Why You Can't Stop Eating & the Simple Food Rule That Could Fix Your Diet

24:00Are they all basically being abused? I sort of have a running joke on the show that everyone that should be on the GLP-1s isn't, and everyone that is, is just like an edge case, like a few pounds overweight, and then they end up looking like an alien from Star Wars, pretty much. Right, right. So is that just we've overprescribed? Is that just that a certain set of people just have access to these things and are hung up on the visual part of how you look more than others? It's tough. I think that there are people who benefit from these medications, and they do affect humans, and they really help a lot of people lose weight.

24:38At what cost? we can talk about and how they help us lose weight is very interesting. Because if you ask people who are on these medications, and some people are on them who should be on them, and some people are on them who are just really, like you said, abusing them. Right. So you might be like obese and diabetic and all those things, in which case you probably should be on something. It could help. It's one option. You could also just change your diet. If you're super motivated, that works too. But the way that these medicines generally, there are obviously many mechanisms, but what's most interesting from people, for me, when you hear them describe what happens in all these medications, is food noise goes away.

25:14Have you heard this term, food noise? It's interesting. I think there is probably a genetic predisposition in some people to more food noise versus less food noise, but there is no obesity gene, right? So Oprah got on The View a while ago and said, I have the fat gene. No, you don't, Oprah. You may have a predisposition to more food noise, which is just this constant in thinking and craving of food. But that food noise, and this is where the conversation gets interesting for me, that food noise comes from the processed food. And that to me is what no one is talking about because we get wrapped up in this calories in, calories out discussion, which look at the level of thermodynamics, a hundred percent true.

25:54And you - Right. You can't argue that. Like you're going to lose weight if you have less calories, but that's not the whole picture. You have to expand the perspective and think, okay, the quality of the calorie affects the way you feel after you eat the calorie, right? And so you said, can I just go burn off the 500 calories? Yes, because you're doing it occasionally. But if you were always eating donuts, Dave, the question is, do you have a strong genetic predisposition to developing the food noise? And I strongly believe that the ingredients in donuts, whether it's a processed naked sugar, a industrially refined seed oil, carrageenan, mono and diglycerides, these sort of ultra-processed food ingredients that over time affect our brains.

26:36And we see this in animal models. We know, and this is what I think is not being talked about as bluntly enough as it needs to be, we know that these ultra-processed foods actually change brain chemistry in humans. They are in some ways breaking our brains and making it very difficult for those of us with particular predispositions to food noise to understand when we're hungry and when we're not. And that is a very difficult loop to get out of. And so you give someone a GLP-1, whether it's ozempic or jazepatide, retitutide, whatever, double, triple, or a single agonist, and that stops because you're affecting the mechanisms in the brain along the GLP-1 axis, this sort of mesolimbic brain reward system, and it quiets that.

27:17But we need to remember the reason it's quieting that, the reason you need it to quiet that is because the foods you were eating in the first place were making it loud and were making it broken. So the simpler solution is eat good food. It also, and I think this fits in your way of looking at the world, it also breaks one of the true joys of life, which is or should be eating if you're doing it the right way. Because I know plenty of people on this stuff and I can think of one guy in particular who I think maybe it was, with you that I mentioned him as we were discussing this. And then he called me after.

27:49He was like, you were talking about me, weren't you? Because he was the guy that kind of got me into making these awesome tomahawk steaks and really got me into tequila. And then I had him over and his wife and he took one tiny bite, one little sip. And I could just see the joy of food was gone. And that is important in a holistic sense. And so it's important for people to realize that you can still have joy in food if you just eat that food that humans were meant to eat, right? Because apples are delicious, raspberries, it's cherry season now, right? A peach, wow, that's sublime. We got some great peaches down here.

28:25Right? You know, a good steak, a good quality steak, or you know, even a salad can be really enjoyable for people if they choose to eat salad. Hey, Chicagoland, the Wayfair store is in your neighborhood at Eden's Plaza and Wilmette. Finally, you can feel the fabric, sit on the sectionals, and even open the refrigerators. Plus, our in-store designers will help you bring it all together with free one-on-one design support for any project on any budget. Yep, we said free. Oh, and did we mention the cafe? So what are you waiting for? Come see all that's in store. Visit the Wayfair store today at Edens Plaza and Wilmette.

29:02Wayfair, every style, every home. Like food can be good, but it's all about what is the level of your dopamine, right? Or sort of these pleasure pathway feedback loops in the brain. And there's a lot of parallels here. The same thing happens with devices, which we can talk about. But when you flood your system with excess pleasure chemicals, this dopaminergic neuron stimulation and this pleasure pathway in your brain with these ultra-processed foods, which are engineered to hijack your dopaminergic systems, they're engineered to hijack your pleasure pathways in the brain. your baseline gets altered.

29:36And you don't think of a peach as rewarding as it should be, because you're after a Snickers bar. That's the baseline of reward. And then if you're only eating Snickers bars and donuts, which are hyper rewarding, you lose context for all this. So that's really important. I think it just, I want to clarify for people that we are literally, this sounds like hyperbole, but I don't think it is. We're literally being poisoned by the foods that we are also being told are fine for us if we just eat a small amount of them, right? That's the calories trap. You can eat 100 calories of Oreos. What if the 100 calories of Oreos is actually poisoning your brain and making it hard to tell what kind of foods you should be eating when?

30:15That's the trap. And Oreos are like particularly terrible, right? Well, yeah, it's all bad. I know all that stuff is. It's all bad. I'm not going to get you. Yeah, but they're all, but I think there's something about Oreos I read somewhere that was like. I mean, they're full of processed oils and processed sugars and dyes. It's all the same thing. It's all just different incarnations of the same bad stuff. So we're basically all crack addicts. It's just not crack that's pretty much getting us. Yes, and the crack is legal. We are addicted to legal crack. All right, let's do the handheld device iPhone portion of this in just a sec.

