don't go move your body and yeah, Correct.

And so what we know is that the mechanisms that control REM sleep and non-REM sleep start deep down within the brain, in fact in the brain stem. So if you were to take a pur, a fruit, like a pur, and you were to turn it upside down, it's that sort of, you know, thin end and the stem of the pur, that's your brain stem. It's there where the principal battle for non-REM and REM sleep plays out across the night to create the 90-minute cycle of non-REM to REM sleep in humans. But as it's expressed upstairs into your brain during REM sleep, which activates lots of brain areas, but also deactivates them, there's a separate signal sent south of your neck, right down into your spinal cord, which paralyzes what we call the alpha motor neurons, which is all of your voluntary skeletal muscles. Now, that fortunately means that your involuntary muscles, things like your heart and your inspiration, keep going. Don't worry, they keep going. Otherwise, we would have been popped out the gene pool together very quickly. but your voluntary muscles, those are paralyzed. The second interesting feature coming back to lucid dreaming though, is that many parts of your brain when you dream light up the visual areas at the back of the brain, the motor strip areas across the top of the brain, the emotional centers, and the memory centers. All of these things light up, and some of them in fact are up to 30% more active when you are in dream sleep than when you are awake. which in some ways is fascinating. But the one part of your brain that goes in the opposite direction is something called your prefrontal cortex. And this is sort of, you know, it's like the CEO of the brain. It's very good at making high level, top down executive control decisions and communication. That part of the brain, as we go into dream sleep, is actively inhibited so your rational, logical brain is shut down and all of these emotional and memory centers light up. No wonder dreams are bizarre, illogical, hyper associative, filled with memories, filled with visual aspects, often have kinesthetic aspects to them. But what we've realized is that the difference between dreaming and lucid dreaming is that that prefrontal cortex part of the brain actually comes back online as we become lucid. In other words, as we gain volitional control over what we dream, the prefrontal cortex seems to be coming back online, gifting you that volition to do what you wish in your dreams.

I've had, I don't know, maybe a handful of times where I've had this dream where I wake up, my eyes are still asleep, but I'm awake, and then I open my eyes, but I feel paralyzed. And I feel like I'm screaming, yet nothing's coming out. And I can't move my arms, and I'm like, Am I paralyzed? And then eventually something comes out of my mouth, and I can move. But it always feels very weird. It's like paralysis.

I don't know if that's... And what it's called is sleep paralysis. It's a very well-known thing. and normally what happens to all of us as were, so REM sleep and non-REM sleep, as I said, will go in this 90-minute cycle. But what's interesting is that in the first half of the night, that's when you get most of your deep non-REM sleep and you don't get very much REM sleep. In the second half of the night, that's when the seesaw balance shifts and now you get much more of your dream sleep in those last few hours especially. And normally as we're waking up out of sleep and therefore typically REM sleep and therefore typically dreaming, the brain has this beautiful synchrony, this lockstep of increasing consciousness into wakefulness and increasing release of that brain-body paralysis. So that as you are regaining waking mental life, your body is released from its physical lockdown, from physical incarceration. However, there are times when one leads too far in front of the other. And it's called sleep paralysis. And you've experienced it. I've experienced it, too, can often happen when we're under levels of high stress or we're typically sleep deprived. And at that point, you become a pseudo aware. You're sort of in this mixed state of consciousness in your between the worlds of wake and sleep, as it were. But your body is still in the paralysis. So you can't lift your eyelids, why? Voluntary skeletal muscles. You can't shout out, why? Voluntary skeletal muscles. And it's often paired with a sense, understandably so, of dread and fear and a presence of someone else being there. And it turns out that this phenomenon called sleep paralysis accurately explains most, if not all, of so-called alien abductions. because when you, you know, when was the last time you heard on the news an alien abduction story that happened in the middle of the day and, you know, people were outside at lunchtime with friends at work, you know, they're all eating their sandwiches, and then all of a sudden they heard this sound, whoosh. And it's like, my goodness, you know, did you see that? Tommy was just abducted by alien. You know, it never happens like that. It's usually at night. You're usually by yourself. You describe a presence or a sense in the room, you say that they injected you with some kind of paralysing agent. You tried to fight back, but you couldn't. It's sleep paralysis.

Sleep paralysis, yeah.

Right.

Now, by the way, it's not necessarily something to be worried about. If you have it, it seems to be somewhat normal. About 25% of the population will experience it. In other words, it's as common as hiccups. But just be aware that there's nothing wrong with you, and it's not that you're being visited by anything strange or there have been some kind of worries in religious sort of domains that you require some kind of exorcism or there's sort of a long history of that in the past. We understand the biology, it's a basic science fact, and it's largely normal.

So when someone experiences it, what should they do? Just try to maintain calm and just wait for the body to wake up naturally.

That's exactly right. You will come out of it and try to, if you can, having heard this, understand what's going on. Sometimes even I don't recognize what's going on when that's going on despite knowing what I know. But gradually I get to the place where I realize what's happening and then I just relax and I say, I'm just going to give it time and I may fall back asleep or I may continue with my, you know, runway jet propulsion and I hit escape velocity of both consciousness and physical paralysis and it will be just fine. But it's very disconcerting. It really is a very strange feeling.

It's scary, right?

It's very scary. Very scary.

Very scary. What's the science talk about with promontory dreams? And, is there any research on this of people able to kind of predict the future and have these dreams that then come true later in life or things like that? Is there science and research on this?

There's some very interesting data where people have called let's say, you know, emergency services or FBI or police to say, look, I had this dream that there was a plane that was going to, you know, undergo some kind of malicious, you know, attack. And it was this particular, you know, airline. And then the next day, something actually happens on that specific airline. And you think, Okay, this surely this is real. Not so. So let's just play the statistics game. So you probably go through three or four or usually about four to five cycles of dream sleep a night. And let's just assume that you only have one dream for each one of those cycles. You usually have more, but let's just assume that. So you're going to have five dreams per night. And then that's, you know, six, five, six, whatever the recent count is, seven billion people. across the planet having seven billion times five dreams per night, the statistical law of predictable averages would absolutely confirm that someone somewhere is going to have a dream that mimics something that happens the next day. It's just chance. It's just statistics working the way that they do. And of course, when we hear it, as I first described it, you think that has to be real. But when you apply scientific rationale to the problem, you realise, in fact, there should be many more of those things than are reported based on statistical chance alone.

Interesting. So there's no science that backs that people can have dreams and they can predict events or things that have happened.

There's no future forecasting that comes by way of dreams, no.

Really?

Interesting.

Okay.

What is the... Well, not that we have of yet. You know, as a scientist, you always have to take that mentality. I think it's very important that scientists should never forget the following truth: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

So it's potentially possible we just don't have evidence scientifically that backs it.

Yeah, right now all I can do is operate in the realm of rational fact, and on that basis I can tell you we have no supportive evidence.

Have you studied any quantum physics or done any research with quantum physics and dreams and how any of that plays in? Just kind of thinking a positive thought and then in the dream creating it and then manifesting your life. Has any of that kind of weirdness come to you or that you've seen?

