These Experts REVEAL How You Can REVERSE AGING and Stay Young LONGER

There's actually a DNA clock that tells our bodies how old we are. We I could take your blood and read it and I could tell you roughly when you're going to die. There's just too many people who aren't exercising enough or correctly at all. They're just sort of withering away. If people could do one thing and leave this conversation with nothing else other than muscle is the organ of longevity and eat high-quality protein. Anyone who says we've reached our maximum limit doesn't know what they're talking about. Well, so I've been studying these enzymes, the sirtuins. Uh, we have seven in our bodies. I've been studying them for about 25 years. And what we've learned is that they respond to the cellular environment. Uh, there's a chemical that they require for gas. Think of them as the fuel, called NAD. And there's another molecule that is like the accelerator on the enzymes. Uh, that makes them go even even faster and that's one of them is called resveratrol, which we discovered years ago from red wine. And together they actually do really great things on these enzymes and make them keep the body younger at least. For 25 years we've been studying mostly um, animals. Um, and even little fungi, uh, yeast cells. And what we've learned from those studies is that these are largely involved in responding to when organisms are under threat of survival. So how do you make the body feel like it's under threat? Adversity. Uh, so one is run a lot or at least become out of breath, you know, a few times a week. Your body will say, "Oh man, we had we had to outpace one of those saber-tooth cats again. Got to got to build up the body." Um, the other is to be hungry, either a couple of times a week or every day, you know, skip a meal or two. And then your body will turn on these sirtuins, make more of that fuel, NAD, for the enzymes. And we think that's what's in part responsible for the health benefits of those uh, lifestyle choices. All right, one thing though that you talk about that I found really interesting is this notion of what may be good for you when you're young may come back to bite you in the ass when you're older. So, it's like um the whole notion of hormesis that a little bit of bad is actually extraordinarily good, which is exactly what you're describing now. Get out of breath through all the stuff. And so, when the information started pouring out that the only thing across every known um living organism that extends lifespan is the eat less, which you talk about in your own book, it feels like you're saying to do it for that reason. Just don't put as much stress on the system. But now I hear you saying, "No, no, no, what you actually want to do is stress the system." Won't that stress of I just ran from a lion, [ __ ] I'm starving, won't that begin to stack up and become problematic? Well, actually if if you step on a snail, it's going to die. So, there's certain amounts of stress that that you don't want to do. But what you want to do is get the body to fear adversity in the future, but not enough to cause lasting damage or the unspooling of the DNA that'll lead to disease and eventually death. So, you you don't want to overdo it. You want to be a little bit puffed, you want to be a little bit hungry. But of course, starvation, malnutrition is not going to make you live longer. So, it's a fine line and what we've learned from many animal studies and increasing numbers of clinical trials in humans is that you want to pulse it. Let the body recover. Not constant. We used to make animals go hungry all their lives and it worked, but it actually works better if you let them recover and I think that's that's the secret. Then let's really dive into that. So, I'm guessing you're talking about where um animals were denied something like 20 to 30% of their caloric intake for very long periods of time is extending their life by what, like 30% or something? Um so, super interesting. But you're saying that if their caloric intake over a long period of time is roughly the same as an animal that's just allowed to eat until it's satiated, that if it's done in a pulse pattern of hunger and and almost overfeed, Yeah. they actually have the same benefits as the animal that has a chronic deficit of calories. All right. Well, well, let's be clear. Nobody knows what the perfect diet is, even when it comes to fasting. It's all largely based on rodent studies. So, what I can tell you about the rodent studies, which I'm very familiar with, is that if you take a rodent and reduce its calories by 25% for its whole life, it will live longer, 30%, but it'll be really miserable and aggressive. Uh and that's true for us as well. I've tried calorie restriction for about a week and I gave up. I was pretty angry. But, what we discovered, our my colleagues um discovered is that if you it's not just what you eat, it's when you eat that's important. And what's been found is that if as long as you have that period of hunger, um in a mouse, so you can feed them every other day, then they can gorge themselves as much as they want, and they do. They