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here's the most important question people ask me this question all the time they say Steve what is your favorite
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ever episode on the DI ofo podcast and I think the more important question is
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actually what is your favorite episode on the DI of AO podcast of all time and
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so I went out to try and answer that question what is your favorite episode what is your favorite moment on this
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podcast of all time and using a data scientist and a big team of analysts
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we've found the most replayed moments of all the hundreds of episodes we've produced this year to show to you today
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these are the moments that you replayed and shared more than any other moment on
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this podcast theoretically this should be the most valuable D of a CEO episode you ever
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listen to because it's a compation of the most valuable moments that we've ever had on this show in 2020
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[Music]
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three the seventh most replayed moment is my conversation with jles yo where he
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takes on some of the biggest myths about Health weight obesity and he answers the
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question do we have to get fatter as we age is it genetic what are the easy ways
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to manage our weight after I read it in your book about us gaining more and more weight his we age I Googled it and the
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healthcare research and quality agency said that we naturally tend to gain
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weight as we age to the tune of 1 to2 pounds per year according to their review and that's from the agency for
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healthare research and quality which I found quite startling but but completely
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accurate so the numbers so what what the numbers that we have is yeah I think that's right actually so between 20 and
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50 years old those 30 years intervening the average person average will gain
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about 15 kilos in weight which is 32. yes 2 pound a year one to 2 pound a year 15 kilos in weight is gained over 30
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years on average some gain very little others gain a hell of a lot more we look at ourselves in a mirror I look at myself in a mirror um but it's true I
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don't want to be that guy mate I don't know how much choice you have what can I do to to to try and
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stay CU for me it's not really about the weight thing or how you look it's more about like I I am I don't know how to say this but
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there was this big set of stairs the other day really really long set of stairs leading down to this Lake I was
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in Indonesia a couple of months ago um and I I remember thinking about those stairs and thinking God if I wasn't you
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know athletic and strong and didn't have good knees and things like that there's
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no way I'd be able to get down this long winding handcarved set of Indonesian
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stairs so that I could go on this boat trip that I was going to go on and I just thought about how it was a weird
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thing I know this is kind of a strange story to tell but it crossed my mind I got to the bottom of the stairs and I turned to the person I was with and was
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literally like you know that's why I've got to stay in shape for as long as I can because I want to do these boat trips and I want to go on this little
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rafting thing but I won't even be able to access it unless I can go down up and down those stairs like 200 meters of
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stairs down this Cliff um so that's what I care about I care about being active and strong and fit for as long as I
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possibly can and I from what you've said about gravity and weight um being
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overweight is going to inhibit my chances of being able to do those stairs so so that I think there are two elements there first of all there is
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doing the things that we want to do okay like that because you're exactly right
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these are the things which I can still do that I can still walk up a mountain or down a mountain because I'm still fit
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enough to do that and I want to stay as fit as long as I can to do that and weight will inhibit that undoubtedly but
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then there's a second element to actually consider now that's healthy look none of us are going to live longer we
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hopefully and anyway if we left lived longer but was unhealthy would you want to live longer so you want to live
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longer but healthier for longer okay and undoubtedly the thing that is closest
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related to health when you age is not your total weight there's a role to play there the amount of muscle you have it
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is your muscle mass as you age independent of how much fat you have okay that will determine how healthy you
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are as you age so as so now the moment now I'm talking about going into the 60s and the the 70s rather than when one is
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able to go down a 200 me set of steps okay so now as you get older the most
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crucial bit of information is to maintain resistance training not lifting and that's not what I'm talking about
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sitting on a wall getting up and down a chair because that the amount of muscle mass you have really really really marks
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the level of Health that that you're going to get and then the the signs is startling it is so so so related
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independent of independent of weight you know from from from the so muscle mass is the most important for healthy aging
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the moment you get 60 70 plus interesting okay so I'll keep I'll keep
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doing resistance training correct always keep resistance training and lifting weights as long as I can lifting weights as long as you can at some point you
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won't be able to lift weights just don't don't write me off don't write me off John the hubis of Youth yeah that's the
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naivity of Youth yeah you just assume you'll always be able to do what you can do now I I yeah it's something I think a
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lot about and I think a lot of people will watch this podcast because probably especially this time of
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year we're in January they'll probably be trying to find ways that they can cut fat they want to be a bit skinnier you
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said think you said half a stone you want to lose I'm in the same place I think most people want to lose a half a
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stone or something what is the way that you would suggest to do that the simple way you know not the like
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complicated go by this guy's course and do three million sit-ups whatever the simple advice you would give someone
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that's H hoping to create sort of sustainable weight loss so the first is
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the amount of protein you eat and you need to try and focus on trying to keep to about 16% of the energy in your day
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okay from protein 16% and there's a sweet spot so if you eat too much and
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you're not lifting you're stressing your kidneys because your kidneys have to get rid of the nitrogen from the protein
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okay so 16% is a sweet spot and it doesn't mean steaks only it can mean beans tofu any kind of protein from from
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anywhere 16 % second is fiber we need to eat as much fiber as physically possible
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okay 30 gr we want to aim for although we're looking at the moment on average in this country we're probably only
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eating 15 grams we need to double the amount of fiber we actually eat third we
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need to limit the amount of added sugars into our diet added sugars meaning
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sugars not tied up in fiber powdered stuff uh uh um maple syrup alav nectar
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all those are added sugars you put in keep it to 5% or less of the of the energy content in your day and those are
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the three numbers that that that I want you to think about so 16% of protein 30 gram of fiber 5% or less of added sugars
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apply that to whatever you want what keto um whatever you want to do apply