So, we've done a little bit of this that touches on the topic and what we've tried to do is, for example, manipulate people's emotions before sleep. So firstly, what we know is that your emotional and mental health are very intimately related to your sleep health, and it's bi-directional. And so, oh, I forgot to speak about the second benefit of dreaming, but we'll come back to that, which is creativity and memory and sort of problem solving and insight. solving. But with emotions, it works both ways. So, if you manipulate people's mood during the day or particularly during the last hour before bed, mood and emotions will have an impact on your sleep. And then conversely, how well you've slept will change how emotionally reactive and pendulum-like and emotionally irrational you are the following day. So, to come to your point, we have which is sort of manifesting positive mindset or mood. If we do a negative mood induction before sleep, and we get people to say, Focus on something that was really difficult in your life. Think about it. Increase that sadness. It has a deleterious impact on sleep. Whereas cultivating a positive mood before bedtime actually improves the quality of their sleep, what we call their sleep efficiency. And so, that's about as far as we've got in terms of augmenting or changing your waking state before sleep to see if it can have either a beneficial enhancement or a blast radius consequence on your subsequent sleep at night. And then we've done the opposite. We've manipulated your sleep at night and then looked at how you become emotionally unhinged the next day.

Right.

As it were. And that should be no surprise for a parent. I don't have children, but it's often that idea of a parent holding a child, the child is crying, and they look at you and they say, they just didn't sleep well last night. As if there's some universal parental knowledge that bad sleep the night before equals bad mood and emotional reactivity the next day. The same is true for healthy adults. Yeah, exactly.

And my focus is health disease, cancer, diabetes.

So ask them to test you on those things and go from there.

Yeah, exactly.

So that's number one, the annual health checkup. That makes sense because knowledge is power.

Exactly.

And if you're not, I think most people are like, how do I delay this checkup the longest until they need to do it? 'Cause they feel like something's off, then they check up. but preventative care is probably the best thing you can do by a number of reasons.

It's like just do the things to.

Prevent it so you don't have to get sick. Exactly.

Well, it's 10 to 20 times cheaper.

Yes.

Right.

It's much more successful.

Less painful.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's less painful. And you don't need to wait until your body will manifest itself with disease. Because at this stage, it's almost like stage four.

Right.

And your recovery chances, like if looking at cancer, is what 20 to 30% and in terms of the quality and even if you survive like my father had lung cancer back in 2005 he survived but he shrunk in size by one third.

His body?

Yeah, yeah and his quality of life never recovered to this extent. So this is where my passion for longevity starts.

You are living longer and more quality.

Yeah, yeah exactly.

Okay so that's number one.

One, two, I call it don't die stupid or don't do stupid things or scientifically I call it passive longevity. So if you're smoking, statistically you're gonna live 10 years, well less than if you look at the average for your gender and population group. So smoking minus 10 years from your life, not using Seat belts? I use them. Minus two years. Seat belts in the car? Seat belts. Yeah, minus two years from your life. Well, excessive consumption of drugs and alcohol, I don't even have the figures, but that's dangerous as well. So these are the simple things or don't doing super extreme sports. For example, I've been blessed and I had an opportunity to travel to South Pole and North Pole because it's it's still pretty safe trips. But then I thought, okay, what if I want to go to Everest, like the highest mountain on Earth? So probability of death, if you try to do it, is a little bit around, well, a little bit above 6%. So I thought like as a man who wants to change 1 billion lives and father of four kids, I don't want to do it. So these are the simple choices. And again, they are all rational in regards to smoking or your safety procedures, etc. So that's very important too. And people really underestimate that.

Don't die stupid. Don't do things so extreme that it gives you more chance of dying younger. Okay, number three.

Third is diet. So one of our limiting beliefs, and this is what has changed for us, is we underestimate the power of food and the food and the fact that food can be our medicine, right? So in this regard, there's so many disagreement in scientific circles around what actually extends our life today. But there's almost one agreement, even the most skeptical ones say that if you decrease the number of calories, your caloric intake, it's almost It's almost guaranteed that you're gonna live like two, three, four years longer and the quality actually gonna be better.

Crazy.

Yeah, it is.

You'll look younger too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. But then the question is how you do it, right? Because you don't want, it's for me, it's a nightmare just to three days a week, sorry, three times a day, seven days a week just to control like the number of calories that you do. So what I do, I'm I'm doing a lot of plant-based food because the caloric intensity of vegetables is so small. Even if we have the whole table full of vegetables, you're still gonna be fine. So that's one. Because of the current production practices for meat and fish, the industrial version of this is full of growth hormones, antibiotics, equally bacteria itself. So I'm just trying to avoid this. So that's important as well. And this is why you switch to vegetables as well. I also do fasting, but it's not for everyone. You know, I do like 36 hours of fasting every week, Monday evening to Wednesday morning.

I've been starting to do that from Sunday evening to Tuesday morning.

Yeah.

And I feel great.

It's amazing.

I just did this a couple days ago.

Yeah.

I've done it a few times this year. and I'm kind of like, okay, once a month right now, try for 24 to 36 hours. Yeah. And it's like maybe every two weeks or maybe every week eventually. I feel like I'm getting leaner. I feel like healthier, younger, all those things.

So.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, that's. I also like your choice of weekdays because I'm. I'm kind of trying. I'm killing the blue monster in the beginning.

Right.

So I'm like, the most difficult part is, like, do it on Monday and then for the rest of the week.

Yeah.

You enjoy yourself.

Yeah.

I also like wine, but specifically California one. But it's really unhealthy, specifically from the age of, like, 45, when your aging processes are starting to progress. So I. I'm sticking, like, probably one or two glasses of wine every week, like, on my scene days, like, Friday evening or Saturday.

Max.

And that's it.

Yeah.

I just did a brain scan with Dr. Daniel Amen, do you know him?

Of course, yeah.

I interviewed him for the book, Amazing Guy. I just got my results back last week and did three brain scans. Supposed to go back in four months. He wants me to give me some supplements and some hyperbolic chamber. Did my first one yesterday. I'm doing another one tomorrow. Supposed to do 40 sessions. Yeah, it's at Next Health here.

Yeah, yeah.

And in the chamber. He said, I asked him, I go, we just had an interview come out with him, but I asked him, of smoking marijuana, cigarettes or alcohol, which one is worse for the brain? And he said, marijuana, based on 80,000, I think, scan results, those that had marijuana had far worse brains than looking brains than those who didn't. He said, obviously, smoking and alcohol also affected, but marijuana's the worst. And so if we know these things that smoking, alcohol, marijuana is bad for the brain, bad for longevity, why do we keep doing them? Why do we keep doing it?

Look, it's a trillion dollar question. I can guess that I do think through evolution we didn't really have access to all these things. So our body and our mind has never been prepared to tackle the challenge of this kind of over availability of this world.

Of the world, right? So much stimulation, so much opportunities, challenges, adversity, pain, suffering, media. It was a much simpler life 100 years ago.

Exactly. Exactly.

There was still adversity, but it was like, okay, we're just hanging out with our few friends in the farm.

Yeah, that's it. Yeah, I agree. and we've never been, well, that's why I talk about discipline and the unit and longevity, because otherwise your body through centuries, actually through million years of evolution has not really been prepared to handle all this stress and all these choices. That's probably the shortest way to answer that.

Okay, so that's how you diet.

And also the final, you know, that was three, right? Yeah, yeah.

Number four.