eat about 90% of what a mouse having free access to food would eat. Uh but they they have the same longevity benefit as a mouse that's always been hungry. And if that's true, what that means is for us is that we can enjoy life as long as we have that period of hunger once a day or maybe twice a week. And I believe the only reason we age, um you know, we could live for a thousand years otherwise. The only reason we age is that our repair systems become complacent. You mentioned that what what is beneficial for you when you're young comes back to bite you when you're old. What we think is that these repair systems are very good when we're young. So, the idea is it's called antagonistic pleiotropy, and I think it's right. And that is that we evolved to stay healthy and alive and fit till we're 40, and then the the forces of natural selection decline after that cuz we've essentially bred. Right. We've often had children, but we don't need to stick around beyond that. And building a a body that will last a thousand years Right. is pointless at that, you know. So, most species only live as long as they need to to reproduce, and then a little bit more. If you're a mouse that could die within two years, they only build a body that last two years. If you're a whale that has no predators, you can live for a couple of hundred years. That makes more sense. Hope you enjoyed the episode, brought to you by our sponsor Ombre Labs. Get 70% off your at-home gut health test when you go to tryombre.com/impact. Enjoy the episode. If people could do one thing and leave this conversation with nothing else other than muscle is the organ of longevity and eat high-quality protein, animal protein and plant protein are totally different, and if you have a diet of plant protein and it's very hard to sustain and calorically devastating cuz you need between 25 and 40% more. So, it's like six cups of quinoa for one small chicken breast. If you really wanted to think about the amino acids necessary to stimulate that tissue. And listen, that's not the only way to do it. Could we add in branched-chain amino acids to lower-quality protein? Absolutely. But why would you do that when we have you know, cattle or a ruminant that have that we've been consuming for two and a half million years and have the capacity to take low-quality plant nutrition and produce high-quality nutrition with that is nutrient-dense and highly bioavailable for humans. So, I understand I've heard you say the same thing. Like, I understand people have they may have a um a moral desire to eat plant-based food, and I get that, dude. As somebody who's absolutely just love animals, and I long for the day where we can lab grow meat and that there was never an animal um involved in that process, but I'm also just selfish enough to say I'm going to protect my health. Um, you know, when you look at obviously sustainable farming and things like that, I'm all for it. I couldn't be more behind that. Um, but wanting to understand sort of at a mechanistic cellular level what's happening, and I don't care what the answer is, vegan, vegetarian, animal, a mix thereof, um, I just want to understand like at a cellular level what's happening, um, and to get that, I think understanding the what branched-chain amino acids are, why they matter, and how the profiles differ from plants to meat, I think it'd be really helpful. Yeah, I I couldn't agree with you more. So, really the quality of our diet, and this is globally, the quality of our diet is largely dependent on protein. So, there's 20 amino acids, and nine of those are essential. Of those essential amino acids, you have to have meaning I I cannot produce it in my body. Exactly. So, the key branched-chain amino acids, and when you think about branched-chain, it's just a structure, right? It's just a nomenclature. You've got leucine, isoleucine, and valine. And out of those three, which by the way should all be consumed together, cuz everything in life has its own balance. Of those three amino acids, leucine is the most relevant for protecting the organ of longevity. And on a cellular level, having the right amount at one time, dosed appropriately, which is where that 2 and 1/2 g, that's from the that's just from research. You know, it's really truthfully it's between 1.8 to 2.5 g of leucine, which the majority of people are not going to go, "Hmm, how much leucine is in my food?" right? It's not on the back of a label, which just goes to show you how protein has been the black sheep of the macronutrient family for decades. When you look at a label, all it simply says is protein. But understanding on a cellular level that really eating protein at a meal-centric dosing, meaning you at one time, you're not drinking protein shakes over a course of 2 hours, but at one meal at a bolus amount, you are getting between 30 and 50 g of protein, which would translate to between 4 and 6 oz of high-quality protein would reach that leucine threshold. So, once you reach that leucine threshold, you trigger this um this complex called mTOR. mTOR is a mechanistic target of rapamycin, which then is actually a nutrient