Dhru Purohit Show - Neuroscientist Reveals the Insane Benefits of Walking Everyday for Brain Health and Longevity with Shane O'Mara

Episode Date: October 12, 2023

This episode is brought to you by WHOOP, Pique Life, and Rupa Health. Did you know that people who walk over 7,500 steps a day reduce their risk of all cause mortality and are less likely to suffer from major depressive disorders? Walking is one of the fundamental actions attributed to humans, yet our modern lifestyles do not promote this activity in our daily lives. It has many incredible health benefits and is one of the most underrated and low-cost activities that can be added to your daily routine to promote longevity and prevent aging.  Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru and Dr. Shane O’Mara discuss the mind-blowing science behind the power of walking and its ability to boost your mood, health, and even creativity.  Shane O'Mara is a renowned neuroscientist and professor known for his work in the field of cognitive neuroscience, particularly in the areas of memory, stress, and brain function. Dr. O'Mara obtained his Ph.D. in behavioral neuroscience at the University of Oxford. Throughout his career, Shane O'Mara has held various academic positions and conducted groundbreaking research in neuroscience. In addition to his research, Dr. Shane O'Mara is also an accomplished author, with several publications in scientific journals and books to his name. In this episode, Dhru and Dr. O’Mara dive into (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): -The consequences our brains and bodies face when we stay sedentary (2:36 / 2:36) -The research around walking and reducing depressive disorders (6:14 / 6:14) -Why walking is such an underrated physical activity (10:28 / 7:50)  -What is the optimal level of activity research recommends versus what average adults do in Western societies (13:45 / 11:00) -Walking has more positive benefits and less side effects compared to any pharmaceutical drug (20:18 / 17:30)  -The research behind how walking can prevent brain aging (24:55  / 22:10) -Practical ways you can incorporate walking into your daily routine (40:39 / 36:44)  -The link between walking and creativity (53:40 / 49:46)  -Health benefits of walking and reversing the damage of a sedentary lifestyle (1:05:32 / 1:01:55)   -Dr. O’Mara’s personal journey and passion that led him to research walking (1:18:37 / 1:14:41)  -Dr. O’Mara’s daily walking routine  (1:31:21 / 1:27:26)  -The relationship between sleep and walking (1:34:21  / 1:30:25) Also mentioned in this episode: -Dr. O’Mara’s Newsletter BrainPizza -Dr. O’Mara’s new book Talking Heads WHOOP is a personalized digital fitness tracker. To get yours, go to join.whoop.com/dhru and get your first month free. Right now, get up to 15% off on Pique’s Sun Goddess Matcha plus a complimentary beaker and rechargeable frother on subscriptions $105 or more. Just go to piquelife.com/DhruTea to get this amazing deal. Access more than 3,000 specialty lab tests with Rupa Health. You can check out a free, live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com today. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There have been many studies that have been conducted over the last 10 years or so. Using activity monitors showing that if you're hitting somewhere above 7,500 steps a day, your all-caused mortality drops, depending on the study you look at, between 30 and about 70%. If you're curious about the mind-blowing science behind the power of walking, yes, walking, and its radical ability to boost your mood, improve your health and longevity, and even boost your creativity, today's episode is for you. Welcome to the Drew Proet podcast. Each week, we explore the inner workings of the brain and the body

with one of the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset. This week's guest is Dr. Shane Omarah. Shane is a renowned neuroscientist and professor known for his work in the field of cognitive neuroscience, particularly in the areas of memory, stress, and brain function. And on today's episode, Shane is going to get you, excited about the power of walking and how integrating it. At the right dosage, sprinkled throughout the day, can radically improve many aspects of your life. Now, a little bit more about Dr. Shane Amara. He obtained his PhD in behavioral neuroscience at the University of Oxford, and throughout

his career, he's held various academic positions and conducted groundbreaking research in the field of neuroscience. He has been associated with prominent institutions, including the University of Dublin, Trinity College Dublin, where he held his chair of experimental brain research. In addition to his research, Dr. Shane Amara is also an accomplished author with several publications in scientific journals and books to his name. He is known for his ability to communicate complex neuroscience concepts to a broader audience and has been involved in science outreach and education for many years now. He has a very popular substack called Brain Pizza, where he features a different aspect of neuroscience each week, and his first book, which is called

In Praise of Walking, the new science of how we can walk and why it's good for us is the focus of today's conversation. Stay tuned for a fantastic episode with Dr. Shane Omar. Shane, a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Thank you for being here. I want to jump right in. You've said that our brains and bodies are designed to move. And if I could extrapolate after reading your book, I would say that, and when we don't move, bad things can happen. Can you give us a few examples of some of the things that can go wrong, both in the body and the brain, when we don't move and especially walk on a regular basis? Yeah, so there's a simple analogy I like to think of when we consider this question.

