The Megyn Kelly Show - Get Healthy, with Gary Brecka, Andrew Huberman, and Sean O'Mara

00:00:00.000 Hey, guys, Megyn Kelly here. Like millions of you, I love true crime content. So this summer,

00:00:07.220 we created the show I always wanted to listen to. We're calling it MK Confidential. One case

00:00:13.120 per week, five episodes, Monday through Friday. New episodes every weeknight. JonBenet Ramsey,

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00:00:25.560 Search for The Megyn Kelly Show wherever you listen to podcasts, you'll find it there.

00:00:55.560 does not endorse products or services. Welcome to the Megan Kelly show live on Sirius XM channel

00:01:04.300 111 every weekday at New East. Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to the Megan Kelly show in

00:01:15.740 today's Sunday mega episode. Today we're calling it get healthy. It's a packed show featuring three 0.98

00:01:21.660 of our recent deep dives into the world of wellness

00:01:24.300 and the many options available to you

00:01:26.760 with three experts to learn from.

00:01:28.980 We've got Gary Brecka, Andrew Huberman,

00:01:31.740 and Dr. Sean O'Meara.

00:01:33.500 Enjoy it, and we'll see you tomorrow.

00:01:36.340 Today, we have one of the most preeminent

00:01:38.520 health and wellness experts in the world.

00:01:41.520 Gary Brecka is a human biologist, biohacker,

00:01:44.700 and influencer who sits at the helm

00:01:46.680 of RFKJ's Maha Action Committee,

00:01:49.780 That's Make America Healthy Again. Once upon a time, he worked for insurance companies tabulating the expected lifespan of their customers. Now he uses those same skills to help you beat the odds. He has millions of followers on social media. He has a hit podcast, and he is in demand worldwide as an expert in the longevity space.

00:02:11.980 He's founder of The Ultimate Human, a movement designed to help you feel better, look better, and live longer naturally.

00:02:20.620 He has many, many prominent fans, including Joe Rogan and UFC president Dana White,

00:02:27.440 who said that, quote, to say Gary Brecka saved my life is the understatement of the century.

00:02:34.460 Gary Brecka, welcome back to the show. Great to see you.

00:02:36.960 I'm so excited to be back, Megan. We had such a great time last time.

00:02:41.180 I felt like our time got cut too short, so maybe we'll have time to take a deep dive on some things today.

00:02:47.640 Same.

00:02:48.100 There is so much I want to ask you about.

00:02:49.940 Let's just start at the beginning, and by that I mean this morning.

00:02:53.060 The Gary Brecka morning routine.

00:02:55.720 Go.

00:02:57.380 Yeah.

00:02:57.840 You want me to just rip it? 1.00

00:03:00.080 Yeah, let's rip it.

00:03:01.240 So I call it bookending your sleep.

00:03:04.120 So I have a specific sleep hygiene that I use to go to bed and the same thing to wake up.

00:03:08.840 The thing about this routine is that it's easy. It's portable. You can do it anywhere in the world. I've proven it a number of times by sharing my sleep scores onto Instagram. You know, last year, I think when I did 14 cities in 18 days and was able to maintain 88% and higher sleep scores, even though I was changing time zones every day for 14 days, people's ears perked up and they started to listen.

00:03:34.400 Because the truth is that sleep is our human superpower, and so I bookend it by using the same routine to go to bed and the same routine to wake up.

00:03:43.400 So morning routine is within 30 minutes of waking every day, I find my way outside into natural sunlight.

00:03:51.160 You know, what's fascinating about natural sunlight is that it doesn't get the credence that it deserves.

00:03:55.980 Sunlight, certain wavelengths that are only in natural sunlight, that are constant on, they're flicker-free.

00:04:02.220 I'm not talking about through a window.

00:04:04.160 I'm not talking about through your drapes.

00:04:05.860 I'm talking about exposing your eyes to natural sunlight.

00:04:09.000 This helps set your circadian cycle.

00:04:12.100 So we actually have a clock in our brain.

00:04:14.620 It's called the suprachiasmatic nucleus.

00:04:17.500 It's a very sophisticated name for basically the puppeteer in your brain that is setting

00:04:23.180 your circadian rhythm.

00:04:24.540 And what's so important about circadian rhythm is that this is what governs your menstrual

00:04:29.420 cycle in a female.

00:04:30.240 This is what governs your sleep and wake cycle in all human beings, when your cortisol rises, when your melatonin calms down. 1.00

00:04:38.160 This actually governs your digestive tract.

00:04:41.400 It actually sends signals to your digestive tract that you're awake and peristalsis can begin, which is why most people don't use the restroom and have a bowel movement at night.

00:04:51.960 They usually have it first thing in the morning.

00:04:54.000 And so the circadian clock is so important, not just to longevity, but it's very important to how well we sleep that night.

00:05:02.380 The one thing that you can do that is absolutely free to ensure that you get a good night's sleep tonight is get sunlight in your eyes this morning.

00:05:11.020 So within 30 minutes of waking, I'm outside.

00:05:13.160 I'm in natural sunlight.

00:05:14.220 I realize people live in cold climates.

00:05:15.860 They live in dark climates.

00:05:17.160 This light does penetrate through the clouds, so it doesn't matter if it's overcast.

00:05:21.160 Get outside in sunlight.

00:05:22.580 and I do three rounds of 30 obnoxiously deep breaths.

00:05:28.100 And at the end of each round of deep breaths,

00:05:31.240 I do a prolonged breath hold.

00:05:33.880 And the science behind this is very valid.

00:05:36.040 In fact, if you really wanna be blown away

00:05:38.560 by what breath work can do to the human body,

00:05:41.220 regulate the immune system,

00:05:42.560 tap into our autonomic nervous system,

00:05:44.720 just watch the documentary on Wim Hof called The Iceman

00:05:48.000 and you will become a believer in breath work.

00:05:51.840 I think because sunlight and breathwork are free, people don't allocate at the same level of validity that it deserves.

00:05:59.040 So I'll do three rounds of 30 breaths.

00:06:01.140 At the end of my 30th breath, and I would encourage you if you're a novice to breathwork, just start with five breaths.

00:06:06.360 I do an extended breath hold.

00:06:08.700 And the reason for that is it allows the carbon dioxide to build up in my bloodstream.

00:06:13.520 Carbon dioxide is the main vasodilator in the human body.

00:06:17.320 The reason why we get vascular when we go to the gym and exercise is because of the CO2 going back to the lung.

00:06:23.520 And so we want to dilate that vasculature first thing in the morning.

00:06:27.340 This is a very simple way for us to wake up.

00:06:30.440 And our bodies are creatures of habit.

00:06:33.200 They crave routine.

00:06:35.120 You know, when you want your body to trust you, you do the same thing at the same time every day.

00:06:41.840 Give it some consistency.

00:06:43.520 something that when you're traveling or when you're in a different time zone or when you're

00:06:48.300 staying in a different environment, sleep environment, you're at a hotel, you're at an

00:06:51.420 in-law's house, something that your body can cue into to know this is time to wake up. And if you

00:06:57.360 make yourself get into sunlight within 30 minutes of waking, do three rounds of five to 10 to 30

00:07:04.340 deep breaths with an extended breath hold in between, if you do that consistently for seven

00:07:09.580 days, you will never miss another day. It will become your new drug of choice because nothing

00:07:14.920 will make you feel better for longer. It improves your mood, improves your emotional state, gets

00:07:19.580 oxygen to our tissues, gets our digestive tract going, spikes our cortisol, reduces our melatonin,

00:07:25.220 and sets us up for a great night's sleep that night. You know, it's really fascinating too,

00:07:29.260 and we can get into more detail on this, but if you look at autoimmune disease as a category,

00:07:36.080 85% of all autoimmune disease is found in females.

00:07:40.300 And why is that?

00:07:41.460 It's not because autoimmune disease is selective by sex.

00:07:44.980 It's selective by weakness.

00:07:47.020 And very often, women especially do not feel safe in their own bodies. 0.82

00:07:52.400 And by safety, I mean out of the fight or flight response.

00:07:56.860 You know, our nervous system, which is regulating everything, 1.00

00:07:59.320 not the least of which is cycling in women, 0.98

00:08:02.560 our nervous system has two states.

00:08:05.160 One is called the sympathetic state, the fight or flight state.

00:08:08.520 One is called the parasympathetic state, the rest and digest state.

00:08:12.380 You want to be in a parasympathetic state to wake up, to go to bed, to digest food, to regulate your hormone cycle.

00:08:21.400 So some of these things that we do tell our body that it's safe.

00:08:25.500 Things are okay.

00:08:26.780 This is a routine that you can rely on, that you can learn to trust.

00:08:30.520 And those habitual patterns are something that if you build over a lifetime will pay tremendous dividends.

00:08:35.160 hmm oh that's fascinating now tell me about um you mentioned it doesn't matter if you live in

00:08:41.700 a cold environment or an environment where it's dark you know our friends in alaska for example

00:08:46.120 but you know typically during the school year most parents wake up at 6 a.m in that hour because

00:08:51.660 they have kids that they have to get off to school and it's dark everywhere pretty much everywhere

00:08:56.520 it's dark at 6 a.m you're not really getting sunlight is the rule the same the rule is the

00:09:01.560 same. If you can't get into sunlight within the first half hour because you're waking up too early,

00:09:05.420 then after you drop the kids off at school, spend eight minutes outside facing the sun,

00:09:11.020 you know, allow the sunlight to hit your skin. I don't know if you've seen the recent research

00:09:14.140 that's come out on sunscreen and exposure to sunlight, but the incidence of skin cancer is

00:09:20.300 significantly lower in groups that do not consistently use sunscreen. Now, I'm not

00:09:26.540 talking about bathing in the sun for hours. I'm talking about eight to 12 minutes of direct

00:09:31.100 sunlight. Sunlight has wavelengths. They're constant on wavelengths that pass through your

00:09:36.040 eyes, and they trigger very specific activities in the brain, one of which is to tell the super

00:09:41.100 chiasmatic nucleus, this master puppeteer, that it's morning, it's time to raise my cortisol,

00:09:47.240 it's time to drop my melatonin, and it puts it onto a very good cycle. You know, we used to sleep

00:09:54.360 and wake with the sun. We are so disconnected from the cycle of Mother Earth now, and our

00:10:00.380 schedules are so discombobulated. Sometimes we get up at 6 a.m., sometimes 9 a.m., sometimes 4.30,

00:10:05.540 depending on whether or not we have a flight. We got to get the kids to school or it's a weekend

00:10:08.880 and we're going to catch up on our sleep. So that consistency gives your body a routine it can rely

00:10:14.120 on. And when you are in dark environments, if you take the kids to school, let's say before the sun

00:10:19.180 rises, when you get back to the house, spend a few minutes outside, do a few rounds of breath work,

00:10:24.560 very simple, go back inside and tell me how good you feel when you start your day.

00:10:28.800 can i ask you about the the studies you mentioned i thought it was observational but the on the

00:10:35.560 sunscreens because as somebody who's very fair you know i'm i am part italian i'm more irish than

00:10:42.280 are you really okay um but there's no evidence of the italian i was gonna say i don't see the

00:10:47.600 italian in there no my grandfather's name was angelo de mayo i mean for fresh off the boat

00:10:53.660 from italy okay but nothing um anyway nothing but the temper that's i got the temper the fire

00:10:59.540 but i didn't get the skin yeah that's where you got the short fuse um but you know everyone in

00:11:05.860 my family has had some form of skin cancer thank god no melanoma but like the basal cells and the

00:11:11.800 squamous and all that stuff and i actually asked my dermatologist i'm very very tuned into skin

00:11:16.500 cancer issues you know is this possibly true like should i be not wearing sunscreen and my kids and

00:11:22.940 she was like, absolutely not. You do need to wear the sunscreen and your kids need to wear the

00:11:28.080 sunscreen. And her take on that study was that it's, I don't know how to phrase it, but basically

00:11:37.240 the people who aren't wearing sunscreen tend to be darker skinned people, people who aren't like me,

00:11:44.660 who can tolerate the sun much, much better than the likes of me can. And so, yeah, of course,

00:11:52.040 they're not going to, long term, if you study those people, they're going to say, no, I don't

00:11:55.520 use sunscreen. And they're not going to have skin cancer. Whereas if you took a bunch of Irish

00:12:00.460 people like me and put us out there for 30 years without wearing sunblock, our cancer rate would

00:12:05.740 be through the roof. So what do you make of that? That's actually not true. If you actually look at

00:12:10.520 population data, I used to be a mortality expert for large life insurance companies. So we studied

00:12:15.040 population data, mortality data. I mean, you can make some broad analogies. For example,

00:12:19.480 some of the longest life expectancies in the world are centered right around the equator,

00:12:23.560 20 degrees, is it longitude or latitude? Latitude from the equator. It used to be,

00:12:29.840 it's not this way anymore, but historically, as you got closer to the poles, life expectancy was

00:12:35.440 precipitously lower. In fact, when I started my career about 25 years ago, Eskimos, true Eskimos, 0.99

00:12:41.920 had the shortest life expectancy of any race on Earth. And when you got closer to the equator, 0.86

00:12:46.940 you extended life expectancy. So it's not whether or not you can use sunscreen. It's the type of

00:12:51.840 sunscreen that you use. So if you were to actually look at skin cancer trends, because we've known

00:12:56.820 about skin cancer for decades before the advent of aerosol sunscreens and topical sunscreens,

00:13:04.300 we knew that skin cancer existed. Look at skin cancer rates in the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s. What

00:13:10.800 you'll find is if you superimpose a chart, now this is correlated, not causal, so you could call

00:13:17.400 it anecdotal, but if you were to superimpose a chart of the parabolic rise in skin cancer,

00:13:22.920 it would be superimposable with the parabolic use of sunscreen. Does that mean that you shouldn't

00:13:27.200 be using sunscreen? No, it means that you should be using a type of sunscreen that has titanium

00:13:31.880 dioxide or what's called non-nano zinc. You want things that sit on the surface of the skin and

00:13:38.980 reflect sunlight. What you don't want, because the skin is not just a barrier, it is a gateway.

00:13:45.200 It is a gateway directly into the bloodstream. It's the largest organ in our body. And so we

00:13:50.660 eliminate waste through the skin. One of the reasons why sauna is one of the best ways to

00:13:55.260 reduce all-cause mortality and cardiovascular disease is because we use the skin to eliminate

00:13:59.180 waste. But it is not just a barrier. It is a gateway. We transmit medications through the

00:14:04.540 skin, patches, creams, sprays. So when you apply sunscreens, para-aminobenzylic acid, and other

00:14:11.420 binders, fillers, agents that are meant to create aerosols, aerosol sprays, those chemicals,

00:14:19.500 and it's not the sunscreen that is the issue itself, it is the chemical carriers in the

00:14:26.060 sunscreen that show up in the bloodstream. And if you look at that study, some of the

00:14:31.120 concentrations of these chemicals, para-amino-benzalic acid being one of them, PABA,

00:14:36.260 were 400 times the safe allowable limit, the FDA's safe allowable limit. And you would think that if

00:14:44.340 I'm spraying it on my skin, it's not transmissible and can't be picked up in the serum of the blood,

00:14:48.960 but that's actually not true. The skin actually transmits a lot of these molecules right through

00:14:53.500 the skin into the bloodstream. So it's the carriers that are taking the sunscreen and making

00:14:59.220 it into an aerosol or making it into a gel that's very easy to spread on your skin, those

00:15:04.380 carriers, those chemicals transmit right to the skin. They get embedded in the dermal layer of

00:15:10.420 the skin. They also enter the blood. And this is where you have issues with skin cancer, because

00:15:15.700 all cancer, regardless of its form or its origin, was at one time a healthy cell. So there's no form

00:15:23.600 of cancer that was not initially a healthy cell. So what happened to that cell? It became

00:15:29.600 metabolically sick. It shifted its metabolism. If it happens in the liver, you have liver cancer.

00:15:34.780 If it happens in a lymph node, you have lymphatic cancer. You know, if it happens in the spleen,

00:15:39.540 you have splenic cancer. And so what causes healthy cells to become sick? Well, very often,

00:15:45.960 what causes a healthy cell to become sick? We know radiation can do this, which comes from sun.

00:15:51.220 We also know that chemicals can do this.

00:15:53.580 So when we apply harsh chemicals to the skin, we can very often cause an accelerated shift

00:15:59.700 in that cell's metabolism, which is the genesis of cancer.

00:16:03.600 So if you're going to apply sunscreen, and I am actually a fan of sunscreen, there are

00:16:07.560 a lot of tallow-based sunscreens that use non-nano zinc.

00:16:10.400 There are sunscreens that use titanium dioxide.

00:16:12.980 These are extraordinarily safe.

00:16:15.140 When I was 19 years old, I was a lifeguard in Ocean City, Maryland.

00:16:18.580 Remember, everybody had the white noses.

00:16:20.700 And then they came out with colored zinc oxide.

00:16:24.180 Yes.

00:16:24.720 So a lot of us had blue noses, pink noses, whatever.

00:16:27.960 Those sunscreens are extraordinarily safe.

00:16:30.160 You can get them clear now.

00:16:31.480 You can get them in gel format.

00:16:33.340 You can get them in paste.

00:16:35.280 So if you're going to apply a sunscreen.

00:16:36.580 Yeah, because that's the downside of the zinc is it just it's so you're so white. 0.65

00:16:40.220 You go from white to even whiter. 0.98

00:16:41.980 Yeah, you do look like Casper the Friendly Ghost.

00:16:44.800 And just by saying Casper the Friendly Ghost, I'm dating myself.

00:16:47.780 I think that show went up 30 years ago.

00:16:49.900 I'm right there with you.

00:16:50.700 Um, and if you remember it, you're as old as I am.

00:16:53.640 Um, but, uh, uh, so these topical sunscreens that have titanium dioxide and zinc oxide,

00:16:59.980 that's the direction you want to go.

00:17:02.640 Okay.

00:17:03.320 All right.

00:17:03.700 Well, got it.

00:17:04.500 That's good to know.

00:17:05.340 A couple of other questions on the morning routine.

00:17:08.240 So the, you get the sunlight, you wake up.

00:17:10.420 Now, here's a question I have for you. 0.94

00:17:12.060 A lot of women my age, we don't sleep well.

00:17:14.700 you know it's like the the menopausal process which i've now found out takes forever yes like

00:17:21.900 the can start in your late perimenopause like yeah it's like 15 years you're stuck in like

00:17:26.960 whatever perimenopause or menopause i don't even know what it is anymore but um you don't sleep

00:17:31.580 well i don't know anyone my age female who sleeps well so i've told the audience before i did start

00:17:37.760 hrt which i really like good for you uh it's been actually kind of miraculous and that i do do the

00:17:43.640 estrogen i do the cream it's great yes and i'm so dumb to think like of course those hormones can

00:17:49.800 pass through my skin but i'm fine with a self-tanner okay i needed this conversation exactly

00:17:53.600 anyway so the progesterone though it's a problem for me and a lot of my girlfriends like not

00:18:01.180 everybody tolerates progesterone well it makes me for example super bloated like uncomfortably

00:18:06.480 bloated and i hate it right so then the doctors are like oh you can do it iud i'm like i don't

00:18:12.200 want to do an iud i don't want to do any i'm not sure i want to do any of that crap but the problem

00:18:16.760 is if you don't you have to do progesterone if you're taking estrogen to protect against uterine

00:18:21.140 cancer that's what the doctors say but the problem is um progesterone makes you uncomfortable and yet

00:18:28.320 it's the key part of hrt that helps women like me sleep it's what makes you sleep it gets you

00:18:35.680 through these menopausal weirdnesses and i wonder if you have any thoughts on that like is there

00:18:42.180 any solution for women who are between 40 and 60 having sleeping difficulty, but who either don't

00:18:50.200 tolerate progesterone well, or who just don't want to do HRT? Yes. So first of all, this happens

00:18:56.680 to be a core competency of mine. And I think it's one of the most underserved areas of all of modern

00:19:01.820 medicine is female hormone therapy, perimenopause, premenopause, and menopause. You know, as you

00:19:07.200 know, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration just recently removed the black box warnings

00:19:11.060 from female hormone therapy because nearly 50 million women suffered for decades because they

00:19:17.040 thought that hormone therapy and specifically estrogen led to an increased risk of breast 0.99

00:19:21.420 cancer. We know that that is patently false. You know, if you look at the study that that came

00:19:26.700 from, which was called the Women's Health Initiative, one of the largest hormone studies

00:19:30.180 ever done, it was bastardized and misreported. And essentially what came out of that study was

00:19:36.060 not that there was a 20% concomitant increase in breast cancer. There was a 20% relative risk

00:19:42.820 reduction in breast cancer. And that's why I applaud the FDA for that. Marty McCary did that

00:19:48.380 before his tenure ended. Yes, God bless him. And they removed the black box warnings from

00:19:53.040 female hormone therapy. So let's just back up a little bit. And let's just talk about what 0.96

00:19:57.760 premenopause and menopause actually is, right? I mean, when you're in menopause, you still have a

00:20:03.240 cycle. It's just that your amplitude is lower. So you have a very high amplitude cycle, very

00:20:09.000 definitive cycles between follicular ovulation and luteal as you are a menstruating female.

00:20:14.260 And as you get older, this amplitude begins to drop. You still have a cycle in menopause. It's

00:20:19.340 just very, very low. So it's important to understand, first of all, that this cycling

00:20:25.760 decline can begin in your late 30s. And the signs are not things that drive you to the emergency

00:20:32.460 room or take you to the ER or get you over to the urgent care. They are signs like brain fog,

00:20:38.520 waking, water retention, poor focus, poor concentration. The hallmark sign is exhaustion

00:20:45.020 upon waking in the morning, which is an inverted cortisol and melatonin cycle, which I'm going to

00:20:50.000 talk about in a second. There is a gold standard test for women. And if your female audience is 1.00

00:20:55.440 listening, I think they should write this down because it may completely change their life. 1.00

00:20:58.720 there's a gold standard test called a dutch test um one of the most dangerous things to do in 1.00

00:21:04.680 female hormone therapy is to prescribe your entire complement of hormones based on a blood test just 1.00

00:21:11.940 a simple one-time blood test a blood test is a snapshot in time a menstruating female it's 0.90

00:21:17.820 perfectly normal for her estrogen to be in the 400s it's perfectly normal for estrogen to be in

00:21:22.200 the teens. So who's to say that 172 or 210 or 68 or 99 is high or low? Well, you don't know unless

00:21:29.480 you know exactly what stage of her cycle she's in, follicular, ovulation, luteal, and you know

00:21:34.720 whether or not all of those hormones are entering or exiting the cycle together. What happens in

00:21:42.060 these different stages of menopause is that all the hormones in a women's body don't get together 0.90

00:21:47.680 in a conference room one day and go, okay, girls, it's been a great run. We're all out of here. 0.89

00:21:52.200 right? They get together in the conference room and estrogen goes, no, no, no, I'm going to stick

00:21:56.980 around a while. Progesterone says I'm out. Pregnantalone says, I think I'm going to hang

00:22:01.100 out for a few months and then I'm going to leave. Testosterone's like, I'm totally out of here. I've

00:22:05.640 been in here long enough. So you get this weird cascade of everything from lack of libido to

00:22:12.660 brain fog, to weight gain, to water retention, to mood changes, to emotional changes. A female's 1.00

00:22:19.200 attraction to their spouse can shift during this period of time. Does it mean that they don't love 0.99

00:22:25.960 their spouse? It means that, and very often, sadly, in relationships, we couple libido and

00:22:34.620 arousal with love and attraction. You can be deeply in love with your spouse, you can be very

00:22:39.620 attracted to your spouse, and you can have no ability to be aroused and no libido. That's

00:22:44.540 usually because free testosterone is low. So these strange things happen where you're like, well,

00:22:49.480 I'm still in love with my significant other. I'm still attracted to my significant other. I'm just

00:22:53.800 not aroused. I have no libido. Or you wake up in the morning more exhausted than when you went to

00:22:58.900 bed. Or someone that is extraordinarily organized. This is what happened to my wife. I'd encourage

00:23:03.500 you to go watch the podcast that I did with my wife, Sage, working her because we went through

00:23:07.000 menopause together. We did the Dutch test and then she was very transparent, put her entire

00:23:13.120 cascade of hormones. She had every symptom that a female could have all the way through to frozen 1.00

00:23:17.760 shoulder, something called adhesive capsulitis. I have a friend who has that right now. 0.99

00:23:22.740 It's menopause. I will tell you, your friend is between 42 and probably 54 years old.

00:23:29.840 It's very painful for her to lay on her shoulder. She probably has a difficult time raising it

00:23:33.860 above level. Okay. Yeah. She just got a shot in it. Oh boy. She got cortisone and next

00:23:39.820 recommendation, tell her to be very careful, is they're going to recommend manipulation under

00:23:44.140 anesthesia, which is where they actually put her to sleep and they break those adhesions while 0.94

00:23:50.060 she's sleeping. They physically break those adhesions. Oh my gosh. It's called adhesive 0.77

00:23:53.880 capsulitis. Within three weeks of starting hormone therapy, her frozen shoulder will be gone. 0.95

00:24:00.720 My wife's shoulder went from being raised to here to straight up in the air, no pain. Your friend

00:24:05.960 will also tell you that it's very painful to lay on that shoulder if she rolls on over on it at

00:24:11.340 night it will just wake her up and she'll tell you that it's restricted and then she'll do simple

00:24:16.140 things like she'll bend down the tire shoe and forget that she has this and it will take her to

00:24:21.300 the floor it's very very painful this adhesive capsulitis this is a byproduct of estrogen

00:24:28.560 metabolism and if you wanted to have one lever to torture a woman it would be estrogen right

00:24:35.460 Because as you, and estrogen is a category of hormones.

00:24:39.760 There's E1, E2, E3, what's called estradiol, estrione.

00:24:44.860 These different hormones are high and low at different times in a woman's cycle, in her life cycle of her menstrual cycle, until she goes into menopause.

00:24:55.500 By moving these estrogen levers, you affect skin elasticity.

00:24:59.840 So all of a sudden they look in the mirror and they're like, I feel like I've aged 10 years and six months.

00:25:05.460 So the elasticity is leaving their skin.

00:25:08.780 Libido crashes.

00:25:10.560 The exhaustion in the morning, they start to retain water because remember, the primary role of estrogen is to retain water in the interstitial space.

00:25:19.280 The reason why estrogen goes from a high of about 400 in a menstruating female to a high of about 4,500 is because when they get pregnant is so that you can retain water, pad the uterus, protect the fetus.

00:25:32.520 So, but when we're older, we don't want to retain water. 1.00

00:25:37.380 These women think that they're getting fat and they're not getting fat. 1.00

00:25:40.380 They're getting water retensive. 1.00

00:25:41.820 This also happens to women that eat in a very narrow feeding women window, which is why 1.00

00:25:46.540 one of the most dangerous things that menstruating women can do is intermittent fasting in a 1.00

00:25:51.440 very, very narrow feeding window. 1.00

00:25:53.480 And you want to frustrate a female when they start intermittent fasting with their spouse. 1.00

00:25:58.200 Husband's got all the energy in the world. 0.98

00:25:59.700 he's putting on lean muscle, sleeping like a bear, wakes up like a tiger, doing great in the gym.

00:26:05.000 A woman's eating in the same narrow feeding window, can't get out of bed, starting to get

00:26:08.940 bloated, is also exercising, is barely eating, and is gaining weight. You know, that's because 1.00

00:26:13.560 you throw off the estrogen cycle and the body starts to retain water. So let me walk you through

00:26:18.140 what the solution to this is. The solution is a 24-hour urine test called the Dutch test.

00:26:23.380 and you do this test once and what it shows is the entire complement of hormones and don't assume

00:26:31.520 that because some of the hormones are tanking heading into menopause that all of the hormones

00:26:37.180 are tanking in fact i'd be very surprised if the reason why you react poorly to progesterone

00:26:42.580 is because your progesterone in its cycle is probably normal and you may be low on pregnenolone

00:26:50.540 you may be low on one of the three estradiols, the estrogen hormones. You're almost certainly

00:26:57.520 low on testosterone and free testosterone. So when you treat women for hormone therapy, 0.81

00:27:03.680 you replace the entire complement of hormones. We do not shoot women with rifles. In other words, 0.82

00:27:09.500 you don't take darts and throw them at hormones. You replace the entire complement of hormones.

00:27:16.860 And the reason for that is because it's called hormone replacement therapy, is that hormones are not cumulative.

00:27:24.980 So I often will open some of my hormone lectures by asking a room full of physicians.

00:27:29.360 Let's say you have two men.

00:27:30.900 One has a testosterone of 200.

00:27:33.120 One has a testosterone of 600.

00:27:35.740 And you're going to put them on hormone therapy. 0.96

00:27:38.260 Who gets more testosterone? 0.91

00:27:40.300 The guy with 200 or the guy with 600?

00:27:43.640 And the answer is they get exactly the same amount.

00:27:47.700 Reason for that is as soon as I replace their testosterone,

00:27:51.800 both of their production is going to zero or near zero.

00:27:55.700 So if I give each of them 200 milligrams of testosterone,

00:28:00.020 they will end in the same place.

00:28:02.720 Because if a man stops taking testosterone,

00:28:06.720 will his body kick back in and make the testosterone again?

00:28:09.740 Depending on how long he's been taking it,

00:28:11.420 which is why I'm a much bigger fan of peptides

00:28:13.820 like kispeptin, gonadalurilin.

00:28:17.000 I'm a big fan of something called enclomiphene. 0.96

00:28:20.240 These will signal the testicles 0.99

00:28:22.800 to increase their production. 0.99

00:28:25.380 So then they're high on their own supply.

00:28:27.520 And no matter what anyone tells you,

00:28:29.380 there is no better hormone

00:28:30.560 than one the body makes on its own.

00:28:32.500 So as men age,

00:28:34.880 they can develop something called primary hypogonadism

00:28:38.640 where they cannot produce their own testosterone.

00:28:41.420 And in that case, absolutely replace testosterone.

00:28:44.820 The evidence is clear.

00:28:46.540 2018, the Journal of American Urology updated all of their clinical guidelines on male hormone therapy.

00:28:53.640 Having low testosterone is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease.

00:28:59.080 Replacing testosterone does not increase your risk of cardiovascular disease.

00:29:03.480 In fact, it reduces it.

00:29:05.740 There are 10,000 receptors for testosterone in the male heart.

00:29:08.980 one of the highest, it's the highest of any organ in the body. So you don't want to deprive it of

00:29:13.680 testosterone if you're a man. There is not an increased risk of prostate cancer. There's not

00:29:18.440 an increased risk of prostate enlargement. And there is not a correlated risk or a causal risk

00:29:23.660 for cardiovascular disease. So you replace it if you can't produce it. You stimulate it if you can

00:29:31.460 produce it. So I want to go back to women for a second and close that loop. A Dutch test will give 1.00

00:29:36.520 your OBGYN, hopefully a functional OBGYN, everything that he or she needs to say, okay, 0.77

00:29:42.420 here are the hormones that are deficient. I am going to bring those back into the normal level.

00:29:47.640 Here are the hormones I'm going to leave alone or I'm going to replace. And then you replace that

00:29:54.340 entire complement of hormones. And it is a game changer for women because no woman only suffers 1.00

00:30:03.600 from the classic signs of menopause. 0.92

00:30:06.660 Classic signs are the hot flashes.

00:30:08.800 Classic sign is low libido.

00:30:10.500 Classic sign is sleep disruption.

00:30:12.420 They usually have this myriad of other symptoms

00:30:15.580 that they don't attribute back to, you know,

00:30:18.120 the poor focus, poor concentration,

00:30:20.540 lack of waking energy, you know, brain fog.

00:30:24.320 These are things crushing fatigue for no reason.

00:30:28.780 Waking exhausted and then having

00:30:30.640 what they call crushing fatigue during the day

00:30:32.880 where they just feel like they really have to take a nap.

00:30:35.280 Your listeners do not have to suffer.

00:30:37.160 Get that Dutch test, get it to a functional medicine doctor

00:30:39.680 and get those hormones replaced.

00:30:42.940 You're not increasing the risk of breath.

00:30:44.400 So now not to beat a dead horse,

00:30:46.960 but if you don't sleep well, notwithstanding,

00:30:50.060 because I am doing the HRT and I love it.

00:30:53.420 There are some out there who are saying like 20 milligrams,

00:30:57.560 I don't know if that's a unit of creatine

00:30:59.140 and you're gonna feel a lot better.

00:31:00.840 And I've never taken creatine.

00:31:02.100 I don't know whether that's something we should be considering, but like, is there any like bounce

00:31:07.560 back tool? Yes. So there are a bunch of things that can mitigate the effects of poor sleep. So

00:31:13.140 first of all, why is sleep important? Um, there's two phases of sleep. They're extraordinarily

00:31:16.520 important. One is called REM phase. This is where we are assembling memory, right? Learned memory.

00:31:21.760 So maybe you learned something on this podcast today. Um, and when you go to sleep tonight,

00:31:27.240 Your subconscious, your hippocampus, and your prefrontal cortex, these two will connect,

00:31:32.440 and this will become a learned memory.

00:31:34.420 You'll remember what maybe that you learned during this podcast or a lecture or an interview

00:31:39.120 or another guest that you had on.

00:31:40.960 So that is called learned memory.

00:31:42.820 That's assembled during REM phases of sleep.

00:31:45.400 During the deep phase of sleep, something called the glymphatic system is active.

00:31:50.100 So we have lymph nodes in the body, right?

00:31:51.960 The lymph nodes that swell when you get a sore throat.

00:31:54.680 We have a glymphatic system in the brain, which drains waste from the brain.

00:32:00.260 And by waste, I mean inflammatory proteins, cytokines, histamines.

00:32:05.640 These inflammatory proteins that, if they are not drained from the brain, will stay in the brain.

00:32:10.920 And these are the genesis of a lot of things.

00:32:13.940 Alzheimer's, dementia, early onset cognitive decline, which, by the way, are not conditions of you losing your memory.

00:32:21.340 it is a fallacy that people that have alzheimer's are losing their memory they are losing access

00:32:28.520 your memory your memory is i am sitting right now physically sitting in a memory care facility

00:32:34.560 it is called regentra um i have i'm checking my my mother and my father in today into assisted

00:32:41.940 care it's actually independent and assisted care living because um there is a project here

00:32:47.180 called Regentra, where they're using red light therapy, hydrogen gas, vibration shake plates

00:32:53.900 to dramatically improve cognitive outcomes in the elderly. And what we are seeing coming out

00:33:01.820 of these studies is absolutely mind-numbing, controlling their glycemic profile, their blood

00:33:07.160 sugar, and reducing these inflammatory compounds. So let's get back to sleep because that's what

00:33:11.740 you asked about. So creatine is one of those things in high doses that crosses the blood-brain

00:33:17.900 barrier. And what it does is creatine can actually mitigate the effects of sleep deprivation. So my

00:33:26.020 wife going through menopause was having a very difficult time sleeping. I mean, if she slept

00:33:30.920 more than two or three hours at a stretch without a long period of waking, that was a good night for

00:33:35.500 her. So she was taking 20 milligrams of creatine daily because in high doses, it does cross the

00:33:43.720 blood-brain barrier. And there is evidence that it can mitigate the effects of sleep deprivation.

00:33:49.640 So if you are a female over 42 to 44 years old, I would insist that you are on a minimum of five

00:33:57.240 milligrams of creatine a day, full stop. Is it something you have to build up, you know, like 0.83

00:34:02.500 five milligrams for a week, 10 milligrams for two weeks, and then graduate to 20.

00:34:07.240 No, the loading dose was sort of a bodybuilder holdover, where you did a loading dose of

00:34:12.920 creatine for a week, and then you actually went down to five milligrams. Those studies are related

00:34:19.380 to muscle hypertrophy, growing lean muscle, tearing a muscle, having the muscle grow back

00:34:24.380 larger. When we're talking about the cognitive benefits and the inflammatory benefits,

00:34:29.740 anti-inflammatory benefits. 20 milligrams of creatine split into two 10 milligram doses.

00:34:35.180 It's very safe. Okay. You just put it in like a glass of water?

00:34:40.220 Put it in a glass of water. Now, here's the difference between the two creatines.

00:34:44.240 Monohydrate, there's more clinical evidence on monohydrate. I am actually a fan of both

00:34:51.020 monohydrate and creatine hydrochloride, HCL. Women sometimes will find that they bloat less

00:34:58.120 on HCL, hydrochloric, because it is 40% more water soluble. One of the things that creatine 1.00

00:35:04.900 does, which is why bodybuilders love it, is it holds water in the muscle, but it also holds 0.71

00:35:10.180 water in the gut. And so dissolve your creatine completely or use a form that has other carriers

00:35:18.560 like a symbiotica gel-packed creatine, a very, very good form of monohydrate. Start with five

00:35:24.900 milligrams and then work your way up. Don't do a loading dose at first. Five milligrams week one

00:35:30.020 and week two, you can switch all the way to 20 milligrams a day. You will notice the difference

00:35:35.600 in cognitive function in 24 hours. Some people even say the same day because sleep deprivation

00:35:42.800 doesn't, it leaves these inflammatory proteins in the brain. So you want something to cross

00:35:48.940 the blood-brain barrier and help get them out. So you could do that every day regularly or just

00:35:54.460 save that for when you had a bad night's sleep? So if you don't have consistently poor sleep,

00:35:59.840 if poor sleep is something that is not common to you, so it only happens when you travel,

00:36:04.280 only happens when you're stressed, only happens when you change time zones, then you can save

00:36:09.140 those large doses of creatine for that period of time. If you're going through menopause or you are

00:36:14.480 a chronically poor sleeper, I would recommend that you take the 20 milligrams of creatine daily.

00:36:21.180 it is a game changer for cognitive function in this memory care facility um i'm in coconut

00:36:26.660 creek florida um these uh 80 85 90 year old um patients are on high doses of creatine 20 milligrams

00:36:36.500 of creatine a day my mother is on 20 milligrams of creatine a day and it is having very very

00:36:41.100 positive outcomes on learned memory short-term recall focus um uh concentration what's the

00:36:46.980 complex tasking. You said, what was that thing you mentioned? Red light therapy, I know,

00:36:51.680 that sounded familiar. Then there were two other things, and the second of them was something about

00:36:56.760 a shake bed? Shake what? It's low vibration therapy. So what happens in the elderly and

00:37:04.140 deconditioned people is, you know, they can't get into zone two cardio. They can't exercise. We all 1.00

00:37:10.660 know the benefits of exercise, right? Maybe we can go down that road, but if you don't, you know,

00:37:15.320 Exercise is probably the single best hallmark activity to ward off aging, all-cause mortality,

00:37:24.040 cardiovascular disease.

00:37:25.360 You see this in blue zone studies.

00:37:26.760 You see this in meta-analyses.

00:37:28.220 You see this in all the big...

00:37:29.280 Alzheimer's.

00:37:30.500 Alzheimer's, which is now also being called type 3 diabetes.

00:37:35.680 If you Google type 3 diabetes, you'll see that type 3 diabetes is Alzheimer's.

00:37:39.520 we used to think that alzheimer's was the presence of neurofibrillary tangles and amyloid plaques

00:37:45.320 that is the byproduct of alzheimer's the genesis of alzheimer's is insulin resistance so if you

00:37:52.700 only had one biomarker that you were tracking and you said i'm only going to choose one biomarker

00:37:58.080 that i'm going to manage for the rest of my life if you managed your um your insulin level and

00:38:04.580 what's called your hemoglobin a1c the three-month average of your blood sugar that would probably

00:38:08.940 do more to ward off all-cause mortality than anything else that you do, which is why exercise

00:38:13.780 is so beneficial. But they're doing a few things here. One, they're using low-impact vibration.

00:38:21.040 So these vibration plates put several Gs of force through the body in very short bursts,

00:38:26.960 vertical bursts. The reason why that's important is it helps the bones to strengthen and

00:38:31.800 remineralize. You know, for decades, we always thought that brittle bones was low calcium,

00:38:36.320 but that is patently false. Our bones are not even calcium. Our bones are calcium bound to

00:38:44.420 something called phosphorus and they form something called hydroxyapatite. So our bones

00:38:50.160 are hydroxyapatite, not calcium. In order for calcium and phosphorus to bind, you need 12

00:38:57.380 minerals. If you're missing any one of those 12 minerals, your bones do not ossify and you get

00:39:03.700 osteopenia or osteoporosis. You can go to assisted care living facilities all over the world and see

00:39:09.440 elderly men and women that have osteopenia or osteoporosis that have been on calcium supplements

00:39:15.260 for 25 years. I promise you this. Calcium is not the answer. Minerals are the answer. Taking a

00:39:22.820 mineral salt would do more for bone density than taking calcium. You know, usually these people

00:39:28.640 are not calcium deficient. Most of us are not calcium deficient. By the way, if you take too

00:39:32.680 much calcium, it ends up in the arterial wall. This is where we get calcification and hardening

00:39:37.740 of the arteries. So mineral salt is something that should also be in your daily routine. I take

00:39:42.880 a mineral salt called Baja Gold. There are lots of great mineral salts out there. Redmond salt,

00:39:47.560 calcine salt. How much of that do you put in? I actually saw you mention that and I ordered it.

00:39:51.880 How much of that do you put, like in the morning, my doctor actually told me a while ago,

00:39:57.020 start your day with a glass of water and put a little salt in there. He didn't recommend it for

00:40:02.540 my husband who's um got some high blood pressure but for me he did but like is it just a pinch

00:40:08.060 you know there's so baja gold has a liquid uh mineral dropper um this is probably the cheapest

00:40:14.800 biohack in the world and it's my favorite biohack um you can buy a bag of this salt for about 15

00:40:20.220 bucks it'll last you five years i buy the liquid mineral salt it comes in a dropper and i put two

00:40:24.980 squirts of it in a glass of water in the morning um with all eight essential amino acids and a

00:40:31.060 hydrogen tablet. I put those three things in water and I whack that back first thing in the

00:40:35.640 morning. And I never, ever, ever, ever miss that. All nine essential amino acids. And that gives

00:40:40.460 you the hydrogen and that gives you the minerals you need? Probably have those with me. I literally

00:40:46.420 never leave home without these things. So hydrogen gas, this is the one that I use. I use one called

00:40:52.860 H2TAP. I love a prop. Sorry. I'll take that up. No, I love it. The visual aid. Everybody loves

00:40:59.200 the visual aid. This is, I will tell you that the role of hydrogen gas in the human body,

00:41:08.040 mark my words on this, is the greatest discovery of our millennia. Hydrogen water, hydrogen

00:41:14.500 inhalation, and even bathing in hydrogen gas will be as common as a multivitamin in 10 years.

00:41:22.280 the evidence is absolutely crystal clear and i am talking about human trials of peer-reviewed

00:41:30.540 placebo-controlled randomized clinical trials conducted at gold standard universities that

00:41:35.420 are in the public domain that have been published hydrogen is the smallest lightest element in the

00:41:41.540 universe it's highest on the periodic table it's also the most prevalent element in the universe

00:41:46.060 10 of your body weight is hydrogen so it's harmless to human beings the role that hydrogen

00:41:50.980 gas has in the human body. We have only recently discovered. So hydrogen acts as what's called a

00:41:58.780 selective antioxidant. So in other words, it doesn't just reduce oxidative stress. It reduces

00:42:07.260 oxidative stress to neutrality. It restores something called redox homeostasis. And why is

00:42:15.580 important? Because too much inflammation, too much oxidation, too many free radicals, very bad.

00:42:23.920 Too little inflammation, too few free radicals, too little oxidation, also very bad. You want

00:42:33.420 there to be a balance, which is called redox homeostasis. You want there to be a balance

00:42:38.960 between what's called inflammation and reduction. But when you take hydrogen gas,

00:42:43.900 it restores this to neutrality to balance and stops even if you take too much there is not a

00:42:52.100 professional athlete that i work with there's not a vip client whose health trajectory i manage

00:42:57.780 who is not regularly bathing in hydrogen gas and does not take hydrogen water tablets every single

00:43:04.820 day and you can just take elemental magnesium and which is what a hydrogen tablet is drop it into

00:43:10.540 water and it will effervesce into pure hydrogen gas and you can drink it. So what happens when

00:43:15.660 that goes into the body is it neutralizes these free radicals. So when we say something is an

00:43:22.860 antioxidant, for example, like what does that mean? Blueberries are antioxidants. Vitamin C

00:43:28.680 is an antioxidant. Quercetin is an antioxidant. What does that mean? It means that it donates

00:43:34.360 electrons. So if something is causing free radical damage and oxidative stress, you neutralize it

00:43:41.560 by giving it electrons. So hydrogen, because it can pass through your skin, through your bones,

00:43:48.340 through your cell wall, right through your joints, through the capsule of your joint, it can go right

00:43:52.500 through your spine. It is the smallest, lightest element in the universe. It's the fraction of the

00:43:58.020 size of a virus. And so it goes everywhere in the human body and reduces this inflammatory

00:44:03.760 cascade um i i don't even talk about this in the public domain because people would call me a

00:44:10.540 complete charlatan but um i have a hydrogen bath at my house um and i have put people into that

00:44:18.460 tub megan nearly crippled with arthritis and they will skip out of my unit like they won the lottery

00:44:25.040 my wife sage has an l5 s1 fusion spinal fusion in her back and if you know anything about spinal 0.89

00:44:31.860 surgeries, they never really go well. You just buy yourself a problem down the street. Anybody

00:44:38.360 that's had back surgery, no. In another life, I was married to an interventional pain management

00:44:43.640 doctor. Were you? And he used to say, I can help anybody except somebody who's actually had back

00:44:49.000 surgery. Yeah. And usually starts with a discectomy, starts with a fusion, and then it goes

00:44:54.960 to another level and another fusion and another discectomy and then rods. But so my wife, Sage,

00:45:01.240 has an L5 S1 fusion. So she had her sacrum fused to her first lumbar vertebrae because of a really

00:45:07.160 bad car accident she was in. And ever since then, you know, when that surgery acts up,

00:45:15.020 it just goes right up her spine and it just cramps her whole spine down. If I beg her in

00:45:21.160 hydrogen gas for 25 minutes, she'll sleep eight hours through the night. I'm like a child.

00:45:26.180 it's an it is a selective antioxidant i will send you the research the published research on this

00:45:33.460 you can put it in the show notes your your readers can or your listeners can check it out for

00:45:37.740 themselves there's also a website called hydrogenstudies.com where you can see all 1500

00:45:43.760 peer-reviewed studies you can select out the animal studies just look at human studies it

00:45:48.640 will be as common as a multivitamin especially in professional sports because professional sports

00:45:53.840 Can I ask you a quick question on this?

00:45:55.820 Is this because I had Dr. Casey Means on the program many times?

00:45:59.260 Oh my gosh, I love her.

00:45:59.860 Her brother, Callie, and I are very, very close.

00:46:01.120 She's amazing.

00:46:02.660 I love him too.

00:46:04.080 I know because you're very active in the Maha space.

00:46:05.920 They're both brilliant.

