0:00:05 I don’t know, but I’m sorry.
0:00:14 I did not think I would cry on this podcast so much.
0:00:21 Lane Norton, scientist, record setting bodybuilder, and is one of the most
0:00:24 respected voices in the health and nutrition space who debunks all the
0:00:26 different fitness and nutrition myths out there.
0:00:28 Let’s go to the technical stuff.
0:00:29 Oh, yeah, let’s do that.
0:00:31 Canaries in, canaries out.
0:00:34 So the first point of confusion, a lot of people may think they’re in a
0:00:37 calorie deficit, but they’re not because, one, people don’t really
0:00:38 understand portion sizes.
0:00:42 If you’ve never had the experience of like weighing out your food, you will
0:00:43 be shocked.
0:00:46 And the other thing is, artificial sweetness.
0:00:48 I’ve wanted for a while whether diet coke is healthy or not.
0:00:52 If we look at the randomized control trials, they saw six kilograms of
0:00:55 weight loss just from switching people from regular soda to diet soda.
0:00:58 Now, when they compare it versus water, this is going to be the most
0:01:00 commented thing about in this entire interview.
0:01:04 I’m sure they found that what are the big misconceptions about intermittent
0:01:04 fasting?
0:01:06 Is it okay if I get deep into the weeds on this one?
0:01:07 Go ahead.
0:01:10 In studies, people in the intermittent fasting groups tend to lose more weight,
0:01:13 but it’s not because of anything magic about intermittent fasting.
0:01:16 It’s because what’s your thoughts on this impact?
0:01:17 Overall, I think it’s a net positive.
0:01:18 And here’s why.
0:01:21 When it comes to weight loss, people are Googling how to lose belly fat.
0:01:25 Practically, it’s kind of irrelevant because, and then is sugar addictive.
0:01:27 This one’s going to get me in trouble too.
0:01:31 So quick one, quick favor to ask from you.
0:01:35 There is one simple way that you can support our show, and that is by hitting
0:01:38 that follow button on this app that you’re listening to the show on right now.
0:01:44 This year in 2024, we’re trying really, really hard to level up everything we’re
0:01:49 doing, and the only free thing I’ll ever ask from you is to hit that follow button
0:01:49 on this app.
0:01:52 It helps the show more than I could probably articulate, and it allows us,
0:01:54 enables us to keep doing what we’re doing here.
0:01:57 I appreciate it, Dealey, onto the show.
0:02:04 [music]
0:02:08 Lane, who are you and what is the mission you’re on?
0:02:16 I’m trying to make fitness information more accessible, fitness more accessible
0:02:24 to everyone, and trying to act as a bridge between academic research and your
0:02:29 average person because so much gets lost in translation because social media,
0:02:37 the news, it is a fire hose of information, a lot of which is misinformation or you
0:02:38 only get part of the story.
0:02:44 And so I have noticed people are so frustrated because they feel like they
0:02:49 understand what it is to eat healthy, and then a new documentary comes out, a new
0:02:53 podcast comes out, a new article comes out and says, oh, nope, you do it.
0:02:56 Whatever it is you’re doing, it’s wrong, and here’s why.
0:03:02 And I just want to help clear up some of that confusion and help people
0:03:07 understand the big stuff that really matters versus not getting lost in the
0:03:09 weeds of the stuff that just doesn’t matter that much.
0:03:13 And when you say fitness, how do you define that?
0:03:15 Because you talked about, you then talked about diet and food.
0:03:17 So what is the sort of bucket that you put yourself in?
0:03:19 What are the categories that you really focus on?
0:03:25 Great question, but you know, I would say that my wheelhouse is nutrition.
0:03:27 So I did a PhD in nutritional sciences.
0:03:36 And I also feel pretty equipped to interpret exercise information as well.
0:03:39 And what is your, so that’s your academic sort of background.
0:03:40 What is your lived experience?
0:03:46 What experiences have you had as a coach to people, as a trainer in your own
0:03:49 personal life that have added to that academic information that you have?
0:03:51 Great question.
0:03:53 So I’ll try to give the abridged version of this.
0:04:00 I got bullied a lot growing up as really skinny kid, hyperactive, weird, you know.
0:04:05 And so when you’re young, what makes you stand out is actually, you know,
0:04:07 not such a good thing.
0:04:13 And I got bullied a lot and I started lifting weights to I thought if I got
0:04:18 bigger muscles, you know, girls would pay attention to me and I’d stop getting bullied.
0:04:20 It didn’t work for either of those two things.
0:04:25 But I did gain more confidence, not because I built bigger muscles, but
0:04:30 because the process of lifting and getting through plateaus and moving
0:04:34 through setbacks and all those sorts of things, that’s what built confidence.
0:04:38 And I started lifting when I was 15.
0:04:44 And when I got to college, I changed my major because I decided I was going
0:04:46 to do my first bodybuilding show.
0:04:46 I did it.
0:04:48 I won the team division and I was hooked.
0:04:50 I was like, this is the thing I want to do.
0:04:52 But back in, you know, this is 2001.
0:04:55 I was 19, I’m 42 now.
0:04:59 The avenues to make money in fitness were basically be a personal trainer, open
0:05:03 a gym, start something company, try to be Mr.
0:05:07 Olympia. And I didn’t know how feasible any of those were.
0:05:11 So I started looking at a PhD literally for no other reason.
0:05:13 I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life.
0:05:18 But I figured if I delay the real world by four to six years, maybe I’ll
0:05:19 have it figured out by then.
0:05:24 But in that meantime, I had started posting on different bodybuilding message boards.
0:05:31 And so I would get a bunch of emails about my articles and people asking me questions.
0:05:35 And I was like, basically doing full on diets and nutrition for people for free
0:05:36 because I just liked it.
0:05:39 And then when I got to grad school, I was like, man, I, you know, this is a lot
0:05:40 of my time now.
0:05:45 Maybe if I just like charge people a little something, I can do this instead
0:05:47 of a teaching assistantship, make a little bit of money.
0:05:49 You know, didn’t really think much of it.
0:05:52 And so I took my first online client back in 2005.
0:05:58 And within three years, I was making a full time income from it with no
0:05:59 advertising, just word of mouth.
0:06:03 And then in my fourth year, I think it was the first year I ever made
0:06:04 like six figures from it.
0:06:06 I remember thinking, what is happening?
0:06:12 I want to take one step back because it’s clear from what you said there,
0:06:15 but also clear from a lot of the research that I did on you and your back story
0:06:20 that much of the driving motivation behind why you are what you are today
0:06:23 and why you help people and why you do the work you do and make the content
0:06:26 you make was because of this early experience with bullying.
0:06:31 And I’ve sat here with so many people who are real anomalies in their lives
0:06:36 for a variety of different reasons, you know, maybe in business or in science
0:06:38 or in sport.
0:06:42 And I so often find that the reason why they’re brilliant
0:06:47 is also fundamentally interlinked to the reason why they struggle or they
0:06:48 struggled, shall I say?
0:06:53 And in your story, that seems to be very pertinent.
0:06:56 I read a quote you said on a video you made seven years ago where you said,
0:07:00 I had intense and sustained emotional bullying.
0:07:06 I would be put in a corner by four to five people and be obliterated repeatedly.
0:07:11 Yeah, I mean, you know, when I tell people like the reason I started
0:07:14 lifting weights and bodybuilding, it was not the noblest of reasons.
0:07:17 You know, it was very much you say I’m worthless.
0:07:23 I’m going to prove you wrong, you know, and even I mean, I would love to say
0:07:26 that it it has no remnants today, but I would be that would be a lie.
0:07:30 Right. Some of the stuff I still struggle with in terms of.
0:07:36 I have a hard time trusting myself a lot of the times because I got told
0:07:38 for so long or trusting some decisions I make.
0:07:41 I got told for so long, you do it wrong.
0:07:44 You know, you suck, you’re worthless, you know, those sorts of things.
0:07:47 When you enter therapy, you would diagnose with a form of PTSD,
0:07:49 bullying PTSD, they call it.
0:07:53 Yeah, my my therapist, she diagnosed me.
0:07:57 And I remember saying, I don’t have PTSD.
0:07:59 Like that’s that’s for soldiers, that’s for leaf.
0:08:04 And she goes, first off, Lane, you don’t like it when people correct
0:08:08 you as a professional in your field, don’t correct me.
0:08:11 And. You’re right.
0:08:14 You didn’t witness people die, nothing like that.
0:08:16 But trauma is trauma.
0:08:21 And her explanation of it was it is all relative.
0:08:25 And it may not have been, you know, horrors from war.
0:08:29 But for your brain, it was traumatic.
0:08:35 And the way she explained it is trauma is something that causes you
0:08:44 to react or act in response to something even after that event has passed, right?
0:08:48 So for me, for example, I’ve struggled in personal relationships
0:08:54 where either partners or friends trying to give me feedback.
0:08:58 And I immediately get defensive, very defensive.
0:09:02 And if you read about relationships, that’s not great, right?
0:09:05 It’s one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse for relationships.
0:09:08 And I never understood.
0:09:10 I just thought, well, I’m just explaining myself.
0:09:15 I’m just and then now I understand it’s, oh, it’s because
0:09:20 that was my response to the bullying, because feedback or criticism to me
0:09:23 feels like bullying, even though it’s not.
0:09:26 So you have a defense mechanism because you had to defend yourself back then.
0:09:31 And it’s so interesting, the things that we adopt to survive
0:09:35 when we’re young, become maladaptive when we get older.
0:09:38 It’s difficult to unpick all of that when you’re an adult, isn’t it?
0:09:40 Because as you know, it’s very hard.
0:09:41 Why they say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.
0:09:46 But I’ve got my own trauma responses that I’m still trying to work through.
0:09:48 And I’m now aware of them, but they still on a bad day,
0:09:50 on an unslept day, they can still come to the surface.
0:09:55 I tell people, I don’t know if you can like completely undo your default setting, right?
0:10:03 But I think what you can do is get mindful of it and learn tools to manage it, right?
0:10:07 And I mean, it’s interesting how this ties into obesity.
0:10:13 Because I used to be somebody I’ve never been obese,
0:10:15 never been overweight, nothing like that.
0:10:19 When I got to grad school, I was very much more towards the side of
0:10:23 if you’re obese, it’s because you’re lazy, it’s your fault, you know.
0:10:29 And then the more I just observed.
0:10:35 I realized that that can be true because there’s so many obese people
0:10:39 that are successful in other areas of their life where they apply a lot of discipline.
0:10:43 What is it about this thing, right?
0:10:48 And I remembered I read a study and I hopefully I get this correct
0:10:50 because it was a while back.
0:10:57 But they looked at obese women and they found that obese women were 50 percent,
0:11:02 I believe 50 percent more likely to have sexual assault trauma in their past.
0:11:08 And you also look at the obesity literature and people who are obese
0:11:13 tend to have a greater reward response from food, whereas people who are lean or normal weight.
0:11:18 It’s it’s not like that huge reward that they get.
0:11:21 It’s like some people, you know, they they can they can have a drink, they can have a beer.
0:11:28 And they go, I like the beer, you know, and other people become alcoholics, right?
0:11:34 And so so much of this stuff gets tied up in.
0:11:39 It gets wired in as a as a kind of coping mechanism.
0:11:42 If you look at, like, for example, binge eating,
0:11:47 what’s happening during a binge is that person is getting a flood of dopamine, right?
0:11:49 They’re they’re masking.
0:11:52 They want to mask that feeling of whatever made them feel uncomfortable.
0:11:56 I always tell people, I’m like, you don’t really find people binge eating
0:11:58 after they’ve had eight hours of sleep at 10 a.m.
0:12:00 in the morning when they’re low stress, right?
0:12:03 It’s at 10 p.m. at night after a long day.
0:12:06 They’ve been fighting with their spouse or kids are driving them nuts.
0:12:09 And they just they want to turn it all off, right?
0:12:15 And I think staying mindful is one of the hardest things we have as humans.
0:12:17 I mean, I know what my addiction is,
0:12:21 unfortunately, based on my current job, I get way too into social media.
0:12:25 You know, I just end up, you know, it kind of started as well.
0:12:27 I’m doing work, right?
0:12:29 And I’m responding to comments and all that.
0:12:32 And pretty soon I’m looking at my screen time and I’m going, oh, my gosh, right?
0:12:40 And so that was something for me to numb up and turn my mind off, right?
0:12:41 But for other people, it’s food.
0:12:43 For other people, it’s gambling.
0:12:44 For other people, it’s alcohol.
0:12:46 For other people, it’s some other drug.
0:12:48 So what do we do with that, then?
0:12:52 So do we first have to figure out what our relationship is on a psychological level
0:12:55 with these addictions with with our food, for example, if we’re just focusing
0:12:59 on weight loss to start with, when you if you were to be coaching someone,
0:13:04 would you try and understand their propensity to binge to to have that sort
0:13:10 of like dopamine craving or do you focus somewhere else?
0:13:14 I kind of say, all right, like walk me through a typical day for you.
0:13:16 Walk me through a typical week.
0:13:18 Where’s where are your struggles really at, right?
0:13:22 And one of the things I we call it the biolane way when we when we kind
0:13:27 of teach our coaches is we do coaching with you have to have two things
0:13:30 are critically important, accountability with empathy.
0:13:34 Because if you’re just the accountability coach, the drill sergeant,
0:13:39 who’s, you know, most people, if they screw up, they’ve beat themselves up
0:13:40 more than anybody else.
0:13:41 I know I’m that way.
0:13:43 I’m sure you’re that way.
0:13:45 So you don’t need to beat them up again.
0:13:50 The empathy portion, so if you’re just beating somebody up,
0:13:53 you’re just holding them accountable without empathy, you just become the drill
0:13:57 sergeant. And what happens is people end up tuning you out or they’re not honest
0:14:01 with you anymore because they don’t want to constantly feel like they’re failing.
0:14:05 Right. The empathy portion, if you just have empathy and you’re saying,
0:14:06 I’m so sorry, that happened.
0:14:08 That’s so hard. I understand.
0:14:10 But you’re not holding them accountable.
0:14:12 There’s no impetus for change, right?
0:14:14 So it takes it takes both.
0:14:18 And so the way I’d often coach, like, let’s take up somebody had a binge,
0:14:19 something like that.
0:14:23 The first thing I’d say, I understand why it happened, you know, that’s really hard.
0:14:26 Where was the antecedent to this?
0:14:28 Like, well, what started this?
0:14:33 Right. OK, now let’s look at if we had to go back and do it over again.
0:14:39 What are some things we might be able to do to put some to put some barriers?
0:14:40 Right.
0:14:43 So I had one client, he’s a hedge fund manager.
0:14:47 And when he started with me, he was binging pretty much, I would say, almost every day.
0:14:53 And I said, OK, where do you find that this is happening?
0:14:55 And he said, well, usually it’s after everybody’s gone to bed.
0:15:01 And, you know, I just find myself in the kitchen and it just happens.
0:15:06 So OK, so it’s not reasonable to lock yourself in your room, right?
0:15:11 But what if we just do a few things to increase your mindfulness, right?
0:15:17 Put a post on the cabinet where you where you keep that the junk food, right?
0:15:20 Not saying anything nasty or anything, but I said, right down.
0:15:23 Am I hungry or am I just upset?
0:15:28 Then on your on your door, right, lock it from the inside.
0:15:32 It’s not, you know, it doesn’t keep you from going out, but you have to unlock it, right?
0:15:34 Like you’re having to turn your brain on, right?
0:15:39 And the more barriers you can put there, the better it gets.
0:15:42 The more sort of mindful moments you can have where you make,
0:15:45 you have to kind of make a decision and you don’t you come out with autopilot.
0:15:48 Because I know it’s when whenever I have my binge moments, which happens once in a while,
0:15:51 it is like unthinking.
0:15:54 Yeah, it’s just like a robot has taken over. Exactly.
0:15:56 And with this, like this particular client, right?
0:15:59 He’d have a rough day at work, hedge fund manager, very stressful job.
0:16:02 I said, OK, if you’ve had a rough day at work,
0:16:07 first thing to do when you’re driving home, say, man, I’ve had a tough day at work.
0:16:11 This is usually where I’d have a binge session, like say it out loud, like name it.
0:16:13 You know what I mean?
0:16:16 Sometimes just naming it is enough to stop it.
0:16:21 I mean, I not the same thing, but I struggle with, I’m sure you know, as ADHD
0:16:25 during conversation, I have something to say, I have something to say.
0:16:27 I want to say, I want to say, I want to say, I want to say it, right?
0:16:30 And I’ll end up cutting people off and making them feel bad.
0:16:33 And so I still have that inclination.
0:16:37 But now I’ll go, if I start, I go, oh, I’m sorry.
0:16:40 I jumped in. Please finish. Right.
0:16:44 And so just like calling it out to yourself
0:16:47 can make a huge difference on changing the behavior.
0:16:50 That which gets monitored gets changed.
0:16:54 I really want to focus on this point of the psychology of both exercise and weight loss
0:16:58 because in all the research that I do on even your conversations and other
0:17:01 conversations, clearly the like fundamental that sits underneath
0:17:05 doing all the things we’re going to talk about is like having the motivation,
0:17:08 the discipline and mastering one’s own mind.
0:17:11 Because as you kind of said, we can have all the diet plans in the world
0:17:15 and many or all of them might work, but without the psychology of how to lose
0:17:19 weight and to motivate ourselves to get to the gym, none of it really matters.
0:17:22 So what else do we need to think about when we’re trying to understand
0:17:26 how to master like the beast within our mind?
0:17:29 There’s a lot to unpack here. Good. I’ll start with this.
0:17:33 Do you know Ethan Suplee?
0:17:34 You familiar with him?
0:17:36 So Ethan is an actor.
0:17:37 He was in My Name is Earl.
0:17:40 He was in American History X and he was in Remember the Titans,
0:17:43 some of the big movies he’s been in, Wolf of Wall Street as well.
0:17:49 And he was over 500 pounds like he in like everybody knows him as the
0:17:52 the really big guy in those movies and those shows.
0:17:58 Now he’s like 220 pounds and looks like he would play a military
0:17:59 operator in a show, right?
0:18:04 And he said something that really stuck with me.
0:18:09 He said, if the house is on fire, just get out of the house.
0:18:13 We can worry about why the fire started later, but just get out.
0:18:18 And there’s so much like paralysis by analysis out there
0:18:23 that people don’t end up actually starting.
0:18:29 And if I put two plates in front of you, you know, with different food.
0:18:32 Yeah, we can scribble, but for the most part,
0:18:35 if I’m sitting something out with the cheeseburger fries and all this.
0:18:39 OK, versus lean meats, vegetables.
0:18:42 We know which one is more conducive to to health, right?
0:18:47 People will argue about these little things, low carb, low fat, those sorts of things.
0:18:51 Just get out of the house.
0:18:58 Stop stop eating so much of this very energy dense, hyper palatable food.
0:19:00 Start moving away.
0:19:03 And Ethan, I think it was Ethan, he has this he has this thing.
0:19:08 He says when he when he whenever he posts a picture in the gym,
0:19:11 he’ll say, I killed my clone today.
0:19:12 And I never I never quite understood it.
0:19:19 And then I read a systematic review of successful weight loss maintainers.
0:19:24 Now, what that means is weight loss, we know diets can help you lose weight,
0:19:30 but they don’t tend to work long term because people their adherence
0:19:32 wanes and they just kind of regain the weight over time.
0:19:37 And if we look at like out about three years after initial weight loss,
0:19:40 it’s like, depending on the statistics you use,
0:19:44 it’s anywhere from 90, 95 percent of people end up regaining almost all the weight they lost.
0:19:50 And this study was about people who had successfully kept it off for a long period of time.
0:19:52 So this is the unicorns, right?
0:19:56 The five, 10 percent of people who actually had that long term success.
0:19:59 And there were things on there that you would expect, you know,
0:20:02 they they practice some form of cognitive restraint.
0:20:07 They did cognitive restraint being counting calories or doing low carb
0:20:10 or time restricted eating or some form of restraint.
0:20:14 But the thing that stood out to me that really grabbed my attention
0:20:18 was so many of them specified and pointed out
0:20:21 they felt like they had to develop a new identity.
0:20:27 And I texted Ethan and I was like, is this what you mean by I killed my clone?
0:20:29 He goes, that is exactly what I mean.
0:20:34 And so one of the things I’ll tell people now is think of the person that you want to become.
0:20:37 Picture them.
0:20:41 Think about what do you think their habits and behaviors look like on a daily basis?
0:20:46 Now reverse now start to reverse engineer that, right?
0:20:52 And you mentioned motivation and I have my thoughts have changed about motivation.
0:20:57 A lot of people.
0:21:02 Wait to get motivated or inspired and, hey, like I think all that stuff’s great.
0:21:09 But in the course of anything and I would bring it back to you and building a startup.
0:21:14 I’m guessing there were days where you were not motivated to do what you were doing, right?
0:21:17 Yeah, these days. Right, right. So many days.
0:21:19 So motivation is great when it comes.
0:21:21 I said that’s like nitrous on a car, right?
0:21:24 Give you a quick boost and it’ll make you a lot faster.
0:21:29 But discipline is the gas tank.
0:21:32 That is it doesn’t.
0:21:36 I tell people, detach your feelings from the process. OK.
0:21:41 I have a very cold calculus when I look at my goals.
0:21:44 What is my goal? What will it take to get there?
0:21:47 Some form of work and time, right? No matter how you slice it.
0:21:51 Let’s just take.
0:21:54 So I won the Masters World Championship in powerlifting in twenty twenty two.
0:21:56 It took me. Thank you.
0:22:01 Took me. I went to open Worlds in 2015, set a World Squat Record there,
0:22:05 but then went through a lot of different injuries and a lot of pain.
0:22:07 Took me seven years to get back and win.
0:22:12 But there were times were very unmotivated to go to the gym
0:22:15 because I couldn’t lift heavy.
0:22:17 I was, you know, in a lot of pain.
0:22:23 But I knew if I want to get back there, this is what it’s going to take.
0:22:27 And so it was it doesn’t matter if I’m motivated.
0:22:30 I have to do the things that I said I was going to do.
0:22:34 And I tell people, try to detach how you feel
0:22:37 from the process it takes to get there.
0:22:40 And that’s really hard for a lot of people to do.
0:22:44 But here’s the thing, as you do the process,
0:22:50 you start to see the results and then the motivation becomes more sustained, right?
0:22:54 The the hard part is when you are down in the ditches
0:22:56 and you you aren’t seeing that progress.
0:22:58 So when I’m coaching people on this stuff,
0:23:03 a lot of it is trying to build their confidence.
0:23:06 And so many people they’ll start a New Year’s Resolution, let’s say,
0:23:07 because it’s beginning here.
0:23:09 I’m going to go to the gym five days a week.
0:23:12 I’m like, stop, you haven’t been going at all.
0:23:15 How about this?
0:23:18 You’re going to be active at least an hour for three days a week.
0:23:20 Let’s start there.
0:23:22 If you go five days, fantastic, right?
0:23:24 But it’s different.
0:23:27 If you said you’re going to go five days, you only go three.
0:23:29 You feel really bad about yourself.
0:23:32 You say you’re going to go three and you go three feel really good about yourself.
0:23:34 What’s the harm of feeling bad about yourself?
0:23:38 So there was a year 2017 where I said I make called every day, Steve.
0:23:41 And I was like, I’m going to go to the gym every every day of 2018.
0:23:46 I believe it was and I’m not going to tell you what happened because I think you know.
0:23:50 But I want to ask the question.
0:23:55 What is the harm of setting a huge goal and then failing and feeling bad about yourself?
0:23:58 You know, there’s a lot of different versions of like what builds confidence.
0:24:01 But I think one of those things is keeping the promises you make to yourself, right?
0:24:05 And also just doing the thing you said you were going to do.
0:24:09 And that’s why I tell people like, hey, for me, if I say I’m going to go four or five
0:24:10 times a week, that’s not a problem.
0:24:14 Because for me, it takes discipline to keep me out of the gym, right?
0:24:15 Like I love that. That’s fun for me.
0:24:19 But if you’re somebody who hasn’t been going.
0:24:25 Just start with something like I’m not saying don’t be ambitious overall.
0:24:29 But you have to build confidence in increments, right?
0:24:33 Like so, for example, I’m going to go back to my own personal experience.
0:24:35 I said in 2015, I set a world squat record
0:24:39 six hundred and sixty eight pounds at two hundred and five pound body weight class.
0:24:42 But when I first started lifting, I was horrible at squats.
0:24:44 I’ve got long legs.
0:24:50 I am, in fact, one of the world powerlifting coaches
0:24:54 looked at the video of my squat and said, I don’t know how you did that.
0:24:58 And. Squats were very intimidating to me.
0:25:02 I would get really scared trying to do it.
0:25:04 My back would hurt, you know, all these sorts of things.
0:25:08 You know, eventually I ended up squatting six hundred and sixty eight pounds.
0:25:10 But the first time I went in the gym, I wasn’t able to do it.
0:25:13 The first five years, ten years, I couldn’t I couldn’t even imagine that, right?
0:25:16 And one of the things I tell people about confidence is I thought when I,
0:25:21 if I squatted that amount of weight, four or five hundred pounds would feel easy.
0:25:24 It still feels heavy.
0:25:26 I just got better at handling it, right?
0:25:30 And I kind of use that euphemism for life and analogy for life
0:25:35 because life doesn’t get easier, but you can get better at handling those things.
0:25:42 And the confidence that I built to be able to do that came through the repetition,
0:25:45 doing it over and over and over again.
0:25:48 And that’s what people need.
0:25:53 The problem is they don’t get the repetition in because they do things
0:25:58 like you were talking about, which is they start to it’d be like me going in the gym.
0:26:00 My first time said, I’m going to squat four hundred pounds.
0:26:03 I’m going to get crumpled into a heap, right?
0:26:09 But if I do it, if I do what I can do at the time and slowly build that confidence,
0:26:13 that can wind up in me doing something that I never thought possible for myself.
0:26:18 I think it was Jordan Peterson that said to me when he deals with some of his clinical patients,
0:26:23 the starting point for them is so small that it almost makes them feel shameful.
0:26:25 So they don’t do it.
0:26:28 So he says he’s dealt with people who literally can’t get out of bed
0:26:31 because their depression is so severe and telling someone that their goal
0:26:36 is just to walk down the hall and walk back, feel so small and inconsequential
0:26:40 and so full of shame that they just think, no, that doesn’t matter.
0:26:41 I’m not going to do that.
0:26:44 And there are a lot of people out there that are listening right now.
0:26:46 And they think about where their starting point might be.
0:26:49 And it might literally be getting out the house, putting their trainers on
0:26:50 and going for a five minute walk.
0:26:53 But in their heads, they’ll go, that’s not going to do anything.
0:26:56 That’s not going to get me to that mountain top that I know I need to get to.
0:26:58 So I’m not going to bother.
0:26:59 A lot of people like that.
0:27:03 And I mean, you know, you can take your cliche that you want to, you know,
0:27:05 journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
0:27:08 How do you an elephant one by at a time?
0:27:10 I mean, it’s cliche, but it’s very true, right?
0:27:15 And I think if you’re climbing a mountain, if you’re only looking at the top,
0:27:18 you’re going to feel like you’re getting nowhere, right?
0:27:21 So if you want to climb a mountain, have in mind the mountain that you want to
0:27:25 climb, but when you’re climbing it, look at the next ledge
0:27:28 and just do that as the checkpoint, right?
0:27:31 So somebody asked me once, if somebody had a lot of weight to lose,
0:27:34 like over a hundred pounds, where would you tell them to start?
0:27:39 I’d say, you know, I look at where they’re at right now, what are their habits,
0:27:43 their behaviors? What are they doing exercise wise?
0:27:45 Let’s get them to the next ledge, right?
0:27:48 So let’s let’s just, you know, we can go into this too.
0:27:51 But, you know, if they’re drinking a bunch of soda per day,
0:27:54 trying to get them to go straight to water, that might be very daunting for them, right?
0:27:58 OK, well, diet soda is better than than regular soda.
0:28:02 And people will argue about it, but I can cite the studies on this.
0:28:08 OK, they’re they’re, you know, they’re eating certain foods.
0:28:12 Can we do something somewhat close to what they’re already doing,
0:28:15 but find a way to cut out some calories from that, right?
0:28:20 Let’s let’s try and I’m going to try and meet them closer to where they are
0:28:22 and then slowly pull them back this way.
0:28:26 When you think about what it takes for someone to make that decision to change
0:28:32 their life so often, it seems that there’s some kind of adverse event.
0:28:35 Like I’m talking here about the why that sits behind the reason
0:28:38 to change to lose the way to build the muscles.
0:28:42 Do you see that often that there’s some kind of catalyst moment?
0:28:46 You actually see a lot of parallels between like the way addicts talk
0:28:50 and people who have lost a lot of weight in terms of they had to develop a new identity.
0:28:55 They often have to get a new set of friends, not on purpose.
0:28:59 But if you think about if you were hanging around a certain type of people
0:29:01 and you became and you were very overweight,
0:29:04 you’ve probably fallen in with people who have similar habits to you.
0:29:08 And even if you still care about those people, as you start to come out of that,
0:29:10 there’s a few things that are happening.
0:29:14 One, if they’re not joining you in the things you’re doing, that creates a gap.
0:29:18 And people can also be very insecure
0:29:22 when people they know start improving themselves
0:29:26 and they start trying to pull them back in crabs in the bucket.
0:29:28 Right. Why do you got to eat that?
0:29:29 Why can’t you enjoy this?
0:29:32 Why can’t you, you know, that’s because you’re holding up a mirror to them
0:29:34 by changing your life, right? Correct, correct.
0:29:37 So, you know, I.
0:29:40 I don’t think he minds me talking about this.
0:29:43 My my brother was an addict
0:29:49 and he like he went to prison for a period of time.
0:29:52 He had a lot of really bad stuff go down in his life.
0:29:54 And I wanted to ask him, I’m like, was it was going to prison?
0:29:56 Was that like your rock bottom?
0:29:58 And he goes, no.
0:30:02 He goes, honestly, I just woke up one day and realized I lose everything.
0:30:04 I get a job and I lose it.
0:30:06 I get some money and I lose it.
0:30:08 I get a relationship and I lose it.
0:30:09 I just got sick and tired of losing.
0:30:14 And not always, but you hear a lot of similar stories
0:30:17 from people who drastically changed their lives as they just got to the point
0:30:21 where they were sick and tired of being that way.
0:30:25 And they just realized that if I don’t make some kind of change,
0:30:28 this is going to continue.
0:30:31 And I think one that takes a self-awareness
0:30:35 that which is hard and having that mirror brought to you is really hard.
0:30:39 I can relate in other areas of life.
0:30:42 But that why really is at the core of it,
0:30:45 because at the end of the day, if you don’t have a really strong why.
0:30:49 It is hard when you start to lose motivation.
