5 Strategies To TRAIN Your Mind For Unlimited SUCCESS

and the more pain you experience the more dopamine you can achieve if you get back on the avenue of pursuit this is about more energy and it's about more clarity and less time wasted it's not just picking a particular disease and trying to figure out what the recipe is that the one size fits all but it's really a journey that we have our whole life if something's valuable you'll make sacrifices to attain it we could let go of something we value in the present and we would gain something we value even more in the future because if you think about most of the growth in life comes from these rigidly externally imposed schedules and we hate them but they are where we learn restraint because once you're real about it then you can make progress but if your energy cycles go to bullshitting yourself you'll never get out of it when you wake up in the morning you are in a perfect position to what i call receive the download of all the work that your neural circuitry has been doing the night before but if you immediately go to a sensory experience especially a rich sensory experience of stuff scrolling by you're actually missing the information that you processed at night and even more importantly that second half of the night during rem sleep is when the emotional weight of things start becomes let's say you put it on the shelf properly things that are important to emotional emotionally register get put in one shelf things that were like the comment you got on twitter that was triggering doesn't seem like such a big deal after a good night's sleep and that's because that second half of sleep is actually when you re-experience these things but your body can't secrete adrenaline it's kind of an internal form of therapy or even trauma therapy and that's why people who don't get that sleep are very you know they're easily agitated they feel like the world is crushing down on them so when i wake up in the morning i want to receive ideas that i want to learn from my learning and if you take in new information you are not in a position to do that and 60 minutes is a tough one so i give myself two no-gos for the 60-minute block if i can do it and i'll tell you a lot of mornings i fail tom i don't do it interesting i just i found that shocking but i heard you say that in another interview and i was like well i mean i'm human you know there are mornings where um i get enticed or worse worse i find myself reflexively picking up the phone without having made the conscious decision and that's when i realized that you know we are all deep in this process and i think uh we have to regulate it the the experiment i'd like to do maybe you'll do this with me as a challenge because the challenge is always good is in the new year i actually want to take every odd waking hour of the day off the phone so even hours of the day as long as it's waking i'm willing to have it on and work with it but odd hours just turn it off no matter what i don't know if this will destroy most of the relationships but just to see can i do it on a rigidly externally imposed schedule because if you think about most of the growth in life comes from these rigidly externally imposed schedules and we hate them but they are where we learn restraint identity to me is something that's practical it's it's your identity is a uh it's like a dramatic role that you play out in the world and while playing that out it has to furnish you with a life and what that means is that it has to be it means that it has to be negotiated with other people when you're a very young child and you first start to play with who you are you live in a fantasy world and according to some developmental psychologists at least particularly this is grounded in the theories of piaget that very young children two or three are quite egocentric in their play they play according to their own rules and so they're not social yet until they're three or four which means that they have their own goals in mind and then they erect a little fictional world around those goals and then they play out the role within that fictional world and that's pretend play and when they get to be about three or four and they start playing with other kids they have to bring their worlds together and negotiate because both children have to want to play and so that means identity has to expand beyond its egocentric focus and increasingly be negotiated in the social world i studied developmental psychology for a long time especially in relate in relationship to the regulation of aggression and most children learn to regulate the regression between the ages of two and four now for example for for instance there's a subset of children mostly male who are very aggressive at the age of two comparatively speaking they bite kick fight hit and steal that's the definition of aggressive and almost all those children are socialized out of that by the time they're four although a small proportion aren't and they tend to be long-term anti-social children and then criminal adults it's very very difficult for that to be rectified if it isn't rectified by four what happens with most children is they learn to move beyond their ego-centric presuppositions and include other children in the play and so they start to negotiate their roles and identity is a sophisticated identity is a negotiated role and so it's not appropriate for associated with who with everyone with everyone and of course you know this is the case because if you if you well first of all if you're a child and you want friends then you can't insist that only your game be played so i'll give you an example there's been observational studies of children in playgrounds so imagine there's a group of children together let's say they're six or seven years old and they're playing helicopter so they've got their erasers out and they're buzzing around in the helicopters okay so they've already established the ground rules they've got together and they laid out the drama they say well let's play helicopter and maybe there's four or five suggestions but the group the group uh um develops a consensus that helicopters the fun game and let's make our erasers into helicopters i don't have an eraser well you can use your pencil and it can be a long helicopter so everybody gets a role and everybody's happy about it otherwise play won't continue right everybody has to be happy or play won't continue and so then the the little drama organizes itself and the kids play helicopter and there's consequences of that that play out like a story and then maybe another kid comes along and he's got an eraser and a pencil in his bag and he wants to play helicopter too and if he's a socially sophisticated kid he'll hang around the outside of the little game and watch and then he'll take out his eraser and maybe start making buzzing noises with it and when when he can see that there's an opening in the play situation he'll swoop in and maybe he'll get integrated it's like when you're at a cocktail party and you hear a conversation and you're hovering around the edge you wait for an opening and then you say something that's germane to the topic and if you're sophisticated enough and the people are friendly enough then it'll open and you'll be allowed in now even popular kids often get rebuffed when they try to enter an already structured game unpopular kids don't watch what's going on and then they come along and try to impose their game on the