Imagine you've decided that you want to get fit and you go down to the shop and you buy yourself a lovely new $2,000 or $3,000 bike. And you bring it home and then you put it in the shed and you just leave it there for a year. How do you imagine it will be after that year? The tires will have deflated. The chain will be all sticky. The gears probably won't work. It'll need a lot of work to get it back to normal because it's a thing that's designed to be used.

And the same is true of our brains and bodies. They are actually designed for movement. Now, let's just turn your question around a little and think about it from a slightly philosophical kind of way. If you ever ask yourself the question, why do I have a brain? Why do you have a brain? Why do trees and plants not have a brain? Well, there's a signal difference between trees and plants and ourselves. Trees and plants are sessile. They stay in one place. They don't move around. They might tumbleweed might, but that is not really under its own kind of motive forces.

But animals have brains, and what we see when you look at different species of animals from simple creatures in the water that move around by propulsing little jets of water out, all the way through to ourselves walking on two legs in this strange kind of fashion, We have brains that are designed to allow us to move. And let's just think about this a little bit further. What is the purpose of thought? The purpose of thought really is action. If you don't ever translate a thought into a movement,

even if it's just words, nobody's ever going to know you had it. It's impossible to know that. So that's kind of just thinking about it in terms of a big picture. Now, just think about it in terms of your own physical health for a moment, and we'll bring the picture out a little further. We know from every piece of data, from every health agency, everywhere in the world, that regular movement throughout the course of the day

is essential for heart health, for organ health, and also for the health of your brain. We know, for example, that if you do not engage in regular movement, regular exercise, regular walking, your heart health fails and you're setting yourself open to all sorts of diseases, metabolic diseases in particular. But it goes much, much further than that. There are slow, insidious changes in the brain that make you more prone to depression, make you more prone to anxiety, make you less interested in being open to experience and make you less social. So I think those are all very good reasons and there's two different ways of

approaching this problem. One is the larger kind of philosophical one and the other is the more narrow kind of instrumental one. Yeah, you know, to share something that I've heard you share previously in lectures and inside of your book as well too, one highlight of this, just one tiny little highlight of this is that you talked about this phenomenon that walking is so important to our mood that there actually have been some studies that have laid. walking and depressive disorders. Can you chat a little bit about that? Yeah, and delighted to. And in fact, even since I've written in the book, there have been quite a number of studies. Brendan Stubbs in London, for example, has published some really elegant work in this area

in the last while, showing that people who walk regularly as the most accessible form of exercise are much less likely to succumb to major depressive disorder. And Stubbs in these latest work only just published in the past year or so has shown that exercise is as effective for moderate to mild depression as drug therapy or cognitive behavior therapy. So a simple self-administered solution where you get up, you move around, you try and hit a target of maybe seven and a half or 10,000 steps per day or whatever it happens to be, acts to build resilience against depression in the first place. And if you are unfortunate enough to suffer from mild to moderate depression,

it seems in many cases it would actually act to relieve it. This episode is brought to you by Whoop. Now, who doesn't want to feel great, live longer, and perform at their maximum potential? I know I do, which is why I started working out on the regular. But so much of getting fitter and stronger comes down to personalization. This is why I love, love, love, whoop. Whoop is a fitness wearable and companion app that specializes in breaking down your recovery, sleep, and workouts, and delivers real-time insights straight to your phone.

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you know this really just goes back to this bigger picture idea which you wrote about inside of your fantastic book in praise of walking which is that walking in many aspects is so fundamental to who we are as human beings and yet there's this other side of the coin which is that it's so vastly underrated as a health, mental and social intervention. So why is walking in particular so underrated, do you think? I think there's lots of reasons. Partly, I think it comes down to this idea that we look upon walking as a lazy form of exercise. We kind of, you know, in a puritanical kind of way, think that if it doesn't hurt a hell of a lot

and you're not sweating a hell of a lot at the end of it, you haven't really exercised. But actually, we know that's not true. You know, so there have been many studies that have been conducted over the last, let's say, 10 years or so, using activity monitors showing that if you're hitting somewhere above five, above seven and a half thousand steps a day, you're all caused mortality drops, depending on the study you look at, between, let's say, 30 and about 70%. these are really big, big numbers. You're not talking effect sizes of, you know, a little bit, a few percent here, a few percent there. What you're talking about is a marked effect on the likelihood that you will die of any condition. So cancer, heart attack, whatever it may be, are reduced dramatically in people who are more active. But we have this, I think, puritanical idea that what we have to do is lots and lots of intense exercise.