0:30:53 You know, I was watching a story of a guy who had a heart attack
0:30:56 when he was like in his forties and then he lost one hundred and fifty pounds.
0:31:02 And he’s like, whenever I started whenever I didn’t have motivation
0:31:05 or I started feeling like I wanted to fall back into bad habits,
0:31:09 I thought about my kids growing up without a dad and it made it very easy for me.
0:31:12 And so when you have that really strong why.
0:31:16 It makes it easier to get through it.
0:31:19 I’m not saying either me or you’re going to be able to figure out an answer here.
0:31:23 But I feel like maybe there’s something we can offer to the question
0:31:25 about how to cultivate the why.
0:31:27 Is there anything that you do on those days?
0:31:30 Any disciplines you think you can put in place that will just keep the why?
0:31:33 Front and centre. I’m going to throw out one.
0:31:37 Something that kind of helped me a little bit was just changing the background
0:31:42 on my phone to an image that reminded me of who I wanted to be.
0:31:45 And it just meant that even if it gives me a one percent psychological
0:31:49 reinforcement in the direct so that I fall on the correct side of a decision
0:31:54 relating to diet or fitness, maybe that would help, you know, because it’s it’s there.
0:31:56 A couple of things I think about.
0:32:00 I think about the people I care about in my life and wanting to make them proud.
0:32:04 Think about my kids, you know,
0:32:06 how would I want now I’m going to get emotional?
0:32:10 How would I how would I want them to remember their dad, you know?
0:32:15 I can remember coming back from all these injuries
0:32:19 and I was lifting in the garage one day and my daughter, she was six at the time.
0:32:23 And she’s such a little sparkplug and she would watch me.
0:32:26 And sometimes she would come in and like do some lifts with me and stuff.
0:32:32 And I was kind of explaining to her why I do this stuff and why it was important to me.
0:32:37 And I said, you know, dad almost was a world champion.
0:32:41 I got really close and, you know, that would be something
0:32:43 that I would really treasure if I got the chance to do that.
0:32:47 And she said, are you going to try and be a champion again?
0:32:52 And she said it in the kid way that like, but oh, my gosh, when she said that,
0:32:56 whenever I felt tired, whenever I felt down or whatever,
0:32:58 I just remember my daughter saying, are you going to try to be a champion again?
0:33:01 Made it easy, you know?
0:33:06 And so I had my like it’s going to sound goofy, but it worlds in 2022.
0:33:09 I was going through a lot of personal stuff at the time.
0:33:13 And I had pictured my kids on my phone and I was looking at that.
0:33:18 And I was almost in tears before I got for lifts because I was so amped up and psyched up.
0:33:20 And that was that was my why.
0:33:23 So I’m thinking about my kids and I also think about, you know, my parents
0:33:26 and like great people wanting to make them proud.
0:33:30 And then honestly, like my my personal hero is my grandfather.
0:33:33 So my grandfather is part of the greatest generation.
0:33:40 He was the funniest person I ever met with the most integrity of anybody I ever met.
0:33:45 And so so many times when I think about the person I want to be,
0:33:51 I think about my grandfather and, you know, still to this day,
0:33:54 I’ll think about it before I if I feel like low motivation
0:33:59 or if I’ve really screwed something up, you know, like that sort of thing.
0:34:02 Let’s go to the technical stuff. Yes, let’s start with.
0:34:05 So we’re talking here about dieting and weight loss.
0:34:09 If I’m trying to lose weight, should I be counting my calories?
0:34:13 Ah, so the first point of confusion,
0:34:17 people assume calories and calories out is the same thing as counting calories.
0:34:23 That’s like saying the law that in order to save money,
0:34:26 you have to earn more than you spend is the same thing as keeping a budget.
0:34:31 Keeping a budget can help you save money, but it’s not the same thing.
0:34:35 So let’s break down calories and calories out calories inside.
0:34:36 Pretty straightforward.
0:34:38 It is the food you eat, right?
0:34:40 The calories in the food that you eat.
0:34:45 Now, I would add one caveat to that, the metabolizable energy.
0:34:49 So when we say calories, calories is literally a unit of energy.
0:34:55 And so I’ll have some people say, well, calories aren’t a real thing.
0:34:57 You can’t look at calories in our microscope. You’re right.
0:35:01 It refers to the potential energy contained in the chemical bonds of food
0:35:06 that through the process of digestion, absorption and metabolism,
0:35:09 that energy is captured in one way or another.
0:35:12 So that’s the energy into the system.
0:35:15 Calories out is more complicated.
0:35:19 So that involves a few different energy outputs.
0:35:22 The first one being your basal metabolic rate.
0:35:26 So your BMR is basically the cost of keeping the lights on.
0:35:29 So if you just lay down, didn’t move,
0:35:32 that’s how many calories your body would burn.
0:35:35 And that’s actually for most people,
0:35:36 the majority of the calories they burn per day.
0:35:39 It’s around 50 to 70 percent, depending on how active they are.
0:35:41 And it fluctuates from person to person.
0:35:43 So as a man with fairly big muscles,
0:35:47 that you will be bigger than mine because you have more going on over there.
0:35:50 Yeah, you can tie about at least based on the regressions.
0:35:54 You can tie about 90 percent of the variance in BMR to someone’s lean mass.
0:35:58 OK, if you look at the studies, it’s very tightly correlated with lean mass,
0:36:02 right, because lean tissue is more metabolically active than non-lean tissue.
0:36:09 So BMR is one bucket, then you have what’s called the thermic effective food.
0:36:16 So your TEF, our bodies are kind of like for lack of a poor analogy,
0:36:20 but an analogy that works is cars like internal combustion engine.
0:36:23 You don’t just put petrol or gas in your car.
0:36:24 All of a sudden, it just spontaneously starts up.
0:36:26 You got to start it.
0:36:31 The battery puts in energy so you can get energy out of the fuel, right?
0:36:35 Your body has to put in energy to extract the energy out of the food that you eat.
0:36:40 And so a lot of the confusion people say, well, calories in, calories out,
0:36:42 assumes that all calories are equal.
0:36:46 It doesn’t because TEF accounts for this because, for example,
0:36:50 protein has a higher thermic effective food than carbohydrate or fat.
0:36:56 So if you look at, so protein requires more energy to basically process it.
0:36:57 Correct.
0:37:02 So if you if you look at, like, say fats, for example, TEF is about zero to three percent,
0:37:07 meaning if you eat 100 calories from dietary fat, you capture about 97 to 100 calories of it.
0:37:10 Carbohydrates about five to 10 percent.
0:37:15 So if you eat 100 calories from carbohydrate, you capture about 90 to 95 calories from it.
0:37:19 A lot of that depends on the fiber content, the more fiber, the lower the metabolizable energy.
0:37:23 So fiber actually has a higher thermic effective food as well.
0:37:26 Then protein is about 70, 80 percent.
0:37:30 So if you eat 100 calories from protein, you capture about 70 to 80 calories.
0:37:34 So some people out there will say, well, there’s negative calories.
0:37:35 No, those don’t exist.
0:37:38 You’re always getting more energy out of it than you put in.
0:37:40 But some are lower than others, right?
0:37:47 And so that TEF is about five to 10 percent of the energy you expend per day.
0:37:49 So now we’ve got BMR, TEF.
0:37:54 And then you have your physical activity, which we can further break into two different buckets.
0:37:57 The first one is obvious, which is exercise, right?
0:38:00 You go to the gym, burn some calories, and that’s energy out.
0:38:03 The second one is less intuitive.
0:38:06 It’s called non-exercise activity, thermogenesis, neat.
0:38:13 And that is the small unconscious movements that you make per day.
0:38:14 Give you an example like what I’m doing.
0:38:17 Like now it’s not subconscious because I’m thinking about it.
0:38:24 But fidgeting when you’re talking with your hands, pacing, right?
0:38:28 In fact, they’ve actually shown that people who have a more
0:38:32 they call it obese resistant phenotype, when they eat more,
0:38:36 they tend to just become spontaneously more active without realizing it.
0:38:41 And so people who are more obese prone, when they eat more food,
0:38:45 they tend to not compensate by becoming more spontaneously active.
0:38:46 Interesting.
0:38:51 And people it’s kind of pedantic, but it’s important to understand the difference.
0:38:54 I heard people say, well, I’m going to take the steps and get my need up.
0:38:57 No, no, you made a decision that’s exercise.
0:39:03 OK, the reason being neat really isn’t consciously modifiable, right?
0:39:07 And so I’ll give you an example of like an extreme example of this.
0:39:10 So when I was getting ready for my last bodybuilding show back in 2010,
0:39:15 the fatigue that you deal with is unbelievable.
0:39:17 It’s hard to describe in words.
0:39:20 Soul crushing would be a way to describe it.
0:39:25 And I had gotten done, you know, I’d train two hours at the gym that day.
0:39:30 I’d done an hour of cardio, got home and I remember I sat down on the couch
0:39:34 and my ex, my wife at the time,
0:39:39 she had like real housewives of whatever county on the TV.
0:39:43 I hated those shows, but the remote was about seven feet away.
0:39:46 I watched the entire show.
0:39:50 I did not get up and move because I was so fatigued.
0:39:54 That’s an example of neat and neat is very modifiable.
0:39:58 So they’ve shown that even a 10 percent reduction in body weight
0:40:02 can reduce neat by up to four or five hundred calories per day.
0:40:06 So you’re just a lot of people end up moving less without even realizing it.
0:40:10 So here’s the rub.
0:40:12 This so you’ve got your calories in, you’ve got your calories out.
0:40:16 BMR plus EF plus neat plus exercise.
0:40:21 People think of these two things as static.
0:40:22 They’re not static.
0:40:24 And that’s what I talk about in the book a lot.
0:40:28 We have various adaptations that fight us for weight loss.
0:40:33 First of which is on the metabolism side.
0:40:39 When you lose body weight, your BMR drops.
0:40:42 But part of that is because you’re carrying around less weight, right?
0:40:45 So if I two hundred pounds and I drop down to one hundred and eighty pounds,
0:40:47 I just have less mass to carry around.
0:40:49 And so your BMR goes down a little bit, which is again,
0:40:53 which again is your base metabolic rate, right, which is the the the cost
0:40:55 to keeping the lights on, basically.
0:40:58 But there’s actually what’s called metabolic adaptation,
0:41:02 which has shown that with a 10 percent body weight loss on average,
0:41:07 you can see a reduction beyond what you would expect of 15 percent for BMR.
0:41:11 So let’s take an example here because people will say,
0:41:15 well, calorie deficit didn’t work for me because, you know,
0:41:17 I was eating this many calories.
0:41:20 I was exercising this much period of time and I was.
0:41:25 You know, so like what happened?
0:41:28 Well, you thought you were in a calorie deficit.
0:41:35 But let’s take me, for example, OK, my BMR, I’ve had it measured.
0:41:37 It’s about it’s about two thousand calories, a little bit lower.
0:41:39 About two thousand calories.
0:41:43 My total daily energy expenditure is around thirty four hundred calories per day.
0:41:45 So that’s all this stuff added up, right.
0:41:49 But if I lose 10 percent of my body weight, for me,
0:41:53 twenty seven hundred calories per day is a pretty significant calorie deficit.
0:41:57 But if I lose 10 percent of my body weight,
0:42:03 if I drop my BMR by 15 percent, 15 percent of two two thousand calories,
0:42:08 those days, 300 calories dropped my need by 400 calories, that’s 700 calories.
0:42:12 All of a sudden, that deficit is no longer a deficit.
0:42:14 That’s now maintenance, right.
0:42:15 Now, this doesn’t happen all at once.
0:42:18 This is a progressive thing over time.
0:42:20 But there’s a reason, like I tell people, I’m like,
0:42:24 if it was a calorie deficit, as soon as you like from the time you did it,
0:42:26 indefinitely, you would starve to death, right.
0:42:30 But all of us, most of us have had the experience of starting a diet,
0:42:34 losing some weight, and eventually, even though you’re eating the same way,
0:42:36 doing the same exercise, it plateaus, right.
0:42:41 And then you have to do something else to further establish that deficit.
0:42:44 And the other way, so that’s on one side,
0:42:48 where that’s kind of working against you to try to bring you back
0:42:52 to your original body weight, right, we talk about weight, weight regain.
0:42:58 The other side is your hunger hormones go up as you diet, right.
0:43:02 So they’ve actually then they have shown obese people who lose weight
0:43:06 to become normal weight when you compare them to normal weight people
0:43:11 who were never obese with the same similar lean body mass.
0:43:16 The formerly obese people have a lower total daily energy expenditure.
0:43:21 And they have higher markers of hunger.
0:43:23 They have higher appetite.
0:43:26 So it’s working on both sides of that equation to push you back.
0:43:30 So the devil’s advocate argument is, well, you know,
0:43:32 I ate this amount of calories
0:43:35 that should have been a calorie deficit and I didn’t lose weight.
0:43:38 Or it’s the, you know, all calories are created equal.
0:43:42 I’ll tell people all calories are created equal
0:43:44 because saying a calorie is not a calorie is like saying
0:43:48 second hands on the clock are different.
0:43:50 No, they’re just a unit of measurement.
0:43:52 All sources of calories are not equal.
0:43:55 So let’s take budgeting, right.
0:43:58 I used that earlier, sports car, OK.
0:44:02 So let’s say somebody makes million dollars a year, right.
0:44:07 If they want to spend 100, let’s assume no loans just for sake of ease.
0:44:10 If they want to spend $150,000 on a sports car,
0:44:12 but they’re still able to pay their mortgage,
0:44:15 they can take care of their responsibilities
0:44:18 and they can put money away for retirement.
0:44:20 Can they buy that sports car?
0:44:21 Sure, they can, right.
0:44:23 And is it a bad investment?
0:44:27 I guess you could argue it’s a bad investment
0:44:30 because they could put the $150,000 in those investments.
0:44:33 But maybe that sports car makes them feel good
0:44:36 and gives them a little care on the end of the stick to, you know, keep working and whatnot.
0:44:41 But if I take somebody who makes $200,000 a year,
0:44:43 should they buy the $150,000 sports car?
0:44:47 If it means they can’t pay their mortgage, they can’t, you know, save for retirement.
0:44:49 No, of course not, right.
0:44:52 Similar thing with energy, right.
0:44:58 So if I’m, you know, somebody who’s very active and I burn a lot of calories,
0:45:05 is it a big deal if I have a pop tart, say, if I’m still getting enough protein,
0:45:12 I’m hitting my target energy, I’m getting enough fiber in my my my micronutrients.
0:45:18 If that gives me that little carrot on the end of the stick to keep being consistent,
0:45:23 not a big deal. But if we’re talking about a smaller woman
0:45:29 with less lean mass who needs to eat 1200 calories a day to lose weight,
0:45:31 that’s not a very good investment, right.
0:45:34 It’s not a very good use of funds.
0:45:37 So what I’ll tell people is, you know, people will say,
0:45:38 well, how do I know what a deficit is?
0:45:40 How do I know how many calories to eat, right?
0:45:43 Because also just on that point, I heard you talk about food labelling as well
0:45:44 and how inaccurate that can be.
0:45:48 So you can you can have up to a 20 percent error in food labelling, right.
0:45:49 So some people will use.
0:45:52 So what that means is it could say 100 calories.
0:45:54 It could be 80, it could be 120.
0:45:57 Now, I will say if it’s coming from a big food company
0:46:00 and they have pretty rigorous standards, it’s probably not that far off.
0:46:03 But they’re allowed up to that, right.
0:46:06 Because they recognize that some food sources are very heterogeneous.
0:46:08 It’d be difficult to like get it exactly on.
0:46:12 So you’ll have some people say,
0:46:14 well, see, calorie counting is useless
0:46:17 because you can’t know exactly how many calories you’re taking in.
0:46:20 And are you going to get your BMR measured?
0:46:22 Are you going to get your meat measured or are you going to get this measured?
0:46:24 It can be much more simple than that.
0:46:27 Again, financial analogy.
0:46:30 I could make the argument that keeping a budget is useless
0:46:34 because you never know what inflation is exactly doing.
0:46:38 And if you have investments, you can get differential, you know,
0:46:43 returns on it and on the output side, you have unexpected expenses.
0:46:45 You have fluctuations and expenses.
0:46:48 Your power bill is going to be different from month to month, right?
0:46:51 Your car breaks down one month.
0:46:54 But if you look at the average over time,
0:46:59 you can get a pretty good idea of on average what your expenses are like, right?
0:47:02 And you can get a pretty good idea over time,
0:47:04 unlike entrepreneurs like us.
0:47:07 But even like us, you get you can start to kind of see the trends
0:47:12 and get a relatively good, good idea of what it’s going to be.
0:47:14 So when it comes to calories in and calories out.
0:47:18 Yes, tracking exactly can be very, very difficult.
0:47:21 But if you are monitoring your body weight
0:47:25 and you’re being consistent with how you track,
0:47:28 you’ll know if you’re in a calorie deficit.
0:47:30 And I think another thing that’s crossed the people up,
0:47:32 this actually showed up on that
0:47:34 that review of the successful weight loss maintainers.
0:47:39 They actually talked about one of the things that was a barrier for them
0:47:42 or hard for them was the weight fluctuations.
0:47:44 Because, you know, if you’ve ever if you ever weighed in every day,
0:47:46 have you ever have you ever done this for you’ve weighed every day?
0:47:48 Even first thing in the morning, right?
0:47:50 Up, down, down, all over the place, right?
0:47:53 So actually, when we with our coaching and then with our app,
0:47:56 we’re not just looking at one weight.
0:47:58 We encourage people to weigh
0:48:00 as long as it doesn’t cause them a lot of stress and anxiety
0:48:02 way and daily.
0:48:04 And then it’s taking the average of those
0:48:07 because day to day changes in weight
0:48:10 are much more dictated by fluctuations and fluid.
0:48:13 But week to week and month to month
0:48:17 averages reflect loss or gain of mass.
0:48:21 So, for example, if you’re monitoring your body weight,
0:48:25 you know, taking averages and looking at that over time,
0:48:27 you’ll know if you’re in a calorie deficit
0:48:29 because on average, you’re seeing it go down, right?
0:48:32 Now, I wanted to make one more point,
0:48:35 which is you don’t have to track calories to lose weight.
0:48:37 Absolutely not.
0:48:39 It’s just one methodology
0:48:42 because no matter what you do, you have to have some form of restraint, right?
0:48:44 And my friend, Peter T, actually breaks it down nicely
0:48:46 into a couple of different three buckets, right?
0:48:50 You can have dietary restraint, which is low carb,
0:48:55 plant based, whole food, you know, whatever it is.
0:48:59 You’re restricting some sort of food group or type of food, right?
0:49:01 Then you have a time restriction.
0:49:04 You eat within a certain time frame or a certain window.
0:49:08 Then you can have just straight up calorie restriction
0:49:10 where you’re tracking and monitoring.
0:49:13 What you choose to do, I think a lot
0:49:16 in terms of what is best for an individual
0:49:20 boils down to their psychology and what feels easy.
0:49:24 So this is where a lot of the diet wars start
0:49:28 because somebody will do, say, low carb, right?
0:49:30 And they’ll get results from that.
0:49:32 And they’ll say, man, it felt like I wasn’t even dieting.
0:49:33 And for whatever reason,
0:49:37 that clicked with the algorithm in their brain and felt easy.
0:49:39 And they got progress from that.
0:49:43 But then they assumed that everyone else will have the same response.
0:49:46 Somebody else does low fat.
0:49:49 Somebody else does intermittent fasting, whatever have you.
0:49:50 And you have all these stories.
0:49:52 Me personally, I was the kind of person.
0:49:56 I’m the kind of person that if I tried to restrict certain foods,
0:49:58 I end up getting that binge response, right?
0:50:02 But if you tell me I can eat whatever I want as long as I’m tracking it.
0:50:06 I become ridiculously consistent.
0:50:10 And I mean, I’m still eating mostly like whole food,
0:50:12 mentally processed foods, you know, those sorts of things
0:50:14 because they’re better for satiety.
0:50:17 But I don’t stress out about having some snacks here and there
0:50:22 that are, you know, bad consistency because I’m being very consistent, right?
0:50:23 How important is that consistency?
0:50:25 It is the most important thing.
0:50:28 So there is actually a meta analysis.
0:50:32 And for when I say meta analysis, think a study of studies.
0:50:34 OK, so it’s not a new study.
0:50:40 It’s what they’re trying to do in a meta analysis is they are trying to take
0:50:43 studies that are similar and compile them together to see.
0:50:46 Is there a consensus here?
0:50:47 Is there an overall effect here?
0:50:53 Right. So there was a meta analysis of where they looked at 14
0:50:58 different like popular diets, and these ranged from low carb to, you know,
0:51:01 high carb, low fat, right?
0:51:05 And what they found is on the long term, none of them were better
0:51:08 than the others for weight loss.
0:51:12 But when they stratified them for adherence from least adherent to most adherent.
0:51:13 What does that mean?
0:51:15 So people who were consistent, basically.
0:51:19 So when they stratified them for, I think, compliance, another way to put it.
0:51:22 When they stratified them that way, regardless of diet,
0:51:26 a linear effect of adherence on weight loss.
0:51:33 So what that tells me is actually the best diet for the individual is the one
0:51:36 that they can consistently execute.
0:51:41 They all function the same way, which is, you know, creating some sort of calorie deficit.
0:51:43 Now, some people will say, that’s not true.
0:51:45 I did a low carb diet and I was eating more food.
0:51:51 You probably felt more satiated because you were eating less calorie dense food.
0:51:56 You probably were eating a greater quantity in terms of weight of food.
0:51:59 But you were eating less calories.
0:52:02 Is there any way to lose weight in a calorie surplus?
0:52:05 Not if that’s so what I’ll tell people is.
0:52:10 All right. You take in food in the carbons that you take in.
0:52:13 They have to go somewhere, right?
0:52:16 And if you are.
0:52:22 If you are not in a surplus, what you are saying is you are creating energy out of nothing.
0:52:25 If that’s the case, NASA needs to study you
0:52:30 because we figured out how to not worry about fuel on long space flights.
0:52:32 Right. We have a perpetual motion machine.
0:52:39 Again, a lot of this, the confusion becomes when you have, you know,
0:52:41 for example, metabolic adaptation.
0:52:45 So, you know, people, they may think they’re in a calorie deficit, but they’re not.
0:52:49 Or they’re overestimating how many calories they burn.
0:52:51 And here’s the other thing that people don’t want to talk about,
0:52:53 because this gets down to the mirror, right?
0:52:55 So there was a classic study.
0:52:57 I think it was from 1992.
0:53:02 And I think the title, I may butcher it, but it’s discrepancy
0:53:07 between reported and actual calorie intake in OB subjects.
0:53:08 I want to say is the name of the study.
0:53:12 And so what they did was they had people,
0:53:15 they screened for people who said that they could not lose weight
0:53:17 even though they were eating low calories.
0:53:22 And the the average calorie intake that was reported by participants
0:53:24 was 1200 calories a day.
0:53:25 And so they measured a bunch of different stuff.
0:53:29 They measured their lean mass, their fat mass, they measured their BMR,
0:53:31 they measured their total daily energy expenditure.
0:53:36 They found that their BMR was very average
0:53:40 when it was when it was for when it was based on their lean mass, right?
0:53:43 And actually, if you look at obese people, they actually have a higher BMR
0:53:47 and higher energy expenditure typically than lean people.
0:53:50 But on average, it’s because they have more lean mass
0:53:52 because when you have more mass to carry around,
0:53:54 your body has to create more locomotive mass.
0:53:57 But when they so they and they told the subjects,
0:54:02 we will we are going to monitor you and we will know if you’re eating
0:54:03 more than you say you are.
0:54:07 The average in the study was they under reported their calorie intake
0:54:11 by about 50 percent and they over reported their physical activity
0:54:13 by just under 50 percent.
0:54:15 Peace. Now.
0:54:19 And some of the participants argued with the researchers about it, right?
0:54:22 Here’s where people miss the message.
0:54:28 The message a lot of people take from that is, oh, see, they’re lying.
0:54:33 And that’s a really hard thing to take to somebody to be like,
0:54:36 well, you’re probably under reporting your calorie intake,
0:54:38 or you’re probably eating more than you think you are.
0:54:41 That feels very, you know, aggressive.
0:54:44 And I don’t think it’s lying.
0:54:48 I think that, one, people don’t really understand portion sizes.
0:54:52 If you’ve never had the experience of like weighing out your food,
0:54:55 you will be shocked, like way out of serving of cereal
0:54:59 or a serving of ice cream, or if you want to be really depressed,
0:55:03 way out of serving of peanut butter, because the tablespoon that you’re
0:55:06 grabbing, I promise you, is probably two or three servings.
0:55:09 And then, you know, like if the first time I weighed out ice cream,
0:55:13 when I when I started weighing my food, I was like, this is a serving.
0:55:17 It’s like two bites, you know?
0:55:20 And so I don’t think people have a really good understanding of serving sizes.
0:55:23 And even I’ll remember, I’ll never forget this was an Instagram DM.
0:55:26 And this lady was saying that she was eating
0:55:28 sixteen hundred calories a day and not losing weight.
0:55:30 And we kind of, you know, had a little back and forth and we were talking.
0:55:33 And I said, well, how she’s like, I am measuring my food.
0:55:34 I’m like, how are you measuring it?
0:55:36 She’s like, I’m doing volume measurements.
0:55:38 So she was doing cups, tablespoons, that sort of thing.
0:55:40 I said, do me a favor.
0:55:43 Do do exactly what you’ve been doing, but way out each one.
0:55:46 A day later, she came back and said, oh, my God,
0:55:48 I’m eating twenty seven hundred calories a day.
0:55:54 And so even dietitians underreport the caloric intake in studies by about 10 percent.
0:55:57 And these are the experts, right?
0:56:02 So you have on one side, people are eating more than they think they are.
0:56:06 And then on the other side, they think they’re being more active than they really are.
0:56:10 But again, that’s a hard conversation to have with people.
0:56:15 And even as such, telling people, hey, you need to move more, eat less.
0:56:18 Mechanistically, that’s true.
0:56:22 But that’s like telling somebody, hey, if you want to save more money,
0:56:25 just earn more and spend less with all of this.
0:56:28 You know, I was adding up all these discrepancies, right?
0:56:31 Discrepancies is in like, you’re weighing it wrong.
0:56:33 The label’s got 20 percent wrong.
0:56:37 And then my head went back to your budgeting analogy as an entrepreneur and as a CEO.
0:56:41 If my accounting was 20 percent off, I’m dead.
0:56:45 Yeah, but then if it’s 95 percent off in the till,
0:56:50 like how much money we’re getting into the till and then I’m using a cup instead of a scale.
0:56:52 So that’s under 30 percent off as well.
0:56:55 No wonder, you know, the business would go bust.
0:56:57 Right. It’s complicated.
0:56:58 I get what the fuck are you going to do?
0:57:02 Yeah, it is complicated, but I will tell people, you know, again,
0:57:06 if you get back to the basics of monitoring your body weight consistently,
0:57:09 which is one of the I have to be careful about this,
0:57:13 because there are some people where monitoring their body weight consistently
0:57:16 ends up being like really anxiety provoking for them disorderly thing.
0:57:17 Yeah, that sort of thing.
0:57:19 So that’s, you know, I try to be sensitive to that,
0:57:22 but it is a very consistent thing in the literature that people who lose weight
0:57:26 and keep it off tend to monitor their body weight pretty regularly.
0:57:28 And it’s a self-correcting thing, right?
0:57:31 Like if you’re keeping a budget very regularly and you see, oh, man,
0:57:33 I spent, you know, five thousand dollars more this month.
0:57:36 What happens? You correct, right?
0:57:40 And so I would use that more instead of the accounting variation.
0:57:44 I would say, well, sometimes your business has unexpected expenses, right?
0:57:47 Or sometimes you have less expenses, right?
0:57:50 And so those are going to fluctuate and can be hard to anticipate, right?
0:57:55 And so what we’re looking for overall is, OK, let’s look back at, you know,
0:57:57 I think a lot of business operate in quarters, right?
0:57:58 Let’s look at this quarter.
0:58:02 OK, on average, here’s here’s our month over month, what we’re profiting, right?
0:58:06 OK, well, we can start to budget based on these sorts of things and expectations.
0:58:07 We’ll try to project out a little bit.
0:58:10 I kind of look at that with people.
0:58:12 I’m like, all right, well, how much weight did you lose on average?
0:58:15 Like over the past month, OK, how much were you eating?
0:58:19 OK, you lost six pounds over the last month.
0:58:21 You’re definitely in a calorie deficit, right?
0:58:22 It’s working. Keep going.
0:58:26 Maybe you’re eating 2,000 calories, maybe you’re eating 2,300 calories.
0:58:28 Who cares? It’s working, right?
0:58:32 Now, what happens is eventually once you plateau,
0:58:37 again, maybe eating 2,000, maybe eating 2,300, doesn’t matter.
0:58:40 Whichever it is, if you plateaued, it means you have to re-establish the deficit.
0:58:45 So you either have to reduce your calories or you have to increase your activity
0:58:48 or a combination of both, you know, those sorts of things.
0:58:52 What about one thing I heard you talk about at the very start of this conversation was
0:58:54 artificial sweeteners, specifically.
0:58:55 Yeah, let’s do that.
0:58:57 Specifically in things like Diet Coke.
0:59:00 I’ve, you know, I’ve wondered for a while whether Diet Coke is healthy or not.
0:59:04 OK, and there’s a lot of, you know, people talking about this at the moment.
0:59:06 So what’s your answer to that?
0:59:09 OK, this is going to be the most commented thing about in this entire interview, I’m sure.
0:59:16 OK, so first off, let’s just talk about weight loss and fat loss.
0:59:17 OK, and leave out the other stuff.
0:59:24 If you look at the epidemiology and the cohort studies,
0:59:29 you tend to see that people who consume more artificial sweeteners or diet soda
0:59:32 are heavier in body weight.
0:59:34 And so some people have said these things cause weight gain.
0:59:40 But the problem with that is, again, lifestyle behaviors.
0:59:45 And so one of the things they’ve shown is that people who consume more artificial sweeteners
0:59:49 actually tended to be more overweight to start with, obese to start with.
0:59:53 They didn’t cause them to become that way.
0:59:57 They’re consuming more of them because they’re trying to get to a less obese state, right?
1:00:00 So there’s a correlation there.
1:00:03 But if we look at the randomized control trials, right, where they say,
1:00:10 hey, you guys drink soda, regular soda, you guys drink diet soda.
1:00:14 There was actually one that just got published, a very, very, really rigorously controlled
1:00:19 one year study, way more weight loss in the diet soda group.
1:00:22 And I’m thinking of another randomized control trial.
1:00:27 I think it was six months where they saw like six kilograms of weight loss just from switching
1:00:30 people from regular soda to diet soda.
1:00:33 Or it might not have been soda specifically.
1:00:37 They call them sugar sweetened beverages versus non-nutritive sweetened beverages.