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that and I think that will be a sustainable healthy way to eat the sixth
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most replayed moment is a conversation I had with Dr Mindy pels who talks about
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the belly fat burning diet nutrition is a huge thing at this time of year and so
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she lays out exactly how to eat and behave in order to reduce belly fat and
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to improve your overall health you told me about the first two styles of fasting the first one was intim fasting which is
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12 to 16 hours which is good for weight loss brain fog that kind of thing the second is autography autophagy what did
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I say autography but I like it I said autophagy I said autophagy we can play that back I definitely said autophagy
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and if I didn't we'll fix it with AI um autophagy fasting which is 17 to 72 hours good for balancing sex hormones
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and preventing illness yeah number three we haven't spoken about gut reset fast
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yeah what's that yeah so that's based off uh a study that came out of MIT that
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showed 24 hours without food and your intestinal stem cells inside your gut
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actually start to reboot themselves now a stem cell is a cell that can go to
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anywhere in the body and repair itself but at 24 hours you get a plethora of them in your gut and in the gut we've
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got a damaged microbiome from everything that we've just been talking about so what I discovered in this 24-hour fast
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is I could take women that had been on birth control pill for years um people that had been on multiple rounds of
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antibiotics people who had been eating horrible food and I could actually put them through a 24-hour fast once a week
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once every every couple of weeks and these stem cells would come in there and they would start to repair and so now if
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I teach that person How to Eat Right their food is actually starting to build a better microbiome in the gut so that
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24-hour fast became this go-to in my clinic where I could take all these gut
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challenges and I could start to unwind them just because I knew the body had
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this capability of making these intestinal stem cells and it was crazy like we got people off supp ments we got
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people that were didn't weren't making serotonin which affects moods comes from the gut all of a sudden start to become
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happier people who hadn't had bowel movements in like three days all of a sudden we started to put in these this
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gut reset and it was like a miracle it was incredible number four fat burner
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fast so the fat burner fast is probably my favorite for those people who want to lose weight the research was done that
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36 hours without food followed by 12 hours of eating and then another 30 they
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actually did it over a 30-day period but we've been using it in our community just dosing it in that at 36 hours what
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happens is that's enough time where the blood sugars come come down where all of
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a sudden the body it's so smart it goes okay blood sugar is not common we've
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been in this fasted State we've triggered autophagy we've brought inflammation down we've made you ketones
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we're trying to go find food but this extra weight it's not not serving you you cuz remember you got to go find food
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so it drops weight and it's the most beautiful way to get a person to unstick
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any kind of weight loss resistance but most importantly you know where it it dropped the most amount of weight from
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where does everybody want to lose weight belly yep so it is the I probably should have called it the fat burning belly fat
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burning the belly fat yeah that would have banged yeah but yeah and so that's what they showed is that actually a 36
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hour fast started to unstick weight loss and it was started with weight around the belly
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compelling number five the dopamine reset fast yeah so number five um I
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found some research showing that when people go without food for 48 hours the
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whole dopamine system will be rebooted so what's important to know about the dopamine system is it is our molecule of
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happiness it is the thing that it's actually a motivation molecule and it's a neurotransmitter that allows thoughts
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happy thoughts to go across from neuron to neuron and so what happens and I'm
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sure you've talked about this on your podcast that we're so dopamine saturated right now but specifically people who
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are Overeaters they actually are finding the study I quote in the book is that they found that people who had food
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addiction people who had extra weight like obese situations they were not getting as much
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happiness out of their food because their dopamine receptor sites were saturated so they had to eat more food
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to get more happiness and a lot and you know food is a state changer it does
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make us happy so what they found is if they put them into a 48 hour fast that they actually rebooted the whole
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dopamine system and new dopamine recept toyes appeared so that when they brought food back in to the equation they
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actually got more enjoyment out of food with less food this kind of got me thinking about a conversation I was
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having yesterday with some of my team here we were talking about how um it almost feels like sometimes if I've
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eaten sugar I can go into a bit of a sugar cycle and what I mean by that is I'll have some sugar and then like a
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couple of hours later I'll have another craving for sugar and then a couple of hours later I'll have another craving for sugar but then at other times
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specifically for example when I did keto I was I did the keto diet for about eight month uh eight weeks bloody eight
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months I wish um8 weeks and throughout that period I didn't have any cravings for sugar yep I we had some chocolate
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come into the studio and I walked over to the chocolate and I smell it Y and I didn't want any of it y it had gone but
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then when I'm in my what I call like the sugar cycle I'm eating sugar maybe you know once or twice a day and I'm getting
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like the craving for it where which I just can't seem to resist yep well dopamine's the molecule of more it's not
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the molecule of enough so what it does is when you get sugar you get this dopamine rush and the Brain goes woo
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love that give me more of that and so you con you it's it's endless you will never be fully satisfied it constantly
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wants you to come back for more and more and more so when you start to go off the ketogenic Energy System you're getting
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the same Euphoria you probably felt the same high the the same mental Clarity but you've totally taken this molecule
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more out of the out of the picture it's it in fact dopamine will actually you know you you get those receptor sites
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that will be repaired but you're not getting a big dopamine buzz when you're in a ketogenic State you're getting
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ketones I was I was mulling it with my team how long I had to stay away from sugar to kind of get out of that vicious
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give me more cycle yeah my experience has been it's about three days three days that's what I thought yeah I think
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I said four or five but it's just from experience as well if I haven't had sugar for three or four days I mean like
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a like a chocolate but something significant in terms of sugar then after 3 or 4 days the craving for it seems to
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to vanish yeah yeah it's not it's not if you think about that it's not hard if you're trying to overcome a sugar
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addiction yeah like just bear it for 3 days and then that dopamine stops
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barking at you and then if you attack fasting onto it now you're getting