sensor. Anything below that, the body's like, "Mhm, I don't care. I'm not going to put on muscle." Or, "Mhm, I don't care. I'm not going to really stimulate this very expensive, elaborate process for the body." It doesn't care. So, that's where you get skinny fat because you're grazing all day at this low-threshold meal, especially important in aging because you don't have that flexibility. And when I say aging, I'm talking about 40s. You know, you've got to stay on top of it, but once you reach that threshold of arguably 2 and 1/2 g of leucine, which you could have a 2 oz of fish and then a scoop of branched chain and get up that leucine level. But, mechanistically, you need that branched chain, that essential amino acid to then trigger the rest of what needs to happen for muscle protein synthesis. And listen, the way that they measure muscle protein synthesis, it's not like you eat it and then you're laying down protein. It true I mean, that's not an accurate assessment, right? I would be um not being truthful if I said that, but it really is a period of time over a period of time as you continue to do with anything correct, optimized habits, you then can protect tissue. And protecting tissue is everything. You know, and it's very dangerous because when people do weight loss, you know, you lose some fat, but you also lose tissue. And now we're in a situation where we're not outside and we're not doing resistance training, and we're not actually moving that endocrine organ. So, you know, it becomes much more difficult to maintain and recoup that tissue. And the tissue is just one aspect. It's truly the metabolic aspects, you know, of the of muscle. And if you want to prevent diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer's, cardiovascular, you know, cardiovascular disease, that whole spectrum, tissue, you know, muscle tissue will do that for you. And then you put on high-quality protein, you're going to keep inflammation low, you're going to keep calories in check, you're going to upregulate your thermal effective feeding. These are all really important. You're going to do You're going to have a lower blood pressure because some of the amino acids, one in particular, helps lower blood pressure. I mean, this is amazing stuff. It's a muscle-centric approach to wellness, and the paradigm is totally wrong. Human beings are wired, in a certain sense, to go out and slay dragons, to climb our own personal Mount Everest, to to get out and and and just to move, right? Living in a modern, post-industrial, largely sedentary era, we no longer are scratching that itch with our jobs. Unless you're lucky enough to be a construction worker, or a painter, or, you know, like my wife out there, you know, bringing alfalfa to the goats in the wheelbarrow, and taking care of the chickens, and pulling weeds out in the garden, and just being out in the sunshine, lifting heavy rocks every once in a while, uh or maybe, you know, you're you're a you're a hunter-gatherer, if you don't fall into any of those categories, you get to the end of the work day or or start the beginning of the work day and you do have this ancestral itch to move. And hence, we now live in an era of CrossFit boxes and pop-up gyms and quick done-for-you 45-minute super brutal exercise sessions to replace what would have normally just been our day-to-day job 100 years ago. And you know up until very recently, gyms and exercise and beating up and buffeting the body, that was the realm of athletes and gymnasts and and warriors and knights and gladiators and it wasn't something the average person really even felt the pressure to do. You know, you want to survive, you want to get through the day, you you want to move and this idea of of intentionally starving yourself or fasting and also intentionally beating up the body with exercise, like this is a relatively new phenomenon, you know, in an era where we're where we're sitting all day and surrounded by food. You know, we've had to figure out a way to to kind of kind of fight that battle, right? So, we fast and we exercise. But the idea with exercise is of course we don't see to in return and kick this horse to death. Not many of the blue zones or longevity hotspots engaging in formal exercise sessions, right? They are moving, lifting heavy things every once in a while, you know, occasionally sprinting or playing game of soccer or tennis or you know, if you look at it in in terms of like an ancestral context, maybe running from a lion. But you know, we're we're not doing a lot of those things now and so we need to to go to the gym. Now, what research has shown is that you know, to respond more directly to your question about how much more than 60 minutes of intense exercise, let's you know, let's say like a CrossFit intensity. Once you exceed about 60 minutes of that, which sounds ridiculous, but I know a lot of people who are who are literally pushing themselves with two-a-days or or exercising hard more than 60 minutes a day, you see a law of diminishing returns and an increased risk of mortality. And in the same way with aerobic exercise, let's say moderate aerobic exercise, right? Where