Yeah, final. piece on the diet is the importance of like take out the sugar drinks. So like we're drinking water today. So that's super important. We have way too much sugar that we should and we can't process in terms of how our body works. The fourth is physical activity. And we have a funny view on physical activity. So, I mean, as humans, everything is like black and white. everything is binary extremes. So it's a group of people just sitting and watching football on TV. The other group of people are, okay, I need to run a marathon. But there's so many things in between. The easiest thing you can do is just wear your Whoop or Fitbit or Apple Watch and count the steps. 10,000 steps a day is enough actually to transform your metabolic state to support your longevity. like a healthy state of your body. If you look at science, starting from 6.5,000 steps or 7,000 steps is actually enough then it's a plateau. But usually say like 10,000 steps a day because we tend to under-deliver in terms of our target. And it's very easy, it's gamified. You can have immediate feedback like a badges, congratulations, prizes. That's the whole thing. I had an interview with Adrian Gore, the founder of insurance companies. I don't know who's their partner in the US, in the UK, it's Vitality UK. They started from South Africa and the only option and tools and resources they had to make people healthy is lifestyle changes. Because of the way the country was run and how poor they were, like it was like the only thing that they did. And they work a lot with guys like Apple, with Fitbit, just to make a change in your health through giving you different stimulus to do physical activity every day in the form of steps. So like if you do every week, if you complete your seven goals, you get like a cup of coffee from Starbucks every two weeks is I think tickets to the cinema. But then the funny thing, you'd be amazed how many things that we can do for free cup of coffee at Starbucks.

Like, oh, I'm gonna go do this for an hour.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So that's the thing. So gamify it. And then obviously on top of that, if you can, you should add stretching, you should add like a cardio exercise because this is the best training for your heart and vessels. And remember, it's one of the top risk for that. So then, yeah, it's cancer. So that's, that's super important as well. And also heavy lifting. What I've, what I've heard, I've seen the study, actually, that people who are professional, like heavy lifters, they have zero problem in any stage of their life, even during the old stage, zero problem with joints and bones as well. I don't know how it works, but it's, it's really amazing. So that's worth, that's your health. Yeah, everything is, I mean, there are.

Some heavy lifter bodybuilders who have destroyed their bodies. So if you're an extremist with it, obviously it's gonna shut your body down. But I think the science behind this is like the resistance training, the heavy lifting is increasing bone density. It's like, it's doing all these things for your body.

Yeah.

And muscle burns fat. So it's like helping you keep the fat off, which is helping when you stay younger and all those things. So that's physical activity. Number five.

Yeah, number five. I call it peace of mind. And as we discussed them, every time we, we think about health, we kind of defer to and we focus on, on physical health. And I do think we underestimate the importance of the mental aspect of that, because if we want to live longer, we want to live in healthy and happy state. so that's important. And that's, that's a lot of simple things, like sleeping. My rule is huge. Eight hours in the bed, seven hours of sleep.

So that's, that's what I resting for an hour.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So that's what I do. You know, I might fall asleep earlier, but then it's just, I don't want to mix that, you know, time in the bed is not always your kind of quality sleep time, then meditation is very important. The problem you just. mention how difficult and destructing this world is. So by this means we all probably have very high level of cortisol, the stress hormone. And the way Mother Nature constructed our body, it's actually meant to be like a spike. So you see a bear or something dangerous in the forest, you have a spike of cortisol, the stress hormone, you run and then in, if you're lucky, in, you know, 10 or 20 minutes, then you can actually relax and your cortisol level goes down. So, but we live in with extremely high cortisol level hour by hour, day by day, week by week. And it's, it's, and it's very dangerous. So meditation is a, is a really simple way to decrease your cortisol level. And it's got enormous health effect. And also in terms of the happiness, I think the sense of purpose and sharing the social realization sense of purpose is super important. And again, as we discussed pre-show, if you think about religious leaders or people who have a big mission in life, they tend to shine more, have more energy, and live longer. So, I mean, my purpose. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, a meaningful purpose. So those are the five out of the ten buckets. Going back to the psychological age and social, I guess, pressures or social norms. Something my father did as a child growing up is he would never celebrate my birthday. And I remember All the other kids in my class would have birthday parties, cakes, balloons, presents, all this. It was like this big celebration. My birthday comes around, nothing. I got no gifts, no parties, no nothing. It was just another day. And I remember after like a few years of this, you know, once I realized at like five, I was like, oh, I'm not even, and it was like seven and eight, I was like, Dad, why don't you celebrate my birthday? What's like, do you not love me?

You know, I was like, Yeah, yeah.

He goes, Son, we celebrate you every day, but I don't wanna put emphasis on your age, on how old you're getting.

Yeah.

Because I've seen so many people focus on their age and be held back mentally and emotionally and physically by how young they are or how old they are. And so we never celebrated it. And I was like, Dad, but we can still get like a cake or something, you know, and have like presents. But he was like, I just don't want you to be limited by your age.

By a number.

By focusing on time. as a factor that's of importance for you that could hold you back. And I thought it was, you know, after of like the sadness of it, I was like, this makes sense. And I grew up feeling just like, it doesn't matter how old I'm getting biologically, right? But psychologically, I'm staying young and healthy and fulfilled and fun and joyful. I'm expressing myself like a child. And therefore I feel young. And so, and I never feel like limited because I'm like, oh, I'm now 38 biologically, so it's like, I can't do this. It's like, no.

And you can't. You can still do whatever I want. Oh, yeah, that's a great story. I mean, it's obviously a little bit painful for the kid, if I can imagine.

But that's a great lesson. But it's kind of a great habit. It's breaking down the social norms of like how to put emphasis on our age. And how, okay, now you're a big milestone 30, now it's 40, like, oh, you're getting over the hill. It's like saying these things, words have meaning and start to psychologically affect us. Like now I'm middle aged. Okay, so you only got half your life left.

I mean, yeah.

So Stalwal downhill from here, it's like the words we use transform our mindset which affects our physiology.

Exactly, exactly. You also touched on very important topic of how society and our life will change if we're all gonna live much, much longer. Whether it's 150 years or 200 years as well. And then I think the biggest mindset shift that we need to do is that our life will consist of several beautiful mini lives. Okay? So mini lives. Mini lives.

Seasons.

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, that's a great metaphor or way to call it. So then every 10 to 20 years, we will have a. An opportunity. and the pleasure of changing career, right? Or start to do things that you always were dreaming of doing. So that's that I do think it's important to recognize and we always be on this trajectory of redefining ourselves. And I do think it's very soon that we'll have it's going to be a social norm to make a lot of changes in your life in terms of, you know, education, career, even purpose, even a dream, every 10 to 20 years. Well, that's one of the things to, to grow young. But also, I think it's a necessity in a world where our lifespan will go beyond or well beyond 100 years.

Yeah, that's cool.

I'm curious about environment and weather. How does that play into age and aging. Are ants staying young? Do people that live in extreme colds live longer? Do people live in extreme hots? Is it more mild temperature where they live longer? Do we have any research on this?

Yes. And this is very interesting actually. So every time we're talking about extremes, it's not really great.

Either way.

So if you're right in the middle of Africa, Right. And always under the sun. It's not that great because it, what it does, it's actually speeds up, like the aging processes in your body.

The skin and everything.

Yeah.

Well, the other, the other extreme, if you are like really up north, that.

Then the body has to work so hard.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

To stay warm.

So that's, that's one. Well, the other thing is, you are deprived of sun because it's like six months or Yes. Yeah, what? Vitamin D. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of polar night and six months of polar day, you don't have like a vitamin D which process naturally in your body. And also you usually have certain limitations in terms of your access to nutritional food. Food is in deficit there in terms of variety and like vegetables as well. So you're really far away from your organic farm or wherever you take your vegetables from. so I do think that we all like, if you think about us or Europe in a sweet spot of where we can live for, to maximize our longevity. I also, I, I talk about then, about this in a concept called longevity Revolution. I do think, and I, I say there's seven signs of longevity Revolution just for communication purposes. And first sign for me is that I, I want you and all of us to watch out how longevity friendly our environment is becoming. So, like China and India added 10% of their timberlands in the last 10 years or driver's cars.