entire group and then they have a tantrum if they don't get let in and so that's a good example of how identity is negotiated at the earliest stages we have to construct a narrative about it that moves us forward and this is why i'm such a firm believer that you should do and believe that which moves you towards your goals people get the do part they understand their actions should be actions that take them towards what they want to accomplish but people often miss the most important part which is only to believe things that move you towards your goals and i see people every day that tell themselves the story about themselves that they are worthless that they're meaningless that they're pointless that their friends and family would be better off if they just died so we have to find a way to construct a narrative about ourselves that empowers us that lifts us up even though even though we make mistakes even though we fall down even though we're never going to get things right all the time and even though terrible things happen to us or maybe we do terrible things but in that the erosion of the self that's the danger the erosion of the self that is the danger and when i talk to people about the 80 20 principle 80 of the time you should be focused on the things that you love the beautiful things that you want to bring to this world the beautiful things that are already in the world and 20 of the time you should be kicking yourself in your ass and saying you can do better it's such a powerful idea but the problem is when people get to the 20 percent they forget that it's only supposed to be 20 of the time and that it's meant to be these acute moments where you're pushing yourself to be more to do more it isn't so you can tear yourself down that's why you have to do and believe that which moves you towards your goals and if thinking that you're a worthless piece of [ __ ] moves you to your goals somehow then fine do it but i can't literally fathom a universe in which that would be a logical way to move forward can you get people really fast because i want to get back to what an ideal fast looks like according to fast this way but first give people a quick breakdown about how you put your body in a state where it will produce ketones and exactly what they are ketones are what happens when your body burns fat instead of sugar naturally it doesn't happen if you're consuming carbohydrates in any meaningful amount and it doesn't happen if you're eating a ton of protein and what happens when you do that is ketones have more energy in them than glucose does and the neurons in your brain love ketones in fact all the cells in your body do but some of them prefer blood glucose so all the sudden you get this feeling of clarity and the natural way to get into ketosis is you fast for about two days for the average person sometimes three and then the body says i got nothing here i better start burning my fat stores so it liberates some fat from the fat stores and all the toxins from the fat it liberates as well which is why it's good to mop them up while you're fasting and then your cells get get this and they go oh man we've got to reformat our power plants because they're used to only having sugar so it takes metabolic energy to transform and they literally change their shape and function so that they're better at consuming fat right and that takes a while now you're metabolically flexible but if you do that all the time forever your cells are like why would i ever be configured to do glucose i live in a world with no sugar so they aren't very good at that which is why cycling in and out of ketosis fasting some of the time but not other times and not fasting the same way every day or every week is really powerful you want to keep the body a little bit off balance so it's like you know what i'm ready to make energy at any time rapidly from any type of fuel and when you do that you can actually go out and have a bowl of hopefully dairy-free ice cream without bad fats in it so a coconut-based ice cream and with real sugar and everything and it'll happen your blood sugar will go up and come right back down and you'll be fine and that's a metabolically flexible person you do it all the time you won't be metabolically flexible right but if you're the guy who has ice cream every single night well then what's going to happen is you're not going to know how to burn fat whatsoever your body's gonna be only sugar burning and it's it's not gonna work and your blood sugar will always be high so the idea is occasionally it's okay to have some carbs i don't recommend you know ice cream is a major source but honestly if you're intermittent fasting you're occasionally in ketosis you ought to be able to eat a treat that isn't full of inflammatory stuff like bad oils and all and be just fine and the evidence is that people whose metabolisms work really well they can do it and their blood sugar doesn't go bonkers well so as a medical doctor i train in internal medicine which means that i take care of young and old men and women healthy and sick you know i have spent most of my career not only in sort of the the the center the thick of the current of modern medicine which is largely about prescriptions and knowledge largely about diagnosing and treating disease the thing that's different about me though is i started realizing with all the successes we've had you know treat new treatments for 12 different types of cancers that didn't exist before you know that we were really only tackling part of the equation because wouldn't it be much better if we could actually prevent the disease in the first place and what's interesting is the same science that teaches us how to intercept and tackle a disease using drugs actually teaches us in some ways a hell of a lot more about how to prevent the disease in the first place how do we actually you know um not just pick up the pieces after the time bomb explodes or the stick of dynamite but how do we actually pull the fuse out or disarm the time bomb right so that's what got me really interested in diverting my scientific focus from treatments to taking a look at prevention now if you're talking about disease it's pretty straightforward diagnose it find a treatment write a prescription refer to a specialist if you're talking about prevention you're really talking about health and this brings me full circle to where you where you started what we're starting so what is health right i mean i'm just like everyone else well if i'm not are you healthy well if i'm not sick i'm actually healthy right so in most people's minds including mine not being sick is kind of the default definition of being healthy but that is very problematic because the absence of something the absence of disease is very is impossible to operationalize you can't do something about the absence of something else so that's what i started to ask well what is health if it's not just the lack of disease well it turns out that and this has been my research it turns out that health is not just the absence of disease it is the result of our body's own hardwired defense systems health defense systems that we're born with these are defense systems are formed in the womb before we're born and the moment we appear on planet earth our health defenses are firing in all cylinders from day one all the way to our very last breath and all of a sudden that gives us a whole new canvas to understand what can we do to support health what can we do to