you're pretty aware that you're exercising. It's not like you're out picking weeds in your garden. Once you exceed about 90 minutes of that, you also see an increased risk of mortality, a decreased rate of return on your exercise, and we see things like a cardiomegaly, like an enlarged left ventricle of the heart. We see increased risk for arterial stiffness. So, it appears to be about 60 minutes of intense exercise and 90 minutes of aerobic exercise where you definitely see a law of diminishing returns. And so, what I recommend that people do is A, you hack your environment so that you are somehow trying to simulate that all day long low-level physical activity type of scenario. You get a standing workstation. You get a treadmill workstation. You litter your office or your cubicle with things that allow you to do short movement spurts throughout the day, such as a kettlebell to stop and do some kettlebell swings or jumping jacks or, you know, I even have a hex bar in my office with some plates on it where I can lift heavy things every once in a while when I take a break. So, I work hard for 25 minutes, take 5 minutes, move, change positions, walk, swing kettlebell, do a few pull-ups, lift the hex bar a few time, keep going. Uh you know, I I wait to take all my phone calls until the afternoon when I can go outside in the sunshine and walk and take my phone calls. So, you figure out a way to get your body to be to to engage in low-level physical activity during the entire day. The way I like to think of it is that exercise should be an option when you finished your day, not a necessity. Then when you do exercise, exercise with the minimum effective dose of exercise. Walking is one of my favorite modes of exercise period cuz I can, you know, I can talk on the phone while I'm doing it. I can be in the sunshine, very low barrier to entry. I can do it when I'm sleep deprived. I can go see a city when I'm in a city. You know, I can it can be functional if I'm commuting. Uh but walking speed, particularly walking at a slightly faster rate than what is comfortable for you, slightly faster than your stroll rate, and being kind of cognizant of your walking speed as you're walking, like pushing yourself to walk just a little bit faster than you want to walk. Walking speed is correlated with longevity as well. Uh and I'll I'll throw one other at you. Uh this particular mode of exercise involves cold exposure. It involves hypoxia. It involves some amount of sensory deprivation, you know, swimming. Just swimming. Just swimming. Interesting that you call that sensory deprivation. Oh, if you've uh you know, this is one of the favorite things I like to do in the mornings when I travel is I'll get into a pool at the hotel and I go under the water. I hold my breath. I go under the water back and forth. And when I need to come up for a breath, I come up for a breath, and I train myself how to control the heart rate. And it's even better if the pool's a little bit cold, right? So, you're getting some of your cold therapy. And then as soon as I recovered my breath, I go back under, and it's peaceful, and you can't hear much other than the little swish of your hands or the swish of your feet. Your heart rate's up. You're training your breath. You're a little bit cold, and you're sensory deprived. So, you almost get a very kind of meditative feeling from it. So, swimming. Swimming would be the one. Let's talk about Ombre Labs. Did you know that your gut is related to so many health issues? Trouble focusing, bloating, constipation, maintaining a healthy weight, and skin blemishes like acne and eczema. And when gut health is poor, it can directly contribute to these types of health concerns. My wife Lisa has struggled with gut problems, so I know exactly how troublesome this can be. Unfortunately, Lisa is not alone in this battle. One in five Americans are are with gut health issues. Thankfully, we can fix a lot of these issues with a better diet and the right probiotics, and Ombre Labs makes this process really simple by offering an at-home gut health test, so you can know the state of your gut health and what problems it may be causing. Ombre Labs will then use your results to develop custom probiotics to help treat these problems. These aren't the one-size-fits-all probiotics you will find at the grocery store. These are personalized to you based on the results of the test. You can get 70% off your at-home gut health test when you go to tryombre.com/impact. That's tryombre.com/impact. Ombre Labs, again, tryombre, o m b r e, dot com for 70% off your at-home gut health test. All right, guys, take care and be legendary. So far my my exploration to this topic has has suggested a couple of things. So, one is we do tend to disproportionately load joints over muscles. So, in an ideal world, you would want to figure out a way to exercise where you can maximally load the muscle while minimally loading the joint. So, there is a lot of joint failure that becomes problematic. I mean, and I'm separating the obvious, which is there's just too many people who aren't exercising enough or correctly at