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26:04It seems to me to be the thing further stop stream in my life that then causes this cascading effect to how I show up in sort of cognitive performance, how well I can articulate myself, if I go to the gym, and how hot my workout is. If I choose healthy options, versus I'm healthy option, say it feels like that. And mood in general. Yeah, I mean, look, I've said this before, and I'm not the first to say this, so I'm paraphrasing others. But if you really stop to think about it, sleep doesn't make a lot of sense from an evolutionary perspective. Like if you go back in time a few hundred thousand years, why would we have spent a third of our life unconscious?

26:41It didn't serve our purpose. You can't mate, you can't hunt, and you can't defend yourself. So, you have to believe that if we could have evolved out of it, we would have done it. And we didn't. So that means that whatever it's doing, it must be really important. I mean, core essential to our existence. While I will completely acknowledge that different people have a different necessity or requirement for how much they sleep, I still think that many people underestimate how much they need. You know you asked me at the start, you said, what are the things that you want to do when you reach your marginal decade?

27:24And I gave you my answer, what's your answer to that? Now that you're a father in a different season of life. Well, they're very similar to the types of things you're thinking about, and I love how you've got specific examples. So I really like playing with my kids, right? So I can imagine that in my marginal decade, I'll have grandkids that are the age of my kids, yeah, right? And, you know, maybe a bit older, but as I'm even getting towards that marginal decade, okay? So playing sports is really, really fun. I really like playing, especially because when I grew up, like I played hockey because I grew up in Canada, And then I immediately went into kind of boxing and martial arts and those became my life.

28:08So now playing sports that I didn't play much as a kid is really fun. Like I'm really enjoying baseball. I'm really enjoying soccer. And so when you play these things, you realize this is not an easy thing to do when you get old. Like to sit in the goal and actually stop a ball when a kid is blasting at you full stop, you have to be able to move around. So again, like I would love to be able to play soccer, throw a football, throw and hit a baseball as long as possible. You can get into movements that are much simpler, but if I can do all of those things, I'm in great shape. Now of course, to be able to do that, I also need to be able to do a lot of things that many people also can't do in their marginal decade, like sit on the floor, get up off the floor under their own power, or walk up X number of flights of stairs, having the strength to do that.

29:02I like doing certain things, like I like archery a lot. So I wanna be able to pull a bow back, obviously not at the same poundage as the current bow that I pull back, but I would still like to be able to pull a 50 pound bow back in the final decade of my life. And when you think about all those things, you wanna accomplish, if we were then to sort of codify them into a bunch of exercises or areas of your health that you had to now be thinking about, that I needed to be thinking about, what are the most important things? So I'm a 32 year old. What are the most important parts of my health that I should be thinking about if I want to achieve all the things that I said to you in my final decade?

29:39No one in the final decade of their life ever said, I wish I had less strength and I wish I had less endurance. So you cannot be too strong and you cannot be too fit. The only time that one would throttle back on the pursuit of those is A, if doing so is coming at the expense of something else, either with respect to your health or your life, and two, if the pursuit of that at such an extreme level produces risk of injury. Okay. So, in other words, could I be stronger than I am today? Yes. I'll give you an example. We know that in resistance training, the sweet spot for pure strength is 1 to 5 reps.

30:27When your goal is to maximize strength, you need to be pushing one, two, three, four, five reps. Once you start thinking about hypertrophy, muscle size, we're starting to think about seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve reps. Once we start thinking about muscular endurance, we start thinking about north of fifteen, right? Those are the general patterns of resistance training. So, if I want to build my muscles because I'm going for aesthetic goals that I need to be aiming above five reps, and it needs to be ten or twelve. If I'm just purely thinking about strength, big awaits, but lower reps.

30:58That's exactly right. And then if I want muscular endurance, we've got to be even higher reps. Okay. Lower weight. Yep. Okay. So again, we could go into much more detail around that, but just to finish the point here, why do I not do much training at one to five reps? In fact, these days, I don't do any training at one to five reps anymore. Why? Because to train at one to five reps comes at a risk. especially for heavy compound movements. So, like, I'm okay getting a little bit less of a strength benefit, while still, of course, getting stronger, but training at a higher rep load. So, I'm typically...

31:39So, I'm targeting eight to 12 reps with one to two reps in reserve, is basically how I'm doing my resistance training. That means every set I'm doing, I would expect to get to within about one rep of failure somewhere. So today, when I lifted, I don't think I did less than seven. I didn't do more than 12. And the weight was always tight -treated so that I was either failing, almost failing or one rep away from failing somewhere in there. And I was adjusting the weight constantly on every exercise to get there. With the exception of one exercise, I did push -ups was one of the things I did. pushups are kind of more in the muscle endurance.

32:17Obviously, I'm doing more reps when I was doing pushups. But pretty much everything else was in that range. So, again, I'm not fully maximizing strength anymore because the cost of it might be a little bit high in terms of injury risk. Similarly, I'm not strength training 24 -7 because I need to make time to do my endurance training and other types of training. How often do you train resistance training? I've resistance trained three times a week. And how often do you train generally? I train every day. Every day. Why? Because, you know, again, the intensity of my training is not that high, at least three days a week.

32:58So the three resistance days are pretty hard, because I'm really only doing each body part once a week. So when I'm doing it, I'll spend that 90 minutes really kind of hammering those body parts. Three of those days are just zone two. So my three of my four cardio days are zone two days where I'm doing, you know, I'm on a bike and I am riding at a level of intensity that actually allows me to still talk. Some, you know, not talk like I am now, but talking on a sort of a strained way. So for me, that's about a heart rate of 140 beats per minute. And And that's just not taking a huge toll on me.

33:40Those are almost like recovery days for me. And then one day a week, I do a really, really hard VO2 max day. And that's a really hard day. That burns a lot of matches. That's tomorrow. Not looking forward to tomorrow. Do you do cardio on your resistance training days as well? No. No, I don't. So it's the seven to its four days of cardio, three days of resistance. Now that's going to change in the summer when I'm going to add three days of swimming. And I will end up doing some swims on some resistance days. So before you do your resistance workout, you don't go in the step of a 20 minute, so cycle for 20 minutes or something.

34:22I don't. Is there a particular reason why? It wouldn't really serve a purpose. So I know a lot of people do that. I know a lot of people will say, hey, I'm going to do a little bit of a work. warm up on the treadmill or the stepmaster before I lift. But I actually have a pretty strong point of view on how we should warm up to lift. And I don't think walking on the treadmill or running on the treadmill or being on the stairmaster on the bike is a great prep for the lift. I think it's better to warm up for a lift doing movements that prepare you to lift. So for example, like if it's a leg day, so Monday's leg day, right?

34:54So what am I going to do? I'm going to start by doing a bunch of core stabilizing stuff. So I'm going to do a whole bunch of this dynamic neuromuscular stabilization stuff. So you get into basically these baby positions and you really learn to activate your core as you move around in a six -month position and stuff like that. I then do a whole bunch of, like you know what a 90 -90 is or a shinbox exercises where you're kind of on the ground in a position where you're really, you know, you can start out doing it isometrically, but ultimately going through a slow eccentric and concentric phase of movement that's kind of activating glutes.

35:32So I go through basically a whole DNS sequence. Then I get into a dynamic movement prep. So then I get into a bunch of bouncing, a bunch of footwork, and then I start with really lightweight. So I'll go to a leg extension machine and do very, very light leg extensions, very, very light leg curls. Come back and do more jumping and moving and lunging and go back and forth. So I'll spend 20 minutes doing a warm -up, but the warm -up is geared for me to lift. Whereas if I had just sat on a bike and peddled around, that doesn't actually replicate any of the movements I'm going to do when I start loading myself.