boost our body's health defenses you see if you have a functional identity when you act it out in the world then you get what you want and need and if an identity doesn't do that well then you should you either retool or your identity or you retool the world your conception of the world well if you're retooling your conception of the world then you're retooling yourself no you can actually i mean what a revolutionary does is try to bring the world into alignment with literally yes literally well and we all do that to some degree because we are practical engineers you know i mean not only do we perceive the world but we also interact with it so that it does manifest itself in accordance with our desires there's limits obviously to how far you can go or how far you should go with that you know and um what are the limits well there's practical limits nature won't do what you want it to unless you're very sophisticated in your in your application of your knowledge and other people will object so now you might say well you should forge forward regardless of their objection and you know there are circumstances under which that's true but generally speaking that's not a very good idea it certainly doesn't make you popular as a child and so that brings up one other issue i would also say and this i developed this idea quite a bit in the new book you go from egocentrism as a child you have to go through this period where you're socialized as a child and adolescent and that really means that you allow your identity to be molded and shaped by the group and you know you think about how important peers friends and peers are to children and adolescents you know your mother will say when you're a teenager well if johnny jumped off the bridge would you too and you say well no but the real answer is well probably if all your friends are there taunting you you would in fact jump off the bridge and not only that generally speaking you should because it's your duty it's your developmental duty as a child and a teenager to take your your isolated self and turn it into us a functioning social unit now you could say well do you peterson wants everybody to be a functional social unit a robot you know a cog in the wheel and i would say well that that isn't where development stops it has to go through that period before you can emerge as a as a genuine individual which means you have to know the rules of the game before you can break them but not being able to abide by the rules is not anything like being a genuine creative individual those are not the same thing and there's plenty of attempt to confuse the two things because it's much better if you can't follow the rules to view yourself as a avant-garde revolutionary than as a failure when i became an entrepreneur knew nothing about it and i was who's the kid in the server room and i was the only one with an office that had no windows and there were like nine other computers in my room and nobody knew who i was and the only contribution i made to phone calls was to say goodbye at the end of a conference call i'm not kidding ten years later i own a billion dollar business who the [ __ ] is laughing now but it only worked because i didn't mind looking stupid it only worked because i wasn't asking myself whether i was worthy or whether i deserved it i just asked myself am i leaving it all out in the field yes or no am i learning yes or no and if i'm not i didn't go oh that makes me a bad person i went i need to change my actions to get a different result and once you start thinking like that and you literally value yourself for how hard you're trying how much you're learning how willing you are to accept when you fall in your face so you don't try to get out from under it or campaign to convince people that you're better than you really are [ __ ] on where you're at because once you're real about it then you can make progress but if your energy cycles go to bullshitting yourself you'll never get out of it before we started rolling though i had this whole interview planned i knew exactly where we were going to go and then you made a comment i was bringing up bitcoin and cryptocurrency as i do because i'm obsessed and you said well there's only one biological currency and that's dopamine that's right and i was like well now i know where we're starting what do you mean by that yeah so you know human beings have evolved tons of technologies uh and currencies bitcoin ethereum are not topics i know a lot a lot about but when you think about dollar euro bitcoin ethereum you think about wins and losses in sport in life and relationship in anything something in your brain and body has to keep track of that did you win did you lose what's a letdown what's a celebration and i think one of the most important findings in the last few years in neuroscience is that while the molecule dopamine is associated with reward it's more about motivation and craving there's a really classic experiment now that people use to demonstrate this take two rats and the rats independently separate cages can level press for food or when they can access food there's a little bit of dopamine that's released anytime they get some food so we always thought that food like many other rewards like food sex warmth when you're cold cool when you're too warm is triggering the release of dopamine but someone had the good idea to deplete dopamine in one of those animals and then what you find is that the animal without dopamine still enjoys food still enjoys other pleasures so dopamine is not really involved in the enjoyment of those pleasures it's involved in motivation because if you make the animal have to move just one rat's length believe it or not to get to that lever the animal with dopamine will work to go get that thing it will work through some effort to go get the reward whereas the animal or it turns out the human without much dopamine can still experience pleasure they can sit on their couch and cram their face with pleasure inducing calories or what have you watch inducing things on the television but they have very little motivation to go pursue things that will deliver them pleasure there are different types of immunotherapy broadly speaking immunotherapy is harnessing your body's own immune system to fight the cancer which is different than inventing a toxic drug or even or even a smart bomb you know a targeted drug to actually go after the cancer so immunotherapy relies on your immune system it is true what you just said there are some very specific kinds of immune systems where you can remove your immune system reprogram it you know kind of turn it from uh you know turn it from an ordinary immune cell into a super soldier okay and then inject it back in the body and it will go and go after the cancer but there are other forms of immune therapy where what you're what you're doing and this is what i was talking about cancers like to develop these sneaky ways of hiding from your immune system they cloak themselves you know like the old star trek the klingons would turn on cloaking device and now you can't the enterprise can't find the enemy ship okay well that's what cancers actually do some immunotherapies all they do is they rip the cloak off the cancer and the immune system goes regular immune system goes aha i see you i'm going to come after you and i'm going to get you because what keeps you and i uh from actually developing lethal cancers right here right now tom is that our immune system is