1:00:44 So when you replace for soda, it seems to be very effective, all things being equal.
1:00:52 And people will say, well, it activates the sweetness and you get hungrier from it.
1:00:56 Well, if that’s the case, then these studies would suggest that artificial sweeteners are
1:00:58 actually the best front burners known to man.
1:01:02 Because if people are eating more and still losing six kilograms, that’s amazing.
1:01:04 They’re not fat burners.
1:01:06 They’re replacing that sweet taste.
1:01:10 And then people will say, well, it’s not better than water, you know, water.
1:01:14 People who just drink water shoot the alligator closest to the boat, right?
1:01:19 Like, okay, hey, if you can drink water and just drink water, cool.
1:01:20 Do that, right?
1:01:24 But if somebody can lose, and I have people all the time when I do a post about this,
1:01:27 I’m going to say I lost 30, 40, 50 pounds.
1:01:30 All I did was stop drinking regular soda and drink diet soda.
1:01:32 Literally the only change they made in their life.
1:01:41 Now, when they compare it versus water, they either see the same results
1:01:45 or the diet soda group gets a little bit better results.
1:01:49 And yeah, now it’s not because of any kind of fat burning effect.
1:01:56 What is likely is when somebody switches from regular sugar sweetened beverage to water,
1:02:01 they may try to fill that gap of that sweet taste somewhere else.
1:02:07 Whereas if they’re just consuming the artificially sweetener, non-nutritive sweetened,
1:02:12 we can’t say artificial because like a stevia is actually, you know, natural, so to say.
1:02:14 So they call it non-nutritive sweeteners.
1:02:18 But if they’re consuming the non-nutritive sweeteners,
1:02:20 they’re filling that gap.
1:02:21 It’s compensation again.
1:02:21 Compensating.
1:02:22 Right.
1:02:24 So now, again, there’s nothing magic about them.
1:02:26 People are just eating less, right?
1:02:30 And if you can do that with water, you don’t have to consume diet soda.
1:02:32 I, you know, I would say drink water.
1:02:35 But if you’re somebody where, man, you know,
1:02:37 you really have a hard time quitting regular soda.
1:02:39 Heck yeah, drinking diet soda is a lot better.
1:02:43 And people will go, well, what about insulin?
1:02:44 They raise insulin.
1:02:47 That is actually one of the biggest myths out there.
1:02:49 There are multiple, not just studies,
1:02:52 but now I’m pretty sure there’s a meta-analysis as well
1:02:58 that shows that these artificial sweeteners do not raise insulin.
1:03:02 There is one study I’m thinking specifically about sucralose.
1:03:05 There’s one study, and everybody always hangs their hats on this,
1:03:11 and I love to break it down, where sucralose did not increase insulin,
1:03:16 but they did a sucralose group, a carbohydrate-only group,
1:03:18 and a carbohydrate-plus-sucralose group.
1:03:21 And the results were the carbohydrate-plus-sucralose group
1:03:24 secreted more insulin than the carbohydrate-only group,
1:03:26 even though they ate the same amount of carbs.
1:03:29 And so people go, well, I’ll see, maybe it’s not bad,
1:03:32 but if you’re, you know, drinking it with carbohydrates, it’s bad.
1:03:35 And this is where reading the full text
1:03:38 and really going deep on a study is very important.
1:03:44 So the carbohydrate-only group was sucrose,
1:03:48 which is 50% glucose, 50% fructose.
1:03:52 The carbohydrate-plus-sucralose group was maltodextrin.
1:03:56 Maltodextrin, if you look at, are you familiar with glycemic index?
1:03:57 Loosely.
1:04:01 Yeah, so glycemic index basically looks at, like, you know,
1:04:03 how quickly glucose appears in your system,
1:04:06 and usually you can kind of correlate the insulin response to that.
1:04:13 Maltodextrin has a significantly higher glycemic index
1:04:16 and causes a greater insulin response than sucrose.
1:04:20 Because it is a, it actually causes a greater
1:04:23 insulin response than even glucose itself,
1:04:26 because it’s kind of getting into the biochemistry,
1:04:27 but because it’s like this polymer,
1:04:31 it is actually a little bit more rapidly digested
1:04:32 and absorbed into the circulation.
1:04:37 So it was actually an inappropriate control group
1:04:39 to try to assess that.
1:04:41 Because if you look at the difference in insulin response,
1:04:43 it’s about what you’d expect
1:04:46 if you just look at maltodextrin versus sucrose.
1:04:51 So based on the research, there’s no evidence it affects glycemia
1:04:52 or increases insulin.
1:04:53 And in fact, in these studies where they,
1:04:55 you know, these randomized control trials,
1:04:58 where they look at, you know, weight loss,
1:05:03 you see improvements in insulin sensitivity, HBA1C,
1:05:05 you know, because people were losing weight,
1:05:07 not because of anything magic with these sweeteners.
1:05:08 Is sugar addictive?
1:05:11 This one’s going to get me in trouble too.
1:05:15 I want to come back to the official sweeteners,
1:05:16 but I’ll answer that.
1:05:19 Sugar by itself does not appear to be addictive.
1:05:26 There are certain foods that appear to create
1:05:28 what’s called a food dependence.
1:05:30 There’s subtle differences between that and addiction.
1:05:35 But I mean, kind of the anecdote is nobody’s like
1:05:39 just grabbing the bag of sucrose and just, you know, eating that.
1:05:41 And if you think about the foods that really are
1:05:47 like very hard to stop eating, they’re usually not just high in sugar.
1:05:53 They’re usually, it’s a combination of sugar, fat, salt, and texture.
1:05:56 Okay, texture matters as well and mouth feel.
1:05:59 People will say, well, sugar is addictive.
1:06:01 Look at cakes, cookies, ice cream.
1:06:06 There’s more calories from fat in those
1:06:07 than there are sugar in a lot of cases.
1:06:11 So couldn’t you by that logic just argue that fat is also addictive?
1:06:20 So sugar, straight sugar doesn’t appear to be addictive per se.
1:06:24 Now, it’s not very satiating, right?
1:06:27 And it’s utterly devoid of any other kind of nutrient.
1:06:29 So I’m not saying it’s a good idea to eat a lot of sugar.
1:06:35 But it doesn’t appear to have addictive qualities in isolation.
1:06:39 But there are certain foods, cakes, cookies, these sorts of foods,
1:06:46 hyper palatable, very great mouth feel, potato chips, french fries.
1:06:51 These sorts of foods may have like semi addictive type properties.
1:06:54 But just sugar itself doesn’t appear to.
1:06:57 And there’s a study that kind of backs that up.
1:07:02 Basically, I think the title was like no evidence for sugar addiction in humans.
1:07:05 So people will say, well, when I eat that piece of chocolate
1:07:10 or that sugary thing, I end up just eating more and more and more and more and more.
1:07:12 And then the next day, I feel like I need sugar more.
1:07:14 And I’ve got my own sort of anecdotal experience of,
1:07:18 I almost call it like a sugar cycle where there might be a week,
1:07:23 once every four months or six months where I have some sugar.
1:07:24 And then the next day, I want more sugar.
1:07:25 And then the next day, I want more sugar.
1:07:26 And then the next day.
1:07:28 And then when I break that sugar cycle,
1:07:30 and if I don’t eat sugar for like five days,
1:07:32 it kind of feels like the craving’s gone away.
1:07:35 You must hear that from people.
1:07:36 Yeah, I mean,
1:07:39 like right now I have no urge to have sugar for some reason.
1:07:40 Yeah.
1:07:43 It’s so hard to disentangle that from just psychology in general.
1:07:43 Right.
1:07:47 And just like, that could be a self fulfilling thing where it’s like,
1:07:50 you know, people have been told sugar is addictive
1:07:52 or they’ve heard sugar is addictive.
1:07:55 And so they eat that mood.
1:07:59 But also like, again, the chocolate, usually also high in fat, right?
1:08:00 Like the mouth feels really good.
1:08:04 So I’m not saying like that stuff is easy to overeat on
1:08:06 and people can have a hard time stopping,
1:08:11 but it doesn’t appear that sugar like independently is addictive.
1:08:16 But it can be part of foods that may have addictive like properties.
1:08:18 Artificial sweeteners, you said you wanted to close off that.
1:08:18 Yeah.
1:08:23 So now let’s talk, so we, very clearly the research studies show
1:08:23 the ones that are controlled.
1:08:28 Well, it does help with weight loss in a lot of these studies.
1:08:33 What about cancer, heart disease and the gut microbiome?
1:08:35 Because that’s a lot of the questions are out there.
1:08:40 So with cancer, a lot of people think, oh, there’s so many studies
1:08:41 showing a causes cancer.
1:08:43 Well, first of all, again, we’re talking about epidemiology.
1:08:45 We’re talking about cohort studies.
1:08:46 So there’s a lot of confounding variables.
1:08:51 But actually, so we’re talking about consensus earlier.
1:08:54 It’s kind of a, I’m on the scientific advisory board
1:08:57 and it’s like PubMed plus chat GPT.
1:09:01 So you can ask it a question and it will immediately like crawl
1:09:04 all the research literature and give you a consensus
1:09:06 of what the research says, right?
1:09:08 And so I did this and you can synthesize it too,
1:09:11 where it’ll show you what percentage of studies say yes, no,
1:09:13 and then possibly, right?
1:09:18 So I think I put in, do artificial sweeteners cause cancer?
1:09:20 Do you know 80% of the studies say no,
1:09:23 but you don’t hear about those and why is that?
1:09:28 Because it’s much more newsworthy to put out negative news
1:09:32 because if you hear a study, this thing doesn’t cause cancer,
1:09:33 ho hum, right?
1:09:36 But what gets shared a lot?
1:09:38 Oh man, Aunt Deborah, she drinks Diet Coke.
1:09:40 Deb, have you seen this?
1:09:43 You know, it’s much more shareable.
1:09:45 So that negative news tends to get published more, right?
1:09:52 And if you look at the human studies, some of the more well done ones,
1:09:55 like I’m thinking of the Neutro-Santi cohort out of France,
1:09:57 the conclusion was, oh, it increased the risk of cancer.
1:10:01 And I looked in it, I think it was aspartame specifically.
1:10:08 If something’s carcinogenic, typically what we see is a dose response, right?
1:10:11 So if you smoke more, you have a higher risk of lung cancer.
1:10:21 Did you know that, yes, so they compared no or low amount of aspartame users
1:10:26 to low moderate and then high moderate?
1:10:28 I want to say it was three different groups.
1:10:31 So I could be butchering this a little bit, but think low, medium, high, right?
1:10:35 The medium group had a higher risk of cancer.
1:10:37 The high group did.
1:10:42 It actually like not compared to the low group.
1:10:46 It was not statistically different, but it dropped from the moderate group.
1:10:51 So to me, again, we’re talking about an odds ratio of like 1.15,
1:10:54 meaning a 15% relative risk increase.
1:10:56 Let me put that in perspective.
1:10:58 15% sounds scary when it comes to cancer,
1:11:04 but relative risk means if your absolute risk of developing cancer
1:11:07 in say the next 10 years is 10%.
1:11:11 A relative risk increase of 15% says it goes up to 11.5.
1:11:14 It doesn’t mean it goes from 10 to 25, right?
1:11:17 So it’s important to understand the difference.
1:11:20 But again, if it’s really carcinogenic,
1:11:23 we should expect to see kind of a dose response, right?
1:11:24 We don’t see that.
1:11:29 So to me, that’s especially with all the studies that don’t find an association,
1:11:35 that’s more likely to be some kind of data artifact with who knows,
1:11:38 confounding variables, healthy user bias, what have you.
1:11:38 What about the gut then?
1:11:46 So now there are studies showing that some sweeteners do change the gut microflora,
1:11:47 the composition of it.
1:11:52 Sucralose appears to, aspartame not so much.
1:11:57 I think saccharin also showed a change to the gut microbiome.
1:12:01 Now, here’s what’s interesting.
1:12:08 It’s hard to know if that is a good, bad, or neutral change in terms of overall health,
1:12:13 because I was looking through one of the studies on sucralose,
1:12:19 and they were talking about that a couple of species are genuses of bacteria that increased.
1:12:25 And one of them that increased was actually associated with people who are leaner,
1:12:27 have less obesity and better insulin sensitivity.
1:12:31 And also a species that produced more butyrate.
1:12:34 And butyrate actually is associated with a whole host.
1:12:37 This is a short chain fatty acid produced by the gut microbiome.
1:12:42 Butyrate is associated with a whole host of positive health benefits.
1:12:48 So I will say it’s worth monitoring, because some of these do appear to change the breakdown
1:12:49 of the gut microbiota.
1:12:54 But there’s probably, you could argue just as much that there’s a positive effect
1:12:56 as you could a negative effect.
1:13:00 So what I’ll say is, again, if we look back at the, again,
1:13:04 shoot the alligator closest to the boat, and there are no solutions, only trade-offs.
1:13:10 If somebody switches to diet soda, even if it’s not the very best thing they could do,
1:13:12 maybe water is the very best thing they could do.
1:13:19 But if they lose 20 pounds and their HBA1C drops and their insulin sensitivity gets
1:13:23 better and the metabolic health gets better, it’s probably a worthwhile trade-off.
1:13:28 Are there any supplements that you would recommend everybody to take?
1:13:34 So I always say I have like tiers of supplements, right?
1:13:42 My first tier, thousands of research studies very clearly has benefits.
1:13:48 Created in monohydrate, which we’ve known about the performance benefits for years.
1:13:54 We’ve known about the strength benefits, the body composition benefits.
1:13:55 You take it every day?
1:13:55 Yes, I do.
1:13:59 Now it’s coming out that there’s cognitive benefits.
1:14:03 And I want to say, man, I hope I don’t get this wrong.
1:14:07 So I will fact check this and make sure you ask me for the study.
1:14:13 I’m pretty sure they did a study that showed that creatin actually decreased depressive symptoms.
1:14:14 Interesting.
1:14:21 So what I will say is, if there was one I would recommend for everybody,
1:14:27 it would probably be creatin monohydrate because it’s cheap, effective, and I mean,
1:14:29 people say, wow, we don’t know what the long-term effects are.
1:14:30 It’s been around for like 40 years.
1:14:34 If there was long-term effects, we’d have seen it by now.
1:14:39 And just to quick aside, creatin monohydrate, don’t waste your money on anything else.
1:14:43 People try to reinvent the wheel with creatin because monohydrate, it’s…
1:14:46 You know, remember when big screen, flat screen TVs came out?
1:14:49 I’m showing my age here.
1:14:50 No, I remember.
1:14:52 But I remember it was like $1,000 for a 40-inch screen TV
1:14:54 and now you can get one for a stick of bubblegum.
1:14:55 You know what I mean?
1:14:58 It’s because everybody makes them.
1:15:00 They’re so ubiquitous, it drove the cost down, right?
1:15:04 Everybody sells creatin monohydrate, it drives the cost down.
1:15:08 So companies come up with new forms of creatin and make these claims around them
1:15:13 to try to get you to spend more money on creatin monohydrate, saturates the muscle cell,
1:15:15 100%, you don’t need to do anything else.
1:15:16 What’s going on there?
1:15:17 So a couple of things.
1:15:23 We don’t fully understand all the mechanisms, but we know that when creatin gets in the system
1:15:28 and gets into the cell, it bonds with the phosphate, which produces creatin phosphate.
1:15:30 That is a high-energy phosphate donor.
1:15:36 So when you’re exercising, basically you are using what’s called adenosine triphosphate,
1:15:40 which is ATP, which is the purest form of energy in your body.
1:15:45 So this, what we call hydrolysis of ATP is used to power a lot of reactions in your body.
1:15:55 And so ATP triphosphate, three phosphates, to power these reactions, it gets cleaved to ADP,
1:16:01 adenosine diphosphate, plus an inorganic phosphate, right?
1:16:06 Creatinine can donate its phosphate to ADP, reform ATP.
1:16:11 So what we see is, especially during anaerobic exercise,
1:16:16 better performance of creatin, because it’s a high-energy phosphate donor can help replenish that.
1:16:21 And then it also pulls water into the cell.
1:16:25 And we think that that’s part of the body composition benefits of it.
1:16:31 Because a hydrated muscle cell, I mean, muscle cells are 70% water.
1:16:32 But they’re mostly water.
1:16:33 And people say, well, it’s just water.
1:16:35 Okay, but that’s lean tissue.
1:16:39 And there’s actually some, I believe there’s some evidence that actually hydrating the muscle
1:16:44 basically actually increases the, improves the contractile properties of the muscle.
1:16:46 So that could explain part of the strength benefits.
1:16:51 And of course, again, it’s going to show up as lean mass, right?
1:16:53 Now, it’s not a huge effect.
1:16:57 We’re talking a couple pounds for most people, something like that.
1:16:57 I’ll take it.
1:17:02 But for a relatively cheap, effective supplement, yeah, take it, right?
1:17:03 What are the supplements then?
1:17:05 Is there anything else in the tier one?
1:17:09 Yeah, I mean, for people who can tolerate whey protein,
1:17:18 I mean, you know, it’s not magic, but it’s a cheap, usually quite tasty way to get in high
1:17:19 quality protein.
1:17:23 And, you know, if you get it from Whole Food, great, but a lot of people struggle to get in,
1:17:26 you know, the amount of protein they’d like to get in from Whole Food.
1:17:31 And so whey protein, again, very high quality, usually easily digestible.
1:17:33 The caveat is whey protein concentrate.
1:17:36 A lot of people can’t tolerate it because there’s lactose in there.
1:17:42 So if you have a lactose intolerance, whey isolate, which is usually micro filtered,
1:17:46 gets out the vast majority, if not all the lactose.
1:17:48 And so most people can tolerate that.
1:17:52 But there are a certain percentage of people who also have a sensitivity to the lactal
1:17:55 humans in whey, the proteins in whey.
1:18:00 So in that case, there’s what’s called whey hydrolyzate, which is pre-digested whey.
1:18:03 And almost all people can tolerate that.
1:18:07 But if you don’t have any digestive issues within a concentrate or an isolate, it’s totally fine.
1:18:09 What else in that tier one?
1:18:11 And then I would say caffeine.
1:18:16 Caffeine is one of the, it is the original cognitive enhancer.
1:18:21 If we look at cognitive tests, we see consistently people perform better.
1:18:25 And if you look at performance, people consistently perform better, right?
1:18:29 Before 12, a lot of people talk to me about the half life of caffeine impacting sleep.
1:18:34 Yeah. So that, I mean, that’s the, you know, there’s even some evidence that, you know,
1:18:40 even if you have like a good dose of caffeine in the morning, that it may still affect your
1:18:44 sleep later. So again, no solutions, only trade-offs, right?
1:18:53 I would say overall, if you are an athlete or somebody who, you know, relies heavily on your
1:19:00 brain power to, you know, do whatever it is you do, caffeine, probably a useful supplement.
1:19:06 As you said, you know, if you’re going to take it, try to get in, you know,
1:19:10 nine hours before you’re going to sleep to cease your caffeine intake.
1:19:15 Because by that time, you know, the majority of it is out of your system, right?
1:19:18 What are the big misconceptions about intermittent fasting?
1:19:21 It seems to be a really great tool for a lot of people
1:19:28 to be able to control their calorie intake in studies where they don’t prescribe calories.
1:19:32 So they don’t match calories. They just tell people either intermittent fast or,
1:19:37 you know, follow a diet. People in the intermittent fasting groups tend to lose
1:19:39 more weight and have better improvements in their blood markers.
1:19:43 But it’s not because of anything magic about intermittent fasting.
1:19:46 It’s because it’s placing them in the calorie deficit.
1:19:47 Did they see that in the studies?
1:19:52 Yeah. So when they do like randomized control trials where they’re actually controlling
1:19:57 calories, like one great extreme version of that would be there was a study on alternate
1:20:03 day fasting, right? So people would do one day fast, complete fast the next day,
1:20:10 eat 150 percent of their maintenance calories. Whereas the group that was just doing continuous
1:20:14 was doing 75 percent of their maintenance calories the entire time.
1:20:18 Both groups lost pretty much the same amount of weight.
1:20:23 Actually, the continuous group retained a little bit more lean mass and lost a little
1:20:28 bit more fat mass. But, you know, that’s a pretty extreme form of fasting.
1:20:33 If you look at the more traditional like 16, 8 or those sorts of intermittent fasting,
1:20:39 you see pretty much the same retention of lean mass compared to just continuous kind of eating
1:20:44 programs. The myths that really get tossed around are a lot of them around longevity.
1:20:50 And people saying, well, because whenever I talk about this, people will say,
1:20:56 “Well, I don’t fast for weight loss. I fast for health. I fast for longevity and autophagy.”
1:21:05 So what I’ll tell you is there’s actually more evidence that calorie restriction increases
1:21:10 autophagy than intermittent fasting. But intermittent fasting or fasting does increase
1:21:17 autophagy. So let’s talk about what this is. So autophagy is a type of basically
1:21:21 lysosomal protein breakdown. So there’s a few different ways that the body breaks down like
1:21:28 old misfolded proteins or just things that need to be turned over. One of them is through this kind
1:21:35 of lysosomal protein degradation, which the lysosome is an organelle in the cell that can kind of
1:21:40 engulf these old proteins and break them down. And then you get the amino acids from those proteins
1:21:45 that can then be recycled to make new proteins, right? Calorie restriction increases autophagy.
1:21:51 Exercise increases autophagy. Fasting can increase autophagy too. But you’ll hear people say, well,
1:21:54 you got to fast for X period of time because it’s when autophagy turns on.
1:21:57 Like three days or something. 72 hours or something.
1:22:04 Not true. So this is autophagy protein breakdown is always occurring regardless.
1:22:10 It’s the relative rate that changes, right? But there’s no evidence that fasting increases
1:22:16 autophagy more than eating the same amount of calories just spread out over time.
1:22:22 Now, let me give you an example, right? Let’s say somebody fasts for 20 hours out of the day
1:22:28 and they eat for four hours, right? And again, the example I’m using is because some people
1:22:33 say, well, I don’t do it for weight loss. I do it for just health benefits. So let’s say
1:22:37 over that day, they’re eating their maintenance level of calories. They’re just eating in a four
1:22:44 hour period, right? Whereas let’s say X person just eats three, four meals and same amount of
1:22:49 calories. During the fasting period, sure, your autophagy is going to, your rates going to go up.
1:22:54 But then during that four hours, when you’re eating, you’re having to eat a lot more food
1:22:58 during that four hours, that’s what’s going to happen. It’s going to go way down. So while
1:23:07 the, your rate of autophagy may be lower eating continuously throughout the day compared to the
1:23:14 time when people are fasting, when those people, when the faster start eating in that window,
1:23:19 whatever it is, since they have to eat more during that time, autophagy drops, whereas
1:23:23 the people eating continuously, their autophagy is now a higher rate.
1:23:28 What if you’re going through some kind of disease or some kind of inflammation or whatever?
1:23:33 Is there a use for intermittent longer term fasting in that context? So say if I was,
1:23:36 I don’t know, if I had some inflammation or there was something wrong with me,
1:23:40 is there ever a use case for sort of 72 hour fasts that will
1:23:46 hold me, I guess, in a greater depth of autophagy?
1:23:49 This is difficult because there’s not really direct research looking at this.
1:23:56 So I, what I will say will be speculation and I’m comfortable speculating on it.
1:24:02 Again, let’s just break it down to equating weekly calories, right? Because
1:24:09 if we’re comparing apples to apples, right, we have the, we know caloric restriction will increase
1:24:14 autophagy. So if intermittent fasting places somebody in the calorie deficit overall,
1:24:20 that’s like what we call a confounding variable, right? So if we assume over the course of a week,
1:24:24 two people assume genetically identical, right, eating the same amount of calories,
1:24:28 but somebody is eating them in four days, whereas the other person’s just spreading them
1:24:32 across seven, but the person eating them in four days is fasting for three days,
1:24:39 well, their rate of autophagy and fat oxidation is going to be much higher during those three days,
1:24:44 right? But then when they’ve got to fit all the calories they normally would in,
1:24:48 over those four days, now it’s going to be much lower and the people eating continuously are
1:24:54 going to have a higher rate of autophagy and fat oxidation. Body’s smart. It strives for homeostasis.
1:24:58 Now, I’ll have some people say devil’s advocate argument is, well, what if you’re not compensating
1:25:02 for the calories during those four days? Well, then now you’re in a calorie deficit
1:25:07 and you can’t disentangle the effects from the calorie deficit, right? So in what I’ll say is in
1:25:11 the tightly controlled randomized control trials that we have where they equate calories between
1:25:18 intermittent fasting groups versus not fasting groups, we don’t see differences in weight loss
1:25:25 and we don’t really see much difference in biomarkers of health, HBA1c, markers of insulin
1:25:30 sensitivity. You have some studies where you’ll see a little bit lower fasting blood glucose with
1:25:35 intermittent fasting when they test it, but I think this is an artifact of the way they test it.
1:25:38 Is it okay if I get kind of deep into the weeds on this one? Go ahead.
1:25:43 So one of the problems is if you’re going to compare apples to apples, if you fast for longer,
1:25:48 your fasting blood glucose will be a little bit lower. If somebody is eating continuously, for
1:25:55 example, and then they’re fasting for say 12 hours before the test, but the person in the
1:25:59 fasting group has fasted for now 16 hours because they were in a defined eating window,
1:26:05 their blood glucose test out maybe a little bit lower, right? And so you see this in some of the
1:26:09 studies, not all, but some of them. But then you look at the longer term markers of insulin
1:26:16 sensitivity like at HBA1c and you don’t typically see differences when they’re equating calories.
1:26:24 And so again, people will hear what I’m saying and it’s always like the filter, right? What I’m
1:26:29 actually saying and what they hear is, “Lane said intermittent fasting sucks and it’s worthless.”
1:26:33 No, if it is something that you can be consistent with and it helps you control your intake,
1:26:38 it is a fabulous way for a lot of people to control their calorie intake and lose weight.
1:26:42 Here’s a question for you. Hit me.
1:26:45 I think I know the answer, but it turns out a lot of people don’t know the answer because
1:26:51 I was doing some research ahead of time about the types of things people struggle with, are
1:26:54 interested in, and I actually did some research into what people are googling the most. And it’s
1:26:58 interesting that people are googling the most when it comes to weight loss. Can you guess what it is?
1:27:05 Kidogenic diet? Well, even more than that is how to lose belly fat.
1:27:08 Oh, interesting. And it’s not so that people are really,
1:27:15 really obsessed with losing this fat right here. And I think there’s some exercises out there and
1:27:20 some diets that purport to be able to help you lose just targeted fat in this region.
1:27:28 What do you say to that? The answer is you may be able to spot reduce, but
1:27:35 I think practically it’s kind of irrelevant, and I’ll explain why. So first of all, the question is,
1:27:43 is that visceral or liver fat, or is that just where you tend to store subcutaneous fat? And
1:27:47 that’s hard to know unless somebody’s done like an MRI and that sort of thing. Because some people
1:27:52 just store their subcutaneous fat in different areas, right? Some people tend to have it more in
1:27:56 their legs, like women in particular, if they store it, they tend to store more in their legs,
1:28:00 whereas men tend to store it more here. What’s the difference between subcutaneous and visceral?
1:28:09 So visceral is the viscera around the organs. Visceral fat and liver fat or gram for gram,
1:28:14 far more metabolically unhealthy than subcutaneous fat. So that’s the point of differentiation.
1:28:19 But the stuff that causes you to lose subcutaneous fat, which is the fat under the skin,
1:28:26 is the same stuff that typically helps you lose liver fat or visceral fat. So one of the things
1:28:30 I tell people, if we’re talking about trying to lose body fat or trying to get any big health
1:28:36 outcome, let’s pick up, if we’re going to try and pick up as much in weight of boulders as we can,
1:28:41 you’re going to focus on the big rocks first, right? And then if you’ve got the big rocks,
1:28:45 you can worry about picking up some pebbles. But don’t drop the big rocks to pick up the pebbles.
1:28:52 And I think a lot of people end up doing that. So before you go into some very specific protocol
1:29:01 on trying to lose belly fat, go back, zoom out. Can I sustain this long term? Because if you can’t
1:29:06 sustain it long term, it’s not really going to matter. You’re better off finding something that
1:29:14 you can sustainably do, consistently execute long term, because if you lose enough overall body fat,
1:29:21 eventually you will lose the belly fat. And I mean, part of it is just our genetics and how we store.
1:29:25 It seems really stubborn though. It seems like for me, it feels like it’s the last thing to go.
1:29:31 I will say they’ve shown that exercise specifically can help target liver and visceral fat
1:29:37 to even without a calorie deficit. So even if people maintain their body weight, they tend to
1:29:42 lose liver and visceral fat just through exercise. So let’s talk about exercise and weight loss.
1:29:48 So hot topic, hot topic, very hot topic. I would love an answer here on, you know,
1:29:52 one school of thought is that exercise isn’t particularly useful for weight loss, because
1:29:58 if I go out for a run, I then come home and I just eat more. And this is kind of a multifaceted
1:30:05 issue in the sense that there’s a biochemical components to that hypothesis. I mean, my brain
1:30:09 produces more of the hunger hormone, so I get more hungry. But then there’s also a psychological
1:30:14 part to that hypothesis where people say it’s actually because I went for a run,
1:30:19 so I think I deserve more food. So then I eat more cake because I feel good about myself.
1:30:27 So this is where the way the study is conducted really matters. So let’s take it mechanistically
1:30:33 first. If we look at tightly controlled studies where they have people exercise and they’re having
1:30:37 them, you know, eat the same amount of calories as people don’t, exercise absolutely helps with
1:30:46 weight loss. Absolutely. The hunger side is a little more complex. So first off, there’s a
1:30:54 compensation of exercise where Hermann Ponser did this research, basically showing that if you
1:31:02 burn 100 calories from activity, you don’t net 100 calories of loss. Your body actually compensates by
1:31:08 your BMR reducing a little bit or you become maybe a little bit less spontaneously active,
1:31:16 right? So there’s a partial compensation, but on average, again, everybody’s different,
1:31:21 but on average, it’s about 28 calories per 100 calories. So if you do 100 calories of activity,
1:31:26 you’re still netting 72. It’s just not as much as you thought you were going to get, right?
1:31:31 So there’s that aspect to it that exercise doesn’t cause the amount of weight loss that you might
1:31:38 predict based on how much you do, right? But it still contributes to energy expenditure.
