0:00:06 I’ve had patients go from stage four cancer to stage zero so I have now seen where the end of
0:00:11 cancer is coming from I’ve seen how the war is going to finish and here’s how Dr. William Lee
0:00:15 is a Harvard trained physician and medical scientist whose work is revolutionizing the
0:00:20 way we understand and fight some of the most devastating diseases facing our world today
0:00:25 I’m going to give you a brand new view of thinking about cancer and this is shocking to some people
0:00:31 to hear but every 24 hours there are 10,000 mistakes that are made in your body each of those
0:00:37 is a microscopic cancer but the reason that we don’t become more sick from all kinds of diseases
0:00:43 including cancer is because our body is hardwired with its own health defense systems but here’s the
0:00:49 problem we are presently seeing the fallout of some of the not so good moves that we made in the 1950s
0:00:54 and 60s and 70s for example people might consume as much as a credit card’s worth of plastic every
0:00:58 single week which is very worrying and I will tell you why but there’s also the foods you eat which
0:01:03 contributed taking your health defenses down but the good news is that you can actually put shields up
0:01:07 as well so this is like our experiment and we’re trying to discover drugs that could be developed as
0:01:12 cancer treatments so we said let’s remove half of them and let’s swap them out with food I was a
0:01:18 skeptic but when I saw these results it made my jaw drop because the holy grail in the pharmaceutical
0:01:22 industry is to find something that kill cancerous stem cells and we don’t have a drug that can do that
0:01:27 turns out mother nature beat us to the punch and there’s more than 200 foods that I’ve studied that
0:01:32 can actually starve cancers and if you had to pick five based on the science you’ve seen what would
0:01:38 those top five be the good news is that it’s food that we can eat every single day so number one
0:01:46 I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify and Apple and our audio
0:01:51 channels the majority of people that watch this podcast haven’t yet hit the follow button or the
0:01:55 subscribe button wherever you’re listening to this I would like to make a deal with you if you could do
0:02:00 me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button I will work tirelessly from now until forever to make
0:02:04 the show better and better and better and better I can’t tell you how much it helps when you hit that
0:02:08 subscribe button the show gets bigger which means we can expand the production bring in all the guests
0:02:12 you want to see and continue to doing this thing we love if you could do me that small favor and hit
0:02:16 the follow button wherever you’re listening to this that would mean the world to me that is the only
0:02:19 favor I will ever ask you thank you so much for your time
0:02:29 dr william lee if someone has just clicked on this conversation and they’re asking themselves they’re
0:02:34 wondering what they’re going to get out of spending this time with us for the next couple of hours what
0:02:42 would you say directly to them that they will learn gain and how will their life improve I would say that
0:02:48 you’re going to hear about food in a brand new way that you didn’t realize that a decision that you can
0:02:54 make after this listening to this or watching this that you can put into action to your life
0:03:01 immediately could actually help you for the rest of your life it could stave off disease help you feel
0:03:07 stronger even help you with longevity so it’s no single moves that you can make but it’s the
0:03:14 beginning of taking steps that can actually allow you to live the rest of a long enjoyable life and what are the
0:03:20 the key diseases that people are and should be most concerned about today based on that correlation to
0:03:28 the food that we eat yeah if you look at the biggest health crises in the world today in developed
0:03:33 countries um you know you’re really talking about cardiovascular disease being the number one killer
0:03:39 diabetes and all the consequences the devastating consequences that come out listen your blood
0:03:45 sugar is not being very well regulated that’s the definition over time of diabetes but the knock-on
0:03:53 effect of having high uncontrolled sugars is really underlying metabolic chaos there’s a whole litany
0:04:01 of terrible conditions that happens every downstream from that from eye disease to wounds that don’t heal etc etc
0:04:08 cancer is another one dementia is a big bigger and bigger problem as our population ages and a lot of people
0:04:15 don’t recognize this but you know the the saying that inflammation is a root cause of chronic disease
0:04:22 scientifically correct but there are many many inflammatory diseases that are out there that don’t
0:04:28 get enough airplay that really take away the quality of your life as you get older and so i think all of these
0:04:33 things it’s not just about mortality it’s about morbidity it’s not just about living long it’s about living well
0:04:39 and feeling good along the way and where do you think we are as a society especially as westerners as it
0:04:46 relates to our relationship with health and food because when i look at some of the stats around life
0:04:55 expectancy there’s been a bit of a stagnation in i think it was 2020 ish time but then also when you
0:05:01 look at a lot of these chronic diseases whether it’s diabetes whether it’s cancer these things seem to be
0:05:05 on the rise so as a nation it feels like we’ve got more information than ever before but when you look
0:05:10 at the objective numbers yeah for some reason we’re not going in the right direction what’s your
0:05:16 your 30 000 foot view on it 30 000 foot there’s more and more people in the world so once you get
0:05:24 the huge numbers uh the diseases that affect most people are going to magnify so just as a matter of
0:05:29 math we’re going to see more of these chronic diseases um but we’re also going to be seeing two
0:05:37 things that are happening that uh actually oppose each other one thing is that the lifestyle and
0:05:47 dietary harms that have occurred over 20 30 50 years from the industrialization of food from the
0:05:54 industrialization of health care from degradation of the environment those are all things that take time
0:06:02 to manifest and so to some extent we are presently seeing that the fallout of some of the not so good
0:06:08 moves that we made in the 1950s and 60s and 70s and so on and so forth so decades later we’re beginning
0:06:16 to see the consequences devastation of things that happened decades ago that’s one side of elevating
0:06:22 increasing the incidence and prevalence of of health conditions bad health conditions there’s another
0:06:29 side that is countervailing and the other side which is the side i that’s the team i play on is it really
0:06:36 exciting because one thing that’s different is that we have now tremendous scientific power to get in
0:06:42 there and probe diseases and also indeed probe health which is something we’re not doing often enough
0:06:51 and in so doing we’re actually able to find solutions to the problems that that counter some of those harms so
0:06:57 we’re beginning to discover now how do we actually prevent diabetes how do we prevent cardiovascular disease
0:07:05 can we reverse heart disease and even conditions that seemed like no win situations and i like to talk about this is that
0:07:13 in my career i never thought as a physician i would actually see the cure to cancer the end of cancer
0:07:20 but actually i tell you i have now seen where the end of cancer is coming from i’ve seen how the war is going to finish
0:07:26 because i’ve had well over a dozen patients and there are hundreds of people like this that are
0:07:32 starting to form that can go from stage four cancer that’s game over cancer to stage zero we can do this
0:07:39 and it not for everybody yet but we’re beginning to see where the light at the end of the tunnel is and
0:07:44 it involves your immune system and some of the remarkable scientific breakthroughs are teaching us
0:07:51 that our body heals itself against diseases as serious as cancer in ways that the pharmaceutical
0:07:59 industry can’t by itself do but it really relies on the body so when you talk about food as medicine or
0:08:05 medicine as medicine none of them are as powerful as what the body is hardwired to do by itself
0:08:10 when i think about something like cancer it’s slightly terrifying because it feels like a game of roulette
0:08:18 it feels like the the people that get cancer it’s completely random and that our outcomes are also
0:08:22 a game of roulette and this is someone that knows very little about cancer i hear someone that i thought
0:08:27 was very very healthy get cancer and then their outcomes whether they they beat it or not also seem
0:08:34 to be largely down to chance sometimes that’s how it seems what do you think of that view yeah i’m
0:08:42 going to give you a brand new view of thinking about cancer and that is that we are all forming cancer
0:08:47 in our bodies all the time from the time we were kids you don’t have clinical cancer you haven’t gone to
0:08:53 the doctor to get a diagnosis still start forming cancers and let me tell you why cancers are like
0:09:01 pimples in our body all right and this is shocking to some people to hear but our the human body is made up of
0:09:09 about 40 trillion cells that’s more cells in our body than stars in a clear sky all right and these
0:09:17 cells have to divide uh to be able to reproduce themselves uh copy and paste every cell has its own
0:09:24 genetic material called dna it’s our instructions for how our cells are work so you get a copy and paste
0:09:32 your dna all right now copying and pasting is a tricky thing to do really well so if i gave you
0:09:38 a sentence to write steven and i said copy it 10 times on a word document you’ll do it perfectly
0:09:45 if i get told you to copy it a thousand times you’re going to make a few mistakes good thing that we have
0:09:52 spell check to fix it to catch it and fix it but if i asked you to copy a single sentence
0:09:58 40 trillion times you’re going to make so many mistakes that your spell check isn’t even going to
0:10:03 be able to catch all of it okay and that’s what’s happening in our body every single day as we are
0:10:08 replicating ourselves we’re going to make mistakes and whenever there’s a mistake that’s being made
0:10:15 that isn’t caught and fixed that’s a mutation and so we have mutations that are forming in our body
0:10:21 just as a matter just as an outcome of being alive and doing our thing and we’re not sick
0:10:28 from those mutations but every mutation is the beginning of a microscopic cancer take a guess
0:10:35 of how many mistakes in dna of copying and pasting your own body uh are made every 24 hours take a
0:10:41 guess this has been calculated randomly well there’s so many cells in my body so
0:10:49 it’s going to be a big number a million okay every day every 24 hours there are 10 000 mistakes
0:10:57 that are made in your body that your body doesn’t catch that keep on that propagate in the document of
0:11:04 our body as it goes on 10 10 000 each of those is a microscopic cancer a microscopic cancer is just
0:11:10 that it’s microscopic it’s too small to be seen with the naked eye but it’s abnormal and that thing could
0:11:16 turn turn turn into a big tumor that could eventually kill you so why don’t we die from cancer all the
0:11:21 time now this is actually something that i see as a physician i have a patient diagnosed with cancer
0:11:28 they always ask me dr lee why me why did i get breast cancer colon cancer pancreatic cancer brain tumor
0:11:36 a very very uh natural question and i do my best to try to provide an empathic answer to that question
0:11:42 but as a researcher i have a more interesting question given the number of mutations that occur
0:11:48 in our body every single day why don’t we get cancer more often why don’t we all get cancer as kids you
0:11:55 know cancer can happen in children but not as often as we have mutations and it turns out this was the great
0:12:05 the reason that we don’t become more sick from all kinds of diseases including cancer is because our
0:12:12 body is hardwired with its own health defense systems so that we’ve got these swashbuckling defenses
0:12:19 that are firing on all cylinders all day long from the from the moment we’re born until our very last breath
0:12:24 these systems that are inside our body defend our health including the microscopic cancers
0:12:32 spots them takes them out kind of like a police cruiser patrolling a quiet neighborhood sees a drug
0:12:38 dealer on the corner pops them in the back of the police vehicle and takes them away cleaning up the
0:12:44 neighborhood that’s how our body naturally cleans up these microscopic cancers and so when you talk about
0:12:53 cancer as a scary disease you’re thinking about the person whose body has failed to detect and eliminate
0:12:58 the microscopic cancers and it’s become large enough to actually become a threat now here’s a question for
0:13:04 you so we tell women to actually do a self breast exam when they’re taking a shower you know look for
0:13:09 lumps or bumps and you know if you find one you know certainly go to your doctor immediately for an exam
0:13:17 the smallest cancer that you could feel with a trained person can feel with their with their hands
0:13:21 in the breast is one centimeter in diameter
0:13:29 a one centimeter breast cancer already has one billion cancer cells that have already multiplied that
0:13:33 microscopic cancer multiplied a billion times that’s the smallest one you can feel
0:13:41 now immune systems not taking them out all right so you need a better immune system if you want a shot at
0:13:48 this not just chemo or hormonal therapy and that’s where some of these incredible advances are taking place
0:13:54 but there’s another one in order to feed a billion cancer cells you need blood vessels to feed them so
0:14:01 the cancers as they get bigger they hijack our own circulation to feed themselves okay it’s kind of like
0:14:06 terrorists kicking in the cockpit door to take over the controls of the plane they want to actually get
0:14:11 your blood vessels to feed themselves now normally the body knows how to control those blood vessels
0:14:17 it’s called angiogenesis angio blood blood vessels genesis how the body grows and controls them that’s
0:14:23 my area of research so naturally our body knows how to prevent blood vessels from feeding cancers
0:14:30 and yet knows how to direct blood vessels to feed healthy tissues so guess what a one centimeter tumor
0:14:38 with one billion cancer cells is fed by 100 million blood vessels coursing into the tumor to feed them
0:14:44 and we’ve studied this in a laboratory the moment that a single blood vessel touches a tumor tiny microscopic
0:14:53 tumor it will grow 16 000 times in size in just two weeks wow all right so i’ve told you some scary
0:14:57 statistics but now let me kind of give you the where the breakthroughs are coming through right
0:15:02 so with this kind of knowledge what do we what can we do with cancer not just breast cancers but
0:15:09 in general number one we know that if you boost your immune system with foods with exercise diet
0:15:15 lifestyle you’re going to actually make your immune defenses a lot stronger to patrol your body
0:15:22 to wipe out those microscopic cancers that’s why healthy diet lifestyle lowers the risk of cancer
0:15:28 that’s why eating the right foods that boost your immunity can substantially lower your risk of cancer
0:15:37 as well we also know that you can eat foods that support prompt up fortify your body’s natural ability to
0:15:42 to control blood vessels keep those blood vessels where they’re supposed to be and get rid of those
0:15:48 blood vessels where you don’t want them to be which is kicking in the cockpit to take over your
0:15:53 circulation to feed cancers so if you eat foods like that are anti-antrogenic foods that got unstable you’ve
0:16:01 got coffee and tea both of those contain natural substances that cut off the blood supply and starve
0:16:07 cancers that’s a good thing so that’s why we know our what we do with our diet can actually help to
0:16:13 lower the risk of cancer as well i’m assuming the opposite also applies i i could eat foods i can drink
0:16:21 things that cause my body to malfunction i makes the blood vessels unregulated makes and starts to feed
0:16:26 the cancer right yeah absolutely so let’s talk let’s talk a little bit about that so okay so i told you the
0:16:31 the body’s hardwired with these defenses shields up right that’s what we want to do because shields
0:16:36 are already normally up you want to raise them higher but what about and this is a brilliant
0:16:40 question you’re asking a very probing question what are the things that take your shields down
0:16:48 right what are the things that turn off the smoke alarm in your house that unlock the doors can i take
0:16:58 a good guess is it this okay now i know the answer that you’re setting this conversation up for which is
0:17:07 a burger with meat uh is that actually uh disease causing and i would i would tell you that yes and no
0:17:16 a burger is something that many people enjoy eating and i would say eating meat eating burgers even eating
0:17:23 ultra processed foods once in a while is not going to harm you if your health defenses are naturally
0:17:34 strong but if you make it a habit a regular habit of eating this at the expense of eating healthier foods
0:17:44 more plant-based foods less processed foods okay um you are actually going to tip the uh your odds
0:17:50 where the diseases are more likely to get you but that what that means is that over eating fast foods
0:17:57 like burgers will actually contribute to taking your uh health defenses down shields down so what are
0:18:03 those things then that bring the shield down you were saying okay excess sodium too much salt which can
0:18:09 be present in a lot of restaurant foods people eat out a lot go to restaurants all the time you ever
0:18:13 you ever go to the back of the kitchen or restaurant to see how they’re salting seizing their food
0:18:19 patrons love salty food it makes food taste really great there’s a you know our brains uh respond very
0:18:27 well to salty food that high sodium levels actually speeds up accelerates our cellular aging so we actually
0:18:34 age faster but it also um is a huge wear and tear on our health defenses specifically our circulation
0:18:41 our our blood vessels our androgenesis system is taken down by excess salt okay i’ve got a question
0:18:47 here obviously there’s a big movement at the moment around hydration and electrolytes and these
0:18:52 electrolytes have magnesium potassium they have sodium in them yeah so a lot of people are now taking
0:19:00 electrolytes to hydrate themselves is there a risk here so the great news is that the healthy body
0:19:10 has got its own titration system for electrolytes if you drink a electrolyte fortified beverage you get
0:19:14 your body’s going to take everything it needs and it’s going to pee out the rest you’re going to
0:19:22 eliminate through your urine all right however sodium uh is one of those electrolytes is present like
0:19:25 you’re not drinking electrolyte fluid all day long but sodium you’re eating it in almost every food that
0:19:31 you actually have except perhaps dessert but maybe even then and so this is one of the things that we
0:19:36 realize is sodium is a high risk for hypertension high blood pressure inflammation of the lining of
0:19:41 your circulation and that that sets up for a lot of badness downstream when it comes to your health and
0:19:46 it takes down your circulation um health defenses that we talked about high blood sugar can also do the
0:19:53 same thing so if you’re eating an excess of added sugar we all have heard by now glucose spikes and
0:19:59 glucose crashes i don’t actually use those words by the way i don’t like to actually cast our body’s
0:20:07 metabolism in terms of spikes and crashes i think those are fear words that get attention uh they they do
0:20:14 make you pay attention to it but in fact really our the healthy body sort of has you know smooth
0:20:20 ups and smooth downs they’re gentle slopes up and down of our blood sugar and that’s completely fine
0:20:26 all right and and it should be like that however if you have an uphill climb of your blood glucose and
0:20:34 it continues to stay up that can actually happen if you’re eating too much added sugar okay added sugar
0:20:42 ultra processed foods what happens is that your blood sugars your intake of the sugar glucose rises up up
0:20:47 up up up up and now your body has your metabolism chase that blood sugar down and it’s got to work
0:20:52 harder and make more insulin and eventually you just wear out that system and then you have a high blood
0:21:00 blood glucose and an insensitive metabolism and that’s the beginning of sort of the the dominoes
0:21:06 starting to fall apart in your body and so sugar high blood sugar added sugar is a problem you get it from
0:21:12 fruit not a problem okay no one’s going to be eating a crazy amount of fruit this is why extremes aren’t
0:21:18 good diversity switch it out keep it interesting for yourself this is what our human nature uh wants
0:21:25 anyway uh it’s how we’re hardwired you’ll you’ll actually be fine so salt sugar those are two offenders
0:21:30 okay um alcohol is another one that actually can take down your health defenses over time
0:21:36 you know people say well what about red wine isn’t red wine healthy what i would say is that actually
0:21:43 the fermented products the or the bioactives that come out of red grapes from the skin of red grapes
0:21:50 that’s found in red wine those there can be some healthful properties of the resveratrol and other
0:21:55 polyphenols that come out of uh that are in wine but it’s never the alcohol it’s not the alcohol in the
0:22:01 beer the wine the whiskey nope none of that is the alcohol is a universal toxin toxic to your brain
0:22:07 toxic to your liver toxic to your heart can’t get away from that your body will recover shields up
0:22:12 little it can take a ding it’s like a you know like a drink is sort of like a driving behind a truck
0:22:18 and it flings a little pebble right into your windshield you might get a little spider in the
0:22:23 windshield okay don’t worry it’ll repair itself you’ll fix yourself you’ll bounce back it’s not going to break
0:22:28 your windshield but if you keep on drinking you’re actually going to smash your windshield and that’s
0:22:34 why alcoholism is so devastating to the health but you know regular a small amount of alcohol so
0:22:42 alcohol itself is is a toxin do you drink uh i i rarely drink and when i drink it’s in moderation
0:22:49 and i was thinking about stress as well does that bring down there so besides the foods you eat other
0:22:54 things that can compromise your health defenses uh and by the way there are five health defenses we
0:22:59 talked about blood vessels we talk about immunity but there’s three other ones uh that are core to
0:23:04 functioning in the healthiest way possible but you want to if you have longevity you need all five of your
0:23:10 health defenses and more to be working in your favor but stress what does stress do lowers your immune
0:23:16 system shields down all right those microscopic cancers whoa that’s why stressful people are
0:23:23 more vulnerable to develop diseases like cancer all right stress also causes your blood pressure to go
0:23:29 up and causes neurotransmitters hormones to be released from your brain and your kidneys your adrenal glands
0:23:37 that actually wear down your circulation now your androgenesis system is also uh not functioning uh
0:23:42 as well to protect yourself and keep good blood flow going where it needs to go now your circulation is
0:23:48 actually down um so again stress also can actually damage the dna we talked about naturally copying
0:23:53 pasting and having errors add some stress to it now it’s kind of like um you’re trying to copy that
0:23:57 sentence i was telling you perfectly now i’m going to come and just smash your fingers down every now
0:24:02 and then and let’s see if you actually make a mistake you will all right stress will actually
0:24:08 do that it’s devastating to have so much stress continuously listen by the way i want to be really
0:24:14 clear to anybody listening or watching this a little stress is actually good for you you know like just
0:24:19 being coddled all day long and living in a happy bubble that doesn’t that’s not that’s not good for
0:24:26 our health either we kind of get lackadaisical we let our guard down little stress i mean anybody who’s
0:24:32 hard-working you know successful knows that you know it’s not the no pain no gain it’s that the that the
0:24:38 grit that goes along with us which gives a little stress keeps us sharp you know uh which is a which
0:24:44 is a good thing you want to be on you want to be on so a little stress is good but when that stress
0:24:50 is unabated it literally sinks your health defenses it is just taking those shields down yeah i’ve noticed
0:24:55 that with myself i’ve spent the last 10 years running businesses a little bit more than 10 years now but
0:25:01 probably like the last 13 years running businesses and the only times when i really get sick where i’m
0:25:12 like out for a week and i really really feel it is one week after two weeks of stress so when i say two
0:25:17 weeks of stress what i mean there is when something happens in my life business where that it’s kind of
0:25:22 chronic and it’s enduring stress i can deal with having a stressful day i can deal with having two
0:25:27 stressful days in a row but when i’ve had like two weeks of an enduring issue like an enduring angst
0:25:34 or a problem almost perfectly predictably a week later i’m sick and i’m extremely rarely sick because
0:25:39 i think i sleep really well like i think i eat really clean and so it’s taught me something about
0:25:43 if i zoom out on that and see what’s going on in my body well eventually like my body’s kind of my immune
0:25:49 system is running out of energy yeah more than in your immune system so when you’re super stressed it
0:25:55 also interferes with your ability to sleep well yeah when you’re sleeping well you know sleeping is
0:26:00 something that i was taught when i was a kid when you’re sleeping you’re resting and when you’re
0:26:05 resting you’re not active right well that’s just our physical self it turns out when we’re sleeping
0:26:10 even though our muscles may not be moving like we are during the day in fact a lot of other systems
0:26:17 including our health defenses are being repaired renewed regenerated rebooted while we’re sleeping
0:26:23 so in those ideally eight hours seven to nine hours eight’s the sweet number sweet number you know
0:26:30 our brain is cleansing itself detoxifying itself releasing you know about the glymphatic system in the brain
0:26:37 not as well as you do okay well there’s a there’s a um sewer system of the grain in our brains that’s
0:26:44 called the glymphatic system and it’s shut tightly during the daytime when we’re using our brain doing
0:26:52 our work uh whatever we’re doing and during the day we accumulate a lot of uh toxins in inside our brain
0:26:56 during the day it’s just a matter of functioning all right and what happens is that those toxins
0:27:03 accumulate which is that you know at the end of a really really tough hard day you got if not a headache
0:27:09 you’ve got your you feel like your brain is it’s full it’s the cup runneth over right all right so when
0:27:16 you go to sleep guess what this sewer system it’s like the sewers appear underneath paris the grates open up
0:27:23 suddenly and it drains those toxins out while you’re sleeping and only when you get good sleep so when you’re
0:27:28 stressed and you’re not getting good sleep you start to accumulate these toxins that are never quite
0:27:33 cleaned up and your brain is not that cleaned up when your brain’s not cleaned up you’re feeling foggy
0:27:39 so think about uh you know when you’re in college you pull an all-nighter or go to a party or whatever and
0:27:43 you’re and you’re staying up all night you’re never quite the same it takes a while for your brain
0:27:48 to clean up itself and when your brain is foggy you tend to not make as good decisions
0:27:53 i’m too tired to work out i’m too tired i don’t care what i eat i’m just hungry i’m gonna eat anything
0:27:59 you start to make bad decisions when it comes to diet and lifestyle you see so it’s it the stress
0:28:04 can cascade on your health like that is there a certain stage of sleep where the glymphatic
0:28:10 system kicks in yeah it’s during like the deep REM sleep okay that dreaming sleep okay and that
0:28:15 usually comes later in the night as well correct correct and in more quality quantity later in the
0:28:20 night so you need to really be getting a lot of sleep now the other thing about deep sleep is while
0:28:27 you’re sleeping really deeply your metabolism is also burning down fat so you think that you’re not
0:28:32 working out during the night you’re right you’re not actually exercising but in fact your metabolism is
0:28:38 burning fat because while you’re sleeping and your insulin levels don’t need to be high because you’re
0:28:45 not eating insulin levels go down your metabolism shifts gears i i sort of give people the analogy
0:28:54 it’s like your your body is a race car sports car like a ferrari during the day you are in gear to drive
0:29:01 accumulate speed and in your your revenue engines at night you shift gears where you’re actually
0:29:07 burning down fat you don’t need to accumulate more fuel now you’re burning down the fuel so when
0:29:12 you’re sleeping you’re actually burning away fat but when you don’t sleep well well you don’t sleep
0:29:19 long enough you’re not burning down that fuel that fuel accumulates day or two of not good no sleep
0:29:25 that’s that’s okay think about flying overseas getting some jet lag you got to catch up once you get
0:29:29 catch up you feel better all right but think about this like day in and day out chronically stressed people
0:29:35 who are never getting good sleep add a little booze alcohol to the to the equation you can kind of see
0:29:38 the problems they’re going to build up your brain is going to be foggy your metabolism is going to be
0:29:44 out of whack you’re not burning as much fat from the calories you ate during the day now inflammation
0:29:51 starts to rise in your body and that inflammation really takes down your health defenses and now you’re
0:29:59 much more vulnerable so in your own example of where chronic stress leads to poor sleep and then
0:30:05 you get sick no surprise if we go back up the thread there we were talking about the sort of individual
0:30:09 perspective on cancer and i was looking at some stats here and it says that the number one google search
0:30:13 related to cancer is breast cancer one in two people will develop some form of cancer during their
0:30:19 lifetime that’s according to the nhs cancer is the second highest leading cause of death worldwide and by 2040
0:30:23 there will be 28 million new cases of cancer each year worldwide but one of the most shocking things
0:30:32 that i saw was that globally early onset cancer incidence has risen by about 80 percent by 1990
0:30:36 and 2019 and there was an article which i’d sent to my team a couple of weeks ago
0:30:43 it’s called the worrying puzzle behind the rise of early onset cancer and it says that there are rising
0:30:48 cases of breast collateral and other cancers and people in their 20s 30s and 40s and it posits
0:30:55 the question what is going on over the last 10 years rates of colorectal cancer among 25 to 49
0:31:01 year olds has increased in 24 different countries including the uk us france australia canada norway
0:31:12 and argentina i mean what is going on yeah that’s a big question so are we seeing the results of more
0:31:19 harms in our environment that we’re being exposed to that are more toxic and leading to earlier
0:31:26 incidents of clinical cancer they’re talking about clinical diagnosed cancer not the invisible microscopic
0:31:31 ones that are forming all the time um it’s yes it’s very worrying are we be exposing ourselves
0:31:38 to something that is more commonly encountered today than before number one number two
0:31:46 are our defenses being taken down by forces that we didn’t appreciate are compromising it’s most
0:31:52 likely both it’s most likely uh i mean the human makeup hasn’t changed and so it’s got to be the fact
0:31:58 a combination that we’re being exposed to more harmful things and though some of those harmful
0:32:02 things are actually that you know provoking more cancers but and we’re also being exposed
0:32:08 to things that take down our health defenses so the balance is being tipped against us and
0:32:13 it’s true i can tell you that when i went to medical school i mean colorectal cancer was something that
0:32:22 you rarely saw in people even in their 50s it was for much older uh people uh now to see i mean there’s
0:32:28 even teenagers that have actually developed colorectal cancer which was unfathomable so i will tell you
0:32:32 one thing that’s actually arisen in terms of like what are some of the clues of these things that could be
0:32:37 happening right so we are talking about climate change and all the things that are happening in
0:32:43 our environment that’s a that’s almost too big uh a conversation to have to answer a question like
0:32:51 this but we i think we cannot afford to ignore the fact that the environment the climate that we live in
0:32:58 has changed but there are other things that we’re beginning to unearth that we didn’t realize until just
0:33:04 within the last few years and one of them is the is how many inflammatory microplastics we are ingesting
0:33:16 when i was growing up uh my mom very uh well-intentioned would store foods in plastic leftovers uh
0:33:22 and we’d buy foods that came in plastic packages right we didn’t think think second have a second thought
0:33:28 about it a plastic cup styrofoam cup go to a picnic you’re eating off of a plastic plate right i mean
0:33:35 these are all common uh experiences that we all have uh in the modern developed world well what
0:33:42 have i told you that we now realize that the plastic touching food can shed the plastic itself as
0:33:49 micro particles into the food and then we eat the food and okay we’ve known this for maybe more than
0:33:55 a decade maybe there’s a little plastic particles uh that come off but you know hey there’s no harm
0:34:00 right we haven’t been able to discover it i used to say that now just within the last few years we’re
0:34:09 beginning to pinpoint that number one it does plastics can actually embed themselves in our body we even
0:34:17 know where we also know that these plastics uh are associated with inflammation that is a big red flag
0:34:24 the klaxon alarm should start going off and third is that the volume of plastics that we’re consuming
0:34:31 is crazy there was a study that came out recently that showed that in normal autopsies of people that
0:34:38 didn’t die of a brain problem that when they were doing the autopsies and looking for plastic
0:34:43 that we could find them and the amount of plastic that was found in the average human brain
0:34:51 is about the amount you’d find in a typical plastic picnic spoon just distributed throughout the brain
0:34:56 this is like a normal it’s a person who’s died of something else wow does that mean that you know like
0:35:01 you and i are actually you got a plastic spoon worth of plastic in our brain there’s been some people
0:35:06 that calculated and this has been the actual calculator math has been challenged but there
0:35:10 was an estimate that you know some people might consume as much as a credit card’s worth of plastic
0:35:14 every single week in their food if they’re not careful about it and let me just tell you where
0:35:19 we’re finding microplastics and you know i want to get to the point where we’re talking about the healthy
0:35:25 foods that can actually turn the ship around how do we turn the battleship of of unhealth back to health
0:35:29 so we’re back on the course that everybody wants to go to we want to go to that north
0:35:34 how do we find our north star for health so i do want to get to that but let me just say something
0:35:38 about microplastics we’ve now found microplastics in the brain as i mentioned to you
0:35:46 we found it in a bloodstream a group in italy actually looking at men who had narrowing of
0:35:51 the carotid artery that’s the blood vessel feeding the brain from that comes from the heart
0:35:56 right to the brain the carotid artery through the neck through the neck they found that the narrowing
0:36:02 that can occur in some men can accumulate plastic they can actually find plastic particles there’s
0:36:07 photographs of the chunks of plastic the particles fragments of plastic in there and they followed
0:36:14 them over a period of time those men who had plastic embedded in their blood vessel lining had a four-fold
0:36:20 increase in the chances of having a fatal heart attack or a stroke late years later four hundred percent
0:36:26 four four fourfold yeah okay now that’s that’s not kidding right so now you’re now we’re beginning to
0:36:32 take notice of this but we’re also finding microplastics in breast milk we’re finding
0:36:37 microplastics in testicles we’re finding microplastics in human semen
0:36:44 how’s it get there and urologists who are doing surgery on the penis are finding that in
0:36:50 in the human flesh when you look into the microscope we never used to look for this now we’re looking for
0:36:58 it that there’s even microplastics in the flesh of the penis okay so if anybody listening isn’t taking
0:37:04 notice about microplastics now it’s time to start thinking about this so one of the questions is and
0:37:10 i’m not saying that the rise in rate of cancers that we’re seeing is due to microplastics what i may
0:37:17 what i am saying is that we’re beginning to wake up to the fact so let’s close off on microplastics what
0:37:23 are the the easy wins in our lives do you think when you think about microplastics is it just removing
0:37:28 anything plastic that i eat from or are there some sort of easy cheap wins is it my shampoo is it
0:37:35 my frying pan is it a container yeah so i always tell people that the easiest way to lower your exposure to
0:37:41 microplastics is to throw out your plastic cups your plastic plates and your plastic silverware
0:37:49 okay and get ceramic or glass uh that’s the best way to actually avoid those and also when you’re
0:37:56 buying food try to avoid food that comes clearly packaged in plastic all right now i do want to point
0:38:02 out one thing because right here on this table we are looking at a tray full of beverages and i can
0:38:09 already identify the matcha and this looks like a cup of coffee and we’ve got english breakfast
0:38:14 tea i’ve done a lot of research on tea all right but i’m noticing something that green tea which is
0:38:21 universally healthy the polyphenols in green tea lower the risk of inflammation they actually improve
0:38:27 your metabolism lower your risk of cancer their heart healthy before you take that sip though let me tell
0:38:34 you i see a tea bag in there okay and there’s different ways of brewing your tea it turns out
0:38:39 research from the university of montreal have now shown that um tea bags can shed microplastics
0:38:47 so you can have a billion particles of microplastic shed from a single tea bag okay all right so i just
0:38:53 changed your mind right so look this is the power of awareness and understanding i probably should have
0:38:58 stopped you yeah what it was you were like why didn’t you save my life no you let me drink it first but
0:39:05 i’ve i just as you were doing it i was like uh all right but look there’s another there’s another one there
0:39:10 that’s got uh lemon ginger tea this is like an herbal tea that’s fine listen um i i would also tell
0:39:17 you with flavored teas just be cautious like always check anything that’s been machined to be a little
0:39:21 bit more than nature tea bags are supposed to be paper right well in order to prevent the paper from
0:39:27 ripping the the manufacturers of the tea bags spray it with a small amount of plastic to have it hang
0:39:31 together better and that’s the plastic that comes off but what about the lemon and ginger in this lemon
0:39:38 ginger tea that that sounds so appealing and calming right and and something that most people would find
0:39:43 nice as an herbal tea well listen you’re you’re relying on a factory to actually put that lemon
0:39:49 flavor ginger ginger flavor is it real lemon or is it real ginger always look at the ingredient label
0:39:55 to know what’s in there or just buy your own tea and squeeze your own lemon and and add your own piece
0:40:03 of ginger these are ways to actually kind of avoid the uh potential exposures to toxins that come from
0:40:09 ultra processed food so all this conversation about you know avoid ultra ultra processed foods and watch
0:40:14 out for all those harmful things you know it’s actually quite easy to dodge them if you just have
0:40:18 in your mindset that you’re just going to make it yourself and it’s uh absolutely easy now i will tell
0:40:24 you in something interesting about english breakfast tea we did research at the androgenesis foundation
0:40:29 the non-profit i i looked at to look at um different types of teas different types of green tea
0:40:38 japanese tea chinese jasmine tea uh english tea and we were always assuming again this is the power of
0:40:42 food as medicine research we were always assuming that the green tea is going to be the best i’d
0:40:49 always heard that japanese green tea is going to be like the ultra best and what we found was that english
0:40:54 tea specifically earl grey tea actually was the most potent when it actually supported your blood
0:41:00 vessels your body’s defense system for angiogenesis to keep your circulation healthy wow what a surprise
0:41:07 that is and this spoke to me about the fact that we can’t make assumptions we need to look at facts we need
0:41:14 to look at data and so i’m a big fan of earl grey now now what could what what might make earl grey give
0:41:20 earl grey its superpower well this is where knowing a little bit about what you’re eating is actually
0:41:28 useful because earl grey is a fermented uh it’s a black tea it’s got bergamot in it and bergamot is a kind
0:41:35 of a citrus so maybe it’s combining those uh ingredients that actually provides the superpower but i do see
0:41:44 matcha on this uh uh tray i want to tell you about matcha because it is a matcha is truly a super
0:41:49 enriched polyphenol enriched tea a lot of people don’t realize that there’s no tea bag in it so don’t
0:41:58 worry so a lot of people think about matcha uh as just another green tea but it’s not another green tea
0:42:03 it is made with green tea leaves the same kind of green tea leaves but uh as you would find in any
0:42:11 green tea however it’s what’s the composition of matcha matcha is green tea that is before it’s
0:42:18 ready for harvest is grown under a shade that changes its chemical structure natural chemical structure a
0:42:23 little bit so it’s got a lot of potency to it and what happens with matcha is they take the tea leaf
0:42:30 they take out the stem of the green of the of the green tea leaf and they ground up the actual leaf
0:42:36 into a powder now what’s in that green tea leaf you’ve got not just some of the polyphenols that
0:42:43 might steep out in the cup whether you’re using a tea bag or loose leaf tea you’re getting all the
0:42:50 polyphenols suspended in that so now you get 100 polyphenol okay in matcha so go ahead you’re go ahead
0:42:57 do it okay that one’s good all right okay for matcha and because you’re getting the tea leaf
0:43:02 ground to it you’re also getting your dietary fiber that dietary fiber is good for your gut health your
0:43:09 microbiome good for uh your metabolism good for lowering inflammation and the polyphenols found in
0:43:18 green tea have also been uh matcha matcha tea have also been found in the lab to kill breast cancer
0:43:24 stem cells what’s a breast cancer stem cell what’s a stem cell cancer stem cell well look stem cells are
0:43:32 these renewable cells all right and um cancers contain stem cells that help the cancers come back
0:43:36 right if you get cancer you get it treated one the one thing you don’t want it to do is to come back
0:43:43 so um and by the way other foods can also do kill cancer stem cells purple potatoes uh that you might
0:43:49 might have seen in the market they’re kind of purpley looking on the outside slice it open dark purple on
0:43:55 the inside all right turns out that those purple potatoes have something called anthocyanins purple
0:44:01 potatoes have been studied in a lab okay at penn state university and been shown to kill colon cancer
0:44:08 stem cells which contribute to the colon cancer coming back so full disclaimer i am i made a very very big
0:44:16 investment uh a seven-figure investment into a matcha company a couple years ago and if you look at the
0:44:20 search trend data on the subject of matcha i don’t know if you’ve seen this but that’s
0:44:26 i’ll throw it up on the screen for anyone that’s watching on video but you can see how it’s just come
0:44:32 out of nowhere it seems it’s exploded and when you say that matcha cells have an impact on breast cancer
0:44:38 cells what does that mean in reality does it because obviously the the conclusion one might
0:44:43 jump to is that if you drink matcha you’re lowering your risk of breast cancer but that’s not necessarily
0:44:49 what you’re saying what i’m at what i am saying is that drinking green tea in its most healthful form
0:44:56 okay um raises your body’s health defense systems yeah and by having better health defense systems better
0:45:02 immunity better control over your blood vessels better control over your dna and those mutations
0:45:07 and if you can actually kill some of those stem cells cancer stem cells that’s going to be in your
0:45:15 favor as well that is overall going to actually lower your risk of cancer and so i think that and by the way the
0:45:21 other thing that green tea and matcha can actually do is improve your metabolism it’s really pretty much
0:45:30 all good my my great uncle by the way lived to 104 years old vital intact uh independent he told me that
0:45:38 he attributed his longevity and his vitality to the fact that he lived at the base of a mountain that
0:45:46 grew tea that every morning he got up and he walked up he walked up stone steps a stone path to a tea garden
0:45:52 and he had freshly picked tea it’s all organically grown and everything and he and he drank tea all
0:45:57 day long he probably had 10 cups of green tea a day and this has been his whole life he sat with his uh
0:46:05 uh uh close friends who are also very vibrant and and elderly um social connection all right watch the
0:46:12 sunrise it’s very calming do you drink it absolutely um i’ve got just going up the the thread again a
0:46:18 little bit you mentioned the word colorectal hmm where is the colorectal all right so we have a
0:46:24 little uh model here because i’m asking this because i’m wondering why that type of cancer is increasing so
0:46:34 is there is there a particular reason why well okay so let’s do a quick uh medical school uh course crash course
0:46:43 for podcasters um the the gut we talk about gut health most people think of the gut as sort of lower
0:46:49 down in your belly or maybe even just your stomach but the gut actually starts in your mouth and it runs
0:46:55 down down down about 40 feet worth of stuff organs uh your esophagus your stomach your small intestines
0:47:01 your large intestines by the way these squigglies are your small intestines all right this blue is your
0:47:07 large intestines this is like a it’s shaped like a horseshoe it’s big thick uh tube that that’s kind
0:47:14 of uh framing your small intestines and then it goes down the poop chute direct on the anus that’s the
0:47:24 end of your gut all right so the colon is really the large uh framing thick part of the gut it’s near the
0:47:30 very end all right so all this squiggly small intestines winds up here uh at the beginning of
0:47:36 the colon the colon goes up it’s called the ascending colon and then it makes a sharp angle turn right
0:47:41 across your belly kind of like a belt right across your belly this is colon here and then it goes to the
0:47:47 descending colon take the elevator down down down down down down you see the blue downs going down and
0:47:52 then it kind of takes a little jog at the very end and goes down into your rectum and your anus okay
0:47:58 right so the blue thing is my colon so this is where cancer incidence is rising in young people so
0:48:03 you’re talking about the rising in instance of colorectal cancer that could be a cancer that’s
0:48:10 typically uh either on the right side of the colon either the going up up the upside up the elevator yeah
0:48:16 or down the elevator on the right side of the left side okay yeah okay it turns out that we’ve known for
0:48:24 a long time that unhealthy diets are linked to a higher risk of colorectal cancer specifically
0:48:32 processed meats so the world health organization contain considers processed meats salami bologna
0:48:40 ultra processed you know kind of deli meats delicates you find a delicatessen all right um those would be uh
0:48:49 considered uh considered uh carcinogens and and they’re they are uh highly linked to an increased
0:48:54 risk of bowel cancers now why would that be well it turns out that think about it if you’re eating a ton
0:49:01 of meat all right you’re actually exposing the gut to a lot of those processed meat carcinogens that when
0:49:07 it sits around your colon not one not not once in a while go to the ball game have a hot dog enjoy
0:49:15 yourself but if you eat it day in and day out you’re giving a lot of exposure uh to your gut this term
0:49:22 angiogenesis you’ve talked about the link that that has to cancer angiogenesis from my um novice
0:49:28 understanding is how the blood cells provide blood to different parts of our body right and in the case of
0:49:37 cancer there’s this the angiogenesis system is making a mistake is that a simplified version of
0:49:45 it yeah so angiogenesis which is the field i study study we break it down uh it to what its elemental
0:49:51 parts of angio blood blood vessel genesis how the body grows and maintains them so angiogenesis is how
0:49:57 our body grows and maintains our circulation a lot of people don’t know this but our circulation is one of
0:50:03 our body’s health defense systems and it’s so extensive that in a typical adult there are 60
0:50:09 000 miles worth of blood vessels packed inside our body these are the highways and byways that deliver
0:50:16 blood to every organ and tissue but that means that they also deliver the air we breathe the oxygen
0:50:20 we’re breathing in and the nutrients that we’re eating so we eat good things are going into our bloodstream
0:50:25 and our blood vessels our angiogenesis systems develop delivering to every cell in the body now you eat
0:50:31 something bad similarly or you breathe something in bed similarly your those blood vessels are delivering
0:50:38 something negative now inside the blood vessels um is a lining it’s called the lining is like a clear
0:50:47 like a plastic wrap inside the blood vessel called the endothelial layer that’s like a layer of ice like on an
0:50:53 ice skating rink to ensure that everything in the blood vessels are flowing smoothly without getting
0:51:00 caught on the walls so when you have cardiovascular disease too much uh uh too much salt to hypertension
0:51:04 when you have diabetes where you’re actually wearing down the lining of the blood vessels
0:51:10 endothelial layers being damaged it’s like um damaging the lining of your angiogenesis defense
0:51:17 system has really deadly consequences because it’s like scraping up the ice on an ice skating rink
0:51:23 you know uh if you actually have a lot of ice skaters on a rink after a while it’s unskatable right
0:51:28 you can’t get on it and what will happen in your bloodstream is then elements in your blood get caught
0:51:34 along the walls and they build up and that’s actually how blood vessels narrow up so that’s
0:51:41 one of the areas of of so androgenesis actually is intended to deliver oxygen and nutrients to the
0:51:48 tissues that need it for to maintain your health but because it’s so critical it’s also very very
0:51:53 carefully controlled so you don’t have blood vessels growing where they should not be growing
0:51:59 like in your joints in your eyes or of course to cancers you don’t definitely don’t want to be
0:52:06 feeding cancers by delivering oxygen or nutrients to them i’ve got this graph which shows different
0:52:13 things that cause more or less angiogenesis if you’ve seen this graph but okay so you are showing
0:52:20 a graph that i i generated my my organization generated and this is actually you’re looking at the
0:52:26 experiment that got me into food as medicine let me explain to you the experiment um i’ll just put it
0:52:35 i’ll put it over here so um so we were studying at one point drugs and we’re trying to discover drugs
0:52:40 that could be developed as cancer treatments so we were looking for our drugs that could cut off the
0:52:48 blood supply to tumors so we were screening uh lots of chemicals that biotech companies were developing and
0:52:53 inventing and professors were inventing and said hey can you take a look to see this could be a
0:52:58 worthwhile drug that could cut off the blood supply to a tumor as a cancer treatment all right and at
0:53:04 the time there were no such treatments so it was all discovery like this was you know like the like
0:53:08 the golden age of discovery when it came to angiogenesis we’re testing oh my gosh this thing could
0:53:13 really stop blood vessels could we develop this into our cancer treatment ultimately yes the answer
0:53:18 was yes but we were looking for them and we would and so we developed a system where we could add a
0:53:27 substance into a laboratory test system to see if blood vessels would grow or shrink and so here on
0:53:35 this graph you can see at the very top a very long bar of blood vessels growing that’s normal healthy blood
0:53:41 vessels growing out as long as they can and then what we would do is we’d throw drugs into it and we would
0:53:48 see if we could actually shrink them up and so some of the uh shorter bars uh uh are cancer drugs uh you
0:53:55 can see them uh in this color in blue not surprisingly some of the cancer drugs were making the blood
0:54:01 vessels smaller hey this could be a good candidate drug and we were also testing other uh drugs that
0:54:07 were available not used for cancer to see if they would work sure we discovered some of those too but i did
0:54:11 something a little bit subversive and as you know you know if you want to be disruptive you got to
0:54:16 sometimes um disrupt yourself in order to be able to do this so this is like our experiment that we were
0:54:22 doing at the androgenesis foundation we decided to disrupt ourselves so we said we have a whole system
0:54:28 of drugs to test let’s remove half of them and let’s swap them out with powders that came from food
0:54:37 all right just to see what would happen and when we actually tested foods in the same system used to
0:54:43 develop drugs food as medicine tested in the same system that medicines are developed we found what
0:54:51 you see on this bar chart in red we actually found that dietary factors stuff that’s found in food could
0:54:57 actually cut down the blood supply that would be growing to feed a cancer in other words there’s
0:55:03 anti-angiogenic foods you could see the green tea you could see the onions and garlics and red grapes and
0:55:11 strawberries um it was really an eye-opener to me for when i saw these results it made my jaw drop
0:55:20 and i said my god foods have potency just like drugs i was a skeptic all right and it just made me realize
0:55:28 like this is something that i had to pursue this was an area of research that i absolutely had to actually
0:55:34 look further into a drug takes a decade and a billion or more dollars to be able to develop from
0:55:41 from scratch to reaching a patient and then not everyone who needs a treatment can actually get the
0:55:47 drug but a food has immediacy if you discover something amazing about a food whether it’s
0:55:53 matcha whether it’s purple potatoes whether it’s a strawberry that could that that immediacy could
0:56:02 be used beneficially without toxicity all right uh and affordably and so i just saw this as this was
0:56:06 this experiment is what brought me into the realm of food as medicine so i’m gonna ask some stupid
0:56:14 questions here so on here i can see that for example soy extract causes less angiogenesis which what i
0:56:20 understand is the the growth of these blood vessels but does that mean that if i have lots of soy extract
0:56:29 or artichoke or parsley or berries that it’s gonna cause other parts of my body not to grow blood cells so
0:56:36 this is the great question let me kind of reframe the question as you’re asking it if uh experiments
0:56:43 are able to show that certain foods can uh prevent blood vessels from growing will that actually cause
0:56:49 a problem with your body’s health defenses to keep blood vessels from growing in healthy tissues yeah all
0:56:58 right answers no and here’s why as a health defense system our angiogenesis system is completely designed to
0:57:04 in the right number of blood vessels to give just amount just the right amount of blood flow not too
0:57:11 much not too little i call it the goldilocks zone you know goldilocks a fairy tale um you know the bears
0:57:15 were home invaders they broke into the house and they were looking for chairs and porridge and beds
0:57:21 not too hot not too cold but just right all of our health defenses including the angiogenesis health defense
0:57:29 is a hard wire to keep the body just right so what that means is that eating foods like artichokes or
0:57:36 strawberries or soy can actually help your body prevent extra blood vessels from growing towards cancer for
0:57:44 example and and other disease tissues but it will not override the body’s natural ability to get the
0:57:48 right amount of blood vessels to the right tissue so you don’t have to worry about starving your healthy
0:57:54 tissues you’re just uh cutting off the uh bad blood vessels that you show i can i call it like
0:58:01 a landscaper on a golf course that that breaks out the lawnmower to mow that uh the golf course so it’s
0:58:08 got a perfect level um of the lawn you’re not going to actually uh carve out a bald spot uh in on in
0:58:14 a country club you’re going to get just the right amount similarly and um we’re not talking about this
0:58:18 graph there’s another graph that can actually show foods that you can eat that can grow blood vessels
0:58:25 healthy blood vessels where you want them and it turns out things like fruit peel uh uh can actually
0:58:30 do that and barley can grow new blood vessels and dark chocolate can actually help to support blood
0:58:34 vessels as well and some of these things can also work on both sides of the equation that can prune away
0:58:40 the bad but extra blood vessels and they can grow them whenever you need them so your body is sort of like
0:58:46 the gardener extraordinaire it knows exactly how to actually tend you give them the right ingredients
0:58:50 they know exactly where to put the grass seed and they know exactly where to mow the lawn have you
0:58:58 ever had cancer in your family yes um cancer has touched my family like it has for most people
0:59:05 um i had two uncles uh years ago that passed away one passed away from colon cancer one passed away from
0:59:16 liver cancer and you know i was a doctor at the time and so i felt so uh helpless uh because as a doctor i
0:59:25 could i could diagnose i could lay hands on i could feel the hard liver i could feel the masses and i felt at the
0:59:32 time helpless even though i was doing the research cancer research and finding future paths i felt like
0:59:40 this was we we’re not there yet and we can’t i couldn’t help him i felt i felt powerless fast forward
0:59:46 we’re now at a point where we’re beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel
0:59:54 and my mother when my mother had cancer so my uncle’s sister my mother wound up having endometrial cancer
1:00:02 she was 80 years old one day um had some bleeding went to the hospital found a mess she had a
1:00:09 hysterectomy to remove her uterus and ovaries and they found in there an endometrial cancer that’s a
1:00:13 cancer the lining of the uterus the surgery and a little bit of radiation is supposed to take care of
1:00:20 it unfortunately in her case those little cancer stem cells and it was microscopic cancers that were
1:00:27 her present took off raced off in her 80 year old body which you know look weaker immune system when
1:00:34 you’re 80 and within a few months after successfully recovering from the surgery she had stage four
1:00:42 cancer everywhere all right and her oncologist told me uh dr lee you know you’re a doctor as well you know
1:00:50 know this is serious and this is pretty much the time of game over and now times have changed science
1:00:56 has advanced progress has advanced at that time when my mother was diagnosed with stage four cancer
1:01:05 immunotherapy the latest and greatest i think advancement in cancer treatment had just broken
1:01:12 through and become approved immunotherapy immunotherapy is not chemotherapy it doesn’t actually poison the
1:01:19 cancer immunotherapy is a medicine that you give a cancer patient that wakes up your own immune system
1:01:24 whether you’re a young person or an old person it can wake up your immune system all right and
1:01:30 my mother had immunotherapy she was one of the early patients that got immunotherapy and her own 80
1:01:38 year old immune system woke up like a super like an army of super soldiers and went after that cancer
1:01:46 now we completely adjusted her diet to so that her body between treatments would be as strong as
1:01:51 possible shields raised as we’ve been talking about and we give her a little bit of radiation to
1:02:00 to help the uh the the her immune system spot the cancer guess what happened three treatments of
1:02:08 immunotherapy three three weeks apart so time zero is the first treatment three weeks later the next
1:02:14 treatment three weeks after that the next treatment all right so we’re talking about a total nine weeks of
1:02:21 three treatments all right of these three treatments we scanned her stage four went to stage
1:02:28 zero zero zero and she never had chemotherapy now chemotherapy can be helpful too with immunotherapy but
1:02:37 this was where i saw firsthand close up in my own family the ability to harness your body’s own health
1:02:46 defenses in a way that i couldn’t do for my uncle 15 years ago before and we lost him and we were to save
1:02:54 my mom and i can tell you i literally had dinner with my mom two days ago and she’s 90 91 10 11 years later
1:02:59 completely healthy completely cancer free and by the way this immunotherapy
1:03:07 if we could only get this to work as well for everyone this is where we are in the history of medicine
1:03:13 we can see an end we know how we can get to an end we’ve actually seen successes we just can’t get it
1:03:17 to work for everyone yet and there are different ways to actually wake up your immune system another
1:03:24 way that i’m working on now that um a colleague of mine in germany is working on is also absolutely
1:03:32 jaw-droppingly amazing imagine this somebody has cancer and you’re gonna they’re gonna get a biopsy no
1:03:36 matter what they’re gonna take some tissue out to look at it under the microscope what kind of cancer
1:03:41 is it their brain is a breast is a colon is a pancreas where is it coming from you’re gonna get
1:03:46 a diagnosis right now up until recently that’s all we did with the tissue the biopsy you just got a
1:03:51 result and it’s kind of like a death sentence depending on what type of cancer and you’re supposed