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31:20When you trade$10, K-A-L-S-H-I. Kalshi, put your money where your prediction is. So that's a good segue, actually. So we're going to talk about the online portion and the devices and the doom scrolling and all that. And the EMF and all that. Yeah, yeah. So talk to me. Wearables. You're not wearing any wearables. I don't have any wearables. I freaking, they're not a sponsor. I love this Oura Ring, and I think it's genuinely changed my life. Between steps, sleep, heart rate, just being aware of all these. I'm not obsessive about it. Look a couple times a day right when I wake up. How was my sleep?

31:55you know, a few other times. I absolutely love it. Are you, do you like these things? Is this going to, is my finger going to fall off? What's going on here? It's great for some people, you know, I think that I'm a little too neurotic to do it. You know, I just, I, I wear the aura ring and I don't sleep well. And then the middle of the night I'm like, Oh, I know my sleep score is going to be bad. It just depends on your sort of the way your brain is built. And I am probably hyper neurotic. And so it doesn't work for me, but for a lot of people, man, if it gives you feedback, rock and roll. Awesome.

32:28I just, I love it. Like if I'm just like, you know what? I last night I didn't sleep that well. I see I got six and a half hours. Like, man, if I can just figure out a way to get a 40 minute nap in here, if I have an open hour, maybe I can sleep for 40 minutes. And then I see that thing go up. It just, it starts feeding itself. And the steps, you can gamify it for people, the steps or HRV, the heart rate variability is a great metric for people. when you see your heart rate variability go up that's a good thing that means you have more recovery and you're doing better so whatever you did yesterday to improve your heart rate variability that's a good thing do more of that maybe it was a workout maybe it was meditation maybe it was a nap maybe it was better diet maybe it was time with your friends and family you know maybe it was red light therapy that's a great feedback loop too so to have a device that can tell you hrv steps sleep quality women are using them now to track fertility yeah because it'll tell you body temperature.

33:19Before a woman ovulates, her body temperature usually goes up about a half a degree Fahrenheit. That's great too. You can tell when you might be getting sick because you'll see that with your HRV will drop and your body temperature might go up. So yeah, they're interesting for me. I mean, we can talk about it. It's probably a very small input for humans. You can put them on airplane mode. So it's like not actually producing any RF, EMF, if we're worried about that, which is a question, but it's the small thing. Right. So, all right. So let's talk about generally relationships with devices. And again, this is my, right now I am somewhere, not in this studio, on my 10th off the grid.

33:54And I genuinely think in a weird way, it like, it like saved my career and my life and everything because I just, just by getting off the hamster wheel, news, the phone, the full thing, I just come back fresh every year. and it's spiritual, it's meaningful, it's kind of everything, but we're all locked into this stuff. So how do you manage your relationship with the devices? There's two sides to it, right? Yeah, there's two sides. There's the benefits of being outdoors, which we can talk about, and there's the negatives of devices. So we can talk about the negatives, and then bad news first, then good news, maybe.

34:28Depends what you want first. So like, it's interesting to me. On average, Americans look at their phones 200 times a day, And the parallels with processed food are incredible here. This is media. This is more dopamine for your brain. And I get sucked in because I want to produce good content. So I will go on Instagram and see what people are doing to try and learn how to create better content. But it's hard to do that without getting sucked in and I'll feel it. And then I want to go on Instagram more. And you think, wow, this is the dopamine. So, you know, Mark Zuckerberg, whoever figured out, it's interesting, like, you know, 10, 15 years ago, someone figured out, hey, scrolling can give people dopamine, just like video games or infinite news feeds.

35:15And that's really similar to your brain as a donut. You know, this is a digital donut. Scrolling is a digital donut, but we don't think about it that way because it doesn't make us fat directly, right? You just think dopamine. You don't really realize this is dopamine, dopamine, dopamine. and doom scrolling is dopamine. And in the same way that processed food is breaking these mesolimbic circuits in our brain, the nucleus accumbens, the ventral tegmental area, scrolling is almost equivalent. It's the same thing. And so TikTok, the algorithms have gotten so good that people need to understand this is digital junk food.

35:51And it's doing the same things. We know that it's changing dopamine levels. It's changing your set point for dopamine in a way that makes normal activities feel less rewarding, just like ultra-processed food makes normal food feel less rewarding. It's also changing neurotransmitter ratios in the brain. So this has been studied by multiple groups when you're doom scrolling. So cellular phone or device addiction, and mostly what we're talking about here is cell phones, because those are particularly easy to access and they're very dopaminergic. It changes the ratios of GABA and glutamate in the anterior cingulate cortex in the brain, which can affect attention.

36:27It can mirror ADHD, and it really changes how we perceive the world. So dopamine is affected, glutamate and GABA are affected. And I said 200 times a day, but the average American also is on their phone five plus hours a day of screen time. And so you draw a hard line between information-based tasks and passive attention. The devices have become anti-boredom. Yeah. Anti-boredom devices, which is very bad for us as humans. Because as you know, you told me before the podcast that you really just want to go somewhere and do nothing. Nothing. Literally. You're seeking boredom. Yeah. You've discovered, and that's actually, that's very evolved of you.

37:12Most people are not willing to be that bored. But what you realize is that when you seek out boredom, and this is the least sexy conversation ever because there's no dopamine in this, but when you allow yourself to be bored, it resets everything in your brain. Have you heard the term raw dogging now? This is people

37:32sitting on planes with nothing, or they're sitting in their house with nothing. They call it raw dogging. So they'll video themselves. I'm raw dogging for three hours and they sit there in a chair and look at a wall, right? Can I tell you an amazing one of those? It's basically, I didn't know it was a phrase or like something that people are actively doing like that. I once sat on a red eye flight from LA to New York and sitting next to me right there, arm's reach was Keanu Reeves. He had no phone, no magazine, no nothing. Looked exactly like he was prepping for the next John Wick, and all he did the entire time, and I kept looking, because he's just so awesome, and I don't get starstruck, but I was like, if I was ever going to be on a plane that was going to get hijacked, like, let's do it right now, Keanu Reeves, and he just stared at the seat in front of him, there was no screen on it, just stared at the seat in front of him the entire time, cracking his knuckles the entire, six hours, non-stop.