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ketones and so you're not needing that as much ketones kill hunger and they make you so mentally mentally clear they
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give you this euphoric feeling so you don't have that urge to go for the for the sugar and the ketones come from
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fasting which is when your body switches metabolic State yeah the last and final
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fasting style immune reset fast yeah so immune reset was built off of Dr wter
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Longo's work and he did a study on people who had cancer and were going
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through chemotherapy and one of the challenges we know about chemotherapy is that it wipes out the whole immune
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system and so he wanted to see well what if I put somebody in a fasted State as
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they went through chemotherapy would there be a difference and what he found is after 3 days of fasting the white
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blood cells in our system actually reboot themselves so what they do is all old white blood cells are are sloughed
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away and new white blood cells emerge so people were able to come out of that
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chemotherapy experience and have a stronger immune system as opposed to what we were seeing was that it was
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wiping the immune system out so that launched the whole three-day water fast sort of craze at least here in America
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we're seeing a lot of people that are just going after 3-day water fast to Prime their immune system but you also
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also at three days get stem cells full systemic stem cells so all of a sudden
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your body's got in surging with stem cells going to all parts of the body repairing it the great example I always
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use on this one was I had an Achilles tendon injury and nothing was nothing
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was helping it so I threw a 5-day water fast at it on the fourth day I felt this
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buzz in my achilles tendon and I was like oh wonder what that is and it stayed all the way through I went
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five full days and um about the fifth and sixth day so sixth day I was
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entering food back in all the pain completely went away and it never came back I tried everything I tried
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everything and that was the only thing that repaired it it does make again evolutionary sense
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that if our body senses we're injured because we're not eating or you know
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some other signal that we are on a course to not survive to put it
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nicely it does make sense that it might set about to repair whatever needs to be repaired you're getting it you know cuz
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like if I was a wounded human back in on the savanas of I don't know Africa or wherever we came from um and I'm laid
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there and I'm not eating my body should probably go okay Steve might need something fixed so that he can get back
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to yeah hunting so you're getting it so
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survival that that is the number one priority of the body so when you go
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without food you amplify every resource it has to keep you alive and if
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repairing my achilles means I can now go hunt for food it's going to do that it's going to make me stronger and I in the
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book I I stumbled when I was writing the book I stumbled upon a really cool hypothesis that's called the Thrifty
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Gene hypothesis and it said that what it's a theory obviously it's hypoth
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hthis it's a theory that the people the humans that evolved out of the Primal
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days had a very specific genotype and this genotype allowed us to metabolically flex and and be stronger
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in a fasted State because we had to survive and the people that didn't make
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it from that time period didn't have that Gene but think about this for this moment so they think we all have this
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Gene inside of us right now this Thrifty Gene where we can go long periods without food and we can survive so what
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happens when we're eating all day what happens when we're ignoring and we're not actually activating that genetic
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profile so what they are now believing is that diabetes metabolic syndrome all of that is largely happening because we
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are going against the G the genetic profile that we are now seeing in humans we're like on the opposite end of the
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spectrum we're overloading our bodies yeah which is meaning that the survival Gene
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you referen there is not being activated to help us that's right that's right
00:19:06
interesting the fifth most replayed moment is a moment from my conversation with Matthew Walker who is the world's
00:19:13
number one expert on the subject of sleep he explains the importance of sleep on our overall health on our
00:19:19
weights and everything in between but most importantly of all he gives us a road map for how to sleep better and I
00:19:25
know so many of you are struggling so I'm not surprised that this is one of the most replayed moments of the dire of
00:19:31
a CEO of 2023 had a lot of Health experts on this podcast recently but none of them have really talk to me
00:19:37
about the role that sleep or sleep deprivation plays in
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wait is there a relationship it's probably one of the most well defined relationships that we
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know in all of sleep science and it is at least a three-part
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story so the first Emer evidence came in terms of um hormones so there are what
00:20:03
we call appetite regulating hormones and the two principle ones of concern here
00:20:08
are something called leptin and gin now leptin when it's released will signal to
00:20:14
your brain that you're satisfied with your food you are satiated and you are
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no longer hungry grin does the opposite when grin is released it says no you're
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not satisfied with your food you are not full you still want to eat more you are
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still hungry and some of the first the they started to uh just limit people
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restrict people's sleep to 6 hours or 5 hours or 4 hours and what they found was
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that um there was firstly that signal leptin that says no you're satisfied with your food you
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don't want to eat anymore you're full that signal of fullness satiation was
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decreased by 18% if that wasn't bad enough grin which is
00:21:01
the hunger hormone that Leed up by
00:21:07
28% overall hunger levels Rose by about uh
00:21:13
26% so firstly you are it's almost like double jeopardy that you are getting
00:21:19
punished twice for the same crime of not sleeping enough once by losing the signal of I'm full I I don't want to eat
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anymore and once again for the no I'm much more hungry and I'm just going to
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overeat which is gring so what that produces is a profile
00:21:39
of increased eating so on average underslept individuals started to eat in those studies about 3 to
00:21:46
400 extra calories at each sit at each sitting by way of insufficient
00:21:53
sleep then what they discovered is that it's not just that you want to eat more
00:21:59
it's what it is that you have a craving for when you are underslept and this is the problem what
00:22:05
they found is that when you're underslept you eat more of everything but you especially eat more of these
00:22:11
heavy-hitting stodgy carbohydrates bread pasta
00:22:16
pizza the the next thing that you started to eat have a preference for was simple sugary Foods sweets and chocolate
00:22:24
and then finally you started to Crave very salty food and high sodium food intake will increase your blood
00:22:31
pressure so that was the first of the the three mechanisms then we did a study
00:22:37
where we said perhaps it's not just the circulating hormones in the body the brain is the ultimate Arbiter of your
00:22:44
food decisions so what's going on in the brain so we took a group of perfectly healthy individuals and we put them
00:22:50
through the experiment twice once when they'd had a full 8 hours of sleep and once when we deprived them of sleep and
00:22:56
then the next day we place them inside an MRI scanner and we showed them images of lots of different foods that range
00:23:02
from being sort of you know very healthy to being very unhealthy and of ice cream and you know chocolate and pizza and
00:23:10
things to Leafy salads and nuts and greens and vegetables and we asked them
00:23:16
to rate how much they wanted that food for each item now we did something a bit
00:23:21
sort of dedly to make it more ecologically correct so that they weren't just saying okay they probably
00:23:27
think I should probably say that's how healthy we said we're going to randomly select one of these images these food
00:23:32