They added what?

Timberlands like forestry area. Forestry area increased, right?

So, Why is that for oxygen?

Is that for nature? Because I mean, I think making sure the world is becoming better, right? And fighting global warming is on everyone's agenda. And like these countries, they kind of thought, okay, if we will increase the timber like a forest land, that's going to help to solve a problem. The other sign is like driverless cars. So if you are, I was about to say, if you're driving driver's car. So if you are in a driver's car, your chances to get in severe accidents or die is actually 10 times smaller.

If you're not driving the car.

Yeah, yeah.

So if it's drive, if it's driven by a computer.

Is that out there yet? I mean, there's the Tesla that I.

Have has like self-driving but you're still. Yeah, we're getting there. It's just a matter of in the next, because, you know, I want to prepare all of us, not only for changes that we just discussed for today, but like you need to stay on Longevity Bridge in the next 5 to 10-15 years. You need to be healthy and happy to make sure you enjoy the benefit of all these technologies which are coming.

It's not too late.

I call it Horizon 2. So we will discuss that as well. But then drive hardy scars. So that's a natural choice. So you just decrease mortality rate by a factor of 10.

Wow.

That isn't it amazing? Or plant-based meat or lab-grown meat. Well, that's. Well, just another caloric restriction intervention, interventionally, if you think so. I'm actually very hopeful and positive about the fact that right now we have a choice, whether you go for, like, a usual meat or. plant-based meat as well. And I'm not religious about being vegan or vegetarian. I have plenty of friends who are.

Gonna.

Have this habit. But, you know, obviously all these changes in the environment contributes to.

Right.

You know, our ability to live longer and enjoying our life. In fact, I'm actually. I'm doing a lot of pro bono programs called longevity at work. with the largest corporations on earth. I don't want to use their names. And again, everything I do in longevity is me sharing the best of me, so I do it for free. But what we do, we create longevity bubbles, like a longevity enabling environment in their offices. So people use the stairs, there's healthy food in canteens and vending machines. They all have wearables, and then week by week you just compare this department with this department. this state with this state as well. They have, and, and right now we have so many apps for, like, meditation, for smoking cessation and, and annual checkup is, is a part of so many health plans. So you just need to have, like, a good focus on that.

Yeah.

So this is what we do. It's just another way for you to improve your longevity chances to make sure you have, you're surrounded with healthy choices rather than you're not just you. opening out your fridge and it's like alcohol and chocolate. I love all of this, but it's just not really healthy. We are not prepared to handle these choices on a regular basis by Mother Nature.

If someone's feeling overwhelmed and stressed on a day-to-day basis and they can never feel to get rid of the stress, they try to meditate, they try to get massages, they try to do all these other things, but they don't try to breathe. What's something they could do? if they have a minute throughout the day.

A minute.

A minute or two, you know, four minutes. Four minutes.

Cool. Okay, four minutes. I got a great exercise.

They're overwhelmed. They're stressed. They're freaked out.

Well, later. I'm gonna do this with you.

Okay.

Four minutes.

Perfect.

Do.

Should I say it right now?

Sure.

Or we do it and then we talk about it. We could do that. It's not so difficult. Okay, I talk about. I just make you do relax. You know, you're not relaxed because you're full of stress. But anyway, I say, just loosen up the body a little.

Stand.

Just mind your body for now. Just four minutes. So shut up there. Just be and feel who you are. You're gonna. You feel your feet on the ground. your arms and that's it. Now breathing. And let go.

Should we stand up and do as it's standing or is it sitting?

Shall we do this?

Let's stand up right here and keep the mics on.

Yeah, okay, you do that.

Work?

You should be able to do push-ups.

Okay, cool. We can do it too. Yeah, we can make it work.

Okay.

Okay.

What you do right now is do make a physiological reset. of the nervous system and the shape of the body is becoming better.

All right.

And it is no effort.

All right.

It feels like, hey, I can go on. What's happening? That's chemistry.

Okay.

Going into the. Keep us up better body and learning how to control stress hormone. So if we are too stressed, we got to go to the mechanism who is producing the stress. and we have no control with this one. You reset the stress hormone mechanism.

Right.

The brain stem.

Okay.

Within four minutes.

Okay.

And afterwards you feel good because the connection is there. And I'm not saying feeling is understanding.

Okay.

There you go.

So standing. That's gonna test it as well.

Yeah.

You might need to. the door and have space out there for you, sir, if you. Unless you can.

Are you able to do push-ups over there?

I'll make it work. Okay, we'll move the camera. I'll make it work.

Yeah, you should be able to do.

Yeah, I'll be good to do that. Yeah, I'll be fine here. Do I need to stand here for the camera?

Okay, time around.

She's got it, yep.

Is it on? Okay, I say, now.

Breathe in.

Let go.

Breathe in.

28. Get them in again. Just go with the flow. No minding, just go. You feel what you feel as you're breathing. We are ox-energizing the body right now. It's getting into all the cells. Not only the carbon dioxide is going down, oxygen is getting in. Body becomes alkaline. What do you need to perform? You need alkalinity. Because of the oxination, alkalinity comes in. That's what you need to perform. Now, because you are so stressed, you are not connected to the brainstem. In the brainstem is the directory of the hormonal system. We will consciously go into a physiological state of not having oxygen because we're gonna do push-ups after exhalation that turns on the brainstem and resets whatever is causing the stress, the hormonal system, the stress hormone, adrenaline, epinephrine, cortisol, and it is controlled. It resets it. Okay.

Yeah.

And you get a good figure out of it. Now you got already a good figure. Okay, no minding about that.

Go on.

15. 14. Let it go. Go into it. 30. Get your mind on. You know what the mind is able to do. Just get your mind on. Into the cell. I do my best. The best will come about. and it's no competition. It's just going into the depth of the body and the brain. 11. 10.

9.

Take a man. Come on, Lewis. and how? Lewis house. That's the way. Yeah, it's fun, too. Five.

Four, three, two, one.

One.

Here comes the last one. Pull it.

Let it go. Stop. Push-ups Let's go. Looking good. No air in the lungs. Mind is resetting. The hormonal system is resetting. There is no doubt. Amazing! Good, good! And relax. This is the way to get into the depth of the brain, the directory of stress hormones and all cells.

Wow.

Yeah, man.

It's the adrenal axis completely under control. It's four minutes. How much did it take?

What?

45 seconds.

No, the total with the breathing.

Less than four minutes.

Oh, less than four minutes. So anybody can do this. Gets a good figure, resets the nervous system. There were good push-ups by the way.

Yeah, all the way chest again.

Yeah, yeah, I saw them.

I broke my wrist playing football. so I have to do one on the fist, but wow, yeah, I did 35. And I can usually maybe do like, I don't know, 20, you know, without having to take a break and.

Wow.

Yeah. Yeah.

Amazing.

It's good.

You know, you. We talked about stress, uncontrolled stress for people who are living in stress.

Wow.

And for them, this is excellent because it trains. the body and it trains the brain to become consciously under your at will, under your control.

Yeah, because if you're stressed out and you do this for four minutes, I mean, I've got a sweat, I've released any tension, you can't think about anything else.