38:29Legend. I've heard Rick Rubin does this. Yeah, I'm sure Rick Rubin does it. I saw Erling Haaland posted about doing it recently on a seven-hour flight. And so this is the anti-dopamine. You don't have to do that. You don't have to raw dog and stare at the wall. But this is actively seeking boredom. And when you are bored, something in your brain called the default mode network, the DMN, kicks in. And the DMN is just this series of regions of the brain that are connected. And that is really important because that's when you start to ruminate. You think about your life. You ask yourself deep questions, that's critical for our happiness long-term as humans.

39:05And we've gotten, just like we've gotten so addicted to junk food that we can't leave the house without some kind of garbage snack, we are anti-boredom humans. We cannot tolerate boredom. And so we have anti-boredom devices and that sells. Just like Snickers bars sell or junk food sells, anti-boredom devices sell because you're waiting for an elevator for literally five seconds, Instagram. That's horrible for your brain. Horrible. You have to be bored. You have to let the DMN, the default mode network, kick in to have natural, healthy connections between the sides of your brain. When you don't do that, it develops into like an ADHD type behavior in humans that's actually not diagnosed as ADHD.

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40:21You can set up in minutes on any device, keep your existing number, and add teammates as you grow. Quo's built-in AI agent can answer after-hours calls, respond to questions, and even book appointments so you never miss a lead. Always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free, plus get 20 % off your first six months when you go to Quo.com slash Rubin. That's Q-U-O.com slash Rubin. Yeah, well, do you have any numbers or is there a way to quantify, like, usually how long it takes for people to let that system that we're addicted to shut off and then the boredom system, in essence, kick in? You can see improvements in 24 to 48 hours.

41:01There was a two-week study that was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences where they gave people dumb phones. And they didn't access the internet. You could call, you could text, but it was a dumb phone. And people had no immediate access to the internet in their hand for two weeks. and it was 476 people. The compliance wasn't great because people were so addicted, but in the people that did it, they saw significant improvements in attention equivalent to a 10-year reversal in cognitive decline. People de-aged 10 years in terms of their cognitive abilities. They became 10 years younger by simply not having an anti-boredom device in their hand all the time.

41:42That's wild. It's good for your brain to be bored. It helps you get younger. It's like brain longevity for attention span. Yeah. Well, I guess this is sort of the same question that I asked you earlier, but do you think that we're going to just go two ways on this too, where there will be a sliver of people that will become more, I mean, if you just think of the people we just mentioned between Keanu Reeves and Rick Rubin, like it's like a specific type of person that will be able to afford to be able to stare at a wall for three hours and everyone else will be just sort of factory reprogrammed automatons that can't stop.

42:12Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there are things you can do. The goal is to get less than two hours a day, right? The average person does five. Average person looks at their phone 200 times a day. And so how do you do it, right? So in this study, they used an app. I think the app was called Freedom. I have no association. There's also apps called Opal and something else. And these are just apps you can put on your phone that lock your phone. You cannot use your apps, right? Or you can put your phone on grayscale. Do you ever do that? He got me on it. It's so horrible that it's beautiful. Your phone is so not appealing when it's on grayscale.

42:49I have my phone on grayscale. Wait, grayscale is the red light? No, that's not grayscale. Oh, that's something else. It's very similar, right? Wait, what's grayscale then? It's just another, you can go in an iPhone, you can go to your display settings and display and text size, and you go to color filters. So in your iPhone, you search, in the search bar, just search color filters. Yeah. And then you just click on grayscale. Yeah. And also in the same setting. Just a grayer version of the red thing that I've done? It's a completely gray version. Can you guys hand me my phone? It's just in my bag there or something I'll show you.

43:14Yeah. It may be in the top pocket. Yeah. And it's just your phone looks gray all the time. It's completely, it's so not satisfying. You can actually, yeah, or I'll unlock it for you. You can see. Well, I can see your main page there is pretty gray. It's pretty gray. So it's basically just like a little hook to get you a little less slammed. I mean, so that's my apps, right? And I try to take as many apps as I can off of here. I have Instagram on there because I constantly go back and forth. I want it off. I put it back on. Doing research, looking at DMs, right? That's my ex, yeah. But look at how it's not appealing at all.

43:48Would you want to click on any of that? Right. And even if you're looking at pictures, you're not going to get stuck in there forever. Yeah. I mean, but pictures are not the worst deal. The problem for people is video games. It's infinite news, text screens. It's TikTok. It's Instagram. It's X. It's all the apps, right? It's anything that is filling the small bore moments of your life. That's what's hard on your brain. That's what changes dopamine, GABA glutamate. It changes your default mode network programming. That's what you need to rebel against. And if you do it, two weeks is enough to change your brain.

44:1824 to 48 hours is enough to change your brain. But you have to be intentional about it. Because just like the food system, everything's stacked against us. I literally, two weeks into doing this, I can remember entire albums, every word to an album. I will think of a kid that I, a guy that I sat next to in second grade out of nowhere. His name will just pop in my head and I'll remember all these different things about him. Like the craziest stuff, it's all there. And it's just that we don't give ourselves the boredom to access it. And I said to you right before we sat down that this year more than ever, I'm really looking forward to off the grade because it's been just politically, it's been a grading year in between Charlie and watching some of my, Charlie Kirk, obviously, and watching some of my friends kind of go crazy.