1:31:45 The more interesting thing is what you touched on, which is intake, which is actually counterintuitive
1:31:50 to what you think. On average, in the studies, yes, people tend to eat a little bit more,
1:31:58 but the compensation is not nearly complete, okay? So peep exercise on the net actually has
1:32:02 an anorectic effect. Now, I’m not saying for every person, there are some people who,
1:32:08 whether it’s psychological or it actually is physiological, they exercise more and they do
1:32:14 feel more hunger, right? But on average, in the studies, exercise either has a neutral or positive
1:32:19 effect on appetite. And there actually is one classic study from the 1950s, I reference it in
1:32:26 the book, where they looked at Bengali workers and they didn’t have an intervention, but they just
1:32:33 looked at sedentary, lightly active, moderately active, very heavily active, right? So think
1:32:40 heavy construction labor workers. And from lightly active to heavily active, they almost
1:32:45 perfectly compensated their energy intake, right? By eating more food. By eating more to match the
1:32:52 activity, right? Just intuitively, the sedentary people ate more than the lightly active. And
1:32:57 if I recall correctly, about the same, maybe a little bit more than the moderately active folks.
1:33:04 Being sedentary actually dysregulates your appetite. When you are active, it actually
1:33:11 sensitizes you to your body’s own satiety signals. They work better. So I actually think
1:33:17 the main benefit of exercise for weight loss isn’t because you burn so many calories. It’s one,
1:33:22 because exercise helps with lean mass retention, which we know that the more lean mass you have,
1:33:27 higher energy expenditure, and it also helps prevent weight regain. So that’s one aspect.
1:33:32 But the actual amount of calories you expend in exercise, I mean, if you look at the actual
1:33:36 research literature, it’s not that much. I mean, you go to the gym for two hours, you might burn
1:33:43 500 calories, something like that. Half my salad. Right, right. You eat a donut, boom, gone, right?
1:33:50 But people tend to have better appetite regulation when they exercise, when they’re active.
1:33:56 And there’s multiple components to it. Like I said, better sensitivity to satiety signals,
1:34:01 but then the psychological aspect of goes the other way. There are some people who will say,
1:34:05 “Well, I’m exercising. I’m going to eat this.” But other people exercise and they actually,
1:34:08 all their habits start to get better. I’m one of those people as well.
1:34:11 Right, right. I always say, if I want to fix my diet, I need to go to the gym.
1:34:15 Right. I always say that because when I said it to, I think some of my friends in my team
1:34:19 of the day, if I’m going to go and work out for an hour, and I’m going to go do a HIIT workout
1:34:24 for an hour, for example, it’s so painful that the last thing I want to do is throw it all away
1:34:30 with like a fucking Krispy Kreme. So I sudden, my diet then falls in place suddenly. And that’s
1:34:35 always, whenever I go through a moment in my life where I’m like, “Steve, you’ve lost control of your
1:34:41 diet here, it’s how can I get myself to the gym?” As the catalyst to get my diet in order.
1:34:47 And so that’s the problem with a lot of, not the problem, but just the limitation of a lot of
1:34:53 studies, which is, especially like epidemiology. When I say epidemiology, it’s like, this group
1:34:59 does this, this group does this, and we’re looking at what other things happen. Well,
1:35:08 people don’t do things in isolation. So you’ll hear a study like, I’m thinking of something,
1:35:20 oh, people who eat more protein have higher rates of this. Okay, well, if we look at where most
1:35:25 people get their protein sources in the Western world, it’s highly processed, energy dense foods,
1:35:32 protein tends to just be a proxy for overall more calories. And so, is it the protein or is it all
1:35:42 the calories they’re taking in, right? And again, people, their lifestyles and habits tend to go
1:35:50 together, right? Like, you hear X group was more prone to heart disease, but then they also tend
1:35:56 to smoke more, drink more alcohol. It is very difficult to disconnect those habits and those
1:36:02 lifestyle habits, right? They call it healthy user bias in studies. It’s one of the things we
1:36:06 have difficulty with. And that’s why, you know, again, human randomized control trials are kind
1:36:12 of our gold standard, because I think this is important to touch on the word randomized, okay?
1:36:18 So if we’re talking about epidemiology or cohort studies, so cohort is a little bit better than
1:36:21 your standard epidemiology because they’re taking groups of people and they’re following
1:36:27 them for years. So each person is kind of their own control, right? But still,
1:36:33 people who are more healthy tend to do more overall healthy things. People who are more
1:36:37 unhealthy tend to do more, it’s hard to disconnect those two. But when you do a study and you say,
1:36:41 okay, you know, one group is going to do a low carb diet, one group is going to do a low fat diet,
1:36:47 and we’re going to randomize them, right? Why is that important? Well, what if we let people
1:36:53 self-select, okay? Well, if they just say, go whichever group you want. Well, and I’m just
1:36:58 speculating, right? But for example, low carb diets, very hot right now. A lot of people may have a
1:37:03 very strong clickivity to go to that group thinking it’s healthier, having a more positive viewpoint
1:37:09 of it, and they may clean up a lot more other aspects of their life. But if we randomize,
1:37:16 what we can assume through that randomization process is that any inherent characteristics of
1:37:21 the subjects are going to be equally distributed amongst the groups. And that is why that’s so
1:37:27 important. And I remember I was listening to a breakdown on a podcast one time and
1:37:32 they were discussing a study that was looking at intermittent fasting versus continuous energy
1:37:37 restriction, so just normal dieting. And basically, the crux of the study was they found no real
1:37:42 difference in weight loss. And the person on there was a very pro-intermittent fasting person. They
1:37:47 said, well, maybe the one group was eating a bunch of junk food or whatever, and I’m thinking,
1:37:54 this person doesn’t understand randomization, right? That would be a very odd thing to just,
1:38:00 it actually would lead you to the conclusion that intermittent fasting might cause you to
1:38:05 seek out junk food, right? So again, randomization is not perfect, but the reason it’s so important
1:38:13 is because it helps us get rid of that healthy user bias. And I think, again, if people,
1:38:19 but the downside to randomized control trials is you can only run them for so long because
1:38:24 they’re controlled. Is your view on keto the same as you’ve kind of said about all diets,
1:38:28 or does keto stand in a bucket of its own? And I asked this in part because a lot of doctors
1:38:33 kind of prescribe keto as a diet for certain people that have epilepsy and certain types of
1:38:38 inflammation and brain related issues. Okay, so epilepsy is a specific case. Essentially,
1:38:47 for epilepsy, ketogenic diet is actually a very effective treatment. It provides a usable
1:38:53 substrate, ketones for the brain, and they see it decrease the incidence of epilepsy. In fact,
1:38:58 my friend that I’ve referenced, Dom D’Agostino, he actually started studying the ketogenic diet as
1:39:05 for deep water Navy SEAL divers because a lot of those divers at depth get seizures, and they found
1:39:11 that doing the ketogenic diet helped reduce those seizures. Now, unfortunately, people have taken
1:39:16 that to say, well, any brain problem, just give them the keto diet, there’s way less evidence to
1:39:21 support it for other brain problems. But let’s talk about, there’s a lot of claims around the
1:39:27 keto diet, low carb diets. It seems to function for fat loss, the same way as other diets,
1:39:34 through a calorie deficit. There have been several really well done randomized controlled trials,
1:39:40 as well as a couple of meta-analyses now. If they compare diets that are equal in calories and protein,
1:39:48 but vary the carbohydrate and fat amount anywhere from low fat, high carb to low carb, high fat,
1:39:56 no real differences in weight loss or fat loss. In fact, it actually, the meta-analysis showed
1:40:01 it slightly favored low fat diets, but it was a really non-clinically significant amount.
1:40:06 But how can that be? Because one of the things people say, well, when you do a keto diet,
1:40:14 you burn way more fat. I think if there’s one sound bite that might make it, this might be it.
1:40:21 So yes, you do burn more fat on a ketogenic diet. Why? Well, when you do a ketogenic diet,
1:40:26 you’re eating higher fat, lower carb. So you’re eating more fat, you have more fat substrate to
1:40:33 burn, but also you’re keeping insulin low. And so you burn more fat because insulin reduces
1:40:40 your rate of fat oxidation and reduces lipolysis. So people take that and they go, well, it’s better,
1:40:44 right? So here’s what we’re getting into. We were talking earlier about mechanisms versus outcomes.
1:40:49 Right? But when we look at these studies where they actually measure the outcome of fat loss,
1:40:57 they don’t see differences between low carb and low fat. How? If they’re burning this much more fat.
1:41:05 Fat loss and fat burning or fat oxidation are not the same thing. Fat oxidation is part of fat
1:41:14 loss, but it’s only one side of the coin. So what you lose or gain fat is fat balance.
1:41:20 You are always storing and burning fat simultaneously. Okay? On a low carb,
1:41:26 high fat diet, you are burning a lot of fat, but you’re also storing a lot of fat.
1:41:35 And here’s why. Carbohydrate really isn’t stored as body fat. Your body almost exclusively has to
1:41:42 burn it when you take it in. They did a metabolic tracer study where they basically labeled carbohydrates
1:41:47 in fats. You can label them with a stable isotope and you look at where the label winds up, right?
1:41:56 Less than 2% of the fat stored in adipose in a mixed diet originated as carbohydrate.
1:42:05 What’s adipose? Fat cells. Over 98% came from dietary fat. So here’s the rub.
1:42:14 If you are doing a low fat, high carb diet, you’re not burning much fat, but you’re not
1:42:21 storing much fat either. If you’re doing a low carb, high fat diet, you’re burning a lot of fat,
1:42:26 but you’re also storing a lot of fat. So what actually matters in terms of fat balance is
1:42:32 energy balance. Are you eating more calories than you’re burning? That is what will end up
1:42:38 dictating that. And that’s why we just don’t see differences in actual loss of body fat between
1:42:43 those groups. So this is where we got into, earlier before we started the cameras, a lot of people
1:42:49 get very focused on these biochemical mechanisms. And one of the things, I was that way when I was a
1:42:55 undergrad in biochemistry. And I think doing that first was great. Doing biochemistry first was great.
1:42:59 And then going to nutrition and having a good advisor who zoomed me out and said, “Hey, you’re
1:43:07 pretty far in the weeds. Zoom back out and look at the whole picture.” Because mechanisms are great.
1:43:12 It’s good to ask questions. And when we see an outcome, and when I say outcome,
1:43:18 fat loss would be an outcome, actual loss of body fat, a change in HBA1C, a biomarker,
1:43:24 that’s an outcome. If there’s an outcome, there will be a mechanism to support that outcome.
1:43:28 But just because there’s a mechanism doesn’t mean there’s an outcome. And what I mean by that is
1:43:36 all these biochemical pathways, these mechanisms, this is a symphony. And when you do one thing
1:43:43 someplace, a lot of times it’s compensated someplace else. An outcome is the summation
1:43:49 of hundreds, if not thousands of different biochemical pathways coming together. And the
1:43:55 example I used with you earlier was getting focused on mechanisms is like looking at a mutual fund
1:44:01 and getting focused on the individual stocks in it. And saying, “Don’t invest in that mutual fund.
1:44:07 Look at those two stocks that are down by 40%. But why do I care if the overall mutual fund is
1:44:13 up by 20%? I care about the overall. That’s the outcome.” And so I’m not against necessarily
1:44:20 looking at mechanisms, but I’m always going to go to first, “Okay, do we actually have human trials
1:44:26 that are measuring the thing that we care about?” Not a proxy measure, but the actual thing.
1:44:33 And if I can invoke a former episode on here, if that’s okay, somebody said, “Well, be careful
1:44:37 drinking caffeine because it stimulates cortisol release and that can cause you to store belly fat.”
1:44:45 So that’s a mechanism, right? If you look at the actual outcome data in terms of body fat and
1:44:52 visceral fat or liver fat with caffeine, you actually see a neutral positive effect.
1:45:00 So, okay, maybe that small increase in cortisol, maybe that’s a negative,
1:45:06 but if caffeine is also stimulating your BMR and also possibly doing some other things like
1:45:12 increasing fat oxidation, okay, maybe there is that negative component to it, but it’s obviously
1:45:18 outweighed by the positive components that end up in the outcome that we’re looking at, right?
1:45:24 So, without being scientists and being able to understand all of the little instruments in
1:45:29 the orchestra, right? Because that’s what we try and do sometimes. We try and figure out all the
1:45:32 little instruments in the orchestra, but really you’re saying listen to the music.
1:45:37 Listen to the music. And listening to the music in that analogy would be
1:45:42 like looking at the scales or would be just looking for the outcomes.
1:45:43 The outcome. I mean…
1:45:49 And also, I guess one thing more would be this point about consistency and sustainability,
1:45:55 because like we all have a bias to want big rewards for small investment
1:46:00 and that sells, right? Five-minute abs, that’s what we want.
1:46:05 Complete physique overhaul in six weeks, add an inch to your arms in 12 weeks.
1:46:08 What I’m really fascinated by is what it takes at a psychology level, and we kind of talked
1:46:12 about it already because we talked about your why and all these things, but you can say that.
1:46:17 You can say to someone like me in business, it’s going to take you 10 years to get there,
1:46:23 or it’s going to take you 10 years to become the world record holder in this powerlifting activity.
1:46:27 But for someone to say, “Yep, fine.” They’re going to have to be a little bit,
1:46:31 there I say, twisted. They’re going to have to be a little bit.
1:46:35 It is the ability, I think, one of the most underrated things of the ability to delay
1:46:41 gratification, right? And not in all areas of my life, but in that particular area,
1:46:44 I’m really good at it.
1:46:47 And I wonder how much of a choice you had at a deep level.
1:46:52 You know, it’s interesting. So I told the story of how squatting was hard for me.
1:46:57 I had been training hard for three years, and I had like these chicken legs.
1:47:00 I used to get made fun of on the bodybuilding forum so bad.
1:47:07 And I remember thinking three, four years in, I’m like, man, people was like,
1:47:11 “Dude, your genetics suck. Why are you going to keep doing this?”
1:47:16 And it’s kind of the let’s find out thing. I remember literally having this internal
1:47:24 dialogue of, you know, maybe they never will be big, but I’m going to commit myself to training
1:47:32 hard consistently for 10 years. And if I don’t have a decent set of legs at that time,
1:47:35 then I’ll allow myself to quit if I still feel that way.
1:47:42 And I always say paralysis by analysis and perfectionism has killed more dreams than
1:47:49 failure ever could. Because one of the worst things you can do is have no action.
1:47:57 Inaction is way worse than failure. Because if you fail, at least you can learn something from it.
1:48:00 You try stuff. I’m sure as an entrepreneur, you’ve had a lot of stuff fail, right?
1:48:05 But you learn from that and you go, “Okay, well, that didn’t work. We’ll try this.”
1:48:09 And eventually, if you’re trying enough stuff and you’re walking the path,
1:48:11 it may not have worked out the way you drew it up,
1:48:15 but you get something better than what you started with, right?
1:48:19 Maybe not exactly what you wanted. Maybe you get something better though.
1:48:26 And I’ll tell people that’s why action is so much more important than
1:48:36 trying to get everything laid out perfectly. Just start where you are right now as imperfect as it
1:48:42 is. Start walking the path. And if you are walking the path, you’re going to screw up,
1:48:49 learn from it, and do better the next time. And eventually, again, maybe you don’t get
1:48:52 exactly what you want, but I bet you get something pretty good.
1:48:58 I got really obsessed with the idea of failure because of business, because I take stock on
1:49:01 the things that move me forward the most, the things that were most course-correcting.
1:49:05 And it was never an accolade or an achievement. It was always when life says,
1:49:10 “You were wrong about that.” And from that, I have this really clear phrase in mind that
1:49:13 failure is feedback. Feedback is knowledge and knowledge is your power.
1:49:20 And I then went on to study Jeff Bezos at Amazon and booking.com. And Thomas Watson,
1:49:25 who was the richest man on earth at one point, he was the founder and CEO of IBM.
1:49:30 And through all of their writing, they are absolutely obsessed with increasing their
1:49:34 failure rate. So much so, Thomas Watson was once asked in an interview after one of his
1:49:39 employees had failed at something that cost the company, I think $400 or $600,000. He said,
1:49:43 “Are you going to fire him?” He goes, “Fire him. I’ve just spent $400,000 training him.”
1:49:46 And then when I looked at Amazon’s shareholder letter, it said the same thing. It says,
1:49:51 Jeff Bezos wrote, “We have to be the best place on earth to fail.”
1:49:56 And he goes on to say in life, it’s not about perfecting that perfect swing. It’s how much
1:50:00 you swing because in the case of Amazon, you’ll never know about endless.com, which is in the
1:50:05 graveyard or the fire phone, which is in the graveyard, or a9.com, which is in the graveyard.
1:50:10 But you know AWS, which will make them $70 billion a year. So he goes on to basically say,
1:50:15 uses a baseball analogy where he goes, “In baseball, you swing, you get a great hit,
1:50:19 you might get four runs, but in life, you swing, and you get a great hit,
1:50:24 you can just absolutely change your life.” So it’s really about making sure you’re swinging.
1:50:28 Yeah. I mean, company Bryant said, I love this quote, and I might butcher it a little bit. But
1:50:37 he said, whether you win or lose, if you win, it’s great. But you’re still going to wake up the
1:50:41 next day and do the process over again. If you lose, it sucks. You still got to get up and do
1:50:48 the same process over again. And it’s that willingness to… Somebody said confidence
1:50:54 is the willingness to wade into uncertainty. And I really liked that quote because I mean,
1:50:59 that’s at the foundation of any big goal that you’re going after. There is no certainty. You
1:51:09 can’t guarantee anything in life. And so we can say it’s important to fail. But when you’re actually
1:51:14 in that moment, you’re not like, “Yes, this failure is great. I love this.” It’s very stressful and
1:51:22 it sucks. It really, really sucks. But I can tell you in most cases, the best stuff in my life came
1:51:31 out of some of the worst stuff in my life. And if I hadn’t been willing to try and wade back into it
1:51:38 repeatedly, I might not have gotten some of the great things that have happened in life. And
1:51:44 whether you win or lose, you’re still going to have to wake up and do the process over. But if you
1:51:50 stop doing the process, if you stop trying, if you stop walking the path, that’s where you really
1:51:57 lose. I think a lot of this, like getting back to the diet stuff, a lot of this, the diet hacks and
1:52:05 stuff like that, it’s people trying to shortcut that painful process. But that process is where
1:52:09 you are going to learn so much about yourself and where the actual fulfillment is.
1:52:16 So that kind of brings me on to Zempec because obviously that’s a big subject at the moment
1:52:22 with dieting, which is we’re talking about quote unquote shortcuts here. What’s your opinion on
1:52:29 Zempec? Okay, I think I’m going to give a very balanced view of this. Overall, I think it’s
1:52:41 net positive. And here’s why. So go 100 years back, 200 years back, whatever. Very rarely did you see
1:52:50 an obese person, right? It was just we didn’t have such crazy access to hyper palatable, extremely
1:52:59 energy dense foods, right? Even go back 60 years, right? If you wanted a cake or a cookie, you had
1:53:11 to go to the bakery. There was barriers to get there. Now we are surrounded 24/7 with unlimited
1:53:19 access to cheap, calorie dense, hyper palatable foods. And again, we know people who tend to
1:53:26 become more obese have a greater reward response to food. Here’s the real tough part and where you
1:53:36 can tie it back to addiction, right? So imagine you were a gambling addict. And I said, well,
1:53:39 we don’t want you to gamble so much, but you got to gamble a couple of times a day.
1:53:45 We don’t want you to drink so much, but you got to drink a couple of times a day.
1:53:50 You know, don’t do blow so much, but you got to do it a couple of times a day.
1:53:54 Now, I mean, again, people argue about food addiction. Is there really food addiction?
1:53:59 Is there not? But imagine being somebody who struggles with appetite regulation,
1:54:07 but knowing you have to eat. You can’t just not eat, right? So I think if we look at the actual
1:54:12 data on Ozympic, what we’re talking about, just to give the background biochemistry,
1:54:19 are GLP-1 memetics. GLP-1 is a hormone that’s secreted by your gut in response to feeding,
1:54:25 and it acts on the GI to tell you you’re full and also acts on your brain to tell you that you’re
1:54:31 full to decrease your appetite. And these things work very well. We see, on average, about a 15
1:54:37 to 20% reduction in body weight in the studies. So pretty much the most effective anti-obesity
1:54:44 treatment that’s ever been created. Now, GLP-1 itself, its half-life is only a couple of minutes,
1:54:49 but what they’ve done is they modify the protein so that now the half-life is much,
1:54:54 much longer. So it has the opportunity to act on the brain and the gut for a much longer period
1:54:59 of time. And again, very effective. So what are the potential downsides?
1:55:04 What does that do to the body then? So that they’ve extended the sort of half-life of the protein,
1:55:08 and then that means that I feel satiated for longer?
1:55:10 Oh yeah. So I don’t feel hungry.
1:55:17 Yeah. In fact, it can be such a powerful effect. A lot of people, it feels like almost nauseating.
1:55:26 Like you hear, again, every drug has side effects, right? Some people initially get nausea, vomiting,
1:55:34 that sort of thing. It tends to decrease with time. But on an anecdotal level, I’ve talked to
1:55:39 people who’ve done the drug, and they’ve said that some have said, even after they stopped,
1:55:46 the best way they described it is, “I don’t have the food noise anymore. I’m not always thinking
1:55:52 about food, or I’m not thinking about food nearly as much. It calmed it down for me.”
1:55:53 Even after they’d stopped.
1:55:57 For some people, even after they’d stopped. So perhaps there’s some long-term changes
1:56:02 to the brain chemistry that happened, we’re not sure. Or perhaps they just got more confident
1:56:06 because they lost some weight and realized, because it’s not increasing your metabolism.
1:56:11 That’s one thing to point out. So I’ve had some people say, “You know, I have a slow metabolism,
1:56:15 so I’ve got to take ozympic.” And I’m like, “Well, you’re going to be disappointed because it’s
1:56:18 acting on the appetite side of things.” So some people will say, “Well,
1:56:27 the devil’s advocate of me is, ‘Well, they could just eat less.’” Right. But if it was that easy,
1:56:35 people would just be doing it. So some of the criticisms of the drug are, “Well, we see a lot
1:56:40 of lean mass loss.” I don’t know if you’ve heard that. Some people have said that.
1:56:47 I don’t think that’s as much of a concern as some people do. And the reason is, most of these studies
1:56:52 with GOP1 memetics, the people aren’t resistance training. And so if you look at studies where
1:56:59 people aren’t resistance training and they just diet and they’re not like their normal protein,
1:57:07 not high protein, you see anywhere from like a 30% to 40% of the weight they lose is from lean mass.
1:57:13 And ozympic is right about in that area, which makes sense because they’re eating less. And if
1:57:18 they’re not resistance training or eating high protein, again, they’re feeling very full. So
1:57:24 hard to eat high protein because protein tends to be quite satiating. So I don’t see that as being
1:57:30 like more necessarily at risk for lean mass loss. I think what I would say that could be problematic
1:57:36 is if people are so full, they may not be choosing the most helpful food choices
1:57:41 because they feel full. If they just end up eating less of the foods they’d normally eat,
1:57:47 these calorie dense, hyperpalatable foods, and they don’t modify their habits, when they get off
1:57:56 of it, they may be prone to regain. And so I look at this as if I have to pick, I’m pro on board with
1:58:01 these. Just say it should be done in conjunction with nutritional counseling and lifestyle
1:58:07 modification, right? Like encouraging people to exercise, educate them on healthy food choices.
1:58:11 Because I think it’s a great option for a lot of people.
1:58:16 Do you think there’s enough data, especially when we think about sort of long term studies on the
1:58:20 impact of ozympic? Because one of the things I’ve come to believe in life is that there’s no such
1:58:24 thing as a free lunch. And this sounds too much like a free lunch to me right now, you know?
1:58:31 So here’s what I’ll say. We don’t have, I mean, long term 10, 20 year data. Some people said,
1:58:35 well, there’s a risk of thyroid cancer. I mean, I think that was from like some kind of rodent
1:58:40 study where they were using a much higher dose than normal. I’m always, I tell people, be very
1:58:46 careful. Less than 50% of animal studies end up translating into like actual human outcomes.
1:58:49 What we say earlier, there’s no solutions, there’s only trade-offs.
1:58:50 Yeah, yeah.
1:58:57 So maybe there is some side effect, some downstream effect that may have a negative effect.
1:59:03 If it helps somebody lose 50, 100 pounds, I’m still going to bet that it’s a net positive,
1:59:07 right? Could have been better if they did it through diet and exercise alone,
1:59:13 maybe, but most of those people weren’t going to get there anyway, or it’s going to be really,
1:59:17 really tough for them to get there. It’s funny because a lot of fitness industry people are
1:59:22 very, very much against this drug. And then they tell you what fat burner that you can buy with
1:59:28 the discount code in their bio. And I’m like, wait, wait, this math doesn’t math to me. So
1:59:33 your fat burner that probably doesn’t work okay, this drug that actually works, not okay.
1:59:35 Make it make sense.
1:59:37 What do you think of the fitness industry?
1:59:45 I have a love hate with it. The big problem with the fitness industry is a couple of things.
1:59:50 First is there’s really no barrier to entry, right? Like if you want to be a medical professional,
1:59:53 there are some barriers to entry, right? Like you got to do some work.
2:00:03 Anybody can call themselves a fitness coach. There’s no barrier at all. And anybody who has
2:00:12 a six pack will get a lot of clients because as I found out, science is way less sexy than just,
2:00:18 hey, look, you know, and, you know, it’s funny. I, for a couple of years, I went up a weight
2:00:21 class in powerlifting. I went up to the 105 kilogram class, which is 231. Now, I’m not,
2:00:28 I’m not fat at 231, but I put it on here quickly, right? My face will get pretty,
2:00:33 in fact, there’s a reason there’s a nice beard here because it’s like makeup for men, right?
2:00:40 Like it hides my chubby cheeks. And man, the comments on my videos and I actually saw I sold
2:00:46 less stuff. And then when I dropped back down at powerlifting and I was leaner, I sold more stuff.
2:00:53 And I’m like, this is so weird. Like my knowledge isn’t any different. It’s the same dude. And it’s
2:00:58 not like when I was 231, that was on purpose. I didn’t get there by accident. It wasn’t like I
2:01:03 forgot how to do nutrition, you know, but if you were a normal person and you didn’t know anything
2:01:07 about fitness and there was two PTs in front of you, you go to the one that looks better.
2:01:13 You go to the one you want to say, I want to look like that. And that’s, that’s tough. It’s a,
2:01:19 it’s a very tough thing to wade through. And what I will say, people ask me all the time,
2:01:22 do you think a personal trainer needs to look the part? Do you think, you know,
2:01:30 a medical professional needs to look the part? I say, no, but people like to see application.
2:01:36 And I do think there is value in being able to tell, one of the things I was able to tell my
2:01:39 clients from competing and bodybuilding and powerlifting and doing all these hard things,
2:01:43 I say, hey, I’ll never ask you to do anything I have not done or would not be willing to do
2:01:49 myself. Right? And we, we said earlier that humans aren’t logical. They’re emotional, irrational,
2:01:54 and all these things. And we, to conserve mental energy, I mean, funnily enough,
2:02:00 I read about this rat study. I don’t need rat studies. Most of my research was in rats.
2:02:04 But it just, it just goes to show how the brain works. And they put a rat into a maze and put
2:02:07 chocolate at the end of it. The first time it goes through the maze, the rat’s brain is going
2:02:12 crazy. Second time it goes through the same maze, its brain is basically, there’s like
2:02:16 almost no activity there. It’s the activity has dropped and it’s turned into autopilot.
2:02:21 The study goes on to talk about how we’re always looking for shortcuts to decisions.
2:02:27 What I would tell people is, again, you can never turn your brain off. Right? Yeah. And
2:02:34 it’s, it’s just hard. It’s hard to identify who knows what they’re talking about. I mean,
2:02:38 you know, I’ll be on this podcast and then, you know, people say, well, what about this guy?
2:02:46 This guy has a doctorate and he has this and that’s one of the reasons I actually started
2:02:50 my research review where I review studies or me and my team review studies every month and try to
2:02:56 like translate it into plain language because I did see this like kind of gap, right? And trying
2:03:02 to build this bridge because it’s so hard for the average person to know. And one of the things,
2:03:08 actually I missed talking about was if you and I are having a conversation, if we’re on a certain
2:03:15 topic, it becomes clear to both of us pretty quickly whether or not one of us is more knowledgeable
2:03:20 on the topic or whether about the same, right? Like pretty quickly can tell. Like if we’re going
2:03:25 into investments and how to start a company and marketing, like you’re the man for that, right?
2:03:30 It comes to nutrition. Like you can tell pretty quickly. Hopefully I know what I’m talking about.
2:03:36 You’re not lifting me. Right. But what we’re really bad at is if two people
2:03:41 are disagreeing on a topic, both of whom are more knowledgeable than us on said topic,
2:03:45 we pretty much have no way to sort out who’s right or wrong.
2:03:52 Let’s talk about Zoe, who you may know because the response of this podcast and I’m an investor in
2:03:57 the company. You guys know health is my number one priority. Zoe’s growth story has been absolutely
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2:04:44 you guys. What is the most important thing we haven’t spoken about today? Gosh, I think we touched
2:04:49 on a lot of stuff. But let’s talk about resistance training real quick. A lot of people think resistance
2:05:00 training is just for vanity and for meatheads. And we see now resistance training decreases
2:05:06 the risk of cancer, decreases the risk of heart disease, drastically decreases the risk of sarcopenia,
2:05:13 of falls, of broken bones. People talk about calcium, vitamin D. Probably the single best
2:05:18 thing you can do to improve your bone density is to resistance train. And you’ll hear people say,
2:05:26 “Well, I’m 40 or I’m 50 or I’m 60. It doesn’t matter. You can still put on muscle.” In fact,
2:05:33 right across the street from where I was doing my PhD, they took basically frail elderly people
2:05:40 who had trouble sitting and standing up and put them through, I think I want to say it was a 16
2:05:46 week program. And resistance for them started out just squatting to a high chair. And then slowly
2:05:50 they lowered it down, lowered it down. And some of them started using weights as well. They saw
2:05:58 significant increases in their muscle mass as older people. So you can still put on muscle even
2:06:07 getting older. In fact, who is a, I think Alan Aragon, he’s another good nutrition person on
2:06:12 social media. He was posting a video of his father showing, I think his father was like over 80 years
2:06:18 old and was doing goblet squats with like a 50 pound kettlebell. The amount of quality of life
2:06:24 improvement you can get in people from either resistance training throughout the course of
2:06:31 life or just getting them started regardless of age. It’s a huge improvement in quality of life.
2:06:33 Do you know what I think though? I think, I’m going to be honest here, right?
2:06:43 This morning I was, I got up, right? And my lower back hurt a little bit. And I remember thinking,
2:06:48 the first thought is, oh God, I’m getting older. That’s why that is. And I remember thinking, oh,
2:06:52 I should probably question that thought because that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way.
2:06:59 If you start to see yourself becoming less mobile and less flexible, your brain, you chalk it off
2:07:03 as an inevitability of aging. Therefore, you do nothing about it. Therefore, it gets worse.
2:07:07 Whereas really, this other thought came into my mind, which was, okay, go to the gym and train
2:07:16 your lower back to strengthen it. One of the most damaging messages that physicians have given
2:07:21 is when people have pain in an area, they tell them to stop doing activity.