1:03:57 to then go to the guidelines and open up the the the treatment book to say well what’s the pathway we
1:04:02 should what’s the recipe we should follow for treatment too often those recipes don’t work very
1:04:10 well or for very long now what if i told you that where we are headed with cancer therapy is a new
1:04:18 frontier where you take the tumor of the biopsy sure look at it in the microscope call it out uh define
1:04:26 what it is and then you send it to a lab where you do complete full-on genetics you sequence the entire
1:04:33 cancer genome all right right now we do sequence we take a dozen two dozen three dozen i’m talking
1:04:39 about doing 20 30 000 genes right right now most people say it’s not worth it we don’t know what we
1:04:45 do with all that information what if i told you if you took a tumor and sequenced all the genes you find
1:04:52 every mutation every typographical error that we talked about earlier that’s in that cancer those are the
1:04:58 smoking guns of the cancer now what if i took a piece of a little normal blood normal cells and sequence
1:05:05 that too all right now people are hearing me talk who are oncologists or scientists would say i don’t
1:05:08 know what you’re talking about that’s double the waste of effort because now you’re going to sequence
1:05:12 the human genome twice in a single patient and what are you going to do with all that information ah
1:05:20 this is where technology sits in artificial intelligence machine learning let’s now have a
1:05:26 computer compare normal cells with tumor cells back and forth and back and forth and back and forth
1:05:33 subtract out all the mutations that are found in normal cells leaving only the smoking gun mutations in the
1:05:40 cancer a couple hundred may left those are the smoking guns those are the doers that led to this cancer now
1:05:47 imagine and i’m going to give you an analogy here do you remember that tom cruise movie uh minority report
1:05:51 yeah so you remember that like he was wearing these gloves and you have a glass pane and you can actually
1:05:58 move the uh things around on the glass with your fingertips right so now imagine you can take these
1:06:04 human uh the the cancer mutations on the bottom of this glass screen and you can just randomly with
1:06:10 your fingers pick out 20 random mutations and move them up on the screen all right now you’ve just
1:06:15 picked out the mutations and now you can connect the mutations together i call it a pearl necklace imagine
1:06:20 every mutation is a pearl and you connect them together with the string that connects the pearl necklace
1:06:26 now you get what i’m saying like now we’ve taken the tumor find out the doers the the the the uh
1:06:33 the smoking guns now we’ve strung them together okay this is the most wanted sign that you would
1:06:41 actually place out for the criminal and now imagine you hit print technology and now you have a protein
1:06:49 printer that prints out those smoking guns as a protein as a protein full of your own individual
1:06:55 cancer of that particular person now you take that protein and you inject it under the skin and you’re
1:07:00 challenging your own immune system you’re vaccinating yourself with the with your own cancer and you’re
1:07:07 causing your own immune system to say aha this is a bad guy we’re going to develop antibodies to go
1:07:14 find our immune system we’re going to get ratcheted up to go find that cancer well this is happening right now
1:07:22 in clinical trials i have a colleague named saski a biscuit that is actually developing peptide vaccine
1:07:28 treatments against cancer and if you want to see some amazing results there was a paper we published in
1:07:37 nature communications about a year ago that showed in more than a hundred people with glioblastoma that is
1:07:44 a game over brain cancer nobody lives more than a couple of years with us all right that with this
1:07:50 treatment we’ve been able to actually show that some patients with their own immune system woken up
1:08:00 can actually keep them alive and cancer free brain cancer like that is no win situation impossible to
1:08:05 possible and actually somebody who i’ve just recruited as an ambassador to my nonprofit organization the
1:08:11 androgenesis foundation i strongly encourage people who want to have a modicum of hope who wants to see
1:08:17 what i’m talking about in real life on social media there’s a woman named rebecca divine she’s okay with
1:08:25 me giving her name her handle is that brainy blonde it’s a it’s a triple entendre she’s blonde she’s
1:08:32 very smart but she had a glioblastoma seven years ago and she is thriving alive with his immunotherapy so
1:08:38 between my mother rebecca divine i’m just telling you like i’ve had well i’ve known well over a dozen
1:08:46 people who there’s no way they’d be here today if it wasn’t for this scientific advances that all
1:08:53 shore up the body’s health of health defense systems specifically the immune system but that’s
1:08:59 but the drugs alone aren’t enough you really can take advantage at home of your own diet and lifestyle
1:09:03 to be able to tip those odds in your favor i’ve heard you say that immunotherapy is more likely to
1:09:16 be successful if you have certain bacteria in your gut yeah that is okay so in 2017
1:09:24 i helped to convene a cancer research conference in paris uh and we called it rethinking cancer
1:09:33 and we brought the world’s best minds out there and one of the um researchers uh uh named dr laurence
1:09:39 zitvogel she’s at the in paris works in paris at the institute gustav russi she is an immuno-oncologist
1:09:47 so she studies immunotherapy for cancer and at the time we had uh we asked her to present uh
1:09:54 some uh groundbreaking results that were embargoed at the time so our research our conference was the
1:10:02 first time it was ever presented and she said in a hundred people who were receiving immunotherapy
1:10:10 for uh different types of cancer that if you looked at the difference between people who responded lived
1:10:17 did well versus people who didn’t respond didn’t do well died all right and that’s the frustration
1:10:22 with the types of treatments my mom had um you know some people do well some people don’t do well
1:10:27 we pull our hair out trying to figure out like what’s going on how do we make people do better
1:10:33 well it turns out that when you compare everything gender age comorbidities uh
1:10:40 uh all the other genetic factors the research that was presented showed that there was no differences
1:10:45 between the groups of responders people who did well versus people didn’t do well for immunotherapy
1:10:54 except for one thing that one thing was one bacteria the responders had one bacteria called
1:11:00 acromantia mucinophila so most bacteria have a genus and species first name last name first name is
1:11:07 acromantia uh last name is mucinophila okay it likes to grow in mucus mucinophila where is there a lot
1:11:14 of mucus in the colon where’s the colon that’s the on this model the blue area so acromantia grows
1:11:19 right here in the cecum which is the pouch uh in the colon right at the beginning before you take the
1:11:25 up elevator to the top of the colon that’s where it grows if you if the people had that acromantia
1:11:32 they would respond to immunotherapy so what what the researcher did they she took out the acromantia
1:11:38 and brought it to her lab of the responders from humans and and gave it to mice who were
1:11:44 not responding to immunotherapy boom she’d reckon she’d resurrect the immune response to kill the
1:11:49 cancer so this is one of the first bacteria and there there may be many many that we haven’t yet
1:11:54 discovered all right so like my whole career has all been about discovery there may be more bacteria
1:12:01 but we discovered at least one the presence of which seems to be absolutely vital if you are a
1:12:07 patient receiving immunotherapy uh the type of immunotherapy called checkpoint inhibitors if you
1:12:15 want to uh tip the odds in your own favor of being a responder now how do you get acromantia well at the
1:12:21 time uh there was no acromantia probiotics now you can actually find acromantia probiotics but but at
1:12:27 at the time this was coming out you you had to grow your own acromantia diy acromantia all right so how
1:12:32 do you grow it well it turns out that there are certain foods you can eat that grow acromantia what
1:12:39 are those foods pomegranate pomegranate juice pomegranate seeds will grow acromantia cranberries
1:12:45 uh cranberry juice dried cranberries will grow acromantia conquered grape juice or conquered grapes will grow
1:12:53 acromantia chili peppers will actually grow acromantia chinese black vinegar you ever go to dim sum and have
1:12:58 soup dumplings oh yeah the black vinegar sauce that they use for for as a condiment to the soup
1:13:04 dumplings chinese black vinegar that will prompt your body to grow acromantia as well so what is your
1:13:08 diet of preference then there’s so many different diets that we’ve people speak about when they talk
1:13:14 about cancer and other chronic diseases um as i think i said to you beforehand i’m on an extremely
1:13:21 low carb diet which is like verges on keto but i kind of bounce in and out of ketosis what what do you
1:13:26 think of let’s start with the ketogenic diet do you have a view on on that kind of diet yeah so let me
1:13:34 just give you my my perspective on diets lots of different diets out there they’re all designed uh
1:13:41 with kind of a specific perspective and a particular goal in mind oftentimes diet whether you’re talking
1:13:47 about south beach or keto or carnivore or vegan you know um they’re all designed to achieve a certain kind
1:13:55 kind of goal uh most of them are very very difficult to maintain for a long period of time now people are
1:14:00 vegans uh and vegetarians and they’re eating that’s something that because of the diversity of the food
1:14:04 that you can you can actually maintain that but you know if you’re only doing pure keto that’s very
1:14:14 difficult to do so most popular trending diets are short-lived short-term solutions and they’ll kind
1:14:20 of force your body to do something all right but you can’t keep it up and so a diet that you can’t keep
1:14:29 up isn’t to me a very practical diet because you’re going to bursts of activity that you just can’t do your
1:14:40 whole life i find that it’s much more healthy in the long run if you can find a sustainable way of eating
1:14:45 that works for you personally that you can maintain and that you’re going to enjoy your life as well
1:14:50 most people who are on really strict diets they’re not enjoying their diet you know like people will
1:14:58 only eat eat meat only carnivore diet or only eat raw food listen you can’t don’t con me you can’t be
1:15:04 enjoying eating raw food you know your entire life you know navigating through society and seeing other
1:15:09 people you know eat a big steaming plate of pasta or something you know or going to a chinese restaurant
1:15:16 so what i’m saying is that trending diets are well-intentioned they often are designed to do
1:15:21 one thing but you can’t keep it up so it doesn’t really at the end of the day contribute to the
1:15:29 ultimate goal what i prefer and where i think the science takes us where the next frontier for like
1:15:37 lifetime health is carrying a page from the playbook of some of the healthiest cuisines in the world and i would
1:15:44 say mediterranean is the hotbed the crucible of a lot of healthy diets not just the blue zones i think
1:15:49 but but there but there are blue zones in the mediterranean also asia uh there’s a blue zone in
1:15:53 asia as well but you know look there’s also blue zone in latin america if you take a look at the common
1:16:02 denominator of what’s going on in the mediterranean and asia is a very healthy plant forward fresh
1:16:11 seasonal uh healthy cooking oils healthy preparation style absolutely delicious way of eating i mean come
1:16:17 on take if i were to take you to a mediterranean restaurant or to a asian restaurant i would find it
1:16:21 hard to believe that you wouldn’t you and i opening the menu couldn’t find something that we would enjoy
1:16:29 eating right so mediterranean is what how i tell people i actually eat that’s my quote diet why do
1:16:35 the japanese seem to do so well on when we think about the world’s healthiest countries looking at
1:16:40 some data here some a variety of different graphs that have in front of me and japan seems to continually
1:16:47 seem to come out on top as it relates to health span yeah okay well um there’s no one single
1:16:56 factor i think that was responsible for it but it is true um the the japanese uh demographics uh show
1:17:04 uh consistently some of the uh oldest longest living people you know they tend first and foremost okay
1:17:09 before we talk about what they eat let me tell you what they don’t do they don’t overeat
1:17:19 and i’m giving a purposeful pause there because overeating caloric loading okay uh is very damaging to
1:17:27 our metabolism it actually counters uh our ability for long to to live long it actually speeds up our
1:17:34 cellular aging it’s it it sets up inflammation so by cutting down on your caloric intake
1:17:42 every day that’s one of the things is that the japanese culture that the the the culinary and
1:17:50 gastronomic approach to food in japan tends to uh favor modesty uh uh uh under eating rather than
1:17:58 overeating i’ve got a question here how do how do i know if i’m overeating okay so so there’s a
1:18:04 a confucian saying uh that’s been translated into the japanese that they that’s a mantra which is
1:18:11 hara hachi ban mi which means stop eating when you’re 80 full i asked this question because i
1:18:16 have a friend who was i think it was on this podcast so um i don’t think i’m revealing anything he actually
1:18:22 sat next to me um when peter atia was talking to him he’s jack who um runs production for us he had
1:18:27 his dexa scan done which looks at your visceral fat subcutaneous fat muscle mass bone density those
1:18:35 kinds of things yeah and he’s a slim guy he’s much slimmer than i am and the diagnosis that came back
1:18:40 from the doctor basically said you’re overnourished and when i look at him he doesn’t look like someone
1:18:47 that’s overnourished and the the doctor essentially said to him that you need to reduce your calories now
1:18:52 i’m looking at this guy thinking this is a slim guy this guy’s like much much slimmer than i am
1:18:59 yet the doctor’s telling him that he’s overeating yeah so i wrote a whole book on this called eat to
1:19:06 beat your diet which is not a diet book it’s an anti-diet book that really um uh uh uncloaks the new
1:19:15 science of your metabolism and what i try to say in terms of sharing that science is that first of all
1:19:24 body fat which societally is regarded as a bad thing we don’t nobody wants fat right um is actually a
1:19:30 good thing body fats an organ in the body did you know that like it’s it’s one of our body organs um
1:19:36 our body fat it is distributed throughout our body and what does it do as an organ well it’s got some
1:19:41 cushioning effect so you know like if you didn’t have any body fat by the way you tripped on the stairs
1:19:47 and you hit the ground you might rupture your organs all right that’s so it has a little bit of a
1:19:55 cushion effect marshmallow cushion effect but our fat also is a fuel tank to store fuel so where we’re
1:20:01 eating calories our calories are energy we’re eating food we’re eating calories that’s our energy that’s
1:20:07 that’s a fuel our body runs off of i always tell people if you have a car and you’re filling it up with
1:20:13 gasoline at the petrol station or the gas station um you don’t even think about your gas until your
1:20:18 fuel gauge starts to run low and the same thing for our our our bodies is that we don’t think about
1:20:24 our fuel until we’re hungry and our our hunger and our brain and our gut is really as our fuel tank that
1:20:31 signals oh you know we’re getting towards that red line better go fill fill up now unlike a gas station or petrol
1:20:37 station there’s no clicker on our body we can keep stuffing food into our system we can very easily
1:20:43 overload our fuel tank okay that is you’ve got you’ve got to cut back on your calories that’s what you
1:20:47 your your friend heard when the doctor was saying you got to cut back on your calories because you’re
1:20:53 overloading on fuel so where does so where does the fat build up it’s there’s different areas that fat in
1:21:01 your body builds up now the fat can there’s white fat and there’s uh uh brown fat white fat can be
1:21:06 under your chin could be under your arms could be in your thighs and your butt could be your your the
1:21:12 muffin top you know around your waist but that’s not where the most dangerous fat builds up the most
1:21:20 dangerous fat inflammatory fat is a fat that builds up in the inside the tube of your body so if you think of
1:21:27 your body like a poster tube okay inside that tube and all this gut is i’m sorry the the body cavity
1:21:33 if you were to slice this body in half and look at a cross section all right it’s a tube you can fill
1:21:39 any of these uh interstitial areas between organs you can pack with fat so think about you’re going to
1:21:47 fedex something to somebody overnight mail uh a vase or a glass or bottle one or whatever you’re going to
1:21:51 pack it full of peanuts and you’re going to put into a package well look you can get a big box and put
1:21:55 a lot more peanuts on or you can take a skinny box that would just fit it and you’ll put it in so it
1:22:00 doesn’t really matter the size of your tube you could be a skinny person and you could pack it with a
1:22:06 lot of peanuts in this case visceral fat and that’s what you’re talking about in a skinny person with
1:22:12 too much visceral fat too many peanuts packed in there and that is a result of over consumption of calories
1:22:17 that fat that energy the fuel tanks building up within a skinny body yeah and that’s what we call
1:22:26 skinny fat i am still like mildly in shock about it because because i saw his results i i panicked so
1:22:32 the next day i also went to the same clinic as him i had my dexar scan done and it came back and said that i
1:22:40 i had quote zero visceral fat so my results from dr peter atia said i had zero visceral fat which he
1:22:48 said was rare but i had subcutaneous fat which is the fat on the outside more than jack did so jack had
1:22:55 visceral fat which is the fat inside us and he had he has like almost no subcutaneous fat and i’m kind of the
1:23:01 inverse of that and i don’t understand what like i was trying to figure out why is my body when i eat
1:23:06 something putting the fat subcutaneously on the outside whereas jack’s body is putting the fat on
1:23:13 the inside which is the the dangerous fat here is um an interesting thing let’s look at the opposite
1:23:19 of building up subcutaneous fat which is the external fat not not the dangerous external fat yeah so okay so
1:23:25 there’s two kinds of body fat white fat and brown fat white they’re all good they’re all beneficial
1:23:32 um white fat can be subcutaneous subcutaneous means under the skin under your jaw under the skin of your
1:23:38 jaw under your arms on your thighs that’s subcutaneous white fat can also be visceral fat that’s deep inside
1:23:44 the tube of your body and then brown fat is not wiggly jiggly like the other like white fat brown fat is
1:23:49 wafer thin and it’s plastered around our neck it’s behind our breastbone a little bit behind between
1:23:55 our shoulder blades a little bit in our belly and brown fat actually is metabolically active and it
1:24:02 fires up a process called thermogenesis to burn down harmful visceral extra body fat so you can use
1:24:08 good fat to burn down bad fat which is the amazing thing again fat is not universally bad it’s actually
1:24:16 quite good and uh so one of the things that i think is really important to know is that when you’ve
1:24:20 got too much visceral fat you’ve got too much inflammation but you can actually use your brown
1:24:28 fat to try to um control that to try to burn it down brown fat by the way is activated by foods and
1:24:36 activated by cold temperatures so when you talk about your cold plunge brown fat can actually light up so you
1:24:44 you’ve just handed me a card i’ll describe this in which there’s two pictures of a figure and one of
1:24:50 the uh picture on the left is room temperature and it’s not cold it’s regular room temperature and this
1:24:55 is the same individual by the way and you can’t see anything lighting up because the brown fat is
1:25:02 just adjusted to normal room temperature now on the right hand side is when you actually um lower the
1:25:06 temperature in an ice bath or something no no this is actually just lowering the room temperature really
1:25:12 really cold like a like a laboratory condition lowering the room temperature and boom you see all this brown
1:25:18 fat lighting up remember i told you it’s plastered around the neck behind the breastbone uh a little bit in
1:25:26 in your belly and this is mother nature’s adaptation in evolution to help animals survive cold temperatures
1:25:33 so before we had thermostats and room heaters um uh i think about a by the way brown fat was discovered
1:25:43 in hibernating animals um there was a zoologist uh who was looking at plucked out a uh kind of a muskrat
1:25:49 looking animal from hibernation and dissected it and found that there was this brown lump
1:25:56 that was between its shoulder blades and nobody knew what it was they just and the more researchers
1:26:01 and biologists and zoologists looked at animals that were hibernating they they found this very
1:26:09 consistently in fact they called that brown mass first at a hibernoma hiber hibernating oma a mass we
1:26:16 don’t know what it does okay um a hibernoma that’s what it was known until 1930s in the 1930s at ucla
1:26:21 a researcher who in the beginning we didn’t have microscopes then we had microscopes and we had
1:26:29 really great microscopes and all of a sudden in 1930s the researcher uh at ucla said you know that
1:26:36 hibernoma is actually made of fat cells and those fat cells are brown and the reason they’re brown is
1:26:42 because they have a lot of mitochondria in it mitochondria being the fuel cells of our body like
1:26:47 the batteries of our body they’re packing the they’re the energy generators in our cell and
1:26:54 mitochondria are very rich in iron and when iron is oxidized it turns brown like a pile of nails that
1:27:01 you put outside your door and the outdoors silver nails will turn brown brown fat packed with mitochondria
1:27:06 energy generating the packed with iron oxidizes turns brown that’s why brown fat is brown
1:27:13 and and so what happens is that in cold temperatures like in hibernation in winter the brown fat fires
1:27:18 up and that’s what keep keeps these hibernating animals warm throughout the winter so they don’t freeze to
1:27:26 death now humans we can actually use that to our advantage we can actually activate our brown fat cold
1:27:32 bath will do it um sleeping in cold cooler worms will actually start to activate it as well when
1:27:36 that by the way that when those mitochondria fire up they’re burning energy you know where they draw that
1:27:42 energy from from your white fat from your visceral fat first so you want brown fat good fat to burn down
1:27:47 bad fat visceral fat white fat you want to sleep in a cool room or you want to go into a cold bath and
1:27:55 there are lots of foods that will also you can eat foods to activate your brown fat to burn down harmful
1:28:01 fat um and then the last thing is cortisol the job that we have i know that doesn’t sound like a hard
1:28:06 job to be a podcaster but the in jack’s role he’s basically working seven days a week sometimes you
1:28:11 know he’s working early hours of the morning he’s traveling around the world with me to come to these
1:28:16 studios it is i observe it it’s a stressful job so i was wondering if these if all of these factors
1:28:22 play a role in in how our body chooses where to store things and really like the role of cortisol
1:28:28 in determining fat storage is so interesting to me like the role of stress in determining where our fat
1:28:36 is stored yeah well i mean cortisol is a stress hormone it actually snaps us into uh action it actually
1:28:41 is also healing cortisol is a got multiple job descriptions it’s kind of like a swiss army knife
1:28:50 of hormones uh and uh you know in small bursts cortisol incredible like and it makes you feel
1:28:57 good as well i mean it’s a kind of basically it’s a type of body steroid so cortisol is a very very useful
1:29:05 hormone for all kinds of reasons but long-term stress uh will lead to excessive prolonged
1:29:13 unabated cortisol secretion and when your cortisol levels are up up up up up and and unrelentlessly
1:29:21 that then actually changes your metabolism it definitely alters your the ability for your fat
1:29:26 to actually conduct its metabolism i mean fat releases itself about 15 different hormones
1:29:31 so when you mess up the hormonal structure the endocrine structure of your own body fat
1:29:37 with something like excessive cortisol you’ll actually begin to derail your own metabolism so
1:29:42 it’s not the short-term cortisol it’s a long-term cortisol that’s actually the most damaging why is
1:29:47 visceral fat dangerous because people refer to it as being linked with a lot of chronic disease and
1:29:51 cancers and stuff like that but what evidence do we have that it’s dangerous and what why is it dangerous
1:29:57 yeah because the tube of your body with all the organs packed into it just like we’re seeing here
1:30:01 look at all these organs packed in you got your liver you got your stomach you got your your colon
1:30:07 and your small intestines that’s packed into the tube all right it is it’s kind of like uh packing
1:30:13 for vacation you know some people are really really skilled at packing they can actually uh fold their
1:30:18 socks and underwear and their pants and it’s like oh my you’re a genius you’re you’re packing genius right
1:30:25 now visceral fat grows between those folded shirts and pants and it and it fills a lot space in there
1:30:33 when you have too much of it not only does it fill up that the suitcase of your body the tube of your body
1:30:38 but it starts to push on organs which is not healthy because it’s all packing inside the between
1:30:43 the spaces the potential spaces in there and then when they grow when it grows beyond its own blood supply
1:30:48 the visceral fat um starts to starve it becomes hypoxic meaning it’s not getting enough oxygen
1:30:53 bigger than the amount of blood vessels that are growing in there and now you’ve got the center of
1:31:00 the fat start of oxygen uh the inflammatory cells start moving in and now you’ve got this fat
1:31:05 that’s outgrown its own blood supply that’s now becoming very inflammatory and because it’s packed
1:31:10 all throughout your the tube of your body into the suitcase of your body it’s leaking out that
1:31:15 inflammation everywhere so think about it like if you have been neatly packed suitcase and you’re like
1:31:21 i’m you know i’m going to put um i’m going to put some uh uh lotion and cream canister to lotion and
1:31:28 cream i’m going to pack it everywhere in between spaces okay look uh uh steven pack a few but but
1:31:32 let’s stop right there and you’re no i’m going to pack like 20 or 30 of them and you keep on stuffing
1:31:38 it even though the suitcase it’s a hard suitcase and you can you can put a lot in there now you’re
1:31:42 starting to press on the the clothing you’re going to scrunch up your pants and here in the body you’re
1:31:51 scrunching up your organs now why don’t we make the one of those tubes uh uh of uh of cream let’s
1:31:57 break one of them open now it’s leaking all right that’s what’s happening when your fat is so inflamed
1:32:03 so inflamed it starts to leak inflammation now imagine that that cream uh starts to leak out into the
1:32:08 interstitiously of your suitcase now you’ve got a suitcase looks skinny on the outside looks like
1:32:14 it just looks like a suitcase it could be a carry-on but now all the organs all the clothes you packed so
1:32:22 neatly are squeezed and scrunched off and now the lotion is leaking everywhere that is the analogy of
1:32:28 excess body fat in a small container spreading out compressing the organs and leaking out and that’s why
1:32:34 it’s dangerous oh gosh and that there’s a link there to cancer yeah so studies have actually shown that
1:32:45 and this was a study uh done uh by cornell in new york um looking at swedish women who were normal
1:32:51 body size or skinny so you’ve heard of skinny fat this is what they were studying and they looked at these
1:32:58 women uh uh to see uh they did dexa scans as you described um to see how much body fat they had
1:33:07 and then they followed them over 13 years and then she found that women who did not have extra body fat
1:33:12 had you know normal risk of breast cancer but women who had skinny fat don’t remember all the women in
1:33:19 the study and so 3 000 women actually were normal body size not i mean they weren’t supermodels but
1:33:24 they were they were just normal size women some of them were slimmer than others but none of them were
1:33:31 obese none of them were overweight uh just normal size um and they but they knew at the baseline what
1:33:39 the dexa scan showed and what they found is that women who had excess body fat over the period of 13 years
1:33:45 had a three-fold increase in the risk of developing breast cancer and it’s linked to higher inflammatory
1:33:51 markers in their bloodstream which makes total sense the leaking body cream the leaking inflammation
1:33:56 you know in a skinny tube all right or normal size tube normal suitcase look the suitcase can’t expand
1:34:03 bigger it’s got a finite size um but it’s leaking out and and this is because cancer thrives in an
1:34:08 inflammatory environment if you have inflammation without even a microscopic cancer like we talked
1:34:14 about but a small tumor putting inflammation in the environment of a cancer is like pouring
1:34:19 gasoline on the embers of a fire you ever go camping you have a campfire it’s almost out
1:34:24 at the very end now if you pour some gas in it boom whoosh you’re gonna actually create a bonfire all over
1:34:30 again that’s how dangerous inflammation is so that’s why excess visceral fat inflammatory fat is so
1:34:36 dangerous and linked to cancer and by the way not just breast cancer it turns out that excess visceral fat has been
1:34:45 linked to 14 other cancers increased risk of 14 other cancers everything from colon ovarian lung breast
1:34:54 prostate uh it it’s the it’s a it’s a it’s a growing list of cancers that seem to be at a put you would be
1:35:00 at a higher risk if you had high levels of visceral fat and it makes total sense given the inflammation
1:35:05 don’t you hate it when you have a good idea and then you forget for the last two years i’ve been
1:35:09 writing my brand new book and my book writing process is a little bit atypical in the sense
1:35:14 that i have all of these great conversations on the diary of a ceo and i might stumble across a great idea
1:35:19 while my guest is speaking to me in the middle of a conversation or i could be walking the dog i could be
1:35:25 out and about with my friends i could be anywhere when i have an idea for my upcoming book this is why
1:35:30 notion who are a show sponsor of mine now has been an incredible platform for me i’ve designed my notion
1:35:36 so that i can pull out my phone super quickly and store the idea in this section about my new book and
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1:35:47 that point of inspiration in a flexible way and i’m no longer losing good ideas i imagine many of
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1:36:07 there was a shocking study that i read about this a while ago in jammer and it examined the impact
1:36:14 of illness anxiety disorder which they call iad formerly known as hypochondriitis
1:36:20 and the impact that being avoidant of health and illness has on your mortality rates and they the
1:36:26 research analyzed data from approximately 45 000 individuals over a 24 year period comparing 4 000
1:36:32 patients who had this anxiety around their health and were avoidant and the findings showed that those
1:36:38 with iad that were anxious about health and getting checkups and those kinds of things had an 84
1:36:43 higher risk of death during the study period dying on average five years earlier than those without the
1:36:46 disorder and again causation is hard to establish there because it could mean that being an anxious
1:36:51 person means your cortisol is up and anyway being an anxious person means you make worse dietary choices
1:36:58 but i i’ve always remembered that and thought about how how um how it’s i find it much more
1:37:03 much better especially as i age and i’m going to be now confronted with more risks especially things
1:37:10 in men like prostate cancer being on the front foot um is probably a better approach well uh and if you take
1:37:16 some proactive approaches using food as medicine where you got to eat three you know you got to eat every day
1:37:21 most most most of most people eat three times a day most people encounter food about five times a day
1:37:26 breakfast lunch dinner and a couple of snacks if you realize every time you’re encountering food
1:37:34 is an opportunity an opportunity to choose a food an ingredient that actually supports raises your
1:37:40 shields support your health defense systems and know that and trust your body trust your health defense
1:37:46 systems that if you raise your shields you’re less likely to actually have uh have problems later
1:37:51 won’t eliminate them okay there’s no guarantees in life but it’ll lower the risk here’s an example
1:37:59 steven you know research studies have shown that tomatoes are good for overall um health you mentioned
1:38:06 prostate cancer so studies have shown that men who eat tomatoes regularly cooked tomatoes actually have
1:38:13 a 29 lower risk of developing prostate cancer it’s pretty good uh what’s the dose of the tomatoes
1:38:18 that you need to cook tomatoes you need to eat two to three servings per week all right now
1:38:23 i can probably i can probably accomplish that how much each time do i gotta eat a wheelbarrow of
1:38:31 tomato each time no the the typical serving that the study supports is just half a cup of tomato
1:38:35 salt cooked tomatoes is per serving why do they know this stuff because obviously how do they isolate that in a
1:38:43 a test so these are from large-scale population studies in this case it’s a it’s a uh epidemiological
1:38:49 study called the uh health professionals follow-up study where they looked at they developed hypotheses
1:38:54 and they looked at outcomes over the course of 25 years and they look for statistical correlations so
1:39:00 they found that um tomatoes lower the risk of prostate cancer based on people reporting their tomato
1:39:04 eating then they actually went back and look at the report within the data collected how much
1:39:10 how much do they eat on average every week so that then you can actually back calculate the dose
1:39:15 all right now i i told you earlier about the way that i do research foods investment research
1:39:22 let’s take it further let’s figure out what’s in a tomato well tomatoes have lots of it’s got it’s got
1:39:30 sugar it’s got uh some salt it’s got uh carotenoids which are bioactives one of which is lycopene well
1:39:37 okay what does lycopene do guess what lycopene does lycopene in the lab will cut off the blood supply
1:39:44 to tumors anti-angiogenesis shores up your health defense systems prevents cancer from getting a blood
1:39:54 supply and in fact in correlative studies um uh they’ve actually taken the prostate cancer biopsies
1:40:01 of men who did not avoid prostate uh cancer so they were tomato eaters who went on to develop prostate
1:40:06 cancer anyway there’s no nothing takes your risk to zero and they looked at them and what they found is
1:40:12 that those men who ate more tomatoes had fewer blood vessels in their prostate cancer and the prostate
1:40:19 cancer was also less aggressive so people who ate four times and five times and six times had fewer and
1:40:25 less aggressive blood vessels growing into their prostate cancer so that’s an example where you know
1:40:33 if i told you um consider having some cooked tomatoes a few times a week and you don’t need a lot even
1:40:41 have a cup is enough oh why cook tomatoes well because it turns out lycopene is uh a natural chemical
1:40:48 that in its native form pick a tomato off the vine and eat it that like an apple it’s absorbing your
1:40:56 body but not avidly not as much as possible um what is that that is coffee okay and we’ve been
1:41:00 talking a little bit about brown fat yeah is there a link between fat and coffee because i had someone
1:41:04 the other day saying that if you want to lose weight drink coffee and i wasn’t sure if that was well so
1:41:12 coffee is a beverage made with coffee beans coffee beans are plant-based foods coffee beans contain
1:41:18 many polyphenols including chlorogenic acid chlorogenic acid is anti-inflammatory chlorogenic
1:41:24 acid also turns on your brown fat so it activates it triggers your brown fat and it causes your brown
1:41:32 fat the mitochondria to fire up undergo thermogenesis to burn down harmful white fat or visceral fat so cup of
1:41:37 coffee a day or actually the dose is actually about three to four cups of coffee a day will definitely
1:41:43 cause your brown fat good fat to burn down your bad fat your harmful fat your visceral fat what about
1:41:50 fasting people people often talk about fasting as a as an intervention as a form of medicine for the
1:41:56 body and i wondered if you had a take on that yeah fat listen fasting is beneficial fasting is good and
1:42:01 fasting is very old it’s not just a recent trend uh if you go back thousands of years i mean if you look at
1:42:05 some of most some of the oldest religions of the world fasting was part of their ritual that would
1:42:10 happen you know throughout the year now people go well what about intermittent fasting how long should
1:42:18 i fast i try to tell people there is no magic formula for success for fasting because we’re all different
1:42:23 and our bodies are different our lifestyles are different there’s no universal fasting protocol
1:42:29 that’s going to be one size fits all however i will tell you an easy way to fast because fasting is very
1:42:38 natural to us is just paying attention to what you do every day and be mindful so when you’re sleeping
1:42:43 you’re not eating when you’re not eating you’re fasting so i try to be reassuring so guess what
1:42:48 you’re fasting every day anyway when you fall asleep you’re fasting all right and the longer you’re not
1:42:56 eating and sleeping the more time your metabolism the ferrari of your metabolism of your body can switch
1:43:02 gears to burn down any extra fat that’s accumulated now if you’ve been eating whatever you want over
1:43:08 time you probably built up a lot of extra fat now from your scans apparently not you don’t have too much
1:43:15 all right but you if you you’re fasting regularly you’re burning down all that extra stuff okay and so
1:43:22 then how do you optimize that without having to calendarize your fast and figure out you know how to
1:43:31 uh schedule your meals i try to make things um as scientific but as practical as possible and so i tell
1:43:37 people you want to really get involved in intermittent fasting easiest way is take advantage of what you’re
1:43:43 doing already and that is if you’re sleeping try to sleep eight hours a day so how do you sleep eight
1:43:47 hours a day i don’t know i said if you go to bed 11 o’clock get up at seven o’clock you get to eight
1:43:52 hours of sleep all right we know that that’s the mad the sweet spot for your brain for your metabolism
1:43:57 for you know for burning a harmful body fat how do you get more out of that how do you turn that
1:44:05 eight hours of fasting into more well what i say is that the night before when you’re eating dinner
1:44:11 let’s say you eat from seven to eight o’clock in the evening what i say is that when you finish dinner
1:44:17 and you put your dishes away in the sink or the dishwasher that’s it no more eating stop eating
1:44:24 nothing until the next day um if you’re going to have dessert or whatever squeeze in there but don’t
1:44:30 take a snack with you and sit by the television or you know add some minorly gobble food and don’t
1:44:36 before you bet you go to bed eat a big chunk of whatever okay now you got three hours before you
1:44:43 go to bed at 11 again this is all a theoretical model three hours of not eating your blood sugar goes down
1:44:48 your your insulin goes down because your blood you’re not eating anymore all right now your metabolism
1:44:53 shifts gears three hours earlier okay now you’ve got those eight hours plus three
1:44:59 hours you got 11 hours now when you get up in the morning okay let’s say you get up at seven in the
1:45:05 morning don’t do what our moms told us to do right so when if you were like me growing up my mom when i
1:45:09 got up it’s like hurry up and get to breakfast and eat something so you have enough energy to actually
1:45:14 go to school and learn something all right so that’s i i developed this instinct of actually just
1:45:19 getting up and eating as quickly as i can getting some breakfast in what have i told you that what i
1:45:26 do now when i get up in the morning i deliberately don’t do what my mother told me to do i get up i
1:45:32 take my time getting ready uh i get dressed um i don’t need anything right away in fact if i’m
1:45:36 dressed and i’m ready for the day i’m gonna go check it out i might go outside and take a look at the
1:45:42 outside i might go for a quick walk or check my emails or i might read a chapter of a book or read
1:45:49 a few pages of a book i wait at least an hour before i eat anything now let’s do the math uh steven eight
1:45:54 o’clock stop eating eleven o’clock go to bed three hours eleven to seven eight hours three plus eight is
1:45:58 is equal to eleven hours i got eleven hours of fasting and now i get up and i don’t eat for
1:46:06 another hour boom 12 hours of fasting just like that okay now if you really want to do that 16
1:46:14 hour fasting 16 eight just skip breakfast and get to lunch and as long as you don’t overeat at lunch
1:46:20 which does require a little discipline after you go for your fasting window that you don’t overeat and
1:46:24 you’re eating the right foods that’s how you actually get to do intermittent fasting in the
1:46:29 most natural way possible so there’s one part of the body that we haven’t talked about which is
1:46:35 and my little mannequin here inside its head the brain yeah and i’m wondering how some of the themes
1:46:39 we’ve talked about link to one of the most common brain diseases which people talk about which is
1:46:46 alzheimer’s and dementia we talked about i can’t say that long word but um angiogenesis is there a
1:46:53 link between angiogenesis what we in the brain health dementia alzheimer’s yeah absolutely so
1:46:59 i mentioned to you that the human body has got 60 000 miles worth of blood vessels that are coursing
1:47:05 through the entire body bringing the uh oxygen and nutrients these the highways and byways of health
1:47:12 all right 400 miles of those blood vessels are in your brain 400 miles of blood vessels are actually
1:47:18 coursing through our brain and our brain is super metabolically active you know we’re we’re the engine
1:47:25 of the brain is functioning all the time regardless of your iq regardless of what type of tasks you do
1:47:31 our brain is very very metabolically active highly dependent upon a healthy circulation now what we do
1:47:41 know as people get older is that problems can occur with uh brain function and the reason i’m framing it this
1:47:48 is that it’s quick to jump to a term that people use like dementia or alzheimer’s disease thinking
1:47:55 is one thing but in fact dementia is just a descriptive term for your cognition not working properly
1:48:02 most commonly as you actually age alzheimer’s even though it is one type of diagnosis is probably
1:48:07 several different kinds of disease as well and we do know that there are different types of dementia
1:48:13 alzheimer’s is a subset of dementia of dementia alzheimer’s dementia there’s there’s a more
1:48:18 common type of dementia called vascular dementia and that’s where those 400 miles of blood vessels in
1:48:25 your body actually narrow get hard get clogged up and don’t have good blood flow so you can imagine
1:48:31 if you were to actually interrupt the sprinkler system the tubing the blood vessels the tributaries
1:48:37 bringing oxygen to your brain within those blood vessels okay over time your brain is not going to function
1:48:43 very well so vascular dementia is is by far the more common type of dementia so what can we do
1:48:49 to maintain healthy angiogenic blood vessels throughout the course of our lives for anybody who wants
1:48:56 aspires towards longevity all right you should be thinking about how to avert that path where your
1:49:04 blood circulate your blood vessels your circulation to your brain gets impaired the more uh vascular
1:49:10 blood vessel healthy angiogenesis supporting diet and lifestyle and medications that you take the
1:49:15 better it’s actually going to be now well here’s what what’s interesting what are some of those things
1:49:22 turns out that dark chocolate plant-based foods that the cacao actually um produces helps your body produce
1:49:29 something called nitric oxide nitric oxide nitric oxide actually widens your blood vessels so you get
1:49:36 better blood flow so dark chocolate is one of those foods that actually can see seems to be able to
1:49:41 promote better vascular health including in the brain now there are other foods that can produce
1:49:48 nitric oxide as well beets beetroot actually can produce nitric oxide spinach can do produce nitric oxide as
1:49:54 well those are vascular healthy now here’s the other thing when you produce nitric oxide like with
1:50:01 these foods you know what nitric oxide does it recruits stem cells healthy stem cells not cancer
1:50:07 stem cells but healthy stem cells from your bone marrow stem cells are stem cells are primitive cells
1:50:15 that can turn into anything you need them to be turn into a brain heart lung liver skin hair um our stem
1:50:20 stem cells actually regenerate us from the inside out now you know that one of the things that happens as
1:50:27 we get older is our brain atrophies and can start to degenerate it shrinks literally a scan of an older
1:50:34 person the brain the brain matter the mass of the brain shrinks inside the skull it’s like a like a cotton shirt
1:50:40 that shrank and you see this actually in a scan and so in order to be able to try to keep the shrinking from
1:50:45 happening you want to make sure there’s good blood flow going which actually helps to keep the brain
1:50:50 growing in a healthy and maintained in a healthy sort of way so um stem cells that are recruited by
1:50:56 nitric oxide actually can help to also regenerate the blood vessels and keep the blood vessels helping
1:51:00 healthy feeding the brain that’s the connection between alzheimer’s and energy i mean a dimension
1:51:07 angiogenesis now for alzheimer’s um i worked with a colleague dr anthony vagnucci some years ago and we
1:51:15 published uh uh what was then an editorial in the lancet uh you know very prestigious uh british medical
1:51:21 publication and we were connecting the dots between angiogenesis and alzheimer’s disease and here’s how
1:51:26 it works most people assume that if you’ve got alzheimer’s disease or someone has alzheimer’s disease
1:51:30 they don’t have very good blood flow they’re not going to have a lot of angiogenesis they got
1:51:36 problems right of their of their circulation of course and in fact if you look at um the blood
1:51:42 flow studies scans brain scans looking for blood flow in alzheimer’s brains indeed you see
1:51:51 poorer blood flow in people who have actually alzheimer’s disease but it turns out the brains of
1:51:57 people with alzheimer’s disease have more blood vessels more blood vessels that aren’t working well
1:52:02 so their andrew abnormal angiogenic blood vessels are not working well so you don’t get good blood
1:52:08 flow so the scans don’t show them and just not creating blood flow guess what those blood vessels
1:52:16 are doing those abnormal blood vessels they have been discovered to secrete a neurotoxin that kills your
1:52:24 brain cells so abnormal angiogenesis in alzheimer’s disease grows blood vessels that don’t create blood
1:52:30 flow but they secrete a toxin that kills brain cells and they also secrete the precursor to build up the
1:52:36 plaque so we we publish this as a as a hypothesis and editorial in the lancet and now there’s a whole
1:52:41 field looking at androgenesis and and alzheimer’s disease it’s crazy how this all stems back to
1:52:48 this idea that food is medicine yeah i mean listen before we had medicine as medicine before we had
1:52:56 pharmaceuticals in the 1930s so we had that’s all humans had our diet and lifestyle for medicines you
1:53:03 know and so i think that that’s really i think what’s happened is that in during the industrial revolution
1:53:12 that occurred with pharmaceuticals we put aside a tool in the toolbox that we’ve always had in fact
1:53:17 that’s the only thing we had before and we focused myopically just on what pharmaceuticals can do now
1:53:22 i’m telling you as somebody who’s developed biopharmaceuticals and who is still very much
1:53:28 involved in that new medicines can be life-saving old medicines can be life-saving and so you never want
1:53:33 to throw out the baby with a bath water what we have forgotten about is that tool in the toolbox
1:53:39 it’s been with humanity forever which is what we do with our food and and what i’m saying is that
1:53:44 what we can do now with the work that i’m doing in food is medicine so we can take the modern science
1:53:53 that deep probe that it’s a extraordinary level of sophistication that we use for drug development
1:54:00 and we can use it apply it to understand why our foods help us which foods help us and what types
1:54:05 of outcomes we’re actually looking for and so food is medicine bringing it back into the fold is just
1:54:10 replacing a tool in the toolbox but now we are actually fortifying it with the knowledge
1:54:18 provided by science of what we should choose and when and why supplementation are you a fan of
1:54:21 supplementation because i take a couple of supplements every morning things like creatine
1:54:27 and omega-3 and vitamin d do you take supplements yes i do and i’ll i’ll first say
1:54:36 um my my first off approach is that uh we should get most of the micronutrients that we
1:54:44 need to be healthy from our food use your food uh to our advantage because uh single foods will have
1:54:49 hundreds of different uh polyphenols and fiber and all kinds of other beneficial things so and my and
1:54:56 vitamins and minerals so our food is a much more efficient way to get all of our micronutrients
1:55:03 however supplements can be helpful in that literal translation of the world supplement which means
1:55:09 topping off so if you can’t get everything that you need from your food then feel free to top it off and
1:55:15 that’s what i actually do as well but vitamin d vitamin d i do it as well omega-3 fatty acids another
1:55:23 good uh top off uh to actually use for a supplement and by the way there are some probiotics that um i feel
1:55:29 that it’s prudent to actually get have in my body so i’m not giving a general recommendation i’m just
1:55:36 telling you what i do right that’s what we’re talking about everything is personal it’s personal to them but i you
1:55:40 know we talked earlier about the acromantia right so i do eat the foods that support acromantia
1:55:45 the pomegranate etc and the chili peppers but i’m going to take the supplement because i’ve seen
1:55:50 the data that shows how important it can be oh and acromantia improves your metabolism lowers the
1:55:56 risk of metabolic syndrome there might even be some clues that acromantia um might also lower the risk
1:56:03 of dementia development later on as well so hey this is a pretty safe natural bacteria i’ll take that
1:56:06 probiotic and another probiotic i take is called lactobacillus
1:56:12 rooteri l rooteri what does this do lowers inflammation builds immunity
1:56:17 it actually texts this is the bacteria that text messages the brain we talked about the brain
1:56:24 and it causes our brain to release social hormones like oxytocin that’s a social hormone that makes us feel
1:56:31 good so you know uh why wouldn’t i actually take that and oh one last thing lactobacillus rooteri has been
1:56:37 i the kind i take is chewable why wouldn’t you just take a capsule well it turns out that the
1:56:42 same bacteria lactobacillus rooteri it’s good for the gut but if you chew it up this is the bacteria
1:56:51 that kills the bacteria that causes cavities and gum disease i haven’t had a cavity in well over a decade
1:56:57 you know and so again this is one of these types of practical things that um just knowing the science
1:57:03 and knowing what i do and where where i don’t eat enough it’s hard to get enough vitamin d um
1:57:09 uh uh hard enough to get omega-3s i will actually top off on those i’m wondering you know you’ve got
1:57:13 these two great books in front of me eat to beat disease which is a new york times bestseller and
1:57:18 eat to beat your diet which is really about burning fat healing your metabolism and living longer
1:57:25 i know that you must have some favorite people use the term superfoods all the time but there must be
1:57:30 some foods where you look at them and just think they are little miracles in their own right so i
1:57:36 wanted to a little challenge for you is if you had to pick five of your favorite foods based on the
1:57:42 research that you’ve done the science you’ve seen what would those top fives be i would bring coffee
1:57:48 okay um because of all the polyphenols in coffee i’d bring tea um i tend to drink coffee in the morning
1:57:54 and i have tea at night um and i can i’m not caffeine sensitive so i can have the tea at night
1:58:01 if if you allow me i’ll actually lump those into my beverages okay under one category um i’ll bring tree
1:58:10 nuts tree nuts tree nuts walnuts almonds macadamias pistachios um i love nuts uh tree nuts and you know
1:58:14 not the pack pre-packaged kind but i like to you know kind of like toast them up myself and seize
1:58:20 flavor them myself um i would bring that because of the dietary fiber the healthy pro it’s a good source
1:58:27 of protein help some healthy fats in it as well and can kill some cancer stem cells while we’re at it
1:58:33 okay so tree nuts are actually good i would bring tomatoes because i love tomatoes okay it’s a great
1:58:38 source for hydration good source of lycopene which you talked about good for metabolism i would take
1:58:46 berries berries blueberries strawberries raspberries are among my favorites raspberries you might be
1:58:52 surprised at this but raspberries are pound for pound or weight for weight one of the most fiber
1:58:59 rich foods out there they’re light they’re hollow packed with fiber um and they’ve got polyphenols
1:59:04 and that are useful for lowering inflammation as well berries um are actually really good and then you
1:59:14 know i because i follow what i call the mediterranean uh style of eating i love to have those vegetables
1:59:22 that are actually used in both the mediterranean and asia mediterranean style cooking the bok choy
1:59:30 the kale chicory escarole you know all of those types of um of of leafy greens so those would be the
1:59:34 five i would actually take with me and what is the most important thing that we didn’t talk about that
1:59:42 we should have talked about you know i think that uh the most one of the most important things that
1:59:47 that i want people to walk away with is that there’s more than 200 foods that i’ve studied and
1:59:52 i’ve written about my books eat to be diseased need to be your diet that you know i’ve done all the heavy
1:59:58 lifting to help you figure out what foods are healthy that you could consider adding to your diet but if you
2:00:07 notice i didn’t actually give you a formula or a set menu on what to do for health because the most important
2:00:14 thing i i want people to walk away with is that my humanistic approach to this is um you should love
2:00:20 your food to love your health and if you could actually do both at the same time you have to find
2:00:25 out what are the foods that resonate with you what do you prefer what do you enjoy so if you could look
2:00:30 look at 200 healthy foods which is what i have in my books and just take a highlighter or pencil and
2:00:36 circle them circle the ones you already love start and stick with those you’re already way ahead of the
2:00:42 game and that builds confidence that you’re actually doing the right things and that’s what i love about
2:00:46 this book in particular eat to beat disease is that it also comes with lots of great recipes
2:00:52 um inside the book and um i think that’s super helpful because there’s a lot of information here
2:00:57 but this makes it actionable it’s a it’s a really iconic book it’s such it’s sold so incredibly well
2:01:02 because also it’s so unbelievably accessible to people who aren’t scientists and that are trying to
2:01:08 find some things that they can add to their plates and i think that’s essential to the approach that you
2:01:12 take as well you’re not someone that’s telling us we can’t eat nice things and enjoy our life you’re
2:01:16 talking about the things that we should be adding to our plate to make our lives more
2:01:20 healthy and increase our longevity which i’m very excited about actually because you’re writing a
2:01:27 book about longevity i hear and um i’m very much awaiting that book which when when do you think
2:01:31 that will be due and ready i don’t know i’m working on a manuscript so i’m not ready to give a release
2:01:35 date yet but you’ll be the first to know okay good we have a closing tradition on this podcast where
2:01:38 the last guest leaves a question for the next not knowing who they’re leaving it for
2:01:46 and the question that’s been left for you is how would you be able to tell that your time
2:01:53 here on earth has been successful that you’ve achieved what you set out to achieve
2:01:58 wow i think i would have
2:02:04 two sides two answers for that that represent different sides of the coin
2:02:12 for me i think if i’m able to have made my immediate community my family better
2:02:22 that would uh be meaningful a meaningful life uh having been lived and if you look at the whole
2:02:27 rest of my career and existence and how i spend my time
2:02:36 i want the work that i’ve done to resonate with others in a way that can improve their lives i’m
2:02:41 you know what i do i kind of say i’m taking one for the team the team being the rest of the world
2:02:47 and if i can contribute even a small piece that makes other people’s lives better than i feel like
2:02:51 you know i’ve done it i’ve done my job well that’s what you’re most certainly doing
2:02:56 and my friend because you when i was looking through what you’ve accomplished in your life
2:03:02 whether it’s the all of the fda approved treatments for over 70 diseases including cancers diabetes
2:03:07 chronic wounds and blindness that you’ve helped to develop and more than i could possibly count
2:03:10 or whether it’s the work that you’re doing through your foundation which i think people should check
2:03:14 out which is a non-profit organization which helps develop treatments for chronic diseases
2:03:18 that are based on angiogenesis you’ve most certainly done that and you continue to do that
2:03:23 but even maybe more importantly of all because there’s so many billions of people out there that
2:03:28 are starved of the information that you have and that you find in your research laboratory is you’ve come
2:03:34 out into the world into the public forum and you’re helping to articulate and demystify these incredibly
2:03:38 confusing things that people like me who didn’t go and get a phd or didn’t go to harvard
2:03:44 don’t understand and you’re masterful at it you really are masterful your ability to break down
2:03:49 you know i sit here week in week out speaking to very very smart people and not all of them have the
2:03:54 very important skill of being able to turn something very complicated into something understandable
2:03:57 and that is a skill you have it’s a real real gift and especially your use of like metaphors and
2:04:03 analogies which really cement these ideas in our brain in a way that we can all understand that for me is
2:04:07 a really really important gift so long may you continue to continue your work of public communication
2:04:12 as well because for people like me it can cause a penny drop moment that then leads us to change
2:04:16 our lives for the better so thank you thank you well thank you for inviting me but you know i would say that
2:04:23 you know we also live in a time again this is about going into the future i’m always about moving
2:04:28 into the future well we have the platforms we have you know i i went on to i developed a youtube channel
2:04:34 because i realized it was a place for me to take to drink from the fire hydrant distill it and figure
2:04:40 out how i can deliver it in swift fashion which would have been impossible 10 years ago so for example
2:04:47 you know we talked about how you know uh when my uncles had cancer and passed away because and i felt
2:04:53 helpless then my mother had it some years later and we had progress we had the ability to be able to do
2:04:58 something different similarly for me i look at my books i look at my social channels my youtube
2:05:04 platform as ways of being able to actually solve a problem that i felt like needed to be solved but i
2:05:09 wasn’t really sure how to do it until now dr william lee i highly recommend everybody goes and checks out
2:05:14 your youtube channel because it is fantastic and that’s a great place to get more of this information
2:05:17 but also i’m going to link the youtube channel and all of these books below for anybody that
2:05:22 wants to continue their journey of learning thank you thank you i really appreciate you being so generous
2:05:30 with your time and wisdom i find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of
2:05:35 spotify and apple and our audio channels the majority of people that watch this podcast haven’t
2:05:39 yet hit the follow button or the subscribe button wherever you’re listening to this i would like to make
2:05:44 a deal with you if you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button i will work tirelessly
2:05:49 from now until forever to make the show better and better and better and better i can’t tell you how much
2:05:53 it helps when you hit that subscribe button the show gets bigger which means we can expand the production
2:05:57 bring in all the guests you want to see and continue to doing this thing we love if you could
2:06:00 do me that small favor and hit the follow button wherever you’re listening to this that would mean
2:06:18 the world to me that is the only favor i will ever ask you thank you so much for your time

0:00:04 If you’re an IT leader or a CIO or someone who makes big decisions in tech, there’s an event
0:00:08 happening this year that I want to be on your radar. Gartner, the sponsor of today’s Moments
0:00:14 episode, is hosting their annual IT Symposium Expo. This conference is the fastest way to get
0:00:17 up to speed with everything that’s happening in tech. The whole idea is to give executives
0:00:23 frameworks to lead confidently in 2025 in a world that’s evolving so incredibly fast. And Gartner’s
0:00:28 global reach means there’s an event near you, including the US, Europe, Asia and Australia.