44:59I always use it as a chance to come back with a fresh perspective. But what I've noticed is the more that we're all walking around this, you just don't have a chance for fresh perspective. Because even if I have three hours off it, you're right back in the fight. So I do it on mega steroids, I guess. It's brilliant. And Rick Rubin talks about this. No relation, unfortunately. As far as we know, we talk once. Have you met Rick? We've talked one time. He's great. He used to come hang out in Costa Rica when I was there. When I was in Costa Rica, I'll tell you a quick story. So when I lived in Santa Teresa, I actually hung out with Jack Dorsey for a while.

45:33So he had a place in Santa Teresa. He let me hang out with him. I lived with Jack Dorsey for a while. It was awesome. Interesting. So he was addicting everyone to Twitter and you were trying to... Yes, well, he was kind of... Okay. Jack is a brilliant, interesting guy. Former CEO of Twitter. Yes, he's a brilliant, interesting guy. I think it'd be interesting to ask him what he thinks about what he created, right? But Rick came and hung out. And so I got to hang out with Rick in Santa Teresa. And Rick would go for these long walks every morning, and he would rock backwards on the beach. And it was just awesome.

46:00I'd see him on the beach. Hey, Rick, what's up? We would talk philosophy. He's such a great guy in person, but he talks on podcasts, and I've heard him talk. He's like, you have to get the space. And again, I'm just paraphrasing. I'm hoping to do Rick's message justice. I could never do it like he does. But he talks about having space and quiet. And if you read his book, he talks about just having a vacuum into which ideas come. And it's sort of this idea of the muse. I don't know if he calls it the muse, but it's the same sort of thing. When you are bored, you create a vacuum. And again, Rick, I apologize if I'm not doing your ideas justice.

46:29This is my interpretation of Rick Rubin's ideas. When you are bored, you create a vacuum into which ideas and creativity flow. Rick is all about this sort of conduit of creativity that we are, and that's important. And so for me, I have to kind of fight this battle of, I want to create content that's valuable for people, so I should be online all the time doing this work? And the counterintuitive answer might be, no, just spend time on a beach doing nothing. And I do that a lot when I'm in Costa Rica. I just spend time in the ocean surfing, right? Do nothing and be bored. And that's when your brain is able to kind of reset and the ideas can flow.

47:07You know, it's funny. We've had an internal struggle here because every August, I have to put up content on my YouTube channel. Otherwise, it will push us out of the algorithm them for like two or three months. So it's not just August that we disappear, but then my, my audience can't even find me for September and maybe into October. So we do a lot of stuff. I mean this, for example, so we're doing a lot of worthwhile content, but I always tell my audience, I want you to take a break too, if you can. Cause I, cause it is, it is a two way street. And if they don't, I want them to be able to get a little of that space too.

47:36You don't have to do a month. Yeah. I always tell people, people are like, how do you do a month? I'm like, when was the last time you tried a day? 20 minutes, 20 minutes. Nobody, 20 minutes. Have you seen the study? This study is often repeated. I apologize if it's beaten to death. There was a study in 2014. It was UVA and Harvard study. They put people in a room by themselves for 15 minutes. This is 2014. This is 12 years ago. We were less addicted to our phones then. 67 % of males would rather give themselves an electrical shock in the ankle than sit in a room quietly by themselves and 25 % of females.

48:10One guy in the study gave himself 190 shocks in 15. I mean, 14 shots, 13 shots a minute, like just because. That guy had some other stuff going on. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that. Yeah, but that's crazy, right? And that was 12 years ago. How many people today could spend 20 minutes doing nothing? And we used to call this meditation. Now we call it raw dogging. You know, it's just sit there and breathe, you know, and just look at a wall. That's actually incredibly powerful. And it feels not productive. It feels like we're in a hustle culture. You have to grind. But what I hope people understand is that there's actual evidence at a neurobiological basis that those 20 minutes you spend decompressing will allow the best ideas to come in.

48:56And it's healthy for your brain. When I rescued Clyde from a shelter during COVID just before he was scheduled to be put down, yes, he had hours to go, I promised that I'd give him the best life possible. That includes what goes into his bowl. Like a lot of people, I used to feed him regular kibble without thinking much about it. Then I looked at the ingredients and realize I couldn't pronounce half of them. That's why I switched to Sundays for Dogs. It's made with over 80 % all-natural meat, plus real superfoods like kale, ginger, and blueberries. No fillers, no chemicals, no mystery ingredients.

49:24And unlike fresh dog food, there's no refrigeration or prep necessary, just scoop and serve. Clyde loves it, and I've noticed a healthier coat, better digestion, and he's always excited for mealtime. They even have a new fish recipe made with 80 % whole and minced fish that's packed with omega-3s to support healthy skin, joints, and brain function. Make the switch to Sundays. Go right now to sundaysfordogs.com slash Ruben and get 50 % off your first order or use code Ruben at checkout. That's 50 % off your first order at sundaysfordogs.com slash Ruben. Let's shift a little bit to testosterone, which we spent a lot of time talking about last time.

49:58You've had your own journey with that. You know, when we did the show last time and I've subsequently done a few other shows, at least partially on it, the amount of people that I now know with either low T or some version of it, or I constantly am joking about so many of the Democrats these days. They seem like they all have low T. I don't know what that affect is where they seem like they have no muscles and they're whining all the time. And I know that's not exactly what low T is, but there is some... Yeah, you're like, well, it kind of is. What is going on with testosterone for men right now?

50:30And is there any new research in the last year or so since we last sat down? I mean, it's just we live in a toxic environment. You know, you think about you have most men are probably nutrient deficient, sunlight deficient, infrared light deficient. We can talk about that. That's the opposite side of the digital thing. So we're probably light deficient. We know that ultraviolet light and infrared light and red light in general can improve testosterone in men. We're probably nutrient deficient, most men and women. And the testosterone deficiency can also occur for women. Women need testosterone in their bodies as well.