36:07I've got particularly concerned about injury. Yeah. Now that I'm 32, because when I was 30 -20, I could do almost anything it seemed to nothing with break, but I had a couple of injuries when doing like shoulder presses and things like that. And one of my friends had a similar injury recently, which took him out for three or four months, where he did a shoulder press, pulled something in his back or something, it's like neck. Yeah. And then he couldn't turn his head anymore. In terms of injury, if I wanted to get injured, am I right in thinking that the thing that leads to injury is basically just walking straight in and trying to lift something heavy, or is there things further upstream that cause injury in the gym?

36:42No, there's, I mean, that's one way to increase your risk of injury for sure. But yes, there are other ways that it can happen. And I think about it a lot. I mean, one of the injuries I think a lot about our calf injuries, Achilles injuries, sort of tendon injuries. This is, I think, one of the things that becomes a real problem for people as they age. You know, you often hear about people my age tearing an Achilles. Yeah, it's a devastating injury. Now again, it's not devastating in that you won't recover from it, but boy, it's going to take you out of commission for six months. So a lot of these injuries happen because the individual still has strength, but they've kind of lost some of the pliability and the tendon because they've kind of lost some of the jumping.

37:28That's why I always start these workouts with low level of jumping. And I'll progress to higher levels of jumping. But jumping is actually a very important part of training. And it's one of the things that we take for granted. But boy, when your ability to jump is gone and jumping, by the way, can mean like just initiating a jump. But it can also mean jumping off something and stopping yourself. Those are really important skills. And so like something like jumping rope is really important, right? Your feet are just kind of moving like that. They're acting as shock absorbers. Caffes and Achilles have to constantly change in length.

38:05And that accommodation is a really important part of resilience. And I think that should be an important part of everybody's warm up at a minimum, if not part of their workout. One thing I'd love you to do is to persuade people for listening, that muscle mass matters for longevity.

38:22Because, and also, if you can't within that, that leg day matters. Because we all avoid leg day treating me. And sometimes I need to be told again, why it matters for me to add it. Well, I mean, I think, look, muscle mass is probably the second most highly correlated finding, or third most, too long jeopardy after strength and cardio respiratory fitness, VO2 max. So why is that? So first of all, I think that muscle mass is both directly a proxy for strength. In general, the more muscle you have, the stronger you are. We all know exceptions to that. We know wiry little people who are insanely strong and I have patients like that.

39:10They're just naturally thin people, but when we put them through the testing protocols, they're remarkable in terms of their strength. And I tend to not worry about the fact that they're slight in build when I see that they're strong across the board. There is another benefit of muscle mass, which is it's the place where you dispose of glucose. So from a metabolic perspective, the more muscle mass you have, the more glucose buffering capacity you have. And why does that matter as I age? Because one of the hallmarks of aging is a reduction in the capacity to metabolize and buffer glucose. And so as glucose levels become less and less regulated, all sorts of bad things happen.

39:56Bad things happen to micro vessels in the body. So if you think of the most extreme example of this is type two diabetes. So once a person has type two diabetes, what are they at risk for? They're at the risk of reduced vision and ultimately blindness, amputations of their digits, impotence, right? The penis has tons of tiny blood vessels in it, and the more that, you know, glycosylated proteins accumulate there, the less they get blood flow, and obviously damage to the small blood vessels of the brain as well. So all of these things are hugely problematic when glucose is dysregulated, and again, the most important thing that you can do to regulate glucose, in addition to the obvious which is eating an energy balance, not eating too much, is making sure you have large insulin -sensitive muscles, which means large muscles in the context of an individual who's sleeping well and exercising, and you're going to basically have a great place to put all of that glucose when you consume it.

40:53And is that going to stave off me getting belly fat? Because my glucose is going to be stored in the muscles as opposed to somewhere else. Again, it all depends on the total energy balance, but yes, it's clearly going to make a difference, right? So one of the surest ways to reduce your capacity to store fat is to add more muscle. I did the grip strength test done it twice now. And meaning you did one of the like grip meters or you did a hanging test. The one of the grip grip me test. I actually did it at Brian Johnson's house and then I but I also did it with Andy Galpin and people tell me it's a indicator of longevity.

41:29But I've never really understood why is it just testing my strength? Yeah, grip strength of all the strength metrics. It's one of the most highly correlated with longevity. We actually prefer to do it like a 10 squared where your colleagues tested yesterday. We prefer to do it on a dead hang. So we make them hang from a bar and we just time how long they can hang. So that's a really good metric of your grip strength because it's also normalized to your weight. Okay. So we wanna see that people can hang for at least two minutes on a bar. And so the question is why is that so highly correlated with longevity?

42:06And it's what you said, it's strength. And the reason for it is it's really hard to be strong anywhere in the upper body if your grip is weak. Like if you think about being able to push, especially being able to pull like all of the real metrics of upper body strength require a strong grip. And if you have a strong grip, you have a strong hand, you have a strong forearm, You have a strong scapula that is connected to your rib cage, like it goes up the whole chain. And that's another reason why we like the dead hang as a way to test it. Because the dead hang is testing everything. It's testing your actual grip, it's testing your scapular stabilization, the stability of your shoulder, it's basically testing that entire chain.

42:50And then I also think there's a practical side of this, right? When, you know, it's very underappreciated what frailty does to an aging individual, and what's sarcopenia, loss of muscle mass does to an aging person. And what it is about falling that is so devastating to an older person. And the stronger your grip, the easier you're able to navigate a lot of those things, right? It just seems unthinkable. That falling is something I should be thinking about, 32, in the future. Like, because my movement is ridiculous. It seems ridiculous, yeah. And yet it is devastating. stating. So once you reach the age of 65, which I think that far, I mean, you know 65 year olds all day long, that's not a very old person.

43:34Yeah. Once you reach the age of 65, your mortality from a fall that results in a broken hip or femur is 15 to 30%. I think just think it is such a staggering number. So you're over 65, you fall and that fall results in the break of a femur or hip. There's a 15 to 30 % chance you'll be dead within a year. What kills me? It could be something very acute like you, you know, the fall that's significant enough to do that also bangs your head. It could be that you get a fat embolism, you get a blood clot. It could be that, you know, during the recovery process of this, you just never really get better.

44:14You never thrive again. I think a more disturbing statistic is that of all the people who survive, 50 % will never again regain the level of function they had before the injury. So they will require a cane for the rest of their life or something like that. Now, there are lots of things that account for that. Andy Galpin, who you mentioned a moment ago, talks a lot about this, but it's a lot of it comes down to foot explosiveness, power. So the reason you're not really afraid of falling, like when was the last time you were walking and you're foot caught something and you slipped like yesterday?

44:49Yeah, quite often. Yeah, exactly. Why don't you fall when that happens? Because I can quickly readjust. Right. That's power. Okay. So you have the power in your foot to readjust when you lose your step. You step off a curb not realizing it, it doesn't matter. You readjust. Okay. Those are a very, very specific muscle fiber that is responsible for that. It's called the type 2B muscle fiber. That is the first fiber that atrophies when you age. In fact, you're already at your peak. It's all downhill from where you are now. Thank you so much. Yes. So I'm already 20 years past you, and my power is a fraction of what it was 20 years ago.

45:26Now, I fight like hell based on the exercises I do to try to keep it as high as possible. So the reason that these people who were in their 70s are falling all the time is people think it's a balanced thing. It's not just a balanced thing, right? It's that they're undergoing the same insult you and I undergo on a daily basis, but the difference is their probability of being able to catch it, either through the explosiveness of their foot or their lower leg, coupled with maybe not being able to grab onto something as quickly and adjust, it's a power deficit problem. So what do I have to train now at 32 to ensure that, specifically the example of hitting something and quickly being able to adjust?

46:08I'm able to do that when I'm 70. I think jumping is a great way to do this, right? So, I mean, I use certain specialized pieces of equipment that actually have power built into it because power is different from strength, right? So strength is really the ability to, is just the ability to move a force independent of the speed at which you move it. Power is the maximum combination of force and speed. Okay. So, if you, on the x -axis, if you were to put force and on the y -axis, if you were to put power, the curve is an inverted U. So as the force or the weight that you're moving goes up and you're trying to move it as fast as you can, you're getting more and more and more and more power.