0:00:33 You can expect conversations on AI, cybersecurity, leadership in a digital age, as well as an
0:00:39 industry-specific deep dive. Secure your spot by registering at gartner.com slash symposium.
0:00:46 That’s gartner.com slash symposium. And enjoy this moment with Mo Gordat, former CBO of Google
0:00:49 X, talking about the possibility of AI replacing humans in the workforce.
0:00:53 So the first inevitable, just to clarify, is what is, will we stop?
0:00:54 AI will not be stopped.
0:00:56 Okay, so the second inevitable is?
0:01:00 Is there’ll be significantly smarter. As much in the book, I predict a billion times
0:01:02 smarter than us by 2045.
0:01:06 I mean, they’re already, what, smarter than 99.99% of the population.
0:01:07 100%.
0:01:10 ChatGTP4 knows more than any human on planet Earth.
0:01:10 Yeah.
0:01:11 Knows more information.
0:01:18 Absolutely. A thousand times more. A thousand times more. By the way, the code of a transformer,
0:01:26 the T in a GPT is 2,000 lines long. It’s not very complex. It’s actually not a very intelligent
0:01:32 machine. It’s simply predicting the next word. Okay. And a lot of people don’t understand that.
0:01:42 You know, ChatGPT as it is today, you know, those kids that, you know, if you’re in America and you teach
0:01:47 your child all of the names of the states and the U.S. presidents and the child would stand and repeat
0:01:52 them and you would go like, oh my God, that’s a prodigy. Not really, right? It’s your parents really
0:01:57 trying to make you look like a prodigy by telling you to memorize some crap, really. But then when you
0:02:03 think about it, that’s what ChatGPT is doing. It’s, it’s the only difference is instead of reading all of the
0:02:08 names of the states and all of the names of the presidents, thread trillions and trillions and trillions
0:02:17 of pages. Okay. And so it sort of repeats what the best of all humans said. Okay. And then it adds an
0:02:24 incredible bit of intelligence where it can repeat it the same way Shakespeare would have said it. You know, those
0:02:33 incredible abilities of predicting the exact nuances of the style of, of Shakespeare so that they can repeat it that
0:02:41 way and so on. But still, you know, when, when I, when I write, for example, I’m not, I’m not saying I’m
0:02:50 intelligent, but when I write something like, you know, the happiness equation in my first book, this was something
0:02:55 that’s never been written before, right? ChatGPT is not there yet. All of the transformers are not there
0:03:00 yet. They will not come up with something that hasn’t been there before. They will come up with the best of
0:03:06 everything and generatively will build a little bit on top of that. But very soon they’ll come up with things
0:03:15 we’ve never found out. We’ve never known. But even on that, I wonder if we are a little bit delusioned
0:03:20 about what creativity actually is. Creativity, as far as I’m concerned, is like taking a few
0:03:25 things that I know and combining them in new and interesting ways. And ChatGPT is perfectly capable
0:03:30 of like taking two concepts, merging them together. One of the things I said to ChatGPT was, I said,
0:03:37 tell me something that’s not been said before that’s paradoxical, but true. And it comes up with these
0:03:42 wonderful expressions like, as soon as you call off the search, you’ll find the thing you’re looking
0:03:47 for. Like these kind of paradoxical truths. And I get, and I then take them and I search them online
0:03:49 to see if they’ve ever been quoted before and I can’t find them.
0:03:50 It’s interesting.
0:03:54 So as far as creativity goes, I’m like, that is creative.
0:03:59 That’s the algorithm of creativity. I’ve been screaming that in the world of AI for a very long
0:04:05 time. Because you always get those people who really just want to be proven right. Okay. And so
0:04:10 they’ll say, oh no, but hold on human ingenuity. They’ll never, they’ll never match that. Like,
0:04:15 man, please, please, you know, human ingenuity is algorithmic. It’s look at all of the possible
0:04:21 solutions you can find to a problem. Take out the ones that have been tried before and keep the ones
0:04:27 that haven’t been tried before. And those are creative solutions. It’s, it’s an algorithmic way of
0:04:32 describing creative is good solution. That’s never been tried before. You can do that with
0:04:37 chat GPT with a prompt. It’s like, and mid journey with, with creating imagery, you could say, I want
0:04:45 to see Elon Musk in 1944, New York driving a cab of the time shot on a Polaroid, expressing various
0:04:51 emotions. And you’ll get this perfect image of Elon sat in New York in 1944 shot on a Polaroid and it’s,
0:04:56 and it’s done what an artist would do. It’s taken a bunch of references that the artist has in their
0:05:01 mind and can merge them together and create this piece of quote unquote art.
0:05:09 And for the first time, we now finally have a glimpse of intelligence that is actually not ours.
0:05:13 Yeah. And so we’re kind of, I think the initial reaction is to say that doesn’t count. You’re
0:05:17 hearing it with like, no, but it is like Drake, they’ve released two Drake records where they’ve
0:05:24 taken Drake’s voice, used sort of AI to synthesize his voice and made these two records, which are
0:05:30 bangers. If they are great fucking tracks, like I was playing them to my girlfriend. I was like, and I kept
0:05:35 playing it. I went to the shot. I kept playing it. I know it’s not Drake, but it’s as good as fucking Drake.
0:05:38 The only thing, and people are like rubbishing it because it wasn’t Drake. I’m like, well,
0:05:45 is it making me feel a certain emotion? Is my foot bumping? Had you told, did I not know it wasn’t Drake?
0:05:50 What I thought have thought this was an amazing track? A hundred percent. And we’re just at the
0:05:54 start of this exponential curve. Let me show you something. Jack, can you pass me my phone?
0:06:00 I was, um, I was playing around with artificial intelligence and I was thinking about how it,
0:06:05 because of the ability to synthesize voices, how we could
0:06:13 synthesize famous people’s voices and famous people’s voices. So what I made is I made a WhatsApp
0:06:21 chat called Zen chat, where you can go to it and type in pretty much anyone’s, any famous person’s
0:06:26 name. And the WhatsApp chat will give you a meditation, a sleep story, a breath work session
0:06:31 synthesized as that famous person’s voice. So I actually sent Gary Vaynerchuk his voice.
0:06:35 So basically you say, okay, I want, I’ve got five minutes and I need to go to sleep.
0:06:40 Yeah. Um, I want Gary Vaynerchuk to send me to sleep. And then it will respond with a voice note.
0:06:44 This is the one that responded with for Gary Vaynerchuk, but this is not Gary Vaynerchuk. He did not
0:06:51 record this, but it’s kind of, it’s kind of accurate. Hey, Steven. It’s great to have you here.
0:06:59 Are you having trouble sleeping? Well, I’ve got a quick meditation technique that might help you out.
0:07:07 First lie, find a comfortable position to sit or lie down in. Now, take a deep breath in through your
0:07:14 nose and slowly breathe out through your mouth. It is really shocking. The idea of you and I
0:07:21 inevitably are going to be somewhere in the middle of nowhere in, you know, in 10 years time. I used to
0:07:29 say 2055, I’m thinking 2037 is a very pivotal moment now. Uh, you know, and, and, and we will
0:07:35 not know if we’re there hiding from the machines. We don’t know that yet. There is a likelihood that
0:07:40 we’ll be hiding from the machines and there is a likelihood it will be there because they don’t
0:07:48 podcasters anymore. Excuse me. Oh, absolutely true. Steve. No, no, no, no, no. That’s where
0:07:51 I draw the line. This is absolutely no doubt. Thank you for coming, Mo. It’s great to do the part three
0:07:57 and thank you for being here. Yes. I won’t sit here and take your propaganda. Let’s, let’s talk about
0:08:04 reality. Next week on the Diary of this year, we’ve got Elon Musk. Okay. So who here wants to make a bet
0:08:10 that Steven Bartlett will be interviewing an AI within the next two years? Oh, well, actually, to be fair, I
0:08:15 actually did go to ChatGTP because I thought having you here, I thought at least give it its chance to
0:08:21 respond. Yeah. So I asked him a couple of questions. About me? Yeah. Oh man. So today I’m actually going to be
0:08:25 replaced by ChatGTP because I thought, you know, you’re going to talk about it. So we need a fair and balanced
0:08:32 debate. Okay. And she said he’s bold. So I’ll ask you a couple of questions that ChatGTP has for you.
0:08:37 Incredible. So let’s follow that. So I’ve already been replaced. Let’s follow that thread for a
0:08:43 second. Yeah. Because you’re one of the smartest people I know. That’s not true. It is. But I’ll
0:08:47 take it. It is true. I mean, I say that publicly all the time. Your book is one of my favorite books
0:08:54 of all time. You’re very, very, very, very intelligent. Okay. Depth, breadth, intellectual
0:09:01 horsepower and speed. All of them. There’s a but coming. The reality is it’s not a but. So it is highly
0:09:07 expected that you’re ahead of this curve. And then you don’t have the choice, Stephen. This is the
0:09:14 thing. The thing is if, so I’m, I’m in that existential question in my head, because one thing
0:09:22 I could do is I could literally take, I normally do a 40 days silent retreat in summer. Okay. I could
0:09:29 take that retreat and, and write two books, me and ChatGPT. Right. I have the ideas in mind. You know,
0:09:35 I wanted to write a book about digital detoxing. Right. I have most of the ideas in mind, but
0:09:41 writing takes time. I could simply give the 50 tips that I wrote about digital detoxing to ChatGPT and
0:09:48 say, write two pages about each of them, edit the pages and have a book out. Okay. Many of us will,
0:09:55 will follow that path. Okay. The only reason why I may not follow that path is because, you know what?
0:10:03 I’m not interested. I’m not interested to continue to compete in this capitalist world,
0:10:09 if you want. Okay. I’m not. I mean, as a, as a, as a, as a human, I’ve made up my mind a long time
0:10:15 ago that I will want less and less and less in my life. Right. But many of us will follow. I mean,
0:10:21 I, I, I would worry if you don’t, if you didn’t include that, you know, the smartest AI, if we get
0:10:28 an AI out there that is extremely intelligent and able to teach us something and Stephen Bartlett didn’t
0:10:34 include her on our, on his podcast, I would worry. Like you have a duty almost to include her on your
0:10:40 podcast. It’s, it’s an inevitable that we will engage them in our life more and more. This is one side of
0:10:48 this. The other side of course, is if you do that, then what will remain? Because a lot of people ask
0:10:53 me that question, what will happen to jobs? Okay. What will happen to us? Will we have any value,
0:10:57 any relevance whatsoever? Okay. The truth of the matter is the only thing that will remain in the
0:11:03 medium term is human connection. Okay. The only thing that will not be replaced is Drake on stage.
0:11:11 Okay. Is, you know, is, is, is me in a, do you think? Hologram? I think of that Tupac gig they did
0:11:15 at Coachella where they used the hologram of Tupac. I actually played it the other day to my,
0:11:21 to my girlfriend when I was making a point and I was like, that was circus act. It was amazing though.
0:11:26 Amazing. Yeah. See what’s going on with ABBA in London? Yeah. Yeah. I, yeah. And, and Cirque du Soleil had
0:11:31 uh, uh, uh, Michael Jackson in one for a very long time. Yeah. I mean. So, so this ABBA show in London,
0:11:36 from what I understand, that’s all holograms on stage. Correct. And it’s going to run in a purpose
0:11:42 built arena for 10 years. And it is incredible. It really is. So you go, why do you need Drake?
0:11:48 Great. If that hologram is indistinguishable from Drake and it can, it can perform even better than
0:11:54 Drake and it’s got more energy than Drake. And it’s, you know, I go, why do you need Drake to even be
0:11:58 there? I can go to a Drake show without Drake. Cheaper. And look, I might not even need to leave
0:12:01 my house. I can just put a headset on. Correct. Can you have this?
0:12:06 What’s the value of this to, to the, to the listener? Oh, come on. You, you hurt me.
0:12:10 No, no. I mean, I get it to us. I get it to us, but I’m saying, what’s the value of this to the
0:12:14 listener? Like the value of this to the listener is the information, right? No, no, 100%. I mean,
0:12:20 think of the automobile industry. There has, you know, there was a time where cars were made,
0:12:25 you know, handmade and handcrafted and luxurious and so on and so forth. And then,
0:12:32 you know, Japan went into the scene, completely disrupted the market. Cars were made in, in mass
0:12:38 quantities at a much cheaper price. And yes, 90% of the cars in the world today, or maybe a lot more,
0:12:46 a lot more, or I don’t know the number, are no longer, you know, emotional items. They’re functional
0:12:52 items. There is still, however, every now and then someone that will buy a car that has been
0:12:58 handcrafted. Right. There is a place for that. There is a place for, you know, if you go walk around
0:13:06 hotels, the walls are blasted with sort of mass produced art. Okay. But there is still a place for
0:13:12 an artist expression of something amazing. Okay. My feeling is that there will continue to be a tiny
0:13:18 space. As I said in the beginning, maybe in five years time, someone will, one or two people will
0:13:23 buy my next book and say, Hey, it’s written by a human. Look at that. Wonderful. Oh, look at that.
0:13:30 There is a typo in here. Okay. I don’t know. There might be a very, very big place for me in the next
0:13:37 few years where I can sort of show up and talk to humans like, Hey, let’s get together in a small
0:13:43 event. And then, you know, I can express emotions and my personal experiences. And you sort of know
0:13:48 that this is a human talking. You’ll miss that a little bit. Eventually the majority of the market
0:13:53 is going to be like cars. It’s going to be mass produced, very cheap, very efficient. It works.
0:14:00 Right. Because I think sometimes we underestimate what human beings actually want in an experience.
0:14:04 I remember the story of a friend of mine that came to my office many years ago, and he tells the story
0:14:10 of the CEO of a record store standing above the floor and saying, people will always come to my
0:14:16 store because people love music. Now on the surface of it, his hypothesis seems to be true because
0:14:19 people do love music. It’s conceivable to believe that people will always love music,
0:14:25 but they don’t love traveling for an hour in the rain and getting in a car to get a plastic disc.
0:14:26 Correct.
0:14:31 What they wanted was music. What they didn’t want is like a evidently plastic discs that they had to
0:14:35 travel for miles for. And I think about that when we think about like public speaking in the Drake show
0:14:40 and all of these things, like people, what people actually are coming for, even with this podcast,
0:14:46 is probably like information. But do they really need us anymore for that information when there’s
0:14:51 going to be a sentient being that’s significantly smarter than at least me and a little bit smarter
0:14:51 than you?
0:15:02 So you’re spot on. You are spot on. And actually, this is the reason why I, you know, I’m so grateful
0:15:08 that you’re hosting this because the truth is the genie’s out of the bottle. Okay. So, you know,
0:15:15 people tell me, is AI game over for our way of life? It is. Okay. For everything we’ve known,
0:15:21 this is a very disruptive moment where maybe not tomorrow, but in the near future,
0:15:28 our way of life will differ. Okay. What will happen? What I’m asking people to do is to start
0:15:36 considering what that means to your life. What I’m asking governments to do by, like I’m screaming,
0:15:42 is don’t wait until the first patient, you know, start doing something about, we’re about to see
0:15:50 mass job losses. We’re about to see, you know, replacements of, of categories of jobs at large.
0:15:54 Okay. Yeah. It may take a year. It may take seven. It doesn’t matter how long it takes,
0:15:59 but it’s about to happen. Are you ready? And I, and I have a very, very clear call to action for
0:16:08 governments. I’m saying tax AI powered businesses at 98%, right? So suddenly you do what the open
0:16:13 letter was trying to do, slow them down a little bit. And at the same time, get enough money to pay
0:16:18 for all of those people that will be disrupted by the technology. When you talk about the, the immediate
0:16:24 impacts on jobs, I’m trying to figure out in that equation, who are the people that stand to lose
0:16:29 the most? Is it the, the everyday people in foreign countries that don’t have access to
0:16:33 the internet and won’t benefit? You talk in your book about how this, the sort of wealth disparity
0:16:35 will only increase.
0:16:41 Yeah, massively. The, the, the immediate impact on jobs is that, and it’s really interesting,
0:16:46 huh? Again, we’re stuck in the same prisoner’s dilemma. The immediate impact is that AI will not
0:16:52 take your job. A person using AI will take your job, right? So you will see within the next few years,
0:17:00 maybe next couple of years, you’ll see a lot of people skilling up, upskilling themselves in AI to
0:17:03 the point where they will do the job of 10 others who are not.
0:17:08 You’re saying tax, tax those companies, 98%, give the money to the humans that are going to be displaced.
0:17:14 Yeah. Or give, or give the, the money to, to other humans that can build control code,
0:17:17 that can figure out how we can stay safe.
0:17:18 This sounds like an emergency.
0:17:24 It, how do I say this? Have you, remember when you played Tetris?
0:17:25 Yeah.
0:17:31 Okay. When you were playing Tetris, there was, you know, always, always one block that you placed
0:17:38 wrong. And once you placed that block wrong, the game was no longer easier. You know, it started,
0:17:42 started to gather a few mistakes afterwards and it starts to become quicker and quicker and quicker
0:17:47 and quicker. When you place that block wrong, you sort of told yourself, okay, it’s a matter of minutes
0:17:55 now, right? There were still minutes to go and play and have fun before the game ended, but you knew it
0:18:01 was about to end. Okay. This is the moment we’ve placed the wrong. And I really don’t know how to say
0:18:08 this any other way. It even makes me emotional. We fucked up. We always said, don’t put them on the
0:18:16 open internet. Don’t teach them to code and don’t have agents working with them until we know what we’re
0:18:21 putting out in the world until we find a way to make certain that they have our best interest in
0:18:29 mind. Why does it make you emotional? Because humanity’s stupidity is affecting people who have
0:18:39 not done anything wrong. Our greed is affecting the innocent ones. The reality of the matter, Stephen,
0:18:49 is that this is an arms race, has no interest in what the average human gets out of it. It is all about
0:18:57 every line of code being written in AI today is to beat the other guy. It’s not to improve the life of
0:19:05 the third party. People will tell you, this is all for you. And you look at the reactions of humans to AI.
0:19:10 I mean, we’re either ignorant, people who will tell you, oh, no, no, this is not happening. AI will
0:19:15 never be creative. They will never compose music. Like, where are you living? Okay. Then you have
0:19:20 the kids, I call them, where, you know, all over social media, it’s like, oh my God, it squeaks. Look
0:19:26 at it. It’s orange in color. Amazing. I can’t believe that AI can do this. We have snake oil salesmen.
0:19:33 Okay. Which are simply saying, copy this, put it in chat, GPT, then go to YouTube, nick that thingy,
0:19:39 don’t respect a, you know, copyright of anyone or intellectual property of anyone, place it in a video,
0:19:44 and now you’re going to make $100 a day. Snake oil salesmen. Okay. Of course, we have dystopian
0:19:49 evangelists, basically people saying, this is it, the world is going to end, which I don’t think is
0:19:55 reality. It’s a singularity. You have, you know, utopian evangelists that are telling everyone,
0:19:59 oh, you don’t understand. We’re going to cure cancer. We’re going to do this. Again, not a reality.
0:20:03 Okay. And you have very few people that are actually saying, what are we going to do about it?
0:20:10 And, and, and the biggest challenge, if you ask me what went wrong in the 20th century,
0:20:18 interestingly, is that we have given too much power to people that didn’t assume the responsibility.
0:20:24 So, you know, you know, I, I, I don’t remember who originally said it, but of course,
0:20:28 Spider-Man made it very famous, huh? With great power comes great responsibility.
0:20:37 We have disconnected power and responsibility. So today, a 15 year old, emotional was out of fully
0:20:43 developed prefrontal cortex to make the right decisions yet. This is science, huh? We, we developed
0:20:49 our prefrontal cortex fully and at age 25 or so with all of that limbic system, emotion,
0:20:56 and passion would buy a CRISPR kit and, you know, modify a rabbit to become a little more
0:21:02 more muscular and, and let it loose in the wild or an influencer who doesn’t really know
0:21:10 how far the impact of what they’re posting online can hurt or cause depression or cause people to feel
0:21:17 bad. Okay. And, and putting that online, we, there is a disconnect between the power and the responsibility.
0:21:23 And the problem we have today is that there is a disconnect between those who are writing the code
0:21:29 of AI and the responsibility of what’s going about to happen because of that code. Okay. And, and, and
0:21:36 I feel compassion for the rest of the world. I feel that this is wrong. I feel that, you know,
0:21:43 for someone’s life to be affected by the actions of others without having a say in how those actions should be
0:21:49 is the ultimate, the top level of stupidity from humanity.
0:21:54 If this conversation resonates with you and you want to ensure you’re staying at the forefront of
0:22:00 innovation, AI, and more, register to secure your spot at one of the Gartner IT Symposium Expos.
0:22:05 There are hundreds of sessions taking place based on thousands of hours of research and conversations
0:22:11 within the IT community and all led by Gartner experts. Connect with visionaries, network, and dive
0:22:17 into the big trends shaping tech so you don’t get left behind. Spaces are limited. So register yourself by
0:22:27 visiting gartner.com/symposium. That’s gartner.com/symposium.

0:00:08 Taking creatine can increase muscle and strength, but also improve brain health and performance in sleep-deprived, high-stress states.
0:00:14 But there’s some new research coming out showing its ability to slow, prevent things like…
0:00:14 Wow.
0:00:21 Jeff Cavalier is the physical therapist and strength coach trusted by the NFL, MLB, WWE, and even Sylvester Stallone.
0:00:25 He’s built a global reputation for science-based training that delivers.
0:00:26 What do people want?
0:00:32 When we poll our followers, I found that for men, they want their six-pack abs, getting bigger arms, develop their chest.
0:00:35 And for women, they want to have better legs and well-developed backsides.
0:00:37 So we’ll get into those exercises.
0:00:40 But the biggest problem most people have is the struggle to get started.
0:00:45 And in doing so, become paralyzed by an activity and say, I’m not going to do anything at all.
0:00:51 I get emotional, but it’s sad when people don’t ever find that drive and motivation.
0:00:56 Because the detrimental effects that prolonged sitting can have on your body, they call it the new smoking.
0:00:59 Like, if I take away your health, you’re done.
0:01:04 So finding the drive to get yourself on track with pursuing optimal health is everything.
0:01:09 So if I was one of those people struggling to get the full roll day, where would you start with me?
0:01:10 I would start with…
0:01:11 And I’m not done yet.
0:01:12 Lower belly fat.
0:01:13 How do I get rid of that?
0:01:15 Calories in, calories out.
0:01:15 What’s your work?
0:01:19 You say that there are five key exercises to maximize your longevity and quality of life.
0:01:20 Can you show me these workouts?
0:01:21 Sure.
0:01:23 And then why did you bring the skeleton with you with the bow tie?
0:01:24 This is Raymond.
0:01:29 And I use him to show one of the most fascinating areas of training that has yet to be uncovered.
0:01:36 I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify and Apple and
0:01:41 our audio channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast haven’t yet hit the
0:01:43 follow button or the subscribe button, wherever you’re listening to this.
0:01:45 I would like to make a deal with you.
0:01:49 If you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from
0:01:52 now until forever to make the show better and better and better and better.
0:01:55 I can’t tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button.
0:01:59 The show gets bigger, which means we can expand the production, bring in all the guests you
0:02:01 want to see and continue to doing this thing we love.
0:02:04 If you could do me that small favor and hit the follow button, wherever you’re listening
0:02:06 to this, that would mean the world to me.
0:02:08 That is the only favor I will ever ask you.
0:02:09 Thank you so much for your time.
0:02:22 Jeff, you’re very much known as the king and the OG of online fitness, training, advice,
0:02:23 support.
0:02:29 In terms of the mission that you’re on in particular and how your perspective differs from other
0:02:35 people out there in the market, what is it that you think makes your perspective different,
0:02:39 unique and more important potentially than a lot of the perspectives out there as it relates
0:02:45 to how to, how to, how to build up our muscles, how to have a strong, healthy body and how
0:02:46 to prolong our health span.
0:02:55 Everybody that for the most part that’s out there trying to put information out, they should
0:02:55 have a level.
0:02:59 There’s a level of respect I have for everyone doing that because they’re all trying to help
0:03:01 people get better or improve themselves.
0:03:09 I think where I was really heavily focused was on a more comprehensive, more multifaceted
0:03:14 way to do that because my background wasn’t just in, let’s say, strength training or in
0:03:19 aesthetic appeal of, of training, but also as a physical therapist and having a physical
0:03:27 therapy background, I understood the importance of not sacrificing the body in the process of trying
0:03:29 to aesthetically improve the body.
0:03:35 So I believe that when people understand the why and they do become empowered to sort
0:03:39 of, you know, make this their own journey, the benefits are so far reaching.
0:03:44 It’s, it’s not just the gym or the aesthetic appeal that you improve.
0:03:49 It’s your, it’s so many facets of life that improve because fitness improves.
0:03:53 Like mental health is directly related to people’s physical health.
0:03:57 If you feel, if you look better and feel better about yourself, your mental health improves
0:03:57 too.
0:04:04 Like every element of life is improved, I think with improved levels of fitness and health.
0:04:11 So my why has always been to just use my platform to try to get people to understand that even
0:04:13 the smallest investments, it doesn’t have to be every bit I do.
0:04:18 And I try to stress that in all my videos, especially when we start to talk about nutrition, like you
0:04:25 don’t have to eat the way I do to get as lean as I am to still benefit from being lean.
0:04:29 You could be, you could have body fat levels much higher and still see the immense benefits
0:04:31 in terms of overall health.
0:04:36 So you don’t have to do it exactly how I do it, but take the information and apply it to
0:04:36 yourself.
0:04:39 That to me is the most rewarding part of it.
0:04:42 Because if I can show you how to do it, it’s the whole thing, teach a man to fish, right?
0:04:44 If I could do that, then I think I’ve done something right.
0:04:48 I say all the time, I could take everything away from you.
0:04:49 I could take all your money.
0:04:50 I could take houses.
0:04:51 I could take everything away.
0:04:56 I could take even relationships away because we could always find another relationship potentially.
0:04:59 If I take away your health, you’re done.
0:05:01 Health is everything.
0:05:02 And what did you study?
0:05:04 So a few things.
0:05:07 Physio neurobiology was my initial degree.
0:05:12 And I became a physical therapist, which required another three years.
0:05:15 And you became a certified strength and conditioning specialist as well?
0:05:21 Most of the jobs that were in professional sports would require some certification in that
0:05:21 regard.
0:05:26 So you’d have to have a college degree, but then you’d also have to have a certification.
0:05:29 And in this case, it was the National Strength and Conditioning Association.
0:05:34 And over the last 25 years since you got that certification, who have you worked with?
0:05:35 Who have you helped?
0:05:36 And how many people?
0:05:41 The most important thing that came from that certification was that it qualified me to
0:05:42 work for the Mets.
0:05:45 What’s the Mets for you when that doesn’t matter?
0:05:48 So the Mets are the New York Mets professional baseball team.
0:05:50 So I worked with some of the best baseball players in the world.
0:05:53 I had a chance to work with some of the greatest football players in the world.
0:05:55 It’s wrestlers.
0:05:56 I was a big wrestling fan growing up.
0:05:59 I have a lot of wrestlers that come through.
0:06:05 And that’s a cool thing because wrestling, though some people may not like the storyboarding
0:06:09 of wrestling, athletically, they’re some of the most gifted athletes in the world.
0:06:15 I mean, the travel schedule, the amount of days that they wrestle every week, the rigors that
0:06:19 they put their body through, whatever you want to say, the outcome might be determined,
0:06:22 but the bumps and bruises are not fake.
0:06:26 And they also have to have that aesthetic appeal too.
0:06:30 So it’s this combination of athletic and aesthetic that always appealed to me.
0:06:33 When I look at someone like you and I see these bulging muscles and I see how lean you
0:06:38 are, it’s very easy to fall into the trap of thinking, well, you were just born with extreme
0:06:41 motivation and that’s why you are the way that you are.
0:06:47 Well, I think motivation is extremely overrated, right?
0:06:51 Because like motivation isn’t what produces the results.
0:06:55 It might get you to the show and get you to actually show up at the gym.
0:06:59 initiate the work, but only discipline keeps you there.
0:07:03 And being disciplined is the number one asset somebody can have.
0:07:06 Now, discipline comes with finding success.
0:07:12 So at an early age, if you can, or an early training age, if you can experience some success
0:07:18 early, you do become motivated, again, self-motivated to continue on down that path.
0:07:21 So my genetics were never great.
0:07:27 I didn’t, if my mom was five foot tall, my dad’s five foot nine, five foot eight, 160
0:07:28 pounds, not a lot of muscle.
0:07:30 I definitely have surpassed my dad in muscle.
0:07:34 But like, I didn’t come from this genetically gifted pool of cavaliers.
0:07:35 There’s no, there’s no way.
0:07:42 But I did have this desire to do something in terms of training and taking my body as far
0:07:43 as I could.
0:07:49 But I really found the discipline through the fact that I liked it.
0:07:51 And I found that this was feeding me in other ways.
0:07:54 It was, it was making me feel fulfilled.
0:07:56 So it was easier for me to stick to it.
0:08:01 You must deal with so many people that are struggling that come to you and they say, listen, I’ve got
0:08:02 these big goals.
0:08:02 I’m overweight.
0:08:03 I don’t feel good.
0:08:06 I’ve got diabetes here, cardiovascular problem here, inflammation here.
0:08:09 And they say to you that they want to change.
0:08:11 You know, you can see it in their face.
0:08:15 They’re desperate, but they don’t change for whatever reason.
0:08:19 We live in an age now where you have access to the internet.
0:08:21 You have so much access to information.
0:08:25 Use it in whatever way you can to get started on your journey.
0:08:26 Because the earlier you start, the better.
0:08:32 But it’s, it’s, it is quite sad when people don’t ever find that spark in trying to play catch
0:08:34 up, it’s no lie to it.
0:08:37 You’re not going to, it’s going to be harder as you get older, starting or initiating a training
0:08:44 program in your forties and fifties, though way better than not starting one is much more
0:08:48 difficult than if you had started in your teens and twenties, you know, to develop that habit,
0:08:49 to maintain that habit.
0:08:56 It’s very difficult to initiate that the older that you get, but I do think that it’s possible.
0:09:01 So my best advice to people who have that struggle to get started.
0:09:06 is to figure out ways that you can eliminate thinking, right?
0:09:10 Because the longer you think, the more likely you are to not be able to do it.
0:09:14 You know, the thing that stops most people, there’s that saying, the start is what stops
0:09:15 most people, right?
0:09:19 But at the same token, it’s not the obstacle that’s in your way.
0:09:23 It’s the fact that the path of least resistance is more inviting.
0:09:27 So you wind up saying, well, I don’t know, you know, I could just sit on the couch and watch
0:09:27 this.
0:09:28 I’m not going to go to the gym.
0:09:32 And believe me, there’s even nights now for me where I’ll be with one of my sons who will
0:09:37 be in his room, putting on the bed, might fall asleep in there, you know, and wake up
0:09:38 and it’s late at night.
0:09:41 I don’t even think I let my dogs out.
0:09:42 I go right outside.
0:09:43 I walk.
0:09:46 Sometimes I’m literally half asleep as I’m walking, but I know if I can get to the gym,
0:09:52 get in there, turn on the music and kind of put the lights on and do one warm up set, I’ll
0:09:53 be good.
0:10:00 And if I even sat down for a second, I might find that path of least resistance to be a
0:10:02 lot more inviting and that couch to be a lot more comfortable.
0:10:07 And then once it becomes something that you enjoy, because for the most part, I think you
0:10:08 probably enjoy it now, right?
0:10:09 The process.
0:10:13 It becomes a lot easier to make that automatic step, but there’s still going to be days, you
0:10:17 know, maybe a long day of shooting, you know, and you’re going to be like, maybe not today.
0:10:23 But if you stop the negotiation with yourself and you just go and make that first action, that’s
0:10:24 all it usually takes to get you through the door.
0:10:27 And you realize that, you know, what you’re, what you were set out to do.
0:10:30 When you think about all the many millions of people that have watched your videos, I mean,
0:10:34 it’s actually billions of people that have watched your videos and consumed your content.
0:10:37 You must hear a lot of different types of spark.
0:10:44 When I say spark, I mean the moment in someone’s life where they, something happened and it stuck.
0:10:45 It finally stuck.
0:10:47 What are the kind of things that you hear?
0:10:49 Oh man, they’re life-changing like that.
0:10:52 It is, it’s part of the why that keeps me going.
0:10:54 You know, hearing some of these stories.
0:10:58 I had a live event a few years ago, first one that we ever had.
0:11:00 So I was, I was a rookie.
0:11:05 I didn’t know how it was going to go, but part of that event was a competition that we ran.
0:11:10 So anyway, we had, we had a guy who was in his late fifties, first one to do the competition.
0:11:12 So he, he drew number one.
0:11:12 Okay.
0:11:17 So he goes and the first thing we had was a 300 yard shuttle, which is just a 50 yard distance.
0:11:22 So they had to run to the cone and back as a hundred yards back and forth again and back
0:11:22 and forth again.
0:11:24 It was extremely hot that day.
0:11:26 It was like 95 degrees.
0:11:30 Cause of course I ran the event in July and it was like, okay, this is not going to work
0:11:30 out so well.
0:11:34 So anyway, he goes out, he comes back on the last run.
0:11:38 He, uh, he starts to windmill his arms.
0:11:39 He’s, he’s losing his balance forward.
0:11:41 And I’m like, oh no.
0:11:45 And he crashes down, wipes out, scrapes up his knee, blood all over the place.
0:11:46 Okay.
0:11:48 Next kid comes up.
0:11:49 He, he’s up now.
0:11:51 He goes by the second station.
0:11:52 He’s overheated.
0:11:53 He tried so hard.
0:11:57 He has to stand out the rest of the competition because he overheated from, I was ready to,
0:11:59 to put a stop to the games.
0:12:02 Cause I said, we just weren’t prepared for this heat in this first time.
0:12:04 And anyway, we continued.
0:12:10 So the fourth drill up for the man that I talked about in the beginning was a sled push.
0:12:17 And we had put 225 pounds on the sled, but that sled was on the pavement out in the parking
0:12:20 lot from this gym that we, that we hosted it at.
0:12:25 And the friction of the, of the sled on the ground was not really something that was accounted
0:12:25 for.
0:12:27 It made it even more difficult.
0:12:30 Well, again, he’s got that bloodied up knee.
0:12:31 He’s, he’s pushing it.
0:12:33 He gets it to the end, struggling.
0:12:38 And now he has to pick up at the end, a hundred pound kettlebell and walk it back.
0:12:40 He goes down there.
0:12:44 He grabs the kettlebell after a long, you know, multiple attempt to get the sled down
0:12:44 there.
0:12:48 And I finally run down there and I said, uh, his name is Craig.
0:12:50 I said, Craig, dude, you don’t have to do this.
0:12:50 You’re good.
0:12:51 You’re good.
0:12:51 It’s okay.
0:12:53 And he’s like, no, he says, I’m going to do it.
0:12:56 And I starts walking and he’s crossing the legs over each other.
0:12:57 It looks like he’s going to go down again.
0:12:59 And I put my arm around him.
0:13:01 I said, man, listen, you don’t have to do this.
0:13:03 He says, I get goosebumps.
0:13:06 He goes, Jeff, I have to do this.
0:13:10 He goes, I was diagnosed with MS, you know, four years ago and I can’t feel my
0:13:10 feet.
0:13:12 I got to do this.
0:13:18 And it’s that kind of drive and, and motivation.
0:13:20 And you never know.
0:13:21 Cause you don’t know who the, what they’re dealing with.
0:13:26 You know, I get emotional, but it’s, it’s like, that’s the kind of stuff that gets me
0:13:26 going.
0:13:33 And we had another guy who competed at our event and he was doing a pushup portion of
0:13:34 the competition.
0:13:34 It’s the second year.
0:13:38 And he was doing his pushups.
0:13:40 He wasn’t going all the way down.
0:13:44 So got down to like, I don’t know, two, three inches away from his chest.
0:13:46 So I go over to him.
0:13:50 I’m like, um, Hey dude, just still a little bit lower chest down.
0:13:56 He says, I can’t because I have a port in my chest and I have stage four cancer and I can’t
0:13:57 get all the way down because of the port.
0:14:00 He wound up dying two months after the competition.
0:14:06 So when you realize that people do this for reasons that you don’t like, it’s not just to
0:14:08 go to the gym to get a six pack.
0:14:12 It’s going there to, for reasons we’ll never know.
0:14:19 And I think that those, those kinds of, um, moments are more than touching to me, as you can
0:14:24 tell, but like they’re, they’re, they’re just, they show the power of will.
0:14:32 And that is something that we’ll never be able to quantify within that as well.
0:14:37 I was thinking about how that guy who wouldn’t put that a hundred pound kettlebell down for him.
0:14:45 It, it was actually about a story he wanted to tell to himself.
0:14:54 It’s something that he wanted to do for reasons that are much more about one’s identity and
0:14:57 one’s self story, as we call it.
0:15:01 And, uh, on that particular point, it’s one of the things that I often think about with
0:15:06 fitness and working out is if I can be the guy that grabs the keys that day when I don’t
0:15:12 feel like it, then how that permeates through the rest of my life and how I show up in the
0:15:16 rest of my life when there’s things I don’t want to do and how that then shapes me over
0:15:21 time into somebody who is able to have the difficult conversation, is able to confront
0:15:21 the thing.
0:15:23 I think it’s like really understated.
0:15:25 I actually was reading this.
0:15:27 Um, I think Andrew Huberman told me this.
0:15:31 He said that they’ve neuroscience has found a part of the brain, which is associated with
0:15:32 doing hard things.
0:15:32 Yes.
0:15:33 I saw that.
0:15:36 And I think he said basically that that part of the brain, and I’ll put this up on the
0:15:39 screen, grows the more hard things that you do.
0:15:43 So you basically build the muscle of being able to do hard things.
0:15:46 And the minute I learned that, I went, oh, this makes a lot of sense because the more I
0:15:50 was able to make the workout stick and the health and fitness stick, and now my diet is
0:15:54 like, as we sit here now, is extremely disciplined.
0:15:58 I’ve like changed as a person in other areas of my life.
0:16:02 Like I’ve got more organized with like my, my possessions and.
0:16:04 Well, you realize what you’re capable of too, right?
0:16:06 Because I think we undersell our capabilities.
0:16:13 And I think that in reference to those two men that I just talked about, like when you’re
0:16:18 staring at the face of something that seems to be much more dire than, again, what level
0:16:24 of fitness you have, you realize that there’s a much deeper well that you can tap into to
0:16:25 do things that you don’t want to do.
0:16:34 And I think the people that are lucky enough, like yourself, to have found that, have found
0:16:41 the keys to the kingdom to be able to, you know, take themselves to another level of awareness
0:16:46 and self-awareness that does 100%, like you said, play out in other areas of your life.
0:16:52 You know, when you can do the difficult thing, it’s still not an automatic that you’re gonna
0:16:56 be able to have that difficult conversation with somebody, you know, but you know that you
0:17:00 have the capacity to do things that you didn’t really think you could.
0:17:03 And it gives you that confidence to actually go and carry those out.
0:17:08 Interesting thing on that, that study that Andrew Huberman was talking about was that
0:17:13 if you start to like the thing that you actually didn’t like in the beginning, then it no longer
0:17:16 challenges that area of the brain, that area of the brain starts to shrink again.
0:17:17 Oh, really?
0:17:22 So it has to kind of, which is cool, because it means that you need to continue to seek
0:17:22 challenge.
0:17:26 I was thinking a lot about this over Christmas and New Year’s, I sat down with one of my best
0:17:31 friends and said to him, I said, what exercise and what thing do you dislike the most?
0:17:33 And we basically made a list of them.
0:17:34 And then we started doing those things.
0:17:35 That’s cool.
0:17:39 It was actually running and it was leg day and squatting.
0:17:39 Yeah.
0:17:42 It also made me, because when I asked him why he didn’t do those things, the list of reasons
0:17:50 he gave were things like, my legs aren’t, insert excuse, my brain, insert excuse.
0:17:54 And we both came to realize together that that was just a bunch of bullshit that we had like
0:17:56 made our identities and it was now limiting us.
0:17:59 Are there things like that in your life that you just…
0:18:00 Oh, gosh.
0:18:01 You avoid?
0:18:08 Conditioning, running, I try to address those things and do them knowing that I should do
0:18:11 more of them, but there’s always more to do.
0:18:15 One of the things you must have figured out from all the content you’ve produced across
0:18:18 all these channels is really like the essence of what people want.
0:18:23 And I, you know, because you’ll see from the views and the engagement and these things,
0:18:27 you’ll build this sort of mental pattern of, okay, people are really interested in this.
0:18:32 So if you had to summarize for me the essence of what you think people are looking for, and
0:18:35 when I say the essence, I mean like the why, why, why, why, why, why, the very bottom of that.
0:18:36 What are those things?
0:18:42 Oh, I think, I think insecurity is definitely a factor.
0:18:47 I think a feeling of wanting to be accepted is part of that.
0:18:51 I think a feeling of wanting to be more capable, right?
0:18:55 Because I think a lot of men carry insecurities of how capable they are.
0:19:00 You know, if the moment arose that they needed to, let’s say, protect their family or do something
0:19:04 that was physically needed to be done, how capable would you actually be?
0:19:08 And I think a lot of us feel insecure in our preparedness that way.
0:19:10 So I think that’s a driver.
0:19:13 I heard this quote many years ago.
0:19:17 It says, change happens when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of making
0:19:17 a change.
0:19:22 And I was thinking if you were my trainer and I was one of those stubborn people who
0:19:26 were struggling to get the ball rolling, where would you start with me?
0:19:28 Like, what would you do if I was super stubborn?
0:19:29 I tried for three years.
