0:00:06 Don’t believe everything you see on a product that you buy because we’re being exposed to really toxic chemicals that we know cause harm
0:00:12 Okay, so I’ve got everyday products that we’re all using. Is this good? No. What about this? Absolutely not. Is this a good one?
0:00:18 Yes. Yes. Throw that out. Good, bad. There are so many issues with that. This. Perfect. What about this?
0:00:24 This is one of the worst products that you can use. I’ve been using it every day. Get rid of them. Goodbye.
0:00:33 Dr. Yvonne Burkhart is a toxicologist whose groundbreaking research has unveiled the shocking truth about the hidden risks of toxins found in everyday products.
0:00:41 And what we can do about it. We don’t know what we’re exposing ourselves to because by law in Europe and in the US, manufacturers do not have to disclose certain ingredients.
0:00:47 But we finally have proof that there are links to increased rates of cancer, infertility, obesity.
0:00:57 We know that a surface scratch on a non-stick piece of cookware can release 9,000 particles into your food. And those microplastics have been found in lungs, heart, brain, penis.
0:01:04 There’s microplastics in my penis? Yes. And scientists have found that eventually we will become more plastic than we are humans if we continue at this rate.
0:01:11 You seem really pissed off about this. I’m really angry that people have to suffer. I mean, these chemicals are causing children to have cognitive delays.
0:01:17 They start having behavioral issues. And I think it brings up a lot of emotions for me because I’ve been personally impacted.
0:01:23 But I think of how many millions of people around the world are struggling and don’t know why.
0:01:28 So what are the most important things that we can do to have the biggest impact? Number one.
0:01:40 I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify and Apple and our audio channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast
0:01:46 haven’t yet hit the follow button or the subscribe button wherever you’re listening to this. I would like to make a deal with you.
0:01:54 If you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from now until forever to make the show better and better and better and better.
0:02:02 I can’t tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button. The show gets bigger, which means we can expand the production, bring in all the guests you want to see and continue to do in this thing we love.
0:02:07 If you could do me that small favor and hit the follow button wherever you’re listening to this, that would mean the world to me.
0:02:11 That is the only favor I will ever ask you. Thank you so much for your time. Back to this episode.
0:02:31 Dr Yvonne Burkhardt. I’ve consumed a lot of your content. I’ve seen your videos. I’ve read a ton of your work. Just to start, if you had to sort of encapsulate the warning that you’re communicating to people into a sentence, what would that warning be?
0:02:37 Don’t believe everything you see on a container, a bottle or a product that you’re buying.
0:02:40 Why? What’s the consequence?
0:02:51 Is that if you’re believing in the marketing and what you see on the front of the label, instead of actually reading the ingredients, you could be exposing yourself to toxins that you probably don’t want to be.
0:02:54 And what mission are you on, Yvonne?
0:03:09 Well, I’m on a mission to empower people to avoid environmental toxins so they can protect their families and really using science and evidence to make informed decisions that affect their health.
0:03:20 And what is the macro picture here? When you think about the world we’re living in and how exposed we are to toxins, do you think people are at all aware of the toxins that we’re consuming every day?
0:03:43 I think now people are becoming more aware, but there are new toxins that are emerging every day and it’s simply a consequence of how the system is set up. And it’s mainly because chemicals and products are not required to be tested for safety before they’re released onto the market, at least in the US and many other regions of the world.
0:03:54 And so what happens is people are buying these products and we’re being exposed to chemicals that we have no idea how they are actually impacting our health if they’re harmful or not.
0:04:01 And we’re basically guinea pigs in a massive human experiment that no one signed up for that we didn’t consent to.
0:04:03 And what’s the risk?
0:04:15 Well the risk is that we go about our daily lives not knowing what we’re consuming or being exposed to and then later on in life unfortunately fall ill and suffer from some chronic disease.
0:04:23 Are there particular illnesses that are most closely associated with toxins in our environment and toxins that we’re consuming every day?
0:04:48 Yes, so cancer is probably one of the most clear associations as well as infertility and more widely known are issues like not being able to conceive, having a decrease in sperm count, sperm quality, and the fact that sperm count has declined by 50% in the last 50 years is pretty alarming.
0:04:50 And who are you?
0:04:52 I’m a toxicologist, but I’m also a mom.
0:04:54 What’s a toxicologist?
0:04:56 So I study the basic science of poisons.
0:05:01 How do chemicals interact with the cells in our bodies and how do they cause harm?
0:05:06 But not only that, how do our cells defend themselves against these toxins?
0:05:09 Why did you choose to do toxicology?
0:05:12 You know, you could have done anything with your life.
0:05:14 You could have pursued anything.
0:05:16 I found it by accident.
0:05:18 Was it really an accident though?
0:05:19 I don’t know.
0:05:20 I think I was led there.
0:05:21 I think I’ve always been interested.
0:05:35 I think I was meant to share this and I think it brings up a lot of emotions for me because I’ve been personally impacted.
0:05:42 But I think of how many millions of people around the world are struggling and don’t know why.
0:05:47 And so if I can bring awareness to that, then I feel like my mission is complete.
0:05:54 But I studied toxicology because just in my body, I knew that something was amiss.
0:05:58 We need to study this environment around us.
0:06:01 We need to be more aware and more conscious of what we’re doing.
0:06:11 And when I was an undergrad and I discovered toxicology, I was living the absolute conventional lifestyle and sick all the time and wondering why.
0:06:14 And just thinking that it was normal and I shrugged it off and it wasn’t normal.
0:06:18 And I reversed it.
0:06:19 It’s so personal for you, isn’t it?
0:06:21 It is. Absolutely.
0:06:23 Why?
0:06:36 Not only because I’ve been personally impacted, but I want my children to have the best version of me so I can look after them.
0:06:45 And so that I don’t have to worry about them having some of the problems that I had.
0:06:47 And you’re scared about that?
0:06:49 I’m concerned.
0:06:51 And I take action on it every single day.
0:06:53 I think about it all the time.
0:06:56 But not in a scared way.
0:06:59 Just what else can I do?
0:07:00 What else can I research?
0:07:01 What else can I learn?
0:07:02 How else can I implement this?
0:07:05 And how else can I share this so that other people can implement it?
0:07:14 Because there’s so much going on in the scientific community about these toxic chemicals that the general public doesn’t know.
0:07:18 And we all have a right to know.
0:07:21 Have we got any tissues, Joe?
0:07:24 Thank you.
0:07:27 Didn’t expect to cry.
0:07:37 Yeah, I mean, I can understand, but it’s illuminating because it really shows why you’re doing what you’re doing and how much it means to you, which I think is really important.
0:07:40 And it makes a lot of things make sense, frankly.
0:07:49 But it also, you know, I haven’t had kids yet, so I don’t have that lens that I guess comes with being a parent and that concern of I think about myself and I’m fairly young.
0:07:56 But I can imagine in a world where I had kids, I’d become ultra cautious and ultra and thoughtful.
0:07:59 Especially coming from where I came from, where I had those problems.
0:08:08 And just to think if I can prevent that in my children and help people prevent that in their children, then that’s the best outcome for everyone.
0:08:13 I actually did never pay attention to toxins before.
0:08:14 I studied toxicology.
0:08:15 I was in the lab.
0:08:20 I was looking at really toxic chemicals, chemicals that we know cause harm and cause cancer.
0:08:29 But as I went on with my life, I started to face more and more increasing health issues, increasing in severity until I was faced with fertility challenges.
0:08:38 And I was unable and unwilling to accept at the time that IVF or in vitro fertilization would be my only option if I wanted to have a family.
0:08:44 And I was unwilling to accept that because I said, wait a second, I know that there’s an environmental component to this.
0:08:47 There’s chemicals in our environment that are impacting my fertility.
0:08:49 That’s what I studied in the lab.
0:08:52 I studied fertility and cancer.
0:09:00 So it was quite shocking to me that I actually started to struggle with some of these conditions, but no one could give me answers.
0:09:19 And what was missing from my view at the time was these low dose chronic exposures over a lifetime to toxins and chemicals in our products, in our homes, in our outside world that nobody really has connected to some of these disease states.
0:09:33 And so it wasn’t until I embarked on a journey of self-discovery and research that I started to uncover the linkages between these low dose environmental chemicals and products that we’re using all the time and how they impacted my health.
0:09:39 And when I started to remove them and replace them with safer options, my health returned.
0:09:44 My health recovered and I was actually able to conceive my own children without assistance.
0:09:48 How old were you when you were first told that IVF was the only route?
0:09:49 I was 32.
0:09:50 Okay.
0:09:57 And you’d had tests done and stuff at that time to see if you were your sort of fertility levels and things like that?
0:09:58 Right.
0:10:01 I was actually not having a cycle at that point for nine months.
0:10:02 You didn’t have a period at all?
0:10:03 I didn’t have a period.
0:10:13 So that is quite striking because as a person in their 30s, people don’t go through menopause and have a lack of a period until sometimes 50 years old.
0:10:17 That’s almost 20 years earlier than that.
0:10:18 That was really shocking to me.
0:10:20 Something was clearly wrong.
0:10:27 My body was screaming for help and I had no other option but to take matters into my own hands.
0:10:39 As a toxicologist, someone who’s trained and done the research, when you were told that IVF is the only route, what did they say was the problem?
0:10:51 Because if someone’s telling you that IVF is the only route, presumably they’re saying that you’re maybe implying between the lines that you’re broken in some way or that it’s normal not to have a period at 32.
0:10:56 What does the system tell you is the problem with you?
0:10:58 That’s the issue is that they didn’t.
0:10:59 They had no answers.
0:11:01 They couldn’t tell me what the issues were.
0:11:06 They said, “Oh, you look normal in tests, but if you’re unable to get pregnant on your own.”
0:11:10 Well, the other option is IVF or adopt.
0:11:18 And as a toxicologist, was there anything that you needed to relearn or re-understand based on your training that you’ve discovered wasn’t true?
0:11:30 I had to relearn almost everything because as a scientist, I was trained as a toxicologist day one to follow the path that and the belief that the dose makes a poison.
0:11:35 That the more you’re exposed to a chemical, the more severe the outcome.
0:11:46 And that’s not always true because as we know now, there are chemicals in the environment known as endocrine disruptors at very low levels have higher activity than they do at high levels.
0:11:48 So it’s completely backwards.
0:11:53 So I had to relearn everything that I had learned as a student in order to recover.
0:12:05 And in fact, I was so resistant and so hesitant to go outside of what I knew that actually helped kept me stuck for much longer than I needed to be.
0:12:09 Did you say with endocrine disruptors that sometimes low doses are worse than high doses?
0:12:10 Exactly.
0:12:11 How can that be possible?
0:12:13 They’re called non-monotonic dose responses.
0:12:14 That’s the technical term for it.
0:12:32 But it’s basically because the hormones in our bodies are present and active at such extraordinarily tiny amounts that any amount of excess or chemicals coming from the environment could trigger those same pathways could be devastating on a cellular level.
0:12:41 And when you think about the products that we use day to day, whether they’re beauty products or, you know, might be a frying pan or a spatula, plastic spatula or anything.
0:12:48 How many of these sort of day to day consumer products have toxic chemicals in them or at least one toxic chemical?
0:12:51 Almost everything.
0:12:55 And it might shock you to think that it’s almost everything, but unfortunately it is.
0:13:10 It’s because our world now is overcome with plastics, single use plastics, plastic containers, food containers, almost everything that we know of has some plastic element to it.
0:13:17 And that’s really at the root of a lot of the problems that we have because the chemicals that are used to create the plastics are leaching.
0:13:27 The plastics themselves are breaking up, leading to microplastic and nanoplastic release that we are just being constantly bombarded with on a daily basis.
0:13:29 And what about beauty products?
0:13:31 Because I had this conversation with my partner recently.
0:13:32 So we’re in the process now.
0:13:33 I’m 32 years old.
0:13:38 So it’s that kind of season of life where you start thinking about having a family and kids and such.
0:13:45 We’ve both become pretty conscious of the products that we’re applying every day from shampoos to deodorants.
0:13:48 She’s become really, really conscious about it and I’m losing products by the day.
0:13:51 Every time I leave the house, something is traded out without my permission.
0:13:58 But because I’ve done this podcast and spoken to a lot of scientists, I’m now a lot more conscious, especially about my like deodorants and stuff.
0:14:01 Things that I just put on every day in my toothpaste and those kinds of things.
0:14:08 As it relates to these sort of beauty products, these cosmetic beauty products are the ones we’re buying on the shelf safe.
0:14:14 And in terms of like percentage, how many of them are toxin free?
0:14:22 So for the most part, if you grab a product off of a store shelf nine times out of 10, there are chemicals of concern in them.
0:14:26 And we’re talking about major retailers, big box stores.
0:14:32 If you go to smaller, let’s say health food stores and chains like that, then the percentage is much lower.
0:14:37 So you have a better chance of getting a safer product at a health food store.
0:14:46 Just before we get into it, can you give me an overview of your personal education and the career journey you’ve traveled that have resulted in the wisdom that you have now?
0:14:50 Yes, so I am a PhD toxicologist.
0:15:01 I started studying reproductive toxicity in the laboratory as an undergrad and we were looking at the effect of environmental chemicals that are pretty much everywhere in the environment.
0:15:03 They’re the products of combustion.
0:15:08 So the combustion of gasoline and cars in cigarettes in cooking.
0:15:14 So some of these chemicals and we looked at the impact on of them on the reproductive system in males and females.
0:15:36 And what we saw was pretty striking, such that when the animals are challenged with these chemicals and they’re pregnant, then the offspring, not only the daughters and the sons, but also the grandchildren are impacted by the grandmother being exposed.
0:15:37 How does that work?
0:15:52 So when a woman is pregnant with a female daughter, her developing ovaries, which will then someday become contain the eggs that will then become the grandchildren are also in the same environment as the mother.
0:16:02 So what the what the mother is being exposed to, the baby is also being exposed to and also her grandchildren are being exposed.
0:16:09 So if a mother is exposed to toxins, her baby’s babies are being exposed to those toxins.
0:16:10 That’s exactly right.
0:16:16 So there’s sort of a generational toxification of people.
0:16:19 Yeah, that’s called multi-generational toxicity.
0:16:22 And it even goes a step further, transgenerational.
0:16:28 That’s when great grandchildren can be impacted because what’s happening in utero is epigenetic changes.
0:16:34 So changes to our DNA that are then being passed down through our progeny.
0:16:45 So great grandchildren, even if they live a perfectly clean lifestyle and haven’t been exposed to toxins, could have already been genetically predisposed to developing some of these conditions.
0:16:56 Are there particular toxins that you think are especially susceptible to this sort of transgenerational passing down through mutations in our DNA?
0:16:58 Yeah, it’s the endocrine disruptors.
0:17:17 Things like phthalates, bisphenol, PFAS chemicals, a lot of the endocrine disruptors that some people are familiar with, other people are not, but that are found in our everyday products like nonstick cookware, the makeup and cosmetics that we’re using, the plastic containers that we’re buying food in.
0:17:19 What is an endocrine disruptor?
0:17:22 Explain that to me like I’m nine years old.
0:17:25 Okay, so in the human body, we have eight endocrine glands.
0:17:32 So they’re little centers in our bodies and they secrete hormones and these hormones regulate pretty much everything that you can think of.
0:17:39 So from sleep, wake, digestion to how well your brain works, cognition to metabolism.
0:17:49 So how quickly you can burn calories, how much fat you deposit, how much fat you can lose, and also your fertility if you’re able to have children someday.
0:17:53 So endocrine disruptors are coming in and they’re basically disrupting.
0:18:01 Like just as the name indicates, they’re throwing the balance off, they’re messing up with the signaling, they’re causing everything to go haywire in our bodies.
0:18:09 So we really need to be careful, especially for children whose bodies are rapidly developing and then you’re throwing in these endocrine disrupting chemicals.
0:18:14 It’s like adding gasoline to, you know, like a dumpster fire, basically.
0:18:21 And as it relates to children, are they especially susceptible to endocrine disruptors because they’re in a developmental stage?
0:18:32 Absolutely. So with children, it’s extremely unfortunate that they are the most susceptible and most vulnerable to a lot of toxins because, like you said, they’re growing.
0:18:41 They’re not able to detoxify. In fact, a child’s detoxification capacity doesn’t fully develop until the age of 10 years.
0:18:44 So detoxification capacity, what’s that?
0:18:53 Yes, so the ability of your body to detoxify chemicals. We all have it. Everyone has it. The liver and the kidney are the detox organs, the main ones.
0:19:01 But we have this capability of being able to break these chemicals down and remove them so that they don’t cause harm in our bodies.
0:19:06 But with children, that ability isn’t fully developed until the age of 10 years old.
0:19:18 When you think about all these little children, they’re being exposed even before they’re born, after they’re born, and then they can’t even get rid of these chemicals from their body until they’re 10 years old.
0:19:26 And what are some of the illnesses or diseases that we see in children that have been heavily exposed to these endocrine disruptors in our everyday environment?
0:19:38 The worst is cancer. So we see an increased risk of childhood leukemia with certain exposures. There’s also neurodevelopmental delays, so cognitive deficits in children that are exposed to these chemicals.
0:19:45 We also see increased rates of obesity. Obesity in children is skyrocketing now.
0:19:58 There are unprecedented levels that we have not seen before, and it’s likely due to these chemicals and this genetic predisposition and programming that kids are just being dealt the worst hand possible.
0:20:09 What about things like neurodivergence? Is there links between things like ADHD and these endocrine disruptors and ADHD, autism, etc., etc.?
0:20:21 Yeah, there is a link, actually. So some of these chemicals have been known to worsen these behavioral conditions, like ADHD and autism, like you mentioned.
0:20:23 And have they done studies on this?
0:20:37 Yes. So there’s associations where they’ll measure the amount of these chemicals in children through their urine or through their blood, and they’ll confirm the severity of these conditions and be able to correlate it with the amount of the chemicals in their bodies.
0:20:43 And what about the impact this has on things like puberty? Because I was reading some stats before that.
0:20:50 I think it’s, is it women are having, girls are going through puberty earlier and earlier, or is it later and later? I can’t remember. It’s one of the two.
0:21:01 It’s earlier, earlier and earlier. So children who are being exposed to these chemicals are experiencing earlier puberty, earlier breast development, earlier menstrual cycles.
0:21:08 And what that does is actually shift the entire window, because if you think about it, we’re born with a set number of eggs in our ovaries.
0:21:17 Once those eggs are gone, that’s when you start having menopause. So what’s happening when you start your period earlier, you actually go through menopause earlier.
0:21:24 And that can come with a whole host of risk factors, bone fractures, and so on and so forth.
0:21:26 And this is because of those endocrine disruptors?
0:21:28 Likely, yes.
0:21:30 How would they know?
0:21:44 They’ve done studies on this as well. So you can see that they’ve done observational studies where they’ll ask families, when did your child start using beauty and personal care products, which are loaded with these chemicals.
0:21:55 The children who use more products have more phthalates, more endocrine disruptors in their blood and in their urine. And then they have earlier puberty, unfortunately.
0:22:07 And as it relates to fertility, generally, in adults, are you aware of the shifts we’ve seen in fertility? Like what are the numbers? How do you quantify the changes?
0:22:15 Well, over the last hundred years or so, there has been a drastic decline in the number of live births. So that’s one of the numbers that I have looked at recently, right?
0:22:24 So it isn’t necessarily that more people are experiencing infertility. It could be a measure of people are having children later, could be.
0:22:35 People are just having less children, but it is an overall measure of population novel. So it looks like there’s just less children being born, and that could be for a whole number of reasons, right?
0:22:40 Are people not able to have kids? Are they choosing not to have kids?
0:22:49 I would almost argue that it’s the fact that people are not able to have kids when you correlate that with the fact that sperm counts have declined by 50% worldwide.
0:22:57 That is absolutely astonishing. We’re not at the point yet where humans will go extinct.
0:23:11 But if we continue on this path and don’t make changes, which there are many ways that we can make changes, then we might be looking at population decline.
0:23:20 Isn’t it the job of the FDA or some kind of government body to regulate the chemicals that are in our everyday items?
0:23:27 You would think, right? In Europe, the European Commission has a much better system of regulating chemicals.
0:23:33 So they require upfront chemical testing, depending on the amount that is produced.
0:23:40 So chemical manufacturers need to provide data, so they have to fund these studies, these laboratory studies.
0:23:47 They have to fund them and provide this package of information to the European Chemicals Agency or ECA.
0:23:54 And once they do that, then based on the amount that they’re producing, you have to give more information. You have to have more testing.
0:24:03 Such that if you’re producing several metric tons of a chemical, you’ve got to do a whole bunch of studies to really prove that it is safe.
0:24:07 Not only for people, but also animals and the environment.
0:24:16 That it’s not going to be something that is persistent, that builds up, that can’t be broken down, that starts to accumulate because that’s what we’re seeing now with some of these chemicals.
0:24:20 And that’s really the problem, is that they don’t break down, they don’t go away, they don’t disappear.
0:24:25 So then what happens? It basically disrupts the entire ecosystem of the planet.
0:24:30 And we’re not disconnected from that, right? We’re connected to the ecosystem. We rely on that.
0:24:39 So if we’re looking at it from the standpoint that testing of chemicals upfront, that is absolutely something that we should be doing.
0:24:42 But no one is really mandating that except in Europe.
0:24:46 Why don’t they mandate it in other parts of the world, like the United States?
0:24:55 Our system wasn’t set up like that over here. I think we’ve got a different relationship between the government and with industry.
0:25:05 I think there is a lack of regulations, a lack of requirements for toxicity testing, combined with the lack of corporate responsibility.
0:25:18 So a lot of these manufacturers don’t want to have to foot the bill and pay millions of dollars to have testing only to show that this chemical that they are so excited and in love with can’t be used because it’s toxic.
0:25:34 Do you think it is malicious and intentional in terms of, do you think there’s a concerted effort to make sure that the government doesn’t increase regulation on these industries so that they can continue to produce low cost items that have long shelf lives
0:25:37 and are cheaper?
0:25:40 I would hope not, but it’s looking like that.
0:25:49 And it’s just this whole system is not set up to protect consumers and then the environment, at least in the US.
0:25:56 So you don’t have your period yourself. You’re told that your best option is to go do IVF.
0:26:02 You then go on a bit of a journey yourself to unlearn lots of things you learn in toxicology training.
0:26:08 What was the ending to that story in terms of what did you do then? Did you go find a different doctor? What did you change?
0:26:10 And what is the ending of that story?
0:26:18 Well, I fell down a rabbit hole of research and I had to pick myself up and say, hey, you know what, I’m going to take matters into my own hands.
0:26:25 I’m going outside of the route that I thought I was supposed to go down the mainstream route.
0:26:30 So I kind of went sideways a little bit and I went with integrative and functional medicine.
0:26:39 And so I went looking for the root cause, the root cause, which is not necessarily what I was being guided toward with the conventional route.
0:26:43 So with integrative and functional medicine, there was personalized testing.
0:26:49 And of course, this was all upfront cost for me, but this was something that was absolutely vital.
0:26:52 So I found a way to pay for these tests.
0:27:04 And they told me exactly what I’m deficient in, what I need to do, and they guided me. So I first started with removing inflammatory foods and really dialing in on my diet.
0:27:09 And I saw relief from my symptoms within two weeks, very rapid.
0:27:16 Once I started removing these triggers that were causing digestive problems, then I started to see improvement very fast.
0:27:21 But it was then going on six months and I kind of felt like I hit a plateau.
0:27:26 I said, there’s something else that’s still triggering me. There’s something else that’s still bothering me and I don’t feel 100%.
0:27:34 Even though I’ve done all the work, I’ve cleaned up my diet, I cook all my meals at home, I have sourced the best quality meats and vegetables.
0:27:39 I even started growing my own food and there was still something there. Something was not right.
0:27:42 And so then I started targeting things in my home.
0:27:51 My makeup cabinet in particular was a huge source of trigger for me in terms of chemicals and toxicity.
0:28:00 Once I started to clean out my makeup drawer, I really saw a shift because what I was doing on a day to day basis, I was using several cosmetic products.
0:28:04 I was absolutely obsessed with perfumes and fragrances.
0:28:14 Once I removed those one by one, slowly disentangling myself from there, just being obsessed with them, I started to see real change.
0:28:21 And I noticed more energy return. I was feeling more fit. I had more mental clarity, more focus.
0:28:30 I didn’t have as many headaches and migraines anymore and I just started to feel like a more vital person, like more vitality.
0:28:31 And did your period return?
0:28:42 It did. It did return and it returned and I was pregnant within nine months of that first, the first time when I started this whole journey, within nine months I was pregnant.
0:28:53 I had my period back within, I’d probably say three months and then six months after that, once I got rid of all the beauty and personal care products, I also looked into my oral care, my oral health.
0:28:59 I had mercury amalgam fillings and mercury is extremely toxic to reproduction, but also to the brain.
0:29:09 Once I got rid of the mercury out of my teeth, that was when things just really took a huge leap in my health journey.
0:29:18 And how were you able to measure the improvements? I know you can say, you know, I felt better, but could you measure the improvements biochemically in a lab somehow?
0:29:24 Yes, actually that was part of this entire journey. So there was regular routine testing going on whenever we made changes.
0:29:30 I was working with these practitioners and I made changes and we would do tests and say, look, your numbers came back, it looks great.
0:29:35 You removed the mercury amalgam fillings from your teeth, your mercury levels have dropped.
0:29:36 Really?
0:29:45 Yeah, it was pretty shocking and I felt almost instantly better when they took those out of my mouth. It was that striking of an effect.
0:29:57 Knowing what you know, surely it’s built up a bit of, I don’t know, a bit of a, if I knew all that you knew, I think, about toxins in our environment,
0:30:07 I would be, A, a really annoying person at like every dinner party and B, there’d be a certain sense of, I guess, emergency and urgency to me.
0:30:16 Because I’d be looking around at all my friends and I’d be, if I understood the consequences of them drinking from that plastic container or putting that product on their face,
0:30:27 I feel like I’d try to be shouted the world to tell them to stop. Do you feel a sense of that? You directly witnessed the impact of making these changes and detoxifying your environment had on you.
0:30:30 Do you feel a sense of like, you know.
0:30:43 Absolutely. I mean, I can’t even tell you how much passion it has ignited in me to be able to share this information and spread it as far and wide as possible because it’s literally affecting every single person on this planet.
0:30:51 And I do find it sometimes challenging not to call someone out and say, hey, be careful with that.
0:31:03 But you know, I think it comes from being a living example and I found that that is much more effective at being a living example instead of telling people, don’t do this, don’t do that, showing them what’s possible.
0:31:11 Look at what happened to me. Look at my journey. Look at the benefit that I feel. And then once you start removing these things and making these simple swaps,
0:31:21 it’s about simple, small incremental shifts that anyone can do over the long term because it’s really about it’s a marathon, not a race.
0:31:30 It’s not about you’ve got to throw everything away and you’ve got to hide under a rock because I tried that and it didn’t work and it caused more stress and stress is harmful.
0:31:41 So being a living example, empowering people with information, educating about the problem, but coming with the solution.