images that you see and after you get out the brain scanner we're going to give you that food and we're going to politely ask you to eat it all so it
00:23:39
made it a bit more realistic so the choices were more you know as much as that we could so what we found is that
00:23:45
when they were sleep deprived the Deep honic centers the emotional centers of
00:23:51
the brain these desire centers these reward centers um they ramped up in
00:23:57
their activity in response these highly desirable highly unhealthy Foods so
00:24:02
these more basic sort of you know gutteral parts of the brain as it were
00:24:08
um these reward centers were lighting up much more strongly when you sleep deprived were still the impulse control
00:24:15
regions in the front of the brain what we call the prefrontal cortex they were shut down they were taken offline so as
00:24:22
a consequence you lost your impulse control and that's why you start to then say you know when I'm sleep deprived at
00:24:28
the food sort of buffet I'm not I'm not going to do salad I'm just gonna that
00:24:34
pizza looks awful good or that Pastor with the cre I'm just going to go into that all go so so your it's what we call
00:24:42
a pattern in terms of brain activity uh in Neuroscience of honic eating that
00:24:48
your brain goes into this honic desire profile so now we understood it's not just hormones in the body it's also
00:24:54
changes in the brain then came the finding that there's another chemical in the body that's
00:25:00
responsible and this comes on to cannabis when people
00:25:08
um when people when people that you may know have smoked cannabis they'll often
00:25:13
say I get viciously hungry I get the munchies I get really hungry that's no coincidence because cannabis will
00:25:21
stimulate appetite now we all have naturally occurring cannabis compounds
00:25:27
in our brain brain and our bodies they are called endoc canabo Endo meaning
00:25:33
comes from insiders um whereas the Cannabis that comes externally when you
00:25:38
sort of smoke it or um take Edibles so Endo canabo do many things for the
00:25:46
brain and the body but one of the things that they do is control your appetite and your hunger and what we found is
00:25:51
that when you sleep deprived individuals these naturally occurring endoc canabo
00:25:56
rocketed up by over 20 % cranking up people's
00:26:02
appetite and so these three ways lead you to start packing on you know when
00:26:09
insufficient sleep is occurring when sleep gets short your waistline typically starts to expand and we Now
00:26:16
understand the reasons if that wasn't bad enough it is bad enough the yeah can
00:26:21
you just stop M honestly I'm really uh the the last thing that we discovered is that let's say that you're trying to be
00:26:28
really careful and you're trying to diet and you're trying to lose weight if you're not getting sufficient
00:26:34
sleep then 60% of all of the weight that you lose will come from lean muscle mass
00:26:42
oh God no and not fat not the muscle I know exactly so in other words when you
00:26:48
are dieting but you are underslept you lose what you want to keep which is
00:26:53
muscle and you keep what you want to lose which is fat
00:26:59
so again it's I'm sold not an ideal situation sleep is important I get it
00:27:06
I'm sold how do I my question is what are the things that in the modern
00:27:13
society are standing in the way of sleep we've touched on some of them Loosely but some of the like big obvious things
00:27:18
the things that you would suggest doing very actionable things we could do straight away to improve our chances of
00:27:24
having that healthy um deep sleep that we need to be um optimal in every regard
00:27:30
of our health and performance there's probably I think five standard tips what
00:27:36
we call sort of sleep hygiene that you can do and then I'll come on to maybe just some unconventional tips uh that
00:27:41
we've sort of touched on and we've spoken about many of these the first thing I would recommend people to do and
00:27:47
this is why when some people say oh what about this new sleep supplement or you know it's it's 40 quid for this bottle
00:27:53
of these sleep new sleep natural medications I'm going to give it a try I would say try these tried and true
00:28:00
things first before you spend your money on supplements the first thing is regularity go to bed at the same time
00:28:06
and wake up at the same time no matter whether it's the weekday or the weekend your brain expects regularity it thrives
00:28:13
best under conditions of regularity when you give it regularity you can improve the quantity and the quantity of your
00:28:20
sleep the second thing is get some Darkness at night as I said we don't get
00:28:25
enough darkness in the modern world and so the trick I would offer and I
00:28:31
don't use it I don't like the word hack but the suggestion would be in the last hour before bed try this experiment for
00:28:39
everyone listening for the next week dim down half of the lights or switch off
00:28:44
half of the lights or even a 34s of the lights in your home in the last hour
00:28:50
before bed all of the lights in every room in all of the rooms you know switch off almost all of the light now I'm not
00:28:57
suggesting be unsafe and walk around in the darkness in the last hour that's not what I want to saying just dim down you
00:29:02
know switch off half of the lights you will be surprised at how sleepy that
00:29:08
Darkness will make you feel and it's also an incredible behavioral
00:29:14
trigger to signal to your brain that it is time for sleep that darkness is
00:29:21
around me that's the second tip is Darkness the third T tip is temperature
00:29:27
most people sleep in an ambient bedroom temperature that is too high and you need to aim for a bedroom temperature of
00:29:34
about 18 18 and a half degrees celus around about 65 to 68° Fahrenheit if I'm
00:29:41
I'm probably butchering the the mathematics there on that but um you need to get cool now you can wear thick
00:29:47
socks you can have a hot water bottle that's fine but the ambient needs to be cold because you need to drop your core
00:29:55
body temperature and your brain temperature by about 1 de Cel to fall asleep and stay asleep and it's the
00:30:01
reason that you will always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that's too cold and too hot so make your
00:30:07
bedroom cold make it dark like a cave the the fourth question would be what
00:30:14
we've or fourth suggestion would be Walk It Out and we've spoken about this the 30 minute rule you know get up do
00:30:21
something different or meditate you know don't lie in bed awake for too long then the final two things we've spoken about
00:30:28
well we've spoken about caffeine we haven't spoken about alcohol but let me just say as the kind of headline of it
00:30:34
alcohol is not a sleep aid many people use it as a sleep aid it is not your friend alcohol again is a sedative so it
00:30:42
knocks you out the second is that it fragments your sleep so you wake up your sleep is littered with all of these
00:30:48
small Awakenings most of them you don't remember because they're too brief but it makes for miserable lousy quality
00:30:55
sleep and the final thing is that alcohol is very good at blocking your REM sleep or your dream sleep which we know is critical for many other
00:31:01
functions as well so alcohol is not your friend that's the sort of the final tip again you know just every if you're with
00:31:08
friends have a glass of red wine just know okay my sleep's not going to be
00:31:14
great and you know I'm not yeah I'm whatever it's just you know live
00:31:21
life to of course I'm not saying that the fourth most replayed moment is a moment from my conversation with the
00:31:26
world leading neuroscientist the man who has scanned more brains than anybody else Dr Daniel aan who is a favorite on
00:31:33
the D CEO and he tells us very very clearly how to grow a healthier brain I
00:31:39
can change my brain it's the most exciting lesson that I've learned you're
00:31:45
not stuck I'm not stuck with the brain I had you're not stuck with the brain you
00:31:52
have you can make it better I can prove it in fact every day what I've come to
00:31:59
believe you're making your brain better or you're making it worse let's start
00:32:05
there by what you're doing what things make the brain worse what are the common things that most of us do without
00:32:11
thinking that make the brain worse when my daughter Khloe was in
00:32:17
second grade I went to her classroom and I wrote 20 things on the board and I
00:32:23
went separate them for me good for your brain bad for your brain seven year olds
00:32:29
they got 19 out of 20 right so most people know the only thing they got wrong was
00:32:37
orange juice they put it in the healthy category when in fact when is it
00:32:43
rational to unwrap fruit sugar from its fiber source because it turns toxic in
00:32:49
your body so I'm not a fan of fruit juice I'm a fan of fruit not fruit juice
00:32:55
what's bad about sugar for the pro-inflammatory which what does that mean it makes you
00:33:01
diabetic but I mean as it relates to the brain why is like orange juice or the ice cream bad for my brain because it's
00:33:10
ultimately going to give you high blood sugar levels MH which erode your blood
00:33:16
vessels and you're going to have lower blood flow to your brain that's bad
00:33:21
thing I mean there's so many things about it so it's addictive it's proin
00:33:28
inflammatory it makes it more likely you're going to have diabetes and obesity so 72% of Americans are
00:33:34
overweight 42% are obese I've published three studies on
00:33:41
35,000 people as your weight goes up the actual physical size and function of
00:33:48
your brain goes down that should scare the fat off anyone I used to be chubby
00:33:54
but when I figured out that connection I'm like oh no I'm it was that that gave
00:34:00
me the motivation to drop about 25 PBS and so
00:34:07
sugar is the gateway drug to diabetes and obesity and so not to
00:34:16
mention inflammation which is the cause of
00:34:21
depression and dementia so you want to avoid things that cause low blood flow caffeine nicotine caffeine caffeine
00:34:28
constricts blood flow to the brain what does that do to my brain Con well
00:34:33
constricts blood flow so you're going to get less blood flow and remember I showed you that progression with
00:34:39
age no you don't want that you want to do things that increase blood flow to
00:34:45
your brain so exercise genko this one of the supplements I'm going to give you
00:34:51
eat foods like um beets oregano Rosemary
00:34:58
cinnamon they increase blood flow while we're on blood flow 40% of 40y olds have
00:35:06
erectile dysfunction 70% of 70y olds have
00:35:11
erectile dysfunction what that means if you have blood flow problems anywhere it