That's it.

You have to focus on beating your record or trying to do as many as you can.

Yes.

And yeah, I wanted to see why you'd be stressed afterwards, or at least you would be able to release a lot.

You test it out. You will will probably meet, you know, many people who are stressed and, you know, famous or stress and a lot of responsibility, pressure and all that creating. And just do the four minutes.

Yeah.

So you see the miracle of life happening in front of you.

So you're breathing for four minutes or do you breathe for three and a half and then do.

No, it's like two minutes, two minutes, two and a half minutes.

Okay. Cool.

And then you do that.

Crazy.

And then, yeah.

Two minutes of breathing and then go in the push-ups and you get a.

Nice figure out of it.

There you go.

And your stress or moan is directly under your control. That's the way nature meant it to be, by the way. But we alienated from nature, so we don't know. And then it runs into Loops and we don't know how to break through. This one break through.

Amazing. How many can you do from that?

I don't know.

You never get stressed. You don't have to do it.

I. I do a lot when I. What I want, I regularly. I do 50, but I did 100 as well.

100.

Yeah.

No breath.

No breath.

Amazing.

Yeah.

The body is amazing. The chemistry is amazing. And what we are able, capable of doing is amazing. Just.

Let's do it.

Your ability to tolerate bad food, bad sleep, sedentary behavior, more stress, all those things, it just gets weaker and weaker and weaker. And I think it declines non-linearly. So again, what you experience is a decline between 30 and 40, eh, it's bad. 40 to 50, yeah, that's worse. 50 to 60, you can fall off a cliff.

Is there a way to reverse this?

I don't think we know. I think you can definitely slow the progression of it. And, you know what? I would say you probably can reverse it, right? So just as you can clearly reverse diabetes, diabetes is a glucose homeostasis problem and it's clearly reversible. But, you know, so there are probably some variants of this that are harder to reverse than others, but no, I think we can reverse this process. But it gets harder, you know, it gets harder as time goes on. It gets harder the further you are into, you know, sort of the physiologic trap.

What are you doing to reverse it now that you've been experiencing this kind of not maybe a cliff, but a dip over the last five years for yourself? How are you thinking about it?

Well, I sort of had a change of heart five years ago. So actually six years ago, 2014. So I sort of hung up my bike, which at that point I'd switched from swimming to cycling as sort of my main sport. But at that point, a couple of things had happened. So, one, I had become very familiar with a lot of emerging research on excessive cardiovascular training, which again, is a rich man's problem.

Ultra marathons, ultra biking, ultra swimming, hiking.

That's right, that's right. So, again, and it's the same sort of curve, right? Where as exercise dose of exercise goes up, mortality comes down, but it has this little bit of a J where once you start to get into hyper amounts of exercise, especially over the age of 40, you're actually driving an increase in mortality. Now, again, Really? Yes.

Does that mean running a marathon once a year or is it running a marathon every week?

Yeah, great, great point. Running a marathon once a year, probably not increasing your mortality at all. but running 40-50 miles a week probably is, especially at that age. Now, again, this gets to your point about resilience. Someone in their 20s doing that doesn't seem to have any impact on mortality. It really only seems to be an issue if you continue. In fact, I did an interview with a cardiologist, James O'Keefe, on my podcast who is the world's expert on this and It was actually James's work six years ago, because I heard him speak at a conference 10 years ago. We became friends. It's one of those things I'm sure you've experienced this, where you hear something and you don't want it to be true, so you basically come up with all the reasons you're going to poke.

Holes in it until you find the evidence the other way.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. And eventually it became very difficult to ignore that this hyper amount of exercise was counterproductive. So that's one piece of the change six years ago.

It's probably bad that I just committed to doing the marathon next year yesterday.

That's all right though, you'll be fine. I just think don't do one a month. Yeah, exactly. And then I think the second thing was I realized, it was sort of funny, but I realized my prime was so far behind me that I needed to think about what was I doing this in service of, right? And not that I needed anyone other than myself to do these things, because I'm very self-motivated. So I don't, But just as a joke one day I asked my wife, I said, Hey, do you know what my PR is for 20K?

Like, bike, run or swim?

Yeah, bike on a 20K bike on the time trial. And I was like, this is my wife. She hears me talk about this stuff all the time. I have spreadsheets and models and data and I analyze my power data every single day. And I'm trying to break the record for San Diego. Like, I'm really so switched on to this, she'll probably get it within a minute. She'll guess what my PR is within a minute. She was off by 20 minutes, meaning she wasn't even in the zip code. So I was like, huh, that's funny. It's literally the most important person in my life, couldn't care less about this. And what I realized was, I need to start thinking about a different sport, which is the sport of longevity. So what does it mean to be a kick-ass 100-year-old? And so that was the beginning of a mental model for me that in the past two years has gained much more traction called the Centenarian Olympics. So how do you train to kick ass at 100 should you get there? And of course, everywhere along the way. So that now dominates my landscape of training, which means I don't, you know, care about how fast I can, you know, ride a 40 kilometer time trial, because that doesn't quite fit into what a centenarian needs to be able to do.

What is your mindset going into a 40 mile bike then, or some type of experience? Is it more the joy of it?

So I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't train. No, my training is very specific, but now it is fundamentally organized around four pillars. So the pillars being stability, strength, mitochondrial or aerobic efficiency and anaerobic performance. And so each of those then has a super layer deep detail approach. And I still ride my bike four hours a week. So it's a fraction of what I used to do, and it's now very much geared to a certain energy system and a type of training.

What was the fourth one?

Stability, strength, mitochondria, and mitochondrial efficiency or aerobic efficiency. And then the fourth and final one is anaerobic performance.

So you focus on those four metrics now on a day-to-day basis.

Yeah, yeah. Those, those four pillars sort of make up the training program, which is then in service of something that I invite every patient to define for themselves, which is because you will have a different set of variables for me potentially. But my Centenarian Olympics has 18 events in it. I want to be able to pull myself out of a pool where there's a one-foot gap between the water and the curb, like lift myself up. I want to be able to hop over a three-foot fence. I want to be able to walk three miles in an hour. I want to be able to carry two 10-pound bags up four flights of stairs. I want to be able to goblet squat 30 pounds because that's about the weight of a kid. I want to be able to get up off the floor without using my hands. So I could rattle off all of my 18 things and you would say, Peter, those seem really easy and you'd be right as a 37-year-old stud. But the point is- As a 36-year-old.

A lot of them aren't easy.

Most 60 year olds couldn't do this if their life depended on it. And I have yet to meet, but maybe one person in their 80s or 90s who can. And so that's the aspiration, is to get to that level in your 80s or 90s. How do you work that backwards to inform your training in your 60s, in your 50s and in your 40s? And it's actually very hard.

And as I'm getting into, you know, I'm three years away from 40. What should someone in my age range be thinking about when they're, you know, I'm healthy, I feel good, you know, maybe if some aches and pains here and there when I'm training hard or something, but for the most part, I feel amazing. What should I be thinking about moving forward so that I continue to feel amazing and have the ability to do these things?