0:31:48 You mentioned cancer is one of the downstream consequences of living in a toxic environment.
0:31:53 And we talked about how sperm quality has reduced over the last couple of decades.
0:32:01 When we look at the stats around cancer, are there any stats in particular that you think are most clearly associated with us living in such a toxic environment?
0:32:10 One of them that always brings to mind is breast cancer because I think I read or heard that breast cancer is on the rise or has been rising for the last couple of decades.
0:32:17 And when you look at the Western world versus something like, you know, a tribe in Africa, they don’t see the same levels of breast cancer.
0:32:24 Yeah, that is definitely a concern because cancer historically was a disease of age, aging.
0:32:29 It wasn’t so common that you see cancer in your 30s, 40s, and even 50s.
0:32:31 Now we’re seeing a shift.
0:32:33 The window is moving earlier and earlier.
0:32:38 Cancer incidence, like you said, breast cancer incidence is definitely on the rise.
0:32:46 I myself never knew anyone that suffered from breast cancer or survived it until I hit my 30s.
0:32:52 Then I knew five people that had it, including two people that I worked with in the toxicology lab.
0:32:56 And what are your suspicions about the root causes of this rising cancer?
0:33:09 I definitely think there is a huge environmental component to it because a lot of what was believed decades ago was that disease and cancer incidents had to do with your genes.
0:33:11 You were just genetically predisposed.
0:33:13 You were unlucky.
0:33:22 But in actuality, what we’re seeing now is that the environment plays such a massive role in whether or not you actually have cancer.
0:33:29 So just because you have the predisposition to developing breast cancer, such as the BRCA gene, doesn’t mean you’ll get it.
0:33:37 It really depends on your lifestyle and how you lived, but also how your ancestors lived.
0:33:48 We talked about the multi-generational effect of these chemicals depending on how your ancestors lived, how your grandmother and how your mother lived could predispose you to this.
0:33:55 And have there been any studies that show the impact of these sort of everyday chemicals on cancer risk?
0:34:02 Yes. And that’s something that is, I don’t want to say that it’s exciting, but I’m glad that we finally have proof.
0:34:06 I don’t want to see these studies. I hate seeing this, actually.
0:34:13 I’m really angry that people have to suffer with cancer because it’s so preventable.
0:34:20 There was a study recently that looked at removing certain ingredients from beauty and personal care products.
0:34:28 So women without any history of breast cancer were asked to remove these ingredients from their products for 28 days.
0:34:32 So that’s very short, four weeks, right?
0:34:41 They took cells from the breast tissue. They were all normal. They measured the amount of breast cancer gene expression.
0:34:53 After 28 days, they took another sample. So after 28 days of removing these ingredients, they took another sample and they saw that the breast cancer gene expression dropped.
0:35:01 And the only thing that they were asked to change about their lifestyle was to remove these ingredients from their beauty and personal care products.
0:35:04 And which products were they told to remove and what ingredients were those?
0:35:15 It was skincare, deodorant, shampoo, things that most people are using, and the ingredients were phthalates, which can often be found in fragrance.
0:35:27 So the seemingly innocuous little term on the ingredients list, fragrance or parfum, can contain a huge number of chemicals.
0:35:34 It’s hidden behind this umbrella term because by law in Europe and in the U.S., manufacturers do not have to disclose this.
0:35:44 It is considered trade secret. And within that chemical mixture are known carcinogens, endocrine disruptors like phthalates,
0:35:48 and the most potent allergens known to man.
0:35:57 And with phthalates, the reason that they’re in fragrances and that manufacturers love them so much is they’re what are known as film formers.
0:36:05 So it helps the fragrance to stick to surfaces like your skin, your clothing, and it helps to make it last longer and linger.
0:36:13 So if you’ve ever sprayed something on yourself and are still able to smell it hours later, that’s a telltale sign that you’ve been exposed to phthalates.
0:36:16 That you have phthalates in that fragrance, in that product.
0:36:20 And how many deodorants on the shelf have phthalates in them?
0:36:25 If it’s got fragrance in it, almost all of them.
0:36:29 It’s code for endocrine disrupting phthalates, essentially. You can assume that.
0:36:33 And in fact, it’s safe to assume that they contain phthalates.
0:36:47 So I mean, this is one of the deodorants that I often use. It’s just, I mean, for anyone that’s just listening, it’s just like one of the deodorants you’d find on a shelf in any store that comes in a little, is this an aluminium can?
0:36:52 It is an aluminium can. Does this have phthalates in it? How do I know?
0:36:59 So you turn the container around and check the ingredients list. Do you see a word fragrance/parfume?
0:37:02 Yeah, fragrance, brackets, perfume.
0:37:04 That’s what you’re looking for.
0:37:07 Okay, so I shouldn’t be spraying this all over my body?
0:37:08 Right.
0:37:12 So sometimes you’ll see on there, it’ll say phthalate-free.
0:37:13 Okay.
0:37:18 Right, that’s helpful. But that still doesn’t take away the fact that there are known carcinogens and allergens in there.
0:37:29 So if you’ve got any kind of respiratory problems, any kind of skin problems, and you just don’t want to expose yourself to unnecessary carcinogens, then it would be beneficial to avoid fragrance.
0:37:33 What about a little spray? Just a pst.
0:37:38 I mean, it depends. Is that really going to benefit you? Are you going to get any effect from that little spray?
0:37:45 I don’t want to smell. So this is why I spray this, because, you know, this drop is quite tight, so if it’s tight and it’s hot in here, I’ll end up smelling.
0:37:49 So I just spray pst, and then I’m really doing, it’s public service for other people, really.
0:37:54 I’m fine to smell myself. I can’t even smell it, but it’s for, you know, Jack and the team.
0:37:59 So the question would be, can you find a safer alternative? And the answer is yes.
0:38:02 How do I find a safer alternative? What am I looking for?
0:38:03 So you don’t want fragrances?
0:38:04 I don’t.
0:38:09 And you definitely, yes. So avoid the word fragrance, unless it says that the fragrance comes from essential oils.
0:38:14 Okay, but if it comes from essential oils, will it still make me smell nice?
0:38:15 Yes.
0:38:16 Okay.
0:38:20 Yes, because that’s where aromatic compounds come from. They come from plants.
0:38:26 But just to give you more context on this aerosol spray, this is one of the worst products that you can use.
0:38:28 I’ve been using it every day.
0:38:30 Yeah. So I’ll tell you why.
0:38:34 Aerosols use propellants. Propellants are derived from petroleum.
0:38:43 And there was a recall on thousands of products within the last couple of years that the propellants were a source of benzene contamination.
0:38:48 And benzene is a known human carcinogen that you do not want to be inhaling.
0:38:54 Because what you inhale goes to your brain. It goes quickly all over your body through the bloodstream.
0:38:58 You don’t want to be delivering a known human carcinogen into your bloodstream.
0:39:02 You’re just not helping you at all.
0:39:07 Because benzene is known to cause leukemia in people.
0:39:12 So it’s a no-brainer if you want to avoid that to avoid aerosols.
0:39:17 But not only that, if you think about how you’re actually applying the product, you’re spraying it like this, right?
0:39:20 In a stream and it heads toward your face.
0:39:24 Then that’s also an inhalation risk because there’s particles in there.
0:39:28 There’s solids in there. You don’t want to be inhaling unnecessary things.
0:39:36 So the best option for deodorant is to look for something that has essential oils and is a roll-on or a stick solid.
0:39:40 Is there anything on the label that I can trust when it comes to deodorants?
0:39:44 Is there like a certain term that I’m looking for? You said phthalate free.
0:39:50 Is there anything else that? Yes. So phthalate free and paraben free are definitely helpful.
0:39:59 Because then we know at least two of the known endocrine disruptors that we have evidence on are not found in that product.
0:40:02 But that doesn’t exonerate everything else.
0:40:13 We still need to be diligent about the ingredients because they are sources of contamination, of byproducts, of carcinogens, and hidden toxins, essentially.
0:40:17 It is pretty crazy that I could get a lighter and go and it would be flammable.
0:40:24 And then I spray that on my body like I’m lathering myself in petrol or something. It is pretty crazy.
0:40:26 That’s essentially what that is. Petrol.
0:40:32 Yeah, because it’s coming from petroleum, all the propellants and some of the other base ingredients.
0:40:38 I’m sure I haven’t looked at it, but I’m almost certain because that is the source of the majority of ingredients that go into these products.
0:40:45 This is my last day ever using aerosol deodorants. Let’s pull up a bin.
0:40:52 Okay. Goodbye. Okay, that’s gone.
0:41:00 Okay, is this a better alternative? What I’ve got here is I’ve got this roll on deodorant, which I think is one of the refillable ones.
0:41:02 Is this a better alternative?
0:41:09 At least from this level of what I know of the fact that it’s a solid, yes, but I have to see the ingredients list.
0:41:13 We have to look at the ingredients list to really know what’s actually in the deodorant.
0:41:14 Okay.
0:41:21 So at least from a sustainability standpoint, that’s definitely great to see that it’s not in a plastic container that is refillable.
0:41:23 But we really need to check the ingredients.
0:41:27 Okay, so I’ve got the ingredients list here. I’ve just pulled it up on my iPad.
0:41:42 It says tapioca starch, baking soda, sunflower seed wax, coca seed butter, tocafenol extate.
0:41:46 Nobody knows. Steril alcohol, perfume.
0:41:54 So do you recognize the ingredients? Are they easily recognizable or do they sound highly synthetic, very chemical like?
0:41:56 It says perfume.
0:41:59 Is there any indication of what’s in the perfume?
0:42:04 All our deodorants are scented with a blend of fragrances to give you the sense you love.
0:42:05 Hmm.
0:42:09 Is there any indication that it’s phthalate free and paraben free?
0:42:12 Hmm.
0:42:13 No.
0:42:18 That’s what should give us pause is when we don’t know what’s in that fragrance term.
0:42:21 That’s really the issue.
0:42:22 Okay.
0:42:25 I mean, there’s just so many bloody words.
0:42:29 Phthalate free deodorant.
0:42:31 I’ve got a better way that I can help you search.
0:42:32 Okay.
0:42:36 If you just type in the word organic and then whatever product you’re looking for, organic deodorant.
0:42:41 That is going to whittle down the choices significantly for you.
0:42:46 What, and you’re saying that if it’s organic, that means that it won’t contain the phthalates and the parabens?
0:42:53 Not necessarily. This is where it gets a little bit nuanced, but at least it whittles down the results that you’ll get in search.
0:43:00 You can check the ingredients one by one and look for the one that has essential oils instead of the word fragrance.
0:43:05 Because it’s really the lack of transparency that should make us pause.
0:43:07 We have no idea what’s in there.
0:43:09 We don’t know what we’re exposing ourselves to.
0:43:16 And if you’re someone who is concerned about the chemicals in the products you’re using, the toxins you’re being exposed to.
0:43:24 If you are someone who is thinking about getting pregnant, are pregnant, breastfeeding, or just health conscious.
0:43:30 And you don’t want these toxins in your products, then this is the work that needs to be done.
0:43:35 Interesting. So just because it’s a roll on doesn’t necessarily mean it’s safe.
0:43:36 Right.
0:43:38 Like you just demonstrated.
0:43:41 And just because it’s sustainable also doesn’t mean it’s safe.
0:43:48 So there’s a lot of marketing that goes on with products and manufacturers know that consumers are becoming savvy.
0:43:50 They’re becoming aware and they’re demanding safer products.
0:43:57 So they will hit all of the buttons and hope that somebody isn’t diligent and doesn’t see through that.
0:44:02 Is fragrance so important because fragrance is an indicator that it contains these phthalates and parabens?
0:44:09 Is that why I should be thinking fragrance is one indicator for whether the cosmetic product is toxic or not?
0:44:15 Yeah, definitely. That would be probably the easiest and most obvious way that you can weed products out.
0:44:17 Is just look for the word fragrance or perfume.
0:44:25 And if there’s no indication that it comes from plants, that it’s from essential oils, then that’s not something that you want to use.
0:44:36 I’ve read a stat that said 91% of antiperspirants, 95% of shaving products, 83% of moisturizers, and 63% of sunscreens contain fragrance.
0:44:44 And 96% of shampoos, 98% of conditioners, 97% of hair styling products contain fragrance as well.
0:44:46 Why are they putting fragrance in everything?
0:44:49 Would the products not sell if there weren’t fragrance in there?
0:44:52 Yeah, I think there’s many reasons that they put fragrances in.
0:44:57 So first of all, we are sensory beings and people respond to fragrances.
0:45:01 Fragrances changes your mood, it uplifts your mood, it helps you feel more confident.
0:45:04 Fragrances affect us on a very primal level.
0:45:10 And the earlier and earlier that you can get hooked on fragrances, the better for these manufacturers, right?
0:45:14 So that’s why they’re putting fragrances in even children’s products and scented everything.
0:45:17 If you notice, I’ve got kids, we go out and look for slime.
0:45:20 I said, let’s look for unscented slime.
0:45:22 It’s nearly impossible to find it.
0:45:24 You’d have to make your own slime at home.
0:45:25 So that’s what we’ve started doing.
0:45:30 And the kids love it because they get to, you know, be like little chemists or whatever.
0:45:38 But you cannot find even, even they have markers, pens, crayons, they’ve got scented stickers.
0:45:41 I mean, scented everything, scented everywhere now.
0:45:47 The fragrance industry has absolutely exploded in the last 10 or 15 years.
0:45:55 And fragrances are the most pervasive source, one of the most pervasive sources of toxins in our homes, in our daily lives.
0:45:58 It’s almost like the new secondhand smoke.
0:46:02 That’s how prevalent it is because the chemicals, once you spray them, right?
0:46:07 The reason you smell them is because they have volatilized means that they have become gases and they reach your nose.
0:46:08 You smell them.
0:46:11 What that also means is that they are in the air.
0:46:19 Studies have shown that these fragrance chemicals, phthalates, carcinogens, allergens, they bind to the dust in your home.
0:46:24 So it’s not like I smell this fragrance, I sprayed it three hours ago and I’m totally fine.
0:46:26 Well, it’s still in the air.
0:46:31 It’s always going to be in the air unless you physically remove the dust.
0:46:38 So if you’re not regularly dusting, mopping, sweeping and vacuuming, you’re becoming re-exposed.
0:46:43 And this is absolutely the worst for a child, a baby, who is crawling on the floor.
0:46:49 Their faces and noses and airways are close to the ground, so they’re inhaling the dust that have settled on the floor.
0:46:53 I don’t know of many people that are sweeping and dusting every single day.
0:47:03 But if you have a child, then I really want you to listen to this because the child is putting stuff in their mouth so they’re ingesting these dust particles.
0:47:06 They’re ingesting the chemicals that are attached to the dust particles.
0:47:09 They’re inhaling them and they can’t detox them.
0:47:11 They can’t detoxify them from their bodies.
0:47:12 And so then what happens?
0:47:13 They grow up.
0:47:15 They start having allergies.
0:47:17 They start having cognitive delays.
0:47:19 They start having behavioral issues.
0:47:21 They start storing more fat.
0:47:22 They can’t lose weight.
0:47:33 They have low energy, depression and a host of conditions that we think are common, but doesn’t mean they’re normal and they’re avoidable.
0:47:41 That’s the part that is so important is that these conditions are avoidable.
0:47:45 I was just reading about allergies as you’re speaking and I’ve got some stats here.
0:47:54 Food allergies, the prevalence of food allergies in children have increased by 50% since the 1990s in the United States.
0:48:05 In terms of seasonal allergies, in 2021 approximately 81 million Americans were diagnosed with allergic rhinitis, also known as hay fever or seasonal allergies.
0:48:16 By 2018, nearly 42 million Americans or 13% of the population had been diagnosed with asthma in their lifetime.
0:48:22 And I mean, why is this happening?
0:48:25 I mean, there’s like BBC articles here that show there’s been huge increases in allergic reactions as well.
0:48:28 The EpiPen business is on the rise.
0:48:31 Why are allergies getting worse in your opinion?
0:48:43 Yeah, I think it’s this pervasiveness of the overuse of fragrances, scented products, and the lack of awareness about the harm that they cause.
0:48:49 There’s studies showing that there are people who as soon as you light a candle, then people start having migraines.
0:48:51 They can’t think straight anymore.
0:48:53 They become dizzy.
0:48:56 But not only that, like you said, increased asthma incidents.
0:48:58 And once you get asthma, it doesn’t go away.
0:49:00 You have reactive airways.
0:49:04 So then you’re triggered again whenever you encounter these chemicals.
0:49:13 What about people who say the allergies have exploded over the last couple of years because we’re not letting our kids consume more dirt?
0:49:14 I hear this a lot.
0:49:18 People say it’s because we’re becoming too sanitized and our kids need to go play in the mud.
0:49:20 That could be it as well.
0:49:34 But I would almost like to see the data in the rise in fragrances and fragrance use overlaid on top of the incidence of allergies in children and all of these health conditions.
0:49:35 I want to see that data.
0:49:36 I haven’t seen it yet.
0:49:42 And I’m hoping that somebody does these studies because I think they would be correlated.
0:49:57 Have you done any research on thinking about other populations and civilizations that aren’t exposed to the environmental factors we’re exposed to and seeing how they’re getting on in terms of their health outcomes when they’re not exposed to microplastics and fragrances.
0:50:07 Some of the tribes in Africa that are still pretty close to being contaminated by human interference in the Western world.
0:50:11 Have you ever looked at any of those civilizations or societies?
0:50:12 Yeah.
0:50:15 The rate and incidence of cancer is almost non-existing.
0:50:17 At least it was almost non-existent.
0:50:20 But now some of these chemicals have spread so far and wide.
0:50:25 And one example being PFAS, they’re known as forever chemicals because they don’t degrade.
0:50:26 They can travel so far.
0:50:27 They basically covered the globe.
0:50:29 They are found in polar bear fat.
0:50:35 So that just tells you how far up the food chain these chemicals have traveled because they don’t break down.
0:50:41 So as soon as an animal eats it and then it gets eaten by another animal, so on and so forth, then it reaches the apex predators, right?
0:50:44 And it’s stored in their fat.
0:50:48 And in polar bears, it’s been seen that you can find some of these chemicals.
0:51:00 So we know how far and wide that these chemicals have gone, that even these tribes that are in remote locations aren’t necessarily exempt from being exposed.
0:51:01 They’re also getting exposed.
0:51:05 It’s just in the air, it’s in the water, it’s in the soil.
0:51:07 And what chemicals are those? PFAS?
0:51:08 PFAS.
0:51:09 PFAS, what does that sound like?
0:51:10 PFAS.
0:51:14 So purr and polyflural alcohol substances.
0:51:19 It’s a huge chemical class of about 15,000 different chemicals.
0:51:28 And that includes things like PFOA, PFOS and PTFE, which are more commonly known as Teflon, non-stick chemicals.
0:51:32 Like this non-stick pan that I have here?
0:51:33 Exactly.
0:51:36 So is that PFAS?
0:51:37 PFAS.
0:51:41 Yes, PTFE is the chemical name for Teflon.
0:51:44 So Teflon is used to create the non-stick coating.
0:51:51 And it is believed that because it is so chemically stable that it wouldn’t come off the pan into your food.
0:51:52 But that’s not true.
0:52:00 There’s evidence showing that there is transfer from the cookware in normal cooking conditions into food.
0:52:05 Not only that, when you heat that pan high enough, it will vaporize and get into the air.
0:52:11 And if you inhale it, you run the risk of experiencing what’s known as Teflon flu.
0:52:15 And it basically has flu-like symptoms when you inhale that stuff.
0:52:21 And so that would be considered an acute exposure, so a one-time higher dose exposure.
0:52:30 But what we really need information on are the chronic low doses that we’re getting just by cooking our daily eggs on there.
0:52:39 Have there been any studies done on the impact of people cooking on these versus people that don’t cook with these non-sticks or Teflon pans?
0:52:43 Well, I can tell you that they’ve measured the amount of chemicals that are coming off of the pans.
0:52:49 And so if you’ve ever had a non-stick piece of cookware, it scratches very easily.
0:52:50 Yeah.
0:52:55 And some of these scratches are microscopic and invisible to the naked eye.
0:53:05 Studies have found that a surface scratch can release 9,000 particles from that non-stick coating into your food.
0:53:14 And if it’s a crack, that number jumps up to 2.3 billion particles that are transferred into your food.
0:53:18 And what’s that going to do to my health? What do these PFAS do to my health?
0:53:22 Well, PFAS are linked with several types of cancers.
0:53:32 So kidney and testicular cancer, thyroid disorders, which thyroid problems are so common these days, but they’re not normal.
0:53:41 Then we have increased risk of miscarriage, preterm labor, preterm birth, preeclampsia, which is high blood pressure during pregnancy.
0:53:48 That could be deadly. You also have increased obesity that’s linked with PFAS chemicals.
0:53:54 And PFAS also contribute to an increase in endometriosis and PCOS.
0:53:56 Oh, really?
0:54:03 So people who have endometriosis and PCOS, they have found to have higher levels of PFAS in their bodies.
0:54:09 And PFAS are found in everybody. No one’s exempt. Everyone has PFAS in our bodies.
0:54:19 But whether or not they’re able to exert toxicity depends on your inner environment, depends on how many other chemicals your body is working to fight off.
0:54:34 I just pulled up some studies here. One of the studies from 2023, which you might be aware of, showed that higher levels of PFAS in the blood of women in Singapore were associated with a 30 to 40% lower chance of pregnancy and live birth within one year.
0:54:45 Another study sampled 381 blood samples from people trying to lose weight, and no matter the diet that these participants tried, they gained weight if they had elevated PFAS exposure.
0:54:52 What the hell? They gained weight even if they tried different diets.
0:55:06 Yeah, so these chemicals are known, endocrine disruptors are also known as Obesogens. So they’re increasing the prevalence of obesity so you store more fat and you can’t lose it.
0:55:11 Obesogens? I thought food was the only obesity.
0:55:21 Well, the chemicals that you’re being exposed to through your cookware, through food packaging, they’re also sources of these endocrine disruptors.
0:55:28 How about cancer? Is PFAS linked to cancer? Have they done these studies on that with animals or?
0:55:33 Yeah, in humans, it’s kidney and testicular cancer.
0:55:38 Okay. What about prostate? I know that’s a big concern for a lot of men in particular.
0:55:45 I haven’t seen direct evidence on that, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that was also linked because that’s also a hormonal tissue.
0:55:59 This study from 2021 in mice at the University of Illinois found that a high-fat diet combined with PFAS exposure could cause changes in prostate cells that promote tumor growth.
0:56:05 Is there an alternative to PFAS? Is there something that I could use instead of this nonstick pan?
0:56:14 Yeah, just get rid of the nonstick chemicals all together and that would be something as simple as cast iron, stainless steel, glass cookware, ceramic cookware.
0:56:16 It’s just a bit more annoying, isn’t it?
0:56:25 Yeah. I mean, nonstick cookware is amazing. I mean, you can make food slide off, clean up as a breeze, but at what cost?
0:56:34 You might be saving time when you’re cooking, but how much of that time is being taken off the back end of your lifespan is the question.
0:56:36 So you’re saying throw this away?
0:56:43 Yeah, I would. But see, that’s the other thing is if you are then hearing this and you’re like, “I got to get rid of my cookware,” well, guess what?
0:56:50 You throw that out and it ends up in a landfill and the PFAS chemicals are now in the environment where they won’t go away.
0:56:52 So am I throwing it out?
0:56:59 So it really depends, right? If you are in the position to where you can get rid of it, then it might benefit you.
0:57:04 But the key is to really stop buying it, but you already have it. So it’s really up to you.
0:57:12 In terms of cookware, that’s better for me. Avoid the nonstick, go for stainless steel, cast iron.
0:57:19 What about the utensils then? So things like, I’ve got a plastic spatula here in my hand. Is this good?
0:57:28 No, because that’s melting. It’s breaking off into little tiny bits and fragments of microplastics and nanoplastics in your food.
0:57:30 So bad spatula?
0:57:32 Yes.
0:57:41 The silicone rubber, the plastic, if you just think about the fact that it’s being heated up, if you’ve ever looked at one,
0:57:50 the integrity, you’ll see it starting to fray. If you see any bits coming off, then you know it’s definitely breaking up and getting into your food.
0:57:58 Yeah, there’s loads of little pieces missing from the end of the plastic. And I guess that’s gone into the food most likely, slowly dissolving over time.
0:58:03 Right, because with nonstick cookware, you can’t use metal utensils, right? You’ll scratch the surface.
0:58:06 But guess what? Even with that, you can scratch the surface.
0:58:09 So the wooden one here in my left hand, that’s better?
0:58:18 Yes, at least from a safety and microplastic and nonstick chemical perspective, yes.
0:58:19 Are you concerned at all?
0:58:20 No, not at all.
0:58:21 So wood is fine?
0:58:22 Wood is totally fine.
0:58:31 What people normally will say is I can’t properly clean the wood, but I haven’t had that issue, just clean it with soap and water and it is fine.
0:58:35 Okay, so we’ll keep the wooden spatula.
0:58:38 What else in terms of cooking products?
0:58:41 So I’ve got this pan here, you’re saying this is a good one? Stainless steel?
0:58:42 Yes.
0:58:44 Great, keep that one.
0:58:46 Keep that one.
0:59:00 Okay, what about this nice plastic container, super convenient, put my lunch in it, go to work, maybe pop it in the microwave, heat it up, get my takeaway in it, plastic container. Good?
0:59:03 Absolutely not. Do not microwave plastic containers.
0:59:11 Even after just a few seconds, you’ll get release of billions of microplastic particles into your food, just from a tiny square centimeter.
0:59:14 You’ll get billions of microplastic particles.
0:59:21 And with microplastics, they’re hard. It’s a solid mass. It does not break down in the body.
0:59:23 What if it says BPA-free?
0:59:29 That’s great, but it’s still plastic. It’s still microplastic. It’s still nanoplastic releasing.
0:59:33 And it probably has phthalates in it, depending on the type of plastic.
0:59:43 Right. Okay, so you don’t want to be microwaving these. And if I get microplastics into my food, what’s the net impact? What’s the harm of that?
0:59:48 Well, microplastics don’t break down. They don’t go away. Again, they’re accumulating in human tissues.
0:59:54 So they’ve actually been found in a whole number. I’m pretty sure they’re all over the body at this point.
1:00:01 We just have to see the evidence to know, right? And so they’re in human lungs, blood in the gut tissue.
1:00:09 They’re in heart. They’re in brain. They are in the placenta. They’re also in penis. And they have been detected in…
1:00:11 There’s microplastics in my penis.
1:00:16 Yes, there could be. Studies have shown that. And even in newborn babies.
1:00:22 So when babies are born, they have their first bowel movement, which is known as meconium.
1:00:30 And in the meconium, microplastics have been found. So that means babies are being exposed to microplastics in utero.
1:00:32 They’re being born with plastics in their body.
1:00:33 And what’s the risk of that?
1:00:40 Well, the risk is that they don’t go away number one. And on a cellular level, they’re causing inflammation and oxidative stress.