00:35:17
means they're everywhere and so like
00:35:24
no and it means either you're too sedentary you're overweight you're
00:35:33
smoking or having too much caffeine or using marijuana because
00:35:38
marijuana lowers blood flow to the brain and so just in that one of the 11 it's
00:35:48
exercise genko for you not for everybody but for you hyperbaric oxygen those three things
00:35:55
will make a big difference in blood flow flow genko genko what is that it's a supplement what does it do uh increases
00:36:03
blood flow to the brain the prettiest brains I've ever seen take genko there's
00:36:09
actually a spec study uh they gave uh people 120 milligrams of genko twice a
00:36:16
day significant Improvement in blood flow to the brain and so in one of the supplements
00:36:22
I'm going to give you we have genko I I've taken it every day for the last 20
00:36:27
years at least and then this is where the US government got an F for the
00:36:34
pandemic loneliness accelerates dementia and
00:36:39
brain problems and so when they isolated us the whole significant increase in
00:36:46
brain problems so get connected to other people the eye in bright Minds is
00:36:53
inflammation so what increases inflammation low omega-3 fat fat acid
00:36:58
levels and we are deficient 93% of the population is deficient in omega-3 fatty acids
00:37:06
93% so all of us should be either eating more fish or taking an omega3 supplement like fish
00:37:16
oil gum disease like who knew like I wasn't really that good at taking care
00:37:23
of my gums until I started reading the studies you have gum disease you have
00:37:29
inflammation you're more likely to get depressed and have dementia the third most replayed moment is a moment from my
00:37:36
conversation with Gary Breer where he lays out how you can become a superhuman strip the fat off your body and get
00:37:43
yourself healthy with free easy simple exercises that will cost you nothing at
00:37:49
all when I heard the story about Dana White and I saw he had gone from respectfully being a man that had a
00:37:56
little bit of weight to to having this these six-pack abs on Instagram of course the six-pack isn't the the
00:38:01
outcome it's as you've said it's the stuff going on inside him that's really the transformation but what can someone
00:38:07
who's just heard that at home where do they start with getting extending their life by triple and getting the so you
00:38:13
know he also started something called a superhuman protocol and superhuman protocol is using magnetism oxygen and
00:38:20
light right so the only things that we really get from Mother Nature the the the big benefit we get from Mother
00:38:26
Nature is is we get magnetism from the earth we get oxygen from the air we get light from the sun the truth is most of
00:38:32
us are not contacting the surface of the Earth that much anymore so he bought $150,000 worth of equipment a pmf mat an
00:38:41
oxygen what's called a hypermax oxygen to do exercise with oxygen therapy and a red light therapy bed and I had him use
00:38:48
that equipment every single day seven days a week but if your listeners want to do it for
00:38:53
free you can take off your shoes and contact the surface of the Earth and I'm
00:38:58
talking about bare feet on soil dirt grass sand because earthing and grounding is a very real thing we
00:39:05
actually discharge into the Earth we actually human beings build up a charge do you know that pH the acid alkaline
00:39:11
scale pH stands for potential hydrogen it's a charge it's a complete fallacy that you can get alkaline by drinking
00:39:17
alkaline water that's the biggest marketing myth ever sold to the public um but you can get alkaline by
00:39:23
contacting the surface of the Earth so if you don't have 150 Grand which I don't expect anybody listening to this podcast to spend 150 Grand but he did I
00:39:30
said you need a MAG you need a pmf mat so you can be alkaline you need to spend
00:39:36
10 minutes a day breathing um 95% O2 under mild exercise and you need to lay
00:39:41
in a red light therapy bed so in the absence of the Superhuman protocol you can become superhuman by contacting the
00:39:48
Earth and by learning to do breath work let's talk about breath work I spend 8 minutes every day doing a very specific
00:39:55
series of breath work people do not realize the power of something that is so accessible so free and so easy to do
00:40:02
right they they want things to be more complicated but it's not and when I said
00:40:08
the presence of oxygen is the absence of disease it's absolutely true remember that every elevated emotional state that
00:40:13
a human being can experience actually has in its molecular structure oxygen is
00:40:20
a component of that emotion so if you look at the difference between passion Elation Joy arousal libido and anger for
00:40:27
example it's usually only one neurotransmitter and the presence of oxygen the reason why no human being is
00:40:33
ever woken up laughing is because you don't have the oxidative state to experience laughter right out of deep
00:40:38
sleep but can you wake up angry yes because anger doesn't require oxygen so
00:40:44
every morning contact the surface of the Earth and then spend eight minutes doing I do a wimh off style of breath work I
00:40:50
give credit where credits do he's the father of breath work as far as I'm concerned so I do three rounds of 30
00:40:55
deep breaths like obnoxiously deep breaths and I
00:41:00
start by trying to take my belly button and pull my belly button out towards the wall imagine there's a string pulling
00:41:06
your belly button towards the wall and then you you fill from the loes of the lung to the apex of the lung and then
00:41:13
you exhale and just
00:41:21
relax did God knows what they think we're doing out there right outside this podcast they're like a bunch of freaka I
00:41:28
knew it was a cult um KN I knew he was a cult leader but um so you do three
00:41:33
rounds of 30 breaths on the 30th breath you exhale and you hold allow the carbohydrate rep receptor to reset when
00:41:40
you don't feel you can hold anymore you take a deep breath in you hold again and you let it out
00:41:47
slow and you start again I would suggest that you start with three rounds of five breaths then work to 10 15 20 25 and 30
00:41:55
if you get laded this is a good sign that the oxygen tension is changing in your brain if your fingers and toes get
00:42:01
tingly this is a good sign that you're changing the oxygen tension if you feel some kind of heat uh temperature change
00:42:07
in your neck these are all Great Signs you will get to the point where you can actually hold your breath for two or
00:42:13
three minutes sometimes four minutes between rounds of breath work um and then the last thing is to expose
00:42:19
yourself to natural sunlight first thing in the morning the first 45 minutes of the day God gives us a very very special
00:42:25
type of light it's called First Light there's no UVA there's no UVB rays in this light um so that it's not the
00:42:31
damaging Rays from the Sun it still generates vitamin D3 it has a positive effect on cortisol on vitamin D3 first
00:42:38
light is the best way to reset your circadian rhythm so by contacting the surface of the Earth doing breath work
00:42:44
and getting first light you can get to the same place that Dana White did with 150 Grand in equipment what about oxygen
00:42:51
masks cuz I I'll be honest when I read when I read um about the Dana story I went on Amazon soon after and I was like
00:42:56
I'm just going to buy an oxygen canister good idea bad idea um so what you want to do is um you know you get an oxygen
00:43:03
concentrator which takes 21% oxygen from which is what the concentration at sea level it turns it into 95% O2 and it
00:43:10
fills this bag and it can refill this bag over and over and over again okay I use one called the hypermax you can see
00:43:16
it on my Instagram and um you turn you plug it in you turn it on it fills this bag and then you go in you put an oxygen
00:43:23
mask on and you exercise for 10 minutes only 10 minutes cycle for 3 minutes uh
00:43:29
Sprint for 30 seconds cycle for 3 minutes Sprint for 30 seconds cycle 3 minutes Sprint 30 seconds and you're
00:43:34
done and what this does is it raises something called the partial pressure the the storage of oxygen in your blood
00:43:40
the only two time two-time Nobel Ora Prize winner in Medicine Dr otter warberg won both of his Nobel prizes for
00:43:46
his work in exercise with oxygen therapy you want to be a superum do mild exercise every day while breathing 95%
00:43:53
O2 it's important that you're exercising and then after that you move into a red light therapy bed
00:43:59
photobiomodulation um so you know if you don't have access to a hypermax oxygen machine just do the breath work get the
00:44:05
breath in you know exchange the oxygen tension and the tissues and expose yourself to First Light what about cold
00:44:11
cold with the plunging so I'm a huge fan of cold water punching but probably not for the reasons why you think you know
00:44:17
um I also sit on the board of the NFL um uh lumni Association athletica as a health services director you know there
00:44:24
there was a time when we used to think that putting athletes in cold water after exercise was good because of its anti-inflammatory effects we know now
00:44:30
that that's only about 15% of the benefit the majority of the benefit comes from something called a cold shock
00:44:35
protein if you really want to be fascinated Google cold shock proteins these are reserved proteins that are in
00:44:41
your liver they're dumped into the bloodstream in effort to save your life when you put yourself in cold water they
00:44:46
scour the body of free radical oxidation they increase the rate of protein synthesis muscle repair they are free
00:44:53
you get them when you put yourself in cold water um I don't know what the Celsius conversion is but I use 50° for
00:44:59
3 minutes minimum 6 minutes maximum cold yes it's it's actually not that cold I
00:45:05
mean you know I see people getting in 37 38 degree water there's no evidence that I've read that shows that colder is
00:45:11
better you get a peripheral Vaso constriction so it forces all the oxygen into the core and up to the brain um and
00:45:17
you you get an activation of something called Brown fat right um thermogenesis comes from Brown fat and for the women
00:45:23
that are listening for some reason I seem to insens snare the women when I say this remember that the definition of a
00:45:28
calorie is a measure of heat right I mean the definition of a calorie is the amount of energy it takes to raise 1
00:45:34
cubic cimeter of water 1° Centigrade so if if if a calorie is a measure of heat
00:45:39