So I think it's never too late to at least become familiar with what these ideas mean. And it doesn't mean that you have to go whole hog and devote yourself to this. Like I've obviously made a very conscious choice that I don't go to swim meets, I don't go to bike races. I don't train for those things anymore. And a big part of that is just time. There are only 168 hours in a week and I have a very clear set of priorities and I'm willing to set aside 10 to 12 hours a week for exercise, which by many people's standards is still quite a lot, but probably by the standards that you exercise and certainly by the standards that I used to exercise, I've never exercised so little in my life. So I have to be very efficient with every one of those minutes. And that means I'm laser focused on the four principles of that. In your case, I think it comes down to saying, okay, how much time do you want to devote to the long game? How much time do you want to devote to the short game? Another way to think about this would be investing. If you're looking at an investment portfolio, you might say, How much do I want to put both time and money, so the actual capital I set aside, but also the amount of time I spend deliberating over it into my retirement account versus how much do I want to invest as a day trader for short-term gains for money that I'm going to be using in the near term that's maybe even supplementing my income today. You could have totally different strategies for that and that's totally fine. So I'm just in the category where I'm only thinking about long-term permanent And so that's the first question is you have to decide how do you want to do that? And it might be that you say, you know, Peter at 37, I just want to focus on running a marathon. I've always wanted to do an Ironman, so I'm going to go and do that. And, you know, I want to climb Mount Everest and that's going to require, like, you might have a whole bunch of these bucket list things.

And truthfully, I would say do them.

Now because it's only going to get harder. Because you're not going to be able to do it later.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't think you're going to want to do it later. So get those things out of the way. and then maybe when you turn 40, you say, okay, now it's time I'm gonna really focus on my centenarian Olympics when I have a better sense of what those events look like for me personally.

That's interesting. Is there a list somewhere of your 18 on your website that I can link up for people to check this out?

No, it's not. We have, I think I have a subset of them for our patients in our documents that talk through this stuff, but it'll be in my book.

I want to close the loop on these. Four things we talked about sleep for a while. The first one was intake of glucose. Second thing was you don't have the efficient muscle to take in the glucose. The third is sleep disturbance. We talked about that for a while. What was the fourth thing that we were going to cover here?

Stress.

Yeah.

So cortisol is a really important hormone. Without it, you'd be dead. But too much of it can really wreak havoc. and a big part of what too much cortisol does is really drive that excess production of glucose out of the liver. And so of these four, I certainly have never seen a case where just stress alone resulted in diabetes in a person whose nutrition intake, you know, or, you know, their, their, their intake, their exercise and their sleep were perfect. But it, it really is like having just a little bit of extra kindling on a fire. It's a multiplier. Yeah, it is. It's a multiplier.

What are the three causes of stress?

Well, I mean, I think there are many causes of stress, right? So I think you've got kind of the, you could divide it into sort of internal versus external, right? So I think of this in a way that says, look, it's really more about a person's response to externalities.

Response to the experience, the event, the thing that happened.

That's right. You can have three people that are exposed to the exact same externality, that have three completely different responses to it. So I think it's less productive to focus on the external piece and more productive to focus on the internal piece. So this is where I think my favorite by far. Well, so now I think there are three ways we can go about coping with this, which, because this kind of goes, this is just the tip of the iceberg is the stress piece. This really becomes now the sort of gateway into what is mental and emotional health all about. Yes. And now I think there are basically three, you can see I'm a very pillared, structured, left-brained guy, right? I like that. So now we go into basically three ways that we can approach dealing with this. One of these is through psychotherapy, which I'm a huge, huge proponent of. Pharmacotherapy, which I'm also a proponent of, though I think it's vastly misunderstood. And then behavioral therapy. which I'm an overwhelming proponent of, in particular a type of behavioral therapy called dialectical behavioral therapy, or DBT. And again, it's- DBT therapy. Yes, dialectical behavioral therapy, not to be confused with cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, which is also popular, but I believe that DBT is more efficacious. But that said, I think different personalities respond different to different versions. For what it's worth, my personality responds so much better to DBT than CBT. So therefore, I found it to be much more helpful.

So these three things will help give us the tools to cope with stress.

Yes.

Gotcha. And what I'm hearing you say is it's we, a lot of people lack tools for these three main things, cognitive, physical, and emotional resilience. We're lacking the tools to then amplify them in our favor as opposed to against us. And the more tools we can gain, then we can hopefully take the actions to live healthier and longer.

Yeah.

And it has to be proactive. I mean, I think that's the piece that's inherent in what you said is at some point you have to decide you're going to go on offense. So, yes. You can't just sit on defense and say, I'm going to take it as it comes and what's going to happen is going to happen.

And.

I think you have to take this view, which is, I'm going to be incredibly proactive and I might not be able to control everything. I don't represent that there's some path where everybody's going to be able to make it to live to 100. There are just some people whose genes Don't command that. And that's fine. There are people out there who have so many genetic things working against them that they'll be lucky to make it to 80. But the point is, without making these proactive changes, they might have lived only until 70. And to your earlier point, they might have spent the last 20 of those years in an unbelievable state of misery. So when you contrast living to 70, spending 20 years in misery versus living to 75 with maybe two years in misery. It just doesn't even strike me as a trade-off.

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So what I'm hearing you say is that the gut, the microbiome, and these bugs have a lot to do with how you can live well now and also for extending life. Is that what I'm hearing?

Yeah, so you take 105 year old people around the world and you look at their... And these are thriving people.

Not like about to die, but they can move around.

They can... Yeah, it's like Edith MoraY who starts the book. That lady was 105 and a half when this picture was taken.

Wow.

And so she was in two inch wedgies. She walks her little Pomeranian and she's smart as a whip and she was one of the women who really changed my life. Her name's Edith Moray. She's Michelle in all my books. So anyhow, so you take these people and you look at their gut microbiome. They have the gut microbiome, the diversity of a 30 year old individual. And if you look normally at people as they age, their gut microbiome becomes less and less diverse. You ultimately have only a few species. So it's this, number one, it's this huge diversity that makes a big difference. Number two, we now know that there are certain bugs that really make the difference. And the longevity paradox is actually teaching people how to nurture the bugs that are very interested in keeping you alive. Another way of looking at this, you're basically a condominium for these bugs, for bacteria.

So how do we attract all these diverse good bugs?

I'm so glad you asked. So we know that good bugs, like to eat certain foods. And a lot of this was actually based on, there's this fascinating creature called the naked mole rat. And naked mole rats, make sure everybody who's listening or watching googles naked mole rats. And here will be my first controversial statement of the day. Naked mole rats have sometimes been described as a penis with buck teeth.

Okay.

Okay. So Google it.

There you go.

You'll see it. So these are probably one of the ugliest creatures in the world. They naked mole rats live in the Sahara Desert, and they live in colonies very much like termites or bees, and they live in Subterranean tunnels. And naked mole rats appear to have no end mortality. In other words, nigamole rats live. at least 10 to 20 times longer than any other rat. Rats live about two years. Naked mole rats have lived 20-30 years. In fact, no one has actually known that you could actually have an end life of a naked mole rat. So they've been the darling of longevity researchers for a very long time. In fact, hilariously, When I was a professor at Loma Linda, which is a blue zone, I had behind my desk this giant iridescent naked mole rat picture from the San Diego Zoo. And everybody goes, what's the deal, you're a famous heart surgeon, what the deal, you got this naked mole rat behind your desk? I mean, it's bright pink and purple. And I've been fascinated with naked mole rats because they're the longest, you you know, living creatures. So naked mole rats have the same diverse microbiome as 105 year old people.

Really?