46:53But then at some point the weight gets so heavy that even as you continue to move it, it's going slower and slower and slower, so your power is going down. So there's a sweet spot there. So one of the things I do is there's certain specialized pieces of equipment that allow you to train in that way. So I definitely rely on a lot of those. But even if you don't have access to that machine, jumping is a a really important way to generate power. So if you're just doing a vertical jump, that's power. What about balance? I was at Brian Johnson's house, and as he was cooking his, I had an breakfast or lunch, whatever, he was balancing on a half bull.

47:26You've seen one of those things. Yeah, yeah. I don't think I asked him why he was balancing on it, but I assume it was to do with balance and this, that muscle's in the leg. There are lots of exercises that are great for balance. anything that produces instability is great because it's, you know, for lack of a better term, I've heard it described as problem solving for your foot. Okay. Right. So if you think about being on any unstable surface, even if you're just walking on an unstable surface, so if you, if you were to look at a person's foot, their lower leg actually, as they're walking on a surface that's constantly changing.

48:00So like a gravel path or something like that, you're going to see, like if this were my lower leg, you would see the musculature of the lower leg, constantly adjusting to it. And so yeah, I really enjoy things that force that type of training. Do you do flexibility stuff? Yeah, so I'm actually naturally a pretty lax person. So I don't do any stretching if that's what you're asking, but all of the sort of stability and dynamic stuff I do incorporates movement at end ranges. So I'll give you an example of why I think the notion of flexibility might be a little bit misunderstood. If you ask a person to stand up and with their legs straight touch their toes, most people would say that's a great test of flexibility in the hamstring, right?

48:54And most people can't do that. What they don't realize is everybody's hamstrings are long enough to allow them to do that. But the reason they can't do it is their central nervous system will not release them to do it. Does that make sense? Interesting. The central nervous system won't release them to do it. That's right. It doesn't feel safe for them to do it. Now, how do I know this? Because if you take a person under general anesthesia, you can put them into almost any position possible. So if you took a person under general anesthesia, laid them on the operating room table, So you could lift their leg up to here.

49:36When they're awake, you couldn't get it past here. When they wake up from surgery, will they have a torn hamstring? Not at all. They won't even know their leg was moved. The difference is when they're under general anesthesia, their brain is not sending a signal to the leg that says don't lift. So why is the brain doing that to the individual? This is how I learned it on a personal level. So about six years ago, I had tweaked my back and I had just done a, you know, unnecessarily heavy set of dead lifts and just pushed it a little too far. And I was kind of nursing this sort of, you know, just very, very tight QL.

50:15I was completely jammed up. And I came into to do some training with a friend of mine who's one of the guys that, actually, he is really the guy that introduced me to this thing called DNS, dynamic neuromuscular stabilization. And I mean, I was stiff as a board. I couldn't, you know, get past my knees bending forward. And I've been hurting for like three days. And we went through a series of exercises for 40 minutes, which included me laying on my back with my legs up, him leaning on top of me. So my feet are here on his chest and doing isometric pushes while working on generating intra -addominal pressure.

50:58And after maybe 40 minutes of this type of exercises, I was palms on the floor. Now, how do I go from not being able to get to my knees to palms on the floor in 40 minutes with three days of horrible back pain? The difference is when my back was hurting, It was my body was not going to let me go down, right? The body was saying, no way, you're back. I'm protecting you because you were not stable. You're not going to go any further. And what we went through with this exercise and a series of exercises was basically, I mean, I'm oversimplifying this and sort of anthropomorphizing it, but letting my brain know it's okay, you're stable.

51:44You're stable. You're stable. The back is safe. The back is safe. Let him go. And then I'm palms on the floor. So I love testing this. Sometimes I'll just wake up in the morning and do five minutes of breathing exercises when I'm stiff as a board and just get into a position on the floor. Why the breathing exercises? Because that's really how it's the breathing is how I kind of create this cylinder in my abdomen to sort of push the, you know, push the floor of the cylinder down as the pelvic wall. The diaphragm is the cylinder, the top and then the entire, you know, entirety of my abdomen is the wall of the cylinder.

52:20And so I kind of go through these exercises every single day, usually on my back actually, that's kind of like part of my warmup. And it's just a way to kind of ground myself around creating a concentric pressure in the abdomen. Just to get some tips from you around your strength training regime. How many exercises do you do? What does I'm really curious? So you train three days a week doing strength and resistance stuff. Do you do like shoulders and back and as like a pet, like you know, yeah, yeah, it's just totally, yeah, yeah, exactly. So on Monday is pure lower body. Okay. And Wednesday is arms and shoulders.

52:59And Friday is chest and back. Okay, super simple. Like nothing, nothing, no rocket science. And Ella? I mean, it's a, like an hour and a half of lifting play plus maybe 20 minutes of the warm -up stuff. So on the chest and back day, how many chest exercises are you doing? Four. Four, okay. And then four and back. Yeah, okay. And I'm just super setting them. And I'm gonna do maybe five sets of each, so five working sets. So there's a lot of warm -up in there too. And I'll also do some other stuff, like some Medball slams or things like that as well. It's been the huge rise in people doing these high rockes and sort of elite endurance events and such.

53:42It's really interesting that it's become so popular, even things like running clubs, I know. But the fact that more people are doing marathons now than ever before, why do you think this is happening? I don't know. I mean, I think it's a very net positive thing, though. I do think that there's more and more people that are taking up things like rucking and running and finding camaraderie and these things. The only thing I hope is that people are doing it in a manner that's sustainable and safe and allows them to do it indefinitely. So I'm always hopeful that whatever thing that people are doing, they're not injuring themselves because, again, rule number one is don't get injured.

54:19So, you're playing... The name of the game is to play the game, as long as possible. In front of me, I have a bunch of different graphs and images, and some of them relate to a word you said earlier on, which is VO2 max. And this is something I've heard you talk about previously, but for anyone that doesn't understand what VO2 max is or why it's important. Can you explain what it is and why it's so critical to longevity and health span? I think most people will be familiar with the idea that we are obligate ana robes, which in English means we cannot survive without oxygen. Okay. So why is that?

55:00So oxygen is absolutely essential to catalyze the chemical reaction that turns food into a currency for energy called ATP. So everybody's probably heard of ATP. ATP is the money, the currency of energy in our body. Anything that interrupts the production of ATP is fatal. So an extreme example of that is cyanide. Everyone's heard of cyanide as a poison. If you take cyanide, you'll be dead within seconds because cyanide blocks one of the transporters in the production of ATP. So this just gives you a sense of how critical it is to have an infinite and abundant supply of ATP. Oxygen is also essential for that.

55:49That's why without oxygen, you can only survive for a couple of minutes. Longer than you can without cyanide, but not much longer. So, how does it work? So, we breathe in air and that air goes into our lungs and that air goes through our lungs into these distal things called capillaries where hemoglobin is bringing the waste product called carbon dioxide back to the lungs and there's a gradient of partial pressure between oxygen and carbon dioxide such that a switch takes place. the air that we breathe in delivers some of its oxygen to the hemoglobin molecules, and the carbon dioxide diffuses off that into the air, and we breathe out air that is lower in oxygen and higher in carbon dioxide than what we breathed in.

56:36So if I go, that was high oxygen -low carbon dioxide, that was low oxygen -high carbon dioxide, and that's happening every second of every day. That oxygen, that hemoglobin molecule that's carrying oxygen is carrying it to every cell in my body because every cell in my body needs oxygen. And that cell in the body is taking the oxygen to run that chemical reaction to make ATP and it's shuttling back carbon dioxide. And it's just the most incredible thing in the world to imagine how frequently this is happening. And the more you exercise, the more you consume oxygen. So oxygen consumption is a proxy for energy demand.