spotting little tiny harmless microscopic cancers and saying i see you you're gone okay you're dead meat and they just clear off it's like taking an eraser just erasing the cancer right off the chalkboard all right so when you uncloak the cancer it allows your immune system to do this the best example of this is former president u.s president jimmy carter when he was in his 90s he developed a melanoma that had spread to his liver and his brain and you know it was at that point this is about 10 years ago now almost 10 years ago a brain metastasis from a skin cancer melanoma is pretty much a death sentence and so he was happy he happened to be one of the first people to actually get a treatment that ripped the cloak off of the melanoma cells in his brain and elsewhere and it allowed his 90 year old immune system to see that cancer and even at that age even with that spread he had all this cancer cleared out of his system can you get people really fast because i want to get back to what an ideal fast looks like according to fast this way but first give people a quick breakdown about how you put your body in a state where it will produce ketones and exactly what they are ketones are what happens when your body burns fat instead of sugar naturally it doesn't happen if you're consuming carbohydrates in any meaningful amount and it doesn't happen if you're eating a ton of protein and what happens when you do that is ketones have more energy in them than glucose does and the neurons in your brain love ketones in fact all the cells in your body do but some of them prefer blood glucose so all the sudden you get this feeling of clarity and the natural way to get into ketosis is you fast for about two days for the average person sometimes three and then the body says i got nothing here i better start burning my fat stores so it liberates some fat from the fat stores and all the toxins from the fat it liberates as well which is why it's good to mop them up while you're fasting and then your cells get get this and they go oh man we've got to reformat our power plants because they're used to only having sugar so it takes metabolic energy to transform and they literally change their shape and function so that they're better at consuming fat right and that takes a while now you're metabolically flexible but if you do that all the time forever your cells are like why would i ever be configured to do glucose i live in a world with no sugar so they aren't very good at that which is why cycling in and out of ketosis fasting some of the time but not other times and not fasting the same way every day or every week is really powerful you want to keep the body a little bit off balance so it's like you know what i'm ready to make energy at any time rapidly from any type of fuel and when you do that you can actually go out and have a bowl of hopefully dairy-free ice cream without bad fats in it so a coconut-based ice cream and uh with real sugar and everything and it'll happen your blood sugar will go up and come right back down and you'll be fine and that's a metabolically flexible person you do it all the time you won't be metabolically flexible right but if you're the guy who has ice cream every single night well then what's going to happen is you're not going to know how to burn fat whatsoever your body's going to be only sugar burning and it's it's not going to work and your blood sugar will always be high so the idea is occasionally it's okay to have some carbs i don't recommend you know ice cream is a major source but honestly if you're intermittent fasting you're occasionally in ketosis you ought to be able to eat a treat that isn't full of inflammatory stuff like bad oils and all and be just fine and the evidence is that people whose metabolisms work really well they can do it and their blood sugar doesn't go bonkers in our phenomenological landscape so that's the world as we experience it complete with emotions and motivations and dreams and so the full range of human experience including the subjective and the objective let's say can broadly be broken into two domains and one is the domain of things that are beyond our grasp and reach and that's the unknown the unknown emerges when the unknown emerges you tend to experience anxiety and then there's the the known and i defined the known very specifically and very carefully the known is the place you are when what you're doing presult produces the results you want and i say want because that brings motivation and emotion into the game so you're motivated to pursue something you pursue it and what you want happens not only do you get what you want but you get validation for the structure that governs your perceptions and your actions now if you you know imagine that you're um you know you're lonely and you approach a young woman in a in a social situation um attempting to make some contact with her um you you want to alleviate your loneliness and so you hope you make a good impression and you tell a joke let's say in a relatively awkward manner and you get rebuffed then you feel you you you're no longer where you control you're no longer where you exercise control and that brings up all sorts of specters and immediately it's like well why were you rebuffed well maybe all women are uh to be despised that's one theory maybe there's something deeply wrong with you maybe you're having an off day maybe it wasn't a very good joke and so when you don't get what you want then a landscape of question emerged questions emerge and those questions can resonate through different levels of your identity from the trivial oh i told the joke wrong to the profound there's nothing desirable about me and i'll be alone for the rest of my life now you asked about identity and i used the example of a child's game but i could go through an identity and so i do this particularly in maps of meaning and so for example let's say i'm sitting typing okay we could decompose my identity so at the highest level of resolution i'm moving my fingers and so that could be my identity i'm the thing that moves its fingers and then slightly at a slightly broader level than that i'm typing words and at a broader level i'm typing phrases and thinking them up and then sentences and then paragraphs and then chapters and then let's say full papers or books that that's that's a productive unit so i'm the author of a book or the author of a paper that's an identity but then that's nested inside for me it would be nested inside being a clinical psychologist being a professor being a good citizen and then that's nested in some inside something that's even broader than that and i would say that that's nested inside a cultural heroism and i don't mean that specific to me i mean that for everyone that's the outermost level whether you're playing out the role of hero or adversary say that's that's the highest possible level of identity that's the level at which fundamental morality is adjudicated and there isn't really anything beyond outside that is it's beyond us it's the transcendent itself and you're all of those at any one time you're all of those levels of identity i think all of us should have some form of that fear which if you didn't hear is to have a vision of the person you could become and to reach the pearly gates as it were see who you could have been contrasted with who you actually are and be disappointed by the gap between them and i love chasing that i think it's a beautiful chase but what i hope