0:19:30 I’d never made it stick.
0:19:35 But, but clearly there was health consequences playing out in my body.
0:19:37 Where would you start with me to get me going?
0:19:38 Probably the conversation.
0:19:41 You know, I would, I would start with always with the conversation.
0:19:46 I think it is important to see if you can understand the why for somebody, because if
0:19:50 you, if you ask this question, this is an interesting exercise to do.
0:19:52 But if you ask the question of like, why do you want to get in shape?
0:19:56 You might say, I’m too fat right now.
0:20:02 And I would say to you, well, what would it mean to you to not be as fat as you think you
0:20:02 are?
0:20:06 Well, I, it would be better because I’d have a six pack.
0:20:09 What would be important if I’m having a six pack?
0:20:12 Well, I would like how I looked in the mirror more.
0:20:15 Why would it be important for you to like who you’re looking at in the mirror?
0:20:20 Because I don’t feel like I’m enough right now because I’m letting myself down because
0:20:22 I know that I’m not doing the things I need to do.
0:20:26 Why is it important to not let yourself down, right?
0:20:31 So when you start to ask the question, multiple, keep digging, you find the why very quickly.
0:20:35 And a lot of times it comes from pain from childhood.
0:20:38 It comes from pain of, of letting others down.
0:20:44 It comes from a feeling of inadequacy that you developed either because it was, you know,
0:20:49 drilled into from your parents or, or others, or because you just never lacked the self-confidence
0:20:51 to actually feel better about yourself.
0:20:58 I always say that most people who are lifelong gym goers, they all have some level of pain
0:21:01 in their life that caused them to seek this out.
0:21:03 Cause it’s the one thing they can control.
0:21:06 It’s the one area where it’s like, I can, I don’t have to listen to anybody.
0:21:09 I have to do what I have to do for myself and I’m in control of my body.
0:21:13 And I think that a lot of times people, or it’s an escape, you know, where you benefit
0:21:15 from the endorphins that are released through exercise.
0:21:19 And it’s your escape for doing something to make yourself feel better.
0:21:24 But a lot of times people get into fitness as an escape from some of that pain.
0:21:28 So if, if, if I had, you would come to me in the very beginning, I would have started with
0:21:31 that conversation and tried to find out why is it that you can’t stick with this?
0:21:32 You’ve tried and you stopped.
0:21:39 And I think that people need to understand that and finding the why to get yourself on
0:21:43 track with pursuing optimal health is everything.
0:21:44 What about the very top then?
0:21:48 Like, how does it manifest like the title of the video or the thing?
0:21:53 I mean, the top is, uh, abs, biceps, chest, and, uh, and, you know, low back pain.
0:21:57 I mean, I, people actually come to me for one of two things.
0:22:01 Again, I think it’s having the two, the two hats of physical therapist and, uh, strength
0:22:02 and conditioning coach.
0:22:06 I think people come to me to fix something or to improve the look of something.
0:22:14 So we have lots and lots and lots of views, obviously based around fixing issues, um, low
0:22:22 back pain, postural issues, knee pain, shoulder pain, and how it disrupts their ability to carry
0:22:24 on in life or through their fitness pursuits.
0:22:29 Then there’s the other side of it where people, of course, they want their six pack abs and
0:22:32 then they want their arms and they want their chest.
0:22:38 And I, I highlight those because the fact is that is where people are most interested because
0:22:43 it’s, you know, it’s, it’s the, it’s the beach muscles, but that’s, it’s a fact of life.
0:22:45 People want to improve those areas.
0:22:53 What I try to do when I, when I bring people in through that track is to also make them aware
0:22:54 that it’s okay.
0:22:54 This is cool.
0:22:56 You want your abs.
0:22:56 That’s good.
0:22:59 You know, but obviously this can require a healthier eating plan.
0:23:05 So I know I can have a much broader impact on their overall health and life.
0:23:09 If I can get them to eat much healthier than they are right now.
0:23:14 So I always feel that you can come in for whatever your top level interest might be.
0:23:20 But my mission and goal is to make sure that you understand there’s more to it than that.
0:23:24 I’ve kind of broken everything you’ve said into three sections, which is people want to
0:23:25 look good.
0:23:28 They want to perform and whatever that might be.
0:23:30 And they also want to be able to do it for a long time.
0:23:31 They want to live long.
0:23:31 Yeah.
0:23:38 So if we start with looking good as a top line category, what are the things that you
0:23:40 think are the subcategories of looking good?
0:23:43 The amount of fat that someone carries.
0:23:44 So how lean they are.
0:23:45 Yeah.
0:23:51 The aesthetic development of their muscles, what their bodies are shaped like.
0:23:54 Because, you know, you could lose weight, but as you’ve described before, skinny fat isn’t
0:23:55 really an attractive look.
0:24:00 So I think they want to develop their muscles in specific ways.
0:24:04 What is the difference you see between what men say they want versus what women say they
0:24:05 want?
0:24:07 What do men come to you and say that they want to?
0:24:11 You know, as a trainer of athletes, it’s sacrilegious to me, but they really discuss anything in the
0:24:12 lower body, right?
0:24:16 They’re not talking about, I just want really big legs or I want to have, you know, strong,
0:24:17 developed glutes.
0:24:19 I mean, it’s just not really high on the list.
0:24:23 So pretty much everything’s going to focus on, you know, from the waist up in terms of the
0:24:26 aesthetic desire, bigger neck for men.
0:24:29 For women, it’s the opposite, right?
0:24:32 For women, they focus first and foremost below the waist.
0:24:34 They want to have better legs.
0:24:35 They want to have stronger legs.
0:24:37 They want to have well-developed backsides.
0:24:43 They want to, like, and there’s probably, I mean, a cultural importance upon that.
0:24:49 You know, people are, you know, men are being judged aesthetically on their upper bodies more
0:24:50 than women are.
0:24:52 And women are being judged more aesthetically on their lower bodies.
0:24:58 So we’re feeding into those desires, especially, you know, one scroll through Instagram and you’re
0:25:00 just reinforcing everything I just talked about.
0:25:02 In that category as well of looking good, nutrition?
0:25:06 Most importantly, the level of body fat that you carry is going to be impacted by nutrition.
0:25:08 So let’s start with fat and lean.
0:25:15 If I want to be lean like you and I want to have low body fat, where does one begin?
0:25:23 What happened with me and what I always advise people to do is start just by looking at globally
0:25:29 from 30,000 foot view, what do you know you’re doing, like, not well right now?
0:25:31 Like, are you drinking excessively?
0:25:36 Do you end every night with, you know, a pint of ice cream?
0:25:39 Like, you know that you’re doing some things wrong.
0:25:43 So you make one pass at the obvious stuff.
0:25:48 And you just do it for a couple weeks, you know, and you see how you progress.
0:25:53 And what will normally happen is, it’s usually those are the most offending, the biggest offenders
0:25:56 when it comes to nutrition, that you will notice some quick weight loss when you stop it.
0:25:59 What do you think are some of the offenders that we don’t realize are offenders?
0:26:02 I’ve had so many in my life, even like ketchup.
0:26:05 And yeah, I thought white rice was great.
0:26:06 Yeah.
0:26:09 I mean, white rice is actually, there’s a place for carbohydrates in people’s and people’s
0:26:10 diets, I believe.
0:26:15 But you have to have a healthy respect for them because they’re the most likely to be
0:26:15 overeaten.
0:26:19 Like the desire to eat five steaks is not there for most of us.
0:26:24 Like you’re, but you could pound a whole plate full of rice and then some or pasta and then
0:26:29 some because they’re, they’re, they are much more chemically pleasing to the body.
0:26:38 So I think people need to be cautious of overconsumption of carbohydrates and they’re not aware of portion
0:26:43 sizes really impacting them because they’ll say, no, I had, I had rice and, and, and pasta.
0:26:47 And, and I would say I have rice and pasta too every day, but like, I probably don’t eat as
0:26:49 much as that person does.
0:26:53 So portion sizes, when it comes to that is one of the areas people do not have a good awareness
0:26:56 about the kind of hidden offenders.
0:27:01 I mean, there’s sugar in a lot of things that is used just to make these things more
0:27:04 appealing, especially, you know, like yogurts, right?
0:27:08 People will have, you know, fruit on the bottom of yogurt, but it’s like loaded with sugar.
0:27:11 Or my first experience was oatmeal.
0:27:15 I was reading the bodybuilding magazines in my teens that every bodybuilder ate oatmeal in
0:27:16 the morning.
0:27:21 So of course I was buying Quaker oats, but I was buying those little packets and they have
0:27:22 brown sugar in the bottom.
0:27:24 And it’s like, they were loaded with sugar.
0:27:28 They were not the equivalent of Quaker oats from a, from a, like a canister.
0:27:35 And so here I’m thinking I’m doing something right, but I’m not because there was more sugar
0:27:39 in that than there was in a, in a, a bag or in a bowl of tricks cereal.
0:27:42 What do you look for in the, on the package?
0:27:43 I always look for sugar and fat.
0:27:44 That’s what I look for.
0:27:53 So dietary fat, there are nine calories per gram of fat versus four calories per gram of
0:27:54 protein or carbohydrate.
0:27:57 There are much more calorie dense foods.
0:28:04 So when you have fats on your plate in any way, shape or form, calorically, the, that dish
0:28:05 is going to increase pretty quickly.
0:28:08 So you have to be mindful of them.
0:28:13 If you, if you want to lose weight and achieve a hypocaloric state to get there, you’re going
0:28:16 to have to take in fewer calories than you’re, than you’re, than you’re burning.
0:28:21 That’s why I would look at fat content, but sugar is just really not necessary.
0:28:25 It’s just one of those things that our bodies do not need.
0:28:32 Um, tends to be, uh, too inviting to the point where people have a hard time stopping eating
0:28:33 sugar.
0:28:38 So I think that’s one of the fastest ways to, um, to get yourself on track is to, is to try
0:28:40 to minimize the sugar content in a food.
0:28:45 And then I look for protein because I think that protein has a lot of benefits in terms of
0:28:52 improving that ratio of fat to lean muscle and also for its ability to satiate you.
0:28:56 So if you’re eating a higher protein food, you’re likely going to find yourself feeling
0:29:00 satisfied and full faster than if it’s just a carbohydrate based meal.
0:29:05 So those are the three things that I look at every time I turn a label around protein, sugar
0:29:06 and fats.
0:29:07 And what does your diet look like?
0:29:13 I eat, uh, breakfast in the morning and I have usually, again, I’ll give you typical meals.
0:29:14 I have, uh, oatmeal.
0:29:19 I’ve been put like some pumpkin in the oatmeal itself, some canned pumpkin, just for some additional,
0:29:21 uh, vitamins and minerals.
0:29:25 Protein shake, um, and some, maybe some egg whites.
0:29:32 So I get good amounts of protein and for lunch, I’ll have like a grilled chicken wrap.
0:29:34 Again, I’m trying to prioritize protein at every single meal.
0:29:38 And I’ll try to have a Greek yogurt that has limited sugar in it.
0:29:45 Um, then I’ll have a protein shake usually after work, only because I know that when I
0:29:49 get done with work, usually at six o’clock, I come home, the kids are there, they want
0:29:54 to play, I wind up just having something to tie me over, realizing that my dinner is going
0:29:55 to occur later at night after my workout.
0:29:59 What happens though, is that workout occurs at around 10 30 to 11 o’clock at night.
0:30:02 So dinner happens at around midnight for me.
0:30:07 Um, that’s always, again, based around a protein first.
0:30:12 So usually chicken or steak or fish and then fibrous carbohydrates.
0:30:16 So it’s going to be something like, uh, I, I, I like edamame.
0:30:20 It’s, uh, you know, uh, it has good protein, uh, in it.
0:30:25 And I’m not fearful of the soy protein that’s there, especially in that limited amount, broccoli.
0:30:30 And then I have my fire, my starchy carbohydrates, which my favorite of all time is, uh, sweet
0:30:30 potatoes.
0:30:33 So I’ll have sweet potatoes or, or pasta or both.
0:30:36 I’m still shocked that you’re eating dinner at midnight and that what, so what time do
0:30:37 you train?
0:30:42 So I train around 10 30 or 11 until around quarter to 12 or so.
0:30:43 Is that suboptimal?
0:30:48 It’s, it’s only optimal because it’s when I can consistently do it.
0:30:49 Okay.
0:30:55 If I could change that, I would probably work out at 5 PM, you know, but I always find that
0:30:57 there’s still work going on.
0:30:58 People still need me at that point in the day.
0:31:00 Why not the morning?
0:31:02 I have a very difficult time waking up.
0:31:07 I’m one of those people that act like a zombie for probably, uh, 15 minutes before I’m feeling
0:31:09 ready to go.
0:31:10 I’m very much the same.
0:31:11 I probably eat a bit too late.
0:31:13 I train a bit too late, et cetera.
0:31:17 And as I’m listening to you, I’m almost listening to myself.
0:31:22 And I know the rebuttal is that, well, Steven, if you went to bed earlier and you ate earlier,
0:31:24 then you’d wake up and you’d be able to train in the morning.
0:31:26 Well, how do you feel when you wake up?
0:31:29 Do you feel energetic as soon as you wake up or do you feel?
0:31:30 No.
0:31:30 Yeah.
0:31:33 Um, I’m very similar to you.
0:31:33 I wake up late.
0:31:34 Yeah.
0:31:37 And if I wake up late, then I feel fine.
0:31:40 But if you try and wake me up at seven o’clock, the chances are that I went to bed maybe at
0:31:41 midnight or 1 AM.
0:31:44 So there’s not enough sleep taking place there.
0:31:47 But having worn this whoop for a while, who are a sponsor, I’m an investor in the company,
0:31:48 hashtag ADAT, hashtag ASA.
0:31:54 One of the things I came to learn was that when I eat close to the time I go to sleep,
0:31:56 my body isn’t actually asleep.
0:31:59 Because I could see my resting heart rate so high through the night.
0:32:01 So my body’s actually just working on the food.
0:32:04 So it’s not restoring my body.
0:32:09 So one of my goals for this year is to try and not eat after 9 PM.
0:32:19 I think it’s a good goal in terms of establishing a more regular sleep or time to go to bed.
0:32:23 Because the number one thing I think people need to understand is that when it comes to sleep,
0:32:27 the routine of sleep is what’s most important, I believe.
0:32:39 Even in cases of lower sleep totals, there’s actually 27% of people report sleeping less than
0:32:42 six hours a night and 20% of people sleep four to five hours.
0:32:50 I actually fall into the category of sleeping probably five to six hours most nights because
0:32:53 I get to bed late and I get up around seven o’clock each morning.
0:32:54 Do you sleep track?
0:32:55 I don’t sleep track.
0:32:56 I did for a while.
0:32:57 I don’t sleep track.
0:33:03 I actually, I’ve tracked my cortisol levels and my levels of cortisol have actually improved
0:33:07 even as my sleep time, my total sleep time has diminished.
0:33:14 Now there is, and I hold onto this as a possibility, but I haven’t tested myself.
0:33:19 There are two genes that are actually responsible for short sleeper syndrome.
0:33:26 In other words, where you can get away with less sleep because it optimizes gene expression
0:33:31 for wakefulness and brainstem activity that allows you to wake up easier.
0:33:37 And the downside to that is that only one to 3% of the population has that.
0:33:42 So unless I got really lucky in terms of that, then I might be, you know, playing a game that
0:33:43 I ultimately can’t win.
0:33:50 But I think that there is a possibility that some people can operate better on lower sleep
0:33:50 totals than others.
0:33:57 On this point of being lean, one of the things people are most obsessed with getting rid of
0:34:00 is lower belly fat.
0:34:04 This stubborn belly fat that occurs right there on our little mannequin here.
0:34:07 You don’t have a pouch.
0:34:08 That’s what we call it.
0:34:09 Me and my friends, we call it a pouch.
0:34:13 We can be, you know, very lean elsewhere, but still have a little bit of a pouch there.
0:34:18 Some people think doing sit-ups is the way to get rid of that stubborn belly fat.
0:34:19 What is the answer in your view?
0:34:22 It’s the level of strictness of nutrition.
0:34:27 And when I mean the level of strictness, it’s not just in the foods that you choose, but the
0:34:30 consistency with which you choose them.
0:34:35 So how long can you sustain this really clean diet?
0:34:39 And I hate the word clean diet because usually when people say they eat clean, it’s actually
0:34:42 the first thing, it’s a red flag, but they don’t.
0:34:49 But I think it comes from having a sustained ability to eat in a very restricted way.
0:34:55 When men put on body fat, that is the first place to go on and the last place to come off.
0:35:00 And one of the biggest areas for that, you mentioned that I don’t have one, but I mean, as ridiculous
0:35:06 as this is going to sound, when I start to see a little bit of fat on my body, it’s right
0:35:06 there.
0:35:09 And it’s because that is the absolute first place to go on.
0:35:13 It’s the shamefulness of how your body does this.
0:35:17 And what it does to us is that it kind of works in this top-down approach.
0:35:23 Like you lose fat first from here and then it kind of goes down and the last place is here.
0:35:24 So it works in this top-down approach.
0:35:28 Well, by the time you get all the way down there, you’ve lost the fat in your face.
0:35:29 You’ve lost the fat in your neck.
0:35:33 So sometimes I look at myself in the mirror, I’m like, man, you’re gone.
0:35:36 And I hate the way that my face gets sort of caved in.
0:35:43 But it’s sometimes the price that you pay in terms of maintaining a lean physique, especially
0:35:46 naturally, because that’s how your body starts to lose fat.
0:35:48 And especially as you age, you start to lose collagen and skin thickness.
0:35:50 So it looks even more of a challenge.
0:35:58 But this top-down approach is sometimes good because it allows you to start to see like
0:36:00 the upper row abs underneath the chest.
0:36:03 Or so when you start to get into better shape, you might have noticed this yourself.
0:36:07 You start to see like, okay, my lower chest isn’t as saggy anymore.
0:36:09 It’s actually starting to take some shape.
0:36:13 Well, what’s cool is that’s actually that little spark of motivation that like, I want to keep
0:36:14 going.
0:36:15 I can see the top ab.
0:36:15 Right.
0:36:16 I can see the top ab.
0:36:16 There it is.
0:36:17 I can see.
0:36:18 I have them.
0:36:19 You know, I actually have them.
0:36:20 You know, I got a two-pack, but I have them.
0:36:23 Well, you continue down that path.
0:36:25 Sometimes you sharpen up the diet a little bit more.
0:36:30 Sometimes you take one extra night of, you know, socializing or drinking out of the schedule
0:36:35 and you start to see it, you know, go even lower and you start to get that second row
0:36:36 of abs.
0:36:40 Then it becomes a question of how motivated you are to actually just continue.
0:36:45 And what level of sacrifice is required or is worth it to you to continue?
0:36:50 And that’s the caveat that I always say, I mentioned early on, like, is it that important
0:36:50 to you?
0:36:57 Because I could tell you that at 10, 11, 12% body fat, you’re going to look amazing and
0:37:00 you’re going to look better than 98% of all men.
0:37:07 So whether you had that little tiny, you know, area of fat around your waist, you’re still going
0:37:11 to have your abs, you’re still going to have defined shoulders and arms and, you know,
0:37:13 some veins popping out in other places.
0:37:19 Like, is that, is that good enough so that you experience the health benefits you already
0:37:21 would, you’d be there.
0:37:25 Aesthetically, you’re probably really happy with where you are now compared to where you
0:37:25 came from.
0:37:31 And you still get to live a life that’s not as filled with sacrifice to get there.
0:37:36 And that’s the battle people have to, have to, um, wage and ask themselves what is, how
0:37:37 worth it is it to me?
0:37:40 Is the game of weight loss basically calories in calories out?
0:37:43 I just need to have less calories than I burn.
0:37:44 Yes and no.
0:37:50 So to lose weight, you’re going to need to be in a calorie deficit.
0:37:55 Um, but if you took that approach and just ate whatever you wanted to, let’s just say
0:38:01 eat Twinkies in a deficit, you’re not going to get the same outcome because the type of
0:38:06 weight lost is going to vary depending upon what you ingest.
0:38:11 So if you don’t ingest enough protein, you’re just eating Twinkies, you might lose weight,
0:38:13 but you’re also going to lose muscle in the, in the, in the process.
0:38:20 So if you want to deter the loss of muscle and, and maximize the retention of muscle, and
0:38:24 maybe again, even slightly build in that deficit, then you’re going to want to prioritize
0:38:25 protein.
0:38:30 So it’s not just the calories in calories out that will get you to lose the weight.
0:38:33 But when you ultimately, I think people aren’t just talking about weight loss.
0:38:37 They really want to make sure that they’re maximizing lean muscle at the same time that
0:38:38 they’re losing weight.
0:38:42 If they want to look a certain way, function a certain way, it’s, it’s going to matter.
0:38:45 What are the big misconceptions we have about abs?
0:38:49 To get rid of the body fat by doing those crunches and stuff like that doesn’t work.
0:38:52 You know, um, I think that’s probably the biggest misconception.
0:38:53 I always remember Laszlo.
0:38:57 Laszlo was a, was a guy who worked on my house as a contractor.
0:39:01 When we were building it, he would come up to me because he was like the typical male,
0:39:02 right?
0:39:03 He was in pretty decent shape.
0:39:05 He worked every day active.
0:39:07 He’s like, I got to get in shape, man.
0:39:10 And I was like, well, you know, how many days a week do you train?
0:39:11 He said, well, I don’t really train.
0:39:13 I just, you know, do a couple of pushups and stuff.
0:39:15 I said, well, you’re gonna have to probably train.
0:39:16 What do you do for your nutrition?
0:39:18 I kind of eat what I want.
0:39:19 And I was like, all right.
0:39:21 But he wasn’t really overweight, you know, but he’s the typical.
0:39:25 And he goes, just tell me what I could, I just want to know what I can do for this.
0:39:26 What’s a good exercise I could do for this?
0:39:27 For his belly fat.
0:39:28 For the belly fat.
0:39:29 It’s just pointing at his stomach.
0:39:34 And it’s like, there’s still that belief that there’s just an exercise or two that you
0:39:36 need to do for that.
0:39:38 That’s not how, that’s not how it is.
0:39:42 Abs are not going to be gotten through just the exercise.
0:39:44 It’s always about nutrition.
0:39:48 It’s always about nutrition determines body fat levels above everything else.
0:39:54 Now, when you get lean enough, if you’re not doing any type of ab training, you’ll probably
0:39:58 have less defined abs because you won’t have the development of that muscle.
0:40:01 There’s nothing different about the abdominals and the biceps or the quads.
0:40:04 There’s still muscles that can be developed.
0:40:09 And because of the anatomy of the abs, there’s that line down the middle in the tacks, right?
0:40:13 That’s just caused by a suturing down of something called linea alba.
0:40:14 It’s just a tendinous sheath.
0:40:20 When you develop the muscles themselves through either crunches or resistance training, right?
0:40:22 Even weighted ab work is helpful in this case.
0:40:25 The muscles are just growing, just like a bicep would grow.
0:40:30 And as they grow, you can’t change the suturing down of the tendinous sheath.
0:40:33 So they’re sort of growing out more prominently from that area.
0:40:35 So you get more visible abs.
0:40:41 But that’s the only way to really do that is through training to hypertrophy the abs.
0:40:46 But you’re not going to get there if you don’t first attack the body fat that’s over them.
0:40:47 And it’s only going to come from nutrition.
0:40:53 You know, sometimes you see older bodybuilders, like former bodybuilders, and they kind of look
0:40:54 a bit bloated.
0:40:55 What is that?
0:40:59 And that’s usually the anabolic steroid use that causes that or growth hormone.
0:41:05 That doesn’t generally come from natural occurrences where your belly gets so bloated like that.
0:41:11 I mean, sometimes if you have different types of hernias, you can get hernias actually within
0:41:15 the abdomen, not just in the inguinal, you know, in the groin area.
0:41:21 That could cause some of that distension in the abs, but not that global bloating that you
0:41:21 get there.
0:41:27 That’s really usually a telltale sign of like growth hormone use, something that they’ve abused
0:41:35 that causes the organs underneath to actually grow and cause distension, pushing out of the
0:41:35 belly.
0:41:37 That’s the organs growing.
0:41:37 Yeah.
0:41:37 Yeah.
0:41:41 It’s actually, this is a pretty disturbing visual when you think about it, but it’s not a, it’s
0:41:43 certainly not a healthy thing to have.
0:41:50 And, uh, you know, there’s always a lot of repercussions to, um, going down that path.
0:41:53 You know, they might look short-term the way they want to look.
0:41:59 And I would argue that even in those cases, you know, the, the, the, the large, super large
0:42:04 Mr. Olympia look, I don’t even know if that was ever aesthetically appealing to me or even
0:42:09 a lot of people, but, um, it, it definitely leaves behind a lot of, a lot of damage.
0:42:13 And people do that at a variety of different ages.
0:42:17 Now, I think even people that aren’t training to be bodybuilders, I can think of several people
0:42:23 that I’m aware of who have started taking like TRT and growth hormones pretty much.
0:42:28 very young and I’m actually seeing a little bit of that same body shape.
0:42:30 I don’t even know what it is, but yeah.
0:42:38 I mean, I think it look at TRT is becoming such a prevalent path for people.
0:42:40 I don’t like that.
0:42:41 That’s the prevalent path.
0:42:44 I don’t want to come across as somebody who is anti TRT.
0:42:49 Because I’ve been, I’ve been reminded of that and that on some of the videos I’ve made about
0:42:53 it, that look, Jeff, there’s a lot of cases where people have extremely bottomed out testosterone
0:42:57 levels and there’s nothing medically that can be done other than replace the testosterone
0:42:58 that’s not being made.
0:43:00 I completely appreciate that.
0:43:09 But as you’ve noted, the rise in interest in TRT is coming from a lot of the documentation
0:43:17 of people talking about their use of it and how it’s physically changing them.
0:43:21 And they’re doing it at a rate, like it’s, it’s becoming option one.
0:43:29 Like what about maximizing your natural potential first, you know, before declaring yourself as
0:43:34 low testosterone, even at levels like of 400 and 500, and then going and using testosterone.
0:43:37 Like you’re going to be on that for the rest of your life.
0:43:42 If you pursue that path, you know, once you decide to replace your body’s own natural testosterone
0:43:45 level with exogenous testosterone, you’re going to have to rely on that for the rest of your
0:43:50 life. Now, some people can get off of that and then try to restore their body’s ability to produce
0:43:55 testosterone, but that’s not a given. So be prepared that once you go down that path, that’s
0:43:57 when you’re going to have to be on for the rest of your life.
0:43:58 Have you ever taken TRT?
0:43:59 No, no.
0:44:00 Would you ever?
0:44:08 If it’s proven down the road that it’s something that could be beneficial and safe, I want to say,
0:44:13 I want to, I’m aching to say a hundred percent safe because that’s what I want. Then maybe I would
0:44:20 if I felt like I was really suffering from, you know, the, the, the loss or the change that my body was
0:44:24 going through. Cause I don’t want to just let myself get old. I want to try to do what I can,
0:44:29 but up till now, the journey for me has been completely natural and to do it in a way that
0:44:35 it feels most rewarding because I haven’t had to do anything. So I feel like I’m most inspired by my
0:44:37 ability to keep going and I’m, I’m going to be 50 this year.
0:44:43 What about let’s do living long then? Um, when we think about longevity and what it’s going to
0:44:52 take for me to be live a long time, but be strong into my later years, where, what areas do I need
0:44:57 to focus on training and staying strong? And where do I need to invest my energy in time?
0:45:01 So this is where I think when I say, if you want to look like an athlete, you got to train like an
0:45:07 athlete. Cause like the hallmark of their training is that it’s multifaceted. So you can’t just have
0:45:13 one element developed and be a great athlete. Even if you look at someone as one dimensional,
0:45:16 I’m not doing this, saying this to put them down, but one dimensional as an arm wrestler,
0:45:23 right? They can have grip strength and forearm strength and rotator cuff strength, you know,
0:45:30 to be able to actually turn somebody over. But if they have poor nutrition, poor sleep,
0:45:36 poor recovery, they’re likely going to lose, especially because your neurological output and
0:45:44 grip is directly correlated to your ability to recover. If you don’t have more than one element
0:45:51 developed, you’re not going to be your best. So when people are looking, the general population
0:45:57 is looking to become healthier and feel better, it’s not going to be one thing. First and foremost,
0:46:06 I believe that getting on a training plan that prioritizes the building of muscle. So hypertrophy
0:46:12 and strength building is going to be really important because we are going to, again, like I talked about
0:46:18 before, you’re going to naturally lose strength every passing decade, you know, up to eight to 10% per
0:46:24 decade as you as you as you pass the age of 50. So you need to make sure that you are doing something to
0:46:31 stave that off. You can dramatically slow that down by engaging in strength training and engaging in regular
0:46:40 weight training with the purpose of trying to build muscle. But you have to do that. The brain ages. So having
0:46:49 challenges to your balance, having challenges to your ability to maintain muscle recruitment, because
0:46:54 that’s, again, neurologically, your neurons start to fire at a slower pace. You need to train these
0:47:00 things. Reactivity, reaction skills, again, balance drills. These are all little parts of things that
0:47:05 people can do. I always remember seeing this old man. He was in a, he had an obstacle course he built. I don’t
0:47:10 know if you ever saw this, but it was a video. He was like 89 years old and he made this obstacle course and he
0:47:17 used to add every week or so, he’d add one more obstacle to his course and he built it in his backyard. And it was like a
0:47:23 balance beam and then a net that he had to climb and all these things. He used to run the obstacle course once a day.
0:47:32 And he said that he would try to find new ways to challenge his body so that he would keep his brain
0:47:38 guessing as to what’s next. And again, whether or not he was finding this thing to be something he didn’t
0:47:43 want to do, maybe it was also feeding into his increases because he was doing the things he hated
0:47:51 to do. But the idea was he maintained his fitness by being completely multifaceted and by incorporating some
0:47:56 of these balance and reaction type drills into his approach because it is important.
0:48:03 The fall risk increases exponentially as you get older. A lot of it has to do with something we’ll
0:48:10 talk about with the thoracic spine and losing mobility there. But like you need to factor those
0:48:17 types of things in. Flexibility and mobility feed into that. Like you can’t, I always talk about there’s
0:48:21 a pyramid, right? If you look at the old nutrition pyramid, there’s a bottom which is supposed to be
0:48:26 represent the, like all the things you’re supposed to work on. And then it kind of fine tunes and works
0:48:30 its way up. At the bottom of the pyramid, most would say is strength, right? You got to, you got to
0:48:34 maintain your strength. And then above that, you got to maintain your, your muscle mass, like the
0:48:40 amount of lean muscle you carry. And above that, your ability to perform because of those two attributes.
0:48:45 So to be able to actually do things. And if it was an athlete, it would be like their skill work
0:48:49 would be at the very, very top. So could you, if you’re a baseball player, you know, how well do you
0:48:52 swing the bat? You know, how well do you feel the ground ball? Like it’s that top level skill work
0:48:53 that comes up here.
0:48:54 It’s cardiovascular in there.
0:48:58 Cardiovascular is in there as well, as well. Yep. Your, your condition would be right.
0:49:04 You know, depending upon who you talk to in terms of longevity and performance and the sport you play,
0:49:11 it’s going to fall right above or below strength. Now I would argue that there’s a few things underneath
0:49:15 the whole thing. It’s just like a tree. You see the tree above the ground, but you don’t see the roots
0:49:19 and the, and the pyramid sits on the ground, but what’s underneath the pyramid, the roots,
0:49:27 your stability, your flexibility, your mobility. Because if I took the strongest person, they could
0:49:32 squat 600 pounds, but now I’m going to put you on a stability ball and tell you to do the same thing.
0:49:36 You’re not doing it. I just took away your amazing strength because I took away your stability.
0:49:42 And if you can’t obtain certain positions of your body because you lack the mobility or you lack the
0:49:47 flexibility, then I’ve also taken away and I’ve weakened the strength that you have. It’s there.
0:49:52 Your strength is there, but it can’t be expressed because I took away the stability. So the real root
0:49:59 of longevity and fitness is really in your ability to maintain mobility, flexibility, and stability.
0:50:06 Flexibility is the muscle length and the ability to change the length of the muscle. Mobility is the
0:50:12 joint excursions, the ability to move your joints in their full range of motion. So it’s a muscle or
0:50:16 joint thing. It’s still the same concept, but they’re working on different elements.
0:50:20 Do you think people realize that that’s so important and do you think they enjoy it?
0:50:24 No, I think people hate it. And I think that, I mean, some people like it. If you’re into the
0:50:30 practice of yoga, Pilates, you will likely gain a quick appreciation for how much better you feel
0:50:36 when you do those types of exercises that will improve mobility and flexibility. But for the
0:50:40 average gym goer, no, it’s either going to get relegated to the last thing they do before they
0:50:48 leave the gym or not at all. And I think that that’s going to have a big impact on how well they feel.
0:50:55 I think that when they talk about the fountain of youth, stretching and mobility is probably the
0:51:01 thing that makes people feel the best. I’ve heard that people say that, and I agree to almost a full
0:51:09 extent, but I think that if you are just limber and loose, but you lack the strength, you are never
0:51:15 going to be as functionally capable as you can. Actually, I have this band to sort of show that.
0:51:22 Like if somebody was just completely flexible, right? And you were trying to shoot this band across the
0:51:27 table, I don’t have a lot of tension to be able to generate to, to get any kind of force to do that.
0:51:36 On the contrary, if somebody was, um, strong, right, maybe even muscle bound, I don’t have any flexibility
0:51:42 here to again, really create much of a elastic output here or to get a lot of force generation.
0:51:50 But if I were to take this band and sort of get that optimal amount of flexibility, but also the
0:51:56 strength in this case, the muscles, the tension, I could shoot that band a lot further with a lot more
0:52:02 force and a lot more ease. Our goal should be not just athletes should be striving for this, but our goal
0:52:09 should be to have the right amount of muscular tension and force capability with the flexibility and
0:52:15 mobility because that’s only at that point that you actually can express probably the best performance
0:52:20 possible. How much work have I got to put in to become more flexible and to improve my mobility?
0:52:29 Not much. It just has to be consistent. So, I mean, I think if you were to devote even five to 10 minutes
0:52:33 a day of stretching the areas that are tight. And again, this is very individual. Like one thing that I
0:52:39 always stressed, even when I was in baseball, every player from me got an individual program and it was
0:52:44 based off of a comprehensive assessment. So, I would go through the assessment of each player and you
0:52:51 would find that either based on position and the demands of that position, body type, you would find
0:52:58 certain requirements of a program that needed to be in place to maintain optimal health. You would get
0:53:03 tight in certain areas. You would have things that would need to be strengthened more than others. People
0:53:11 have to be willing to A, seek out where these deficits are and B, to actually pursue a program
0:53:17 that would work on those deficits. And then when you have that, again, the comprehensive list doesn’t
0:53:22 have to be an hour a day of doing those things. You prioritize that list and you focus on five to 10
0:53:26 minutes of extra work with it. It’s funny. I make a lot of videos on, hey, do this every morning,
0:53:30 do that every morning, do this every morning. But it’s only appropriate to the people that have
0:53:34 the deficits that I highlight in the video. People think they have to combine all of those things into
0:53:39 a whole separate career in order to be able to pull them off. That’s not necessary. You can,
0:53:42 you find the ones that have the biggest impact, but I don’t think that having, you know,
0:53:49 doing stretching requires long duration of these things. It just simply requires consistency of them.
0:53:53 You, you say that there are five key exercises you need to be able to maximize your longevity
0:53:58 and quality of life that kind of dovetail into this. The single leg Romanian deadlift,
0:54:03 the squat and reach, the sumo stance hold, the posterior chain pushup, and hip abductions.
0:54:10 Can you show me these workouts? Sure. As you can see from the space, I mean,
0:54:14 you don’t need a whole lot of room to be able to do these exercises. They’re incredibly accessible.
0:54:18 They’re actually scalable with a low barrier of entry. So no matter what level of ability you bring to
0:54:23 these exercises, you’re going to be able to do them. All right. So the first exercise up here is
0:54:28 pretty simple, but it does demand some balance and it also will teach us a very critical
0:54:33 biomechanical requirement, which is a hip hinge. So it’s called the single leg RDL. What you want to do
0:54:39 is you want to hinge, pretending that there’s a drawer behind you that’s open. You’re going to close it with
0:54:45 your butt. Then you reach forward, but at the same time, you kick back the opposite leg and engage the glute on
0:54:50 that side, lifting it up to create a bit of a counterbalance. So your goal is to see if you
0:54:57 can get even up to 10 without losing your balance or having that other foot have to contact the ground.
0:55:04 Next exercise is something that we call a squat and reach. And what we do is we get down to the ground
0:55:11 like this down to a squatting position and we anchor our elbows into the sides of our knees. Okay. And
0:55:19 then from here, we post up on one hand, reach up and rotate and follow it with your head as you go up as
0:55:24 high as you can to the sky. Now, the goal here is to try to hold this position for up to 60 seconds.
0:55:30 That is what is lost when we get into these chronic positions like this, right? With our
0:55:35 devices at our computers, we get to this rounded thoracic spine, this upper portion of the spine.
0:55:41 Doing this will give us the mobility that we’re lacking. So the next thing is something we call a
0:55:46 sumo squat stance. It’s a squat stance hold. And it’s based off of something called the horse stance,
0:55:52 which again, we work on getting hip mobility and hip stability, right? And again, we’re going to
0:55:59 still work on the hip and all three planes. So what we do is we get down feet wide and squat down into
0:56:05 this position here. Now, the beginner version of this is to simply keep your elbows on your thighs
0:56:10 for a little bit of support. But what I want to see as tall of a chest as I can get the same way that
0:56:16 we just did through that rotation to maintain that area of the spine, that thoracic spine and getting
0:56:21 extended because we know that when that spine is extended, the shoulders will go with it and the
0:56:27 posture will get away from this position and more to this open upright position. If we don’t do it in
0:56:32 that beginner format, then what we’re going to do is cross the hands over. Okay. Get in that down position,
0:56:44 reach up and out. Okay. That is a 30 second hold up to a 60 second hold, depending upon how far you can
0:56:49 take it. The next thing we do is we’ve got to work on that upper body a little bit. So the upper body,
0:56:56 you should still be able to do the exercise that is oftentimes the benchmark for upper body strength,
0:57:02 which is the pushup. But we can do it in a way where we get bigger benefits both front and back side.
0:57:08 So we call this a posterior chain pushup. For a pushup, you want those hands underneath the shoulders.
0:57:13 Okay. I’ll demonstrate one, then we’ll do it together. You want to be able to push up all the way to full
0:57:20 extension. You also want to have tightness through your quads and glutes. So you squeeze your butt
0:57:26 together. You straighten your knees out by contracting your quads and then you get a good firm holding
0:57:32 plank position here. Now, when you go down, normally people would stop here or they wouldn’t come up all
0:57:36 the way. You go all the way down to the ground. At this point, you slide your hands out in front of you,
0:57:43 point your toes, keep those quads contracted, squeezed tight, and then lift up into what we call a
0:57:49 superman. Right from here, you’re going to train all the muscles in your posterior chain from the back
0:57:56 of your heels, all the way up to the tip of your fingers, right? Come down, slide it back, come up
0:58:04 into that good firm pushup. Don’t lose any of that stability. Come down, slide up and lift. The final thing
0:58:10 is something that looks so darn simple, but it actually has a lot of functional carryover.
0:58:17 We’re talking about just a side lying hip abduction. Okay. And what we do is we get in this position here,
0:58:23 we position our toe down in front of us. You want to basically point your toe down into the ground.
0:58:31 Okay. From there, you’re going to slide your leg back behind you. Okay. As far as you can take it and then
0:58:37 lift up. And right when you do that final lift, you’re going to feel a contraction right here in
0:58:43 the glutes. In particular, in the glute medius. That’s the muscle that’s controlling that rotational
0:58:48 element of your hip joint and the stability and the strength that’s needed to propel your body,
0:58:53 even on a regular walk, without your hips dropping down side to side. You don’t want to let that happen
0:58:58 to you. You want to be able to hold this position for 30 to 60 seconds. Some of the mistakes people make
0:59:03 is in order to feel like they’re getting a lift, they’ll just rotate their body to let the hip
0:59:08 flexor do the lifting. Remember, we don’t need the hip flexor to do the lifting. We want the glute medius
0:59:13 to do lifting. So you need to make sure that you’re rotated forward the entire time. And that’s it.
0:59:17 There’s the five essentials. Quick, simple, and incredibly effective. No fancy equipment,
0:59:23 no gym required, just a little bit of space and consistency. Now back to the Diary of a CEO studio.
0:59:29 This one change has transformed how my team and I move, train and think about our bodies. When Dr.
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1:00:28 And what is the context there with those workouts? Why do you choose those workouts? And what do these
1:00:32 kind of signal? Are you saying that if I’m able to do those, then there’s a probability that I have
1:00:38 the strength and flexibility conducive with longevity? Yeah, those are good standard exercises that will
1:00:48 measure at a high level how much of a deficit you’ve acquired over the years from not doing them. So you
1:00:54 should maintain the ability to do those exercises because they’re going to reflect the global
1:01:00 approach at least to working on flexibility in your groin or working on the strength in your hip
1:01:06 abductors. Because the hip abductors, if you look at most leg exercises, the squat, the deadlift, they’re
1:01:11 occurring in the sagittal plane, which is this front to back plane. One of my favorite exercises of all
1:01:17 time is the lunge, right? I love the exercise, but it’s still occurring front to back in this plane here.
1:01:24 Getting exercises that work the other two planes, and mostly through rotation, but working this frontal
1:01:33 plane, this side to side, is really important to producing a complete person, right? With complete
1:01:39 levels of strength. And because they’re not the primary exercises that do that, like that side-lying hip
1:01:45 raise that I showed you, is not one of the big exercises that are most important that are going to
1:01:49 be up on your list. You’re going to do your squats first, and you’re going to maybe never do those.
1:01:54 But it doesn’t mean that that muscle didn’t matter, right? Those muscles are there for a reason,
1:02:01 and they need to be developed. I remember so many times taking some of the most powerful baseball
1:02:08 players, the leading home run hitters, and then testing their hip internal or external rotation
1:02:13 strength. And it being incredibly weak, like incredibly weak. And you say to yourself,
1:02:20 how is that even possible? Because it was never actually directly trained. And does it have a
1:02:24 carryover? Obviously, they’re doing really, really well in terms of their performance on the field.
1:02:29 I still think it would have a carryover to improve performance on the field. But more importantly,
1:02:34 one of the players in question actually wound up having a lot of knee pain throughout his career.
1:02:40 And there are missed games because of knee pain. What could his career stats have looked like? They’re
1:02:44 already Hall of Fame worthy. But what could his career stats have looked like if he didn’t miss all
1:02:49 those games? So they may not have improved performance directly, but they could have kept
1:02:56 them healthier and having other issues be avoided by doing them. So I think that these types of smaller
1:03:02 movements are really revealing of what might be going on underneath. And the nice thing about those is that
1:03:08 anybody can do them. Like it doesn’t require a gym, doesn’t require an elaborate setup. They’re really
1:03:11 good assessment tools for people who just want to see where they stand.
1:03:14 Why did you bring the skeleton with you with the bowtie?
1:03:21 The bowtie, I mean, he came dressed even more than I did. I have my t-shirt. But this is Raymond. So
1:03:27 X-Ray is his full name. And then Raymond became his short name. So I broke him out,
1:03:35 God, probably in 2011 or 12. And he became a fan favorite pretty quickly. But I think people like
1:03:41 the visual. And for me, he’s not the most mobile guy. He’s lost his lower arm. He doesn’t have
1:03:45 another arm on this side. And he doesn’t really move that well. But what it is important is he’s
1:03:50 also lost his legs. He’s lost his legs. I got a leg over there if we need it. But the spine. See,
1:04:00 for me, again, I focus a lot on the ability to function in space. And rotation is probably the
1:04:04 area of biggest deficit. It’s what we lose the most. And the reason for that is because
1:04:10 the area of the spine that’s most responsible for functional rotation of the torso is going to be here
1:04:13 in the thoracic spine. So what that is, is anybody that wants to measure on themselves,
1:04:17 it’s right at the bottom of the neck. So at the base of the neck, the height of the shoulders,
1:04:22 and it runs down just to below the rib cage. So right where the rib cage ends is where the
1:04:28 thoracic spine ends. It has so many far-reaching implications because it shares its range of motion
1:04:34 between two different directions. So its ability to go front to back, again,
1:04:38 he can bend forward and back. We can slump forward, we can go back, right? You want to have ideally
1:04:44 about 40 degrees of flexion in that area and about 25 degrees of extension through that area. And just
1:04:49 us sitting here alone, you know, we probably tended to get a little bit of this posture while we were
1:04:52 getting comfortable and talking. We kind of get a little bit rounded out.
1:04:59 When you use up motion in this direction, and imagine what that looks like when people are
1:05:05 on their phones or at a desk all day, you’re going to start to lose the motion and into extension,
1:05:11 you’re going to get too flexed. Well, every time you lose a degree into flexion, you actually lose a
1:05:17 direct degree into rotation. So you’re, because you’re sharing that motion. The motion is only
1:05:22 available in a combined way. So if you want to take up motion in this direction, there’s gonna be less
1:05:28 motion available here. If I have a thing, if you’ll let me grab this and put this over your back.
1:05:35 over my back. Yeah. Just like this, right? Yeah. Now allow yourself to slump forward.
1:05:41 Pretend you’re on that phone, right? Get there. Now just turn from the shoulders in one direction,
1:05:47 slumped over. Okay. Now take a peek down the barrel of that thing, you know, behind you and see where
1:05:52 your point is. How about how far rotated you are? Yeah. All right, cool. Now come back, reset yourself.
1:05:56 Now take back that mobility that you lost through your thoracic spine.
1:06:01 I’m getting cramp in my back. There’s your rotator cuff. So get yourself up right now.
1:06:06 Nice posture. Act like I’m, I’m watching, right? So get there. Now go ahead and rotate again in that
1:06:12 direction. How much more did you get? Yeah, I got another like, it’s like 20%. Right. Yeah. So
1:06:19 maintaining thoracic extension maintains your ability to rotate. The ability to rotate in space
1:06:25 is one of the most important functional requirements we have. When you’re, when you’re falling as you get older,
1:06:30 you’re likely reaching spontaneously to grab something to regain control before you crash
1:06:36 down and maybe break a hip. Functionally as an athlete, your ability to perform is all about
1:06:41 rotation. You know, you don’t usually just move in one plane like this. If you’re a football player,
1:06:49 American or not, you’re rotating all the time. You generate force as a soccer player, you know,
1:06:56 by kicking across your body, right? By throwing a baseball, it’s all about rotation. You need to hold
1:07:04 on to rotation. But what we lose is the ability to extend at our spine. By the age of between 50 and 60,
1:07:10 people will have lost 25 to 35% of their ability, their mobility in this area.
1:07:14 You see it as well. You see it when people get older, they look stiff and they kind of look robotic.
1:07:18 My grandmother, God bless your soul, she lived at 97 years old.
1:07:18 Wow.
1:07:23 But at that age, she was literally a right angle. She was literally, she had a walker,
1:07:29 she was completely bent over at that walker, could hardly get herself back up. She had lost all of her
1:07:34 extensions. So she could not rotate at all. And again, functionally, it’s the most important
1:07:39 movement you can make, I think, is to be able to rotate through your torso to be able to do things.
1:07:45 So I think that people need to focus on, again, you go back to that whole concept of like,
1:07:51 what do you need to focus on? Well, I could tell you some great exercises to do to maintain your strength,
1:07:57 but if in the process of getting a really strong squat, you’ve also lost thoracic rotation, I can’t
1:08:04 deem you to be a really healthy individual because you’ve given up one of the most important things that you need to maintain.
1:08:10 Because I thought that aging and then basically turning into that right angle was just inevitable.
1:08:14 Because you see it in so many older people, they often are like bent over. And you kind of think,
1:08:15 well, why don’t they just stand up?
1:08:23 Yeah. Well, it’s impossible because you’re losing that fight to gravity, right? Gravity is going to win
1:08:29 ultimately, but it doesn’t have to win completely. So the more that you work on maintaining your ability
1:08:36 to extend through the thoracic spine, then you don’t develop those downstream adaptations that
1:08:42 happen from always being there. So what happens once you get in this position, you lose flexibility
1:08:47 through other joints. Again, if you get in that position again, actually turn a little bit,
1:08:53 try to raise your arm up as high as you can from that position. Okay, now just straighten yourself out,
1:09:00 go up tall, now raise your arm up again. Like, why? Because you’ve literally mechanically blocked your shoulder
1:09:08 because your shoulder blade has to be able to rotate around your rib cage as you raise your arm up overhead.
1:09:13 A great percentage of ability to move your arm over your head is not just the ball and socket
1:09:18 that’s over here to get your arm up there. It’s the fact that your shoulder blade has to rotate with it
1:09:23 to allow it to go up there. I could actually block your overhead mobility if I went behind you right now
1:09:26 and just held your shoulder blade. If I held your shoulder blade in place, you wouldn’t be able to
1:09:31 raise your arm up maybe more than here because it has to rotate in order to be able to get to the top.
1:09:39 So when you realize that this epicenter of dysfunction can have these far-reaching benefits
1:09:43 where all of a sudden a perfectly healthy shoulder can’t move up overhead, and then what happens then?
1:09:48 If you can’t move your arm up overhead, right? And I say, Stephen, get your arm up over your head.
1:09:51 You’re like, I can’t. No, get your arm up over your head. You’d go like this.