all, and so they're just sort of withering away. But, if you come at this through the lens of, okay, well, what if we're dealing with a subset of people who are committed to figuring out how can they exercise best? In many ways, it's just a lack of specificity, right? So, most people who exercise can't actually tell you why they're doing what they're doing. The 99.9% of us who don't get paid to play a sport and who aren't even really competing at a serious level outside of the professional ranks, I don't think we know what our sport is. And I think the sport should be being the most kick-ass 100-year-old that ever lived. So, what would that look like? Like, what does it mean to be the most kick-ass 100-year-old? And I think you have to then reverse engineer all of the things one should be able to do. So, a kick-ass 100-year-old should be able to I I don't know. I'm making this up because I haven't fully codified this yet, but they should certainly be able to carry two 25-lb bags from a grocery store. They should be able to lift a 30-lb or 40-lb bag over their head to put it in a you know, compartment of an airport uh of an airplane. They should be able to have a you know, 25-lb little terror run at them, you know, I either great-grandchild or dip down into a squat and grab them and pick them up. They should be able to jump down on the floor and play with cars or dolls and stand up without assistance. And if you start to map out the 25 or 35 things, that becomes a new decathlon. So, instead of saying the decathlon is running this distance, jumping this far, swimming this far, it's like, great. Those are kind of arbitrary. Now, we're going to come up with like real-world things that you have to be able to do when you're 100 if you want to live what I would describe as potentially a more fulfilling physical life to enjoy the fruits of having not died by that point in your life. All right. So, how do we build towards that? I love this, by the way. Like, I always tell people, I want to live forever. I'm well aware that as of right now, I'm going to die. Um so, my thing is, how do we stay alive long enough to give time for these step function breakthroughs to happen? So, what do I do? Like, what are the things that I train or the hormone replacement therapies that I need to go What do I need to watch? What are those things that I should be doing? Taking a step back, I would say 3 years ago, 80 to 90% of my energy went into how to not die. Which basically Yeah, which is tantamount to how do you delay the onset of chronic disease? So, the mathematical equivalent of longevity from a lifespan perspective is creating a phase shift in disease onset. If you want to live to a hundred, it basically means you have to delay the onset by about two decades of every major chronic disease. So, it doesn't mean you can't get cancer or heart disease or any of these other things, but you better figure out a way to get them 20 years after the average person gets them. I would say now that occupies 50% of my brainwave energy, whatever, and much more time goes into two other things, which is how to minimize suffering, which is kind of an emotional problem, and then how to be this kick-ass 100-year-old. So, to the latter, um the model I have in my mind is that of sort of Bruce Lee. Bruce Lee sort of looked at each and every discipline of martial arts, including boxing and wrestling and things like that, and said, "Let me extract from each of these disciplines that which I believe is useful, discard those that I think are useless, and create a perfect fighting form that is truly geared towards self-defense. So, it is not a sport, there is no tournament, there is no rank, there is no belt, there is no sensei. It is Can you handle yourself in a life-or-death situation?" If I go to a yoga class or if I do a Pilates class, invariably there's something in there that I think is really valuable. And truthfully, there's a bunch of stuff that I'm like, I don't need this. This is just If I had infinite time, this would be fine to do, but I don't have infinite time. So, now you apply a constraint to the problem, which is not only do you want to be sort of the best 100-year-old imaginable, what if you're only willing to spend 10 to 12 hours a week preparing for that? And so, you say, "Okay, well, so there's a new sport, which we defined some of the parameters of. That's your new Olympics, and that Olympics is 50 years from now. How will you train for it if you're only willing to spend 10 to 12 hours a week training for it?" Well, my guess is you will take a lot of things from various disciplines, discard a lot of things, and sort of have to build a very bespoke routine around it that will involve the maintenance of muscle mass, joint integrity, flexibility, uh functional movement, balance, things that we don't even really think about anymore. How many times does someone who's 90 fall because they've lost their balance? And it's that fall that ultimately leads to their demise. How much of that the balancing do you think is neurological and how much is physical? They're just not doing enough physical [ __ ] to figure out