51:04So it's really not just a men-specific conversation. It's a men and women. So most men and women are probably nutrient deficient because we've been told that the most nutrient rich foods on the planet, meat and organs and animal foods are bad for us. Yeah. Based on faulty narratives around lipids, you know, we probably talked about the last time. Yeah. Just the twice a week meat thing that was so broken. A portion that's the size of like a golf ball. Crazy. Crazy. That's nuts. That's just not how you create healthy humans. That's been demonstrated time and time again. We know this. And then, you know, you think like so much of the food that we eat is now packaged in plastic cans, plastic bottles and soda cans and soup cans.

51:45It's not impossible, but waking people up from this matrix is challenging. Hey, Chicagoland, the Wayfair store is in your neighborhood at Edens Plaza and Wilmette. Finally, you can feel the fabric, sit on the sectionals and even open the refrigerators. Plus, our in-store designers will help you bring it all together with free one-on-one design support for any project on any budget. Yep, we said free. Oh, and did we mention the cafe? So what are you waiting for? Come see all that's in store. Visit the Wayfair store today at Edens Plaza and Wilmette. Wayfair, every style, every home. Because at every turn it can be overwhelming, right?

52:22What are you drinking your water out of? What is in the water coming out of the faucet at your house? Are you eating packaged foods? Are they packaged in plastic? What about your - Wait, so let's just do each one. So you would want people, in general, you would want people to drink water out of glass, right? Glass or aluminum, I guess? Not aluminum. It's stainless steel. Sorry, stainless steel. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think glass is better than stainless steel. That's a really far down the rabbit hole conversation. Okay, but basically glass. Glass, or just get a reverse osmosis filter at your house.

52:49Yeah, we got it. That's the way, right? Because I don't want people to have to buy bottled water all the time, right? When I'm traveling, I will buy bottled water in glass when I can. Sometimes it's impossible, and then I don't know what to do. And I kind of freak out a little bit. I bring my Mountain Valley bottles when I play basketball. The guys will think I'm some fancy. I'm like, no, it's just good water in a glass. Yes, don't freak out of the plastic. So water is a great place to start. Put a reverse osmosis filter under your sink, maybe$500. It'll pay dividends for years. It's simple. People get bent out of shape with RO.

53:22It's dead water. It's not dead water. It's pure water. You're getting plenty of vitamins and minerals in the foods you're eating. You can remineralize the water if you want from RO. Simple solution done. End of story. If you're traveling, try to drink water in glass as much as you can. You don't have to be perfect like the donut. Yeah, but the less you drink water out of plastic the better. And stainless steel is okay. Stainless steel is fine. Stainless steel is fine. Yeah, stainless steel is fine. Some people could be sensitive to nickel in stainless steel, which is like again a nuance. If you don't have skin issues or nickel allergy, stainless steel is probably fine.

53:53But all stainless steel has nickel in it. And so you'd have to get like an 18-0 stainless steel if you want to know nickel. So people that have nickel allergies can go down that rabbit hole. We'll just pause on that one. And so you have water, then you have food. Make sure you're getting enough nutrients in your food. Just eat some red meat. Eat some eggs. You'll be fine. Get out in the sun. I want to talk about why that's so important. Ultraviolet light is important for vitamin D, but it's also important for the production of hormones, including testosterone, and then regulate your sleep. Don't do too much of the blue light devices at night and sleep well, just like you've got the Oura Ring.

54:27Sleep is business. Sleep is valuable. You must sleep well as a man or a woman for your brain, specifically the pineal gland in the center of your brain, to release the hormones, LH and FSH, to tell your testicles or your ovaries to produce sex hormones in adequate quantities. If you're not sleeping well, your body is freaking out. It's going, hey, I'm not sleeping well. I'm in stress and it's not time to make a child. So I don't need to be fertile. I don't need testosterone or estrogen. Both men and women need both. And so what we're talking about is giving your body like signals of safety, signals of abundance.

54:59And that's when your body is fertile because ultimately when your testosterone and estrogen are in the right levels for both men and women, we are fertile, happy, healthy humans. Those two things go hand in hand. So that's important. You want to give your body that safety and security. So it's light, it's avoidance of toxins, it's the right food. That's a great start. All right, so let's do the sunlight thing. Here we are. It's South Florida. You just got a little place here. So you're in Costa Rica and South Florida. So you're getting plenty of light. I'm getting plenty of light. What are your feelings now on like sunscreen and just generally putting stuff on when you're out there?

55:35It's fine if you're going to get burned, just be careful what's in it, right? So there's two types of sunscreen. There's chemical and there's mineral. Yeah. The chemical sunscreens are very problematic for humans. And I think we're going to see this more and more. Chemical sunscreens are like banana boat, whatever. You know, these are the smelly sunscreens. I was in Austin recently at Barton Springs sitting outside by the springs and everyone is using the spray sunscreens, which I think are, they're, they're kind of frustrating because I don't want to smell your sunscreen, right? Now it's going into my lung, epithelium, but I don't want to have your sunscreen on my body.

56:08So whether you're using a spray sunscreen or a cream, putting a chemical sunscreen in your body is a bad idea. We know the chemicals in there. There's a bunch of them. They have long names, avabenzone, octabenzone, homosalate, octocrylene. They're absorbed through the skin, excreted in the poop and the pee, and found at levels in the human body that exceed the FDA maximums from a single administration of sunscreen, and they're associated with endocrine disruption. Now, again, this goes back to the hormones, right? How many things are you putting on your skin, your face cream, your deodorant that can be absorbed through your skin?

56:41This is a porous organ. The skin is not a barrier as much as we think it is. And those things can disrupt hormonal signaling. And the way they can do this is at the level of the ovary or the testicles, they can block the signaling from the compounds, the hormones that get released from your pineal gland, LH and FSH. So if the signals to your sex organs as a man or a woman can't reach the sex organs, you're not going to have healthy levels of hormones. So why are you putting this on your skin? Why are you putting it on your children's skin? Right. So we really, especially from having kids, so we do minerals with them, but you can do it in a spray.