then this means that when Heat's leaving your body calories are leaving your body so if there is nothing nothing no amount
00:45:48
of exercise hits cardio no type of cardiovascular or weight training that comes anywhere close to immersing
00:45:54
yourself in cold water in terms of what will strip fat off your body fast if you want to strip fat off your body get in
00:46:02
cold water 3 to six minutes a day that's fascinating because because the oxygen rushes to my head that's why it has a
00:46:08
really profound impact on mood that's why it has a very profound impact on mood because if you think about it what's the reason why we need deep sleep
00:46:14
what happens in deep Sleep that's so special there's a secondary oxygen transfer we transfer oxygen from the
00:46:19
periphery from the extremities to the brain remember the brain's a non-metabolic organ so in other words
00:46:25
it's unlike a muscle if I pick up a weight wait and start to work out my muscle my arm my body will send more
00:46:30
blood more amino acids more oxygen to that muscle because it's working well if I'm sitting at my computer and I'm
00:46:35
watching reruns of The Simpsons or I'm sitting in my computer and I'm solving the most complex joint venture agreement
00:46:43
partnership agreement with all kinds of mathematical equations my brain gets the same amount of nutrients same amount of
00:46:49
blood flow same amount of oxygen so it eats the same meal whether or not it's in a dead Sprint or whether or not it's
00:46:54
just chilling on the couch except in deep sleep and when you're in cold
00:47:00
water because it's forcing the oxygen up to the brain the second most replayed
00:47:06
moment is a moment from my conversation with Dr Tim Spectre a favorite on the
00:47:12
Diary of a CEO and here he talks about health more holistically and some of the biggest myths that most of us believe
00:47:19
that are currently standing in our way we've got a fitness group among some of my friends there's about 10 of us in it
00:47:25
and um we've been tracking how often we work out and how frequently work out and the workouts that we do and one of the
00:47:31
things I have to say is pretty much no one in the group has lost any weight we've been doing this for a year and uh that kind of bucks what you
00:47:39
would think so the only time that I lost weight was actually when I went on the keto keto diet I went from 14 Stone 8 to 13 stone 8 in roughly in several weeks
00:47:47
but exercise and exercising for almost religiously for the last two and a half years doesn't really seem to impact my
00:47:53
weight at all in a you know in the way that the Fitness Experts might tell me
00:47:58
on Instagram what's your stance on the role that exercise play plays in weight
00:48:03
loss has very little role in weight loss all the studies long-term studies show
00:48:10
uh it doesn't help uh weight loss and it's been grossly exaggerated as an easy
00:48:17
fix for our obesity problem exercise doesn't help weight loss no all the studies show that the only caveat to
00:48:24
that is if you have ch ched your diet improved your diet and you've lost some weight at maintaining some exercise does
00:48:33
help prevent it going back up again but as on its own if you don't change your
00:48:39
Dart it's of no use and that's well known Now by all the Obesity experts and
00:48:45
all the studies does sugar make us fat is that the culprit one of the main things that's
00:48:51
contributing to no again that's that's reductionism you know we the
00:48:57
but the reason the reason exercise doesn't work it's important to realize
00:49:03
this is because we all know this that you know you go for a walk build up Hunger before a meal that's what your
00:49:09
parents told you you know and everything about exercise is after it your body slows down your your metabolism slows
00:49:17
down and it tries to regain the energy that you've lost that's just our EV Evolution and so
00:49:26
that's why it's a you're not going to it's great for your health I'm in know I exercise fantastic for your mood um it's
00:49:34
great for your heart anti-cancer all kinds of things we should all do it but absolutely not if your goal is weight
00:49:41
loss you have to do something about changing your diet and I think that's that's the big a huge myth particularly
00:49:48
Peto by gyms and uh fitness apps and everything else and it it is complete
00:49:53
nonsense I read that you um when you look to studies over 30 years and you looked at how many studies had been done
00:49:59
on the relationship of exercise and weight versus things like sugar and weight there was 12 more 12 times more
00:50:06
studies done on the relationship of exercise and weight versus sugar and weight and why why is that why is there
00:50:14
less research done on the latter um I think that's the influence
00:50:19
of governments and the food companies and the drink companies so uh a lot of
00:50:25
the excise SI research done in the last 20 years was sponsored by uh large
00:50:34
corporations who wanted to make this link between uh exercise and weight loss so that they
00:50:42
could continue to sell sugary Ultra processed foods and drinks and just say
00:50:48
it's you know childhood obesities because we've we don't have playgrounds and we don't uh encourage this and
00:50:54
that's why the Cokes and the Pepsis are always there at the Olympic sponsoring
00:51:00
Olympic events and associating themselves with Sport and they gave
00:51:06
hundreds of millions to various physiology departments Sports
00:51:11
departments nutrition departments to do research in this area basically it was very hard to get anyone to do research
00:51:18
into how sugary drinks make you uh gain weight or cause problems because they
00:51:25
the amount of money for nutrition has been abysmally poor you know in from from governments and that's why you know
00:51:32
we the only the first ever study of ultra processed food in a controlled trial was only about three years ago and
00:51:38
it's been around for you know 30 40 years so such is the power of that Lobby
00:51:44
that it it doesn't necessarily distort the research in a sort of you know evil
00:51:49
way but they point it to make sure that the researchers are working in an area
00:51:55
that they want uh people to work in and distracting them keeping them away from talking about sugars or even artificial
00:52:02
sweeteners which in my view are nearly as bad because they're sort of you know
00:52:07
hidden um and and deflecting us from the idea that yes giving kids sugary drinks
00:52:15
or even artificial sweet drinks is going to be bad for them and cause obesity wait so I'm I've been I've cut my I cut
00:52:21
out sugar drinks about a year ago I still have the same Brands but I have
00:52:27
the no sugar version oh dear oh what do you mean oh dear well all the
00:52:33
all the summary of the trials shows that if you take uh young adult young adults
00:52:40
and kids and they would say on two cans of you know full sugar sodas and you
00:52:45
change them to the diet version there's no real difference in in weight or um
00:52:52
metabolic um changes in their blood um the you will go to the dentist less so you
00:52:59
don't get as many fillings but and yet you you should be gaining
00:53:05
300 calories right if you doing two cans a day so it doesn't work out as it
00:53:11
should do and that's because of the extra these chemicals are not inert so the sweeteners in kids they changed
00:53:18
their their brains to give them they want more Sweetness in their food okay so it it could reflect your
00:53:26
wish for your your late night milk chocolate who knows um and it it makes
00:53:32
it very difficult to train kids to have more bitter Foods or sour Foods if they've got these artificial sweeteners
00:53:38
in their diet all the time but they've now shown that all these sweeteners actually affect your gut microbes so
00:53:46
even Stevia you know these sort of so-called healthy ones have an effect on your gut microbes and they're not inert
00:53:53
so we know that sacarin and sucros is also cause spikes in your blood sugar uh
00:53:59
when I did it you know have a trace they're not supposed to but they they actually do things they're not
00:54:05
supposed to so we know very little about these these products and my view is that
00:54:12
they are harmful probably not as bad as having the sugar but they are absolutely
00:54:18
not a health drink and we should be encouraging people to have you know teas
00:54:23
and kombuchas and uh more bitter tasting interesting flavors and Foods than just
00:54:30
this Ultra sweet uh chemical concoctions it's this sugar conglomerate that have
00:54:36
been funding much of the research that points towards um some of the things you're talking about
00:54:41
there there that's also the conglomerate that wants us to believe the calories in calories out approach because if I just
00:54:48
view every all foods as kind of equal and on this sort of calorie number then I can drink some of the sugary Fizz
00:54:55
fizzy drinks and some of the processed foods as long as I keep it within that sort of calorie deficit I'll be fine and
00:55:01
so are they is that Sugar conglomerate is the processed food conglomerate for the calorie model
00:55:07
absolutely they need that right they absolutely it's vital you know zero
00:55:13
calories or one calorie you know on the can that's what you see and you know you're fooling people into thinking this
00:55:19
is a a healthy drink and oh you know if I used to have full Coke or Pepsi and
00:55:24
now having the diet version I'm getting 300 calories less a day I should lose weight it's exactly what they've been
00:55:31
doing and they're also desperate to show that artificial sweeteners
00:55:36
are really healthy and they come down on anyone who who tries to say that they're
00:55:42
you know could be any way dangerous and yet they're not obliged to test them so none of the none of the chemicals added
00:55:50
really go through rigorous testing on how they affect our gut microbes and this is
00:55:56
this you know their testing mechanisms haven't changed in 50 years as you'll know if you've listened to this podcast before I'm an investor in a company
00:56:02
called hu I'm on their board and they sponsor this podcast and I have a very exciting announcement to make this
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00:56:20
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00:56:50
sell out and here is the single most replayed moment as it relates to health
00:56:56
on the Diary of a CEO of 2023 so the first thing I came up against because this was around the time of the
00:57:02
financial crisis was the lack of understanding of the brain Body Connection so these high performing
00:57:10
Executives were kind of acting like their body was just the vehicle
00:57:15
that was moving their brain around from meeting to meeting and both