00:46:07.040 We're so lucky to have them.

00:46:09.260 But she was the first person who just insisted that I get the RO filter in my house, which I did.

00:46:15.560 The carbon filter and the RO.

00:46:17.220 Yes.

00:46:17.420 But a friend of mine was saying that they had, they've gone next level and they put one of these, like, is this possible to have a, is it a hydrogen filter in their house? Like, do I need something other than the RO now? Like, what is this? How would this work in terms of consuming water?

00:46:33.280 I will tell you that the single best under-the-counter water filtration system in the world is called a Maul water filter, M-A-W.

00:46:44.880 I think it's Maul Wellness.

00:46:47.060 That tells it I have it under every sink in my house.

00:46:49.580 I have it under every sink in every property that I have.

00:46:51.840 So what this does is uses sediment and reverse osmosis, these different carbon filters and different filters to completely destructure the water.

00:47:03.280 So you have, you take out fluoride, chlorine, microplastics, pharmaceuticals, what's called PFA's, polyfluoroalkyls.

00:47:12.320 I live in Miami.

00:47:13.720 We have some of the worst municipal water.

00:47:17.120 They'll tell you that it's clean, but I've had it tested.

00:47:19.940 Arsenic, palladium, cadmium, nickel, trace amounts of lead, not significant amounts of lead, but chlorine, fluoride, microplastics.

00:47:29.800 I would argue that one of the best things that you can do as a passive wellness hack, meaning not something you have to be active in doing, like getting in a sauna or getting in a red light bed, is to put water filtration in your home.

00:47:42.920 So this this mall wellness filter, M-A-W wellness, what it will do is it will destructure the water.

00:47:50.300 And then before it comes out of the sink, it will make the water alkaline.

00:47:55.440 it will uh add electrolytes back to the water and it will remineralize the water

00:48:01.960 so it destructures it wow and then restructures it coming out of the uh so i still put my hydrogen

00:48:09.500 tablet in there but i would argue that that is the single best water you can put in the human body

00:48:14.540 because it's so helpful i'm gonna go out a shopping spree after this although it's i imagine

00:48:21.760 that the the ma water filter is pricey probably and for people who don't have money to spare

00:48:28.060 can you just try to put that on one filter and go from there i mean like you know that sounds

00:48:34.080 like a lot yeah there's a filter called a cold life um that you can actually screw on just to

00:48:38.400 your sink and that will do fluoride chlorine uh microplastics which is a long way to getting

00:48:44.700 really healthy water if you want the gold standard an under the counter water filtration you know

00:48:49.580 these things are, it's an investment you make once, and it is pricey, and you probably could

00:48:54.200 finance it. But if you added up all of the bottled water that you drank, you know, I just traveled

00:48:59.680 with an aluminum bottle that I filled up from that filter this morning. So you actually can

00:49:06.000 save on glass bottled water and plastic bottled water by actually having water filtration in your

00:49:10.740 home. And then you're cooking with it, you're drinking it, your kids are drinking it, your

00:49:15.420 spouse is drinking it, you know, it's, it probably, I think as a single intervention,

00:49:20.540 one of the, one of the best things that you can do. Wow. And all the things that you're saving

00:49:24.860 yourself, as you said, you're not, not, now you're not drinking chlorine. You're not drinking

00:49:28.020 all the arsenic and your children aren't either. So it's, it is an investment. All right. Stand

00:49:32.900 by. Cause we have much more. Gary stays with us. We take a quick break, but one and only Gary

00:49:37.000 Breck. I've learned so much this hour. I hope you have to more to come. Stand by.

00:49:40.440 i'm megan kelly every day on the megan kelly show we bring you the news and this summer we're

00:49:47.560 bringing you something extra before i was a journalist i was a lawyer i've spent 20 plus

00:49:53.060 years now covering crime and the law so i built a true crime series that i always wanted to listen

00:49:58.900 to we're calling it mk confidential and there we cover cases that you've heard about like john

00:50:04.360 Benet Ramsey, Chandra Levy, the DC Snipers, Scott Peterson, and some that you haven't.

00:50:10.200 One case per week, five episodes, Monday through Friday. New episodes every weeknight. Search for

00:50:16.040 The Megyn Kelly Show wherever you listen to podcasts and you will find MK Confidential.

00:50:20.560 Mazda, a leader in safety. Mazda has more 2026 IIHS Top Safety Pick Plus awards than any other

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00:50:40.620 select CX-70 and CX-90 models. Visit your local Mazda retailer or mazda.ca for details. Conditions

00:50:47.660 apply. Visit IIHS.org to learn more. Welcome back to The Megyn Kelly Show. Well, my entire staff and

00:50:53.400 I have been shopping during the commercial break, trying to get tabs, hydrogen tabs, and tallow-based

00:50:59.240 sunscreen and all sorts of these fun recommendations. And I feel healthier already.

00:51:03.980 Thanks to Gary Brecka. He's our guest today. He's founder of the ultimate human media platform. And

00:51:10.540 let me tell you something. I know you, you're very familiar with this story, Gary, but there it is

00:51:14.660 ultimate human. Um, it wasn't that long ago. I don't know, maybe nine, 10 months, maybe a year

00:51:20.420 where I was, I was watching something that you had done and you were telling the Dana White story,

00:51:26.760 uh, CEO of, uh, UFC. And it led me down a rabbit hole into Dana White videos talking about his

00:51:34.700 health. And I'm going to let you set the stage in a second for his turnaround, but I just want

00:51:39.340 to show the audience this. So this, I get to this video where he's laying out part of what Gary's

00:51:44.200 protocol for him has been and how it's been absolutely life-changing. This is a guy who

00:51:48.440 was on blood pressure medication. They were going to be doing these like aggressive interventions,

00:51:53.800 like surgical interventions on his heart.

00:51:56.000 He thought he had a limited time on this earth left

00:51:58.860 when it came to his blood pressure and his heart issues.

00:52:01.820 And then Gary came into his life.

00:52:03.080 Long story short, he's off all meds.

00:52:04.660 He's off all of them now, thanks to Gary.

00:52:07.220 And here's some of what he put on the internet

00:52:09.780 that he does, which I find fascinating.

00:52:11.340 So first there's Dana,

00:52:13.660 there's video of him getting into this red light bed.

00:52:16.340 So he doesn't just do red light for the face.

00:52:18.080 He does red light.

00:52:20.120 He's in the bed.

00:52:21.560 He's got his shorts on.

00:52:22.580 that's all he wears and he goes into this red light bed that he pulls down over him

00:52:26.260 i think it's 20 minutes a pop he says he does this at least a few times a week and this is

00:52:33.540 one of the ways in which he starts his day then he also says he does this he runs on a treadmill

00:52:39.820 while breathing oxygen now i have done this at this spa not far from me we call it med spa or

00:52:46.840 gym spa spa gym and uh this is like a big thing where they have you at this gym spa we ride a

00:52:55.120 bike and we put these oxygen masks over our faces and then you put the littles like a handle on on

00:53:02.540 the mountain where your oxygen goes way down and off the mountain you get all sorts of good oxygen

00:53:08.420 flowing in through this mask so it's the same sort of approach i don't understand it any better when

00:53:12.900 i do it there than i when i watch dana doing it here we'll get to that with gary and third uh

00:53:18.680 dana shows us that he goes on something called a p-e-m-f pad that uh here in his video he just

00:53:27.100 lies on it on like a massage table you can see him pressing a button but he says that he sleeps

00:53:32.960 on this every night and that seems like another very low impact way of improving your health if

00:53:41.700 you just have to sleep on a pad. I mean, this is right up our alley. Is it not people where like

00:53:46.060 we can get just a little bit better without all of that looks highly pleasant, to be quite frank.

00:53:51.300 So walk us through the Dana White story and those protocols there, Gary.

00:53:56.540 So I'm going to tell you the expensive way to do it and then the free way to do it, because

00:54:00.520 great. You know, the best biohacking modalities, what they do is they take the best of what

00:54:07.440 mother nature has to offer us and they just make it convenient. Very often I say I'm a much bigger

00:54:14.220 believer in what God gave us than what man makes us. I'm a bigger believer in our God-given immune

00:54:20.780 system than I am in chemicals and synthetics and pharmaceuticals. And the same thing is true with

00:54:25.380 a lot of biohacking modalities. So I'm a huge believer in red light. I'm a huge believer in

00:54:32.560 PEMF, pulse electromagnetic field. And I'm also a big believer in what Dana was doing, which is

00:54:37.820 called EWAT, which is based on Dr. Otto Warburg's research, who won two Nobel Prizes in modern

00:54:44.640 medicine called multi-step oxygen therapy. So if you can afford those pieces of equipment or you

00:54:50.340 have access to them in a spa or a gym, by all means, regular red light therapy, regular sauna,

00:54:58.100 regular PEMF, even cold immersion, and something called intermittent hypoxia. Those are phenomenal

00:55:05.400 things for your body. They not only shift your cellular biology, they improve your VO2 max very

00:55:11.480 often at rest, and they have proven life extension capabilities. And I'm going to explain that in a

00:55:16.460 second. Proven, clinically proven life extension capabilities. In fact, I'm in the process now of

00:55:22.600 of opening 600 ultimate longevity centers all over the country because I really feel like my

00:55:29.140 message is for masses, not just for the top 2% of society that can afford that type of equipment,

00:55:36.520 a red light bed like that, a really good red light bed will cost you $100,000. So if you're

00:55:42.020 getting ready to buy a Ferrari, buy a hyperbaric or a red light bed, you don't have the money for

00:55:46.260 a Ferrari or a red light bed, you find your way to one of these centers. And there'll be 600 of

00:55:52.760 these around the country in the next few months. That's great. That's great news.

00:55:58.800 Yeah. I'm really excited about. It's a project that Tony Robbins Life Force is involved for the

00:56:06.540 corporate practice of medicine, hormone therapy, nutrient deficiencies, peptides. But most

00:56:12.540 importantly, you know, low cost memberships where people can actually go in and use sauna, red light,

00:56:18.500 hyperbaric chambers, PEMF, like you're seeing there with Dana, and something called intermittent

00:56:23.760 hypoxia. And I want to explain those in a moment. But if you cannot afford a red light bed, a PEMF

00:56:29.980 and an EWAP machine, get sunlight on your skin, learn to do breath work, and touch the surface

00:56:37.760 of the earth. You will get the same, very close to the same outcomes because certain wavelengths

00:56:43.660 of red light, we are very photovoltaic beings. So red light therapy, the primary role of red light

00:56:49.560 therapy is it passes through the skin. Remember that light doesn't care about inflammation. It

00:56:54.960 doesn't care about the cell wall. It doesn't care about the tissue. It passes right through your

00:56:59.180 skin. And when it passes through the skin, one of the things that it does is, without getting too

00:57:05.300 scientific is it goes into a little organelle in the cell called the mitochondria. And the

00:57:11.080 mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. It's a little battery that's inside of your cell.

00:57:15.560 And we have about 110 trillion of these in our bodies. 10% of your body weight is mitochondria.

00:57:21.240 So you've got 110 trillion of these in your cells. They're very important. And they're making energy.

00:57:25.960 They're making this form of energy called ATP. What's fascinating about the mitochondria is that

00:57:31.860 there's a motor inside of the mitochondria and every time it makes one revolution it has two

00:57:37.040 choices it can either create two units of energy two atp or it can create 36 units of energy

00:57:44.520 36 atp one turn and it's either 16 times more powerful or 16 times less powerful so what

00:57:55.100 determines whether or not it's 16 times more efficient or more powerful or 16 times less

00:58:00.360 the presence of oxygen. If oxygen enters that cycle, aerobic respiration, you get 36 ATP.

00:58:09.060 If carbon dioxide, anaerobic respiration, enters that cycle, you get two ATP. One of the things

00:58:16.060 that red light does is when it passes through the wall of this mitochondria, it kicks out a gas,

00:58:21.960 a gas called mitochondrial nitric oxide, and forces oxygen to dock. So it's almost like taking

00:58:28.340 a hammer and driving oxygen into the battery, the powerhouse of the cell. So red light therapy

00:58:35.560 heals you and gives you energy from the inside out. Certain wavelengths of sunlight do the same

00:58:42.280 thing. So yes, red light therapy is excellent. How many times a week would you be doing that?

00:58:47.300 Well, red light therapy is dose dependent, just like sauna. So if you look at the research on

00:58:52.160 dry sauna, for example, and the data is clear on dry sauna, I don't think anyone in the functional

00:58:57.260 medicine or biohacking space would argue the impact of sauna. Just to clarify, dry sauna is

00:59:04.860 like what you know of as sauna. Wet sauna is steam room. I mean, dry sauna and infrared sauna.

00:59:11.740 So they're both dry. One uses light to create friction and heat you up. The other uses heat

00:59:19.200 to heat you up. A dry sauna is usually about 160 to 180 degrees. An infrared sauna is usually about

00:59:24.820 100, 155 degrees, but it also makes you sweat. It makes you sweat by using wavelengths of light

00:59:30.260 to create friction in water chromophores. So it actually also makes you sweat. Either of those

00:59:35.880 is fine, an infrared sauna or a dry sauna. I'm not a fan of commercial steam rooms unless they

00:59:42.360 filter their water because commercial steam rooms usually bring in the municipal water

00:59:46.220 and then you are vaporizing fluoride gas, chlorine gas, polyfluoroalkyls. Whatever is in that water,

00:59:52.600 you're turning into a gas good point and the way that we take a poison and turn it into a bioweapon

00:59:58.440 is we vaporize it right i mean you you and i could be sitting on in front of a desk with a 0.50

01:00:03.860 pile of anthrax on our desk no problem if you lit that on fire or vaporized it big problem

01:00:10.140 right um so there's a dark thought there's a dark yeah i got really dark there for a second

01:00:16.020 sorry wow i'm not there i was in the steam room enjoying myself until i got poisoned by anthrax

01:00:22.600 Yeah, it was all fun and games until Gary vaporized the anthrax, you know.

01:00:28.140 But, and I'm not saying municipal steam rooms are that bad, but when you walk into a lot of these, yeah, locker rooms, you smell the chlorine, right?

01:00:38.360 Yeah, that's right.

01:00:39.220 You can just smell it.

01:00:40.260 And it's chlorine gas and fluoride gas.

01:00:43.360 So unless you're filtering the water in your steam room, I would avoid that.

01:00:47.340 I wouldn't use municipal water.

01:00:48.780 But if you filter it, great.

01:00:49.620 Right. So we know that sauna reduces all-cause mortality, meaning we know that the reduction in cardiovascular risk and the reduction in all-cause mortality clearly causal, not correlated.

01:01:02.840 It is a clear line in the scientific literature. So sauna is one of those things that if you're on a longevity bandwagon, it should be somewhere in your stack.

01:01:13.500 But it is also dose-dependent.

01:01:16.400 So five days is better than two.

01:01:18.040 Two days is better than one.

01:01:19.840 Red light therapy is the same way.

01:01:21.800 The more consistently you lay in a red light therapy bed, the more youthful an appearance

01:01:27.220 you'll take on.

01:01:28.360 You will notice extraordinary youthful changes in your skin.

01:01:33.220 Why?

01:01:33.400 Because it's very good for collagen, for elastin, for fibrin, and for something called

01:01:39.440 vasomotor circulation.

01:01:41.540 vasomotor is something you may even want to write down because most people think that our heart

01:01:49.660 circulates all the blood in our body they're cardiologists that think that but um that the

01:01:54.940 heart circulates all the blood running through our body that is that is not true um the heart

01:01:59.500 circulates about 30 percent of the blood in our body nobody has a left ventricle with a single

01:02:03.800 contraction that is strong enough to push blood um 63 000 miles you have about 63 000 miles of

01:02:10.940 blood vessel in your body, including venules and capillaries and arterioles. So this 70% of our

01:02:18.380 circulation, how does that 70% of the blood circulate? It's circulated through this activity

01:02:24.320 called vasomotor. So I want you to think of a snake swallowing a mouse, okay? We don't put a

01:02:30.820 hose in the snake's mouth and push the mouse along. What happens is there's a muscular, like

01:02:36.140 peristalsis, a muscular motion that moves that mouse down the snake's body. That's how the

01:02:42.320 bolus of blood is moved through 70% of your circulation. So vasomotor, this microvascular

01:02:51.420 circulation, we never examine it. We don't image it. We don't treat it. We don't even talk about

01:02:56.580 it. And so what happens as we age is we get compromise in this vasomotor circulation.

01:03:04.980 Red light therapy is one of the best things you can do for vasomotor circulation.

01:03:09.460 And if you go back to Dana White, Dana White had what's called brittle hypertension when I met him.

01:03:16.480 And brittle hypertension means that you have extraordinarily high blood pressure all the time, and it's not controlled well by medication.

01:03:24.660 He had been on beta blockers, calcium channel blockers, diuretics, something called ACE inhibitors.

01:03:30.760 None of it was working to keep his blood pressure down.

01:03:33.000 What was fascinating was that Dana was told he had familial hypertension.

01:03:41.260 He was told he had genetically inherited hypertension.

01:03:44.120 And I want to make something super clear for your listeners.

01:03:47.460 In modern medicine, there's a type of diagnosis called idiopathic.

01:03:52.480 So when a physician has no idea, in fact, the Latin root of that is unknown origin.

01:03:58.520 So when you have a condition and we don't know why, we just diagnose it as idiopathic.

01:04:03.740 You have idiopathic hypertension.

01:04:05.900 You have idiopathic hypothyroid.

01:04:08.260 You have idiopathic autoimmune, which means we have no idea what caused this.

01:04:15.900 85% of all primary hypertension diagnosis are idiopathic.

01:04:22.260 So when they are medicating your heart for a crime they cannot prove it's committing, it's because they do not know the origin.

01:04:30.200 And that's in the record, idiopathic.

01:04:32.580 And so when we can't explain things in medicine, we look for other routes to validate it.

01:04:39.020 And one of the routes they do is they look at your family history and they go, oh, my gosh, Megan, look at this.

01:04:43.620 You have high blood pressure.

01:04:44.780 We've examined your heart.

01:04:46.060 There's nothing wrong with your heart, which is what happened to Dana.

01:04:48.760 Your EKG is normal.

01:04:49.800 EEG is normal.

01:04:50.600 Heart sounds are normal.

01:04:51.420 Lung sounds are normal.

01:04:52.260 cardiac cast normal, dicontrast study, all of these advanced studies are all normal.

01:04:56.600 So we can't find anything wrong with the heart. We want to medicate the heart anyway.

01:05:00.840 So we look at your family history and we go, oh, look at that. Your father's brother

01:05:04.440 has hypertension. Your mother had hypertension. You have familial hypertension. You have genetically

01:05:11.920 inherited hypertension. Well, if I can get you to believe that you have a genetically inherited

01:05:16.720 disease, I can get you to subscribe to a lifetime of medication. But if we took that conversation

01:05:21.340 one step further and you look the physician in the eye and said, if I inherited this disease

01:05:27.100 from my ancestor, what gene did they pass on to me that caused this condition to exist?

01:05:34.520 That's when their face would go blank because that gene does not exist. There's not a gene

01:05:40.260 for hypertension. There's not a gene for hypothyroid. There's not a gene for type 2 diabetes,

01:05:44.520 drug and alcohol addiction, depression and anxiety. All of these things run in families.

01:05:48.740 none of them are genetic so wow that is a critical distinction so they diagnosed dana

01:05:59.520 with idiopathic hypertension hypertension of an unknown origin the reason familial genetic

01:06:09.580 hypertension even though there's no gene for hypertension so the first conversation i had

01:06:15.200 with Dana was, well, they don't know the origin. They're medicating your heart for a crime they

01:06:20.920 cannot prove it's committing. In fact, your cardiac workup says the opposite. You have

01:06:25.620 no cardiac anomalies. Your EEG, EKG, heart and lung sounds, and all of your cardiac workup has

01:06:31.340 been normal for 10 years. Dana's response, I won't say his exact response on the show because it's

01:06:38.440 very colorful. But he said, what in the beep am I on all of these medications for?

01:06:46.000 And so what I found was that he had an amino acid in his blood. Please, if you have hypertension,

01:06:54.740 write this down. He had an amino acid in his blood called homocysteine. Homocysteine is in

01:07:00.780 everyone's blood that's listening to this conversation right now. Homocysteine is normal

01:07:05.860 in our bloodstream, our body takes homocysteine, breaks it down, and turns it into another amino

01:07:13.160 acid called methionine, which then quiets the mind. So when homocysteine rises, which is genetic,

01:07:22.220 you inherit poor homocysteine metabolism, which means you inherit high homocysteine.

01:07:31.260 You do not inherit hypertension. And so when this amino acid rises and it's cruising by the inside

01:07:38.340 lining of your blood vessels, it irritates your blood vessel. And if you irritate a blood vessel,

01:07:44.220 it will clamp down. And when you make the pipes smaller in a fixed, excuse me, a fixed system,

01:07:51.560 the pressure goes up. An apprentice plumber knows if I want to increase the pressure,

01:07:56.720 i decrease the diameter of the pipes so you have 63 000 miles of blood vessel in your body

01:08:02.080 70 of which we never image and never um and never examine and if you get vascular constriction

01:08:08.680 vasoconstriction in that 70 of your system the pressure is going to go up just like if i wanted

01:08:14.480 to raise your blood pressure right now i just put some normatec compression boots on your on your

01:08:19.020 legs your blood pressure will skyrocket nothing wrong with your heart if i take the boots off

01:08:24.420 pressure goes back to normal so what happened to dana over 21 weeks and i would encourage your

01:08:29.540 audience to write this down too if they have hypertension check your homocysteine level if

01:08:34.500 you have high homocysteine that means that you have vascular constriction if you have vascular

01:08:39.280 constriction you likely have high blood pressure and this is well documented in in the literature

01:08:44.280 um you take an amino acid called tmg you can get this over the counter trimethylglycine what tmg

01:08:53.680 will do is help your body metabolize the homocysteine. So over 21 weeks, as Dana took

01:08:59.000 this amino acid and he began to metabolize homocysteine, as his homocysteine level dropped,

01:09:05.200 his vascular system began to relax. And as it relaxed, his pressure returned to normal.

01:09:10.560 So after 21 weeks, he was off all of his cardiovascular medication. He is no longer

01:09:15.320 brutally hypertensive. He does not take medication for his heart. And he takes an amino acid called

01:09:21.100 trimethylglycine tmg that's incredible perfectly normal absolutely incredible the uh just to circle

01:09:29.500 back before we move on um we talked about red light bed we talked about the treadmill with o2

01:09:36.160 yes let's talk about the free version of that because i said i would tell you what to do for

01:09:41.340 free if you can afford any walk get on a treadmill breathe the oxygen if you can't learn to do

01:09:46.160 breath work. That breath work that I described at the beginning, three rounds of 30 deep breaths,

01:09:52.200 obnoxious, like deep breaths in through your lungs, really expanding your rib cage,

01:09:57.840 exercising the auxiliary muscles of respiration, and then out through a straw.

01:10:03.000 Three rounds of 30 breaths followed by an extended breath hold. And then the final one

01:10:07.040 is touching the surface of the earth. It's called earthing or grounding. And I used to get a lot of

01:10:11.780 flack for this 10 years ago, but it's not. I know. I know. That's real though, right? That's real.

01:10:17.180 You discharge into the earth. You can hold a voltage meter and put one, get one off of Amazon,

01:10:22.280 put one pin of the voltage meter in your hand, plug the other one into the ground,

01:10:25.700 and then stand barefoot on top of your tennis shoes. Okay. Hold the voltage meter,

01:10:30.940 step off of your tennis shoes onto bare ground and watch the meter peg all the way to the right.

01:10:36.740 So you have to have your shoes off. That's it. That's important.

01:10:38.600 Yes, you want to touch the surface of the earth with bare feet.

01:10:40.880 It's called grounding or earthing.

01:10:42.260 That's why people feel so good when they go to the beach.

01:10:45.740 And the PEMF does that for you.

01:10:48.720 It's kind of a substitute if you can't.

01:10:51.220 I mean, if you live in a very snowy area.

01:10:52.960 Oh, by the way, does it work in a snowy area?

01:10:54.740 Like if you were standing on snow, would that work?

01:10:56.200 It does.

01:10:56.400 It'll work on cold ground too.

01:10:58.380 What's fascinating too is a lot of commercial buildings are grounded.

01:11:04.060 So like if you actually live in a commercial condominium, you're in New York City and you're like,

01:11:07.740 area there's no dirt around um uh you can also get a grounding test meter on amazon they're six

01:11:13.980 bucks um and you can hold it and take your shoes off and stand on your tile floor you may be

01:11:19.760 grounded because commercial buildings run uh steel um and they also have steel poles so very often

01:11:26.540 the concrete surfaces in those buildings are grounded so you may be on the 15th floor but

01:11:31.720 fully grounded you can just touch the surface of the earth touch your touch your tile and you'll

01:11:35.680 grounded um on the subject of you know the the dana white revolution can we talk about ldl

01:11:45.420 there's such a debate over ldl and i actually was looking into this recently because

01:11:52.200 like my doctor i've told my audience this he loves the statins he thinks everybody should

01:11:59.520 be on a statin he thinks they should be in the drinking water literally said that i love my guy

01:12:03.640 but he's he's more of an old school you know he's not functional medicine um but i'm into

01:12:10.320 functional medicine so like it's interesting for me but so he loves loves loves the statins

01:12:14.400 but now i know i've had enough people on the show that i know that there's a real question

01:12:18.540 about statins and there's a real question about whether we should be focused on ldl cholesterol

01:12:22.040 at all oh you're great peter atia who's he's you know in the longevity space he does believe did

01:12:28.620 resurface? Well, I don't know. Maybe he's not, he's not functional, but he's in the longevity,

01:12:33.660 but he, he loves this. He wants LDL down. He also believes LDL should be low and you do have to

01:12:40.280 worry. And my doctor was telling me in Europe, they want your LDL to be like below 60. I mean,

01:12:47.300 that's really low and you know, they'll lead you to believe you're going to have a heart attack

01:12:52.680 if you don't manage the LDL. So where do you stand on LDL? So first of all, let's talk about

01:12:58.040 what cholesterol is and what it's not. So cholesterol is not a fuel supply. Your body

01:13:03.660 cannot use cholesterol for energy. So what is it? It's a construction material. We use it to build

01:13:08.620 every cell wall, every cell membrane. We use it to make vitamin D3, the only vitamin that human

01:13:14.320 beings make on our own. Human beings only make one vitamin, and it's vitamin D3, called calciferol.

01:13:20.680 We make it from sunlight and cholesterol. You don't need to eat, drink, or supplement. You just

01:13:26.480 expose your skin to sunlight, have cholesterol in your bloodstream, you'll make vitamin D3.

01:13:30.640 So just think for a moment how critical that must be to human function if when God made us,

01:13:36.020 he made us with the ability to make one vitamin. So it's a construction material. And so secondly,

01:13:42.560 cholesterol is also a transport molecule. So if cholesterol was a tennis ball,

01:13:49.120 the fuzzy yellow surface on the top, that would be a triglyceride, a fat. So fat, triglyceride,

01:13:57.100 is transported around the bloodstream on the surface of cholesterol. So if you remember from

01:14:03.660 high school geometry, that as the size of a sphere gets smaller, its surface area to volume ratio

01:14:12.880 goes up. Why is that? Oh boy. Hold on. I'm going to explain it in the way that your audience is

01:14:18.480 gonna get bring it home gary for the naysayer nerds um so let's say you had two basketballs 0.97

01:14:27.460 of cholesterol sitting on your desk okay they're covered in fat and you want to add more fat to

01:14:35.960 your desk you want to put more fat on those basketballs how do they hold more fat two

01:14:41.520 basketballs become four softballs. You add more fat to the bloodstream. Four softballs become eight

01:14:49.100 baseballs. You add more fat. Eight baseballs become 16 golf balls. You add more fat. 16 golf

01:14:56.980 balls become 32 little BBs. Now, those two basketballs are markers for longevity, large

01:15:07.360 puffy cholesterol the 32 bbs are markers for cardiovascular disease same level of cholesterol

01:15:16.560 different size does that make sense yeah the two basketballs have the same surface area as 32

01:15:24.420 little bbs those 32 little bbs are very dangerous because they will pass through the endothelium the

01:15:28.960 the arterial wall they'll get eaten by a macrophage they'll start foam cell um they'll start the

01:15:34.620 production of what's called foam cells, which is the genesis of plaquing, scarring, narrowing

01:15:39.500 cardiovascular disease. Cholesterol by itself doesn't magically just jump out of the bloodstream

01:15:45.160 and stick to the arterial wall. You need oxidation and you need that molecular size of the cholesterol

01:15:52.640 to be very small. So I'm going to say something that's going to sound controversial, but if anyone

01:15:58.140 has evidence to prove this statement wrong, I'm happy to look at it. No one has ever been able

01:16:02.400 to do this for me so far. But there is zero, and I mean zero, evidence anywhere in the peer-reviewed

01:16:09.900 published clinical literature linking elevated levels of LDL cholesterol on its own to cardiovascular

01:16:17.380 disease. You have to have a corresponding increase in triglyceride, or you have to have the small

01:16:23.460 particle size. Now, lipo A, lipo little a, which is genetic, is a very dangerous form of cholesterol.

01:16:31.260 Right now, there are no pharmacological solutions for that.

01:16:34.680 PKS39 inhibitors do not reduce lipo little A.

01:16:38.020 There may be solutions by the end of this year, but as we stand right now, there are

01:16:41.620 not pharmacological solutions for lipo little A, lipo B.

01:16:45.320 So what happens is we've selected one myopic view of cholesterol, LDL, and we've said LDL

01:16:52.340 high, cardiovascular risk high, we need to get it low.

01:16:55.840 That is not true.

01:16:57.440 And I will tell you that in the evidence, because when I was in the mortality space, we had access to the day, date, time, location, and cause of death for 371 million lives.

01:17:10.440 I can tell you in 22 years, I never processed a single death claim on a centenarian, somebody who lived over age 100, that did not have clinically elevated levels of LDL cholesterol at the time of their death.

01:17:21.740 And if you look at blue zone studies, elevated LDL cholesterol, low triglyceride. If you look

01:17:29.220 at the centenarian death claims that I processed, high LDL cholesterol, low triglyceride. If you

01:17:35.940 want to focus on a single variable that makes your cholesterol less lethal, control your insulin.

01:17:43.640 Insulin resistance is a greater marker for cardiovascular disease, insulin and hemoglobin

01:17:49.880 a1c than ldl cholesterol i would not i am not a physician so let me be the first one to say that

01:17:56.960 i'm not a physician and i am not licensed to practice medicine um but i am a data scientist

01:18:02.200 and i have read the data um if it were me or my loved one i would not take a statin if purely my

01:18:09.760 ldl cholesterol number was elevated especially if i had normal to low triglyceride so can i ask you

01:18:17.760 a question then if you're a diabetic whose insulin is controlled right if you're a medicated diabetic

01:18:25.440 who's controlling her insulin all the time shouldn't you then never die of a heart attack

01:18:30.400 like because well what's interesting your insulin's always under control um if you look at the category

01:18:36.460 of diabetes so diabetes if there's a measure called hemoglobin a1c okay this is the three

01:18:44.560 month average of your blood sugar. It goes from 4.8 to 5.6 on most standard lab values. In that

01:18:50.740 range, you're considered to have normal blood sugar. Between 5.6 and 6.0, you are considered

01:18:57.500 pre-diabetic. Between 6.0 and 6.4, you are diabetic, but not insulin dependent.

01:19:08.160 So insulin dependence, you can have diabetes and not be insulin dependent.

01:19:14.560 you can have diabetes and require insulin. So if you look at the incidence of cardiovascular

01:19:20.400 disease in type 2 diabetics, meaning they are diagnosed with diabetes, then you find

01:19:27.640 significantly higher rates of cardiovascular disease. In fact, insulin is a more correlated

01:19:34.420 risk to cardiovascular disease than LDL cholesterol. It is a greater predictor of

01:19:40.500 cardiovascular risk and disease than LDL cholesterol on its own. Insulin resistance

01:19:45.820 is what causes cholesterol to oxidize. So if you're going to monitor, if you just had an LDL

01:19:55.260 cholesterol number and you had your insulin and hemoglobin A1C, I would control my blood sugar

01:20:02.260 before I took a stat because the uncontrolled blood sugar-

01:20:06.580 thing about blood sugar is it's not just sugar. I mean, obviously, if you're having boatloads of

01:20:12.300 candy and ice cream and sugary products, that's not good. But you could eliminate all that and

01:20:16.820 still have high blood sugar, right? Like, that's right. For example, if you if you have hunks of

01:20:21.820 bread, your body recognizes that as sugar, it processes that as a sugar, there are ways of

01:20:28.020 spiking that blood sugar that have nothing to do with the consumption of actual sugar.

01:20:31.720 That's right. Yeah. And the big offenders are white bread, flour, rice, pasta, grains. Those are the ones that they don't taste sweet, so we don't think of them as spiking blood sugar, but they spike blood sugar.

01:20:48.040 Fruits that end in berry, great.

01:20:49.900 Be very protein forward with your diet.

01:20:52.420 Saturated fats and proteins are fine as long as you do not also have high glycemic carbohydrates with them.

01:20:59.180 We just updated the entire, not just the food pyramid, but the nutritional guidelines to be very protein forward.

01:21:05.960 We also ended the war on saturated fat.

01:21:08.120 Um, when, when we launched the war on saturated fat, we began the explosion of high sugary

01:21:18.140 drinks, sodas, snacks, and highly processed foods.

01:21:21.700 And look at the rates of diabetes when we went after fat and replaced it with sugar

01:21:29.060 because everything got worse.

01:21:32.000 Yeah.

01:21:32.540 And I know Gary, you say just to get the same, we have to take a break, but you say the number

01:21:36.500 one, the only diet rule that matters is to avoid processed foods. I mean, processed foods are the

01:21:45.060 devil. Like you can't eat them. You do not buy them. Do not have them in your pantry. Do not

01:21:51.560 give them to your children. Avoid them like the plague. Yes, this is very true. And just quick,

01:21:57.400 because I know we're talking on time, um, blue zone studies, meta-analyses, and big data all

01:22:01.900 lineup. There's no argument for dogmatic dieting to extend life. It's not keto, paleo, pescatarian,

01:22:07.940 vegan, vegetarian, carnivore, you know, raw food. The secret to extended life is the absence of

01:22:14.000 processed food. You can do fine on a vegetarian diet. It's difficult, but you can. Very difficult

01:22:20.540 on a vegan diet, but you can do it on a vegetarian diet. Difficult, but you can do it. You can do it

01:22:25.280 eating fish, chicken, meat, eggs, as long as you are not taking in high amounts of

01:22:32.380 highly processed food and you are watching your sugars. Honey is great. You know, fruits and

01:22:39.480 berries are amazing for you. It's not no sugar. It's eating sugar in moderation. And when you look

01:22:46.760 at all of the areas of the world where we have life extension, there is no presence of processed

01:22:52.260 food. Wow. Think of that. And we are the capital of the world when it comes to that stuff. It's

01:23:00.480 part of our diet. It's pushed on us everywhere. And we're the sickest, fattest, most disease-ridden

01:23:05.760 nation in the world. All right. A lot more to get to, including fermented foods. We're going 0.90

01:23:12.540 to play you what Cheryl Hines says about RFKJ and his obsession with steak and ferments, as he calls

01:23:20.380 them. And then what about peptides? Is there something we should be taking? Gary knows all

01:23:24.980 about them. We'll ask him when we come back after this break. All right, Gary, I have so many things

01:23:29.880 I need to get through with you in the last 13 minutes. Can we bang through a bunch of quick

01:23:33.780 hits? Let's go. All right. There's a lot. Okay. This is from you. You do not have an autoimmune

01:23:44.280 disease, you have a pathological infection. So if you think you have an autoimmune disease,

01:23:52.900 you say there are five things that you need to think about. Forget what the disease is,

01:24:01.420 forget lamentations about having one. There are five things you can look into to improve

01:24:07.500 your health and how you feel. The first one on the list is mold. Very interesting. Do you want

01:24:13.640 keep going from there? Yep. Mycotoxin, parasite, virus, and heavy metal. I'm going to do a little

01:24:21.520 demonstration here that may be the most significant thing that you learned about

01:24:25.400 autoimmune. Now, I am not saying that all autoimmune disease is caused by those five

01:24:30.200 things. What I am telling you that is that as a category of disease, 85% of autoimmune

01:24:37.300 is diagnosed as idiopathic, which means that you're led to believe that you woke up one day

01:24:42.540 and for no apparent reason your immune system turned on your colon so you have Crohn's you woke

01:24:47.380 up one day and for no apparent reason it started to attack the myelin sheath of your nerve you have

01:24:51.900 multiple sclerosis it went after your thyroid you have Hashimoto's the chagrins lacrimal gland of

01:24:57.380 the eye and on and on and on um so if if this this is a piece of gum but if this was a mold spore

01:25:04.900 or a mycotoxin or a parasite or a virus or a heavy metal,

01:25:10.080 this healthy cell, this does not hide like this.

01:25:14.760 It hides like this.

01:25:16.900 And that's a very important distinction

01:25:18.700 because the immune system is hypervigilant.

01:25:21.400 It wants to get to this, right?

01:25:23.860 And it's hiding.

01:25:25.140 Just for listening audience,

01:25:26.000 he's putting the bad thing in the middle of his fist.

01:25:28.180 He's saying it like hides in the middle of your system there.

01:25:31.260 Keep going.

01:25:31.720 Yeah, so think about if somebody across the street

01:25:33.980 from your house robbed the bank and ran into your house and barricaded himself in your in your house

01:25:38.320 the police would bust down that door to get to the perpetrator they're not just showing up to

01:25:43.340 your house to kick in the door for no reason they're kicking in the door because the perpetrator

01:25:47.200 is inside so the immune that's why your autoimmune markers are up there's something bad happening

01:25:52.220 inside of you that they're after exactly so we can take one of two types of belief if we have

01:25:57.820 no explanation one god made a mistake the immune system just attacked you for no reason god didn't

01:26:03.420 make a mistake, the immune system is there for a reason. So the police officer just showed up and

01:26:08.500 barricaded through your door and ran around your house. Or he kicked in the door to get to a

01:26:13.480 perpetrator. So what happens when the immune system reaches the wall of a cell and it doesn't

01:26:18.780 have permission to go inside? The way it gains permission to go inside, kick down the door,

01:26:23.200 is it manufactures an antibody to that tissue. So if you look at the incidence of heavy metal

01:26:29.260 toxicity in Hashimoto's, which is autoimmune thyroid, you would find that very often, not

01:26:37.240 always, but very often, these patients have high levels of metals embedded in their thyroid. Why?

01:26:43.240 Because the thyroid has an affinity for heavy metals. So mercury toxicity, palladium, lead,

01:26:50.340 arsenic, very often will gravitate into the thyroid. And then what happens? The immune system

01:26:55.560 is chasing that perpetrator, and it begins an autoimmune response. If you have Crohn's disease,

01:27:01.140 the immune system didn't just wake up one day and attack your colon for no reason. Usually what has

01:27:05.560 happened is that you have damaged the single cell layer of the inside lining of your intestine.

01:27:12.420 You have something called leaky gut, where contents from the inside of your intestine are

01:27:18.900 leaking through the wall and into the bloodstream, and the immune system arrives there and starts a

01:27:24.660 fight. And then we suppress the immune system. We hold it responsible for a crime it's not

01:27:29.140 committing. And we give you high doses of corticosteroids, anti-inflammatories to try

01:27:34.640 to control the inflammation. Instead of saying, why did the immune system show up in the first

01:27:39.740 place? Why is a police officer at my house kicking in my door? Oh, there's a bank robber inside.

01:27:46.480 Oh, there's a heavy metal. There's a mold spore, a mycotoxin, a parasite, viruses, same way. When

01:27:51.640 a virus arrives to a cell, what it does is it sticks to the cell wall and injects its DNA.

01:27:56.800 And then it takes over the function of that cell. A virus is not a living thing. It needs a cell

01:28:02.060 to survive. So it survives by injecting its DNA. It's like being bitten by a zombie. Now you're a

01:28:07.980 zombie, right? So a cell bitten by a virus becomes that virus, for lack of better explanation.

01:28:15.000 And also, I just want to say, Dr. Dale Bredesen, who is a brilliant doctor who studies Alzheimer's

01:28:20.800 and dementia. He says looking at all those things also helps prevent Alzheimer's because you're

01:28:27.800 reducing your viral load. You're reducing your toxic load, which will help, you know, your brain

01:28:33.360 in addition to these other things. So yeah, this can help you in a number of ways, but I want to

01:28:38.840 keep going. Cause there's so many, so many other things. You had a woman on your show recently

01:28:42.480 talking about your feet. No one thinks about their feet as important to longevity, but I listened to

01:28:50.260 the two of you and i went i have to say i bought a pair of the ugliest sneakers i have ever seen

01:28:56.180 but they're gonna make us live longer somehow gary i know but they're so not fashionable megan

01:29:02.000 but i mean if just look at the general shape of the foot foot shaped like a y

01:29:09.040 look at the general shape of a uh shoe it's shaped like a pyramid

01:29:14.840 like a pizza yeah pizza shaped like a slice of pizza but that's usually processed food so let's

01:29:21.840 stay away from the pizza analogy shaped like the uh the uh capitol building so you you you have this

01:29:29.060 uh pizza shape to most shoes but you have a y shape to our feet and if you look at what happens

01:29:35.240 bunions and um corns and and things like that you know the the toes start to turn in towards each

01:29:42.600 other. We also, because our shoes, some running shoes even have carbon fiber insoles, like flat

01:29:50.060 insoles. So we're losing the original strength of our feet. There's an amazing book called

01:29:55.220 Born to Run. It was about Mexican tribes that run 60, 70 miles on a regular basis every week

01:30:01.400 barefoot. And they have no ankle injuries. They have no foot injuries. They don't have knees and

01:30:06.500 hip and low back injuries because the foot is adaptive the foot has 300 planes of motion that

01:30:13.080 it moves in has 20 i want to say seven bones um so the foot is meant to adapt to different

01:30:20.040 surfaces it's meant to be malleable um and when we cast it and we put it in narrow toes

01:30:25.660 high heels are the worst than the most poor anatomical position for women um and so we we 0.94

01:30:33.500 do damage to our feet. You know, I've seen photographs of a lot of NBA players, famous 1.00

01:30:38.720 NBA players. These are online. They're the grossest things you've ever seen. Ingrown hair, I mean,

01:30:43.120 ingrown toenails, toes literally overlapping with other toes. You know, this very pizza shape to all

01:30:51.560 of the toes at the distal end of the foot. So this is a very unnatural position for us. So yes,

01:30:57.540 wider toad, Y-shaped shoes. Great for you. Being barefoot is excellent for you. Toe strength is

01:31:04.380 right up there with grip strength in terms of how we can determine how balanced we are.

01:31:09.040 So in elderly people that lose toe strength and they lose foot strength, it's very easy for them

01:31:13.960 to fall. And she was saying that if you keep your toes out and you like lift your big toes,

01:31:19.680 that's good. Like do that to keep your, you know, some toe strength, separate your toes apart so

01:31:25.320 that they're not together try the exercise where you just try to raise just your big toe it's way

01:31:30.260 harder than you think all right now what about ferments because rfkj and a bunch of other people

01:31:36.880 in the administration are on some diet where they're eating red meat and ferments only well

01:31:40.860 right now he is only eating uh meat and fermented vegetables so what that looks like is um in the

01:31:50.880 morning at 6 30 he's cooking a steak and eating sauerkraut so what happens do you guys go out to

01:31:58.320 eat is he like waiting to get back home to eat now this is he i don't know if he wants me saying

01:32:03.200 this either but who cares um he's so dedicated to this diet that he's eating that he will bring his

01:32:10.380 own sauerkraut to a restaurant which by the way katie you will appreciate this because we'll be

01:32:18.020 in the car dressed up I'll have like a little no I'll have my little clutch right one of my good

01:32:26.760 bags that I only take out every once in a while because I don't I want to keep them nice and he'll

01:32:32.360 hand me a bag of sauerkraut and say can you put this in your bag and I'll say I actually cannot

01:32:39.660 and I you know what if you would have told me when we were inside I would have brought a different

01:32:46.220 bag but what you're about to put in in this bag is not okay i'm going to give this bag to one of

01:32:53.620 my daughters so when she you know when i die this is not a sauerkraut bag but you mean if you tell

01:33:00.540 me ahead of time i can bring a sauerkraut bag you know what i mean it's too much in advance i won't

01:33:09.580 bring the chanel i won't bring the chanel exactly what do you make of those so fermented foods um

01:33:14.920 first of all, they're excellent for your body. They have great probiotic flora in them. I eat a

01:33:20.200 lot of sauerkraut, a lot of kimchi, some really interesting research coming out on kimchi and

01:33:24.540 microplastics, correlated, not causal, meaning they can remove microplastics from the body.

01:33:29.300 This is a correlated result so far. But fermented foods have two things. One, they have soluble and

01:33:35.240 insoluble fiber. Soluble fiber is what turns into free fatty acids and produces something called

01:33:41.680 butyrate, which is an anti-cancer molecule, and it also lowers inflammation. Insoluble fiber moves

01:33:49.760 through the gut as bulk. And we know that high fiber diets are correlated to decreased risk of

01:33:55.500 colorectal cancer. And so one of the things that you can do is reintroduce fermented foods and you

01:34:01.760 get the benefits of soluble and insoluble fiber. Reduction of inflammation, we would call these

01:34:07.580 foods anti-cancer. They're not to treat cancer, but we call them anti-cancer. The bulk moves

01:34:12.980 through as bulk and the soluble fiber turns into free fatty acids and butyrate. Really good for

01:34:18.080 you. All right. There's a free tip for you. Now, peptides. All the latest, you know, big celebs,

01:34:24.740 they love the peptides. Yeah. I mean, I'm a big fan of peptides. I've used them myself

01:34:29.020 and used them with really good effect, you know, on a couple of injuries.

01:34:34.920 I love peptides.

01:34:37.380 Peptide plumping or nail polish?

01:34:39.540 Peptide plumping.

01:34:40.900 I guess I just don't really care about my nails.

01:34:42.920 I've been enjoying my peptides.

01:34:45.220 I got restocked on my peptides, which I kind of cycled off, and I love them.

01:34:50.800 These peptides, these are pills.

01:34:53.560 I love them.

01:34:55.700 Joe Rogan, BPC-157, a synthetic 15 amino acid peptide derived from a protein found in human

01:35:03.080 gastric juice marketed for tendon, ligament, muscle, and gut repair. Is that something we

01:35:08.580 should be taking? And is there another peptide you like? No question. First of all, so just a

01:35:14.580 quick explanation on peptides. Peptides are not new, novel, recently discovered molecules.

01:35:19.980 Peptides are generally things that are made endogenously in the human body.

01:35:24.480 Insulin is a peptide.

01:35:26.660 GLP-1 is a peptide.

01:35:28.280 We have a trillion-dollar industry built on the back of a peptide that we make in our own gut.

