The 17 BEST Moments From The Rich Roll Podcast 2024 | BEST OF Part 1

I basically don't trust anything in reality trying to live every day as if it's my first you are not stuck with the brain you have you can make it better and I can prove it rather than being stressed over making the right decision make the decision right the magic you're looking for is in the work you're trying to avoid the old models of therapy are wrong we have the intuition for a reason and listen to it we fool the satiety mechanisms of the brains of humans by putting chemicals in our feet quick fixes don't work

they just cannot hey everybody happy holidays I got to say it's been an incredible year here at the RRP and as is our tradition the time has once again arrived for our annual celebratory best of series uh it's a bit of a gratitude check 2024 really has been a treasure Trove of wisdom and when I think back I realize we've hosted just such an incredible array of guests conversations that have spanned everything from mindfulness and productivity to Fitness and Nutrition of course brain health and how to balance careers with personal well-being so from groundbreaking medical

research to inspiring personal stories I think it's fair to say say that we've canvased a pretty rich spectrum of human knowledge expertise and experience butress with just so much actionable advice for life-changing growth and so for our loyal listeners and viewers consider these two end of year episodes as sort of a greatest hits album a chance to revisit your favorite lessons and for those newer to the show maybe consider it like a highlight reel or a crash course and hopefully uh these two episodes will entice you to discover episodes you might have missed or skipped

over and for that matter to explore what I think is a pretty robust and Evergreen back catalog either way I'm thrilled to share these moments with you and we're going to start with suica Joad suica is an Emmy award-winning writer and New York Times best-selling author if you saw the Oscar nominated documentary American Symphony which profiles suica and her celebrated musician husband John batist you already know that suica is also a cancer survivor and this experience is one that she shared with me in one of the year's most moving episodes of the show a glimpse

of which I'm honored to now share with you so when I got the date for my first bone marrow transplant uh my doctor told me Point Blank that I had about a 35% chance of surviving it and I had about a month and a half between before I was going to undergo that transplant and so that sense of finitude Came Crashing Down on Me and I realized that there were lots of things that I wanted to do that I might not be able to do um but writing had always been this great love of mine

and I decided I was going to take the contents of this journal and turn them into essays and so I started a WordPress blog from my hospital room I watched YouTube videos on how to built it it was pretty you know basic stuff and I'm sure that in that first week my readership consisted of solely my parents and my grandmother but I took it really seriously I would write every single day um and it felt really good to have a job to do other than just being patient um and it was that sense of agency

that I've been craving for that I've been craving for a long time um and about two or three weeks into writing that blog it started to get passed around and shared and I got an email from an editor at the New York Times and later a phone call um and which she asked me if I might be interested in writing an essay for the paper and I thanked her um and said I wasn't interested in writing an essay and then I took a deep breath and I told her that what I really wanted to do

was to write a weekly column From The Trenches of treatment because so often illness narratives were written from the perspective and vantage point of someone who survived and it was a very different experience to write from that place of not knowing that place of deep uncertainty I am an a different kind of lional space now I'm in a different kind of in between place I will be in treatment indefinitely for however long or short that might be um and when I got that news from my doctor he said to me uh you have to live

every day as if it's your last which is the kind of thing that you say to someone when they're in that sort of limbo um and you know I tried hard to figure out what that meant for me but more specifically why it instilled an intense sense of panic in me um and I realized you know when you're trying to live every day as if it's your last you're thinking about how you can ring as much out of life how you can like seize the day and it like puts you in this space of urgency

and taking um and I've come to believe that as well intentioned as that advice might be it's terrible advice um because if we were all to live every day as if it were our last we'd be robbing banks and I don't know cheating on our spouses staring at trees or eating ungodly amounts of ice cream um and so instead as I navigate this new level of uncertainty which of course you know we all have none of us know you know it's just more what the future is going and acute for to look like and life

is a finite condition for all of us um I've shifted to a place of trying to live every day as if it's my first uh which is to say waking up with a sense of curiosity and wonder that a newborn baby might and rather than seeking out these like huge important life moments um seeking out moments of play and tiny little Joys and moments of nourishment and that has made it such that I feel like I'm I'm moving through this uncertainty um in a way that doesn't put me in panic um but places me in

a state of of Wonder and awe and generosity we are so steeped in binary thinking but the truth is most of us aren't either happy or sad or healthy or well you know the border between those binaries is porous and much of us are forced to live in synthesis to exist in that messy middle you know I think we often think of healing as ridding ourselves of the pain that plagues us whatever that pain might be um and I have tried to do that in every number of ways from numbing it to compartmentalizing it to

dodging it to stowing it as far down as I can um but the only way that I've been able to endure these various things that have happened is by engaging with that pain and looking it directly in the eye um and you know observing it the way you might through the lens of a kaleidoscope where you shift the prism and the light falls in a different [Music] way what role does technology play in extending human life Tech entrepreneur turned longevity experiment Brian Johnson joined the podcast in episode 810 to answer this question and more offering

what I think is a fascinating primer on his controversial $2 million perear protocol to defy aging it's really simple I basically don't trust anything in reality not Authority not my mind not my perception nothing I just trust data and numbers and the only thing I believe in is I don't want to die outside of that you know like I'll go play around and like say this and that but if I really try to say like what what can I dis steal my existence down to I enjoy being alive right now and I don't want to

be dead in 5 minutes I don't want to be dead in 10 minutes I don't want to be dead tonight now what's going to happen 100 years from now I don't know but that's what I've really tried to do because otherwise life is just so messy it's so hard to understand what's really going on it's hard to understand what to do it's hard to understand how to resolve conflict it's just it's just messy and it's chaotic and so I tried to distill this down into In This Moment In Time in 2023 and this goes back

to what I was trying to do for for the species if you ask this singular question you can do you you can do one thing with your existence and you try to uplevel the human race or or make a contribution to the human race what do you do and that's what I just spent 10 years trying to figure out if you look at the Precedence where the first time a message was sent with a telegraph the Pony Express was dead nobody wanted to run Mel anymore with horses it was so much better the first time

you could navigate with GPS a paper map on your lap is dead it's just inevitable like we don't do these things because it's more efficient when you can wash your clothing in a washing machine versus down at the river so you look at these hundreds of examples of where technology becomes sufficiently good at doing a given task it's more efficient or cost- effective or whatever the case may be we humans adopt it extremely fast I'm arguing with my health and wellness that my team and I have built an algorithm that takes better care of me

than I can myself it is able to look at all the data in my body it's looking at scientific evidence it creates an algorithm so it creates super Superior cognitive ability Superior metabolic ability Superior physical ability All Above I am a superior human because it's algorithm so I have two options do I say I'm going to do things as I did and go produ my pantry am I going to make decisions on the menu no like I'm going to choose the algorithm just like I use GPS like a washing machine and like I use autopilot

or an airplane and so it's inevitable that when these things cross a technological threshold and they allow each of us to achieve our goals we adopt them instantaneously up until that point we kick and scream we talk about lost jobs we talk about the fear like it's a process every single time it happens but we ruthlessly adopt them and so that's just what's going to happen it's absolutely inevitable in the early 13 colonies of America there was a big debate on whether uh they should be ruled by the monarch of England or whether they should

adopt uh democracy and Thomas Payne wrote this pamphlet and he argued that the colony should adopt democracy because they would be better at ruling their own interests than having the Monarch and he talked about all the shortcomings of the Monarch and we now look back and we think okay democracy is actually one of the biggest advancements in the history of the human race where you had this new way of governing away from monarchs at the time it was not clear and this is an example of history of like what is really cloudy in that moment

how do people see clarity his pamphlet was the bestselling uh of the early American colony days and democracy prevailed and in that moment democracy ended up being a more powerful system of managing uh human thriving one individual as a monarch was inferior to this democratic system I did the same thing with my body my mind is a monarch in the same way you just spoke about your mind your mind is act acting contrary to your best interest my mind is a drunken sailor exactly it is it's an absolute disaster and I wholeheartly agree with that

I did the same with my body I said who should really be in charge the Monarch or should we have a democratic Rule and then we started with blueprint we started measuring every organ of my body we said okay heart lungs liver pancreas cardiovascular function what do you need to be your best self and I let them speak and I so I shifted power from my Monarch mind that's a disaster to my body to be in charge and that's what the algorithm works with the algorithm Works directly with my body what I'm arguing here for

the human race is I'm suggesting we have always treated our mind as the ultimate Authority on all things it decides on in any circumstance what it wants when it wants how it thinks what it's going to prioritize it has ultimate Authority like the Monarch I'm arguing in this next phase of the human race that that is an Antiquated model of management of human life there are more powerful and more capable systems of intelligence that are emergent specifically what I've done with blueprint empowering my body and artificial intelligence to manage your self now do I still

have free will I feel like I do do I still have my same uh agency I feel like I do am I happier I feel like I am but it's this paired with the challenging of death is the most significant revolution in the history of homo sapiens in one of our most viral moments of 2024 we welcome to the podcast Dr Ellen Langer the Sparky and pioneering Grand of the Harvard psychology department who's affectionately known as the mother of mindfulness Dr langers outof thebox thinking and and groundbreaking work on the mindbody connection has reshaped our

understanding of health and aging for decades and over the course of our conversation she unpacked the many fascinating ways our thoughts influence physical well-being offering pretty valuable insights that had listeners buzzing for weeks so here is Dr Ellen Langer you said we don't enjoy our lives enough because we are not actually there we are Mindless not mindful virtually all the world's ills boil down to Mindless most of us live mindlessly most of the time yeah no I mean big it's even bigger than that when I give talks about it where I I have a slide

that says virtually um all of our ills personal interpersonal professional uh Global are the direct or indirect uh result of our mindlessness now when I give a talk on that I say and just Among Us and the other million or so people I've said this to I mean all um so yeah I think that um if we could only wake up life would be very very different for a virtually all of us well let's tease that out a little bit like what would be a good example so when I lecture on this I often uh

give this example one thing that everybody thinks they know how much is one plus one well I'll I've read the book so the answer is two okay so uh it is sometimes too but not always if you add one water of chewing gum plus one wat of chewing gum 1 plus 1 is one if you add one pile of laundry plus one pile of laundry 1 plus one is one you add one Cloud Plus One Cloud 1 plus 1 is one in the real world 1 plus one probably doesn't equal two as a more often

as it does now imagine right after we finish talking someone comes over to you and says Rich how much is one plus one you're no longer going to mindlessly say two what you're going to do is pay some attention to the context and then you're going to answer more Mindful and say it could be and then you can say could be one could be too right and and what does plus even mean EXA right right I think this is really important um especially but not exclusively with respect to Health Medical Science like all science can