57:11That in and of itself is not negative, right? You can do mineral sunscreens and sprays, and people are starting to do this. So the best one is probably non-nano zinc oxide. I'm not as much a fan of titanium dioxide. It's used as a mineral sunscreen, but non-nano zinc as a cream or a mineral sunscreen appears, as a sprayable mineral sunscreen, appears to be pretty darn safe. You know, you just want to make sure that if it's a mineral sunscreen spray, what is it formulated with? Don't put seed oils on your kid's skin, you know? But what would you say to people? So would you say the main reason to put that stuff on is just if you're going to burn, meaning go out and get as much sun otherwise?

57:46Yeah, get sun. Sun is healthy. And we can talk about times of the day and the difference between sunlight and indoor light or isolated UV. This is an important conversation. So yesterday I was in North Miami and I took, do you know what a foil board is? It's like a surfboard with a wing underneath. So I've got a foil board. So I went foil boarding and I was in the water for a while and my back got a little too much sun. I should have worn a t-shirt or put a mineral sunscreen on my back. That's the use case for me. If I'm in Costa Rica and I'm surfing in the middle of the day, I'll use a mineral sunscreen on my face, right?

58:23Even in the morning, I'll probably use a mineral sunscreen on my face because I'm trying to, you know, just protect the skin of my face especially. So mineral sunscreens are fine, especially non-nano zinc. If you're in the sun for a long amount of time or you think you'll burn based on your baseline skin tone, use it or cover up. Now, there's a big difference between ultraviolet light and isolation and ultraviolet light and sunlight. When you go outside, again, this is just something we take for granted. Sunlight is incredible, right? This is something, the sun is an incredible thing. It's not just ultraviolet light.

58:56Less than 10 % of sunlight is UV light, and UV light is UVA and UVB. UVB is a very small fraction of sunlight, 0.13%. 5, 6, 7 % of sunlight is UVA. So less than 10 % is ultraviolet light. More than 50 % or around 50 % of sunlight is infrared light. You can't even see it. It's infrared. It's either far or near infrared. And the rest is visible wavelengths. So the red, orange, yellow, blue, green, violet, those are the wavelengths. So the majority of sunlight is not UV. When UV is studied in isolation, it has very different effects on the human body than when UV is studied in connection with a whole sun, a whole light source.

59:38The parallels again here are striking. We have whole food sunlight and processed food indoor lights or ultraviolet lights, right? And so this blue light that we're in now, great. Hopefully it makes us look good for the podcast. Not a great thing for humans. It's isolated blue wavelengths, which are short wavelengths, 480 nanometers. UV wavelengths are even smaller than those. But when you look at cell culture, it's very interesting. If you expose cells in cell culture to ultraviolet light, whether it's human cells or animal cells, they don't like ultraviolet light in isolation. But if you precondition them with infrared light, they don't have any problem with this.

1:00:13And so yes, it's true. and there are a lot of health influencers now sort of, I would say, urging people to avoid the sun. They're easy to pick out. They're very pale. Very pale influencers. And they will say ultraviolet light causes collagen and elastin and DNA damage in the skin, which is true. But infrared light protects collagen and elastin and is protective of the DNA. So you put them together and you have a very different animal, right? This is the same thing, or it's parallel to processed sugar and honey. Honey is a very different physiologic effect in humans because of the hundreds of phytochemicals in the honey that affect our gut flora.

1:00:53Processed sugar, harmful. Processed UV light, indoor light, problematic for humans in excess. Outdoor sunlight, great in moderate doses because it has infrared light. Now, this begs the question, are most of us getting enough infrared light? It's not enough through a window. The window filters out the infrared. What does infrared do? So it's actually beneficial to all the cells of our body. I think a lot of humans are deficient in infrared light. It actually causes the production of melatonin. This is a sleep hormone canonically, but it's actually an antioxidant. It causes the production of melatonin systemically in your body in the mitochondria.

1:01:32We will talk in a moment about what morning sunlight does in your brain with melatonin. This is completely different. So melatonin is produced systemically in every mitochondria of your body when you are exposed infrared light. So going outside is literally a nutrient. It is healthy for humans. You must get infrared light, and why not get it from the free source of the sun? And in the morning, so those figures I quoted for UV light are midday sunlight on a clear day in the summer. So here in Miami, maximum you're going to see is maybe 9 % UV of sunlight. In the morning, it's significantly less.

1:02:05So when you go out in the sun in the morning, there's almost no UVB, and there's a much smaller amount of UVA. So morning sunlight before 9 a.m. in most places, depending on the time of the year, is great for a lot of reasons. I'm going to talk about that in a second. But there's no UV in the morning and there's not really much UV in the afternoon. In the middle of the days when you get the UV, be careful of that. But if you balance it with infrared light, it doesn't have the same effect. We don't have to fear it as much. Can you get burned? Yes, you can get burned in the middle of the day. That's not a good thing for humans.

1:02:32But can you be out and is that healthy? Absolutely. If you've been feeling more tired, stressed, or just not yourself lately, it might not be random. High cortisol, your body's stress hormone, can affect your energy, sleep, focus, and overall drive. That's where Mars Men comes in. It's designed to support healthy testosterone production while helping your body manage cortisol levels naturally. No synthetic hormones or stimulants, just a clean formula that's made in the USA and third-party tested. For a limited time, our viewers get 50 % off for life, free shipping, and three free gifts at mengotomars.com.