01:35:32.800 And we make this peptide, GLP-1, in response to nutrient density.

01:35:39.480 GHKCU, the famous copper peptide for the skin, we make this in the human body.

01:35:44.860 So peptides very often are endogenous.

01:35:47.120 We make them in the human body.

01:35:48.380 That's the first thing.

01:35:49.360 The second thing is they are signaling molecules.

01:35:51.620 they usually tell the body to do something, produce more growth hormone, produce more

01:35:56.820 testosterone, send platelets to this location and heal this tissue. So it taps into the body's

01:36:04.580 innate systems that already exist. Very often as we age, the body does not lose the ability to

01:36:13.180 produce youthful levels of things like growth hormone, testosterone, other hormones. The signal

01:36:19.500 gets turned down. So in other words, if you walked into a room and you could barely hear the music,

01:36:23.700 you wouldn't go mess with the speakers. You would find the tuner and you would turn the tuner up

01:36:27.640 and the music would play louder. This is how peptides work. They're signaling molecules.

01:36:32.180 They're like the tuner. And so because they're amino acids, they actually have enzymes in the

01:36:38.280 body that recognize them and can break them down and eliminate the waste. The reason why you don't

01:36:43.340 desensitize to food, you can eat 1,500 calories a day for the rest of your life. Why don't you

01:36:48.600 have to eat 10,000 calories 10 years from now because your body is not desensitizing to food.

01:36:54.160 It's not building a tolerance to food. Why? Because we recognize it. We have enzymes to

01:36:59.620 break it down. We can store it as energy. We can use it to build structures, or we can eliminate

01:37:04.360 it. Peptides fall into this category. What's fascinating about peptides, I think these are

01:37:09.680 big farmers' worst nightmare, is that it can signal the body to accelerate wound healing,

01:37:14.340 BPC-157, TB-500, GHKCU. Peptides that already exist in our body, amino acid chains that we

01:37:24.000 already have, we can add these back to the body and we can accelerate wound healing.

01:37:29.280 There are peptides that are anti-anxiolytic that actually reduce the impact of anxiety.

01:37:34.340 They have impacts on brain-derived neurotropic factor, BDNF. There are peptides that cause our

01:37:41.160 body to secrete something called telomerase and lengthen our telomeres. So peptides are something

01:37:47.100 that we've been using for the last 10 years in clinical practice. My team of physicians

01:37:52.360 probably written over a quarter of a million prescriptions for peptides without a single

01:37:58.220 adverse event, serious adverse event, itching and rashes at the site of injection, minor infection

01:38:04.140 at the site of injection for not being sterile, or some of the side effects, but those are not

01:38:09.220 related to the peptide. Those are related to the injection. There are certain peptides that have

01:38:13.900 contraindications. You should always have a physician do these. But the Pharmacy Compounding

01:38:18.420 Advisory Committee is meeting on the 23rd of this month. And I pray that there is a positive

01:38:23.640 recommendation to the FDA that they turn into guidance on peptides, taking these off of the

01:38:29.060 Category 2 and putting them on the Category 1 list. I will be in Washington on Monday advocating for

01:38:34.240 this myself. That's great to hear. Okay. Well, I'm excited by these because as you say, big

01:38:40.780 farmer's nightmare, they actually seem like they're helping people and it's not necessarily

01:38:45.380 a game of, and now we are hooked for life and we're just going to make tons of money off of you.

01:38:49.680 And the more I hear, the more interested I am. I'm not, I don't think I'm on any peptides,

01:38:54.780 but I'm interested. I don't think I'm on any peptides. I love that. You can go to my website.

01:38:58.280 I'm going to have to actually look. And I do a whole educational series on peptides.

01:39:02.060 i loved our conversation i'm so grateful to you gary thank you thank you for all for all the

01:39:07.920 great work you're doing check out the ultimate human.com ultimate human.com yeah um the ultimate

01:39:14.640 human.com yes the ultimate human.com all the best to you i'm megan kelly every day on the

01:39:24.320 megan kelly show we bring you the news and this summer we're bringing you something extra before

01:39:29.120 I was a journalist, I was a lawyer. I've spent 20 plus years now covering crime and the law.

01:39:34.840 So I built a true crime series that I always wanted to listen to. We're calling it MK Confidential.

01:39:40.840 And there we cover cases that you've heard about, like JonBenet Ramsey, Shandra Levy,

01:39:45.660 the DC Snipers, Scott Peterson, and some that you haven't. One case per week, five episodes,

01:39:52.440 Monday through Friday. New episodes every weeknight. Search for The Megyn Kelly Show,

01:39:56.400 wherever you listen to podcasts

01:39:57.840 and you will find MK Confidential.

01:40:00.620 Every car brand talks about safety.

01:40:03.780 Mazda was named the safest new car brand

01:40:06.020 by Consumer Reports.

01:40:07.820 Every Mazda vehicle is designed around the driver

01:40:10.440 with an intuitive interior that helps you stay focused

01:40:13.620 and standard iActiveSense safety technology.

01:40:17.240 Find out why Mazda is a leader in safety.

01:40:20.300 Visit your local Mazda retailer or mazda.ca for details.

01:40:24.420 Consumer Reports does not endorse products or services.

01:40:31.920 We've got a first-time guest on the show today, Dr. Andrew Huberman.

01:40:37.020 He's a neuroscientist, Stanford professor, and host of the hugely popular Huberman Lab podcast.

01:40:42.980 He has published more than 75 peer-reviewed articles in top scientific journals

01:40:47.560 and delivered more than 100 invited research and keynote seminars around the world.

01:40:52.080 He's had a fascinating life and provided guidance on how to live better to millions of fans and followers, but he's never written a book until now.

01:41:02.180 His new book is called Protocols, an Operating Manual for the Human Body, and it's available right now for pre-order.

01:41:09.800 It's out later this month, and it is a guide to improving brain function, enhancing mood

01:41:15.880 and energy, optimizing bodily health and physical performance, and rewiring your nervous system

01:41:22.020 to learn new skills and behaviors even that could positively transform your life.

01:41:28.620 Andrew, welcome to the show.

01:41:30.020 Thanks so much for having me.

01:41:31.280 Great.

01:41:31.520 Great to finally meet you, albeit virtually.

01:41:35.020 Yeah, same.

01:41:36.380 It's a pleasure.

01:41:36.840 I'm a big fan, and I've learned a lot from you over the years, just from clips and from

01:41:40.600 your show.

01:41:41.220 So this is a thrill.

01:41:42.780 And I'm loving the chance to get to talk to you about you before we kick off the health

01:41:49.000 and other advice.

01:41:51.000 So you're a California boy.

01:41:52.780 I am.

01:41:53.340 Right?

01:41:53.600 Grew up in California.

01:41:54.520 I am.

01:41:54.900 And it seems like, from the book, you had sort of an idyllic first 14 years, and the

01:42:03.380 family had dinner together every night and that's so important to one's mental health and well-being

01:42:08.820 and then something happened in your family that gets downplayed by a lot of people is really not

01:42:14.340 that relevant to a child's mental health but it is relevant and it was life-changing for you and

01:42:20.240 that was your parents divorce yeah i did have a quite idyllic life my dad's a scientist um

01:42:25.980 my mom's a writer and uh you know and along with my sister we had dinner together every night

01:42:33.060 I, in my home, there wasn't a lot of discussion about sports, but I certainly got to hear a lot

01:42:37.600 about the luminaries of science and ideas from my dad. We always shared that. My mom has a real love

01:42:44.080 of literature, obviously, and I have a close relationship with my sister and everything was

01:42:48.960 pretty fantastic. And, um, and then, you know, I was born in 1975. So divorce wasn't as common,

01:42:54.880 uh, back when, but when I, about at age 14, uh, they separated and got divorced. So this happens

01:43:02.320 a lot nowadays, as we know, unfortunately. Look, I love my parents. Everyone did the best they could

01:43:08.260 with what they had. But it was a high conflict situation. And as things played out, I found

01:43:16.980 myself disengaging from academics, disengaging from kind of standard social milieu of school.

01:43:24.960 I went to a very, very, very good public school in South Palo Alto. Keep in mind at this time,

01:43:30.320 Palo Alto wasn't the Palo Alto that it is now, you know, of.com and tech fame, but most of the

01:43:35.480 kids there were the children of academics or engineers or something like that. And, uh, we

01:43:39.720 were, we were well enough off. Uh, I wouldn't say we were like at the high end of the wealth scale

01:43:44.640 or low end. We were, you know, uh, the focus on, in our house was on love and ideas. And,

01:43:49.140 but what happened was in response to that, and I regret this, and I encourage all kids of

01:43:55.160 divorced parents, uh, high or low conflict situations to, you know, keep, keep studying,

01:43:59.500 keep doing your homework and stay engaged in school sports and activities. What happened for

01:44:03.580 me was I ended up organizing my life around basically skateboarding and hanging out with

01:44:10.740 skateboarders because back in the late 80s and early 90s, that's where all the feral kids went.

01:44:17.120 And I talk about this a little bit at the beginning of the book, even though it's not

01:44:20.680 the main focus of the book. What was really great was in that community, there were a bunch of kids

01:44:25.960 whose parents were not engaged in their lives much, right?

01:44:28.920 That was the unifying theme.

01:44:30.640 That's why we skateboarded

01:44:31.480 because you didn't need your parents

01:44:32.380 to come to baseball or soccer practice.

01:44:35.180 And, but there's a ton of creativity.

01:44:37.080 A lot of those people went on to create big brands like DC.

01:44:40.380 I knew those kids that started DC,

01:44:42.540 that started all these big brands.

01:44:44.820 And some kids got sponsored and turned pro.

01:44:47.300 Others got really into drugs and alcohol

01:44:49.940 and destroyed their lives.

01:44:51.740 And so, you know, it was a very interesting time

01:44:53.840 for me being completely free.

01:44:55.960 getting exposed to a lot of things way too early, in my opinion, looking back. A lot of exposure to

01:45:02.600 violence, drugs, and sex that, frankly, as a 14-year-old, you know, I shouldn't have been

01:45:06.760 exposed to. But I was witness to a ton of great skateboarding. I, unfortunately, was not a great

01:45:11.120 skateboarder. But fortunately, by virtue of getting injured a lot, I started foraging for

01:45:15.860 other things to do. And eventually, mainly because of a high school girlfriend who went off to

01:45:20.260 college and I didn't want to be away from her, I found my way back to academics. And somewhere

01:45:25.900 along the way, I took a course in neuroscience. At the time, there wasn't a field of neuroscience,

01:45:32.240 but it was one truly amazing teacher. His name was Harry Carlyle, who taught me about brain

01:45:38.380 function and taught me about these neurochemicals in the brain that controlled things like anxiety,

01:45:42.680 depression, addiction. And I'd witnessed a lot of that. And I thought to myself,

01:45:48.900 this is the coolest thing ever, especially when I learned about neuroplasticity, which is,

01:45:53.240 you know, this organ that we have in our head is unlike all the other organs of the body in that

01:45:57.740 it can deliberately change itself. We can learn new things. We can have a new emotional relationship

01:46:03.480 to things. And so as my life went on, I pursued a career in science, eventually became a tenured

01:46:08.820 professor at Stanford, ran a research lab for a long time. I still teach at Stanford and fell in

01:46:14.280 love with all of that, but it was really this kind of merge of the hard things that I had seen and

01:46:19.800 experienced, plus the understanding that there's this incredible organ in our brains that we don't

01:46:24.860 really understand that much about, at least not back then, but now we understand enough to make

01:46:28.800 really great choices, including to, you know, I think, you know, even though the discussion about

01:46:35.500 things like psychedelics and things of that sort are very interesting for therapeutic purposes,

01:46:40.200 that I think because the young brain is so plastic that all kids would benefit from,

01:46:46.580 frankly, staying away from that. This isn't an anti-drug campaign that I'm on, but the developing

01:46:52.800 brain is so fragile and so susceptible to both chemical and environmental inputs. And I will

01:47:00.120 stand on firm ground and say that while I understand that in some cases it may be necessary

01:47:05.760 that, you know, having two parents at home and them getting along and working through things

01:47:13.380 together. I love my parents. I don't hold any grudge whatsoever, but I think it's clear now

01:47:19.000 from the data that's enormously helpful to a child's development. So no regrets. It all worked

01:47:24.880 out for me, but there was a high friction road along the way. And I think science, an amazing

01:47:30.000 teacher and then others who came along, plus the love of science and a care for the world that my

01:47:37.140 father and mother put into me. So I'm grateful to them too. I love them, pray for them and with them

01:47:44.580 and life is good. So I only look back with fondness, but it was rocky.

01:47:51.840 Yeah. I mean, my own take on it and having read the book is I don't think you'd be doing what

01:47:56.280 you're doing if you hadn't gone through that trauma, that traumatic period, and been exposed

01:48:01.680 to as many stressors as you were. Clearly, it lit something inside of you that needed addressing,

01:48:07.800 needed healing, needed some sort of attention. And like most people who have had some trauma

01:48:12.860 in their past, whether you've made progress on it or not, I think most of us spend the rest of

01:48:18.500 our lives in some way trying to solve it, address it, heal it, or make it better for others who we

01:48:25.780 can see coming up behind us who have similar issues so i mean i would argue that this book

01:48:31.140 protocols is a direct result of all that you went through and thank you and thanks to your parents

01:48:37.140 in a way because as a result we have such good advice in here i do want to spend one minute on

01:48:43.020 this was such a sad thing so you mentioned professor carlisle who became such a mentor to you

01:48:48.960 and this was an important person in your life and ultimately he he dies by suicide yeah

01:48:55.720 So I don't want to give people the impression that the book is entirely dark.

01:49:01.380 It's a story about lightness and what you can do to better your abilities in sleep and stress mitigation, all these things.

01:49:08.740 But I touch on the science of grief and how to get through things in a healthy way and mental health.

01:49:16.440 And along my path, what I saw was the following.

01:49:21.140 A lot of the kids I grew up with and with this amazing community of skateboarders, I saw some flourish.

01:49:28.640 I saw others succumb to addiction.

01:49:31.380 I saw some succumb to mental health issues.

01:49:34.460 And as I went into science, I incorrectly thought, oh, you know, what's going to happen is that scientists are all going to be super healthy, right?

01:49:43.200 These are people who understand the brain.

01:49:45.760 And as a consequence of understanding the brain and biology, I naively thought that they would

01:49:51.300 be immune to a lot of the problems that this other community had. And I found quite the opposite. So

01:49:59.340 there were three things that happened along the way for me that really motivated me further to

01:50:05.100 write the book Protocols, to have a podcast where we talk about health, where I teach

01:50:09.020 about what we do and don't know about the brain and how people can benefit.

01:50:12.280 And the first one really was these observations from my teen years. The next observation was that this guy, Harry Carlyle, who understood mental health, depression, disease, suicidality as chemical issues, for whatever reason, I eventually was able to fill in some of the pieces, took his own life in a pretty dramatic fashion.

01:50:37.480 And that told me something, right? I was close friends with his wife and I knew his family. It told me that knowledge alone doesn't save us. Knowledge is important. It's as we say in science necessary, but not sufficient, you know? And then what happened was I went off to graduate school and had an amazing time in graduate school.

01:50:57.580 Everyone says, oh, you know, you finished graduate school and you're aged and you're tired. I was so full of life in graduate school and after. I loved my graduate advisor. She was like a mother to me. Her name was Barbara Chapman. And then she, I know her family and kids. Her daughter is a neuroscientist now. And she died of cancer at 50. And I thought, oh my goodness, she had the BRCA mutation. So she had a genetic susceptibility. And I thought, my goodness.

01:51:23.540 And then I became a postdoc at Stanford. And my postdoc advisor, the first day of my faculty

01:51:30.300 appointment, had a heart attack across the table for me at dinner. He survived that. It turns out

01:51:35.360 he had pancreatic cancer. He was dead roughly a year later. I ended up writing his obituary

01:51:39.740 for nature. We were very, very close. And I thought to myself, this is crazy, right?

01:51:45.520 Like either the joke in my field, the kind of morbid joke is you don't want me to work for you,

01:51:49.440 obviously, because the odds are, you know, it didn't work out so well for these people. But

01:51:53.800 the serious aspect of it is at one point I thought, what's going on here? What's going on?

01:52:01.380 And I also noticed in my field of neuroscience, people doing tremendously well. I know Nobel

01:52:06.940 Prize winners, members of the National Academy, my closest childhood friend is now the chair of

01:52:10.880 neurosurgery at UCSF. He's doing phenomenally well in life and including family. And I thought to

01:52:15.800 myself, what's happening here? And I realized, especially at the beginning of the pandemic,

01:52:22.240 scientists, doctors, parents, kids, nobody knows the manual, the rule book for how to control their

01:52:29.080 stress. Nobody knows the playbook for how to take care of their health. And we're supposed to be all

01:52:34.220 about health. And we're supposed to eat right, sleep right, et cetera. But I'm watching my

01:52:38.500 colleagues get sick. I'm seeing them. They look badly out of shape. And I understand they're time

01:52:43.280 limited, but they're talking about back pain. They're talking about their kid has anxiety.

01:52:47.320 There's a colleague, this very famous person in my field became addicted to painkillers and then

01:52:53.000 eventually died. No one talked about it. And I'm thinking to myself, we're not talking about this

01:52:58.040 stuff. We need to talk about it. In fact, this last year, one of the luminaries in our field,

01:53:01.840 it still gets me, who was a real pioneer in transcranial magnetic stimulation therapies

01:53:09.140 for depression and also psychedelic therapies, the studies of these took his own life. My dear

01:53:15.580 friend and colleague, Nolan Williams, who's helped the veterans community tremendously.

01:53:20.200 So I realized at some point, people don't know how to take care of themselves. They don't even

01:53:26.080 know what self-care is. It sounds very selfish. And in some versions of it, it can be. So what

01:53:31.560 are we supposed to do? So in 2020, with the world on lockdown and everyone kind of been battling

01:53:38.220 each other. I thought, look, I'm not a virologist. I'm just going to stay out of that whole thing.

01:53:42.640 It's a, it's a, it's a hornet's nest for an academic like me, but here's what I will do.

01:53:46.720 I'm going to go online and I'm going to start talking about ways to improve your sleep.

01:53:50.520 My lab had worked on a number of things, including eye diseases and trying to cure

01:53:54.960 blindness, glaucoma. We'd worked on brain development and I'd worked on stress mitigation

01:53:59.920 in humans. And I knew that there were simple tools that people could apply to learn to shut

01:54:04.980 their brain off at the end of the day and get great sleep, to have more energy, elevated mood

01:54:10.300 and focus throughout the day. I knew the literature quite well because I teach it and I'd done

01:54:15.380 research on it and published on some of it on how you can modify your brain in adaptive ways and

01:54:20.800 how you can start to unpeel some of the emotional load of traumatic experiences. And I thought

01:54:25.980 the world needs this. So I'm going to just start blabbing about it into the camera. And I teamed

01:54:31.620 up interestingly i teamed up with a guy who had a little bit of a background in media his name

01:54:37.780 is rob moore and we started this little production company in my closet with my bulldog costello

01:54:42.500 snoring in the background and i grabbed some skateboarders my friend mike blayback is now a

01:54:47.380 famous action sport photographer he came up through skateboarding had his own challenges with alcohol

01:54:52.740 and drugs got clean got lean and healthy he's a family man he's got two kids he's doing great

01:54:59.700 I grabbed two skateboard filmers because skateboarders, mind you, the ones that made it

01:55:04.200 through the shoot of all the troubling stuff, they are the original do-it-yourself filmer

01:55:09.480 editors. We all carried around cameras when we were kids, long before smartphones, and they are

01:55:13.880 phenomenal at making movies. So we're a small pack of guys, and we did it the same way you'd

01:55:19.320 start a skateboarding company. Find a space, film people doing what they love, put it out into the

01:55:25.240 world. And I just started giving away tools to the world on sleep, on stress mitigation,

01:55:30.060 on neuroplasticity, on personal development. And I would have guests on, but I would also do these

01:55:35.600 solo episodes where I would explain here, here's what the real story on dopamine is. It's not about

01:55:40.000 pleasure. It's about motivation. Here's how you can leverage that to your advantage to stay

01:55:44.720 motivated, but not burn out and so on. And then eventually I realized that the world needed that

01:55:49.840 information in a different form so that the book is sort of a lookup table. It tells a story. You

01:55:54.900 could go linearly through it, but it's kind of a lookup table. You can go any chapter you want.

01:55:59.160 So you can just navigate straight to it. If you want to read about sleep, you can go to that

01:56:00.880 chapter and so on. So that's really the purpose behind what I do. Yeah. Again, the book is called

01:56:07.980 Protocols by Andrew Huberman, available for pre-order right now. Let's spend some time on

01:56:14.740 sleep because I've seen so many clips of you talking about sleep, and I can tell you this

01:56:19.840 is definitely an issue for me and a lot of my viewers of a certain age, women in particular,

01:56:25.660 but a lot of guys out there too, got a lot of truckers who listen to this show on SiriusXM

01:56:30.000 who are not well-rested and are not getting the appropriate amount of sleep.

01:56:36.060 And I have to say, the more time you spend talking about how you need to sleep,

01:56:40.260 the harder it can be to sleep because then you're in your bed at night like,

01:56:43.500 I'm supposed to be asleep, but I can't fall asleep. And it's amazing to me that

01:56:49.440 you argue that it begins when you wake up. Your good night's sleep begins the moment

01:56:56.380 you wake up. And whenever I hear this next part, because I've heard you say this over the years,

01:57:01.500 I think, Andrew Huberman is not from the Northeast and does not live in the Northeast.

01:57:08.000 And now, understanding that you're a California boy, it's starting to come into full focus for

01:57:12.180 me. Because you want us to get up, go outside within the first 30 minutes or so, and stare

01:57:18.780 at the sun for, you know, 10 minutes maybe. And now we do mean like at the sun or like right next

01:57:25.400 to the sun, not like the fully bright sun, but you say that's not really the sun you're getting

01:57:30.120 in the morning when it first rises anyway. But explain why this is important and explain how

01:57:35.200 this is supposed to work for those of us in places like Connecticut when it's minus 15 and awful when

01:57:42.100 you wake up fair fair play um you know i uh i've largely lived um west of interstate five which

01:57:49.060 cuts down through the center of california so uh all fair so here's the thing uh i'm gonna try we

01:57:56.000 too we also want to live right the rest of the country the people of minnesota yes the people

01:58:00.500 in washington yeah you guys are are having a couple other other advantages that we can talk

01:58:05.860 about. So it all, it all evens out. Here's the deal to really master your sleep and get great

01:58:13.640 sleep, but also to have elevated daytime mood, focus, et cetera. You really want to master the

01:58:20.560 first hour of your day in the last hour of your day. And fortunately, I'm not going to tell you

01:58:24.520 that you need to do a bunch of things in each of those hours that require finances or require a

01:58:30.740 lot of energy. Here's the theme, which is we know is conducive to better mental health and physical

01:58:38.160 health and longevity. You want bright mornings and days and dark nights. Now, if you're going

01:58:44.920 to tell me, well, there's not a lot of sunlight out here, but here's the deal. When you wake up

01:58:49.680 in the morning, you wake up because of a rise in a hormone called cortisol and because of a rise in

01:58:54.300 body temperature. Most people think of cortisol as a stress hormone and they think, oh, that's

01:58:58.920 bad. I don't want high cortisol. You want your morning cortisol high. I'll repeat that. You want

01:59:03.880 your morning cortisol high. It is not a stress hormone. It is the hormone of energy and to

01:59:08.920 mobilize energy in your body and get you moving into the day. And if you get your morning cortisol

01:59:13.360 high, it helps ensure that your nighttime cortisol is low. And when your nighttime cortisol is low,

01:59:19.880 it's easy to fall and stay asleep and you get great sleep. Your metabolic health will be better.

01:59:24.080 the hormone melatonin goes up, which makes you sleepy. You want morning cortisol high,

01:59:29.640 nighttime cortisol low. So the best way to kind of book, so think about bookending your days.

01:59:35.300 I don't care what time you wake up, if it's 4 a.m. or it's 10 a.m. We can talk about what to do if

01:59:40.560 the sun isn't out yet. But within the first hour of waking up, ideally within the first 30 minutes,

01:59:46.640 you're going to get up. Most people use the restroom. I suggest you hydrate, drink a little

01:59:50.460 bit of water. And if the sun is up, and by the way, you don't need to be able to see the sun,

01:59:56.180 it can be completely overcast. But if there's daylight coming through the clouds, which there

02:00:00.820 is even in the depths of winter in Boston, it's much brighter at 7am, for instance, in Boston in

02:00:06.660 the middle of winter than it was at midnight the night before. There's a lot of what we call

02:00:10.020 photons or light energy coming through those clouds. You go outside, you could even stand

02:00:14.700 on a balcony, best not to do it through a window. But if you have to, you go out on a balcony or

02:00:20.220 outside. You look in the direction of the sun. If you can't see the sun because there's a building

02:00:24.020 in the way, that's fine. Take off any hat you might be wearing because the sun's coming in

02:00:28.520 from the top. You want to get to your eyes. Don't wear sunglasses.

02:00:32.580 Not sunglasses at this time. Eyeglasses and contacts are fine.

02:00:36.960 You can have your coffee there. You can do your morning prayer or meditation there.

02:00:41.220 You can bring your dog. You can bring a friend. You can be completely alone.

02:00:44.940 Even if you just grab one minute of daylight, it's going to benefit you. Why? Because there's

02:00:50.020 this critical window within the first hour of waking, where if you get bright light in your

02:00:54.460 eyes from daylight, from sunlight, it amplifies that cortisol peak, which makes it much lower

02:01:01.180 before sleep, which makes it far easier to fall asleep at night. In addition, most people want

02:01:07.240 less stress in their life, not more. If you spike your cortisol that way first thing in the morning,

02:01:13.480 Any stress you have during the day will lead to a more transient, a briefer increase in stress

02:01:20.760 hormones. You are better at dealing with stress when you do this. And there are a number of

02:01:25.160 biochemical reasons for this. These are not psychological phenomena. These are pure

02:01:28.840 physiology. This isn't about mindset. This is just-

02:01:31.700 Can you just explain what am I looking, you know, because they say you're not supposed to

02:01:35.860 look directly into the sun, but am I supposed to be looking directly into the sun at this hour?

02:01:39.080 Great question. So as somebody who worked on blinding the diseases of the eye for many years,

02:01:43.520 I want to encourage people, you can look in the direction of the sun, but blink as needed to

02:01:47.260 protect your eyes. If it's really bright for you and you're blinking, great. The blink reflex is

02:01:51.260 there to protect your eyes. Never force yourself to look at any light, sunlight or otherwise,

02:01:55.840 that's painful to look at. So you can just look in the direction of the sun. You could even keep

02:02:00.240 your eyes closed. Believe it or not, the photon energy goes through your eyelids, but you look

02:02:04.580 kind of off to the side of the sun. If it's in the middle of winter, the sun is easy to

02:02:09.140 look at because it's behind so many clouds. When the sun is low in the sky, such around sunrise or

02:02:15.240 sunset, and keep in mind, I'm not saying you need to see the sun cross the horizon. If you wake up

02:02:19.460 at 9 a.m. and the sun's already up, you miss sunrise. It's rising. But when it's low in the

02:02:24.440 sky, you'll notice something about the sun if it's not a cloudy day, which is it looks a bit more

02:02:29.300 yellow, orange, red than at other times. Now, of course, the light coming from the sun is the same

02:02:34.040 all times of day. But when the sun is low in the sky, there's an atmospheric phenomenon called

02:02:40.040 Rayleigh scattering where the UV, which are damaging rays for the most part, get scattered.

02:02:46.280 And so those aren't reaching your eyes. So you see what are called the longer wavelengths of light.

02:02:50.220 It looks a bit more like candlelight and bright, but more like candlelight. So when the sun is low

02:02:55.480 in the sky, you don't have to worry about UV damage to your skin. You don't have to worry

02:02:59.380 about damage to your eyes or getting cataract. When the sun is overhead, that's when you really

02:03:03.640 need to be careful about too much UV exposure. We know that UV exposure-

02:03:07.940 So in the perfect Huberman protocol, I'm out, I'm looking up, I'm maybe just to the right of

02:03:16.560 the sun, not directly into the sun. I don't have sunglasses on. And how long do I need to stand

02:03:22.580 there looking? And do I need to be looking nonstop? Or can I look around at the dogs and the-

02:03:30.620 Look around. Those photons are bouncing off of surfaces. They're getting reflected.

02:03:37.060 If you take a walk, if there's any green space around, see, this is where the East Coast,

02:03:40.720 you have an advantage. Except in some cities, you often have a lot more green because you get a lot

02:03:45.140 more rain, right? The Oregonians really benefit here too. The really beneficial wavelengths of

02:03:51.900 light are bouncing off greenery. That long wavelength light that bounces off greenery

02:03:57.580 is tremendously good for our mitochondria. It actually can go into and through our body. This

02:04:02.260 is a separate story that I cover in the book. It can actually lower blood glucose. Believe it or

02:04:07.020 not, your blood sugar management is much better when you're out in daylight than when you eat

02:04:11.820 indoors. This was shown by my colleague, Glenn Jeffrey at University College London. They shined

02:04:17.300 a red light, which approximates sunlight on people's backs while they did a glucose tolerance

02:04:22.080 test. It blunts glucose levels by nearly somewhere between 20 and 30%, which is remarkable. How could

02:04:28.740 that be? The light actually goes into the body, through the body, and the mitochondria, the

02:04:35.260 energy factories in our cells actually start using more ATP. Metabolism goes up, which is remarkable.

02:04:42.800 Now, here's the interest. Just so I'm clear, you have to be exposing your skin in that moment. 0.99

02:04:46.900 It doesn't count when you're skiing and you're completely covered head to toe.

02:04:50.820 that the light needs to hit your actual body skin.

02:04:54.920 They've shown it can go through a T-shirt

02:04:56.520 or even a shirt like the one I'm wearing,

02:04:58.680 you know, a thin enough shirt,

02:05:00.020 a thick jacket it won't go through.

02:05:02.120 So you get outside, you take any brimmed hat off,

02:05:05.980 you look in the direction of the sun.

02:05:07.440 Yes, if you need to text someone, that's fine.

02:05:09.620 You walk, you take a call, you talk to somebody.

02:05:12.900 It's, you know, it's especially nice

02:05:14.260 to get five minutes or so.

02:05:15.660 I suggest doing a 10 breath meditation,

02:05:17.920 you know, just focusing on 10 breaths

02:05:19.640 or do your morning prayers.

02:05:21.020 That's a big practice for me.

02:05:22.520 And then get into the day and you've done it.

02:05:25.600 You've spiked that cortisol.

02:05:27.340 Look, even better would be if you can get some exercise

02:05:30.280 in the first hours of the day,

02:05:31.600 because everyone's so afraid of cortisol,

02:05:33.800 but everyone's told to exercise.

02:05:35.620 A moderate to high intensity exercise session,

02:05:38.200 cardiovascular training or resistance training

02:05:40.240 will triple your cortisol level, but transiently.

02:05:43.420 That's a great thing early in the day.

02:05:45.760 And it sets you up for great sleep at night.

02:05:47.820 If you have to exercise later in the day,

02:05:49.600 that's fine. And we can talk about that. But in that case, you'd want to, one of the things that

02:05:54.020 really leads to better sleep, as long as we're here, we might as well just kind of throw in a

02:05:57.640 few things that lead to better sleep. If you're having a hard time calming your system down at

02:06:02.140 the end of the day, two things really help. One, you need to lower your core body temperature.

02:06:06.300 That's actually how you fall asleep. The one excellent way to do that is to take a hot shower

02:06:11.180 or bath. You say, wait, I'm heating up my skin. How's that going to make me cooler? Well,

02:06:15.380 your brain has a little thermostat region called the medial pre-optic nucleus and when just like

02:06:20.580 a thermostat when the surface of the skin heats up the the brain says oh we need to lower a core

02:06:26.640 body temperature and your body temperature starts falling when you get out of that shower or bath

02:06:30.380 if you don't have access to a shower bath even a warm compress to the face will accomplish this

02:06:35.500 very easy essentially costs nothing and it will facilitate the transition to sleep the other thing

02:06:41.840 that is. And this is probably a bigger thing, but I'll let you finish your point. But can you,

02:06:46.960 after this, talk about staying asleep? Yes. Yeah. So one of the key things to falling asleep

02:06:53.820 and to stress mitigation, you'll notice I'm trying to fire hose tools at people that they

02:06:58.360 can use anytime. Yes, we want them. These are all, and I'll just point out, like I didn't discover

02:07:02.740 these tools. I've published on some of them as tools in my laboratory, but I want to really

02:07:08.880 point out something important in the backdrop here is these mechanisms are hardwired into all

02:07:15.000 of us. We're born with them. We're going to die with them. So there's no real learning except how

02:07:20.920 to activate these circuits. Hence a user manual for the brain and body, right? An operating manual.

02:07:26.660 So the idea here is you have these cells in your eye. They're called melanopsin intrinsically

02:07:32.000 photosensitive retinal ganglion cells. That's just nerd speak for the cells in your eye that

02:07:37.160 actually know that morning sunlight is hitting them. It's different than other forms of light.

02:07:43.120 Your phone won't do it. A computer won't do it. An indoor light, unless it's a 10,000 lux

02:07:48.320 artificial light, we'll talk about that in a minute, won't accomplish this. We have these

02:07:53.580 cells for the very purpose of waking us up in the morning, for telling the brain and body it's

02:07:58.220 morning. That circuit gets activated. Boom, you just go into your day. You don't have to think

02:08:02.880 about it anymore. There's another feature to the way that we are hardwired, which is we have a

02:08:09.140 little collection of neurons in our brain that communicate with our body in the following way.

02:08:14.280 When you are feeling too alert, could be stress, could be panic, could be public speaking, could be

02:08:19.840 a hard conversation, could be anticipation of a medical outcome, or you're having trouble falling

02:08:25.520 asleep or getting back to sleep. What you need to do is do a long, deliberate exhale.

02:08:32.880 just like that if you want to make it even more effective you do two inhales through your nose

02:08:39.780 to maximally inflate your lungs and then you exhale what am i talking about here this is not

02:08:44.700 breath work this is a collection of specific neurons that were discovered by my friend and

02:08:49.360 colleague jack feldman at ucla that lead to a slowing of heart rate in a good way you're everyone's

02:08:57.920 heard of the vagus nerve now it's this nerve nerves in the body collect sensory information

02:09:02.240 from the body, telling the brain what's going on in the body. We're not even thinking about it,

02:09:05.780 but there's a another part of the vagus nerve, which goes from brain to the sinoatrial node of

02:09:11.360 the heart. And it controls something called respiratory sinus arrhythmia, which sounds bad.

02:09:15.600 People hear arrhythmia and that sounds bad. But when you do a deliberate exhale, your heart rate

02:09:21.160 slows down. So if you want to calm down really fast, the fastest way to do that is not self-talk.

02:09:28.560 It's not meditation because you don't have time to run off and meditate. It's not a drink even that will take longer

02:09:34.820 We can talk about alcohol later. It is to do a deliberate exhale. You're too amped up. You want to calm down

02:09:42.200 Long deliberate exhale

02:09:45.780 There's a specific pathway that slows the heart rate down these days in the fitness circles

02:09:51.180 You're hearing more about heart rate variability a stress monitor like a whoop band or anything that measures hrv

02:09:58.240 it's measuring how often your brain sends this break signal to your heart rate.

02:10:05.980 That's what HRV is. In fact, if you do a few deliberate exhales during the day, just a few

02:10:11.240 times, you're walking out of the restroom, going back to work, you're sitting down to your desk,

02:10:15.680 whatever, you're driving, you're picking up the kids, you do one long deliberate exhale,

02:10:19.500 your HRV gets higher at night in sleep, which is great for you. And during the day, you want

02:10:24.820 high hrv it shows that your nervous system can calm your heart rate down slow it down and this

02:10:30.800 is a well you know i could get into the mechanism the diaphragm you know moves up the heart gets a

02:10:36.240 little smaller blood moves faster the brain says uh-oh blood's moving faster through that smaller

02:10:40.580 volume of the heart slow heart rate down when we inhale heart rate speeds up and everyone's told

02:10:47.700 oh you're stressed take a take a deep breath that increases your heart rate so you know circa 2019

02:10:53.880 18, 20, 20, I'm thinking to myself, everyone's stressed. Everyone's saying, take a deep breath.

02:10:58.840 That's not going to work. That's going to send you in the opposite direction.

02:11:02.120 Okay. Humans inhale actively and passively exhale. We do this all day long. We let the air fall out.

02:11:10.880 When we actively exhale, it activates this circuit that's just sitting there waiting for you to calm

02:11:16.200 yourself down and you actively exhale. The reason exercise increases HRV has a lot to do with how

02:11:23.360 much exhaling you do during exercise. So in that last hour of the day, here's what I'd love for

02:11:28.620 people to do. I understand people watch Netflix. They're listening to podcasts. They're watching

02:11:32.900 TV. They want to know the verdict on this new case. I get it. I totally get it. I'm human too.

02:11:37.700 Just do this for me. Try and make the first hour of your day as bright as possible that day. If all

02:11:42.900 you can do is flip on all the lights in your house first thing in the morning, that's it.

02:11:46.280 Can't get outside. It's too cold. You don't want to do it. Fine. Just make it bright.

02:11:49.320 make as bright as you can even better for people in the northeast would be to get and i don't have

02:11:54.380 any relationship to the companies that sell these but for about a hundred dollars you can get a

02:11:58.040 10 000 lux artificial light looks like a tv screen you put it in the kitchen or the bathroom you flip

02:12:03.040 it on go about your morning you don't have to stare at it or you get outside get some light in

02:12:08.340 your eyes do that and if you can we can talk about exercise in the early part of the day great first

02:12:14.020 three hours or so and then in the last hour of your day think i'm going to try and heat up the

02:12:19.220 surface of my body to cool down internally so I can fall asleep better. So hot compress to the

02:12:24.460 face for 10 seconds, maybe a hot shower, hot bath. Okay. If you have time, dim the lights,

02:12:31.660 if you can't dim the lights, try and not use overhead lights because the eyes, the cells in

02:12:36.820 the eyes that, that carry this information about waking up to the brain, they view the upper visual

02:12:41.580 field. That's how they're, they're placed so they can see the sky. So do like the Scandinavians and

02:12:47.240 use desk lamps or a floor lamp. Okay. Dim those lights, dim your screen. And if you're still 0.97

02:12:53.660 feeling too ramped up and you can't sleep, do some long exhales, just a few long exhales.

02:12:59.420 This whole thing will have an outsized positive effect on people's sleep, daytime mood focus and

02:13:04.800 alertness. And there's a beautiful study out of the UK Biobank of more than 80,000 subjects,

02:13:10.200 which shows that even if people just make their nights darker, for instance, maybe an eye mask

02:13:16.520 while you sleep. Don't have an eye mask, grab a soft t-shirt, throw it over your eyes when you

02:13:20.640 go to sleep. Even just making your sleep environment darker has a significant positive

02:13:27.060 effect on reducing symptoms of depression, OCD, mania, dementia, and on and on. Better to make

02:13:34.240 mornings bright and dark nights. But if you look at the way humans have been trending for the last

02:13:39.820 few years, we have days that are too dim and nights that are too bright. And if you think,

02:13:46.140 well, no, actually my work environment's pretty bright. Just putting people near a window or

02:13:51.900 having people look out a window a few times during the daytime has significant improvements

02:13:57.120 on metabolic health, longevity, mood. It's not that we should be living out of doors. No one's

02:14:05.460 going to do that, right? People want, we've evolved all these ways to live indoors and

02:14:10.120 they're great, frankly, but brighter mornings, darker nights, even in these subtle ways will

02:14:15.720 help tremendously. Now there are some people for whom all of that, they'll do all of that

02:14:21.220 and they'll say, I still wake up at two or three in the morning and I can't get back

02:14:24.600 to sleep. And for that, I'm going to offer you a really weird trick, but the reason I'm

02:14:29.620 willing to do this, even as a scientist is a, there's a scientific basis for it and B

02:14:33.920 it works. And it's the following. We know this one, this is a wild trick, but this will get you

02:14:40.280 back to sleep. It's why I know it's really wild. Well, three, I saw you do it. I have tried it a

02:14:46.260 few times. It looks crazy, but you'll think you'll thank me later, folks. I promise. And also what's

02:14:51.660 fun about these things is like, these were, these are in you, right? This isn't something you have

02:14:56.780 to go purchase, right? Um, you know, I I'll be happy if people purchase the book, but frankly,

02:15:01.300 the reason I go on podcasts like this is all the time. And it's because I just want people to have

02:15:07.620 these tools. I mean, I wish I had known as a kid, as an adult, I can calm myself down fast for a

02:15:14.760 tense moment, just doing a deliberate exhale or even better, a double inhale, long exhale. I can

02:15:20.380 get better sleep because I had sleep issues starting basically in high school and college.

02:15:24.680 I'd wake, I'd fall asleep and I'd wake up in the middle of the night. I mean, when we're sleeping

02:15:29.020 well, life is so much better. Getting over traumas, recovery from addiction, dealing with

02:15:35.920 difficult circumstances, but also our ability to do all the things that we know we're supposed to

02:15:40.480 do like exercise and earn a living and do all the things that we're striving, all our strivings

02:15:45.460 get so much easier. So these are the tools I wish I had had, but they weren't out there.

02:15:50.400 So the thing that you can do to fall back asleep, I'll just give you the science very briefly first.

02:15:57.300 Anyone that's ever had a kid or held a kid knows that if you rock the kid back and forth and you

02:16:01.100 walk, they fall asleep. Turns out there's a scientific study of the exact rate of rocking

02:16:07.420 and walking that's ideal for putting babies to sleep. Turns out in adults, believe it or not,

02:16:13.640 scientists are so weird, they did a study using a slow rocking bed and it puts people to sleep.

02:16:19.200 Okay. I want one. I know. I'm like, I want one too. But for most people, it's not practical.

02:16:26.560 And then there was this woman who actually was in, she wasn't at Stanford, but Francine

02:16:30.980 Shapiro, who developed this thing called EMDR, which is a trauma treatment where people recount

02:16:36.480 a story while moving their eyes from side to side.

02:16:39.080 Sounded pretty wacky.

02:16:40.240 People made up silly theories that, oh, that's mimicking rapid eye movement sleep.

02:16:45.000 No, nothing of the sort.

02:16:46.600 Turns out, based on now three or four really solid publications, that when the eyes are

02:16:51.680 moving from side to side, for whatever reason, it quiets the activity of this brain region called

02:16:57.060 the amygdala, which is involved in stress, threat detection, and fear, as it's commonly referred to,

02:17:02.720 the fear center. The critical thing for falling asleep is that you be not stressed, but also

02:17:10.860 that you forget about your body position. So it turns out that this rocking motion or the movement

02:17:17.520 of the eyes both suppresses areas of the brain that are involved in threat detection and anxiety

02:17:22.940 and stress, but they also help you forget what's called proprioception, your knowledge of where

02:17:28.980 your limbs are. And that is a requirement for falling asleep. So there are two things that

02:17:35.240 happened in the following year. First of all, a group of brilliant scientists at MIT came up with

02:17:40.020 a sleep mask that they're developing now. I have no relationship to this company, but I've tried

02:17:43.640 this mask that creates a very specific eye movement pattern by low-level electrical stimulation

02:17:49.580 that causes you to fall asleep. And I've done it. You fall asleep almost immediately.

02:17:55.060 But the eye movement pattern is something that you can create yourself. So you close your eyes,

02:18:00.500 you're in bed, you're wide awake. This happened to me last night. I woke up,

02:18:03.440 went to sleep around 10 o'clock, woke up at 3.30, boom, wide awake. I was having some intense dream

02:18:09.340 about some meaningless thing, like so many dreams. And I thought, oh, I'm wide awake. What do I do?

02:18:14.920 Keep my eyes closed. So under the eyelids, you move your eyes slowly to the left, then to the

02:18:20.560 right, then up, then down, try and move them counterclockwise, clockwise. I know it sounds

02:18:28.820 crazy. Still with eyes closed, kind of point them towards your nose. It's not really crossing your

02:18:33.980 eyes, and then you do a long exhale. When people do this, the typical reaction I get because people

02:18:42.700 write to me is, next thing I know, it was morning. I know that sounds wild. And listen, I wouldn't

02:18:49.220 put this out into the world at this scale if I wasn't confident that doing that one to three

02:18:53.580 times for most people is sufficient for them to get back to sleep. Now, if you're intensely

02:18:58.780 ruminating on something really troubling, you're going to need to do something else. But

02:19:02.360 very, very often that will do the trick. And these eye masks that are now being developed

02:19:08.820 are just trying to recapitulate that eye movement pattern.

02:19:13.360 That's crazy. All I can think of is the movie, The Jerk, you know, where he puts the sunglasses on

02:19:17.820 or the eyeglasses and they've got something. And the next thing you know, everybody who tries them

02:19:20.840 is cross-eyed. I hope the masks don't have any weird side effects.

02:19:24.520 That's not going to do this. But what I just described is entirely safe. Why does it shut

02:19:29.040 down your proprioception, your knowledge of body position. I can't help myself, but tell people

02:19:35.940 why. The mechanism is important here because otherwise it becomes a hack, right? And a hack

02:19:40.520 is something that's designed to overcome a problem. Like if these glasses break and I put a paperclip

02:19:45.600 in the corner to fix them, that's a hack. It's not what the paperclip was designed for. It's not a

02:19:51.100 really good solution. It's a temporary solution. The reason this is not a hack, this is grounded

02:19:56.240 in your physiology. Your eyes have many connections to the brain. Some are designed to tell your brain

02:20:01.800 when it's daytime. Others are designed to let you see colors and shapes and movement of objects like

02:20:07.660 cars. But there's another circuit that goes from your eyes to deep brain structures that then

02:20:14.540 connects to what's called your mini brain, a little brain in the back of your brain, literally. It

02:20:19.220 looks like another brain called the cerebellum. Most people think of the cerebellum as a balance

02:20:23.840 structure. It's critical for balance. It's also critical for learning. But the cerebellum is also

02:20:30.460 critical for taking your eye movements, understanding where your eyes are, and

02:20:36.160 adjusting your body position accordingly. When you walk through any environment, office, outdoors,

02:20:42.280 whatever, you don't experience the world as blurry. But if I took a picture on my phone and

02:20:47.600 moved my phone, it would be blurry. How is that? The cerebellum takes your eye position and sends

02:20:53.360 the eyes a message to offset any slip in the visual world. So you see the world as stable

02:20:58.900 as you move your head around. Amazing. When you move your eyes the way I described under the

02:21:04.280 eyelids, it confuses the cerebellum. There's a map of your body in the cerebellum and the

02:21:09.920 cerebellum doesn't know how to deal with these weird eye movements of side to side, round and

02:21:15.080 up and down. And all of a sudden that proprioceptive mechanism is shut down. And that's the second

02:21:21.600 step in being able to fall asleep. So lowering your core body temperature, keeping the room cool

02:21:27.640 helps too. Some long exhale breathing before sleep. If you wake up in the middle of the night,

02:21:32.360 keep the room dark. Yes, get up and use the restroom if you need to. I highly recommend

02:21:37.100 you not look at your phone if you can avoid it. But when you're ready to go back to sleep,

02:21:40.760 do these eye movements. You will find almost certainly that you'll fall back asleep much

02:21:46.500 more easily. And men, I get thousands of notes every day. Let me hit you with a couple of

02:21:51.200 quick ones, a couple of quick ones. Um, when you say double inhale, can you show us what that is?