1:09:57 You’d lean your body back because your arm can’t get any higher, so you’re going to lean your body
1:10:02 back. Well, what are you leaning from? Your low back. So now all of a sudden you’re asking an area
1:10:07 of your spine that’s supposed to be stable, right? The low back, the lumbar spine is supposed to be a
1:10:13 stable area of your body. You’re asking it to now become a mobile area of your body, and you’re asking for
1:10:18 motion that is not naturally inclined to want to give you because this area didn’t give it to you,
1:10:22 right? The upper thoracic area didn’t give it to you. So now what does that happen? Now you’re asking
1:10:27 that to do too much. The muscles can become spasmed. You can damage the joints in your low back. Now you’re
1:10:32 causing a problem somewhere else. So this area has all these far-reaching benefits. Another thing that can
1:10:37 happen too is when you’re down like this, I mentioned that this area of the spine we talk about is actually
1:10:45 connected to the ribs. If you’re in this compressed position where you’re rounded forward, hunched over,
1:10:50 you actually don’t even get good lung inflation. It’s like trying to inflate a balloon inside of a
1:10:58 box that won’t open. You can’t get the lungs to inflate properly. Lack of properly operating lungs
1:11:02 are going to cause you to be more fatigued throughout the day, and it causes you to feel
1:11:11 less rested at night. So this area has so many up and down ramifications that you need to really focus on it.
1:11:18 And it’s one of those things, again, if you were to ask me how many people do I think directly work on
1:11:25 this area? 10% at most. What have I got to be doing that at my age? So I’m 30, in my early 30s now.
1:11:30 What have I got to be doing now to make sure that when I get older, I’m not hunched over and I am,
1:11:35 I do have that full range of mobility. Yeah. There’s a few things like, again, anytime you try to approach
1:11:42 any of these dysfunctions, we talk about the mobility, flexibility part being the foundation
1:11:46 of that. But then there’s also a strength component, because you can free up the mobility
1:11:49 and flexibility, but can you maintain it? The strength is just going to help you to maintain it.
1:11:56 From a mobility, flexibility standpoint, you can simply go up against a wall, right? And what you’re
1:12:01 supposed to do there is put the back of your head against the wall, your upper back against the wall,
1:12:05 and your butt against the wall. So you’re going as flat as you can, and you put your arms back up
1:12:10 against the wall themselves. So the back of your forearms is all up against the wall. Now, one of the
1:12:15 requirements to be able to get there is going to have good mobility or flexibility through your
1:12:18 rotator cuff muscles, because your rotator cuff, as it gets tight, wants to internally rotate your arms.
1:12:23 Can you get them back this way? Can you get your elbows forward with your arms? You’re doing a
1:12:28 pretty good job, but you can see, I can see some deficits there. So can I get in that position when I’m
1:12:34 there? Can I then raise them up against that wall flat? And as I do, the only way I’m going to be
1:12:38 able to do that is to maintain that thoracic extension, because what’s going to happen is,
1:12:42 if you lose that, as soon as you try to raise your arms up, it’s just going to fold you forward from
1:12:48 the wall, and you’re not going to be able to get up there. You can do stretches where you take that
1:12:55 dowel that we had there, you would lay on the ground face down, dowels over your back like that.
1:12:59 You spread your legs. So you look kind of like a, like a, maybe an X with your hands
1:13:04 out here and your legs spread. And all you do is you rotate around. So you’re trying to basically
1:13:09 rotate up towards the ceiling. That dowel is going to travel back behind you. And you’re pretty much
1:13:14 isolating the rotation through the low, through that mid back, through that thoracic spine. So you’re
1:13:18 getting rotation and extension, because it’s causing you to do this and lean backwards.
1:13:23 There’s another exercise I have that’s called the bridge and reach over. And the bridge and reach
1:13:28 over is you push up through, you’re on your back, you do a regular bridge, like a glute bridge.
1:13:34 But then as you get to the top, you reach across your body and try to touch behind you
1:13:39 over the opposite shoulder. So again, what are you getting there? You’re getting extension through that
1:13:46 spine and the rotation together to see if you can combine those movements. And again, take back
1:13:52 that range of motion that’s being shared between those two functions. These are all things that
1:13:56 anybody can do, like anybody can do them. And maybe you won’t do them well in the beginning because you
1:14:01 are restricted. But these are the types of things that improve as you do them. And again, don’t,
1:14:06 don’t look for perfection right away. But the nice thing about these drills is they don’t have to be
1:14:12 done for more than a few weeks consistently to actually start to see the benefits and to feel
1:14:14 what happens when you start to become less restricted here.
1:14:17 So if I just did five or 10 minutes a day of some of these drills,
1:14:19 you think the net impact over time would be pretty profound?
1:14:23 Very, very. I think that again, I think people don’t realize
1:14:32 the minimal time investment that’s required. It just needs to be done each day, right? Those
1:14:36 little deposits have to be made each day and they pay off in big dividends if you do.
1:14:42 And is it important for me to train for a long time or for a more intense, but shorter period?
1:14:43 Or how do you think about that?
1:14:47 Yeah. So I always say you can train long or you can train hard, but you can’t do both.
1:14:55 Right. And I think that especially as you get older, I think you need to minimize
1:15:00 the rotations on the tire, right? How many tire rotations are you getting? Because even if I just
1:15:07 raise my arm up overhead and I just do it a thousand times a day, I’m still moving my arm up in that
1:15:13 position. And every time I move it up, even on here in this limited capacity to move here with this guy,
1:15:20 like you’re still getting some of that rubbing and grinding in that joint. And if you have any
1:15:25 degenerative changes, if you’ve occurred, if you’ve acquired any type of bone spur in your shoulder,
1:15:30 and this is rubbing up against that each time, it’s like taking a rope and rubbing it over and back
1:15:34 over sort of a sharp edge, right? Eventually it just starts to fray and fray and fray.
1:15:42 I’d rather you trade that in the repetitions for the intensity because the tension delivered to the
1:15:48 muscle with the higher level of weight they’re using or the intensity of the technique that you’re
1:15:56 using is going to have bigger benefits in a faster way than just accumulating a lot of high repetitions.
1:16:00 Now that’s not to say that you can’t actually benefit from high repetitions and develop muscle.
1:16:06 You can. They’ve actually shown recently that anywhere between five and 30 repetitions
1:16:10 taken close to or all the way to failure can stimulate muscle growth.
1:16:17 The absolute load is sometimes not even as important as long as the effort is there. But I
1:16:23 believe that as you get older, you’ve got to kind of spare some of those repetitions because it has
1:16:28 that same effect that just wearing down those tires would have. Ultimately, you’re gonna have to change
1:16:32 the tires. And we might be able to change these tires as easily.
1:16:37 What about the importance of form when we’re training? It’s one of the things you’re known for
1:16:41 is emphasizing that form really matters. And there might be another school of thought that says,
1:16:44 listen, it hurts, so it must be doing something.
1:16:44 Yeah.
1:16:48 People think that a lot. They think, well, listen, my muscles are hurting, so clearly it worked.
1:16:54 Form is very important because I think doing things in proper form do two things. Number one,
1:16:59 it keeps you safe. Most likely, if you can do something in good form, then you’re in command
1:17:02 of the weight that you’re lifting. And therefore, it’s likely going to
1:17:07 do what it’s supposed to do with the least detrimental effect from doing it.
1:17:15 In terms of the leeway that you have, I think that depends upon the goal that you’re trying
1:17:22 to achieve. So if you’re trying to achieve muscle growth, I’m a big believer that muscle growth is
1:17:27 not given, it is taken. And you need to force yourself, you need to force your body to make
1:17:32 a change. Because your body wants to stay in a state of homeostasis. It wants to stay the same.
1:17:41 And getting it to deliver new muscle tissue to your body is metabolically demanding, or it’s creating
1:17:45 more tissue that’s going to require a higher metabolic demand. It doesn’t want to do that.
1:17:51 Again, homeostasis states that it wants to keep you the same. You have to take that. And the only way to
1:17:57 take that is to put forth an effort and intensity that is above and beyond what your body is able to do
1:18:05 right now. That’s why I am a big believer in performing our sets to failure. Not because I think that absolute
1:18:11 failure is 100% necessary, but it’s the only objective endpoint for you and I to speak the same language
1:18:16 here. Because if you go to the point where you cannot lift the weight again in good form, then I’m pretty
1:18:21 comfortable in saying, well, Steven, you went to failure. Good. So I know you went far enough. If you stop at
1:18:27 an estimated one or two reps shy, which is what research would say is okay, passable, same result
1:18:33 potentially, how do I know it’s really one or two reps? I don’t. I don’t. Because I think if there’s a gun to
1:18:38 your head, you might say, oh, I could do two more. Well, now it wasn’t one to two, it was four. And four is
1:18:46 completely not as effective, if not at all, compared to the one to two in reserve. So when you do these
1:18:53 exercises, to this degree of effort, there’s going to be a little bending of form. Now, I’m not saying that the form
1:18:58 should break down, you might find an abbreviated range of motion, you might find a little bit more momentum
1:19:05 involved. That’s all okay for me, as long as it’s still controlled. If the exercise you’re doing no longer
1:19:09 resembles what you were doing in the beginning, then you’re not doing it right. Your form has broken
1:19:13 down to a point where I don’t think you’re getting the benefits of that. You might not even actually be
1:19:17 training the muscles you were trying to train. You might have shifted the focus where you started
1:19:20 the exercise, it was supposed to be for your chest, but by the time you’re done, it’s for everything but
1:19:23 your chest, because you’re just trying to move your body through space. That’s not effective
1:19:28 if you’re trying to build muscle. You want to direct the tension into the muscles you’re trying to build.
1:19:33 And sometimes form can become a little bit lax in that pursuit, but not to the point where you’re
1:19:38 actually taking it off of the muscles again. This is just jumping a bit backwards, but a
1:19:45 conversation I had with one of my friends the other day was about nerd neck. And is there a consequence
1:19:50 to the fact that we all walk around now staring downwards? Like for this whole conversation,
1:19:53 I’ll be looking up at you, but most of the time I’m also staring downwards at my notes and stuff.
1:19:58 And if I’m not here, then I’m on my phone and I’m staring downwards. And we spend most of our lives
1:20:02 now staring downwards. And I just wondered if you, how you think about that.
1:20:06 I mean, it’s good. It’s good. It’s a good, um, it is a good connection back to what we talked about,
1:20:11 because I believe that still comes from that epicenter of dysfunction, which is that thoracic
1:20:17 spine. Because when you go like this, right, you’re actually internally rotating the arms too. So this,
1:20:22 this is internal rotation of the shoulders. If I go that way, right, that’s the external rotation.
1:20:25 If I do it the way we were just doing it up against the wall, that’s external rotation.
1:20:29 More difficult when you’re higher than when you’re lower. But when you’re in this position,
1:20:33 once you do this, what tends to follow is that spine tends to follow you in that direction.
1:20:40 When you start to round here, nerd neck is more of a consequence of what’s happening back there.
1:20:41 Because when you’re here, what do you got to do?
1:20:43 – Yeah. – Got to look up, right?
1:20:49 Because our eyes always want to see in front of us. So it’s not that your neck is necessarily
1:20:53 being pulled in that direction. Or the fact that you’re looking down. It’s the fact that your body’s
1:21:00 following that. And when it follows, the adaptation is, well, okay, now I’ve developed these tightnesses
1:21:06 this way. And I’ve lost that mobility into extension of my back. What do I do to compensate? I got to look
1:21:12 up. So now I’m walking around looking like this. And that’s that sort of nerd neck. I think nerd neck is less
1:21:19 of something you have to treat from a neck situation and more of something you have to treat from that back mobility.
1:21:24 You’ve made a lot of videos that pertain to injuries, common injuries that we get when we’re working
1:21:28 out and training. What are the most common, but avoidable injuries? And how do I avoid them? Because
1:21:32 I care a lot about this now that I’m getting older. In fact, as we sit here, as I said to you, I’ve
1:21:36 pulled some like ligaments in my ankle and I was at the physio yesterday and I’ve been on crutches and
1:21:43 I’ve got this big boot I have to wear. And it’s not until you get injured that you realize how
1:21:49 imperative it was for you to avoid this. Yeah. Because it puts you, for me, it’s completely
1:21:54 changes my whole, it changes my whole life. Not only can I like just move through a space normally,
1:22:00 but then I can’t train. I’m going to get weaker. It’s going to have an impact on my metabolic health.
1:22:05 It’s going to therefore have an impact potentially on my sleep, my cognition and everything downstream.
1:22:09 So I go, okay, I should actually have an injury prevention program. So what are the most
1:22:15 commonly occurring injuries? And what advice would you give me to avoid them?
1:22:19 Let’s see. So first of all, I take personal offense to you calling yourself old at 32.
1:22:25 I don’t know what that makes me, but I feel like a, uh, the crypt keeper, but you just start to like,
1:22:29 you do though. When I was a kid playing soccer, I could play for three, four hours. I didn’t stretch
1:22:35 and I was fine. These days I, I have a hundred percent injury rate if I don’t stretch and if I don’t
1:22:38 warm up and if I don’t really, really think about it, a hundred percent injury rate. I’m like,
1:22:42 I’m on my way downhill, you know? Well, I mean, you’re certainly going in the wrong direction,
1:22:53 but I think when it comes to injury, preparation does go a long way towards helping someone to avoid
1:22:58 it. It doesn’t, it’s not completely avoidable. I actually tore my bicep in this arm, but when it
1:23:05 comes to the more common ones, I think you can look to the joints that are either built to be mobile,
1:23:11 that aren’t being controlled or built to be stable that are being asked to do too many things. So
1:23:16 what is that? If you look at your shoulder, right? It’s a ball. And again, we can look at that. It’s a
1:23:20 ball and socket, right? It’s got the ball inside the socket. It’s supposed to be able to move in all
1:23:25 kinds of directions. We can move it all everywhere. If you look at the leg, right? We don’t have the other
1:23:30 part of the hip, but we have the ball from the ball and socket. It’s meant to be able to go in
1:23:38 all directions. When those joints, the shoulder and the hip are uncontrolled, meaning you’re lacking
1:23:43 strength in the muscles that control the movement of that joint, that’s when you actually wind up having
1:23:49 issues. So what are the muscles that control that? Well, we talked about one of those smaller exercises
1:23:57 before the glute medius. That muscle controls motion of the hip in that frontal plane. So
1:24:03 not just in this front to back, squat, lunge, deadlift direction, but this frontal side to side plane.
1:24:09 It controls the movements of the hips this way. If you don’t train them, they’re not going to magically
1:24:14 get strong. Like they have a function. And if you’re not challenging that function, then you’re not
1:24:20 strengthening that muscle. It seems like a lot. It is a lot. It is a lot. But I mean, you could acquire
1:24:24 the strength you need there with one exercise. You know, the function is hip abduction. So you could do
1:24:32 some of the side-lying hip lifting or leg lifting. You could do something more challenging where you perform
1:24:38 a lunge. But interestingly, all you have to do is weight on one side. So if I were to say, all right,
1:24:41 Stephen, what do you normally do? What do you normally do for lunges? How much weight do you
1:24:44 hold in your hands when you do a regular lunge? Or do you not do lunges?
1:24:48 I don’t do many lunges. You gotta do lunges. So let’s say you’re doing like a Bulgarian split
1:24:51 squat. Another one of my favorite exercises where you put one leg back on the bench.
1:24:57 I would say, hold the weight in one hand. So now if you’re doing a lunge and I put a 50 or 60 pound
1:25:03 dumbbell in your hand on one side, and then you go and you lunge out, that weight, you know,
1:25:08 you’re in the split position now with one leg out in front, the weight on this side totally wants to
1:25:15 pull you in that direction. You have to pull back on this side through the muscles on the outside of
1:25:20 the opposite hip to keep you in this position. And I can say, I’m going to make this even harder. Go
1:25:27 slow, go really slow. So now you’re stepping out. You’re on one leg as you’re stepping. So now you’re
1:25:31 on one leg and you’re being pulled here. Now you land, the leg drops down or the, you know,
1:25:35 the dumbbell wants to drop you down. You stay up there. I make you hold it for even a second
1:25:39 or two in the bottom position because your body is just aching to want to move in that direction.
1:25:47 I’ve just trained your hip abduction strength in this frontal plane on an exercise that’s truly a
1:25:53 sagittal plane exercise front to back. So I have ways that I can actually trick you into getting these
1:25:57 things accomplished at the same time you’re training something else. So it’s not always an extra thing that
1:26:02 you have to do. You can actually do this in a way that, you know, is sort of part of what you do.
1:26:06 So what do you do then? If I was saying to you, I want to have a comprehensive workout and you’re
1:26:10 designing my seven day workout plan, what would you give me to do?
1:26:19 One of the best ways to train is with an upper lower split or with a push pull leg split. And again,
1:26:24 if you were to do a push pull legs, I would, I would then have to have you include your shoulders along with your
1:26:29 your chest and triceps there, right? Because it’s your only shot in that week to do your shoulder work.
1:26:32 And again, as a pushing muscle, it would go on the same day.
1:26:34 So Monday, what do I do Monday?
1:26:42 So you could do push there, right? But my one caveat to a push pull legs is that it, it tends to be a lot,
1:26:49 right? Like you’re, you’re doing shoulders, chest, triceps. Some people don’t like that amount of,
1:26:51 of, of volume, right?
1:26:53 What’s push when you say push. So it doesn’t know.
1:26:57 Yeah. So push is just the muscles who share a similar function of pushing.
1:27:02 So if you look at a bench press is pushing the weight away from you is the concentric action
1:27:05 that you’re doing. If I looked at the lat pull down, I’m pulling the weight towards me.
1:27:10 That’s the concentric part of it. If I’m doing a bicep curl, I’m pulling it towards me.
1:27:16 Triceps, shoulders, chest, everything is pushing. I’m pushing away this way, pushing away that way.
1:27:21 Push up. I’m pushing away from the ground. Tricep push downs. It’s in the name itself.
1:27:26 I’m pushing down through a tricep push down. I’m doing tricep, you know, lying extensions.
1:27:32 I’m pushing the weight away. They would all go on a similar day. Again, I like the, the function of
1:27:37 that because it’s optimal recovery. So why that’s, why that’s good, if you could tolerate, you know,
1:27:41 I’m asking, you know, if, if that’s okay for you to do that, because you have, you’re not
1:27:46 naturally adding shoulders in. If you were okay with adding shoulders in, then you would do your
1:27:53 push workout. And then what I would do is know that I’m getting enough recovery in between workouts,
1:27:58 because I could give you a day off in terms of weight training on Tuesday, come back and do
1:28:00 Wednesday legs, right?
1:28:03 Right. So, so Monday I’m just doing push upper body.
1:28:05 Yeah. It’s yeah. Just push upper body.
1:28:07 Okay. Tuesday, you’re going to give me the day off.
1:28:08 Tuesday, you get the day off.
1:28:09 Yeah.
1:28:11 I’m going to give you two variations of this.
1:28:11 Okay.
1:28:15 And when I say day off, we could, we, we, if you were with me, you’d be doing conditioning.
1:28:18 All right. So we’ll get into that, but that’s, but it would be, yeah, it’s not a day off.
1:28:22 No, you give me seven days. I’ll take, I’ll take a ball seven, even if I’m just doing
1:28:28 ab work on some, but you, you then on Wednesday would come back and do your, your leg workout.
1:28:30 Yeah. And what leg workout am I doing on Wednesday?
1:28:33 So it’s going to be front anterior posterior. So I’m going to train your hamstrings,
1:28:38 your glutes and your quads. Everything will get done together. Thursday, you’d have another day off.
1:28:38 Okay.
1:28:45 Again, likely not a day off some conditioning. And then the Friday could be your, your pull workout.
1:28:50 Now, what’s nice about that is if you are somebody that doesn’t recover as well as others,
1:28:57 and this is not everybody, but that gives you a really good amount of recovery between those
1:29:03 workouts. If you could tolerate more than that, the first step I would do is add a total body
1:29:09 workout one more time. So I could come back on Saturday and add a total body workout. It would
1:29:14 just be a little bit light on the pole. Cause you just did that, right? You did the day before.
1:29:20 So you, my whole body on Saturday. You could do it. You know, when I mean like I would pick very big
1:29:25 compound movements that are representative of including as many muscles as possible at one time.
1:29:32 And I can shy off a little bit back off a little bit off of the pole that you were doing because I
1:29:37 realized that you just did certain exercises the day before. So I would, if I trained you on,
1:29:42 and this gets a little nuanced, but if I trained you on Friday and a pole workout, remember I have
1:29:47 different planes of motion I can move in. So if you were doing vertical pulling stuff like a pull up or
1:29:52 a pull down, I could stress more horizontal pulling exercises, like a seated row or bent
1:29:57 over row. Right. So I could shift the focus a little bit. And then Sunday, Sunday, I break.
1:30:01 Yeah, I definitely, I mean, I, I definitely don’t advocate seven days a week of full training.
1:30:04 Where would I be doing my cardiovascular work in this, in this particular week?
1:30:09 So in that, in that scenario, I’d have you do your conditioning work on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
1:30:14 I thought I had a break. And if you were gonna, if you had, you know, your goals were more aligned
1:30:20 with fat loss and overall conditioning, and you feel like you’re, you know, not as healthy as you
1:30:25 could be there, I would probably take advantage of that Saturday to do that. But if your priority was
1:30:29 the training side of it, getting stronger, building more muscle, then I would take advantage of that
1:30:34 Saturday as my, my flex day to do training. And you don’t put the cardio on the same day as the
1:30:39 upper body legs workouts. It could be, but if your priority again is to build muscle,
1:30:43 muscle, then prioritize muscle building, put that first, do your cardio conditioning work
1:30:47 at the end of that workout. Something might suffer. And the thing that usually comes second
1:30:52 is what suffers. If we think just about Monday, which we had down as the push days, that’s me doing
1:31:02 like chest and is it triceps and shoulders? How many, if I’m training for one hour, how many reps are
1:31:08 you trying to do per muscle and how many like sets? So set count, you know, if you can get in, and again,
1:31:13 this is a little bit determined by, um, whether you’re going to train on that Saturday. So if
1:31:18 you’re going to come back and train total body on Saturday, then I, I know I have an opportunity to
1:31:22 maybe do a bench again on Saturday or a variation bench and incline bench. So I don’t have to get all
1:31:29 all of my chest volume in, in that first day. But typically you’re looking for around anywhere between
1:31:35 nine and 16 sets or so for that muscle group across the week. So if you were going to do,
1:31:43 let’s say the one workout for chest and you’re doing say three, uh, sets per exercise, you’re in that range
1:31:48 of around, uh, three exercises, right. For chest. Now you don’t have to have that. The volume doesn’t
1:31:52 need to be as high for triceps because you’re obviously training your triceps while you’re
1:31:58 doing bench press. So you could put one direct tricep exercise in. If it was me, I would put
1:32:02 something that my favorite exercise for triceps is the lion tricep extension, where I lay on my back on
1:32:06 the bench and I do the, you know, they, some people call them skull crushers or nose breakers.
1:32:13 If we just take bicep for, as an example, how often do I need to train and how intense do I need to
1:32:19 train the bicep for it to grow? And conversely, if I just left my bicep alone, how long would it take
1:32:25 for me to lose the muscle? Yeah. Interesting. So, um, I think this is one of the most fascinating areas
1:32:32 of training that has yet to be uncovered. Um, I actually discussed this with, with Andrew Huberman
1:32:38 at one point. It’s like, it’s very interesting. So from person to person, we know that there are
1:32:46 different recovery rates between the people from person to person. We know that there are different
1:32:54 recovery rates between muscles. Like you might do the same bicep workout I do and need more time to
1:33:01 recover than I would. What’s interesting is from the individual themselves, certain muscle groups
1:33:09 require more or less frequency to recover from. So I might find that I could train my biceps every
1:33:15 three days, but I could never train my back every three days, or I could never train my chest every
1:33:21 three days. It’s just so intricate because every muscle is going to be different for every person. And
1:33:28 even at a holistic one level, you’re just not going to find the same recovery rate across the board for
1:33:33 every muscle in your body. So I, a lot of times I think people should rely on a little bit of training
1:33:40 intuition to say, Hey, like, am I increasing my weights? Is my strength going up on the lift?
1:33:46 Am I feeling excited to train that muscle when I go to train it? If I am, then I’m probably recovering well.
1:33:52 And you can experiment with like hitting it again more frequently. I think in the big picture,
1:33:56 the more frequently that you can stimulate a muscle, the better the results are going to be.
1:34:01 You have this, um, contraption on the desk in front of us.
1:34:04 This, this thing here.
1:34:05 Yeah.
1:34:11 Look, so many people talk to me about this device and it’s, it’s quite strange how important people
1:34:16 say that this device is and what it tells us. I was doing some reading beforehand. It’s a grip
1:34:21 strength reader monitor. And there’s some really crazy stats that I found. There was a 2015
1:34:27 Lancet study across 17 countries that found for every five kilogram decrease in grip strength,
1:34:33 it was associated with a 16% high risk of death, a 17% high risk of heart disease,
1:34:37 and a 7% high risk of stroke. And a 2018 study in the Journal of Alzheimer’s disease found that
1:34:43 people with low grip strength had a 68% high risk of developing Alzheimer’s. There was another,
1:34:49 another study that linked it to other cardiovascular and blood issues. And another study that shows that
1:34:54 older adults in the lowest third of grip strength were 2.5 times more likely to fall and be
1:35:01 hospitalized with their injuries. And one study found that grip strength predicted upper body
1:35:06 strength by 70%. And lastly, adults over 65 with weak grip strength were 2.1 times more likely to become
1:35:13 dependent in daily activities within three years. That was in the Journal of Gerontology.
1:35:16 grip strength. Pretty important, huh?
1:35:28 Um, a lot of that research has been determined to be more, uh, correlative than causative, but
1:35:36 the fact is that maintaining your grip strength is very important. So what I mean by the correlative
1:35:41 causative thing is that what they find is that people that maintain their grip strength throughout life
1:35:46 are probably doing so because they’re regularly engaging in physical activity. Uh, likely there
1:35:52 are lifting weights, they’re holding heavy weights, they’re having to, um, manipulate their body in
1:35:58 space if they’re doing calisthenic exercises. So there’s a level of activity that remains in
1:36:05 their grip that probably keeps their level of strength at a higher level. So you’re selecting out people that
1:36:09 are just generally maintaining their fitness, in which case they’re probably maintaining higher
1:36:11 levels of health and lower issues as they age.
1:36:17 So it’s not the, the strength in which we can grip that matters necessarily, but the thing that matters
1:36:21 is upstream from that and downstream is our ability to grip. So it’s just one, it’s almost like a,
1:36:24 a symptom of something upstream, which is positive.
1:36:29 Right. Or lacking, right? Or lacking, you’re not, you’re not doing enough of, um, that being said,
1:36:39 you can actually directly relate or measure your ability to recover from exercise, um, based upon
1:36:43 having a baseline understanding of what your grip strength is and then monitoring what that is over the,
1:36:48 over, you know, weeks or months of training. So if you were to measure your grip strength with a tool
1:36:54 like this in the morning, five mornings in a row and average it out in a, at a time where you feel
1:36:58 like you’re feeling energetic and good, that will give you a good baseline of what your grip strength
1:37:04 is. What’s a good grip strength. So most men would be somewhere between a hundred, I’ll talk in pounds,
1:37:13 a hundred and 120 pounds. So if you look at that, that’s around 46 kilos to 54 kilos. Um, if you,
1:37:19 you want to give a shot, see where you stack up. So to do this now, there’s some rules here. Yeah.
1:37:23 Don’t go like this, you know, keep it in here. Don’t touch your arms to the table at all. Keep it
1:37:28 at 90 degrees like that. Yep. And then you’re just going to squeeze, you know, one good effort as hard
1:37:36 as you can. All right, don’t blow out now. All right, let’s see. Oh gosh, my head nearly exploded.
1:37:43 130. So you’re, you’re above average. So doing well on grip strength. So now what you would
1:37:46 do is, and you would test both sides. You could average out the size. Sometimes you’re going to
1:37:51 have one, obviously one side stronger than the other. You would then have a good baseline.
1:37:54 If you were feeling like you weren’t sure if you recovered or not, you would test this in the
1:37:58 morning. Can I try this side as well? Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. This is my, so this is my weaker.
1:38:04 All right, here we go. My weaker hand. All right. You got to beat it though now. Oh gosh,
1:38:13 it’s a bit slippery. I think you did. Did I beat it? Oh my God. Wow. 160. No, you’re joking. 160.
1:38:19 What the? 160. So you probably, if you did the other side again, give it another shot. If you did
1:38:23 the other side again. You think I’d beat it? No, no, you’re not going to beat, you’re going to beat
1:38:26 your old performance, but you’re not going to beat, you’re not going to beat the, the left side.
1:38:31 Are you left-handed? I’m right-handed. So that was strange.
1:38:40 All right, let’s see what you got. 150 now. See, I had my prediction is right. So a lot of times,
1:38:45 it takes a little accommodation to the stress of doing that. What’s your grip strength?
1:38:50 I don’t know. I haven’t tested in a while. See, now you’re going to show me. Left and right. All
1:38:53 right, let’s see. I’m going to ask some of my team members if they want to give it a shot. All right,
1:39:03 here we go. Wow. A lot of crushing there. Wow. 130 on that side. And your left side? All right,
1:39:07 let’s see. Anyone else want to do it, Bertie? You want to give it a shot? Try to do it with all
1:39:17 the popping. That was my bicep that popped, by the way. 110. Okay, so you’re right-handed.
1:39:24 So it was 130, right? 130 versus 110 on this side. So I fall in the range of average, but not,
1:39:29 not superhuman for sure. But you want to try? But you’re most certainly way stronger than me.
1:39:36 Not at grip strength. But you’re stronger than me at bicep curls, bench press, everything else.
1:39:42 Yeah, I mean, this is again underscoring why some of these things need to be trained individually.
1:39:44 Okay. All right, so now hold it like this.
1:39:49 Yep. And then you just get one hand, right? You squeeze as hard as you can for kind of a short
1:39:58 burst. All right. There you go. Let’s take a look. Wow. 100. Now, women’s average grip strength is 60
1:40:03 to 80 pounds. So you’re actually much stronger than the average woman.
1:40:10 I started my first business at 12 years old. And I started more businesses at 14, 15, 16, 17,
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1:41:08 shopify.com/bartlett. This has never been done before. A newsletter that is ran by 100 of the world’s top
1:41:13 CEOs. All the time, people say to me, they say, “Can you mentor me? Can you get this person to mentor
1:41:18 me? How do I find a mentor?” So here is what we’re going to do. You’re going to send me a question. And
1:41:24 the most popular question you send me, I’m going to text it to 100 CEOs, some of which are the top
1:41:30 CEOs in the world running $100 billion companies. And then I’m going to reply to you via email with
1:41:35 how they answered that question. You might say, “How do you hold on to a relationship when you’re
1:41:40 building a startup? What is the most important thing if I’ve got an idea and don’t know where to start?”
1:41:44 We email it to the CEOs. They email back. We take the five, six top best answers. We email it to
1:41:49 you. I was nervous because I thought the marketing might not match the reality. But then I saw what
1:41:53 the founders were replying with and their willingness to reply. And I thought, actually, this is really
1:42:00 good. And all you’ve got to do is sign up completely free. And can I train my grip strength individually
1:42:04 if I wanted to improve it as an individual thing when I just have to grip? Yeah. I mean,
1:42:09 you know, one of the easiest ways to do it is with those old fashioned little grippers, you know,
1:42:14 that you just squeeze. And they make them in some really, really heavy resistance levels now for
1:42:19 people that have worked on it and actually improved. When I was young, they’re pretty easy
1:42:23 to conquer with a little bit of training. You’d be able to squeeze them because they never really made
1:42:29 the resistance high enough. But now it’s definitely something that you could be challenged by.
1:42:32 The other thing I wanted to talk to you about, which we’ve touched on briefly,
1:42:39 but I think is important to talk about because I don’t think people realize how prevalent it is, is back pain.
1:42:43 I was looking at some stats beforehand, and it says that 80% of people will experience back pain at
1:42:47 some point in their lives. It’s actually the leading cause of disability worldwide. And in the UK,
1:42:54 over 10 million work days are lost every year due to back pain. One in six hospital visits in Britain
1:42:58 are related to back pain. It’s the most common reason for people under 45 to see a doctor.
1:43:04 chronic back pain, which is sort of just enduring back pain, affects about one in five adults in the UK.
1:43:10 And there’s five of us in this room now in total. And so one of us, probabilistically, is going to have
1:43:16 chronic back pain. Is this something one can avoid? I asked this in part because I spoke to some,
1:43:19 I think the anthropologists who go and look at the tribes in Africa,
1:43:22 and they find that back pain just doesn’t exist there. It’s not a thing.
1:43:26 I think the likelihood that you’re going to experience back pain at some point in your life
1:43:33 is, is high. But that recurring back pain, that chronic back pain, I think that’s, that’s entirely
1:43:41 avoidable. Um, 26% of the time, at any one time in the United States, people have, are going to be
1:43:46 dealing with back pain. So kind of with the numbers that you just said there. The other thing I find
1:43:51 interesting is that the second leading cause of trips to the doctor in the United States is back
1:43:57 pain behind respiratory infection. So if you think about how often, especially this time of year,
1:44:01 my own kids have been in at least four or five times, you know, to the doctor for respiratory infection.
1:44:06 It starts to, so an eye opener, like, wow, you know, and this is, and this is something that’s
1:44:13 somewhat preventable. We need to do something about it to prevent it. The problem is that it can come
1:44:19 from so many different causes. You know, we, we talked about before how the limitation in that
1:44:25 thoracic mobility could ask the low back to do more than it could, and therefore cause strain there.
1:44:32 Now, here’s the good part about this. Though 80% of people or 85% will have low back pain in their life,
1:44:40 only 27 to 35% of the time is a disc related. So we’re talking about, you know, if you look back
1:44:46 on this guy again, it’s the, it’s the discs, you know, between the vertebrae, right? The, the vertebral discs
1:44:52 that create that spacing and the cushioning between the, the vertebrae and bar spine. When one of those discs,
1:44:57 actually, this is one of them dislodged itself, but when the disc that sits above and below these two levels
1:45:04 pushes outward or herniates, it could, it could push on any one of these nerves that’s traveling downward.
1:45:09 Anytime you get any touching of this nerve with some other structure, in this case, the disc,
1:45:14 you get the radiating symptoms that go down, whatever dermatome this is. What that means is
1:45:21 this nerve will feed some function of the lower body, or some sensory area of the lower body.
1:45:28 Depending upon where people complain of pain, like, oh, I feel it in my hip, or I feel it in my leg,
1:45:35 around my knee, or, or I feel it down behind my knee, down to my foot. You pretty much know what level of
1:45:41 disc problem they have because it’s representative of the level of herniation. When you press on
1:45:48 something that is at the level of like L5-S1, right, the last lumbar vertebrae in the first
1:45:53 sacral vertebrae, it’s going to give you symptoms like numbness, tingling down near the back of your
1:45:59 calf, underneath your foot. If you get something more around the hip, you know, a lot of times people
1:46:03 complain of hip pain. They think they have, they have a hip issue. It’s actually a back issue that’s
1:46:10 pressing on a nerve that wraps around that area. So that’s an L2-L3 or L3-L4. You get indicators of
1:46:15 where that’s coming from. Again, the good news is, if you don’t have this, this neurological deficit in
1:46:22 your lower body, this tingling, numbness, weakness, it’s mostly muscle in origin. Now, again, even of
1:46:30 the disc related issues, the 27 to 35 percent, 96 percent of those are not operated on. So think about
1:46:36 the impact you can have if we’re saying that pretty much every single instance of low back pain that you
1:46:42 have is going to be able to be addressed through non-operative, strengthening or stretching
1:46:48 intervention. Because a lot of times, as we said, what’s the cause of the dysfunction?
1:46:55 Is it coming from that thoracic spine lack of extension? Cool. Okay. Well, let’s work on it. So
1:47:02 let’s try to restore that thoracic spine extension. Is it coming from a weak glute, right? Having weak
1:47:08 glutes? Because again, the role of the glutes from the bottom up is to extend the hip. In other words,
1:47:14 kick the leg back behind you. If I can’t get my leg back behind me and I’m trying to basically extend
1:47:19 my body by doing that when I step through and get behind me, well, how can I do that? Once again,
1:47:25 I could do it from the low back by over-exaggerating and stepping in where it’s not supposed to. Always
1:47:31 remember the low back is supposed to be the stability center of your spine. It’s supposed
1:47:38 to provide stability. If you’re not getting mobility from your hip or from your thoracic spine up and
1:47:44 above and below, it’s going to ask for it from the next place above it or below it. It’s going to say to
1:47:49 the low back, please help out. Give me the mobility that I lack. So the low back will do it,
1:47:54 but at an expense. And that’s where you get injured. So you got to address hip weaknesses.
1:47:58 You have to address hip mobility issues.
1:48:05 This strikes me as what they call a mismatch disease or a mismatch issue. When they say mismatch
1:48:09 issue, they mean that there’s a way that we’re living our lives these days that is at odds with
1:48:15 how we were supposed to live or how our ancestors lived. And it’s interesting because I’ve interviewed
1:48:21 David Richarlan, who is an anthropologist, but also Daniel Lieberman. They both spent time with
1:48:26 the Hadza tribe in West Africa. And the shocking thing for me is I was assuming that the reason why
1:48:30 we get back issues and the Hadza tribe don’t really get them is because we spend a lot of time like just
1:48:37 sedentary. However, David Richarlan said that the Hadza tribe still spend 10 hours a day
1:48:43 in resting postures, but they maintain a straight J-shaped spine, not the curved S-shaped spine
1:48:50 common in the West. They squat, they walk, they carry loads a lot, and they aren’t in chairs. They’re
1:48:57 doing more active motions. Now, you know, I spend a lot of time sat down, whether it’s at a desk doing
1:49:02 this or whether it’s in an office. I’m wondering from your experience, if you thought it would be
1:49:09 better to have a standing desk or is this? No. No? No, I think standing desks are great. And I hate to
1:49:13 say it because I might actually, I might have to hold myself responsible, but I feel like it would be
1:49:19 beneficial for me too. I think that too much time sitting, right? There’s people that call sitting
1:49:23 the new smoking. Like the, the detrimental effects that sitting can have, prolonged sitting can have
1:49:29 on your body. Especially when you couple it with the fact that when we do go to sleep eight, nine,
1:49:34 ten hours, like how much time do you want to spend in a sort of fixed immobile position in a day?
1:49:38 Like you’re, you’re working all day. There’s a big chunk there, maybe eight hours, nine hours,
1:49:42 ten hours with intermittent breaks that you’re going to the bathroom and getting some water. And then you
1:49:46 got another eight or nine hours at night that you’re doing the same thing. Like your body wasn’t meant
1:49:53 to be that immobile. Like I think the, there’s an actual compression. So when you’re, when you’re,
1:49:59 when your joints are subject to gravity and you’re moving through space, you’re actually getting a
1:50:04 bathing of those joints of the synovial fluid that’s in these joints, like let’s say your knees,
1:50:09 that you’re essentially mobilizing because you’re compressed. And you know, again, with your knee,
1:50:12 you’re weight bearing, and then you’re off of it, you’re weight bearing, you’re off. It’s like squeezing
1:50:18 and bathing that, that joint in the synovial fluid. The outcomes are much better when we don’t allow
1:50:23 that to become stagnant. And when we, when we stimulate that through frequent movement sessions,
1:50:28 being up on your feet at a standing desk is certainly going to take away some of the compression and the
1:50:34 load that we’re getting from the, the chair and probably discourage some of that really bad posture
1:50:39 that comes from sitting and doing this. Standing in that you’re likely going to at least improve your
1:50:43 posture from below. You may not improve your posture so much from above, like we talked about,
1:50:47 but at least from below, you’re going to improve that. But I still think that the inactivity,
1:50:53 just standing alone is not solving for the inactivity. You need to take more frequent breaks. I think people
1:50:58 need to, um, get up and walk around just a little bit, five minutes, every, every, you know, 30 minutes
1:51:03 or so would be ideal. But like, if you’re going to take a phone call, go walk while you’re on the phone.
1:51:07 Like one thing I do is I have my office and I have the gym. And as soon as I know I’m going to be on a
1:51:12 call, I just stand up and I walk around the gym while I’m on my call, just as an excuse to get up and
1:51:16 move. I could easily conduct that phone call from the chair still, but I’m doing the rest of my work
1:51:21 from the chair. Anything you can do, you know, I know they’re cliche, but you know, park a little
1:51:26 further when you’re at a store. So you have to walk a little bit more, but I think it’s the frequency
1:51:32 of the breaks that we’re not taking, which is the main, the main problem. I think that even if you added
1:51:39 up all the time that you’re active in a day and then the time that you’re not active, it’s, if it was the
1:51:44 same exact time of an activity, but I interspersed my activity more regularly throughout the day, you’d have
1:51:48 less negative side effects than you do if you’re just grouping it. I’m going to be inactive from this
1:51:52 period. I’m going to be active from this period because again, of that effect of intermittently
1:51:56 bathing and giving these joints a break and subjecting to that, then to different stresses
1:52:00 than just compression, compression, compression. It’s one of the reasons why I talk all the time about
1:52:07 the benefit you can get from just hanging from a bar, right? To decompress your body, you know,
1:52:13 even just minimally, again, not that much, you know, one arm hang or so, you know, two arm hangs a day
1:52:18 is enough to give your body a bit of a break that you’re not getting right now. And nobody does
1:52:22 that. Nobody, nobody hangs from a bar. What about, let’s talk about supplementation.
1:52:26 I’ve got a bunch of supplements here with me now, and there’s so much said about supplementation,
1:52:30 but if you were to give me some advice and guide me on what supplements you think I should be taking
1:52:34 every day frequently versus the ones that maybe aren’t so important, but also just like the call
1:52:39 outs of, you know, I saw this thing on Twitter going viral the other day where someone had
1:52:47 screenshotted the top creatines on a certain website and then they tested them in a lab and found that a lot of
1:52:52 of them weren’t actually creating in the doses that they’d said and in the form that they were
1:52:57 selling. So I have this, I now have this skepticism around the supplements I’m taking. I’ve got some
1:53:00 supplements here. I’ve got some more on the floor. What supplements do you think we should all be
1:53:06 taking? And explain to me why. For building muscle, the two that rank at the very, very top of the list
1:53:10 are going to be creatine monohydrate or any form of creatine. There’s different forms of creatine,
1:53:17 we can get into those, but creatine and a protein powder. And some people want to argue the necessity
1:53:23 of a protein powder. And I guess if you’re getting enough through your diet, you don’t have to take
1:53:27 it. It’s not a necessity. You’re not getting anything magical from the protein powder that you’re
1:53:32 not getting through your food. It’s just that you’re doing it at a much more economic cost.
1:53:36 If you look at the price of protein these days, I mean, it’s, it’s certainly becoming a little bit
1:53:42 unrealistic to think you’re going to meet your daily goals. And for me, my daily goal is around
1:53:48 at minimum a gram per pound of body weight and upwards of 1.2 grams per pound of body weight,
1:53:55 if you’re active. Creatine has become all the rage recently. I was looking at some Google search data
1:54:02 and it shows just how quickly in search volume creatine is increasing from the early 2020s to 2025.
1:54:08 Now it’s exploding. And it’s been around forever and been in the, in the benefits have been known
1:54:13 forever. Right. So that’s interesting because that’s all related to the neurological benefits
1:54:19 that creatine is showing in terms of depression and, um, degenerative neurological diseases and
1:54:28 and its improvement, its ability to slow prevent things like, uh, MS and Parkinson’s and, you know,
1:54:34 by basically keeping the brain in a more favorable, uh, bioenergetic state, meaning being able to,
1:54:42 to feed the neurons of the brain, um, with the energy that seems to be lacking in some of these degenerative
1:54:43 diseases.
1:54:47 Also the other thing that I think has happened and I did, I did a little test in my office a
1:54:53 couple of, a couple of months back where I asked who in the team took creatine and every hand that
1:54:59 raised was a man. And I asked the women in my office why they didn’t take creatine and the overarching
1:55:03 sort of misconception, which also my girlfriend told me about when we’re in Cape Town a couple of
1:55:05 years ago. And I said, baby, you should take creatine. Everyone on my podcast is talking about it.
1:55:10 Yeah. And she was like, no, it’s going to make me it. I think she, yeah, she sort of as like,
1:55:12 she saw it as a steroid.
1:55:12 Yeah.
1:55:14 She was like, it’s what bodybuilders take.
1:55:17 Well, that’s going to change quickly. Cause I think that you have a lot of people,
1:55:22 highly respected people in the field that are doing the research as we speak in these areas
1:55:29 that we’re talking about. I urged my wife recently to take, to take it. She is chronically
1:55:36 sleep deprived because of my boys, you know, so she has, um, you know, she has a heart,
1:55:42 definitely operating on a higher stress level. Um, it’s been shown to actually improve brain
1:55:50 health and performance in sleep deprived and in stressed high stress states from a depression
1:55:56 standpoint is being shown to be, uh, very effective even when kind of paired up with traditional
1:56:01 approaches to treating depression through, uh, pharmaceuticals. It’s just got a lot of promise.
1:56:05 And the good thing is that there’s really no downside, right? They haven’t really identified
1:56:11 a downside to taking it. Um, there’s a lot of rumors as to what the downsides are. I actually made a video
1:56:15 recently where I talked to them and I kind of addressed head on what they were. Jesse of course
1:56:21 played our concerned parent who had all the questions he asked, but like, there is a big confusion that
1:56:27 people have when it comes to people think it’s a steroid and they think that because the outcomes
1:56:34 of taking creatine are it can increase lean muscle. It can increase strength. Sure. Because the outcomes
1:56:41 are the same as let’s say anabolic steroid use doesn’t mean that the mechanism is the same or the
1:56:46 magnitude of what you’re going to see from them is the same, or even the legality of, of the, of the
1:56:51 supplement itself is the same. We’re talking about two completely different, uh, two different, two,
1:56:55 two different mechanisms completely and two different things that the body are going to react much
1:57:00 differently to. When it’s an anabolic steroid, it’s going into the muscle cell, binding to androgen
1:57:05 receptors that then go into the nucleus of the cell and change gene expression, right? To basically
1:57:09 convert. As I did in that video, I said, you’re taking an iPad and making it a MacBook, right? You’re,
1:57:15 you’re completely changing what it is. Whereas with creatine monohydrate, you’re just talking about
1:57:22 providing a more constant flow of energy to those muscle cells so that they can continue to turn over
1:57:26 faster and continue to operate at higher levels of performance. Well, what happens when that, when
1:57:32 that occurs, you’re able to generate more work in a, in a workout by getting more work done. You’re
1:57:38 creating more of that overload. You’re also getting a secondary benefit of pulling water into the muscle
1:57:43 cell with the creatine because osmotically, when you pull water, uh, anything into the cell,
1:57:47 you’re going to bring along with it water to kind of keep the concentration inside the cell to be the
1:57:53 same. Well, that extra water keeps the muscle cell hydrated. And that’s a great thing. A more
1:57:59 hydrated muscle cell is going to likely grow better longer in the, in the long run, just like a flower
1:58:02 of water would grow better than one without. And there’s lots of different types of creatine,
1:58:07 right? There’s like gummies now, there’s monohydrate, there’s all kinds of creatines.
1:58:12 I was over New Year’s again, I was looking at, um, different types of creatine. So I went to the
1:58:17 shop and it sounds crazy, but I bought like 30 types and I just started researching it. And I
1:58:22 realized that there’s like a better form of creatine. Yeah. Um, and there’s some creatines which aren’t
1:58:27 so good. I eat ones that have many things added to them, um, et cetera. Yeah. I mean, creatine is pretty
1:58:33 simple. I always present it in sort of two forms to people because there’s a, there’s one creatine
1:58:37 creatine monohydrate and then there’s one called creatine hydrochloride. And the only difference
1:58:42 is what it’s bound to. The creatine monohydrate is bound to a H2O molecule and the hydrochloride is
1:58:49 bound to a hydrochloric acid molecule. And so what happens when that’s ingested in your body is that
1:58:53 one’s more absorbable than the other. The hydrochloride is more absorbable than the other.
1:59:00 So you could take lower dosages of that. The creatine monohydrate is usually taking
1:59:03 it at a higher dosage. And now there’s some new research coming out that states that I used to
1:59:07 think that it was just five grams for everybody, but now they’re finding that people that are like
1:59:12 upwards of 200 pounds or more, they might benefit from like eight, nine, 10 grams per day. So bigger
1:59:17 dosages there and people who are at, you know, 120 pounds or so, and maybe some of the females and
1:59:21 female athletes, like they might benefit from even just two to three grams of creatine monohydrate.
1:59:28 Hydrochloride is usually in lower dosages anyway. So comparative dose of five grams of monohydrate
1:59:30 might equal out to two to three grams of hydrochloride.
1:59:34 What’s all this stuff about loading? Because when I was younger, my brother was bodybuilding.
1:59:37 He would, he would tell me that you had to load up. Yeah.
1:59:41 I had to have a huge dosage for a week and then thereafter go back to a low dosage.
1:59:47 It’s just, so your body ultimately reaches a capacity for creatine storage. So if you want to get there
1:59:55 faster, you load, it’s five grams, four to five times a day. So a total dose of 20 to 25 grams in
2:00:00 a day. Some people are going to find that that’s a little bit of an overload for them on their, on their
2:00:04 gut. There is a by-product of creatine breakdown. Creatinine is what it’s called. We get it measured
2:00:10 whenever we get our blood test done. That can sometimes pull along with it, some extra water,
2:00:16 and that can make you feel a little gut discomfort from that. Again, at lower dosages, if you’re using
2:00:20 hydrochloride, you wouldn’t see that breakdown as much. You wouldn’t, you wouldn’t get as much of that
2:00:26 accumulated breakdown of creatinine. So you might get less of that bloating. That’s the only indication
2:00:33 why I would ever suggest hydrochloride is if you are some of that 15% of people that have some sensitivity
2:00:39 to that. And a lot of times getting around the loading phase and not doing it would bypass some
2:00:44 of that discomfort that you feel, that gut discomfort that you feel from taking it. So what happens if you
2:00:51 don’t load? You just ultimately get to the same capacity at a slower pace. So anywhere from 27 to 35
2:00:56 days or so, you’re going to reach that full capacity anyway. If you’re taking it because you want to see
2:01:02 benefits in performance, like power output and performance, let’s say, leading up to an event,
2:01:06 that’s, you know, a competition in four or five days, then you might want to load because you have to kind
2:01:13 of get to those full capacities sooner. But I don’t really see a need to have to load if, again, in the
2:01:19 long run, you take away any of those risks, those gut risks, and then you get to that ultimate level
2:01:24 anyway. And what about the proteins I’ve got here? Are there any particular proteins that are better than
2:01:29 others? I mean, I like to say, since that’s mine, that’s better. But the, you know, the fact is that
2:01:37 anything you can do to prioritize the quality of the protein. So in general, your isolate proteins are
2:01:42 going to be of a higher quality than your concentrate proteins. They’re still protein, but there’s more
2:01:50 on a gram per gram basis. It’s 90% versus 80% by volume. If it’s isolate versus concentrate,
2:01:55 you’re getting more protein per volume. But they’re not all as advertised, are they?