57:22So we can measure this. Now to do so, you have to put a mask on because I have to be able to measure very precisely two things. After you will measure exactly the flow rate of air going in and out of your mouth, and I have to be able to measure very precisely the concentration of oxygen coming out. If I know those two things, I can calculate how many liters per minute of oxygen you are consuming. So, you and I sitting here right now are probably consuming less than half a liter a minute.

58:10Call it 500 CC a minute of oxygen right now. Because you have to consume some to be alive and look, I'm moving my arms around and you're nodding and taking notes. So, you know, if you're sleeping, you might be consuming 300 milliliters of oxygen per minute. That's the lowest level. If you were to get up and we were to walk around here, that number might go up to 800 milliliters per minute. If we were to walk a little more briskly, we might be at a liter per minute of oxygen. If I said, let's go out in the parking lot and jog. Well, we might get up to like 1 .5 liters per minute. We pick up the pace a little bit, we'll get to two liters per minute.

58:51If I start really, really running us hard, we're gonna get to three and a half, four liters per minute. Well, at some point, I am going to push you so hard that you will achieve your maximum level of oxygen consumption. And if I push you any harder and faster, you won't extract more oxygen from the air. You may go faster, but you will do so through a process that does not involve the consumption of oxygen. You will do so through an anaerobic glycolytic pathway, but you will have achieved your maximum consumption of oxygen. And that number has a very special name. It's called VO2 max. So VO2 max measured in liters per minute is the maximum amount of oxygen you can consume.

59:38And the only way you can measure that again is to have this mask with very, very fancy apparatus that measures both of those things I said, and you have to be stressed hard. So we typically do this on a treadmill or on a bike. So your colleagues that came into 10 squared yesterday, they did it on treadmills. They ran and they ran them and ran them and they ran them until they couldn't go any faster. And then we measured how many liters per minute of oxygen they were consuming. Now, that answers what VO2 max is. So, the next question is, does this matter? Well, the short answer is, we don't have a single metric of humans that we can measure that better predicts how long they will live than how high their VO2 max is.

1:00:26And it's not even close to be completely clear. So, if you compare somebody who is in the top 2 % to someone who is in the bottom 25 % for their age, the difference in mortality is 5x. 500 % yes 400 % technically because with hazard ratios you you go two two a two X hazard ratio is 100 % I guess yeah so let's look at you so I see you've pulled this chart out which is one of my favorite charts okay so you oh by the way there's one other thing I should state we normalize this by weight okay okay so we always divide that number of leaders per minute by how many kilograms you are. So the number is actually reported as milliliters per kilogram per minute.

1:01:14Okay. Okay. All right. So if we look at somebody who is your age, male 30 to 39, if their VO2 max is below 35 milliliters per kilogram per minute, they are in the bottom 25%. Conversely, If they are at 53 milliliters per kilogram per minute, they are in the top two and a half percent. So to be clear, if you take a 35 -year -old man, and one of them has a VO2 max of 53, and the other one has a VO2 max of 35, there is a 400 percent difference in their all -cause mortality over the coming year. Wow, okay, so all course mortality, anything killing them over the coming year. That's right. Now this becomes more and more profound as you age because the all -cause mortality ratio for a 35 -year -old is incredibly low.

1:02:17Yeah. It's like 1%. So, that means you're comparing 1 % to 4%. It's not that big a deal. But when you get up to my age, so I'm two decades older than you. So now the low bar, the bottom quartile is less than 29. The high bar is more than 50. Well, my relative mortality in the next decade is probably 2 % to 3%. So now multiply that by 4%. Okay. When I get into my marginal decade, the low bar is 18. The high bar is 36. That's a 2x difference in VO2 max. A 4x difference in mortality is huge when they all cause mortality for an 85 year old is going to be the one year mortality for that person is more than 10%.

1:03:15Yeah. So one of the things that we do is we sort of think through this, not just through the lens of mortality, which is what I just walked you through here, but also health spam, which is kind of what you were talking about earlier with the graph of strength and disability. So we have another figure that we show people that on the x -axis shows age, and on the y -axis shows VO2. And it has a whole bunch of lines that come across that show various activities. You know, if you want to be able to run a six -minute mile, you have to have a VO2 that's very high. If you want to be able to run an eight -minute mile, a ten -minute mile, if you want to be able to climb a flight of stairs without getting out of breath, like it shows all of these different things and you see what the required VO2 is.

1:04:05I think, in fact, we might even have these graphs in here. Yeah, right there. So we put your dot on the graph and we say, if you stay where you are, you're meaning right at that green curve, you're in for a great life. Why? Because even when you're in your 80s, you're still gonna be able to do all of those things. So the results you're looking at here are jacks results. Yep, who runs the production here? He came to your center. Yep. Came to Ten Square, Nostin. He did the task to think he was on the treadmill like an hour or something like that. And can you explain to me exactly what his results say as it relates to what you were just describing?

1:04:47Yeah, so he did both Zone 2 and a VO2 max test. So Jack got on the treadmill and there's a protocol for how you warm somebody up. You really want them to be able to get to a maximum effort. You don't just put them on the treadmill and crank it up. You take your time getting them up there and he had an amazing result. So his VO2 max was 4 .1 liters per minute. And he achieved that at a heart rate of 204 beats per minute, which is higher than what was predicted for his age. If you normalize it by his weight, he was at 56 .5 milliliters per kilogram per minute. So when you look at his age, because he's in his 20s, He was at about the 97th percentile for his age, meaning his VO2 max was higher than 97 % of people his age.

1:05:44And so out of the gate that just tells us from a longevity standpoint, our goal is to keep him there as long as possible. I mean, we're so ambitious with our patients and clients that we actually want them to be, as an aspiration to be two decades younger at the top 2%. So if you're 50, you wanna be VO2 max north of 53. And then the other thing we do is we check on something called heart rate recovery. So in 60 seconds post VO2 max, how long does it take, how many beats does their heart rate come down in one minute? This is also a very powerful predictor of mortality because it's a huge indication of what's called parasympathetic balance.

1:06:30So it's basically a question of how much is their autonomic nervous system in favor of sort of a stress response versus a recovery response? And so the gold standard here, we want to see people that can recover at least 30 beats in the first minute. He did pretty well. He recovered 28 beats. You know, if you're really, really fit, you're going to be 40, 50 beats of recovery within the first one minute. It's incredible. Then we tested his lactate levels and we ran him for what we called zone two testing. So zone two is his aerobic base. This is where he should be spending 80 % of his training, 80 % of his cardio training time should be in this energy system.

1:07:18So it's hard enough that it's not just pure recovery but not so hard that it's pushing energy systems that are higher. This is a pace he should be able to hold for an hour, and he should certainly feel like he's working, but not feel it too much. Technically, it's also a place where he's got maximum fat oxidation. So we do this also in the same measure on a treadmill. This is a bit more of a complicated test because you're titrating between how he feels and what his blood lactate levels are, maybe not to get too complicated in the weeds on that, but we're simultaneously looking at the ratio of how much carbon dioxide he produces to how much oxygen he consumes.

1:08:01That tells us how much fat he is using in his own body, and we look at that number, and he maxed out at 0 .77 grams per minute, which is very good. One gram per minute of fat oxidation is exceptional. So 0 .7677 is pretty darn good. His lactate hit about two millimole, and he achieved this running at 7 .3 miles per hour. So again, there's a lot to unpack in there, but that gives us a pretty good sense of his level of fitness. And for a guy in his 20s, that's really good fitness. He does a lot of running. Yes, yeah. But even this test is about, we normally would separate these two tests on two separate days.