But if you observe, for example, people living in non-mechanized tribal societies in Africa and South America, what you see is those people don't go out and deliberately exercise. You know, they conserve their energy, but they walk a hell of a lot. They don't have cars. They don't have bicycles. They tend not to have horses or other mounts to ride on. But they'll typically put in if you're a male somewhere between. 14 and 18,000 steps a day, and if you're a female, somewhere between 12,000 and about 16,000

steps per day. And their metabolic health is astonishingly good. Their cholesterol levels are very low. The inflammatory factors in their blood are very, very low. Their cardiac health is remarkable. In fact, a study of the Samani in South America by Herman Ponsor and colleagues at Duke University has shown that the average 80-year-old Samani, who lives this non-mechanized lifestyle as a heart health equivalent of the average 50-year-old American which is really when you think about it

that is just something and they just walk everywhere they're not running around the jungle taking deliberately trying to get exercise they're just engaged in a constant level of activity throughout the course of the day day in day out and that seems to be the recipe

Mm, fantastic. You know, going back to a little detail inside of what you just shared, in those studies that were showing that all cause mortality dropping, you know, so you're reducing your risk of dying from everything, you know, that's typically out there that are the main chronic disease that kill human beings. When it came to walking, do you know what level of activity were they having people shoot for in those studies? And can you contrast that to the typical amount that people would walk here in America where I am? or most sort of westernized cities. Yes, so that's a fantastic question, actually. And so we know lots about how much people walk in America. We know lots about how much we walk here in Ireland or in Western Europe and across the world generally because of smartphone data. And what you see typically is the average adult in Westernized societies walks somewhere around about four, four and a half thousand, maybe five thousand steps a day.

not so very much. Whereas these tribal societies I'm talking about are in the five digits, they're somewhere, let's say, on average, around 14,000 steps a day. So almost three times as much, or a little bit more than three times as much. What we seem to be seen from the epidemiological studies is that there's a threshold at around about four and a half thousand, five thousand steps a day as a minimum and somewhere up to about seven and a half thousand steps and that gives you a huge chunk of that decrease in mortality. And obviously if you push it a bit further, you know, maybe go out to 10,000, 12,000 steps

a day, there are more gains from that. But my advice always is, and I think this is a rule of thumb more than anything else that people don't walk very much. They don't know how much they walk. So turn on your mobile phone first. Get a sense of what you're doing every day. You'll be shocked by it and try and go for 5,000 steps a day more than you're currently doing. If you're doing 2.5,000 a day, that will take it up to a comfortable 7.5. If you're doing 5 a day, it'll take it up to a very nice 10,000 a day. So somewhere between 5 and, you're somewhere north of 5,000 and preferably heading towards the 7.5 to 10,000 is a good range to be in. But remember, it must be reasonably consistent day in, day out, and it must be dispersed across the day.

It's not a good idea to think you can walk off a day's sedentary behavior by going and hitting the gym or going out for a good walk in the evening. you need to challenge your body regularly during the course of the day. So the two of us are seated at the moment. We're seated in chairs that have backs. If you look at, again, these tribal societies, or remarkably, if you look at paintings from a few hundred years ago, what you'll see is the chairs did not have backs. We sat on stools. And why am I emphasizing this?

Or, again, if you look in the tribal societies, people very often don't sit. they hunker down on their two feet and they hold themselves by the knees. What's good about that? Well, what's good about that is that you're challenging the vestibular system to keep you balanced. So you're engaging in this fine tuning all the time. And if you're getting up and moving around regularly, you're allowing the change, or the gradient of the blood pressure across the whole body axis from the toes all the way up to the top of your head. That's a good thing. It militates against pooling of blood in your feet. which again is something that can happen from being seated all day. So get up, move around regularly.

Even a minute or two will be enough to be a challenge or a challenge that your body needs. That's a powerful takeaway for individuals. Just to recap there, you know, whatever you're doing right now, people are genuinely and generally, because we know the averages are going to benefit from adding in about 5,000 additional steps to their normal repertoire. Because especially if we know the average for the Western cities is 4,000, you know, one thing that I consistently see is that people often think they're walking way more than they actually are, which goes back to your point, that it's so important to track.

And we're so lucky that most smartphones today have a basic step counter inside of there that can give them that. And then so whatever you get is your base, now add 5,000 steps to that. And now at least we're heading in the right direction. especially if we're able to sprinkle that throughout the day. Yeah. And of course, one thing to emphasize, of course, is, you know, the city or the town that you live in makes an enormous difference to the amount of walking that you can do.

So we see, for example, with indices of walkability for U.S. cities, that New York, Boston, and San Francisco come right out at the top where walkability is concerned. There's good public transport systems. The cities are old. and people walk a hell of a lot. I was in New York for a very lovely little trip in April and we just walked everywhere, which is just fantastic.