Really? And what the heck is going on? Well, it turns out naked mole rats, unlike any other rat, eats roots, eats tubers, and eats fungi that are growing in the subterranean area. So if you think I would like you to eat some roots and tubers and mushrooms, you're absolutely right, because the evidence is rather striking that the bugs that like these things are what keeps the naked mole rat living so long, unlike any of its other rat cousins who eat grains. And we can be sure to be talking about that soon. So this is the only rat that eats tubers and mushrooms and roots and they have the microbiome of 105 year old people who are thriving. In fact, a study published last week out of Singapore showed that humans who eat two cups of mushrooms per week do not get Alzheimer's disease. And it's because of any type of mushroom? Any type you want.

Just go to the grocery store, get some mushrooms.

Button mushrooms are second best of all mushrooms in terms of a compound that we now know is the secret of mushrooms. Porcini mushrooms, which of course is the prized mushroom of Italians, is number one for these compounds. Now these compounds are polyphenols. They're actually cousins of polyphenols that are in green tea. And what happens with these compounds is that they're actually eaten by bacteria. Bacteria love to eat polyphenols. And the bacteria then, for lack of a better word, poop out these compounds that have been changed a little bit. And it's those compounds that then enter our circulation. And a particular compound in mushrooms that's been manipulated by bacteria protects the brain from damage.

From Alzheimer's or Alzheimer's or anything like that.

Wow.

So mushrooms.

Mushrooms. Eat your mushrooms every week.

Every week.

What if there's a diverse of mushrooms or if you eat the same mushroom.

All the time, does it matter? It really doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter. And again, the plain old humble button.

Mushroom will do it for you.

Just have a couple of weeks. What I do is, you know, I take a bunch of different mushroom blends.

Mix it up.

Yeah, mix it up.

Nations of mushrooms.

Yeah, and I take mushroom capsules and I have a product that's actually lots of different mushrooms. You just squeeze in your coffee or whatever.

There you go. Okay, I have a question now. So, for people that want to live longer and be healthy while they live longer, not having to get surgeries all the time. If you had three to five minutes max to talk to someone, who said, I just want to live longer. I want to know the secrets to living longer. I got to figure out the keys and you've got three minutes with them. What would you say in three minutes are the things they must do every day or as often as they can for the rest of their life to extend their life?

The first thing they must do is realize that the only purpose of food is to get olive oil into your mouth. The only purpose of food. and preferably it'll be mushrooms that you pour the olive oil on. That's number one. The evidence that the polyphenols in olive oil, if you really, you know, wanted to live well for a very long time, olive oil is the key. Two of the blue zones, actually three if you count the Acioli, use a liter of olive oil per week. Now that's a lot of olive oil. It's like 10 to 12 tablespoons a day. So there's a beautiful study out of Spain that I talk about where you took 65 year old people and we'll dumb it down real quick. Two groups. One group had to use a liter of olive oil per week for five years. Then they changed their olive oil once a week at the clinic. The other group had to eat a low fat Mediterranean diet. both Mediterranean diets of Spain. At the end of five years, the olive oil group had better memory, had improved memory than when they started. The low fat group lost memory. The women in the olive oil group had a 67% less incidence of breast cancer than the low fat group. People in both groups who had coronary arteries disease. The group that got the olive oil had a 30% less incidence of new events versus the group that had the low fat diet. And so if three blue zones, and this study doesn't convince you that you better get olive oil into you, olive oil grows brain cells. And it's not the oil per se, it's actually the polyphenols in olive oil. Olive oil, the polyphenols literally make your blood vessels slippery. And I've actually published data on this that your blood vessels, you cannot stick cholesterol to blood vessels if you have olive oil in your system. Huh.

Yeah.

So, you know, drink the dumb stuff. Do you drink it?

Yeah, I do. Wow. I take a shot of it.

Craig's always talking about how he can drink as much as possible. But what I would urge people to do is, so you can cook an olive oil. This myth that olive oil, oxidizes when you cook it is one of the worst internet myths there is. It turns out that olive oil is the least oxidizable oil. It's even better than avocado oil or coconut oil. It does not oxidize. Oxidize meaning like evaporate.

No, I mean it gets damaged.

Damaged? Got it. Okay. It turns out everybody sees olive oil smoking and they figure that's damaged.

It's not. So, you can burn as much as you want.

You know, cultures have been using olive oil to cook with for 5,000 years. And, you know, there's not a lot of dead Italians from cooking in olive oil. Okay, so you gotta get out of that. So that's number one. Number two, you gotta take vitamin D3.

You got to.

Vitamin D3, not D. Yeah, well, there's D2, there's D1. What's vitamin D3 and why is it important? So D3 is the active form of vitamin D. that we use, you will be shocked that people who have the highest levels of vitamin D in their bloodstream live the longest and live well compared to people with the lowest levels of vitamin D3. It turns out that you have to have vitamin D3 to activate stem cells activation.

And we can.

Vitamin D is also through the Sun, is that correct?

But it's nearly impossible to get enough vitamin D through the Sun.

Really? Nearly impossible.

80 of Southern Californians are vitamin D deficient because we're slathering sunscreen on us and we're wearing long sleeve shirts. We're inside a lot. You know, I live in Palm Springs. It's pretty hot in the summer. Really hot. And not to go out a lot. in the summer, so we don't have enough vitamin D. And so you have to swallow vitamin D. The University of California San Diego published a study that the average human being to have an adequate level of vitamin D3 should be taking 9,600 international units a day. So basically 10,000 international units. They found no one who had vitamin D toxicity at 40,000 international units a day.

Overdose on vitamin D?

I have yet to see vitamin D toxicity and I've been measuring vitamin D levels for 20 years in patients every three months. I personally run my vitamin D level greater than 120 nanograms per milliliter for the last 12 years to prove I'm not dead. So far so good. And here's, you know, just to tell you how crazy this is, if I feel I'm getting something, if I'm coming down with a scratchy throat or something, I'll take 150,000 international units of vitamin D3.

How many capsules?

Three days. Well, so you can get 5,000s, right? So that's 10 capsules three times a day for three days. So I'm basically taking half a million international units of vitamin D to ward off a virus.

Everyone always says you should take vitamin C when you start to feel like a scratchy throat.

It really doesn't work. Vitamin D is probably one of the best antivirals that's ever been discovered. So vitamin C really doesn't help that much. It really doesn't help that much. We can get into vitamin C and I think everybody should take a time release vitamin C twice a day and it's actually for a different purpose.

What's the purpose? All right, quick version.

All right, quick version. So you and I are one of the few animals animals that don't manufacture our own vitamin C. Us, monkeys and guinea pigs. And we have actually all the genes to manufacture vitamin C. There's actually five of them. The last gene is turned off. It's called a ghost gene. Why do we do that? Well, we manufacture vitamin C from sugar, from glucose, and it's actually very expensive to manufacture vitamin C. So the theory is, and I like the theory, is we grew up in Africa with lots of vitamin C containing plants in our diet. And so it was unnecessary for us to manufacture vitamin C and the theory goes we'd have some extra glucose left over that we could store as fat to make it through the winter when times were rough and we're the only fat storing apes. So, the problem is vitamin C is essential to repair collagen and everybody collagen, okay? The reason smokers get wrinkles is collagen is broken because you actually repair cracks in collagen with vitamin C. And smokers use up all their vitamin C with what's called oxidative stress. so they don't have any vitamin C. In fact, here's another controversial statement. If I've got a smoker with heart disease, I'm willing to trade him his smoking with him taking large amounts of vitamin C while I get the rest of his diet squared away rather than tell him to stop smoking. Now, the reason I say that is, and I talk about this in the book, there's this fascinating fascinating island people called the Kitavans in New Guinea who smoke like fiends. They eat 60% of their diet is taro root. The other part of their diet is coconut oil. And they live into their mid-90s with no medical care, but they've been studied extensively. There has never been a case of a heart attack, heart disease, or a stroke in these Smokers. What they do do is they eat a lot of vitamin C containing fruits and vegetables as part of their diet. Olive oil as well?