1:00:49 And oxidative stress is free radical damage. And what that means is if you ingest these microplastic particles, which everyone is,
1:00:59 and they’re in your tissues, and your body cannot get rid of them, then they’re basically like the equivalent of a million little fires all over your body.
1:01:08 And unless you have enough detox capability like antioxidants to get rid of them, they’re there to stay.
1:01:12 What do you mean by detox capabilities? As in my liver and…
1:01:20 Yeah, exactly. Every cell in your body has some antioxidants in it. If you didn’t, you would be dead.
1:01:28 Because in order to live on this planet and breathe oxygen, we need antioxidants to neutralize the free radicals that happen.
1:01:35 Through cellular respiration, right? So whenever we breathe oxygen, there are free radicals that are created.
1:01:43 And our cells have naturally in them antioxidants like glutathione, and they help to neutralize these free radicals.
1:01:48 But glutathione is also vital for detoxifying environmental chemicals.
1:01:52 So if you think about it, how does the body decide what’s more important?
1:01:58 Do I neutralize these free radicals because I need to breathe and live? Or do I have to deal with these chemicals over here?
1:02:05 I don’t know. So you’re literally being torn. Your body is torn at this point. What to deal with first?
1:02:11 And usually it’s the oxygen I need to breathe. So let me neutralize the free radicals from breathing oxygen.
1:02:18 Then I’ll deal with these chemicals later if I have enough left in the tank, and most people don’t.
1:02:33 Modern lifestyles are resulting in depletion of glutathione. Our glutathione is being robbed by these microplastics, by these parabens, phthalates, and other chemicals that you find in consumer products.
1:02:38 You had to sum up in a sentence what microplastics are doing to us. What would that sentence be?
1:02:46 Slowly killing us over time. We’re becoming plastic. We’re actually known as the plasticine epic.
1:02:54 Human kind is more plastic. Eventually we will become more plastic than we are humans, if we can continue at this rate.
1:03:01 There have been over 300 million metric tons of plastics produced.
1:03:05 I mean that’s a really big number, but I can’t really wrap my head around it.
1:03:15 And they don’t go away. They don’t go away. That’s the problem. They just continually break up into smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller fragments.
1:03:29 A 2024 study on microplastics in human livers, kidneys, and brains found that all of them contained microplastics, but the brain contained 10 to 20 times more than any other organ.
1:03:37 The brains measured around 0.5% plastic by weight. That’s a Guardian article. Does that mean 0.5% of my brain is plastic?
1:03:47 Yes, and that’s because plastic is fat soluble and the brain is mostly fat. So microplastics travel there through the bloodstream.
1:03:57 We inhale them. They go to the brain and they can’t leave because the brain does not have the ability to detoxify itself the way the other tissues do.
1:03:59 I guess it wasn’t expecting the plastic.
1:04:06 Right. So it’s like, who’s this? I can’t get rid of you. So just stay, but then what is it doing to you over time?
1:04:11 What is it doing to our brains over time? I’m going to throw this away, by the way. I’m not going to microwave my food and plastic anymore.
1:04:15 What is it doing to our brains over time? Do you think? Is there any associations?
1:04:24 I haven’t seen any clear evidence, but my hypothesis is that it’s increasing the likelihood of cognitive decline.
1:04:34 And the brain is one of the most important, obviously the most important organs in our bodies, and brain problems don’t usually show up until you’re in your elder years.
1:04:44 But I would be interested to know if the rate of dementia, if people are getting dementia and other brain related disorders earlier, just like cancer.
1:04:47 I would not be surprised if I saw that.
1:04:54 We drink out of these stainless steel cups here on the dirovisio. Are these okay to be drinking out of?
1:04:55 Yes.
1:04:56 Okay.
1:05:00 Because they’re not leaching microplastics into your drink.
1:05:05 Like BPA free stainless steel. Okay. They weren’t expensive. That’s good news.
1:05:11 But sometimes when I go to shops and supermarkets and stuff, I grab these plastic bottles full of water.
1:05:18 There’s been a lot of conversation around plastic bottles and water. Are these safe to drink from, in your opinion?
1:05:22 Well, if you have no other option, then that’s what you’ve got.
1:05:28 And so I don’t want people to think I can never drink bottled water ever again or I’m going to die, because that’s not the case.
1:05:34 I myself traveled here. I had to drink from bottled water because I didn’t bring enough of my own water with me.
1:05:38 Is that something that I’m going to panic about? No, it’s not.
1:05:44 Is it something that I want to do? No, but I need water. So that’s my only option.
1:05:49 But if you are able to avoid that, then absolutely avoid bottled water.
1:05:51 Have there been any studies done on bottled water?
1:05:56 Yeah. There have been so many studies showing that bottled water is a major source of microplastics.
1:06:03 Because if you think about it, plastic is not meant to be permanent, but it kind of is.
1:06:08 But at the same time, there are certain conditions that promote leaching.
1:06:15 And one of them is if you put that plastic water bottle in the sun, UV causes plastic to break down.
1:06:24 So that’s releasing microplastics. Just squeezing it, physical force is causing microplastic sharing and release.
1:06:28 But not just that. Just over time, the plastic is just leaching on its own.
1:06:34 Temperature is another factor. So if you leave that in a hot car, microplastics.
1:06:41 If you’ve ever had a bottle of water sitting in a hot car and you drink it and it tastes like plastic, that’s because it’s plastic.
1:06:43 It’s becoming more plastic.
1:06:48 But the microplastics are releasing endocrine disruptors, right?
1:06:52 The same phthalates that we talked about in fragrances are also in plastic water bottles.
1:07:00 What about these water bottles that a lot of people have now that kind of like Stanley cut star water bottles that are made of this metal?
1:07:01 Are these better?
1:07:04 Yeah, definitely. It’s the same as these stainless steel cups.
1:07:08 Yeah. Okay, so everyone should have one of these for their water.
1:07:10 But not only that, it’s also more sustainable, right?
1:07:17 Because plastic bottles make up the majority of plastic waste in the environment.
1:07:26 And all of those are breaking up again into smaller and smaller microplastics and nanoplastics that are basically polluting everything now.
1:07:32 Okay, so instead of that plastic container I had, this glass container for the microwave and for my food is better.
1:07:33 Perfect.
1:07:36 Okay, but what about the lid? The lid has got these little plastic handles on it.
1:07:40 Yeah, so what I would do is take the lid off if you need to heat up your food.
1:07:41 Okay.
1:07:46 And what I also do is keep a space between my food and the lid so it’s not in direct contact with the plastic.
1:07:48 How do you keep a space?
1:07:50 Just don’t fill it all the way to the brim.
1:07:51 Oh, okay, just keep it.
1:07:53 Just keep a little space.
1:07:55 Okay, so that’s good.
1:08:01 It’s the contact with the plastic. I mean, if you need the container and you need a lid to store your food.
1:08:02 Okay, we’ll keep the lid.
1:08:04 I mean, I have those too, so.
1:08:05 We’ll keep the lid.
1:08:08 Just the thing is just try to keep your food from touching it if you can.
1:08:09 Okay.
1:08:17 And what about this coffee, coffee cup? I went to, you know, you go to a Starbucks and you go to a coffee shop.
1:08:25 They give you these takeaway coffee cups, which are made of like this sort of papery feel good, bad, indifferent.
1:08:26 Get rid of them.
1:08:27 They’re terrible.
1:08:35 So they’re basically lined with plastic and studies have shown that within 15 minutes of contact with the hot liquid,
1:08:39 you’re getting 25,000 microplastic particles in that cup.
1:08:43 And most people, some people don’t drink their coffee in 15 minutes to let it sit longer.
1:08:46 And so the longer it sits, the more leaching there is.
1:08:48 And not only that, the lid is plastic.
1:08:54 So as the hot liquid is passing through the lid, there could also be leaching of microplastics.
1:08:57 That plastic lining also leaches heavy metals.
1:09:01 So it’s, there are so many issues with that cup.
1:09:03 You seem really pissed off with the cup.
1:09:06 I’m actually really, they’re so pervasive.
1:09:11 And I remember being in Germany about 10, 15 years ago, maybe something like that.
1:09:13 And coffee to go was new.
1:09:17 And at the time I come from the U.S., they’ll have been around forever.
1:09:18 I was like, why is this new?
1:09:22 I don’t understand coffee to go, why is that a thing?
1:09:27 And my husband said, it’s because we sit down and drink our coffee out of a mug.
1:09:29 We don’t take it to go.
1:09:32 So this is like appealing to tourists.
1:09:34 But what’s wrong with coffee to go?
1:09:35 Is it the container?
1:09:36 It’s the container.
1:09:39 So if you bring your own container, Starbucks will fill it up.
1:09:42 Or if you bring your own container, some shops will fill it up for you.
1:09:46 And they might even knock off 10 cents because you brought your own container.
1:09:51 So I’d have to bring something like, I guess like this, which is a steel.
1:09:52 Right.
1:09:53 With a little glass lid.
1:09:54 Right.
1:09:55 Okay.
1:09:56 Okay.
1:09:57 It’s a plastic lid.
1:10:00 So if you can take the lid off to drink.
1:10:04 If you can’t, again, don’t stress out over it.
1:10:05 Okay.
1:10:09 We’ve been through some of these things so far, just on the consumables.
1:10:10 Okay.
1:10:11 Fine.
1:10:12 Okay.
1:10:17 So, and last question on consumption stuff is about food and water.
1:10:19 Should I be filtering my water?
1:10:20 Absolutely.
1:10:21 Absolutely.
1:10:23 If you live in an area where water has been fluoridated.
1:10:24 How do I know?
1:10:26 You’ve got to check the water report.
1:10:29 Most municipalities have water reports.
1:10:33 And if not, you can go to the EWG, the environmental working group.
1:10:36 They have a water report database that you can check.
1:10:39 So just type in your zip code of where you live.
1:10:43 And it’ll tell you what contaminants are found and which ones exceed safe limits.
1:10:45 And it’s very helpful to know.
1:10:51 What if I get these kind of like, you know, these little plastic water filter systems
1:10:54 you can get where you put it in the fridge, you pour the water in and then you put like
1:10:57 a filter thing in, you replace it and then you pour it in.
1:10:58 Are those good?
1:11:00 It depends on what type of filter you have.
1:11:01 Okay.
1:11:06 Some of the more mainstream lower costs, lower end options do not remove fluoride number
1:11:10 one and they don’t filter nearly enough chemicals.
1:11:13 Tap water is a source of hormones.
1:11:23 So endocrine disruptors, pesticides, heavy metals, fluoride, if it’s added to the water.
1:11:28 When there’s agricultural runoff, there’s a bunch of different contaminants in tap water,
1:11:29 depending on where you live.
1:11:36 Some are worse than others and there have even been tragic instances of lead, high levels
1:11:40 of lead because of the lead piping that water is transported through.
1:11:46 So we’ve got to be careful with the water that we’re using to drink and cook with.
1:11:51 And so what’s a sort of low cost solution to this for people that are concerned about
1:11:54 their consuming and their families are consuming?
1:11:58 Yeah, actually there have been studies showing that you can boil your water.
1:12:02 So if you boil your water, that can actually remove a significant portion of the microplastic
1:12:07 pollutions in there because of, if you’ve ever noticed after you boiled water, there’s
1:12:10 sort of a white crust at the bottom of the pot.
1:12:15 That’s actually calcium, calcification, and the microplastics get trapped in that calcified
1:12:20 layer, but that still doesn’t take care of all the other chemicals that are found in tap
1:12:21 water.
1:12:24 So the best option is to filter it.
1:12:28 Some filters are more accessible and affordable than others.
1:12:34 Reverse osmosis removes the most contaminants, but it also generates the most wastewater.
1:12:36 So it isn’t the most efficient.
1:12:40 And it also can remove beneficial minerals, which you then have to add back in because
1:12:44 it’s not good to drink de-mineralized water over time.
1:12:49 So there are different options that you can use, but the best option, you have to filter
1:12:52 at some point, at some level, depending on where you are.
1:12:55 So check your water and look for a filter.
1:12:59 So carbon filters are effective for the most part, but you want to check to make sure that
1:13:02 the filter can remove fluoride as well.
1:13:03 Okay.
1:13:07 Well, in the show notes of today’s episode, what I’ll ask you to do is to just help us
1:13:12 put together a bit of a list of things that you approve of relating to the subjects that
1:13:13 we’ve discussed today.
1:13:19 Just, you know, some of the deodorant stuff that we mentioned, and also water filter systems
1:13:21 and stuff, because I can imagine it can be quite confusing for people.
1:13:25 And I imagine most people listening, they just want, they want to know what the most
1:13:29 important simple things that they can do to have the biggest potential impact.
1:13:34 And also they’re going to be quite cost-conscious, as we all are, about not overspending on
1:13:37 things and they don’t have thousands and thousands of pounds, but they want to make
1:13:39 significant steps forward.
1:13:44 And I guess to that point then, if you were to say to someone, what are like the simple,
1:13:49 free things we can all do or cheap things, cost-effective things we can do as it relates
1:13:54 to our cookware, things we’re consuming to make sure that we’re staying as healthy as
1:13:56 we possibly can be.
1:13:58 First thing is to filter your water.
1:14:02 Second thing is to get rid of fragrance products.
1:14:05 So you’re actually saving money by not buying that stuff, right?
1:14:08 So if you can remove that, then you’re better off.
1:14:10 Thirdly is to cook at home.
1:14:15 Cooking at home is also significantly more cost-effective than getting takeout all the time.
1:14:19 And you’re also saving on a massive amount of toxic exposure that way.
1:14:23 What about the types of foods we buy?
1:14:26 Have I got to just be buying organic food?
1:14:29 If you’re able to, then it’s helpful.
1:14:36 But if you can’t, eating an unprocessed diet as much as you possibly can, whole foods,
1:14:41 single ingredient foods, if you choose to eat meat, fruits and vegetables,
1:14:48 things of that nature, try to get the least processed option you possibly can and cook at home.
1:14:51 And if you can, cook on stainless steel or cast iron.
1:14:54 But if not stick is all you have, that’s all you’ve got, right?
1:15:01 So just do what you can with what you’ve got, but try to eliminate the processed food as much as you can.
1:15:02 What about beauty then?
1:15:06 I’ve got some beauty products here, moisturizers, got some eyeliners.
1:15:09 This is a Roland geogen, you’re probably familiar with these.
1:15:12 Yeah, that looks like an antiperspirant.
1:15:13 Antiperspirant, oh yeah, right.
1:15:15 So that’s different than deodorant.
1:15:19 So antiperspirants contain aluminum salts and those physically block sweat ducts.
1:15:22 And so what that does over time is it prevents you from sweating, right?
1:15:23 That’s why it’s antiperspirant.
1:15:31 But the problem with aluminum is that there have been links to increased risk of breast cancer in young girls who use deodorant.
1:15:37 Because aluminum itself also acts like an estrogen in the body.
1:15:39 Oh, God, it smells strong.
1:15:40 Wow.
1:15:46 Okay, so these Roland deodorants that are, for anyone that doesn’t, isn’t watching, it’s the one with the ball on it.
1:15:49 The little ball thing that you roll under your armpit.
1:15:53 The key is to avoid the antiperspirant, if you can.
1:16:00 And I know a lot of people have, you know, self concern with sweating and everything like that.
1:16:04 But some people online have done armpit detoxes.
1:16:10 So with apple cider vinegar and bentonite clay, you make a little paste out of it, smear it under your arms,
1:16:16 and that can help to pull out some of these embedded particles in your sweat ducts.
1:16:19 What is the most compelling study that you heard about as it relates to,
1:16:23 because I am always, you know, from doing this podcast and reading about this subject matter,
1:16:27 I am increasingly concerned about, you know, putting things under my armpit.
1:16:31 For a number of reasons, it’s really hot under there, but then it just feels, I don’t know,
1:16:35 then I read there’s stats around breast cancer, and I thought, gosh,
1:16:41 it’s probably not a good idea to be like, lathering chemicals under my armpit.
1:16:47 What is the most compelling study you read on this subject that made you think twice about antiperspirants?
1:16:53 Yeah, it was the increased risk of breast cancer in young girls that are using these underarm antiperspirants.
1:16:58 What about these other beauty products then? Throw that one away.
1:17:02 Everyday beauty products, I think, I don’t even know what these products are.
1:17:06 That looks like a foundation makeup that you would put all over your face.
1:17:07 So you’d go like this?
1:17:08 Yeah.
1:17:09 Okay.
1:17:13 Or concealer or something like that to help even out your skin tone, cover up spots.
1:17:14 Right.
1:17:17 So that goes all over your face, right? So products that sit on your skin,
1:17:22 those are known as leave on products, those comprise a higher risk than something you would rinse off like a soap,
1:17:25 or a body wash, because it’s sitting on your skin.
1:17:27 So the contact time is longer.
1:17:35 The longer something sits on your skin, the longer time it has to penetrate the skin and get absorbed into your bloodstream.
1:17:39 Lipstick is also a high risk product if you’re using the wrong kind,
1:17:43 because it’s going on your lips and you’re having some ingestion.
1:17:45 So don’t use foundation?
1:17:49 No, not necessarily. Find a safer foundation.
1:17:53 So avoid the fragrance foundations.
1:17:55 Smells good, this one.
1:17:57 Yeah, so it’s got fragrances in there, I’m sure.
1:17:58 Okay.
1:18:03 Because foundations are usually made of chemicals, right?
1:18:05 Chemicals don’t always smell good.
1:18:08 So a lot of manufacturers put fragrance in there to mask the odor.
1:18:11 Even like lip balm, I had this conversation with my girlfriend the other day,
1:18:14 and she was lathering on her lip balm and I was like, “I don’t know if that’s good for you.”
1:18:16 And she was like, “It just smells so good.”
1:18:20 I was like, “I don’t know, do you know what I have this conspiracy theory about lip balm that I’ve never shared with anybody?”
1:18:27 Which is, my girlfriend applies lip balm all the time and her lips get dry often,
1:18:30 whereas I don’t apply lip balm ever, on any special occasions.
1:18:34 And I’m joking, I never apply it and my lips don’t seem to get dry unless I go on a plane or something.
1:18:41 But I just wonder sometimes if these cosmetic products are fixing a problem that they’re creating.
1:18:47 Yeah, I would think so because if you never touched your face, what would your skin be like?
1:18:49 Some people only use water on their face.
1:18:53 And I have found personally, the more I mess with my face, the more products I use,
1:18:58 the more I end up feeling like I need them because my skin is reacting differently.
1:19:02 So I think it’s creating an issue that wasn’t there and then comes in and like,
1:19:04 “Oh, this is the solution to that.”
1:19:07 It’s brilliant if you think about it from a money-making perspective.
1:19:10 But also, if I’m disrupting your hormones with all of these chemicals,
1:19:14 then I’m more likely to be causing you to have skin flare-ups and skin issues
1:19:16 and I’d probably even ageing in wrinkles,
1:19:19 which you’re then going to need to use some of these cosmetic products to solve for.
1:19:26 Right, and then they’re going to try and sell you some other, more invasive procedures down the line.
1:19:32 I’ve seen some people who don’t use skin products at all and have never used them because of the society they live in.
1:19:39 And they have unbelievable, remarkable skin and they don’t have the flare-ups and all these kinds of things that we have over here.
1:19:41 So I’ve always been pretty dubious.
1:19:43 I think I’m a bit of like an evolutionist.
1:19:49 I don’t know if that even is a thing, but just someone who has much more faith in my body’s natural systems
1:19:53 for dealing with things than the modern world would lead us to believe.
1:19:56 Like, I know that we live in an unnatural world, right?
1:19:58 So there are some things that we need.
1:20:03 I live in, you know, we’re indoors all day, so I probably should be taking some vitamin D, for example.
1:20:10 But outside of that, I just don’t buy that we need all of these products like, you know, shampoos and conditioners and…
1:20:11 What do you think of shampoos?
1:20:15 I’ve got a shampoo brand here, which I just got off the shelf in the local shop.
1:20:17 Are shampoos okay?
1:20:20 Yeah, again, it depends on what the ingredients are, right?
1:20:24 Moles shampoos are heavily fragrance and heavily scented.
1:20:27 But if you look, you’ll find some that aren’t.
1:20:29 Smells delicious.
1:20:30 Yeah, okay.
1:20:36 And it’s very highly likely that you can become addicted to lip balm and addicted to scent.
1:20:37 I was.
1:20:38 You’re addicted to lip balm?
1:20:39 Yeah.
1:20:43 Like you said, the more you apply, the more you need it, and then you just keep applying it.
1:20:46 So it’s every 10 or 15 minutes, it felt like at some point.
1:20:51 And I was using a very heavily scented fragrance lip balm when I was a teenager.
1:20:53 It just was trendy at school.
1:20:54 What scent do you have?
1:20:55 What flavor do you have?
1:20:59 And everyone was doing it, so it just became a thing.
1:21:00 What about this?
1:21:03 This is a tampon.
1:21:04 What about tampons?
1:21:14 I had a conversation on this podcast with a lady who had a toxic reaction to a tampon and lost both of her legs because of that.
1:21:21 What’s your thoughts on menstrual products, generally tampons, period pads?
1:21:32 Menstrual products contain some of the worst chemicals that should never be in direct contact with your reproductive tissues, with your vaginal canal.
1:21:34 They just should not be there.
1:21:39 Things like benzene, there’s heavy metals in tampons.
1:21:44 Actually, there was a study showing that women who use tampons had higher levels of heavy metals in their body.
1:21:46 We don’t need those down there.
1:21:52 And fragrances, again, with the phthalates, they’re also found in tampons.
1:21:55 A lot of menstrual products contain scent.
1:21:58 Maybe that one doesn’t, but there’s a lot that do.
1:21:59 What’s the alternative?
1:22:01 It’s entirely unnecessary.
1:22:06 The alternative would be to use, you can find organic cotton tampons.
1:22:08 Tampons are made of cotton, right?
1:22:13 Cotton is one of the most heavily sprayed crops in the world with glyphosate.
1:22:15 We don’t need glyphosate down there.
1:22:19 The problem is that the vaginal canal is occluded, right?
1:22:25 So it’s blocked off, it’s warm, it’s body temperature, and there’s also friction.
1:22:31 So all of these factors increase and drive chemical absorption into the body.
1:22:36 And you don’t want to be delivering some of these chemicals directly to your reproductive organs.
1:22:39 You think it’s going to have a big impact on fertility?
1:22:41 I think it could.
1:22:47 In fact, there are a lot of anecdotal reports anyway of people saying that when they switched out their period products
1:22:54 and went with more organic and more sustainable options, that their periods became easier.
1:22:56 Some people close to me have PCOS.
1:22:59 I’ve also got some friends that have endometriosis.
1:23:09 Is there a link between phthalates and sort of menstrual products and PCOS and endometriosis, in your opinion?
1:23:13 Yes, there is, and there is a link with PFAS chemicals too.
1:23:24 So these xenoestrogens are exacerbating these conditions because if you think about it, the uterus is an endocrine responsive tissue.
1:23:26 It’s a hormonally active.
1:23:28 It responds to estrogen.
1:23:33 You’re delivering, let’s say, phthalates through tampons directly down there.
1:23:38 It’s going into the circulation and it bypasses what’s known as the portal circulation.
1:23:41 Phase 2 detoxification by the liver.
1:23:43 So it bypasses detoxification.
1:23:49 So you’re basically delivering hormonally active chemicals directly where you don’t want them to go.
1:23:53 They cannot be detoxified.
1:23:55 What about my clothes?
1:23:59 You mentioned cotton a second ago and it made me think about the clothes that I’m wearing.
1:24:03 How do I know if the clothes that I’m wearing are toxin-free?
1:24:06 Are there certain clothes that are and aren’t?
1:24:08 That’s a really good question.
1:24:17 Organic cotton is one way of knowing if your clothes contain pesticides and certain chemicals that are used in the farming of cotton.
1:24:25 But not only that, if your clothes are made out of synthetic fibers like polyester, nylon and acrylic, those release microplastics.
1:24:31 And they’ve also been found to contain BPA, which is an endocrine disruptor.
1:24:35 You got to check the tag around the side sometimes.
1:24:39 95% polyester.
1:24:46 That’s a source of microplastics. Every time you wash it, every time you move, there are microplastics breaking off.
1:24:49 5% spandex.
1:24:52 That’s also synthetic.
1:24:56 So you’re basically wearing an entirely synthetic shirt.
1:25:05 What about the chemicals that I wash it in? I’ve got some… This is where I expose that I’ve never cleaned a t-shirt properly in my life. Sugar.
1:25:14 I’ve got some fabric cleaner thing here.
1:25:18 I guess this is probably a source of toxins. I’m getting the hang of this now.
1:25:22 Yeah, you’re right. You called it out. You called it out exactly right.
1:25:23 Fragrances.
1:25:30 I wash my clothes in this and then I put the clothes on. I’m exposing myself to toxins. Let me see.
1:25:40 Right, because it’s covering your entire body, right? Wherever you have the clothing touching your skin, there’s some friction, there’s movement, there’s body heat, there’s moisture.
1:25:47 That’s increasing chemical penetration and absorption into your bloodstream.
1:25:54 The solution there is if you like scented laundry care products, is again to use essential oils.
1:26:01 So instead of the dryer sheets that you get at the store, those actually just coat your clothing with some type of oily, waxy substance.
1:26:06 That’s what makes them feel soft. They’re not actually softening your clothes. They coat your clothing.
1:26:12 And so all of that is touching your skin. It’s rubbing. How much of that is getting absorbed, right?
1:26:23 And instead look for wool dryer balls made out of wool. People put essential oils in there and let it run through their clothing.
1:26:34 I am something quite startling that I read when I was going through all of your work is that beauty in a hair products marketed to black women often contain the most toxic ingredients.
1:26:58 Yes, that is known as environmental injustice. So that’s one of the, I would say the most tragic circumstances that we’re facing as a society is that the people who are exposed to the most amount of toxins are low income people and people in ethnic groups.
1:27:12 And so some of these products that are marketed specifically to black girls contain some of the worst ingredients I have ever seen. And I think it should be outlawed.
1:27:21 Like you said, the fragrances, the endocrine disruptors, these harsh detergents, some formaldehyde releasers, formaldehyde is a human carcinogen.
1:27:35 What place does it have in a beauty and personal care product? It doesn’t. It needs to be removed. There needs to be better regulations and better protection for vulnerable populations.
1:27:56 I was doing some research and I looked at Harvard Health and it said 50% of products advertised to black women contain endocrine disruptors, which are those disruptors that are going to impact their hormones, increase their chance of things like cancer, infertility, etc, etc, compared to roughly 7% that are advertised to white women.
1:28:04 And these endocrine disruptors can impact fertility and increase their chance of getting cancer. Why, why is that? Why is that the case?
1:28:26 I think it has to do a lot with the types of products that certain demographics would gravitate towards. So depending on your hair type, what kind of products you might need, there really is no explanation to why these toxic chemicals are in those products in particular in such high numbers.
1:28:47 That’s really the problem is why is it more prevalent for those populations than others? And I think this is an ongoing societal issue of environmental injustice and to a certain extent environmental racism.