2:07:29 As you age, you are going to have pain. You can be strong in half pain or you can be weak in half
2:07:39 pain. I love my dad. Great dude. Very sedentary, right? He has really bad sciatica. He doesn’t
2:07:47 lift weights. But if you lift weights, it actually has been shown to decrease back pain,
2:07:53 like on the whole. Like when you do what I do, where you’re lifting cars, essentially,
2:08:01 yeah. So it’s funny. I’ll post videos of me lifting once a week, just because most people
2:08:05 don’t care about me lifting. They just want to get information out of me. And the comments are
2:08:12 always, “Isn’t that bad for your lower back?” Or, “Isn’t that going to…” They’ll say, “Well,
2:08:18 you’ve had so many injuries. I’ve been doing this 25 years. Show me an athlete who’s competed
2:08:24 at a really high level for two decades, who also doesn’t have a laundry list of injuries and pain.”
2:08:31 Tiger Woods swings a golf club. He had all kinds of back issues and knee issues and leg issues,
2:08:39 right? Activity is medicine. Yes, if you’re doing it at a very high level, athletes,
2:08:47 what’s the dosage needed to improve at the highest level of exercise is always going to be
2:08:51 right up against what will get you injured, because you get to the point where you simply
2:08:56 can’t recover from it enough. And that’s why, actually, if you look at what actually prevents
2:09:02 injuries, it’s not stretching. It’s not mobility work. It’s not warm-up. It’s sleep,
2:09:07 psychological stress reduction. Those are two of the main movers. And just load management,
2:09:12 appropriate load management. We could get into a whole thing on pain science. But one of the
2:09:19 really damaging messages is, “Well, took an MRI or lower back, and I’ve got a bulge disc,
2:09:25 so just can’t lift out anymore.” If you imagine my lower back right now, I promise you I have
2:09:32 bulge and herniated disc. I’m sure I do, but I don’t have pain. And there was a study done
2:09:40 where I think people over 40 who were asymptomatic had no back pain. I think almost half of them
2:09:49 had bulged or herniated disc. So we’ve got this model where it’s, “Oh, if you have pain,
2:09:57 you must have damage. And if you have damage, you must have pain.” And it doesn’t really work
2:10:04 that way. I mean, look at people who lose limbs. They have pain not just at the stump,
2:10:09 but where the limb used to be. They sense pain. Pain is just as much a psychological experience
2:10:16 as it is an actual tissue damage experience. And when you get things that are painful for years,
2:10:23 your tissues heal in six to 12 months for most things. But if you’re still having pain,
2:10:30 that’s because you’ve developed a sensitivity to that particular area. And so one of the worst
2:10:37 things for pain is becoming inactive. But the reason physicians do this, and orthopedics do this,
2:10:46 is it’s straight up a liability coverage. Because if somebody says, “You have pain,
2:10:51 but you could probably go back and you back off a little bit on your lifts and progressively work
2:10:55 it back up, you’d probably be fine.” Well, if they go in and then they injure themselves,
2:10:58 guess who’s going to complain about the doctor? Give them a one-star review and say,
2:11:06 “They caused me to blow up my back.” But if you look at this stuff, I mean, on the whole
2:11:10 resistance training decreases pain. I want to build my muscles, Lane,
2:11:15 like your muscles. I want the muscles like yours. Question on the way that I’m working out,
2:11:20 just it’s sort of practical advice. Do I have to work out to sort of overload
2:11:24 till I fail to build my muscles so that they’re like yours?
2:11:28 Great question. So if I say, “Built muscles like me.”
2:11:32 What should you do? Put your biceps up for three hours? Three hours a day, you know.
2:11:34 Can we use AI to shrink them?
2:11:39 Stephen just having the biggest arms in the podcast.
2:11:47 What matters for building muscle, we think. We have the amount of hypertrophy research
2:11:50 in the last 10 years has absolutely exploded compared to what it was before,
2:11:53 and hypertrophy is muscle growth is what we’re talking about.
2:12:01 What seems to be the cause of it is what’s called mechanical tension. So just creating a lot of
2:12:04 attention on the muscle because now we’re actually having studies coming out. We’re doing like
2:12:10 hard stretching. They actually see increased muscle growth from like sustained hard stretching.
2:12:17 There was a study done with the calf muscles. So they put them in this contraption where basically
2:12:23 they’re like stretching their calves and holding it there. I think, I can’t remember what the
2:12:27 duration was, but it was a long time, right? And they were comparing that to traditional
2:12:31 resistance training. And it was, I mean, it was a pretty painful stretch. I think they said it was
2:12:37 like a seven or eight or nine out of 10 in terms of pain level for this stretch. But they built
2:12:42 as much muscle as people who were doing calves three times a week, resistance training. I think
2:12:47 they were doing these stretches every day. So it was pretty intense. But that’s really interesting,
2:12:52 right? Because even if you don’t have weight, you can still create that tension through stretching,
2:12:59 right? Now the stretching, again, not your traditional like, you know, it’s pretty intense
2:13:04 and pretty painful. I would argue that resistance training is probably a more practical methodology
2:13:12 to getting it and more fun. But in terms of mechanical tension, it does to maximize muscle
2:13:19 growth. So we always have to be careful about like a lot of things could cause muscle growth.
2:13:23 But if we’re talking about absolutely maxing muscle growth, you do have to get close to
2:13:29 volitional failure, which is basically like if I’m doing, say, a bicep curl, right? Or maybe a
2:13:38 bench press, better example. I’m doing reps, reps, and again, that’s failure, right? The research
2:13:44 suggests you don’t have to go to failure, but you have to get pretty darn close within a couple
2:13:50 reps, you know? And if you’ve never trained to failure, it’s actually really hard to know what
2:13:55 that feels like. And so like, and actually in research studies where they take people who are
2:14:01 beginner, intermediate, and they ask them like they have them do a set and they ask them, “Hey,
2:14:05 how many more reps could you have gotten?” They underestimate by like five. Yeah.
2:14:11 Especially difficult when you’re training alone. Something like bench press, if I fail the thing
2:14:15 back at Foxen. So I’m like, I’ve put in a buffer of maybe three reps there just so that I don’t
2:14:24 embarrass myself in front of, you know. Exactly. Mechanical tension appears to be cumulative.
2:14:28 And what I mean by that is if it was just about creating as much tension as possible,
2:14:34 just load the bar up and just do one rep, right? So it’s cumulative throughout a set.
2:14:43 Now, the way I like to describe it is intensity is the medicine and the number of hard sets,
2:14:47 which number of sets close to failure is the dosage. Now, when you first start,
2:14:53 you can get results on a very low dosage because your body has literally done nothing. It’ll grow
2:14:57 off anything. As you progress, I mean, remember when you first started lifting, you had five,
2:15:01 10 pounds every week, right? Like clockwork. Well, eventually you can’t add that anymore, right?
2:15:06 But you can still, a lot of times you can increase the reps, right? With the same weight.
2:15:09 Well, eventually you can’t do that anymore. So how do you continue to progress? Well,
2:15:14 you can add more hard sets and- What do you mean by hard sets?
2:15:19 Volume. So for example, if I’m, let’s just take bench press again, right? Let’s say I’m doing
2:15:25 three sets close to failure and I eventually stop progressing. I can add another set. And that is
2:15:30 still another form of progressive overload, right? Because again, mechanical tension is cumulative.
2:15:38 And I mean, there is some debate about this in the resistance training field. But for the most part,
2:15:45 I would say it’s generally agreed upon by most experts that higher volumes improve muscle growth
2:15:50 relative to lower volumes, meaning more hard sets. And it doesn’t really seem to matter about
2:15:55 machines versus free weights either, seem to cause equal kinds of muscle growth. So
2:16:00 when it comes to building muscle, the cool thing is you got a lot of options. And if you have pain
2:16:04 doing one thing, you know, joint pain, whatever, lower back pain, try something else.
2:16:10 Fantastic news for me. Laine, we have a closing tradition on this podcast.
2:16:14 Okay. Where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they’re going to
2:16:19 leave it for. And the question that’s been left for you. Oh, I like this. I know what my question
2:16:26 will be. Your one’s a really difficult one. Okay. So I don’t get to see until I open this book,
2:16:31 but Jack has a little peek before I ask the guest. Was it any? No, it actually wasn’t Andy.
2:16:34 Because there was one person between them and they’re the person that left this question for you.
2:16:42 Very difficult question, I think. Have you ever stayed in a relationship that was harming you?
2:17:02 And why? Yeah. Because of a lot of reasons, one being perception from other people,
2:17:12 I felt like I had to make it work. The other being because of some of the remnants of bullying,
2:17:24 I found it very hard to trust myself in personal relationships. I could be easily
2:17:29 talked into me being the problem for everything. And I’m not saying that I was never the problem,
2:17:33 because I definitely was. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in personal relationships,
2:17:41 and I’ve had my own toxic behaviors that I know I do. But yes, I have definitely stayed
2:17:49 in a relationship too long. And I think one of the hardest things for me and for a lot of people
2:18:01 is knowing when is it time to give up and when is it time to push through? And I don’t think we have,
2:18:09 I don’t think anybody has a clear parameter, but for me, staying in was not trusting myself,
2:18:17 not trusting my gut, and feeling like I had to make it work. Because of the kids or because of
2:18:23 this or because of whatever. Because of a whole host of many things. And again, I think
2:18:33 I’m not a relationship expert, but I’ve gone to therapy for eight years now. One of my good
2:18:40 friends, John Deloni, is an expert on this, and very rarely does a relationship break down because
2:18:50 of just one person. It’s usually a dynamic. But I think that is one of the hardest things to figure
2:19:00 out. When is it time, because we talked about not quitting, these sorts of things, but there’s
2:19:09 also like, sometimes it’s not quitting, it’s just moving on to possibly something better, right?
2:19:20 And learning from what happened. And yeah, that is a really tough question. And I’ve definitely
2:19:25 stayed in things too long. And not just like romantic relationships, but also like business
2:19:35 partnerships, friendships, where it became highly toxic. And again, I think the next hardest thing
2:19:41 to do after that is looking back and going, what did I contribute to that?
2:19:50 Lane, in my life, I’ve lost people. I’ve lost a lot of people along the way from grandparents,
2:19:56 friends, lady who used to was sort of my proxy mother when I was younger, died in a motorcycle
2:20:02 accident. And it’s only in those moments that you kind of have the regrets of all the things that
2:20:09 you could have said. You wish you could go back. And often for people somewhat similar to me,
2:20:14 somewhat maybe similar to you, who have had struggles with expressing their emotions,
2:20:20 we probably have the greatest amount of regret because we found it harder to maybe
2:20:23 tell these people when we had the chance. So my closing question for you, which is a question
2:20:33 of my own, is if right now you could send a message to your kids, and I’m going to let you
2:20:38 send one as well to your granddad and your dad. And it was the last thing you were going to say.
2:20:51 What would you say? Okay, my kids, I would say, of course, I love you more than anything.
2:21:00 You, God dang it. You fulfilled a whole of my life. I didn’t know I had.
2:21:11 And I wish I could go back and do a lot of things differently. But I love you more than anything.
2:21:25 And I don’t care what you do with your life. Find something that you love. And it is a positive
2:21:35 contributor to the world and go to that and try to make somebody else’s life better along the way.
2:21:47 And to my dad, I would say, thank you, like for not following in your dad’s footsteps
2:21:55 and not like stepping in front of that wildfire and saying, not on my watch. Sorry.
2:22:05 You know, my dad’s not perfect, but both my mom and dad are really great people. And, you know,
2:22:17 they’ve struggled with some health issues. And, you know, if I had to say one thing,
2:22:24 it would be, you know, thanks for always believing in me, always having my back, accepting me for
2:22:29 who I was. In some ways, I feel like they’re the only people who always accepted me for who I was.
2:22:35 And they never put expectations on me for what I want to do with my life. When I told them I
2:22:39 wanted to get in the bodybuilding, they were like, oh, this seems weird. But, okay, when my first
2:22:45 bodybuilding show, they were the loudest people up there supporting me, you know? There, you know,
2:22:51 when I won Worlds in 2022, I was going through a very hard personal time in my life. It’s basically
2:22:58 the front end of a divorce. And it had just kind of come to a head, like just the whirlwind kind
2:23:06 of chaos stuff. And my mom called me, they were watching online with my kids. And my mom was like,
2:23:11 son, how the hell did you just do that? With everything going on in your life,
2:23:17 how did you do that? And, you know, they’ve just always been such big supporters of me,
2:23:23 even when they didn’t understand, you know, my mom didn’t understand like, you know, every,
2:23:29 what are you studying again? What are you studying again? But, you know, came to my PhD exit seminar,
2:23:35 you know, mom was in every baseball game growing up. Dad was on the road a lot, but, you know,
2:23:42 couldn’t, but came to everything he could. You know, they showed up for me a lot. And I knew,
2:23:47 you know, I knew I was loved. And so if I had to say anything to them, it would just be thank you
2:23:53 for everything that you did. And when I had kids, I was like six weeks in, I called my mom, I’m like,
2:23:59 oh my God, you did all this stuff for me. And I gave you all that grief. I’m so sorry, you know.
2:24:04 So yeah, they’re amazing. And if I had to say something to my grandfather, it would just be,
2:24:11 God, you know, I would give somebody asked me this the other day, I would give anything to have
2:24:16 five more minutes with my granddad and ask him so many questions about life that I just didn’t
2:24:21 know enough about to even ask the question, you know, because the man just oozed wisdom,
2:24:26 you know, but if I had to say anything, I’m like, I would just say thanks for what you did for your
2:24:33 family. You know, my grandfather, when he passed, I mean, this is a man who had like his first
2:24:40 heart attack in his fifties and this back in the 19, like late, like 1970s when like open heart
2:24:47 surgery was like carpentry, you know, his expert, his like life expectation, I think was five years
2:24:51 at the time. He was in the Battle of the Bulls, the deadliest battle in World War Two.
2:24:59 One more story. He, I forget what country he was in, but he was supposed to go on leave
2:25:06 the next day and a convoy was coming through and it was going to the place where he was going to
2:25:12 go on leave, right behind the lines. And his commanding officer said, hey, why don’t you just
2:25:19 take it? Like just go today. That night, a German soldier dropped a grenade down and killed his
2:25:29 entire unit. And sorry. Dang, I didn’t think he’d give me to cry on this podcast, man, so much.
2:25:36 And he said, you know, after that day, I just, everything was, I was living on borrowed time,
2:25:42 in my opinion. He’s like, I should have been down there. And he said, I get up every day,
2:25:48 I look at the obituary and if I’m not in it, I figure I’m good for another day. And he had,
2:25:53 I think, three heart attacks, three open heart surgeries, two strokes. He had a boat fall on
2:26:01 him, long story. So this guy, we always joked he had nine lives. And whenever he was on his death
2:26:07 bed, I mean, we kind of, we knew like six weeks in advance, he had kind of multi system, just
2:26:15 basically old age. And it never occurred to me, I was 20 years old. It never, sorry, 22.
2:26:24 It never occurred to me, the idea of how you die, as being so important. And he went exactly how you
2:26:30 would draw it up. You know, he was in the hospice, so he was at his home. His whole family was around
2:26:37 him. And again, he was the funniest man I ever knew. And I walked in, and all the seats are taken.
2:26:47 And he’s still lucid talking. And I said, he had his little like portable toilet, you know,
2:26:51 but he had been using it, whatever the seat was down. And I said, do you mind if I sit here,
2:26:55 because I was going to sit next to him. And he said, yeah, you can’t clog that one up, because I
2:27:01 was known in my family for clogging toilets, right? So he’s still cracking jokes on his death bed.
2:27:05 And even like the doctor asked him when he was basically the doctor telling him, hey,
2:27:09 you’ve got like six weeks left. Doctors said, hey, we, you know, you’re an organ donor, but
2:27:16 we can’t really use anything. You know, it’s all bad, basically. Would you be interested in
2:27:21 donating your body as a cadaver for med students? He goes, I always wanted to go to med school.
2:27:28 I figured it’s the only way I’m getting there now. So just like had this great outlook on life,
2:27:35 you know, and just when he passed, I remember what,
2:27:47 sorry, my mom looking at him and saying, it’s okay, dad, it’s okay, we’re going to be okay.
2:27:57 And I wasn’t even sad because I’m like, that guy, he got every bit out of it. He milked life for
2:28:03 everything he had, had a great family, and so many people who loved him. And if I could just
2:28:09 have that kind of impact, even half that impact on my family, oh man, that’d be worth so much to me.
2:28:12 So I would just tell him, thank you for being an inspiration.
2:28:19 Lane, you have been, you’ve been exactly that. You’ve had an impact on millions of people’s
2:28:24 of lives. And I think back to that young kid, five, six, seven years old. And I think back to
2:28:27 what you said about fighting your way out of it, you fought your way out of all of that
2:28:32 to now inspire and impact millions and millions of people’s of lives that you’ll never get to
2:28:36 meet in such a positive way in the same way and with the same integrity and fight that your
2:28:40 granddad so clearly had. It’s funny because when you went through all of those people,
2:28:47 I saw an element of you in every single one of them. And I think that’s a credit to them,
2:28:51 but it’s also a credit to you. And I know that if your granddad was, I’m sure he’s watching us now,
2:28:59 cracking jokes. But I’m sure you’d be so incredibly proud of you because of the work
2:29:02 you’ve done, but continue to do. So thank you so much for your time today. Thank you,
2:29:08 especially for your honesty and openness, because you have no idea how many people that
2:29:12 side of you, the willingness to be honest about faults and nuanced about yourself,
2:29:15 as you are within your work, will have on millions and millions of people’s of lives.
2:29:18 I feel richer for having this conversation. So thank you, Lane.
2:29:25 Thank you. I’ve never cried a podcast like that, but I actually, it was kind of cathartic.
2:29:28 I was thinking of a lot of different things while I was going on. So thank you for having me on.
2:29:52 [Music]

0:00:05 This is super scary. 50% of men who kill themselves have no history or evidence of mental illness.
0:00:10 What causes people to kill themselves is they try to connect with others and they get rejected.
0:00:14 You know, it’s, it’s, I, I can feel the hurt. I can feel the loss.
0:00:24 Dr. Aloe Phenogea is a psychiatrist, Harvard Medical School instructor,
0:00:29 real-life monk who uses his own addictive past to help millions of people improve
0:00:33 their own mental health. Everyone is getting screwed, but there’s a crisis with men.
0:00:38 People telling us that being a man means that you’re, that you’re toxic, that there’s a patriarchy,
0:00:42 that your testosterone level makes you violent. So men are struggling right now and the rest of
0:00:48 the world says, no, you’re not. You’re privileged. And these people have been literally killing
0:00:52 themselves because no one has been listening to them, except there is one group of people who
0:00:56 says your life sucks. And that’s these toxic masculine people. And these guys say, I will
0:01:00 show you a way to make it better. And that’s when things go back. And this, by the way, is how people
0:01:05 wind up with addiction. Because when you look at addiction, what happens is we use a substance
0:01:09 or a technology as an antidote to pain. So I’ve worked with people who have pornography addiction,
0:01:14 for example, that will have work on one screen and they will literally have pornography on the
0:01:18 second screen. You’re joking? No, very common. And this is where there’s a big problem in the
0:01:22 world today. Now you’ve got this young generation of women as well that are exploding in their
0:01:26 suicidality. Loneliness seems to be getting worse and worse. What is the remedy to this?
0:01:30 So this is something that’s very important to understand. Everyone who is listening to this
0:01:31 podcast needs to.
0:01:37 Quick one, quick favor to ask from you. There is one simple way that you can support our show.
0:01:41 And that is by hitting that follow button on this app that you’re listening to the show on
0:01:48 right now. This year in 2024, we’re trying really, really hard to level up everything we’re doing.
0:01:52 And the only free thing I’ll ever ask from you is to hit that follow button on this app.
0:01:55 It helps the show more than I could probably articulate and it allows us,
0:02:00 enables us to keep doing what we’re doing here. I appreciate it dearly. Onto the show.
0:02:08 Dr. K.
0:02:09 Stephen.
0:02:12 With all of your work and all of the content you’ve produced,
0:02:16 if someone’s just clicked on this podcast now,
0:02:21 what do you think they’re going to get out of this conversation? What do you think they’re
0:02:22 going to walk away with?
0:02:29 I hope what they’ll walk away with is the realization that you are the instrument of your
0:02:34 life. And understanding that fundamental instrument that you use to live your life,
0:02:38 your body, your mind, will ultimately help you accomplish whatever you want.
0:02:43 And what is the opposite mindset to that, to understanding that you’re the instrument of
0:02:47 your life? What is the typical mindset that people have that go through their lives without
0:02:49 the realization that they are the instrument of their life?
0:02:56 I think it’s assuming that something outside of them will fix things inside of them, right?
0:03:00 So people will think like, okay, if I get a promotion, then I’ll be happy. If I date this
0:03:05 person, then I will be happy. If I have this amount of money, I will be happy. Everyone assumes that
0:03:10 things outside of you will fix things inside of you.
0:03:14 Why is this subject close to home for you?
0:03:23 Because I used to believe that. So I struggled a lot. I mean, I’m by all definitions of the word
0:03:32 an absolute failure. I failed out of college, was finished school at the age of 35 or 36.
0:03:37 You know, it took me a long time to kind of get on my feet and figure out what I was doing in my
0:03:43 life. And I realized that like the reason that I was screwing up so much is because I always
0:03:47 thought that accomplishing something outside of me or achieving some kind of goal would make me
0:03:54 happy. And I didn’t understand that all of my problems came from me. I also blamed all kinds
0:03:59 of things outside of me. So I would blame circumstances. I would blame my professor’s
0:04:07 bias. This girl is, you know, she doesn’t see the goodness that I have in me. She can’t recognize
0:04:12 how awesome I am. So I kept on blaming things outside of me instead of accepting responsibility.
0:04:19 Take me from that point onwards. So what happened that brings you to sit here today
0:04:22 as an accomplished individual, as a doctor, and so on?
0:04:27 So I think my journey starts with failure. So I think we think about failure as a negative
0:04:33 thing, but I think that that’s what actually got me started on my journey. After failing out of
0:04:38 college, I went to India and I stayed in a monastery or ashram for about three months,
0:04:44 and it completely changed the way that I looked at the world. So what I sort of realized is that,
0:04:51 kind of like what I was saying, is that, see, I had assumed that things outside of me
0:04:58 were responsible for things inside of me. So as a simple example, I attached my sense of
0:05:05 self-worth to getting an A. So when I went to college, I was planning on becoming a doctor,
0:05:11 and as any Indian kid wants to do, I wanted to go to Harvard. And so I had sort of all these
0:05:15 grand dreams of what I wanted to accomplish in life and how I wanted to be a good force in the
0:05:21 world and all this kind of stuff. It’s all ego. And so what sort of happened is, even though I
0:05:25 wanted all of these things, I assumed that all of that accomplishment would bring me happiness.
0:05:30 It’s when I went to India that I sort of discovered that like no amount of external
0:05:34 accomplishment will bring you lasting happiness. And this is what we sort of see. These are the
0:05:39 people that I work with now. You know, I’ll work with someone like a banker or a doctor or a content
0:05:45 creator. And for all of these people, it’s like once you accomplish your goal, your mind moves the
0:05:49 goalposts. So you got promoted to vice president, now you need to be director, then you need to be
0:05:55 managing director, then you need to be, you know, there’s always more. The mind always wants more.
0:06:01 So chasing after all of that will never lead to lasting happiness. So once I sort of started to
0:06:08 realize that, I kind of gave up all of my desires for accomplishment. And the real paradox there is
0:06:15 that as I let go of all of my goals, I started to become more successful. And so instead of trying
0:06:21 to be something great, I just focused on, you know, small targets, I sort of focused on my
0:06:26 spiritual practice. I tried to become a monk and take vows at the age of like 22. And my teachers
0:06:33 rejected me. So they said, I said, I’m ready to forsake my life. And they said, you have nothing
0:06:38 worth giving up, you have your life is meaningless, like you have nothing worth giving up. So go back
0:06:44 to the United States, rise as high as you can, finish a doctoral degree, actually get something
0:06:48 worth giving up. And then at the age of 30, if you still want to take vows, we’ll take you.
0:06:52 What situation must you have been in at that point though, before you went off at sort of 21
0:06:59 years old to that ashram to be so prepared to give everything up? Because I heard that
0:07:04 reading through your story that you were, you had addictive behaviors at that point already.
0:07:08 Yeah. So I struggled a lot with video game addiction. So I started playing video games
0:07:14 when I was very young. And then in high school, it really started to impact my grades. In college,
0:07:19 I was basically playing video games all day long. Instead of like going to class and stuff like that,
0:07:24 like I remember waking up the morning of my Spanish final. So this is my final exam.
0:07:29 And then realizing that I like wasn’t very prepared for it. So I just turned off my alarm clock and
0:07:35 went back to sleep and therefore guaranteed failure. And so where I was mentally was just in a really
0:07:41 bad place. So I had all of these goals and aspirations. And I was so frustrated with myself
0:07:48 that I couldn’t bring myself to do what I wanted. So I knew that I had to study more every single day.
0:07:52 I would wake up and be like, I have to study more. I have to catch up. I’ve fallen behind.
0:07:57 And so I’d have all of these thoughts. And no matter how much I wanted something,
0:08:03 it seemed like my body or my brain would just not listen to me. It wanted the video game more.
0:08:08 It wanted something else more. And so what I really was was I had no control over my life.
0:08:11 I was probably depressed if I had seen a psychiatrist. I’m sure I would have gotten
0:08:18 diagnosed with something. Brief periods of suicidality, basically waking up at noon every day,
0:08:23 playing video games all day long. And I also remember like before I had to play to the point
0:08:29 of absolute exhaustion. Because if I put my head on the pillow and I did not pass out,
0:08:34 all of the thoughts that I was keeping at bay with the video games would come rushing back
0:08:39 about how I’m ruining my life day after day after day after day. And I was just sort of sinking
0:08:43 deeper and deeper and like falling into a pit that I could not climb out of.
0:08:49 So the ashram in India tells you that you can’t give up your life.
0:08:53 What happened then? And why did you specialize in psychiatry?
0:08:59 So when I went to med school, I mean, when I was in med school, I was, I still had ego.
0:09:02 So I mean, I still have ego now. But so I was going to like, like,
0:09:06 combine Eastern medicine and sort of focus on evidence-based complementary and alternative
0:09:12 medicine. And I was going to be an oncologist and be a real doctor and save lives. But what I really
0:09:21 found is that in med school, a couple of things, one is my favorite organ was the mind. So what I
0:09:26 fell in love with in India was the mind and sort of the internal sense of self and all this kind
0:09:31 of stuff. So I really liked that. And then I think that my people were in psychiatry. So the other
0:09:37 thing that happened is I was trying to decide between internal medicine and oncology and psychiatry.
0:09:42 And so one of my mentors in med school told me, like, do this. So do one month of each and then
0:09:47 just ask yourself, which one do you enjoy more? So on the one hand, when I was thinking about
0:09:51 oncology, this was also chasing a desire, right? I had this idea that I wanted to be a real doctor,
0:09:55 right? Because those are like, I want to cure cancer. Like, that’s like, let’s be like a real
0:10:00 solid doctor and do that. And then what I noticed was that now what internal medicine has become is
0:10:04 very like sitting in front of a computer. So when you work in a hospital, like eight hours of the
0:10:08 day, I’m sitting in front of a computer and you spend very little time with your patients. And
0:10:14 then over time, I started to realize that like, psychiatry is the only field of medicine that
0:10:20 we’re losing the war in. So if you look at medical outcomes for things like bypass surgery and stuff
0:10:24 like that, those are really good. And this is really insane to really think about. So we can take
0:10:29 your body, Stephen, and we can give you a heart from a different human being. We can give you a
0:10:33 kidney from a different human being. We can give you a liver from a different human being. If you
0:10:38 have a part of your body that doesn’t work, we can literally rip it out of you, stick in a new one,
0:10:44 and you will survive. So outcomes in every field of medicine are improving except for mental health.
0:10:49 So mental health is the one area where addictions are getting worse, depression is getting worse,
0:10:55 suicidality is getting worse. And this is in spite of advances in neuroscience. So something
0:11:01 has happened where we’ve missed something about the mind and everyone is getting sicker. So like,
0:11:06 this was the problem that really attracted me. And this isn’t about my desire. This is sort of
0:11:12 where we introduce the concept of dharma or duty. So I recognize that I’m lucky. I’m this kid who
0:11:17 got to spend seven years studying to become a monk in India. So I travel back and forth,
0:11:22 but I spent my summers there. So I had this really unique perspective. And then I got to train at
0:11:26 Harvard Medical School. And what am I supposed to do with this knowledge, right? Like, this is 15
0:11:32 years that I’ve devoted to understanding how human beings work. And like, I had this very kind of,
0:11:37 you know, chic private practice in Boston, where I worked with very, very successful people and
0:11:43 helped them achieve. And then I sort of realized like, that’s not what I’m here for, right? So I’ve
0:11:49 gotten 15 years to learn all of this stuff. And like, there’s no shortage of people lining up to
0:11:54 help CEOs with their mental health. There’s absolutely a shortage of people helping 25 year
0:11:59 old incels who are like on the internet, who everyone wants to throw in jail because they’re
0:12:04 very hateful and misogynistic and things like that. So I sort of realized that like, okay,
0:12:07 like this is what I’m supposed to do. So I’m going to do it.
0:12:12 Okay, so I’ve got a big question. But before I just to tee up that big question,
0:12:15 you said you had this practice in Boston, where you’re working with sort of high
0:12:21 profile individuals, etc. What is the full spectrum of individuals that you’ve spent
0:12:24 time working with on a one on one basis or through your practice?
0:12:29 I worked with people out of MIT incubators, CEOs, entrepreneurs, things like that. So a lot of
0:12:35 high performance people. But then I’ve also worked with like, losers, let’s say. So this is also more
0:12:39 intensely. This is everything from 25 year old kid who’s living in his mom’s basement playing video
0:12:46 games all day, two people who are even homeless. So I’ve worked with like basically like the whole
0:12:52 spectrum. And yeah, you use the word losers there. You did a little air quotes for anyone that can’t
0:12:58 see you right now. I’m really interested when you talked about incels as well, whether the way
0:13:05 society is in the way that we’re heading in terms of clarity over what it is to be a man
0:13:12 has had any impact on those people that you refer to as incels. Because we now have this
0:13:17 digital world that we can live our lives in as a distraction from the real world. And there’s
0:13:23 now more confusion than ever over what it is to be a man and the role of a man in it. And then we
0:13:27 look at the stats around suicidality. And I think in Europe, the biggest killer of men under the age
0:13:33 of 45 is themselves currently. Is the shifting idea of what it is to be a man having an impact on
0:13:41 people’s sense of self and their purpose 100%. So there’s a there’s a crisis that’s going on in men.