only give us probabilities an experiment says if it's reliable that if you do it again the exact same way which you can never do exactly the same thing you're likely to get these findings those probabilities are presented in in um medical journals textbooks what have you as absolutes when you know something absolutely you don't pay any more attention to it and uh people need to know that everything they're told is a probability is a best guess um you know so I I mean I can't imagine but there are still doctors who will say something like

you have six months to live there is no way they could know that and when their prognoses become self-fulfilling and I you know I get upset yeah even the the diagnosis of cancer that you have cancer you could have something that people have cold cancer but is different from it in you know in these ways and those you know um we just don't know uh so you know and if I got sick I'd certainly go to the medical world but I wouldn't just hand myself over to them and any Doom and Gloom hypothesis um I

don't think I would be quite as willing as many people seem to be to accepting the truth of it most people get themselves craz with should I do this or should I do that the decision is based on a prediction right should I do this is because I'm predicting that this will be great or this which will be great which will be greater I don't know and so on when you can't predict it doesn't matter and if it doesn't matter then life actually becomes easy so my bottom line rather than waste your time being stressed

over making the right decision make the decision right randomly choose now you can randomly choose if you want an AM and Joy or a Snickers nobody's going to care right but it's the exact this is the hard part to swallow it's the exact same thing about getting an abortion or not getting married or not taking the job or not doesn't matter whether the decision is big or small you can't know that a very confronting idea yeah well I mean you've you can only live one life if there were some magical way that I could live

a life as somebody who's had three kids and live a life as somebody has one kid and somebody who hasn't had kids maybe I can make a comparison but you don't have that available to you so I say to my students let's say should you go to Harvard or should you go to Yale so they made a decision to go to Harvard so let's say it's terrible you know they screw up royally and they say oh I wish I had gone to Yale there's no way of knowing that Yale wouldn't have been worse better uh

the same and that's why I regret is so mindless because the choice you didn't take you're presuming would have been better um and you know there's no evidence for that globally renowned productivity expert and digital minimalist Cal Newport dropped by the studio earlier this year to discuss this idea of slow protoc productivity Cal is an authority on how to thrive in an age of constant distraction and here's a taste of that message right I mean I think the the plight of the modern knowledge worker is we don't have a good definition of productivity so we

think we do right I mean it's someone like yeah I know what it means to be productive or not productive but we don't actually have a great definition and knowledge work of what that means because knowledge work is not well set up for the classical definitions of what it means to be prod Ive right so in a factory I can measure model produced per labor hour input and it's a number right and then if you change something about how you build the model T's and that number goes up you say this weighs better this is

more productive that came out of Agriculture bushels yielded per acre of land if you planted your crops a different way and that number went up you're like ah this is a better way of doing it knowledge work emerges as a major sector in mid 20th century right the term is coin 1959 how do we Define productivity here well those did not exactly apply anymore because individual knowledge workers weren't producing one thing they were doing many things and maybe what I'm doing is different than what you are doing these are the projects I happen to have

taken on you've taken on these projects the systems by which we were doing our work also are no longer transparent so in knowledge work how you organize yourself or manage your work is personal which is a big change actually in the history of economic activity but it's personal productivity um so there's nothing to even improve in an obvious way so we we couldn't use standard defition defs of productivity so what do we do instead we said let's use visible activity as a proxy for doing useful effort which is just a a veneer of productivity the

appearance of productivity the pseudo productivity talk about exactly my contention is this really went off the rails when we had the front office it Revolution so now we have computers and we have networks and we have laptops and then we get wireless internet now suddenly you can demonstrate visible activity at any point Wherever You Are uh the fine graininess of these demonstrations is much smaller right it's now not just I see you in your office it's I have to actually be answering specific messages and work can follow you wherever you go also the low friction

nature of digital Communications made potential work really Skyrocket so workload per worker really went up because it was just much easier now for things to be put on your plate if I can just send you an email like hey can you handle this that's much lower friction much less social capital cost than having to actually come to your office and ask to do something so workloads also spiraled pseud productivity did not play well in that environment so if I could demonstrate business at any point in my life and there was a never- ending queue of

work this was going to create a crisis because now every moment at the office or not at home home office now in the home office on the soccer field wherever you are you're constantly now in the psychological battle internally speaking between do I demonstrate more productivity or not this is what I think started to burn people out it's what began to create a burnout crisis and know work that you really don't see pick up until the early 2000s right if you look at time management books from the 1990s look at you know first things first

by stepen cvy all optimism all figure out your values and you can carefully plan your day to to actualize all of your your best interest like raah R very positive you get to 2004 David Allen's getting things done and now it's how do we even find like some moments of zen-like Peace among the onslaught there's no everything is gone except for how do we survive the onslaught so by the 2000s digital technology was cracking pseudo productivity and so I think this is what began to rapidly burn out knowledge workers that combination so slow productivity is

much more uh based on producing stuff that's good and it's much less based on activity so it's results oriented more than it is activity focused it has three big Ideas uh the first is to do fewer things which terrifies a lot of people but it shouldn't the second is to work at a natural pace so this idea which is possible in a world of suit productivity that you're going to just be full intensity 9 to5 week after week month after month year after year with no variation like you can you can pull that off if

what you're doing is just lots of email uh you can't pull that off if you're doing serious cognitive work so we need more of a natural varied pace and then finally obsess over quality so counterbalance that or support that with an obsession over the quality of what you produce I I think that combination is engineered to be much more sustainable it matches the Human Condition much better so you can you can pursue that definition of productivity without by default burning out and I think it's actually effective it's going to produce a lot of valuable things

and your your company your career these things are going to do well if you're a knowledge worker this is why you're feeling the way you're feeling it's p productivity is soul deadening there's other ways there's other ways to organize your work the the key if we do anything is just at least all admit we have to start talking about alternatives to pseudo productivity we have to name pseudo productivity we have to realize why this is not producing stuff and it's making people miserable and then we have to declare clearly this is what I do instead

and not everything that everyone declares is going to work for everyone else and some might not even work at all but we have to actually start having that conversation because what happened in the pandemic is people got completely burnt out from pseudo productivity and it led to this anti-product backlash but the whole thing I think was really confusing and mixed up and it was unclear who was mad at what and is it is this is it capitalism's fault or is it the uh is it Instagram hustle culture and it was like this weird sort of

everyone wants to be mad at something and nothing it was just a mix of of upsetness and sort of like Justified exhaustion like that didn't really get us anywhere this is what and I made this argument uh I wrote I coined this term a couple months ago on the New Yorker the great exhaustion is where we are we had the great resignation we had quiet quid we had the hybrid work Wars now knowledge workers are at the great exhaustion and my argument is a lot of that stuff that was happening in the pandemic was a

proxy battle for this real battle we just didn't realize it like why were we fighting so much about some of the details of where work happened or didn't happen it's not that the key to our happiness was schedule flexibility it was just the only thing that was there for us to fight about but our real discontent was not the details of a a hybrid schedule the real discontent Underneath It All was pseudo productivity and so quiet quitting also we burnt out so we quiet quitting you know maybe I'll just stop doing work and that didn't

work out the great resignation had a lot of knowledge workers just leave the workforce because they were exhausted from this stuff but all of these things were circling without actually identifying the real issue which is pseudo productivity is not sustainable you know so we we looked for enemies and we looked for reform and resistance but we weren't actually reforming or resisting the underlying thing that mattered which is as long as visible activity is our proxy for useful effort and we have computers and email and laptops and smartphones we're going to be miserable for anyone navigating

the complex terrain of women's health understanding the brain's role is crucial so here to give us guidance on the menopause brain is neuroscientist and author Dr Lisa Moscone who joined me this year to talk about her groundbreaking research on the connection between menopause and Alzheimer's disease women's Brains age differently from men's Brains and that difference is very at least in part related to differences in our reproductive systems and the hormones that drive those systems so this is actually a nice thing to talk about as you know as a woman and the scientist is then we

are born with a very important and Powerful system which is the neuroendocrine system is like a pathway that connects the brain the neurological system with the ovaries via the endocrine system that is powered by our hormones and this system we born with but is effectively activated during puberty for both men and women and then for women is reactivated every time you go through a pregnancy and then is eventually deactivated the turn off listing part once women reach menopause now what's important about the system is that men have it women have it but the hormones that

drive the system differ in their types and quantity so when women are born our brains come equipped with estrogen receptors the far outnumber receptors for other hormones like testosterone for example for men is the other way around you have a lot of Androgen receptors in your brain and some estrogen receptors which means the women's Brains are regulated for the most part by estrogen or the women's Brains run effectively on estrogen men's Brains are more modulated more heavily modulated by testosterone levels and other androgens now that has consequences because hormonal fluctuations for women occur on a

monthly basis for as long as you have a menstrual cycle then there's a long period of time that I'm hoping we'll talk about it's called per menopause the menopause transition that can last a decade during which there are strong hormonal shifts that can kind of hijack your brain a little bit this is what we're going to talk about and then these hormones effectively recede at least some of the estrogens recede after menopause which could be a bit of a shock to your system so I think it's it's really important to clarify the pause is not

just something that happens to your ovaries right as a society I think that in so far as we have understood menopause at all it's traditionally or historically been just the half that speaks to the functionality of the overies and brain scientists were really not involved in that definition so now we understand that menopause is actually a neuroendocrine transition state which means it's a neurologically active phase during which your brain is impacted just as much as your ovaries are in some ways more because when your brain is impacted then you have all these symptoms that sometimes

really prompt fear in many women who have no clue what is happening to them and when women talk about having half lashes and N sweats and depression and anxiety and insomnia and brain fog which is scary and memory lapses and forgetfulness or panic attacks or even skin crawling Sensations if you don't know why you're having those symptoms it is legit to really worry that that there's something really bad happening to you in your brain so those symptoms are in fact symptoms of menopause that have nothing to do with the ovaries those are neurological symptoms that

are prompted by your brain because menopause is in fact changing your brain when it comes to brain health quick fixes don't work they just cannot because from the neck down our bodies are engineered for change right so if you think about cellular turnover blood cells renew every few weeks even the skeleton is renewed at the rate of 10% a year so your body can respond to changes quickly and if you go on a diet if you start exercising you can see the changes relatively fast not so much in the brain because the brain is built