1:28:59 It really is, yeah, you said it’s a form of racism and it’s a form of sort of environmental injustice. Are people aware of this?
1:29:16 I don’t think so. I think the vast majority of people are entirely unaware of this and studies show it because there are studies showing that the earlier you start using cosmetic products, the higher your chance of coming down with breast cancer.
1:29:39 And the people who had the highest prevalence were African American females. So I think it’s a combination of the fact that there is some level of racism, environmental injustice, but also a cultural and societal preference for certain products.
1:29:44 So black women are at the highest risk of getting breast cancer under the age of 40.
1:29:47 Yes.
1:30:00 What can be done about that, do you think? Is this something that the government have to do something about? Or is it both something that we have to sort of increase our own public consciousness of and make better choices?
1:30:04 Is there an easy solution to fix this?
1:30:09 I think if we wait for the government to take action, we’ll be waiting for a long time.
1:30:26 The cosmetic regulations in the United States were not updated until recently, and before that the last update was when they were actually created nearly 100 years prior. 100 years had gone by. No change to the cosmetic regulations, none.
1:30:38 Yet more and more products are being churned out without being tested, without knowing what the health effects are. And then later on we see increases in all of these diseases that we’ve been talking about.
1:30:51 So I think instead of waiting for the government, my goal and my purpose and my passion is to empower people with knowledge and solutions so they can take steps to protect themselves.
1:31:00 Is there a funding issue with black-owned businesses and sort of these black beauty products that is causal in all of this, in your opinion?
1:31:14 I think it really comes down to whether or not the creators of the products are aware of these risks and whether or not they are able to formulate in such a way that they don’t use these types of ingredients.
1:31:25 And I think that there has been a push for clean beauty, black-owned clean beauty. I’ve seen it. Could it get cleaner? Yes, I think so.
1:31:32 So I think it’s only a matter of time before somebody creates it. And so I’m looking forward to that.
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1:33:33 Before we start these podcasts, what we always do is we light some candles.
1:33:36 And this is one of the candles that we light.
1:33:43 I think you mentioned candles earlier on at the start of the conversation, but what’s your opinion on candles? Are they safe?
1:33:45 It depends on what type of candle you have.
1:33:50 There’s basically a safer alternative for pretty much any product that you can think of.
1:33:55 So I’m not one that says across the board candles or toxic.
1:34:04 It’s very specific conventional candles, paraffin wax scented candles, which is what you’ll see in stores.
1:34:08 The majority of candles out there are the ones that we shouldn’t be burning.
1:34:11 So this is a scented candle.
1:34:15 It doesn’t say what type of wax it is.
1:34:21 So we can be pretty certain that this is a paraffin wax candle.
1:34:29 At least using the precautionary principle, we should assume that something is guilty before it’s proven innocent.
1:34:37 So unless we know for sure that this is not a paraffin wax candle, I wouldn’t light it.
1:34:42 So because if I light it, then I’m pushing toxic chemicals into the air.
1:34:50 Exactly. So conventional candles, there are five main reasons why I would not burn a conventional candle.
1:34:59 Number one is that when you light those candles, they liberate carcinogens like benzene, toluene, and formaldehyde.
1:35:02 But not only that, ultrafine particles.
1:35:09 Ultrafine particles are some of the most hazardous substances that you can create in your home.
1:35:24 So ultrafine particles are tiny particles, less than a hundred microns in diameter, excuse me, less than 0.1 microns in diameter, a hundred nanometers invisible to the human eye, tiny.
1:35:29 And these particles have the ability to, as soon as you inhale them, they’ll go into your brain.
1:35:31 They have the ability to do that.
1:35:39 They also have the ability to go as far down into the lung as one can go, all the way down to the alveoli.
1:35:44 And down in those microscopic structures of the lung, that’s where gas exchange happens.
1:35:49 There’s only one cell layer separating the outside from the inside, your bloodstream.
1:35:51 One cell, that’s pretty much nothing.
1:35:54 That’s pretty much no separation, no protection.
1:35:59 So if an ultrafine particle can get that down, far down into your lungs, it’s guaranteed into your bloodstream.
1:36:02 It’s getting all over your body.
1:36:08 It’s causing inflammation and oxidative stress, which are the basis of many chronic diseases.
1:36:12 So ultrafine particles, we need to avoid them as much as possible.
1:36:16 And so one way is to not light a conventional candle.
1:36:21 Number two is that they’re also releasing volatile organic compounds, right, as I mentioned.
1:36:26 Number three, they contain undisclosed fragrance.
1:36:32 And within fragrance, there can be endocrine disruptors, carcinogens, and allergens.
1:36:36 So when you light these candles, you’re getting all of these toxins into your air.
1:36:41 Number four, some of the dyes that are used to color candles are carcinogenic.
1:36:48 And nobody has any idea is if you burn them, what are the health effects of burning these carcinogenic dyes?
1:36:57 And number five, candles are largely unregulated, which means that if you were to look at that candle and it says soy blend,
1:37:02 there can be paraffin wax in there, even though it says soy blend.
1:37:07 A lot of people think soy blend, oh, it comes from soy, it must be healthier for me.
1:37:08 So they’ll go for that.
1:37:17 But if it says soy blend, one should assume that it’s a majority of petroleum derived paraffin wax with a little bit of soy wax in there.
1:37:25 Because the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which regulates candles, doesn’t look at the ingredients in the candle.
1:37:35 They’re concerned with the vessel, the container of the candle, whether or not it’s fireproof, and whether or not the WIC contains lead.
1:37:46 They’re not looking at what’s in the wax, but studies have shown that when you light these candles, you are liberating a significant number of hazardous chemicals.
1:37:53 So we shall use incense instead.
1:37:55 Incense is even worse.
1:38:01 And I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but incense has been used for thousands of years.
1:38:07 But incense, as we know it now, is not the same as incense that was used a thousand years ago.
1:38:13 They now contain, again, phthalates, the endocrine disruptors, but also the ultrafine particles.
1:38:19 And studies have shown that incense creates more ultrafine particles in pollutants than cigarette smoke.
1:38:25 There’s an increased risk of cancer because these ultrafine particles are damaging DNA.
1:38:30 Damaged DNA leads to mutations. Mutations can lead to cancer.
1:38:34 There’s an increased incidence of cancer in temple workers.
1:38:40 So people who are around incense for hours upon hours at a time, there’s an increased risk of cancer.
1:38:49 Not only that, there’s an increased risk of cancer, almost threefold, in children whose parents burned incense in the home.
1:38:53 Okay, so no incense, my house is going to stink.
1:38:56 Well, you can use, there’s different candles that you can use.
1:39:05 So based on my research, I looked, I was really hell bent on finding what is the type of candle that has the lowest emissions, the least emissions.
1:39:08 Because let’s make it, I want to make it really clear.
1:39:12 Anytime you burn something, that’s not necessarily healthy.
1:39:14 But does it mean that you can’t do whatever? No.
1:39:31 If you find a candle that is low emission, like beeswax, essential oils, wooden or cotton wicks, then that’s a much better alternative than your conventional paraffin wax scented candle, brightly colored.
1:39:37 One of the things that I guess is kind of adjacent to this inhaling chemicals is vaping.
1:39:42 It’s really interesting because over the last couple of years, vaping has become more and more popular around the world.
1:39:48 I think cigarettes have declined, and especially amongst young people, more and more people in my friendship group anyway are vaping now more than ever.
1:39:52 What are your thoughts on vaping? Is that, is that harmful?
1:40:01 Yes, vaping fluid, liquid, is a chemical mixture that you are inhaling.
1:40:06 And these chemicals have not been tested for inhalation safety.
1:40:10 Namely, the flavors and the fragrances that are used.
1:40:18 Specifically, the flavors have not been tested for inhalation because they’re intended for oral ingestion to be eaten.
1:40:20 So they’re not tested for inhalation safety.
1:40:32 I used to work in a flavor and fragrance company, and that was one of the biggest issues was that people were putting these chemicals that were not tested into these vapes.
1:40:41 And the health effects are unknown, but now that’s been 10, 15 years, we know that vaping is not healthy.
1:40:48 Shisha. You look like a hookah. I guess you call it hookah in America. I mean, that’s even worse, isn’t it?
1:40:52 There is also a lot of risk associated with hookah, so hookah smoke.
1:41:04 I tried to do it earlier and it was like, it said it was the equivalent of 100 cigarettes having a Shisha, which is annoying because from time to time when I’m in the Middle East, I’ll go to one of these Shisha bars, whatever, with some of my friends.
1:41:10 But when I read that it’s equivalent to like 100 cigarettes, I thought I’m never doing that again. It’s just really not worth it.
1:41:18 And speaking of being in the Middle East and these sort of big built up cities, one of the things I’ve thought a lot about more recently is air quality.
1:41:23 Air quality both indoors and outdoors. What do I need to know about air quality indoors and outdoors?
1:41:35 Air quality indoors can be up to five times worse than air quality outside, which shocks a lot of people. That stat comes from the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA.
1:41:48 The reason being is that people are not adequately ventilating their homes and we’re doing things like cooking. Cooking generates particulate matter too, but do we need to stop cooking? No.
1:41:55 But we need to prioritize what’s important and what’s not important. Burning candles, how important is that to you?
1:42:00 Make sure you’re choosing a better candle. Make sure you’re opening the windows.
1:42:07 Indoor air is absolutely imperative if you want to improve your health. You have to clean up your indoor air.
1:42:11 Keep my shoes at the door. I heard you say that before.
1:42:22 This shocks a lot of people, but there are simple ways to improve your indoor air quality and one of them is taking off your shoes, not wearing your outside shoes in your home.
1:42:42 That doesn’t mean you have to go barefoot. You can wear slippers, you can wear other shoes that are specifically meant to stay indoors and that’s because shoe soles are vectors for fecal material, poop, pathogenic bacteria and viruses, heavy metals, industrial chemicals, pesticides, things that are outside should stay outside.
1:42:45 But didn’t we used to live outside as a species?
1:42:54 Right, but when we lived outside, there weren’t all these cars and factories that were spewing all of this exhaust all over the place.
1:43:01 Dust our house on a regular basis, you said as well. Hoover sweep regularly and you said keep plants in the house.
1:43:12 Plants. Yeah. Indoor plants, make sure that if you have indoor plants, they can be really beneficial for well-being. They can help to purify the air to some extent, but they can also harbor mold in the soil.
1:43:16 So just make sure, check your house plants for mold.
1:43:21 Does humidity of my house matter? Because a lot of people are getting these dehumidifiers in their house now.
1:43:26 Yeah, humidity can increase the growth of mold and mold is extremely toxic.
1:43:28 So you want low humidity?
1:43:35 Yes, you want to keep your humidity in a steady range. So have one of those little humidity monitors.
1:43:47 They’re just a couple dollars. You can find them at almost any store and try to keep your humidity on the lower end. We don’t want it necessarily too high because then that will promote mold growth.
1:43:53 So what about seasons? Are there particular seasons where our houses become more and more toxic?
1:43:59 Definitely during the colder months. People don’t open their windows enough. Some of us are lighting more candles.
1:44:05 Some people like to light wood and burn wood, fireplaces and stoves.
1:44:06 What’s wrong with that?
1:44:10 Those create the most ultrafine particles that you can imagine in your home.
1:44:17 These ultrafine particles, nitrogen dioxide, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, these are all carcinogens.
1:44:23 They are created when you burn things and burning wood in your home is one of the worst things that you can do.
1:44:28 If you can avoid it, if you don’t need it to survive, consider something else.
1:44:29 But I’ve got a chimney.
1:44:34 Right. It doesn’t always stay in there. It doesn’t only go up. It can come out.
1:44:42 So how do I, so better way to keep my home is just by doing like the, you know, the central heating, the hot water, central heating, underfloor heating.
1:44:52 Right. But make sure you open the windows on a regular basis too because you want to exhaust the old stale air and you want to replace it with fresh air.
1:45:02 So aside from people who live near a busy highway, most people should be able to open their windows, even in cold months.
1:45:12 In Germany, there’s a practice called Luft, Lüften, where you open the windows even in the dead of winter and it lets in fresh air.
1:45:17 It refreshes the stale air and it makes such a huge difference on our health.
1:45:28 I was reading about indoor air pollution and there’s some research done by the World Health Organization that says household air pollution was responsible for 3.2 million global deaths per year.
1:45:36 This is because household pollution can cause deadly health problems such as pneumonia, pulmonary disease, lung cancer strokes and cardiovascular disease.
1:45:48 The combined effects of outdoor air pollution and household air pollution are associated with 6.7 million global premature deaths annually, according to the World Health Organization.
1:45:53 I mean, it’s difficult, isn’t it, living in cities with so much outdoor pollution as well.
1:46:00 And there’s not really a solution to that. I mean, we could go around wearing like masks or something all day, but it’s just not going to, it’s not going to be a good way to live.
1:46:11 Right. I mean, if you’re able to get an air purifier that can help with your indoor environment, but the key is to remove the sources of pollution as much as you can.
1:46:17 Just try not to create it and then you don’t have to spend as much time trying to clean it up.
1:46:22 You mentioned earlier that the body has an antioxidant called glutathione.
1:46:29 Is it possible to increase my levels of this compound if it’s good for me? Is there something I can do?
1:46:38 There’s so much you can do. There’s so much you can do. Number one, you can exercise. Exercise increases glutathione. Very simple. Just exercise. Move your body.
1:46:40 And where is glutathione produced?
1:46:48 It’s mainly produced in the liver and kidneys and the third highest amount of glutathione in the body is in the testes and the ovaries.
1:46:56 Because it plays a vital role in protecting our reproductive organs from toxicity and ensuring fertility.
1:46:57 It’s a chemical.
1:47:05 It is technically a chemical. It’s made out of three amino acids, glutamate, cysteine and glycine. And we all have it. Everyone has glutathione.
1:47:12 Some people have more, some people have less. It really just depends on your genetics. Some people just genetically make more of it than others.
1:47:16 And if I make more of it, then my body’s going to be less toxic. Is that a simple way of thinking about it?
1:47:21 Yes. Very simplistically, right? But that’s not counting your lifestyle.
1:47:29 Okay. And what about my lifestyle? Could make it worse and lower? What can impact my glutathione levels? What can make it lower?
1:47:42 The non-stick cookware, the heavily fragrance products, eating ultra-processed foods, not exercising. So being stagnant, not moving enough, all of that reduces your glutathione, not sleeping well.
1:47:43 What about alcohol?
1:47:50 Alcohol absolutely depletes glutathione. We know that alcohol targets the liver. Glutathione detoxifies alcohol.
1:47:56 If you don’t have enough glutathione, you can’t detoxify alcohol. Alcohol can cause cancer.
1:48:09 So if I’m drinking heavily and I’m also consuming a lot of these other toxic chemicals because of just my everyday life, then my glutathione is going to be depleted because it’s so focused on the alcohol, detoxifying the alcohol,
1:48:13 that there won’t be enough left to detoxify the rest of my body. Is that a simple way to think about it?
1:48:16 Right. And all the other chemicals that you’re being exposed to.
1:48:18 Okay. So you want to keep your glutathione levels high?
1:48:19 Right.
1:48:33 I read that the healthy glutathione levels in an adult is 553, which is 90 millimoles per liter of total glutathione in their blood.
1:48:39 So I want to, I want to increase my glutathione levels to make sure that I’ve had a better natural defense toward these toxic chemicals in my life.
1:48:49 I’m going to start exercising. I’m going to avoid ultra processed foods. I’m going to eat whole foods.
1:49:02 Yes, whole foods, but specifically sulfur rich foods because glutathione contains cysteine, which contains sulfur and sulfur is the part of the glutathione molecule that’s doing the work that’s protecting us.
1:49:09 So the more sulfur you can give your body, the more building blocks it has to make glutathione.
1:49:19 So we eat things like leafy greens, broccoli, cruciferous vegetables, meat, eggs, dairy can also help to increase it.
1:49:29 There’s even some studies showing that if you consume whey protein, it can help to increase glutathione by supplying the amino acids needed to produce it.
1:49:35 And matcha green tea is also a really good source of glutathione building blocks.
1:49:42 But I think what we need to do is also remove the chemicals that are depleting our glutathione.
1:49:47 And that’s through choosing better products, not stressing as much.
1:49:54 And then adding on how can we build and add more glutathione with the lifestyle changes, making sure you get adequate sleep.
1:49:58 If you don’t sleep well enough, that’s going to impact the amount of glutathione you have as well.
1:50:01 Interesting. Cigarettes?
1:50:05 Cigarettes absolutely get rid of cigarettes. Cigarettes deplete glutathione.
1:50:14 You mentioned matcha there. I’m one of the owners. I’m an investor in a matcha company, a matcha green tea company.
1:50:19 What’s your opinion of, I mean, I’m exposing my bias here obviously, but what’s your opinion of matcha?
1:50:26 I think matcha is amazing. If you get the right type of matcha, you want to look for organically grown matcha.
1:50:31 You want to look for ones that are tested for heavy metals because heavy metals can accumulate in tea plants.
1:50:36 That’s just naturally occurring. So you want to look for matcha that’s been tested.
1:50:41 And because you’re consuming the entire leaf, it’s important to look for the cleanest matcha you can get.
1:50:47 But there are so many benefits to matcha. The fact that it helps you increase glutathione is I’m sold. I’m sold on it.
1:50:48 Do you drink matcha?
1:50:52 I do. But we also want to avoid not adding dairy to a matcha.
1:51:02 I know that a lot of people like to drink matcha lattes, but there’s actually studies showing that the casein protein can decrease the absorption of some of the beneficial compounds in matcha.
1:51:09 So if you can drink it, the traditional way in Japan is just water. No sugar, nothing. Just matcha and water.
1:51:18 The company I’m referring to, obviously, I’ve got to disclose my, there’s probably going to say hashtag ads, hashtag sponsored, whatever.
1:51:22 I’m an investor in a company called Perfected and it’s absolutely exploded in the UK.
1:51:34 I spoke to them this morning, actually, and they told me that their sales have increased 5x since last year because I think people are looking to shift away from some of the canned energy products.
1:51:38 And there’s a lot of sort of energy benefits with matcha.
1:51:45 And now if you go to like a Joe in the Juice or any of these like Blank Street Coffee or Tesco or whatever, you can find their products in there.
1:51:50 And it seems to be like there’s a bit of a revolution going on with energy and matcha, which is very, very exciting.
1:51:56 Because I’ve, for many years, I was drinking some, I don’t want to name any names, but I was drinking some of these energy products that you’ll find.
1:51:59 And I just felt bad.
1:52:03 And there’s something about the like energy curve of matcha, which I think is better.
1:52:07 I feel like I’m less susceptible to crashes with matcha.
1:52:16 I don’t know if there’s any support there, but it’s good to hear that it’s also, it increases my glutathione levels, which will help me have less of a toxic body.
1:52:17 Yes, absolutely.
1:52:27 Because it is in and of itself a strong antioxidant with anti-cancer properties, and it can help to increase the production of energy in ourselves.
1:52:33 And so one of the things that is required to create glutathione is ATP.
1:52:38 And a lot of these environmental chemicals are targeting the mitochondria, which are the powerhouses of the cell that make ATP.
1:52:51 So if you’re knocking down the energy center of the cell and it’s not able to make ATP, you’re not able to detoxify, you will feel sluggish and over time diminish the quality of your life.
1:52:55 What is the most important thing we haven’t spoke about today that you’re most passionate about?
1:53:03 Is there anything that we missed that you think is particularly important to the many people that are listening right now?
1:53:08 I think the one thing that I want to emphasize more than anything is to not fear chemicals.
1:53:17 I want there to be empowerment and not fear, because chemicals are all around us all the time, whether or not you’re aware of it, but not everything is going to kill us.
1:53:29 So being in a state of confidence and knowing that, hey, I’ve done taking some very simple steps that I know will have a big impact on my life in the long term.
1:53:34 That’s what I want everyone to walk away with.
1:53:37 I’m just thinking about the simple changes that I can make immediately.
1:53:44 I think the big things that I have as takeaways are, get rid of the antiperspirants that I’ve been using, get rid of the deogens that I’ve been using,
1:53:54 transition away from the nonstick pans, stop consuming anything plastic, especially if it’s been heated.
1:53:59 So like plastic cups from coffee shops and plastic trays that you microwave things in.
1:54:02 My water, you said that was really critical.
1:54:03 Yeah.
1:54:04 Air quality?
1:54:05 Air quality.
1:54:13 It’s quite difficult to do something about air quality, but I guess the simple thing is to open the windows and doors more often, clean the house, keep the shoes at the door.
1:54:18 Get rid of the scented and fragrance products, the scented plug-in, the air fresheners.
1:54:19 I was just thinking about my dog.
1:54:26 I was like, you know, I do love my dog, but I don’t want to be — what’s your thoughts on pets?
1:54:33 Well, pets can actually increase the amount of pollutants in your air, but again, if you’re cleaning your home on a regular basis, it’s not a problem.
1:54:35 There’s so many benefits to having pets.
1:54:36 And cleaning their pets as well.
1:54:37 Yeah.
1:54:41 Yeah, so maybe consider wiping off their paws when they come back in from a walk.
1:54:46 Is there anything else that you’re working on at the moment or any research that you’re particularly curious about?
1:54:57 Any hypotheses you have that are bubbling away in your mind about toxins in our environment that you’re yet to maybe share with the world?
1:55:04 I’m waiting to find out more about microplastics and the diseases that are associated with microplastics.
1:55:09 I think that is the next emerging toxin of the year.
1:55:14 And I think more awareness needs to be brought around microplastics and just more research is urgently needed.
1:55:20 I think, yeah, you make a really good point that none of us are ever going to reach perfection and that shouldn’t necessarily be the goal.
1:55:29 But a worthy goal and a goal that we can all aim for is just to be better in some way as it relates to our environment, to improve our environment in even small ways.
1:55:40 And even the small improvements, as you’ve said, when you talked about the dose and you talked about how these things compound in our bodies over time,
1:55:44 even small improvements made today can have big impacts over the long term.
1:55:51 And so small improvements, small things that we can change and not getting bogged down because our life and our environment is so full of toxins.
1:55:55 And it’s always going to be, really, there’s not a scenario we’re going to live in where it’s not the case.
1:55:58 But small things we can do can have big impacts.
1:56:01 And as you said, you’ve made changes to your life in it.
1:56:06 It’s been the causal factor of you having a family, which is a beautiful thing.
1:56:11 We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they’re leaving it for.
1:56:19 The question that’s been left for you is, if you could solve any problem in the world, but only one problem, what would it be?
1:56:20 The problem of toxins.
1:56:22 That’s too easy, isn’t it?
1:56:23 That’s too easy.
1:56:25 Of course it would be toxins.
1:56:26 Hands down immediately.
1:56:34 If I could just remove all of these toxic chemicals from our environment and just eliminate them, not send them into outer space,
1:56:38 but just remove them from the face of the earth and just have them cease to exist.
1:56:42 That would be the most amazing achievement I could ever imagine.
1:56:45 And what would life be like in such a world?
1:56:48 I imagine it to be like a utopia.
1:56:56 People aren’t sick, people aren’t ill, people are well and happy and thriving and just radiating, radiant.
1:56:57 That’s how I see it.
1:57:01 Dr Yvonne Burkhart, where can people find you if they want to learn more about your work?
1:57:05 What’s the best place for them to go to get more information?
1:57:08 I have a website, DrYvonneBurkhart.com.
1:57:26 I also have a newsletter that I send out called Low Talks Talks and you can also find me on Instagram @DrYvonneBurkhart and I also have a YouTube channel where I love to do deep dives and get really, really geeky and nerd out on one topic at a time.
1:57:29 Okay, I’ll link all of that below so everyone can find you.
1:57:31 Thank you so much for the work that you do.
1:57:41 So incredibly important and it’s so incredibly illuminating because it’s got it so mad that it’s only recently in the last couple of years that these conversations have emerged.
1:57:50 The things about microplastics and endocrine disruptors and the link this has to fertility, our health, obesity and all of these kinds of things.
1:57:56 It’s so crazy that these conversations only emerged in the last couple of years because growing up, there was no mention of this in my household.
1:58:04 There was absolutely no mention and I just wonder how life could have been different for myself but also for so many millions of people all around the world if we were aware of this information.
1:58:09 It’s not to say again that we can live perfect lives and that’s never the goal, it’s never my goal.
1:58:16 My goal is just to have more access to information so I can make small steps and often low cost steps in the right direction.
1:58:27 And if that increases my probability of having kids, which is the season of life that I’m in now and increases the probability that my kids are healthy, when they grow up, then that is an amazing thing and that is the work you’re doing.
1:58:28 You’re doing an amazing thing.
1:58:30 So thank you so much Dr Yvonne Burkhart.
1:58:33 I highly recommend everyone goes and checks out your YouTube channel.
1:58:40 It will send you down a really important rabbit hole because you make really, really accessible, great videos on that channel.
1:58:43 So thank you so much for your time today and thank you for the work that you’re doing.
1:58:44 Thank you.
1:58:50 I’m going to let you into a little bit of a secret.
1:59:02 You’re probably going to think me and my team are a little bit weird but I can still remember to this day when Jemima from my team posted on Slack that she changed the scent in this studio and right after she posted it, the entire office clapped in our Slack channel.
1:59:09 And this might sound crazy but at the Diary of SEO, this is the type of 1% improvement we make on our show and that is why the show is the way it is.
1:59:16 By understanding the power of compounding 1%, you can absolutely change your outcomes in your life.
1:59:19 It isn’t about drastic transformations or quick wins.
1:59:24 It’s about the small, consistent actions that have a lasting change on your outcomes.
1:59:29 So two years ago, we started the process of creating this beautiful diary and it’s truly beautiful.
1:59:33 Inside there’s lots of pictures, lots of inspiration and motivation as well.
1:59:44 Some interactive elements and the purpose of this diary is to help you identify, stay focused on, develop consistency with the 1% that will ultimately change your life.
1:59:48 We have a limited number of these 1% diaries and if you want to do this with me, then join our waiting list.
1:59:51 I can’t guarantee all of you that during the waiting list will be able to get one.
1:59:53 But if you join now, you have a higher chance.
1:59:57 The waiting list can be found at TheDiary.com.
2:00:00 I’ll link it below but that is TheDiary.com.
2:00:25 [Music]

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0:01:12 What the fertile window is, is going to be the five days before and then the day you ovulate. So
0:01:17 an egg lives for 24 hours. The five days before you ovulate, okay. So the five days before you
0:01:23 ovulate and then the day that you ovulate. The egg lives for 24 hours. It has to be fertilized
0:01:28 while it is in the fallopian tube in those first 24 hours. Sperm can live in the female
0:01:36 reproductive tract for five days. So that is why we will tell people to have sex before and then
0:01:42 during ovulation. Put some of that sperm from the locker there a little bit earlier and then get some
0:01:48 there right at the time when you’re ovulating to see if you can fertilize that egg. If we think
0:01:54 about understanding when your fertile window is based on your cycle length. So if we say your cycle
0:02:00 is the entire process and then your period is just the bleeding days. The entire process,
0:02:07 if your cycles are on average 28 days, the corpus luteum lives 14 days. So 28 minus 14,
0:02:14 you on average would ovulate on day 14. So the five days before and then day 14 are going to be
0:02:19 your most fertile days to try to target intercourse or avoid if you don’t want to be pregnant.