And the same is true here in Dublin. We're very lucky. We've got a decent public transport system. So it's an old medieval city. You don't want to drive into the middle of it. You're much, much better off walking. Other cities are much more car oriented. And those cities are much more problematic.

for people to get walking in. Because often you don't have appropriate sidewalks. You may not have crossing points. You know, there's lots of things that may be missing. So my advice in those kinds of circumstances is even in your own home, you can do a lot. If you're taking a phone call, don't take it seated. Get up and walk around. I know people don't talk with the phone as much as they used to.

You can listen to a podcast while walking around your sitting room a little. You know, there are small things that you can do that get you up out of the couch for 10 or 15 minutes at a time that are actually very, very health enhancing. And, you know, they're kind of zero cost. I appreciate that outside your front door, it might be a different story. But at least within the space that you have, you may be able to do more than you currently think you can do. Yeah, you're really helping folks listening to this podcast truly rethink of movement. and in particular walking as medicine. In fact, in your book, you write that walking is one of the most underrated forms of medicine,

and you remind us that no drug, no drug that exist out there has, quote, all of these positive effects and for sure without the side effects that typically come with drugs. Can you chat about that? Absolutely. So there's a great slogan in modern medicine and in public health medicine in particular, that movement is medicine, which is, I think, a very, very simple three-word phrase that carries such a rich message. And the key message really here to give you is this, that when you stand up, when you move about, everything about your body changes. The signals that are coming from

your brain to your body are different. The signals that are coming from the periphery into your body and into your brain are different. How is that possible? Well, just think about it like this. I'm seated at the moment. Suppose I say, actually, I want to get up. Well, I have to form an intention. That intention will be formed, presumably, in my frontal lobes. And a message has to come out from my brain to my body through the spinal cord to get my muscles active. I'm not going to stand up if I don't have a command signal to do that. And then I stand up. Now, if you watch people standing, what you'll see is they're swaying ever so slightly backwards and forwards. They're not falling over.

There's a micro-correction going on to keep you balanced because you're in a kind of a dynamic equilibrium with the environment. That's a positive challenge for your brain. So your brain is having to respond to the feel of the ground beneath your feet, perhaps if there's wind blowing at your face or, you know, these kinds of things. And then you have to move. So you have to decide, am I walking out the front door to the local shop? am I walking down to the local park, whatever, it might happen to be.

So you're having to use brain areas that are involved in mapping your world. As it happens, the parts of the brain that are concerned with cognitive maps are also the same parts of the brain that are involved in memory. And there are also, as I've discussed in my new book, which we're not going to talk about here, the same parts of the brain that are involved in imagination because you have to imagine where you're going to go. Imagine, I think through the consequences of going there. So you're not there so you don't know what it's like. So you have to think what it might be like. And then you have to move. So you've presented your body with all of these challenges. And then you have this lovely set of feedback from the world. You get the wind on your face. You get optic flow across

your eyes, you might, if you're lucky, you meet your neighbor or you go out with your spouse or your friend. So you're getting a social challenge from going out as well. So you've got all of these things going on. And within your body, there's a whole system of kind of molecules churning away that are involved in actually building resilience. So when your muscles move, they produce a molecule called a myokine. And myokines are very, very good for strengthening and building resilience in muscle. And we also know when your brain is active, when you're driving it, especially through movement, you're producing a kind of a fertilizer in your brain called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which helps keep the brain cells nice and active and talking to each other, helping stave off

conditions like dementia. powerful very powerful you know in fact i heard you share on another podcast that walking's ability to turn these bd and f key components that are like miracle growth for our brain are so powerful that there was a study that you referenced where they made uh college students sedentary and they had older individuals walked and i believe it was linked to creativity is that ringing a bell so that's about three different studies all at once okay sorry sorry I kind of combined a bunch of things things together

but actually you know you've kind of hit on a key theme that movement is involved in all of these things movement enhances creativity movement enhances brain function and movement counters the effect of being sedatory but let's pick each of these apart we'll focus on one at a time

one at a time so we'll focus on brain aging for a moment. Yeah, let's talk about brain aging because this audience here is especially very interested in that topic. Yeah, so the short quick message is this. Being active is good for your brain. What's good for your heart is good for your brain. Now, how do we know this and how do we know the consequences of this? Well, the way we know this is there's lots and lots of ways of studying brain function. One of the very, very easiest now is to pop people in a brain scanner. get a picture of the brain, see what the size of the different areas of the brain are. So that's called a structural scan or structural magnetic resonance image.

And then challenge people with memory tasks or attention tasks, things like this, and see what level of activity is in these brain areas. And then you can measure things like BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor in the blood because it passes out of the brain into the blood. So you can measure what's in the brain. blood. So you take a large group of people, maybe 100, maybe 150 older adults, maybe in their late 60s, 80, 70s. You divide them in two. One group goes out for exercises regularly. The other group just lives their life as they normally do. You've done all the pre-assessment so you know they're all

at about the same level of functioning where memory is concerned, where attention is concerned, all of those kinds of things. And then you ask what happens. One group goes out for regular walks. The other group doesn't. They just live their lives. And you come back after a year, you've tracked them for two years and you say, what has happened? Well, what you see is in the activity group, the group that's regularly active, memory function is actually enhanced a bit. Their ability to recall things goes up a little. The volume of the brain areas that are concerned with learning and memory, in particular, this area, which I haven't named before, but I will now, the hippocampal formation, that grows ever so. slightly. That tells you that this brain area is responsive to activity, which is really, really important.