for stability our neurons the vast majority of our neurons are born with us and stay with us for a lifetime and they are very very protected from changes in the environment from changes in the diet from changes in your exercise activity because if if every time we went on a different diet that had an immediate impact on our brains we would all be crazy yeah we'd be lunatics it would be lunatics can you imagine it would damage our brains very easily that can be so lifestyle changes are important and are impactful but they only they

have a gentle effect on your brain which means that you have to build up the effects over time and that's why consistency is key right you can go to the gym two weeks the best exercise is the one you're actually going to do yeah time and time again exercise helps also patients who have Alzheimer's disease it really has a positive effect on on their mental health for sure but also on cognition you can see that in patients with dementia who work with a trainer sometimes I I know quite a few and it really has an

impact so if you don't have dementia the impact is much more obvious I would say and it is true that it's never too late it's never too late to start I I would love to see more clinical trials they really are done by age but I also the thing that exercise and the type of exercise you decide to do can help your brain in different ways so we know for instance aerobic exercise is really good for cognitive Health it seems to be given the the strongest boost to neuronal health because it stimulates so many different

parts of your brain in different ways but it's also important for Thermo regulation so for instance when women are having hat flashes and night sweats then aerobic activity can really help mitigate those symptoms which I think is really important like there are studies showing that women who are physically active in midlife have almost up to 50% fewer half flashes the women who are sedentary oh wow and those there are studies that followed like hundreds of women for many many years up to 40 years and they showed that women who were physically active in midlife more

with a cardiovascular fitness Style exercise had the 30% lower risk of dementia later in life as compared to those who were sagittary wow midlife is up to 65 right but there's no that's Mass significant hey everybody today's episode is brought to you by seed gut health I talk about it all the time on the podcast you know it's important if you've even listened to a few of my podcasts I think I've maybe devoted I don't know a dozen two dozen episodes to the microbiome you got to take care of your gut health if you want

to have Optimal Health how do you do that well your nutrition your lifestyle habits sleep all of these things play into that but it's also important to find a really good Prebiotic and probiotic how do you do that well there's a lot of nonsense out there so you got to follow the science and the best evidence-based product that I found out there is seeds ds01 daily symbiotic I've been taking it for I don't know over 3 years at this point every single day there's just a tremendous amount of science behind this product I urge you

to check it out and right now it's a great time to do that because you can get 25% off your first month of seeds DSO one daily symbiotic hit the link in the description below to visit seed.com roll and use code Rich Roll 25 get on [Music] it everyone wants to be fit we want to be healthy but parsing fact from fiction when it comes to nutrition science can be much harder than it seems so here to simplify and clarify our approach to nutrition and fitness is straight shooter Dr Lane Norton who delivered a blunt

and Powerful primer on evidence-based strategies for sustainable health I think one of the things people Miss is when you talk about some of this stuff what you're talking about is a mechanism of a biochemical pathway right oh this double bond could be oxidized and that's going to cause oxidation in your body and inflammation and heart disease you're people don't realize you just made a lot of assumptions right there that's like looking at single stocks inside of a mutual fund okay so a mutual fund is a bunch of stocks inside of an overall fund right what

do I care about if I'm investing the performance of the mutual fund and this is like somebody coming to me going oh you don't want to invest in this look at these two stocks that are down by 50% this year and you go but if the mutual funds up 30% who cares right like there's going to be some stocks that underperform in there and what I would submit to people any food you eat probably activates negative and positive biochemical Pathways but the question is not whether or not it does both good and bad things the

question is what is the summation of that response the outcome of that response because outcomes inflammation heart disease changes in body weight these are the summation of hundreds if not thousands of mechanisms in biochemical Pathways and so what I always tell people is like well if only we had studies that actually measured that oh wait we do have studies that measured this and here's what they show I look at this stuff as kind of tools in a tool belt right and when we look at long-term like kind of and now I'm kind of specifically talking

about weight loss right we look at long-term weight loss studies um they see really no differences longterm between any of these popular diets but when they stratify them for adherence there's a linear effect right so again kind of going back to you have to do some form of dietary restraint in order to get results right whether it's counting calories whether it's plant-based whether it's low carb intermittent fasting whatever have you but probably pick the form of restriction that feels the least restrictive for you like you talked about like pun base feels easy for you you

don't have to think about it you do it it feels easy yeah I don't know that it was easy in the beginning but it's easy now well any it's just like any change that you make you have to understand that it's going to be uncomfortable and you have to weather that discomfort because you're being deprived of the things that you crave and that you're used to but there is light at the end of the tunnel like those Cravings dissipate you acclimate to this new environment and what used to feel like a heavy lift now is

second nature I mean that's just that's like any behavioral change right like everyone has an opinion on nutrition if I tell you I'm a theoretical physicist and I study String Theory I mean we might have a short conversation but most people aren't going to challenge me too much or really go down the rabbit hole with string theory right uh for the most part you're just going to listen as I try to explain it but if we talk about nutrition everyone has a personal experience and belief system they've developed around it because everyone eats and so

regardless of and they have made some association between something they've ate and something that's happened and so I think that kind of makes it to where people have really strong opinions but don't understand like the physiology behind everything and so you have a lot of really strong uninformed opinions out there mhm yeah we all have our anecdotal experience uh and we tend to over index on the importance of that and how much can be extrapolated from that to apply to the general public and if somebody has had an experience in which they lost a tremendous

amount of weight or they had some kind of you know uh Epiphany as a result of making a significant dietary change and that has affected them positively obviously they're going to want to share that and I'm I'm no different I've done you know I've had that experience and I have evangelized um but the more that I learn uh the more humility I have developed around the complexity of it that is really appealing to people because this idea of like secret knowledge you know that that people who are getting results there must be some kind of

secret they have to have gotten the results that they've gotten and quite frankly it works I mean people buy it um but you know you you've been a very highle athlete right and my guess is there wasn't a whole lot of magic in it it was just a lot of repeated consistent work like obviously I'm sure you had you know good coaches and those sorts of things and had a good game plan to follow but the magic you're looking for is in the work you're trying to avoid for the most part all the gains are

in the the least sexy stuff ever and you know that you know as a powerlifter and bodybuilder for many many years has been training forever there's just no way around it and nutrition is obviously fundamental to your progress as an athlete um but there isn't any kind of magic secrecy to that at all um really about everything is about consistency obviously uh but there is something about the the kind of primate human brain that lights up when it's been told that there is this thing that's hiding you know behind the curtain and I'm going to

tell you what it is that gives people a sense of of agency and excitement makes them feel special um that overrides that that you know default to good judgment and yep and experience you know we we believe what we want to believe and it is especially when it comes to like you you kind of pointed out the conspiracy aspect of they're lying to you it's the food companies and the government conspired get and they made you sick and and that's a very sexy thing for people because nobody wants to believe that their actions led to

them being it wasn't your responsibility right how do we balance the demands of a high-profile career with the needs of personal well-being well answering this important question is the life's work of Jazelle bunin yes she's a world famous supermodel but she's also quite wise Wellness Advocate and you're going to find out cuz here's a glimpse into our delightful exchange about holistic living what I did for a living is something that kind of just happened to me at 14 years old you know it it was like hey do you want to be a model and I

thought oh I can help my family you know I can do make a living and and help you know I have five sisters and and all that so modeling to me is something that is um an opportunity that came along like I think in life you have these opportunities that either you take that train and then see where it goes you know and I never even believed that this was going to take me and I was going to be doing this for almost 30 years you know it's it's one of those things that I was

like oh I'll start doing this job and you know send money home and help my sisters go through school and do all that and um and maybe in five years you know I'll get a house because I didn't even go to school you know I I I was emancipated at 14 yeah you were in Tokyo at 14 I was living in Japan without speaking English and or Japanese KN and that's when I when I start learning the language of of of energy you know what I mean because you don't have to understand the language you

just have to feel you know something there's a lot more that has been said without words you know sure so I start learning about that um but I think that I went through this journey of modeling which was something I thought was going to last five years and I was just going to help my family out for a little bit and it just kept going you know it just kept happening in my early 20s I um developed you know anxiety and panic attacks and all that because you know when you drink a bottle of wine

and that because you're like I used to be a smoker so I smoke I can't even imagine I used to smoke it feels like a whole different life you know but um it was the late 90s and there was a lot of um drugs and fashion and all that so I thought I was saying just because I was like having some wine and smoking cigarettes everybody was doing way worse things than me yeah I'm sure you've seen a lot I've seen a lot yeah that's a whole other show about that that's a whole other story

but yeah so um you know so that was the beginning for me to start Rec connecting with myself because I think when I was 14 and I got that train my only focus was like how can I be the best that I can do on this and and and that was my focus and and I didn't measure any sacrifice he was like if I had to work 360 days a year and I felt like I couldn't say no because people were giving me a chance and then I was like in this really overdrive uh and

burn down my adrenals I found out later when I found this amazing natural Doctor Who told me like listen you don't have any more adrenals they're shut down because you burn them basically I'm like but I'm only 22 you know so um basically I had to change the habits that I you know smoking a pack of cigarettes drinking alcohol every day to C myself down coffee all day to keep myself up and also going from you know one time zone to the next I was three days in Paris two days in London one day in