0:02:24 And if your cycles are 35 days, though, it’s very different, right? Because now 35 days minus
0:02:31 14 is going to be 21. Yeah, you go 21. So your fertile window or for that person is going to be
0:02:38 cycle day 21. So now the five days before and day 21. So those are very different fertile windows,
0:02:42 days they should be having sex. It’s a lot, isn’t it? Do we just have sex every day if we can?
0:02:48 So absolutely, like if you can have sex every day or every other day, and you don’t have to track
0:02:53 your cycles, if they are coming regularly and you’re putting sperm in the presence of the egg
0:02:57 by every day or every other day sex, absolutely. And that’s one of the things that I see people do
0:03:04 wrong the most is have less sex in the idea that they should save it up to put more sperm
0:03:09 present when the egg is arriving. I have to say, I mean, there’s a few things I wanted to say about
0:03:14 this. So I think what’s the first thing I wanted to say? The first thing I wanted to ask is,
0:03:21 how long on average do different age groups need to try before they hit the bull’s eye?
0:03:27 If you’re age 30 and you’re trying to get pregnant, you have a 20% chance of pregnancy
0:03:31 per month. Okay. This means that the majority of people should be pregnant within six months.
0:03:36 Infertility is defined as trying for a year and not getting pregnant within that year.
0:03:42 It’s kind of going off the curve of that standard deviation. Importantly, trying to get pregnant
0:03:49 means that you’re having intercourse, you’re ejaculating inside, and you’re having regular periods.
0:03:54 If you’re not able to complete the active intercourse and you’re not having regular periods,
0:04:00 people should not wait X amount of time to come see a doctor. You should go be seen right away.
0:04:02 When my friends tell me that they’ve started trying, I always think,
0:04:08 God, doesn’t that just ruin the fun? You know what I mean? Because I have this one friend who’s
0:04:16 telling me that because they’re trying now, sex has become such a like a chore. And if he’s away
0:04:21 when she’s most fertile, then she gets annoyed at him. And I just think, God, it’s so crazy what’s
0:04:27 happening with sex in that regard that we’re now, because we’re having kids later and later,
0:04:32 and we’re leaving things a little bit later than ever before, we’re now having to treat
0:04:36 making kids almost like, as you say, like a chore. It’s becoming like, I don’t know,
0:04:40 there’s something about that that I’m like, oh gosh, like… Well, it’s a good point because if you’re
0:04:45 waiting later and you still want to have more than one child, there’s a lot of pressure on it.
0:04:50 If you’re starting at 35 and you have that 10 to 15 percent chance per month, if you’re starting
0:04:55 at 38 and now it’s five to eight percent per month, if you’re 40, it’s three to five percent.
0:05:00 Isn’t pressure like the opposite of sex? Right? It doesn’t sound very fun. I think that one,
0:05:05 having realistic goals is helpful because if you’re trying to start your family at 37 and you
0:05:12 want four kids, it is very unlikely to happen without intervention, like IVF saving embryos for
0:05:17 the future, which we can absolutely do. And we do that for people sometimes so that they can go have
0:05:24 fun with their sex life again. Two, you feel like you have to track your cycles and time intercourse
0:05:30 appropriately when you’re older because there’s so much that you can’t do, right? You only have so
0:05:34 many eggs. You only have so much time and you’re trying to do what you can. Understanding your
0:05:39 cycle tracking for a woman is a reflection of our full health. How’s your brain interpreting your
0:05:45 entire body? So it is helpful because if you have irregularity, it is a sign that things are not
0:05:51 working normally. That being said, regular sex is good for so many reasons and in a relationship
0:05:58 that if you can establish sex more frequently as just part of your relationship, it becomes less
0:06:03 burdensome that you’re here recording a podcast at this time or somebody’s out of town this one
0:06:10 given month. If we remember that sperm live in the female reproductive tract for up to five days,
0:06:15 most of sperm is going to live there for two to three days. So fives kind of go longest it can.
0:06:22 What we have is that, okay, have sex two or three times a week. What about couples that can’t?
0:06:27 Because I’ve sat here and interviewed so many sex therapists and sexologists, if that’s even a
0:06:32 thing. And we often speak about sexlessness, people having sex less and less than ever before
0:06:36 because they’re so busy and they’re so stressed in their lives. And you must meet so many couples
0:06:40 in your practice that you look at them and go, well, really the problem here is you’re just not
0:06:45 having sex with each other. 100%. And sometimes it’s situational, truck drivers, pilots, they’re
0:06:51 just a job where it is too hard to have that intercourse during the fertile window. But then
0:06:56 also, yeah, high performing people or who just don’t prioritize or don’t enjoy that part of the
0:07:02 relationship. We certainly do what we call IUI, your intrauterine insemination. And this is where
0:07:07 you take the sperm and you’re putting it inside the uterus. So instead of intercourse, we are
0:07:11 taking an ejaculated sample and then processing it and putting it in the uterus.
0:07:19 Wait, so I could just ejaculate in a petri dish, get a little pipette and pst.
0:07:26 I mean, you can’t do it yourself. But why? Well, because most of the ejaculate of your sperm
0:07:31 is actually meant to protect the sperm from the acidity of the vagina. So most of that is not
0:07:36 ever going to see the inside of a uterus. And if we put the whole sample up in the uterus,
0:07:42 it would cause a huge inflammatory or infectious process. But if we clean that sample and we
0:07:49 pellet out, centrifuge it and get just the sperm, we can then put the sperm into the uterus and
0:07:52 avoid having all that protective ejaculate sample with it.
0:07:58 If we talk about doing it the old fashioned way, you know, sex, there’s a lot of misconceptions
0:08:01 around how to increase our odds of getting pregnant. You hear about women putting their
0:08:10 legs in the air after sex or things like people think if you go for a wee, then you’re going
0:08:14 to we out all the sperm and that’s not going to make you pregnant or any of these things true.
0:08:19 There’s so many myths when it comes to trying to get pregnant the good old fashioned way within
0:08:24 our course. So certainly we can go through a few of them. One of them we already touched on,
0:08:30 which is, oh, you should save up sperm for when you’re ovulating. So we see that sometimes men
0:08:36 will ejaculate less or couples will actually not have sex trying to save up for that exact day of
0:08:40 ovulation. But there’s no need to do that. As we know, we want to clear the pipes to keep the
0:08:46 sperm coming out healthy and alive and not have dead sperm and that you can have sperm survive
0:08:51 in the reproductive tract for up to five days. So you want to be having intercourse up until
0:08:57 that ovulatory day. So every other day sex, every day sex, every three day sex, those are all fine.
0:09:01 Nobody ever needs to have less sex. So if you and your partner have sex every day, please
0:09:06 don’t have less sex because you’re trying to get pregnant. Number two, the sperm are
0:09:14 inside the fallopian tubes within minutes. They have gone from the vagina gotten through that
0:09:19 seminal fluid in the ejaculate through the cervix through the uterus and into the fallopian tube
0:09:24 within minutes under five minutes. So there’s no need to prop your hips up on a pillow for 30
0:09:30 minutes or put your feet in the air, truly the sperm are into the cervix within two minutes.
0:09:36 And the cervix is where they then sit for up to the five days. So the two minutes time that
0:09:42 is going to take you to withdraw, get up, go to the bathroom, the sperm are fine. You’re not going
0:09:46 to pee out any sperm. You don’t need to put any device in to keep sperm in place, keep your feet
0:09:52 up, lay in bed. You can go and do whatever you want to do. And in fact, we know that urinating
0:09:57 after intercourse for a woman decreases the risk of a urinary tract infection. So we try to encourage
0:10:02 people to get up and be normal. I also tell people all the time embryos and plant eggs fertilize
0:10:08 when you are up and living your life. So you don’t need to just be horizontal to have fertilization
0:10:12 occur. So what about sex positions? Are there any sex positions that are more conducive with
0:10:19 Yeah, whatever position allows for ejaculation. So this is where variety is the spice of life,
0:10:23 because as you alluded to earlier, sex can feel a little bit more of a chore when you’re trying to
0:10:28 get pregnant or you’re struggling. So making sure that ejaculation can happen. If there’s not any
0:10:33 position that is going to be better or worse, or going to have higher chance of a boy or a girl,
0:10:40 or any of that kind of knowledge. If the female orgasms, does that increase the chance of fertility?
0:10:48 We do know that orgasm does help uterine contractions help get the sperm to the eggs faster.
0:10:54 So we do know that. So we would have, how do we know that? Yeah. There have been studies looking
0:10:58 at, there have been studies looking at orgasm and then the speed of which sperm get to the
0:11:03 fallopian tubes. We’ll just say that. I was thinking of all the causal factors like maybe it’s just
0:11:08 bigger and that’s just good. No. So yeah, just that those contractions are helping kind of propel
0:11:13 the sperm up there. What about penis size? So penis size really doesn’t matter. What’s interesting
0:11:18 is that penis size does tend to correlate with different race and ethnicity, also with vaginal
0:11:23 lengths. So we tend to see different vaginal lengths in correlation with what tends to be a
0:11:31 similar penis length based on that ethnicity or where that person originated from, which is super
0:11:36 interesting. But you don’t need to… You don’t need a smaller penis or a bigger penis as long.
0:11:40 This sperm doesn’t need to get closer to the cervix. People obviously think that.
0:11:44 Yeah, I don’t know. When you ejaculate, it goes. It gets right where it needs to go.
0:11:55 Okay. Crazy. It’s super interesting. I’ve learned so much about all of this stuff today.

0:00:04 Someone was leaking information on Google, and this stuff is incredibly secret.
0:00:06 So what are the secrets?
0:00:07 Well, the first is…
0:00:09 Eric Schmidt is the former CEO of Google.
0:00:14 Who grew the company from $100 million to $180 billion.
0:00:15 And this is how…
0:00:18 As someone who’s led one of the world’s biggest tech companies,
0:00:21 what are those first principles for leadership business and doing something great?
0:00:23 Well, the first is risk-taking is key.
0:00:26 If you look at Elon, he’s an incredible entrepreneur
0:00:30 because he has this brilliance where he can take huge risks and fail fast.
0:00:34 And fast failure is important because if you build the right product, your customers will come.
0:00:39 But it’s a race to get there as fast as you can, because you want to be first.
0:00:40 Because that’s where you make the most amount of money.
0:00:43 So what are the other principles that I need to be thinking about?
0:00:44 So here’s a really big one.
0:00:51 At Google, we have this 70/20/10 rule that generated 10, 20, 30, 40 billion dollars of extra profits over a decade.
0:00:53 And everyone can go do this.
0:00:54 So the first thing is…
0:00:55 What about AI?
0:01:00 I can tell you that if you’re not using AI at every aspect of your business, you’re not going to make it.
0:01:02 But you’ve been in the tech industry for a long time.
0:01:07 And you’ve said the advent of artificial intelligence is a question of human survival.
0:01:09 AI is going to move very quickly.
0:01:14 And you will not notice how much of your world has been co-opted by these technologies
0:01:15 because they will produce greater delight.
0:01:17 But the questions are, what are the dangers?
0:01:20 Are we advancing with it and do we have control over it?
0:01:22 What is your biggest fear about AI?
0:01:24 My actual fear is different from what you might imagine.
0:01:25 My actual fear is…
0:01:29 That’s a good time to pull the plug.
0:01:33 This has always blown my mind a little bit.
0:01:38 53% of you that listen to this show regularly haven’t yet subscribed to the show.
0:01:40 So could I ask you for a favor before we start?
0:01:43 If you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us,
0:01:46 the free, simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button.
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0:01:53 to make sure that this show is better for you every single week.
0:01:55 We’ll listen to your feedback.
0:01:59 We’ll find the guests that you want me to speak to and we’ll continue to do what we do.
0:02:00 Thank you so much.
0:02:10 Eric, I’ve read about your career and you’ve had an extensive, a varied, a fascinating career.
0:02:15 A completely unique career and that leads me to believe that you could have written about anything.
0:02:20 You know, you’ve got some incredible books, all of which I’ve been through over the last couple of weeks here in front of me.
0:02:21 I apologize.
0:02:24 No, no, but I mean, these are subjects that I’m just obsessed with.
0:02:30 But this book in particular of all the things you could have written about with the world we find ourselves in.
0:02:33 Why this?
0:02:34 Why Genesis?
0:02:37 Well, first, thank you for I wanted to be on the show for a long time.
0:02:41 So I’m really happy to be able to be here in person in London.
0:02:46 Henry Kissinger, Dr. Kissinger ended up being one of my greatest and closest friends.
0:02:55 And 10 years ago, he and I were at a conference where he heard Demis Hassibis speak about AI.
0:02:59 And Henry would tell the story that he was about to go catch up on his jet lag.
0:03:01 But instead, I said, go do this.
0:03:02 And he listened to it.
0:03:09 And all of a sudden he understood that we were playing with fire, that we were doing something that we did not understand.
0:03:16 It would have the impact on and that Henry had been working on this since he was 22 coming out of the army after World War Two.
0:03:20 And his thesis about cons and so forth as an undergraduate at Harvard.
0:03:29 So all of a sudden I found myself in a whole group of people who were trying to understand what does it mean to be human in an age of AI?
0:03:33 When this stuff starts showing up, how does our life change?
0:03:35 How do our thoughts change?
0:03:42 Humans have never had an intellectual challenger of our own ability or better or worse.
0:03:44 It’s just never happened in history.
0:03:49 The arrival of AI is a huge moment in history.
0:04:02 For anyone that doesn’t know your story or maybe just knows your story from Google onwards, can you tell me the inspiration points, the education, the experiences that you’re drawing on when you talk about these subjects?
0:04:15 Well, like many of the people you meet, as a teenager I was interested in science, I played with model rockets, model trains, the usual things for a boy in my generation.
0:04:21 I was too young to be a video game addict, but I’m sure I would be today if I were that age.
0:04:28 I went to college and I was very interested in computers and they were relatively slow then, but to me they were fascinating.
0:04:39 To give you an example, the computer that I used in college is 100 million times slower than the phone you have in your pocket.
0:04:42 And by the way, that was a computer for the entire university.
0:04:52 So Moore’s Law, which is this notion of accelerating density of chips, has defined the wealth creation, the career creation, the company creation in my life.
0:05:00 So I can be understood as lucky because I was born with an interest in something which was about to explode.
0:05:04 And when sort of everything happens together, everyone gets swept up in it.
0:05:06 And of course the rest is history.
0:05:15 I was sat this weekend with my partners, little brother who’s 18 years old, and as we ate breakfast yesterday before they flew back to Portugal,
0:05:24 we had this discussion with her family, her dad was there, her mom was there, RAF, the younger brother was there, and my girlfriend was there.
0:05:30 Difficult because most of them don’t speak English, so we had to use funnily enough AI to translate what I was saying.
0:05:34 But the big discussion at breakfast was what should RAF do in the future?
0:05:44 He’s 18 years old, he’s got his career ahead of him, and the decisions he makes is so evident in your story at this exact moment as to what information and intelligence he acquires for himself.
0:05:47 Well, quite clearly define the rest of his life.
0:05:55 If you were sat at that table with me yesterday when I was trying to give RAF advice on what knowledge he should acquire at 18 years old, what would you have said?
0:05:58 And what are the principles that sit behind that?
0:06:03 The most important thing is to develop analytical, critical thinking skills.
0:06:06 To some level, I don’t care how you get there.
0:06:13 So if you like math or science, or if you like the law, or if you like, you know, entertainment, just think critically.
0:06:23 In his particular case as an 18-year-old, what I would encourage him to do is figure out how to write programming, to write programs in a language called Python.
0:06:29 Python is easy to use, it’s very easy to understand, and it’s become the language of AI.
0:06:34 So the AI systems, when they write code for themselves, they write code in Python.
0:06:43 And so you can’t lose as developing Python programming skills, and the simplest thing to do with an 18-year-old man is say, make a game.
0:06:49 Because these are typically gamers, stereotypically, make a game that’s interesting using Python.
0:06:57 It’s interesting because I wondered if coding, you know, I think five, ten years ago everyone’s advice for an 18-year-old has learned how to code.
0:07:08 But in a world of AI where these large language models are able to write code, and are, you know, increasing every month in their ability to write better and better code, I wonder if that’s like a dying art form?
0:07:21 Yeah, a lot of people oppose this, and that’s not correct. It sure looks like these systems will write code, but remember the systems also have interfaces called APIs, which you can program them.
0:07:31 So one of the large revenue sources for these AI models, because these companies have to make money at some point, right, is you build a program and you actually make an API call and ask it a question.
0:07:36 Typical example is give it a picture and tell me what’s in the picture.
0:07:40 Now, can you have some fun with that as an 18-year-old? Of course, right?
0:07:49 So when I say Python, I mean Python using the tools that are available to build something new, something that you’re interested in.
0:07:56 And when you say “critical thinking,” what is critical thinking and how does one go about acquiring that as a skill?
0:08:07 Well, the first and most important thing about critical thinking is to distinguish between being marketed to, which is also known as being lied to, and being given the argument on your own.
0:08:17 Because of social media, which I hold responsible for a lot of ills as well as good things in life, we’ve sort of gotten used to people just telling us something and believing it.
0:08:24 Because our friends believe it or so forth. And I strongly encourage people to check assertions.
0:08:28 So you get people to say all this stuff and I learned at Google all those years.
0:08:40 Somebody says something, “I check it on Google.” And you then have a question, “Do you criticize them and correct them or do you let it go?”
0:08:43 But you want to be in the position where somebody makes a statement.
0:08:51 Like, did you know that only 10% of Americans have passports, which is a widely viewed but false statement?
0:08:55 It’s actually higher than that, although it’s never high enough in my view in America.
0:08:59 But that’s an example of an assertion that you can just say, “Is that true?” Right?
0:09:05 There’s a long meme of American politicians where the Congress is basically full of criminals.
0:09:09 It may be full of one or two, but it’s not full of 90.
0:09:13 But again, people believe this stuff because it sounds plausible.
0:09:18 So if somebody says something plausible, just check it.
0:09:26 You have a responsibility before you repeat something to make sure what you’re repeating is true.
0:09:32 And if you can’t distinguish between true and false, I suggest you keep your mouth shut, right?
0:09:37 Because you can’t run a government or society without people operating on basic facts.
0:09:40 Like, for example, climate change is real.
0:09:46 We can debate over whether it’s how to address it, but there’s no question the climate is changing.
0:09:48 It is a fact. It is a mathematical fact.
0:09:51 And how do I know this? And somebody will say, “Well, how do you know?”
0:09:58 And I said, “Because science is about repeatable experiments and also proving things wrong.”
0:10:01 So let’s say I said that climate change is real.
0:10:04 And this was the first time it had ever been said, which is not true.
0:10:07 Then 100 people would say, “That can’t be true. I’ll see if he’s wrong.”
0:10:13 And then all of a sudden they’d see I was right and I’d get some big prize, right?
0:10:17 So the falsifiability of these assertions is very important.
0:10:20 How do you know that science is correct?
0:10:23 It’s because people are constantly testing it.
0:10:29 And why is this skill of critical thinking so especially important in a world of AI?
0:10:33 Well, partly because AI will allow for perfect misinformation.
0:10:36 So let’s use an example of TikTok.
0:10:40 TikTok can be understood, it’s called the Bandit Algorithm in Computer Science,
0:10:43 in the sense of the Las Vegas one-armed bandits.
0:10:49 Do I stay in the Bandit Machine and I keep on this slot machine or do I move to another slot machine?
0:10:57 And the TikTok algorithm basically can be understood as I’ll keep serving you what you tell me you want,
0:11:01 but occasionally I’ll give you something from the adjacent area.
0:11:03 And it’s highly addictive.
0:11:08 So what you’re seeing with social media, and TikTok is a particularly bad example of this,
0:11:13 is people are getting into these rabbit holes where all they see is confirmatory bias.
0:11:19 And the ones that are, I mean, if it’s fun and entertaining, I don’t care.
0:11:24 But you’ll see, for example, there are plenty of stories where people have ultimately self-harm or suicide
0:11:29 because they’re already unhappy and then they start picking up unhappy.
0:11:34 And then their whole environment online is people who are unhappy and it makes them more unhappy
0:11:37 because it doesn’t have a positive bias.
0:11:42 So there’s a really good example where, let’s say in your case, you’re the dad.
0:11:47 You’re going to watch this as the dad with your kid and you’re going to say, you know, it’s not that bad.
0:11:50 Let me show you some, let me give you some good alternatives.
0:11:53 Let me get you inspired, let me get you out of your funk.
0:11:56 The algorithms don’t do that unless you force them to.
0:12:01 It’s because the algorithms are fundamentally about optimizing an objective function,
0:12:05 literally mathematically maximize some goal that has been trained to.
0:12:06 Attention.
0:12:08 They just, in this case, it’s attention.
0:12:15 And by the way, part of it, part of we have so much outrage is because if you’re a CEO, you want to maximize revenue.
0:12:19 To maximize revenue, you maximize attention.
0:12:23 And the easiest way to maximize attention is to maximize outrage.
0:12:26 Did you know, did you know, did you know, right?
0:12:29 And by the way, a lot of stuff is not true.
0:12:31 They’re fighting over scarce attention.
0:12:36 There was a recent article where there’s an old quote from 1971 from Herb Simon.
0:12:43 He’s an economist at the time, Carnegie Mellon, who said that economists don’t understand,
0:12:46 but in the future, the scarcity will be about attention.
0:12:54 So somebody now 50 years later went back and said, I think we’re at the point where we’ve monetized all attention.
0:13:02 An article this week, two and a half hours of videos consumed by young people every day, right?
0:13:08 Now there is a limit to the amount of video you can, you know, because you have to eat and sleep and hang out.
0:13:13 But these are significant societal changes that have occurred very, very quickly.
0:13:17 When I was young, there was a great debate as to the benefit of television.
0:13:24 And, you know, my argument at the time was, well, yes, we did, you know, we did, you know, rock and roll and drugs and all of that.
0:13:28 And we watched a lot of television, but somehow we grew up okay, right?
0:13:31 So it’s the same argument now with a different term.
0:13:34 Will those kids grow up okay?
0:13:40 It’s not as obvious because these tools are highly addictive, much more so than television ever was.
0:13:42 Do you think they’ll grow up okay?
0:13:45 I personally do because I’m inherently an optimist.
0:13:50 I also think that society begins to understand the problems.
0:13:54 A typical example is there’s an epidemic of harm to teenage girls.
0:13:59 Girls, as we know, are more advanced than boys at those, you know, below 18.
0:14:08 And the girls seem to get hit by social media at 11 and 12 when they’re not quite capable of handling the rejection and the emotional stuff.
0:14:14 And it’s driven, you know, emergency room visits, self-harm and so forth to record levels.
0:14:15 It’s well documented.
0:14:18 So society is beginning to recognize this.
0:14:24 Now schools won’t let kids use their phones when they’re in the classroom, which is kind of obvious if you ask me.
0:14:33 So developmentally, one of the core questions about the AI revolution is what does it do to the identity of children that are growing up?
0:14:38 Your values, your personal values, the way you get up in the morning and think about life is now set.
0:14:41 It’s highly unlikely that an AI will change your programming.
0:14:44 But your child can be significantly programmed.
0:14:52 And one of the things that we talk about in the book is what happens when the best friend of your child from birth is a computer.
0:14:54 What’s it like?
0:14:56 Now, by the way, I don’t know.
0:14:57 We’ve never done it before.
0:15:03 You’re running an experiment on a billion people without a control, right?
0:15:05 And so we have to stumble through this.
0:15:16 So at the end of the day, I’m an optimist because we will adjust society with biases and values to try to keep us on a moral, high ground human life.
0:15:24 And so you should be optimistic for that because these kids, when they grow up, they’ll live to 100, their lives will be much more prosperous.
0:15:28 I hope and I pray that there’ll be much less conflict.
0:15:30 Certainly their life spans are longer.
0:15:36 The likelihood of them being injured in wars and so forth are much, much lower statistically.
0:15:38 It’s a good message to kids.
0:15:46 As someone who’s led one of the world’s biggest tech companies, if you were the CEO of TikTok, what would you do?
0:15:56 Because I’m sure that they realize everything you’ve said is true, but they have this commercial incentive to drive up the addictiveness of the algorithm,
0:16:04 which is causing these echo chambers, which is causing the rates of anxiety and depression amongst young girls and young people more generally to increase.
0:16:05 What would you do?
0:16:08 So I have talked to them and to the others as well.
0:16:11 And I think it’s pretty straightforward.
0:16:14 They’re sort of good revenue and bad revenue.
0:16:20 When we were at Google, Larry and Serge and I, we would have situations where we would improve quality.
0:16:22 We would make the product better.
0:16:29 And the debate was, do we take that to revenue in the form of more ads, or do we just make the product better?
0:16:31 And that was a clear choice.
0:16:37 And I arbitrarily decided that we would take 50% to one, 50% to the other, because I thought they were both important.
0:16:45 And the founders, of course, were very supportive. So Google became more moral and also made more money.
0:16:50 There’s plenty of bad stuff on Google, but it’s not on the first page.
0:16:52 That was the key thing.
0:16:55 The alternative model would be to say, let’s maximize revenue.
0:17:02 We’ll put all the really bad stuff, the lies and the cheating and the deceiving and so forth that draws you in and will drive you insane.
0:17:06 And we might have made more money, but first it was the wrong thing to do.
0:17:09 But more importantly, it’s not sustainable.
0:17:12 There’s a law called Gresham’s Law.
0:17:18 It’s a verbal law, obviously, where bad speech drives out good speech.
0:17:25 And what you’re seeing is you’re seeing in online communities, which have always been present with bullying and this kind of stuff.
0:17:32 Now you’ve got crazy people, in my view, who are building bots that are lying, right, misinformation.
0:17:34 Now why do you do that?
0:17:39 There was a hurricane in Florida, and people are in serious trouble.
0:17:45 And you, sitting in the comfort of your home somewhere else, are busy trying to make their lives more difficult.
0:17:46 What’s wrong with you?
0:17:48 Like, let them get rescued.
0:17:50 You know, human life is important.
0:17:57 But there’s something about the human psychology where people talk, there’s a German world called Schadenfreude.
0:18:00 You know, there’s a bunch of things like this that we have to address.
0:18:05 I want social media and the online world to represent the best of humanity.
0:18:12 Hope, excitement, optimism, creativity, invention, solving new problems as opposed to the worst.
0:18:14 And I think that that is achievable.
0:18:17 You arrived at Google at 46 years old, 2001?
0:18:18 2001.
0:18:19 2001.
0:18:20 2001.
0:18:24 You had a very extensive career before then, working for a bunch of really interesting companies.
0:18:27 Sun Microsystems is one that I know very well.
0:18:30 You’ve worked with Xerox in California as well.
0:18:38 Bell Labs was your first sort of real job, I guess, at 20 years old, first sort of big tech job.