to maintain that. My guess is it's probably both. There's a stability issue that starts to go away as you age. Also, the consequences of a fall become much more apparent. So, um it's probably not just the case that someone who's older falls that much more. It might be that the the severity of the injury becomes so much more severe. So, right now, if I were walking here and I tripped on that stair and fell, you know, maybe on a really, really bad day I break my wrist. Right. But most likely nothing happens. Uh in 50 years, if I do that same thing, the probability that something bad happens is going to be much greater. Yeah. Um but that said, I already can tell my balance is not what it was when I was 20. Mhm. When I was 15. I mean, I used to do I used to be able to do this exercise when I was 15 where I would do a with blindfolded I could do a single leg squat with the with the non-squatting leg straight out in front of me. So, I could go all the way to the floor and all the way up, arms crossed, blindfolded, I could do 20 each leg. I can't do that once today with my eyes open. Mhm. So, admittedly, I'm nowhere near as strong as I used to be, so there's a strength component, but I also just clearly lack the balance. And so so the question is now maybe that activity is a bit over you know, it's that's just unnecessary. Um and again, I don't know what the answer is. I don't know if this means I need to get out there and practice on a tightrope or something like but there's there's something that needs to be done. So, every time I do some sort of really well-thought-out workout, I find myself thinking, "God, like some percentage of this is so essential. Mhm. All of those things need to be put into this new discipline, this new sport, which is called, for lack of a better word, being a kickass 100-year-old." So, for me it came out of necessity, right? I was in my late 30s and I was on QVC all the time and I remember one day I was getting my makeup done and I was like, "This is crazy. I feel like I just accelerated my aging overnight. Something happened and it's really weird because it's taking so much more time to sort of bring my glow out and my skin feels dull and I feel like dull energy-wise and this is not going to work for the amount of things that I want to do in my life. And I think for every single one of us, right? Sometimes you can have this feeling of "Oh my god, I'm like held back by just sort of this toxic feeling inside." Um and I became really passionate about this idea of what is it at the cellular level that will give me that energy back? And I knew that my cells were either building, like building up, you know, through the protein and the different nutrients, or they were detoxing. And this is very much the layman thought process. I was just thinking they're eliminating crap, right? Like my cells are either building on themselves and they're replicating or they're eliminating junk and maybe they're dying off, but I didn't know that there was an actual biological process that occurred. So, fast forward to Italy, I'm in the orchard with this brilliant PhD, Dr. Elizabeth Janda, and she opens up a citrus bergamot fruit, shows the white, gives it to me, I'm eating it. We go back to our lab, we're drinking this tea all day long, this citrus tea. I'm like, "I love this tea, but what's the deal? Like I've never drank so much tea other than when I was in Japan where they were just drinking green tea three, four, five cups a day. And she was doing the same with the citrus tea and she's like, oh, it's my anti-aging secret. And um it activates my autophagy. Like a That What's that word? And I started to learn from her. She explained to me that this process is something that we all have in every single one of our cells. It's almost like a little doctor inside of each of your cells that says, okay, time to recycle this part. These organelles need to be removed. This needs to be killed. This needs to be strengthened. And so autophagy is like this brilliance within our cells. And there's so many ways to activate it and there are so many ways to deactivate it. You don't always want to keep it on, right? Like it's it's kind of like the ocean back and forth. So she told me about it and I came back to US and I was obsessed and I was on a mission. And that was like five years ago. And I knew when my when I looked at my skin and I saw that I had experienced these accelerated agers and I looked older than I was and I actually looked at a picture of my mother at 37 years old. I grabbed this photo of her and I looked at a picture of me and I looked so much older than she did. Woah. Like this is really messed up. Like I know I put a lot more stress on myself. You know, I travel around the globe like on average eight times a year. Woah. Yeah, I'm I'm on the go. Um so I'm dealing with a lot of that. I have four kids, you you built I was running, you know, Twinlab, CEO of Twinlab. I had sold my company to them. Um public company. So, all of these factors put stress, but still, I shouldn't have been looking that much older than my mother. And so, that's when I got into activating autophagy. Okay, that's