New York going back to you know my life was in a living in a suitcase and of course your nervous system is going to freak out you know and the way I was eating it was very you know anything that was in front of me I was just like not mindful about anything you know I was just kind of um like a Workhorse and I think but that was a big wakeup call for me because I think sometimes you know you have to reach rock bottom and when I had that those anxiety and they start

becoming like almost crippling because I couldn't get on planes it was just you know I was going to all these doctors and they were like you have to take this stuff and I was just afraid of taking anything because I've never taken anything you know I was a there was a te for for this there you know my grandmother wasn't there so finally you know I wasn't going to take any medication because just the idea of taking something I was like I was normal before how can I go back being what I was you know

like I I I didn't have these issues so what's happening long story short I found this doctor I had to replace my habits it was that simple I had to replace these habits that had created the reality I was living at that moment which was you know um really killing me in in so many way ways you know killing my spirit killing my and and I replace it with good habits so now instead of smoking cigarettes and having a mocha frappuccino in the morning I'll would go out and do breath work and go out for

a run and you know I replace in one day I gave up everything because he he looked at me he said jelle he called me Adrenalina he says do you want to live and I said I do he's like so we're going to change my diet and that's for the first time in my life that I realized that I I was really like the one who got myself there and I was the only person who could get myself out by the choices that I was making so I had to take full responsibility for what I

had created but it was in my power only in my power to change that there were no doctors nobody who was going to save me I had to change um you know the choices I was making and I and I did that and it was incredible because after over a year and a half like really struggling with anxiety and panic attacks and all that within three months I was like I never had another incident and it was you know and and once you start meditating I mean at that point this was 20 years ago right

it wasn't like people were talking about meditation and yoga and any other um it was just um you know when you sit in silence and you and you reflect which is what we don't really give ourselves time to do because the world is so fast-paced and everything is catching your attention is trying to throw you off your Center you know everything is so busy it's like an overload of information to have that space to go inside and reflect reflect and look and really take a step back I think that was the biggest blessing of my

life so really I think what could have killed me is what gave me a whole new life and it was amazing because since then like everything changed like I realized that food is my medicine I realized that I am the director of my own movie that I'm creating my reality based on the choices that I'm making but what I'm choosing to not only the people I'm choosing to have around in my life but what type of energy what kind of thoughts I allow to what am I feeding you know what kind of thoughts am I

so all of that so that became like a big um changing of seasons for me in my early 20s this year we also welcome the renowned psychiatrist and brain health Pioneer Dr Daniel aan making his debut on the podcast uh Dr aan shared groundbreaking insights on brain health and why understanding our brains is crucial for overall Wellness his approach to Psychiatry particularly the use of brain Imaging is innovative for some controversial and for others revolutionary here's a fascinating excerpt from this eye- openening and memorable discussion if you're blessed to live to 85 you have a

one and two chance of being diagnosed with dementia one and two one and two which means it's either you or your partner and that's horrify but what most people don't know is you can have an impact on that and since 2005 I wrote a book with my friend Rod Shankle called preventing Alzheimer's and I updated it in 2017 with memory rescue and the big idea is if you want to keep your brain healthy or rescue it you have to prevent or treat the 11 major risk factors that steal your mind and you talked about your

mom having it the pneumonic that we'll talk about is called bright minds and the g in bright Minds is genetics but we don't think about it properly oh well I'm overweight because my family's overweight or I have hypertension because it runs in my family or I have diabetes because it runs in my family or I have Alzheimer's disease or I'm vulnerable to it and there's nothing I can do about it and that's a lie genes increase your vulnerability and they teach you what you should be doing so I started looking at the brain in 1991

and we've looked at over 250,000 scans but early on I came to realize you are not stuck with the brain you have you can make it better and I can prove it and so if I look at your brain and then you have a car accident your brain's going to be worse if I look at your brain and then you go on a a drug Bender your brain is going to be worse if I look at your brain and then you all of a sudden you stop sleeping or you go through a divorce odds are

your brain's going to change in a negative way but I also did the big NFL study when the NFL was sort of lying they had a problem with traumatic brain injury in football 80% of my players got better I could see the damage but when they go on a brainhealthy program 80% their brains looked better anywhere from 2 to 6 months later that's exciting 1995 I get a call late one night from my sister-in-law Sherry who told me my 9-year-old nephew Andrew had attacked a little girl on the baseball field for no particular reason and

I'm like what and she said Danny he's different he's mean he doesn't smile anymore I went into his room today and found two pictures he had drawn one of them he was hanging from a tree the other picture he was shooting other children so if you think about it he's Coline or Sandy Hook or Parkland Florida waiting to happen and I'm like I want to see him tomorrow and they lived eight hours from me so they brought him to me I'm like buddy what's going on and he's like Uncle Danny I'm just mad all the

time like is anybody hurting you no is anybody teasing you no is anybody touching you in places that shouldn't be touching you no and 999 child psychiatrists out of a thousand would put them on medicine and therapy and because of my experience I already scanned a thousand people at that point I'm like he's got a left temporal Lo problem and so I'm like I held his hand while he held his teddy bear and got scanned and he was missing the function of his left temporal loobe i' never seen it I've seen it a hundred times

since then turned out he had a cyst the size of a ball occupying the space of his left temporal loob and I told his pediatrician I said you find somebody to take it out cuz he wasn't in my neighborhood and he talked to three neurologists all of them said they wouldn't touch the cyst until he had real symptoms at which point I lost my mind and I start screaming at the pediatrician of a homicidal suicidal child who attacks people for no reason what do you mean real symptoms and he got anxious and he said I

think they mean like seizures or he loses conscious I'm like serious and in my head I'm like neurologist neurologist neurosurgeons neurosurgeons will do stuff so I called UCLA talked to the head of the Pediatric nurse surgery Department J haloera and he said Dr Ammon when these cysts are symptomatic we drain them he's obviously symptomatic and after the surgery I got two calls one from my sister-in-law who said the surgery went really well and when Andrew woke up he smiled at her she said Danny he's not smiled for a year and then I got a call

from Dr lazera Who said oh my God Dr Amon that cyst was so aggressive that put so much pressure on Andrew's brain that thin the bone over his left temporal LOE so his skull had been thinned he said if he would have been hit in the head with the basketball would have killed him instantly either way it would have been dead in 6 months next up is Olympian Cara Goucher one of the greatest long-distance Runners of all time Cara shared deeply impactful experiences in professional Athletics and her fight for integrity in sport here's a slice

of that exchange when does it start to appear that things might not be as they as they seem you there were little signs early on of things that were just a little off um the way people were talked about or certain rules that were sort of like laughed off but honestly the first couple years we believed in what we were doing and we believed in Alberto I mean it was it wasn't like we got there and we thought what are we doing here it was weird you know we were sleeping with a tent over our

bed and Alberta was so involved in our lives in a way that we weren't used to you know talking seeing us every day calling us a lot constantly checking in there it was just different um but you know it was a couple years in before anything came up that felt uncomfortable I think that's why I stayed for so long because it was sort of like the Slow Burn of me sort of compromising my values as we went along I I think that's one of my weaknesses is searching for this figure and it you know this

will make me emotional but like it I realized now I had it the whole time my grandpa but you know I want I worshiped my high school coach it was in mail I worship my college coach but with Alberto he brought me into his home he had me eat meals with him he I was at his house all the time it was you know Mark Wetmore I've never been to his house I've known the guy since 1996 you know um same with my high school coach I have no idea where he lives it was just

different it was so much more invested in and what felt like so much more invested in me and so it was very easy for me and looking back this was a huge mistake I made but to allow him to be more than a coach and to be that person and he I know that he enjoyed that he actually would say like I feel like I'm a father he would call my mother and say that I was brought into his life for a reason and that looking back was extremely unhealthy but at the time it felt

almost like God inter yeah intervene and I was brought into confusing you know but also makes the transgressions all the more egregious when the deception and the abuse emotional and physical you know starts to enter the picture I'm sure people have asked or or or perhaps you had to Think Through what's going to happen when people ask me well you didn't even tell Adam these things your husband what was going on when they were going on how do you expect us to believe what you're saying about how Alberto was behaving yeah I mean I I've

been asked that a lot especially on Twitter thank you social media Twitter's pretty reliable for that kind of thing look it's it's a great question as I've gone through this and I've met with other victims it's actually very very common but I didn't know that the first time that Alberto touched me inappropriately I'm in a foreign country with him in 2006 it's the first trip we've ever taken together it's the first trip where I am the focus and I I truly I mean in the in the moment I was so Frozen with fear I couldn't

believe this was happening and I just convinced myself it was an accident because he's a dad and he's a devout Catholic and he loves me like a daughter he tells me and again like with those boxes if I think maybe he did that on purpose it ruins everything that I'm living for and that I've built my life around so the first time it happened I really truly just convinced myself that it was an accident it wasn't until 3 years later that that happened again and at this point and when it happens it it involves substances

this guy's like you know at least a couple glasses of wine in and and sometimes an ambient Etc like it feel it feels like he has a substance issue yeah oh yeah yeah um but now I'm thinking like what am I going to tell Adam like he touched me inappropriately 3 years ago and I didn't tell you it feels it feels like I'm soiling our marriage and I hid something and I know that I just should have told him but I just didn't I I came back from that trip we were in Lisbon Portugal and

came back and I said I never want to travel without you again and that was my way to solve it I'll never be alone with him again and I and I wasn't until a plane ride 2 years later the doping piece was that I we went Adam and I went together to usada in 2013 and and there was already a case open you know I thought oh I'm going to shock them there was already an open open case going on um which should have been comforting to you to realize like oh I'm not the only

one like people are looking into this they don't know if they can trust me that's what it felt like you know for the first two hours they just let me blabber on about what I think happened and then they're like go go have some coffee and then let's go back in and then the questions start and and I I appreciate you s so much and I understand all of it but in the moment it felt like oh they don't know if I engaged in this or not which how would they know um so that was

very uneasy right but then so you know for years people would say we know why you left we know why you left and I'd be like you have no idea who I left but okay um a lot of media from the UK constantly asking and so there was this documentary in in 2015 that that they were doing and it was uh BBC and pro publico we doing a piece together and I cried and when Adam told me he was going to do it I said please don't do it I'm still running I want to run

for at least another year everyone's going to ask me about this I'm never going to be able to escape it please don't do it and he he said I have to do it and I respect him so much and I respect his values that I knew it was the right thing to do but I was too afraid so they came over from the UK they interview Adam for hours the next day before they fly out they want to meet with me so that I feel better about the situation I meet with them they were very

nice well- intended I believed um and then that night I just started started eating at me like why didn't I do it like why was why couldn't I be brave like Adam now now I'm going to have to answer questions that I could answer I could be on the front end and yeah it just ate at me and and a couple of the bigger decisions in my life I've just really really prayed upon it and I prayed upon that and I just said I really regret not doing it and so Adam reached out to them

and they got another plane and came back the final thing I wanted to ask you is pertains to the athlete who's listening to this or watching this who is starting to realize that the dynamic that they're in on the team that they're on or with the coach that's overseeing their progress might not be the healthiest maybe it's not terrible if they told somebody who knows what the reaction would be what do you say to that person how do you guide that person to address a situation that on some level is somewhat relatable or similar to

what you endured I think we have intuition for a reason and I stopped listening to mine because I thought what I know this feels uncomfortable I know this feels not good but it's so small and the goal is right there we have the intuition for a reason and listen to it and you know what maybe for other people that is a great situation but the same situation isn't good for everyone you trust yourself you have that ability to know what's right and what's wrong and at the end of the day it doesn't matter if someone

else thinks it wasn't a big deal if it's making you uncomfortable and your little bells are going off that is not going to help you as an athlete you're not going to run or perform the way you want when you have those constant questions in your mind so listen to yourself and trust yourself you will make the right decision I am a total Gearhead and I've learned that people often Overlook apparel but what you wear isn't just close it is without a doubt technology that can make or break a performance and I can tell you