you guys will do if you ever find yourself at the pearly gates disappointed in how much farther you could have gone to simply ask one question of yourself every day did i give it my all today dopamine is the neurochemistry of the pursuit of making sure that i have the energy to go but do we know how we can spike that well first of all it's clear to me based on your description that you've tapped into these uh channels that release dopamine because craving and wanting whether or not it's sex or or money or connection or anything all right is that's the primary trigger for dopamine release yeah now sex and reproduction makes the most sense from the perspective of evolution uh i mean any species every species has tends to have two primary goals one protect it's young and second make more of itself usually in reverse order right so even for people that don't want children i mean you might not or people of course not everyone is having sex just to reproduce but at a primordial level that's what those circuits are there for so every species in particular mammalian species where there's a lot of parenting and caretaking of the young tries to take make more of itself and everything that you see like maternal aggression which is a powerful circuit that gets activated after females of any species in particular mammals give birth they will fight to the death and they gain superhuman strength in order to protect their young that's a there's a known circuit for that in the brain that gets activated once a female has offspring and it's robust what's the ideal split for you the ideal split is whatever you'll do and 16 8 is great but for 16 hours of not eating and then i eat however much i want in an eight hour window or do you put limitations in the eating window you can eat as much as you want during the window of twinkies uh you know you can and you'll still get benefits to be perfectly honest you'll just get more benefits if you eat good stuff during the window and that's the other thing okay maybe you don't want to go grass-fed only maybe you don't want to eliminate french fries from your universe okay fine intermittent fasting will help everybody even on a complete crap diet however you'll be more hungry during your intermittent fast if you eat crap so you got to deal with that and ideally what you're eating after you break your fast you can have carbs and not have carbs but don't have sugar don't have seed oils and eat grass-fed meat or don't eat meat and if you follow those basic principles and there's other nuances in there what you find is that you feel really good and the next morning you wake up and you're not ravenous and you're like oh yeah i don't even want breakfast and that's a very liberating thing because if we're spending so many of our thoughts every day on food food food and then you just aren't hungry it really changes things so i want millions of people to say i'm going to try this basic thing i'm not going to worry about getting my diet perfect i might make a few changes but i'm just going to learn how to intermittent fast and what i don't want them to do is what a lot of the fasting community does where it's all about the fast and you know every month i'm going to fast for a week and what you end up doing is you get people who become they basically burn out their adrenals and so women see sleep problems as the first symptom that they're overdoing it and then they see hormonal problems in their monthly cycle and then see hair loss and hair thinning guys same thing but it's usually two to four weeks out for women first is sleep problems then you wake up and there isn't a kickstand and then you it took me a second it got there yeah and then after that you can see her thing as well and this is from excess cortisol because you overdid it and you could see the same thing from just being keto for three months straight right that's why i've always recommended cycling because i made all these mistakes when i was learning about all this stuff it was just very early days and so how do you make this sustainable and the truth is fasting the same way every day is bad for you because it doesn't lend your body the idea of metabolic flexibility it's like oh i live in a world where there's almost never enough food so have breakfast every now and then at least you know saturday morning have breakfast with your family and you can have a keto breakfast or you can have the gluten-free waffles whatever you want you should be able to handle that just don't eat bad oils and over time it takes about two years to replace half your cell membranes the oil in those membranes over time you'll become more and more metabolically flexible because your cells work better but if while you're intermittent fasting you're still eating a ton of junk food you won't get that benefit but you'll get many other benefits of fasting you're still going to lose weight you're still going to have an improved blood sugar profile but not as good as if you made a few changes in the diet so this is something everyone can do that's cheaper and more convenient than what you do in the morning right now i can create rules in my life and then i really stick to those rules so once i'm very careful about what rules i put in place because i have to believe that they will actually lead me to this goal that's really exciting for me but if i believe it then i can put them in and then also part of my identity is that i'm the type of person that when i set a rule i follow it so i can create this loop of like feeling good about myself and the thing that i'm pursuing but it really works and i'm shocked how few people have the kind of rule that you're talking about in the new year to say hey i'm only going to do odd hours there's no phone yeah well and like i said i'm not perfect i'm not as disciplined as you are about my no goes i try i actually find that tabulating is kind of fun it's also fun to get really triggering comments and and to not close the dopamine loop for them i think if people understood um the dopamine reward prediction error that we could end all the um amplifying comment battles online because what happens is if someone takes a a jab at you of any kind there's actually an open dopamine loop waiting for you to respond and any response actually gives them that that dopamine response of success it's a little bit of a it's like scoring a three-pointer and the no response actually drops their dopamine below baseline and that's its own form of retaliation and i have to be careful because i don't want to encourage people to retaliate but any anything that short-circuits the kind of madness of getting pulled into some online battle that's totally meaningless it's taking people away from other powerful good things that they could do in the world you know we've been talking mainly about dopamine and its scheduling and about the fact that it can be attached to anything i think many people find it hard to subjectively attach dopamine to something they don't want to do this is something that uh if we'd spoken a year ago i would've i my answer would have been a little bit different to the question of how do you get motivated well one way to do that is if you are good at subjectively attaching dopamine to the pursuit just knowing okay i really am hungry for this i'm just i'm going to tell myself that you know making you know making it one percent of the way is a success and i'm going to keep going and i'm going to keep ratcheting on and that's great