1:08:44Okay, so people, you know, the people who come to 10 squared are not from Austin. They're from all over the place So they come in for two days of testing and you got to sort of figure out a way to take a person who's not necessarily that fit and And allow them to do these tests so that it's kind of broken up over two a couple days so they can mix it with the strength testing and all the other stuff and if you were advising Jack on how to improve some of these schools here, what would you say? So the truth of the matter is looking at his stuff here I would say I think you've got the endurance thing really covered in his case There were other issues that were uncovered during his intake that were of more concern And this is a matter of like now what we think of his portfolio management, right?

1:09:24So when your VO2 max is in the top 2 % when you're fat oxidizing point seven You know almost point eight grams per minute and he's got a heart rate of 165 to 170 when he's Inzone two. I mean this guy's cardio is dialed in Just for a second I want to talk about a company I've invested in and who spunts this podcast called Zoey. Like me, many of you are big on tracking your fitness and your sleep. But how many of you understand how your body handles food? Metabolic fitness is all about understanding your metabolism's response to food. And we will react differently. So Zoey created a test to help you understand how your body responds.

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1:10:41That's Zoe .com with Code Bartlett 10. I've got a story that I think you'll be interested in hearing and it's brought to you by my show sponsor, Fyther. About six months ago, my team and I sat down to try and work out how we were going to build the most valuable newsletter for ambitious entrepreneurs ever. And after hours of discussion, we finally agreed that to tip the odds in our favour, we needed to be constantly experimenting. But to do this we needed manpower, or womanpower. So we hired a group of freelancers through Fiverr and tasked them with testing different elements, which are like the visuals in the newsletter, the subject lines, the copy links.

1:11:14And even after launching 100 CEOs, the new newsletter, in getting 93 ,000 signups on the first day, our experimenting hasn't stopped. I'm confident we wouldn't have seen the same success had we not experimented in this way. And our freelance support from Fiverr was critical to that. So next time you're launching something find your failures and fix them fast with five of freelancers Visit five of dot com slash diary today and use code D OAC for 10 % off your first order These are Jack's results so I've invited Jack in because I feel like he might have some questions and you might have some questions So you guys go ahead All right, well first off Jack.

1:11:51Thanks for being an awesome guinea pig yesterday You hit it out of the park as far as your cardio training So tell me a little bit, like, what are you doing for cardio? How often do you running? So I actually stripped it back quite a lot. I've really started maybe, maybe like two years ago, going really heavy on running, and that's all I did. And then I started getting a little bit injured. So now I've cut it back, but I'd say I do like one long run a week, and that's like 20k. Outside of that, I don't really do much other cardio. Interesting. I know that the team talked to you about your left foot.

1:12:24Yes. And did they show you the pictures on the treadmill? It did, yeah, super interesting. It's super interesting. I sprayed my ankle really badly like six months ago. Yep. So did that could have been something? I think it's very likely that the ankle sprain has not... has changed your gait such that you probably are going to develop an injury over time with your running if your pattern is not corrected. So you're overcompensating on the left. and I assume you noticed the difference in the height of your shoulders and your head and everything while you were running. So even though the engine is working insanely well, this test only measures the performance of your engine.

1:13:02Your chassis, which is a subjective assessment to use the car analogy, shows that the chassis is a bit weak. Okay, I'll give a bit of context on what that actually was. So when I was running on the treadmill, I think it's Kyla. He showed me a picture afterwards of me running and basically my head was right in the middle when I went on my right size But then when I went on my left my whole body was like a bit lopsided. Yeah, so yeah That's kind of what you're talking about that. That's right and again like the good news about running is each step is very light But if you're running 20k, that's a lot of steps.

1:13:37So even something that's a light impact but done thousands of times will produce a problem Okay, so let's shift from how well the engine is, which is exceptional, at both ends, by the way, to be clear, your peak engine output, which is VO2 max was awesome, and your engine efficiency, which was your zone two, your fat oxidation, exceptional. We do have this issue in the chassis that needs to be addressed, or you're gonna get a repetitive strain injury. So then the next thing that the team did was just a very simple test called the DEXIS scan, but we do a more comprehensive one. So we're looking at all the bone density, left hip, right hip, lumbar spine, and then total body fat, total muscle mass, and then visceral fat, which is fat around the organs.

1:14:22I think the most surprising aspect of the test was your bone density. So a DEXIS scan measures bone density very accurately, and both sort of across the board in terms of your lumbar spine and your right hip and your left hip, you were in your lumbar spine two standard deviations below the mean for someone your age. So that means basically you're in the bottom 10 % tile of bone density for a guy your age and for your hips you're not much better. Both on the left and right hip you're about one and a half to 1 .7 standard deviations below the mean. So what does that mean? That means that you already have something called osteoporosis.

1:15:12So when your T -score, which in your case is almost the same as your Z -score because of your age, but the Z -score compares you to someone your age, the T -score compares you to someone 30 years old. So when your T -score is minus 1, you have osteopenia, and when it gets below minus 2 .5, you have osteoporosis. Those are just technical definitions of bone density. The problem is your risk of bone fracture goes up really significantly. Now, because of how young you are, it's not like I'm worried you're going to walk out of here and something's going to go wrong. But the risk of you sustaining an injury in sport is not trivial, right?

1:15:48So if you were out skiing and Stephen was out skiing, assuming he had normal bone density and you guys both took a tumble, I would be infinitely more worried about your bone density. And we have patients in our practice who do their young, healthy people and they get these freakish fractures while skiing or playing sports and things like that, and they have really low bone density. So, so once just something we want to address, the bigger concern is that what's what is the what is the what is the story of this going to be when you're 60 and 65 and 70 and that's that's the one where we really want to mitigate it.

1:16:16So I know that the team talked to you about making sure you follow up with an endocrinologist you want to make sure that there's nothing here that is medically obvious to be treated such as vitamin D deficiency anything that has to do with parathyroid hormone or calcium and things that are medically obvious to treat. The most important behavioral thing that a person can do with low bone density, beyond correcting all the nutritional deficiencies that can lead to it, is applying heavy load to the bone. So bones are active pieces of tissue, even though we don't think of them that way, and they respond to deformation.

1:16:54So you have to put strain into a bone for it to respond and strengthen. And it's counterintuitive that running is not amazing at doing that. It's not bad. So in general, runners have better bone density than sedentary people, but not by much. Believe it or not. Swimmers and cyclists believe it or not, actually have lower bone density on average. But resistance training with heavy weights is actually kind of what is necessary, grappling as well, by the way. So people who do jiu jitsu, strength training, resistance training, those are the ways that you're going to increase this. So I would say that was the first finding that is important and worth discussing.

1:17:38Do you have any questions on that? Because I've got a couple. Well, I think my first one was, so I only actually start lifting weights like probably maybe two years ago. So that's probably why you're seeing that. Maybe. I mean, I guess, did you have asthma as a child or anything? No. I know when I, my mom said something about like when I was born, I had low calcium, something about low calcium. They had to put something in my teeth, but I don't know what that is exactly. Well, if you had low, if there's something that was impacting your calcium levels when you were little, that would certainly be a potential risk for it.

1:18:09The, the, our bones are mostly formed for, for males in the early 20s, for girls typically in the late teens. So anything that disrupted calcium metabolism when you were young could have played a role in this for sure The reason I asked if you had asthma is a lot of the times we see folks that you know had any medical condition that required corticosteroids prolonged use of corticosteroids would be another big risk factor Of course, there's also genetics so probably worth knowing if your parents themselves have low bone density But but it sounds like there's something going on with calcium metabolism as a kid that might have played a role The reason it is really important to connect with an endocrinologist now is there are actual medical treatments that can increase bone density in addition to all sort of the total optimization of the nutritional stuff, vitamin D, calcium levels, things of that nature, and of course the training.

1:19:02That specific exercises I do to increase that, or is it just an all -around comment? No, I mean I think the if you think about the long bones of the body, which are the ones that we're basically measuring here. I mean, the short bones in the spine, but the femurs and hips, anything that puts those things under deformation. So anything from a farmer's carry to a step up, to a box squat. I mean, you know, it's whatever you can do safely that's loading you and placing these bones in a manner that forces them to actually undergo deformation. The way, the way, and the other thing I would also make sure of is that someone's checking your blood levels to look at things like testosterone and estrogen.