really interesting. And let's um sort of bring it down from the scientific for a second because so, I heard you on um Bulletproof Radio, and Dave was talking about how wow, your skin really looks good in person. And so, the second I saw you, I was like, "What's going on with this guy?" It really is fascinating seeing you up close. Like, truly, your skin is phenomenal. Um so, now becomes a question of what are you doing on a daily basis? You've talked about things you put on your skin, which I thought was super weird, but maybe you want to go out and do it. Um and you were talking about like coffee grounds and all kinds of crazy [ __ ] So, walk us through the things that you eat, and then walk us through the things that you apply externally. Okay. I I consume tons of super herbs, tons of power phenols. Okay. Um which is like cacao and and a lot of those things. I eat a ton of microgreens. So, that's like broccoli sprouts. Mhm. Microgreens? Yes. So, like little sprouts. Uh-huh. So, when you go to Japan, you should be taking sulforaphane, which comes from the broccoli sprout, because it's an incredible autophagy activator and detoxifier. So, you're going to be in a very polluted city. Yeah, you can take it in a supplement form. You can find it anywhere. Sulforaphane um is it's really awesome. Okay. So, I take those foods, those supplements. I personally um really benefit from a ketogenic diet. It reduces the inflammation in my body. There's maybe what, 15 or 20% of the population that does well on a low-fat carb-rich diet, but the rest of us just are better off, you know, I'll very much put myself in that camp. Um do you live in ketosis, like year round? Yeah. I only got um, really into it about a year and a half ago myself personally. I had um, maybe eight years ago, one of um, my translator had cancer, and so we put him on a ketogenic diet um, with his cancer, and that was many years ago. And um, that was based on Tom Seyfried's work, and um, one of my children, my seven-year-old has suffered from seizures, so he's ketogenic, so he was ketogenic before I was. And uh, a year and a half ago, I was just like, I have to figure out how I myself, my family, my mother, I mean, you spoke about metabolic um, disorders, and you know, metabolic syndrome, and and and obesity, and morbidly obese. Um, when we moved to this country, my mother developed metabolic syndrome. Interesting. And uh, that has been the most one of the most painful things for me personally, cuz I couldn't solve it for her. So, a year and a half ago, I interviewed over 80 experts, and I created a documentary called The Real Skinny on Fat. It's a free documentary, it's online. And um, I got so inspired by these genius minds that I went ketogenic, and I haven't gone back. When you're sleeping, what will happen is it you have this thing called a circadian rhythm. And animals are really good about not screwing up their circadian rhythm. All right? Like, the birds don't wake up late. There's not a bird that's like, you know, oh, I don't get up until noon. Right? They just get up. Right? And they go to bed at the same time, and so what that does is it really sets this biological clock, so that everything happens on a on a 24-hour cycle. And certain hormones need to be released at certain times. And then certain repair mechanisms need to happen at the immune system level or in your brain. Um and you can be quote unquote sleeping, but if you're not really sleeping well, like you're have sleep apnea or you keep waking up or you have a lot of anxiety, then you're not going to be able to go into deep sleep. You're not going to get enough REM cycles, you know, and every time you wake up, you restart the whole sleep system because you have this thing called sleep inertia. So, your first REM cycle takes a long time. Takes over 2 hours usually for you to do that. And then every successive REM cycle, it can be um compressed. So, in 7 hours, you could easily get four REM cycles. But if you keep waking up, you could be in the bed for 9 hours and never get it. So, I hate sleep. Uh if I didn't need it, I wouldn't get it. I fully understand I actually prioritize it in my life. It's one of the most important things that I do. Um if I had to guess though, I average without an alarm clock. I never set an alarm clock. I always go to bed at the same time. I'm very aware of my circadian rhythms, but just in terms of where I'm at in my life, levels of excitement, levels of stress, whatever, I probably average about 6 to 6 and 1/2 hours of sleep a night. Um and one thing that I heard is that while you're sleeping, your brain actually shrinks and or de-inflames maybe is the right way to think about it and allows like a a brainwashing, if you will. Um is that what's happening or is there something else going on um during the different phases of sleep that make it so critical? Yeah, so there's a lot more going on. And really probably one of the most important things that's going on are the immune cells that get stimulated in your brain. So, these microglial cells and these astrocytes that are in your brain, they they're doing all the repair. And