if you can do that but for people that can't do that understanding this relationship with a pleasure pain balance can be more powerful just understanding the more friction and pain that you experience the greater the dopamine reward you will get later and that serves as its own amplifier of the whole process of pursuing more dopamine and then the other aspect of it is that any time that we're leaning into action you know it has the possibility of being an amplifying process or a depleting process and the key to that is making sure that you're balancing the dopamine and epinephrine systems you know epinephrine being this molecule of universal currency of energy output could be out of hate or could be out of love epinephrine doesn't care and actually dopamine doesn't care none of these systems care about us they just work underneath our underneath our conscious control but when you start to understand that hitting the gas pedal is great but hitting the gas pedal and then coming off the gas pedal a little bit you can kind of sit in a more relaxed rpm actually allows you to go much further i think that people leaning into action is terrific i always say you can either be back on your heels flat-footed or forward center of mass the best situation is actually to be right upright but just know that you can be forward center of mass at any point and you know that to take it back to sex and reproduction because it's a salient example the arc of of sex is very interesting because when you think about autonomic arousal it turns out that the the arousal stage of sex actually involves release of dopamine but is what we call parasympathetic dominant it's actually has to be relaxed enough in order to occur it's not about weight loss even it's really about health and because when i was doing my research to look at different foods that would activate our health defenses here's the first thing i was surprised by it's not like one food or two foods or five foods or yeah it was more than 200 different kinds of foods and they were fruits and they were vegetables they were spices and they were legumes and they were different kinds of seafood including shellfish and they were different kinds of fish beyond salmon okay and and there's even some dairy products that can actually have some benefits as well including fermented foods like yogurt and sauerkraut and kimchi and these foods are so ubiquitous that they are found in the traditional cultures of every single society but especially mediterranean diet which we know is healthier for us as a pattern an asian food which we also know is healthier and so what i started to realize is that eating to beat disease is not just picking a particular disease and trying to figure out what the recipe is that the one size fits all but it's really um a journey that we have our whole lives from the time we're small until we get old we get older parents have the opportunity to actually start feeding their children when as soon as they're taking solid food foods that can actually help them beat diseases in fact in fact breastfeeding is actually helping your child beat disease by uh shaping and sculpting their microbiome right one of the health defense systems so i came up with 200 different foods i laid them all out according to which health defense systems they activate some cases they activate all of the health defense systems i call those grand slammers because man a single food will knock out you know knock the five health defenses out of the park it's a home run not to eat those things and i explain all the research has been done by myself and other people to show how they actually work so what's the principle to eat to beat disease you can love your food to love your health love your food to love your health that seems so contradictory to what we used to think about healthy food right because the old thinking is that well you got to eat healthy you got to cut out everything you love you know and and and i'm i'm turning that upside down inside out i'm inverting the whole equation i'm saying if you look at those 200 foods that i put down in my book you could be diseased take a sharpie out and circle the ones that you love already i like this i like that one tomatoes i like oh man i like this one okay that's a great starting point because if you start eating those foods you're already head of the game because you already love foods that can actually eat that can activate your health defenses now you can explore expand your horizons by choosing these other foods that are out there as well if you sat on tv and watched a food the food network you can find all these people experimenting with different ingredients if you go onto youtube you can look for an ingredient you don't recognize [ __ ] or melon the heck is a bitter melon well it's an asian gourd is it bitter absolutely but there are ways of actually cooking it so it's not so bitter and it has medicinal value well how would i do it click on youtube and search on recipe cooking bitter melon and you'll watch somebody teach it to you so love your food to love your health explore with your life and just know the foods i put in the book activate your body's health defenses what is a good entry point where they're not hangry they're not going crazy but they're still getting some benefits anti-inflammatory they're maybe in uh you know ketosis they've got some autophagy going on like what does that starter kit fast look like all right i'm going to to explain that right here i'm also going to offer um because i was a teacher for five years at the university of california i wrote every book i've written i haven't really been a great teacher of the content i just write them like you should read it when people order fast this way and send the receipt to fastestway.com um i will teach you this over two weeks like every morning explaining walking people through this who are new to fasting ending in a one or two day spiritual fast so that's the long answer to the question is this gonna take me two weeks but i'll show you the short answer is that do 12 hours without food see if you can do that if you've never done it before that's not really technically an intermittent fast you're just showing yourself you've got legs and you work yourself up to 14 hours without food and that's when you're really starting a real intermittent fast and then you maybe the next day have breakfast just lots of protein lots of fat no carbs for breakfast right you're taking it easy and then the next day okay i'm gonna do a 16 hour fast and you may use all three of the fasting hacks because you're ravenous when i was 300 pounds if you told me i was going to skip breakfast and lunch i'm like i will kill the people around me like i will be such a jerk and it was true i ate six or eight times a day because i knew i'd go into starvation mode if i didn't and all this like mental garbage we've been told so what you end up with is this idea where you're slowly gonna work your way up and it's okay to do that and some mornings someone's gonna bring in donuts and you're just gonna break your fast and in the book i explain the psychology and the biology of why that happens and it's just it's okay right you have the rest of your life to to do this that's why it's called a fasting practice and it doesn't have to be perfect and once you get up to that 68 one day you're going to sit there and go you know what it's lunch time but i'm actually not that hungry so i am going to for the