1:19:39So estrogen, believe it or not, probably the most important hormone besides vitamin D in bone health. So you can think of a bone as something with a strain gauge in it and as the bone is deformed, the strain gauge sends a signal, a chemical signal to cells that build the bone. The chemical signal is estrogen. So the reason women are so susceptible to osteophenio and osteoporosis is once they go through menopause, many of them lose the restrogen if they're not placed on, well, they all lose the restrogen, but if they're not placed on a hormone replacement therapy, they don't get it back. And so they lose that chemical signal.

1:20:15So women see a rapid drop off in bone density at menopause. Peter, is this craft accurate? Roughly. Yes, this would be accurate. So if this is broadly accurate, what is the game then for someone like Jack, is it building bone or is it preventing the cline? Yeah, preventing the cline. Most of us reach our peak bone mass. in our 20s. Yep. So the name of the game is prevent it from getting any weaker. The good news is, by the way, I had a woman on my podcast named Belinda Beck who studies osteoporosis. She's from Australia and she did this amazing study there called the Lift More Study where she enrolled a bunch of women with osteoporosis who had never done any resistance training and And half of them were randomized to the usual activities like yoga and things of that nature.

1:21:07And then half of them were randomized to heavy resistance training. And the women that did the heavy resistance training, actually, first of all, on DEXA, saw no change in bone density. Or saw a very minor reduction in bone density compared to a significant reduction in the women who were not resistance training. But more importantly, on CT scans, the women who had done the resistance training actually showed an increase in cortical thickening of bone, suggesting that it might even be that DEXA is not by itself sufficient to fully assess bone health. It says it's bone density, but not necessarily bone health.

1:21:41And her hypothesis is that these women might actually be getting stronger bones, even if the density is going down just a little. But either way, even if density were sufficient, the fact that their density went down so much less than the others was amazing. And it's actually, you know, if you can find the video and link to it on YouTube, Belinda Beck's Lift More Study. It's just an awesome video to watch these little old ladies walking around, picking up, you know, deadlifting their body weight and stuff like that. Is there anything else you wanted to ask Jack, or about your results, or anything else?

1:22:13Maybe pressing questions you have. Yeah, nutrition would be a good one, actually. Yeah, calcium, vitamin D, protein. Yeah. Everything that's going to support muscle mass as well, because that's the other thing that we found here. So we looked at your body fat percentage. Again, in absolute terms, not that high, but for your age, pretty high, right? Because you're young, so you're at the 80th percentile for your age. And your visceral fat was at the 50th percentile for your age. So we don't really care that much about total body fat. We care a lot more about visceral fat. So the fact that your visceral fat was at the 50th percentile, visceral fat is the fat that's around your organs.

1:22:48That's the more metabolically deranging, damaging fat. We actually, we have a very high standard. We want to see that below the 10th percentile. I'll hit pause on that for a second, but then to relay the next thing that we looked at was your muscle mass. So we looked at the total muscle mass in your arms and legs. That's called your appendicular lean mass. And then we looked at the total fat free mass in your body. And both of those put you at about the 20th percentile. So the first question I'm asking when I'm looking at these results is, are you adequately muscleed or under -muscled? So, I really want to see somebody above the 50th percentile in muscle mass.

1:23:24So, you're under muscle. The second thing I'm looking at is with the body fat percentage where it is, both in the visceral fat, is that to me, I call that overnourished. Now, I don't have blood tests to see where you are metabolically, but I want those are the, those are what I could call my three questions. Are you metabolically healthy or not? I need a blood test to see it. I suspect you are, though, based on your zone two. So the fact that your fat oxidation was 0 .77 grams per minute, very hard and your fasting lactate was 0 .5, which is also very good. So my bet is you are metabolically healthy.

1:23:58We would have to do a bunch of blood test to confirm that, but I bet you would be. But you are overnourished, meaning body fat is too high and visceral fat is too high, and you are undermuscled. You're ALMI and your FFMI are too low. So that immediately tells me like what do you need to be doing? You need to be eating more protein, fewer calories, more resistance training. You don't need to do any more cardio. That's oversimplification, but that's your path forward. The last question I had around, I think I've heard you speak about it before, but it's around the potential of what your muscle's mass can be.

1:24:34If you lift as a teenager versus if you start lifting in your 29, so if I start lifting it like 27, the potential which was a lot less right, is that true or is that? I'm not sure. I think genetics play a pretty big role in that. And I think, in other words, I think that your ceiling is probably more dictated by your genetics than it is the age at which you started. I think if you took a, you know, someone who was just genetically wired to put on muscle and they don't start lifting until they're, in their 20s, they're still gonna put on a ton of muscle. I mean, like, I've been lifting weights my whole life since I was 13 years old, I'm never going to be like a monster.

1:25:13Like it's just not going to happen, right? There's no chance I'm ever going to be on the stage of bodybuilding, you know, contest. Okay. Yeah, that's just one thing. It's like, oh, it's haunted me. Well, haunted me in the last two years. Yeah, yeah. And now you, but again, you have to consider a bunch of variables as you're lifting, right? So are you training at the right intensity? Are you training at the right frequency? Do you have the right selection of exercises? Is your technique correct? So lifting weights, it's not a uniform term. So you really have to dive into that, right? So to put on muscle you probably need to be doing a minimum of 10 and I would say ideally closer to 20 sets per week, her body group, the intensity has to be sufficient.

1:25:57So we were talking about that minimum to ideally one rep in reserve per working set. So if you're if you're just doing like three sets of 10, but you could have done three more reps if you really pushed. There was no training stimulus there. I've got a question on that, which is linked to one of my friends, but it's something I've heard you say, which is you said to me before that you struggled with gaining weight. Yes. A friend of mine says it has said this to me for the last 10 years. A muscle. Yeah, so he says, like, even when he eats a lot, he has, like, he feels like he's force feeding himself, and it's like not natural.

1:26:31And then when he goes to the gym, he hasn't seen the results. Whereas for me, I've never had the problem of like, I can eat loads, and then I go to the gym, and I work out, and muscle comes on. So for those people that struggle with a, eating enough calories, and then they go to the gym, and they don't feel like they're able to gain muscle. You've experienced this before, haven't you? You've experienced people that have said this to you. Sure. It's actually much more common with women than men, but it's sort of focusing more on the protein as opposed to the total calories. I mean, you do need the calories, but it's probably breaking down the protein intake into smaller servings.

1:27:07And that for many people just means they have to get shakes or things like that, they're not gonna get it through whole foods all the time. I don't need to drink shakes because I'm able to get protein through food enough, but that shouldn't be viewed as something you don't wanna do. I mean, even I'm sure some of the most successful bodybuilders in the world just based on their protein requirements still have to resort to shakes. So figuring out what it takes to get one gram of protein per pound of body weight and making sure you get that even if it takes four servings a day is it should be the highest priority.

1:27:38And again, you don't need more calories at this point based on your visceral and body fat. We just need to make sure you're getting that gram of protein per pound of body weight and that you're getting the right training stimulus in the gym. Okay. Thank you. Okay, thank you for that pizza. I didn't know we were going to be doing a little console. Yeah. I know, but it's super fascinating. Even for me, even though they're not my results, I learned a ton about that. The question, we don't necessarily need to go through all of the results here for a reminder, but how do you see women's results being different typically as it relates to bone density, muscle mass, and those things, I was wondering if even for the VO2 max, you're expecting different results for women or well, we score them on a different curve.