0:13:44 And people think that this is new, but I don’t think it’s new. It’s always been there. So if you
0:13:50 look at like, you know, even 50, 60 years ago, 80% of suicides are still going to be men. So
0:13:54 historically, men have been killing themselves for like 100 years and no one’s been paying attention.
0:14:00 We’re just noticing now because the problem seems to be getting worse. So there’s a couple of things
0:14:06 that are really interesting to understand. So one is that if we look at what technology is doing
0:14:11 to our brains, the first thing that it’s doing is it is externalizing our attention. So if you
0:14:18 look back, like let’s say 1000 years ago, as human beings, we spent a lot more time with ourselves.
0:14:23 So let’s say that you and I go out hunting. And then let’s say you shoot an arrow at a deer and
0:14:28 you miss and then I shoot an arrow at a deer and I hit. So in this moment, I’m superior to you.
0:14:32 And then we pick up the deer and we’re carrying it back. And then we have about two or three hours
0:14:37 to take that emotional insult and we kind of process it. We just give our mind space to
0:14:43 process it, which it does automatically. Now, if you look at what happens in people’s days,
0:14:49 they don’t actually have any time to process what happens to them because we are so constantly
0:14:54 distracted by external things. So I don’t know if you’re like this, but I was in this point where I
0:15:00 was idiotically efficient. So I would wake up in the morning and I would listen to a podcast while
0:15:06 I’m like doing my exercise or whatever. And then even when I’m cooking, I’m listening to a lecture.
0:15:12 And then when I’m walking to the train, I have earbuds in and I’m listening to a lecture there.
0:15:16 On the train, I’m reading. I wanted my life to be completely efficient. I didn’t want to waste a
0:15:21 single moment. I literally listen to the news in the shower. Right? So we don’t want to waste time.
0:15:25 And so if you really think about it, where’s the attention of your mind? Your mind is pointed
0:15:31 outside of you. And so then what happens is once we do not pay attention to ourselves,
0:15:37 we lose sight of our internal signals, literally in the same way that if you raise a child in a dark
0:15:44 cave, the photoreceptors in their eyes won’t develop. They will atrophy. So anything that the
0:15:48 mind does not get access to will start to atrophy. If I don’t practice Spanish, I’m going to forget
0:15:54 Spanish. The mind is very, brain is very efficient to organ. So as we externalize our attention,
0:16:00 we lose sight of our internal signals. We don’t know who we are anymore. And now if I don’t know
0:16:06 who I am, how do I figure out who I’m supposed to be? I pay attention to the outside. Where are
0:16:10 the answers? They’re on the outside. So this person is talking about masculinity. This person is talking
0:16:14 about what it means to be a man. This person is talking about what it means to be a man. And
0:16:18 now since I don’t have any internal source of information, I’m trying to figure out what it
0:16:24 means to be a man from the outside world. And this is when men get truly fucked. Because what it
0:16:28 means to be a man, we are getting all kinds of mixed signals. So on the one hand, it means being
0:16:33 physically fit. On the other hand, it means being a provider. On one hand, it means having sex with
0:16:39 as many women as you can find. On the other hand, it means having sex with just one woman and being
0:16:43 a really solid man and being a good father. And then there’s also people telling us that being a
0:16:48 man means that you’re shit, right? That you’re toxic, that your testosterone level makes you
0:16:52 violent, that you’re evil, that you’re privileged, that there’s a patriarchy, all this kind of stuff.
0:16:57 So we’re getting all this information from the outside about what it means to be a man.
0:17:03 And so the other like, there are all kinds of interesting ramifications of this. So men in
0:17:07 today’s society are not allowed to complain. So if you complain and you’re a successful person or
0:17:10 a privileged person, everyone is going to think you’re arrogant. Everyone is going to think, oh,
0:17:14 my God, who’s this fucking guy? This guy doesn’t know what my life is like. How does he have any
0:17:18 right to complain? And even your mind will tell you this. You’ll look at these people and you’ll
0:17:22 be like, yeah, I don’t have a right to complain. But now we need to stop for a second and think
0:17:27 about what it does to your psychology when you as a human being are not allowed to articulate your
0:17:32 suffering. I’ve worked with people who have grown up in abusive households where children will say
0:17:37 to their parents, mommy, daddy, I’m hurting. And the parent smacks them across the face.
0:17:42 How dare you? You’re so lucky. You don’t realize the sacrifices I make for you. It’s traumatizing
0:17:47 to the child when they say, I am suffering and no one listens. This is what we’re doing to the
0:17:52 generation of men. People are saying, I am suffering for a hundred years. Men have been
0:17:58 killing themselves. 80% of suicides are men. The most dangerous thing for a man under 45 is
0:18:02 themselves. And these people have been literally killing themselves because no one has been listening
0:18:07 to them. So in the same way that you grow up with it as a child in a household that’s abusive,
0:18:12 where no one takes you seriously, no one listens to your suffering. And now we even have successful
0:18:17 men who are not allowed to complain. So the psychological impact is the same. Anytime you
0:18:21 have a human being who is suffering in some way and they cannot find connection with another human
0:18:26 being, they cannot find compassion with another human being. That person is going to feel isolated.
0:18:31 And if you look at the statistics on suicide, it’s very interesting. So the number one thing
0:18:36 that correlates with male suicide is not depression. And this is super scary. There’s one study I saw
0:18:42 recently that suggests that 50% of men who kill themselves have no history or evidence of mental
0:18:47 illness. And this, I believe the statistic in my clinical practice because I know what depression
0:18:51 looks like. I know what bipolar disorder looks like. And half the men that I’ve worked with,
0:18:57 at least, are not actually mentally ill. See, mental illness means a pathology of the mind,
0:19:01 which means that the mind is malfunctioning. Most of the suicidal men that I work with,
0:19:06 they’re not, their mind isn’t malfunctioning. They genuinely have a life that is no longer
0:19:10 worth living. They’re looking at things and objectively realizing that there’s no way out of
0:19:15 the situation. So they turn to suicide. So I know it’s kind of like a very controversial statement,
0:19:19 but I think that’s what my clinical practice has shown. And there’s some research to even back
0:19:24 that up. So if we sort of look at what’s going on with men, we’re sort of, they have nowhere to
0:19:28 turn to. And the number one thing that correlates with it is not mental illness, but is a sense of
0:19:34 thwarted belongingness. So this is kind of like, in fact, a multivariate regression analysis.
0:19:39 But basically what happens is what causes people to kill themselves is they try to connect with
0:19:44 others and they get rejected. So it’s specifically a very specific research term called thwarted
0:19:51 belongingness. So I try to belong to a group, and that group or multiple groups usually will
0:19:56 thwart my attempts to join the tribe, to join the community. And this is what actually correlates
0:20:02 a lot with suicidality. So what’s going on with men right now is that we really don’t allow them
0:20:07 to suffer, you know, because then you’re not manly. And we’re so externalized with our attention
0:20:13 that we’re not connecting with ourselves. And so we’re looking to other people to tell us what it
0:20:18 means to be a man. But that may or may not work for you, right? That may have been what worked for
0:20:22 them. So then we kind of get into this problem where we’re disconnected from ourselves. And then
0:20:27 like the world doesn’t accept us, we’re not allowed to suffer. And that’s what creates the problem.
0:20:29 What is the remedy to this?
0:20:34 So I think the first thing is we must reconnect with ourselves. Right. So when you’re kind of
0:20:39 saying like, why does everyone think, oh, I need to like achieve this. I need to make this money
0:20:42 and things like that. Where did you learn that you should do all that? You learned all that from
0:20:48 the outside. Instagram. Instagram, right? So we get fed all of these ideas because if you look at
0:20:54 all these influencers, what are they doing? They’re never crying. They’re smiling. Some of them will
0:20:58 even pay very attractive women to take pictures with them. Well, some of them are crying, but
0:21:03 they’re crying and uploading it for ulterior motives, right? Absolutely. And I think a lot
0:21:07 of them are genuinely suffering too. But then it’s also like, I mean, there’s all kinds of weird
0:21:11 stuff going on. So one thing is like people say that men, we don’t allow men to be emotional.
0:21:16 Nowadays, people say, oh, men are allowed to cry. This is something that I experienced even in my
0:21:21 marriage where we allow men to cry, but we don’t allow men to be angry. But why is it that men no
0:21:25 longer allowed to be angry? You just think about it for a second. So anger is just a completely
0:21:32 normal emotion, right? But if I’m in a situation where I’m in an argument with my wife and I feel
0:21:38 emotion A and I express emotion A and she feels emotion B and she expresses emotion B,
0:21:44 these two things should be equal, right? We as both human beings get to express what we feel.
0:21:50 Now, in the case of me expressing anger and her expressing sadness, she’s crying and I’m yelling.
0:21:55 Suddenly, I’ve become a villain. It’s so interesting. I saw a viral tweet yesterday.
0:22:02 It was someone Googling, my wife is yelling at me, what should I do? And then my husband is yelling
0:22:06 at me, what should I do? When they Googled, my husband is yelling at me, what should I do?
0:22:12 Domestic violence helpline comes up. It’s like a Google pop up. When you Google,
0:22:17 my wife is yelling at me, what should I do? Nothing comes up. Because obviously,
0:22:21 as you said, in the case of villainization, I know that most domestic violence comes from
0:22:26 men. But it’s interesting that we see the emotion, we interpret the emotions entirely
0:22:31 differently because of that. Absolutely, right? So we as a society will say like, oh men,
0:22:35 men need to be in touch with their emotions, but not anger. And then this is what really
0:22:42 screws men, because as men, we are socialized and conditioned to only feel anger. This is the only
0:22:47 emotion you’re allowed to feel as a man growing up. And this is the one emotion that gets demonized
0:22:51 when you’re older. So I’ll give you a simple example. So like, I used to get bullied a lot,
0:22:54 right? So when I get bullied in school, like, what am I supposed to do, Steven?
0:22:56 In school, it depends if you can fight back.
0:23:02 Absolutely, right? It’s fighting back. Like, you didn’t say, talk to the teacher,
0:23:06 you didn’t say, ask for help, you didn’t say cry about it, because if I cry about it,
0:23:08 what’s going to happen, Steven? You’re going to get bullied more.
0:23:14 Absolutely. So we turn every emotion, so men experience anger as something called an umbrella
0:23:21 motion. We literally suppress and are conditioned to suppress all other emotions except for anger.
0:23:26 And then if you talk to men about their experience of life, anger is always the first thing that
0:23:29 comes out of their mouth. Someone breaks up with you, how do you feel about it? Do you feel ashamed?
0:23:34 No, that’s not what we say. I feel pissed off. How could she do this to me? And then we vent
0:23:39 that anger on the internet, and then this turns into misogyny, right? And then we get demonized
0:23:45 for it. And it’s not that there isn’t, we should be harshly judged if we act on those kinds of
0:23:50 emotions. I’m not saying that that’s the case. But what we also need to consider is that the men
0:23:55 who are saying these kinds of toxic things are saying that for a reason. This is because of their
0:24:00 upbringing. This is because of the world that they lived in, right? So we’re conditioned to only
0:24:05 experience anger. Even sadness gets turned into anger. Shame gets turned into anger. Fear gets
0:24:09 turned into anger, right? So if I’m afraid of something happening, what do I need to do? I mean,
0:24:15 man up, get angry, right? Let’s go, son. Let’s go. This is the emotion that we tap into to overcome
0:24:20 fear. So we don’t feel any of those other emotions and we’re left only feeling anger.
0:24:26 At the very heart of aggression, I heard someone say to me once that at the very heart of aggression
0:24:32 is some kind of insecurity. But for men, when they encounter that insecurity, they only know how to
0:24:38 sort of manifest it as aggression. So I wouldn’t agree with the first thing that at the heart of
0:24:44 all anger is insecurity. But I would absolutely agree with the second thing that the way that we,
0:24:48 the only way we know how to respond is with anger. Because here’s the exact quote,
0:24:52 just found it. The source of aggression is insecurity as we are unconsciously aware that our
0:24:58 position in life is never secure. People feel increasingly insecure and helpless. So they will
0:25:04 be increasingly aggressive and confrontational at a personal and a social level. So let’s
0:25:10 tunnel down into that for a second. Okay. So I think that that is true on some level, but also I
0:25:15 would disagree. So the first thing is that we have parts of our brain, even animals feel anger.
0:25:21 But I think that when two dogs are fighting over territory, I don’t think that that’s born of some
0:25:26 kind of identity of insecurity. So if we really look at the evolutionary purpose of anger is my
0:25:32 opinion, is that anger is the emotion that we feel to protect our territory. It’s a protective
0:25:37 emotion. So if I slap you across the face, what’s the first thing that you’re going to feel? It’s
0:25:42 going to be anger. So if I insult you, you’re going to feel angry. It’s fascinating the way that it
0:25:48 works. So anger causes our thoughts to be faster. Anger causes our peripheral vision to collapse
0:25:56 to 30 degrees. So I only see what’s in front of me. And it also makes me less sensitive to pain.
0:26:01 So like my nociceptors will actually like start to be suppressed when I feel angry, right? So if I
0:26:05 get into a fight, I’m going to feel it tomorrow. But like while I’m getting hit, I’m not going to
0:26:10 feel it. So I don’t think it’s born of all insecurity. I think anger is simply an evolutionary
0:26:16 response. It’s something that we experience to protect ourselves. That’s why we feel angry,
0:26:22 right? So if I attack baby bear, mama bear is going to come out angry. So it’s really a protective
0:26:29 emotion. Now I agree with the second part of the statement 100% that when we feel insecure, especially
0:26:34 as men, the only way we are taught to deal with our problems is through anger, right? So if I’m
0:26:37 feeling insecure, if I’m feeling ashamed of myself, if someone’s bullying me, what do I do? I put
0:26:42 them in their place, right? I don’t try to make peace. I don’t complain to someone because no
0:26:45 one’s going to take me seriously, right? I have to stand up for myself.
0:26:50 So we’ve got the first point there about how we remedy this challenge, which is about self-expression,
0:26:55 more self-expression, that’s what I heard. Not self-expression, introspection. Introspection,
0:27:00 getting to know ourselves, right? So it’s very simple. So if you look at your idea of what it
0:27:06 means to be a man, what percentage of that idea comes outside of you? And what percentage of that
0:27:11 idea comes from within you? About 90% comes from outside of me. And that’s why 90% of people
0:27:16 were 90% fucked, right? So and if you look and I’m sure you know this and you’ve probably done
0:27:20 this too, if you look at where is the goodness in your life, where does it come from, Stephen?
0:27:24 It doesn’t come from what other people have told you. They may have told you something,
0:27:30 but then you looked within yourself and then you found that to be true. Yeah. The goodness in you,
0:27:35 the motivation, the really good motivation in you, not chasing things, but the duty that you
0:27:39 have, you know, everything that you really strive for, all that good stuff comes from inside you.
0:27:43 And the problem is that we live in a world that pulls our attention away from ourselves.
0:27:48 What do you think of andrutatism then? So as a general rule, I don’t comment on people
0:27:54 that I don’t speak to. So what, what, tell me the features of what you’re talking about.
0:27:57 Okay. So the recent wave of
0:28:07 internet masculine influencers who have like Bugattis and lots of women and sports cars,
0:28:10 and there’s, there’s many of them, there’s many of them. And they seem to be resonant for some
0:28:17 kind of reason that are kind of saying that the way to become, be a man is to have loads of money,
0:28:22 lots of women, these kind of cars, physical strength. And there’s just this huge sort of
0:28:28 generation of young, typically men that are now disciples of that religion.
0:28:33 So I think if you dislike that toxic masculinity, what we need to understand is it’s the people
0:28:39 who hate that toxic masculinity that are driving these people towards it. So I know this is kind
0:28:44 of crazy. So what’s happened is this has grown, right? And as it’s grown, what have we done?
0:28:48 We’ve demonized these people. We’ve said these people are bad. And as we demonize them, what’s
0:28:52 happened? They’ve grown stronger. So this is something that’s very important to understand.
0:28:58 If you are a man and you say, I am suffering today, what is the response that you’re going to get?
0:29:01 Shut up. Absolutely.
0:29:04 Not in those exact words, but that’s whatever the words are, that’s what they mean.
0:29:09 Now, I want us to be very, very careful, right? So if you are listening
0:29:13 to Steven say, people tell you to shut up. And your first thought as a listener is,
0:29:19 no, that’s not true. That’s the problem. So if people agree with you, they understand what
0:29:23 you’re saying. But if they disagree with you, that’s the problem. You, we literally have a man
0:29:28 who is telling us right now that your experience is when I say I’m suffering, people tell you to
0:29:31 shut up. And then people are going to be judging you for saying that. And they’re going to be
0:29:37 saying, no, that’s not true. They’re going to be saying, shut up. Absolutely. Right? So this is
0:29:42 exactly the problem. So men are struggling right now. And the rest of the world says, no, you’re
0:29:48 not. You’re privileged. You’re a man. There’s a patriarchy. And I’m not commenting on the sociology
0:29:52 of it. There is a patriarchy, whatever. There’s men have many advantages in life. I’ve experienced
0:29:56 many advantages of being a man. It’s absolutely true. I’m not, let’s not go there. I’m talking about
0:30:02 the individual experience of men. So there is one group of people on the planet who says,
0:30:07 yes, your life does suck. And that’s these toxic masculine people. They’re the only people that
0:30:13 truly validate men’s experiences. Because everyone else says, why are you complaining? And these guys
0:30:17 say, yeah, you’re a fucking loser. What are you going to do about it? They at least meet you where
0:30:23 you’re at. And they say, yes, your life is hard. And I will show you a way to make it better. Whereas
0:30:27 the rest of the world says, no, your life isn’t hard. What are you complaining about? And I’ve
0:30:33 seen this as a doctor. I’ve seen patients who are complaining about pain, women who are complaining
0:30:38 about pain because they have an internal bleed within the wall of their uterus that cannot get
0:30:42 detected. And they’re saying, I’m hurting. I’m hurting. I’m hurting. And we ignore this person’s
0:30:49 pain. And that’s when things go bad. So for years and years and years, we have ignored the struggles
0:30:54 of men. And there’s one group on the planet who accepts them with open arms. And the more that
0:30:59 we demonize them, so when someone starts believing in this toxic masculinity, what is the response?
0:31:05 Do people ever ask, help me understand what your life is like? What do you like about this person?
0:31:09 Because everyone’s going to them for a reason, but we never bother to ask,
0:31:13 why are you listening to this person? What does this mean to you? I see these, we see these posts
0:31:17 all the time in our community. My boyfriend is getting into this stuff. My son is getting this
0:31:23 up. How do I stop it? Hold on a second. Don’t try to stop it. Understand it first. Because
0:31:27 everyone’s trying to stop it and no one is bothering to listen to what the experience
0:31:31 of these men are. And that’s why it’s getting worse and worse and worse as we try to stop it.
0:31:39 So if I’m the mother of a son who is watching a lot of these sort of toxic male influences online,
0:31:44 what would be a better approach versus just banning the computer and telling them that that’s
0:31:50 toxic and not to look at it? Help me understand what you like about this. What is it like to be
0:31:56 a man in today’s day and age? How do you feel about yourself? How does it feel knowing that 70 to 80%
0:32:01 of women want you to make more money than them? And yet 60% of people who graduate from college
0:32:08 are women. So men are faced or living in a world today where there are impossible expectations
0:32:17 to meet. And so what is it like to be someone who fundamentally has no chance of success?
0:32:23 These are the kinds of things that you need to say to these people. You need to give them an
0:32:30 alternate place to go where they can be heard and helped, supported and understood. See,
0:32:34 anytime we make a judgment, our mind already has a conclusion. There’s nothing left to learn.
0:32:40 Anytime we’re judgmental. So what do we do to all these people who are toxic men? We even create
0:32:46 the word toxic. We literally label them as bad in some way. And I’m not saying that the behavior
0:32:52 isn’t toxic. But what I’m trying to point out is that even in our language, there is so much harsh
0:32:58 judgment. So I once had a patient- We both just did it, didn’t we? Absolutely. So I once had a
0:33:05 patient who is smearing feces all over the school, so adolescent kid. And when you have a kid who’s
0:33:09 literally taking a shit and wiping it on the walls and stuff, what happens? The kid gets punished.
0:33:14 Kid gets punished again and again and again. The one really sad thing is no one ever asks,
0:33:21 “Why are you doing this? What’s going on inside you?” Because healthy kids don’t do this. It’s only
0:33:25 kids who have been traumatized in some way. And as I’ve worked with incels, as I’ve worked with
0:33:29 people who are toxically masculine, it always starts with trauma. And when I say always, there’s
0:33:35 a clinical experience, but I’m talking about 100%. So 100% of people start on this path by getting
0:33:40 hurt in some way, by getting taken advantage of in some way, by sacrificing something and not
0:33:44 getting something in return. And they have their share of responsibility too. I’m not saying that
0:33:49 they’re hapless victims. But I think that people who are raised with love and compassion and do have
0:33:55 connections don’t go down this road. You’re so passionate about this, aren’t you? Because I
0:34:01 feel like your eyes have seen in your practice some pretty heartbreaking things. Yeah. I mean,
0:34:09 I think it’s like… See, unless we are willing to be what these people need, they’re going to
0:34:14 continue going down the toxic masculinity route. Someone needs to start offering these people
0:34:20 safe haven, no matter what they say or not no matter. I think there should be consequences for
0:34:24 actions. But as someone who’s worked in a jail, right? So, and this is what’s kind of interesting,
0:34:31 if you really think about it, people will judge me for talking to or even trying to support people
0:34:34 who are toxically masculine. And they’re like, “Oh my God, you’re such an asshole. You’re giving
0:34:38 these people a platform. How could you make the world the worst place?” And then I tell them,
0:34:42 I worked in a jail for three months and they’re like, “Oh, look at you. You’re so compassionate.
0:34:46 You’re working with these people who are like criminals and like, “Oh my God.” I don’t think
0:34:51 they realize that anyone you see on social media is 10 times better than the people that I worked
0:34:56 within jail. These are people who are actual pedophiles, actual rapists, right? Not just talking
0:35:00 about it. Maybe the people on social media are too, I don’t know. And so, it’s really interesting the
0:35:04 way that our mind automatically judges things. And so, if we really want to fix this problem,
0:35:12 and I think we need to fix this problem, it’s just my take. I mean, I’m not a big fan of compassion
0:35:15 and trying to support other human beings. I’m not saying that that’s always the right answer.
0:35:19 I think sometimes you may need things like war or violence or whatever. I mean, there may be
0:35:24 causes for it. But generally speaking, I think that demonizing these people isn’t working.
0:35:30 Is there anything else that we haven’t covered in the remedies to this sort of male crisis?
0:35:35 We’ve talked about getting more in touch with yourselves. Is there anything else? Do we need
0:35:39 more positive role models? Or is it really not about the external at all?
0:35:43 No. I mean, so I think all that stuff is true. So, we know that, for example, like there’s a
0:35:49 loneliness crisis and things like that. I think that we all, it’s not just role models. We need
0:35:54 individual responsibility. So, for example, everyone will say, yeah, I know it’s a real tragedy
0:36:00 that men don’t have friends, but it’s not my job to fix. I will hear this from both men and women.
0:36:04 It’s a real tragedy, but it’s not my responsibility. It’s sad that this thing happened, but it’s not
0:36:10 my, which makes sense, right? No human being is responsible for another human being. But then
0:36:14 the question kind of becomes like, okay, let’s play that tape through to the end. What happens to
0:36:18 that person? Whose responsibility is it? So, if you look at a lot of what’s going on with men right
0:36:24 now, it’s loneliness, it’s isolation, it’s touch starvation, it’s suicidality. Sexlessness as well.
0:36:30 Sexlessness. And it’s no individual person’s responsibility. But the real problem with this
0:36:34 is that these are not problems that men can solve on their own. This is exactly why this is the problem
0:36:39 that men are experiencing. Because as men, we are taught to be independent. We are taught to be,
0:36:44 you should fix everything on your own. And so, men have fixed all of the things that we can fix on
0:36:50 our own. The only thing that’s left is the things that we must rely on other people for, right?
0:36:54 So, no one’s complaining about, you know, I mean, a lot of men are obese, but there’s not like an
0:36:57 obesity, there is a crisis, but that’s not what’s bothering people. That’s not where we’re losing
0:37:03 the war. We’re not losing the war on baldness, right? So, there are lots of things as a man that
0:37:08 you can fix in your own life. It’s just the real challenge is that no one is willing to take
0:37:13 responsibility for any level of connection with men. And so, that’s not something that is going
0:37:17 to get fixed because you need another human being to hug you. Like, you can’t hug yourself, it just
0:37:23 doesn’t work. So, I, and my area of focus tends to be on introspection because I think that’s like
0:37:27 really, really powerful, but there’s all kinds of other stuff that’s important.
0:37:31 Mentorship, role models, all that kind of stuff. But I think ultimately, through introspection,
0:37:38 you can attain complete peace, no matter who you are, what your, what your path is, circumstances.
0:37:41 I think it’s kind of like the silver bullet, which is what the discovered.
0:37:46 So, are you saying now that as a society, we should take on more of the responsibility
0:37:50 for some of these big fundamental issues that men and people in crisis can’t solve for themselves?
0:37:58 Subtly, no. Not a society. Because as a society, who’s part, no, I mean you. I mean,
0:38:04 your listeners as individuals need to take responsibility. And it’s not that you,
0:38:08 you have to take responsibility. It’s not fair to you to be responsible for someone else,
0:38:14 but unless anyone who is listening to this podcast goes out and literally hugs a man,
0:38:17 no one else is going to do it. Because if you don’t do it, who’s going to do it?
0:38:22 You can’t rely on society. We’ve been relying on society to fix the problem. It’s not working.
0:38:24 So, I can’t do shit. So, you’re saying me. Me?
0:38:28 Forget society. Don’t wait for government to have some kind of intervention.
0:38:30 How’s it working out?
0:38:35 Not great. I mean, the direction of travel as it relates to these sort of key issues like loneliness
0:38:39 are only getting worse and worse. Suicideality seems to be getting worse and worse.
0:38:42 Now, you’ve got this young generation of women as well that are
0:38:46 exploding in their suicidality. Yes.
0:38:50 Young women. I think it’s the fastest growing group at the moment if my stats are correct there.
0:38:54 Yeah. So, we have one really interesting thing is that men and women are becoming more
0:39:00 equal in many ways, but in unfortunate ways. So, female suicidality is getting worse.
0:39:06 We’re also seeing like male body dysmorphia on the rise. And I suspect it’s way worse than we
0:39:12 realize. But I think that what we’re starting to see is less of a discrepancy in gender-related
0:39:17 health issues. So, the things that used to be predominantly men are now women or catching up,
0:39:21 which is a bad thing. And things that were predominantly women now men are catching up.
0:39:25 So, body dysmorphia in men, addictions in women are on the rise.
0:39:29 So, things are getting worse.
0:39:36 What explains that? Specifically, the suicidality in young women? I hear social media is a leading
0:39:41 cause of that. Yeah. So, I think if we look at it, it’s not just social media. So, I think what’s
0:39:47 happened is that the fundamental day of a man and a woman, I believe, I don’t know if this is
0:39:52 factually correct, is getting closer and closer. So, women are working now, men are working now,
0:39:56 like dating is hard, like being on Tinder socks if you’re a dude or a woman for different reasons.
0:40:03 We have a lot of technological influence. So, everyone’s kind of getting screwed and we’re
0:40:08 all kind of getting screwed together. And just because things are getting bad or worse for men
0:40:14 and men are in crisis, does not, has no relation to the fact that women are struggling for a whole
0:40:18 different set of reasons. So, there’s plenty of biases that I see as a psychiatrist. There’s
0:40:22 biases against men in psychiatry. There’s biases against women in psychiatry. I think one of the
0:40:26 biggest mistakes that we make is that we seem to think that it’s like a pendulum where it’s like,
0:40:32 if we’re biased against men, we can’t also be biased against women. But I think both groups can
0:40:37 suffer at the same time catastrophically. And they are. Yeah. I want to talk about the role of
0:40:41 social media. Your book is called How to Raise a Healthy Gamer. And when I think about gaming,
0:40:45 I think some people think about it like holding a controller and being a, I don’t know, a character
0:40:50 in a video game or shooting something, whatever. But many of these social media apps are almost
0:40:57 indistinguishable from gaming in many respects. So, the role of social media in our mental health
0:41:05 in the modern world, good, bad and different. So, bad right now. So, let’s understand something.
0:41:10 So, social media and technology is kind of like introducing an invasive species.
0:41:15 So, there’s no, there’s no checks and balances right now. So, I don’t think gaming is evil.
0:41:20 So, I struggled with video game addiction. I play video games with my kids now. So,
0:41:24 the main problem with social media and technology is that it’s completely unregulated and we don’t
0:41:28 know how to fight against it. So, what’s happening right now is, especially if you look at social
0:41:35 media, is that like it is affecting our brains and we’re outgunned. So, if you kind of like look at,
0:41:38 for example, we’re talking about masculinity, right? And what’s my antidote to that? It’s
0:41:45 introspection. So, if we sort of look at these yogic or meditative skills, as we train ourselves in
0:41:52 these skills, we will become impervious to the negative effects of technology. The problem is
0:41:57 that these things are so good at literally shaping our thoughts. So, as an example, if we look at
0:42:02 social media, you know, body dysmorphia and insecurity about the way that we feel about
0:42:07 ourselves can lead to things like suicidality, okay? So, as we look at, you know, all these
0:42:12 pretty people on social media, you look at all these people who are not normal, right? So,
0:42:18 social media will show you the prettiest people. And so, we start, as I see pretty face after
0:42:23 pretty face after pretty face, I start to think that that is normal. My brain makes this calculation
0:42:29 and then I start to feel ugly. So, this results in body dysmorphia. So, if we sort of look at that,
0:42:34 the more we see pretty things, the more that we have FOMO because everyone is having fun,
0:42:39 right? If I log on to Facebook or Instagram, this person is having a birthday party, this person
0:42:45 is having every time I log on, everyone is having a blast. But this is 365 people who each have one
0:42:50 birthday party. I get one birthday party a year, but anytime I look at social media, it seems like
0:42:54 everyone is always having fun. It’s not everyone. It’s just one person is having fun today. One
0:42:58 person is having fun tomorrow. Everyone just gets one birthday a year. But when we see it,
0:43:03 we see everyone’s having fun and I’m not having fun. So, this makes us feel bad about ourselves.
0:43:08 So, what is the antidote to that? So, in the yogic tradition, we have this concept of a humkat or ego.