0:18:46 What did you learn in this journey of your life about what it is to build a great company and what value is as it relates to being an entrepreneur?
0:18:47 And people and teams.
0:18:55 Like, if there were, like, a set of first principles that everyone should be thinking about when it comes to doing something great and building something great, what are those, like, first principles?
0:19:03 So the first rule I’ve learned is that you need a truly brilliant person to build a really brilliant product.
0:19:04 And that is not me.
0:19:06 I work with them.
0:19:15 So find someone who’s just smarter than you, more clever than you, moves faster than you, changes the world, is better spoken, more handsome, more beautiful.
0:19:23 You know, whatever it is that you’re optimizing and ally yourself with them, because they’re the people who are going to make the world different.
0:19:28 In one of my books, we use the distinction between divas and naves.
0:19:39 And a diva, and we use the example of Steve Jobs, who clearly was a diva, opinionated and strong and argumentative and would bully people if he didn’t like them, but was brilliant when he was a diva.
0:19:41 He wanted perfection.
0:19:45 Aligning yourself with Steve Jobs is a good idea.
0:19:53 The alternative is what we call a nave, and a nave, which you know from British history, is somebody who’s acting on their own account.
0:19:55 They’re not trying to do the right thing.
0:19:58 They’re trying to benefit themselves at the cost of others.
0:20:05 And so if you can identify a person in one of these teams, they’re just trying to solve the problem in a really clever way.
0:20:08 And they’re passionate about it, and they want to do it.
0:20:10 That’s how the world moves forward.
0:20:13 If you don’t have such a person, your company’s not going to go anywhere.
0:20:17 And the reason is that it’s too easy just to keep doing what you were doing.
0:20:21 And innovation is fundamentally about changing what you’re doing.
0:20:28 Up until this generation of tech companies, most companies seemed to me to be one-shot wonders.
0:20:35 They would have one thing that was very successful, and then it was typically follow an S-curve and nothing much would happen.
0:20:39 And now I think the people are smarter, people are better educated.
0:20:41 You now see repeatable waves.
0:20:49 A good example being Microsoft, which is an older company now, founded in basically 81, 82, something like that.
0:20:57 So let’s call that 45 years old, but they’ve reinvented themselves a number of times in a really powerful way.
0:21:03 We should probably talk about this then before we move on, which is what you’re talking about there is that sort of founder.
0:21:10 Things people now refer to as founder mode, that founder energy, that high conviction, that sort of disruptive thinking.
0:21:12 And that ability to reinvent yourself.
0:21:18 I was looking at some stats last night, in fact, and I was looking at how long companies stay on the S&P 500 on average now.
0:21:23 And it went from 33 years to 17 years to 12 years, average tenure.
0:21:29 And as you play those numbers forward eventually in sort of 2050, an AI told me that it would be about eight years.
0:21:33 Well, I’m not sure I agree with the founder mode argument.
0:21:41 And the reason is that it’s great to have a brilliant founder and there’s this, it’s actually like more than great.
0:21:44 It’s like really important and we need more brilliant founders.
0:21:47 Universities are producing these people, by the way.
0:21:49 They do exist and they show up every year.
0:21:54 You know, another Michael Dell at the age of 19 or 22, these are just brilliant founders.
0:22:00 Obviously Gates and Ellison and sort of my generation of brilliant founders, Larry and Sergey and so forth.
0:22:05 For anyone that doesn’t know who Larry and Sergey are and doesn’t know that sort of early Google story.
0:22:10 Can you give me a little bit of that backstory, but then also introduce these characters called Larry and Sergey.
0:22:11 For anyone that doesn’t know.
0:22:21 So Larry Page and Sergey Brann met at Stanford in, they were on a grant from, believe it or not, the National Science Foundation as graduate students.
0:22:28 And Larry Page invented a algorithm called PageRank, which is named after him.
0:22:33 And he and Sergey wrote a paper, which is still one of the most cited papers in the world.
0:22:38 And it’s essentially a way of understanding priority of information.
0:22:44 And mathematically, it was a Fourier transform of the way people normally did things at the time.
0:22:50 And so they wrote this code, I don’t think they were that good a set of programmers, you know, they sort of did it.
0:22:53 They had a computer, they ran out of power in their dorm room.
0:23:02 So they borrowed the power from the dorm room next to and plugged it in and they had the data center in the bedroom, you know, in the dorm classic story.
0:23:11 And then they moved to a building that was owned by the sister of a girlfriend at the time.
0:23:13 And that’s how they founded the company.
0:23:21 The first investor was the founder of Sun Microsystem, his name was Andy Bechtelschein, who just said, “I’ll just give you the money because you’re obviously incredibly smart.”
0:23:22 How much did he give them?
0:23:26 $100,000, maybe it was a million.
0:23:29 But in any case, it ultimately became many billions of dollars.
0:23:34 So it gives you a sense of this early founding is very important.
0:23:42 So the founders then set up in this little house in Menlo Park, which ultimately we bought at Google, you know, as a museum.
0:23:47 They set up in the garage and they had Google World headquarters in neon made.
0:23:54 And they had a big headquarters with the four employees that were sitting below them and the computer that Larry and Sergey had built.
0:23:59 Larry and Sergey were very, very good software people and obviously brilliant, but they were not very good hardware.
0:24:03 And so they built the computers using corkboard to separate the CPUs.
0:24:08 And if you know anything about hardware, hardware generates a lot of heat and the corkboard would catch on fire.
0:24:13 So eventually when I showed up, we started building proper hardware with proper hardware engineers.
0:24:18 But it gives you a sense of the scrappiness that was so characteristic.
0:24:23 And, you know, today there are people of enormous impact on society.
0:24:27 And I think that will continue for many, many years.
0:24:31 Why did they call you in and at what point did they realize that they needed someone like you?
0:24:40 Well, Larry said to me, they’re very young, he looked at me and said, “We don’t need you now, but we’ll need you in the future.”
0:24:42 We’ll need you in the future?
0:24:47 Yeah. So one of the things about Larry and Sergey is that they thought for the long term.
0:24:51 So they didn’t say Google would be a search company.
0:24:55 They said the mission of Google is to organize all the world’s information.
0:25:01 And if you think about it, that’s pretty audacious 25 years ago. Like, how are you going to do that?
0:25:03 And so they started with web search.
0:25:09 Eventually, and Larry had studied AI quite extensively, and he began to work.
0:25:18 And ultimately he acquired with all of us, obviously, this company called DeepMind here in Britain,
0:25:24 which essentially is the first company to really see the AI opportunity.
0:25:32 And pretty much all of the things you’ve seen from AI in the last decade have come from people who are either at DeepMind or competing with DeepMind.
0:25:39 Going back to this point about principles then, before we move further on, as it relates to building a great company,
0:25:41 what are some of those founding principles?
0:25:43 We have lots of entrepreneurs that listen to the show.
0:25:51 One of them you’ve expressed is this need for the divas, I guess, these people who are just very high conviction and can kind of see into the future.
0:25:55 What are the other principles that I need to be thinking about when I’m scaling my company?
0:25:57 Well, the first is to think about scale.
0:26:00 I think a current example is look at Elon.
0:26:05 Elon is an incredible entrepreneur and an incredible scientist.
0:26:14 And if you study how he operates, he gets people by, I think, sheer force of personal will to overperform, to take huge risks,
0:26:20 which somehow he has this brilliance where he can make those trade-offs and get it right.
0:26:23 So these are exceptional people.
0:26:27 Now, in our book with Genesis, we argue that you’re going to have that in your pocket.
0:26:32 But as to whether you’ll have the judgment to take the risks that Elon does, that’s another question.
0:26:39 Yet one of the other ways to think about it is an awful lot of people talk to me about the companies that they’re founding.
0:26:41 And they’re a little widget.
0:26:43 You know, like I want to make the camera better.
0:26:44 I want to make the dress better.
0:26:46 I want to make book publishing cheaper or so forth.
0:26:48 These are all fine ideas.
0:26:53 I’m interested in ideas which have the benefit of scale.
0:27:02 And when I say scale, I mean the ability to go from zero to infinity in terms of the number of users and demand and scale.
0:27:06 There are plenty of ways of thinking about this.
0:27:10 But what would be such a company in the age of AI?
0:27:12 Well, we can tell you what it would look like.
0:27:18 It would have apps, one on Android, one on iOS, maybe a few others.
0:27:26 Those apps will use powerful networks and they’ll have a really big computer in the back that’s doing AI calculations.
0:27:31 So future successful companies will all have that, right?
0:27:33 Exactly what problem it solves.
0:27:35 Well, that’s up to the founder.
0:27:42 But if you’re not using AI at every aspect of your business, you’re not going to make it.
0:27:50 And the distinction as a programming matter is that when I was doing all of this way back when, you had to write the code.
0:27:54 Now AI has to discover the answer.
0:27:56 It’s a very big deal.
0:27:59 And of course, this was all of this was invented at Google, you know, 10 years ago.
0:28:09 But basically, all of a sudden, analytical programming, sort of what I did my whole life in a writing code and, you know, do this, do that, add this, subtract this, call this, so forth and so on,
0:28:13 is gradually being replaced by learning the answer, right?
0:28:18 So for example, we use the example of translate language translation.
0:28:25 The current large language models are essentially organized around predicting the next word.
0:28:34 Well, if you can predict the next word, you can predict the next sequence in biology, you can predict the next action, you can predict the next thing the robot should do.
0:28:50 So all of this stuff around large language models and deep learning, it has come out of the transformer paper, GPT-3, chat GPT, which for most people was this huge moment, is essentially about predicting the next word and getting it right.
0:29:02 In terms of company culture and how important that is for the success and prospects of a company, how do you think about company culture and how significant and important is it and like when and who sets it?
0:29:06 It’s almost always set, company cultures are almost always set by the founders.
0:29:08 I happen to be on the board of the Mayo Clinic.
0:29:11 Mayo Clinic is the largest healthcare system in America.
0:29:13 It’s also the most highly rated one.
0:29:23 And they have a rule which is called the needs of the customer come first, which came out of the Mayo brothers who’ve been dead for like 120 years.
0:29:25 But that was their principle.
0:29:28 And when I initially got on the board, I started wandering around.
0:29:32 I thought that this is kind of a stupid phrase and nobody really does this.
0:29:36 And they really believe it and they repeat it and they repeat it.
0:29:42 Right. So it’s true in non-technical cultures. In that case, it’s a healthcare for service delivery.
0:29:45 You can drive a culture even in non-tech.
0:29:47 In tech, it’s typically an engineering culture.
0:29:56 And if I had to do things over again, I would have even more technical people and even fewer non-technical people and just make the technical people figure out what they have to do.
0:30:00 And I’m sorry for that bias because I’m not trying to offend anybody.
0:30:06 But the fact of the matter is the technical people, if you build the right product, your customers will come.
0:30:11 If you don’t build the product, then you don’t need a sales first. Why are you selling an inferior product?
0:30:25 So in the How Google Works book and ultimately in the trillion dollar coach book, which is about Bill Campbell, we talked a lot about how the CEO is now the chief product officer, the chief innovation officer.
0:30:33 Because 50 years ago, you didn’t have access to capital, you didn’t have access to marketing, you didn’t have access to sales, you didn’t have access to distribution hours.
0:30:38 I was meeting today with an entrepreneur who said, “Yeah, we’ll be 95% technical.”
0:30:39 And I said, “Why?”
0:30:44 I said, “Well, we have a contract manufacturer and our products are so good that people will just buy them.”
0:30:48 This happened to be a technical switching company.
0:30:51 And they said, “It’s only 100,000 times better than its competitors.”
0:30:55 And I said, “It will sell. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work yet.”
0:31:01 It isn’t the point. But if they achieve their goal, people will be lined up outside the door.
0:31:08 So as a matter of culture, you want to build a technical culture with values about getting the product to work.
0:31:12 And working me is not another thing you do with engineers.
0:31:20 They make a nice presentation to you and they go, “That’s very interesting, but you know, I’m not your customer.
0:31:27 Your customer is really tough because your customer wants everything to work and free and work right now and never make any mistakes.”
0:31:32 So give me their feedback. And if their feedback is good, I love you.
0:31:37 And if their feedback is bad, then you better get back to work and stop being so arrogant.
0:31:45 So what happens is that in the invention process within firms, people fall in love with an idea and they don’t test it.
0:31:52 One of the things that Google did, and this is largely Marissa Mayer, we’ll be back when, is one day she said to me,
0:31:56 “I don’t know how to judge user interface.”
0:31:58 Marissa Mayer was the previous CEO.
0:32:02 She was the CEO of Yahoo and before that she ran all the consumer products at Google.
0:32:06 And she’s now running another company in the Bay Area.
0:32:09 But the important thing about Marissa is she said, “I can’t…”
0:32:13 I said, “Well, you know, the user interface is great at the time.” And it certainly was.
0:32:23 And she said, “I don’t know how to judge the user interface myself and none of my team do, but we know how to measure.”
0:32:28 And so what she organized were A/B tests. You test one, test another.
0:32:35 So remember that it’s possible using these networks to actually kind of figure out, because they’re highly instrumented, dwell time.
0:32:40 How long does somebody watch this? How important it is.
0:32:53 If you go back to how TikTok works, one of the signals that they use include the amount of time you watch, commenting, forwarding, sharing, all those kinds of things.
0:33:01 And you can understand those as analytics that go into an AI engine and makes a decision as to what to do next, what to make viral.
0:33:10 And on this point of culture at scale, is it right to expect that the culture changes as the company scales?
0:33:17 Because you came into Google, I believe, when they were doing sort of $100 million in revenue and you left when they were doing what, was it $180 billion or something staggering?
0:33:24 But is it right to assume that the culture of a growing company should scale from when there was 10 people in that garage to when there’s 100?
0:33:35 So when I go back to Google to visit, and they were kind enough to give me a badge and treat me well, of course, I hear the echoes of this.
0:33:43 I was at a lunch where there was a lady running search and a gentleman running ads, you know, the successors were the people who worked with me.
0:33:51 And I asked them what’s going on. They said the same problems. The same problems have not been solved, but they’re much bigger.
0:33:59 And so when you go to a company, I suspect I was not near the founding of Apple, but I was on the board for a while.
0:34:07 The founding culture you can see today in their obsession about user interfaces, their obsession about being closed and their privacy and secrecy.
0:34:11 It’s just a different company, right? I’m not passing judgment.
0:34:21 Setting the culture is important. The echoes are there. What does happen in big companies is they become less efficient for many reasons.
0:34:26 The first thing that happens is they become conservative because of their public and they have lawsuits.
0:34:39 And a famous example is that Microsoft, after the antitrust case in the 90s, became so conservative in terms of what it could launch that it really missed the Web Revolution for a long time.
0:34:46 They have since recovered. And I, of course, was happy to exploit that as a competitor to them when we were at Google.
0:34:54 But the important thing is when big companies should be faster because they have more money and more scale, they should be able to do things even quicker.
0:35:05 But in my industry anyway, the tech startups that have a new, clear idea tend to win because the big company can’t move fast enough to do it.
0:35:10 Another example, we had built something called Google Video. I was very proud of Google Video.
0:35:15 And David Drummond, who was the general counsel at the time, came in and said, “You have to look at this YouTube people.”
0:35:21 I said, “Why? Who cares?” And it turns out they’re really good and they’re more clever than your team.
0:35:25 And I said, “That can’t be true. Typical arrogant Eric.”
0:35:32 And we sat down and we looked at it and they really worked quicker even though we had an incumbent.
0:35:39 And why? It turns out that the incumbent was operating under the traditional rules that Google had, which was fine.
0:35:43 And the competitor, in this case, YouTube, was not constrained by that.
0:35:48 They could work at any pace and they could do all sorts of things, intellectual property and so forth.
0:35:52 Ultimately, we were pseudo over all of that stuff and we ultimately won all those suits.
0:35:58 But it’s an example where there are these moments in time where you have to move extremely quickly.
0:36:02 You’re seeing that right now with generative technology.
0:36:08 So the AGI, the generative revolution, generate code, generate videos, generate text, generate everything.
0:36:12 All of those winners are being determined in the next six, twelve months.
0:36:22 And then once the slope is set, once the growth rate is quadrupling every six months or so forth, it’s very hard for somebody else to come in.
0:36:26 So it’s a race to get there as fast as you can.
0:36:31 So when you talk to the great venture capitalists, they’re fast, right?
0:36:35 We’ll look at it, we’ll make a decision tomorrow, we’re done, we’re in and so forth.
0:36:41 And we want to be first because that’s where they make the most amount of money.
0:36:46 So we were talking before you arrived, I was talking to Jack about this idea of like harvesting and hunting.
0:36:50 So harvesting what you’ve already sowed and hunting for new opportunities.
0:36:56 But I’ve always found it’s quite difficult to get the harvesters to be the hunters at the same time.
0:36:59 So harvesting and hunting is a good metaphor.
0:37:01 I’m interested in entrepreneurs.
0:37:09 And so what we learned at Google was ultimately if you want to get somebody done, you have to have somebody who’s entrepreneurial in their approach in charge of a small business.
0:37:17 And so, for example, Sundar, when he became CEO, had a model of which were the little things that he was going to emphasize and which were the big things.
0:37:20 Some of those little things are now big things, right?
0:37:22 And he managed it that way.
0:37:26 So one way to understand innovation in a large company is you need to know who the owner is.
0:37:32 Larry Page would say over and over again, it’s not going to happen unless there’s an owner who’s going to drive this.
0:37:37 And he was supremely good at identifying that technical talent, right?
0:37:39 That’s one of his great founder strengths.
0:37:49 So when we talk about founders, not only do you have to have a vision, but you also have to have either great luck or great skill as to who is the person who can lead this.
0:37:57 Inevitably, those people are highly technical in the sense that they can end very quick moving and they have good management skills, right?
0:38:00 They understand how to hire people and deploy resources.
0:38:02 That allows for innovation.
0:38:15 If I look back in my career, each generation of the tech companies failed, including, for example, Sun, at the point at which he became non-competitive with the future.
0:38:21 Is it possible for a team to innovate while they still have their day job, which is harvesting, if you know what I mean?
0:38:28 Or do you have to take those people, put them into a different team, different building, different P&L, and get them to focus on their disruptive innovation?
0:38:32 There are almost no examples of doing it simultaneously in the same building.
0:38:52 The Macintosh was famously — Steve, in his typical crazy way, had this very small team that invented the Macintosh, and he put them in a little building next to the big building on Bob Road and Cupertino, and they put a pirate flag on top of it.
0:38:55 Now, was that good culturally inside the company?
0:38:57 No.
0:39:00 Because it created resentment in the big building.
0:39:04 But was it right in terms of the revenue and path of Apple?
0:39:05 Absolutely.
0:39:06 Why?
0:39:10 Because the Mac ultimately became the platform that established the UI.
0:39:15 The user interface ultimately allowed them to build the iPhone, which, of course, is defined by its user interface.
0:39:17 Why couldn’t they stay in the same building?
0:39:18 It just doesn’t work.
0:39:21 You can’t get people to play two roles.
0:39:23 The incentives are different.
0:39:28 If you’re going to be a pirate and a disruptor, you don’t have to follow the same rules.
0:39:34 So there are plenty of examples where you just have to keep inventing yourself.
0:39:46 Now, what’s interesting about cloud computing and essentially cloud services, which is what Google does, is because the product is not sold to you, it’s delivered to you, it’s easier to change.
0:39:53 The same problem remains. If you look at Google today, it’s basically a search box, and it’s incredibly powerful.
0:39:57 But what happens when that interface is not really textual?
0:39:59 Google will have to reinvent that.
0:40:00 What do you mean by that?
0:40:04 The system will somehow know what you’re asking.
0:40:07 It will be your assistant.
0:40:09 And again, Google will do very well.
0:40:17 I’m in no way criticizing Google here, but I’m saying that even something as simple as the search box will eventually be replaced by something more powerful.
0:40:19 It’s important that Google be the company that does that.
0:40:21 I believe they will.
0:40:27 And I was thinking about it, you know, the example of Steve Jobs in that building with the pirate flag on it.
0:40:41 My brain went, there’s so many offices around the world that were trying to kill Applet that exact moment that might not have had the pirate flag, but that’s exactly what they were doing in similar small rooms.
0:40:47 So what Apple had done so smartly there was they owned the people that were about to kill their business model.
0:40:48 And this is quite difficult to do.
0:40:56 And part of me wonders if in your experience, it’s a founder that has that type of conviction that does that.
0:41:05 It’s extremely hard for nonfounders to do this in corporations because if you think about a corporation, what’s the duty of the CEO?
0:41:10 Many, there’s the shareholders, there’s the employees, there’s the community, and there’s a board.
0:41:15 Trying to get a board of very smart people to agree on anything is hard enough.
0:41:20 So imagine I walk in to you and I say, I have a new idea.
0:41:23 I’m going to kill our profitability for two years.
0:41:27 It’s a huge bet and I need $10 billion.
0:41:31 Now, would the board say yes?
0:41:34 Well, they did to Mark Zuckerberg.
0:41:39 He spent all that money on essentially VR of one kind or another.
0:41:51 It doesn’t seem to have produced very much, but at exactly the same time, he invested very heavily in Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook, and in particular in the AI systems that power them.
0:42:03 And today, Facebook, to my surprise, is a very significant leader in AI having released this version called Lama 400 billion, which is curiously an open source model.
0:42:05 Open source means it’s available freely for everyone.
0:42:13 And what Facebook and Meta is saying is, as long as we have this technology, we can maximize the revenue in our core businesses.
0:42:19 So there’s a good example and Zuckerberg is obviously an incredibly talented entrepreneur.
0:42:23 He’s now back on the list of the most rich people.
0:42:30 He’s feed it in everything he was doing and he managed to lose all that money while making a different bet.
0:42:32 That’s a unique founder.
0:42:36 The same thing is almost impossible with a hired CEO.
0:42:45 How important here is focus and what’s your sort of opinion of the importance of focus from your experience with Google, but also looking at these other companies?
0:42:55 Because when you’re at Google and you have so much money in the bank, there’s so many things that you could do and could build like an endless list you can take on anybody and basically win in most markets.
0:42:58 How do you think about focus at Google?
0:43:03 Focus is important, but it’s misinterpreted.
0:43:09 In Google, we spent an awful lot of time telling people we wanted to do everything.
0:43:12 And everyone said, you can’t pull off everything.
0:43:14 And we said, yes, we can.
0:43:16 We have the underlying architectures.
0:43:17 We have the underlying reach.
0:43:21 We can do this if we can imagine and build something that’s really transformative.
0:43:31 And so the idea was not that we would somehow focus on one thing like search, but rather that we would pick areas of great impact and importance to the world, many of which were free, by the way.
0:43:33 This is not necessarily revenue driven.
0:43:34 And that worked.
0:43:35 I’ll give you another example.
0:43:52 There’s an old saying in the business school that you should focus on what you’re good at and you should simplify your product lines and you should get rid of product lines that don’t work until famously had a term is called arm.
0:43:54 It’s a risk chip.
0:44:01 And this particular risk chip was not compatible with the architecture that they were using for most of their products.
0:44:02 And so they sold it.
0:44:15 Unfortunately, this was a terrible mistake because the architecture that they sold off was needed for mobile phones with low memory with small batteries and heat problems and so forth and so on.
0:44:22 And so that decision, that faithful decision now 15 years ago meant that they were never a player in the mobile space.
0:44:31 And once they made that decision, they tried to take their expensive and expensive and complex chips and they kept trying to make cheaper and smaller versions.
0:44:37 But the core decision, which was to simplify, simplified to the wrong outcome.
0:44:45 Today, if you look at, I’ll give you an example, the NVIDIA chips use an ARM CPU and then these two powerful GPUs.
0:44:47 It’s called the B200.
0:44:48 They don’t use the Intel chip.
0:44:51 They use the ARM chip because it was for their needs faster.
0:44:54 It would never have predicted that 15 years ago.
0:45:08 So at the end, maybe it was just a mistake, but maybe they didn’t understand in the way they were organized as a corporation that ultimately battery power would be as important as computing power, right?
0:45:11 The amount of battery you use and that was the discriminant.
0:45:18 So one way to think about it is if you’re going to have these sort of simple rules, you better have a model of what happens in the next five years.
0:45:24 So the way I teach this is just write down what it’ll look like in five years.
0:45:25 Just try.
0:45:27 What will look like in five years? Your company?
0:45:29 Whatever it is, right?
0:45:31 So let’s talk about AI.
0:45:34 What will be true in five years?
0:45:36 That it’s going to be a lot smarter.
0:45:37 That is a lot smarter.
0:45:40 But how many companies will there be in AI?
0:45:44 Will there be five or 5,000 or 50,000?
0:45:45 50,000?
0:45:47 How many big companies will there be?
0:45:49 Will there be new companies?
0:45:51 What will they do, right?
0:46:05 So I just told you my view is that eventually you and I will have our own AI assistant, which is a polymath, which is incredibly smart, which helps us guide through the information overload that it is today.
0:46:06 Who’s going to build it?
0:46:07 Make a prediction.
0:46:09 What kind of hard rule be on?
0:46:10 Make a prediction.
0:46:12 How fast will the networks be?
0:46:13 Make a prediction.
0:46:17 Write all these things down and then have a discussion about what to do.
0:46:34 What is interesting about our industry is that when something like the PC comes along or the internet, I lived through all of these things, they are such broad phenomena that they really do create a whole new lake, a whole new ocean, whatever metaphor you want.
0:46:37 Now people said, well, wasn’t that crypto?
0:46:38 No.
0:46:40 Crypto is not such a platform.
0:46:44 Crypto is not transformative to daily life for everyone.
0:46:48 People are not running around all day using crypto tokens rather than currency.
0:46:50 Crypto is a specialized market.
0:46:52 By the way, it’s important and it’s interesting.
0:46:55 It’s not a horizontal transformative market.
0:47:02 The arrival of alien intelligence in the form of savants that you use is such a transformative thing because it touches everything.
0:47:06 It touches you as a producer, as a star, as a narrative.
0:47:08 It touches me as an executive.
0:47:11 It will ultimately help people make money in the stock market.
0:47:13 People are working on that.
0:47:17 There’s so many ways in which the technology is transformative to start.
0:47:28 In your case, when you think about your company, whether it’s little, you know, itty bitty or a really big one, it’s fundamentally how will you apply AI to accelerate what you’re doing?
0:47:35 In your case, for example, here you have, I think, the most successful show in the UK by far.
0:47:38 So how will you use AI to make it more successful?
0:47:48 Well, you can ask it to distribute you more, to make narratives, to summarize, to come up with new insights, to suggest, to have fun, to create contests.
0:47:51 There are all sorts of ways that you can ask AI.
0:47:53 I’ll give you a simple example.
0:48:01 For a politician, thankfully I’m not, and I knew my district, I would say to the computer, write a program.
0:48:15 So I’m saying to the computer, you write a program, which goes through all the constituents in my interest, figures out roughly what they care about, and then send them a video, which is labeled, you know, of me digitally.