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over to on.com rroll and sign up for On's [Music] newsletter beneath countless problems in our society lies a sleeping giant and that is the crisis of masculinity to shed light on this critical issue and offer a fresh perspective we welcome Scott Galloway to the podcast Scott is a professor he's an entrepreneur and an influential voice on technology and modern culture and he really brought his trademark insight and wit to this discussion about the challenges facing young men today this is something that I'm passionate about I think the data overwhelming you three times as likely to

be addicted four times as likely to kill themselves as women uh 12 times as likely to be incarcerated 70% of opioid every day you know we don't have a homeless problem we don't have an opioid problem we don't have an incarceration problem we have a male suicide homeless and incarceration problem and if any other special interest group were committing suicide at four times the rate of the control group we would talk about it in different terms we would talk talk about the need for social programs intervention empathy but when something like this happens to young

men there's a lack of empathy you hear words like accountability or if they were just more in touch with their emotions and I think that's really gotten in the way of a productive conversation and because there hasn't been a productive conversation and people out there feel and see what's going on some voices have entered into that void that are sort of unproductive voices and sometimes that kind of this proman rhetoric often times is just suddenly veiled misogyny or a lack of empathy or kind of what I'll call the manosphere starts off fine it's be action

oriented be fit take control but then it goes to really weird places it treats women as property or talks about immigrants taking your job or just sign up for my crypto University it just goes to weird places what is going on like how did we get to this place what are the tectonic plates that have led us to this situation that we find ourselves in so just to make the point around accessibility I don't know the numbers in Stanford but when I applied to UCLA in 1982 the acceptance rate was 76% and it cost $1,200

a year and I had to apply twice and I got in the acceptance rate this year will be 9% and it's $34,000 so it's just inaccessible to anyone who's not remarkable remarkable or Rich so how did we get here I think there's been a variety of things Confluence of factors that have all collided around young men one there's just a lack of empathy people see it as a zero some game where if you feel empathy for men it must mean that you are anti-women and so there's a lack of empathy and what I call zero

some gaming it you know civil rights didn't hurt white people it helped them gay marriage doesn't hurt heteronormative marriage it it enhances it so to talk about empathy for young men is in no way and should in no way be seeing as anti-women I think the group that wants more viable young men uh first and foremost mothers that's who I hear from the most who see what's going on with their daughters and the difference between their daughters and their sons and also women women are I think ready for more economically and emotionally viable young men

women are dating older and older because they're having trouble finding what they would perceive as viable young men so a few things one just biological men's prefrontal cortex matures later they just don't have the same executive function or adult in the room they're less mature literally less mature two we have an education system that is biased against them if you talk about the behavior behaviors reward in school you're essentially going to describe a girl be organized be a pleaser sit still you also have an education industrial complex 92% of kindergarten teachers are women there's more

female per capita fighter pilots in kindergarten male kindergarten teachers it's about 70 80% K through six and about 60 70% in high school and naturally you're going to empathize with a little version of you so I just don't think there's the same level empathy for young men we've also done away with metal shop auto shop um wood shop so the guy who's not cut out for college who doesn't sit still who's not academically focused has fewer and fewer on-ramps into a middle class lifestyle and then these guys get into the workforce there's fewer middle class

trades jobs in America parents have done a really good job of convincing themselves they' failed as a parent if their kid doesn't end up at Stanford or UCLA so there's a lot of rage and shame in the house household there's not visible on-ramps into a healthy middle class life 3% of LinkedIn Profiles In America say Apprentice It's 11% in the UK in Germany 50% of Germans have some sort of vocational certification that's not true here it's kind of become this you either get to Stanford or UCLA or you and your parents have failed and then

a lot of Dynamics dating apps where you have two 3: one uh men to women and you also have this effect where because everyone has access to everyone not everyone but women who have a much finer filter are all drawn to the kind of what I call same guy so you have 50 men on Tinder 50 women 46 of those women will show all of their attention and interest to just four guys so it's great to be in the top 10% on a dating app if you're a guy the bottom 90 it's really difficult and

the bottom half of men on dating apps were now one and two relationships begin get validation that they have absolutely no worth in the dating Market so a lack of economic prospects a lack of maturity a society that doesn't seem to have a lot of empathy for them and then a mating Market that validates they don't have a lot of value and you see these men go down this downward spiral where they start and this is where you know they we've really lost them they start becoming Ultra nationalist they start blaming immigrants they start blaming

women they become prone to conspiracy theory in some they just become really shitty citizensh and the final thing I would say is that the most profitable valuable companies in the world have one thing in common and that is they're tapping into a lack of Regulation and instinctive flaws men are more risk aggressive so the fastest growing technology sector right now is gaming which is a polite way of saying gambling men are more risk aggressive they like to gamble 85% of gamblers are men they're four to six times more likely to develop a gambling addiction you

then put it on a phone and you have Kevin Hart and Charles Barkley telling you that you're smart you should bet on March Madness and then you have social media apps or Robin Hood or or meta or YouTube sort of tapping into these instincts these flawed instincts of men where they become prone to conspiracy theory more much more risk aggressive much more inclined to develop a relationship with upup porn as opposed to saying okay how do I go out there and develop the skills and the game and the economic and emotional viability to find my

own romantic partner they're mistaking Reddit and Discord for friendship they're mistaking Robin Hood and coinbase for making a living they're mistaking you porn for establishing a relationship and so a lot of these men have had the real world or the motivation to find real relationships replaced with algorithms and screens it's a low entry lowrisk cost of having a reasonable fact assembly of life and if you're not careful you wake up a few years later you don't have those skills and you're depressed because getting out and finding a job getting out going into work getting up

putting on a tie learning how to read the room learning how to make a woman laugh establish body language be persistent endure rejection you know there's a reason romantic comedies are 2 hours not 15 minutes this [ __ ] is hard and it's humiliating but that's what real victory in real life looks like and I think there's a disproportionate or a small number of men young men who are ever going to experience that real joy and that real Victory because of the low cost low entry reasonable fact simil of life that these companies pray on

I find young people are totally unrealistic I call it the myth of balance I mean you can have it all but you can't have it all at once When I Survey my kids I mean my students I say how much money do you expect to be making they expect to be in the top 1 percentile of income earning households 80% of them by the time they're 30 and then they talk about balance balance in the context of an expectation they want balance they don't want to work that hard they want balance they want Hobbies they

want to spend time with their family and their dogs I'm like okay unless you're born rich I don't know how to do that I just I don't know anyone that successful who didn't for good 10 or 20 years work pretty damn hard maybe Beyonce but bance supposed to work 60 hours a week next up is vegan basist OK Calahan a truly remarkable person who alongside her gig as a professional touring musician has dedicated her life to fighting for animal rights and environmental causes our conversation centered on her journey from Irish roots to Global Rock stages

with bands like white snake Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden and D Snider and how she uses her platform for positive change it makes sense right it's like as soon as I discover this like well I don't want to eat them cuz I like animals I don't want to stay here because it's wasting my time I know my time is better spent over here but maybe that's not obvious to to most or the the pressure is too hard but to be able to live a congruent life and to know that you know you're in alignment with

your morals is something that was very obvious like and natural from a young age so I don't think that it's Unique or different but think that it's it is also probably why there's so much frustration in the world and why people are so divided and that because we we are often out of line and we're not living in congruency what we we actually feel inside and you know we obviously do that a lot when it comes to morally justifying or morally compartmentalizing things just because it's convenient so you're in the Deep South you're on tour

maybe you're in Arkansas or Mississippi or rural Louisiana or something like that and you come upon somebody and you find yourself in a conversation and um and suddenly this person seems curious and receptive to they're like wow this Tanya like I've never seen anyone like Tanya before like what do she you know what is this person all about um and then there's an opening where they're like how do I make that lifestyle change like what do you say to that person who suddenly seems receptive to doing something different usually say something like you're already vegan

because you just you're vegan but you also eat meat and cheese so I look at that me I already I look at these things in reverse because I always find it really funny when people say that it's hard or it's you know extreme because everybody eats pasta pizza potatoes broccoli fruits veggies I mean if you're going to tell me you don't eat any of those things good Bas to start with so I'm like you're already vegan you just you also eat me meat and dairy so it's about kind of breaking down that what people might

think is complicated around food but also like I said earlier just saying if someone's asking about for instance how do I eat out order the sides instead or try to add more veggies to to every meal but I'm not a big fan of the labels of the diet it you know so I try to keep the the buzzword out a lot because for some reason they're a big trigger if you're saying like vegan or vegetarian I mean I'm not sure why because it's literally about being kind to animals I don't know why it got tagged

with like the the tagline of a being extreme Choice sometimes you're gauging like if if a person's trying to come at something from a health perspective if they have a very obvious health issue of course you can go with the we know like the science is stunningly clear that there's a serious benefit for heart disease diabetes hypertension you know all these the obvious things but if it's not a health thing then maybe it's animals maybe it's well do you really love animals have you ever looked in into what you know mass animal agriculture actually looks

like and what factory farming looks like cuz you know people are like oh I get grass-fed like it's funny that everybody's saying they get grass-fed when it's very small very very minimal percentage that actually is so you're I guess you're trying to gauge what the person is curious about is it their own health or is it maybe they love animals but the cool thing about the whole plant-based umbrella it's about the closest thing to a Panacea we have because you look at ocean acidification rain Forest deforestation antibiotic resistance zootic diseases like there's no real negative

to shifting towards this because for your own health obviously the health of the planet and then all these Ripple effects that it has out surely one of these things speaks you do have children like this is what we're doing to the planet and their generation is going to be affected by this the planet's going to be fine you know I hate when you get the sort of performative activism of sa Save the Planet of course we all want to save the planet but the planet's going to be fine um but whether or not we want

to exist here in in a on a healthy Planet while we're here and your kids and their kids so you know I often talk to to older families who have two and three generations that like by the you know they're starting to shift toward plant-based because they saw oh wow the soil like you know places in I was talking to a farmer and his family in Kansas a couple years ago and he was telling me the story of how it was when his granddad was on the land and how different it was by the time

he had to work under the contracts for big agre and they're tied into using these specific you know fertilizers and pesticides the soils changed the food changed the financial system structure changed for his family and then he's like I don't want to pass this down to my son and their kids so they were starting to kind of think about shifting but a lot of you know the information is is being kept away so I really like getting into depends on where the person is coming from if someone's asking you from a health perspective I'm like