0:43:12 So, you have particular meditative practices that help you dissolve your ego. And essentially,
0:43:19 what social media does is amplifies our ego, makes us feel really bad about ourselves. Remember that
0:43:24 one of the key hallmarks is comparison of ego. So, social media induces a lot of comparison. So,
0:43:30 as we train our mind, we will become free from those problems. So, if I learn how to dissolve my
0:43:37 ego, then social media is not a problem. Easier said than done. Absolutely. Even said that you’ve
0:43:42 still got an ego. 100%. And you’ve done all this practice and you’ve still got an ego. Yeah.
0:43:49 Have you dissolved it at all? Oh, absolutely. So, I mean, it’s way smaller than it used to be. But
0:43:55 even to say that I have completely dissolved my ego is an egotistical statement. So, this is a
0:43:59 battle that I will never win. And I’ve just accepted that, right? So, there’s no way to win.
0:44:03 I’m not going to become enlightened in this day and age. So, I’m just going to do the best that
0:44:08 I can and I’ll never succeed. That’s okay. There’s so many shocking stats that kind of links to two
0:44:12 things we’ve talked about here around connection and relationships. I think we all know intuitively
0:44:17 now, especially with all the research and data that’s come out, how important relationships are
0:44:23 for mental health. Gaming, social media, the digital world, the vision pro, I bought one yesterday,
0:44:29 virtual reality, augmented reality. As we head more towards these digital worlds,
0:44:37 are you concerned at all that we’re losing sight of connection? And I sit that in comparison or
0:44:42 alongside the stats that we know about sexlessness, people having less sex,
0:44:47 marriage is seeming to get worse and worse and more difficult. The direction of travel here
0:44:53 doesn’t feel like it’s very optimistic. Yeah, it’s not. And what do we do about that?
0:44:59 Do you think we just become gurus and leave the digital world and the western world and
0:45:03 try and escape and take our kids with us? I had someone talk to me about that idea.
0:45:06 No. So, I don’t think so, right? So, my book is How to Raise a Healthy Gamer.
0:45:12 What I believe is that these things are only evil if we don’t know how to deal with them.
0:45:17 So, what’s happened is human beings have created fire for the first time, but we don’t know how to
0:45:22 control fire. So, we don’t need to run away from technology. We just need to get better at dealing
0:45:27 with it. And getting better at dealing with it is everything from maybe government regulation or
0:45:34 whatever to even training our personal sense of self. So, if you look at why our relationships
0:45:40 decaying, it’s for a number of reasons. The first is that, see, human relationships evolutionarily
0:45:45 were predicated on the fact that humans needed each other for survival. So, fundamentally,
0:45:50 what is always bound human beings together is like, “I need you and you need me. Otherwise,
0:45:54 we’re not going to survive.” But what’s happening in the world today is we no longer need each other
0:45:58 for survival. So, I never even need to leave my house. I can order groceries. I can order food.
0:46:04 I can work from home. I can literally stay in my home or in my room, and I never need to walk out
0:46:10 of the house. I never need to interact with someone. So, once you remove necessity from the
0:46:16 equation as to why human beings form relationships, so we’re seeing a decay in relationships because
0:46:20 we no longer need each other. So, women no longer need men. You can have an independent life as a
0:46:23 man. You no longer need a woman. You can get a flashlight if you want to. You can have an AI
0:46:30 girlfriend. You have pornography. We don’t need each other. And yet, the human mind is the only
0:46:36 organ of the body that, in order for it to be healthy, it requires another human being. So,
0:46:40 we don’t need—our heart can be healthy without another human. Kidneys can be healthy. Liver
0:46:44 can be healthy. Our whole body can be healthy except for the brain and except for the mind.
0:46:50 We need someone else to be mentally healthy. So, now what we’re going to have to do as a society
0:46:56 is evolve. We’re going to have to start to realize that we don’t need relationships anymore in
0:47:02 order to survive. But without them, we will all suffer. And so, what we need to do is evolve as
0:47:07 humans. And I think part of that is like learning some of these yogic and meditation skills so that
0:47:12 we can resist the influences, the negative influences of technology. But that also means
0:47:16 prioritizing relationships even when we don’t need to.
0:47:19 Do you think they should teach these skills in school, the yogic?
0:47:19 100%.
0:47:21 It would be a good time to intervene, wouldn’t it?
0:47:28 Yes, 100%. And I taught these kids these skills to kids. And it’s amazing how quickly they pick
0:47:33 it up. It’s hard for me and you to learn because we’re already formed. But just like a language,
0:47:39 like if you teach it to a child, I taught infants to meditate, my own children. I taught them to
0:47:41 meditate when they were like two.
0:47:45 What does that mean? What are these skills? If you were trying to teach a grown-up like me,
0:47:46 where would you begin?
0:47:49 So, I’ll tell you where I began with my kids.
0:47:55 So, let’s understand what meditation is. So, meditation is controlling the attention of your
0:48:00 mind. So, if I tell my mind to focus on this, it’s going to focus on this. So, if we look at
0:48:07 meditation, there are a couple of key steps. The first is ignoring impulses. So, if I tell my mind
0:48:13 to focus on this object, it will have an impulse to focus on something else. So, we have to train
0:48:18 the mind to stop thinking about other things. So, I teach this to my four-year-old in a very fun way.
0:48:22 I tell her to lay down on the ground and we play this game called Sniffer Gobbler,
0:48:26 where I’m a monster called a Sniffer Gobbler and she has to be perfectly still. So, the Sniffer
0:48:30 Gobbler is going to try to get her to move and if she moves, then she gets gobbled. So, this
0:48:34 becomes a game. So, I’m kind of trying to get her to move. I’m tickling her a little bit. I’m
0:48:38 sniffing or whatever. I’m playing some kind of game with her and she’s being perfectly rigid
0:48:43 because it’s part of a game. So, what’s going on in her brain in this moment? As I tickle her,
0:48:48 there’s an impulse to move. The peripheral body is sending nervous signals to the brain. Let’s
0:48:54 move. Let’s shift. Let’s do something. Let’s do something. But, her frontal lobes in that moment
0:48:59 are learning to restrain her mind and literally control her impulses. So, this is step number one,
0:49:05 is stop your impulses. You can learn this very simply by, for example, I would recommend for
0:49:10 someone like you a practice called Tractica. So, Tractica is fixed point gazing. So, you take a
0:49:15 candle and you look, you gaze at the candle without blinking. So, the first 10 seconds will be easy,
0:49:20 but then you’ll start to get signals. Let’s blink. Let’s blink. Let’s blink. Let’s blink. It’s going
0:49:23 to start to burn. They’re going to start to tear up. You probably won’t get hurt. Don’t worry about
0:49:27 its safe practice because then your eyes will start to water and they’ll lubricate, which is
0:49:32 usually what our eyelids need to do. And so, you’ll start to have tears, but then you focus your mind.
0:49:36 And now, what you’re literally doing is controlling your impulses. You’re restraining your impulses.
0:49:41 So, that’s the first step of meditation, is to not let your mind wander into a thousand different
0:49:46 things. Now, if you do this one practice, which is not even real meditation, your life will be
0:49:51 transformed. So, you will literally, it’s like lifting weights for self-control. So, now you’re
0:49:57 sitting down to eat a meal, 11 p.m. rolls around. You have those cravings, but if you’ve done
0:50:01 Thratika, your frontal lobes will be strengthened. And as your frontal lobes become strengthened,
0:50:07 you are able to resist your impulses. You will gain control over yourself. That’s step one,
0:50:12 just resist your impulses. This is usually why meditation practices involve sitting and focusing
0:50:17 and like not moving even. The second step is a little bit different. There’s a difference between
0:50:23 avoiding distraction and then pushing my mind to focus on a different thing. So,
0:50:31 then, for example, what I’ll do with my daughter is I’ll tell her to chant om and maximize the
0:50:36 feeling of vibration in your chest. So, now what she’s doing is she’s attuned to her body, she’s
0:50:41 chanting om, and then she’s trying to maximize the vibration. So, in this moment, she’s using
0:50:46 something to focus the attention of her mind, because her mind is fully on the chest and feeling
0:50:51 that vibration. And then she’s kind of experimenting a little bit, but she’s really tuned in. And that
0:50:56 trains our mind to focus on one thing. So, these are steps number one and two. So, the first thing
0:51:01 you’ve got to do is avoid impulses and distractions. And the second thing is teach your mind how to sit
0:51:07 on one thing and don’t go anywhere else. That’s step one and two, and then you’ll be ready for
0:51:14 meditation. And what is meditation? So, the word meditation in English has three Sanskrit words
0:51:21 that get translated into meditation. Dharana, dhyana, and samadhi. So, dhyana is technically a
0:51:27 focusing technique. It’s something that you do. So, I can tell you gaze at a candle flame without
0:51:31 blinking. This is a dhyana. It is a focusing technique. This is what’s confusing for a lot
0:51:37 of people. The second word for meditation is dhyana. So, dhyana is not something you can do,
0:51:42 it’s a state of mind. So, I’ll explain this very simply. Do you know how to go to sleep?
0:51:47 Me? No. I mean, well, I go to bed and I lay down in an event. I usually put something on
0:51:52 so I can listen to as I fall asleep. Is that how I sleep? No. How should I sleep? Pretend I don’t
0:51:59 know how to sleep. Can you teach me how to sleep? Go to the bedroom. Okay. Done that.
0:52:06 Make sure it’s nice and cold. Okay. Lay there in the bed and close your eyes. Okay. And wish for
0:52:12 the best. So, I laid there and I closed my eyes. I have a blanket over me. It’s cold and I’m not
0:52:16 asleep yet. What am I doing wrong? What do I need to do to go to sleep? Maybe you’re not tired enough.
0:52:21 Have you slept before? Yeah. Have you done it a lot? Yeah. But you can’t tell me how to do it.
0:52:28 Not really, no. Absolutely. So, sleep is a state of consciousness. So, going to bed is something
0:52:35 that you do and then sleep happens to you. This is the biggest misunderstanding about meditation.
0:52:40 Everyone’s focused on meditation techniques. These are dharanas. If you are in a dharana as
0:52:46 you gaze at the candle for an extended period of time, your mind will enter a state of consciousness
0:52:51 in the same way that you enter sleep. But you can’t control it. You can’t do it. You can’t evoke it.
0:52:55 You just have to create the right environment and then the consciousness will trigger.
0:53:00 The closest thing that many people experience is the flow state. But even in the flow state,
0:53:06 there is mental activity. So, the flow state is like the early stage of meditation. And then,
0:53:11 after you enter dhyan, which is a state of consciousness which is of no mind.
0:53:18 So, you have awareness but you have no thoughts, no emotions. You’re just simply aware. The best
0:53:23 example of this that some people have experienced a couple of things. One is orgasm. The moment of
0:53:29 orgasm is one where you have no thoughts. Thoughts come afterward. Thoughts come before. But in that
0:53:35 moment of orgasm, you are aware, you are present, you are blissful, but you have no thoughts or no
0:53:41 mental activity. Sometimes, also like looking at the sun, like watching a sunset, walking along
0:53:44 the beach. There are some moments where you’re present. You’re not really thinking about anything,
0:53:48 but you’re not asleep. You’re not daydreaming. This is what dhyan is. This is the second stage
0:53:54 of meditation. After you sit in dhyan for a while, then you will attain something called samadhi.
0:53:58 So, these are the transcendental states of meditation. This is the kind of stuff that
0:54:02 psychedelics does to you. So, when you enter these samadhi states, this is when you start to get
0:54:07 transformed and all this weird stuff that’s very hard to describe. So, I would say that meditation
0:54:11 is these three things. It’s a focusing technique followed by a state of consciousness that fingers
0:54:16 crossed get induced. And once you’re in that state, then you can start climbing.
0:54:20 And what impact has it had on your life? Transform it. It completely changed my life.
0:54:26 I mean, I used to be a 25-year-old kid with nothing to show for it, and now, arguably,
0:54:31 I’m successful. So, I’m an entrepreneur. I’m a Harvard-trained psychiatrist. I have a clinical
0:54:36 practice. I’m a dad. I’m a content creator. And it’s like, I’m the same kid that was failing out
0:54:42 of college. Like, I haven’t changed the only difference between the loser and the successful
0:54:46 person, which neither of those are true, by the way. Those are both manifestations of ego.
0:54:50 I’m neither a loser nor am I successful. These are external trappings. But fundamentally,
0:54:56 I’m the same person that I’ve always been. And the only difference is that meditation taught me
0:55:02 how to control this thing. It’s like when you’re living life, it’s like you’re playing a video
0:55:08 game and the controller is unplugged. So, the character on the screen does whatever the fuck
0:55:13 it wants to. And you’re trying to send it signals, but it’s not listening to you. So, what meditation
0:55:18 is, is the process of plugging in your controller so that you start controlling the instrument of
0:55:22 your life. You understand how your body works. You understand how your mind works. You understand
0:55:26 where your desires come from. You understand how to conquer them. You understand what your ego
0:55:30 is. You understand all of these kinds of things. And meditation is what helped me do that.
0:55:34 The thing with meditation, the sort of instant rebuttal is I tried it and it didn’t work.
0:55:37 Or I tried it and I can’t stop myself from thinking about things. That’s like what I
0:55:41 hear all the time. “Oh, I can’t meditate. I tried it. My brain’s too busy.”
0:55:48 Okay, great. So, let’s rebut those as I’ve helped at least a thousand people overcome this. So,
0:55:52 let’s understand a couple of fundamentals. See, if you’ve tried meditation, it didn’t work for you.
0:55:58 It’s not your problem and it’s not that meditation doesn’t work for you. It’s that you had a crappy
0:56:03 teacher. So, if we understand, okay, like this is something that we, how do people learn how to
0:56:09 meditate? They hear a podcast like this and then they go sit in their room at some point
0:56:13 and then they close their eyes and try and think of nothing and it doesn’t work. So, they stop.
0:56:16 Okay, great. So, like, who is their teacher? The Diary of a CEO.
0:56:22 Right, but this is what I mean. So, the quality of meditation teaching has degraded
0:56:26 so profoundly. Everyone has mindfulness apps. What’s your teacher? It’s an app.
0:56:31 So, if I were to say like, okay, like, you know, Stephen, you’re a pretty crappy surgeon,
0:56:35 but you’ve never gone to medical school. How would you expect to ever be a decent surgeon
0:56:40 unless you literally had people teach you? So, there are a couple of things that I learned how
0:56:44 to meditate because I had expert teachers. The reason that I teach meditation successfully is
0:56:48 because I’m a decent teacher. I’m not even the best teacher out there. So, a couple of things
0:56:54 to understand about meditation. One is that there are 112 meditation techniques, one of which will
0:57:00 work very naturally for every person on the planet. Okay? So, the number one reason that people suck
0:57:05 at meditation is because we’re not teaching them the right kind of meditation as a simple example.
0:57:10 So, I have patients with ADHD and I teach them very successfully to meditate. Now, a lot of these
0:57:15 patients when they come to me, they say meditation doesn’t work for me because I can’t get my mind
0:57:19 to slow down and focus on one thing. It always wanders, to which I say, “That’s great. No problem.
0:57:23 We’re going to teach you meditation that’s going to feel so easy for you.” So, let me ask you this.
0:57:28 If I’ve got a kid, okay, who’s running around and I want my kid to sit still, how do I get the kid
0:57:34 to sit still? How do people typically do that? Yeah. They shout at the kid. Okay. So, the kid
0:57:38 sits still for a little while, then what happens? Runs off again. Absolutely. So, how do I get a
0:57:44 kid to sit still? When does a child sit? When it’s playing a game. Okay. So, we can engage it
0:57:49 in some way. So, like this is why I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but in airports, they’ll have
0:57:53 like these little play places. So, the best way to get a child to sit down is to tell it to run.
0:57:59 You run. Go to the playground. Go to the playground for an hour and then what will the child do?
0:58:04 Naturally, I want to sit down. So, when I’m teaching my patients with ADHD how to meditate,
0:58:08 I don’t tell them to slow down their mind. I tell them to move it as fast as you can.
0:58:14 So, I’ll literally take my patients to a cafeteria and we sit in the cafeteria and I tell my patient,
0:58:21 you have to pay attention to as many sounds as you can as quickly as you can. I want you to hear
0:58:26 every sound in the cafeteria. Don’t miss a single one. Don’t pay attention to what people are saying,
0:58:29 but hear the words, hear this sound, hear this sound, hear this sound, hear this sound, hear
0:58:35 this sound. So, what I’m really telling their mind to do is run instead of sit still. Eventually,
0:58:38 what happens is they’re paying attention to sound number one, then sound number two, sound number
0:58:43 three, not fast enough. Faster. You need to listen to 10 sounds in three seconds. Go faster. Go
0:58:48 faster. Go faster. Go faster. And eventually, the mind gets tired and then the mind naturally
0:58:54 sits down. Easiest meditation in the world. Then they enter the on. So, what are they doing in
0:58:58 Dharana? They’re paying attention to sound number one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight,
0:59:03 nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14. And then eventually, the mind will calm down. It’ll get exhausted and then
0:59:08 they’ll enter the on and then they’ve learned to meditate. So, I think the reason that meditation
0:59:13 doesn’t work for people is because they haven’t tried the right technique. So, you look like a guy
0:59:19 who exercises. You exercise? Yeah. How do you exercise? Go to the gym, lift the weights. Okay.
0:59:24 What about running? Yeah, sometimes. Swimming? No, can’t swim. Why not? I think it’s just a story
0:59:31 I’ve told myself, but I just can’t float. Okay, great. So, if all exercise was swimming,
0:59:36 you would have concluded that exercise is not for me. But there are a thousand ways to exercise
0:59:42 because human beings are different. So, you just have to find the right kind of exercise for you.
0:59:45 And it’s fun for you. People will look at you. They’ll say, “I don’t understand how you exercise.
0:59:50 Oh my God, it’s awful. I personally, I hate lifting weights, but I love swimming. I love hiking. I
0:59:55 love rafting.” So, learning how to meditate is not about doing one particular tradition. And this
1:00:00 is where there’s a big problem in the world today, which is that most meditation teachers just know
1:00:06 they’re one tradition. And so, if a student comes to them and they don’t do it right, the teacher
1:00:10 tells them, “You need to keep trying, keep trying, keep trying.” I’ve seen very few meditation teachers
1:00:14 say, “You know what? I’m not the teacher for you. This is not the right app for you. You should go
1:00:20 use this different app because based on your mind, this is what will suit your mind.” We each have
1:00:25 a cognitive fingerprint. And learning how to meditate very easily is about choosing the right
1:00:32 meditation for your cognitive fingerprint. And does meditation help us with these addictions
1:00:38 we’ve been talking about? 100% Social media addictions, porn addictions you talk about as well,
1:00:47 gaming addictions. I would go as far as to say that it conquers them all. So, that’s kind of a
1:00:51 grandiose statement. But if we really look at what is an addiction, an addiction is two things.
1:00:58 It is a source of pleasure and it is an antidote to pain. So, anytime we look at any addiction,
1:01:03 so opium, for example, gives me pleasure and it also numbs out, it shuts off the
1:01:08 functioning of my amygdala and my limbic system. Video games shut off my amygdala and my limbic
1:01:12 system, make my negative emotions go away and release dopamine. So, we have dopamine release
1:01:16 and we have suppression of our negative emotional circuitry. All addictions do this.
1:01:23 So, if you sort of look at it, why do we fall into an addiction? It’s because we become dependent
1:01:31 on this dopamine surge on giving into our wants. So, our mind says, “Oh, I want this thing and we
1:01:35 can’t control that impulse. When it wants something, I have to give it. I can’t control it. I’m too
1:01:41 weak.” The other thing that happens is that anytime we have pain, we have to run away from it. But
1:01:47 meditation is literally the process of training those two skills. So, when I have a want,
1:01:51 I learn to resist it. I want to scratch my nose, no scratching your nose. And what we sort of know
1:01:56 from a neuroscience standpoint is that we know that meditation strengthens our frontal lobes
1:02:02 and weak frontal lobes are fertile ground for addictions. So, we know that we literally strengthen
1:02:06 the parts of the brain that will help you resist an addiction from the pleasure side.
1:02:12 The other cool thing about meditation is that it makes us not impervious to pain, but we stop
1:02:18 avoiding pain. So, you ask me, “Am I nervous about how the book is going to go?” No, if it crashes
1:02:23 and burns, then I will be sad. So, what? Right? So, I’m going to be sad. Will it be sad forever?
1:02:28 Well, that depends on whether I base my sense of identity on this one book. I’ll be sad for some
1:02:33 amount of time. And that sadness, by the way, is karmically what I bought when I wrote the book.
1:02:36 And I think this is something that a lot of people miss. But the moment that I write the book,
1:02:42 I open myself up to the pleasure of it being a success and the pain of it being a failure. Does
1:02:47 that make sense? So, if I really wanted to avoid the pain, the only solution is to not write the
1:02:51 book in the first place. But that’s not the way to live life. So, meditation teaches us how to
1:02:57 tolerate pain, how to accept pain. And then once you can accept pain, oh my God, your life will
1:03:03 become so much easier. And then something beautiful happens. Now, I don’t have to use the opium.
1:03:09 My day job is as an addiction psychiatrist. So, I teach this stuff to people who are addicted to
1:03:14 heroin and fentanyl and video games and stuff like that. And it works for all of them, not all of them,
1:03:19 most of them. And so, meditation absolutely helps because it literally strengthens the
1:03:26 parts of our brain that addictions prey on. And these are all addictions, like food addictions
1:03:30 and porn addictions and gaming addictions and social media addictions. So, each addiction has a
1:03:36 slightly different manifestation. But the core aspect of providing pleasure and taking away pain
1:03:43 is true of all addictions. What is the most popular addiction in your mind that the vast majority
1:03:49 of society are currently prey to, but don’t really realize? I mean, reading through your book,
1:03:55 I think phone addiction, which you talk about in chapter seven, is maybe the thing that none of
1:04:00 us see as an addiction. But we’re probably addicted. If I look at my screen time, I think Jesus Christ.
1:04:05 The most popular, yeah. So, I think phone addiction is really bad. I mean, in a weird way, I’d say,
1:04:09 this doesn’t really qualify as an addiction. But the biggest problem, I think, is our
1:04:16 addiction to success, right? So, if we sort of think about it, like, I don’t know if that’s
1:04:19 kind of the context of just where my mind goes, but if we sort of think about it, everyone is
1:04:25 using success as an antidote to their pain and a source of their pleasure. And so, here we are
1:04:31 chasing all of these things for success, for success, for success. But in terms of technology,
1:04:35 or from a psychiatric perspective, I think phone is probably at the top of the list.
1:04:40 I think I’ve been quite confused about something in my life, but just generally, because when I
1:04:44 think about those young men that are struggling, or young women that are struggling, I often think
1:04:50 what their life is lacking is a sense of purpose and ambition and something to strive for. This
1:04:54 is kind of what we say. But now I’m kind of confused based on what you’ve said, because
1:05:01 is that what they’re missing? Like, you see a kid, he’s 22 years old, he’s in his mom’s basement,
1:05:08 he, you know, low self-esteem, playing video games all day, doesn’t respect himself, low
1:05:14 self-worth. In my head, I used to think, okay, well, what that kid needs is a big goal to strive for.
1:05:19 Fair enough. So, but let’s pay attention to your specific language. So, you said,
1:05:24 what that kid needs is purpose, ambition, and something to strive for. Are those three things
1:05:30 the same? No. Right? So, this is the big core of the problem is this is why things get modeled,
1:05:33 and this is why people get confused, because ambition is very different from purpose.
1:05:38 They’re like at opposite ends of the spectrum. If we look at it from a scientific perspective,
1:05:42 the number one thing that correlates or one of the two most popular or two variables that correlate
1:05:47 the most with pornography addiction is meaninglessness in life. So, if you want to conquer
1:05:54 your pornography addiction, you have to have a reason to not jerk off and watch porn all day.
1:05:59 So, you have to have a life that like makes it so that you just don’t do that, because what happens
1:06:04 is if you have an empty life and your brain is kind of sitting there, and it’s like, okay,
1:06:08 we’re not doing anything anyway, so let me get some dopamine. Like, let’s just do that. And that’s
1:06:11 how people become addicted to pornography. Is there a correlation there between when people
1:06:17 masturbate and what they’re going through in their life? Absolutely. So, it’s not even masturbation
1:06:22 with pornography addiction, but what we find is that the more emotional, the more their amygdala
1:06:27 and libic system gets activated, the more pornography they will use. So, the more negative
1:06:33 emotion you experience, the more pornography you will watch. Why? Because I want dopamine.
1:06:38 No, so this is where it avoids the pain. So, pornography shuts off our experience of negative
1:06:41 emotions. It’s not even the pleasure, it’s the avoidance of the negative emotion.
1:06:45 So, if I’m really stressed and I’m going through a lot of shit at work, I will,
1:06:48 I have a higher chance of masturbating that day. Not even masturbating, watching pornography.
1:06:53 Okay. So, masturbation is what leads to the dopamine, but watching pornography will shut
1:06:56 off the negative emotions. So, I’ve worked with people who have pornography addiction,
1:07:02 for example, that will have work on one screen, and they will literally have pornography open and
1:07:08 playing on the second screen. You’re joking. No, very common. So, we don’t talk about pornography
1:07:16 addiction. So, like, and the worst their life is, the more stress they have, that’s when I’ll ask
1:07:20 them, you know, when are the days that you have porn open on the second screen? And they’ll say,
1:07:24 it’s like, it’s the day, the worst their stress gets, the worst their use gets.
1:07:29 So, how’d you help that person? You teach them a couple of things. One is that you have to
1:07:35 understand what the pain is, right? So, and then you teach them alternate emotional
1:07:40 regulation skills. So, if you teach them other ways to manage their emotions, they won’t need
1:07:44 the pornography. The reason that porn is so addictive is because from a biological perspective,
1:07:51 we’re so wired for sex, that it is a very effective way to shut off our negative emotions.
1:07:54 But if you can teach them how to manage their negative emotions, and the second thing that
1:08:01 we do is we metabolize the source of your negative emotions. So, if there is some kind of trauma at
1:08:06 the root, as we heal that trauma, the drive for the addiction will melt away.
1:08:09 Interesting. Have you dealt with a lot of people that have a pornography addiction?
1:08:17 Sure. And the sort of common thread is that they all have some kind of early trauma.
1:08:20 And I’ve read in your book as well that those people are typically exposed to pornography
1:08:25 at a younger age. Yes. So, there’s all kinds of stuff that happens. But yeah, usually people
1:08:32 have, what I would say is they have unmetabolized emotions or a source of constant streaming of
1:08:37 negative emotions. Does it create shame? 100%. And those people, is that one of the…
1:08:40 That’s the problem, right? So, as I become addicted to pornography, I feel ashamed of
1:08:45 myself. And what’s my antidote to shame, Stephen? Pornography. There we go.
1:08:48 So, that’s the downward spiral. The upward spiral looks like,
1:08:54 like getting out of there. So, I’m watching pornography. I do something. I need less pornography.
1:08:59 Yeah. So, oftentimes what the upward spiral looks like is when you feel shame, come and talk to me.
1:09:03 Right? So, we’re going to talk about what you feel ashamed of. You’re going to vent that negative
1:09:09 emotion. So, we also know this is something that Freud discovered, is that experiencing emotion,
1:09:15 even if it’s not related to a real event, weakens the emotion. So, what he sort of found is that
1:09:20 if you can get someone to cry in your office as a psychotherapist, and they vent that emotion out,
1:09:24 they feel lighter, they feel better. The emotional energy has left their body in some way.
1:09:30 So, that, and then we oftentimes will get to the source of their trauma, and we’re going to metabolize
1:09:34 that emotion that’s really deep down there. And that’s kind of like, it’s kind of like an oil well
1:09:39 that’s just pumping up this black stuff. So, we shut off the oil well, we teach them alternate
1:09:43 emotional regulation skills, and we work on building a life that is worth living.
1:09:47 What is one example from your practice where someone has gone from
1:09:52 really zero to a remarkable place? Is there a case study that comes to mind where you go,
1:09:56 oh my god, that is proof that any transformation is possible?
1:10:01 Sure. So, there’s a privacy concern. So, I’m happy to be a little bit general here. But,
1:10:08 you know, so, I had someone who was started using opiates in their teenage years,
1:10:18 and at the age of 32, went back to school and has developed a career and became a best-selling
1:10:25 author by the age of 36. So, in the four years that we worked together, they got to writing,
1:10:29 which is what they always wanted to do, published a book, and like the book was very, very successful.
1:10:33 And then they actually have a separate career on top of that.
1:10:38 Chapter five, the first conversation. The hardest thing about talking to someone about an addiction
1:10:42 they have is that the first conversation has to be open without it affecting their
1:10:47 gaming addiction in this case. That first conversation is the most difficult often.
1:10:54 Yeah. So, it’s not just for addiction. So, if we sort of understand like the first conversation
1:10:58 that you have with someone about something that they’re not doing well in their life,
1:11:03 and this relates to like men or incels or whatever, you have to approach that non-judgmentally.
1:11:07 So, if you want to connect with someone in a big part of what I believe about addiction,
1:11:12 and I learn not believing this is true, is that you can’t cure an addiction for someone else.
1:11:19 So, they have to want to stop. So, I’ve had people, you know, I used to work at two rehabs,
1:11:22 and these are like 30-day rehabs where people get forced into rehab, never going to work.
1:11:27 The person themselves has to want to stop the addiction, conquer the addiction,
1:11:32 quit the addiction in order for it to be successful. So, how do you convince someone
1:11:37 that, okay, this is a problem and like you need to stop this? You can’t really convince them.
1:11:43 But the best that you can do is approach them non-judgmentally. Right? So, like, help me understand
1:11:48 what is going on in your life. Help me understand why you use this thing. Like, you can have judgments
1:11:54 in your mind, that’s okay, but be open-minded and be compassionate. Recognize that if this person is
1:12:00 doing something, they are doing it for a reason. If they didn’t get, if their brain did not get
1:12:04 more benefit than harm out of it, then their brain would not be doing it.
1:12:12 On that first conversation, and also that moment of sort of change where they realize that they
1:12:16 want to make a change in their life, and it’s, you know, enough is enough, people often refer to
1:12:25 that as the rock bottom. Is it true that people need to, because I speak to a few people about
1:12:28 this, whether we need to get to a rock bottom in order to make those big changes in our lives,
1:12:31 or if there’s a way to not get to rock bottom before we decide to make the change?
1:12:36 So, I’ll give you an answer from one of my patients who I think knows this way better than I do.
1:12:42 See, when you hit rock bottom, you can always pull out a jackhammer and break down to the next level.
1:12:48 So, there’s no such thing as rock bottom. There is just as low as you go before you start moving
1:12:53 up. That’s honestly what I believe. So, you could say that I hit rock bottom, but you could easily,
1:12:57 I mean, I’m sure I could have done worse, right? And so, a lot of people for them,
1:13:02 it is hitting rock bottom. But I think really, I trust my patients that it’s just as far down
1:13:05 as you go before you turn around, and that’s your lowest point.