Whereas the other group that are just living their sedentary life, they continue to show this maybe perhaps slight shallow decline over the next two years. So one group is kind of age-proofing themselves a bit through activity, and the other group is kind of maybe succumbing to the effects of aging through because of their inactivity. And inactivity is such an important thing where brain aging is concerned that it has been cited as the central behavior that you can engage in that will do the most to stave off dementia. In the recent reports of the Lancet, which is a very important medical journal, the Lancet Commission has focused on how we can prevent dementia. and we know that about 40% of cases of dementia can be prevented by changing your behavior. And one of the key things that you can change is your level of activity.

Get it up and the chances of getting dementia go down a bit. Keep your behavior or your activity levels low. Your chances of getting dementia, go up a bit. In other words, dementia is not an inevitable feature of aging and it shouldn't be thought of as an inevitable feature. of aging. It's something that you can change the likelihood of happening by changing your behavior. This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health. You know, as a CEO of a functional medicine clinic and someone who spends a lot of time with functional-minded practitioners, one of the top complaints that have heard from my friends in this field is how complicated

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You can find out more by going to Rupa, R-U-P-A-Halth.com. That's RupaHealth.com to sign up today. Is one of those mechanisms that you believe, you know, being in this field and looking at all the different research, is one of the mechanisms of that, also the metabolic health component? Oh, so. Yeah. Yeah, could you expand on that a little bit? Yeah, for absolutely sure. There's no question about that.

What we know, I think, with a very high degree of certainty, is that your metabolic health status has an really very, very important effect on how your brain functions. So if you're in a subclinical state for type 2 diabetes, your neurons, your individual brain cells tend to, not to function as well as they might do. Your blood pressure is probably a bit higher than it should be. You're probably carrying a bit of weight. Now, in and of itself, maybe carrying a bit of weight is okay, but what appears to be the case from the latest data is that if you're carrying too much body fat, what you're doing is releasing inflammatory factors into the bloodstream, which give you a kind of a chronic inflamed state. And this feeds back in you in all sorts of ways. One of the ways it does

is a very surprising one, which is that it lowers your pain thresholds. You'll feel pain a little bit more acutely. And we know that people who are fitter have slightly higher pain thresholds because their pro-inflammatory state has been lowered. So again, doing all, doing regular exercise, not killing yourself, I'm not asking anybody to go run up Mount Kilimanjaro or whatever it happens to be. But just engaging in regular exercise, regular movement right throughout the course of the day, every day, broken up over the course of the day is a really good recipe for improving heart health, brain health, metabolic health, generally, and how you feel all of those other nice things that we like to worry about. I've heard and I don't know if this

any credence or if you have any knowledge about this, but I've heard individuals say that, you know, movement and walking in particular, especially when you get into the higher numbers that we really want people to be towards, you know, the seven, eight, nine, ten, you know, 11, 12,000 steps a day, sprinkled throughout your day, integrated into your lifestyle. It is a great way to maintain weight, not necessarily the prescription that's given to people to lose weight, where they might have to me focusing a little bit more on sort of pulling back and dialing back on calories. Any thoughts about walking in particular and its relationship with weight, weight loss? Yeah.

So the story with weight loss and activity is an extremely complicated one. And I think the data on this are becoming very much clearer. And the first thing to say is that the saying to people who want to lose weight, eat less and exercise more is a recipe for design. It does not work. It's not possible to tell people to eat less and exercise more and expect that they will lose weight and keep it off. Why? Because your metabolism changes. The rate at which you burn energy changes depending on how much you are eating. So that's problem number one. Problem number two is our bodies are designed to cap the rate at which we burn energy when we're exercising. And you can demonstrate this very, very easily. So if you put somebody lying back on a couch, you put on a mask to measure the amount of oxygen, they're burning, and carbon dioxide, they're exhaling. And then you compare that to when the person is on a treadmill doing exactly the same thing with the mask. And you ask, what's the change?

Well, what you see is the change is actually very little. Because most of the energy that we burn is it's referred to as our basal metabolic rate is concerned with keeping you alive. You've got, I've forgotten the number, two trillion cells in your body, something of that order. They all need oxygen, they all need energy, they all need to repair themselves. They all need waste products carried away. And they need to do this on a continual basis. So they're engaged in this continual traffic that you're not aware of unless you hold your breath. and then you realize suddenly how badly you need oxygen.