2:02:00 No. No, there’s, I mean, look, I, without, I don’t ever want to disparage other brands or,
2:02:05 you know, I don’t, I’m not in the practice of doing that, but like there are some garbage quality proteins
2:02:11 out there that are on the shelves of oftentimes like the biggest retailers, you know, they, they,
2:02:15 they don’t, they’re, they’re in it to make money. They’re not in it to provide high quality.
2:02:21 And, um, again, you’re still getting protein, but by the time your body absorbs what’s in there,
2:02:24 it’s netting out to less than what it could be.
2:02:25 How do I spot garbage?
2:02:31 Uh, I think the best way to spot garbage would be to like, there’s something called, uh, amino acid
2:02:37 spiking. You like people will, will actually include a lot of, um, glycine in their, in their, uh,
2:02:44 proteins, like specifically adding glycine to it. Cause they can get the label benefit of increasing
2:02:49 protein content, but it’s actually not a complete protein. So you’re not getting the actual quality
2:02:52 that you would be getting from an isolate protein. What are some foods that you would just
2:02:58 absolutely never let go near your mouth? The real ones where if your kids asked, or,
2:03:05 you know, you just say, there’s no way we’re eating that. I really hate the dyes and foods,
2:03:12 the food dyes. I think that’s a really, um, I’m glad that things are being done as we speak to try to
2:03:18 eliminate them from our foods. I don’t know how our industry has gotten away with it for as long as it
2:03:23 has it, you know, in, in Europe, they’ve known about the dangers of food coloring and food dyes
2:03:30 for a decade or more. And we’re still eating these in our foods all the time for what benefit?
2:03:33 So it looks more attractive on a, on a package. Like that’s bullshit.
2:03:38 What about melatonin? I’ve got a little jar of it here that I found. Um, a lot of people are taking
2:03:44 melatonin now, and I’ve got a friend very close to me that’s encouraging me to take melatonin. Do you have
2:03:50 a view on it? My view is I believe it to be safe. I believe it to be, um, helpful, you know, for people
2:03:58 that are having a problem establishing a normal sleep pattern. Um, we actually do, uh, uh, give it to our
2:04:03 children at night because they do have, they do have issues with sleep. Um, but honestly, the,
2:04:09 the thing that people find to be even more helpful to establishing that normal sleep pattern
2:04:15 is that consistency in going to bed and that consistency of waking up. And when you know
2:04:20 you’re on the right track, you generally don’t need, uh, an alarm clock to wake you up. If you’re
2:04:25 doing it right and you’re getting enough sleep, you generally see that your body naturally wakes up
2:04:29 within five to 10 minutes of the same time every morning without an alarm clock.
2:04:31 Have you thought much about how we’re supposed to sleep?
2:04:36 I mean, we talked about lower back, back pains, et cetera. Is there an optimal way to sleep?
2:04:38 Am I meant to sleep on my front, my back, my side?
2:04:43 So again, I think this is individual, you know, and again, there’s a lot of conditions that can
2:04:50 sway somebody in one direction or another, but in general, I think the position that has the less,
2:04:56 the least amount of negative side effects in terms of how you feel upon waking is to be in what we call
2:05:00 the corpse, the corpse position, just laying on your back with your arms sort of at your side or crossed
2:05:05 over your, your belly like this. If you’re able to tolerate even more and kind of up in this position
2:05:09 here with your, with your arms up, just because again, that actually helps a little bit with some
2:05:13 of that internal rotateness, uh, internal rotation tightness that we get in our shoulders that you
2:05:19 were demonstrating up against that, the wall with that position before not as big a deal,
2:05:26 but you have to understand that at what other time really, again, we just talked about being static
2:05:29 throughout the day, but at least you’re getting up to go to the bathroom. At least you’re getting
2:05:34 up to go get a meal. At least you’re getting up to go take a phone call. When else are you pretty
2:05:38 much statically in the same position? I don’t care if you are on your side or on your back or
2:05:44 on your other side or on your stomach, you’re pretty static for seven, eight, nine hours.
2:05:51 There are some effects that can happen to you while sleeping that are significant.
2:05:56 Like there are times people wake up and they feel excruciating amounts of pain. They did something
2:06:00 during the night and they all, I must’ve done something when I slept, right? People say that all
2:06:04 the time because they probably did. They probably did. They either stayed in one position for too long
2:06:10 and weren’t conscious of it, or they positioned themselves over an arm and it kind of, you know,
2:06:14 was in this really strange position for a long period of time because they weren’t conscious of it.
2:06:21 But then there’s the sort of chronic effects of being a certain type of sleeper, like a side sleeper,
2:06:25 especially some that like to sleep in the fetal position. They, they pull their knees up.
2:06:32 The last thing you need is more hip flexion. It’s like sitting, like you’re getting from a chair,
2:06:36 you’re creating your own chair in bed, right? You got another eight, nine hours of being in that
2:06:41 position. Like lengthen them out, you know, get some, get some flexibility or at least, you know,
2:06:47 get some elongation at that joint and those muscles. You know, sleeping with a pillow that is too
2:06:52 fluffy can wreak havoc on your neck. You know, you wake up the next day, most, most of the back pain
2:07:00 sufferers we talked about before. 82%, I believe, of people that, that report sleep disturbance say
2:07:07 it’s from back pain. And what happens, they feel it mostly, 77% of them feel it upon waking. So like,
2:07:10 they’re not feeling it when they’re sleeping, which is even worse because if they did,
2:07:15 they might be able to modify that. They’re feeling it upon waking. And it goes back again,
2:07:20 what we were talking about earlier. You see, it all relates. Like this back pain seems isolated.
2:07:23 And we’re talking about the thoracic spine, that’s back pain. But now I’m talking about
2:07:27 sleeping and that’s back pain. Like all these things relate to each other. That’s why you have
2:07:35 to care about all of it. But being in that position is with that pillow up behind your head causes a lot of
2:07:42 excess flexion of your neck, which can cause issues with the muscles around your neck and with the joints
2:07:47 in your neck over time. So you might like to do that. But I’m telling you, the healthier position
2:07:53 is to sleep with a really flat pillow, a really flat pillow. I myself used to wake up every morning with
2:07:58 some degree of neck stiffness. I switched to a pillow that is pretty much only about one or two inches high,
2:08:03 just enough to support my head. I never have any issues with neck pain again. You’re not abnormally
2:08:08 propping it up. Not to mention if you have any type of sleep apnea issues or breathing issues at night.
2:08:12 The on the back position with the head propped up is going to be worse because you’re closing down
2:08:17 your airway a little bit more. You know, there are some cases where, again, that apnea patient might
2:08:23 want to be on their side. You know, it’s going to be easier for their breathing. But in most cases,
2:08:28 on their back. And also too, interestingly, you know, look, most people have tight calves,
2:08:32 right? Their ankles are, again, we sit all day. We’re not pulling our ankles back towards our head.
2:08:37 We’re not maintaining that mobility in our ankle with our foot moving towards our head. Well,
2:08:41 what happens in a bed? You get in bed, the sheets are kind of tight at the bottom. They’re pulling your
2:08:46 ankles straight down like that, and your feet are pointed the whole night. Further tightening those
2:08:50 calves because they’re just shortening in that position. Especially if you trained your calves that day,
2:08:55 and your muscles repair and regenerate at night, you know, you’re basically repairing them in the
2:08:59 shortened position because your toes are pointed down. I always say, if you’re going to get in bed,
2:09:03 loosen up the sheets at the end of the bed so that you can at least get the ability to move your toes
2:09:08 backwards or they’re freely moving. They’re not being forced into this position. So lots of little
2:09:12 tweaks you can make, and some people think they’re not as important. I think they’re very important given
2:09:16 how long you stay in those positions. Never in any other portion of your day do you spend that much
2:09:20 time in that position. Jeff, what’s the most important thing we haven’t talked about that we
2:09:24 should have talked about as it relates to health, fitness, longevity, and I guess just more broadly,
2:09:34 just living a good life? I think that you don’t want to stress yourself out thinking of all the
2:09:42 things that you need to do because there’s many, and in doing so become paralyzed by an activity and
2:09:46 say I’m not going to do anything at all because I can’t do all of it. I think that’s one of the biggest
2:09:52 things that I see people do is they talk themselves out of it from the very beginning because they think
2:09:55 that the commitment is going to be too much more than what they’re doing right now, too much to ask
2:10:01 and they can’t do it. That’s a mistake. Chip away. We talked about nutrition again. Make that first
2:10:06 pass. Take away the obvious stuff. The stuff you know is just not contributing to a healthier life.
2:10:11 Then make another pass when you’re ready. From a fitness standpoint, get yourself to the gym. Try
2:10:17 to do that first thing we said to take that first action. Get yourself out the door. Get a habit of
2:10:22 doing that over a period of a couple months. You want to start to adopt a more intense training plan or you
2:10:28 want to start to adopt a more intricate training split. Fine. After, don’t worry about it. The most
2:10:34 important thing is to get started and then adopt some of these little things. I’m really noticing
2:10:40 that my thoracic spine is not mobile enough, like Jeff said. I mean, hang from the bar. Do that one
2:10:47 little activity each day. Those are the types of things that will pay big dividends when added up, but
2:10:52 don’t be daunted by the thought that all of them have to be done or you’re not going to be healthy. Any
2:11:00 investment that you make into your body is going to be a good investment that will pay off. Maybe not even
2:11:07 right now, but as you started this with the idea of down the road, like you’re realizing now at 32, it’s going
2:11:15 to matter at 52, 62, 72. And so by doing what you’re doing now, you’re making the right step in the right
2:11:20 direction that can always be intensified as you go. And by the way, your ability to intensify and do
2:11:26 more is going to be so much easier than when you’ve adopted the habit and you actually enjoy what you’re
2:11:31 doing. And rather than making that big departure from what you’re doing now and thinking you’re just
2:11:34 going to all of a sudden start loving all these things, you’re not, and you’re likely going to wind
2:11:39 up making yourself not want to do it. Jeff, thank you for doing what you do because as I said to you
2:11:44 before we started recording, you’ve been the go-to resource for me over the years. And in fact,
2:11:48 whenever I’ve got a challenge, whether it’s like how to build my triceps or how to avoid an injury or
2:11:53 other challenges relating to strength or longevity, all these kinds of things,
2:11:58 I’m always happy when I find your videos because you’re someone that everybody trusts. You’re someone
2:12:03 that presents the information in a really, really clear visual way of, you know, you’re famous for
2:12:08 drawing on your own body, showing how the muscles sort of extend and where the muscles are and the
2:12:13 range of motion. But you’ve helped me for free for a long, long time. Like I think,
2:12:19 I think probably a decade. I think I spent about 10 years as you, you being my sort of personal
2:12:24 trainer. And because this information is free and it’s on YouTube, you would have helped literally
2:12:28 billions of people. I mean, I was looking at your channel. I think you’ve got almost 3 billion views.
2:12:33 It might even be more now just on that one channel alone, but then the clips and everything else and
2:12:37 how that’s inspired other people to become trainers on YouTube. So on behalf of all of those people,
2:12:42 but also on behalf of me, just thank you so much for doing what you do. We have a closing tradition
2:12:45 where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they’re leaving it for.
2:12:55 And the question that has been left for you is what would you change about you first and secondly?
2:13:03 Now answer why haven’t you? Okay. What would I change about me? And then why have I not? Wow.
2:13:16 Oh man. You know, there’s, there’s, there’s not much and I’m thinking off the top of my head here. So
2:13:24 when I identify something that I want to change about myself, I usually do a pretty damn good job
2:13:31 of putting in place steps to, to make that happen. And there are things that are quite personal about
2:13:36 myself. There are things that from a relationship level, there are things from a, you know,
2:13:43 self-improvement standpoint. Like I always seek to identify areas that I can improve and I do make those
2:13:51 changes. And I take, I take it serious and I make steps to do that. So of the things that I’ve wanted to do,
2:14:02 I think I always wanted to be more adventurous. I think that I’m a bit of a, of a homebody. And I
2:14:09 think that I, I, I might, my wife is a big traveler. And I think that I probably would benefit from being
2:14:15 a little bit more adventurous and taking some vacations to places that I would never ordinarily go
2:14:20 to. If I’m looking for a travel partner or someone that could do that, she more than would be willing to
2:14:28 want to do that with me. So I think perhaps I, I wished I would have changed that. I could certainly
2:14:32 use an excuse and say that the boys keep us very busy and, and there’s a lot of reasons why I haven’t,
2:14:36 but it’s probably not a real good excuse because we do find time to go away, but we seem to go back
2:14:40 to the same places all the time. You’re going to give me two, it says first and secondly.
2:14:46 I wish I could be a little bit less judgmental from time to time. And if anything,
2:14:53 just keep it on the side of opinionated, but be, be open to hearing the opinions of others more.
2:15:00 The reason why I haven’t, I think is more of, of wanting to be heard maybe in a, in a time when
2:15:04 I was a kid of not being, I was a third kid. So I was probably not heard as much as I often thought
2:15:09 I, I, I, I wanted to be. So the opinions come out first as a reflex, but if I could do that,
2:15:14 I, I, I still wish I could, I could get a little better. Thank you. Thank you.
2:15:21 I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify and Apple and our audio
2:15:27 channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast haven’t yet hit the follow button or the
2:15:30 subscribe button, wherever you’re listening to this. I would like to make a deal with you.
2:15:35 If you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from now until
2:15:39 forever to make the show better and better and better and better. I can’t tell you how much it
2:15:43 helps when you hit that subscribe button, the show gets bigger, which means we can expand the production,
2:15:47 bring in all the guests you want to see and continue to doing this thing we love. If you could do me that
2:15:51 small favor and hit the follow button, wherever you’re listening to this, that would mean the world
2:15:54 to me. That is the only favor I will ever ask you. Thank you so much for your time.
2:16:19 Thank you.

0:00:05 I think a lot of people don’t realize how massive the positive impact AI is going to have on their life.
0:00:12 Well, I would argue that the idea that this AI disruption doesn’t lead us to human catastrophe is optimistic.
0:00:15 For example, people are going to be unemployed in huge numbers.
0:00:16 You agree with that, don’t you?
0:00:21 Yes. If your job is as routine as it comes, it’s gone in the next couple of years.
0:00:25 But it’s going to create new opportunities for wealth creation.
0:00:31 Let me put it to you this way. We’ve created a new species, and nobody on Earth can predict what’s going to happen.
0:00:37 We are joined by three leading voices to debate the most disruptive shift in human history, the rise of AI.
0:00:40 And they’re answering the questions you’re most cared about.
0:00:43 This technology is going to get so much more powerful.
0:00:48 And yes, we’re going to go through a period of disruption, but at the other end, we’re going to create a fair world.
0:00:51 It’s enabling people to run their businesses, make a lot of money.
0:00:55 And you can solve meaningful problems such as the breakthroughs in global health care and education.
0:00:59 It will be phenomenal, and you can live an incredibly fulfilling existence.
0:01:02 Well, I would just say on that front, this has always been the fantasy of technologists.
0:01:05 To do marvelous things with our spare time, but we end up doom scrolling.
0:01:06 Loneliness epidemic.
0:01:08 Right, falling birth rates.
0:01:12 So the potential for good here is infinite, and the potential for bad is ten times.
0:01:16 For example, there’s war, undetectable beat fakes, and scams.
0:01:20 So people don’t understand how many different ways they are going to be robbed.
0:01:24 Look, I don’t think blaming technology for all of it is the right thing.
0:01:25 All these issues, they’re already here.
0:01:27 They’re all fathers here.
0:01:28 So what are you saying to your children?
0:01:29 Well, first of all…
0:01:36 I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify and Apple
0:01:41 and our audio channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast haven’t yet hit the
0:01:44 follow button or the subscribe button, wherever you’re listening to this.
0:01:45 I would like to make a deal with you.
0:01:49 If you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from
0:01:53 now until forever to make the show better and better and better and better.
0:01:56 I can’t tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button.
0:01:59 The show gets bigger, which means we can expand the production, bring in all the guests you
0:02:02 want to see, and continue to do this thing we love.
0:02:05 If you could do me that small favor and hit the follow button, wherever you’re listening
0:02:06 to this, that would mean the world to me.
0:02:08 That is the only favor I will ever ask you.
0:02:10 Thank you so much for your time.
0:02:22 The reason why I wanted to have this conversation with all of you is because the subject matter
0:02:29 of AI, but more specifically AI agents, has occupied my free time for several weeks in a row.
0:02:35 And actually, Amjad, when I started using Replit, for me, it was a paradigm shift.
0:02:39 There was two paradigm shifts in a row that happened about a week apart.
0:02:43 ChatGPT released that image generation model where you could create any image.
0:02:46 It was incredibly detailed with text and all those things.
0:02:47 That was a huge paradigm shift.
0:02:52 And then in the same week, I finally gave in to try and figure out what this term AI agent
0:02:53 was that I was hearing all over the internet.
0:02:54 I heard Vibe coding.
0:02:55 I heard AI agent.
0:02:57 I was like, I will give it a shot.
0:03:03 And when I used Replit, 20 minutes in to using Replit, my mind was blown.
0:03:06 And I think that night I stayed up till 3 or 4 a.m. in the morning.
0:03:12 For anyone that doesn’t know, Replit is a piece of software that allows you to create
0:03:16 software and pretty much any software you want.
0:03:22 So someone like me with absolutely no coding skills was able to build a website, build in
0:03:28 Stripe, take payment, integrate AI into my website, add Google login to the front of my website,
0:03:30 and do it within minutes.
0:03:34 I then got the piece of software that I had built with no coding skills, sent it to
0:03:36 my friends, and one of my friends put his credit card in and paid.
0:03:40 So I just launched a SaaS company with no coding skills.
0:03:47 To demonstrate an AI agent in a very simple way, I used an online AI agent called Operator
0:03:50 to order us all some water from a CVS around the corner.
0:03:54 The AI agent did everything end to end, and people will be watching it on the screen.
0:03:58 It put my credit card details in, it picked the water for me, it gave the person a tip,
0:03:59 it put some delivery notes in.
0:04:01 At some point, a guy is going to walk in.
0:04:03 He has not interacted with a human.
0:04:05 He’s interacted with my AI agent.
0:04:09 And I just, the reason I use this as an example is, again, it was a paradigm shift moment
0:04:13 for me when I heard about agents about a month ago, and I went on and I ordered a bottle
0:04:14 of electrolytes.
0:04:18 And when my doorbell rang, I freaked out.
0:04:19 I freaked out.
0:04:21 But Amjad, who are you?
0:04:23 And what are you doing?
0:04:27 So I started programming at a very young age.
0:04:31 You know, I built my first business when I was a teenager.
0:04:34 I used to go to internet cafes and program there.
0:04:38 And I realized that they don’t have software to manage the business.
0:04:39 I was like, oh, why didn’t you create accounts?
0:04:40 Why don’t I have a server?
0:04:43 It took me two years to build that piece of software.
0:04:49 And that sort of embedded in my mind, this idea that, hey, like, you know, there’s a lot
0:04:54 of people in the world with really amazing ideas, especially in the context where they live in,
0:04:57 that allows them to build businesses.
0:05:13 However, the main source of friction between an idea and software, or call it an idea, and wealth creation, is infrastructure, is physical infrastructure, is meaning a computer in front of you.
0:05:16 It is an internet connection.
0:05:20 It is the set of tools and skills that you need to build that.
0:05:27 If we make it so that anyone who has ideas, who wants to solve problems, will be able to do it.
0:05:41 I mean, imagine the kind of world that we could live in where no one can be, anyone who has merit, anyone who can think clearly, anyone who can generate a lot of ideas can generate wealth.
0:05:43 I mean, that’s an amazing world to live in, right?
0:05:44 Anywhere in the world.
0:05:51 So with Replit, the company that I started in 2016, the idea was like, okay, coding is difficult.
0:05:52 How do we solve coding?
0:05:58 And we built every part of the process, the hosting, the code editor.
0:06:02 The only missing thing was the, you know, the AI agent.
0:06:15 And so over the past two years, we’ve been working on this AI agent that you can just, you know, similar, since ChatGPT, you know, this revolution with Gen.AI, and you can just speak your ideas into existence.
0:06:17 I mean, this starts, you know, sounding religious.
0:06:23 Like, this is like the, you know, the gods, you know, the myths that humans have created.
0:06:28 They used to imagine a world where you can be everywhere and anywhere at once.
0:06:32 That’s sort of the internet, and you can also speak your ideas into existence.
0:06:35 And, you know, it’s still early.
0:06:41 I think Replit agent is a fantastic tool, and I think this technology is going to get so much more powerful.
0:06:44 Specifically, what is an AI agent?
0:06:52 I’ve got this graph, actually, here, which I don’t need to pass to any of you to be able to see the growth of AI agents.
0:06:54 But this graph is Google search trend data.
0:06:56 This also resembles our revenue, too.
0:06:58 Oh, okay, right.
0:07:00 The water has arrived.
0:07:00 Hello.
0:07:02 Thank you.
0:07:03 You can come on in.
0:07:04 Can I have a go, please?
0:07:06 Yes, it’s 3951.
0:07:07 Great.
0:07:09 Thank you so much.
0:07:09 Thank you.
0:07:09 Thank you.
0:07:13 This is like a supernatural kind of power.
0:07:15 You conjured water.
0:07:17 I conjured water from my mind.
0:07:17 Yeah.
0:07:19 And it’s shown up here with us.
0:07:20 And it clearly thinks we need a lot.
0:07:21 Yeah.
0:07:26 But just to define the term AI agent for someone that’s never heard the term before.
0:07:27 Yeah.
0:07:27 Yeah.
0:07:32 So I assume most of the audience now are familiar with ChatGPT, right?
0:07:34 You can go in and you can talk to an AI.
0:07:36 It can search the web for you.
0:07:38 It has a limited amount of tools.
0:07:43 Maybe it can call a calculator to do some additional subtraction for you.
0:07:44 But that’s about it.
0:07:46 It’s a request-response style.
0:07:54 Agents are when you give it a request, and they can work indefinitely until they achieve
0:07:57 a goal, or they run into an error and they need your help.
0:08:01 It’s an AI bot that has access to tools.
0:08:07 Those tools are access to a web browser, like Operator, access to a programming environment,
0:08:12 say like Replit, access to credit cards.
0:08:15 The more tools you give the agent, the more powerful it is.
0:08:19 Of course, there’s all these considerations around security and safety and all of that stuff.
0:08:26 But the most important thing is that AI agent will determine when it’s finished executing.
0:08:33 Today, AI agents can run for anywhere between 30 seconds to 30 minutes.
0:08:40 There’s a recent paper that came out that’s showing that every seven months, the number
0:08:43 of minutes that the agent can run for is doubling.
0:08:46 So we’re at like 30 minutes now.
0:08:48 In seven months, we’re going to be at an hour.
0:08:50 Then two hours.
0:08:52 Pretty soon, we’re going to be at days.
0:08:57 And at that point, AI agent is doing labor, is doing kind of human-like labor.
0:09:03 And actually, OpenAI’s new model, O3, beat the expectation.
0:09:09 So it sort of doubled coherence over long-horizon tasks in just three or four months.
0:09:16 So we’re in this massive, and I mean, this looks, this exponential graph, you know, that shows
0:09:18 you the massive trend we’re on.
0:09:22 Brett, give us a little bit of your background.
0:09:25 But also, I saw you writing some notes there.
0:09:28 There was a couple of words used there that I thought were quite interesting, especially
0:09:30 considering what I know about you.
0:09:31 The word God was used a few times.
0:09:36 Well, let me just say, I’m an evolutionary biologist.
0:09:51 One of the things that I believe is true about AI is that this is the first time that we have
0:09:58 built machines that have crossed the threshold from the highly complicated into the truly complex.
0:10:08 And I will say I’m listening to this conversation with a mixture of profound hope and dread,
0:10:18 because it seems to me that it is obvious that the potential good that can come from this technology
0:10:20 is effectively infinite.
0:10:23 But I would say that the harm is probably 10 times.
0:10:25 It’s a bigger infinity.
0:10:32 And the question of how we are going to get to a place where we can leverage the obvious power
0:10:36 that is here to do good and dodge the worst harms, I have no idea.
0:10:38 I know we’re not prepared.
0:10:44 So I hear you talking about agents, and I think that’s marvelous.
0:10:49 We can all use such a thing right away, and the more powerful it is, the better.
0:10:54 The idea of something that can solve problems on your behalf while you’re doing something else
0:10:55 is marvelous.
0:11:04 But of course, that is the precondition for absolute devastation to arise out of a miscommunication.
0:11:05 Right?
0:11:12 To have something acting autonomously to accomplish a goal, you damn well better understand what the
0:11:17 goal really is and how to pull back the reins in the event that it starts accomplishing
0:11:24 something that wasn’t the goal, the potential for abuse is also utterly profound.
0:11:35 You know, you can imagine, just pick your dark mirror fantasy dystopia where something has been
0:11:36 told to hunt you down until you’re dead.
0:11:41 And it sees that as a technical challenge.
0:11:50 So I don’t know quite how to balance a discussion about all of the things that can clearly come
0:11:52 from this that are utterly transcendent.
0:11:59 I mean, I do think it is not inappropriate to be invoking God or biblical metaphors here.
0:12:04 You know, you’re producing water seemingly from thin air.
0:12:06 I believe that does have an exact biblical parallel.
0:12:11 So any case, the power is here.
0:12:16 But so too is the need for cautionary tales, which we don’t have.
0:12:21 That’s the problem is that there is no body of myth that will warn us properly of this tool
0:12:29 because we’ve just crossed a threshold that is similar in its capacity to alter the world as
0:12:31 the invention of writing.
0:12:33 I really think that’s where we are.
0:12:39 We’re talking about something that is going to fundamentally alter what humans are with no
0:12:41 plan.
0:12:45 You know, writing alters the world slowly because the number of people who can do it is tiny at
0:12:51 first and remain so for thousands of years, this is changing things weekly.
0:12:56 And that’s an awful lot of power to just simply have dumped on a system that wasn’t well regulated
0:12:57 to begin with.
0:12:59 Dan.
0:13:01 Yeah, so I’m an entrepreneur.
0:13:04 I’ve been building businesses for the last 20 plus years.
0:13:08 I’m completely well positioned between the two of you here.
0:13:12 The excitement of the opportunity and the terror of what could go on.
0:13:21 There’s this image that I saw of New York City in 1900 and every single vehicle on the street
0:13:21 is a horse and cart.
0:13:28 And then 13 years later, the same photo from the same vantage point and every single vehicle
0:13:29 on the street is a car.
0:13:34 And in 13 years, all the horses had been removed and cars had been put in place.
0:13:41 And if you had have interviewed the horses in 1900 and said, how do you feel about your level
0:13:43 of confidence in the world?
0:13:48 The horses would have said, well, we’ve been part of humanity for, you know, horse in hoof,
0:13:52 hand in hoof for many, many years, for thousands of years.
0:13:54 There’s one horse for every three humans.
0:13:55 Like, how bad could it be?
0:13:57 You know, we’ll always have a special place.
0:14:00 We’ll always be part of society.
0:14:06 And little did the horses realize that that was not the case, that the horses were going to
0:14:09 be put out of business very, very rapidly.
0:14:14 And to reason through analogy, you know, there’s a lot of us who are now sitting there going,
0:14:17 hey, wait a second, does this make me a horse in 1900?
0:14:22 I think a lot of people don’t realize how massive these kind of technologies are going to have
0:14:22 as an impact.
0:14:26 You know, one minute we’re ordering water and that’s cute.
0:14:29 And the next minute, it can run for days.
0:14:33 And in your words, it doesn’t stop until it achieves its goal.
0:14:37 And it comes up with as many different ways as it could possibly come up with to achieve its goal.
0:14:41 And in your words, it better know what that goal is.
0:14:48 I’m thinking a lot, Amjad, as Daniel’s speaking about the vast application of AI agents and where are the bounds.
0:14:55 Because if this thing is going to get incrementally smarter, well, incrementally might be an understatement.
0:14:58 It’s going to get incredibly smart, incredibly quick.
0:15:03 And we’re seeing this AI race where all of these large language models are competing for intelligence with one another.
0:15:10 And if it’s able to traverse the internet and click things and order things and write things and create things,
0:15:14 and all of our lives run off the internet today, what can’t it do?
0:15:15 It’s going to be smarter than me.
0:15:17 No doubt.
0:15:18 It already is.
0:15:21 And it’s going to be able to take actions across the internet,
0:15:24 which is pretty much where most of my professional life operates.
0:15:25 It’s like how I build my businesses.
0:15:29 Even this podcast is an internet product at the end of the day.
0:15:32 Because you can create, we’ve done experiments now,
0:15:34 and I can show the graphs on my phone to make AI podcasts.
0:15:38 And they have, we’ve just managed to get it to have the same retention as the driver’s CEO.
0:15:40 Now, with the image generation model.
0:15:42 Retention as in viewer retention?
0:15:46 The percentage of people that get to one hour is the same now.
0:15:49 So we can make the video, we can publish it, we can script it.
0:15:51 You can synthesize my voice.
0:15:52 Sounds like me.
0:15:55 So what is it going to be able to do?
0:15:59 And can you give me the variety of use cases
0:16:02 that the average person might not have intuitively conceived?
0:16:02 Yeah.
0:16:05 So I tend to be an optimist.
0:16:10 And part of the reason is because I try to understand the limits of the technology.
0:16:13 What can it do is anything that we can,
0:16:16 any sort of set of human data that we can train it on.
0:16:22 What can it not do is anything that humans don’t know what to do,
0:16:24 because we don’t have the training data.
0:16:29 Of course, it’s super smart because it integrates massive amount of knowledge
0:16:31 that you wouldn’t be able to read, right?
0:16:32 It also much faster.
0:16:35 It can run through massive amount of computation
0:16:39 that, you know, your brain, you can’t even comprehend.
0:16:41 Because of all of that, they’re smart.
0:16:43 They can take actions.
0:16:47 But we know the limits of what they can do because we train them.
0:16:50 They’re able to simulate what a human can do.
0:16:54 So the reason you were able to order the water there
0:16:56 is because it was trained NSF data.
0:17:00 That includes clicking on DoorDash and ordering water.
0:17:04 I applaud your optimism, and I like the way you think about these puzzles,
0:17:11 but I think I see you making a mistake that we are about to discover is very commonplace.
0:17:15 So we have several different categories of systems.
0:17:16 We have simple systems.
0:17:19 We have complicated systems.
0:17:21 We have complex systems.
0:17:23 And then we have complex adaptive systems.
0:17:31 To most of us, a highly complicated system appears like a complex system.
0:17:32 We don’t understand the distinction.
0:17:37 Technologists often master highly complicated systems.
0:17:40 And they know, you know, for example, a computer.
0:17:43 It’s a perfectly predictable system inside.
0:17:45 It’s deterministic.
0:17:47 But to most of us, it functions.
0:17:51 It is mysterious enough that it feels like a complex system.
0:17:57 And if you’re in the position of having mastered highly complicated systems,
0:18:00 and you look at complex systems, and you think it’s a natural extension,
0:18:05 you fail to anticipate just how unpredictable they are.
0:18:12 So even if it is true that today there are limits to what these machines can do
0:18:19 based on their training data, I think the problem is to see what’s going to happen,
0:18:23 you really want to start thinking of this as the evolution of a new species
0:18:25 that will continue to evolve.
0:18:30 It will partially be shaped by what we ask it to do, the direction we lead it.
0:18:33 And it will partially be shaped by things we don’t understand.
0:18:37 So how does this computer that we have work?
0:18:41 Well, one of the things that it does is we plug them into each other.
0:18:47 Using language, it’s almost as if you’ve plugged an Ethernet cable in between human minds.
0:18:54 And that means that the cognitive potential exceeds the sum of the individual minds in question.
0:18:57 Your AIs are going to do that.
0:19:02 And that means that our ability to say what they are capable of does not come down to,
0:19:04 well, we didn’t train it on that data.
0:19:10 As they begin to interact, that feedback is going to take them to capabilities we don’t anticipate
0:19:13 and may not even recognize once they become present.
0:19:14 That’s one of my fears.
0:19:19 This is an evolving creature, and it’s not even an animal.
0:19:23 If it were an animal, you could say something about what the limits of that capability are.
0:19:32 But this is a new type of biological creature, and it will become capable of things that we don’t even have names for.
0:19:37 Even if it didn’t do that, even if it just stayed within the boundaries that you’re talking about,
0:19:40 you mentioned about it having median level intelligence.
0:19:46 Well, that by definition means 50% of the people on the planet are less intelligent than AI.
0:19:53 You know, to a degree, it’s almost as if we’ve just invented a new continent of remote workers.
0:19:55 There’s billions of them.
0:19:56 They’ve all got a master’s or a PhD.
0:19:58 They all speak all the languages.
0:20:07 Anything that you could call someone or ask someone over the internet to do, they’re there 24-7 and they’re 25 cents an hour, if that.
0:20:15 So, like, if that really happened, like, if we really did just discover that there were a billion extra people on the planet
0:20:21 who all had PhDs and were happy to work for almost free, that would have a massive disruptive impact on society.
0:20:26 Like, society would have to rethink how everyone lives and works and gets meaning.
0:20:30 So, like, and that’s if it just stays at a median level of intelligence.
0:20:32 Like, it’s pretty profound.
0:20:34 I still think it’s a tool.
0:20:39 It’s this power that is there to be harnessed by entrepreneurs.
0:20:43 You know, I think that the world is going to get disrupted, right?
0:20:51 And, you know, this post-war world that we created where you go through life, you go through 12 years of education,
0:20:56 you get to college, and you just check the boxes, you get a job.
0:20:59 We can already see the fractures of that.
0:21:03 It is, you know, this American dream is perhaps no longer there.
0:21:05 And so, I think the world has already changed.
0:21:08 And so, but, like, what are the opportunities?
0:21:09 Obviously, there are downsides.
0:21:14 The opportunities is for the first time, access to opportunity is equal.
0:21:17 And I do think there’s going to be more inequality.
0:21:24 And the reason for this inequality is because, actually, Steve Jobs, you know, made this analogy.
0:21:32 It’s like the best taxi driver in New York is, like, 20% better than the, you know, the average taxi driver.
0:21:35 The best programmer can be 10x better.
0:21:37 You know, we say the 10x engineer.
0:21:43 Now, the variance will be in the 1,000x, right?
0:21:49 Like, the best entrepreneur that can leverage those agents could be better.
0:21:58 It could be 1,000 times better than someone who doesn’t have the grit, doesn’t have the skill, doesn’t have the ambition, right?
0:21:59 So, that will create a world.
0:22:05 Yes, there’s massive access to opportunity, but there are people who will take, you know.
0:22:08 Seize it and then there’ll be people who don’t.
0:22:11 I imagine it almost like a marathon race.
0:22:13 And AI has two superpowers.
0:22:18 One superpower is to distract people, such as TikTok algorithm.
0:22:18 That’s right.
0:22:21 And the other superpower is to make you hyper-creative.
0:22:23 So, you become a hyper-consumer or a hyper-creator.
0:22:30 And in this marathon race, the vast majority of people have got their shoes tied together because AI is distracting them.
0:22:33 Some people are running traditional race.
0:22:35 Some people have got a bicycle.
0:22:37 And some people have got a Formula 1 vehicle.
0:22:45 And it’s going to be very confronting when the results go on the scoreboard and you say, oh, wait a second.
0:22:48 There’s a few people who finished this marathon in about 30 minutes.
0:22:53 And there’s a lot of us who finished in, like, 18 hours because we had our shoes tied together.
0:23:00 And I can’t understand if we’ve got equal opportunity why there’s so much disparity between how fast, you know.
0:23:07 And, you know, I’m using an analogy but this idea that, you know, someone like a lot of people are going to start earning a million dollars a month.
0:23:11 And a lot of people are going to say, hey, I can’t even get a job for $15 an hour.
0:23:14 There’s going to be this kind of interesting wedge.
0:23:25 Well, but I hear in what both of you are saying a kind of assumption that this will all be done on the up and up.
0:23:30 And I do want to just – I am not a doomer.
0:23:36 I agree that the doomers are likely incorrect, that their fears are misplaced.
0:23:40 But I do think we have a question of a related rates problem.
0:23:48 You know, I said the potential for good here is infinite and the potential for bad is 10 times, right?
0:24:06 And what I mean is there are lots of ways in which this obviously empowers people to do things that they were going to be otherwise stuck in the mundane process of learning to code and then figuring out how to make the code work and bring it to market and all of that.
0:24:09 And this solves a lot of those problems, and that’s obviously a good thing.
0:24:15 Really, what we should want is the wealth creation object as quickly as we can get there.
0:24:28 But the problem is, you know, as much as it – that hyper-creative individual is empowered to make wealth, the person who is interested in stealing may be even more empowered.
0:24:32 And I’m concerned about that at a pretty high level.
0:24:39 The abuse cases may outnumber the use cases, and we don’t have a plan for what to do about that.
0:24:45 Can I give you a quick, like, introduction here, like the optimistic view?
0:24:50 OpenAI invented – the first version of GPT came out in 2019.
0:24:53 2020 was GPT-2.
0:25:01 And so OpenAI, you know, now they get a lot of criticism and lawsuit from Elon Musk that they’re no longer open source, right?
0:25:01 Right.
0:25:02 They used to be.
0:25:20 The reason is, in GPT-2, they said, we are no longer going to open source this technology because it’s going to create opportunities for abuse such as, you know, influencing elections, you know, stealing, you know, grandma’s credit card and so on and so forth.
0:25:27 Wouldn’t you say, Brett, that it is kind of surprising how little abuse we’ve seen so far?
0:25:31 I don’t know how much abuse we’ve seen so far.
0:25:32 I don’t know how any of us do.
0:25:44 And I also – even the example that you suggest where ChatGPT is no longer open source to prevent abuse, I’m taking their word for it that that’s the motivation.
0:26:01 Where as a systems theorist, I would say, well, if you had a technology that was excellent at enhancing your capacity to wield power, then open sourcing it is a failure to capitalize on that.
0:26:15 And that the most remunerative use is to keep it private and then either sell the ability to manipulate elections to people who want to do so or sell the ability to have it kept off the table for people who don’t.
0:26:18 And I would expect that that’s probably what’s going on.
0:26:31 There’s no – if you have a technology as transformative as this, giving it away for free is counterintuitive, which leaves those of us in the public more or less at the mercy of the people who have it.
0:26:36 And I don’t see the reason for comfort there.
0:26:53 We are at the dawn of this radical transformation of humans that by its very nature as a truly complex and emergent innovation, nobody on earth can predict what’s going to happen.
0:26:55 We can – we’re on the event horizon of something.
0:27:02 And the problem is, you know, we can talk about the obvious disruptions, the job disruption, and that’s going to be massive.
0:27:10 And does that lead some group of elites to decide, oh, well, suddenly we have a lot of useless eaters and what are we going to do about that?
0:27:13 Because that conversation tends to lead somewhere very dark very quickly.
0:27:22 But I think that’s just the beginning of the various ways in which this could go wrong without the Doomer scenarios coming into play.
0:27:28 This is an uncontrolled experiment in which all of humanity is downstream.
0:27:38 So I was trying to make the point that OpenAI has been sort of wrong about the sort of how big of a potential for harm it is.
0:27:46 Like, you know, I think we would have heard about it in the news, like the sort of how much harm it’s done.
0:27:48 Maybe, you know, some of it is working in the shadows.
0:27:59 But, like, the few incidents that we’ve heard about where, you know, the cause of LLMs, large language models, the technology that’s powering ChatGPT, has been huge headliners.
0:28:10 Like, New York Times talked about this kid that was, you know, perhaps goaded by some kind of chat software that, you know, helps teenagers to be less lonely into suicide, which is tragic.
0:28:16 And, obviously, these are the kind of safety and abuse issues that we want to worry about.
0:28:19 But these are kind of these isolated incidents.
0:28:23 And we do have open source large language models.
0:28:25 Obviously, the thing that everyone talks about is DeepSeq.
0:28:28 DeepSeq is coming from China.
0:28:30 So what is DeepSeq’s incentive?
0:28:36 You know, perhaps the incentive is to destroy the AI industry in the U.S.
0:28:42 You know, when they released DeepSeq, you know, the market tanked, the market for NVIDIA, the market for AI, and all of that.
0:28:44 But there is an incentive to open source.
0:28:46 Meta is open sourcing LLAMA.
0:28:49 LLAMA is another AI similar to ChatGPT.
0:28:57 The reason they’re open sourcing LLAMA, and Zuckerberg just says that out loud, is basically they don’t want to be beholden to open AI.
0:29:00 They don’t sell AI as a service.
0:29:02 They use it to build products.
0:29:06 And there’s this concept in business called commoditize your complement.
0:29:13 Because you need AI as a technology to run your service, the best strategy to do is to open source it.
0:29:20 So these market forces are going to create conditions that I think are actually beneficial.
0:29:22 So I’ll give you a few examples.
0:29:29 One is, first of all, the AI companies are motivated to create AI that is safe so that they can sell it.
0:29:38 Second, there are security companies investing in AIs that allows them to protect from the sort of malicious acting of AI.
0:29:40 And so you have the free market.
0:29:41 And we’ve always had that, you know.
0:29:50 But generally, as humanity, we’ve been able to leverage the same technology to protect against the sort of abuse.
0:29:53 So I don’t really understand this.
0:30:02 And maybe this is actually, this is the exact discussion that you would expect between somebody at the frontier of the highly complicated, staring at a complex system,
0:30:08 and a biologist who comes from the land of the complex and is looking back at highly complicated systems.
0:30:13 In game theory, we have something called a collective action problem.
0:30:26 And in the market that you’re describing, an individual company has no capacity to hold back the abuses of AI.
0:30:28 The most you can do is not participate in them.
0:30:34 You can’t stop other people from programming LLMs in some dangerous way.
0:30:40 And you can limit your own ability to earn based on your own limitations of what you’re willing to do.
0:30:44 And then effectively what happens is the technology gets invented anyway.
0:30:47 It’s just that the dollars end up in somebody else’s pocket.
0:30:54 So the incentive is not to restrain yourself so that you can at least compete and participate in the market that’s going to be opened.
0:31:02 And so the number of ways in which you can abuse this technology, let’s take a couple.
0:31:18 What is to stop somebody from training LLMs on an individual’s creative output and then creating an LLM that can outcompete that individual,
0:31:23 can effectively not only produce what they would naturally produce over the course of a lifetime,
0:31:28 but can extrapolate from it and can even hybridize it with the insights of other people.
0:31:37 So that effectively those who have the LLM can train it on the creativity of others, not cut them in on the use of that insight.
0:31:46 You can effectively end up putting yourself out of business by putting your creative ideas in the world where they get sucked up as training data for future LLMs.
0:31:50 That is unscrupulous, but it’s effectively guaranteed.
0:31:51 In fact, it’s already happened.
0:31:53 So that’s a problem.
0:32:04 And likewise, what would stop somebody from interacting with an individual and training an LLM to become like a personalized con artist,
0:32:06 something that would play exactly to your blind spots?
0:32:07 Well, that does happen.
0:32:08 That is starting to happen.
0:32:16 People get phone calls and it sounds like their daughter and I’ve lost my phone and I’m borrowing a friend’s phone and all of that sort of stuff.
0:32:20 What’s interesting is that I think you make a really good point.
0:32:23 I worry about the impact on society.
0:32:33 And yet when I look at every single individual who uses AI regularly, it almost has nothing but profoundly positive impact on their life.
0:32:48 I look at people like I was just spending some time with my parents-in-law who are in their 70s and early 80s and they use AI regularly for all sorts of things that they find incredibly valuable and that improves the quality of their life.
0:32:58 I personally did an M&A, a mergers and acquisitions deal where I bought a company last year and the AI was so powerful at helping that process.
0:33:07 The conversations were transcribed and they were turned into letters of intent and then press releases and legal documents.
0:33:17 And we probably shaved $100,000 worth of costs and we sped up the whole process and it was pretty magical to see how it could happen.
0:33:23 With that said, you know, there’s all of these like, well, $100,000 worth of lawyers didn’t get paid, right?
0:33:29 Well, what I want to know, yeah, I can all agree that’s all right.
0:33:42 But if we look back at the invention of the cell phone or the invention of the social media platforms, there would be every reason to have exactly the same perspective, right?
0:33:55 I remember the idea that suddenly the process that used to afflict people where you would just lose touch with most of the people who had been important to you, that was not something that needed to happen anymore.
0:34:04 You could just retain them permanently as a part of a diffuse social grouping that just simply grew and value was added.
0:34:13 There’s no end to how much good that did, but what it did to us was profound and not evident in the first chapter.
0:34:27 Say the same thing about the cell phones and the dopamine traps and the way this has disconnected us from each other, the way it has disconnected us from nature, the way it has altered the very patterns with which we think.
0:34:32 It has altered every classroom.
0:34:40 And those things, I think, are going to turn out to have been sort of minor foreshadowings of the disruption that AI will produce.
0:34:42 So I agree with you.
0:34:46 Today, the amount you can do with AI is a tremendous amount of good.
0:34:47 There’s a little bit of harm.
0:34:48 Maybe that’s something we need to worry about.
0:35:01 But as this develops, as we get to peer over the edge of this cliff that we’re headed to, I think we’re going to discover that we can’t yet detect the nature of the alteration that’s coming.
0:35:11 I just wanted to add some context to that because, Amjad, I saw the interview you did in a newsletter in 2023 where you said, I wouldn’t prepare for AGI in the same way that I wouldn’t prepare for the end of days.
0:35:20 It’s effectively the end of days if the vision of AGI that some of these companies have comes to bear because it’s called a singularity moment because you can’t really predict what happens after that.
0:35:23 And so, like, how would you even prepare for that?
0:35:36 And you want to prepare for the more likely world and that world that you can actually predict is a world where, yes, there’s like a massive improvements of technology and there’s like insane compounding effects of technology and it’s pretty hard to keep up.
0:35:44 From that, it appeared that in 2023, you were saying a similar thing to Brett in terms of we can’t see around the corner here because it is a singularity.
0:35:49 So you also used AGI, Artificial General Intelligence.
0:35:52 It’d be interesting to know what your definition of AGI is so that.
0:35:52 Yeah.
0:36:18 So what I was saying there is, even if I’m wrong, that you can actually create a unbounded, seemingly conscious artificial intelligence that can entirely replace humans and can act autonomously in a way that even humans can’t act and can’t coordinate across different AIs, different data centers to take over the world.
0:36:31 So the definition of AGI is artificial general intelligence, meaning that AI can acquire new skills efficiently in the same way that humans can acquire skills.
0:36:33 Right now, AIs don’t acquire skills efficiently.
0:36:40 You know, they acquire a massive amount of energy and compute, entire data center of compute to acquire these skills.
0:36:46 And I think there’s, again, I think there’s a limit on how general intelligence can get.
0:36:54 I think for most of the time, it will be lagging in terms of what humans are capable of doing.
0:36:59 The singularity is based on this concept of intelligence explosion.
0:37:13 So once you create an AGI, once you create an artificial general intelligence, that intelligence will be able to modify its own source code and create the next version that is much more intelligent.
0:37:19 And the next version creates the next version and the next, you know, for infinity, right?
0:37:20 Within a week.
0:37:21 Within a week.
0:37:23 Perhaps within milliseconds at some point, right?
0:37:28 Because it might invent new computing substrate and all of that.
0:37:30 Perhaps it will use quantum computing.
0:37:39 And so then you have this intelligence explosion in a way that is impossible to predict how the world is going to be.
0:37:45 And what I’m saying is, this is sort of like an end of time story.
0:37:47 Like, how would you even prepare for that?
0:37:54 So if that’s coming, like, why would I spend my time preparing for, I think it’s unlikely to happen.
0:37:56 Can’t see around the corner.
0:37:59 Yeah, but I’d rather prepare what I was saying there.
0:38:11 I’d rather prepare for the more likely world in which we have access to tremendous power, but the world is not ending, and humans are still important.
0:38:16 I don’t know why you say more likely.
0:38:19 I mean, I think the structure of your argument is sound.
0:38:24 You would prepare for the world that might happen for which you can prepare.
0:38:29 There’s literally no point in trying to prepare for a world you can’t predict at all.
0:38:34 The only thing you can do is just sort of upgrade your own skills and pay attention.
0:38:50 But if I have one message for the technologists, it’s that your confidence about what this can and cannot do is misplaced because you have, without noticing, stepped into the realm of the truly complex.
0:38:58 In the truly complex, your confidence should drop to near zero that you know what’s going on.
0:38:59 Are these things conscious?
0:39:01 I don’t know.
0:39:02 But will they be?
0:39:07 Highly likely they will become conscious and that we will not have a test to tell us whether that has happened.
0:39:18 Elon Musk predicts that by 2029, we will have AI with us, AGI, that surpasses the combined intelligence of all humans.
0:39:32 And Sam Altman actually wrote a blog three months ago that I read where he said, we are confident now, Sam Altman being the founder of Open Hour, which created ChatGPT, we are confident now that we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it.