0:48:22 So I’m not fake, but it’s kind of like my intention, where I explain to them how important I, as their constituent, have made the bridge work.
0:48:27 Right, and you sit there and you go, that’s crazy, but it’s possible.
0:48:39 Now politicians have not discovered this yet, but they will, because ultimately politicians are on a human connection, and the quickest way to have that communication is to be on their phone, talking to them about something that they care about.
0:48:49 When chat GPT first launched, and they sort of scaled rapidly to 100 million users, there was all these articles saying that the founders of Google had rushed back in,
0:48:55 and it was a crisis situation at Google, and there was panic, and there was two things that I thought first is, is that true?
0:49:02 And second thing was, how did Google not come to market first with a chat GPT style product?
0:49:09 Well, remember that Google also, that’s the old question of why did you not do Facebook? Well, the answer is we were doing everything else.
0:49:19 Right, so my defensive answer is that Google has eight or nine or 10 billion user clusters of activity, which is pretty good, right?
0:49:24 It’s pretty hard to do, right? I’m very proud of that, I’m very proud of what they’re doing now.
0:49:35 My own view is that what happened was Google was working in the engine room, and a team out of OpenAI figured out a technology called RLHF,
0:49:45 and what happened was when they did GPT3, and the T is Transformer, which was invented at Google, when they did it, they had sort of this interesting idea,
0:49:51 and then they all, then they sort of casually started to use humans to make it better.
0:49:59 And RLHF refers to the fact that you use humans at the end to do A/B tests, where humans can actually say, well, this one’s better,
0:50:04 and then the system learns recursively from human training at the end.
0:50:13 That was a real breakthrough, right? And I joke with my OpenAI friends that you were sitting around on Thursday night and you turn this thing on,
0:50:22 and you go, holy crap, look how good this thing is. It was a real discovery, right, that none of us expected. Certainly I did not.
0:50:31 And once they had it, the OpenAI people, Sam and Mira and so forth, we’ll talk about this, they didn’t really understand how good it was.
0:50:38 They just turned it on, and all of a sudden they had this huge success disaster because they were working on GPT4 at the same time.
0:50:48 It was an afterthought, and it’s a great story because it just shows you that even the brilliant founders do not necessarily understand how powerful what they’ve done is.
0:51:02 Now today, of course, you have GPT4O, basically a very powerful model from OpenAI. You have Gemini 1.5, which is clearly roughly equivalent, if not better, in certain areas.
0:51:17 The Gemini is more multimodal, for example, and then you have other players. The Llama architecture, L-L-L-A-M-A, does not stand for Llamas, it’s large language models, out of Facebook and a number of others.
0:51:30 There’s a startup called Anthropic, which is very powerful, founded by one of the inventors, or GPT3, and a whole bunch of people, and they formed their company knowing they were going to be that successful.
0:51:45 It’s interesting, they actually formed, as part of their incorporation, that they were a public benefit corporation, because they were concerned that it would be so powerful that some evil CEO in the future would force them to go for revenue as opposed to world goodness.
0:51:53 So the teams, when they were doing this, they understood the power of what they were doing, and they anticipated the level of impact, and they were right.
0:52:01 Do you think if Steve Jobs was an apple, they would be on that list? How do you think the company would be different?
0:52:09 Well, Tim has done a fantastic job in Steve’s legacy, and what’s interesting is normally the successor is not as good as the founder.
0:52:24 But somehow, Tim, having worked with Steve for so long, and having set the culture, having Steve, they’ve managed to continue to focus on the user with this incredible safety focus in terms of apps and so forth and so on, and they’ve remained a relatively closed culture.
0:52:31 I think all of those would have maintained that Steve tragically died, and he was a good friend.
0:52:47 But the important point is Steve believed very strongly in what are called closed systems, where you own and control all your intellectual property, and he and I would battle over open versus closed because I came from the other side, and I did this with respect.
0:52:49 I don’t think they would have changed that.
0:52:51 And they’ve changed that now?
0:53:00 No. I think still Apple is still basically a single company that’s vertically integrated. The rest of the industry is largely more open.
0:53:13 I think everyone, especially in the wake of the recent launch of the iPhone 16, which I’ve got somewhere here, has this expectation that Apple would, if Steve was still alive, take some big, bold bet in some…
0:53:24 And I think about Tim’s tenure, he’s done a fantastic job of keeping that company going, running it with the sort of principles of Steve Jobs, but has there been many big, bold, successful bets?
0:53:34 A lot of people point at the iPods, which is a great product. But I think AI is one of those things where you go, I wonder if Steve would have understood the significance of it and…
0:53:43 Steve was that smart that he, I would never, you know, he’s an Elon level intelligence.
0:53:59 And when Steve and I worked together very closely, which was 15 years ago for his death, he was very frustrated at the success of MP4 over MOV format files.
0:54:06 And he was really mad about it. And I said, well, you know, maybe that’s because you were closed, and QuickTime was not generally available.
0:54:15 I said, that’s not true. My team, you know, our product is better and so forth. So his core belief system, he’s an artist, right?
0:54:24 And given the choice, we used to have this debate where do you want to be Chevrolet or do you want to be Porsche? Do you want to be, you know, General Motors or do you want to be BMW?
0:54:32 And he said, I want to be BMW. And during that time, Apple’s margins were twice as high as the PC companies.
0:54:38 And I said, Steve, you don’t need all that money. You’re generating all this cash. You’re giving it to your shareholders.
0:54:48 And he said, the principle of our profitability and our value and our brand is this luxury brand, right? So that’s how he thought.
0:54:58 Now, how would AI change that? Everything that he would have done with Apple today would be AI inspired, but it would be beautiful.
0:55:00 That’s the great gift he had.
0:55:08 Because I think Siri was almost a glimpse at what AI now kind of looks like. It was a glimpse at what the, I guess the ambition was.
0:55:15 We’ve all been chatting to the Siri thing, which is I think most people would agree is kind of like largely useless unless you’re trying to figure out something super, super simple.
0:55:25 But now this weekend, as I said, I sat there with my girlfriend’s family there speaking to this voice activated device and it was solving problems for me almost instantaneously.
0:55:28 They’re very complex and translating them into French and Portuguese.
0:55:42 Welcome to the replacement for Siri. And again, would Steve have done that quicker? I don’t know. It’s very clear that the first thing Apple needs to do is have Siri be replaced by an AI and call that Siri.
0:55:50 Hiring. We’re doing a lot of hiring in our companies at the moment and we’re going back and forward on what the most important principles are when it comes to hiring.
0:55:57 Making lots of mistakes sometimes, getting things right sometimes. What do I need to know as an entrepreneur when it comes to hiring?
0:56:07 Startups by definition are huge risk takers. You have no history, you have no incumbency, you have all these competitors by definition and you have no time.
0:56:19 So in a startup you want to prioritize intelligence and quickness over experience and sort of stability. You want to take risks on people.
0:56:28 And part of the reason why startups are full of young people is because young people often don’t have the baggage of executives that have been around for a long time.
0:56:38 But more importantly, they’re willing to take risks. So it used to be that you could predict whether a company was successful by the age of the founders.
0:56:46 And in that 20 and 30 year old period, the company would be hugely successful. Startups wiggle. They try something, they try something else.
0:56:55 And they’re very quick to discard an old idea. Corporations spend years with a belief system that is factually false.
0:57:03 And they don’t actually change their opinion until after they’ve lost all the contracts. And if you go back, all the signs are there.
0:57:08 Nobody wanted to talk to them. Nobody cared about the product. And yet they kept pushing it.
0:57:17 So if you’re a CEO of a larger company, what you want to do is basically figure out how to measure this innovation so that you don’t waste a lot of time.
0:57:23 Well, Gates had a saying a long time ago, which was that the most important thing to do is to fail fast.
0:57:32 And from his perspective as the CEO of Microsoft, founder of Microsoft, that he wanted everything to happen and he wanted to fail quickly.
0:57:34 And that was his theory.
0:57:35 And do you agree with that theory?
0:57:40 Yeah, I do. Fast failure is important because you can say it in a nicer way.
0:57:49 Fundamentally, at Google, we had this 70 2010 rule that Larry and Sergey came up with 70% of the core business, 20% on adjacent business and 10% on other.
0:57:50 What does that mean? Sorry.
0:57:57 Core business means search ads. Adjacent business means something that you’re trying like a cloud business or so forth.
0:58:00 And the 10% is some new idea.
0:58:02 So Google created this thing called Google X.
0:58:08 The first product it built was called Google Brain, which is one of the first machine learning architectures.
0:58:10 This actually precedes DeepMind.
0:58:13 Google Brain was used to power the AI system.
0:58:21 Google Brain’s team of 10 or 15 people generated 10, 20, 30, 40 billion dollars of extra profits over a decade.
0:58:23 So that pays for a lot of failures.
0:58:32 Then they had a whole bunch of other ideas that seemed very interesting to me that didn’t happen for one or another and they would cancel them.
0:58:35 And then the people would get reconfigured.
0:58:45 And one of the great things about Silicon Valley is it’s possible to spend a few years on a really bad idea and get canceled, if you will, and then get another job having learned all of that.
0:58:54 My joke is the best CFO is one who’s just gone bankrupt because the one thing that CFO is not going to let happen is to go bankrupt again.
0:59:02 Well, on this point of culture as well, Google as such a big company must experience a bunch of microcultures.
0:59:15 One of the things that I’ve always, I’ve kind of studied it as a cautionary tale is the story of TGIF at Google, which was this sort of weekly all hands meeting where employees could ask the executives whatever they wanted to.
0:59:22 And the articles around it say that it was eventually sort of changed or canceled because it became unproductive.
0:59:24 It’s more complicated than that.
0:59:29 So Larry and Sergey started TGIF, which I obviously participated in and we had fun.
0:59:31 There was a sense of humor.
0:59:33 It was all off the record.
0:59:43 A famous example is the VP of sales, whose name was Omid, was always predicting lower revenue than we really had, which is called sandbagging.
0:59:48 So we got a sandbag and we made him stand on the sandbag in order to present his numbers.
0:59:50 It was just fun, humorous.
0:59:52 You know, we had skits and things like that.
0:59:58 At some size, you don’t have that level of intimacy and you don’t have a level of privacy.
1:00:02 And what happened was there were leaks.
1:00:05 Eventually there was a presentation.
1:00:18 I don’t remember the specifics where the presentation was ongoing and someone was leaking the presentation live to a reporter and somebody came on stage and said, we have to stop now.
1:00:25 I think that was the moment where the company got sort of too big.
1:00:36 I heard about a story that, because from what I had understood, this might be totally wrong, but it’s all just things that Google employees have told me, was that there wasn’t many sackings, firings at Google’s.
1:00:37 There wasn’t many layoffs.
1:00:39 It wasn’t really a culture of layoffs.
1:00:47 And I guess in part that’s because the company was so successful that it didn’t have to make those extremely, extremely tough decisions that we’re seeing a lot of companies make today.
1:01:02 I reflect on Elon’s running of Twitter. When he took over Twitter, the story goes that he went to the top floor and basically said, anyone who’s willing to work hard, is committed to these valleys, please come to the top floor, everyone else you’re fired.
1:01:09 This sort of extreme culture of culling and people being sort of activists at work.
1:01:12 And I wanted to know if there’s any truth in that.
1:01:24 There’s some. In Google’s case, we had a position of why lay people off, just don’t hire them in the first place. It’s much, much easier.
1:01:32 And so in my tenure, the only layoff we did was 200 people in the sales structures right after the 2000 epidemic.
1:01:35 And I remember it as being extremely painful.
1:01:37 It was the first time we had done it.
1:01:43 So we took the position, which is different at the time, that you shouldn’t have an automatic layoff.
1:01:51 What would happen is that there was a belief at the time that every six months or nine months you should take the bottom 5% of your people and lay them off.
1:01:55 The problem with that is you’re assuming the 5% are correctly identified.
1:02:01 And furthermore, even the lowest performers have knowledge and value to the corporation that we can take it.
1:02:05 So we took a very much more positive view of our employees and the employees like that.
1:02:08 And we obviously paid them very well and so forth and so on.
1:02:12 I think that the cultural issues ultimately have been addressed.
1:02:25 But during there was a period of time where there were, because of the free willing nature and nature of the company, there were an awful lot of internal distribution lists which had nothing to do with the company.
1:02:26 What does that mean?
1:02:31 There were distribution lists on topics of war, peace, politics, so forth.
1:02:32 What’s a distribution list?
1:02:34 A distribution like an email.
1:02:36 Think of it as a message board.
1:02:40 Roughly speaking, think of it as message boards for employees.
1:02:45 And I remember that at one point somebody discovered that there were 100,000 such message boards.
1:02:55 And the company ultimately cleaned that up because companies are not like universities and that there are in fact all sorts of laws about what you can say and what you cannot say and so forth.
1:03:01 And so for example, the majority of the employees were Democrats in the American political system.
1:03:08 And I made a point, even though I’m a Democrat, to try to protect the small number of Republicans because I thought they had a right to be employees too.
1:03:15 So you have to be very careful in a corporation to establish what does speech mean within the corporation.
1:03:27 And what you are hearing as wokeism is really can be understood is what are the appropriate topics on work time in a work venue should you be discussing.
1:03:35 My own view is stick to the business and then please feel free to go to the bar, scream your views, talk to everybody.
1:03:40 You know, I’m a strong believer in free speech, but within the corporation, let’s just stick to the corporation and its goals.
1:03:50 So I was hearing these stories about, I think, in more recent times in the last year or two of people coming to work just for the free breakfast, protesting outside that morning, coming back into the building for lunch.
1:03:53 As best I can tell, that’s all been cleaned up.
1:04:02 I did also hear that it had been cleaned up because I think it was addressed in a very high conviction way, which meant that it was seen to.
1:04:08 How do you think about competition? For everyone that’s building something, how much should we be focusing on our competition?
1:04:13 I strongly recommend not focusing on competition and instead focusing on building a product that no one else has.
1:04:16 And you say, well, how can you do that without knowing the competition?
1:04:18 Well, if you study the competition, you’re wasting your time.
1:04:22 Try to solve the problem in a new way and do it in a way where the customers are delighted.
1:04:27 Running Google, we seldom looked at what our competitors were doing.
1:04:31 What we did, we spent an awful lot of time was what is possible for us to do?
1:04:34 What can we actually do from our current situation?
1:04:39 And sort of the running ahead of everybody turns out to be really important.
1:04:41 What about deadlines?
1:04:48 Well, Larry established the principle of OKRs, which were objectives and key results.
1:04:53 And every quarter, Larry would actually write down all the metrics and he was tough.
1:04:57 And he would say that if you got to 70% of my numbers, that was good.
1:05:04 And then we would grade based on are you above the 70% or you below the 70% and it was harsh and it works.
1:05:09 You have to measure to get things done in big corporation.
1:05:17 Well, there was everyone kind of looks good, makes all sorts of claims, feels good about themselves, but it doesn’t have an impact.
1:05:20 What about business plans? Should we be writing business plans as founders?
1:05:27 Google wrote a business plan that was run by a fellow named Salar and I saw it years later and it was actually correct.
1:05:34 And I told Salar that this is probably the only business plan ever written for a corporation that was actually correct in hindsight.
1:05:43 So what I prefer to do, and this is how I teach it at Stanford, is try to figure out what the world looks like in five years.
1:05:49 And then try to figure out what you’re going to do in one year and then do it.
1:06:01 So if you can basically say this is the direction, these are the things we’re going to achieve within one year and then run against that as hard goals, not simple goals, but hard goals, then you’ll get there.
1:06:08 And the general rule, at least in a consumer business, is if you can get an audience of 10 or 100 million people, you can make lots of money.
1:06:18 So if you give me any business that has no revenue and 100 million people, I can find a way to monetize that with advertising and sponsorships and donations and so forth and so on.
1:06:27 Focus on getting the user right and everything else will follow. The Google phrase is focus on the user and everything else is handled.
1:06:37 Sergey and Larry, you worked with them for 20 years, many decades, two decades. What made them special?
1:06:40 Frankly, raw IQ. They were just smarter than everybody.
1:06:41 Really?
1:06:52 Yeah, and Sergey’s case, his father was a very brilliant Russian mathematician, his mother was also highly technical, his family is all very technical, and he was clever.
1:06:58 He’s a clever mathematician. Larry, different personality, but similar.
1:07:06 So an example would be that Larry and I are in his office and we’re writing on the whiteboard a long list about what we’re going to do and he says, look, we’re going to do this and this.
1:07:12 And I said, okay, I agree with you. I don’t agree with you. We make this very long list and Sergey is out playing volleyball.
1:07:24 And so he runs in his little volleyball shorts and a little shirt all sweating. He looked at our list and said, this is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. And then he suggests five things and he was exactly right.
1:07:30 So we erased the whiteboard and then he of course went back to play volleyball and that became the strategy of the company.
1:07:37 So over and over again, it was their brilliance and their ability to see things that I didn’t see that I think really drove it.
1:07:38 Can you teach that?
1:07:42 I don’t know. I think you can teach listening.
1:07:53 But I think most of us get caught up in our own ideas and we are always surprised that something new happened.
1:07:58 Like, I’ve just told you that I’ve been in AI a long time. I’m still surprised at the rate.
1:08:08 My favorite current product is called Notebook LM. And for the listeners, Notebook LM is an experimental product out of Google DeepMind, basically Gemini.
1:08:14 It’s based on the Gemini backend and it was trained with high quality podcast voices.
1:08:15 It’s terrifying.
1:08:25 And you basically give it a, so what I’ll do is I’ll write something and again, I don’t write very well and I’ll ask Gemini to rewrite it to be more beautiful.
1:08:33 Okay, I’ll take that text and I’ll put it in Notebook LM and it produces this interview between a man and a woman who don’t exist.
1:08:40 And for fun, what I do is I play this in front of an audience and I wait and see if anyone figures out that the humans are not human.
1:08:43 It’s so good, they don’t figure it out.
1:08:44 We’ll play it now.
1:08:46 So this is the big thing that everyone’s making a big fuss about.
1:08:48 You can go and load this conversation.
1:08:59 Now it’s going to go out and create a conversation that’s in a podcast style where there’s a male voice and a female voice and they’re analyzing the content and then coming up with their own kind of just creative content.
1:09:01 So you could go and push play right here.
1:09:04 We are back Thursday. Get ready for week three.
1:09:06 The injury report this week.
1:09:07 What’s a doozy?
1:09:08 It’s a long one.
1:09:09 Yeah, it is.
1:09:12 And it has the potential to really shake things up.
1:09:20 So for that, to me, notebook LM is my chat GPT moment of this year.
1:09:21 It was mine as well.
1:09:31 And it’s much of the reason that I was deeply confused because as a podcaster who’s building a media company, we have an office down the road, 25,000 square feet.
1:09:33 We have studios in there.
1:09:46 We’re building audio, video content at this in the dawn of this new world where the cost of production of content goes to like zero or something.
1:09:49 And I’m trying to navigate how to play as a media owner.
1:09:54 So first place you’re what’s really going on is you’re moving from scarcity to ubiquity.
1:09:57 You’re moving from scarcity to abundance.
1:10:04 So one way to understand the world I live in is it’s scale computing generates abundance and abundance allows new strategies.
1:10:06 In your case, it’s obvious what you should do.
1:10:15 You’re a really famous podcaster and you have lots of interesting guests simply have this fake set of podcasts criticize you and your guests.
1:10:16 Right.
1:10:19 You’re essentially just amplifying your reach.
1:10:25 You’re not going to substitute for your honest brilliance and charisma here, but they’re going to accentuate it.
1:10:27 They will, they will, they will be entertaining.
1:10:29 They will summarize it and so forth.
1:10:31 It amplifies your reach.
1:10:37 If you go back to my basic argument that AI will double the productivity of everybody or more.
1:10:41 So in your case, you’ll have twice as many podcasts.
1:10:45 What I do, for example, is I’ll write something and I’ll say, I’ll have it respond.
1:10:49 And I’ll say, make it longer and it adds more stuff.
1:10:52 I think, God, I do this in like 30 seconds.
1:11:05 Then how powerful in your case, take one of these lengthy interviews you do, ask the system to annotate it to amplify it and then feed that into fake podcasters and see what they say.
1:11:11 You’ll have a whole new set of audiences that love them more than you, but, but it’s all from you.
1:11:13 That’s the key idea here.
1:11:20 I worry because there’s going to be potentially billions of podcasts that are loaded to RSS feeds all around the world.
1:11:25 And it’s all going to sort of chip away at, you know, the, the moat that I’ve.
1:11:31 So, so many people have believed that, but I think that evidence is, it’s not true.
1:11:41 When I started at Google, there was this notion that celebrity would go away and there would be this very long tail of micro markets, you know, specialists.
1:11:46 Because finally you could hear the voices of everyone and we’re all very democratic and liberal in our view.
1:11:52 That’s the, what really happened was networks accentuated the best people and they made more money.
1:11:59 Right, you went from being a local personality to a national personality to a global personality and the globe is a really big thing.
1:12:01 There’s lots of money and lots of players.
1:12:10 So you as a, as a celebrity are competing against a global group of people and you need all the help you can to maintain your position.
1:12:18 If you do it well by using these AI technologies, you will become more famous, not less famous.
1:12:25 Genesis, I have had a lot of conversations with a lot of people about the subject of AI.
1:12:32 And when I read your book and I’ve watched you do a series of interviews on this, some of the quotes that you said really stood out to me.
1:12:39 One of them I wrote down here, which comes from your book, Genesis, it’s on page five.
1:12:46 The advent of artificial intelligence is in our view a question of human survival.
1:12:49 Yes, that is our view.
1:12:54 So why is it a question of human survival?
1:12:57 AI is going to move very quickly.
1:13:00 It’s moving so much more quickly than I’ve ever seen.
1:13:05 There’s the amount of money, the number of people, the impact, the need.
1:13:11 What happens when the AI systems are really running key parts of our world?
1:13:14 What happens when AI is making the decision?
1:13:24 My simple example, you have a car which is AI controlled and you have an emergency or a lady’s about to give birth or something like that.
1:13:34 And they get in the car and there’s no override switch because the system is optimized around the whole as opposed to his or her emergency.
1:13:42 We as humans accept various forms of efficiency, including urgent ones versus systemic efficiency.
1:13:50 You could imagine that the Google engineers would design a perfect city that would perfectly operate every self-driving car on every street,
1:13:56 but would not then allow for the exceptions that you need in such an important issue.
1:14:04 So that’s a trivial example and one which is well understood of how it’s important that these things represent human values.
1:14:08 We have to actually articulate what does it mean.
1:14:11 So my favorite one is all this misinformation.
1:14:14 Democracy is pretty important.
1:14:18 Democracy is by far the best way to live and operate societies.
1:14:20 There are plenty of examples of this.
1:14:24 None of us want to work in essentially an authoritarian dictatorship.
1:14:33 So you better figure out a way where the misinformation components do not screw up proper political examples.
1:14:39 Another example is this question about teenagers and their mental development and growing up into these societies.
1:14:42 I don’t want them to be constantly depressed.
1:14:50 There’s a lot of evidence that dates around 2015 when all the social media algorithms changed from linear feeds to targeted feeds.
1:14:54 In other words, they went from time to this is what you want, this is what you want.
1:15:01 That hyper focus has ultimately narrowed people’s political views as we discussed.
1:15:04 But more importantly, it’s produced more depression and anxiety.
1:15:15 So all the studies indicate that basically if you time it to roughly then when people are coming to age, they’re not as happy with their lives, their behaviors, their opportunities for this.
1:15:19 And the best explanation is it was an algorithmic change.
1:15:23 And remember that these systems, they’re not just collections of content.
1:15:29 They are algorithmically deciding, you know, the algorithm decides what the outcome is for humans.
1:15:31 We have to manage that.
1:15:41 What we say in many different ways in the book is that you have sort of a choice of whether the the algorithms will advance.
1:15:42 That’s not a question.
1:15:44 The question is, are we advancing with it?
1:15:46 And do we have control over it?
1:15:55 There are so many examples where you could imagine an AI system could do something more efficiently, but at what cost, right?
1:16:03 I should mention that there is this discussion about something called AGI, artificial general intelligence.
1:16:09 And there’s this discussion in the press among many people that AGI occurs on a particular day, right?
1:16:15 And this is sort of a popular concept that on a particular day, five years from now or 10 years from now, this thing will occur.
1:16:19 And all of a sudden we’re going to have a computer that’s just like us, but even quicker.
1:16:21 That’s unlikely to be the path.
1:16:26 Much more likely are these waves of innovation in every field.
1:16:28 Better psychologists, better writers.
1:16:31 You see this with ChatGBT already.
1:16:39 Better scientists is a notion of an AI scientist that’s working with AI real scientists to accelerate the development of more AI science.
1:16:44 People believe all of this will come, but it has to be under human control.
1:16:46 Do you think it will be?
1:16:47 I do.
1:16:52 And part of the reason is I and others have worked hard to get the governments to understand this.
1:16:57 It’s very strange in my entire career, which has gone for, you know, 50 years.
1:17:05 We’ve never asked for government for help, because asking the government help is basically just a disaster in the view of the tech industry.
1:17:14 In this case, the people who invented it collectively came to the same view that there need to be guardrails on this technology because of the potential for harm.
1:17:19 The most obvious one is how do I kill myself, give me recipes to hurt other people, that kind of stuff.
1:17:26 There’s a whole community now in this part of the industry, which are called trust and safety groups.
1:17:36 And what they do is they actually have humans test the system before it gets released to make sure the harm that it might have in it is suppressed.
1:17:39 It literally won’t answer the question.
1:17:43 When you play this forward in your brain, you’ve been in the tech industry for a long time.
1:17:51 And from looking at your work, it feels like you’re describing this as the most sort of transformative, potentially harmful technology that humans have really ever seen.
1:18:00 You know, maybe alongside the nuclear bomb, I guess, but some would say even potentially worse because of the nature of the intelligence and its autonomy.
1:18:07 You must have moments where you think forward into the future and your thoughts about that future aren’t so rosy.
1:18:09 Because I have those moments.
1:18:11 But let’s think, let’s answer the question.
1:18:17 I said, think five years in five years, you’ll have two or three more turns of the crank of these large models.
1:18:22 These large models are scaling with ability that is unprecedented.
1:18:28 There’s no evidence that the scaling has laws, as they’re called, have begun to stop.
1:18:31 They will eventually stop, but we’re not there yet.
1:18:36 Each one of these cranks looks like it’s a factor of two, factor of three, factor of four of capability.
1:18:43 So let’s just say turning the crank, all of these systems get 50 times or 100 times more powerful.
1:18:49 In and of itself, that’s a very big deal because those systems will be capable of physics and math.
1:18:54 You see this with ODOT1 and OpenAI, all the other things that are occurring.
1:18:57 Now, what are the dangers?
1:19:00 Well, there’s the most obvious one is cyber attacks.
1:19:08 There’s evidence that the raw models, these are the ones that have not been released, can do what are called day zero attacks as well or better than humans.
1:19:10 A day zero attack is an attack that’s unknown.
1:19:12 They can discover something new.
1:19:13 And how do they do it?