And that accounts for most of your energy burn. So trying to get people to lose weight by cutting down on their food simply slows their metabolism. Your body is designed to fight against weight loss because we evolved in a climate when we were making that great journey out of Africa where food sources were very limited. but you might eat today, you might not eat tomorrow. So what you want to do is when you get food,

you want to store the energy so you have it. And what we've done is we've created an environment where food is everywhere. You know, I can go down to my local shop and I can get pizza, I can get sushi, I can get food from all over the world without any trouble. And we've created this food-rich environment. But the problem is this food-rich environment is addressing a problem that we humans don't have, which is if you don't currently have, which is that we generally are not worried about restricted access to food. In fact, what we have is excess access to food.

So if people want to lose weight, exercise more is not going to do much for you. It might help a little at the margins. what people really need to focus on is what they're eating. And I talk in the book about the Western diet versus other styles of diet. And we know, for example, that when people move from Japan where they've got very, they're not obese, they've got very good blood cholesterol and all the rest of it, and they move to the US or they move to Europe, their metabolic status disimproves very quickly because of the food environment. What we really need to do is to change what we're eating. We need to be eating food that's metabolically expensive to digest.

So think about, for example, trying to digest rough porridge oatelets in the morning with a little bit of milk and a tiny bit of sugar or a tiny little bit of honey to make them a little more palatable. versus a couple of donuts. You eat the donuts. They're in your bloodstream in a couple of minutes, whereas the low glycemic index porridge would be sitting in your gut, making you feel full for hours,

and you won't have that sugar crash two hours after you've eaten a bunch of donuts. It's those kinds of shifts in our diet that we really need to make if we want to get people to lose weight. And of course, we now have this new amazing, I think for want for a better word, the GLP1 antagonists, Ozenpec and Wegevi, which actually work on these glucagon receptors. They damp down the

feeling of reward from eating. So you don't have that same metabolic drive to get calories that you would have had otherwise. So I think that, you know, the way forward here is actually one of not giving out to people about why they're eating so much. The food environment around us, the ecology that we live in is designed to make us do that. And our evolutionary drive is one to say, look, we might be hungry tomorrow, but we've got food today. The problem is we've solved that problem, so we need a different approach. Yeah, we need a definitely need a different approach. And walking can be a part of that approach. And as you mentioned, absolutely. Because a part of that is also this feeling of there are times where we might have, you know, depending on people's diets and

generally my audience here, you know, they all consider themselves to be in sort of some category of more mindful eating, clean eating. That might mean that there's certain foods that they stay away from on a regular basis. But every so often, we all eat different things. And one of the simplest things that we can do is after eating a big meal, especially if it contains more processed food inside of that meal is go for a walk afterwards. Can you chat about that? Yes. So there's actually two things you can do. Before you eat the big meal, go for a walk beforehand. It actually has the paradoxical effect of blunting your appetite. How interesting. Which people aren't very terribly well aware of. But you're absolutely right. Going for a walk afterwards has one very good effect,

which is that it stops the spike in blood sugar that you would otherwise have. The when you've eaten a huge meal, typically when you measure the kind of post-pranial glucose and these other variables in your blood, what you'll see is a big spike in the blood sugar. And you have these receptors in the brain that are sensitive to the amount of sugar that's in your blood and they make you feel sleepy. But if you go for the walk, that feeling of need to sleep disappears and you're actually burning the excess off in muscle and in other things through the activity. But I think if you can do both, go for a walk beforehand. You won't eat as much and go for a walk afterwards, which is what we do under, you know,

normal circumstances. If you're living out in the steps or wherever you run to hunt to get your food, you get your antelope or whatever it happens to be, you walk at home. you butcher it, you do whatever you do, and then you have to go for a walk afterwards because you're going to have to get food again. Whereas all I have to do is go to the fridge, you know, so we've solved this problem and it's great that we have. You know, nobody should be going hungry in the modern world, but the consequence is that we have these other spillovers. Yeah, and we're trying to adapt our lifestyle accordingly and sort of inspire a different organization of cities, which we're going to get to

in a second because you have a lot of thoughts on that inside of your book. You know, I want to talk about the practicalities of do you genuinely feel for most people the idea, and I'm asking in a genuine manner, you know, I've heard the advice of people walking after meal and you've now added into walking before. What are some practical ways that people can start to think about incorporating that into their life, you know, in sort of this modern world that we live in? You know, what do you do or what do you recommend to people out there out there? So again, I think the first thing we have to do is not be condemnatory of individuals. The world we live in is designed in a particular way and the way you or I, the effect that you or I can have on changing the design

of that world is relatively limited. So if you're living in an environment as I happen to be where I live here, where we have good sidewalks, good lighting, good access to local parks and a short walk to the train station to take me to work. It's a really easy for me. It's a no-brainer. The car is really something I don't want to use, especially, as I said, Dublin is an old medieval city. You don't want to be driving into it.