They don't have any olive oil.

They have coconut oil. That's their coconut. They don't have any olives down there.

So, you can do without olive oil and still live a long life.

Yeah.

But you think olive oil will... Yeah.

Since olive oil is so readily available, you might as well... Might as well.

Might as well.

Okay. So, anyhow, back to vitamin C. Yeah. You have to have vitamin C to repair the cracks in blood vessels. People remember scurvy, where people would die, they'd bleed to death on long ocean voyages. Actually 50% mortality on those old ocean voyages, just dying from scurvy. And the British Navy, the reason they're called limeys is because the surgeon in the British Navy realized that if he gave them limes to take on the voyage, that they wouldn't die of scurvy. That's why the British Navy is still called Limeys. So vitamin C repairs the cracks in collagen and our blood vessels are flexing all the time. And so these cracks have to be repaired and if they're not repaired you basically bleed to death. We have a system of repairing those cracks and it's called cholesterol and cholesterol will patch those cracks. So if you have plenty of vitamin C throughout the day, you'll be able to repair those cracks. And there's a wild study, I mean, head down a rabbit hole, you can genetically engineer rats to lack that final gene to make vitamin C. And they will live half as long as a normal rat. If you then put vitamin C in their water, they will live as long as a normal rat who can manufacture their vitamin C, but they're drinking the water throughout the day. So, vitamin C, unfortunately, we have to manufacture it. We have to manufacture it and we've got some interesting tricks to do that coming up. But in the meantime, the average person should take like 1000 milligrams of timed-release vitamin C twice a day to cover their ass.

Wow.

Okay. So the first thing I heard you say this, three minutes is turning into 20 minutes. It's okay. No worries.

The first thing I heard is olive oil. Oh, and olive oil is actually one of the tricks to activate the dose gene, a polyphenol and olive oil. Okay.

You will actually make vitamin C. Okay. There you go.

So there you go.

Another good reason. So have olive oil, vitamin D, have.

Lots of vitamin D. Three, D3. D3. And then what's next to live a long life? Next is you got to get some form of long chain omega-3 fat, better known as fish oil. And vegans have no excuse anymore. There is algae based DHA and EPA. But here's the deal. Your brain is about 70% fat. So if you want to call me a fat head, you know, I will attack you.

Yeah, yeah.

And I can just see now the internet lighting up. he is a fat head. So, half of the fat in your brain is actually an omega-3 fat called DHA. So, half, basically half of your brain is fish oil. And as I talk about in the Longevity Paradox, you look at people what are called the omega-3 index, which basically looks at how much DHA you have in over the past two months. People with the highest Omega-3 index have the largest brains and the largest areas of memory, the hippocampus. People with the lowest levels of DHA have the most shrunken brains and the smallest memory areas, hippocampus. So mom was right when she said fish is brain food. She's in no why it was, but we now know it's DHA is really what makes your brain.

So sushi is good.

Sushi is actually not a good idea.

Oh, wow.

Most of the people I see with high mercury levels are sushi eaters or dentists. So, and particularly sashimi grade tuna.

God, that's so good.

You just wanna just kind of want to stay away from it.

Ah, sugarfish is amazing though.

Yeah.

And it's got the grains, too.

Yeah, it's got the grains, you know? So.

So no sushi.

Yeah.

So once in a while.

Yeah. Once in a while.

Okay.

Absolutely. Yeah. But, yeah. So fish oil is incredibly important.

Yeah.

And what I try to get people to do, and again, I measure this every three months in all my patients, and we're talking, you know, thousands and thousands of patients over the last 20 years. you want to get about a thousand milligrams of DHA per day. Now how do you do that? Well, you get fish oil. I mean you can go to Costco, I don't know. And you look on the back and you find serving size and make sure it says one serving size. They love to fool you. They may say two or three and then you look down below and you see DHA and you look to see how much DHA is in a capsule. and you add it up and say, oh, okay, there's 250 milligrams of DHA in this capsule, so I need to take four.

Wow.

Four a day.

Yeah.

A thousand a day. Okay, DHA.

We got olive oil, we've got vitamin D3, we have fish oils. What else do we need to live longer?

So you got to have polyphenols in your diet.

So.

Polyphenols. How do you remember polyphenols? think about polyphenol. Phenols are plant compounds, polyphenols are plant compounds that plants use primarily to protect themselves against stress and sunlight. Just interesting fact, we know that red wine is beneficial for you because of actually two polyphenols. The most famous is resveratrol, the other one is curcumin. Cercisetin or Cercisetin. The higher the grapes are grown, the higher in altitude the grapes are grown, the more polyphenols they make because they.

Need more to protect themselves.

Exactly, it's basically suntan. They've actually protected themselves against sunburn.

Interesting.

Also, the more the plant is stressed, the more polyphenols it makes to protect itself. So polyphenols are traditionally in dark colored berries. So for instance, blueberries, blackberries, raspberries. Interesting fun fact, the leaves of these trees or vines have more polyphenols than the actual fruit does. So for instance, black raspberry leaves have far more polyphenols than black raspberries. And I take black raspberry capsules, by the way, and it's in the book.

There you go.

So olives, for instance, are loaded with polyphenols. And olives that are stressed produce better. They are even better. Olive leaves have more polyphenols than olives. So olive leaf extract, fact is an easy way of getting the huge amount of benefits without drinking a liter of olive oil.

So, what about leafy greens? Do you want stressed out looking leafy greens or do you want healthy, thriving looking- Excellent question.

It turns out that the reason organic vegetables in general are better for you besides the fact that they haven't been sprayed with pesticides and herbicides and probably Roundup, and we can get into that, is the fact that these creatures, these plants actually have to work harder and they have to produce more polyphenols to protect themselves against insect predation. And so that's actually the reason you want to eat organic. So when you're going to the farmer's market and the poor little organic vegetables have got potholes of insects, they're dying and they don't look very good. You go, I want that guy is struggling. He is going to just be so loaded with polyphenols. And correlation with that is the more bitter, the better. Because polyphenols in general are very bitter. For instance, when we were developing my signature product Vital Reds, it's pure polyphenols primarily and they're bitter. So we lots of taste testing to figure out how the heck we're going to mass these really bitter compounds. So more bitter, more better. In fact, as I talk about in the book, I had the pleasure of knowing Jack Lalanne, who you would know is really the godfather of fitness and nutrition in the United States. And I knew him in his later years. And Jack used to have a saying is that if it tastes good, spit it out.

Interesting.

Now, what he really meant by that is bitter things, nasty tasting things is actually what is gonna give the bugs that are actually gonna keep you alive what they want to eat. And don't, you know, more bitter, more better. So, you know, the more polyphenols, the more bitter greens I can get into.

You, But you can get that through capsules and other things too.

Yeah, you can. And in fact, that's one of the reasons I'm a nut about taking a bunch of supplements.

We're killing ourselves. We're accelerating our aging process. So you've got to get out of that comfort zone.

We're killing ourselves by being comfortable.

Right.

So is there too much, like if I'm cold therapy and hot and fasting and doing a HIIT workout, is there such thing as too much discomfort in your life that will start to age you?