go listen to Rich Ro and Simon Hill read these books um but that's that's the really cool thing about this whole sort of movement per se there's a positive no matter what way you're looking at it it's there's there's really no negatives that we've yet to find in episode 827 we welcome the brilliant social psychologist Jonathan hey to the podcast to explore his groundbreaking research on social media's impact on on youth mental health which is the subject of his seminal book The anxious generation Heights insights into how digital technology is reshaping adolescence made this one

of our most impactful episodes of the year so here is an excerpt from that conversation we were at a Tipping Point even if I didn't write this book and I just had the very good fortune that I kind of rushed through you know writing the book and I felt like I had to get it out soon it just happens to come out just as America is ready to tip in Britain they actually tipped last month in Britain the parents are rising up people have had enough I've been studying this since uh intensely since 2019 but

a bit before then in 2019 it seemed pretty clear that the phones are doing a number on the kids um there was an academic debate I couldn't prove it but I I was making the case along with Jee twangy and then covid came in and Confused us all for several years what kids really needed before covid was a lot less time on their screens and a lot more time outside playing with each other and then Co came in and what American kids and kids all over the world got was the opposite a lot more time

on their screens a lot less time playing with other kids face to face and it was became clear by 22 23 the kids are really a mess I mean the mental health is horrific but what Jee twanky had showed what I've been showing is that covid actually didn't make things a lot worse it's been getting worse and worse since 2012 something happened in the early 2010s mental health fell off a cliff for those born after 1996 not for those before and what we're trying to figure out is what on Earth happened and how do we

roll it back so I'll start in the 1990s because that's when most of us got our first look at the internet and it was marvelous it was miraculous you know it was as if God came to Earth and said would you like to know everything instantly all the time and we're like yes and so you know I certainly was a techno Optimist um I first first used I guess alista in 1994 and in the '90s we thought that the technology the internet was going to knock down tyrants going the best friends of democracy so most

of us are very positive about these developments and it really was amazing then we get the early social media you know 2003 2004 Myspace Facebook they're connecting people it's it's all so amazing you get you know Uber and Amazon totally amazing 2007 the iPhone comes out and it's not at all harmful it's a digital Swiss Army now if you out when you need a tool so everything's great until you know 2010 or so um the mental health of teenagers is fine it's stable it's actually getting a little better in some ways compared to Gen X

and then between 2010 and 2015 Everything Changes the technological environment changes and with it the mental health and what we can discuss later the evidence on whether it's causal but at least it's incredibly well correlated what you have to see is that in 2010 of course kids were on their phones all the time we all talked about how they're always texting but that's all they could do they could text and they could call that's what a flip phone does that's it they didn't have high-speed internet they didn't have front-facing cameras they didn't have Instagram um

they just used their phones to connect it's okay over the next 5 years uh that's when everybody flips over to a smartphone so by 2015 70% of American kids are now on a smartphone mostly an iPhone most of the girls have Instagram front-facing camera high-speed internet that uh unrestricted data plan and so now you could be online literally all day today like in 2024 um about half of American kids say that they are online almost all the time this is what's so devastating puberty is this really important period of child development in which the brain

is rewiring based on input it's getting and all around the world adult societies help their kids through that transition how does a boy become a man how does a girl become a woman and what we did in the early 2010s is we said how about if we don't help you with that at all how about if we give you a device which will take up all of your attention like every that isn't nailed down to something it's going to go to your phone and a lot of that attention is going to be to random weirdos

on the internet who are selected by an algorithm because how extreme their performances as voted by other random weirdos on the internet how about if we let that socialize you so in all these ways going through puberty in say 20 5 like a millennial versus 2015 like gen Z made all the difference in the world and I believe that's what has caused it's there many cause but that's the biggest single cause of the gigantic increases in anxiety depression self harm and suicide that are the characteristics of genen Z so to end this on an optimistic

note your your analogy is sort of like the Berlin Wall like it's about to burst it's not this incremental thing that we're going to be sitting around waiting for forever there's enough energy behind this that you know the dam is going to burst soon and then everything changes exactly there's what's called preference falsification there there are situations in which in which if people are only supporting something because they're afraid to speak up or if they're kept in place by fear as soon as the fear comes everything can change very very quickly and that happened in

Eastern Europe everyone hated communism I traveled there in 1987 I I don't think there were many communist or any back then like everyone hated it but they were just kept in placed by the secret police they were afraid and once it became clear that actually you know if we all mass at the wall and try to it over we win and then it fell everywhere now that's a little bit too dramatic for what we're talking about here but the the the social dynamics are actually very similar because why is it that we're all giving our

kids phones at such an early age because we're afraid that they will then be left out and they're afraid of being left out so it's not the fear of the secret police that's the most powerful human urge that's right yeah I mean being afraid of the secret police and being abducted in the night and torture that's pretty Primal too okay I'm not saying but the same pathway right like we want to be a member in good standing of a group we're terrified of being isolated being cut off being alone that's why banishment used to be

a punishment in the ancient world before they had like good prisons and things like your punishment is to be banished we're not going to kill you we're just going to send you away and that's like death social death and teenagers are really really vulnerable to social death so anyway my point is if the kids themselves say yeah I'd like to get off if everyone else does well then why don't you get off because everyone else so if a system is held in place by the fear of missing out and we can all get out together

then kids aren't missing out we give them back childhood we give them back play we give them back each other renowned sobriety Advocate coach and former pro footballer Andy romage returned to the podcast to drop wisdom on the merits of an alcohol-free lifestyle personal transformation mindset and cultivating a life of purpose here's a look what is the sense of growth like how many people are doing this now well I guess if you flip it into the alcohol free drinks industry for example when we last had our conversation in in over in the next 5 years

it's grown by about 500% um we've still got about 70% of the adult population of the western world are still drinking in that Middle Lane but all the stats are starting to show that that's rapidly declining and my big mission really 2030 I'd love to see one in two so 50% of adults on the fun side yeah of the island with me rocking it and it's escalating you know rapid growth younger people are drinking less or not at all I think there's still a huge band of people this Middle Lane which is probably 35 to

75 that are stuck in that old ways and behaviors of drinking and again it's the middle Lane that I worry about the most because I think and you know this Yourself Rich it's very obvious if you've got a severe problem with alcohol or an addiction you know that there's an issue with it but the Middle Lane for the last however many years I've been drinking completely unaware that their relationship with alcohol those one or two drinks in the week or two or three more at the weekend are having a massive negative impact on their life

it might just be on their sleep it might be that they're a little bit more grumpy it might be that they can't quite be bothered to exercise they're not consistent in the way that they nourish their body because they've got those hangover blues or that their mental health is not where it wants to be and that's in the Middle Lane and I think most people are so unaware of it and that's what's really exciting for me that people are becoming aware of their relationship with alcohol as middle angel drinkers average Drinkers and the change is

starting to happen rapidly and it's it's just wonderful to be a part of it's just growing and growing all the time and I think that's another thing that I love there there's a great quote from T Lawrence Lawrence of Arabia he says dreamers of the Night Dream dreams that sit in the rusty recesses of their mind and they wait to find it was just vanity but dreamers of the day they're dangerous men and women for they dream with their eyes wide open and they make their dreams a realityy and I love that cuz I believe

that's what happens when you go alcohol free you're seeing people coming through this movement that are dreamers of the day they're actually saying things and taking action whereas I was one of those for many a year I sat in the pub and how many people in the pub talk a great game about all the things they're going to do and then never quite happens foras I think the alcohol-free space itself is producing all these incredible dreamers of the day like Bill like many others that are turning these dreams into reality on a massive scale and

it's changing the face of culture I'll give you a beautiful example of this I went to Ireland just recently I spent a lot of time in Ireland as you know my wife's Irish I went to a place called The adir Manor it's a beautiful place they're going to get the ride a cup there in 2025 and I went for a drink in this local pub in Adair Mana or a dare and we sat down to have a drink and as soon as I walked in the lady said what would you like I said I don't

drink she said brilliant we've got loads of alcohol free Alternatives this is in Ireland in Ireland right and they're all over it in Ireland so that's wild gave me this lovely drink and I sat and getting Goosebumps before he even told the story and I watched the scene that's played out in a million Irish pubs for Generations there was an old guy at the bar drinking a pint of Guinness and he was sitting there drinking his Guinness as you know many Irish people do and in walked his son I knew it's his son CU you

could tell they looked alike the old guy was probably 70 the son about my age probably 49 50 and his son sat next to him again a scene you would see in every Irish bar and his son sat next to him and he ordered his Guinness and his Guinness came out and he started to Dr his Guinness and I looked at his Guinness his Guinness was 0 0 that is a cultural shift right there he was able to be with his father in this space and the Irish pubs are the best pubs in the world

you'll see three generations in Irish pubs they connect and he was able to do it in a way that felt connected felt grown up but he didn't have alcohol in his drink and just to set the scene like I described earlier I would describe myself as a middle Lane Drinker was I drinking too much absolutely but who isn't especially in that environment you know and that would involve a few drinks in the week and a few more at the weekend there was no major problem there was no Rock Bottom an average Drinker drinking too much

which most people are and then I tried to remove it and it was so incredibly difficult because there was so much Social pressure you know alcohol still is the only drug in the world when you try and stop it you get berated for it or you get the Mickey taken out of you or people try and force it upon you and this is 10 years ago when the Middle Lane didn't have a voice there was no alcohol free Alternatives um so trying to take a break was difficult but I finally cracked it and I got

about 28 days in and all of the things that I hoped it would bring it did I suddenly felt well rested i' slept like I hadn't slept in years I got my energy back I was suffering from anxiety that anxiety started to disappear and dissipate I got my time back my zest for life back and this just snowballed that 28 was only ever meant to be a 28 day break that 20 and here I am 10 years later that 28 days became 90 days I lost that three stone in we got fitter faster healthier my

broken business when everyone said it would fail we grew it seven times bigger in half the time cuz I was always on the ball I wasn't writing off half of my week to underperformance and I think what I realized is an important message for people my new normal because of my relationship with alcohol I think was probably 50 or 60% of my optimal best and it wasn't until I removed alcohol as a middle Lane Drinker that I got that Peak Performance back which allowed me to perform my Peak Pig in my business my relationships blossomed

at home I was fit again healthy again my Sparkle would come back again it was just such a transformational experience that I thought I've got to share this so I wrote a little ebook uh called one you know beer we put it out into the world it was never meant to be a thing a few people picked up on it that turned into a book with Pam McMillan I got ruy on board ruy was inspired by my first break rur is the co-founder of one no beer originally we created this movement called one no beer