But, you know, if I was living, let's say, in deepest, darkest rural Ireland, where there are no footpaths, there's no street lighting, there's only dark, narrow roads. Walking at night for people under those circumstances is actually kind of dangerous. You know, so we really do have this kind of issue that the infrastructure around you,

for which you're principally not responsible, makes a huge difference. And you can see this, as I've said, in cities like New York, really easy to walk. The sidewalks are nice and big. Everything is reasonably straightforward in terms of walking, and it's easier to get around than getting into a car. So that really is an issue. But I think, you know, thinking about what you can change as an individual is important as well. So if you have to use a car and you're driving to the shops, you know, I'm sure this happens in the US.

It certainly happens here in Ireland. People drive as close to the door as they possibly can to the shop that they're going to. Don't do that. Park a little bit away in the car park, so you actually have to walk a bit. That, you know, it adds 200 steps at each end. that's a little bit of a small gain. So I think what you have to be conscious of is figuring out how you can get

little small incremental gains. If you're walking to a cafe to get your lunch, don't go to your usual cafe. Go to one that's another few minutes away so you add in an extra few steps. You explore maybe a little bit more of your town or your city. If you take the bus to work,

you know, a very simple thing to do is just use a bus stop that's a little bit further away so that you get a little bit more of a few more steps in. If you're in your office, have an alarm on your phone or on your laptop or whatever. Or just a note.

I have a note on a postage saying get up. Get up every 20 minutes or every half hour for a little walk around. If you're about to change between one major project and another, don't go straight from one to the other. Get up and go for a walk. about, do something different. As I've said already, if you're taking a phone call and people do still take phone calls, stand up, move, walk. If you take a half hour or 40 minute phone call, you'll crank out maybe 2,000, 3,000 steps without noticing. So there's lots of little

ways that you can incrementally add just a little bit more movement, excuse me, into your your day. But you do have to be a little bit conscious of it. But like I said, this issue of how the infrastructure around us works is really important. The building I work in, if you want to come up to my office, it's up on the third floor. If you want to get to the lift, you just come in, the door you turn right. There's the lift, or the elevator, as you call it, in the US. If you want to take the stairs, you have to go through four fire doors. Now, you're welcome to do that, but you're going to have three fire doors.

And then a fourth one to get out onto my floor. that's a building that when I look at it now I think we did not build movement into that building whereas architects I think are a bit more conscious these days of

trying to ensure that there's more movement that work spaces are built in an active way walking desks are a thing now having walking meetings is a thing now it wasn't a thing previously having standing meetings

all these kinds of ways, you know, go for a walk around your corridor if you can't walk outside. You can build extra little bits of movement in without trying too hard. But you have to be conscious of it. Absolutely. And that's what we're doing on this podcast today where rather you're doing through your work. And I'm just getting a chance to sit here and try to ask good questions without mixing up studies. You know, you've mentioned that walking is not just walking. There's different types of walking.

And the more aware we are of these different types of walking, the more that we can tap into them for their respective benefits. Can you give us some of the examples of the different types of walking and how somebody might utilize them to achieve the respective goal in that category? Yeah. So I think this is one of the things we're damned by. We've got one word, which is walking to walk, I walk, you walk. But we've got all of these other things that come with it. So an example that I think is well worth reflecting on for a moment. When we humans are annoyed by something,

when a political leader is doing something we don't want them to do, what do we do, in a democracy at least? We gather together and we walk on the place where they are resident, or we walk on the parliament or the Congress or whatever happens to be. You know, we signal our annoyance, our disagreement with our political leaders by gathering and walking. No chimpanzee ever did this. No locust has ever done this. No tiger, no lion, no antelope has ever done this.

The idea that we would gather together in a common cause and we would walk to signal our disproval to our leaders that we disagree with what they are planning for us. So walking can be a very political act and it seems like almost a mundane thing to say. But my point is that we alone in the animal kingdom are the only species that are capable of even thinking about doing this. Now, let's just push that a little bit further. When you ask people or study people who gather like this who go on these walks together, it might be a pilgrimage like the Camino, it might be walking together to a rock. concert, it might be walking to a football match, or it might be walking together to signal protest. What do people feel? Well, what people feel is part of something larger than themselves,

and this has all sorts of interesting benefits to them. It will enter into their memory, and they will, when they meet again, when the smaller groups meet again, they'll talk about that day when they gathered and they chanted together as they walked along. They'll talk about the signs that they displayed. They'll remember the feeling of being together. And one of the remarkable things is that people feel this kind of slight dissolution between self and other. They become part of something bigger than themselves. And the sociologist Emil Durkheim gave us a fabulous phrase.