02:21:58.280 Is that, is that regular inhales or is something else? You want to do the two inhales through the

02:22:02.440 nose. The second inhale will be shorter because your lungs are already mostly full. And then the

02:22:06.340 exhale through the mouth. This is the fastest way to bring your heart rate down and de-stress in

02:22:10.480 real time. Okay. So unless you're underwater, I can't see a circumstance where you couldn't do

02:22:15.040 this. So you, you do it the following way until lungs are empty. So it was a long inhale filling

02:22:27.860 your lungs. Then one, one extra that when you don't think you have extra room, you do, you do

02:22:33.660 one extra and then a long, and then a slow exhale through the mouth, inhale through the nose,

02:22:38.180 exhale through the mouth. The reason for that second inhale is important. Your lungs are not

02:22:42.760 just two big bags of air. They have hundreds of millions of little sacks that actually fill with

02:22:48.400 air. And those little sacks are kind of moist in the middle. And like if you're ever trying to blow

02:22:54.540 up a balloon at a kid's party, sometimes it's easy to blow up the balloon. But if they're those

02:22:58.520 little water balloons, sometimes what you find is, you know, if you want to put air into a water

02:23:03.360 balloon so that you can tie it, right, because you filled it too much, you have to get sometimes

02:23:07.220 two pushes, two exhales, right? So in order to maximally inflate those little sacs, you get that

02:23:14.360 big first inhale and that'll inflate most of them. But then there are a bunch of them that are

02:23:18.300 collapsed and kind of sticking together from surface tension. You do that second inhale,

02:23:22.460 they open up. They don't burst, but they open up. Great. Now you can offload more air on the exhale.

02:23:29.280 And there's a story here also about oxygen coming in and you're offloading carbon dioxide.

02:23:34.040 a lot of our stress is about too much carbon dioxide in the blood. The brain has a set of

02:23:42.640 neurons. Again, this neuroscience thing is incredible, right? It's like you have a set

02:23:47.100 of neurons that don't tell you when to breathe because you need more oxygen. They tell you when

02:23:51.760 to breathe when carbon dioxide gets too high. Many people have what's called sleep apnea.

02:23:56.880 They're not getting enough oxygen during sleep or they have daytime apnea. And so they're not

02:24:02.900 getting enough oxygen and there's carbon dioxide levels are too high. There are three reasons why

02:24:08.400 you want to offload carbon dioxide. You need it, but you don't want too much of it building up in

02:24:12.880 your system. First of all, sleep apnea, snoring, et cetera, severe cardiovascular and basically

02:24:19.980 brain health issues come from that. Get your snoring fixed. Get that deviated septum fixed.

02:24:27.500 get the cpap if you have to um well i had friends who had their uvulas cut out and it stopped their

02:24:33.860 snoring oh my goodness they said it was very painful that's yeah i don't know how that works

02:24:38.120 if that's what it takes provided it's done by a good surgeon you know do that for some people

02:24:42.940 that are overweight or even the guys who like to lift weights and they have these giant necks

02:24:46.760 that's actually can create sleep apnea you don't want to be overly muscled or too much body but

02:24:51.660 you don't want overly anything really. But apnea is bad because of the buildup of carbon dioxide

02:24:57.660 in sleep. It won't cause dementia, but it certainly predisposes you to it and to heart

02:25:03.620 attack and so forth. But a lot of people during the daytime, they're walking around mouth breathing

02:25:08.320 as much as you can only breathe through your mouth when eating or speaking.

02:25:13.620 Now, if you're exercising hard, great to breathe through your mouth. That's fine.

02:25:17.560 But do you like the mouth tape that people are using?

02:25:20.080 I don't because I have this mustache beard thing and it never stays on.

02:25:23.520 Oh, yeah.

02:25:24.060 So what I do is when I do my low-level cardiovascular exercise, like walking, unless I'm on a call

02:25:31.080 or if I'm doing an easy cardiovascular exercise, I restrict myself to nasal breathing.

02:25:36.840 It actually sets you up to be a nasal breather in sleep.

02:25:40.320 You kind of start defaulting to nasal breathing.

02:25:42.260 But if I'm running harder or exercising harder, I definitely breathe through my mouth.

02:25:47.040 The carbon dioxide thing is real.

02:25:50.080 in the sense that when you're stressed,

02:25:52.420 there's a buildup of carbon dioxide,

02:25:54.200 which is, that's what stimulates the gas reflex.

02:25:56.920 That's what makes you feel anxious

02:25:58.620 and you can't shut your thoughts down.

02:26:00.280 If you've ever been swimming

02:26:01.340 and, you know, when kids can be so cruel, right?

02:26:04.560 You're swimming.

02:26:05.260 I grew up with a pack of wild heathens

02:26:07.580 and they were just so, they were good kids.

02:26:09.880 But, you know, occasionally you'd be swimming.

02:26:11.160 Learned about some of them in the book.

02:26:12.140 Exactly.

02:26:12.680 And you try and come up out of the water.

02:26:15.100 By the way, it's called Protocols by Dr. Andrew Huberman.

02:26:17.040 You can pre-order yours now.

02:26:18.480 Go ahead.

02:26:18.680 Thank you.

02:26:18.860 Yeah. You know, you're coming up out of the water and that mean kid holds your head right as you're trying to come up. Listen, you had enough air a moment before that, but that split second is terrifying because your brain knows it needs oxygen. So you have a gas reflex that's looking for oxygen. There's an oxygen hunger, a breath hunger.

02:26:39.340 When you do this double inhale, long exhale, you reset the carbon dioxide oxygen ratios.

02:26:46.040 And it's a wonderful state to be in because you're alert but calm.

02:26:50.820 So let's say you're studying.

02:26:51.920 So it's maybe a good thing to do at any point during the day.

02:26:54.160 Like while you're just sitting there, you're listening to this program, you could be doing a few of them.

02:26:56.780 Just a couple, you know, one even just deliberate long exhale or the double inhale through the nose, exhale through the mouth.

02:27:02.300 The beauty of this, again, is your HRV increases.

02:27:05.120 You become more of a nasal breather in sleep.

02:27:07.960 Your sleep is deeper.

02:27:08.960 you have less apnea. You'll kind of notice that today, a lot of the things we move from cortisol

02:27:13.620 to light to breathing, a lot of these things are about being alert when you want to be alert,

02:27:19.840 but not too alert, and being asleep when you want to be asleep. In fact, I would argue that

02:27:23.860 as a human, if you can master the ability to be alert but calm by using these tools,

02:27:30.640 long exhales if you need them, bright light to be more alert, if you can learn to turn your brain

02:27:36.180 off and go to sleep, you're going to be a very effective professional parent, partner,

02:27:43.660 friend, and your relationship to yourself gets way better because so many of the woes of the

02:27:49.220 world have to do with an inability to self-regulate in order to get sleep. Then self-regulation becomes

02:27:55.000 even harder. Or I'm a big caffeine drinker. Let me just continue my couple questions on this

02:28:00.780 because number of hours people obsessed, seven or eight, a lot of people can't get that. What's

02:28:07.060 the bare minimum per night like people really should be striving for? Okay. So new parents,

02:28:12.180 caretakers, and people who are in very stressful times in their life, I will tell you this,

02:28:18.120 I'm not recommending it, but if you can get that first four hours of sleep,

02:28:23.820 ideally you'd get more, but you will get some growth hormone release, some bodily repair.

02:28:28.580 you can carry on for better or worse for quite a long while with four to five hours, but you're

02:28:33.860 not setting yourself up for health in the long run. But I say this because I want to be sensitive

02:28:38.900 to the fact that some people are taking care of a sick relative. Some people are in a very

02:28:43.400 stressful life situation where they're raising young kids. You will survive.

02:28:48.200 I know. And then you're like, you're going to get dementia.

02:28:50.760 You'll survive. You're going to survive.

02:28:53.760 It's a very unfortunate message.

02:28:54.520 You'll survive. Once the kids are sleeping better, you'll sleep better. You will survive.

02:28:58.220 You'll be okay.

02:28:59.840 You don't want to do this for decades on end or even for five years on end, but you

02:29:04.940 will be okay.

02:29:06.300 For most people, they need somewhere between seven and eight.

02:29:09.500 I feel pretty darn good at six.

02:29:12.720 Developing kids probably need eight or nine.

02:29:14.960 When you're battling an illness, nine or 10 is not abnormal and is healthy.

02:29:19.400 But if you only need six hours and you feel great on six, God bless you.

02:29:25.300 Keep going with six.

02:29:27.040 do not stress that you need to get more sleep than you need one thing that's critical however is

02:29:32.000 if you are having trouble with sleep and you're napping in the daytime you need to stop napping

02:29:37.840 when you get sleepy because of the buildup of a molecule called adenosine and when you nap you

02:29:44.000 shave off some of that adenosine from your brain and body which is good you come out more alert

02:29:49.120 but at night you want to create the the real fatigue at the end of your day so that you're

02:29:54.640 tired. That's why exercise is great. That's why napping in the daytime is bad for people who have

02:30:01.260 trouble sleeping. I have a whole section in the book, believe it or not, on napping. At one point,

02:30:06.960 I thought to myself, I'm teaching people how to nap. This is crazy. But if you need a nap,

02:30:12.140 20 minutes should really be the limit so that you don't cause sleep inertia, which is the tiredness

02:30:17.480 coming out of the nap, but also that you're not eroding your nighttime sleep. There's also,

02:30:21.440 and I put some reference to this in the book, even just sitting down and quietly doing a few

02:30:28.500 exhales and just closing your eyes, not looking at your phone for, believe it or not, make it 60

02:30:33.520 seconds, three minutes. You'll come out of that feeling some renewed vigor. The problem is

02:30:39.500 nowadays I'm a big consumer of media. I love media, but every moment is filled with more

02:30:47.420 information coming in. So I'm talking about things that take on the order of minutes across

02:30:52.160 the entire day, costs nothing. I'm Megan Kelly. Every day on the Megan Kelly show,

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02:32:05.040 I take it from this discussion you are against falling asleep to an audio book or a podcast.

02:32:11.800 Yes and no.

02:32:13.160 So after now, you know, six years of doing public health science education, I've come to the place

02:32:20.520 where I, you know, I was a years ago, I took kids backpacking in Yosemite. That was my summer job.

02:32:27.560 And you learn something working with teenagers, which is be a channel, not a dam. And it turns

02:32:33.900 out that you want to do the same with adults. If listening to a podcast or having the news on

02:32:40.300 helps you fall asleep, I actually suggest you keep doing it. I do. But if you're waking up

02:32:47.420 four hours later and having a hard time getting back to sleep, you might want to think about how

02:32:51.860 the light from the screen or that noise might be impacting you. You know, this whole thing of

02:32:57.300 listening to stuff out of interest is one thing, but when we're listening to podcasts while we

02:33:01.200 sleep or we are leaving the TV on, I think it reflects a much bigger... I always ask myself

02:33:06.640 as a scientist. Why are people doing this? And I think they're doing it because it's hard to turn

02:33:11.240 our thoughts off. You know, one of the practices I talk about, and I'm happy to share now,

02:33:16.400 I talk about in the book, I'm happy to share now is this practice of non-sleep deep rest,

02:33:21.280 which sounds like meditation, sounds like a nap, but it's not. You know, one of the great

02:33:25.820 super skills in life that I wish I had had years ago is the following. Some people have what can

02:33:33.680 really, we call it low activation energy, meaning they have a lot of get up and go. You say, let's

02:33:38.000 do this. They get up and do it. They go, go. They're ambitious. They're doing sports. They're

02:33:41.200 doing this. Those people tend to be the same people that have a hard time turning their mind

02:33:45.880 off. Other people have the motivation issue. I don't have an issue with sleep. I have an issue

02:33:51.880 with motivation. Procrastination is an issue, right? That's what they say. People are getting

02:33:57.260 after it. They're exercising, et cetera. They're thinking about business, family. The woes of the

02:34:02.600 world, or even just the small things are, you know, circulating in their head, need to learn

02:34:07.820 to get the mind out of thinking and doing and planning and spend a few minutes in order to

02:34:14.660 fall asleep in just pure sensation. And there's a practice that was actually developed in India

02:34:19.620 thousands of years ago called yoga nidra, which means yoga sleep. It involves no movement where

02:34:24.300 you do, this won't come as a surprise. Now I call it non sleep deep rest, but you take a few minutes

02:34:30.020 during the day and you could do it sitting or lying down and you close your eyes. You do a few

02:34:36.420 long exhales to slow your heart rate down. And instead of meditating by trying to maintain focus

02:34:41.600 on, you know, between your forehead or instead of trying to clear your mind, this that's almost

02:34:45.800 impossible to do, right? Clear your mind. No, impossible. It's like the, don't think of the

02:34:51.140 elephant. You know, you can't not think of it. Instead you migrate your thoughts like a spotlight

02:34:57.560 around your body, your feet, the other foot, your knee, the other knee, your heart, your body.

02:35:03.620 And what you're doing there is you're occupying just enough of the brain's attention that it

02:35:07.600 makes it very easy to do. You're not trying to turn off your thoughts, but what ends up happening

02:35:12.380 is you stop thinking and planning and you start just going into pure sensation. And when you do

02:35:20.420 that, the brain goes into, we now know from really good science, goes into this kind of liminal state

02:35:24.980 between asleep and awake, and little pockets of the brain start mimicking sleep. Three things

02:35:30.760 happen when you come out of this practice, and it could be five minutes, could be 10 minutes,

02:35:34.520 could be 20. There are a lot of these non-sleep deep breaths scripts out on the internet now,

02:35:38.760 some with my voice, some with much more pleasant voices, and so on. They're all zero cost.

02:35:44.880 And you emerge from it feeling mentally and physically restored. That's interesting.

02:35:49.880 learning of physical information cognitive information is enhanced in people that do this

02:35:57.120 you could do this once a week three times a week or daily it takes very little time

02:36:00.700 and people's ability to fall asleep gets better people recover from traumatic experiences better

02:36:06.660 what's going on here what is going on what's going on is threefold first of all we now know

02:36:12.900 that in these states of deep relaxation that are not meditation and are not a nap, there's a clear

02:36:20.220 out of debris from the brain. This is called glymphatic clearance. We don't have time to go

02:36:25.440 into the mechanisms, but there's a clearance of all the stuff of cellular metabolism in the brain,

02:36:31.360 ammonia, carbon dioxide, cellular debris. The ability to clear that stuff out has been shown

02:36:38.260 to offset the development of dementia reduces the likelihood of dementia helps you maintain

02:36:43.360 brain function in addition and some people will just i usually find that people this is the one

02:36:49.860 that really gets people if you've ever had a poor night's sleep you know those bags under your eyes

02:36:54.080 not yours but i'm speaking metaphorically here um you certainly don't have this uh whatever you're

02:36:59.140 doing you're doing all the right things clearly but when we've all had if i do we have the wrong

02:37:03.420 lighting in here well it i don't believe that but in any case that if you've ever had one poor

02:37:08.000 night's sleep, you look in the mirror and you go, oh my God, what is that? Have you ever wondered

02:37:12.320 why then two days later after you slept well, you're back to great. What happened? Turns out

02:37:18.140 it's the buildup of glymph, this lymphatic fluid under the eyes. And in the eyes, you can even see

02:37:24.020 in somebody that hasn't slept well, their eyes don't quite look right. There's actually lymphatic

02:37:28.600 clearance from the eyes. So these practices of deep relaxation, as well as sleep, where the

02:37:35.040 majority of this clearance of this waste product and the glymphatic clearance occurs you can build

02:37:42.180 in these micro practices throughout the day or just one minute or five minutes of doing this

02:37:46.560 and you're offsetting dementia you come out of it mentally and physically restored you don't have

02:37:51.760 the sleep inertia the grogginess of a nap and we're finding that people learn faster it's great

02:37:58.000 for stress mitigation i mean the myriad in the book again which is called protocols you you write

02:38:04.420 about, you can listen to a scripted NSDR session, non-sleep, deep rest, scripted. So where can we

02:38:12.560 find that? What's that? Is that like on YouTube? Yeah, you can find these on YouTube, Apple,

02:38:16.180 Spotify. You can download them for completely free. Download them to your phone so you don't

02:38:20.560 even have a Wi-Fi connection. You can be on the plane or wherever. I put a bunch of them that I

02:38:25.080 really like. You go to hubermanlab.com slash NSDR, or you could simply do a web search and just put

02:38:31.680 NSDR. For a really pleasant woman's voice, my friend Kelly Boyes, B-O-Y-S, does wonderful NSDRs.

02:38:39.400 She's in the Waking Up app also. There's some with my voice. You can find some. There's a guy

02:38:44.240 named Liam Gillen. My sister really likes his Irish voice. I think she has a bit of a crush

02:38:49.940 on him, if I'm honest. Sorry to my sister. But she loves his voice. She's like, he has the best

02:38:55.160 voice. She does Liam's. And these are so simple. They cost nothing. And by the way, the reason I

02:39:03.340 renamed Yoga Nidra NSDR and put these scripts out into the world is I intentionally took away all

02:39:10.280 the intentions, the mysticism. I want to acknowledge the people that initially developed

02:39:15.800 Yoga Nidra. But when people hear Yoga Nidra and then they hear they have to do intentions,

02:39:20.900 that takes it. I'm not sure my truckers are into it. Exactly. That takes away from the

02:39:24.860 practice. And it's sort of like the word hypnosis. I have a colleague at Stanford who does

02:39:30.500 medical hypnosis, incredible success rates at a smoking cessation, pain modulation,

02:39:37.520 even outcomes from cancer treatment. But I always tell him, you need to rebrand this thing because

02:39:43.500 in his hands, hypnosis is rapid brain plasticity, rewiring of the brain. But people hear hypnosis

02:39:49.540 than they think stage hypnosis and people squawking like chickens. So what I'm talking

02:39:54.640 about here, whether it's cortisol or darkness, light, breathing, exhales, non-sleep, deep rest,

02:40:01.580 I really want to emphasize what I'm talking about is taking your God-given physiology,

02:40:07.400 okay, the cells and circuits in your brain and body that you were endowed with and just putting

02:40:12.780 them to their best use for your health. That's the whole story. In the book I get into, I do

02:40:18.180 You talk about supplements and pharmaceuticals.

02:40:20.320 I talk about nicotine, both benefits and risks.

02:40:23.420 I talk about how one can, if you like to have a drink or two, how you can do that and not

02:40:28.300 disrupt your sleep or health as much.

02:40:30.740 At least eight to 10 hours before you go to bed, 10 hours. 0.99

02:40:33.860 You're in favor of the darty is basically what we're learning.

02:40:36.220 This is the college term for the day party. 1.00

02:40:37.940 You got to keep that shit well away from the time you go to bed. 0.99

02:40:42.820 I don't drink. 1.00

02:40:43.860 I did in my past.

02:40:44.860 I don't drink now.

02:40:45.860 I understand people like, there are people like alcohol, have your glass of wine, but then do a

02:40:51.160 couple of things, simple things like I just described to get your sleep, to keep your sleep

02:40:56.040 good or great. We actually don't know whether the negative effects of alcohol, I'm talking about low

02:41:01.900 amounts of alcohol, could very well be due to the disruption that alcohol has on sleep. So do a few

02:41:08.740 other things. And look, if you go out and have a bunch of drinks with your friends and you're safe

02:41:13.200 about it. You're not an alcoholic and you're of age. Like you're going to be okay. You're going

02:41:17.740 to be okay. I think that some people have taken my podcast and my book to mean that like everything

02:41:21.900 has to be very rigid. I start off the book by saying, listen, true optimization is about

02:41:27.020 accepting who you are and what you are and are not going to do. And then trying to get the most

02:41:32.640 vigor and enjoyment out of life and most life while also having the occasional sleepless night,

02:41:38.860 sometimes due to crisis, sometimes due to a celebration. That's life.

02:41:42.780 This is reminding me something recently happened on X. You may have seen it. You know,

02:41:46.200 Brian Johnson, the don't die guy who has been on this show. He posted and he knows he's going to

02:41:53.180 get hit for these things. So I kind of admire his honesty, but he posted last night I had dinner

02:42:00.480 at a restaurant. I asked for caffeine free coffee. I'm convinced they brought me caffeinated.

02:42:06.580 the sleep protocol was off i could not do my morning dunk session which i think is related

02:42:11.560 to basketball i think he means actual dunking although i don't know with brian johnson you

02:42:14.640 never know they had to cancel it because at my whole evening and day were disrupted

02:42:18.460 and the responses were so funny one of them was basically um michael jordan once had 10 beers

02:42:26.900 and then played a game in which he scored 50 points and then went on to do a round of golf

02:42:33.440 at which he was like X under par. It's like we have weakened ourselves. And especially this is

02:42:40.080 a man to man situation to the point beyond shame. You should be able to have one night of a cup of

02:42:48.160 coffee and not post about it. And the whole next day's activities are off. Like, come on. We

02:42:54.360 actually are somewhat resilient. Yes. So a couple of brief points about that. I know, Brian. So

02:43:02.680 yes, X is an environment, um, where you don't want to show weakness. Um, you, uh, most certainly

02:43:12.120 if you're going to make exercise claims, you need to put videos. And if you put videos, um, don't

02:43:16.620 confuse, uh, you know, you have to, you have to use proper form and full, full range of motion,

02:43:22.000 or the guys are going to hammer you, right? Like it's a very, there should be a third party in

02:43:26.940 your life. Someone who doesn't love or work for you who approves of said video before it gets

02:43:31.960 So Brian's, you know, when Brian put that out there, I think there's three phenomenon going on. One is, you know, I look at Brian's content, I think he's mostly generating entertainment content for people. I mean, his takeaways about sleep, I think are very valid. But it's more of a caricature of longevity, in my opinion, if I'm honest, I think that, you know, most people are not going to do all the things he's doing. And then he has this chronic disease, which kind of undercut the story.

02:44:00.620 But anyway, listen, I think it's great that he's out there, just like I think it's great that Matt Caberline's out there and Eric Topol.

02:44:07.740 This is one thing that people really need to understand about health and longevity in the online communities.

02:44:13.320 In science, in medicine, and I observed this in the world of skateboarding and action sports, you need a community that represent the sort of different extremes, right?

02:44:25.320 In skateboarding, we have our Tony Hawk.

02:44:26.920 We had my friend Danny Wei who jumped the Great Wall of China.

02:44:29.660 of, you need the variety of characters, right? And in science, you see this too. I don't have

02:44:35.900 time to go into it now, but I grew up in science and you get a lot of characters and you need the

02:44:41.320 battles. You need all that. But at the end of the day, people are after truth and some things end

02:44:45.320 up being more for entertainment purposes and the take, and that's fine. And if it gets people

02:44:49.840 paying attention to the space, so be it. Okay. Let me keep it going. I have a question for you

02:44:54.780 as a neuroscientist about OCD?

02:44:58.460 Because maybe it's just my anecdotal impression,

02:45:00.820 but I feel like it's growing.

02:45:01.920 I feel like I don't know a mom or a dad

02:45:03.620 that doesn't have a kid with this

02:45:04.780 or that isn't doing it themselves.

02:45:07.340 I've got a little bit of this in my own life,

02:45:09.320 not like hand-washing,

02:45:10.460 but just like repetitive movements

02:45:12.360 or counting in my own head.

02:45:14.600 And yet I don't think of myself as an anxious person.

02:45:16.840 I don't feel any active anxiety pretty much ever,

02:45:20.820 but I do have a tinge of this.

02:45:22.180 So is there, is that a neuroscientist thing and might some of these techniques, because

02:45:27.760 you're big into stress management in the book and there are tons of tools for stress

02:45:31.280 management and I don't know how you'd classify that.

02:45:33.840 Is that stress?

02:45:35.120 What is that?

02:45:35.780 Yeah, a great question.

02:45:36.960 Um, so whether we're talking about ADHD or OCD, uh, we need to separate the, the sort

02:45:44.000 of the semblance of those things that many, many, many people have and is normal versus

02:45:49.380 the full-blown pathology.

02:45:51.060 so the clinical definition of ocd is when the compulsion the behavior actually doesn't suppress

02:45:59.720 the obsession it makes it worse so people who have true ocd they feel like they need to wash

02:46:05.060 their hands they wash their hands and then they feel like they need to do it more they feel like

02:46:08.680 they they need to count they count then they feel like they need to do it more and it's maddening

02:46:13.200 it is a it is a they are stricken and they'll do it till their hands are raw they'll pull there's

02:46:20.400 the, you know, the hair pulling version of it. There's some very, very severe manifestations of

02:46:24.860 this. But OCD in that form is just an extreme version of something that many, many people have.

02:46:30.720 Just like, I'll give another example. If you go to a bridge and you think, oh my gosh, like what's

02:46:35.880 keeping me from jumping off? Or people have thoughts and they go, oh my goodness, like why

02:46:39.720 did I have that thought? That's actually a healthy reflection of your ability to suppress action and

02:46:44.800 thoughts, right? You're not going to act on those things. It's perfectly normal. Now, when we're

02:46:50.100 tired, when we are stressed, symptoms of OCD and people that don't have full-blown clinical OCD

02:46:56.420 can worsen. Now, I know these days, for understandable reason, there's a lot of

02:47:01.360 concern about SSRIs. And I agree that when you look at the data, it's clear that many, many,

02:47:07.120 too many adults and children were medicated with SSRIs. But I will say, in fairness to the

02:47:13.000 scientific literature. SSRIs have greatly helped people with severe OCD. OCD, we know, is associated

02:47:21.200 with an overgrowth of a particular brain area in what's called a circuit called the basal ganglia.

02:47:25.980 It's involved in action and suppressing action. And a brilliant scientist at NIH named Judith

02:47:30.640 Rappaport discovered this years ago. Remember, prior to the 90s, like when I started learning

02:47:35.540 about neuroscience, I claim no discovery here, but it was thought that this was all psychological

02:47:40.500 or like bad parenting or, you know, or trauma-based of which it can be, but we know this is a brain

02:47:47.340 issue. So those drugs in the proper hands and proper dosages can really help people as can

02:47:52.860 behavioral treatments. Okay. In people like you, I'm assuming you don't have full-blown clinical

02:47:57.320 OCD based on what you told me, or people who say, I can't be a 10. I just like when I,

02:48:02.300 well, I noticed like when I was practicing law, where I was working all the time and not getting

02:48:06.880 a lot of sleep. Whenever I was walking on the streets of New York, I was counting my steps

02:48:11.480 or when I'd go up or down a staircase, I would count the number of stairs. Like little things

02:48:16.940 would just pop up here and there in your day where you're, then you're like, why am I counting?

02:48:20.820 What am I doing? Right? Something like that. It's a great question. So, and then, you know,

02:48:24.680 in some cultures they worry beads, right? Where people are constantly moving the beads in their

02:48:28.640 hands to sort of dispel some of the energy. I will venture a guess here, an educated guess

02:48:35.680 that you have a lot of energy. You're a focused person. You're always looking for ways that you

02:48:41.100 can do better and be better and so on. And people like that, when there's not a task right in front

02:48:47.580 of them, tend to have a lot of energy pouring into the system. The same way that I've always

02:48:52.080 had bulldog, mastiff, mutts, and they love to run, then they're lazy. But if you don't give

02:48:57.780 them enough exercise, they start gnawing on their paw. They need to chew. We all have our chew.

02:49:05.240 right a bulldog needs to gnaw a retriever needs to retrieve a rat terrier needs to look for things

02:49:11.340 and as humans we have these tendencies where our brain circuits become thankfully asymmetric towards

02:49:18.700 learning teaching communicating look you're on you're in front of the public eye every virtually

02:49:25.040 every single day and it's high stakes right and it's and so your system learns to relax in that

02:49:31.100 You are a high-level professional athlete, thinker, communicator, learner, doer.

02:49:36.440 And so when you're walking down the street, it's hard to just switch brain modes to, oh,

02:49:41.180 I'm just walking down the street.

02:49:42.300 Now I'm just going to be in my most chill form.

02:49:44.460 And so the brain starts looking for things to do, count, think about things.

02:49:48.880 Sometimes listening to a podcast or a book can help.

02:49:52.420 It's very hard to turn the brain off.

02:49:55.000 And it's actually not advantageous for you to walk out of a meeting or this podcast,

02:50:00.760 walk to lunch.

02:50:01.560 And during that walk to lunch, you're just completely decompressed.

02:50:04.240 And then you eat your lunch and then you come back and you snap back on.

02:50:07.040 The brain doesn't work in what we call step wave function, in square wave functions.

02:50:10.760 You don't go from asleep, awake, awake to asleep.

02:50:14.680 There are these transition states.

02:50:16.200 So when you're walking down the street and you're thinking, I'm kind of obsessing about

02:50:19.960 that, why?

02:50:20.540 Well, there's some carryover from the previous thing.

02:50:22.820 just like if you were waking up, you don't immediately feel wide awake and ready to go

02:50:27.600 about your day. There's some shifting of circuits. And actually, in the final chapter of the book,

02:50:33.740 I talk about tools for task switching. Many people find that they can't focus,

02:50:39.220 but actually their challenge is in dropping the mindset from the previous thing to be able to

02:50:44.280 focus. For you and me who do public-facing work, it's a requirement, right? Our phones aren't out.

02:50:50.400 you know uh it's we have to be locked in but i bet within 10 minutes of ending this like one of us

02:50:56.960 will pick up our phone most likely and so that's normal it's healthy but don't expect your brain

02:51:01.820 to shut off completely and and i'll just weave one other thing in here many people are having

02:51:06.200 attention issues these days there's a study that was done recently that shows that if your phone

02:51:11.100 is upside down on the table in front of you or it's in your bag under your chair completely turned

02:51:17.080 off, you have a harder time focusing compared to if it's in a different room. But it turns out you

02:51:23.800 can focus if it's on the table or it's underneath your chair. The problem is it takes more mental

02:51:28.560 resources and you give up what is essentially intelligence, cognitive flexibility, and

02:51:34.200 creativity. So there's a cost. But more importantly, if you're used to looking at your phone every

02:51:39.880 three minutes or so, when your phone is not there, every three minutes or so or less, your brain

02:51:45.900 gets distracted with no distraction. The brain learns these rhythms of the sun comes up in the

02:51:52.420 morning. It goes down at night. I'm alert in the morning because I got my morning sunlight or one

02:51:58.060 of these 10,000 lux lights. I dim the lights. This is something we call entrainment. And the beauty

02:52:03.600 of this is that if you take everything we've talked about and you do it for a couple of days,

02:52:08.800 the bright lights and the bright mornings, darker nights, you try and limit your phone for just

02:52:14.300 fight the impulse just every other time to reach for, just for an extra 10 seconds.

02:52:19.320 What happens is you naturally start to feel more alert when you wake up in the morning,

02:52:24.660 even before you got the light in your eyes. I always get the question, how come I wake up

02:52:29.320 one minute before my alarm clock? Guess why? Because that rise in cortisol is what wakes you

02:52:34.620 up and that is entrained to your alarm clock. Now you can entrain it to sunlight also. And guess

02:52:41.280 what, on the day when you miss it, because it's really dreary out in the Northeast, you'll still

02:52:45.320 feel plenty alert. And at night- I'm going to start texting you pictures of me in January

02:52:51.080 outside in the snow saying, damn that, Andrew Huberman. Listen, I will be happy to gift you 0.98

02:52:57.440 a 10,000 lux artificial light. I send them to people who say, I'm just not going to go outside.

02:53:01.740 I'm just not going to, I'm not going to go outside. I'm not going to do it. And flip on

02:53:05.740 all the screens, some music, or just wake yourself up. You will find that bookending your day in this

02:53:11.240 way. And just understanding a bit about my brain is doing something normal and healthy here. I'm

02:53:16.260 counting things. I have a little bit of a superstitious streak. I get it. And it's our

02:53:22.140 brain's attempt to have some control, but also just to take this attention, this energy that we

02:53:28.200 have and put it someplace. And dogs need it. Humans need it. We need more focus and we need

02:53:34.980 deeper sleep and brighter days and all of that. But I also want to emphasize, we need to be human.

02:53:40.860 you need to enjoy your life right i think i think people saw that the brian thing and they

02:53:45.660 i think he did do it more for entertainment purposes and we said we're out and it's like

02:53:50.260 look most people sleep to prepare for the next day clearly he's he spends his days preparing to

02:53:56.900 sleep it's just an inversion of the of the life design but most people are not going to do that

02:54:01.920 he's going to live forever for what yeah that's not living thank god at least he has a girlfriend

02:54:05.620 now the girl who's been helping him do his uh online posts so that's that's a plus for brian

02:54:10.600 Um, let me ask you a question about on the question of light, the issue of light, expose

02:54:16.400 your skin and eyes to long wavelength light.

02:54:20.200 And you say it can be red light near infrared and infrared.

02:54:24.160 Now I feel like I've, I've heard you talk about this, but I can't remember these specifics

02:54:29.660 because red light is becoming more and more popular.

02:54:34.060 Like women are doing it, red light therapy on their face for, you know, even skin tone 0.80

02:54:39.780 and so on. 0.52

02:54:40.600 Some men are doing infrared or, you know, saunas.

02:54:45.540 What is the story with your eyes, exposing your eyes to red light or infrared light?

02:54:51.980 Yeah.

02:54:52.580 So the best, zero cost, but perfect source of long wavelength light, meaning red light

02:55:00.740 and infrared light.

02:55:02.040 Infrared light is the warmth from the sun is sunlight, right?

02:55:07.000 god built us the perfect light device for our mitochondria for our skin for our hormone health

02:55:13.360 etc there's only one problem you can't do it on your schedule you have to do it on the sun schedule

02:55:19.540 because what you want is the long wavelength light so these are the yellows oranges reds and

02:55:24.660 then outpass red is infrared right we can't see it but we can feel it that's the stuff that's great

02:55:30.580 for our mitochondria and that my colleague glenn jeffrey university college london i've known him

02:55:35.620 for decades, did these studies, as I mentioned earlier, shine, you get that light on your skin

02:55:40.340 or even through a t-shirt or light shirt and your metabolism is improved. But it also turns out

02:55:47.240 that if you're 40 or older, if you get this long wavelength light on your skin or ideally in your

02:55:54.760 eyes, you can do that from the morning sunlight viewing or afternoon sunlight viewing, sunset

02:55:59.560 viewing. You help repair the cells in the back of the eyes called the photoreceptors. These are the

02:56:07.060 cells that take photons of light, convert them into electrical energy that allows you to see.

02:56:12.580 And you can offset, what he showed in that study was that you can offset some of the age-related

02:56:17.740 vision loss. You also offset myopia, which is nearsightedness. Now, I had to start wearing

02:56:23.940 readers recently because of writing this book because I was spending so much time up close to

02:56:28.120 a screen. When you look at things too close up and you don't see horizons very much, you're not

02:56:33.840 looking at a distance very much, the eyeball lengthens and the visual image lands in front

02:56:39.240 of the light sensing portion of the eye, not on it. That's what corrective lenses do. They bring

02:56:44.100 the light point of focus onto the right location. There is a true epidemic of myopia, of nearsightedness

02:56:52.980 and the data on kids and their data emerging on adults too, is that if kids just take their

02:56:59.440 tablets, computers outside, if you get outside more, you offset this. So the long wavelength

02:57:05.400 light turns out to be the key. Sunlight is full spectrum. You have UV short wavelength,

02:57:10.440 medium and long wavelength. And the balance is key. You don't want too much UV because it can

02:57:14.740 damage your skin. There's a lot of debate nowadays about how much sunlight you need some UV for

02:57:19.320 vitamin D production and for mood and health, but you don't want to get a sunburn. And indeed,

02:57:25.080 it can cause accelerated aging in the skin if you're getting too much UV. We could talk about

02:57:30.500 that if you like, but getting some long wavelength light from sunlight or, and, or I would say you

02:57:36.840 could get a red light, like a red light LED device. You could use a red incandescent light.

02:57:42.060 We don't have a lot of farmers out. But don't put goggles on?

02:57:44.160 So in the evening, I will put on short wavelength blocking glasses.

02:57:49.560 They look red tinted, but that's to block the short wavelengths.

02:57:53.040 But when you're out during the day, you're getting a lot of long wavelength light penetrating the skin.

02:57:58.920 It's benefiting you and it's benefiting your eyes.

02:58:01.560 But the study showed this offset of age-related vision loss is when people get enough long wavelength light.

02:58:07.840 And if you're indoors, he's in England.

02:58:09.500 So that study was done where people are spending a lot of time indoors.

02:58:12.900 they're under led lights which we all use now because they're more energy efficient

02:58:17.360 candle light will do it so if you like candles in the evening or if you um or if you have a fire in

02:58:23.640 the fireplace or here's a here's a cool trick the farmers taught me this they have a cheap an

02:58:30.280 inexpensive solution to all this you get it what they call it a pig light it's a red incandescent

02:58:34.680 bulb and it supplies long wavelength light farmers knew this it's very interesting actually as i've

02:58:40.380 written this book. So you don't have to stare at the bulb. You just have to be near it. It fills

02:58:43.920 the room. And the beauty of long wavelength light is that it bounces off surfaces all over. So you

02:58:48.580 don't have to be looking right at it. If you can get outside in a green space, if I were to give

02:58:54.300 you infrared glasses, goggles, like the special operators wear, you would notice that everything

02:58:59.700 green was glowing white. And that's because the long wavelength light is bouncing off it. It's

02:59:05.920 getting reflected down on you. There's wonderful work showing that recovery from surgery, recovery

02:59:11.500 from illness, staving off illness, including upper respiratory infections, skin health, eye health,

02:59:18.500 longevity, is get that long wavelength light. The key is to not get too much UV because that can be

02:59:23.900 damaging. So that's why sunlight can be a little tricky. You like the red light bed? Yeah. But

02:59:29.660 infrared saunas are great if you can afford one. An infrared incandescent light is great. An LED

02:59:35.040 panel, they tend to be pretty expensive. But the incandescent lights are not terribly expensive.

02:59:41.560 And as I've talked to more and more farmers, they laugh, right? They're like, I get up with the sun.

02:59:47.020 I go outside. I'm carrying stuff. I'm doing work. I'm drinking my coffee. Then I have breakfast

02:59:53.220 afterwards. I might catch a quick nap in the afternoon, but I have to go out in the evening,

02:59:57.920 take the animals in, take care of things. I'm not suggesting we go back to living that way,

03:00:01.680 but they nailed it. They nailed it. It wasn't so bad. They nailed all the light. It's funny though,

03:00:06.800 when you mentioned the candlelight in law school, we had to sit alphabetically. So the guy next to

03:00:11.520 me on the one side was named Andy Kelly and Andy Kelly was starting to lose his closeup vision,

03:00:17.360 you know, he, from all the reading in law school and so on. And he told me at the time that he

03:00:22.380 reversed it by staring at candlelight. And I remember being like, really, is that even possible?

03:00:29.540 and he swore it was possible.

03:00:30.820 And here I am sitting across from Huberman

03:00:32.760 and hearing, yeah, it's possible.

03:00:34.520 I mean, I think the highly processed foods conversation

03:00:38.080 for the next two years,

03:00:39.340 you're gonna hear two things I anticipate

03:00:41.220 will be really big in the health space.

03:00:43.240 Cortisol will no longer be seen as this stress hormone.

03:00:46.080 It will be seen as the thing to leverage

03:00:47.560 high morning, low at night.

03:00:49.420 I hope to play a role in that.

03:00:51.380 The other thing that you're gonna hear quite a lot about

03:00:53.920 is how all these LED lights,

03:00:55.900 which are incredibly energy efficient.

03:00:57.640 I mean, how often do you have to change a light bulb nowadays?

03:00:59.820 Hardly ever.

03:01:00.700 The problem is they're short wavelength shifted.

03:01:03.280 It's not the blue light.

03:01:04.520 It's that there isn't enough long wavelength light.

03:01:06.800 So we're going to hear about supplementing with long wavelength light.

03:01:10.280 That does not mean you have to buy a red light panel, candlelight, fireplace, get outside

03:01:15.240 when the sun is low in the sky, either near sunrise or near sunset, get that long wavelength

03:01:20.460 light.

03:01:21.800 Immensely beneficial also for mental health and for physical health.

03:01:25.220 it's so interesting that so many of the things we're talking about in health are about undoing

03:01:29.080 the damage from the lifestyle and technologies that we've built but there's also just a lot of

03:01:36.080 you know this notion that oh we used to be scared of saber-toothed tigers and that's why we stress

03:01:40.800 no i mean 10 000 years ago i guarantee that people were concerned about their loved ones when they

03:01:45.620 went off to hunt or gather relationships had issues kids got sick stress has always been a

03:01:51.660 part of life. The key is to teach yourself how to de-stress, to get great sleep, turn your mind off,

03:01:58.680 get focused and alert. And I'm a consumer of caffeine. And if you want, we could talk about

03:02:03.820 nicotine, but these are just skills that take minutes, if that, to learn because they work the

03:02:10.820 first time and every time. You notice there's no learning curve in anything I'm saying. I'm not

03:02:14.740 saying, listen, if you go outside for three days in a row, then these cells will learn. It's morning.

03:02:19.000 No, the first time you do it, it works.

03:02:21.660 And it works the first time and every time.

03:02:24.920 The book spends a fair amount of time focusing or talking about focus, motivation, and learning.

03:02:29.600 Chapter six, you go deep on that.

03:02:31.580 So if you need better focus in your life, if you need motivation.

03:02:35.020 But the learning thing was interesting to me.

03:02:38.900 Protocol three I wanted to talk about, embrace errors.

03:02:42.860 There's a whole long bit in the book about embracing errors.

03:02:47.040 saying they embrace the fact that errors are an essential trigger for learning. Errors that come

03:02:52.840 from genuine attempts to learn something are the signal for plasticity to occur. This is true for

03:02:58.960 all forms of skill development, cognitive, motor, musical, mathematical, etc. So whether you're

03:03:07.280 learning a sport, a musical instrument, or history, or news for that matter, making errors in the

03:03:16.580 process of learning is critical. So can you expand on that? Yes. So if I could put a banner across

03:03:23.980 the sky, I would want people to understand the following message. The agitation you feel from

03:03:33.140 not being able to do something through a genuine attempt, so not throwaway errors, that agitation

03:03:40.320 is the reflection of the release of certain molecules. We call them neuromodulators in the

03:03:45.100 brain and body that tell your nervous system, you need to change to close the gap between what

03:03:50.940 you're trying to do and what you currently can do. Okay. We don't tell kids this, we don't tell

03:03:57.100 adults this. And so we think the friction that comes from the attempt to learn that that somehow

03:04:03.240 is signaling that we're in the wrong place. No, if you're, if you think about it logically,

03:04:07.620 if your nervous system could do something, if your brain could do it, if your body could do it,

03:04:12.300 why would it change? It wouldn't. And we've been so captivated by this concept of flow,

03:04:17.560 which is a beautiful concept, but this idea of, you know, forgetting ourselves and just being able

03:04:22.640 to do the skill. I mean, this is unfortunately the consequence of science fiction and movies

03:04:28.760 where somebody gets the sword, they drink the drink, they are wake up and, you know, 0.91

03:04:35.240 they get hit by lightning and now they have superpowers like damn that Harry Potter, right? 0.91

03:04:39.140 You know, like, no, that's not how it works. That's this thing called fantasy. The way it works 0.96

03:04:45.280 is that you know nothing. You go from unskilled to skilled, skill to mastery,

03:04:50.460 mastery to virtuosity. How do you do that? You make genuine attempts to do something.

03:04:56.000 In order to do that, you have to be alert and focused. So you have to learn to focus. And I

03:05:00.960 talk about that in that chapter. Then you can't do it. That's the signal your nervous system

03:05:06.520 needs to change. You get some rest from sleep or non-sleep deep rest, ideally both. And you come

03:05:13.040 back a day or two later and you can sort of do the thing. Huh? Amazing. We all know this to be true,

03:05:19.360 but it turns out the errors are the signal to your nervous system that needs to change,

03:05:23.700 but your nervous system doesn't know error. It knows that it's your nervous system speaks to

03:05:29.640 the neurons speak to each other in electricity and chemicals. So agitation and, and that low

03:05:35.360 level stress. So alert, but calm, but a little bit stressed that signals it's time to change.

03:05:41.380 Here's the best way to think about it. If you've ever played that game, hot hands,

03:05:45.160 where, you know, your hands are on top of someone else's hands and the person underneath is going

03:05:50.040 to flip their hands over and hit your hands. That's the level of attention and kind of alertness

03:05:54.080 that you need to learn. That just to me describes it perfectly. So you're not stressed, but you're

03:06:00.380 not too relaxed either. So you have to be wrapped with attention and looking for something, ready

03:06:06.560 for something, trying to throw the dart to the bullseye, trying to, you know, hit the, you know,

03:06:11.400 sink the ball, trying to learn the language. So you have to pay attention. There's only so much

03:06:16.180 you can do in a given learning. I call them learning bouts because it should feel like a

03:06:19.980 fight with yourself. And if you're too stressed, you can't do it. Now there's even studies that

03:06:26.120 show that if you take a drug like propranolol, beta blocker, conventional beta blocker,

03:06:31.920 after you try to learn something, you don't learn it. Because the adrenaline in your body

03:06:38.860 and norepinephrine in your brain are two of the key neuromodulators for learning. This is why,

03:06:45.260 unfortunately, traumatic experiences and fortunately are one trial learning, right?

03:06:51.140 If you step off the curb and a car almost hits you, okay, you can probably go about

03:06:56.700 your day okay, but you have a changed relationship to that location, okay?

03:07:03.540 And what happened was there was a lot of adrenaline and trauma comes about when there's so much

03:07:09.380 adrenaline that it grabs memories that are unassociated with the event.

03:07:14.040 So now the sound of cars just gets you ramped up.

03:07:17.080 Doesn't matter if the car is driving away from you.

03:07:18.820 that walking out on the street gets you ramped up. And then the processes of also of plasticity

03:07:24.220 where you have to unlearn. Now we call it triggering. You have to unlearn the emotion.

03:07:27.800 So now we, every form of trauma therapy, whether it's, you know, EMDR or it's talk therapy is

03:07:35.180 about getting you into a calmer emotional state while recounting the event. You're not going to

03:07:38.880 forget the thing. It's about peeling off the emotional load. So when you want to learn

03:07:43.780 something, what I call self-directed adaptive plasticity. It's a bunch of words, but to

03:07:48.540 distinguish it from bad plasticity, because brain damage is a form of plasticity, but it's not one

03:07:53.260 you want. But when you're trying to learn something, you have to be alert so you can be

03:07:56.820 focused. I talk about ways to do that. Should you or should you not use caffeine or nicotine?