00:57:21
disrespecting their their physical health but also not understanding that
00:57:26
what they were actually really being paid for was to use their brain and they weren't creating the best conditions for
00:57:32
that brain to operate in um and I'm talking about really basic things like sleep and a good diet and hydration and
00:57:38
not being sedentary managing your stress Etc so you know this tiny
00:57:44
organ if it's not in an environment that is giving it the best chance of doing
00:57:50
its job it's not going to and a crack's going to appear somewhere um and the
00:57:55
first time we really kind of had a big confrontation with the bank was when
00:58:02
people were dropping dead on the trading floor of heart attacks and they asked me to work more
00:58:08
in my capacity as a former medical doctor to help with the physical stuff and I said I can't do that if we don't
00:58:14
address the mental and emotional piece because that's what's causing this and
00:58:20
they just could could not get that what did you want to do with those people in a specific and practical sense what if
00:58:26
you could have you know been in charge of preventing them from dropping dead on the trading floor where would you have
00:58:32
started the understanding that stress so everything that you're experiencing
00:58:38
mentally and emotionally that's challenging and things like a lot of travel which is challenging for your
00:58:44
body that that raises levels of the hormone cortisol which comes from your adrenal glands and that cortisol courses
00:58:52
around your blood through your entire body and brain and the brain has
00:58:57
receptors for understanding what's going on in terms of threat to your survival
00:59:03
so in a 24hour cycle depending on your age and your gender there's a normal range for cortisol so it can go up and
00:59:10
down like this you know if something challenging happens we need to adapt and rise to meet that challenge but when
00:59:16
that level is above the top range all the time these receptors in your brain
00:59:21
basically think that there's an imminent threat to your survival so there's this whole Cascade of
00:59:27
hormones and they basically cortisol causes inflammation in the body MH so
00:59:33
inflammation of your vascular system inflammation around your heart and everything else gut and you know other
00:59:39
things but particularly around that time we were seeing a lot of heart attacks caused by stress this was in the absence
00:59:45
of high blood pressure high cholesterol smoking it was all stress once upon a
00:59:51
time I Googled um because I had a thesis I Googled is stress contagious MH and it
00:59:58
came up and it said it was contagious is it contagious in what circumstances do we need to be aware of
01:00:04
that contagion and more importantly how and why is it contagious okay I will tell you the answer to that but I'm
01:00:10
going to ask you a question first have you ever walked into a room with someone and by the time you've left that meeting
01:00:17
with them you just feel so drained okay so yeah you know so you
01:00:22
know the feeling so I'll I'll tell you how it works physiologically um I'm going to start with something else to
01:00:28
like build you up to this story so did you know that women who live together or
01:00:33
work closely together will synchronize their menstrual periods within two or three months so whenever I want to
01:00:40
explain something that's complex or I don't actually know the current Neuroscience I always take it back to
01:00:47
what happened in ancient times so when we were living in the cave the men
01:00:53
hunted and gathered and lived quite nomadically so sometimes they would go away for months at a time and in those
01:01:00
days the most fundamental important thing for the survival of the human species was that the alpha male must
01:01:06
pass on his genes so if he was going to be away for months and he couldn't you know that
01:01:12
there weren't men there to defend the women from predators maybe there was going to be a spell of the Ice Age and
01:01:17
they would all freeze to death or they wouldn't have food um he needed to make
01:01:24
sure that at least at least five women were impregnated with his sperm at the
01:01:29
same time so that if there was a food shortage or there was like still birth or miscarriage or whatever at least one
01:01:35
out of five would survive so to be able to do that they had to be fertile at the same time so that's why that mechanism
01:01:43
exists now we don't need that mechanism now but it's still wired into the way
01:01:49
that we operate so those sex steroid hormones like estrogen and progesterone
01:01:56
they leak out of our sweat about this far around us and that's why if you're living with another woman or if you know
01:02:01
you're sitting across the desk every day then particles of hormone from my sweat
01:02:07
would go into the through the skin of the other woman if she's within what distance I mean it's not you wouldn't
01:02:14
have to be sitting next to each other if you live together that that means you're interacting enough that it would happen Okay so particles but not not if you
01:02:21
work together if you work together and you sit right next to each other every day then it does happen too so you know in a a small office that's
01:02:28
got like six girls in it that that the menstrual synchronization will happen
01:02:33
interestingly it's led by the alpha female so yeah so you can you can work
01:02:39
out if you don't know already who the alpha female well if you you know basically let's say My Cycles don't
01:02:44
change and everyone says oh I've got my period early or I haven't had my period yet but now it's started then that would
01:02:50
mean that probably I was the alpha female how does the body know who the alpha female is that will be to do with
01:02:57
levels of testosterone why why did the body why does that matter who the alpha female is why does it matter that they
01:03:02
sync up with her I I don't I don't know if it really matters I think it's just a case of physiology so it's a little bit
01:03:08
like in the um troops of gorillas the stress levels of the silver
01:03:16
backat gorilla affect the other gorillas more than gorillas who are peers to each other so there is we have a natural
01:03:23
hierarchy and it must be related to survival as well so she was probably the
01:03:29
person who the alpha male was going to impregnate first probably so everyone
01:03:35
needs to kind of fall in line because when she starts having sex they need to be ready yeah okay and also it'll probably be to do with things like you
01:03:42
know survival genes so it'll be the people with the hardiest genes because that's what you'll want to pass on as
01:03:47
well mhm okay makes sense most resilient okay okay so where were we stressing
01:03:53
contagion done all the hormones and the menal so basically cortisol is a hormone that works in that same way so cortisol
01:04:00
is the main stress hormone and this one doesn't matter if you're male or female but it does matter where you are in the
01:04:06
hierarchy of the organization as I just mentioned so usually in that conversation I
01:04:13
mentioned to you where you go into a room and you just feel completely drained afterwards usually the person that comes out feeling drained is less
01:04:20
senior than the person that's had that effect on them and that's why this is so crucial to lead leadership because your
01:04:27
stress levels as a leader as a CEO are going to have more impact on everybody
01:04:32
else than the rest of the people um put together basically so managing your
01:04:38
stress is obviously important for you but it's important in terms of what happens to other people and the first
01:04:45
issue I came up against was CEOs and CFOs that said well I won't show them
01:04:52
that I'm stressed I won't I won't tell them what's happening with the numbers I won't display emotions in front of them
01:04:59
and I said they're still going to know physiologically it's going to impact them so now you really have to do
01:05:05
something about it um and the other thing about cortisol
01:05:10
which is quite funny well one of the side effects is quite funny is that as a
01:05:17
survival mechanism it will help you to store fat around your
01:05:22
abdomen so you know again in the cave if you were potentially going to like not find food for a month then if you had
01:05:28
extra fat around your abdomen you could digest that and survive till you could find food so with my clients in financial
01:05:36
services it got to a point where as soon as I walked into the room they just lift their t-shirt up and say now you know
01:05:41
how I've been in the last month so stress causes belly fat belly fat that's really hard to shift so again what I
01:05:48
would see with people is that they would say oh I've put on a bit of weight around the middle you know had to loosen the belt a bit so I've started eating
01:05:54
less I've started like exercising more and I still can't shift it and again that's when I would explain this is the
01:06:00
impact of cortisol as long as you're still leaking out extra cortisol nothing's going to change
01:06:06
so and like I said even exercising more or eating better less or differently
01:06:13
whatever it is wouldn't shift that fat you had to get to the root cause you had to reduce the
01:06:18
cortisol for any of you that are still here I have a bonus moment for you I often get asked what is my favorite
01:06:25
episode of the dire of a CEO of all time and I often try and avoid that question because I don't want to pick one particular episode it's kind of like
01:06:31
picking your children however because you've gotten here I'm going to reveal it to you and I'm going to play you a
01:06:37
moment from that conversation my favorite ever episode on the dire of a CEO of all time is episode
01:06:48
101 and it just happens to be the most shared episode we've ever had of all
01:06:55
time time on WhatsApp and I know that sounds a little bit obscure but the interesting thing about WhatsApp is it's
01:07:01
one toone typically so it's typically one friend sending it to a family member or to a friend or something like that
01:07:08
and for it to be the most transferred between one person and another I think is telling about the value of that
01:07:16
conversation here is one of the most important moments from my favorite episode on the Diary of a CEO of all
01:07:23
time to understand what happiness is you have to understand the cause of it yes and you write about that extensively and
01:07:28
solve for happy so what is the cause of unhappiness as you see it especially if you're building sort of machine learning
01:07:34
applications that are going to you know um solve you know make people arrive at contentment or happiness in a
01:07:40