1:19:16 They just keep trying because they’re computers and they have nothing else to do.
1:19:20 They don’t sleep, they don’t eat, they just turn them on and they just keep going.
1:19:23 So cyber is an example where everybody’s concerned.
1:19:24 Another one is biology.
1:19:29 Viruses are relatively easy to make and you can imagine coming up with really bad viruses.
1:19:34 There’s a whole team, I’m part of a commission, we’re looking at this to try to make sure that doesn’t happen.
1:19:36 I already mentioned misinformation.
1:19:43 Another probably negative, but we’ll see, is the development of new forms of warfare.
1:19:47 I’ve written extensively on how war is changing.
1:19:57 And the way to understand historic war is that it’s the, stereotypically the soldier with the gun, you know, on one side and so forth, World War trenches.
1:20:03 You see this by the way in the Ukraine fight today where the Ukrainians are holding on valiantly against the Russian onslaught.
1:20:09 But it’s sort of, you know, mono a mono, you know, man against man, sort of all of the stereotypes of war.
1:20:15 So in a drone world, which is the sort of the fastest way to build new robots is to build drones.
1:20:23 You’ll be sitting in a command center in some office building connected by a network and you’ll be doing harm to the other side while you’re drinking your coffee.
1:20:26 That’s a change in the logic of war.
1:20:28 And it’s applicable to both sides.
1:20:31 I don’t think anyone quite understands how war will change.
1:20:39 But I will tell you that in the Russian Ukraine war, you’re seeing a new form of warfare being invented right now.
1:20:42 Both sides have lots of drones.
1:20:44 Tanks are no longer very useful.
1:20:48 A $5,000 drone can kill a $5 million tank.
1:20:50 So it’s called the kill ratio.
1:20:52 So basically it’s drone on drone.
1:20:57 And so now people are trying to figure out how to have one drone destroy the other drone, right?
1:21:01 This will ultimately take over war and conflict in our world in total.
1:21:03 You mentioned role models.
1:21:06 This is a concept that I don’t think people understand exists.
1:21:13 The idea that there’s some other model that’s the role model that is capable of much worse than the thing we play with on our computers every day.
1:21:15 It’s important to establish how these things work.
1:21:21 The way these algorithms work is they have complicated training things where they suck all the information in.
1:21:27 And we currently believe we’ve sucked all of the written word that’s available.
1:21:29 That doesn’t mean there isn’t more.
1:21:33 But we’ve literally done such a good job of sucking everything that humans have ever written.
1:21:35 It’s all in these big computers.
1:21:37 When I say computers, I don’t mean computers.
1:21:40 I mean supercomputers with enormous memories.
1:21:43 And the scale is mind boggling.
1:21:49 And of course, there’s this company called NVIDIA, which makes the chips, which is now one of the most valuable companies in the world.
1:21:56 Surprisingly, so incredibly successful because they’re so central to this revolution and good for Jensen and his team.
1:22:02 So the important thing is when you do this training, it comes out with a raw model, right?
1:22:05 It takes six months and, you know, you wait 24 hours a day.
1:22:06 You can watch it.
1:22:09 It gets close to, there’s a measurement that they use called the loss function.
1:22:12 When it gets to a certain number, they say, good enough.
1:22:15 So then they go, what do we have?
1:22:17 Right? What do we do? Right?
1:22:20 So the first thing is let’s figure out what it knows.
1:22:23 So they have a set of tests.
1:22:28 And of course, it knows all sorts of bad things, which they immediately then tell it not to answer.
1:22:37 To me, the most interesting question is in over a five-year period, this systems will learn things that we don’t know they learn.
1:22:41 How will you test for things that you don’t know they know?
1:22:54 The answer in the industry is that they have incredibly clever people who sit there and they fiddle, literally fiddle with the networks and say, I’m going to, I’m going to see if it knows this.
1:22:56 I’ll see if it can do this.
1:22:59 And then they make a list and they say, that’s good.
1:23:01 That’s not so good.
1:23:08 So all of these transformations, so for example, you can show it a picture of a website or they can generate the code to generate a website.
1:23:10 All of those were not expected.
1:23:11 They just happened.
1:23:13 It’s called emergent behavior.
1:23:14 Scary.
1:23:16 Scary but exciting.
1:23:20 And so far, the systems have held.
1:23:22 The governments have worked well.
1:23:26 These trust and safety groups are working here in the UK.
1:23:30 One year ago was the first trust and safety conference.
1:23:32 The government did a fantastic job.
1:23:38 The team that was assembled was the best of all the country teams here in the UK.
1:23:40 Now what’s happening is these are happening around the world.
1:23:43 The next one is in France in early February.
1:23:45 And I expect a similarly good result.
1:23:55 Do you think we’re going to have to guard, I mean, you talk about this, but do you think we’re going to have to guard these role models with guns and tanks and machinery and stuff?
1:23:59 I worked for the Secretary of Defense for a while.
1:24:02 In Google, you could spend 20% of your time on other things.
1:24:06 So I worked for the Secretary of Defense to try to understand the US military.
1:24:11 And one of the things that we did is we visited a plutonium factory.
1:24:14 Plutonium is incredibly dangerous and incredibly secret.
1:24:17 And so this particular base is inside of another base.
1:24:21 So you go through the first set of machine guns and then you have a normal thing.
1:24:25 You go into the special place with even more machines, guns and even because it’s so secure.
1:24:39 So the metaphor is do you fundamentally believe that the computers that I’m talking about will be of such value and such danger that they’ll have their own data center with their own guards, which of course might be computer guards.
1:24:47 But the important thing is that it’s so special that it has to be protected in the same way that we protect nuclear bombs and programming.
1:24:55 An alternative model is to say that this technology will spread pretty broadly and there will be many such places.
1:25:04 If it’s a small number of groups, the governments will figure out a way to do deterrence and they’ll figure out a way to do non-proliferation.
1:25:05 So I’ll make something up.
1:25:09 I’ll say there’s a couple in China, there’s a few in the US, there’s one in Britain.
1:25:13 Of course, we’re all tied together between the US and Britain and maybe in a few other places.
1:25:15 That’s a manageable problem.
1:25:25 On the other hand, let’s imagine that that power is ultimately so easy to copy that it spreads globally and it’s accessible to, for example, terrorists.
1:25:30 Then you have a very serious proliferation problem, which is not yet solved.
1:25:32 This is again speculation.
1:25:36 Because I think a lot about adversaries in China and Russia and Putin.
1:25:44 I know you talk about them being a few years behind, maybe one or two years behind, but they’re eventually going to get there.
1:25:51 They’re eventually going to get to the point where they have these large language models with these AIs that can do these day-zero attacks on our nation.
1:26:02 They don’t have the same sort of social incentive structure if they’re a communist country to protect and to guard against these things.
1:26:04 Are you not worried about what China’s going to do?
1:26:12 I am worried, and I’m worried because you’re going into a space of great power without fully defined boundaries.
1:26:14 We talked about this in the book.
1:26:21 The Genesis book is fundamentally about what happens to society with the arrival of this new intelligence.
1:26:25 The first book we did, Age of AI, was right before chatGPT.
1:26:28 So now everybody kind of understands how powerful these things are.
1:26:30 We talked about it, now you understand it.
1:26:33 So once these things show up, who’s going to run them?
1:26:34 Who’s going to be in charge?
1:26:35 How will they be used?
1:26:43 So from my perspective, I believe at the moment anyway that China will behave relatively responsibly.
1:26:48 And the reason is that it’s not in their interest to have free speech.
1:26:56 In every case in China, when they have a choice of giving freedom to their citizens or not, they choose non-freedom.
1:27:00 And I know this because I spent all the time dealing with it.
1:27:11 So it sure looks to me like the Chinese AI solution will be different from the West because of that fundamental bias against freedom of speech.
1:27:14 Because these things are noisy. They make a lot of noise.
1:27:17 They’ll probably still make AI weapons though.
1:27:25 Well, on the weapons side, you have to assume that every new technology is ultimately strengthened in a war.
1:27:27 The tank was invented in World War I.
1:27:31 At the same time, you had the initial forms of airplanes.
1:27:37 Much of the Second World War was an air campaign which essentially built many, many things.
1:27:44 And if you look at the, there’s a book called “Freedom’s Forge” about the American structure.
1:27:51 According to the book, they ultimately got to the point where they could build two or three airplanes a day at scale.
1:27:55 So in an emergency, nations have enormous power.
1:28:05 I get asked all the time if anyone’s going to have a job left to do because this is the disruption of intelligence and whether it’s people driving cars today.
1:28:11 I mean, we saw the Tesla announcement of the robo-taxis, whether it’s accountants, lawyers, and everyone in between.
1:28:14 Oh, podcasters. Are we going to have jobs left?
1:28:19 Well, this question has been asked for 200 years.
1:28:23 There were the Luddites here in Britain way back when.
1:28:27 And inevitably, when these technologies come along, there’s all these fears about them.
1:28:32 Indeed, for the Luddites, there were riots and people, you know, destroying the looms and all this kind of stuff.
1:28:34 But somehow we got through it.
1:28:44 So my own view is that there will be a lot of job dislocation, but there will be a lot more jobs, not fewer jobs.
1:28:45 And here’s why.
1:28:53 We have a demographic problem in the world, especially in the developed world where we’re not having enough children that’s well understood.
1:29:00 Furthermore, we have a lot of older people and the younger people have to take care of the older people and they have to be more productive.
1:29:07 If you have young people who need to be more productive, the best way to make them more productive is to give them more tools to make them more productive.
1:29:17 Whether it’s a machinist that goes from a manual machine into a CNC machine or in the more modern case of a knowledge worker who can achieve more objectives.
1:29:19 We need that productivity group.
1:29:24 If you look at Asia, which is the centerpiece of manufacturing, they have all this cheap labor.
1:29:25 Well, it’s not so cheap anymore.
1:29:26 So do you know what they did?
1:29:29 They added robotic assembly lines.
1:29:35 So today, when you go to China in particular, it’s also true in Japan and Korea, the manufacturing is largely done by robots.
1:29:36 Why?
1:29:40 Because their demographics are terrible and their cost of labor is too high.
1:29:43 So the future is not fewer jobs.
1:29:50 It’s actually a lot of jobs that are unfilled with people who may have a job skill mismatch, which is why education is so important.
1:29:53 Now, what are examples of jobs that go away?
1:30:04 Automation has always gotten rid of jobs that are dangerous, physically dangerous, or ones which are essentially too repetitive and too boring for humans.
1:30:07 I’ll give you an example of security guards.
1:30:13 It makes sense that security guards would become robotic because it’s hard to be a security guard.
1:30:14 You fall asleep.
1:30:16 You don’t know quite what to do.
1:30:19 And these systems can be smart enough to be very, very good security.
1:30:23 And these are important sources of income for these people.
1:30:25 They’re going to have to find another job.
1:30:31 Another example in the media, in Hollywood, everyone’s concerned that AI is going to take over their jobs.
1:30:34 All the evidence is the inverse, and here’s why.
1:30:36 The stars still get money.
1:30:38 The producers still make money.
1:30:46 They still distribute their movie, but their cost of making the movie is lower because they use, for example, synthetic backdrops so they don’t have to build the set.
1:30:48 They can do synthetic makeup.
1:30:50 Now, there are job losses there.
1:30:57 So the people who make the set and do the makeup are going to have to go back into construction and personal care.
1:31:03 By the way, in America, and I think it’s true here, there’s an enormous shortage of people who can do high quality craftsmanship.
1:31:05 Those people will have jobs.
1:31:08 They’re just different, and they may not be in Los Angeles.
1:31:11 Am I going to have to interface with this technology?
1:31:13 Am I going to have to get a neurolink in my brain?
1:31:18 Because you go over the subject of there being these sort of two species of humans, potentially.
1:31:25 Ones that do have a way to incorporate themselves more with artificial intelligence and those that don’t.
1:31:30 And if that is the case, what is the time horizon in your view of that happening?
1:31:37 I think neurolink is much more speculative because you’re dealing with direct brain connection and nobody’s going to drill on my brain until it needs it, trust me.
1:31:40 I suspect you feel the same.
1:31:58 I guess my overall view is that you will not notice how much of your world has been co-opted by these technologies because they will produce greater delight.
1:32:03 If you think about it, a lot of life is inconvenient.
1:32:05 It’s fix this, call this, make this happen.
1:32:07 AI systems should make all that seamless.
1:32:14 You should be able to wake up in the morning and have coffee and not have a care in the world and have the computer help you have a great day.
1:32:16 It’s true of everyone.
1:32:19 Now, what happens to your profession?
1:32:25 Well, as we said, no matter how good the computers are, people are going to want to care about other people.
1:32:36 Another example, let’s imagine you have Formula One and you have Formula One with humans in it and then you have a robot, Formula One, where the cars are driven by the equivalent of a robot.
1:32:39 Is anyone going to go to the robotic, Formula One?
1:32:44 I don’t think so because of the drama, the human achievement and so forth.
1:32:49 Do you think that when they run the marathon here in London, they’re going to have robots running with humans?
1:32:50 Of course not.
1:32:53 Of course, the robots can run faster than humans.
1:32:54 It’s not interesting.
1:32:57 What is interesting is to see human achievement.
1:33:05 So I think that the commentators who say, “Oh, they won’t put any jobs, you won’t care,” I think they miss the point that we care a great deal about each other as human beings.
1:33:06 We have opinions.
1:33:15 You have a detailed opinion about me having just met me right now and I for you, we just start naturally set up your face, your mannerisms and so forth.
1:33:17 We can describe it all, right?
1:33:20 The robot shows up and is like, “Oh my God, another robot, how boring.”
1:33:28 Why is Sam Altman working on the founder of OpenAI, one of the co-founders of OpenAI, working on universal basic income projects like Worldcoin then?
1:33:34 Well, Worldcoin is not the same thing as universal basic income.
1:33:40 There is a belief in the tech industry that it goes something like this.
1:33:52 The politics of abundance, what we do is going to create so much abundance that most people won’t have to work and there will be a small number of groups that work who typically are these people themselves.
1:33:56 And there will be so much surplus, everyone can live like a millionaire and everyone will be happy.
1:33:58 I completely think this is false.
1:34:00 I think none of what I just told you is false.
1:34:07 But all of these UBI ideas come from this notion that humans don’t behave the way we actually do.
1:34:09 So I’m a critic of this view.
1:34:21 I believe that we as humans, so I’ll give an example, is we’re going to make the legal profession much, much easier because we can automate much of the technical work of lawyers.
1:34:23 Does that mean we’re going to have fewer lawyers?
1:34:26 No, the current lawyers will just do more laws.
1:34:28 They’ll add more complexity.
1:34:30 The system doesn’t get easier.
1:34:34 The humans become more sophisticated in their application of the principles.
1:34:40 We are naturally, basically, we have this thing called basically reciprocal altruism.
1:34:43 That’s part of us, but we also have our bad sides as well.
1:34:45 Those are not going away because of AI.
1:34:54 When I think about AI, the simple analogy I often think of is, say my IQ is Stephen Bartlett is 100 and there’s this AI that sat next to me whose IQ is 1,000.
1:34:57 What on earth would you want to give Stephen to do?
1:35:01 Because that 1,000 IQ would have really bad judgment in a couple of cases.
1:35:07 Because remember that the AI systems do not have human values unless it’s added.
1:35:14 I would much rather talk to you about something involving a moral or human judgment, even with the 1,000.
1:35:17 I wouldn’t mind consulting it, so tell me the history.
1:35:19 How was this resolved in the past?
1:35:29 But at the end of the day, in my view, the core aspects of humanity which have to do with morals and judgment and beliefs and charisma, they’re not going away.
1:35:31 Is there a chance that this is the end of humanity?
1:35:32 No.
1:35:39 The way humanity does is it’s much harder to eliminate all of humanity than you think.
1:35:48 All the people I’ve looked with on these biological attacks say it takes more than one horrific pandemic and so forth to eliminate humanity.
1:35:51 And the pain can be very, very high in these moments.
1:36:02 Look at World War I, World War II, the Holomador in Ukraine in the 1930s, the Nazis, these are horrifically painful things, but we survived.
1:36:06 We as a humanity survived and we will.
1:36:11 I wonder if this is the moment where humans couldn’t see past around the corner.
1:36:17 Because I’ve heard you talk about how the AIs will turn in, they’ll be agents and they’ll be able to speak to each other and we won’t be able to understand the language.
1:36:20 Well, I have a specific proposal on that.
1:36:26 There are points where humans should assert control and I’ve been trying to think about where are they?
1:36:27 I’ll give you an example.
1:36:34 There’s something called recursive self-improvement where the system just keeps getting smarter and smarter and learning more and more things.
1:36:39 At some point, if you don’t know what it’s learning, you should unplug it.
1:36:41 But we can’t unplug them, can we?
1:36:42 Sure you can.
1:36:44 There’s a power plug and there’s a circuit breaker.
1:36:46 Go and turn the circuit breaker off.
1:36:58 Another example, there’s a scenario, theoretical, where the system is so powerful it can produce a new model faster than the previous model was checked.
1:37:01 That’s another intervention point.
1:37:10 So in each of these cases, if agents, and the technical term is called agents, what they really are is large language models with memory.
1:37:12 And you can begin to concatenate them.
1:37:15 You can say, this model does this and then it feeds into this and so forth.
1:37:18 You build very powerful decision systems, we believe.
1:37:21 This is the thing that’s occurring this year and next year.
1:37:22 Everyone’s doing them.
1:37:24 They will arrive.
1:37:26 The agents today speak in English.
1:37:29 You can see what they’re saying to each other.
1:37:33 They’re not human, but they are communicating what they’re doing.
1:37:36 English to English to English.
1:37:44 As long as, and it doesn’t have to be English, but as long as they’re human understandable, so the thought experiment is one of the agents says, I have a better idea.
1:37:48 I’m going to communicate in my own language that I’m going to invent that only other agents understand.
1:37:51 That’s a good time to pull the plug.
1:37:54 What is your biggest fear by AI?
1:37:56 My actual fear is different from what you might imagine.
1:38:02 My actual fear is we’re not going to adopt it fast enough to solve the problems that affect everybody.
1:38:08 The reason is that if you look at everyone’s everyday lives, what do they want?
1:38:13 They want safety, they want healthcare, they want great schools for their kids.
1:38:15 We just work on that for a while.
1:38:18 Why do we make people’s lives just better because of AI?
1:38:20 We have all these other interesting things.
1:38:32 Why do we have a teacher that is an AI teacher that works with existing teachers in the language of the kid, in the culture of the kid, to get the kid as smart as they possibly can?
1:38:42 Why do we have a doctor, or a doctor as assistant really, that enables a human doctor to always know every possible best treatment and then based on their current situation?
1:38:47 What the inventory is, which country is, how their insurance works, what is the best way to treat that patient?
1:38:50 Those are relatively achievable solutions. Why don’t we have them?
1:39:02 If you just did education and healthcare globally, the impact in terms of lifting human potential up would be so great that it would change everything.
1:39:09 It wouldn’t solve the various other things that we complain about, about this celebrity or this misbehavior or this conflict or even this war.
1:39:18 But it would establish a level playing field of knowledge and opportunity at a global level that has been the dream for decades and decades and decades.
1:39:21 Chuck me, that perfected.
1:39:27 One of the things that I think about all the time, because my life is quite hectic and busy, is how to manage my energy load.
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1:41:33 Throughout the pandemic, I’ve been a big supporter. It was a contrarian view, but I think it’s now less of a contrarian view
1:41:38 that companies and CEOs need to be clear in their convictions around how they work.
1:41:44 One of the things that I’ve been criticised a lot for is that I’m for having people in a room together.
1:41:49 My companies were not remote. We worked together in an office, as I said, down the road from here.
1:41:54 I believe in that because I think of community and engagement and synchronous work.
1:42:00 I think that work now has a responsibility to be more than just a set of tasks you do in a world where we’re lonelier than ever before.
1:42:04 There’s more disconnection, and especially for young people who don’t have families and so on.
1:42:11 Having them work alone in a small white box in a big city like London or New York is robbing them of something which I think is important.
1:42:17 This was a bad—this was a contrarian view. It’s become less contrarian as the big tech companies in America have started to roll back
1:42:20 some of their initial knee-jerk reactions to the pandemic.
1:42:24 A lot of them are asking their team members to come back into the office at least a couple of days a week.
1:42:26 What’s your point of view on this?
1:42:32 So I have a strong view that I want people in an office. It doesn’t have to be all one office, but I want them in an office.
1:42:38 And partly it’s for their own benefit. If you’re in your 20s when I was a young executive, I knew nothing of what I was doing.
1:42:40 I literally was just lucky to be there.
1:42:45 And I learned by hanging out at the water cooler, going to meetings, hanging out, being in the hallway.
1:42:51 Had I been at home, I wouldn’t have had any of that knowledge, which ultimately was central to my subsequent promotions.
1:42:56 So if you’re in your 20s, you want to be in an office because that’s how you’re going to get promoted.
1:43:03 And I think that’s consistent with the majority of the people who really want to work from home have honest problems with commuting and family and so forth.
1:43:08 They’re real issues. The problem with our joint view is it’s not supported by the data.
1:43:15 The data indicates that productivity is actually slightly higher when you allow work from home.
1:43:23 So you and I really want that company of people sitting around the table and so forth, but the evidence does not support our view.
1:43:25 Interesting. Is that true?
1:43:27 It is absolutely true.
1:43:31 Why is Facebook and all these companies rolling back there and like Snapchat rolling back their remote working policies?
1:43:41 Not everyone is. And most companies are doing various forms of hybrids where it’s two days or three days or so forth.
1:43:49 I’m sure that for the average listener here who works in public security or in a government, they say, well, my God, they’re not in the office every day.
1:43:54 But I’ll tell you that at least for the industries that have been studied,
1:43:58 there’s evidence that allowing that flexibility from work from home increases productivity.
1:44:03 I don’t happen to like it, but I want to acknowledge the science is there.
1:44:08 What is the advice that you wish you’d gotten at my age that you didn’t get?
1:44:14 The most important thing is probably keep betting on yourself and bet again and roll the dice and roll the dice.
1:44:21 What happens as you get older is you realize that these opportunities were in front of you and you didn’t jump for them.
1:44:26 Why you were in a bad mood or you didn’t know who to call or so forth.
1:44:32 Life can be understood as a series of opportunities that are put before you and they’re time limited.
1:44:39 I was fortunate that I got the call after a number of people had turned it down to work for and with Larry Surgey at Google.
1:44:43 It changed my life, but that was luck and timing.
1:44:50 My one friend on the board at the moment said, I was very thankful to him and he said, but you know, you did one thing right.
1:44:53 I said, what? He said, you said yes.
1:44:57 So your philosophy in life should be to say yes to that opportunity.
1:45:03 And yes, it’s painful and yes, it’s difficult and yes, you have to deal with your family and yes, you have to travel to some foreign place and so forth.
1:45:06 Get on the airplane and get it done.
1:45:09 What’s the hardest challenge you’ve dealt with in your life?
1:45:18 Well, on the personal side, you know, I’ve had a set of personal problems and tragedies like everyone does.
1:45:31 I think on a business context, there were moments at Google where we had control over an industry that we didn’t execute well.
1:45:35 The most obvious one is social media.
1:45:40 At the time when Facebook was founded, we had a system which we called Orcut, which was really, really interesting.
1:45:44 And somehow we did everything well, but we missed that one, right?
1:45:48 And I would have preferred and I’ll take responsibility for that.
1:45:52 We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they’re going to be leaving it for.
1:46:00 And the question left for you is, what is your non-negotiable, something you do that significantly improves everyday life?
1:46:05 Well, what I try to do is I try to be online and I also try to keep people honest.
1:46:12 Every day you hear all sorts of ideas and so forth, half of which are right, half of which are wrong.
1:46:16 I try to make sure I know the truth as best we can determine it.
1:46:18 Eric, thank you so much.
1:46:19 Thank you.
1:46:24 It’s such an honor. Your books have shaped my thinking in so many, so many important ways.
1:46:32 And I think your new book, Genesis, is the single best book I’ve read on the subject of AI because you take a very nuanced approach to these subject matters.
1:46:38 And I think sometimes it’s tempting to be binary in your way of thinking about this technology, the pros and the cons.
1:46:43 But your writing, your videos, your work takes this really balanced but informed approach to it.
1:46:53 I have to say, as an entrepreneur, the trillion dollar coach book is what I highly recommend everybody goes and reads because it’s just a really great manual of being a leader in the modern age and an entrepreneur.
1:46:56 I’m going to link all five of these books in the comments section below.
1:47:02 The new book, Genesis, comes out in the US, I believe, on the 19th of November.
1:47:05 I don’t have the UK date, but I’ll find it and I’ll put it in.
1:47:11 But it’s a book, it’s a critically important book that nobody should avoid.
1:47:14 I’ve been searching for answers that are contained in this book for a very, very long time.
1:47:18 I’ve been having a lot of conversations on this podcast in search of some of these answers.
1:47:23 And I feel clearer about myself, my future, but also the future of society because I’ve read this book.
1:47:24 So thank you for writing it.
1:47:25 And thank you.
1:47:26 And let’s thank Dr. Kissinger.
1:47:31 He finished the last chapter in his last week of life in his deathbed.
1:47:34 That’s how profound he thought that this book was.
1:47:41 And all I’ll tell you is that he wanted to set us up for a good next 50 years.
1:47:50 Having lived for so long and seen both good and evil, he wanted to make sure we continue the good progress we’re making as a society.
1:47:52 Is there anything he would want to say?
1:47:58 Any answer he gave would take five minutes.
1:48:00 A remarkable man.
1:48:01 Thank you, Eric.
1:48:02 Thank you.
1:48:08 I’m going to let you into a little bit of a secret.
1:48:10 And you’re probably going to think that I’m a little bit weird for saying this.
1:48:17 But our team are our team because we absolutely obsess about the smallest things, even with this podcast.
1:48:24 When we’re recording this podcast, we measure the CO2 levels in the studio because if it gets above a thousand parts per million, cognitive performance dips.
1:48:27 This is the type of 1% improvement we make on our show.
1:48:29 And that is why the show is the way it is.
1:48:35 By understanding the power of compounding 1%, you can absolutely change your outcomes in your life.
1:48:39 It isn’t about drastic transformations or quick wins.
1:48:44 It’s about the small, consistent actions that have a lasting change on your outcomes.
1:48:48 So two years ago, we started the process of creating this beautiful diary.
1:48:49 And it’s truly beautiful.
1:48:54 Inside, there’s lots of pictures, lots of inspiration and motivation as well, some interactive elements.
1:49:03 And the purpose of this diary is to help you identify, stay focused on, develop consistency with the 1% that will ultimately change your life.
1:49:05 We have a limited number of these 1% diaries.
1:49:08 And if you want to do this with me, then join our waiting list.
1:49:11 I can’t guarantee all of you that join the waiting list will be able to get one.
1:49:13 But if you join now, you have a higher chance.
1:49:16 The waiting list can be found at TheDiary.com.
1:49:20 I’ll link it below, but that is TheDiary.com.
1:49:45 [Music]