03:08:01.220 Should you or should you not take a cold shower first? Well, the best way to get alert is to have

03:08:05.600 a good night's sleep the night before. But caffeine helps too. Hydration helps too. And

03:08:10.320 if you really care about something that helps too, right? Even kids with severe ADHD can

03:08:16.000 concentrate on their favorite video game. We know this. They don't have a focus issue. They have a

03:08:20.560 focus on things they don't like issue. Adults as well. This is important. And then you focus and

03:08:27.000 then you have to try and do something. I'm trying, I'm trying. And people, I hear it all the time.

03:08:31.280 I'm not good at that. I'm not good at that. Why? I don't know. It stresses me out. Great.

03:08:36.380 now's the opportunity to learn one of the reasons why exercise helps your brain there are many

03:08:42.300 reasons helps with better oxygenation of the brain better sleep etc but one of the reasons that you

03:08:47.160 learn so much better in the four or five hours after exercise is that it makes you more alert

03:08:52.260 because you have epinephrine and norepinephrine circulating in your brain and body so a lot of

03:08:57.300 the positive effects of exercise are it's true i should say that yes exercise makes your brain

03:09:04.020 better, but really it should be exercise gives you the opportunity to learn. You don't get smarter

03:09:09.740 by exercising. Anyone that's known like a pure jock can attest to that. That's a joke against

03:09:14.900 my jock friends. But anyone that just exercises isn't getting smarter, that's not true. It gives

03:09:22.240 you the opportunity to learn because you come out of that exercise, provided you didn't exhaust

03:09:26.720 yourself. We're not talking two hours of squats or something. You come out of that exercise and

03:09:31.760 you feel different. Why? What is that? Dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine, the so-called

03:09:37.180 catecholamines, that cocktail of neurochemicals primes you for learning. So 2026, 27, come out

03:09:46.300 of exercise. Maybe you read for a moment. Maybe you sit and do some emotional learning. You know,

03:09:50.440 some people are trying to be a better spouse. They're trying to be better to themselves. And

03:09:56.080 this sounds so silly, right? But to sit there and think, you know, I'm going to try and be a little 0.87

03:10:00.720 bit kinder to myself today or to other people. It sounds really squishy, right? But if you're

03:10:06.820 in a certain state of mind, it actually works. It carries over. But just telling yourself,

03:10:12.740 I'm going to be a nicer person is like saying, I'm going to be kinder to myself. That's about

03:10:17.440 as effective as telling yourself, I'm going to learn fluent Japanese by saying, I'm going to

03:10:21.660 learn fluent Japanese. No, it's the state that you're in when you set that intention to learn.

03:10:27.720 It's the state that you're in when you arrive at the learning.

03:10:32.040 And so we can all learn new things.

03:10:34.780 It's just a function of being alert, being focused, and getting into that agitation,

03:10:40.120 and then going and doing something else.

03:10:41.700 And you'll come back better.

03:10:43.460 You will master that skill over time.

03:10:47.160 Well, you write about personal growth in the book.

03:10:50.440 And I was actually just talking about this with my audience.

03:10:52.380 I've mentioned it many times.

03:10:53.280 People generally know it.

03:10:54.340 But I was saying, and this is in your book as well, in my view, the less time spent thinking

03:11:03.320 about the past, the better. I try to stay away from it. And I've had a great life. It's not

03:11:10.240 because I had a ton of trauma. I had some things, but I definitely don't ruminate on them. And when

03:11:15.520 I start going to them, I try to get myself off of them and I can pretty quickly. I just find no good

03:11:20.340 comes from it. And I'm trying to teach my kids that same skill. Like there's really no point

03:11:24.860 in just ruminating or going back or reliving some unfortunate moment. The less time spent

03:11:29.860 thinking about it, the better. And kind of the same about the future. Like some planning is

03:11:36.660 required to exist on this earth and make something out of yourself. You know, you have to figure out

03:11:40.860 if you want to take a big vacation in June and it's December, you might need to buy an airline

03:11:44.920 ticket and so on. But the best thing for happiness is to be in the present. And they say that

03:11:50.240 all the time now. And it is harder, it's easier said than done, but you've got some tips in the

03:11:57.260 book, which I thought were quite clever. Again, the book is called Protocols by Andrew Huberman

03:12:03.060 right here. You can get it on pre-order right now. It's coming out soon. And I thought these

03:12:08.600 were clever, like questions that you can ask about your environment that will bring you right

03:12:14.320 right into the room unavoidably yeah the past um okay two most dangerous words in the english

03:12:20.680 language are if only uh i stand by that i didn't say that someone once said that to me you you

03:12:26.580 cannot live in if only that that that that is death that that is spiritual death that's uh

03:12:34.460 so that i'll just leave there as a to me a hard truth i will say i'll put it a different way as 0.99

03:12:41.240 my, as my dear friend always says, the past is like your ass behind you. So, um, being the data, 0.99

03:12:49.980 that's a good one. The, the, the data definitely say large scale data sets definitely say that

03:12:55.480 being present, um, correlates with happiness. And that's true, even if you're in unpleasant

03:13:03.420 present circumstances. So you're with someone who's sick in the hospital.

03:13:08.520 interesting try not to distract yourself but you need to sleep to be a great caretaker so i i have

03:13:14.380 to i'm going to put two caveats and then total agreement the first caveat is there's a section

03:13:19.740 in the book where i talk about data from this guy named james pennebaker who developed a tool

03:13:24.500 called expressive writing where if you're having if there's something in the back of your mind that

03:13:30.020 you can't shake an experience you cannot shake a time when you experience shame or a trauma

03:13:36.120 There are now tens of thousands of quality studies showing that if you take 15 minutes, but just 15, not more, and you write about that four days in a row, by the end of the fourth day, you will have significantly offloaded a lot of the emotional load of that thing.

03:13:57.500 so i want to be fair to that so if there's something that like i use the term sometimes

03:14:02.260 that you know there are these past experiences that are kind of like barbed wire like we they're

03:14:05.720 painful to get off and they're painful to stay on i mean you know so that pennebaker exercise

03:14:12.500 costs nothing you can tear up the paper afterwards actually i suggest you do but you do it four days

03:14:16.980 in a row you will feel significantly better say the data pretty incredible writing does seem to

03:14:23.140 be important, handwriting it out. Set a timer, do it. You will come out of that first session

03:14:28.540 not feeling great, but you'll move about your day. Symptoms of health, immune system function

03:14:34.760 improves. They've done all the measures of biology and psychology that one would want to see, and

03:14:38.980 it's really impressive. So that aside. The other thing is I'll just mention a saying I didn't come

03:14:46.160 up with, but that I love is, and it's harsh, but the difference between winners and losers is the

03:14:52.320 following. Losers take things that happened to them, happened to them, or that they did that

03:14:59.780 they wish they hadn't done. And they take the negative feelings around those things and they 0.91

03:15:05.300 use it for self or outward destruction. Winners, I think we would all agree, take the hard things

03:15:13.420 that happen to them as well as the gifts they've been given. They think about them as much as they

03:15:19.520 need to, but then they transmute that, those experiences, maybe years of experience into

03:15:25.240 things that are good for them and for the world, period, end of story. I know it's harsh, winners

03:15:31.100 and losers, but let's face it, most of the bad stuff in the world is because people are taking

03:15:35.580 bad stuff that happened to them and doing bad stuff. They feel justified in doing it. There's 0.95

03:15:39.940 some full-blown psychosis type stuff, but- Let me just interject quickly. Last week, we watched

03:15:46.340 the Novak Djokovic documentary,

03:15:49.180 The Wolf of Winter.

03:15:49.740 He's impressive.

03:15:50.700 Which is, I think, on Netflix right now.

03:15:52.340 And of course, he's like, he's the goat.

03:15:54.020 And that's saying something in the world of tennis

03:15:55.920 because there are others who are just right there with him.

03:15:59.060 But he's got the most wins when it comes to Grand Slams,

03:16:02.300 which is how they measure it.

03:16:03.160 So the movie, It's Two Hours Long, is very good.

03:16:07.380 But Djokovic is a controversial guy

03:16:09.920 or was very controversial when he started in the tennis world

03:16:12.400 because he was less mature.

03:16:13.880 He did some mocking of other players.

03:16:16.160 He suddenly got injured in matches that he was losing when he was younger.

03:16:21.340 And this turned a lot of people on him.

03:16:23.220 And for years, he was booed.

03:16:25.740 He was never the favorite.

03:16:27.760 They created a rivalry in tennis between Federer and Nadal.

03:16:32.020 Djokovic wasn't part of it, even though he was up and coming and then very much was in

03:16:36.280 it with those two, but would be the lesser than.

03:16:39.060 He has a line in his documentary, table for three, please.

03:16:42.200 but they weren't giving this to him because he was never the favorite and what Djokovic talked

03:16:48.380 about was there's something in Serbian culture called in it that makes you thrive on that and

03:16:56.420 people who aren't Serbian or don't have that natural mindset couldn't understand that all 0.76

03:17:00.840 those boos and treating him like a second-class citizen and making him feel like odd man out

03:17:05.740 even when he was number one in the world, only fueled him to win more. And in fact,

03:17:12.360 he's somebody who kind of needs it in order to win. So all of his detractors were inadvertently

03:17:17.820 helping him. Now it's changed. He's beloved and he's matured and he's totally likable in this

03:17:24.300 documentary entirely. But in any event, when you talk about that, that's what I'm thinking of,

03:17:27.940 somebody who takes what could be traumatizing for someone else, being openly booed by the entire

03:17:36.420 stadium at the Australian Open, which you've won something like 16 times and where you should be a

03:17:42.060 king because you leave after getting seriously hurt. This is later in his career. Openly booed?

03:17:48.040 What? You could be talking about that as your trauma on a self-help show. Instead, it's fuel

03:17:56.220 for him and it's a positive so this is what you're talking about yeah i look i it goes back

03:18:01.800 to the beginning of our conversation the biggest mistake i made in life the biggest mistake and i

03:18:07.920 own it completely even though i was only 14 was taking the circumstances of my family life at the

03:18:14.380 time and not continuing to apply myself in certain areas of life i should have you know you could say

03:18:21.520 well, you're only 14. Okay, fine. And it all worked out, but it was a moment. And I talk

03:18:27.220 about this in the book. It was, you know, a moment, it was a physical altercation when I was,

03:18:31.080 you know, first year away at school that made me realize if I don't take the hard things that have

03:18:38.300 happened and do something with my life, no, no one's going to care. And I won't have any self

03:18:44.780 respect. The story of a, of a hard childhood is something that we can all like, we feel compassion

03:18:50.960 for. But I realized I was like, I'm going to be like a genuine loser. I was like, I'm going to

03:18:55.680 be a genuine loser. It doesn't matter what else I do unless I actually turn my life into something 0.82

03:19:02.440 worthwhile. And I started developing agency. I started running. I started exercising. I started

03:19:06.500 studying. And I had to fasten myself to a chair with a timer. I had to, I mean, I will say,

03:19:14.400 and I know people work, I worked like a maniac and I still work very, very hard. And so I have

03:19:21.960 great respect for anyone that can take hardship or shame. And I've had other things like my

03:19:25.400 advisors dying and mistakes I've made. And there's this transmutation, we call it. You take

03:19:30.760 the negative energy and you have to like pretzel twisted into this expression that is good for you

03:19:37.400 and for the world, or at least not destructive. I mean, I think this is why Djokovic or David

03:19:43.880 Goggins. You know, we love these people because they're doing it. We can feel David's pain. I

03:19:51.680 mean, I've sat down with David. I knew him before he had a book and got famous. And he was the exact

03:19:55.480 same guy. We actually were at a meeting in San Jose. This is a wild story. And we finished up

03:20:00.240 this meeting. It was a private meeting. It wasn't being recorded. And he said, I'm going to run to

03:20:03.920 the airport. He meant run to the airport. He put on his back. He ran like 16 miles to San Jose

03:20:10.400 airport. No book, no fame, no nothing, no cameras. And I was like-

03:20:15.260 Luggage? Look at his luggage.

03:20:16.980 He just like rocked his backpack. It was incredible. And I thought-

03:20:20.340 Oh my.

03:20:20.860 That's where our, you know, I don't see him that much, but, you know, because he's off on his

03:20:24.420 own running. But I've got a bunch of Goggins stories from before he got famous and he was

03:20:28.340 the same guy. He's in a battle with himself, the self-hate voice. He came on my podcast.

03:20:33.200 Every day he hears, you're a piece of garbage that came from the outside, but eventually he 1.00

03:20:38.180 internalized. And when you realize that it's all in your head, you realize that you can and need 1.00

03:20:44.360 to flip the script. And there's nothing more beautiful about humans than our ability to do

03:20:52.760 this. And for people who don't have intense hardship, because a lot of times now kids will

03:20:56.880 come to me and be like, I don't have the trauma story. I'm like, great. Well, don't get soft.

03:21:02.460 You know, like you didn't have that, you know, and a lot of wealthy parents approach me. What

03:21:06.260 do i do my kid is like a total loser they don't or my kid doesn't want to work because they got 0.93

03:21:11.440 all this dopamine they got everything they wanted with no effort dopamine and rewards without effort 0.98

03:21:17.520 first destroy a human it just destroys a human it's like giving your dog a treat just for being

03:21:22.880 cute you get a you get an unhealthy dog that dies early fact the dogs have we all have this

03:21:29.940 sometimes it's more latent that in others than in others but we have this desire to work we want

03:21:35.640 that friction and overcome that, that's what makes us feel so alive and that we have capacity.

03:21:41.280 And then of course, peace and joy and meaning, it doesn't have to all be about the grind,

03:21:46.080 but everyone will tell you that the peace and meaning and love and connection, that's all

03:21:51.280 much better on a backdrop of hard work. End of story. So I don't believe in focusing on the past,

03:21:59.420 but I do believe in transmuting your past into goodness for you and for others. And I believe

03:22:04.680 If that if something, if you're really stuck, you're really stuck, you need to get off the

03:22:11.100 barbed wire.

03:22:11.680 And that Pennebaker writing exercise costs nothing, has been shown to be very effective.

03:22:16.180 And the idea is that you do it and then you move on.

03:22:18.480 It's not that you do it every day.

03:22:20.020 You do it and then you move on.

03:22:22.040 The other piece, I'm sorry.

03:22:23.980 On the, I just want to raise what you wrote in chapter seven, because you give people

03:22:30.200 this actual tool. Writing, if your thoughts are elsewhere, re-tether them to the present. Ask

03:22:36.560 questions anchored in your current surroundings. This is such a good tool. Like, I've never heard

03:22:41.920 somebody do this before because they just say, be in the present, be in the present, be in the

03:22:46.180 moment, which is very hard for somebody who's a worrier or an obsessor about the past. And you

03:22:52.220 suggest ask questions like how cold or warm is it in this room? What does it smell like? How many

03:23:00.220 people in line in front of me are on their phone, et cetera. But something you say, I realize this

03:23:04.940 is trivial, but it returns your perceptions to the present because they can only be answered

03:23:10.540 right here and now. I love this. Yeah. So that came about because, you know, somewhere around

03:23:18.520 2015. Look, I was about to get tenure at Stanford. My life was great, but I noticed I had accumulated

03:23:25.100 a lot of stress. And I started studying stress and stress mitigation. And I found no one could

03:23:31.060 give me a real-time tool for de-stressing fast. Then I discovered the physiological sigh. It had

03:23:36.140 been around since the 30s. But I was hearing all about grit, resilience, and mental toughness. And

03:23:41.020 no one was telling me how. Just all these amazing stories of people being gritty. I'm like, how do

03:23:45.140 you do it i'm a scientist i want to know about cells circuits mechanisms and protocols so then

03:23:51.100 it would i was seeing you know the bumper stickers be here now beautiful quote from ram das where you

03:23:57.740 hear your your life is what your thoughts make it which by the way came first from the bible but then

03:24:01.800 you find in every philosopher said that but then like how do you do that be present i mean there's

03:24:06.880 nothing squishier to me than be present how great tell me how and and you can tell i get a little

03:24:12.180 irritated by i don't i really don't like um hippie wellness i have friends that listen to grateful

03:24:18.120 dead and you know i like a few of their songs but i'm not like beating up on on hippies i just

03:24:23.660 i don't like these terms like calm down or you know or uh just take a deep breath no it turns

03:24:30.600 out it's all wrong so the be present thing i thought i'm a neuroscientist what do i know for

03:24:35.920 sure i know that we can be planning a lot of the brain's function is to predict things thank

03:24:41.700 goodness. We can remember things, great, unless we're focused on negative things from the past,

03:24:47.020 as you pointed out, that are keeping us from moving forward in life or self-damaging or

03:24:50.880 harming others. That's not good. Also, focusing on your trauma all the time is not solving it.

03:24:56.100 It's amplifying those circuits, so you need to move past it. And then I started exploring the

03:25:01.960 neuroscience of perception and what brings the brain from a state of thinking and planning and

03:25:07.460 remembering things of past, so stuck in the past or the future, to being right in the present.

03:25:12.600 And it turns out you have to just get into sensation. And you need to get into perceptions

03:25:16.520 and asking questions. The brain loves questions. Questions help shift the brain from one state to

03:25:23.300 another. So if I could just look at the data, and I looked at the data on how to get present,

03:25:29.580 it turns out you have people pay attention to seemingly trivial things like, how cold am I?

03:25:34.640 What does it feel like? The contact of my legs to the chair I'm sitting on, something I wasn't

03:25:38.980 thinking about. All of a sudden, it's not about what you're focusing on. It's now what you're

03:25:44.100 not focusing on. And once you're in the present, then the brain can more easily shift to the

03:25:48.880 positive things that you can do to have some agency over your current conditions. We hear a

03:25:53.480 lot about agency. This is so good. This is very helpful. Yeah. So like when you're feeling like

03:25:58.500 you don't have control of your life, you can go online and watch something that says, if you're

03:26:01.960 on X, it's all about agency, right? It's kind of like, it's all about agency on Instagram,

03:26:06.120 not anymore, but it's about more entertainment and victim stuff. Who's the victim? I'm the victim.

03:26:14.060 They're the victim. Who's the victim? No, he's the, he's the aggressor.

03:26:17.220 Mine is on cute hair tricks, but okay.

03:26:19.200 Or that, like I, I like the bulldog stuff and there's other stuff too, but I'm sort of, I'm

03:26:23.820 kind of talking at the extremes, but how do you have agency? Well, you have to get present

03:26:29.860 because you can't have agency over the past.

03:26:32.460 You sure can't have agency over the future

03:26:34.260 unless you take care of the right now.

03:26:36.280 How do you do that?

03:26:37.400 And it's interesting because kids learn this very fast

03:26:40.240 if you teach them.

03:26:41.160 I've taught many kids the physiological side

03:26:43.380 and when they're stressed

03:26:45.160 to just focus on what's around them.

03:26:47.360 And they learn it so fast.

03:26:49.660 But as adults, we have these well-charted reflexes

03:26:54.420 to, gosh, I'm thinking about that thing again.

03:26:56.400 I can't stop thinking about that thing.

03:26:57.480 And then people think that they're ruminating

03:26:59.840 and indeed they're ruminating.

03:27:00.980 Then they wonder if it's trauma and it might be.

03:27:03.380 I mean, there are real traumas that need to be overcome.

03:27:05.780 I talk about that in the book,

03:27:06.720 but just the simple thing of saying,

03:27:09.060 you know, how cold or warm is this thing I'm holding?

03:27:13.040 That shifts the brain in the direction you want to go.

03:27:15.740 That's not where you want to stop,

03:27:17.040 but it brings you back to the present

03:27:18.680 so you can continue forward in the present.

03:27:21.700 This is, and so there's a lot of discussion

03:27:23.460 in Manhattan for 17 years.

03:27:25.040 You really don't want to stop on

03:27:26.020 what does it smell like in here?

03:27:27.280 Right, right.

03:27:27.960 So that's really about brain.

03:27:29.020 states. That will bring you right into the room. Exactly. Right. So it's about brain states. It's

03:27:32.800 about understanding that the brain doesn't go from sleep to awake, from stress to calm. It's

03:27:38.080 that you need to do things to bridge these states, to get from one state to another. And you have

03:27:43.220 that power in your mind and body. And so I try and provide tools that represent the fastest and

03:27:48.880 most seamless path to those that doesn't require any learning. And all you have to learn how to do

03:27:56.080 them, but there's no, it's not like you need to master the skill. You have the skill. You just

03:28:01.080 haven't exercised it before. Yeah. You probably weren't asking the right questions. Now, because

03:28:06.560 you've mentioned it a couple of times. Can you tell us about the physiological sigh?

03:28:09.960 The physiological sigh. So that's the double inhale, long exhale. So that's the...

03:28:20.100 And then the exhale through the mouth. Okay.

03:28:21.820 And our study on that a few years back, we had people do that repeatedly, showed that if you were to repeat that and compare to, say, a meditation practice or to box breathing, which is inhale, hold, exhale, hold, or to a meditation practice, what you would find is they all have some benefit.

03:28:38.160 But the physiological sigh allows you to calm down the fastest, and it improves your sleep, it improves your mood, and it improves resting heart rate, heart rate variability.

03:28:49.360 it just has so many positive effects and it's so simple and it's costs nothing. And if you don't

03:28:55.400 remember to do it every day, you just do it every once in a while. And I know it, I know, no, no,

03:29:00.500 I have neurosurgeon friends who use it. I have tier one operator friends who use it. I know

03:29:07.420 eight-year-old kids who use it. Moms, you know, like even my dog does it, but they do it reflexively.

03:29:13.620 If you watch your dog before they go down to sleep, they do a double inhale. 0.88

03:29:17.500 Yeah, you write this in the book.

03:29:18.640 Long exhale.

03:29:19.440 And it's to balance their carbon dioxide oxygen ratios.

03:29:22.520 Dogs are so smart because they don't worry about stuff.

03:29:25.740 Not mine, but most.

03:29:27.360 Yeah, it's wonderful to see that others have that in their pets.

03:29:31.720 Let's talk about nicotine and caffeine

03:29:33.720 because especially nicotine is all the rage right now.

03:29:37.500 The little packs that people put in their mouths.

03:29:40.680 What's the story of nicotine?

03:29:41.900 Okay.

03:29:43.140 Well, 90% of the world uses caffeine every single day

03:29:46.260 and they're not going to quit. And I love caffeine. The data say it can offset dementia.

03:29:50.460 If you don't like caffeine- And you say to take it before exercise or drink it, whatever.

03:29:55.220 Yeah. You drink yerba mate, which is what I like, or coffee I like as well.

03:29:59.320 People have different caffeine tolerances. I will say, if you don't like caffeine,

03:30:03.320 don't go drink it to try and offset dementia. You'll be fine. But if you do like caffeine,

03:30:08.660 you don't have to worry. I don't recommend drinking caffeine too late in the day because

03:30:12.080 it can mess up your sleep. But I love a 2 p.m. espresso. I love it, I have to say. And I drink it

03:30:19.500 and I sleep fine. Nicotine is a special one because humans throughout history, ever since

03:30:27.000 they discovered nicotine, have found a way to get it into their systems. Then they discover it

03:30:30.580 causes cancer. They find a new way. They create vaping. Then they find out that vaping isn't good

03:30:35.020 for you. It's not as bad as smoking, but it's still terrible. It causes all sorts of lung issues.

03:30:40.140 so then now oral nicotine is all the rage. Here's the deal. I'll tell you the positive first.

03:30:47.800 Nicotine, there is some evidence, some evidence that it may help offset Parkinson's and dementia

03:30:54.760 before it forms. Okay. Why? It increases acetylcholine, which is one of the major

03:31:01.520 neuromodulators that's depleted in many forms of dementia, and it increases dopamine and

03:31:07.820 movement and parkinson's and dopamine that whole story is about loss of dopaminergic neurons most

03:31:13.660 treatments for parkinson's are about increasing dopamine so the problem is that nicotine is

03:31:21.000 extremely habit forming slash addicting okay it it's an amazing stimulant because it makes you

03:31:27.480 alert but it also makes you feel calm it puts you in that perfect state for learning and for most

03:31:32.800 daytime activities, but it also raises blood pressure, which in particular for men can cause

03:31:39.840 cardiovascular issues and sexual health issues because it's a blood flow inhibitor, right?

03:31:44.940 So nicotine can cause problems if taken in excess. But the big problem is that now people take

03:31:50.940 one, you know, let's say a three to six or even eight milligram pouch of nicotine

03:31:55.980 and they feel great. And then they're doing two a day, then three a day, and then pretty soon

03:32:02.640 need an entire canister every few days just to be normal. Same thing with caffeine. Most people

03:32:09.760 are drinking caffeine and using nicotine just to be at their normal level of alertness. So if you

03:32:13.580 really want to use nicotine as a cognitive enhancer, as a healthy person, you use it very

03:32:19.140 occasionally, three to six milligrams, maybe two to three times a week maximum, one pouch. But most

03:32:26.060 people don't do that. They're quickly into multiple pouches per day. So it's sort of, when I say it's

03:32:31.060 a cognitive enhancer, that's with occasional use. And the same goes for caffeine. You need

03:32:36.240 to be alert to get focused. Most people need caffeine just to be alert. So you don't get

03:32:40.920 any learning benefit or cognitive benefit from caffeine. You're just getting yourself into that

03:32:45.480 plane of alertness that allows you to function. But I love caffeine so much. I love yerba mate.

03:32:52.520 I love coffee. And you're not going to take it away from me. And I just love it. And so I like

03:32:59.660 to acknowledge that some people really like their nicotine, but if you're going to use nicotine,

03:33:03.220 make sure you check your blood pressure and ideally you're exercising too. I will say a lot

03:33:08.260 of the guys that I know, it does seem to be mostly guys. I went out to, I won't mention which, but a

03:33:13.780 big military school on the East coast. And I did an informal poll of how many of the 4,000 students

03:33:19.400 use nicotine and about two thirds of the hands in the room went up. And then when I spoke to

03:33:23.680 the sports teams, it was like almost all of them are using nicotine. But they're athletes,

03:33:29.600 they're young, they're running around. Do I suggest it? Not really. But if you're doing that

03:33:34.640 as opposed to smoking cigarettes or vaping, great. Definitely be safer for you than alcohol.

03:33:39.680 And I'm not a big fan of cannabis. Some people can do it without issues, but it does predispose

03:33:44.560 to psychosis in some people. It's a whole story into itself. This gets very political. I'm happy

03:33:49.540 to talk about it, but I did a podcast showing that there are strong data showing that THC,

03:33:55.240 especially in young males, can predispose them to permanent psychosis. These very strong THC

03:33:59.520 products, not all, but a lot of them. And I got vehemently attacked by the left. They were like,

03:34:07.020 misinformation, what are you doing? I'm like, listen, I gave the balanced picture. I don't

03:34:11.320 tell people what to do, but know what you're doing. Heard from many parents and people like,

03:34:15.240 my kid is schizophrenic because of and this is real right then there were some movements on the

03:34:22.640 right the administration was trying to actually make some of the laws around cannabis a little

03:34:27.680 bit more liberal and then all of a sudden the left started attacking cannabis and so i started

03:34:32.440 realizing like of course i don't get political but i realized okay most media i i know you don't do

03:34:39.200 this but most media that they actually are not reporting the issue from a place of heart and

03:34:43.200 understanding of data. They're just kind of going, it's like my team, your team's stuff.

03:34:47.140 So the data are this. Some people can use cannabis, no problem. It nukes your deep or

03:34:53.160 your rapid eye movement sleep. That's not good. But some people can do it, no problem. The edible

03:34:57.500 is not a problem for them. Other people, it causes apathy, psychotic issues, one or the other,

03:35:04.020 or in some cases, both. And so you just need to be very careful. And I will tell you, as

03:35:08.180 I've only had the experience of being male. And I will tell you, young males should not use 1.00

03:35:13.480 cannabis. You want to develop your life. You want to be ambitious, as ambitious as you can

03:35:19.440 while being a kind person and taking care of yourself. Cannabis, except for extremely talented

03:35:25.220 creatives, is a motivation success inhibitor. I don't know the data for females as well, 1.00

03:35:33.220 because we don't have a lot of female specific data on it. So that's why I just sort of mentioned 0.72

03:35:38.620 that. But I will tell you when young guys are like, how do you feel about THC? I'm like,

03:35:42.600 I love it when my competitors take THC in anything. You better hope that all your

03:35:47.760 competitors take THC because it's a complete killer. I think many of mine do. Yeah. And then

03:35:53.840 I will say, someone will come along every once in a while and they'll say, I know this athlete

03:35:57.980 who uses cannabis and they're a super athlete. Or my grandfather smoked and drank every day and

03:36:04.720 lived to be 102. To those stories, I always say, yeah, well, you know, yesterday, and this is a

03:36:10.360 true story, I sat down with somebody whose dad did everything right and got a glioma. So you're

03:36:15.800 always, and died. So you're always going to have these margin cases at the extremes where someone

03:36:20.660 does everything right and still gets sick and dies. And someone does everything wrong and still

03:36:25.300 lives a long, healthy life, but most people are not at those extremes. And so if you're going to

03:36:30.760 use the excuse, like I'm going to do everything wrong and be okay, forget it. The data say that's

03:36:36.060 very unlikely. Or if you say, I'm going to do everything right. And I'm certain that I'm going

03:36:41.000 to live to be 150. Well, that's not true either. That's not true either. And so what you want to

03:36:47.460 do is most things, right? Most of the time and avoid the pitfalls of that could cause psychosis

03:36:53.540 or drunk driving.

03:36:55.020 I mean, we sort of know this, it's logic,

03:36:57.480 but the health messaging has gotten very contaminated

03:36:59.460 by the political sphere in a way that I think

03:37:02.540 has hurt a lot of people.

03:37:04.280 I just want people to have the information.

03:37:05.680 No, I laugh because my Nana, God love her,

03:37:09.640 my mom's mom lived to be 101

03:37:11.020 and she ate at least in the last 30 years of her life. 0.99

03:37:15.520 She ate nothing but processed foods.

03:37:17.420 She never saw exercise in any way, shape or form.

03:37:20.460 She walked a little bit around her senior citizens complex

03:37:22.960 that she lived in, lived on her own

03:37:24.620 until she was 100 and a half.

03:37:26.760 This is your grandmother?

03:37:27.940 And yeah, my Nana, she was stressed out,

03:37:30.860 all the things that we're not supposed to do.

03:37:32.860 But that's, of course, the exception, not the rule.

03:37:35.660 We can't go by that.

03:37:36.660 I thought the exercise and the eating advice in the book

03:37:40.640 was very sound and it was right along the lines

03:37:42.900 of what you're saying.

03:37:44.020 Nothing extreme, you know, a normal sort of natural foods,

03:37:49.160 diet, less processed, the better.

03:37:50.880 and exercise, yes, weight training, cardiovascular, as well as walking, you know, a few times a week

03:37:58.440 in addition to like cardiovascular training, all good. But we only have a couple minutes left.

03:38:03.960 Can you just hit, so for the quick learners or the people who just want to get like a quick

03:38:09.700 highlight, what are the top three things you want them to take away when it comes to

03:38:13.640 their wellness, what they can learn from your experience?

03:38:20.880 bright mornings that involve light, ideally from sunlight or artificial lights, some movement,

03:38:27.800 some hydration. I'm a big proponent of prayer, meditation, things that orient you to what's

03:38:34.540 really important. For me, that's prayer in the morning and before going to sleep at night.

03:38:38.380 These things have an outsized positive effect on your health and your mood and your ability to

03:38:43.860 focus all day long. The second thing would be do a long exhale or ideally two inhales through your

03:38:51.840 nose, a long exhale through your mouth. Anytime you feel stressed or even a couple of times

03:38:55.480 throughout the day, you'll improve your heart rate variability, your resting heart rate.

03:39:00.140 You'll find that you actually can handle stress very well. You'll lower your baseline levels of

03:39:05.560 stress and you'll feel more control over your mind and body in a way that carries over to

03:39:11.380 everything. That tool works anywhere and everywhere unless you're underwater. And then darken your

03:39:16.980 sleeping environment, cool it down, and do some long exhale breathing before sleep. And those

03:39:23.460 three things, and of course, you still need to do some exercise, try and walk a bunch and lift some

03:39:28.260 heavy objects now and again, heavy for you. Get your heart rate up doing some exercise. Don't eat

03:39:33.100 too much processed food, this kind of thing, the things we all know. But if you do those three

03:39:37.120 things, you will find that everything gets better right away. Daytime energy, ability to mitigate

03:39:45.240 stress, learning, presence with emotional presence and physical presence with people you love,

03:39:52.260 your ability to just enjoy life a bit more, to pivot your brain state, and to reset in that

03:39:59.080 magical phase of our 24-hour cycle sleep that no one seems to get away with outdoing for very long.

03:40:05.440 those things you'll look better you'll feel better you will be healthier you will live longer

03:40:10.180 and it sounds like good old-fashioned advice because i'm saying sleep right exercise don't

03:40:15.360 stress social connection but what no one i i will you know you know with humility aside and and and

03:40:22.860 humbly i'll say also no one ever told us how it's like we're told what not to do so i'm not going to

03:40:29.940 bark at you to not drink or not do this or not i'm going to tell you do those things and also

03:40:34.720 learn to enjoy them. They're for you. And there's, so you can show up better for yourself and other

03:40:39.240 people in life. Learn to enjoy them. They're your God-given circuits and molecules. Like we all have

03:40:44.740 them and put them to use. And if you miss a couple of days, no big deal, get, get right back on it.

03:40:49.320 They take seconds to minutes. They cost nothing. They're available to you in some form every single

03:40:54.560 day. And the, I mean, there's over 1200 references in the book that support what I'm saying. I'm not

03:41:00.640 coming up with this stuff. I'm not naming it after me. These are not the Huberman protocols.

03:41:04.720 This is your body, your physiology, your brain, your mind, and you deserve to get the best from

03:41:10.140 them. And that's my, my deep, deep wish for people. I've seen it. I've experienced how they

03:41:15.260 can help. I've seen how it can help others. I just want those for, for the world. I really,

03:41:20.200 really do. You gotta get the book now. It's going to sell out. It's called Protocols by Andrew

03:41:27.200 Huberman, an operating manual for the human body. Don't wait. It's going to hit the stores soon,

03:41:33.720 but you want to get it now because it'll sell out and then you won't have it. It's a pleasure.

03:41:38.700 Thank you so much for coming on. I hope I get to talk to you again.

03:41:41.360 Thanks so much for hosting me. Forgive me that in my excitement, various times I

03:41:45.640 inadvertently spoke over you. I'm a big fan and I really appreciate the opportunity to

03:41:51.640 connect to your audience and really enjoyed your questions. Indeed, I learned a lot during

03:41:55.820 this conversation. So thank you. Oh, the pleasure is ours. All the best to you and

03:41:59.700 good luck with the book. Thank you very much. See you again. Bye for now.

03:42:03.720 I'm Megan Kelly. Every day on The Megan Kelly Show, we bring you the news,

03:42:07.780 and this summer, we're bringing you something extra. Before I was a journalist, I was a lawyer.

03:42:12.880 I've spent 20-plus years now covering crime and the law, so I built a true crime series that I

03:42:18.860 always wanted to listen to. We're calling it MK Confidential, and there we cover cases that

03:42:24.260 you've heard about, like JonBenet Ramsey, Chandra Levy, the DC Snipers, Scott Peterson,

03:42:28.940 and some that you haven't.

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03:42:35.280 New episodes every weeknight.

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03:43:09.400 Visit IIHS.org to learn more.

03:43:13.560 Oh, do we have a treat for you today.

03:43:17.020 All right, let me tell you how this came down.

03:43:21.120 So I love RFKJ, and I heard that he was doing this very strange diet.

03:43:29.960 It sounded very strange to me.

03:43:31.540 It was all meats and, quote, ferments.

03:43:34.260 And I wasn't even sure what a ferment was.

03:43:37.120 I mean, I knew sauerkraut was fermented, but honestly, beyond that, I had no idea.

03:43:40.800 Well, there's a whole school of things that are called ferments or that you can ferment,

03:43:46.900 And it's a vast category of eating that may be available to you if you are so interested.

03:43:53.040 And this diet he was pursuing is basically meat, preferably grass-fed, grass-finished red meat with ferments, period, pretty much period, a couple other things.

03:44:06.080 And then one thing led to another, and I found out J.D. Vance was on this diet, too.

03:44:10.540 Then eventually the Wall Street Journal did a piece on it and said that Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, was on this diet.

03:44:16.260 And it said, Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary.

03:44:19.100 I'm like, what is this?

03:44:21.240 Who is behind this?

03:44:23.240 And it turns out it's a guy who's a former lawyer, now doctor, and retired U.S. Army

03:44:29.520 colonel named Dr. Sean O'Mara.

03:44:32.420 Now, he is a physician.

03:44:33.620 He's an expert in metabolic health.

03:44:35.700 And his big focus is something called visceral fat, okay?

03:44:41.860 And also human performance optimization.

03:44:45.160 He believes that you can get better, not just get older, that you do not have to go on a downward slide as you go into more advanced age, that you actually can get better and better, that you actually can grow more hair on your head if you want, that you can be at your strongest.

03:45:03.420 And by the way, the exercise piece of this is totally doable and does not require you to be at spin soul cycle classes nonstop.

03:45:14.000 All right. It's a meat and microbes diet. It pairs nutrient dense animal meat with fermented foods. But you got to be OK eating pretty much just that and all sorts of other things that will optimize your humanity.

03:45:32.300 you as a human. It's not about losing weight. It's about losing visceral fat, which is around

03:45:39.100 your organs. And you can have this even if you look thin on the outside. So I said to my team,

03:45:46.520 can you book this guy? Let's book this, Dr. Sean. I want to know more about this.

03:45:52.220 The next thing I knew, I was in an MRI machine. So I didn't even know how it happened. Kayla and

03:45:57.700 Abby, Kayla's the new Abby, said, you're going for a full body MRI. I'm like, I am. I've never

03:46:03.640 had that done before. So I went and I sat in it and they give you like the quick rundown on how

03:46:10.020 you did via the computer, you know, like at the place. And it was basically like, you're good.

03:46:15.940 You know, you get a couple of small things, but you're fine. And then you meet with Dr. Sean and

03:46:21.440 he, he tells you his assessment. Well, he was looking for something very different from what

03:46:27.320 the computer was looking for, and he was looking at visceral fat. And let's just say I didn't get

03:46:33.760 an A, all right? And the word toffee was used, thin outside, fat inside. So for a day and a quarter,

03:46:48.540 I'm doing this diet now. I am a day and a quarter into the Sean O'Mara diet, and he's

03:46:57.160 here today to walk all of us through what it is and why he is so convinced it revolutionizes health.

03:47:05.620 Doc, great to see you, Sean. Wonderful to have you.

03:47:07.980 Yeah, great to be here, Megan. Thank you so much for having me.

03:47:11.200 We're going to go through it all because you and I went to the store together. I took a picture of

03:47:15.740 the ingredients we bought. I mean, we've gotten to know each other pretty well over the past few

03:47:19.160 days. So let's just start with a little background on you because for Kix, I was looking through

03:47:24.880 your Instagram. And back in 2016, you were definitely talking about wellness, but you

03:47:29.260 weren't yet on this. So how did you get to the point where you're like, I've got it. I know what

03:47:35.620 I need to do to eliminate this fat. So my background was, I was a former criminal prosecutor.

03:47:43.040 And then I decided I want to go to medical school. I was disillusioned with the practice of law. I

03:47:48.300 really didn't feel like I could make the choices that I wanted to make as a professional. And so

03:47:53.860 I went back to medical school. I went to school. I had to actually take a bunch of college courses

03:47:58.720 to be able to get into medical school just to apply. And when I became a physician,

03:48:05.380 I got a scholarship through the army. I practiced like a typical physician. I took care of people

03:48:11.060 in emergency rooms. That was my formal training. And people fell apart and they came into the ER.

03:48:18.720 Lots of bad things happened to them. But those bad things were slowly happening to me.

03:48:23.260 And I met this young guy in the hospital gym, and he was in great shape.

03:48:29.200 And I was just complaining about what most people complain about, getting heavy.

03:48:34.120 I was fat, and I wanted to lose weight.

03:48:36.720 So he told me, do the paleo diet, eat fermented foods, start sprinting outdoors.

03:48:43.000 So I did those things, and I did lose weight.

03:48:47.200 Previously, I was drinking skim milk with Hershey's chocolate powder in the emergency

03:48:52.640 room with a gallon of skim milk.

03:48:54.500 That's what I thought was healthy.

03:48:56.140 And I was eating apples.

03:48:57.560 I wasn't losing any weight.

03:48:59.700 And I just got sick of skim milk with chocolate and apples, wasn't losing weight.

03:49:04.820 But when I started eating these fermented foods and when I started to sprint, then I

03:49:10.240 lost weight.

03:49:10.760 But the other thing was, I didn't, nobody told me this, but I had had high blood pressure,

03:49:17.320 I had atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, I had erectile dysfunction, I had a enlarged

03:49:24.200 prostate that I would have to wake up five times the night to pee.

03:49:28.880 I had to put toilet paper in my underpants.

03:49:32.780 I mean, this is embarrassing to me.

03:49:34.120 I was 48, but I was, you know, draining liquid at the age of urine, at the age of 48.

03:49:40.760 and it was humiliating and i and i suffered in silence the urologist couldn't help me

03:49:45.940 uh i was really desperate and when i started eating these fermented foods and started to sprint

03:49:52.240 i didn't have any expectation that i was going to get any better i just thought i was going to lose

03:49:58.400 weight the other thing i had was precancerous lesions around my esophagus so i had a condition

03:50:04.140 in my esophagus called Barrett's esophagus

03:50:07.720 that were these precancerous changes

03:50:11.200 in the cell type lining in my esophagus.

03:50:13.920 So heartburn, years of suffering heartburn,

03:50:16.220 taking all this medicine.

03:50:17.820 It all went away in about one year

03:50:20.200 from eating these foods.

03:50:23.120 And I was astounded.

03:50:25.580 I mean, I was mad.

03:50:27.280 I was upset that none of my medical training

03:50:29.460 did anything for me to help me get better.

03:50:32.080 And so I remember consciously making a decision morally and professionally that I had to investigate for the sake of my own understanding and moreover for patients because I couldn't see anything in the Internet.

03:50:44.980 There was nothing in my medical training that explained how my erectile dysfunction, how my prostate shrank, how I went from peeing five times a night in the middle of the night to nothing, and how those precancerous lesions went away.

03:50:58.760 My gastroenterologist couldn't explain it.

03:51:01.080 He says, you've been cured.

03:51:02.740 I've never seen this.

03:51:03.960 And you were like, it's all thanks to Patrick.

03:51:05.520 Yeah.

03:51:06.360 Do you know Patrick?

03:51:08.680 Well, I was attributing at that time to this young man who taught me to eat this paleo food.

03:51:16.300 But lots of people were doing this before I was really, I think, giving it a try.

03:51:24.600 This is about 2009.

03:51:27.140 And so because I changed so much, I became a researcher.

03:51:31.080 So I made a sacrifice. I had five kids. We were this Catholic family. I was sending my kids to Catholic schools. And I cut back to working part time while I volunteered full time doing research for the National Science Foundation.

03:51:46.400 So it was taxpayer money.

03:51:48.980 NSF is funded by the taxpayer.

03:51:51.560 And it's one of the great things that goes on in government, that they can fund some really important science.

03:51:58.400 And one of them was my research project that I did with a colleague who was Dr. C.J. Zeng.

03:52:03.920 And he was the one that taught me first about visceral fat.

03:52:07.020 And so we targeted visceral fat.

03:52:08.960 He had been doing research for the University of Washington, looking at atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. 0.80

03:52:14.840 And he knows the people that had the most amount of disease had this white stuff.

03:52:18.080 He called it white stuff inside the abdomen.

03:52:20.240 And he's got this thick Chinese accent.

03:52:22.000 And he said, what is all this white stuff?

03:52:23.840 So I said, what is all this white stuff?

03:52:25.940 And he investigated and he figured out it was visceral fat.

03:52:29.580 And so he and I set up a research practice.

03:52:32.260 We applied for funding through the National Science Foundation.

03:52:35.580 We studied, CJ and I studied for seven years full-time visceral fat, fat around the heart, and then fat within the legs.

03:52:44.320 volunteering, CJ and I never took a penny. We both did this full time. And it was an enormous

03:52:51.780 sacrifice, you know, for my family professionally to do this. But it allowed me to see for seven

03:52:59.840 years, Megan, this dangerous fat that nobody else was talking about. It wasn't taught in medical

03:53:05.560 schools. It's not part of the curriculum in medical schools. And it's not part of the curriculum of

03:53:11.240 training for resident physicians. When they graduate from medical school, you start specializing

03:53:16.420 either in cardiology or gastroenterology, or in my case, emergency medicine, or some other

03:53:23.440 variant of surgery. None of those specialties train physicians to look at this fat.

03:53:29.920 You never hear it mentioned at your annual physical, et cetera.

03:53:33.300 No, they talk about cholesterol, other things. But when we started studying it in 6,000 Americans,

03:53:41.240 we noticed when we got rid of that fat and told them we learned how to get rid of it

03:53:46.900 we had an mri scanner we were scanning people sometimes every single day we learned how to

03:53:52.400 target that fat and get rid of it we noticed they got better are they they're all their other

03:53:57.660 chronic disease that they're remitting to arthritis bursitis erectile dysfunction dermatitis

03:54:04.840 eczema all these conditions in fact every form of chronic disease in those 6 000 americans we

03:54:12.280 never found one that didn't get better or go completely away depending on how long they were

03:54:19.340 eliminating this visceral fat it went on for seven years and so it became my life mission i'm like

03:54:26.640 i am going to share with america how to get rid of chronic disease because it not only allowed

03:54:34.680 people to get better and eliminate chronic disease, but they end up looking better and

03:54:39.920 performing better. And then I got excited because I thought, well, you know, corporations are going

03:54:44.840 to find out about visceral fat because they're going to want their employees to have a wellness

03:54:49.140 program that eliminates visceral fat. So they perform better. Productivity would go up. You 0.64

03:54:54.240 know, they would reduce their health care costs that many corporations have are burdened by the

03:55:00.800 second highest amount of cost to a corporation behind salaries and wages is actually health care

03:55:07.160 costs for a self-insured company. And so it gives me great hope that America will eventually

03:55:14.540 embrace this, even though it's not taught yet in medical schools. The corporations are going to

03:55:20.860 find out about it and they'll say, by golly, we're going to pay for visceral fat education 1.00

03:55:26.220 and elimination of employees so that productivity goes up.

03:55:30.400 And what a great objective.

03:55:33.180 I mean, think about improving productivity across America.

03:55:36.360 We in America are to blame for chronic disease

03:55:40.640 because we introduce processed foods

03:55:43.640 and then we spread it all over the globe,

03:55:46.540 leading to disease all over our lifestyles and our diet.