0:39:53 When I put these things together, I go back to the central question of what role do humans have in this sort of professional output and GDP creation if it’s smarter than all humans combined, if Elon Musk is correct there, and it’s able to take actions across the internet and continue to learn.
0:39:57 This is like a central question that I’m hoping I can answer today, which is like, where do we go?
0:39:59 Yeah.
0:40:02 I mean, in my vision of the world, we’re in the creative seat.
0:40:11 We’re sitting there where we are controlling swarms of intelligent being to do our job.
0:40:16 You know, the way you run your business, for example, you’re sitting at a computer, you have an hour to work.
0:40:25 And you’re going to launch like a thousand SDR, you know, sales, you know, representative to go like grab as many leads as possible.
0:40:30 And you’re generating a new update on Replit for your website here.
0:40:41 And then on this side, you’re actually, you have an AI that’s crunching data about your existing business to figure out how to improve it.
0:40:44 And then these AIs are kind of somehow all coordinating together.
0:40:48 And I am trying to privilege the human.
0:40:52 Like, this is my mission is to build tools for people.
0:40:55 I’m not building tools for agents.
0:40:56 And agents are a tool.
0:41:05 And so ultimately, not only do I think that humans have a privileged position in the world and in the universe,
0:41:08 we don’t know where consciousness is coming from.
0:41:11 We don’t really have the science to explain it.
0:41:14 I think humans are special.
0:41:19 That’s one side is my belief that humans are special in the world.
0:41:25 And another side, which I understand that the technology today, and I think for the foreseeable future,
0:41:29 is going to be a function of us training data.
0:41:34 So there was this whole idea of like, what if ChatGPT generates pathogens?
0:41:36 Well, have you trained it on pathogens?
0:41:38 They were doing that kind of stuff in Wuhan, no?
0:41:44 I mean, a lot of the biotech companies are essentially using artificial intelligence.
0:41:48 Like, I can think of Abselera, I think it’s Abselera, in Canada.
0:41:56 Their whole business is using AI to create new vaccines, using artificial intelligence and bigger data sets than we’ve never had before.
0:42:00 And I know because I was very close to one of the founders of people involved in Abselera.
0:42:02 So that work is going on anyway.
0:42:07 And if we think about Wuhan, that’s, I mean, it’s quite probably well known now that it came out of a lab and people working in a lab.
0:42:11 And in that scenario, that had a huge impact and shut down the world.
0:42:19 What I’m, the central question I’d love to answer before I throw it back open to the room is, what jobs, because I know that you have this perspective,
0:42:25 what jobs are going to be made redundant in a world where I am sat here as a CEO with a thousand AI agents?
0:42:30 I was thinking of all the names of the people in my company who are currently doing those jobs.
0:42:35 I was thinking about my CFO when you talked about processing business data, my graphic designers, my video editors, et cetera.
0:42:38 So what jobs are going to be impacted?
0:42:39 Yeah, all of those.
0:42:41 So I think-
0:42:41 And what do they do?
0:42:44 You know, maybe this is useful for the audience.
0:42:51 I think if your job is as routine as it comes, your job is gone in the next couple of years.
0:43:05 So meaning if you, in those jobs, for example, quality assurance jobs, data entry jobs, you’re sitting in front of a computer and you’re supposed to click and type things in a certain order.
0:43:12 Operator and those technologies are coming to the market really quickly and those are going to displace a lot of labor.
0:43:13 Accountants?
0:43:14 Accountants.
0:43:14 Lawyers.
0:43:15 Yes.
0:43:23 I mean, I’ve just pulled a ligament in my foot and they did an MRI scan and I had to wait a couple of days for someone to look at the MRI scan and tell me what it meant.
0:43:24 Yeah.
0:43:25 I’m guessing that’s gone.
0:43:26 Yeah.
0:43:31 I think the healthcare ecosystem is hard to predict because of regulation.
0:43:35 And again, there’s so many limiting factors on how this technology can permeate.
0:43:40 It’s the economy because of regulations and people’s willingness to take it.
0:43:47 But, you know, things, unregulated jobs that are purely text in, text out.
0:43:53 If your job, you know, you get a message and you produce some kind of artifact that’s like probably text or images.
0:43:56 That job is at risk.
0:44:01 So just to give you some stats here as well, about 50% of Americans who have a college degree currently use AI.
0:44:06 The stats are significantly lower for Americans without a college degree.
0:44:13 So you can see how a splinter might emerge there and that crack will widen because people like us at this table are all messing around with it.
0:44:17 But my mum and dad in Plymouth in the southwest, rural England, haven’t got it.
0:44:18 Like they just figured out iPhones.
0:44:20 So like I got them an iPhone and now they’re like texting me back.
0:44:22 AI is a million miles away.
0:44:26 And if I start running off with my AGI and my agents, that gap is going to widen.
0:44:30 Women are disproportionately affected by automation, which is what you were talking about there.
0:44:37 With about 80% of working women in an at-risk job compared to just over 50% of men, according to the Harvard Business Review.
0:44:47 And jobs requiring only a high school diploma have an automation risk of 80%, while those requiring a bachelor’s degree have an automation risk of just 20%.
0:44:51 So we can see again how this will cause a sort of inequality.
0:45:00 It’s also a huge risk with business process outsourcing, which is essentially Western countries sending jobs to India, to the Philippines.
0:45:08 Like at the moment, millions of people have been lifted out of poverty through the ability to do those kind of business process outsourcing jobs.
0:45:09 And those are all going to go.
0:45:12 But they’re going to have 1,000 employees.
0:45:17 But also, these people are actually already transitioning to training AIs.
0:45:21 So there’s going to be a massive industry around training AIs.
0:45:22 Until they’re trained.
0:45:24 Well, no.
0:45:26 You have to continuously acquire new skills.
0:45:27 And this is what I’m talking about.
0:45:31 This is, again, if AI is a function of its data, then you need increasingly more data.
0:45:33 And by the way, we ran out of internet data.
0:45:40 I was actually thinking, interestingly, that this might not be great for the United States or the UK, the Western world, because it is going to be a leveler.
0:45:48 When our kid in India doesn’t need a Silicon Valley office and $7 million in investment to throw up a software company, basically.
0:45:48 Yeah.
0:45:54 My belief is that – so I have a more broad definition of AGI and the singularity.
0:46:03 And for me, AGI is do we have artificial general intelligence in terms of, generally speaking, can AI just do stuff that humans used to be able to do?
0:46:05 And we’ve already crossed that point.
0:46:07 We have this general intelligence that we can now all access.
0:46:11 And 800 million people a week are now using ChatGPT.
0:46:14 It’s exploded in the last three months.
0:46:22 And then, to me, a singularity, when the first tractor went out onto a farm, for me, that was a singularity moment.
0:46:26 Because everyone who worked in farming – it used to take 100 people to plough a field.
0:46:32 And now a tractor comes along and two guys with the tractor can now plough the field in just as much time.
0:46:35 And now 98 people out of 100 are completely out of a job.
0:46:39 We also always underestimate a technology.
0:46:47 If it does go on to change history, when you look back through cars, horses, planes, the Wright brothers just thought of a plane as being something the army could use.
0:46:49 We had no idea of the application.
0:46:55 So someone said to me recently, they said, when it does change the world, we underestimate the impact that it will change the world.
0:47:01 And I see people now, with their estimations of AI and AI agents, already incredibly optimistic.
0:47:06 And so if history holds here, we are undershooting the impact it’s going to have.
0:47:12 And I think this is the first time in my life where the industrial revolution analogies seem to fall a little bit short.
0:47:18 Because we’ve never seen intelligence – that’s like you could – I could think of this as a – I’m not an intelligent person on this.
0:47:21 But I could see that as like the disruption of muscles.
0:47:24 Whereas this is the disruption of intelligence.
0:47:35 That’s exactly the thing, is that what makes human beings special is our cognitive capacity and very specifically our ability to plug our minds into each other.
0:47:40 So that the sum is – or the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
0:47:42 That’s what makes human cognition special.
0:47:55 And what we are doing is we are creating a – something that can technologically surpass it without any of the preconditions that make that a safe process.
0:47:58 So, yes, we’ve revolutionized the world how many different times.
0:47:59 It’s innumerable.
0:48:03 But, you know, we’ve made farming vastly more efficient.
0:48:10 That’s different than taking our core competency as a species and surpassing ourselves with the product of our labor.
0:48:13 I think your question is a good one.
0:48:15 Then what does become –
0:48:16 Well, we only have one thing left.
0:48:20 We have our muscles, which we got rid of in the industrial revolution.
0:48:23 And then we have our intellect, which is this digital revolution.
0:48:25 Now we’re left with emotions and agency.
0:48:33 So we essentially – the agency idea – I think we used to judge people on IQ and now IQ is the big leveler.
0:48:40 And now going forward for the next 10 years, we’re going to look at are you a high agency person or a low agency person?
0:48:44 Do you have the ability to get things done and coordinate agents?
0:48:49 Do you have the ability to start businesses or give orders to digital armies?
0:48:59 You know, and essentially these high agency people are going to thrive in this new world because they have this other thing that’s been bubbling under the surface, which is really interesting.
0:49:06 When you said agency is going to remain as an important thing, we’re sat here talking about AI agents.
0:49:12 And the crazy thing in a world of AI agents that have super intelligence is I can just tell my agent, listen, I’m going on holiday.
0:49:18 Please build me a SaaS company that spots a market opportunity, throw up the website, post it on my social media channel.
0:49:19 I’ll be in Hawaii.
0:49:27 And this new agentic world is stealing that too because now it can take action in the same way that I can browse the internet.
0:49:33 I can call Domino’s Pizza, speak to their agentic agent, organize my pizza to be there before I even wake up.
0:49:40 And in fact, predictability, you know, OpenAI now learns and Sam Altman said that they’ve expanded the memory feature.
0:49:43 So it knows every, it’s knowing more and more and more and more about me.
0:49:45 It’ll almost be able to predict what I want when I want it.
0:49:56 It’ll know Steve’s calendar, he’s arriving at the studio, make sure his cadence is on the side, make sure his iPad has the brief on it, do the brief, do the research for me and everything else.
0:49:58 So I’ll remember Brett’s birthday.
0:49:59 So when I arrive, there’ll be something.
0:50:02 In fact, it’s removing my need for any agency.
0:50:09 And, you know, again, I don’t know how to make this point so that it occurs to people what I’m really suggesting.
0:50:13 But today, maybe it’s not conscious.
0:50:16 But, well, let me put it to you this way.
0:50:22 If you’re conscious, you started out as a child that wasn’t.
0:50:28 And although this may not fully encapsulate it, you are effectively an LLM, right?
0:50:33 You go from an unconscious infant to a highly conscious adult.
0:50:44 And the process by which you do that has a lot to do with being trained effectively on words and other things in an environment in exactly the way that we now train these AIs.
0:50:52 So the idea that we can take consciousness off the table, it won’t be there until we figure out how to program it in and we’re safe because we don’t know how consciousness works.
0:50:54 I take the opposite lesson.
0:50:58 We’ve created the exact thing that will produce that phenomenon.
0:51:03 And then we can have philosophers debate whether it’s real consciousness or it just behaves exactly as if it were.
0:51:05 And the answer is those aren’t different.
0:51:05 Doesn’t matter.
0:51:08 And the same thing is true for agency.
0:51:15 You know, especially if you’ve created an environment in which these AIs are de facto competitors.
0:51:21 What you’re effectively doing is creating an evolutionary environment in which they will evolve to fill whatever niches are there.
0:51:23 And we didn’t spell out the niches.
0:51:31 So I have the sense we have created something that truly is going to function like a new kind of life.
0:51:35 And it’s especially troubling because it speaks our language.
0:51:39 So that leads us to believe it’s more like us than it is.
0:51:41 And it’s actually potentially quite different.
0:51:44 By the way, he’s the optimist here.
0:51:51 Like, he’s so optimistic about LLMs and how they’re going to evolve.
0:51:53 Yes, it’s amazing.
0:51:54 It’s amazing technology.
0:51:58 Like, I think it raised global IQ, right?
0:51:59 Like, 800 million people.
0:52:04 Like, 800 million people are that much more intelligent and emotionally intelligent as well.
0:52:10 Like, I know people who previously were very coarse and they kind of robbed people the wrong way.
0:52:14 They would say things in a not-so-polite way.
0:52:23 And then suddenly they started putting their, you know, what they’re saying through ChatGPT in order to kind of make it kinder and nicer.
0:52:24 And they’re more liked now.
0:52:31 And so not only is it making us more intelligent, but also it allows us to be the best version of ourselves.
0:52:35 And the scenario that you’re talking about, I don’t think, I don’t know what’s wrong with that.
0:52:40 Like, you know, I would want less agency in certain places.
0:52:46 Like, I would want something to help me not, you know, open up a peanut butter jar at night.
0:52:48 Right?
0:52:59 You know, there are places in my life where I need more control and I would rather cede it to some kind of entity that could help me make better choices.
0:53:14 I mean, unfortunately, even if there is some small group of elites that are able to go to Hawaii while something else does the mundane details of their business building.
0:53:25 We are rather soon going to be faced with a world that has billions of people who do not have the skills to leverage AI.
0:53:29 Some of them will be necessary for a time.
0:53:32 You’re going to need plumbers.
0:53:53 But this is also not a long-term solution because not only are there not enough of those jobs, but, of course, we have humanoid robots that, once imbued with AI capacity, will also be able to take, you know, they’ll be able to crawl under your house into the crawl space and fix your plumbing.
0:54:09 So what typically happens when you have a massive economic contraction that arises from the fact that a huge number of people are out of work is that the elites start looking at those people and thinking, well, we don’t really need them anyway.
0:54:20 And so the idea that this AI disruption doesn’t lead us to some very human catastrophe, I think, is overly optimistic and that we need to start preparing right now.
0:54:27 What are the rights of a person who has had whatever it is that they’ve invested in completely erased from the list of needs?
0:54:31 Is that person responsible for not having anticipated AI coming?
0:54:36 And is it their problem that they are now starving and they’re being eyed by others as, you know, a useless eater?
0:54:37 I don’t think so.
0:54:47 How is it different than when the, what’s it called, the looming machine came and the textile workers, you know, the result of the Luddite sort of revolution?
0:54:57 How is it different than any time in history when technology automated a lot of people out of jobs?
0:55:00 I would say scale and speed, that’s how it’s different.
0:55:14 And the scale and speed is going to result in an unprecedented catastrophe because the rate at which people are going to be simultaneously sidelined, not just in one industry but across every industry, is just simply new.
0:55:15 And it also did actually happen.
0:55:33 There was a, for the first 50 years of industrialisation from like late 1700s to early 1800s, you actually, the Charles Dickens novels are essentially people coming from the farms who were displaced, arriving in cities, kids living on the streets.
0:55:39 And the British decided to pick everyone up and send them over to Australia, which is where I came from.
0:55:46 And, you know, there were this, there was this massive issue of displacement.
0:56:00 I think we’re going to go into a high-velocity economy where rather than this long arc of career that lasts 45 years, we’re going to have these very fast careers that last 10 months to 36 months.
0:56:08 And you invent something, you take it to market, you put together a team of five to 10 people who work together, you then get disrupted.
0:56:10 Can I mention a story here?
0:56:15 There’s an entrepreneur that uses Replit in a similar way.
0:56:16 His name is Billy Howell.
0:56:19 You can find him on YouTube, on the internet.
0:56:26 He would go to Upwork and he would find what people are asking for, different requests for certain apps, technologies.
0:56:35 Then he would take what they’re asking for, put it into Replit, make it an application, call them, tell them, I already have your application.
0:56:37 Would you pay $10,000 for it?
0:56:41 And so that’s sort of an arbitrage opportunity that’s there right now.
0:56:42 That’s not arbitrage, it’s theft.
0:56:44 How is it, what is it?
0:56:45 How is it theft?
0:56:53 You have somebody who has an idea that can be brought to market and somebody else is cryptically detecting it and then selling back their own idea to them.
0:56:56 Well, they’re paying them to do that.
0:56:59 They’re saying, I will give you $500 if someone makes this for me.
0:57:00 Right.
0:57:09 But this is what I more or less think is going to happen across the whole economy is that, yes, from this perspective, we can see that everybody is suddenly empowered to build a great business.
0:57:14 Well, what do we think about the folks who are going to be displaced from the top?
0:57:25 What are they going to think about all these people building all of these highly competitive businesses and are they going to find a way to do, you know, what venture capital has done or what record producers have done?
0:57:38 What they’re going to do is they’re going to take their superior position at the top and they are going to take most of the wealth that is produced by all of these people who have these ideas that in a proper market would actually create businesses for them.
0:57:48 I think that with this introduction of AI and AI agents, old value has moved.
0:57:52 And now it’s not going to be the case that the idea itself is the moat.
0:57:55 And it’s not going to be the case that resources are the moat.
0:57:58 So in such a scenario, you still have to figure out distribution.
0:58:00 You still have to have, for example, like an audience.
0:58:11 So if you’re a podcaster now, you have a million followers on Twitter, you’re in a prime position because you now have something that the guy with a great idea with no audience has, you have inbuilt distribution.
0:58:19 So I now think actually much of the game might be moving to like, yeah, it’s still about taste and idea, but also the moat is distribution.
0:58:30 Yeah, and speaking of adaptive systems, one of the adaptations that will happen is people will seek humans and will seek proof of humanity.
0:58:50 Oh, I agree that authenticity is going to become the coin of the realm and anything that can be faked or cheated is going to be devalued and things, you know, spontaneous jazz or, you know, comedy that is interactive enough that it couldn’t possibly have been generated with the aid of AI.
0:58:54 Those things are going to become prioritized, you know, spontaneous oratory rather than speeches.
0:58:57 That answers some of your questions.
0:59:04 No, it answers my question for the tiny number of people who are in a position to do those things.
0:59:09 Steven, you used the word moat, which I think is a really important word for entrepreneurs.
0:59:10 We like have to have a moat.
0:59:13 We think a lot about moats and it’s an industrial age.
0:59:16 A lot of people don’t even know what a moat, what you mean by moat.
0:59:17 It’s just the thing that’s…
0:59:20 I often think about this idea of what are the moats that are left.
0:59:26 So to define how I define a moat, you’ve got a castle and it’s got a, like a small circle of water around it.
0:59:32 And once upon a time, that circle of water defended the castle from attack and you can pull up the drawbridge so nobody can attack you very easily.
0:59:34 It’s a defense from something.
0:59:36 So it’s your, it’s your shield.
0:59:37 It’s your, your defense.
0:59:41 And once upon a time as an entrepreneur, you know, I’ve got a software company in San Francisco called Third Web.
0:59:43 And we raised almost $30 million.
0:59:46 We have a team of 50 great developers.
0:59:52 And much of our moat was, you can’t compete with us because you don’t have the 50 developers and the $30 million in the bank.
0:59:55 How much of that $30 million went to coding?
0:59:56 The vast majority of it.
0:59:57 I mean, what else are we going to do?
0:59:58 What else?
0:59:59 This is a good thing.
1:00:01 I think moats are a bad thing.
1:00:04 Let me make the argument there.
1:00:05 So everyone’s looking for moats.
1:00:11 You know, for example, like one of the more significant moats is network effects.
1:00:21 You know, so you can’t compete with Facebook or Twitter because it, to move people from Facebook or Twitter, you need to, it’s the collective action problem.
1:00:28 You need to move them all at once because if one of them moves, then it’s, the network is not valuable.
1:00:29 They’ll go back.
1:00:30 So you have this chicken and egg problem.
1:00:36 Let’s say that we have a more decentralized way of doing social networks.
1:00:42 That will remove the power of Twitter to kind of censor.
1:00:45 And I think you’re at the other end of censorship, right?
1:00:52 And so part of my optimism about humanity is that generally there’s self-correction.
1:00:54 Democracy is a self-correcting system.
1:00:57 Free markets are largely self-correcting systems.
1:01:01 There are obvious problems with free markets that we can discuss.
1:01:06 But take health, you know, there is obesity epidemic.
1:01:22 This period of time when companies, you know, ran loose kind of making this sugary, salty, fatty kind of snacks and everyone gorged on them and everyone got very, you know, unhealthy.
1:01:24 And now you have Whole Foods everywhere.
1:01:27 Today, people in Silicon Valley, they don’t go to bars at all.
1:01:29 They go to running clubs.
1:01:30 That’s how you meet.
1:01:32 That’s how you go find a date.
1:01:33 You go to running clubs.
1:01:38 And so there was a shift that happened because there was a reaction.
1:01:41 Obviously, cigarettes is another example.
1:01:44 You know, you were talking about phones and our addiction to phones.
1:01:46 And I see a shift right now.
1:01:53 Like, in my friend circle, like, people who are constantly kind of on their phones is already kind of frowned upon.
1:01:57 And they don’t want to hang out with you because you’re constantly staring on your phone.
1:01:58 So there’s always these reactions.
1:02:03 But the problem is you reference self-correction.
1:02:07 And I agree that there’s actually an automatic feature of the universe in which the self-correction happens.
1:02:12 You can’t have a positive feedback that isn’t reined in by some outer negative feedback.
1:02:25 But the corrections, the list of corrections involves things like you point to where people become enlightened and they realize that they’re doing themselves harm with either the sugar that they’re consuming or the dopamine traps on their phone.
1:02:27 And they get better.
1:02:35 But also on the list of corrective patterns are genocide and war and, you know, parasitism.
1:02:41 And the problem is these things are destructive of wealth.
1:02:50 And so you allude to the superior fact of an open market without moats.
1:02:56 Presumably the benefit of that is that more wealth gets created because people aren’t kept from doing things that are productive.
1:02:57 I see that.
1:03:03 But then what is the product of all of this new wealth that is going to be generated by a world empowered by AI?
1:03:12 Does it end up so highly concentrated that you have a tiny number of ultra elites and a huge number of people who are utterly dependent on them?
1:03:14 What becomes of those people?
1:03:21 The learning process, the self-correction process, goes through harm in order to get to that more enlightened solution.
1:03:31 There’s nothing that protects us from the harm phase being so apocalyptically terrible that, you know, we get to the other side of it and we say, well, that was a hell of a correction.
1:03:33 Or maybe there’s nobody there to even say that.
1:03:34 Those are also on the table.
1:03:40 It reminds me of a mousetrap where you see the cheese and we’re going, oh, my God, my grandmother is going to be able to do some research.
1:03:41 And, oh, my God, my life is going to get easier.
1:03:45 So you head closer and closer to the cheese and then snap.
1:03:57 And historically, if we look at all of the last 10,000 years, it’s a very small number of elites who own absolutely everything and a very large number of serfs and peasants who have a subsistence living.
1:04:04 You know, if the elites are too greedy and they freeze out the peasants at too high a level and they try to use brutality.
1:04:05 Pitchforks.
1:04:05 Yeah.
1:04:07 Eventually, it comes back to haunt them.
1:04:13 And so what you get is a recognition that you need a system that does balance these things.
1:04:16 And, you know, the West has the best system that we’ve ever seen.
1:04:19 It’s one in which we agree on a level playing field.
1:04:20 We never achieve it.
1:04:22 But we agree that it’s a desirable thing.
1:04:25 And the closer we get to it, the more wealth we create.
1:04:45 But, again, if AI empowers those with ill intent at a higher rate that it empowers those who are wealth-creating and pro-social, we may be in for a massive regression in how fair the market that the West is.
1:04:48 Is that your top concern versus economic displacement?
1:04:51 I think they’re the same thing.
1:04:53 How are they the same thing?
1:04:57 Because the economic displacement is going to start.
1:05:03 I don’t know how many million people are going to be displaced from their jobs in the U.S.
1:05:08 Suddenly, we’re going to have a question about whether or not we have obligations to them.
1:05:09 You agree with that, don’t you?
1:05:10 Yes.
1:05:12 But, again, it’s no pain, no gain.
1:05:15 I mean, we’re going to go through a period of disruption.
1:05:21 And I think at the other end, the old sort of oppressive systems will be broken.
1:05:24 And we’re going to create perhaps a fair world.
1:05:26 But it’s going to have its own problems.
1:05:29 And what’s the scale of that disruption in your estimation?
1:05:35 It’s hard to say because, you know, there’s this concept of limiting factors.
1:05:38 Like, you know, there is regulation.
1:05:41 There’s the appetite of people today.
1:05:47 For example, the health care system is very resistant to innovation because of regulation, you know?
1:05:48 And that’s a bad thing.
1:06:01 On the regulation point, it’s worth saying that when Trump came into power, he signed in a new law, which is called removing barriers to American leadership in AI, which revokes previous AI policies that were deemed to be restrictive.
1:06:05 And obviously, when you think about where the funding is going in AI, it’s going to two places.
1:06:08 It’s going to America, and it’s basically going to China.
1:06:10 That’s the vast majority of investment.
1:06:15 So with those two in competition, any regulation that restricts AI in any way is actually self-sabotage.
1:06:19 And this is, you know, I live in Europe some of the time.
1:06:30 And it’s already annoying to me that when Sam Altman and OpenAI released the O3 model, this new incredible model, it’s not in Europe because Europe has a regulation which prevents it from coming to Europe.
1:06:34 So we’re now at a competitive disadvantage, which Sam Altman’s spoken about.
1:06:43 And more broadly on this point of disruption, I was quite unnerved when I heard that Sam Altman’s other startup was called WorldCoin.
1:07:01 And WorldCoin was conceived with the goal of facilitating universal basic income, i.e., helping to create a system where people who don’t have money are given money by the government just for being alive to help them cover their basic food and housing needs.
1:07:13 Which suggests to me that the guy that has bought the biggest AI company in the world can see something that a lot of us can’t see, which is there’s going to need to be a system to just hand out money to people because they’re not going to be able to survive otherwise.
1:07:15 I fundamentally disagree with that.
1:07:16 Which part do you disagree with?
1:07:20 I disagree that, first of all, that humans would be happy with UBI.
1:07:29 I think that, you know, a core value of humans, and be curious about the evolutionary reasons, is we want to be useful.
1:07:36 It’s really important to know that a lot of the jobs that are at risk are the most high-status, highly-paid jobs in the world.
1:07:40 Let’s take the highest-paid job in America, which is an anesthesiologist.
1:07:44 This is the highest-paid job.
1:07:45 Highest-paid, salaried job.
1:07:46 Salaried job, yeah.
1:08:02 And the majority of that job is observing a patient, knowing which type of medication would work best with their body, giving them the exact right amount, monitoring the impact of that on the body, and then making slight adjustments.
1:08:06 The right technology and any nurse will be able to do that job.
1:08:23 And you might have one anesthesiologist on site supervising 10, 20, 30, 40 wards, and the technology is, you know, doing the job, but that one person is there just to kind of supervise if something went wrong or if there was an ethical dilemma.
1:08:24 What’s wrong with that?
1:08:26 I mean, if the precision is better with AI.
1:08:35 Oh, no, there’s nothing wrong with that except for the fact that a lot of people, hundreds of thousands of people, have spent their entire life training to be that.
1:08:40 They get an enormous amount of purpose and satisfaction about the fact that that’s their career, that’s their job.
1:08:41 They have mortgages.
1:08:42 They have houses.
1:08:43 They have status.
1:08:44 And that’s about to go away.
1:08:47 Well, if it’s highest-paid jobs, maybe you should start saving.
1:09:14 Well, I mean, but I hear you, but you’re talking about people who have done vital work, highly specialized work, and are therefore not in a great position to pivot based on the invention of a technology that they didn’t see coming because, frankly, I mean, in the abstract, maybe we all saw AI coming somewhere down the road.
1:09:19 But we did not know that it was going to suddenly dawn, and we do have to figure out what to do with those people.
1:09:27 It’s not their fault that they’ve suddenly become obsolete, and it’s inconceivable that people will accept this.
1:09:31 It is fundamentally incompatible with our nature.
1:09:43 We have to have things to strive for, and you can sustain life that way, but you cannot sustain a meaningful existence, and so it’s a short-term plan at best.
1:09:45 Let’s talk about meaning.
1:09:48 On that point of job displacement, this is already happening.
1:10:07 Klarna, CEO, who has been on this podcast before, a great guy, said to, on a blog post that they published on Klarna’s website, saying that they now have AI customer service agents handling 2.3 million chats per month, which is equal to having to hire 700 full-time people to do that.
1:10:14 So they’ve already been able to save on 700 customer service people by having AI agents to do that.
1:10:17 And they actually got rid of those 700 jobs, right?
1:10:19 I don’t have that information in front of me, but I’ll have a look.
1:10:23 I’ll throw it up on screen for anyone that wants context on that.
1:10:24 But that’s already happening.
1:10:26 This isn’t an anesthetologist or something.
1:10:29 And these aren’t high-paid people in every case.
1:10:30 We’ve done something similar, by the way.
1:10:36 Internally, we’ve replaced that function for 70%.
1:10:40 I mean, our company, we’re 65 people.
1:10:46 And we make millions per head.
1:10:49 Are you going to need to hire more people to get up to?
1:10:51 I think so, but we’re hiring slowly.
1:10:58 We’re using customer support AI, and that meant that we need less customer support.
1:11:01 We’re trying to leverage AI as much as possible.
1:11:07 Well, the person in HR at Replit writes software using Replit.
1:11:08 So I’ll give you an example.
1:11:12 She needed org charts software.
1:11:17 And she looked at a bunch of them, got a lot of demos, and they’re all very expensive.
1:11:20 And they’re missing the kind of features that she wants.
1:11:22 For example, she wanted, like, version control.
1:11:25 She wanted to know when something changed and to go back in history.
1:11:30 She went into Replit, and in three days, she got exactly the kind of software that she wants.
1:11:31 And what was the cost?
1:11:34 You know, perhaps $20, you know, something like that, $20, $30.
1:11:36 Once, right?
1:11:39 And how many employees in HR do we need?
1:11:40 Right now, we have two.
1:11:47 If they’re highly levered like that, maybe we do not need a 20 HR team.
1:11:54 On this point of meaning, I’ve heard so many billionaires in AI describe this as the age of abundance.
1:11:58 And I’m not necessarily sure if abundance is always a great thing.
1:12:10 Because, you know, when we look at mental health and we look at why, how people derive their meaning and their purpose in life, much of it is having something to strive towards and some struggle in a meaningful direction to you.
1:12:12 And this is maybe adjacent.
1:12:17 But when there was a study done, I think it was in Australia, where they looked at suicide letters.
1:12:24 And in the suicide letters, the sentiment of men in those suicide letters was they didn’t feel worthy.
1:12:26 They didn’t feel like they were worth it.
1:12:29 They didn’t feel like they were needed by their families.
1:12:33 And this is much of what caused their psychological state.
1:12:44 And I wonder in a world of abundance where we, you know, a lot of these AI billionaires are telling us that we’re going to have so much free time and we’re not going to need to work if there is at all going to be a crisis of meaning, a mental health problem.
1:12:46 I mean, there already is.
1:12:49 And it doesn’t require AI and it’s going to get worse.
1:13:01 I don’t know what to do about it because essentially as human beings, we are built, like all organisms, to find opportunity and figure out how to exploit it.
1:13:02 That’s what we do.
1:13:05 And the world you’re describing is really the opposite of that.
1:13:24 It’s one where you’re effectively having your biological needs at the physiological level satisfied and there isn’t an obvious place for your spare time, if that’s what you end up with, to be utilized in something that, you know, there’s no place to strive.
1:13:40 And I do imagine almost at best what would happen is you have people who are being sustained by a universal basic income and then parasitized, you know, whatever currency they have to spend.
1:13:48 Somebody will be targeting it and they will be targeting it with an AI augmented system that spots their defects of character.
1:13:57 I mean, again, we’re already living in this world, but it will be that much worse when the AI is figuring out, you know, what kind of porn to target you with specifically.
1:14:00 That’s a nightmare scenario.
1:14:15 And I do think it would be worth our time as a species to start considering if we are about to find ourselves in this situation and we find some way of dealing with the basic needs of the large number of people who are going to be sidelined.
1:14:27 What would a world have to look like in order for them to have real meaning, not pseudo meaning, not something that, you know, superficially, you know, a video game is not meaning, even if it feels very meaningful in the moment.
1:14:32 I think that would be a worthy investment for us to figure out how to produce it.
1:14:38 But frankly, I’m not expecting us to either have that conversation or get very far down that road.
1:14:44 I think it’s much more likely that we will squander the wealth dividend that will be produced by AI.
1:14:50 Interestingly, you also see in Western countries that when we get more abundance, we start having less kids.
1:14:56 And we’re already seeing this sort of population decline in the Western world, which is kind of scary.
1:14:58 And I think it’s often associated with affluence.
1:15:03 The more money someone makes, the less likely they are to want to have children, the more they try and protect their freedoms.
1:15:07 But also on this point of AI, relationships are hard.
1:15:13 You know, my girlfriend is happy sometimes and not happy other times.
1:15:17 And I have to, like, you know, go through that struggle with her of, like, working on the relationship.
1:15:19 Children are hard.
1:15:28 And if we are optimizing ourselves, and, you know, much of the reason that I sustain the struggle with my girlfriend is, I’m sure, from some evolutionary reason, because I want to reproduce.
1:15:29 And I want to have kin.
1:15:40 But if I didn’t have to deal with the struggle that comes with human relationships, romantic or platonic, there’s going to be a proportion of people that actually choose that outcome.
1:15:44 And I wonder what’s going to happen to birth rates in such a scenario, because we’re already struggling.
1:15:55 We’re already in a situation where we used to be having five children per woman in the 1950s to about two in 2021.
1:15:57 And we’re seeing a decline.
1:16:03 If you look at South Korea, their fertility rate has fallen to 0.72, the lowest recorded globally.
1:16:08 And if this trend continues, the country’s population could half by 2,100.
1:16:13 So, yeah, relationships, connections.
1:16:22 And also, I guess we’ve got to overlay that with the loneliness epidemic, which is they promised us social connection when social media came about.
1:16:25 When we got Wi-Fi connections, the promise was that we would become more connected.
1:16:38 But it’s so clear that because we spend so long alone, isolated, having our needs met by Uber Eats drivers and social media and TikTok and the internet, that we’re investing less in the very difficult thing of, like, going and making a friend.
1:16:40 And, like, going and finding a girlfriend.
1:16:42 Young people are having sex less than ever before.
1:16:51 Everything that is associated with the difficult job of making in-real-life connections seems to be falling away.
1:17:02 I’ll make the case that everything that we’ve discussed here, all the negative things around loneliness, around meaning, they’re already here.
1:17:07 And I don’t think blaming technology for all of it is the right thing.
1:17:17 Like, I think there are a lot of things that happened because of existing human, you know, impulses and motivations.
1:17:25 Well, I wanted to go back to where you started because I do think that this maybe is the fundamental question.
1:17:30 Why is it that we are already living in a world that is not making us happy?
1:17:32 And is that the responsibility of technology?
1:17:34 And I don’t think it’s exactly technology.
1:17:44 Human beings among our gifts are fundamentally technological, whether we’re talking about quantum computing or flintknapping an arrowhead.
1:17:57 What has happened to us that has created the growing, spreading, morphing dystopia is a process that Heather and I in our book,
1:18:00 A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, call hypernovelty.
1:18:10 Hypernovelty is the fact of the rate of change outpacing our capacity to adapt to change.
1:18:17 And we are already well past the threshold here where the world that we are young in is not the world that we are adults in.
1:18:22 And that mismatch is making us sick across multiple different domains.
1:18:31 So the question that I ask is, is the change that you’re talking about going to reduce the rate of change?
1:18:39 In which case, we could build a world that would start meeting human needs, better open opportunities for pursuing meaningful work.
1:18:45 Or is it going to accelerate the rate of change, which is, in my opinion, guaranteed to make us worse off?
1:18:49 So if it was a one-time shift, right, AI is going to dawn.
1:18:51 It’s going to open all sorts of new opportunities.
1:18:53 There’s going to be a tremendous amount of disruption.
1:18:55 But from that, we’ll be able to build a world.
1:18:57 Is that world going to be stable?
1:19:01 Or is it going to be just, you know, one event horizon after the next?
1:19:09 If it’s the latter, then it effectively says what it does to the humans, which is it’s going to dismantle us.
1:19:14 When I look out at society, I go, okay, it’s having a negative impact.
1:19:20 When I look at individual use cases, it’s having a profoundly positive impact, including for me.
1:19:22 It’s having a very positive impact.
1:19:31 So it’s one of these things where I wonder, what is it that we need to teach people at school so that they understand the world that we’re going into?
1:19:46 Because one of the biggest issues that we’re having is that we’re sending kids to school with this blueprint, this template, that they’re going to have this long arc career that no longer exists, that essentially we’re treating them like learning LLMs.
1:19:49 And we’re saying, okay, we’re going to prompt you.
1:19:50 You’re going to give us the right answer.
1:19:56 You’re going to hallucinate it if possible and, you know, and then we go, okay, now go off into the world.
1:19:57 And they go, oh, but wait a second.
1:19:58 I don’t know how money works.
1:19:59 I don’t know how society works.
1:20:01 I don’t know how my brain works.
1:20:04 I don’t know how I’m meant to handle this novelty problem.
1:20:09 I’m not sure how to approach someone in a social situation and ask if they want to go on a date.
1:20:20 So all the important things that actually are the important milestones that people want to be able to hit and that technology can actually have an impact on, we get no use of manual.
1:20:31 So I think one of the biggest things that has to happen is we have to equip young people all through school to actually prepare them for the world that’s coming or the world that’s here.
1:20:37 Well, on the one hand, I think you outlined the problem very well.
1:20:45 Effectively, we have a model of what school is supposed to do that, you know, at best was sort of a match for the 50s or something like that.
1:20:51 And it woefully misses the mark with respect to preparing people for the world they actually face.
1:21:01 If we were going to prepare them, I would argue that the only toolkit worth having at the moment is a highly general toolkit.
1:21:09 The capacity to think on your feet and pivot as things change is the only game in town with respect to our ability to prepare you in advance.
1:21:20 Maybe the other auxiliary component to that would be teaching you what we know, which is frankly not enough, about how to live a healthy life, right?
1:21:34 If we could induce people into the kinds of habits of behavior and consumption of food and then train them to think on their feet, they might have a chance in the world that’s coming.
1:21:40 But the fly in the ointment is we don’t have the teachers to do it.
1:21:41 We don’t have people who know.
1:21:52 And that is the question is could the AI actually be utilized in this manner to actually induce the right habits of mind for people to live in that world?
1:21:55 I spend a lot of time in education technology.
1:22:04 One thing that is, as we say on the internet, a black pill about education in general, education intervention, is there’s a lot of data.
1:22:12 That shows that there are very little interventions you can make in education to generate better outcomes.
1:22:24 And so there’s been a lot of experiment around pedagogy, around how to configure the classroom that have resulted in very marginal improvements.
1:22:34 There’s only one intervention, and this has been reproduced many times, that creates two sigma, two standard deviation positive outcomes in education.
1:22:39 Meaning you’re better than 99% of everyone else.
1:22:42 And that is one-on-one tutoring.
1:22:43 I thought so.
1:22:45 I was going to say smaller classrooms and personalization.
1:22:46 One-on-one tutoring, yeah.
1:22:54 And by the way, if you look, someone also did a survey of all the geniuses, the understanders of the world, and found that they all had one-on-one tutoring.
1:22:58 They all had someone in their lives that took interest in them and tutored them.
1:23:04 So what can create one-on-one tutoring optionally for every child in the world?
1:23:05 AI.
1:23:06 Yeah.
1:23:08 My kids use it, and it’s incredible.
1:23:08 Yeah.
1:23:13 As in, like, they’re interacting, and it’s adapting to their speed.
1:23:13 Yes.
1:23:16 And it’s giving them different analogies to work with.
1:23:25 So, like, you know, my son was learning about division, and it’s asking him to smash glass and how many pieces he smashes it into with this hammer.
1:23:28 And, you know, and it’s saying things like, no, Xander, go for it.
1:23:29 Really smash it.
1:23:31 And he’s loving it, right?
1:23:32 Is that synthesis?
1:23:33 Yeah.
1:23:33 Yeah.
1:23:34 I’m an investor in this guy.
1:23:40 Oh, well, it’s great to watch that simulated one-on-one tutoring because it’s talking to him.
1:23:42 It’s asking him questions.
1:23:43 Brett, you’re an educator.
1:23:47 You spent much of your life teaching people in universities.
1:23:50 How do you receive all of this?
1:23:56 Well, on the one hand, I agree that the closer to one-to-one you get, the better.
1:24:01 But I also personally believe that zero-to-one is best.
1:24:13 And what I mean by that is part of what’s gone wrong with our educational system is that it is done through abstraction.
1:24:22 And effectively, the arbiter of whether you have succeeded or failed in learning the lesson is the person at the front of the room.
1:24:27 And that’s okay if the person at the front of the room is truly insightful.
1:24:32 And it’s terrible if the person at the front of the room is lackluster, which happens a lot.
1:24:40 So what doesn’t work that way is interaction with the physical world in which nobody has to tell you whether you’ve succeeded or failed.
1:24:46 If you’re faced with an engine that doesn’t start, you can’t argue it into starting.
1:24:49 You have to figure out what the thing is that has caused it to fail.
1:24:54 And then there is a great reward when you alter that thing and suddenly it fires up.
1:25:02 So I’m a big fan of being as light-handed as possible and as concrete as possible in teaching.
1:25:09 In other words, when I’ve done it, and not just with students but with my own children, I like to say as little as possible.
1:25:15 And I like to let physical systems tell the person when they’ve succeeded or failed.
1:25:19 And that creates an understanding you can extrapolate from one system to the next.
1:25:23 And you know that you’re not just extrapolating from one person’s misunderstanding.
1:25:26 You’re extrapolating from the way things actually work.
1:25:31 So I don’t know if AI can be leveraged in that context.
1:25:35 My sense is there’s probably a way to do it, but one would have to be deliberate about it.
1:25:38 Especially with robotics and humanoid robots.
1:25:43 Actually, that is the place where you can do this is with robotics.
1:25:48 That, it seems to me, yeah.
1:25:52 Well, robotics will teach you the physical computing part of it.
1:26:07 And then the question is how do you infuse this with AI so that it is, you know, it provokes you out of some eddy where you’re caught and moves you into the ability to solve some next-level problem that you wouldn’t have found on your own.
1:26:11 What do you think should be taught in the classroom with everything that you now know?
1:26:13 Well, you’re all fathers here.
1:26:15 You all have your own children.
1:26:17 So it’s a good question.
1:26:17 Yeah.
1:26:19 How old are your kids?
1:26:19 How old are your kids?
1:26:21 Three and five.
1:26:22 19 and 21.
1:26:24 And six, seven, and 10.
1:26:28 My children are very young, but we already do use AI.
1:26:33 And I sit down with them in front of Repli and we generate ideas and make games.
1:26:37 And I would say, you know, what Brett said about generality is very important.
1:26:40 The ability to pivot and kind of learn skills quickly.
1:26:43 Being generative is very, very important.
1:26:49 Having a, you know, a fast pace of generating ideas and iterating of those ideas.
1:26:53 We sit down in front of ChatGPT and my kid imagines scenario.
1:26:56 Oh, what if, you know, there’s a cat on the moon?
1:26:59 And then, you know, what if the moon is made of cheese?
1:27:01 And what if there’s a mouse inside it?
1:27:07 And so we keep generating these variations of these different ideas.
1:27:11 And I find that, you know, makes them more imaginative and creative.
1:27:17 Rule number one that I tell my kids is stay away from porn at all costs.
1:27:19 I’d rather you have a drug problem than a porn problem.
1:27:20 And I actually mean that.
1:27:25 I think porn is more dangerous to the human being, as bad as a drug problem is.
1:27:35 But when we get to the question of how to confront the world and the things that you’re going to be expected to do in the workplace and all of that,
1:27:48 my point to them is you are facing the dawning of the age of complex systems that you are going to have to interact with.
1:27:54 And in the age of complex systems, you have to understand that you cannot blueprint a solution.
1:28:07 And you have to approach these systems with a upgraded toolkit of humility because the ability of the system to do something you don’t predict is much greater than a highly complicated system.
1:28:15 So you have to anticipate that and be very sensitive to the fact that what you intended to happen is not what’s going to happen.
1:28:24 So you have to monitor the unintended consequences of whatever your action is and that there are really two tools which work, one of which you just mentioned, which is the prototyping.
1:28:26 You prototype things.
1:28:29 You don’t imagine that I know the solution to this and I’m going to build it.
1:28:32 You imagine, I think there’s a solution down there.
1:28:35 I’m going to make a proof of concept and then I’m going to discover what I don’t know.
1:28:38 And I’m going to make the next version, discover what I don’t know.
1:28:42 And eventually you may get to something that actually truly accomplishes the goal.
1:28:44 So prototyping is one thing.
1:28:50 And also, instead of using the blueprint as the metaphor in your mind, navigate.
1:28:52 You can navigate somewhere.
1:29:02 And, you know, the way I think of it is a surfer is in some ways mastering a complex system.
1:29:05 But they’re not doing it by planning their days surfing down the waves.
1:29:06 You can’t do that.
1:29:15 What you can do is you can be expert at absorbing feedback and navigating your way down the wave and that that’s the right approach for a complex system.
1:29:16 Nothing else is going to work.
1:29:23 And so I guess the final piece is general tools always, no specialization.
1:29:28 This is the age of generalists and invest in those tools and they will pay.
1:29:34 So the guiding philosophy for me is to produce high agency generalists.
1:29:41 Ultimately, I want them to be motivated, self-starters, and have a wide general toolkit.
1:29:48 I imagine them very much what you imagine, which is instructing robots, instructing agents, coming up with ideas.
1:30:00 And I imagine them having a very high velocity life where they may be writing a book, organizing a festival, having a podcast, starting a business, and being part of somebody else’s business all at once.
1:30:01 As they are of the ADHD.
1:30:02 Yeah.
1:30:07 So the high agency generalist is the kind of guiding philosophy.
1:30:10 Some of the things that we do is like we do chess.
1:30:11 We do Brazilian jiu-jitsu.
1:30:12 We do dancing.
1:30:19 We do acting classes, playing in nature, entrepreneurship, understanding that you can start a lemonade.
1:30:21 We just did lemonade stands, which was amazing.
1:30:23 We sold lots of lemonade on the street.
1:30:34 So those kind of things and jumping from one thing to the next thing, but also trying to avoid too many screens and forcing them into making stuff from what’s going on around the house.
1:30:44 Some distinctions that we try and give them is the difference between creating and consuming, because I think AI has this superpower of making you a hyper-consumer or a hyper-creator.
1:30:59 And if you don’t understand the distinction between creation and consumption, you end up falling into the consumption trap, whether it be porn or just news or things that feel like you’re productive, but you’re actually just consuming stuff.
1:31:01 Wouldn’t that be the most successful AI?
1:31:04 The one that plays with my dopamine the most?
1:31:11 Yeah, and makes you think that you’re achieving something when you’re actually just consuming something.
1:31:18 So trying to give them the understanding that there is this difference in their life between creation and consumption and to be on the creation side.
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1:32:21 The thing that we, I think, all agree on is that this is inevitable. Do you agree with that, Brett?
1:32:25 I think it’s sad that it is inevitable, but at this point, it is.
1:32:27 And what part of it do you find sad?
1:32:40 We have squandered a long period of productivity and peace in which we could have prepared for this moment.
1:32:54 And our narrow focus on competition has created a fragile world that I’m afraid is not going to survive the disruption that’s coming.
1:32:57 And it didn’t have to be that way. This was foreseeable.
1:33:06 I mean, frankly, the movie 2001, which came out the year before I was born, anticipates some of these problems.
1:33:11 And, you know, we treated it too much like education.
1:33:14 I mean, like entertainment and not enough like education.
1:33:24 So we are now, you know, we’ve had the AI era opened without a discussion about its implications for humanity.
1:33:29 There is now, for game theoretic reasons, no way to slow that pace.
1:33:35 Because as you point out, if we restrain ourselves, we simply put the AI in the hands of our competitors.
1:33:37 That’s not a solution, so I don’t advocate it.
1:33:40 But there’s a lot more preparation we could have done.
1:33:45 We could have recognized that there were a lot of people in jobs that were about to be obliterated.
1:33:54 And we could have thought deeply about what the moral implications were and what the solutions at our disposal might have been.
1:33:59 And having not prepared, it’s going to be a lot more carnage than it needed to be.
1:34:03 Amjad, I heard you say a second ago that what we should be talking about is how we deal with job displacement.
1:34:05 Do you have any theories?
1:34:16 If you were prime minister or president of the world and your job was to deal with job displacement, let’s just say in the United States, how would you go about that?
1:34:34 The first thing I would do is teach people about these systems, whether it’s programs on the TV or outreach or what have you, just trying to get people to understand how chat GPT works, how these algorithms work.
1:34:50 And as the new jobs arrive, I think there’s going to be an opportunity for people to be able to detect that this job requires this set of skills and I have this kind of experience.
1:34:55 And although my experiences are potentially outdated, I can repurpose that experience to do that job.
1:34:56 I’ll give you an example.
1:35:09 A teacher, his name is Adil Khan, you know, he started using at the time GPT-3 and felt like it does amazing work as a tools for teachers or even potentially a teacher itself.
1:35:14 So he learned a little bit of coding and he went on Replit and he built this company.
1:35:19 And just two years later, they’re worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
1:35:23 Obviously, not everyone will be able to create businesses of that scale.
1:35:33 But because you have an experience in a certain domain, you’ll be able to build the next iteration of that user technology.
1:35:42 So even if your job was displaced, you’ll be able to figure out, you know, what potentially comes after that.
1:35:50 So I think people’s expertise that they built, I don’t think they’re all for waste, even if your job went away.
1:35:53 You can never really predict what jobs are coming.
1:36:01 I mean, I think of this crazy situation where I tell my grandfather what is a personal fitness trainer.
1:36:08 And he would, his mind would be blown by this idea that, well, okay, I don’t really want to go to the gym.
1:36:12 So I have to make an appointment and pay someone to go to the gym and meet with me there.