they're more active during the night. Um the other thing is that your brain is taking all the memories from the day and you're forgetting. Forgetting is really the most important process because your hippocampus will just get full of all these proteins that just get accumulated during the during the day. You don't want to remember like every single little detail of the day. You just don't have that capacity. And if you don't make sure that you process all that short-term memory and free it up, the next day you're going to be compromising your ability to remember. This is This is the the generational difference between the two of us, Tom. So So like, you know, you're looking for the hacks. Like, what's the ideal? How do I live the longest and how do I live you know, and how do I optimize that? And and I have to take everything together and I say, well, first of all, I don't care if I live forever. I don't want to live forever. I don't need to live forever because what I'm of that mindset that what defines my enjoyment of life right now is partly offset by the knowledge that it ain't going to be there one day. So I'm trying to, you know, meet out the the pleasure over a finite period of time. Again, I talk about like if there's if somebody said, "Look, you got to eat this, Mark. It tastes like [ __ ] but you're going to live 5 years longer and you're going to have to eat it twice a day." I'm like, "I'm out. I don't need I don't need to um sacrifice the sort of short-term hedonistic experience uh that I crave, you know, whether it's a serotonin or dopamine. It's just I want I'm looking for that. And if you tell me that it's been proven by science that's going to have me live 5 years longer, I'm probably going to reconsider whether, you know, it's worth the sacrifice of the of the of the immediate experience because you know, as you get as we get down to this, we can talk about what happens in 20 or 50 years from now, but right now all that matters is is this moment. I'm hanging out with with Tom Bilyeu. We're having a great conversation. That's all that matters to me right now. Uh and I want to I want to be in that moment as often as I can. Um and it takes it takes work uh for it for as long as I can and not have to make a sacrifice of whatever today's experience or now's experience is because somebody did some research that said you know if you do it differently and and you sacrifice significantly um you'll live longer. I'm like, well, okay. Quality of life has to factor into the equation. Uh you know, you can't just tell me I'm I'm going to live forever and then say, but your life's going to suck and you're and you're going to some you know, whatever. Right? So No, no, I totally get it. I'm I'm rambling on here. Sorry about that. Not at all. That that's super interesting to me. I love that people come at this stuff from different angles. Um so to that point, so you have a very specific way of looking at the world and and you just laid it out for us. If you could only have five ingredients, not uh five meals, but five ingredients. So, it could be uh filet mignon, it could be asparagus. What are the five things that that you would want if that was all you could eat for the rest of time and you wanted the the kind of life you have now. So, it's delicious, but it's also, you know, cognitively it's great. On and on. What No, what's interesting is because um the typically people ask me what are like what are some of the things that you wish you could eat every day but you can't. And to me, it's peanuts and beer. Like, I could live the rest of my life on peanuts and beer. That's amazing. I can't eat I can't I can't eat peanuts cuz they're horrible for me. And and you know, I I I I still like beer, but I I'm limited to like a half a glass once in a while. Um No, I mean, my my my favorite food of all is lamb. So, you know, a lamb lamb chop would be one. Um probably pick if I had to pick a vegetable, you know, broccoli's probably my favorite vegetable. If I had to pick some sort of a starchy tuber, don't don't think I'm weird but um like either turnips or rutabagas with butter. I did not see that coming. No, nobody does. I like the I like the real bitter aspect of that. But I'm I'm sort of picking one from from each of these categories. Right? If I sort like a fruit. If I had to pick a fruit, it would be like Bing cherries. I think are probably, you know, one of my favorite fruits. And um you know, and probably red wine. And and I could live the rest of my life on those on those five things. Word. Those Those are some fantastic choices. Respect. So, we talked about this the last time we met. I was I did a rabbit starvation diet which is basically 85 or more percent of my calories came from protein. Took my fat as low as I could. My carbohydrates were essentially zero. My doctor loved me. He was telling me I was going to live forever but I felt like [ __ ] And when you talk about steer by how you feel and not, you know, worry so much about all the things you can measure, that seems wild. There's a great example. You're born to measurement than you. Feeling certainly trumps everything.