03:55:50.340 We need to redeem ourselves and share these insights

03:55:54.580 about this dangerous disease, this disease process,

03:55:58.140 that for the most part, nobody has any idea

03:56:00.800 that they have inside of them.

03:56:02.540 Can you tell us about the coroner who called you?

03:56:07.140 Yes.

03:56:07.860 So after being on social media and sharing about visceral fat,

03:56:13.220 a coroner pathologist reached out to me,

03:56:15.620 was doing autopsies and studying histopathology

03:56:18.660 of tissues underneath microscopes.

03:56:21.440 And she goes, before I found you on the internet,

03:56:24.580 I thought I was the only doctor in the world that had figured out that all this fat inside

03:56:30.700 of people, visceral fat, was causing all this disease.

03:56:33.800 She would do autopsies, and she noticed the ones that died from chronic disease had all

03:56:39.440 this fat inside them.

03:56:40.940 The ones that had beautiful arteries, beautiful muscle, beautiful tissue, and were killed

03:56:47.480 tragically in a car wreck had none of that.

03:56:51.100 They didn't have that amount of disease.

03:56:52.760 So she realized on her own, just her eyes, she's a great scientist.

03:56:58.200 And doctors who pay attention to things that develop can see the association of this disease

03:57:04.500 because it's not taught in medical school.

03:57:06.960 However, there are over 25,000 published studies on visceral fat showing its association disease.

03:57:16.600 It is definitely documented and known in the literature,

03:57:19.640 but it's kept out of the lives of doctors and if you don't believe me ask all your doctors

03:57:26.560 to tell you about visceral fat show ask them to show you visceral fat on on your mri scan it's

03:57:34.160 the largest thing in your body and they won't even be able to point to it and you don't you

03:57:39.300 don't know how much you have just based on your outside fat like you can be a toffee right you're

03:57:47.700 thin people would say what do you mean and it's not a diet like i'm going to lose weight diet it's

03:57:53.260 a way of life but it it you could be covered in it and not know if you haven't had this mri testing

03:57:59.540 and the scary thing megan and you sharing that is the people that are topies like yourself that

03:58:06.200 have very little fat on the outside and otherwise look seemingly healthy and attractive and

03:58:13.020 Everybody says, oh, Megan, you're great, and so-and-so, you're great.

03:58:17.780 But meanwhile, they have this disease inside of them.

03:58:20.220 They have a higher level of mortality than the patently heavy obese person.

03:58:26.740 Why?

03:58:27.020 Well, as it turns out, this fat that's on the outside of your body is made up of a particular type of fat called superficial subcutaneous fat, and it's abbreviated SSAT.

03:58:38.720 And this superficial subcutaneous fat has a molecule in it called adiponectin.

03:58:45.360 And adiponectin is protective against disease.

03:58:49.100 So what does society teach us?

03:58:51.380 This explains so much about my lineage.

03:58:53.440 My mom, my nana, they're both. 0.98

03:58:55.840 My nana was always overweight. 1.00

03:58:57.100 She lived to 101. 1.00

03:58:58.000 My mom, she loves when I tell everybody that she's been overweight her whole life.

03:59:01.820 She's 85.

03:59:03.120 Yeah, but I'm thin, but I'm toffee.

03:59:07.140 Keep going.

03:59:07.600 So society teaches you that you need to be thin and glamorous and to have a six-pack.

03:59:14.060 But the reality, I think I'm the only physician except for physicians that train with me and learn about these fat depots and learn that the relationship, as you eliminate that fat on your body and then you proudly display a six-pack, you are accelerating your exposure to disease.

03:59:30.940 And we see higher amounts of fat around the heart.

03:59:33.780 We see more visceral fat, more fat in the muscles. 1.00

03:59:36.580 And the bodybuilders, you know, are also championists and poor women. 0.57

03:59:41.940 They die young a lot, the bodybuilders. 0.73

03:59:44.100 They do.

03:59:44.620 The latest study came out from sudden cardiac death shows that in just amateur bodybuilders,

03:59:51.080 their rate of mortality from sudden cardiac death is 10 to 15 times that of an average person.

03:59:58.160 These are ostensibly healthy people lifting weights.

04:00:01.140 But if you're a professional bodybuilder, even more aggressive about eliminating that fat, your risk for mortality versus sudden cardiac death is 90 to 180 times greater.

04:00:17.440 So I call it like what it is.

04:00:20.440 It's the most dangerous sport and profession in the world is bodybuilding at a professional level in terms of what it does to your health. 0.99

04:00:29.180 But the scary thing is a lot of women are getting involved in that, and there's CrossFit. 0.61

04:00:35.240 And I see a lot of female clients that come to me and people online have shared how they fell into this body image of having a six-pack like the guys.

04:00:45.660 And then they confided to me that it gave them a dude face.

04:00:49.400 They got a masculine-looking face, and their voices became emasculated.

04:00:55.880 They weren't as attractive.

04:00:57.320 and if your audience just goes on the internet and starts you know looking for photographs

04:01:03.260 googling or using ai to find photographs of women with six packs abs very often their faces are 0.59

04:01:10.000 cut off or their faces are blocked but if you see their faces they're not as attractive and women

04:01:16.560 have written to me that they've had procedures where they they've had tummy tucks and liposuction 0.94

04:01:22.860 and they've removed the fat on their abdomen

04:01:25.480 trying to get that sculptured look

04:01:27.200 and then they express regret

04:01:29.040 because it changed their face.

04:01:30.940 They're not telling women

04:01:32.140 that they lose their pretty faces 0.66

04:01:34.100 and women need to have attractive faces. 1.00

04:01:37.640 Women influence culture 1.00

04:01:39.400 and they have a role in society 0.99

04:01:42.640 and their face plays a role

04:01:44.320 and so does a man,

04:01:45.560 but it's a little different way.

04:01:46.900 But all the studies show

04:01:47.780 that attractive people,

04:01:49.040 people who are deemed attractive

04:01:50.420 by whatever your societal standards are,

04:01:52.480 do better in life they they get more attention they get more money i don't know it's just they

04:01:57.340 do they use that to use that term and i know you don't like influence they're better influencers

04:02:02.340 and so by that term i mean their ability to help whoever they're dealing with understand the

04:02:10.780 information that they're trying to convey so for example you are healthy your level of fat was

04:02:17.160 way lower than most people, most average people.

04:02:20.340 You do have disease inside of you.

04:02:22.080 But because you have a lower amount

04:02:24.120 and you have the best amount I have actually seen

04:02:28.360 of any social media podcast hosts

04:02:30.180 that I've ever been with and done this before.

04:02:32.260 So you're at the top.

04:02:33.640 You definitely have some areas to work with

04:02:35.120 and we'll work on that area together.

04:02:37.400 But your ability to influence your audience

04:02:40.700 is predicated on your face and your body.

04:02:43.920 And the signal that it sends is-

04:02:45.960 and your brain to be able to articulate those words.

04:02:49.720 But your appearance says, I hunt well

04:02:52.600 and I can help you hunt well and live better.

04:02:57.160 I can get us a bison.

04:02:58.520 Yes.

04:02:59.220 Come with me.

04:03:00.480 Yes.

04:03:00.860 And people want, biologically,

04:03:03.060 they don't understand,

04:03:04.660 your audience doesn't really understand

04:03:06.320 how wired their brains are to pay attention

04:03:09.740 to the appearance of people and their performance

04:03:12.980 so that they can live better.

04:03:15.360 And what you're saying is that everyone can get there.

04:03:19.000 You actually can get more attractive.

04:03:22.040 A hundred percent.

04:03:22.560 Like I said, potentially with more hair.

04:03:24.960 These claims have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.

04:03:28.340 Consult your own doctor.

04:03:29.660 But I've seen it.

04:03:31.400 I've seen it in you.

04:03:32.160 I've seen it on your Insta.

04:03:32.960 I've seen it on your phone.

04:03:33.640 We've talked about numerous cases.

04:03:36.540 Even thin people can get more shredded.

04:03:39.780 Like you can see the muscles come out, but not like obnoxiously, but just more ripped.

04:03:45.360 And the biggest benefit, I think, well, I would argue, on top of just being healthier,

04:03:51.980 where you're going to live longer, ideally, is you feel better.

04:03:56.560 You have been making the case, Kennedy has made the case, you feel much more mentally

04:04:01.780 acute.

04:04:02.980 So what's happening there?

04:04:04.920 So as people eliminate disease, the disease process includes better, improved blood flow.

04:04:11.860 So our arteries are diseased.

04:04:13.540 I mean, they teach us in medical school.

04:04:15.360 in physician training to feel for pulses.

04:04:18.980 You should actually see pulses.

04:04:21.340 Your arteries should be so clear.

04:04:23.520 You were showing me that.

04:04:24.200 We were at the store together.

04:04:25.340 You held out your arm,

04:04:26.260 just sticking your arm out to the side.

04:04:28.780 And you were showing me,

04:04:29.900 I could see your pulse in the crook of your arm there.

04:04:32.620 I mean, you just held it up and there it was.

04:04:35.020 Every time you did it, I saw it.

04:04:36.740 Yeah, it's a great marker of health, better perfusion.

04:04:40.760 So when your blood flow is better, your brain is better.

04:04:43.560 And so you become more articulate. You can access information in your brain and do better arguments. So this is a desirable feature. So lots of recently senators and congressmen, politicians have been finding out about this. And so I work with quite a few of them now to help them improve their performance.

04:05:03.640 you got a lot of work to do. It's the beginning of a rich field, a long haul. Yes. All right. So

04:05:10.600 now let's go through it because the number one thing I I'm thinking that the audience wants to

04:05:15.840 know, because it was the number one thing I wanted to know when I heard about this was

04:05:19.240 what about LDL? You eat red meat all day and we'll talk about it, but like some dairy and cheeses

04:05:27.420 and eggs, like actual eggs with yolks.

04:05:31.320 And, you know, we can all feel our cholesterol going up,

04:05:34.820 which every doctor on earth,

04:05:37.320 the American Heart Association,

04:05:38.880 do a Google search on this,

04:05:40.160 will all tell you if it's high, it's going to kill you.

04:05:44.100 That's a bad thing to have go up.

04:05:45.680 The LDL, the HDL is the good stuff.

04:05:48.200 So the higher numbers there are okay.

04:05:49.660 It's the LDL that they want us to worry about

04:05:51.320 and they're putting us on statins about.

04:05:53.080 And like every doctor says that.

04:05:54.980 So what about the LDL?

04:05:55.880 So LDL is the darling of not just cardiologists, but really mainstream medicine.

04:06:03.240 Physicians tout it.

04:06:04.740 And so virtually every conversation you have with your doctor is dominated by discussion of cholesterol and LDL and these markers and metrics associated with it.

04:06:15.240 However, keep in mind LDL, cholesterol, these are natural molecules that are made in your body.

04:06:25.360 Your body utilizes cholesterol, needs cholesterol, makes it to create cell membranes, to build hormones.

04:06:33.820 You can't even have a hormone without cholesterol.

04:06:37.000 So just from the premise that we're giving medicine to try to lower something that your body is making should give people a little pause and wonder if that's the very best strategy that we ought to be having our conversations with providers dominated by.

04:06:54.220 But here's my opinion. I really think the discussion about cholesterol and LDL has been hijacked and really engineered socially by the powers to be in the system.

04:07:08.600 And I don't want to get into conspiratorial kind of discussions, but the system that is behind the largest part of economy, which is health care, it dwarfs oil.

04:07:18.480 You know, oil is nothing compared to health care.

04:07:23.100 And by the way, it's increasing at about twice the rate of our GPI.

04:07:28.400 So basically, if you're smart with numbers, we are medically bankrupt as a nation because a chronic disease keeps going up.

04:07:36.240 And meanwhile, the system is profiting from it.

04:07:39.580 It's a small number.

04:07:40.480 I'd like to figure out where all that pots of money are going that is leveraging and profiting from the disease of not just Americans, but our entire species.

04:07:52.140 And this is a phenomenon that goes all over the country.

04:07:54.940 So cholesterol is the wrong thing to pay attention to.

04:07:58.060 There are 8 billion people.

04:07:59.320 Name one person. If anybody in this show listening today can find me one person that ever optimized their their level of cholesterol or the LDL and enjoyed any health benefit.

04:08:11.580 It's a new it's a change in a number, but it doesn't eradicate disease.

04:08:16.040 It doesn't really have any strong benefit.

04:08:18.900 The president of the American College of Cardiology dropped to the ground on a stage in San Francisco, I think it was like three years ago, when they had their meeting of cardiologists, and it had a heart attack.

04:08:35.180 Oh, no.

04:08:35.780 I mean, really?

04:08:37.560 The president of the College of Cardiology, okay, has a heart attack.

04:08:42.600 And by the way, the average person that has a heart attack has normal levels of cholesterol.

04:08:48.900 So why are we spending so much time, money, effort on cholesterol?

04:08:53.140 Well, here's my opinion.

04:08:54.680 Because if something more useful came out, like disease, LDL on cholesterol is not disease.

04:09:02.340 Visceral fat is disease.

04:09:04.740 It's structural disease.

04:09:06.320 You can measure it.

04:09:07.440 It doesn't change in a few seconds or minutes.

04:09:10.060 It's reflective of your lifestyle.

04:09:12.380 So your report card really goes to how much of this fat do you have inside this disease?

04:09:17.940 Let's not just call it fat.

04:09:19.720 The better way is to be scientific and educated about this.

04:09:23.560 Not all fat is the same.

04:09:25.340 There's unbelievably dangerous fat, disease fat, like visceral fat and heart fat and fat

04:09:32.100 in your muscles.

04:09:33.260 And there's unbelievably beneficial fat, like superficial subcutaneous fat.

04:09:39.580 And by golly, Sean O'Meara wants the people to know that there is a big difference.

04:09:44.920 And to understand those two differences, that's your report card.

04:09:49.380 I'm a health optimizing physician.

04:09:51.720 That's my specialty.

04:09:53.020 I've left working in emergency medicine.

04:09:55.800 I work with people that want to look better and perform better and function better.

04:10:00.240 And I could follow any metric in the world, but I don't follow LDI and cholesterol.

04:10:06.160 I follow these disease processes because nothing in my seven years of research and since I've

04:10:11.740 been doing now for 13 years have i found that's more valuable for human being to work on to improve

04:10:19.200 how they look how they perform how they live than getting rid of this disease and so it's high time

04:10:26.920 that it gets added back or gets added into the curriculums of medical schools and by the way

04:10:32.500 the curriculums of medical schools uh in america are followed around the world i mean we have

04:10:39.780 carried uh this this concealment of this disease process to all the medical schools around the

04:10:47.200 country no other country it's not like you go to you know physicians in india or bangladesh

04:10:52.960 or qatar know anything about visceral they don't it's all it's like i'm having that thought again

04:10:59.460 somebody wake me up from this nightmare nobody knows about this unless they actually are

04:11:04.280 researchers and start studying it and the big difference is we didn't just research it

04:11:09.780 we didn't just see how bad it was we figured out how to get rid of it and then i was like surprise

04:11:16.240 in my life people got really good looking and they performed better i just thought they would

04:11:21.580 get healthy how naive i was i just thought they you know would lose you're making america hot

04:11:26.720 again yes i mean i even went to a modeling agency and they said you know i said you know if your

04:11:33.120 your models find out about visceral fats though their careers will last longer and it's terrible 0.83

04:11:39.180 They held up a stack of resumes, this thing, and said, well, when they don't look good, we got all these new girls that are coming in to replace them.

04:11:47.420 I was so sad.

04:11:48.260 I'm looking forward to watching Bobby Kennedy and J.D. Vance and Howard Lutnick get hotter.

04:11:52.900 Yeah.

04:11:54.580 And, you know, they are becoming healthier looking.

04:11:58.120 Yeah.

04:11:58.540 And because they're becoming healthier looking, they're becoming more better performing and better influencers.

04:12:05.380 So I'll say this.

04:12:07.320 So you and I have talked about this.

04:12:09.180 my audience knows my dad died of a heart attack at age 45 in 1985. So I've lived my whole life

04:12:17.120 since age 15, worried about having a heart attack young. And it's scary to me to do anything that's

04:12:23.620 going to jack up my LDL just because of the conventional wisdom I've been raised on.

04:12:27.780 All the doctors say the one thing, but now more and more functional medicine doctors are saying

04:12:32.620 we have put way too much emphasis on that number of LDL. And there's even a split. I know Peter

04:12:37.420 Tia worries about LDL, but like my hormones doctor doesn't worry about it at all. She's

04:12:42.360 much more worried about protecting my brain with my hormones and cholesterol protects your brains 0.78

04:12:46.180 and so on. So it's just, there's a split. So you and I talked about my own comfort level

04:12:52.500 is to try it. I actually, I am in the midst of trying it and plan to continue. And then

04:12:59.080 some measure of months in, maybe three months we said, possibly I'll go back to my cardiologist

04:13:04.480 who I see every year for a stress test and a scan of my arteries so he can see what the fatty

04:13:09.320 buildup is on the walls and I will see where it is. So I like, for me, that's good because then

04:13:14.940 I'll be able to look inside. We'll do the MRI again and we'll see if the visceral fat has gone

04:13:19.500 down. But I'll also take a peek inside with a cardiologist just to make sure nothing catastrophic

04:13:25.060 is happening and people should consider that if they want to try this because both measurements

04:13:30.080 would be good to have absolutely so maybe it would be good to actually show a picture of this

04:13:35.020 this heart fat for people to actually see so maybe i can put it in the camera get a better view but

04:13:40.960 this uh this image and i think uh your editors will put these images in show three different

04:13:49.220 hearts and you can see that the top image is from a 28 year old that died from a motor vehicle

04:13:55.220 accident okay good and uh and then the middle image shows a picture of somebody who's uh i think

04:14:01.340 38 who um died from a mild from a heart attack and you can see half their heart is covered with

04:14:08.160 fat the image on the top is barely has any fat around it at all where's the fat on the second

04:14:14.040 heart there in the the yellow so all that yellow is fat around versus the top image they have just

04:14:20.700 It's a little bit of fat around the arteries.

04:14:22.620 Oh, for the listening audience,

04:14:23.580 the entire front of the heart is in yellow.

04:14:26.620 Yes.

04:14:27.720 It's covered in fat.

04:14:28.720 Yes, and the bottom image-

04:14:30.680 Oh, what's the bottom image?

04:14:31.840 There's not a single area on the heart.

04:14:33.820 The bottom image looks like a beef wellington.

04:14:36.000 Yes.

04:14:36.560 Fat in the heart.

04:14:38.140 And the scary thing is, Megan,

04:14:39.960 I haven't had a single 50-year-old or older

04:14:43.560 ever come to me that didn't have an image

04:14:46.160 like the bottom one.

04:14:47.400 And nobody knows this is going on.

04:14:49.640 So how do you think your heart can function

04:14:52.000 with all that inflammatory fat surrounding it?

04:14:55.300 So what I do is I image that fat and I show people-

04:14:59.160 Losing fat on your body through a diet or exercise

04:15:02.380 does not mean the reduction of visceral fat?

04:15:05.820 No.

04:15:06.320 So you said it best in the beginning.

04:15:08.640 It's, we're not talking about,

04:15:10.340 I don't promote just losing weight.

04:15:12.420 I promote losing visceral fat

04:15:14.680 or what I like to say, lose disease.

04:15:16.880 You don't want to lose weight.

04:15:17.980 Yeah, I don't need to lose weight.

04:15:19.300 They lose disease.

04:15:20.840 Yeah.

04:15:21.160 And what we find out is when people lose weight

04:15:24.140 and they lose disease,

04:15:26.880 that they actually put on healthier tissues.

04:15:29.780 So look at this 87-year-old guy.

04:15:32.800 Maybe the screenshot,

04:15:33.940 they can take another screenshot of that.

04:15:36.760 And maybe I have to move the...

04:15:38.520 We'll improve it on the post-game.

04:15:40.340 But in the image,

04:15:43.120 visceral fat shows up as white in the bottom.

04:15:46.340 And so his atom is pushing up,

04:15:48.260 this 87 year old man uh his belly is bulging yep and then to his right you see how a flat his

04:15:54.620 abdomen got he lost so much visceral fat he no longer had a dad bod laying down on the table

04:16:00.200 when he's going the mri he's got now has a flat abdomen but the dark structures that are around

04:16:06.200 his his side right here are the oblique muscles the uh on the side image right there is the

04:16:13.300 oblique muscles. And so his oblique muscles got bigger, 40%. He's 87 years old. He didn't take

04:16:21.860 testosterone. He didn't take peptides. He didn't take stem cells. He didn't take any hormones at

04:16:27.700 all. He built muscle and got rid of disease and he's 87 years old. So what I like to tell people

04:16:34.760 is our ancestors, you talked about, you're going to lead the hunt. You use that expression.

04:16:40.060 Our ancestors in the past, the oldest women and the oldest men, the very best, led the hunt.

04:16:47.220 They led the fight.

04:16:48.580 They led the tribe because they had two things, gray hair, which is connoted for wisdom and experience.

04:16:56.860 Megyn Kelly today knows way more than Megyn Kelly when she was 20. 0.72

04:17:01.860 That's for sure.

04:17:02.500 And so that's why you lead this show and you lead so many Americans because of that experience.

04:17:07.680 The future of professional sports will be football players in the NFL who are in their 50s and 60s will be the highest paid because we're going to get rid of disease that they don't know about right now and they'll actually perform better.

04:17:25.560 So a really cool kind of a story is take a look at this football player who just came to me this past week.

04:17:35.300 He has a chronic disease that is Parkinson's, and he's very open about his Parkinson's.

04:17:43.840 Oh, I know who this is.

04:17:45.040 So this is Brett Favre, and he gave me permission to share.

04:17:48.600 I don't talk about my clients.

04:17:50.900 Everybody loves Brett.

04:17:52.700 The sweetest guy.

04:17:53.620 Brett is attacking his Parkinson's, and now he's attacking it by trying out, eliminating visceral fat.

04:18:00.980 All those 6,000 people, I didn't have any Parkinson's.

04:18:03.980 So I went on the internet a couple weeks ago to my ex-community, and I said, does anybody know Brett Favre?

04:18:11.800 And all my community reached out.

04:18:14.360 Some of them knew them, and they went to Brett.

04:18:17.220 And so Brett came to me, and he's working on getting rid of his Parkinson's by eliminating his visceral fat.

04:18:23.620 and optimizing his microbiome.

04:18:25.980 And just so people know, like I was,

04:18:27.880 there's a gal, Jordan Peterson's daughter,

04:18:30.180 Michaela Peterson.

04:18:31.260 She has been all over YouTube for the past several years

04:18:34.080 talking about how in her case,

04:18:36.160 I think she said she had bipolar

04:18:37.680 and she also had an autoimmune disease

04:18:41.060 and some other problems.

04:18:42.720 And she seems very sensitive to things like molds

04:18:45.420 and certain foods and so on.

04:18:47.520 Long story short, she wound up going beef only,

04:18:52.140 beef only.

04:18:52.860 That's like an elimination diet, and she stayed on it for, I think, eight years.

04:18:57.440 Now, that's not your diet or your way of eating, but it's like a sister in a way,

04:19:01.960 and she eliminated all of those problems.

04:19:05.660 She got rid of bipolar by eating just meat, and her autoimmune issues by eating just meat.

04:19:13.600 So it's like, it is pretty remarkable, because some people may be thinking,

04:19:16.940 you can't cure Parkinson's with diet, but I'm not sure we know that's true.

04:19:22.180 Yeah, so what it turns out, I think, and there was a study that just came out this week supporting that, that microbes inside our gastrointestinal tract, which amount to our microbiome, this collection of species of microbes, again, not well taught in medical school, but at least is addressed, and it's emerging a lot more.

04:19:42.400 These microbes have been found to be associated with Parkinson's, and moreover, there was a study that just came out about four months ago where they were doing fecal microbiota transplants, where they take some feces from super healthy humans, transplant it into people that had Parkinson's, and it was reversing their motor deficits.

04:20:04.180 That means how they move, how they walk, their capacity for motor movement of their muscles.

04:20:10.240 So Parkinson's is a disease that has a very strong impact.

04:20:15.260 But it's not just Parkinson's.

04:20:17.440 The microbiome is ultimately going to play an enormous role that we're going to find out in many areas of chronic disease, disease that afflicts human beings.

04:20:28.680 That makes so much sense if you look back to what we've been doing to ourselves with the processed food.

04:20:32.420 Right.

04:20:32.740 And also the over-prescription of antibiotics, where we just absolutely destroy our microbiome.

04:20:38.420 Yes.

04:20:38.900 And then go along our merry way without thinking much about it.

04:20:41.280 Maybe take a probiotic, that's it.

04:20:43.320 But we're not actively building up the variety of good bugs that your diet, with the ferments in particular, will provide.

04:20:50.480 Exactly.

04:20:51.240 So to your point about the carnivore diet, which Michaela Peterson promotes and does, 0.99

04:20:58.340 Her version is the lion diet, just eating meat and salt. 0.67

04:21:02.760 I think she was eating specifically ruminant meat like lamb.

04:21:05.380 Yes, yes.

04:21:06.040 And so-

04:21:06.940 What's ruminant?

04:21:08.440 Ruminant means animals with ruments.

04:21:12.200 And that's really interesting because they have a special type of,

04:21:15.680 you can think of a specialized stomach that they eat vegetation and they ferment it.

04:21:21.180 Oh.

04:21:21.480 So fermenting vegetables, unlike like chickens and swine, pork, they don't have rumens.

04:21:30.100 So this fermentation takes place and fermentation is going to be.

04:21:36.160 You love fermentation.

04:21:37.620 I do.

04:21:38.220 I mean, I love Secretary Kennedy because he put in our national guidelines.

04:21:43.220 God bless this man.

04:21:44.980 I don't know of a politician that did something more important than Secretary Kennedy.

04:21:50.840 Putting in fermented foods, recommending it to Americans, and also to emphasize the microbiome.

04:21:57.740 These are going to have enormous contributions to our country if Americans adopt this and listen to this great leader.

04:22:07.380 Wait, I completely agree.

04:22:09.000 Love him.

04:22:09.760 But you are going to make the point Michaela Peterson is doing the lion diet, so she's with ruminant meat and salt.

04:22:15.840 That's not this diet, though, because you allow more than ruminant meat.

04:22:19.740 No. So ruminant meat, this red meat, does help because it's eliminating processed foods.

04:22:27.840 So you don't eat any processed foods and also vegetables. So what we're finding out,

04:22:33.640 now hold on, everybody's going to get upset at me, particularly plant-based. I take care of

04:22:38.520 people that are vegans, okay? And I get them well. But there are certain nutrients and certain

04:22:45.520 elements inside plants that I would describe as microtoxins, okay? They're just small little

04:22:52.040 things like lectins and oxalates and phthalates and saponins, and we're learning more about them

04:22:57.640 all the time. So there is anecdotally, people that go on the carnivore diet, like you said,

04:23:04.120 are eliminating autoimmune disorders, not in mass, not everybody does it, but enough people

04:23:10.440 to create what we call a signal.

04:23:12.920 A signal is something that has some sort of effect,

04:23:17.100 either good or bad.

04:23:18.580 So there is a positive signal we see

04:23:21.100 when vegetables are cut back and there's more red meat,

04:23:24.960 but you wanna eat the healthiest form of red meat possible.

04:23:28.660 But I advocate meat and microbes,

04:23:31.680 like you talked about in the beginning,

04:23:33.160 I call it the living diet,

04:23:35.060 because when you add in fermented foods to your diet,

04:23:39.160 You're actually eating extraordinarily different than you've ever eaten in your lifetime.

04:23:45.880 You're now eating food that's alive with these living microbes.

04:23:49.940 And I want America to know, stop thinking that germs are always bad.

04:23:56.760 The reason you have obesity and you're overweight is you have an untreated infection inside of you.

04:24:04.860 You have microbes inside you, ladies and gentlemen, that is causing you to crave ice cream and cookies.

04:24:12.980 That's not you.

04:24:14.280 You don't lack willpower. 0.51

04:24:15.680 You're infected.

04:24:17.240 And big pharma knows that this works, but they are not going to treat the underlying infection because, you know,

04:24:24.180 a Zempic and GLP meds are making a ton of money out there.

04:24:27.560 But as soon as you stop taking it, every study shows that obesity returns, weight gain, disease gain, let's call it for what it is.

04:24:36.200 It's not just weight.

04:24:37.040 You're not putting back on muscle.

04:24:38.680 In fact, you put on disease when you stop those medicines.

04:24:42.280 You return to a greater level of disease, it looks like, than where you were when you started.

04:24:47.320 And so this disease process begins because they never treated the underlying infection.

04:24:52.580 If you want to get better, start eating fermented foods, learn about the microbiome, like Secretary Kennedy said, and get these fermented foods into your diet, eat them together with the food you eat.

04:25:07.460 Secretary Kennedy goes to meetings and presentations and talks about co-mastication of fermented foods together with meat.

04:25:15.660 Meaning you're chewing them together.

04:25:17.780 That's one thing I didn't realize just in reading up about the diet.

04:25:20.860 you're supposed to put this grass-fed and grass-finished, we'll get into that, beef in

04:25:27.460 your mouth at the same time as the ferment, and you eat them together. If you look at Sean's

04:25:32.960 average plate, the way he eats, it's like, and I think the New York Magazine described it as

04:25:38.580 dropping a steak in the middle of an artist's palate. And I think that's a good description,

04:25:42.880 actually, because you've got the beef in the middle, and then all around the beef, you've got

04:25:46.940 not just one ferment. It's not like a dab of sauerkraut. It's like dab of sauerkraut, dab of

04:25:52.340 kimchi, dab of fermented beets, a dab of kefir, kefir, whatever you say that, a dab of yogurt.

04:25:59.740 And you want us to cut off the beef, a piece of it, and dunk it in several of those.

04:26:06.980 Correct.

04:26:07.320 And then eat them together simultaneously, each bite.

04:26:10.880 When we study the microbiome, one of the attributes and characteristics of a healthy

04:26:15.680 microbiome, which means the person, the host is healthier, is alpha diversity and beta diversity.

04:26:21.760 So they have a greater variety of species of microbes inside of them. And those species of

04:26:29.600 microbes, when they're more diverse, empower the human to have better resources. So these microbes

04:26:37.020 improve your immunity. They help you fight disease. They create peptides and signals that

04:26:43.460 improve your level of health and your functioning and your performance so really it's something that

04:26:49.200 the average consumer needs to find out about but you want to strengthen your diversity of your

04:26:54.680 microbiome by eating a variety like one of the worst things you can do army is very um it's it's

04:27:00.920 a very uh elementary form of uh approaching the microbiome and fermented foods it's just eat one

04:27:07.640 brand of sauerkraut one little jar you want to eat about in my refrigerator i have about 20 to 30

04:27:14.900 different varieties of fermented foods and i'm always adding to them and when i travel

04:27:20.860 and i go to different areas like i did up here i get the local ferments in this area because

04:27:27.380 we are maybe professionals you're you're a journalist i'm a physician but biologically

04:27:36.040 were all hunter gatherers and so we would roam following migratory patterns of animals and when

04:27:42.600 we roamed we would collect the microbes in that area when we drank the water from the streams

04:27:48.160 rivers and lakes 50 000 years ago and when we hunted those animals the the microbes from that

04:27:55.140 animal literally were transferred to us in two ways we would process that meat field dressing

04:28:03.120 and there was no disinfectant, Megan.

04:28:05.540 We didn't have sterilized USDA-inspected facilities

04:28:10.520 where meat was processed.

04:28:13.500 The microbes from the fur of the animal

04:28:15.760 and the gut of that animal were transferred to the meat.

04:28:19.340 We would eat it and it would empower us.

04:28:22.500 And our ancestors were so vigilant and so observant,

04:28:27.220 like my coroner friend, Dr. Rosales,

04:28:30.560 who picked up, you know, this visceral fat inside people cause disease.

04:28:34.640 Our ancestors picked up that the healthiest bison made us healthier and better performing.

04:28:42.140 And when you took that skin off that animal and you put it into another human being to wear his clothing, they got better.

04:28:49.840 But if you hunted like a lame animal, an animal that was like a downer or something, you know, like predators hunt, whatever's easy, the old and the lame.

04:28:58.640 We have cortex.

04:29:00.500 We have higher levels of thinking.

04:29:02.620 We can learn patterns.

04:29:04.240 So we saw that the most majestic animals in a herd conferred through the skin made humans better.

04:29:11.940 Or if you hunted the lower ones, it made you worse.

04:29:15.720 Our ancestors could pick up on that.

04:29:18.000 And that's why adornment became popular, I think, and to this day.

04:29:23.600 people would pay attention to clothes because biologically we would see this really impressive 0.98

04:29:30.080 animal fur and say, oh my God, she must be a mighty hunter. Look at that skin animal fur that 1.00

04:29:39.620 she wears on her clothing, or she must be very important to somebody who conferred that majestic

04:29:48.160 animal skin to her and so we had this legacy of adornment but today it's very different you see 0.98

04:29:54.520 you can go buy that and you could you could be a you know i hate to use this term a loser and you 0.66

04:30:00.240 could go buy you know fancy clothes and you think you're better made by your clothes in the old days

04:30:05.960 it literally made you better and it was a sign of accomplishment but today we've lost that but

04:30:11.980 you so but so you're you started this by saying you go when you travel and you get the ferments

04:30:16.100 from the local towns, because the more wide and variety you can introduce, the better when it

04:30:23.300 comes to the ferments. But before we get to the specifics of the diet, and I got ahead of us,

04:30:29.680 I want to talk about the bare minimum, because I was reading up on you in addition to our

04:30:35.120 interviews and our behind the scenes talks. And it seems like the number one thing,

04:30:40.060 If you want to do like the mini, mini Sean O'Mara, you would eliminate every processed

04:30:46.920 food from your life.

04:30:48.140 I would.

04:30:48.740 That is not negotiable.

04:30:50.040 I would.

04:30:50.700 You're going to do the baby Sean.

04:30:52.200 And I'm so glad you asked that question.

04:30:54.020 So if you're listening today and you're wondering, how do I get started?

04:30:57.120 We'll take a look at this one particular study we did for the National Science Foundation.

04:31:02.320 So this is the first time in the history of humanity this was done.

04:31:08.040 And it's the only time in the history of manning this was done.

04:31:11.980 And see the red?

04:31:13.120 It all goes away in 35 weeks substantially.

04:31:17.940 And the dark muscles grew.

04:31:21.300 So they lost visceral fat.

04:31:23.200 They grew muscle in 35 weeks.

04:31:26.100 And are you ready for this?

04:31:27.480 The only thing they did was they cut out processed foods.

04:31:30.940 Wow.

04:31:31.300 They didn't add in anything else.

04:31:33.420 They didn't even add in fermented foods.

04:31:35.320 It was one man who was, he was a 70 year old man who was a CEO of a company and he did

04:31:42.460 not exercise ready for this one minute.

04:31:45.500 All he did was cut out processed foods and got rid of a ton of visceral fat.

04:31:49.760 So right now millions of people are going to see this and there will be a few people

04:31:54.120 in the processed food industry that are going to get so mad that this, the cat is out of

04:31:59.860 the bag right now for millions of people to realize how destructive processed foods are.

04:32:05.040 and just how much you improve

04:32:07.160 when you eliminate processed foods.

04:32:09.020 So that's a mini Dr. Sean dot.

04:32:10.540 So if you are sitting out there and you're saying,

04:32:11.640 I cannot eat like this.

04:32:13.520 I can't just do beef and ferments for the rest of my life.

04:32:16.360 You can get rid of processed food.

04:32:21.180 Just that's the baby Sean O'Mara.

04:32:22.620 It is.

04:32:23.020 However, there is a question about what is processed food?

04:32:26.580 I mean, I think we all know that like,

04:32:28.380 you know, not to pick on Nabisco,

04:32:30.140 but like a box of anything from Nabisco

04:32:31.780 would be a processed food item.

04:32:33.360 but I think there's like some sneaky processed foods.

04:32:36.540 We're going to pick it up.

04:32:37.600 I'm going to take a quick break.

04:32:38.600 We're going to pick it up there

04:32:39.440 and we're going to get into the specifics

04:32:40.820 of how we're eating, how we're exercising

04:32:43.320 and the other tips for taking yourself next level.

04:32:47.960 When we come back, more with Dr. Sean

04:32:50.180 right after this, don't go away.

04:32:53.620 I'm Megan Kelly.

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04:33:58.360 Dr. Sean O'Meara is back with me.

04:34:03.960 He's the author of Growing Better, Not Older.

04:34:07.180 How to biologically optimize your body, improve your appearance, and crush your goals by targeting visceral fat.

04:34:15.840 Okay, so we were talking about what is a processed food?

04:34:18.980 It's not, they always say just avoid like the middle of the grocery store and anything that's in like a box or that you could, that could live on your counter.

04:34:27.720 not live, but like stay on your counter for two weeks

04:34:29.860 without, you know, spoiling.

04:34:31.980 But it's more, there's some sneaky processed foods, I think.

04:34:34.820 Yeah, there are.

04:34:35.700 And you know, the simplest guidance I give to people

04:34:38.480 is if it has a label, it's probably gonna be processed.

04:34:43.680 When it needs ingredients and ingredient lists,

04:34:46.820 it's very likely that it's been processed a little bit.

04:34:50.020 So sometimes even, you know, taking meat

04:34:52.960 and changing its form or vegetables exposes it to air and oxidation

04:34:58.940 and helps degrade the process and make it more inflammatory.

04:35:03.260 So the safest thing to eat is chunks of vegetables and chunks of meat.

04:35:07.580 And so the other thing I tell my clients that work with me

04:35:11.580 is calories don't matter as much in numbers as much as the quality of the calories.

04:35:17.800 So a calorie isn't a calorie.

04:35:19.940 The quality of calories matters more than the quantity of it.

04:35:23.460 Well, like you said, ice cream is processed.

04:35:26.240 That's considered a processed food?

04:35:28.080 It is, because oftentimes they will add things in like sugars, and sometimes they'll leave them-

04:35:35.780 Xantham gum.

04:35:36.360 Yeah, these fillers and stabilizers, emulsifiers to make them more palatable tasting.

04:35:43.500 But really, you'd be better off making your own homemade ice cream.

04:35:47.720 I'm not an advocate for sugar.

04:35:50.500 You know, sugar, we notice that people eliminate this fat, visceral fat disease in their abdomens

04:35:56.520 around the heart the fastest when they cut out carbohydrates and then just eat fat and

04:36:01.620 protein.

04:36:02.460 So sugars, carbohydrates attract species of microbes that preferentially put down fat,

04:36:09.860 fatty disease around your heart and your abdomen rather than your subcutaneous skin where you

04:36:15.780 should be storing that fat.

04:36:16.840 And I said to you, well, I really like my ice cream.

04:36:19.700 It's a bad vice.

04:36:20.960 I have it a lot.

04:36:22.340 I just have a little bit at a time,

04:36:23.940 but I have it like every other night.

04:36:26.440 And my dear friend, Nancy, told me that needs to stop.

04:36:29.680 And then you came into my life and told me,

04:36:31.860 I'm not gonna want it.

04:36:34.040 That's right.

04:36:34.520 So that's actually comforting.

04:36:36.240 It's not that I'm gonna be longing for it and missing it.

04:36:40.420 The microbiome is gonna change

04:36:42.260 to where the compulsion is not there.

04:36:44.760 Yeah. You'll even get a sick feeling. I mean, I feel so sad and I get nauseated

04:36:50.360 seeing people eating processed foods and ice cream, even when it's pretty ostensibly

04:36:56.600 kind of minimally processed. My microbiome is geared towards meat, seafood, and fermented foods.

04:37:04.300 And now it gives you almost like a sense of revulsion when you see the foods that are not

04:37:08.660 good for you. Yes. Like when you see the unattractive cave woman. Yes. You know she

04:37:14.640 was not picking the healthiest bison. But the aversion goes both ways. So sometimes people

04:37:21.300 will see fermented foods and they'll be repulsed by fermented foods. But it's the microbes inside

04:37:27.940 of them that are fighting for their survival and tell the host, don't eat that fermented food. So

04:37:33.880 So it's the sight, the smell, and the taste.

04:37:37.320 So these microbes are wired into our central nervous system.

04:37:41.460 And you would fight like Hades.

04:37:43.240 I always tell people, if I came across that table, put my hands around your neck, and started choking, you'd become a wild woman and fight like crazy for your life.

04:37:52.400 The same thing are these microbes inside of you.

04:37:54.960 When they see something that is threatening them, like their host is about to eat fermented foods, they make them hate them.

04:38:00.880 So I tell my clients that have an aversion where they feel, you know, this repulsion to fermented foods, to take a little butter knife, dip it in a little bit of kimchi juice, a little of the juice around the fermented vegetables, put it in a glass of non-chlorinated water, just one little drop.

04:38:19.440 They won't see it.

04:38:20.600 They won't taste it.

04:38:21.560 They won't smell it.

04:38:22.580 Then they drink that water.

04:38:23.900 And when they drink it, they just drink millions of these beneficial microbes.

04:38:28.920 they're going to start living inside them go down and kick the fannies of those bad microbes inside 0.66

04:38:35.640 the gut of those person that was previously hated she is less unattractive less offensive 0.95

04:38:40.780 less repulsive and slowly over a period of time like i i rarely tell this story but i remember

04:38:48.740 my mother taught me to make fudge when i was four years old with a candy thermometer

04:38:53.140 you know on a stove i don't know how i never was scalded as a four-year-old but my mom liked the

04:38:58.260 fudge. So I made her fudge and made her coffee. Those were her tictions. And so I ate all this

04:39:02.740 fudge, but I became really colonized with all these bad pathogenic microbes. And I remember

04:39:10.560 I was this sweet little kid that would listen to Christmas carols about Jesus and I'd be crying.

04:39:16.220 You know, it was this sweet little, adorable little six, seven-year-old, but somebody would

04:39:21.060 get behind me. I could smell kimchi. And I remember, I'm telling you for the first time in my life, 0.81

04:39:27.860 I felt homicidal rage.

04:39:29.860 Oh, wow.

04:39:30.720 I was seven years old, didn't understand it, 0.90

04:39:33.380 but I wanted to kill the man behind me.

04:39:35.460 And it would happen over and over again. 1.00

04:39:37.680 And it would be some Asian or Korean 0.99

04:39:39.500 with kimchi on their breath. 0.98

04:39:41.140 And that's how powerful these microbes are.

04:39:43.540 They're so wired into the host to defend against a threat.

04:39:47.500 Is this part of the reason why most of us

04:39:50.120 find organ meats repulsive?

04:39:53.900 In part because of the nutrient value,

04:39:56.340 but less so because the microbes,

04:39:59.900 because typically organ meat

04:40:01.400 isn't going to have a strong sense

04:40:05.860 of microbial contribution.

04:40:07.480 There won't be living microbes.

04:40:08.460 So those are just genuinely disgusting.

04:40:10.340 Well, but also the metabolites.

04:40:12.680 So there are metabolites

04:40:14.500 that are richer nutrients in that organ meat

04:40:17.360 that will be fertilizer for beneficial microbes, 0.90

04:40:21.180 but also just,

04:40:22.600 and when the beneficial microbes start growing,

04:40:25.560 They outsource, they out-compete the bad ones.

04:40:28.980 So there's a war going on inside of you. 0.99

04:40:30.980 It's an African safari.

04:40:32.980 It's a rainforest in your stomach,

04:40:36.980 but you never think about it.

04:40:38.840 But the balance of that,

04:40:40.320 you want as many healthy microbes in there as possible.

04:40:43.700 Okay, wait, I wanna keep going

04:40:45.160 because I have so many things I need to talk about.

04:40:46.800 In the break, we talked about how your face

04:40:51.580 will and actually can change as a result of this diet.

04:40:56.820 And you talked about the example of your daughter

04:40:59.660 who's also on the plant.

04:41:01.840 She's 25 years old.

04:41:03.240 She works with you.

04:41:04.040 Here's a, this is a different example.

04:41:05.980 Yeah, that's a picture of my-

04:41:07.200 That's you.

04:41:07.780 Yeah, that's how much I changed when I was 48.

04:41:11.540 That was me when I became the researcher

04:41:13.260 for the National Science Foundation.

04:41:14.940 Wow.

04:41:15.300 So my face showed a huge amount.

04:41:18.860 That's before.

04:41:20.160 So how inflamed my face?

04:41:21.860 Oh, sweet and nerdy.

04:41:23.940 But puffy.

04:41:25.040 But I weighed less there.

04:41:26.800 I weighed 165 pounds there in that photograph,

04:41:29.500 but I had more disease and not as much muscle.

04:41:32.420 Today, I weigh closer to 178.

04:41:34.720 I have like no visceral fat disease

04:41:37.660 and my muscles have gotten a lot bigger.

04:41:40.500 And your features have just become much more defined.

04:41:43.760 Yes, and I think this goes back 20,000 years ago.

04:41:47.500 We can't find photographs,

04:41:48.620 But if we could look at men and women 20,000 years ago, they would have lean faces.

04:41:54.520 So we were talking in the break about how when you get older, your nose starts to droop.

04:41:59.420 And like, I don't know, it just seemed to me that it was gravity.

04:42:02.500 And you were saying that's not true.

04:42:04.860 No.

04:42:05.200 You do not have to surrender to that.

04:42:06.680 So people think that they literally get heavy, their noses get bigger because they're older.

04:42:13.160 But here's an example, my own daughter.

04:42:15.320 So my daughter, Riley, when she was 14 years old, is her originally right here, her photograph.

04:42:24.600 And we scanned her and she was filled with visceral fat.

04:42:27.720 And she ended up getting polycystic ovarian syndrome. 1.00

04:42:32.520 And this visceral fat inflamed her face. 1.00

04:42:34.720 And look how much she improved as she got rid of her visceral fat. 1.00

04:42:38.000 That's not plastic surgery. 1.00

04:42:39.540 The nose is remarkably thinner.

04:42:41.620 No hormones, no steroids. 0.88

04:42:42.160 Her nose got smaller. 1.00

04:42:43.760 but we consistently see this in clients. 1.00

04:42:46.680 I tell my female clients, 1.00

04:42:48.400 if you want to be a model and they're older, 1.00

04:42:50.600 absolutely, I'll make you a model.

04:42:52.540 Because when you get rid of health,

04:42:54.740 I mean, you lose your health, you lose your appearance,

04:42:57.520 but nobody in their 50s, 60s, 70s are getting better looking

04:43:01.060 unless they're getting rid of this visceral fat disease.

04:43:03.720 So, and this is a person in his 40s

04:43:06.420 who we know is on the diet.

04:43:08.580 His name is J.D. Vance.