1:13:09 We can all think of people in our lives that we want to help change. And I guess,
1:13:13 in what I just said is part of the problem, because we want to intervene in their lives and
1:13:18 create change for them. But we sometimes watch them self-sabotaging and self-sabotaging,
1:13:22 and then telling us they have this goal, they want to be this or that or the other,
1:13:26 but then their behavior continues to follow a similar pattern where they continue to self-sabotage.
1:13:31 And as bystanders, sometimes we try and intervene, we try and help them in various ways. I’ll pay
1:13:36 for your therapist, I’ll take care of your gym membership, whatever. What should we be doing
1:13:42 as bystanders of someone who’s saying they want to change, but it’s showing no sign of doing anything
1:13:48 about it? Great question. So, what we should do is not be bystanders, but also not quite pay for
1:13:52 therapy. So, this is something that’s very important. So, I once had a very brilliant teacher at
1:13:57 Massachusetts General Hospital who told me that, “As a doctor, you should never go the extra mile for
1:14:02 a patient.” And then I was kind of confused by that, right? Because I was taught that, “Oh, my God,
1:14:06 like, as a doctor, you should sacrifice. You need to go the extra mile.” And he said, “The extra mile
1:14:12 is a mile too far. So, anything that someone can do for themselves, you should not do for them.”
1:14:17 So, what I sort of really found is that, you know, there’s a really interesting case of a
1:14:22 patient that I had that was a child with HIV. So, this is when HIV was first discovered.
1:14:27 They got diagnosed as an infant. So, they had perinatal HIV exposure. And so, this is when we
1:14:32 were really discovering HIV. And so, everyone bent over backwards for this kid, because the support
1:14:36 of this is a seven-year-old kid with HIV. So, if they ever did anything wrong, it’s not their fault.
1:14:41 The kid has HIV. They’d come late to appointments. They wouldn’t do their homework. Oh, there’s always
1:14:45 people bending over backwards to help this person, help this person, help this person. So, I was this
1:14:52 person’s doctor when they were in their late 20s. And I was stunned by how incapable they are.
1:14:56 They can’t do even the most basic things like fill out an application for a particular thing
1:15:01 that they needed. They needed the nursing staff to sit with them and fill out the application.
1:15:06 Because what we had done is engendered some degree of helplessness by doing everything for them.
1:15:12 So, the biggest mistake that a lot of parents make is that they accept responsibility for their kids.
1:15:18 And if we love someone who has an addiction, we want to protect them from the consequences
1:15:25 of that addiction. So, we actually step up and we do more. The problem is that the moment that
1:15:31 you start doing more, they will start doing less. So, if you look at something as simple as, let’s
1:15:36 say, you’ve got a roommate and there’s dishes in the sink. The more you take responsibility for
1:15:40 the dishes, what is your roommate going to do? They’re going to do them less. The same is true.
1:15:45 So, what I sort of find is that instead of because we’re so afraid, oh my God, like if I don’t help
1:15:48 them with this, if I don’t pay for your therapy, then you’re going to be fucked. You’re so afraid.
1:15:53 And so, who’s taking responsibility for it? You are. Let them ask you to pay. Let them come to
1:15:57 you and say, “You know what? I really want to conquer this. I found someone, but I can’t afford
1:16:03 it. Will you help me?” The outcomes that you see will be drastically different. In my own practice,
1:16:08 sometimes I charge a lot of money. And what I have found, 70% of my practice at one point was free.
1:16:14 What I found is the number of people who know show for their appointments, which I’m giving them
1:16:19 a big break, the more of a break I give them, and if they’re free, they show up the least.
1:16:25 If someone has skin in the game, they will actually do it. So, my patients who are actually paying
1:16:31 for my services, they’re the ones who always show up. So, what we want to do is we want to start by
1:16:36 asking these people, “Hey, tell me how you feel about your addiction or not addiction. Just tell
1:16:40 me what’s going on with your gaming. How do you feel about your life? Help me understand what’s
1:16:46 going on with you.” Start by just understanding the person. And if you do that, everyone has
1:16:50 ambivalence. That means internal conflict. There’s a part of them that wants to quit and there’s a
1:16:56 part of them that doesn’t want to quit. The problem is that any time we see a flash of them wanting
1:17:00 to get better, what do we do? We’re like, “Yay! Let’s do it.” And then what happens? We get that
1:17:05 resistance from them. So, if I come to you, Stephen, I’m like, “Hey, man, I’m thinking about going to
1:17:10 the gym. What do you say?” “Yeah, come on. Come with me.” Right. And then what do people do when
1:17:16 you say that? “They don’t come.” Right? So, what’s kind of interesting? So, what we do is what I do
1:17:19 as a psychiatrist is like, “Hey, you know, you’re just thinking about going to the gym, but like,
1:17:26 do you really need to?” “Oh, really? You push back.” Yeah, right. So, whatever side you take,
1:17:30 they’re going to take the opposite side. “Why do you do that?” Because that’s what the science
1:17:34 tells us. So, there’s this technique called motivational interviewing. And anytime you’re
1:17:39 dealing with something called ambivalence, which is internal conflict, if you push them in one way,
1:17:44 they’re not moving in that way. They’re going to move in the opposite way. I’m not saying that you
1:17:49 can’t encourage them, but let them take the lead. That’s the big difference. Let it be their motivation.
1:17:53 Let it be their motivation. And anytime they move in the right direction, you want to support that,
1:17:59 but don’t ever push them. The choice is theirs. And the less that I do for my patients, the better
1:18:07 that they end up doing. Last question. You talk about this 25% rule. What is the 25%
1:18:14 rule? And how does one apply it? So, see, we all think about goals where I want to be. Now,
1:18:18 there’s a really tricky problem in our brain. So, if I have a goal that I want to be a millionaire,
1:18:25 and I work today and I earn $10, how does my brain interpret that? It looks at the effort
1:18:30 that I put in. It says $10 is nowhere near my goal, and that actually tanks my motivation,
1:18:35 because it looks at the situation. It says, I have not moved sufficiently close to my goal.
1:18:40 So, the bigger our goal is, the harder it is for our brain to get on board with doing it.
1:18:46 So, the 25% rule is take anything that you want to accomplish and cut it in half,
1:18:50 and then cut it in half again. And this should be your first goal at a minimum. You can even
1:18:55 go smaller than that. You’re 12.5. There’s no amount that is too small. But generally speaking,
1:19:00 if you really look at it, the more ambitious your goals are, the harder they will be to achieve.
1:19:04 And I know that sounds kind of weird, but you can still achieve it, but only if it’s not your
1:19:08 goal. That’s been my experience. So, there’s neuroscience to back this up. But even then,
1:19:11 you know, when I was 18 years old, I wanted to go to Harvard, and I wanted to become a doctor.
1:19:16 When I gave up on the goal, and I focused on the task at hand. So, if you really look at how do
1:19:22 you accomplish great things, not by wanting to accomplish great things, I can be at the bottom
1:19:26 of Mount Everest, and I can look at the top, and I can say, I want to climb to the top of Mount
1:19:31 Everest. Or I can not even look at the top of Mount Everest. Whether I’m looking at the top or not
1:19:36 looking at the top, the way to get to the top is the same, one step at a time. So, it’s really
1:19:40 interesting because everyone is so focused on goals. What I’ve sort of learned as a psychiatrist,
1:19:45 and even in my own life, is like, focus on today, focus on doing something today,
1:19:51 and be super careful about setting a big goal. Because then, even if you set a huge goal,
1:19:57 and you do 50% of it, you’ll feel like, oh my god, like I didn’t accomplish my goal. And even 50%
1:20:02 progress will feel like a failure because you didn’t hit your goal, right? This is really weird
1:20:06 the way our motivational circuitry works. So, cut your goal in half, and then cut it in half again,
1:20:09 and focus on that one. It makes sense. It’s what the performance director of, I think,
1:20:13 Team Sky said, David Brailsford talked to me about many years ago. He said that he used to ban
1:20:18 the athletes from thinking about the podium, and just focus them on their pedal strokes today,
1:20:22 on their bikes, and that team went on to become the greatest cycling team of all time, pretty much,
1:20:27 from being down and out. And I always wondered why he, yeah, he said he banned them thinking
1:20:31 about the medals and stuff like that, because it would form as a distraction from today’s performance.
1:20:34 But it’s difficult to do. So, okay, I’ll stop setting goals.
1:20:39 Oh, or set them 25% or set them with awareness?
1:20:43 No, I do anyway. To be honest, I don’t set big goals in my life. I find it really difficult
1:20:46 when people ask me, “What’s your five-year or your 10-year plan?” You feel like you’re
1:20:51 bullshitting, because the answer in reality is, “I’m just going to do my very, very best every day.”
1:20:55 Exactly, right? So, I agree with that 100%, because what more can you do?
1:21:01 Like, setting a 10-year goal doesn’t, I mean, we can sort of think that it makes us work harder,
1:21:04 and it can in some ways, but it’s not the ideal way.
1:21:07 It’s going to confuse today and cause a lot of procrastination and confusion about
1:21:11 what I should be doing today, because if my goal is 10 million in five years, like what, like,
1:21:14 absolutely, doing a course online today doesn’t feel like it’s sufficient.
1:21:17 Yeah, so if you have a 10-year plan, you can afford to waste today,
1:21:21 and you can afford to waste tomorrow, because you have so much time.
1:21:22 Exactly, and that’s not useful.
1:21:26 If you’ve seen my most recent post on LinkedIn, you probably have seen that I’m on a bit of a
1:21:30 hiring spree at the moment across my company, Flight Group, trying to find the world’s best
1:21:34 talent, and throughout these years of building these businesses, my first port of call for hiring
1:21:39 has always been LinkedIn Jobs, who are a proud sponsor of this podcast. This is because of two
1:21:43 reasons. Number one, LinkedIn isn’t just another job board. It has a vast network of more than
1:21:47 a billion professionals and quality candidates, which I believe makes it the best place to find
1:21:52 and hire professionals you can’t find anywhere else. And number two, their process and features.
1:21:57 LinkedIn is constantly finding ways to make the hiring process easier, with super easy
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1:22:17 Post your job for free at linkedin.com/doac. That’s linkedin.com/doac to post your job for
1:22:22 free right now. And of course, terms and conditions apply. We have a closing tradition where the
1:22:25 last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they’re going to be leaving it for.
1:22:33 The question that’s been left for you, if you could write one more book, and that book was one
1:22:39 page long, and it was the last message that you could send to the world and your family,
1:22:44 what would you use that page to say? So I can tell you what I would want it to say,
1:22:51 but I think writing it in one page would be very difficult. I would do it. So I’ve thought about
1:22:57 this, that if I die tomorrow, I basically only have one regret about life. I only have one thing
1:23:03 that I want to accomplish, which is that I’m trying very hard to help a lot of people in the world,
1:23:10 and the one regret that I would have if I died tomorrow is that I would not have taught my
1:23:15 children what I teach the rest of the world. So I’ve even thought about this, that if I got
1:23:20 diagnosed with cancer and I had one year to live, how would I spend that year? I would write a book
1:23:25 for my kids that distills everything that I’ve learned about this sort of motivation, neuroscience,
1:23:31 spirituality. It’s all the same thing. It’s all the same truth. See, the Yogis learned this stuff,
1:23:34 and they were using the same brains that we learned. So they discovered all the principles
1:23:39 of neuroscience through internal observation. So I would put on that one page, probably one page
1:23:47 is how many lines, 16 lines, 18 lines, 20 lines maybe. So I’d probably write 20 sutras that are
1:23:54 like the core of what I’ve learned. And that may be things like one of the sentences will be like,
1:24:00 what is the ego? The ego is that which compares in the sense of self. How does one introspection
1:24:07 is the way to shed yourself of worldly expectations. Like once you start to know yourself, you won’t
1:24:12 look to the outside world to tell you who you should be. And as long as you’re telling the
1:24:16 outside world, as long as you’re listening to the outside world to tell you who you should be,
1:24:21 you’ll never be happy because they keep changing. So some of this stuff, it would be something like
1:24:24 that. But that’s probably what I would do. I’d try to distill everything that I’ve learned into
1:24:28 20 lines. I was hoping that I can do it in a book, but one page would be tough.
1:24:33 I’m curious about what some of those other lines would be. So you’ve talked about introspection,
1:24:40 about ego. Yeah. So I’d probably include one line about glishta and one line about vasana.
1:24:46 So glishta is coloring. So the realization that most of what you experience in life doesn’t come
1:24:51 from the outside world. It comes from what your mind adds to the equation. So I’ll give you an
1:24:56 example. So if I met you for the first time and I called you a loser, if I said, “Steven,
1:25:02 you’re a loser,” the impact of that, these are just words. But whether that hurts you or doesn’t
1:25:08 hurt you is based on the interpretation of your mind. So another good example is, let’s say I’m
1:25:12 like talking to a girl and I text her and she doesn’t text me back. There are a thousand reasons
1:25:20 why she may not text me back in 10 minutes. But it is what my mind adds to the reality of the world
1:25:25 that actually fucks me the most. And most people don’t realize this. They think that, oh, this person
1:25:28 dislikes me and this thing is going wrong and this thing is going wrong. No, it’s not actually like
1:25:35 that. It is your mind that is actually coloring all of your experiences. So there’d be one sentence
1:25:41 on glishta, one sentence on vasana, an understanding of the ego, an understanding of where desires come
1:25:48 from, how to be happy. This whole idea that chasing an external thing for happiness will not
1:25:52 ever achieve it in a lasting way. You got two kids? Yeah.
1:25:57 What would be the last paragraph you’d ever say to them?
1:26:08 Probably I’m sorry I have to go. And I wish I had more time with you.
1:26:18 That’s probably what I would say. And then I love you. And I may be gone in this body,
1:26:25 but I’ll be around and we’ll meet again. It’s interesting because, you know, when you meditate,
1:26:33 we have this idea that we only live this life. And that’s because of the conditioning of our
1:26:38 brain. And there are lots of studies. There’s a guy at University of Virginia who’s done research
1:26:44 on past lives. And I’ve even done past life psychotherapy with my patients. And when I was
1:26:50 meditating, I realized one day that in a past life, I know this is going to sound completely insane,
1:26:56 but I’ve done that. What you’re hearing now is not a hypothetical. I’ve lost a child before. I’ve
1:26:59 been a mother before and it took me some time to figure this out. But when you meditate, you start
1:27:05 to discover things about yourself. And I have this very deep sense of loss in me that I’ve lost a
1:27:12 child. This is not hypothetical. I know what it’s like to lose a child. And it’s happened to me
1:27:16 before. And I still carry that hurt with me from a past life. So when you ask me this hypothetical,
1:27:21 this is not a hypothetical for me. This is a trauma that I’ve experienced just not in this life.
1:27:27 So I’m lucky that so far it hasn’t happened. I hope it doesn’t happen. But I’ve chosen to be
1:27:33 attached to my kids. And in the same way that we talked about, you know, the moment that I write
1:27:39 the book is the moment that I open myself up to success of the book or disappointment in the
1:27:44 book. And the moment that I choose to love my kids, I open myself up to the hurt of losing them,
1:27:50 because I could lose them one day. And so that’s one question that I think I’ve answered before.
1:27:55 It’s the first person that’s ever asked me that, but, you know, it’s, it’s, I can feel the hurt.
1:28:01 I can feel the loss. And just in my own experience, maybe it’s an imagination or a construction from
1:28:05 the neurons in my brain. But just what I’ve learned, I think it’s like,
1:28:09 I’ve been there before, and it’s very painful. And I still carry that pain with me.
1:28:13 Do you think that’s some kind of generational trauma, or do you believe that that was you in
1:28:20 another life? Oh, same thing. So I think now we know from studies of epigenetic inheritance
1:28:24 that we as human beings, we actually all inherit memories. So I think it’s really interesting,
1:28:29 because even if you look at your aversion to snakes, how does you, how do you have a fear
1:28:34 of snakes? Even the first time you see a snake, you’ll be scared of it. So we know scientifically
1:28:39 that we inherit memories that are not our own. So now the question is just a little bit intellectual
1:28:43 or philosophical, that if you inherit a memory, was it you? I don’t know. I mean, it’s part of your
1:28:49 DNA. It’s part of your epigenetic expression. Would you consider that part of you or not?
1:28:54 I think most people would consider your DNA part of you. So I think, yeah, we even have scientific
1:28:59 evidence of that you could argue is sort of a mechanism through which we inherit memories from
1:29:04 the past, for sure, whether it’s your life or not is up for debate. My girlfriend said this to me.
1:29:11 She’s talked about traumas that she feels like come from a past life. It’s very difficult to
1:29:18 believe, very difficult to believe, but my girlfriend always seems to be right about
1:29:22 everything eventually. I eventually come to learn through lots of research that what she’s saying
1:29:28 isn’t crazy. She’s gotten very, very emotional at times about things that she thinks she’s tapped
1:29:32 into from her past life through meditation. She’s a breathwork practitioner. She’s actually in
1:29:38 Costa Rica now doing some retreats and stuff. It’s so interesting. I’d love to learn a lot
1:29:44 more about that. But for now, Dr. K, thank you so much for so much. You’re one of the most engaging
1:29:47 people I’ve ever spoken to in my life because you’re so deeply passionate about the things that you
1:29:51 speak on. Your book is about much more than gaming. The book is called How to Raise a Healthy Gamer,
1:29:56 but it’s about everything. It’s about addictions. It’s about our mind. It’s about
1:30:02 our relationships with both the technology that we have and each other. At the top of the book,
1:30:05 it says, “End power struggles, break bads, green habits, and transform your relationship with your
1:30:11 kids.” But it’s much more than just about kids. It’s about all our relationships with all things
1:30:15 and all people fundamentally because it’s about the human mind. That’s why it’s so incredibly
1:30:20 important. If nobody has discovered you online before, I would highly recommend they go and
1:30:24 check out your YouTube channel because you’ve managed to distill some of these complex things
1:30:29 into highly engaging science-based advice. It’s a remarkable talent that you have.
1:30:32 You’re one of the most effective communicators I’ve ever encountered. So thank you for your time
1:30:39 today. Thank you so much, Stephen. It’s been awesome being here. I feel privileged to be
1:30:50 a tiny slice of your life because I can see you’re such an amazing dude. I’m very excited
1:30:53 that you exist in the world today and I get to see what you continue doing.
1:30:55 Oh, what a compliment. Thank you.
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1:32:22 [Music]

0:00:07 You know, when you started studying neuroscience and psychology, were there some like fundamentals
0:00:12 about the nature of life and the nature of human beings that I’m sure there’s so many
0:00:17 of them, but were there any like real fundamentals that were debunked or reversed as it relates
0:00:21 to your own personal perspective, whether it’s about personal responsibility or about,
0:00:25 I don’t know, agency or autonomy about how much control we have or about how much influence
0:00:29 we have over our happiness? Were there anything foundational that had a real impact on your
0:00:32 personal life?
0:00:36 You know, there’s one thing that recently is just, it’s just something that I recently
0:00:42 changed my mind on. And that was actually while writing the current book that I’m writing,
0:00:47 which I’m writing together with Cass Sinestein, who is the co-offer of Nudge. And it was actually
0:00:53 in fact about happiness. Because, and I remember this clearly, I was in a workshop at the LSC
0:00:57 and they did a survey, they asked, “Who thinks that happiness is the most important thing?”
0:01:03 Right? That everything you do is for happiness. And you know, everyone had to stand on a scale.
0:01:06 If you think like, it’s all about happiness, stand here. And if you think it’s not at all,
0:01:11 stand here. And I was standing here. I was thinking anything that we do, we do for happiness
0:01:17 and that all that matters. And while writing this book actually, we both came to the conclusion
0:01:25 and for me it was a change of mind, that happiness is actually one of three factors that matter.
0:01:30 So one is happiness. The second is meaning. A lot of things you do because it gives you
0:01:36 meaning and it doesn’t necessarily give you happiness. Sometimes the two go hand in hand.
0:01:42 But sometimes it doesn’t. So you could do work that’s meaningful and it doesn’t necessarily
0:01:45 give you happiness and sometimes it does. And then there’s a third factor that’s also
0:01:51 really interesting, which is called the psychological rich life, which is basically variety. A lot
0:01:57 of people just do things for diversity, for variety, to try a lot of different things.
0:02:01 And again, sometimes it goes hand in hand with meaning and happiness, but sometimes
0:02:07 it doesn’t. And that kind of explains why many times we make choices that we understand
0:02:11 is not necessarily going to gain us more happiness, but it will gain us some other thing. One
0:02:19 of these two other things that together, I think, is what brings a good life. And that
0:02:25 is something I think I changed my mind on, that we’re not actually motivated for happiness.
0:02:30 Probably defined as a good feeling, kind of joy.
0:02:35 Why variety? Why do humans care about having variety in their life?
0:02:38 I mean, there’s kind of the unconscious evolutionary reason.
0:02:40 Give me that one.
0:02:48 So I think it’s exploration, right? To move forward, both as an individual and as a society,
0:02:53 we have to explore a lot of different things. Some of these things are not necessarily going
0:02:57 to give you happiness immediately or for you at all. But a lot of times, if you explore
0:03:02 a lot of things, you will find something that is going to be very important, maybe for yourself,
0:03:09 maybe for our species. I always give kind of the really simple example of our ancestors
0:03:15 leaving Africa to explore the rest of the world, right? They had, I mean, why would
0:03:20 they do that? Either they thought there was something better for them to find, right? And
0:03:25 it was probably very hard to do. But that’s just kind of an example of exploration, right?
0:03:31 You’re trying different things. And I can see it in my own life, right? I often do something
0:03:35 and then I kind of, okay, I had enough with this, let’s try something else. And so variety
0:03:41 is kind of a factor that I’m trying to maximize. It’s kind of a balance, right? It’s exploration
0:03:45 and exploitation, right? So you need to do a little bit of exploitation because you found
0:03:49 something that works and something that you’re good at, you don’t want to just leave it be.
0:03:54 But on the other hand, if you just stick with one thing, you may be missing a whole other,
0:03:55 a lot of different things.
0:03:59 It’s like farming and hunting. It’s like the analogy from that book, Who Moved My Cheese.
0:04:04 When I think about variety, my brain was going, well, I know some people that get so caught
0:04:09 up in their comfort zones that they never go exploring. And so the thought that we’d
0:04:16 be motivated or fulfilled by variety, by new things, by adventure, seems to sit in conflict
0:04:21 with a lot of people that I know that are like stuck in a situation and maybe not happy,
0:04:27 but they’re more comfortable in the known than they are leaving that place and venturing
0:04:28 out.
0:04:33 Right, because exploration is risky, because there’s uncertainty. You don’t know what’s
0:04:37 going to happen. Risk means that there’s a high likelihood of both good and bad and
0:04:39 you just don’t know where it’s going to go.
0:04:44 And so that can cause fear. Uncertainty is a state that usually people don’t like and
0:04:50 don’t enjoy. And that’s definitely something that keeps you in place. And in fact, one
0:04:55 of the kind of points that we make is that it seems that people are not making enough
0:05:02 change in their life. That a lot of times, if people think about changing something in
0:05:06 their life, maybe it’s a relationship, maybe it’s a profession, it could be something stupid
0:05:12 like the color of your hair or something like that. There is a great fun little study that
0:05:18 was conducted by the free economic Stephen Levite. What he did, he wanted to see if on
0:05:22 average making a change, when you think you might want to make a change, this is not just
0:05:26 like, “Oh, I think you should get divorced when you’re not even thinking about it.” But
0:05:31 when you’re thinking about a specific change, on average, are you more likely to be happy
0:05:37 if you go ahead with a change or not. And this is a tricky thing to study because normally
0:05:41 you could say, “Well, let’s test people. Let’s ask them how happy they are before and
0:05:45 after they decide to make a change, after they made a change. And then also let’s do
0:05:48 the same for people who didn’t make a change and see who’s happier.” That’s not going
0:05:53 to work because people who go on and make a change, they probably had more reason to
0:05:59 do it. So it’s not kind of a good experimental design. So he wanted to randomize whether
0:06:04 people are going to make changes or not. So what he did is, he had people go online and
0:06:07 he asked them, “Are you thinking about a change?” And it could be small and it could
0:06:13 be big. And they said what the change was. And then he had them flip a virtual coin.
0:06:21 So heads, you go with a change, you take the new job. Tails, you don’t. The likelihood
0:06:28 that people would change if they got the heads, the change, was 25% more than the people who
0:06:32 didn’t. So basically, people were thinking about a change, they did it, they flipped
0:06:35 the coin, if they got the change, they’re more likely to have a change. And indeed,
0:06:41 people who went actually and committed and did the change were happier than people who
0:06:45 didn’t. So that kind of suggests that we’re probably not making enough changes than we
0:06:50 should be. Potentially because it’s scary, right? Trying something new is scary and sometimes
0:06:51 it’s not going to work.
0:06:56 I think that’s so much in friends of mine and lots of DMs from young people who are
0:07:01 in a situation where they’re, it’s certain, but it’s miserable. And they have a potential
0:07:08 option to go through that dark chasm to this potentially better place, but they’re choosing
0:07:11 to stay in that certain miserable situation, whether it’s a relationship, a job, whatever
0:07:19 it might be. And I’ve always felt that our relationship with uncertainty has a huge sway
0:07:23 on our overall outcomes. And what I mean by that is people who are okay with jumping into
0:07:28 that sort of dark hole where there isn’t certainty about their outcomes and just persisting
0:07:33 because they’d rather not be in certain misery, end up having better lives, but I don’t know
0:07:36 how to get people to have a better relationship with uncertainty. I mean, that’s a compelling
0:07:40 argument I can say to them, but you know, just stats and facts, because I’ve read your
0:07:46 books, aren’t enough. There needs to be some kind of emotional pitch to them to get them
0:07:51 to dive nose first into uncertainty. Any advice?
0:07:54 Yeah, that’s a really good question. First of all, I mean, you’re absolutely right. There’s
0:07:59 individual differences on how comfortable we are with uncertainty and how comfortable
0:08:09 we are with taking risks. So I think probably it would be something like, to some extent,
0:08:15 helping them through the change. So it might be difficult to change people’s relationship
0:08:20 with uncertainty in a global, general way, but perhaps every single time when there’s
0:08:27 a specific issue in front of them of what they want to change, kind of like helping them
0:08:34 along the way with that change, holding their hand and so to speak, is probably the only
0:08:40 thing that you could do, to be like, I’m here for you, whether it’s a friend or a mentor.
0:08:44 Well, in their mind in that moment, the thing that’s causing the resistance, you describe
0:08:49 it as fear, right? So what’s the opposite of fear? Is it hope?
0:08:57 You know, it’s not an opposite. But I think it is something that will be likely to drive
0:09:04 you to take that step. And it’s not so much just hope, it’s optimism, which kind of takes
0:09:08 us to some of my research. So, okay, what’s the difference between hope and optimism?
0:09:15 So hope is you want something to happen in the future, right? I want to get that job.
0:09:23 I want to find that relationship. Optimism is believing that I’m likely to get that job.
0:09:29 I’m likely to find that wonderful relationship. And it’s absolutely true that if you’re optimistic,
0:09:35 you think this is going to go somewhere good, then you’re more likely to go ahead and try
0:09:41 that, which makes sense, right? Because my expectation is going to change my actions.
0:09:45 And my actions is going to change my outcomes, right? Because if I think, well, I am going
0:09:51 to try for this competition, because I think I’m likely to get something, then I go ahead
0:09:56 and I try. If I think, well, there’s no chance I don’t try. And so, of course, I’m not going
0:10:01 to get it. So it’s a bit of a self-fulfilling optimism.
0:10:04 And so then the question becomes, if I go back to your question, then the question becomes,
0:10:10 well, how do I enhance optimism, right? So there’s actually, and it’s a good idea, because
0:10:13 enhancing optimism will cause you to take more risk.
0:10:18 I want to know how to enhance optimism in all of my team members, in all of my companies.
0:10:26 So there’s a few ways to do it. One way is a sense of control. We are more optimistic
0:10:31 about things that we believe we have control over, because we do think that when we have
0:10:36 control, that means we can steer the wheel in the right direction, right?
0:10:41 And so if we can cause people to get a sense that they have control, and if it’s about
0:10:47 your team, as for example, let’s say there’s a project that you want someone to work on,
0:10:53 so you can just tell them to do that project, or you can have them choose to do that project,
0:10:59 right? And you can guide them to the choice that you think is correct. But if they believe
0:11:03 that they made the choice, that enhances a sense of agency, enhances the change of the
0:11:09 sense of control, and they become more committed to that option. So you can give them, oh,
0:11:13 well, there’s two options, two projects you can work on, which one do you prefer? And again,
0:11:17 you can frame it in a way that maybe perhaps will make them more likely to choose one over
0:11:21 the other. But once they made the choice, it’s amazing, we’ve done studies on this,
0:11:26 where we give people options. For example, going on holiday, do you want to go to France
0:11:32 or Rome, right? Thailand or Hawaii? If they make a choice, there are two things that are
0:11:36 exactly, they want it the same. They really want to go to Hawaii, they really want to
0:11:41 go to Florida. But once they make a choice, seconds after making a choice, they now believe
0:11:45 that Hawaii is much better than they did just a few seconds ago before making a choice,
0:11:50 and that Florida is not that great, right? Because once you make a choice, immediately,
0:11:56 your preferences change, you rationalize why that choice was great, and now you’re more
0:12:01 committed to it. So that’s true for holidays, but it can be true for work as well, right?
0:12:05 Should I go work on Project A or B? If I make the choice, I become more committed to it,
0:12:08 and it doesn’t work if someone else makes a choice for you. If someone else wants a
0:12:13 choice for you, don’t get into this rationalization mode, where you have to rationalize your choice
0:12:18 because it wasn’t your choice. And once I feel I have control, then kind of that also
0:12:23 enhances my expectations of how good it’s going to be.
0:12:28 But it also boosts your happiness, right? Because I read about the study in care homes
0:12:31 where they had an agency floor and the other floor where people didn’t feel like they had
0:12:35 a lot of agency and choice over their lives, and there was a pretty significant impact
0:12:37 on levels of happiness, right?
0:12:40 Yes. So what they did is they gave them some plans. Is that the study?
0:12:41 Yeah, yeah, that one.
0:12:48 Yes, absolutely. So when we feel we have control, we have agency that enhances well-being. When
0:12:53 we feel our agency has been restricted, that causes anxiety, right? And this is one of the
0:12:58 reasons that people are quite anxious on planes. It’s not just because we fear the worse, but
0:13:03 because we have no control at all, right? No control about when are we going to get there?
0:13:07 What are we going to eat, right? And that causes a lot of anxiety. So by enhancing agency
0:13:13 and control, you are lifting people’s well-being, happiness, and reducing stress and anxiety.
0:13:18 Yeah, and that study with the plants, it works with kids as well, right? You can give kids
0:13:23 some plants to take care of, or have kids make their own salads. They’ll be more likely
0:13:26 to eat it. So that’s just a few examples.
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