1:28:19So the results are gonna be a little lower. And again, part of the reason is women have less muscle, all things equal. and muscle is the organ that is going to consume the most oxygen, I mean outside of the brain. So, you know, if you took a woman at 25 and a man at 25, there's a different threshold for what the grade is on the curve. But I would say the biggest difference we typically see is, and not so much at the ages of these guys, because they're both so young and fit, but as we get into kind of older folks, We definitely see more of an issue with muscle mass in women and bone density in women.

1:29:00I was quite surprised with Jack when you talked about visceral fat. Yeah. There's two types of fat that I've come to learn. Subcutaneous, which is, I think, is on the outside. Yep. And then visceral is around the organs. Right. So the body fat is mostly measuring his subcutaneous fat. Oh, on the outside. Yeah. Okay. I've got a little bit of subcutaneous fat right now as we do all. How do I know if it's an issue or not? Now, unfortunately, it's very difficult to know without further investigation. I say this because I haven't been able to predict it looking at somebody. I've seen people who have lots of subcutaneous fat, but when you look at their liver and look at their visceral fat, they have virtually none, and they tend to be quite metabolically healthy.

1:29:44So, maybe aesthetically, they've got too much body fat, and there are lots of reasons why they might want that, might not want that. I'm sorry based on excess body weight that just in general is an impediment to movement or, you know, pain in their knees or joints. But it's not actually causing them harm physiologically. And conversely, you know, if you look at Jack, like he's, he actually looks, he's pretty lean looking guy. Like nobody would look at Jack and say he's overweight, but he's got a little bit too much fat on the inside. And that, if not, I mean, I think his running and his fitness is probably offsetting it metabolically, but there might become a day when that's not the case.

1:30:24So it, you know, this is something that I think just needs to be addressed. And again, people that are in their 20s can get away with a lot and it starts to become something you don't get away with in your 40s. Is there a genetic component to this? And also, what is caused it? What usually causes it? The body fat, the visceral fat. Visceral fat. Yeah, there's definitely a genetic component to it. But the truth of the matter is the cause of this is just fuel partitioning. It's just it's just where the body is putting excess energy, right? So all of the fat we have in our body comes down to where does our body choose to store excess energy?

1:31:00Because that's the only way we store it. We can't store protein. So we can only store when we store protein technically in muscles, but we're basically storing carbohydrates and fat. So you can store carbohydrates preferably in the muscle and in the liver as glycogen, but that's a very finite source. So most of where you're storing those things is excess glucose gets stored as fat and then fat gets stored as fat. So if theoretically Jack had a high muscle mass, you would have less visceral fat potentially. Yeah, probably because first of all muscle is more metabolically active. So more metabolically active tissue means higher energy expenditure, which would all things equal mean lower fat.

1:31:41That makes sense. And if there were a couple of things that I could do to reduce my visceral fat, we talked about exercise, there we talked about diet, intermittent fasting, do you have found of those kinds of things? There's no evidence that intermittent fasting produces any benefits above the equivalent amount of caloric restriction. So whether you're eating in eight hours or six hours or across 12 hours, if the same number of calories are consumed, it's essentially producing the same outcome. Sleep stress? Absolutely, dramatic. What we've talked about sleep already, right? If your sleep is not good, you are going to be insulin resistant.

1:32:19If you are insulin resistant, you are partitioning fuel in an unfavorable way, which in English means you are more likely to access glucose than access fat, even at low levels of intensity when you should be accessing fat. That's why, by the way, I thought he's probably still insulin sensitive based on how high his fat oxidation was. meaning when he was at 165 beats per minute on a treadmill, he was pulling out almost 0 .8 grams per minute of fat. That's really good. That tells me he fuel partitions well. He knows how to access fat when he needs fat. So that's that's still working in his favor.

1:33:00But for many people, once they're exercising that hard, their their fat oxidation goes to hell. And all they're doing is access and glucose. But they could be a link for in his case between sleep and visceral fat. Yeah. Especially if he travels with you. Yeah. And then alcohol, you mean, juctures in your cow -cow, but generally visceral fat and alcohol. Yeah. Bad time. I want to talk to you about the cell -cow point, because that's all at Huberman tweet the other day saying that it's now pretty well established that even moderate alcohol intake is bad for you. But I sat here the other day with someone else who said to me that they talked about the Mediterranean diet, Italians, they seem to be fine, et cetera.

1:33:37And I wanted to kind of get your perspective on whether small amounts of our colin take are okay or not. Because some people still think it's healthy, tough, moderate our colin take. It's better for the heart. I think that is pretty abundantly not true. So I don't think I am aware of any really evidence. And we've scrutinized the heck out of this. We, so the subscribers to our podcast, get these premium newsletters every month, where we do an ultra -insane, deep dive into a topic, and alcohol was one of them. So this is like, you're getting a treatise, right? A 20 -page research report on a topic.

1:34:15So for anybody who's interested in that, they should go and get the alcohol piece. But yeah, the TLDR is that there is no compelling evidence whatsoever, that there is a health benefit that comes from ethanol consumption. The molecule of ethanol is not healthy at any dose, and I believe that is unambiguously true. That said, it does not appear to be linearly toxic, meaning low, low doses, probably sub 15 grams per day. 15 grams of ethanol would be what you would get in a standard drink. Standard drink, not a generous drink. So, you know, whatever, like three, four ounces of wine would be 15 grams of ethanol, 14 grams of ethanol.

1:35:05It appears that for most people, the toxicity of that amount of ethanol is very difficult to measure. And this is where you get into the area of, for some people, there might actually be enough of a pro -social benefit from that amount of ethanol if consumed in an otherwise healthy the environment, right? So if you talk about the individual who comes home and has a glass of wine while he's with his wife and they kind of unwind in the backyard and talk about their day and things like that, there might be benefits from doing that that outweigh the very, very small amount of toxicity that came in that ethanol.

1:35:48Once you reach about 30 grams of ethanol a day, I don't see, and I have not seen, a shred of evidence that there is any amount of prosocial behavior that can offset the toxicity of that ethanol. So while I would not go as far as the World Health Organization, which is condemned ethanol as a carcinogen at every dose, I just don't see the data to make that case for every dose, I tell my patients in a very measured, nuanced way, kind of what I just told you. like, you know, I drink alcohol, and I, but I think about it every time I do. Like, is it worth it? Is it worth it? Is it worth it? Like, I'm not just drinking for the sake of drinking.

1:36:33I have this expression, don't drink on airplanes because the alcohol sucks. Like, I'm not just drinking to numb myself, right? Like, if I'm going to drink, there's a reason. It's going to be really freaking good. And that, for me, amounts to probably like four drinks a week. You're just talking about airplanes now. I was thinking about electrolytes. There's been a huge boom over the last couple of months of people consuming more and more electrolytes. Everyone's launching an electrolyte drink and consuming much more salt and sodium. What do you make of this? Are we electrolyte deficient? Well, first of all, as a disclosure, I'm an investor in a company that sells electrolytes.

1:37:11So, Elemente. So, I'm an investor in that company, which I was going to disclose stuff like that if it's pertinent. The short answer is it depends. So why did I get interested in electrolytes? Well, I historically never consumed electrolytes when exercising. I was pretty much always consuming water and or water plus carbohydrate, depending on the intensity and duration of the exercise. I also tend to have very low blood pressure. And a couple of years ago, I had a really, really bad fall when I woke up in the morning and I was jet lagged. So I had just flown to Brazil. So obviously you get a little bit dehydrated on a plane.

1:37:46And then the first, you get in whatever that night, and then the next morning I woke up, got out of bed, and face planted into a table. You can probably still see the scar on my forehead. And I get back home, and my doc measures my blood pressure. It's like 95 over 60. And he's like, yeah, you're just, you're really dehydrated, man. Like, we need to get a little more, And it's not like I don't eat salt. I make zero effort to restrict sodium in my diet. But clearly I was just exercising too much. I mean, especially in living in Texas, like when I'm exercising outdoors, I'm sweating like crazy. So it's like, you just gotta get more salt, man.