04:43:10.520 and he started it for lent um he was just going to do it for lent and look at this this is from

04:43:17.340 february 28th to march 27th the difference in the vice president's face alone you can see how much

04:43:24.200 less puffy he is indeed i think a lot of women think the puffiness only happens to them but it

04:43:30.700 happens to men too it does it does and you know particularly um politicians who get have a lot of

04:43:37.600 stress. They build up cortisol, which feeds visceral fat inside of them, and it shrinks the

04:43:43.600 fat on the outside. So they tend to have lower amounts of the beneficial superficial subcutaneous

04:43:49.220 fat, and they have higher amounts of the fatty disease around their heart and in their adjuvant

04:43:55.000 and their muscles. And this deteriorates their appearance and the ability to influence. So

04:44:00.920 as you get older, you actually should get more attractive. Like looking at the examples of other

04:44:06.640 politicians many of them have gone on this uh this this diet and improved their appearance

04:44:13.060 as they've gotten rid of visceral fat their faces improve and so because their faces improve

04:44:19.340 um you you actually like the example um that happened to joe biden and uh president trump

04:44:26.620 i like to give now we don't have the benefit of mris to see what happened but this is the election

04:44:31.620 at 2020, and this is 2024. And President Biden looked pretty good. His face was lean. He did

04:44:39.180 well on the debate in 2020. But in 2024, he was abysmal. But look at the accumulation of cortisol,

04:44:45.960 the inflammation in his face, and look at President Trump. His face was more inflamed in 2020.

04:44:51.760 I think one of his sons has gone carnivore and is now eating more healthy and may be influencing

04:44:57.520 his dad. Wow. And look how much he improved. The president's face improved. And look, it reached

04:45:03.680 voters. It reaches influencers. So the future of politicians. Is that the White House doctor over

04:45:09.000 there? It is. I recognize him. So look at the doctors. They had different doctors. So Biden's

04:45:14.500 doctor was this physician and President Trump's was Admiral Jackson, Ronnie Jackson's now a

04:45:20.780 congressman so you know it depends on who's influencing helping your diet you know point

04:45:26.560 yeah and so i tell people you pay attention to your doctor when you go to a doctor and they're

04:45:32.020 so heavy and they're so diseased and they look off and they talk like this and he's gonna lower

04:45:36.780 your cholesterol we're gonna start a statin you know it's like going to a dentist with jacked up

04:45:41.720 messed up teeth or going to a personal trainer who's morbidly obese yes i don't think so yes

04:45:46.700 wait this when you and i were talking about the ice cream one more one more tip for those out

04:45:50.600 there who are like me and have this problem, but no longer. You said to me, you know who else

04:45:56.160 liked his ice cream every night? I said, who? Joe Biden. I was like, OMG, I never thought of it

04:46:03.780 that way. Problem solved. And I'm cured. Good point. Very good point. There's choosing to live

04:46:11.040 well will result. Here's the insight. You want to go to a new level. You think when you eat that

04:46:17.680 ice cream you're eating for yourself you're eating less for yourself and more for the microbiome the

04:46:24.500 community of microbes inside of you and so they drive you to eat that food sick they're evil and

04:46:30.260 you they are they're far more it's a form of intelligence that we don't really understand

04:46:35.600 but there's a mechanism inside a bacteria single cell mechanism called crisper and crisper is

04:46:43.080 is revolutionary. It's way more sophisticated than anything we've ever seen in human development.

04:46:48.980 They can do gene editing. Yes. And so they have this ability to detect a threat,

04:46:53.580 create the solution to the threat, and eliminate the threat. It's a very elegant

04:46:58.800 genetic capability that's in the single cell organisms. And so microbes have really a form

04:47:07.020 of existence that is far beyond what we really understand. So it's high time that America pays

04:47:13.920 attention to their microbiome. You said the same thing about alcohol because, well, I don't drink

04:47:17.560 a ton. I do drink socially. And you were saying same thing, that any Jones for alcohol will go

04:47:24.020 away on the diet because you're going to change the microbiome for this same reason. The bugs

04:47:29.700 will change. I've worked with thousands of people now and they've reported to me. I used to never

04:47:35.060 asked them to to stop drinking alcohol and sometimes i would but now it just happens as

04:47:41.580 they start eating fermented foods and they improve their diet and they do the other things that we

04:47:46.340 have them that they that we have them doing to eliminate disease their health improves so much

04:47:52.080 their microbiome improves so much they lose all attraction for alcohol the healthy human being

04:47:57.480 doesn't drink alcohol doesn't have an attraction for it and so um alcohol is one of those things

04:48:03.900 and other vices.

04:48:05.380 Sometimes I feel like I'm almost a Catholic priest

04:48:08.360 because these clients come back to me,

04:48:09.980 tell me, I didn't tell you this before, father,

04:48:12.940 but I was addicted to gambling.

04:48:15.560 I was addicted to pornography.

04:48:17.420 I was addicted to substance abuse, alcohol, and drugs.

04:48:22.680 And then they have to know,

04:48:24.020 what is it about getting rid of visceral fat

04:48:27.400 and eating these fermented foods

04:48:29.020 that these problems go away?

04:48:31.120 They wanted me to tell them

04:48:33.160 They had been struggling their whole lives.

04:48:36.220 And so, you know, there are probiotics.

04:48:38.240 Lots of effects.

04:48:39.920 Many, many beneficial effects.

04:48:41.700 All right, let's talk about the eating.

04:48:42.920 So, so far, I'll tell the audience what I had for breakfast.

04:48:47.540 I had eggs, a little bit of cheese,

04:48:50.740 but you can't have just any cheese.

04:48:52.060 It's gotta be like smelly cheese, blue cheese.

04:48:55.480 Old world cheese.

04:48:56.500 Old world, okay.

04:48:58.800 What's the other one?

04:48:59.820 Blue cheese, gorgonzola,

04:49:00.940 and there was a third that we got.

04:49:02.140 Roquefort.

04:49:02.780 Okay. So I had eggs. I had a little bit of cheese. I had a little kefir. And this is yesterday. And I did have like a couple of strips, tiny, not big, but you said, go for it if you want, of steak. I had steak for the night before. So that was my breakfast, which was very hearty. It wasn't like a huge plate, but I had all of those things on it. And I made sure I was chewing comastification, whatever RFKJ says, in every bite.

04:49:29.260 Then for lunch, I had steak with ferments, a bunch of them.

04:49:35.240 And by the way, we have to talk about the fact that when you get your ferments from

04:49:38.300 the grocery store, you have to reach into the back of the display case and try to get

04:49:45.400 the ones that were in the dark because light is not great for your ferment.

04:49:49.080 So reach into the back and then you can keep it in your fridge.

04:49:52.360 But as you pointed out, I'm like, well, the fridge has a light.

04:49:54.420 And you were like, not when it's closed.

04:49:55.840 Hello.

04:49:56.720 Okay.

04:49:57.420 Anyway, so then I had my steak

04:49:59.680 and I had a couple of different ferments on there.

04:50:01.800 And then I basically had the same dinner as I did lunch.

04:50:04.960 So I think that was a basic approach to the diet.

04:50:08.700 You can get fancier

04:50:09.760 and you don't have to stick with just cow.

04:50:12.400 You can do bison, elk, venison, lamb.

04:50:16.340 Correct.

04:50:16.940 And even some fish, though it's not your favorite.

04:50:19.360 I don't eat fish anyway, so it's kind of not a thing.

04:50:21.220 And I recommend like wild-caught seafood.

04:50:23.400 If you're going to do fish, do wild-caught, more natural.

04:50:25.480 And on the beef, not just grass-fed, but if you can find it, grass-finished.

04:50:29.380 Correct.

04:50:29.940 Which means what exactly?

04:50:31.120 Yeah, so grass-fed, grass-finished.

04:50:33.560 And I'll show you a picture because it's very powerful, the difference that this makes when you actually eat something that is grass-fed, grass-finished, you get a higher level of healthier meat.

04:50:46.120 So here's a picture of the difference, a grass-fed, grass-finished steak on one side versus grain-fed.

04:50:54.800 Oh, wow.

04:50:55.100 So you get this marbleization.

04:50:57.460 It's the one that's grass-fed and grass-finished looks like pure red.

04:51:01.840 And the one that isn't has a bunch of the fat marble throughout it.

04:51:06.020 Yes.

04:51:06.800 And so this marbleized meat is not as healthy.

04:51:11.080 And so when you finish, sometimes it's just grass-fed, but they finish it on grain.

04:51:16.000 So you really want to be eating meat that's grass-fed, grass-finished with less marbleization.

04:51:21.440 And the impetus behind us, the reason why we learned this, and I didn't know this, they didn't teach us this in medical school, was really this photograph right here that shows the connection how this happens in human beings.

04:51:36.160 So look at these two abdominal scans side by side next to them.

04:51:41.620 We have the legs of the humans that correlate with their abdominal scan.

04:51:47.940 And you can see on the image on the left, they have a lot more visceral fat.

04:51:51.880 And in the image on the right, below it, they have less visceral fat.

04:51:56.920 But their legs to the side show different degrees of marbleization in their muscles.

04:52:03.120 So the image on the bottom is from Olympic sprinter, correct.

04:52:07.620 And look at those big, gorgeous muscles,

04:52:10.760 very little visceral fat inside their abdomen

04:52:13.240 and their legs are very lean.

04:52:15.480 But the guy in the top looks like,

04:52:17.340 I call him human wagyu.

04:52:19.020 He has so much marbleization of his muscles.

04:52:22.120 And ladies and gentlemen, if you follow Megan,

04:52:25.480 the reason you need a walker and a cane and a wheelchair

04:52:29.840 is not because you're old,

04:52:32.440 is because this white stuff forms in your legs

04:52:35.560 and keeps you from supporting yourself anymore.

04:52:39.640 That's it.

04:52:41.500 That's it, America. 1.00

04:52:43.240 No other reason you need a wheelchair 1.00

04:52:46.340 and you're going to need a wheelchair 1.00

04:52:48.720 and eventually your muscles be so filled with fat 0.97

04:52:51.500 you'll fall over in a wheelchair

04:52:52.680 and then you're in a bed for the rest of your life 0.99

04:52:55.060 until you die.

04:52:56.040 Unless you find out about this disease going inside of you. 0.99

04:53:00.420 It's that important.

04:53:01.560 so it's huge that's why i have people eating grass-fed grass-finished beef so that and i

04:53:07.440 promote many different you're allowed to have to do that you're allowed to have eggs and with that

04:53:13.300 was one thing i didn't ask you with yolks like are we going for it yes we are not doing yes 0.98

04:53:17.760 cholesterol thing anymore because like no most people look at that and say holy shit you'll be 0.93

04:53:22.120 dead by noon yeah old science so absolutely whole eggs are great and uh the healthier the chickens

04:53:28.980 the healthier the eggs so ideally you should buy eggs if you can uh from a farmer that has them

04:53:36.080 out pastured uh where they're out eating bugs bugs and less not grains uh poultry in the wild

04:53:44.120 fowl game fowl they're not out eating grain they're out eating bugs and so you want to eat

04:53:50.280 an animal that eats a natural diet and so in between animals in the wild are domesticated

04:53:56.340 animals like chicken, pork, and beef. But to the extent that it's more natural, it's more healthier

04:54:03.780 for you. So you want to eat grass-fed, grass-finished in the room, and that's beef and bison.

04:54:08.600 And the chickens, you want to eat ones that are pastured.

04:54:11.240 What's the thinking? But we're not eating chickens. You mean the eggs.

04:54:13.700 Yeah.

04:54:14.260 What's the thinking behind the cheese, like the stinky cheese?

04:54:18.380 Yeah. So the thinking is dairy. I don't recommend dairy unless it's fermented.

04:54:24.300 When you, fermentation is the only processing that I can think of as a physician and a scientist

04:54:31.800 and a researcher that actually improves the form of food.

04:54:36.020 And so when you ferment dairy, you're actually improving.

04:54:39.940 You're increasing the nutrient value and you're adding to the microbial value, these

04:54:44.020 living microbes.

04:54:45.300 And the ones that are more old world and more stinkier and smellier like blue cheeses and

04:54:51.300 roqueforts and gargonzolas have higher levels of colony forming units and metabolites these little

04:54:59.200 tiny signals these little tiny peptides that are now the darling of big pharma and you see it just

04:55:06.040 blowing up all over the internet these peptides well they already exist in nature and so you can

04:55:12.440 see that people that eat uh traditionally and that's how we learn to co-masculate too as

04:55:18.880 traditional people eat fermented foods with meat they chew them together like in south korea you

04:55:24.600 would never eat a piece of meat without chewing it with kimchi and the korean women the ajimas the 0.93

04:55:29.840 older women that are in restaurants will come up and yell at you in korean if you just eat the meat 1.00

04:55:35.060 and don't eat the kimchi they will castigate you in public over this because it's a tradition 0.99

04:55:40.260 inculcated within their society so cheese fermented is a tradition way of taking dairy

04:55:47.140 and improving it.

04:55:49.000 And when you-

04:55:49.760 So it's a ferment.

04:55:50.580 It's a ferment.

04:55:51.460 Okay.

04:55:51.820 It's through fermentation that milk,

04:55:54.320 specifically the lactose, the milk sugar,

04:55:56.720 gets reduced, gets eliminated.

04:55:59.040 It's changed into lactate.

04:56:03.020 And actually through this chemical biological process,

04:56:05.880 a better way of describing through biological influence

04:56:08.120 of these beneficial microbes that are added to the vat of dairy,

04:56:13.080 and it's in a big cheese wheel.

04:56:15.080 And then when it's cut into triangles, that's your, when we were shopping, I told you to buy the triangular type, that's your cue that it's really old world processing.

04:56:26.120 It's not like processed ricotta or, you know, cottage cheese that's really not familiar.

04:56:30.400 We were joking about our Velveeta.

04:56:32.040 Yeah.

04:56:32.300 No offense, Velveeta.

04:56:33.580 You served me well for a number of middle school years.

04:56:36.440 Here, for the listening audience, we're going to put on the board now, and you should just check this out.

04:56:41.300 It's about an hour and 20 minutes into the show.

04:56:43.940 So the purchases we made at Whole Foods,

04:56:48.060 but you don't have to go to Whole Foods.

04:56:49.500 You can probably do it at any other

04:56:50.900 sort of more alternative grocery store.

04:56:53.500 But Sean and I went together, which was very helpful.

04:56:56.180 And I photographed here

04:56:57.280 and just check out the show on YouTube.

04:56:58.900 But all the things that we bought,

04:57:01.640 including the butter, which is over there on the right,

04:57:04.800 it's like a little French butter that Sean likes.

04:57:07.600 And he uses that butter, man,

04:57:09.320 because I said, what do I cook the beef in?

04:57:10.700 He said, well, either just on the grill and with nothing

04:57:12.660 or you just, or you can cook it in butter.

04:57:17.380 And at the end, you put some butter on top of it.

04:57:19.400 You are not afraid of the butter.

04:57:20.560 No, I'm not.

04:57:20.980 This butter is delicious.

04:57:22.400 I don't know what this is,

04:57:23.360 but I've had it now for two days in a row.

04:57:24.880 And it's freaking heavenly.

04:57:27.520 It's crazy.

04:57:28.840 So we took a pic,

04:57:29.780 and then I took a picture back at my house

04:57:31.240 more clearly of the labels.

04:57:32.520 And I'll show you those too.

04:57:33.580 So that if you just want to copy what I did,

04:57:35.720 you know, it's just easier.

04:57:36.880 Yeah.

04:57:37.300 So it really is an important thing.

04:57:39.200 You need to get around somebody

04:57:40.420 who knows how to eat healthy

04:57:41.520 and learn how to shop in stores

04:57:44.080 because traditionally we just go in and grab anything.

04:57:47.520 But you want to be mindful.

04:57:48.900 On the yogurts too.

04:57:49.860 There's a picture of the yogurt there that you liked.

04:57:52.400 And fermented dairy.

04:57:53.400 And you were not pro-Greek.

04:57:55.380 No.

04:57:56.080 I was shocked to learn that.

04:57:57.300 No, it's a form of processing.

04:57:59.340 So they're eliminating the beneficial microbes

04:58:02.060 and the tart liquid form.

04:58:04.980 If you separate it, it makes the yogurt more creamy.

04:58:09.080 And then people are buying it,

04:58:10.100 but you're losing the metabolites and the microbes

04:58:13.100 when you're doing that.

04:58:14.560 And so the consumer is getting ripped off from that.

04:58:17.800 And so it appeals to the palate.

04:58:20.360 So that's a good example of how processing,

04:58:24.360 kind of semi-processed.

04:58:25.620 The yogurt you like is on our little picture that I posted here.

04:58:29.320 So that picture shows that.

04:58:31.660 But I make the point that our ancestors

04:58:34.880 didn't just hunt any bison.

04:58:37.000 They were very selective about it.

04:58:38.820 And you need to be that intentional, Megan, and your audience needs to be intentional about selecting the very best food when they go to a grocery store.

04:58:47.860 Don't just get the most tasty one.

04:58:50.620 So there was a process in anthropology called selection pressure.

04:58:55.860 It was an influence on our species.

04:58:58.200 It's still present in the wild that has an animal select the best decision that's going to help them live longer and perform better.

04:59:06.220 It used to be present for homo sapiens.

04:59:09.480 Our existence, our survival and a quality life was dictated on us making better choices.

04:59:15.320 Today, selection pressure has been replaced by what I call selection pleasure.

04:59:21.500 Greek yogurt, creamier things, tastier things, sweeter things.

04:59:26.500 So I tell my clients, the enemy tastes sweet.

04:59:30.860 Now, you might think you're giving up a lot by giving up sweet things.

04:59:34.380 I don't know a human being in the world that enjoys steak and ferments better than Sean O'Meara.

04:59:41.300 It is like better than any trip to Walt Disney World that I've ever had.

04:59:45.480 And it's every single day that I eat is the most unbelievable experience I could have during the day because that food tastes so extraordinarily good.

04:59:56.580 My microbiome is all in on the very best strategies for optimizing.

05:00:01.420 And eventually it happens to my clients over a period of time.

05:00:04.240 So as you do this, you'll get more and more excited about eating.

05:00:08.280 It will taste way better.

05:00:09.660 You will laugh and be appalled.

05:00:11.540 Did you ever eat ice cream at some point?

05:00:14.560 I'm looking forward to that.

05:00:15.980 Now, we should talk about what you just said, every day that I'm eating, because you are

05:00:21.080 not eating every day.

05:00:24.180 Fasting is a part of this diet.

05:00:26.320 I'm sorry to break it to you at home, because I think fasting is so hard.

05:00:31.040 I was telling you, I used to do the 16-8 fast.

05:00:34.380 And even the 16 for me, I thought as a woman, was particularly hard those last two hours.

05:00:40.300 And then I did hear some conventional wisdom that women shouldn't go 16.

05:00:43.960 You were like, not only should you go 16, you should go three, maybe even four days. 0.78

05:00:50.760 And then I said to Sean, women, women should go four days.

05:00:53.980 And he said, when the men couldn't find the bison, what do you think the women were doing?

05:00:57.760 That no one was eating, the males or the females.

05:01:01.040 Yeah, so it's absolutely-

05:01:02.920 Talk about the fasting.

05:01:03.580 And by the way, I forgot to ask you something important.

05:01:05.680 Is that every week?

05:01:06.680 You don't fast four days a week every week, do you?

05:01:08.960 I fast typically,

05:01:11.200 I used to fast three or four days every single week.

05:01:14.700 So literally like half the month I was fasting.

05:01:17.680 I still kind of do that now,

05:01:19.420 but I do even longer fast, like five days. 1.00

05:01:22.240 So look at this lady's face

05:01:24.900 who is kind enough to allow us to share her photograph,

05:01:28.740 how much she improved her face. 0.94

05:01:30.600 And so this is over a six-month period of time, this lady adopted meat and microbes, the living diet, and also started fasting. 0.82

05:01:40.180 So when you fast, you eliminate structural disease in your body and the influence in your face. 0.99

05:01:46.480 So you get this gorgeous appearance to your face. 0.99

05:01:49.420 A lot of women are afraid to come to me. 0.84

05:01:51.140 They think that I only work with these, you know, studly males, tough guys. 1.00

05:01:55.680 But women get these beautiful results where they have fantastic results.

05:02:00.140 So biology knows no difference between men and women in terms of lifestyle.

05:02:05.560 The healthier the food you eat, the healthier your lifestyle is available for men and women. 0.57

05:02:10.300 Let's just say it's three days because four days sounds insane to me.

05:02:15.200 Maybe it won't six months away.

05:02:16.020 It took years for me to get up to that.

05:02:17.780 Okay.

05:02:18.140 I eased into it.

05:02:19.620 So I don't want-

05:02:20.600 What should I do right now as a baby, Sean, disciple?

05:02:24.400 So I tell people to ease into fasting because the scariest thing for me right now is Megyn Kelly goes on a three-day fast, hates it, feels super weak, and then said, I tried fasting, and it didn't work. 0.86

05:02:38.980 That comes on the show, says, that sucks.

05:02:41.040 Everything I said, I take back. 0.98

05:02:42.360 Yeah, yeah.

05:02:43.380 I mean, it would be a terrible tragedy.

05:02:45.500 So you want to ease into it.

05:02:47.220 It's not a race.

05:02:48.560 You're a young lady. 0.99

05:02:50.220 You've got decades of quality living ahead of you, so ease into it.

05:02:53.700 Now, a little tip, our ancestors, when they didn't get a bison, would go drink from creeks, rivers, lakes, glaciers, and they knew the gray-haired women and the gray-haired men, the alphas, the leadership of a clan, knew which particular stream to drink that would reduce their hunger.

05:03:14.240 And so these microbes have a capacity literally of increasing GLP-1.

05:03:21.560 And so GLP-1 is this natural endogenous peptide that causes satiety.

05:03:27.880 So today we can't drink rivers and lakes, but here's what we're going to find out.

05:03:33.420 I am now experimenting and it's going to come out with certain strains of bacteria, probiotics

05:03:39.900 that you will take and also postbiotics.

05:03:43.540 Postbiotics are what probiotic microbiota, these species of microbes, produce.

05:03:49.400 So they're pieces, basically, of the living microbes.

05:03:53.740 They signal you that you're no longer hungry.

05:03:57.640 And so even though you didn't get a bison that day in the hunt, you're not hungry and you still have energy.

05:04:04.160 So what does that mean for you today, 2026?

05:04:07.060 You'll probably be getting, I've already given some to you,

05:04:10.540 certain species of postbiotics that you can take, probiotics rather, and postbiotics,

05:04:16.540 and they will reduce your hunger and allow you to fast without any hunger pains,

05:04:21.520 without food noise, without cravings for food.

05:04:24.320 So my clients, the longest I've seen a client fast 10 days with these particular strains of microbiota,

05:04:32.120 And I can't say what they are because we want them to be manufactured and available for all Americans to take.

05:04:38.400 So we're in the process of trying to do that, work through that.

05:04:41.340 But it will be in the future that you'll be taking these strains of microbiota.

05:04:45.200 They will dust all of the medications that are out there because they're going to treat the underlying infection the Big Puff Pharma doesn't treat.

05:04:54.080 So for the listening audience, though, like what can they do before they get the special probiotics?

05:04:59.240 like can they what shoot what's a realistic goal one day a week to go just go 24 hours without

05:05:06.000 going you know a lot of people uh should be able to do at least 18 to 24 hours see how they do

05:05:12.280 drink a non-chlorinated water make sure you're taking glycine uh magnesium um and i i like

05:05:20.500 magnesium citrate when i'm fasting because it has less bump on your autophagy autophagy is the

05:05:27.080 the physiological condition that you want to achieve by fasting so autophagy is like spring

05:05:35.620 cleaning inside your cells where cellular debris and disease is cleared up from the body so people

05:05:43.200 who fast just get healthier you can have coffee you can have coffee i'm fasting right now full

05:05:50.400 disclosure i've been fasting four days straight that's crazy i haven't had a single calorie in

05:05:55.800 four days does it look or sound like i have a lack of energy no or or brain fog no because i i said

05:06:02.940 to you i said i tried i found it very hard to do the 16 hour fast into a show i needed to eat or

05:06:08.840 i'd have brain fog and you said you will get to the point where you will only do your show while

05:06:14.220 100 that's so crazy your most important shows you will do in a fastest state the most important like

05:06:20.760 the super bowl and world cups the owners of those teams will demand that their their their athletes

05:06:27.300 are in a fasted state really and those 50 year olds are going to be as they'll be healthier than

05:06:33.020 20 year olds why what does megan kelly you dust everybody in journalism compared to a 20 year old

05:06:40.140 because you learned how to become a better journalist human beings in the past the 50

05:06:45.120 year olds were healthier than the 20 year olds. Think about that. Today, the 20 year olds are

05:06:50.500 healthier than 50 year olds only because of this undiagnosed disease process. But in the future,

05:06:56.240 it's going to be 50 year old men and women, athletes, and also politicians and executives.

05:07:03.040 So as quickly as possible, optimize your microbiome. If you're a high performer, come to me.

05:07:08.320 I'll work with them and get them more optimized. But that's what you're going to do. You'll be

05:07:12.580 using fasting and these insights to perform better, look better, because you're going to be

05:07:18.580 better in a fasted state, because that's when you hunt. How many years did it take you to get to

05:07:23.940 doing three days of fasting? Literally, I was slow. I didn't realize all these benefits because

05:07:29.500 the studies have been coming out over the past 10 or so years, but it took me about five to six

05:07:37.300 years to get up to three days. Now, I get a lot of my clients, like that young lady,

05:07:43.040 she was doing three days, I think, and within one month. What? She eased into three days. 0.99

05:07:48.280 Hardcore. Just water and coffee. Coffee, and then take certain species of bacteria,

05:07:57.080 probiotics that you take. So maybe we won't fast until you can say publicly what the probiotics

05:08:03.120 And then kimchi, you know, a little bit of kimchi juice, a little fermented brine.

05:08:08.560 So a little like fermented pickles, you know, fermented pickle brine.

05:08:13.080 You can drink because there's no calories in it.

05:08:15.040 And a little bit of like a couple of tablespoons of like organic unpasteurized vinegar.

05:08:21.960 Pasteurized vinegar is dead.

05:08:25.220 So you want-

05:08:25.800 Like apple cider vinegar?

05:08:27.000 Yeah, so unpasteurized.

05:08:28.580 and you add it a little bit to non-chlorinated water

05:08:32.460 and you drink it and it stops your hunger pains.

05:08:35.320 It increases your satiety

05:08:37.380 and improves your level of health.

05:08:39.960 And so it's a great addition to-

05:08:42.400 So the fasting, we've disclosed it.

05:08:44.200 It's coming your way.

05:08:45.200 Just know that that's a piece of this.

05:08:46.140 It is coming to America.

05:08:47.880 Don't wait for it to go mainstream.

05:08:49.500 If you're an early adopter, move ahead.

05:08:51.280 I do want to talk about eating out

05:08:54.000 because that seems like it would pose a challenge

05:08:56.860 on this diet, which brings me, of course, to this wonderful clip of Cheryl Hines talking about

05:09:03.740 RIFKJ, her husband's diet, SOT1. Well, right now he is only eating meat and fermented vegetables.

05:09:14.500 So what that looks like is in the morning at 6.30, he's cooking a steak and eating sauerkraut.

05:09:23.200 so what happens you guys go out to eat is he like waiting to get back home to eat

05:09:27.220 now this is he i don't know if he wants me saying this either but who cares um

05:09:31.340 he's so dedicated to this diet that he's eating that he will bring his own sauerkraut

05:09:38.180 restaurant which by the way katie you will appreciate this because we'll be in the car

05:09:45.400 dressed up i'll have like a little no i'll have my little clutch right one of my

05:09:53.140 good bags that I only take out every once in a while because I don't I want to keep them nice

05:09:57.700 and he'll hand me a bag of sauerkraut and say can you put this in your bag

05:10:02.800 and I'll say I actually cannot and I you know if you would have told me when we were inside

05:10:11.340 I would have brought a different bag but what you're about to put in in this bag is not okay 0.99

05:10:18.880 I'm going to give this bag to one of my daughters.

05:10:21.920 When she, you know, when I die, this is not a sauerkraut bag.

05:10:26.440 But if you tell me ahead of time, I can bring a sauerkraut bag.

05:10:33.000 You know what I mean?

05:10:34.740 It's too much.

05:10:35.560 You tell me in advance, I won't bring the Chanel.

05:10:37.420 I won't bring the Chanel.

05:10:38.620 Exactly. 0.96

05:10:41.000 That's Cheryl with Katie Miller and a very funny exchange.

05:10:43.880 Totally funny. 1.00

05:10:44.740 I think she's the funniest woman.

05:10:46.640 I had dinner with her.

05:10:47.520 She's the best. 0.99

05:10:47.980 And she's like that all the time. 0.84

05:10:50.160 Yeah, she's sat right in the chair that you're in. 0.99

05:10:52.100 I think she's the funniest female

05:10:53.520 I've ever met in my lifetime.

05:10:55.560 She's got it.

05:10:56.320 I love her, yeah.

05:10:57.500 So eating out, you do have to bring the sauerkraut,

05:11:01.200 not necessarily in a bag.

05:11:02.420 You recommend baby food jars.

05:11:04.500 I do, I do.

05:11:05.640 I get the little tiny baby food jars,

05:11:07.600 the really small ones,

05:11:09.040 and I put a variety of ferments into it,

05:11:11.500 put it in this little discreet jar.

05:11:13.400 I put it into my coat pocket or my jeans pocket.

05:11:16.880 I pull it out when I'm in a restaurant and dump it on the plate.

05:11:20.440 I call it reverse shoplifting.

05:11:22.060 Like you're bringing something into a restaurant, but they oftentimes are a little uneasy about it, but you don't need a lot.

05:11:28.800 Put the little garnish in there.

05:11:30.580 I get some, sometimes I get stares, but I do it fast and I put it back and, you know, it's gone.

05:11:35.140 You order, you look for grass-fed beef.

05:11:37.420 I do.

05:11:37.800 And you ask if they can cook it in butter.

05:11:39.520 I do.

05:11:39.960 And so when you're at the table and you're talking to a waiter or waitress, you can say, do you cook your butters in seed oil or your meat in seed oils?

05:11:49.740 Can you cook mine in butter and ask them?

05:11:51.980 And this is why you want to be selective.

05:11:53.720 Yeah.

05:11:53.920 You know, and I also tell people, look, you can't always find grass fed when you go to restaurants.

05:12:00.240 I eat a McDonald's.

05:12:01.760 I do.

05:12:02.420 It's not great quality meat, but it's way better than pasta.

05:12:06.200 I just don't eat the buns and the ketchups

05:12:08.580 and all the other things that are added to it.

05:12:10.920 And I bring ferments with me.

05:12:13.100 I remember going on a vacation with my wife.

05:12:15.220 I'm a retired army guy.

05:12:16.660 I'm not a wealthy guy.

05:12:18.020 So, you know, we're out eating at McDonald's.

05:12:20.340 My wife, you know, I'm 62 years old then, you know,

05:12:24.720 and we're eating at McDonald's

05:12:26.740 and we're getting rid of the buns

05:12:27.860 and I'm dumping the ferments on the McDonald's patties.

05:12:32.240 And that was our date night

05:12:33.920 while we're out on this whole vacation.

05:12:35.360 You could potentially have like a white fish or some sort of fish.

05:12:38.760 Yes, so seafood and you can, and ideally, I like wild caught because they tend, you know, the farm variety of seafood, they feed a lot of grains just like they do with cattle.

05:12:51.420 So they're dumping stuff into these farm ponds that they have all this fish in.

05:12:57.180 And sometimes even when they're out in the ocean, they pretend like, you know, that's a healthier version.

05:13:02.020 They might get a little bit more healthier water, but then they're still feeding grains and carbs and all this unnatural diet to these farmed fish.

05:13:11.020 And sometimes there are better operations, but I just think you need to be a lot more selective about the food you eat whenever you can, especially at home.

05:13:18.960 You can go shop. You can find the very best foods shopping online and your local grocery supplier.

05:13:26.520 bring that home and then on occasion if you have to go out eat a little grass-fed beef

05:13:31.380 or grain-fed beef bring some ferments with you and when you go to your neighbor's house

05:13:36.500 or your family members don't dive down to their level be the hero be the champion in your family's

05:13:44.880 life and in your neighbor's house and you show them that you eat differently you eat better and

05:13:50.980 it's real for you don't compromise your health so it's an opportunity to kind of like witness to

05:13:57.380 them i'm trying to live better i and you know the consequences is you know not that you just miss

05:14:03.240 out on all the beneficial living we're talking cancer and strokes and neurodegenerative conditions

05:14:10.240 from this not just one cheat meal if you're eating ice cream it's a cumulative effect of bad food of

05:14:17.560 a lifetime and a poor lifestyle. And it contributes and manifests with all this structural disease,

05:14:25.500 vestibular fat, fat around your heart. And you never know when you're going to get a bad disease.

05:14:30.400 Can you talk, I was telling the audience what I ate yesterday on my first full day on the diet.

05:14:35.600 Can you give an example of your typical diet, like your breakfast, your lunch, and your dinner?

05:14:40.700 Sure. So I get up in the morning and if I want to eat, particularly if it's feasting,

05:14:45.920 And I just, you know, I live a lifestyle of fasting and feasting, just like our ancestors.

05:14:51.700 You know, we did not eat around the clock, you know, grazing and things.

05:14:56.360 We're not cows.

05:14:57.680 We would hunt, get a gigantic animal.

05:15:00.820 Woolly mammoths were a good example.

05:15:02.560 It's the only animal I can think of that we hunted to extinction.

05:15:05.560 Ding, ding, ding.

05:15:06.700 We love woolly mammoths, you know.

05:15:09.040 Got to bring that back.

05:15:10.480 Yeah, we do.

05:15:11.960 On the menu. 0.75

05:15:12.860 Work on that for science.

05:15:13.980 Little steak, little lamb, little woolly.

05:15:17.260 So I eat a big chunk of meat.

05:15:20.300 And when I feast, I'm eating a lot.

05:15:22.860 Game on.

05:15:24.060 You are eating a lot.

05:15:25.480 That one picture has, it looks like four burgers with butter.

05:15:29.040 It's not cheese on top.

05:15:30.280 It's a pat of butter.

05:15:31.040 And that isn't even all that I ate.

05:15:32.320 I eat a lot.

05:15:33.020 I will eat four.

05:15:35.480 I eat more than Sean Baker.

05:15:37.460 I'll eat four to five pounds of meat a day.

05:15:39.560 Oh my God.

05:15:40.480 What?

05:15:40.860 That's insane.

05:15:41.700 I know.

05:15:42.000 Well, because I'm making up for the meat that I didn't eat.

05:15:45.940 When you were fasting.

05:15:46.380 When I was fasting.

05:15:47.280 Okay.

05:15:47.600 So I recover.

05:15:49.100 And so, you know, as far as the amount of food goes, it's probably equitable for, you know, what I would be eating if I was eating like a standard American, you know, kind of lifestyle.

05:15:59.400 So if you are easing your way into this diet where you are maybe fasting one day a week, if that, do not have four to five pounds of beef in a day.

05:16:07.760 No, you won't want to like feast.

05:16:09.580 but when i break and the other thing you should be aware of too is i call it prime the pump if

05:16:15.120 you haven't eaten in like four days most people when they return to eating they can have a

05:16:22.020 hyperasmodic effect where they put food in until their gi track it gets acclimated to it and they

05:16:30.560 can have some you know dysbiosis they can they can be a little bit uncomfortable a little nauseous

05:16:35.800 So you're going to ease into a fast.

05:16:37.680 Okay.

05:16:38.280 So start slow, calm, priming the pump, and a little bit of blue cheese, a little bone broth, a little soup broth, a little tiny piece of meat over about four to five hours, and work your way up to it.

05:16:49.960 Now I can break my fast.

05:16:52.000 Everybody that's eating this way is always surprised.

05:16:54.640 I can break my fast with four ribeyes.

05:16:58.480 Oh, my Lord.

05:16:59.480 And I do.

05:16:59.860 I'm just like a lion.

05:17:00.980 I haven't eaten in, you know, six days

05:17:04.240 and I'll eat four giant ribeyes.

05:17:07.900 Wow.

05:17:08.300 I've, my biggest, I've done six pounds of meat

05:17:12.780 in one sitting, 96 ounces.

05:17:15.060 I ate a tomahawk.

05:17:17.680 I would hate to see the LDL at that moment.

05:17:20.320 I don't think that would be encouraging.

05:17:22.120 You won't worry about LDL after you do this.

05:17:24.380 You'll realize that LDL and cholesterol

05:17:26.400 is beneficial to you.

05:17:27.960 It's a structural disease around your heart.

05:17:29.880 you'll feel so much better. Talk about your breakfasts.

05:17:33.380 So breakfast is kind of like what you ate. Steak and eggs are one of my favorite breakfasts in the

05:17:39.000 morning. Omelets with, you know, aged cheddar cheese and some blue cheese and some ferments.

05:17:45.520 Oh my gosh, to wake up and have that is just so sustaining and beneficial. And so every meal is

05:17:52.300 a little bit different because there's so many varieties of fermented foods that you eat.

05:17:56.320 yogurts and kefirs and different forms of fermented vegetables and fermented fruit.

05:18:04.700 So I do eat fruit, but only if it's fermented. I have my clients back off of fruit because of

05:18:12.520 the fructose and the fruit sugars that are in there. We noticed when we had people eat fermented

05:18:18.080 fruit and cut out regular fruit that the fat around the heart went away a lot faster.

05:18:23.140 And vegans that don't eat any meat, they do lose fat around their heart and they lose visceral fat if they add in fermented vegetables.

05:18:32.440 So if they're eating a predominantly plant-based diet, sorry carnivores, the plant-based people are losing visceral fat when they stay vegan if they add in fermented foods.

05:18:45.700 But in all honesty, they lose it slower.

05:18:49.160 But they're losing it and the rest of America is gaining it.

05:18:53.140 So, vegans who add in fermented foods do better than Americans that are eating a standard American diet.

05:18:58.460 That's good.

05:18:58.860 So, vegans can do this diet.

05:19:00.160 They can.

05:19:01.180 Do they have to ferment every vegetable?

05:19:03.340 They don't have to, but I prefer it.

05:19:05.920 You know, they don't have to, but, you know, they seem to prefer to have some fresh vegetables that aren't fermented.

05:19:16.240 And so, they eat broccoli and other things that haven't been fermented.

05:19:19.800 On that front, and I want to ask you lunch too, but on that front, one of the first things you

05:19:23.960 said to me is there's no cheating on this diet. So like if you were weak and you wanted to have

05:19:31.620 a salad, you shouldn't. But like, why? Is that going to throw the whole thing off?

05:19:37.580 So the cheating with the salad is not going to be bad as cheating with raisins. And then you

05:19:44.380 add in honey and and then you add in a sweet a salad dressing with sugar in it that's that's

05:19:52.260 more of a cheating that's problematic if you just ate lettuce or you know some you know arugula

05:19:59.660 it's really as a very very small amount of these anti-nutrients and microtoxins not realistically

05:20:07.200 a huge threat it's oftentimes when it comes to salads the accoutrements and the the condiments

05:20:14.080 and other things that are coming along.

05:20:15.120 We've had some people say on the show

05:20:16.540 that sourdough bread is not bad for you

05:20:18.820 because it's got a lower glycemic index.

05:20:21.300 It is very bad for you.

05:20:23.500 It's just not as bad.

05:20:25.140 That's what this physician research.

05:20:27.020 When people come to me and they take sourdough bread,

05:20:30.960 they always have visceral fat and heart fat.

05:20:34.140 And when I show that to them and they get very upset,

05:20:38.340 they eliminate it.

05:20:40.120 And then that heart fat and visceral fat goes away.

05:20:42.340 It, honest to God, correlates because it's still carbohydrates, it's still processed,

05:20:48.120 it's dead bread.

05:20:50.340 It may have had some living microbes in it at some point, but when you bake it, it's

05:20:54.880 dead.

05:20:55.720 And so those beneficial microbes are no longer present in there.

05:20:58.900 So again, if you are doing the starter, Sean, you are eliminating processed foods, which

05:21:03.240 will include bread, pasta, obviously sugars, ice cream, et cetera.

05:21:09.400 Or the bare bones version of this could be meats and what?

05:21:17.620 Like if you had to give them, not the full, Sean.

05:21:19.700 Meat and then probably eating like vegetables

05:21:22.900 that aren't fermented.

05:21:24.440 That are not, okay.

05:21:25.300 But then add fermented too.

05:21:27.260 And then, yes.

05:21:28.740 But if you're going to be eating any vegetables

05:21:30.840 that aren't fermented,

05:21:31.920 make sure you're co-masticating,

05:21:34.900 including in your meal, fermented vegetables.

05:21:37.620 But anything processed really, you should, anybody listening to your show, should be able to eliminate processed foods relatively easily and then up your amount of seafood and meat and vegetables if you really want to add in vegetables and you want to take a slow kind of junior approach, a Dr. Sean light approach to this diet.

05:22:02.020 Just for people who think I can't do it. I know a lot of people are thinking it's too extreme. I can't do it. But maybe you could try the intro version. And then if you do okay on that, the real version might not seem too undoable.

05:22:17.020 Now, wait, there's a lot more to discuss, including drinking.

05:22:20.820 Like, what do we drink?

05:22:21.840 And you've got thoughts on that.

05:22:22.800 You have two drinks here.

05:22:24.040 We're going to talk about what you should order as your beverage at a restaurant and

05:22:29.600 what you should be drinking as your beverage at home.

05:22:33.000 There are a couple of options that surprised me, and I think they'll surprise you too.

05:22:37.440 Stand by.

05:22:38.020 We're going to take a quick break, and then we are back with Dr. Sean here to tell us

05:22:42.600 about his revolutionary new diet.

05:22:45.420 it. Check with your doctor before you jump full in, but your doctor will probably say he doesn't

05:22:49.600 like it, which, you know, expect that. Okay. There's still so much to talk to you guys about.

05:22:55.740 So let's just start on the water because I was surprised that you're not against RO water,

05:23:02.180 which is what like literally everybody tells you to get the RO filter, but you really prefer

05:23:06.740 something else. Tell us what you like. I do. So I like natural water. It comes right out of the

05:23:11.400 earth. And it's very interesting that there's no chemicals added from chlorine and fluoride

05:23:21.920 and from natural bottled water. And so I prefer water that comes from the EU. They actually have

05:23:27.160 laws in the European Union that the water has to be in the bottle in the same form that comes out

05:23:32.940 of the ground. We don't have that in America. Under the USDA and the FDA, the water has to be

05:23:39.760 process it's heat treated oftentimes it's filtrated so if you have a choice to get like

05:23:45.160 san pellegrino or my favorite is gerol steiner water that actually has spell that yeah g-e-r-o-l-s-t-e-i-n-e-r

05:23:57.020 gerol steiner it's kind of cheap water over in europe it's a little more pricey by the time it

05:24:03.160 gets over here comes from the german alps but it has a very low level of acidity so it's really

05:24:10.600 more in alkaline water and it has the highest amount of minerals and it's the most probiotic

05:24:15.700 meaning it has some living microbes uh still present in that water it comes out of the ground

05:24:21.000 versus what we process here so if you have a choice get that water and it will add to your

05:24:27.380 microbiome it will contribute it's a way better source of water to drink from rather than drinking

05:24:33.440 the process kind even ro that you know helps to eliminate chlorine i have yet to find a single ro

05:24:40.040 that completely eliminates chlorine and chlorine is disruptive on your microbiome because we add

05:24:46.220 it to water to keep bacteria from growing in there to kill bacteria but the downside to it is it

05:24:52.240 doesn't just finish its job when it's in the pipes coming from you know some municipal treatment

05:24:57.600 center it gets delivered into a microbiome where it disrupts oftentimes the elegant beautiful

05:25:04.180 beneficial microbes that help fight disease and keep us healthy so you're drinking 100 of your

05:25:09.640 water out of a bottle you got from europe i do well not necessarily 100 i go to a natural spring

05:25:15.340 near me in minnesota called the frederick miller spring you can google natural spring

05:25:19.960 near me and find different sources of natural springs.

05:25:23.740 You go like with a bucket,

05:25:25.180 Little House on the Prairie style?

05:25:26.320 Yeah, and then for years,

05:25:28.120 I was taking cowboy showers with these jugs of water

05:25:32.440 and I would pour it over me

05:25:33.620 because I didn't do my chlorinated water.

05:25:36.440 But now I have a brand of water called Ophora

05:25:41.100 that's a cold plunge and they take out the chlorine

05:25:44.360 and it has super high levels of oxygen.

05:25:47.320 so now i can take a bath uh in my cold plunge every day it's very interesting technology

05:25:53.120 and uh clients get to try it out when they come to my to my house so for cold plunge so now no

05:26:00.320 more cowboy showers for dr sean i lived in you know a suburban house and and for years then the

05:26:06.220 police came

05:26:06.920 arrested for public indecency that was the end of the cowboy shower so i do love natural water i

05:26:16.560 think you know we drink way too much processed water and another fun fact is it's an observation

05:26:21.720 i'm a i'm a surfer is i've never seen an overweight surfer that's heavy and so the ocean water is one

05:26:30.360 of the richest source of microbes that you can get oh and when we were little children we would

05:26:35.500 get knocked out by wave and we'd drink that water and you thought you were going to die but you live

05:26:40.520 perfectly fine but the surfers are two things about them they're lean and they're attractive

05:26:47.740 the men are attractive women love male surfers and males love surfer babes because they're hot

05:26:54.560 they're attractive they're healthy and what's going on there is not because of their exercise

05:26:59.500 first of all i'm a surfer it's the laziest sport in the world you're only balancing for a few

05:27:04.800 seconds and then what happens you wipe out and you drink the ocean water and so it's the only

05:27:10.100 population in the world that's intentionally drinking ocean water unintentionally but forced

05:27:15.620 to drink it and so it's making this rich microbial contribution and it's one of the richest sources

05:27:21.960 of food that you can actually water that you can drink comes right from the ocean wow and so i do

05:27:27.520 have my clients actually drinking intentionally small amounts of ocean water contributing to the

05:27:33.040 microbiome and it adds to diversity to your microbiome but i as a in like the rule is the

05:27:40.420 only things you drink in a day are water and coffee correct that's it i'm not drinking anything

05:27:44.800 else and when you go to a restaurant you'll say do you have san pellegrino i do i ask for san

05:27:49.860 pellegrino i'll ask for gerald steiner if they don't have it i'll drink an american brand like

05:27:55.320 mountain spring or something but i do not drink any chlorinated water i once was talking to a head

05:28:01.180 estate and i remember there's they're asking me well how long do i have to wait before because

05:28:05.900 they were drinking taking probiotics to to help increase their microbiome they said how long do i

05:28:11.340 have to wait before i can start drinking tap water like oh my god never forever more never

05:28:16.980 drink tap water okay because it's so filled with chlorine and it's just going to disrupt your

05:28:23.000 microbiome so you get one step forward two steps back always think of your new life as you optimize

05:28:28.920 is adding the most amount of beneficial microbes

05:28:33.240 and the least amount of detrimental ones.