first time in my adult life i am going to just say i'm not going to eat till dinner and then you're really kind of tricking yourself because it's only like four or five more hours until you've had dinner anyway and then you're going wait a minute the last time i ate was dinner yesterday but it wasn't pain it wasn't suffering it wasn't struggle it wasn't strife it wasn't pushing it was just oh okay i could do that i was a little hungry in the afternoon but i drink some extra water right maybe you did use coffee coffee's good for you anyway right it's okay and then no sugar or cream i'm assuming thank you no sugar no cream no protein no artificial sweetener either you can use stevia or monk fruit if you want to but definitely not nutrient or splenda because those wreck your gut bacteria and it it's really shocking and you see this look at wonder like wow i can't believe i i thought i would die right but i didn't i just did 24 hours and as we talked about earlier that's you know one meal a day but if the next day you're like i did yesterday i'm gonna do it again today and you're still just getting into it you're probably not gonna feel as good right so the next day go back to sixteen eight right like slowly work up to it and what you're doing it's like you go to the gym say i haven't worked out in two years but i'm gonna go do a full crossfit workout right i'm gonna do the full wad and then the next day you're laying on your back and you're like i think i have to go to the hospital my kidneys are overloaded with protein breakdown you know i hate my life it's because it's okay when you're exercising yourselves the way fasting knows it's okay to just get started in a healthy gentle way and work yourself up to this i can fast for 48 hours and still be totally fine and and have my brain work and do interviews like this and i feel great i can also eat and feel great but before i'd eat and then i get the food coma and then you don't feel very good and then you gotta have some sugar that doesn't happen either but if you just go all in and say i'm gonna start with a 10 day water fast man you're gonna feel like crap and the deal here is fasting is not about deprivation and it's not supposed to be about willpower unless you're doing a spiritual fast and what i would say is do fasting in a painless way which is a big part of the book or choose to face the pain and use it as a spiritual personal development practice two things will happen on your deathbed if you failed you really went for something and you failed one they will all mourn that you weren't able to live your life because you were so myopically focused on the goal that you forgot to enjoy the journey and somewhere along the way you stopped loving you stopped loving them you stopped loving yourself because all you could see was succeeding getting that thing the tick on the paper box and you lost your way that's possibility number one possibility number two is there like hey this [ __ ] tried and it was inspiring and just to see them go day after day after day in the face of so much defeat but to have the will and determination to keep going winston churchill said and i quote success is going from failure to failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm it doesn't matter if you win that's not success the success is going from the failure to the failure to the failure and still being excited to show up it's like this is how i liken success success is like love you know the beautiful part about love getting the [ __ ] kicked out of you and then coming back for more that's so hopeful that's so optimistic to be like whoa i just had my ass handed to me and yet i want to be vulnerable again i want to go through this again i want to open myself up to this i want to be touched by that i want to feel that [ __ ] people can get behind that man we can get excited about that we want to be friends with people like that we want to feel that in our own lives that willingness to to have tasted defeat and still come in open and not jaded how beautiful is that there's these three voices in your head that make you do everything you've ever been ashamed of and they're coming from mitochondria and gut bacteria and getting on top of that and just owning that that's awesome but if you have to own it every day on top of everything else in your life it's gonna be overwhelming and it's gonna raise your cortisol and you don't need to do that to get the benefits what are the three voices this is the algorithm that all life runs it doesn't matter if you're a plant it doesn't matter if you're a bacteria which is what's powering us or whether you know you're a deer and the first rule is run away from kill or hide from everything so that's fear and you put 10 times more energy on that than is necessary right because from the perspective of making a life form that will always be around it should protect itself and you protect yourself if you're a plant with hard shells or spikes or toxins and if you're a bacteria you use toxins or other defense things and if you're a person you think you're out of it and the second f word which gets about five times more attention than normal is eat everything because famines kill lots of things so now we have fear and we have food right and that's why food gets so much attention when you're fasting because your bacteria like eat that eat that eat that eat that eat that and you're like no no no and eventually it's like a little kid wearing you down and okay fine you can have half the cookie johnny and they're like why do i eat the cookie i'm such a bad person no your mitochondria got the best of you it's okay and then the third f word what else does all life have to do to make sure it's on the earth forever tom fornicate baby oh i was thinking fertility but if you want to just go straight through i'll go right there you're correct so i actually was thinking of the other f word i was just trying to get you to say it so nice dodge what um what's going on there that gets about three times more attention than it deserves right and all life has to do it and this explains everything you've ever done that you're ashamed of like all procrastination all resistance all not seeing things like that's fear right eating all the stuff you shouldn't eat that's food going on that date you know you shouldn't have gone on that is the other f word right and this is in our cells this is not your brain this is your cellular biology driving you to do it our body has five very simple health defense systems that are um that have now been discovered they are number one something called angiogenesis that's blood vessels that's how our blood body grows blood vessels angio means blood blood vessels genesis is how the body grows blood vessels we've got 60 000 miles worth of blood vessels packed in our body and these are the highways and byways of our oxygen our nutrients whatever we breathe whatever we eat in order for ourselves to get the benefits of the critical elements of life they have to be carried by the blood vessels so that's so critical for our defenses that's healthy number two our stem cells you know when we were kids we were told that starfish and salamanders can regenerate but humans can't guess what that textbook's been thrown right out the window because humans do regenerate just slowly and we know that we generally regenerate because our hair grows back um you know our skin uh can actually heal and and grow itself back but some of the crazy things