1:38:25So I just went, I literally then did a super deep dive on hydration and realized that there's basically two ways to maximize hydration. Either you consume water with a high enough, enough, not just to high enough, with the absolute correct concentration of glucose in it, and the correct concentration is between 5 and 6 percent. So that's 50 to 60 grams of glucose per liter of fluid will maximize water uptake through the sodium water transporter, or you consume what's called osmotic sodium in water. Those are your two options, with the glucose one being slightly better. And so what I realized is, look, I don't exercise is long enough anymore to justify it.

1:39:08And the only workout I do a week that is intense enough to justify it is that VO2 max one, where I'm actually M using glucose and water. But for the rest of my workouts, I don't need it. I just need sodium and water. And then I just went through every product on the market. Literally went to Amazon, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, order every one of them. And realized at the end of the day, it's a commodity product. Get the one that tastes the best, because that's the one you're going to have to suck down every day. Pete, what's the most important thing we didn't talk about that we should have talked about as it relates to your work, the science that you're obsessed with at the moment, and anything that my audience might and should need to know that we haven't yet discussed.

1:39:47Maybe just the idea that it's really tempting in the world I live in to want to find single sources of problems, right? So there's always a bogeyman. And I think unfortunately, the entire landscape of health influencing and social media has created a very unhelpful narrative around many of these things. And so there's an effect called the Dunning Kruger effect, which can be sort of put into a cartoon, where it shows experience on the x -axis and confidence on the y -axis. So you've seen this graph, I'm sure, where it starts out like it just skyrockets up to what's called the peak of stupidity, and then it kind of comes down into the valley of humility and then as you become more and more of an expert, you graduate.

1:40:45So this idea of like the deeper you go out from shore, the further from shore, the deeper the water gets. And most of what I'm sure your audience is going to be exposed to, because we all are if we're on social media or whatever, is people preaching from the peak of Mount stupidity. And so I think maybe the thing to be thinking about is, what are the signs of that? And it's usually people that are like, there's one thing that is the thing. It's this additive in food, or it's this particular oil, or it's this sugar, or it's this that. and it's like the truth of the matter is it isn't one thing.

1:41:22Like it's really, really complicated and it's hard to talk about things that are complicated and we tend to just want to focus on one thing. And I've been guilty of this myself. If I look at stuff I was writing 15 years ago, I'm like, man, you really oversimplified that too much. Like you overe indexed on that and you ignored this thing. And so I just think that, try to identify people out there who are talking about things in a nuanced way, and you're generally going to be closer to the direction of reality. And how do you deal with it as a podcast host? Because you must sit there. You know so much about the subject matter, and you must sit there, and hear people say to you on your podcast things that you don't agree with.

1:42:02Well, on my podcast, it's easy, because again, the nature of my podcast is super inquisitive, so it's just very easy to push back. And sometimes I don't. Sometimes I'll, you know, I was recently interviewing somebody, and they may make a comment. And I just knew it was wrong, but I was like, you know,

1:42:21I'll make an editorial comment later about this for the audience to understand that he's confusing cause and effect. And I didn't push back. And afterwards I thought I probably should have. I probably should have pushed back on what he said a little bit. But again, on my podcast, it's easy. I think the bigger issue is when people send me links to podcasts. Like, what do you think of this? And I have to go through and explain why what this person said is completely wrong. I mean, just completely unfounded in any scientific basis whatsoever. But there are very compelling speakers, and so I get it.

1:42:55Like I get why, you know, that you would, you know, as my friend send that to me with concern. One of the things we've introduced recently, well, in the last three, four months is just, we put, we have some independent scientific individuals who have a look at some of the things that are being said just across reference and provide context. We call it kind of context checking. Just because some of the bigger things, obviously there's so many big, as you were saying, so many terms like seed oils in this, in this, in this, that I've started a bit of a nutrition war on the internet. And so we just want to make sure that we provide more context to these things.

1:43:30So that person at home who isn't going to take it upon themselves to apply that context or do the research has more of a wide opinion. But it's difficult because, as you say, often times, it's the best speaker or the person with the most conviction that gets heard. You've managed to break through all of that and provide a tremendous amount of nuance and complexity to these subjects, but also to achieve the same focus and articulation and resonance and accessibility that some of those individuals have achieved. I would highly recommend anybody who has not read to this book to read this book because this is the book on this subject.

1:44:06And I say that I've interviewed many hundreds of people, but this is the book on this subject. It's been a global phenomenon for all the reasons I've described about it being so accessible. It's so nuanced, but so easy for someone like me to understand even though I'm not a scientist. And it's the book that I recommend to my friends, to my family when they're trying to understand the subject matter of longevity in a world where there is just so much information. And that's why this book did so well. And it continues to do so unbelievably well. But I'd also recommend everybody go check out your podcast, which I love watching.

1:44:34And also, if they want other resources from you, where do we send people Peter? I think our website probably, so Peter, Tia, MD, the website, will probably direct people to all the different sort of places where we have unbelievable amounts of free information. So we have a newsletter that comes out every single week. It's free. It's really valuable. People, you know, the open rate on that is through the roof because it's not junk. Like it's, we're putting something in your inbox every single Sunday that you're going to want to read about the exact topics you're asking. So I'm going to link all of that below.

1:45:06So put all of the links below for Peter's work. If you haven't become obsessed, like we all are here with Peter's work. And I really mean that. We're all massive fans of yours. Jack was saying before you came, he said, I love Peter. You were saying this the other day, was saying this about a week ago. And that's something that I think we all feel because of the impact you've had on our lives of demystifying this information, but bringing it to us in a way that's so accessible, so smart and so trustworthy. So Peter, thank you for what you're doing because you're demystifying a very complicated world for all of us and it's a world that ifdom is defied we stand a better chance of living happier, healthy, along the lives and there's probably nothing more important to what makes life meaningful and fulfilling and me being able to walk up and down those stairs and barley when I'm 75 so thank you Peter it's tremendous, really really tremendous and I appreciate you very very much Peter I was so caught up in admiration for you that I forgot that we have to ask you this question which is the question left by the last guest and that is what would you do if you weren't afraid?

1:46:02Why that face?

1:46:07Oh. Um.

1:46:12Because I've been dealing with that for a long, I've been dealing with something for a couple of weeks that is is is incredibly. Frightening, but I think I've finally worked up the courage to do it. But I can't speak about it unfortunately. Oh really? At least not yet. I will be able to one day. There will be a day when I will be able to tell this story. And it will be one of the most important decisions I've ever made in my life. Oh, I'm so curious and so intrigued. And it's, I can tell by your reaction that it's going to be profound for both you and all of us. I can tell by your reaction. Because I can tell that there's some of the minutes trouble there.

1:46:50So whatever it is, best of luck. And maybe we'll talk again in the future wants you to be able to talk about it. I care about it. Thank you Peter. We launched these conversation cards and they sold out and we launched the McGinn and they sold out again. We launched the McGinn and they sold out again because people love playing these with colleagues at work, with friends at home and also with family and we've also got a big audience that use them as journal prompts. Every single time a guest comes on the diave of a CEO they leave a question for the next guest in the diary and I've sat here with some of the most incredible people in the world and they've left all of these questions in the diary and I've ranked them from one to three in terms of the depth.

1:47:27One being a starter question and level three, if you look on the back here, this is a level three, becomes a much deeper question that builds even more connection. If you turn the cards over and you scan that QR code, you can see who answered the card and watch the video of them answering it in real time. So if you would like to get your hands on some of these conversation cards, go to the diary .com or look at the link in the description below. This has always blown my mind a little bit. 53 % of you that listen to this show regularly haven't yet subscribed to this show. So could I ask you for a favor?

1:48:00If you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us, the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment to you is if you do that, then I'll do everything in my power, me and my team to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback, we'll find the guess that you want me to speak to, and we'll continue you to do what we do. Thank you so much.

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