personalized way we must be able to know what's causing this lack of allow me a
01:07:45
bit of time to explain it because it it's simple when we get it but it's not simple to get to it so so happiness is
01:07:52
very predictable okay if you look back at any point your life where you ever felt happy there is one commonality
01:07:58
across all of those moments that can actually be be documented in a mathematical equation okay you've never
01:08:05
felt happy because of a specific event in your life okay uh take for example
01:08:11
rain rain doesn't make you happy or unhappy there is no inherent value of happiness in Rain okay rain makes you
01:08:18
happy when you want to order your plant and it makes you unhappy when you want a sunbath right and so it's not just the
01:08:24
event rain it's the comparison between the event and an expectation in your
01:08:31
mind of how life should be okay if you're worried about your plants then life should be generous to me and get me
01:08:37
rain so I can water the plants and if life does that then life meets your expectations and you're happy okay and
01:08:44
so happiness in that sense becomes equal to or greater than so it's really mathematics the your perception of the
01:08:51
events of your life minus your expectations of how life should be okay and apply that to anything apply
01:08:58
that to anything so you know my favorite example is nature we're all happy in nature why are we all happy in nature I
01:09:04
mean you go out there and there are ants and there are flies and you know trees
01:09:09
are crooked and there are you know shrubs everywhere and bushes and it's just really not that hedged and
01:09:16
organized but that's what we expect so you know Nature's chaos is what we
01:09:23
expect nature to be and so we feel happy you know nobody ever sits in front of the ocean and says I like the view but
01:09:29
please mute the sound okay you just take it you know it's it's the monotonous sound and the view and the wind and and
01:09:37
the Sun and the whole experience right uh and because of that uh happiness becomes very different
01:09:46
than what was defined to us okay what was defined to us is that happiness is
01:09:52
found in a a gathering at the pub or party or a you know an activity or some
01:09:58
kind of pleasure or fun or Elation or whatever that is that's not at all true these are I call these the state of
01:10:04
Escape okay happiness as per the definition of the happiness equation is events equal to or beating expectations
01:10:11
life going my way okay and so basically happiness is that calm and peacefulness
01:10:17
you feel when you're okay with life as it is it doesn't really matter what life is okay what matters is that you can be
01:10:24
okay with it right so so you take you know the any example huh if your boss is annoying and
01:10:32
your expectation is yeah bosses are annoying this is what life is about they become bosses because they're annoying
01:10:38
right and and so if if that's your expectation you're going to look at it and go like yeah I need to learn the
01:10:45
skill of managing annoying bosses okay and if that's the case then you're not going to be upset about it uh similarly
01:10:53
anything else if you look at it then it's not just the event it's your perception of the event so you have a a
01:11:00
something to influence it's not just the event huh your partner might say something hurtful on Friday at 4
01:11:07
p.m. that's the event my partner said something hurtful at Sunday morning you
01:11:13
tell yourself he or she doesn't love me anymore okay that's your perception of the event that's not actually the event
01:11:19
the event is something hurtful was said but your perception of the event is your work is your it's your brain adding
01:11:26
color to it and then you compare that to your expectations right you compared my boss is annoying to my boss shouldn't be
01:11:33
annoying where did you get that from right so we blur the happiness equation we break the happiness equation because
01:11:39
of what I call the six and seven okay six Grand Illusions and seven blind
01:11:45
spots which are the six Grand Illusions are basically uh call them
01:11:51
Pathways uh that the modern world teaches us to navigate the modern world that our Illusions are not true okay
01:11:59
take for example control everyone knows that to succeed in the modern world you
01:12:04
have to learn to control certain events right so you start to believe that the way to succeed in life is to control
01:12:11
everything but the truth is even if you go down to the basics of physics that we never are in control that the the
01:12:18
absolute design of nature itself of the universe itself is entropy and Chaos
01:12:24
right that's the actual design and so if you try to control it you're bound to be disappointed a lot of events are going
01:12:31
to miss your expectations okay and yes I'm not saying don't control anything at all but start to understand that you're
01:12:38
you're going to be selective because you have a finite amount of effort and by
01:12:43
the way even if you're selective and you you try to control everything sometimes things will fall out of control okay and
01:12:50
that should be your expectation once you get that right that was one that was my biggest illusion okay I a mathematician
01:12:57
I'm a software developer I am a physicist I am an engineer and I am a
01:13:03
senior executive that doesn't get worse than that okay I'm like the worst absolute the worst I used to give my
01:13:09
wonderful wife I swear to you Stephen don't judge me I used to give her a spreadsheet that would tell her when to
01:13:16
wash the colors and when to wash the whites based on our average consumption as a family to save the environment and
01:13:23
poor Niel would would actually you smile at me and say sure baby I will use this right of course and ignores the hell out
01:13:31
of me because that's how crazy you can be when it comes to control now these are the Illusions if you live your life
01:13:37
through the illusion of control good luck finding happiness so six Grand Illusions the illusion of uh of thought
01:13:44
the illusion the illusion of self the illusion of uh knowledge the illusion of time control and fear okay now that's
01:13:52
one side and that disrupts your your entire view of what to expect from life
01:13:57
because you're expecting life to behave through a length of a a lens of an illusion the other side of it is what I
01:14:04
call Seven blind spots okay and the Seven blind spots are not really defects
01:14:09
in your brain as a matter of fact they are the very design of your brain okay
01:14:15
your brain is designed to tell you what's wrong okay it's not designed to you know if a Tiger shows up right here
01:14:22
now my brain has no you you whatsoever in telling me Oh my god look how
01:14:27
Majestic that animal is right yeah it's a beautiful animal but my brain will say we're going to die okay and we're going
01:14:33
to die is the idea that basically makes our uh our brain constantly look for
01:14:39
what's wrong blur the events of life huh you ask a mother and and she will say oh
01:14:46
my daughter's been sick all winter no she just had two episodes of flu 3 days
01:14:51
each but to the to the Caring Heart of a mother that needs to be exaggerated to
01:14:57
the exaggeration is one of the blind spots your your brain is trying to get you to take action so it pushes you it
01:15:04
pushes You by exaggerating the event a little bit so that you jump in and take action and accordingly the event you're
01:15:10
comparing to you're comparing the wrong event to the wrong expectation and the happiness equation falls apart isn't
01:15:17
this cool every single conversation I have here on the DI of AO at the very end of it you'll know I ask the guest to
01:15:24
leave a question in the Diary of a CEO and what we've done is we've turned
01:15:30
every single question written in the Diary of a CEO into these conversation cards that you can play at home so
01:15:37
you've got every guest we've ever had their question their name and on the
01:15:43
back of it if you scan that QR code you get to watch on your phone the person
01:15:50
who answered that question the next guest we're finally revealing all of the question questions and the people that
01:15:57
answered the question and we've just released the updated conversation cards
01:16:02
we released it the first time and it sold out instantly we released conversation cards again and they sold
01:16:08
out instantly for a second time we've updated the cards put all the new questions in and we've introduced a
01:16:15
Twist on the back of the conversation cards now we've got different levels of
01:16:20
vulnerability so level one these are more sort of surface level questions and by the time you get down to level three
01:16:27
the questions become a little bit more challenging a little bit more vulnerable and that's really where connection
01:16:33
happens to test the power of these cards we invited 20 total strangers to come
01:16:39
and have dinner and the only thing they had to do was answer a level three
01:16:45
question that was put in front of them in a room full of strangers and we saw
01:16:51
unbelievable almost magical results people teers people forming lifelong
01:16:57
friendships and people unlocking truths within them that they' been too scared to confront vulnerability is the door to
01:17:05
connection that is what we've always done here on this podcast and that's exactly what these conversation cards do
01:17:12
you can play them with your partner at home you can play them with your colleagues at work or you can play them with your best friend on the weekend the
01:17:19
stories we've heard about these cards about a grandson playing it with their grandfather to get to know them pulling them out in the midst of a divorce with
01:17:26
their wife and saving their marriage as you've often seen on this podcast sometimes one question and someone who
01:17:32
is genuinely open to answering it is all it takes to unlock a truth that will end
01:17:39
up setting you free and that's exactly why we made these conversation cards and
01:17:44
you can get them right now at the conversation cards.com I'll put a link
01:17:50
to the conversation cards in the description below they've sold out twice instantaneously so if you are interest in getting hold of some limited edition
01:17:57
conversation cards I really really recommend acting quickly and let me know how powerful they were for you and or
01:18:03
for your relationships thank you do you need a podcast to listen to
01:18:08
next we've discovered that people who liked this episode also tend to absolutely love another recent episode
01:18:15
we've done so I've linked that episode in the description below I know you'll enjoy it
01:18:23
[Music] oh [Music]