that we're beginning to actually discover is that uh if you snip a piece of your lung off and it'll grow right back at the very tip if you cut up take away two thirds of your liver okay let's say that you have a tumor in your liver you can remove two-thirds of it and that one-third will grow the rest of the liver back kind of like a salamander's leg it's crazy and of course our nerves will regenerate and so biotech companies have been trying for decades now to figure out how to inject stem cells well mother nature's already beat them to it because stem cells are present in our body as a defense and we're continuously regenerating ourselves from the inside out repairing problems you know there's a road crew inside our body um yours and mine right here right now that are fixing things that are invisible to us third microbiome we can talk more about this you know it's the tip of the spear of a whole new frontier about the human body that we're just beginning to understand but the important part of it is that we know that when we've got good healthy gut bacteria and this microbiome is the ecosystem of our gut bacteria i call it the great barrier reef in our body you know um 39 trillion bacteria all living inside there and what we know the important part for your your viewers and listeners is that they help when they're healthy they help to lower inflammation in our body which then lowers all kinds of disease they help optimize their metabolism everybody's always worried about their metabolism good gut bacteria helps that right along fight fat um helps to avoid um insulin sensitivity over uh and avoid glucose uh surges all very important controls our hormones you know so that our mood and our brain so our mood is actually uh healthy as well and can fight cancer and uh regulate obesity all kinds of things if our gut and by the way it's so easy to disrupt the gut i mean think about a tanker spill uh that destroys you know a coral reef that's what we can accidentally do to ourselves by eating the wrong things you know if you were taking a boat by the great barrier reef and you were to take a a bottle of toxic material and pour it right down on top of the coral reef guarantee you that the fish and the anemones are all going to be dead okay that's what we do to ourselves so this higher level of awareness that we have we have to take care of our gut microbiome so important for for defending our health our gut defends our health fourth our dna defends us against the environment so most people think about our dna as our genetic code yes it is it is the blueprint for our proteins in our body that we inherited half from our mom half from our dad et cetera et cetera however the the really cool um unsung part of our dna is that it's one of our bodies five health defense systems what does it do it fixes itself what do i mean by facing itself well we go out you know during the summer and you go to the beach and you are enjoying laying out you know enjoying the weather of beach weather that ultraviolet radiation is coming in and mutating your dna now how come we don't develop cancer all the time after going to the beach because our dna is hardwired to fix itself when it's damaged by the environment and the beach is one thing and i'm not even talking about the tanning salon but i always ask people when you're actually filling up your car with gas like you're you know you're at the gas tank do you stand upwind or downwind of the of the of the pump and people go huh what are you talking about i'm like well if you smell the fumes the solvents then you're standing downwind and if you smell them you're breathing in solvents they can mutate the dna in your lung so how can we don't get lung cancer because our dna fixes itself an amazing defense system um uh that our dna plays and then finally is our immune system which of course you know after the past year and a half everybody knows just on how important good strong immunity actually is but most people don't know that even as we get older our immune system still has the capacity of fighting invaders not just outside invaders like viruses and bacteria but inside invaders like cancer so we are able to now and this is one of the most remarkable things i've seen in my medical career give people who have cancer even metastatic cancer that spread immune treatments that by themselves don't kill the cancer but uncloak the cancer so that your immune system can go after the cancer and even if you've got metastatic disease even brain metastasis it's possible in some cases now for your own immune system to wipe out all traces of cancer and put you not just in remission okay that's what chemo does can put you in remission but immunotherapy can actually turn the clock back and reset yourself so you don't have cancer anymore we've been talking to kids about rights and we really should be talking to them about responsibility and what you owe the world instead of what the world owes you now i'll frame it a little we have to balance those right because i mean even technically speaking your rights are my responsibilities and vice versa and so we can't only have half the dialogue because the responsibility makes enables the rights so you know it could easily be that we could be in a situation where we should be talking more about rights but i don't believe that we are in that situation at the moment and i i mean i think for me that's been borne out by the fact that people have been interested in what i've been saying because one of the things i've noticed time and time again is that whenever i talk about the relationship between responsibility and meaning the crowds that i'm talking to go silent say look you need a meaning to sustain you through the vicissitudes of life okay well try to debate that it's like is life painful yes is it anxiety provoking yes is it uncertain yes is it painful beyond bearing sometimes yes it's difficult everyone agrees about that now they might disagree about how difficult but that doesn't matter that the central point holds okay what if you think that's all pointless well that doesn't seem very helpful okay so you need a sustaining meaning well where do you find that well you generally find it in responsibility to yourself and other people and people ask themselves those questions when when i'm talking because i ask them to ask themselves those questions and that's the answer well what's meaningful well i have a meaningful relationship with my father i have a meaningful relationship with my wife i have a meaningful relationship with my pet you know because i take care of that pet um when i commit to something and make sacrifices that sacrifice is something i also talk about a lot in both of the last two books you know if something's valuable you'll make sacrifices to attain it that that discovery of sacrifice i think that's what separates human it's one of the primary factors separating human beings from animals because we discovered that we could let go of something we value in the present and we would gain something we value even more in the future we acted that out dramatically in all sorts of strange ways over thousands and thousands of years before it was formalizable psychologically but it's a massive discovery i can forego gratification in a particular way and benefit in the future so i can share the proceeds of my hunt and i store up future food in the form of reputation and the favors i've owed i'm owed now by other people it's a massive discovery