1:03:03That's mengotomars.com. So basically the best thing you could be doing is if you can get out there at say 8 a.m. for an hour, take that walk. You likely don't need any mineral or otherwise anything on you. I mean that's what I'm trying to do with my dog every morning is do an hour at 8 a.m. I try not always to bring my phone, but that's when I'm usually setting up what I'm doing for the show. It's just part of the day, but at least I'm out there. I'm also doing the no sunglass thing. That's really important. That's what I was going to say. I see people a lot of the times in the morning and they're wearing sunglasses.

1:03:34You want the light to come into your eyes, especially in the morning. So this is really interesting. There's a set of cells in the retina of the eye. They're called intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells. And these are special cells. They cluster in the bottom half of your eye because you look up at the sky, right? And they don't transmit to the visual cortex. Most of the retina goes to the visual cortex. That's how I'm looking at you, right? It's interpreting the light coming into my eye, going to the visual cortex in my brain. these cells transmit to the suprachiasmatic nucleus and the suprachiasmatic nucleus is sort of this master controller in the brain of your circadian your daily rhythm the circadian the suprachiasmatic nucleus does so many incredible things so it's we can list them out it affects neurotransmitters so when you go out in the sun in the morning it increases your dopamine this is this reward seeking hormone it also increases serotonin so you're going out in the sunlight in the morning with no sunglasses and you're not getting ultraviolet light it's just bright light.

1:04:33It has to be 50 to 100 ,000 lux. Again, you're indoors. You don't get it. It's not bright enough. You don't realize how different the brightness is because of something called the lux cliff. Lux is how we measure brightness of lights. Even though you could be in your house, maybe you have a great beautiful picture window in your house. It's only, it's three to 5 ,000 lux max. It's not bright enough. You have to go outdoors. Even on cloudy days, it's much brighter outside than it is indoors. So you get that bright light in your eyes to this intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells, and the suprachiasmatic nucleus is switched on.

1:05:05It increases dopamine, reward-seeking behavior. You're more motivated to do things during the day. Serotonin, emotional balance, feel-good hormone, quote-unquote. The suprachiasmatic nucleus also amplifies your morning cortisol awakening response. So we think of cortisol broadly as a bad hormone, but in the morning, it's part of our diurnal rhythm of hormones. You want the cortisol to come up in the morning, that's your intrinsic alarm clock. So when you go outside, it amplifies that, which is a good thing. And it also tells your brain to shut off the production of melatonin. So melatonin is that hormone that hopefully got produced at night because you weren't looking at blue screens.

1:05:43When you wake up and you get the bright light in your eyes, those special cells, melatonin gets shut off. And it sets a clock. It sets a timer. Remember those oven timers? It's a 12 to 14 hour timer for your body to have the proper rhythm of cortisol in the morning, which is up and then down. It's a 14 hour rhythm of cortisol. When you go to sleep, it's very low. And the proper rhythm of melatonin, which is increasing in the evening. So both of those timers are set by the morning sunlight. There's a German word for it. It's Zeitgeber. There's time giver. That morning sunlight is a time clock. It's like a stopwatch.

1:06:19you begin the race of your day in the morning which can be frenetic or not but you begin your body needs to know when to begin so you set the beginning of the day with that morning sunlight and then you also affect so many other systems in your body the hormones it's such a powerful signal if you don't get that your body doesn't know when to begin these processes so it's very that then why so many people seem to have these crazy cortisol spikes in the middle of the day like up down crash because they just sort of never got out of the gate you never got out of the key Yeah, you could have had, it's possible you're not sleeping well, you had too much blue light at night.

1:06:53We know that kids who have blue light at night, they have devices at night, it can impair melatonin secretion, which can delay the onset of deep sleep, slow-wave sleep, and REM. Those are the special parts of sleep where you get this glymphatic network. So people are talking about lymphatics now in your body. Oh, women want to move the lymph? Yeah, there's a glymphatic network in your brain, which is how your brain clears out metabolic toxins, amyloid proteins. You need to clear that stuff out. You ever had brain fog? You didn't sleep well? You're jet lagged? That's literal dirty brain. That's toxins in your brain.

1:07:26That's metabolic waste, amyloid peptides. It's kind of scary when you think about it because I have it sometimes and you think, wow, my brain is actually dirty right now. I can't form a memory. I can't remember something. I can't think. When we came back from Australia last time, it took me a good week. And I have a lot of these good habits that you mentioned, but it took me a good week to get over jet lag. I was not right on the show for sure. Yeah, it's tough. And so that's just dirty brain. That's dirty neurons. And so you need to, it's like you're, it's, it's this, this constant cycling, right?

1:07:56You kind of want to get the evening right and you want to get the morning right. And that will set you up. Getting the evening right helps you get good sleep. You get the cortisol awakening response. It's really, really important to go outside in the morning and get that sunlight in your eyes. You put sunglasses on and you're not getting, you've just taken that really valuable 50 ,000 to 100 ,000 lux light and you've decreased it massively. This went by super quick. So in the last little bit here, just talk to me about some of the other things that people can do that would be good. So I'm, I'm doing some red light stuff.

1:08:25I don't know if you saw, I had this crazy basketball injury. You can probably see it. I can show you off camera, but I've got a crazy, my clavicle is up because whatever. So I'm doing red light on that. I did stem cells. I did exosomes. I'm doing all this stuff. I'm in therapy. I don't know if the clavicle is going to come down. I may have to have surgery after, but I'm doing red light. I'm doing, we had an infrared sauna. Now we have a real sauna here, which I want to show you after. It's pretty awesome. I'm doing the cold plunge thing. Like I'm trying, like if you were just saying to somebody that maybe doesn't have access to everything, like if you could just do a few little, a couple things, you know, what, what would someone's like, what would you, what do you think like the most healthy kind of average good week would be for people that want to incorporate some, some things, it depends whether you want to use biohacking devices or you want to use outdoors.