05:28:35.800 So you want your lifestyle choices to be intentional

05:28:38.260 about protecting your microbiome

05:28:40.620 and trying to add to the diversity.

05:28:43.100 You don't want to kill off all those good bugs

05:28:44.760 you just created.

05:28:45.800 Correct.

05:28:46.660 By the way, we're sitting here

05:28:48.040 and whenever I have a guest on this set,

05:28:49.840 I'm always conscious of my posture

05:28:51.600 because it's a two shot and I always want to.

05:28:54.120 But one of the things you say

05:28:56.220 is likely to happen to you on this diet

05:28:58.840 is you actually will stand a little taller.

05:29:01.340 Your posture could improve.

05:29:02.580 Like you've seen that in yourself.

05:29:04.720 I have.

05:29:05.520 So I actually have a couple of pictures

05:29:07.180 that I can show of how much my posture

05:29:09.960 has changed over this period of time.

05:29:11.520 And it's really interesting.

05:29:13.380 And it's because as you lose this disease fat

05:29:16.500 that's inside of you,

05:29:18.200 the fat that's inside of your muscles,

05:29:20.740 here's a picture of my posture.

05:29:22.480 And it was just kind of an accidental photograph

05:29:27.100 that I went back in years and caught this.

05:29:30.480 But you can see my posture is curved

05:29:33.400 in the photograph there

05:29:35.240 with the shorter pair of pants on.

05:29:37.800 And it's because you get this curvature of your spine

05:29:40.640 as this fat that invades your muscles,

05:29:43.800 invades your back muscles too.

05:29:46.640 And so you get this curvature of your spine.

05:29:48.580 And then look how much better my posture is today.

05:29:52.040 And so-

05:29:52.560 Remarkable.

05:29:52.860 Now on the right,

05:29:53.600 you look like the army colonel you are.

05:29:55.240 Yeah.

05:29:55.520 Yeah, and it's not like intentional.

05:29:58.080 I stand, I sit like a, I don't know, like an 18-year-old.

05:30:02.660 I'm always like that.

05:30:04.140 But I remember formally kind of being kind of hunched over

05:30:07.180 and looking like some kind of a strange kind of figure.

05:30:10.380 But that muscle becomes invaded with inflammatory fatty disease

05:30:15.740 called fatty muscle replacement or myosteotosis, muscle fat.

05:30:21.260 And it's the same process you see in most meat

05:30:25.020 that you buy in a supermarket, marbleized meat.

05:30:27.880 And so I'm sorry all the ranchers

05:30:29.820 and a lot of people say that marbleization

05:30:31.940 is what you pay for.

05:30:33.080 Here's the ironic thing.

05:30:34.160 Let me say it for the first time in a podcast.

05:30:36.520 When you are buying prime meat,

05:30:38.620 you're buying diseased meat and paying more for it.

05:30:41.600 Buy choice.

05:30:43.380 The only difference is less marbleization.

05:30:46.720 It's the USDA grading.

05:30:48.940 You don't want prime, you want choice.

05:30:50.360 Choice, and it's cheaper.

05:30:52.440 Oh.

05:30:52.940 It's less diseased, and Americans are paying more.

05:30:56.580 It's ironic that our federal government, USDA, Undersecretary Rollins, she runs the USDA,

05:31:03.860 they actually pay inspectors to go look at the level of marbleization and say,

05:31:08.300 that's high enough, it's got enough, really has enough disease in it,

05:31:12.800 that you could be able to charge prime.

05:31:15.080 So the consumers are that backwards in their mentality.

05:31:19.380 they're buying more diseased meat and it's even worse with wagyu you're paying sometimes a hundred

05:31:25.100 dollars a pound for the diseased animal and these these cattle i've been told can barely stand much

05:31:32.140 less walk oh my gosh they can't they can't fornicate they can't reproduce they have now

05:31:37.340 artificial dissemination is kind of a practice that's practiced a lot in the cattle industry

05:31:42.380 however here's an interesting fact i've never heard i've read this it blew me away what i go

05:31:46.960 beef. When the egg is fertilized, the embryo, they don't transfer it back into a Wagyu cattle.

05:31:53.760 They transfer it back into a Charmaine because the Wagyu is not helping. It's a different breed

05:32:00.480 of cattle. And so the Charmains are not as diseased as Wagyu beef because the baby can't

05:32:06.600 survive long enough in gestation and the mother won't live during birth. And so they actually

05:32:12.620 They literally just use the diseased egg and sperm.

05:32:15.740 Then they put it into a different breed of cattle.

05:32:18.080 So you're not a big fan of the Wagyu.

05:32:19.720 No, I'm not.

05:32:20.400 Is there, other than looking for choice at the grocery store and grass-fed,

05:32:25.560 if you can find it grass-finished as well,

05:32:27.900 is there like a cut of beef that you recommend?

05:32:31.720 Cuts that I like, typically if it's really grass-fed or grass-finished,

05:32:36.120 or my favorite beef right now is plain view beef,

05:32:38.820 which is grass-fed, sprout-finished.

05:32:41.400 so they feed these sprouts that have higher nutrients to these cattle and they get a higher

05:32:47.780 level omega-3s they get inside their meat and that means the meat their flesh is more nutritious so

05:32:54.840 you get more nutrition for your money so grass-fed sprout finish plain view beef i don't i i sponsor

05:33:02.480 them but i don't get any money i just promote them because i'm a physician i don't want you

05:33:07.180 don't have to pay me money to say something good so i like that that particular type i also like

05:33:13.060 p manis i like white oak pastures uh and i like u.s wellness those are all grass-fed grass-finished

05:33:20.200 ranchers providers right and they're right here in america and on the cuts and ribeyes new york

05:33:27.560 strips hamburger if it's grass-fed grass-finished you want that fat but if it's grass-fed grain

05:33:34.940 finished or just all grain, trim the fat off, go with the leaner cuts like New York strips or

05:33:41.480 fillets. Don't get the hamburger if it's grain fed because it will be more inflammatory, higher

05:33:46.700 levels of omega-6s and just not as good. But grass-fed, grass-finished or grass-fed, sprout-finished,

05:33:54.260 higher nutrition, and you can get any cut you want, eat nose to tail, and you'll have a higher

05:34:02.220 level of nutrition and be healthier. If it's just grass fed, because most of us just go to the

05:34:05.780 grocery store and it doesn't say anything about how it's finished, just says grass fed. Should we

05:34:09.520 be eating the whole thing? Like, is the fat in that product okay to eat or not? Yeah, it's better

05:34:15.420 than no grain, no grass fed at all. But here's an interesting thing. Like you talked about grass

05:34:21.980 fed. One of the things I've noticed when I eat grass fed and grass finished, that you extract

05:34:30.600 a lot more nutrients uh in that so take a picture take a look at this so this is an interesting

05:34:37.940 phenomena that happens to my clients um that uh is a yellow mountain or yellow green mountain dew

05:34:45.640 they put this color in because it creates a signal and makes you want to buy it's a positive signal

05:34:50.820 in your brain that that's good well here's the interesting thing when you start eating grass-fed

05:34:55.240 grass finish and you eat from us i never told you this surprise surprise that that jar on the 0.62

05:35:01.320 bot the left is urine that's green fluorescent that's crazy green that looks like a witch's

05:35:07.760 brew and you own you'll start peeing a fluorescent green what when you eat grass fed grass finish

05:35:14.040 with a healthy microbiome really so my clients are all waiting to to pee green and then they

05:35:19.180 get in the client group i'm starting to pee green and it's a and then i've done this a hundred times

05:35:24.700 when i go and start eating grain because sometimes my boys would come back from texas a&m

05:35:29.940 and i'd have to hit costco i mean those those kids are eating a lot i'm yeah you know military

05:35:34.900 family so we'd go buy a lot of steaks at costco and green urine would disappear and then when

05:35:40.420 the boys would go home go back to school i'd eat the grass the green urine would come back oh and

05:35:45.960 And so the reason is, is heme, heme is present in higher-

05:35:50.640 H-E-E-M? 0.74

05:35:51.120 H-E-M-E.

05:35:52.600 So H-E-M-E is higher in grass-fed, grass-finished meat

05:35:57.120 and lower in grain-fed and vegans don't get it.

05:36:01.220 So vegans don't get to pee green.

05:36:03.580 They don't have this really attractive-

05:36:05.740 I know, they're missing out on it.

05:36:07.520 But it really turns on your microbiome.

05:36:11.360 So the degree of your microbiome

05:36:13.700 adds to your ability to do that.

05:36:15.480 And one trick, if you're listening today and you want to try eating, you know, getting

05:36:19.560 this green pea, and I call it the ultimate bioflex, like you ain't nothing unless you

05:36:24.580 can pea green, you know, is to take it from a piece of meat.

05:36:29.020 You take grass-fed, grass-finished liver because that has way more heme in it.

05:36:35.960 Oh.

05:36:36.560 And you eat that liver and then you have a higher concentration.

05:36:39.840 You eat liver?

05:36:40.340 I do.

05:36:40.940 How do you prepare it?

05:36:42.220 So I have a little interesting way of doing it.

05:36:44.940 I take it and I blend it for 10 seconds with water.

05:36:49.580 I know.

05:36:50.300 And then I add a little kefir and I shake it up.

05:36:52.960 So I add a little ferment to it.

05:36:54.800 Yeah.

05:36:55.520 And then I usually add a little brine.

05:36:57.080 I shake it up.

05:36:57.840 And then I eat it like a little kid.

05:36:59.560 Drink it.

05:37:00.420 I hold my nose.

05:37:01.680 Yeah.

05:37:02.100 Because it tastes like iron.

05:37:03.500 And I drink it in one shot down.

05:37:06.580 It's like 10 gulps.

05:37:08.180 I get that liver.

05:37:08.980 And two hours later, I'm peeing green from that grass-fed, grass-finished liver.

05:37:14.000 When we went to Scandinavia, we went to a farmer's house for a lunch, the whole family, and I don't eat fish. I just don't like it. I never have. And it was all fish. We forgot to ask what the menu would be. And I was like right on the water in Norway. And it was all fish, which it was like, okay, fine. I was making my way through it with a polite bite here or there.

05:37:35.520 and then she brought out this fish that was like in the shape of a bell i don't know it had been

05:37:40.080 like formed and it was fried and uh one of my kids asked how how did you make this and the woman the

05:37:47.340 mom this norwegian woman you know stout sturdy lady was like oh we put the whole fish in the

05:37:53.760 blender and we just blend it up and then we use the cookie cutter thing to make the shape i was

05:37:58.900 like, is anyone else sweating? I think I need to step outside. Just the thought of a freaking

05:38:06.940 blended fish. I'm not sure I'm going to make this. Anyway, blended livers, not quite that bad,

05:38:16.300 but it's up there. You should have shared that with Chevy Chase for a new vacation movie.

05:38:20.080 Yes, it was that level. All right, let me go through a couple of other things. I know I'm

05:38:25.260 jumping all over the place now, but I only have another 40 minutes with you and I want to make

05:38:28.360 account. Steve Krakauer, our executive producer, wanted to know, is there any way other than the

05:38:35.160 MRI to figure out what your visceral fat is? Yeah, great question. So the other way to visualize

05:38:41.620 visceral fat, and by the way, the only ways to directly visualize it is by either an MRI or CT

05:38:48.500 scan. So a lot of people will report that their levels of visceral fat are X amount because they

05:38:55.540 do a DEXA scan. So let me just say DEXA is a technology that's completely incapable of directly

05:39:04.120 visualizing and measurable visceral fat. What it does is it looks at overall body fat and it does

05:39:12.860 an interpretation through algorithms that's based on your weight and what it sees in fat and your

05:39:21.180 muscle and it extrapolates what an average person would have so it doesn't really measure your

05:39:27.040 visceral fat doesn't image your visceral fat you can't see it on a dexa scan but you can on a ct

05:39:32.560 and mri well what's the difference between ct and mri mri is better resolution you can see it more

05:39:38.360 and ct less resolution and it also uses radiation and uh and the mri uses magnetic field so i have

05:39:48.900 my clients using safe magnetic field, non-ionizing MRIs. They get a better image. And by the way,

05:39:58.920 the clearer you see this disease, the more your life changes. So you've got to see it.

05:40:05.300 And the MRI, like it's going to be about 2,400 bucks.

05:40:08.360 About 2,400 dollars.

05:40:09.620 It's not cheap, but it's not.

05:40:10.700 That's a full body.

05:40:11.540 I thought it was going to be 10 times as much.

05:40:13.220 Yeah. It's a full body, $2,400 from Pronuva, where we sent you to.

05:40:17.840 They're the best in the country

05:40:19.140 that I've ever seen for captioning.

05:40:21.920 The imaging is the best and how they do it.

05:40:23.840 And can I tell you, it was quite pleasant.

05:40:25.680 I was lying there.

05:40:27.840 It wasn't uncomfortable at all.

05:40:29.100 You know, like one time I had to have an MRI on my shoulder

05:40:31.360 and it was so uncomfortable

05:40:32.360 because your arm has to be back like this

05:40:33.940 for prolonged periods.

05:40:35.480 It was just lying, you know, supine.

05:40:38.080 And they gave me the little eyepiece,

05:40:41.940 you know, this thing like this mask over your eyes.

05:40:44.020 And I watched The Gentleman.

05:40:46.360 You could pick your show on Netflix or what have you.

05:40:48.280 It was very pleasant.

05:40:49.380 They had good snacks.

05:40:50.500 They had delicious coffee.

05:40:52.220 They're really good.

05:40:53.040 It was very nice.

05:40:54.080 Yeah, they got it down, the best science, the best imaging, and they also standardized it.

05:40:59.920 So I sent all my clients there if I can.

05:41:02.840 Now, some clients are in foreign countries, although they're also in Dubai and some other foreign countries, London.

05:41:09.580 But you can also, instead of just getting a full body scan, you can just get an abdominal scan.

05:41:15.640 And a Donald scan frequently will capture

05:41:18.560 at least some of the heart so you can see that fat.

05:41:20.920 Listen, you have it.

05:41:21.900 You have visceral fat.

05:41:23.240 You don't, if you can't afford the MRI,

05:41:24.940 just know that you have it

05:41:25.880 and you have to do something about it.

05:41:27.220 That's, I mean, really the odds of you not having it,

05:41:29.520 I think are pretty slim

05:41:30.340 if you've been eating any processed foods

05:41:32.160 or your regular American diet.

05:41:33.200 And we hope to get the price down.

05:41:34.720 If America starts tracking visceral fat,

05:41:38.160 the price will come down through scales of economy.

05:41:41.360 And so I think there's a future

05:41:42.960 that it's gonna come down cheaper.

05:41:44.900 Okay, so that's, we're talking about her diagnosis.

05:41:47.900 Again, forgive me for jumping around,

05:41:49.120 but I want to hit all my points.

05:41:50.820 I didn't ask you about your lunch and your dinner.

05:41:52.720 We just did the breakfast.

05:41:53.800 Yeah, so my lunch will oftentimes be

05:41:57.060 just a different variant.

05:41:58.960 I will have more meat.

05:42:01.040 Sometimes it's a completely different meat.

05:42:03.660 So I might go from ribeyes just to New York strips,

05:42:07.940 or I might start doing massive amounts of hamburgers.

05:42:11.300 So I take hamburgers.

05:42:13.100 I don't make patties.

05:42:14.520 I take the square hamburgers and break them in half twice

05:42:17.280 so they're squares, they're nice and thick,

05:42:19.540 and I grill them.

05:42:20.660 I like it medium rare to rare inside,

05:42:23.860 and I'll eat tons of those.

05:42:25.720 I'll eat like 12, you know, three pounds of hamburger,

05:42:29.300 put some cheese on it, and all my ferments.

05:42:32.000 Only the cheese that was approved.

05:42:33.800 Yes, only, you know, I had no Val Vita.

05:42:36.820 Aged cheddar, you said?

05:42:38.300 That was a new one.

05:42:39.000 Aged, aged.

05:42:40.400 So it's just whole cheddar.

05:42:41.920 Or would the grocery store have that?

05:42:43.640 So, yeah.

05:42:44.420 And it will oftentimes be on a label.

05:42:48.220 It will say aged like one year, aged six months.

05:42:51.500 The older, the better, the more fermented.

05:42:53.240 If you don't want to do all the ferments all over your plate

05:42:56.620 because you're rushed or whatever,

05:42:57.820 is it okay to just have the cheese in the burger

05:42:59.840 because the cheese is the ferment?

05:43:01.380 I mean, a little bit, yeah.

05:43:03.120 And sometimes, honest to God, I have to do that

05:43:05.360 because I only could get like one.

05:43:08.840 I'm going somewhere on the move.

05:43:10.080 I'm going all over the place.

05:43:11.720 So sometimes I can't get, you know, fermented vegetables, kimchi.

05:43:15.520 Now, Asian markets are everywhere all over the world, but sometimes you can't get it and you can get cheese.

05:43:21.400 And so I at least will eat the living cheese with my meat and get it in that way.

05:43:27.820 That improves it.

05:43:28.640 Okay, so then we get to the dinner.

05:43:31.060 Now, you have sometimes a chef who helps you.

05:43:34.760 You don't eat with the chef every night.

05:43:36.340 but I have to show the audience a bit of this video because I had hope reappear in my life

05:43:42.960 when I saw this video. It looks so elegant and so lovely and inviting. I was like, Oh, okay.

05:43:46.920 Cause at first I'm thinking every meat forevermore, I'm going to have a hunk of burger and

05:43:51.480 like a bunch of sauerkraut. That doesn't sound like a life. And then I saw this video and I

05:43:57.420 started thinking about it very differently. Let's play some of what Dr. Sean's chef prepared when

05:44:03.420 had a guest over. Every fruit on here is fermented and every nut or seed, anything that I use is

05:44:12.000 always fermented. On the bottom, you have a pumpkin kavas with a little bit of sour cream.

05:44:20.780 I actually took the barbacoa sauce and then fermented that. So it's guajillo chilies,

05:44:26.100 licea peppers and organic tomatoes and then you have just a sprinkle of a lava salt and then you

05:44:37.120 have a piedmontese pican picanha and then new york strip and ribeye

05:44:43.540 yum looks delicious everything's fermented other absolutely nothing none of that is not fermented

05:44:51.960 it's all fermented except for the meat. And my chef is exquisite. He's the best in the world that

05:44:59.600 I'm aware of with fermentation. He's got to do a cookbook ASAP. He is. He and I are writing a

05:45:04.540 cookbook. Good. The Living Diet Cookbook. Oh, good. So we trademarked that name, The Living

05:45:10.420 Diet. So we'll do that. And I'm going to have a white coat on mine, the Dr. White Coat. He'll

05:45:15.240 have a chef coat on the cover. I like it. And we'll launch it. But yeah, he's great. He works

05:45:20.320 with my clients to make sure that they can eat well you you you can eat super healthy and super

05:45:26.080 delicious a lot of people like you were afraid uh initially that if you're going to eat healthy

05:45:30.780 you're going to have to dive down into a world where it's not palatable and it's not uh sensational

05:45:36.760 it can be every bit um of uh the delicious meal that people are eating right now yeah only these

05:45:44.120 meals actually make you better instead of diseasing you and it looked elegant i mean i i very much i

05:45:49.840 would be happy to serve that at a dinner party. Back to the bathroom. You talked about the urine,

05:45:56.840 but we didn't talk about the number two because I did see what you said about this. I don't know,

05:46:04.380 maybe it was New York Magazine or the Wall Street Journal. I can't remember, but it was very funny.

05:46:08.440 And I'm just going to read what you said. When you start eating healthy, you don't need toilet

05:46:14.760 paper animals in the wild have no residual stool on their anus he described a proper bowel movement

05:46:22.560 to me this way uh odorless wipe free over in three to seven seconds and nearly orgasmic okay that's

05:46:32.860 that's a bridge too far but it could you just explain so everything's going to change in the

05:46:39.420 bathroom? Yes. So you're only as good as you defecate and as you pee. So your biological

05:46:45.860 functionality really is a marker of how healthy you are. So over the thousands of clients I've

05:46:53.120 worked with, they're able to defecate so much better. They overcome constipation. And they

05:47:00.320 have a stool. Oh, we have a picture of the stool. It's not a real one. It's just a graphic. But they

05:47:06.480 do teach this in medical school and this is the bristol stool chart and what you want is stool

05:47:11.680 like four the number four that's pointy and when you have pointy stool looks like kielbasa you

05:47:17.780 don't have residual stool on your anus and animals in the wild don't need toilet paper because 0.82

05:47:24.280 they have a healthy functioning anus and your anus uh is a marker of how healthy you are 0.97

05:47:31.640 and when you toilet trained your kids you taught them to wipe and you said mommy says to wipe daddy 0.96

05:47:37.320 says to wipe and there was nothing on that toilet paper because their little anuses and their gas

05:47:41.840 intestinal tracts were so healthy and so what happens is you have a rectum it fills with stool

05:47:47.140 the stretch receptors get triggered it tells the host the organism to start moving towards the

05:47:53.100 bathroom you're gonna have a bowel movement your anus is on the outside it's actually folded in

05:47:57.940 and as you have a bowel movement it opens up and comes unfolds and there's a little tiny hole that

05:48:04.520 creates that little tip on the initial part of that stool little tiny tip and then it opens up

05:48:10.200 to a preformed kind of a distance it kind of it's like a supercomputer you have a normal shaped stool

05:48:16.680 and then when the stress receptors relax it starts a program to close it perfectly and that's why

05:48:23.060 a healthy stool has points on each end and when you wipe there's no stool so i tell my clients

05:48:30.460 my report card is how well this works in your report card eventually you won't have to you

05:48:36.140 won't have any residual stool wow and you'll have these ghost wipes where you wipe and your your

05:48:40.860 anus is super high now when you are having a stool like that you're running you're sprinting 0.99

05:48:45.760 you're standing you're enjoying life to a new level you're having sexual relations with your

05:48:50.980 your spouse like whole way better level of living than you've ever lived before and yeah the fact

05:48:58.960 that we and covet everybody needed toilet paper because we were so diseased so i often tell my

05:49:04.800 clients you're going to make this up come in and work with me and the amount of money you're going

05:49:08.700 to save in toilet paper alone you know for the rest of your life so yeah how well you defecate

05:49:13.500 how well you pee is an expression and a marker of how healthy you and not only that but you also

05:49:18.500 mentioned like in the bedroom for men you should expect potentially better performance because you

05:49:24.400 got the whole blood flow going you got like better circulation the same way i could see your vein 0.66

05:49:28.400 pumping in your arm yes so blood flow really is is all over your body so your genitalia is you know

05:49:35.940 really should be a biomarker of how healthy you are but you don't want to take a pill to be able 0.79

05:49:40.780 to achieve an erection if you're a male you want to have a lifestyle that allows you to have a

05:49:46.120 super healthy erection. And what we have noticed, and it wasn't taught in medical school, I have

05:49:51.740 this conversation in urologists, is when clients get a much healthier erection, they report this

05:49:57.500 little teeny bounce that started out. And then the bounce would get bigger and more prominent.

05:50:02.440 So there are these 60-year-old males no longer need Viagra or Cialis. They get a fantastic

05:50:08.240 erection. And this little bounce eventually turns into this big bounce. And just imagine 50,000 0.94

05:50:13.860 years ago, before there was a sacrament of matrimony and marriage and things, there'd

05:50:18.720 be males walking around, they would get an erection, the maids are waiting in some watering 0.68

05:50:25.400 hole would be attracted to that male with a big bounce because he had better perfusion 0.88

05:50:31.700 and better genetics, and he would hunt better.

05:50:35.020 You'd see that bounce, you're like, this guy is going to provide some massive woolly mammoth

05:50:40.520 meat to me that i'm gonna live well and compared to the person with like a little teeny bounce

05:50:46.020 or no bounce at all and it's just like drooping down so that that blood flow is key but not just

05:50:52.960 to your genitalia to your brain to your to your liver to your heart to your muscles and to your

05:51:00.100 skin so health is your whole package you know how well you look so these little attributes are just

05:51:07.500 part of the biometrical expression but there's it's the whole body okay so the other piece of it

05:51:13.820 is outside of eating there's exercise and then there are lifestyle things like i know you

05:51:20.900 mentioned cold plunge which you like you love sauna you told me i should go in the sauna every

05:51:24.360 day which i will and i have been um ideally draw dry sauna versus infrared 20 minutes if you can

05:51:31.060 do it. Sweat. You want to be sweating. And you have maintained on social media that the better

05:51:38.240 shape you get in with the eating program and everything, the sooner you'll sweat. So I believe

05:51:42.280 that because I'm not a good sweater, but I will be. You will be. But can we talk about the exercise?

05:51:47.460 Because if you go to Dr. Sean's Instagram, you're going to see he's ripped. There's a lot of

05:51:53.080 shirtless videos of you on there. And you say you only do five minutes of exercise a day.

05:51:59.800 I do. So explain this. Yes. So the bottom line is we have exercised incorrectly. When we set up

05:52:07.040 this study to get rid of chronic disease for the National Science Foundation, we studied,

05:52:12.240 we forgot the science because it's not working. We're falling apart. We study what goes on in

05:52:18.200 nature. They have no visceral fat, no heart fat, no muscle fat. So how do they exercise? How do

05:52:23.040 they eat? We copied those things and we put humans into doing those tasks. So how do animals

05:52:29.260 exercise is they have fights. They sprint, fight or flight. You may be a journalist,

05:52:36.580 but biologically, you're a hunter-gatherer, and the way you always exercise our species is fight

05:52:42.560 or flight. It's not chronic exercise. I'm sorry, but not chronic exercise. We get our clients to

05:52:49.640 stop doing durational exercise. It's fight or flight. It lasts about one to five minutes,

05:52:54.580 and then it's done it's a big fight or a big sprint and so we get our clients to save gobs

05:53:00.880 of time most of them are like senators or governors or high level executives they love the

05:53:08.300 fact that we save them time instead of having to go to gym and work out for 30 to 45 minutes a day

05:53:13.540 we get them sprinting for a few seconds a day and doing push-ups and pull-ups and lifting weights

05:53:19.820 And the ROI on that is phenomenal.

05:53:23.040 We see that fat disappearing on MRIs.

05:53:25.720 We see the fat leaving in their legs and their skeletal muscle.

05:53:29.720 We see the fat around the rectum disappearing through maximum intensity exercise.

05:53:36.000 So the bottom line is everybody else is lifting wrong, exercising incorrectly.

05:53:41.320 It's fight or flight.

05:53:42.880 That's how you're meant to design.

05:53:44.620 And it's recovery period.

05:53:46.660 And so that's why we do that.

05:53:48.580 If somebody goes outside today, now, I know it depends on how old they are, but what does

05:53:56.500 a sprint look like?

05:53:57.380 I mean, and you were saying, don't do it on your treadmill, do it out on the road.

05:54:00.600 So we, yeah, we believe in nature, but first, before anybody thinks that they can go exercise

05:54:06.080 with a belly full of visceral fat and do a sprint or lift weights, they got to be medically

05:54:11.680 clear.

05:54:12.400 That disease sets you up.

05:54:13.820 The more disease you have, the more likely is you're going to get a strain.

05:54:17.200 Think about a deer that's at its end of life.

05:54:22.280 It can still sprint.

05:54:23.580 It looks good.

05:54:24.800 You probably wouldn't even be able to tell it's an old deer.

05:54:27.360 You sure can tell an old human because of the amount of chronic disease they have.

05:54:31.900 But that visceral fat can set you up to have an injury when you start sprinting, so you've got to ease into this.

05:54:38.180 So I have my clients start eliminating visceral fat, work with our, I don't really call them coaches,

05:54:45.280 work with our executive consultants or biological consultants that work with people to help them get started into sprinting and lifting weights.

05:54:52.860 So you want to be medically cleared, you want to ease into this, start eliminating your visceral fat,

05:54:58.400 and also improving the inflammation in your visceral fat.

05:55:01.740 Before, even as your visceral fat is going down, the very characteristic of that fat is going down.

05:55:07.460 and it improves your performance as that happens.

05:55:10.300 So just a little bit of visceral fat reduction

05:55:12.820 dramatically changes people's faces,

05:55:15.800 their bodies and their level of performance.

05:55:17.920 So what does this typical sprint look like?

05:55:21.000 Typical sprint that we have people do

05:55:23.080 is about 10 seconds, maybe 15 seconds long.

05:55:28.040 Start slow and slowly accelerate

05:55:30.380 because the acceleration is where the injury happens

05:55:33.560 when you're first accelerating.

05:55:35.600 and think about this in the wild like people like i got all these athletes attacking me

05:55:40.840 when i said you want to be able to sprint that animals in the wild sprint if animals are grazing

05:55:46.560 and they go from zero miles per hour to 60 in like no time flat there's no warming up

05:55:51.640 i mean yeah humans have to warm up because we're so diseased but that's not your ideal state your

05:55:58.040 ideal state is to be standing and suddenly gunfire and or car coming towards you and you can sprint

05:56:03.680 out of the way. We've all seen those videos of the fat guy can barely get out of the way,

05:56:08.580 gets clobbered because they can't react fast enough. In nature, that's how you get eliminated

05:56:14.060 from the gene pool. In humans, you want to have a capability of reacting instantly, very quickly,

05:56:20.500 not needing to warm up. That is your optimal state that you want to get to. So that's where

05:56:26.680 I work with clients so they can react in a nanosecond to any kind of a threat that's going on

05:56:32.220 Or a tough question, when you're a litigator, you're handing somebody on a stand, you're cross-examining, you can react very quickly because to the extent you can react physically, you can react intellectually.

05:56:45.020 So physiology and cognitive capabilities go together.

05:56:49.060 So 15 seconds, you go out there, assuming you've built it up to this point, you go out there, 15 seconds, you start off slow, and then you go full bore.

05:56:58.520 Full bore for 10 to 15 seconds.

05:57:00.720 And then you rest for how long after that?

05:57:02.940 And then you usually, I try to get people to rest

05:57:06.160 until their shortness of breath goes away.

05:57:08.560 And by the way, I've yet to see any form of exercise

05:57:11.660 get you more to short a breath in 10 seconds than a sprint.

05:57:16.100 I mean, I can go get a gigantic barbell

05:57:18.420 and put as much weight on as possible

05:57:21.040 and try to lift it for 10 seconds

05:57:22.500 or even lift it for 10 seconds.

05:57:24.340 I'm not as short as breath as I get in doing the test

05:57:26.760 because you use so much muscles.

05:57:28.620 So you wait until it comes back down

05:57:30.140 And then you do another, like how many of those, or you just keep doing it until five

05:57:33.340 minutes are done.

05:57:34.100 Yeah, you do.

05:57:35.060 I'll do it over five minutes.

05:57:36.520 And I actually, my best favorite thing to do is to do about six sprints of about 10 seconds.

05:57:43.780 And I do it over the course of eight hours, every hour, you know, when I'm doing productions,

05:57:49.540 when I'm doing admin, I'm reviewing scans, I'm, I'm working with clients.

05:57:54.700 I'll go out and do a short sprint.

05:57:56.520 And I have one sprint or you do the five minute thing.

05:57:59.760 every 30 seconds six every hour a 30 second sprint wow okay bless excuse me and i mix it up

05:58:08.340 and then executives when they open up a report and the kpi and the company is doing bad drop

05:58:14.920 and do push-ups or go out and do sprints 15 seconds yep you just jacked up your cortisol

05:58:20.860 and what's killing americans are is unrecovered stress you just tolerate it but i i have told

05:58:28.840 people that go into the white house situation room do push-ups in this situation room do push-ups

05:58:35.780 in your boardroom do push it when life happens answer the stress that you get with some brief

05:58:44.080 intense form of exercise and that's how you get rid of stress that is otherwise causing disease

05:58:49.660 and ultimately can lead to your early demise deteriorate your face your health your performance

05:58:55.380 So you look at poor Senator Mitchell today, stress from being McConnell, sorry, McConnell, the the majority leader that he had for that period of time, you know, accumulate all this stress and it causes cognitive decline.

05:59:09.020 It happened to Joe Biden. So politicians, business executives, chairmen of the board, singers, performers, journalists running shows, you meet you get stressed.

05:59:20.580 You've got to meet that stress through recovery, doing some kind of form of intense exercise.

05:59:24.940 But it doesn't take a lot.

05:59:26.620 And so in studies, antelopes, when they get attacked by lions and tigers,

05:59:31.060 before the attack, their cortisol is going up.

05:59:34.160 The lion and tigers are milling around.

05:59:35.960 Those antelopes are restless.

05:59:37.240 They're moving around.

05:59:38.300 But when the attack happens, they're sprinting.

05:59:41.760 And the adrenaline and the mild kinds that get released lower your cortisol.

05:59:47.140 Now, durational runners, they're out jogging.

05:59:50.100 and when they jog for a long time,

05:59:52.000 it raises their cortisol.

05:59:53.540 They stop jogging.

05:59:54.640 They go back to their house.

05:59:55.740 They're drinking water.

05:59:56.780 Their cortisol stays elevated.

05:59:58.640 When you do a sprint,

06:00:00.300 many studies show you don't even bump the cortisol up

06:00:02.940 in a short sprint,

06:00:04.180 but if you do enough, it will go up.

06:00:06.660 And then when you stop sprinting,

06:00:07.780 it goes down, ready for this,

06:00:09.740 lower than when you started that sprint.

06:00:12.500 So that's how you improve yourself with sprinting.

06:00:14.100 What about, how do you get muscles?

06:00:17.220 I mean, you're obviously doing more than sprinting.

06:00:19.420 When you sprint, if I could only do one thing, I couldn't lift weights, I couldn't do anything else, it would be a sprint.

06:00:27.580 So what happens, like this guy whose example, the best MRI scan with the best, the biggest muscles that I've ever seen inside a core, this guy right here at the bottom, all he did was sprint.

06:00:42.320 He did nothing else.

06:00:43.540 He was a one-trick front.

06:00:44.180 What about for your arms?

06:00:45.340 Because you need.

06:00:45.900 It causes mild kinds that produce your arms.

06:00:48.480 And when you sprint, you're using your arms.

06:00:50.980 And so I learned this when I became a researcher.

06:00:54.060 I put blood flow restriction bands on my arms.

06:00:57.040 And I realized when I added those in, I got much more short of breath.

06:01:01.340 So Megan, you use your arms like crazy in a sprint.

06:01:05.560 Really?

06:01:05.860 You think it's just your legs, but that's why you get so short of breath in a sprint.

06:01:11.660 And so you want to be sprinting.

06:01:13.560 If you could only do one thing, you want to be able to do sprinting.

06:01:17.020 But do other things, push-ups, pull-ups, and lifting weights.

06:01:20.820 For how long?

06:01:21.380 Like if you were doing push-ups just to the point of exhaustion or what?

06:01:23.700 To exhaustion.

06:01:24.120 You can't do any more.

06:01:25.720 Until I'm praying to God, ask me to do one more.

06:01:28.120 Dear God, help me, help me.

06:01:29.560 I go right to sheer exhaustion because that's how you fought.

06:01:33.900 When you were fighting for your life, you don't say, oh, I think I'm going to stop and die.

06:01:38.640 No.

06:01:39.280 If you exercise in that manner with that level of intensity, you produce a higher level of myokine,

06:01:45.180 which tells your body to do things, burn deadly fat and produce beneficial muscle.

06:01:52.540 Okay. So that's why we get great results. We got 10 minutes. So we got to,

06:01:55.320 we got to tear through these last things. You say kids can do this. Yes. Talk to your doctor.

06:02:00.320 He won't like it. But because I was saying, you know, like my, my teenager, how's he supposed

06:02:05.480 to do it? He has to go into school and eat at the lunch counter, which is definitely not going to

06:02:09.420 have ferments and grass-fed beef. Yeah, so lunch counters oftentimes in schools have very poor

06:02:16.980 levels of health. But look at these kids. Even kids can do this. So these are two different MRI

06:02:22.640 scans on these kids. But look at their faces. They have inflamed-looking faces. So this is

06:02:29.320 happening. Visceral fat is accumulating. We have the permission to show this. We do. This family

06:02:34.200 came to me, and they want this. In fact, this was shared with very, very high-level people in our

06:02:39.080 government. But look at their faces, how much they changed. So their thin little pale lips

06:02:44.900 become big and red and healthy, and their eyes become healthy, their faces. This is six months

06:02:52.160 of eliminating visceral fat by working with their mom and dad. And by the way,

06:02:57.220 both sets of grandparents did this together. The entire family, 11 of them came to me.

06:03:04.040 They caused me a lot of, I was doing a lot of sprints those three days, trying to scan 11 of

06:03:08.260 and then sit down and go through all of them.

06:03:11.100 But when families do this together,

06:03:12.900 they get even better results than a single individual.

06:03:14.800 What do they eat at lunch?

06:03:15.720 What do they eat at school lunch?

06:03:16.960 They eat meat and they also bring permits.

06:03:20.220 Now, these kids happen to be homeschooled.

06:03:22.200 So they're homeschooled.

06:03:23.740 And so they have a little bit of advantage.

06:03:26.160 But I'm working, trying to work with a school.

06:03:30.200 I can't quite say, but it is, it's a school that, sorry.

06:03:35.680 Oh, what?

06:03:36.360 in the news and we're going to get this diet into that school in minnesota oh oh no yeah we're

06:03:43.580 going to do it there the catholic school that was the subject of the shooting yeah oh that's

06:03:48.160 terrible yeah they they approached me so we're gonna we're gonna do it and then they want to

06:03:52.660 they they approached me and they want to be a model for the rest of their art diocese and the

06:03:57.720 rest of the country so i'm just it's such a great thing i can't wait to tell secretary kennedy

06:04:02.860 that story but god bless you yeah we're gonna help those kids yes and uh and so they they want

06:04:09.220 meat in microbes they want to do this so i'm just so so excited for the audience the um the pictures

06:04:15.840 are remarkable they're little boys who they look maybe six years old to me seven and uh their faces

06:04:22.780 are completely like shrunken in the second picture in a good way like their their bone structure has

06:04:27.340 come out their lips have come out their their big eyes are more beautiful like it's it's a

06:04:32.100 remarkable difference. Okay. I want to keep going. Can we talk about the dental floss? I mean,

06:04:41.360 I told you about, I floss obsessively. I'm a big flosser. And you were like, stop doing that

06:04:48.480 unless you're going to rinse with ferment brine afterward. I'm like, what? Basically, I got to

06:04:55.160 go downstairs and grab the pickle juice, keep a little jar of it next to my sink or the sauerkraut

06:05:01.060 juice or apple cider vinegar. And what? So you want a variety. So think when you floss,

06:05:08.300 you disrupt, you like abrade those tissues and you're perturbing the skin and you're opening up

06:05:13.400 your immune system. And so when you just leave it open, other pathogens from your tongue,

06:05:20.160 biofilms can get in and these travel to your gut and to your brain. And we found that it's

06:05:26.800 associated with dementia but what we have our clients doing is flossing perturbing those immune

06:05:32.900 systems opening them up and then rinsing swishing around with fermented brine which adds beneficial

06:05:40.420 microbes just the juice of kimchi fermented sauerkraut fermented carrots even yogurts and

06:05:47.540 kefirs so do it like a mouthwash swish it around and spit it out yeah don't use antiseptic mouth

06:05:53.100 washes, within 15, 20 minutes of using like Listerine or some product like that, you actually 0.62

06:05:58.880 raise your blood pressure. It perturbs your physiology. But adding in these ferments is the

06:06:04.400 way to go and will significantly improve your oral health and your overall health.

06:06:08.900 You are a big proponent of sleep like every doctor on earth, but you have a recommendation

06:06:15.780 or two for what to do when you can't sleep and how to improve your chances of falling to sleep

06:06:20.540 and staying asleep.

06:06:21.860 Yeah, so the healthy you are,

06:06:23.580 the better you'll be able to sleep.

06:06:25.220 But one big problem people have is-

06:06:27.340 Just not for nothing, but last night I slept like a baby

06:06:29.860 and I have sleep problems.

06:06:31.980 Yeah.

06:06:32.480 Night one.

06:06:33.520 I don't know if it's like psychological,

06:06:35.160 but like a baby.

06:06:35.880 The microbes help you sleep so much better.

06:06:39.000 They really involve in the production of melatonin,

06:06:41.880 the microbiome.

06:06:42.960 Nothing will improve a human being more

06:06:44.980 than getting visceral fat.

06:06:46.540 And the way to do that is optimizing your microbiome.

06:06:49.700 That's the strategies we use, focus on microbiome.

06:06:51.960 But you also like to take the lights down and do like these Himalayan salt lamps.

06:06:56.820 When you have lights that are from LEDs, it's like eating processed foods.

06:07:01.940 So what you want are incandescent light bulbs or light that goes through pink Himalayan salt with a natural red, rather than like red glass.

06:07:10.880 A lot of people are doing like online influencers recommend red incandescent light bulbs.

06:07:15.400 just getting pink himalayan salt the natural color tones that get the good lord and mother nature made

06:07:21.360 and have that and it's like a campfire you put that on in your living room all over our house

06:07:27.020 it's campfires every room we have these pink himalayan salt lamps and when i travel and the

06:07:32.460 and and people like senators and governors very high people they have these you know incandescent

06:07:38.360 light bulbs and these pink himalayan salt lamp light bulbs and it's a glowing red when they

06:07:43.580 travel and they sleep so much better getting rid of the light pollution so it's not going to work

06:07:49.020 for kids who have to do homework until the wee hours and now unfortunately no but you know you

06:07:53.500 can at least get them on incandescent light bulbs and it cuts out the blue spike they can still see

06:07:58.040 so go back buy incandescent light bulbs there's a great company called strainless lighting i don't

06:08:04.300 have any trump we can get those again i don't have yeah thanks thanks to president trump i don't have

06:08:08.820 an affiliation with strainless lighting but it was a college kid he's genius strainless strainless

06:08:14.780 so no strain okay strainless lighting he knows he couldn't sleep in his college dorm room he got an

06:08:20.640 incandescent light and he started sleeping better now he launched this company sells these little

06:08:25.540 lights with incandescent light bulbs absolutely love these lights i've given them to cabinet

06:08:30.100 members and you know senators and stuff to have these lights when they travel it's a little small

06:08:36.240 thing you can put in your in your suitcase and so incandescent light is beneficial because it

06:08:41.800 has a blue spike and it doesn't flicker these lights going on and off with led lights flickering

06:08:47.520 cause inflammation and disrupt your melatonin and disrupt your physiology you also say if you do

06:08:53.420 wake up in the middle of the night rather than tossing and turning for 20 minutes in the bed

06:08:56.880 what should you do yeah so people that have that oftentimes they're getting a cortisol spike

06:09:03.240 And so to eliminate that, if you get some, particularly fasting can make you a little

06:09:09.500 craze, crave a little more carbohydrates, want to wake up.

06:09:12.820 But if you take some probiotics or drink some kimchi brine before you go to bed, you'll

06:09:19.040 sleep through that and you won't do that.

06:09:21.540 If you still wake up, you could have a little teaspoon of that kimchi brine, you know, it's

06:09:26.520 non-caloric and a little non-chlorinated water and it'll ease you right back into sleep.

06:09:32.740 Wow. So that's a little tip. Your microbiome is your most underutilized asset that almost nobody's taking advantage of. And that's why it's Wall Street Journal, you know, New York Times, The Times of London, The Financial Times. All of these, you know, stories are picking up and it's just spreading.

06:09:51.360 What are we not anticipating? What makes people quit?

06:09:55.260 well i think a big a big problem is bad microbes they have in them that war against them getting

06:10:04.400 healthy here's the thing i'll just come out and say it at the risk of alienating the audience

06:10:08.960 the microbes you have in you where they reproduce and what their mission is dictates what they're

06:10:14.660 going to do in you and so if they live in you and reproduce in you their full life cycle they're

06:10:21.580 helping you they're creating metabolites to help the host organism but let me ask this question

06:10:27.660 what happens if they can't complete their life cycle in you but only in dirt there's something

06:10:35.220 like toxoplasmosis that can only complete its life cycle in a cat well they cause rats when

06:10:42.960 toxo gets in them you were told when you were pregnant to stay away from cat litter boxes

06:10:47.140 Listen, toxo causes a rat to lose its fear of a cat.

06:10:52.440 And it literally walks around very prominently so that the cat sees the rat, catches it, kills it, and eats it.

06:11:00.040 Because the toxo drives the rat to die.

06:11:03.640 So this is a way of saying what?

06:11:05.320 So what it means is your microbes, where they complete their life cycle, influence where they're going to help you or hurt you.

06:11:12.820 So the ones that need to complete their life cycle in the soil may be harming the host to kill the host to get it into the dirt.

06:11:22.200 So don't go on instinct is your point.

06:11:24.540 No.

06:11:25.200 Do not go on instinct.

06:11:25.720 Well, you want to get the very best microbes in you that complete their life cycle inside of you.

06:11:31.460 And that comes, the best collection you can get that I can think of comes from fermented foods.

06:11:36.380 All right.

06:11:36.980 We've got one minute left.

06:11:38.520 So far, I feel kind of heavy in the stomach one day into it.

06:11:41.960 Is that unusual?

06:11:42.820 No, very often when people change their diet,

06:11:45.660 start adding in fermented foods and eat more meat,

06:11:49.540 their microbiome needs to adjust over a period of time.

06:11:52.180 So just take it as an indication,

06:11:55.040 great things are happening inside of you

06:11:56.640 and great things are coming.

06:11:57.940 I can't wait to report back on the bathroom,

06:12:01.460 the bedroom, the street in front of my house

06:12:04.840 as I run like the wind.

06:12:06.420 There's a lot to do.

06:12:07.560 I'm actually excited to try it.

06:12:09.400 And I love that you gave us all this time

06:12:12.000 And thank you so much for everything you've done for me, Sean.

06:12:14.580 It's been a pleasure getting to know you.

06:12:16.300 Well, thank you for being a brave American.

06:12:18.440 Have me come on your show, sharing it with the audience.

06:12:21.040 It means so much to me.

06:12:22.460 And I'm so grateful.

06:12:23.620 To be continued.

06:12:24.780 This is the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

06:12:26.760 I hope so.

06:12:27.420 Check them out.

06:12:27.920 Is there a website, Sean?

06:12:28.940 Yeah, you can find out more from me, drseanomara.com, D-R-S-E-A-N-O-M-A-R-A.com.

06:12:37.280 Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show.

06:12:39.160 No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

06:12:42.000 We'll be right back.

06:13:12.000 retailer or mazda.ca for details conditions apply visit iihs.org to learn more time to get this party

06:13:19.140 going uh i thought you said you were using your reward points to get a new sound system i didn't

06:13:25.720 have as many points as i thought sounds like you need bemo and blue rewards the points add up fast

06:13:30.300 really why because you can earn two times the points at any grocery gas or wholesale retailer

06:13:34.980 that's a ton of points and 10 times the points at select partners i'm stoked let's crank the tunes

06:13:42.000 How much is the high five?

06:13:44.240 BMO.

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The Megyn Kelly Show - October 04, 2026

Get Healthy, with Gary Brecka, Andrew Huberman, and Sean O'Mara

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