which still exists today sure that's inspired many many people um and I stepped down from there in 2019 not long after our last podcast to really look at this from a completely different angle and create lots of new ideas and initiatives to inspire people to take a break that's what it's all about for me how do we navigate the complex world of the new weight loss drugs well uniquely suited to address that question is returning guest Johan Hari who through firsthand experience as well as extensive research explored the promises and The Perils of OIC which

made for one of the more lively RRP episodes of 20124 so I'm taking a zenic right I started taking it for the book that I've written because as soon as I heard about these new weight loss drugs I felt a massive mixture of emotions first thing I thought was well I'm older now than my grandfather ever got to be he died when he was 44 of a massive heart attack Lo those of the men in my family get heart disease my dad had terrible heart problems my uncle died of a heart problem um if there

really is a drug that can reverse obesity or hugely reduce it and we know the average person who takes a zenic or wovi loses 15% of your body weight I thought wow that could mean a lot to me right we know that obesity causes over 200 known diseases and complications you know a drug that can move you away from that that could be a big deal but I also immediately thought wait a minute I've seen this story before I think people should be very wary of anyone who's saying about these drugs either just uncomplicatedly yay

everyone should be on them or boo nobody should be on them I think is missing the much more important nuance and complex point which is you know the subtitle of my but magic pill is the extraordinary benefits and disturbing risks of the new weight loss drugs because the truth is both halves of that are true there are extraordinary benefits and there are 12 disturbing risks and there's no one siiz fits all for that and there's a lot we don't know but there's a lot we do know and I think what people really need to do

is go down the list of the benefits and risks see which ones apply to them which ones don't and also just be prepared for some of the psychological changes that happen when you take these drugs some of the big cultural changes that are going to happen now you know 47% of Americans want to take these drugs this is blowing up all around us um everyone who takes these drugs becomes a kind of walking advertisment for the drugs this is huge this is going to change so much you know Barkley's Bank commissioned a very sober-minded financial

analyst called Emily field to go away research these drugs to guide their future investment decisions and she came back and said if you want a comparison for what these drugs are going to do you got to compare it to the invention of the smartphone I think she's right why did obesity blow up right it's really important to understand because I think this has been kind of um forgotten obesity has exploded in our lifetimes I would just urge anyone to just pause this podcast for a second and just Google for a moment photographs of public beaches

in the United States in the 1970s so when you and me were born right just look at them for a minute to us they seem really weird CU almost everyone on those beaches looks to us what we would Now call skinny or jacked right and you look at it and you go well where was everyone else that day right was it like a skinny person convention at the beach and then you realize no that's what Americans look like when we were born right you basically have around 300,000 years where you have humans and obesity is

very rare it existed we know it's there in the historical record but it's always remarked upon because it's so unusual right and then essentially in our lifetimes this staggering explosion so between the year I was born 1979 and the year I turned 21 obesity doubled here in the United States and then in the next 20 years o severe obesity doubled again right and you look at that and think well what happened what's going on there cuz it goes to the heart of this point you were making where you're absolutely right we know why this happened

this change this explosion in obesity happens in every country that makes one change it's not where people suddenly have a collapsing willpower it's not where people suddenly become lazy it's where people move from Mostly eating a diet that consists of Whole Foods that they prepare on the day to eating a diet that mostly consists of processed and Ultra processed foods Which con which are constructed out of chemicals in factories in a process that isn't even called cooking it's called manufacturing food and it turns out this new kind of food which never existed in the past

right which is totally new thing affects our bodies in a completely different way to the way the old Whole Foods used to affect us no one can deny it a big motivation is to look better as it's defined by the culture right um and I think that can make us excuse your judgment you want to overplay the benefits and underplay the risk I think that was a factor for me I think I've got to be candid about that um and you think about some of the risks you were talking about this particularly plays out you

think about muscle mass right so I'm sure your listeners know but um muscle mass is the total amount of soft tissue in your body it's really important for like movement right um and naturally as you age you shed muscle mass every decade depressingly from the age of 30 which I statistic I don't like um so just whoever you are you're going to lose some muscle mass as you age the risk with these drugs is as with any other form of radical weight loss you don't just lose fat Mass you lose muscle mass so the danger

is that you go into the aging process with a diminished amount of muscle mass now this is particularly true for a category of people we haven't talked about who I think are really important to think about which is not people who are overweight or obese who are taking these drugs to get down to a healthy weight but people who are in fact skinny who are taking them to be super skinny you know we've cracked the code of what regulates weight it's gut hormones there are more than 70 gut hormones that affect weight so asmic works

on one glp1 or simulates one um munaro works on Two glp1 And Gip um Triple G works on three but now there's 70 of these damn things right there's going to be all sorts of combinations and increasingly it's going to be pills 8 years we've got big issues around cost at the moment but 8 years from now as then pick goes out of patent it doesn't cost much to make this as a pill 8 years from now unless we're in a Fen fence situation which I don't rule out and if someone's watching this in the

future on YouTube and go oh right okay um but 8 years from now it'll be a daily pill it'll cost a dollar a day barring a catastrophe I would anticipate 47% of the population using it is a low estimate actually wow wouldn't you wow given that 70% are overweight or obese and a dollar a day ain't much right and and I would be worried about that and the biggest thing I hope is it wakes us up to go how like I said before how the [ __ ] did we get here and why are the

Japanese not there right how come in Japan when I went to Japan it's the weirdest sensation to walk around a school of a thousand children just a normal school and realize there were no overweight children in that school right because Japanese people protect their children from process and ultr processed foods um and there's very few obese adults right four% of Japanese people are obese compared to 42.5% here in the US um but yeah so the hope is that it wakes us up now as I say that there's a little bit of me that goes [

__ ] it'll send us to sleep if you've got a little technical fix why would you bother fixing the environmental problem it blinds you to getting at the root cause of what's driving the problem in the first place so it it it it moves us further away from the actual solution this year we welcome Dr Phil STS to the podcast Phil is the renowned psychiatrist and protagonist of the Netflix documentary stuts and our conversation delved into all kinds of things personal transformation The Art of embracing life's challenges and the current state of Mental Health Care

his practical non-nonsense tools for navigating life's difficulties really resonated with me pretty deeply and I'm thrilled to share a glimpse into our powerful exchange well here's the situation as I see the old models of therapy and and a lot of the old models about human uh nature are are wrong it's par they're particularly wrong now um and the reason is no one is satisfied in our culture no one so you have a lot of people almost everybody feeling they didn't get paid so to speak and the the dissatisfaction is only going to grow and the

reason is human beings only can feel satisfaction if they're co-creating with the higher forces it's it's not like a philosophy or or um something I figured out it's just what I've observe that's a and that's the secret that's you know the thing the secret this is the real secret you'll never be satisfied if you're doing something in in a completely isolated manner part of the ethos of what I do is you never let the person leave without something it could be a tool it could be just a sense of hope it could be relating differently

to the world but some something that they can actually do and um I'm a little shaky today I'll show you this we're going to get a drawing am I going to be allowed to keep the drawing we'll see we'll see how you do I don't think there's going to be a drawing because my [ __ ] that's all right we got all the time in the world okay so we got a pyramid here with two lines through the middle yeah so so this this is the right pathway to look at the world as far as

I'm concerned um and it has to do with faith the bottom of this thing is like is called Faith now and people don't understand what faith is people want want to have um Faith be because it's proven to them which is impossible the idea is you have to have a freely chosen you have to choose to have faith for no reason without Pro without anything if you do that then you can act which is a second level of the thing and then once you can act then you become confident see people think that they can't

act until they become confident and it's not true at all it's it's it's partx just wanting to paralyze them so Faith at the foundation of the pyramid yeah action in the middle yeah confidence at the top yeah and your confidence isn't about any one result that's disaster to look at it like that the confidence comes because you know you're going to repeat the pattern over and over and over again you have to choose to have faith and some of the tools are just to help you in that direction and the tools all being action oriented

because action is the engine of whatever sort of emotional result you're you're aiming towards as opposed to upside down which is the way that most people yeah I can't believe you said that yeah a lot of the stuff in our culture is to people are selling stuff all the time and what they're selling you is uh follow me or buy this product or whatever it is um you you're exonerated from those you get get oped out yeah you got a pass and that's that's one of the worst things that's going on and I would say

post World War I it it's really gotten out of hand and some some of that also for me has to do with um the economics of it um like if I make um less this year it has no consequence to me it's not real but what the people you know at our level financially don't understand well you understand it obviously um is that the guy who is Works maybe he makes $69,000 a year he works his ass off and he's a good person if he he he walks around in Terror that his kid is going

to get sick [ __ ] Terror which brings us to and and it's because I'm like half in one world and half in the other world I could I could see it from both points of view um I don't know the exact numbers but it's easily easily I would say 30 40% of the population now and that's just an example of other things that are happening which means the institutions that we've always relied on and we felt well this safety here there's somebody on my team over here they're all cracking and and they're they're all

corrupt and they're people don't trust them anymore so the last Bastion of denial to me has been broken right cuz that that's always been an illusion or a delusion but now it's just more evident how illusionary it is that there's some kind of safety or capacity for us to exert control over things we have no control over that's correct and the other side of that I call it institutional corruption is the not the middle level people because most of them are good people and they do their job but the I I know a lot of

people on the higher level and they they actually think they're exempt from all of this and because of that they they can't penetrate at deeply enough into the other person's experience and if you can't penetrate into the other person's experience no matter what and I mean from here that you feel it if you can't do that you you're at of touch with reality which brings us to another point which is the the role of groups and I you're a 12 step so you understand this um only a group or even if it's two people that

you're working with can allow you to have the relationship with these higher forces they're not meant to be experience in a singularity Sam Harris is one of the most influential voices in contemporary intellectual discourse so it was an amazing experience to break bread with the neuroscientist philosopher and mindfulness Advocate to discuss critical thinking in our age of misinformation the transformative power of Med meditation and strategies for navigating our increasingly complex world so here's a clip that illustrates Sam's unique ability to bring scientific rigor to the challenges of our time it seems to me that Consciousness

either exists on some sliding scale that is calibrated with the complexity of of a brain how many neurons do you have or it's endemic to everything what's known as pan psychism and sounds like you're relatively agnostic on that and that exploring the truth behind that isn't necessarily the best use of time and energy because at the end of the day we have this experience and that's what you're interested in trying to better understand yeah and and I think the the gradations of Consciousness are more a matter of the contents of Consciousness right so what you