1:09:10Biohacking is interesting to me, right? It's mostly bringing nature into your house, which is great because a lot of us don't get enough time outside of nature. But so many of these biohacks are available for free. Right, right, right. Take a walk. Yeah, you can, taking a walk in the morning is red light therapy, you know? And it's about, it's like two or three to one. So like if you spend an hour outside in the morning, you're getting red light. It's about three times less effective. But if you're an hour, that's equivalent to maybe 15 or 20 minutes in front of a red light panel in terms of red and infrared wavelengths.

1:09:42The panels are very intense and they can give you more of that. But I think a red light panel is great for red and infrared. I said most people are deficient in infrared. Red light and infrared have been shown to help collagen and elastin. People use them for vanity, but that's fine. We've all, we've all got the mask. I get it, man. We've all had, we've all had dalliances in our past. I had, I had sunburns in the past, you know, we're all aging. and so nobody wants wrinkles and everybody wants to protect. So great. So you can use a red light device or you can go outside, in the morning especially.

1:10:12Sauna is awesome. It's going to be helpful in a lot of different ways. I think you're sweating. You can use the sauna as a default mode network reset. Go in the sauna without your phone. Yeah. I mean, I do 172 20 minutes. It's like my phone can't be in there. I don't want it in there, but it couldn't be in there anyway. So there you go. You're in there, and you can just look at the wall in the sauna. You can do the mini Keanu Reeves. Instead of raw-dogging, you can read Keanu Reeves. You can Keanu Reeves in the sauna. You can Keanu, yeah. I thought that sounds better to me. You can just default mode network support in the sauna.

1:10:48Just do those things. But you see the sauna is a perfect illustration. People bring their phone in their anti-boredom device. Saunas are great. Cold plunging, you want to be careful with cold plunging because you can mitigate the benefits of exercise. Yeah. Right? So you don't want to do it after you exercise. I've been seeing a lot of this lately. I'm doing it more. I've been just kind of jumping in in the morning. I don't even need to be in there for, you know, people are trying to push two minutes or whatever. No, no, no. I've been, like, just jumping in in the morning, just like, bah, I'm awake, and then get going.

1:11:15Catecholamines. Yeah. It's a good way to start the day. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, one of my favorite things in my travels I just got back from Montana is jumping in cold mountain lakes. Yeah. Oh, I saw the video. It's the same sort of thing. and it's just go in a cold mountain lake and boom, you know, just change your brain chemistry. Cold plunges can actually be helpful. So can cold water on the face. If you're in an activated emotional state, you know, we get sad, we get angry, you're just kind of, I'm in this horrible state. Put your face in cold water. It can help you reset that. So if you have a cold plunge and you're angry or sad, just jump in a cold plunge.

1:11:49It helps to reset your neurochemistry. Yeah. anything else one five give me one final tie it all together something here all right they're eating more whole foods they're doing a little of the bio or non-bi or non they're doing a little outdoor and a little biohacking let me just tell you about so one of the things that's really cool is is forest bathing have you heard about this no so this is a the japanese word for it is shinrin yoku so again montana idaho is where i was for the last three weeks i got this in costa rica too more jungle bathing, forest bathing, you know? And it's really interesting to me, the research that's been done on chemicals that are released by trees.

1:12:28They're called phytonides and they have benefits in humans. So this is just... We're doing like an avatar thing now. Yes. It's where we've come from as humans. We've come from... The blueprint is clear, right? And it sounds, like I said, it sounds pedestrian, but the blueprint is clear. Spend time in nature, get morning sunlight, Don't get toxins. Do what humans were doing 50 ,000 years ago, but wear clothes and live indoors. Be a modern human, but live as much like you can 50 ,000 years ago. And again, it sounds hokey. It sounds pedestrian, but it works. So when you go out into the forest, there's these chemicals released by trees that actually affect our physiology.

1:13:04So there's alpha and beta pinene, which probably come from pine trees, that can increase memory. They inhibit acetylcholinesterase inhibitors in the brain, so they change neurochemistry. These are compounds in the forest. You go hiking and you think, it smells so good. You're just inhaling chemicals from trees that are changing your neurochemistry. There's other chemicals in there. D-limonene has been known to sort of be calming in humans. So there's these chemicals. And then there's stuff from the dirt. Like good dirt is valuable. You're in the forest and the dirt actually creates smells that are helpful for us as humans.

1:13:43There's a bacteria in the dirt, Actinomyces class, that creates geosmin, which is this scent of dirt when it rains. And that actually produces serotonin in humans in the brain and can be calming for us. There's another bacteria, it's a mycobacterial species that does the same thing. It creates these sort of compounds that we smell that are helpful for, that actually are calming to our nervous system. And then the last part, which is the best part, is that just being in the forest for 20 or 30 minutes, preferably more than that, actually improves NK cells, so natural killer cell activity in humans, up to 50%.

1:14:19So forest bathing affects your immune system. And if you go out in a forest for a day, you go on a hike, the effects can last for up to 30 days when you get back. And these compounds actually result in the production of anti-cancer compounds from the cells. So it's this idea, okay, look, is being in the sunlight, being in nature, these are not nice to have. These are must-haves for humans. Like what you're going to do when you go off grid is be in nature. You're going to be these things. You're going to be in this sort of environment. You're going to forest bathe. You're going to just nature bathe.

1:14:53That's what we need as humans. And it's so interesting to me that we think, oh, it's frivolous to go for a walk in the woods. I mean, even go for a walk in the park near your house, look at some trees. It's so valuable for us as humans. And then have you heard of this idea of landscapes of despair? That's smart. That's like sharp angles. It's right angles. You know, you're seeing buildings. When we're in nature, we're looking at fractals, and that is also calming. So that's why people put pictures of nature scenes on their garages, because that image, the fractals, natural angles, they're soft.

1:15:23They're curves. They're these sort of fractalized patterns. That's calming for our visual field. So we need these things. You have set me up nicely to go off the grid. I'll see you on the other side. Thank you. I can't wait to see you when you get back.

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