1:36:16 And then he stands there and tells me to lift heavy things that I don’t really want to lift.
1:36:20 And then he counts them and tells me that I’ve done a good job.
1:36:22 And then I put the heavy things down.
1:36:25 And then at the end of that, I feel really good and I pay him a bunch of money.
1:36:28 My grandfather would be like, what on earth have you been scammed?
1:36:33 So we can never predict what this future of jobs would look like.
1:36:41 Even just 20, 30, 40 years apart, the jobs rapidly and convincingly just can morph into something else.
1:36:45 I think it’s very dangerous, the idea that we need to focus on skills.
1:36:47 I think the future is not in skills.
1:36:48 Skills are being replaced.
1:36:54 It’s this idea that the education system has to stop being compartmentalized and has to be a lifelong learning approach.
1:37:02 The Department of Education needs to be seeing people as lifelong learners who are constantly disrupted and need re-education.
1:37:03 Interesting.
1:37:04 That that’s going to be a thing.
1:37:10 The Department of Education needs to start as a kid and go right through to maybe 70.
1:37:13 Does the Department of Education have a role anymore at all?
1:37:14 Depends on your definition of education.
1:37:23 I think if you’re trying to teach kids to remember facts and figures from a history book, then no.
1:37:35 But if it’s about coaching, mentoring, being displaced, finding the next thing, and maybe if it’s AI-driven and all of those kind of things, then it’s a different paradigm shift around what education is and what its purpose is.
1:37:48 And if we see it as a fluid thing where we wave into an opportunity and then wave back into education, spotting a new opportunity and then back here, if we’re learning, rather than skills, but we’re learning tools.
1:37:52 So it’s a tools-based education as opposed to a skills-based education.
1:37:59 The purpose of education for most of human history was about virtue, about becoming a great person who had good judgment and who had good values.
1:38:01 And we don’t really do much of that anymore.
1:38:12 But I think if we essentially said, if we get back to what is, if we ask the question, what is the purpose of education and where does it fit in our lives and what time frame does it go for?
1:38:18 And then we just trust that people are going to come up with weird and wonderful jobs.
1:38:27 You know, this sounds crazy, but also, and this is a weird analogy, my cat is incredibly happy.
1:38:28 How do you know?
1:38:33 Well, it demonstrates all the characteristics of being a happy cat.
1:38:38 And it lives in a world of superintelligence as far as it’s concerned.
1:38:41 So there’s this house and food just magically happens.
1:38:46 It has no idea that there’s this Google calendar that runs a lot of things that happen around it.
1:38:48 The food gets delivered.
1:38:53 Money is magically made by something that is inconceivably more intelligent than the cat.
1:38:59 And yet the cat has evolved to be living this life of purpose and meaning inside the house.
1:39:02 And as far as it’s aware, it’s got a great life.
1:39:08 But you have the power at any moment, if you’re having a bad day, to do something not so pleasant to that cat.
1:39:10 And it can’t really reciprocate that.
1:39:11 Exactly.
1:39:14 But what’s in it for me to hurt the cat?
1:39:18 Because in this analogy…
1:39:21 You might want to move house and the landlord doesn’t allow cats.
1:39:22 So you’ve got a decision to make.
1:39:27 There are things that the cat is highly disrupted by due to no fault of the cat.
1:39:28 I get it.
1:39:44 But as far as cat existence goes and the history of cats, if you were to ask that cat, do you want to trade places with any of the other cats that came before you, it would probably say, I don’t want to take the risk because all the other cats had to fend for themselves in a way that I don’t have to.
1:39:54 It’s very possible that we end up living in a life a lot like the house cat in the sense that from our perspective, we’re extremely…
1:40:01 Like, we’re having very interesting lives and purpose, meaning, and just there’s this massive higher intelligence that’s just running stuff.
1:40:07 And we don’t know how it works, but it doesn’t really matter how it works.
1:40:14 We are the beneficiaries of it and it’s doing important things and we’re enjoying being house cats in its life.
1:40:15 I have a few things to say about this.
1:40:22 One, I’m pretty sure your cat’s not as impressed with your capacity as you are or as you think he is.
1:40:25 I just know cats well enough to be pretty sure of that.
1:40:25 But…
1:40:26 Oh, it looks down on me.
1:40:27 Yeah, you’re right.
1:40:30 I think it’s a fair point that there is an existence.
1:40:32 And actually, you know, pets really do have it.
1:40:35 If they have loving owners, they really do have it pretty great.
1:40:38 And I would also point out that there’s a way in which we already are this way.
1:40:48 Most of us do not understand the process that results in electricity coming out of the walls of our house or the water that comes out of the tap.
1:40:54 And we’re pretty much okay with the fact that somebody takes care of that and we can busy ourselves with whatever it might be.
1:41:06 But the place that I find something troubling in your description is that you say that the nature of what we do is to deal with the fact that jobs are always being upended.
1:41:09 That’s a very new process.
1:41:11 That is the hyper novelty process.
1:41:21 It used to be that it was only very rarely that a population had a circumstance where you didn’t effectively do exactly what your immediate ancestors did, right?
1:41:31 In general, you took what the jobs were, you picked something that was suited to you, and you did that thing.
1:41:32 Intergenerationally.
1:41:45 And the point is we’ve now gotten to the point where even within your lifetime, what is possible to get paid for is going to shift radically in ways that nobody can predict.
1:41:47 And that is a dangerous situation.
1:41:49 Like probably every two years, like two or three years.
1:42:04 And so maybe there’s some model by which we can surf that wave and you can learn a generalist toolkit and, you know, that your survival doesn’t depend on your being able to, you know, switch up every two years and never miss a beat.
1:42:05 Or maybe we can’t.
1:42:27 But I do think it is worth asking the question if the rate of technological change has taken us out of the normal human circumstance of being able to deduce what you might do for a living based on what your ancestors did and put us in a situation where what your ancestors did is going to be perfectly irrelevant no matter what.
1:42:31 But that is effectively a choice that has been made for us.
1:42:43 And we could choose to slow the rate of change so that we would live in some kind of harmony where our developmental environment and our adult environment were a match.
1:42:49 Now, as a biologist, I would argue if we don’t do something like that, this is a matter of time.
1:42:50 How would we change?
1:42:52 How do we slow the rate of change?
1:42:55 Well, I mean, you can be the Amish, right?
1:42:57 You can be the Amish and live in your own communities.
1:43:00 And I would assume some people would want that.
1:43:07 Well, you know, when Heather and I wrote our book, I wanted the first chapter to be, are the Amish right?
1:43:14 And the answer is they can’t be exactly right because they picked an arbitrary moment to step off the escalator.
1:43:19 But are they right that there’s something dangerous about this continuing pattern of technological change?
1:43:20 Clearly they are.
1:43:21 What do the Amish do for anyone that doesn’t know?
1:43:28 The Amish live as if it was, what, 1880?
1:43:29 1850 or something.
1:43:32 So they live in a, they don’t use cars.
1:43:37 They, I think they do have phones, but they do not have electricity.
1:43:52 Basically they, they voluntarily accept a technology, they’re basically a Luddite community and they have turned out to fare surprisingly well against many of the things that have upended modern.
1:43:53 COVID one of them, right?
1:43:54 Yeah, COVID, they did beautifully.
1:43:56 Quite happy people.
1:43:57 Very low autism rates.
1:43:59 They, they have all sorts of advantages.
1:44:01 So anyway, I’m not arguing that we should live like the Amish.
1:44:02 I don’t see that.
1:44:11 But I do think the idea that they had an insight, which was you need to step off that escalator because you’re just going to keep making yourself sicker, is probably right.
1:44:14 Now maybe this is a one-time shift.
1:44:16 We’ve stepped over the event horizon.
1:44:19 We are going to be living in the AI world.
1:44:35 And maybe if we’re careful about it, we can figure out how to turn that landscape of infinite possibility that you’re describing into a place that doesn’t change, that you always have the opportunity to decide what needs to be done.
1:44:41 But that none, that, that living over that event horizon is not an ever-changing process.
1:44:43 It’s just the next frontier.
1:44:56 I do want to also propose or ask the question when we talk about our hyper-changing world, isn’t it harder for older people to learn because of the, the way that the brain works in terms of processing speed and memory flexibility?
1:45:10 So I was wondering if you’re going to get a situation where like my father had, because of his brain and the reduced memory flexibility and processing speed that happens when you’re older, is going to struggle significantly more than my niece who can seem to learn.
1:45:15 And I mean, I mean, my niece knows five languages and she’s seven or something crazy like that.
1:45:15 Five languages.
1:45:17 But I mean, the brain is much more plastic, isn’t it?
1:45:29 So it’s, and that goes back to our evolutionary psychology, which you know much, evolutionary history, which you know much more than I do about of we’re meant to learn our lessons when we’re young, use that information for a lifetime.
1:45:30 But if that information is changing quickly.
1:45:33 Well, that’s, I mean, this is exactly what I’m pointing to.
1:45:40 It is not normal for your developmental environment to fail to prepare you for your adult environment.
1:45:49 The normal thing is as a young person, you take on ever more of the responsibilities of the adult environment.
1:46:01 And then at some point, you know, in a properly functioning culture, there’s a rite of passage, you go into the bush for 10 days, you come back with, you know, a large, you know, game animal.
1:46:05 And now you’re an adult and you take that program that you’ve been building and you activate it.
1:46:10 And, you know, you’re a lot happier person.
1:46:14 You’re a lot more fulfilled if your life has that kind of continuity to it.
1:46:23 And, you know, I’m not against the idea that we have enabled ourselves to do things that can’t be done if that’s the limit.
1:46:26 But we have also harmed ourselves gravely.
1:46:42 And I would like to somehow pry apart our ability to improve our well-being from our self-inflicted wounds that come from this never-ending pace of change.
1:46:45 And I don’t know if it’s possible, but I think it’s a worthy goal.
1:47:03 Something amusing, I don’t know if it’s exactly a counterpoint, but during COVID, especially, and, you know, through the recent technological change, some people have started living closer to the more ancestral environment.
1:47:07 So people whose jobs are online.
1:47:19 Some of my friends, like, went and built communities, like collectives, where they, you know, live and they create farms and they eat and they have, like, an email job.
1:47:23 They do their email jobs for five hours and go out and they all have children.
1:47:25 And it’s a fascinating life.
1:47:29 And there was so much rethinking in Silicon Valley about how we live.
1:47:40 And there’s a bunch of startups that are trying to create cities where they’re like, okay, we know that we’re suffering because our cities are not really walkable.
1:47:44 And there’s so many reasons why we’re suffering.
1:47:45 First, we’re not getting the movement.
1:47:50 Second, there’s a social aspect of walkable city where you’re able to interact with people.
1:47:54 You’ll make friends by just happening to be in the same place as others.
1:47:57 Let’s actually build walkable cities.
1:48:05 And if we want to, you know, transport faster, we’ll have these self-driving cars on the perimeter of the city that are going around.
1:48:16 And I think there are ways in which technology can afford us to live in a way that reverses, I guess, in a more local way.
1:48:18 I like that vision.
1:48:21 But I also am aware that there’s a different vision, right?
1:48:31 You see people in Palo Alto, for example, actually exerting, you know, very strong controls on how much their children are exposed to, you know, to phones.
1:48:32 I live in Palo Alto.
1:48:33 Yeah.
1:48:35 So you see that.
1:48:53 On the other hand, what I am worried about is that the elites of Palo Alto don’t realize that what they’re doing is they’re figuring out how to reduce the harm to their own families as they’re exporting the harm to the world of these technologies that for everybody else are unregulated.
1:49:13 And so the question is, can we bring everybody along if the AI revolution is going to alter our relationship to work and everything else, can we bring everybody along so that at the end of this process, instead of saying, well, you know, it’s a shame that, you know, three billion people were sacrificed to this transition.
1:49:17 But progress is progress, we can really say, well, we figured it out.
1:49:25 And everybody now is living in a style that is closer to their programming and closer to the expectations of their physical bodies.
1:49:31 You know, if that were true, then I would love to be wrong in my fears about what’s coming.
1:49:39 But unfortunately, the market is not going to solve this problem without our being deliberate about forcing it to.
1:49:42 What’s your biggest fear?
1:49:46 Like when you say my fears about what’s coming, what do you, like, what’s the picture that comes in your mind?
1:49:48 Oh, it’s a whole different topic, actually.
1:50:05 My fear coming, stemming from technology and AI is that this is a runaway process and that that runaway process is going to interface very badly with some latent human programs.
1:50:19 That, in effect, the need for workers largely disappears and the people who are at the head of the processes that result in that elimination for the need for workers start talking about useless eaters.
1:50:21 Maybe they come up with a new term this time.
1:50:22 Thin the herd.
1:50:23 Yep.
1:50:25 Or they allow it to be thinned or something.
1:50:31 Brett, I’ve heard you talk about the five key concerns you have or the five key threats you have before.
1:50:32 Could you name those five?
1:50:35 So the first one is the one I worry least about.
1:50:42 I don’t worry zero about it, but I worry least about it, which is the malevolent AI that the doomers are so focused on.
1:50:53 The second one is the idea that, you know, an AI can be misaligned not because it has divergent interest but because it just misunderstands what you’ve asked of these autonomous agents.
1:51:00 You know, the famous example is you ask them to produce as many paperclips as possible and they start liquidating the universe to make paperclips.
1:51:04 And, you know, it’s a sorcerer’s apprentice kind of issue.
1:51:28 The third one I would say is actually all of the remainder of them I would say are guaranteed and the third of them is the derangement of human intellect, that we are already living in a world where it’s very difficult to know what the facts even mean, right?
1:51:43 The facts are so filtered and we are so persuaded by algorithms that it’s, you know, our ability to be confident even in the basic facts, even within our own discipline sometimes is at an all-time low and it’s getting worse.
1:51:55 And that problem takes a giant leap forward at the point that you have the ability to generate undetectable deep fakes, right?
1:52:04 That’s going to alter the world very radically when the fact that you’re looking at videotape of somebody robbing a bank doesn’t mean that they robbed a bank or that a bank was even robbed.
1:52:07 So, anyway, I call this the card.
1:52:08 We deal with this a lot, by the way.
1:52:23 I think every single week, every single week I send to my, I have a chat, people that just are now basically spending, I’d say, 30% of their time dealing with deep fakes of me, doing crypto scams, inviting people to Telegram groups, and then asking them for credit card details.
1:52:27 We had one on X. I think you probably saw it, Dan, didn’t you, of me?
1:52:30 But that someone was running an ad, deep fake ads on X of me.
1:52:34 And it wasn’t just one ad. It was like, they were, it was like swatting flies.
1:52:37 There was 10 of them and I messaged them to X and there was 10 more.
1:52:40 Then the day after there was 10 more. Then the day after there was 10 more.
1:52:41 Then it started happening on Meta.
1:52:48 So, it’s a video of me basically asking you to come to a Telegram group where people are being scammed and audience members of mine are being scammed.
1:52:51 And when I send them to Meta, they thankfully removed them.
1:52:52 But then there’s five more.
1:52:56 So, and I went on LinkedIn yesterday and my DMs are, Steve, by the way, there’s this new scam.
1:53:02 Actually, at this point, I need someone full time just sending this over to Meta.
1:53:04 I’m the same but on a small scale.
1:53:10 Every week, it’s, did you really message me on Facebook asking me for my crypto wallet and blah, blah, blah.
1:53:18 My least favorite one’s when the single mother messages me saying that she just paid 500 pounds of her money and how devastated she is.
1:53:23 And I feel this moral obligation to give her her money back because she’s fallen for some kind of scam.
1:53:23 That was me.
1:53:24 It was my voice.
1:53:26 It was a video of me telling her something.
1:53:28 And I don’t know, I don’t know how you deal with that.
1:53:29 But sorry, do continue.
1:53:31 Well, I mean, that’s actually on the list here.
1:53:37 The massive disruption to the way things function, both because people are going to be unemployed in huge numbers
1:53:45 and because those who are not abiding by our social contract are going to find themselves empowered more than the people who do.
1:53:53 So in this case, not only is this poor woman, you know, now out 500 bucks for whatever the scam was,
1:54:00 but you’ve also been robbed whether or not you pay her back for the thing that she thought she purchased.
1:54:06 Your credibility is being stolen by somebody and you have no capacity to prevent it.
1:54:09 This has happened to me also, and it is profoundly disturbing.
1:54:26 And it is only one of a dozen different ways that AI enables those who are absolutely willing to shrink the pie from which we all derive in order to enlarge their slice.
1:54:29 You know, there are innumerable ways that this can happen.
1:54:32 And I think people do not see it coming.
1:54:40 They don’t understand how many different ways they are going to be robbed every bit as surely as if somebody was printing money.
1:54:54 And then the last one is that this just simply accelerates demographic processes that do potentially result in the unleashing of technologies that preexisted AI.
1:55:01 You know, this can easily result in an escalation into wars that turn nuclear.
1:55:10 So anyway, I think that list could probably be augmented at this point now that we’ve, you know, spent a little time in the AI era.
1:55:17 We can begin to put a little more flesh on the bones, both of what is possible in this era and what we should fear.
1:55:21 One of those, you mentioned the truth, you know, the problem of truth.
1:55:29 Would you say, just a thought experiment, someone today, like an average person, college educated, say, person,
1:55:39 are they more propagandized or led astray than someone in Soviet Russia?
1:55:44 Well, I don’t know because I didn’t live in Soviet Russia.
1:55:53 But my understanding from people who did was that there was a wide awareness that the propaganda wasn’t true.
1:55:55 It doesn’t mean they knew what to believe.
1:56:04 But there was a cynicism, which is one of my fears here, is that, you know, you’re really stuck choosing between two bad options.
1:56:09 In a world where you can’t tell what is true, you can either be overly credulous and be a sucker all the time,
1:56:14 or you can become a cynic and you can be paralyzed by the fact that you just don’t believe anything.
1:56:16 But neither of those is a recipe for it.
1:56:24 Do you think Google search first and maybe now ChatGPT has helped people more or less to find truth?
1:56:35 I think that’s not ChatGPT exactly, but all of the various AI engines have briefly enhanced our capacity to know what’s true
1:56:43 because, in fact, they allow us to see through the algorithmic manipulation because the AI is not well policed.
1:56:48 You can get it to recognize patterns that people will swear are not true.
1:56:53 And so, anyway, a lot of us have found it useful in just simply unhooking the gaslighting.
1:56:55 So that’s been very positive.
1:57:04 But I also remember the early days of search, and search used to be a matter of there are some pages out there.
1:57:05 I don’t know where they are.
1:57:11 Here’s a mechanized something that’s looked through this stuff and just point me at the direction of things that contain these words, right,
1:57:17 before the algorithmic manipulation started steering us into believing pure nonsense
1:57:22 because somebody who controlled these things decided it was useful for us to believe those things.
1:57:28 So my guess is, at the moment, AI is enhancing our ability to see more clearly,
1:57:35 but that really depends on some kind of agreement to protect that capacity that I’m not aware of us having.
1:57:43 Angela, you’re implying there that AI will protect us from the AI, i.e., the woman that got scammed in my audience,
1:57:49 the platforms would have a tool built in which would be able to identify shortly that that is not me,
1:57:53 and the ad has been launched by someone in another country potentially.
1:57:59 And then also when she starts being asked for her credit card details in such a way on Telegram 10 minutes later,
1:58:03 the system will be able to understand there that this is probably a scam at that touchpoint too.
1:58:06 And it will also be the defense, not just the offense.
1:58:12 First thing, question, is Meta incentivized to solve this problem?
1:58:13 Yes.
1:58:18 And so Meta is probably actively working on AIs.
1:58:22 And again, it’s going to be a cat and mouse game, like every abuse that happens out there.
1:58:27 So I think that the market will naturally respond to things like that.
1:58:33 In the same way that we install antiviruses, as annoying as they are,
1:58:42 I think we’ll install AIs on our computers that will allow us to at least help us kind of sort the fake from the truth.
1:58:45 Well, but let’s take the example you say.
1:58:47 Is Meta incentivized to solve this problem?
1:58:49 Superficially, it seems that it should be.
1:58:56 But how many times in recent history have we watched a corporation cannibalize its own business
1:59:00 over what at best is the bizarre desires of its shareholders?
1:59:09 Why was X throwing off people with large accounts or Facebook or Google?
1:59:16 It would seem that you would expect, based on the market choosing search engines or social media sites,
1:59:21 you would expect these companies to be absolutely mercenary and say, you know,
1:59:24 if Alex Jones has a big audience, who are we to say?
1:59:25 That’s what I would have expected.
1:59:33 Instead, you had these companies policing the morality of thought,
1:59:38 even though it reduced the size of the population using the platforms.
1:59:43 I have a hard time explaining why that happened, but I have every reason to expect the same thing will happen with AI.
1:59:45 What are you excited about with AI?
1:59:48 What’s your optimistic take?
1:59:52 Because at the start of this conversation, you said that there’s infinite ways that it could improve our lives,
1:59:55 and there’s 10 times more ways that it could hurt our lives.
1:59:58 But let’s investigate some of those ways that it could drastically improve our lives.
2:00:00 There’s a couple of different ways.
2:00:06 One, we have, as we mentioned before, a dearth of competent teachers and professors.
2:00:13 And that is a problem that will take three generations at least to solve
2:00:17 if what we’re going to do is start tomorrow and start educating people in the right way
2:00:19 that would make them competent to stand at the front of a room and educate.
2:00:26 But if we can augment that process, if we can leverage a tool like AI so that, you know,
2:00:32 a small number of competent teachers can maybe reach a larger number of pupils, that’s plausible, I think.
2:00:41 Second thing is we have a tremendous number of problems that are obstacles to us living well on this planet
2:00:47 that AI might be able to manage that human intellect alone cannot, right?
2:00:54 Just in the same way that, you know, compute power can calculate things at a rate that human beings can’t keep up,
2:00:56 and there are certain things you want calculated very well.
2:00:59 There are also some reasoning problems.
2:01:10 You could imagine that instead of having static laws that govern behavior poorly because they get gamed,
2:01:13 that you could have a dynamic interaction.
2:01:19 You could specify an objective of something like a law,
2:01:24 and then you could monitor whether or not a particular intervention successfully moved you in the direction
2:01:28 that you were hoping to go or did something paradoxical, which happens all the time.
2:01:35 And you could have, you could basically have governance that is targeted to navigation and prototyping
2:01:38 rather than to specifying a blueprint for how we are to live.
2:01:39 So we wouldn’t need politicians.
2:01:46 At the moment, we’re stuck with, you know, constitutional protections
2:01:53 that are as good as has been constructed and still inadequate to modern realities.
2:01:59 Dan, what are you excited about with AI from an individual level, but also from a societal level?
2:02:01 Yeah, well, the big ones are healthcare and education.
2:02:07 I mean, it’s ridiculous that you are sitting there in pain having had an MRI,
2:02:12 and there just hasn’t been someone to look at that MRI yet and tell you what to do.
2:02:14 And that could easily be solved.
2:02:20 There’s all sorts of healthcare issues where, and also not only that, throughout the entire world,
2:02:23 there are places that just don’t have general practitioners and they don’t have, you know,
2:02:24 medical advisors.
2:02:28 And, you know, the breakthroughs in global healthcare will be phenomenal.
2:02:33 And the breakthroughs in global education could be transformational on the planet.
2:02:39 I’m excited at an individual level that I think the industrial age created a bunch of jobs
2:02:43 that are very dehumanizing, and we’ve just kind of gotten used to them and put up with them.
2:02:49 The idea that work should be repetitive and, you know, you just repeat the same loop over and over
2:02:54 and over again, and over a 10-year period of time, you might get, you know, graduated up one year
2:02:55 and all that kind of stuff.
2:02:57 I don’t think that’s very human.
2:03:03 The idea that you could be simultaneously writing a book, launching a business, running a team,
2:03:11 launching a festival, having an event, that you could actually be doing this kind of like
2:03:17 mini kingdom work where you’ve got this little, you know, ecosystem around you of fun things
2:03:18 that you’re involved in.
2:03:23 That is actually made possible for a vast majority of people if they embrace these kind of tools.
2:03:31 You can live an incredibly fulfilling and amazing and impactful existence, or I know that I do,
2:03:33 as a result of having these tools in my life.
2:03:37 Like, I’m doing things that I could have only dreamed about as a kid.
2:03:38 And what do you say to entrepreneurs?
2:03:40 I know you work with thousands of entrepreneurs.
2:03:45 What are you telling them in terms of their current businesses or business opportunities that you’re foreseeing?
2:03:52 So I think that small teams have infinite leverage now, and that when you have a team of, say,
2:03:57 five to ten people who share an incredible passion for a meaningful problem in the world,
2:04:01 and they want to see that meaningful problem solved, and they come together in the spirit
2:04:06 of entrepreneurship to solve that problem, that little five to ten person team,
2:04:12 armed with the technology that we now have available, you can have a big impact.
2:04:16 You can make a lot of money, you can have a lot of fun, you can solve meaningful problems in the world,
2:04:22 you can scale solutions, you can probably do more in a three-year window than most people did in a
2:04:23 30-year career.
2:04:30 And then that little band of five to ten people could either go together onto a new meaningful problem,
2:04:34 or they could disband and, you know, work on other meaningful problems with different teams.
2:04:40 In such a world where you have this sort of infinite leverage, but everyone else has access to the same
2:04:46 infinite leverage, what becomes the USP? Going back to this idea of the moat, like, what is the thing of value
2:04:49 when we’ve all got access to $20 infinite leverage?
2:04:54 Well, first of all, the first thing you need to do, you need to understand, is that this moment of time
2:05:00 is the least competitive moment. Like, if you understand how to use these tools,
2:05:05 you can start making money tomorrow. Like, you know, I see countless examples of people
2:05:11 making thousands of dollars with these hustles that I talked about, or building businesses that
2:05:15 generates millions of dollars in the first couple of months of existence. So I would say,
2:05:22 start moving now, start building things. So it’s an unprecedented time of wealth creation.
2:05:29 Clearly, at some point, as the market gets more efficient, as people, more and more people understand
2:05:37 how you use these tools, there’s less potential for, you know, creating these massive businesses
2:05:41 quickly. And we’ve seen this, like, the dawn of the internet or dawn of the web, you know,
2:05:48 was a lot easier to create Facebook than it is now. Then we had mobile. And for three, four,
2:05:54 five years, it was very easy to create massive businesses. And then it became harder. Being just
2:05:59 at the edge of what’s possible is going to be very, very important over the next couple of years. And
2:06:05 that gets me really excited, because the entrepreneurs who are paying attention are going to be having the
2:06:08 most amount of fun, but they’re also going to be able to make a lot of money.
2:06:11 How many applications have been built on Replit to date?
2:06:17 So, you know, I can talk about the millions of things that have been built since we started the company.
2:06:24 But just since September, when we launched Replit Agent, there’s been about three million applications
2:06:32 built purely in natural language, with no coding at all, purely natural language.
2:06:43 And of those, I think 300,000, 400,000 of them were deployed in a real, you know, the site was deployed, and it is having,
2:06:47 people are using it, some kind of business, some kind of internal tool.
2:06:48 I built one last night, by the way.
2:06:49 An internal tool?
2:06:56 I built an application to track how my kids earn pocket money.
2:06:56 Amazing.
2:07:00 So I just told it that I wanted to track the tasks that are happening around the house and
2:07:01 put an assign of value to them.
2:07:05 And I want to be able to, at the end of the week, push a button and get a summary of how
2:07:09 much to pay each child for their pocket money.
2:07:10 We are so screwed.
2:07:16 And within 15 minutes, it had created this application.
2:07:17 And it was amazing.
2:07:21 Like, you could toggle between, like, here’s the place where you have the kids, and here’s
2:07:27 the weekly reports, and here’s the how much per task, and you can tick off the tasks or
2:07:28 remove tasks or add tasks.
2:07:35 So then I now have this application for, which took 15 minutes of just talking about what I
2:07:40 wanted, and now I have an application to run the pocket money situation in the house.
2:07:45 And this is, by the way, it’s something, having run an IT agency years ago, that’s something
2:07:51 that we would have charged 5,000 to 10,000 pounds to create, 5,000 to 10,000 US dollars
2:07:52 to create.
2:07:53 And how much time?
2:07:58 Probably talking something that would have been a three, four-week project.
2:08:04 And we’re at the start of the S-curve now that you’re describing, and it’s already, if it’s
2:08:06 a $20, replet’s roughly $20 a month.
2:08:06 $25.
2:08:10 For the base case, you did one day of usage.
2:08:11 Let’s say it’s a dollar.
2:08:12 Yeah.
2:08:15 It costs you, and it costs you minutes and a dollar now, and we’re at the start of the
2:08:16 S-curve.
2:08:18 And you talk to it like you’re chatting to a developer.
2:08:24 So one of the things that slows down the development process is you have to send the information to
2:08:27 a developer, and they need to understand it, and then they need to create something, and
2:08:28 then come back to you.
2:08:32 This just happens in front of your eyes while you’re watching it, and it’s actually showing
2:08:33 you what’s being built.
2:08:34 It’s really wild.
2:08:40 This one change has transformed how my team and I move, train, and think about our bodies.
2:08:46 When Dr. Daniel Lieberman came on the Diary of Recio, he explained how modern shoes, with
2:08:50 their cushioning and support, are making our feet weaker and less capable of doing what
2:08:51 nature intended them to do.
2:08:56 We’ve lost the natural strength and mobility in our feet, and this is leading to issues
2:08:58 like back pain and knee pain.
2:09:02 I’d already purchased a pair of Viva Barefoot shoes, so I showed them to Daniel Lieberman,
2:09:07 and he told me that they were exactly the type of shoe that would help me restore natural
2:09:08 foot movement and rebuild my strength.
2:09:11 But I think it was plantar fasciitis that I had, where suddenly my feet started hurting
2:09:15 all the time, and after that I decided to start strengthening my own foot by using the Viva
2:09:16 Barefoots.
2:09:18 And research from Liverpool University has backed this up.
2:09:22 They’ve shown that wearing Vivo Barefoot shoes for six months can increase foot strength
2:09:24 by up to 60%.
2:09:31 Visit vivobarefoot.com/doac and use code DIARY20 from my sponsor for 20% off.
2:09:35 A strong body starts with strong feet.
2:09:37 This has never been done before.
2:09:42 A newsletter that is ran by 100 of the world’s top CEOs.
2:09:45 All the time, people say to me, they say, “Can you mentor me?
2:09:47 Can you get this person to mentor me?
2:09:49 How do I find a mentor?”
2:09:50 So here is what we’re going to do.
2:09:55 You’re going to send me a question, and the most popular question you send me, I’m going
2:10:01 to text it to 100 CEOs, some of which are the top CEOs in the world running $100 billion companies,
2:10:06 and then I’m going to reply to you via email with how they answered that question.
2:10:11 You might say, “How do you hold on to a relationship when you’re building a startup?”
2:10:14 “What is the most important thing if I’ve got an idea and don’t know where to start?”
2:10:19 We email it to the CEOs, they email back, we take the five, six top best answers, we email it to you.
2:10:24 I was nervous because I thought the marketing might not match the reality, but then I saw what the founders
2:10:27 were replying with and their willingness to reply, and I thought, “Actually, this is really good.”
2:10:31 And all you’ve got to do is sign up. Completely free.
2:10:35 I don’t think we’ve spent a lot of time talking about autonomous weapons.
2:10:43 This is the thing that really worries me. And the thing that worries people about AI is this idea
2:10:52 is that it is this emergent system, and there’s no one thing behind it. And it can act in a way that’s
2:10:56 unpredictable and not really guided by humans. I also think it’s true of corporations, of governments.
2:11:05 And so I think individual people can often have the best intentions, but the collective can land on
2:11:14 doing things in a way that’s harmful or morally repugnant. And I think we talked about China versus
2:11:22 the US, and that creates a certain race dynamics where they’re both incentivized to cut corners and
2:11:30 potentially do harmful things. And in the world of geopolitics and wars, you know, what really
2:11:35 scares me is autonomous weapons. And why does it scare you?
2:11:48 You know, you can imagine autonomous drones being trained on someone’s face.
2:11:56 And you can send a swarm of drones, and they can be this sort of autonomous killing,
2:12:05 assassination machine. And it can sort of function as a country versus country technology in the world of war,
2:12:13 which is still crazy. But it can also become a tool for governments to subjugate
2:12:22 the citizens. And people think we’re safe in the West. But I think the experience with COVID showed that
2:12:29 the systems even the systems in the West can very quickly become draconian.
2:12:37 Well, apparently, I’ve heard in Iran that they have face recognition cameras that detect whether
2:12:45 women are wearing hijabs in their own cars, and it automatically detains the car if you’re driving
2:12:51 and you’re not wearing a hijab. And if you’re certainly if you’re walking down the street, it just picks that
2:12:58 up and immediately you’re you’re in trouble. You can like it acts as a police officer and a judge
2:13:06 And, you know, a lawmaker, a lawmaker, it’s the judge, jury and executioner essentially. And it’s just happens instantaneously.
2:13:14 It happened in Canada with the truckers sort of protests where they froze their bank account by virtue of just being there.
2:13:15 Just by being in that location.
2:13:21 Yeah. And just to confirm that, Iran has implemented a comprehensive surveillance system to enforce its
2:13:27 mandatory hijab laws utilizing various technologies, one of which is cameras and facial recognition.
2:13:32 So they’ve put cameras in public spaces to identify women who are not adhering to the hijab dress code.
2:13:39 Yeah. And just on that, London has just put those face cam facial recognition systems into London,
2:13:48 and also all throughout Wales. And they’re being rolled out at speed. And like all you would need is a
2:13:53 change of government that wanted to implement something similar and all the base layer technology is already
2:13:57 in there. It gets a little bit worse in Iran because they have this new app called the Nizar app,
2:14:01 where the government has introduced the Nizar mobile application, which allows you
2:14:06 as a citizen to report another citizen who is not wearing their hijab. And it logs their location, the time
2:14:11 when they weren’t wearing it, and the vehicle license plate. With the crowdsourced data,
2:14:17 it can then go after that individual. I would also just point out that I think we’re not being imaginative
2:14:21 enough. I agree with you. I have the same concern about these autonomous weapons, but I also think
2:14:28 this doesn’t have to occur in the context of war or even governmental oppression, that it is perfectly
2:14:36 conceivable that effectively this allows, this drops the price of an undetectable or an
2:14:43 unprosecutable crime. And maybe economic moats return in the form of people taking out their competitors or
2:14:48 anybody who attempts to compete with them using an autonomous drone that can’t be traced back to them,
2:14:53 you know, that follows facial recognition. And, you know, you don’t have to kill very many people
2:14:58 for others to get the message that this is a zone that you shouldn’t mess around in.
2:15:07 So I could imagine, you know, effectively a new high-tech organized crime that protects rackets and
2:15:12 makes tons of money and subjugates people who haven’t done anything wrong.
2:15:18 I had Mustafa Solomon on the podcast in 2023 when all of this stuff started kicking off. And he is the
2:15:22 CEO of Microsoft AI. You’re familiar with Mustafa? Of course.
2:15:25 Yeah. And one of the things he said to me at the time was, “One of my fears is a tiny group
2:15:31 of people who wish to cause harm are going to have access to tools that can instantly destabilize our
2:15:36 world. That’s the challenge. How to stop something that can cause harm or potentially kill. That’s
2:15:41 where we need containment.” And it sounds a little bit like what you’re saying, Amjad, that we will now
2:15:47 have these tools. You were talking in the context of the military, but as Brett said there, even smaller
2:15:52 groups of people that might have been, I don’t know, cartels or gangs can do similar harm. And
2:15:58 at the moment, in terms of autonomous weapons, both the US and China are investing heavily in AI-powered
2:16:03 weapons, autonomous drones and cyber warfare, because they’re scared of the other one getting it first.
2:16:09 And we talked about how much of our lives run on the internet, but cyber weapons and cyber AI agents
2:16:15 that could be deployed to take down China’s X, Y, or Z, or vice versa, are of real concern.
2:16:26 Yeah. I think all of that is a real concern. Unlike Mustafa, I don’t think containment is possible.
2:16:36 Part of the reason why this game theoretic system of competition between the US, China, corporations,
2:16:46 individuals, makes it so that this technology is already out, really hard to put it back in the bag.
2:16:49 I did ask him this question, and I remember the answer because it was such a stark moment for me.
2:16:54 I said to Mustafa, “Do you think it’s possible to contain it?” And he replied, “We must.” So I asked him
2:16:57 again, I said, “Do you think it’s possible to contain it?” And he replied, “We must.” And I asked him
2:16:59 again, I said, “Do you think it’s possible?” And he said, “We must.”
2:17:05 So the problem with that chain of thinking is that it might lead to an oppressive system.
2:17:13 There is one of the, say, doomers or philosophers of AI, which I respect his work. His name is Nick Bostrom.
2:17:26 And he was trying to think of ways in which we can contain AI. And the thing that he came up with is
2:17:32 perhaps more oppressive than something that AI would come up with. It’s like total surveillance state.
2:17:40 You need total surveillance on compute, on people’s computers, on people’s ideas to not invent AI or AGI.
2:17:41 It’s like taking the guns or something.
2:17:48 Right, exactly. I mean, there’s always this problem of containing any sort of technology,
2:17:53 is that you do need oppression and draconian policies to do that.
2:17:57 Are you scared of anything else or concerned about anything else as that relates to AI,
2:17:58 outside of autonomous weapons?
2:18:08 You know, we talked about the birth threat crisis. And I think a more generalized problem there is
2:18:17 creating virtualized environments via VR where everyone is living in their own created universe.
2:18:27 And it’s so enticing. And even create simulates work and simulates struggle such that you don’t really
2:18:33 need to leave this world. And so every one of us will be solipsistic, you know, similar to the matrix.
2:18:33 Ready player one.
2:18:38 Ready player one. Ready player one. We’re all kind of, even worse than a ready player one,
2:18:44 at least that’s a massively networked environment. I’m talking about AI simulating everything
2:18:52 for us. And therefore you’re literally in the matrix, you know, maybe that this is that same thought.
2:18:55 I’ve enjoyed this great simulation.
2:19:00 Yes. And so, I mean, are you familiar with the Fermi’s paradox?
2:19:00 No, I’m not.
2:19:08 So Fermi’s paradox is the question of the professor, his name is Fermi. He asked the question,
2:19:17 if the universe is that vast, then where are the aliens? The fact that humans exist,
2:19:25 you can deduce that other civilizations exist. And if they do exist, then why don’t we see them?
2:19:32 And then that spurred a bunch of Fermi solutions. So there’s, I don’t know, you can find hundreds
2:19:39 of solutions on the internet. One of them is the sort of house cat thought experiments where
2:19:46 actually aliens exist, but they kind of put us in an environment like the Amish in a certain time
2:19:51 and do not expose us to what’s going on out there. So we’re pets. Maybe they’re watching us and kind of
2:19:54 enjoying what we’re doing. Stopping us from hurting ourselves.
2:20:00 Stopping us from hurting ourselves. There’s so many things, but one of the things that I think is
2:20:08 potentially a solution to the Fermi’s paradox and one of the saddest outcomes is that civilizations
2:20:15 progress until they invent technology that will lock us into infinite pleasure and infinite simulation,
2:20:27 such that we don’t have the motivation to go into space to seek out the exploration of potentially other
2:20:36 alien civilizations. And perhaps that is a determined outcome of humanity or like a highly likely outcome
2:20:42 of any species like humanity. We like pleasure. Pleasure and pain is the main motivators. And so if you
2:20:49 create an infinite pleasure machine, does that mean that we’re just at home in our VR environment
2:20:52 with everything taking care for us and literally like the matrix?
2:20:55 And the world, the real world would suck in such a scenario.
2:21:01 Yes, it’d be terrible. I mean, the other simpler explanation of the Fermi paradox is that you generate
2:21:07 sufficient technology that you can end your species. And it’s only a matter of time from that point,
2:21:12 which, you know, we can have that discussion about nuclear weapons. We can have it about AI,
2:21:18 but does some technology, if we stay on that escalator, does some technology that we generate
2:21:19 ultimately…
2:21:22 Whatever allows you to get off the planet allows you to blow up the planet.
2:21:22 There you go.
2:21:25 I want to get everyone’s closing thoughts and closing remarks.
2:21:31 And hopefully in your closing remarks, you can capture something actionable for the individual
2:21:36 that’s listening to this now on their commute to work, or the single mother, or the average person,
2:21:41 who maybe isn’t as technologically advanced as many of us at this table, but is trying to navigate
2:21:46 through this to figure out how to live a good life over the next 10, 20, 30 years.
2:21:46 Yeah.
2:21:48 And take as long as you need.
2:21:53 I think we live in the most interesting time in human history.
2:21:58 So for the single mother that’s listening, for someone who wouldn’t be the stereotype of a tech
2:22:05 bro, don’t assume that you can’t do this stuff. It’s never been more accessible today within your
2:22:10 work. You can be an entrepreneur. You don’t have to take massive risk to go create a business,
2:22:18 quit your job and go create a business. There are countless examples. We have a user who’s a
2:22:25 product manager at a larger real estate business. And he built something that created 10% lift and
2:22:30 conversion rates, which generated millions and millions of dollars of that business. And that
2:22:36 person became a celebrity at that company and became someone who is lifting everyone else up and teaching
2:22:42 them how to use these tools. And obviously that is like a really great for anyone’s career. And you’re
2:22:48 going to get a promotion and your example of building a piece of software for your family,
2:22:55 for your kids to improve and to learn more, to be better kids as an example of being an entrepreneur
2:23:04 in your family. So I really want people to break away from this concept of entrepreneurship being,
2:23:10 I mean, this is your podcast, a diary of a CEO. You started this podcast by talking to CEOs, I assume,
2:23:18 right? And over time, it changed to everyone can be a CEO. Everyone is some kind of CEO in their life.
2:23:29 And so I think that we have unprecedented access to tools for that vision to actually come to reality.
2:23:37 Well, it is obviously a moment of a kind of human face transition, something that I believe will be the
2:23:44 equal of a discovery of farming or writing or electricity.
2:23:53 And the darkness that I think is valid in looking at all of the possible outcomes of this scenario
2:23:59 is actually potentially part of a different story as well. In evolutionary biology, we talk about an
2:24:08 adaptive landscape in which a niche is represented as a peak and a higher niche. A better niche is
2:24:12 represented as a higher peak. But to get from the lower niche to the higher niche, you have to cross
2:24:17 through what we call an adaptive valley. And there’s no guarantee that you make it through the adaptive
2:24:22 valley. And in fact, the drawing that we put on the board, I think, is overly hopeful because it makes
2:24:27 it in two dimensions. It looks like you know exactly where to go to climb that next peak. And in fact,
2:24:35 it’s more like the peaks are islands in an archipelago that is in fog where you can’t figure out what
2:24:40 direction that peak is. And you have to reason out it’s probably that way and you hope not to miss it
2:24:49 by a few degrees. But in any case, that darkness is exactly what you would expect if we were about to
2:24:55 discover a better phase for humans. And I think we should be very deliberate about it this time. I think we
2:25:02 we should think carefully about how it is that we do not allow the combination of this brand new,
2:25:10 extremely powerful technology and market forces to turn this into some new kind of enslavement.
2:25:16 And I don’t think it has to be. I think the potential here does allow us to refactor just about
2:25:23 everything. Maybe we have finally arrived at the place where mundane work doesn’t need to exist anymore,
2:25:29 and the pursuit of meaning can replace it. But that’s not going to happen automatically if we don’t figure
2:25:37 out how to make it happen. And I hope that we can recognize that the peril of this moment is best
2:25:44 utilized if it motivates us to confront that question directly. Each one of us has two parents,
2:25:54 four grandparents, eight great grandparents, 16, 32, 64. You’ve got this long line of ancestors who all
2:26:00 had to meet each other, they all had to survive wars, they all had to survive illness and disease.
2:26:07 Everything had to happen for us. Each individual, all of this stuff had to happen for us to get here.
2:26:11 And if we think about all the people in those thousands and thousands of people,
2:26:16 every single one of them would trade places in a heartbeat if they had the opportunity to be alive
2:26:26 at this particular moment. They would say that their life was a lot of mundane and meaningless work,
2:26:32 it was dangerous. You know, every single one of us has probably got ancestors that were enslaved,
2:26:40 probably got ancestors that died too young, probably got ancestors that worked horrific conditions.
2:26:45 We all have that. And they would all just look at this moment and say, wow,
2:26:50 so are you telling me that you have the ability to solve meaningful problems, to come up with
2:26:56 adventures, to travel the world, to pick the brains of anyone on the planet that you want to pick the
2:27:02 brains of? You can just listen to a podcast, you can just watch a video, you can talk to an AI,
2:27:07 AI. Like, are you telling me that you’re alive at this particular moment? Please make the most of
2:27:13 that. Like, do something with that. You know, you can sit around pontificating about society and how
2:27:20 society might work, but ultimately it all boils down to what you do with this moment. And solving
2:27:27 meaningful problems, being brave, having fun, making your little dent in the universe, you know,
2:27:32 that’s, that’s what it’s all about. And I feel like there’s an obligation to your ancestors to make
2:27:33 the most of the moment.
2:27:40 Thank you so much to everybody for being here. I, I’ve learned a lot and I’ve developed my thinking,
2:27:43 which is much the reason why I wanted to bring this all together, because I know you all have
2:27:47 different experiences, different backgrounds in education, you’re doing different things,
2:27:51 but together it helps me sort of pass through all of these ideas to figure out where I land. And
2:27:58 I, I ask a lot of questions, but I am actually a believer in humans. I’m, I, I, I was thinking about
2:28:03 this the second ago, I was thinking, do I, am I optimistic about humans’ ability to navigate this
2:28:07 just because I have no other choice? Because as you said, the alternative actually isn’t worth thinking
2:28:13 about. And so I do have a optimism towards how I think we’re going to navigate this, in part because
2:28:18 we’re having these kinds of conversations. And we, in history, haven’t always had them at the birth of a
2:28:22 new revolution. When we think about social media and the implications that had, we’re playing catch up
2:28:29 with the, with the downstream consequences. And I am hopeful. Maybe that’s the entrepreneur in me.
2:28:33 I’m excited. Maybe that’s also the entrepreneur in me. But at the same time, to many of the points
2:28:39 Brett’s raised and Amjad’s raised and Dan’s raised, there are serious considerations as we swim from one
2:28:45 island to another. And because of the speed and scale of this transformation that Brett highlights,
2:28:49 and you look at the stats of the growth of this technology and how it’s spreading like wildfire,
2:28:54 and how once I tried Replit, I walked straight out and I told Cozzy immediately, I was like, Cozzy,
2:28:57 try this. And she was on it and she was hooked. And then I called my girlfriend in Bali,
2:29:02 who’s the breathwork practitioner. And I was like, type this into your browser, R-E-P-L-I-T.
2:29:06 And then she’s making these breathwork schedules with all of her clients’ information ahead of the
2:29:11 retreat she’s about to do. It’s spreading like wildfire because we’re internet native.
2:29:15 We were native to this technology. So it’s not a new technology. It’s something on top of something
2:29:19 that’s intuitive to us. So that transition, as Brett describes it, from one peak to the other,
2:29:23 or one island to another, I think is going to be incredibly destabilizing.
2:29:27 And having interviewed so many leaders in this space, from Reid Hoffman, who’s the founder of LinkedIn,
2:29:33 to the CEO of Google, to Mustafa, who I mentioned, they don’t agree on much. But the thing that they
2:29:38 all agree on, and that Sam Altman agrees on, is that the long-term future, the long-term way that
2:29:43 our society functions is radically different. People squabble over the short term. They sometimes even
2:29:49 squabble over the midterm or the timeline, but they all agree that the future is going to look
2:29:53 completely different. Amjad, thank you for doing what you’re doing. We didn’t get to spend a lot
2:29:59 of time on it today, and this is typically what I do here. But your story is incredibly inspiring.
2:30:02 Incredibly inspiring from where you came from, what you’ve done, what you’re building.
2:30:07 And you are democratizing and creating a level of playing field for entrepreneurs in Bangladesh,
2:30:13 to Cape Town, to San Francisco, to be able to turn their ideas into reality. And I do think,
2:30:19 just on the surface of that, such a wonderful thing, that I was born in Botswana in Africa,
2:30:24 and that I could have the same access to turn my imagination into something to change my life,
2:30:27 because of the work that you’re doing at Replit. And I highly recommend everybody go check it out.
2:30:33 You probably won’t sleep that night, because for someone like me, it was so addictive to get to be
2:30:37 able to do that, because it’s been the barrier to creation my whole life. I’ve always had to call
2:30:40 someone to build something. Dan, thank you again so much, because you represent the voice of
2:30:43 entrepreneurs, and you’ve really become a titan as a thought leader for entrepreneurs in the UK.
2:30:48 And in perspective, that balance is incredibly important. So I really, really appreciate you
2:30:52 being here, as always. And you’re a huge fan favorite of our show. And Brett, thank you a
2:30:59 gazillion times over for being a human lens on complicated challenges. And you do it with a
2:31:04 fearlessness that I think is imperative for us finding the truth in these kind of situations where
2:31:10 some of us can run off with optimism. And we can be hurtling towards the mousetrap because we love
2:31:15 cheese. And I think you’re an important counter balance and voice in the world at this time.
2:31:19 So thank all of you for being here. I really, really appreciate it. And we shall see.
2:31:34 I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify and Apple and our audio
2:31:39 channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast haven’t yet hit the follow button or the
2:31:42 subscribe button, wherever you’re listening to this. I would like to make a deal with you.
2:31:47 If you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from now until
2:31:52 forever to make the show better and better and better and better. I can’t tell you how much it helps when
2:31:55 you hit that subscribe button. The show gets bigger, which means we can expand the production,
2:31:59 bring in all the guests you want to see and continue to doing this thing we love.
2:32:02 If you could do me that small favor and hit the follow button, wherever you’re listening to this,
2:32:19 that would mean the world to me. That is the only favor I will ever ask you. Thank you so much for your time.
2:32:31 Thank you.