obviously get as you scale up in information processing and intelligence is more mind right you get more distinctions you can make you get more you know you get ideas I mean we get language I mean just having language is an enormous difference right you know it's just like everything about us that's recognizably human is a matter of us leveraging the power of language right and are being able to conceive of a past and a future in in ex explicit terms and to plan across that that time Horizon I mean that's you know that's something that

you know chimpanzees can't do you know I have no doubt that chimps are conscious there's something that it's like to be a chimp some of that would be recognizable to us but the fact that they're not language using in any deep sense deprives them of of so much that is uh there's so much mental real estate that can't be actualized without language and so you're noticing impermanence you're noticing that that the more closely you look the more fleeting experience becomes right so it's like when you start and you have very little concentration and you know

you're told to just feel your body sitting in the chair or sitting on the cushion well you just have this kind of gross feeling of okay I I just I feel I feel my body I like basic proception I feel the energy in my body I feel my knee I feel my shoulder I feel my back I got a pain in my in my neck I hope that goes away okay I'm back to the back to the body as you do this hour by hour by hour you you get more concentration the difference between being

lost in thought and being really present with your sensory experience becomes clearer and clearer such that eventually the the present moment gets enough kind of gravity to it where your attention more and more naturally rests there and you can actually pay attention to the breath and to sounds and to Sensations and the moment that begins to happen the mo you begin to notice impermanence just rains right like nothing is solid nothing is stable you thought you had a body but when you pay attention you just have this cloud of fleeting sensation you have these tiny

points of pressure and tingling and temperature and pain and tightness and movement and you know your hands disappear into this poist painting you know of of sensation and so it is with everything you can pay attention to sounds or everything becomes very punctate and fleeting you begin to pass through this layer of Concepts where you're no longer hearing traffic and birds and the the rustling of somebody's rain jacket you're hearing just the raw data of sound you haven't become a [ __ ] you can you can still think about what you're hearing but you notice

that the that automatic conceptualization is something you can relax and you get more into to the flow of just raw data of seeing hearing smelling tasting touching and then thoughts arise to and try to grab hold of it and you just notice them too as appearances in Consciousness but for the longest time it can feel like there's a subject doing this right like there's still you there's still a meditator you know aiming at objects right and even even if the aiming becomes effortless even if even if you're just noticing attention go out to the sound

and go go down to the to the feeling of pressure in the body or whatever it is the locus of which is in the head yeah I mean most people start with a very clear sense that there's a you know they're up there in their head and now they're paying attention to the body and the body is down there right they're aiming attention to to Sensations in the knee say or when you're doing walking meditation you're aiming attention down to the sensations in your feet or your legs but it can become very effortless and and

it can become you can notice so much impermanence that you begin to extrapolate from this this kind of just blizzard of change that there can be no stable self to be to be made out of all of this right there's just this next moment of hearing this next moment of seeing this next moment of sensing sensation there can be a lot of great feelings of Freedom that come with this because you're there's just like a real relaxation into the flow of the present moment and you're not trying to do anything with it you're not trying

to change anything the goal here of noticing all of this is to at least in this system to increase the the mental factor of equinity because so you're noticing the pleasant stuff disappears you can't there's nothing to hold on to there in a pleasant taste or a pleasant sound you also noticing the unpleasant stuff disappears the moment you notice it so there's nothing to there's no problem there's nothing to push away even in very strong feelings of physical discomfort you can get to a point where you can have really strong pain in your body you

know excruciating pain in your body or certainly would have been excruciating yesterday but now you've got such equinity that it's just it's just change just changing you know it's twisting and burning and stabbing and but it's just like there's no there there even like the moment you try to find the stabbing Sensation that was a problem a moment ago it's not there there's something new but it's gone the moment you notice it right so everything's just falling away from attention the more the more you pay attention and there's a an immense Freedom that comes with

that rounding out our incredible lineup is Dr Alan goldhammer a true Pioneer in the field of medically supervised water only fasting for over four decades Dr goldhammer has been at the Forefront of using fasting as a powerful tool for healing and Longevity and our conversation dop deep into the science behind fasting and its potential to revolutionize our approach to chronic disease what is fasting what are we talking about when we're discussing this topic well the type of fasting that we do is the complete abstinence of all substances except water in an environment of complete rest

so it's therapeutic medically supervised water only fasting but the fact is it can be done safely it can be done effectively and when it's needed there's nothing else that does exactly what water only fasting does right so at True North the typical hard case that finds his or her way to your doorstep um is somebody that you're going to supervise over a period of how long as they undergo this protocol uh fasting ranges from 5 to 40 days on water only and there's a period of half the length of the fast recovery in a supervised

setting so typical patient might fast for 2 or 3 weeks they might be with us a month and those patients will often times come in with specific complaints high blood pressure type 2 diabetes autoimmune diseases or some forms of cancer particularly things like lymphoma everybody's worried about obesity and being fat and they think of it often as a cosmetic issue and it's far from just a cosmetic issue on your body there's a type of fat called visceral fat it particularly accumulates around the abdomen and the organs that has hypermetabolic effects it produces inflammatory products I6

tnl Alpha acute phase reactive proteins and these inflammatory components are thought to be responsible for the heart disease the diabetes the autoimmune disease and some forms of cancer uh so getting rid of you can think of visceral fat like a tumor so if you had a multi- pound tumor in your body you would be appropriately alarmed because of its effects and we go to inordinate effects to get rid of those types of tumors and interestingly enough let's say you went on a fast and lost 10% of your body weight you might think well I lose

10% of my visceral fat but that's not the case you may be losing subcutaneous fat or or muscle mass you would lose all those things you'd lose muscle fiber glycogen water and fat when you fast and when you come off the fast you regain water fiber glycogen and protein but not fat when you follow a whole plant food sosf free protocol you'll continue to lose fat and what's interesting is you don't just lose equal amounts of fat and visceral fat you will lose preferential mobilization of visceral fat for example uh we used a dexa scanner

to do some studies typical male uh fasts for 2 weeks loses 20% of their total fat but 55% of their visceral fat so the visceral fat is being mobilized much like tumors are in other words if you lose 10% of your body weight you don't lose 10% of your breast tumor you might lose 50% or all of the breast tumor so how does the body know that it wants to get rid of the breast tumor versus anything else CU there is mechanisms in the body that pref deferentially mobilize materials in inverse proportion to their need

and visceral fat shouldn't be there and as a consequence the body appears to go in and deal with that first which is really great because it's one of the great benefits of fasting is the preferential mobilization of visceral fat three billion people globally have chronic diseases in the US 150 million people face chronic disease despite substantial Health Care expenditures six out of 10 us adults have some form of chronic disase disease there's 40 million deaths annually as a result of these illnesses heal us healthcare costs have exceeded 3.5 trillion in 20022 and in the US

over 70% of adults are overweight with 40% being obese like that is shocking so help me understand how we got here we got here because of the pleasure trap the hidden force that undermines health and happiness we fool the satiety mechanisms of the brains of humans by putting chemicals in our feed if you put these same chemicals in the feed of rats or mice or Birds they the rodents will gain 49% of their body weight in 60 days the birds will get so fat they can't even fly there is no obesity in wild animals you

know even whales are what 9% body fat they're lean mean machines they just wear it on the outside of their body unless those animals get exposed to our highly processed foods with these chemicals added to it and then they'll get fat just like we do and they'll get the same disease diseases we do the breast cancer the colon cancer the heart disease the diabetes these changes occur in animals the same the way they do in us and the chemicals that we put in our feed that fool the satiety mechanisms allow us to ere eat and

our responsible for the Obesity and overweight that we see are salt oil and sugar SOS and that's why we Advocate a whole plant food sosf free diet because salt oil and sugar are not food they're hyperconcentrated food byproducts they're added to food to make food taste better and that's what tasting better is is the artificial stimulation of dopamine in the brain and foods do taste better to us with those in fact they taste so much better that we'll systematically overeat them if you ask a person to eat their fill of say rice or anything they'll

eat a certain amount everything else being equal if you salt that up they'll eat more before they reach satiety before they feel satisfied and people say yeah cuz it tastes better that's right that's what it means is that it will stimulate that dopamine production and you will have to eat more before you feel satisfied if you just eat a whole plant food sosf free diet we're talking about brown rice uh grains not necessarily we don't use the glutenous grains the wheat rye and The Barley we certainly don't use uh encourage the Breads and you know

bread is a great example they call it the staff of life right people really like bread but if you take away the salt the oil and the sugar from bread then they call it matah and it's punishment on Passover nobody's you know getting too crazy about the wheat and the and the water it's the additives that are added and if you take wheat berries and you boil them and eat them it's 500 calories a pound you take bread it's, 1500 calories a pound before you turn it into a butter boat and spread coagulated cowp pass

all over it so the bottom line is how you process these foods can make a big difference in terms of whether they're helpful or or not helpful um so we're talking about grains and legum so beans lentils peas this kind of thing but cook like soup and you know whole grains rather than necessarily processed all the way down we're talking about fresh fruit but not necessarily fruit juices and dried fruits and highly processed fruits we're talking about vegetables both raw and cooked and we're talking about all kinds of vegetables starchy vegetables like Hub squash and

butternut squash and potatoes and sweet potatoes we're talking about the variety of green vegetables particularly and getting these you know High mineral content Foods into us and again I'd rather see people eating more Whole Foods necessarily than relying entirely on juices and and and processed foods where you remove the uh soluble fiber which is so critical to maintaining a healthy gut microbiome and then we're not and we're using small quantities of you know nuts and seeds and more concentrated higher fat plant Foods what we're not using though are animal Foods so meat fish foul eggs

and dairy products oil salt and sugar so basically what I tell people is they should go inside themselves look at a food if they want to know if they should eat it just say do I really really really want it and if the answer is truly yes you know mhm you can't have it cuz you get nothing if you really really really want it there's it's likely banging on the pleasure trap if you just eat a whole plant food SOS free diet and you eat to your satisfaction you will be able to maintain Optimum weight

but to the degree that you add salt oil and sugar to the food the only question is how fat are you going to get and uh there you have it 2024 it's been an incredible journey I really hope you enjoyed these highlights and in closing I just want to say that I'm genuinely grateful for all the guests who shareed their wisdom and also for you our listeners our viewers without whom this show just wouldn't be possible so thank you if any of these Snippets piqu your interest I encourage you to watch the full episodes links

to which you can find in the show notes on the episode page at ral.com as well as in the YouTube description look for part two of our best of 2020 24 series coming up later this week packed with even more mind expanding conversations until then peace [Music]