It's the feeling of collective effervescence, which I think is a lovely phrase. We get this kind of bubbly together kind of sensation. And there have been quite a few studies now looking at people after they've undertaken long walks like the Camino or some of the religious pilgrimages that people undertake in Mexico or India or other parts of the world. And people report a feeling of well-being that lasts long beyond the event itself. it becomes something that's psychologically very important to them and it becomes a reference point in their lives especially if they've only ever been able to undertake something like this perhaps once or twice in their lives

it's something they will encourage other people to do and you see all sorts of other nice benefits but the key point is that we gather together in unison for a common purpose we feel this slight dissolution of self and other, and we walk with a common purpose together. And as I've said, no other species does this, but we humans do it. So that's one form of walking, which I think is very important to us. But let's focus on something slightly more prosaic, which is creative walking.

So by creative walking, I don't mean walking with funny steps or walking backwards when you should be walking forwards. By the way, just to interrupt, I don't know if you're familiar, but there's this whole movement of people walking backwards now to strengthen their knee joints. And there's this gentleman online. He goes by knees over toes is his handle. And he's created this movement. So here in Los Angeles, when you go to the beach regularly, you will see people who are practising his protocol to strengthen their knees by walking backwards. So it was funny that you mentioned that. I just had to add that in there.

A chap who's just walked backwards across the US, I think. Oh, really? I didn't know about that. That might be something different. Yeah. You know, backwards walking is a kind of a funny thing because if you look at humans, we did some studies on this a few years ago. And I was inspired to do it because I was sitting on an airplane once. And one of the stewardesses walked backwards from the top of the cabin all the way.

back pulling one of these trolley things without looking. And I was like, whoa, that's absolutely amazing. And it turns out humans are not very good at backward walking unless we're well trained. And in the case of somebody who works on an airline, overtrained at walking in a straight line holding onto something. I'm fascinated by the backwards walking for your knees. I can see the logic to it, but it's not something I've tried myself. Yeah, I'll send you a link to it. I think the whole idea is that it's supposed to support that sort of de-centric movement.

You know, a lot of elderly people, especially as you get older, more people hurt themselves going down the stairs instead of up the stairs. And there's a lot of, there's a lot of knee pain that people develop overall. And a lot of it is because we just don't have this regular movement in our life. And so just just like 10, 20 minutes a day of backwards walking can support that. It's not that they're telling you to go walk to the local cafe or walk the whole day backwards, but just a little bit of looking with your head over your shoulder. How do you do a blind?

Well, it's funny because they have a treadmill that's designed for backwards walking that they created. And then they also say that a lot of people, like in the gym, for instance, I will put, we refer to it as a sled. You know, you'd push it, you know, forward. you put some weights on it, well, you can strap a little waistband, and then you just walk backwards with a little bit of resistance of that sled kind of pulling on you. So I'll put, you know, 20, 40, 50 pounds, and I'll just do 20 minutes of backwards walking, you know, from one side of the gym to another. And I definitely can say anecdotally, you know, and of one, I feel like my knees are getting stronger from it.

But anyways, that's a little bit of a tangent, but I had to throw it in there since you mentioned back. Yeah, but I think all of this is good. Yeah, yeah. You're up on two feet. You're challenging your body. in ways that it hasn't been challenged before, you're having to maintain stability and equilibrium in an entirely new translational plane. These are all good things to do. And, you know, if you find yourself out walking

and you slip, you slide backwards ever so slightly, maybe having done this kind of thing will actually be good for you. Yeah, you'll be more agile. Your brain will be more anticipated. You'll be ready to kind of stabilize yourself. Yeah, I must give it a shot. I have a nice park beside the house here.

the neighbours will probably look askance at me but I think it's maybe worth giving a go. Anyway, back to creativity. Yes, yes, yes, please. Try and focus. So, you know, it's a kind of a commonplace observation that there are many creative people who like to walk and walk an awful lot.

You know, so the old saying in Regensburg in Germany was that you could set the clock in Regensburg by Emmanuel Kant, the philosopher, because he would be out at 3 p.m. every day, rain, hail or shine, he would go for a walk. And of course, Stephen King, the novelist, is a famous walker. I'm not certainly he still walks, but he certainly used to walk an awful lot. Bertrand Russell, the philosopher, a great walker as well. And it was said of him that, when he was going to write, what he would do is he would go for a walk and a think, and then he would come back and he would produce these perfectly composed paragraphs

with beautiful logic and all of the rest of it. And here in Dublin, Ireland's greatest mathematician is William Rowan Hamilton, who died in the late 1800s. The reason we're able to speak together is because of him. he invented the mathematics that allow these kinds of weird image transforms. He invented the mathematics that are used as the core of games engines in computers, and a whole load of weird mathematics like this. They're called, it's called the Quaternians in terms of the maths.

And he was also the astronomer at the time, the chief astronomer. And he would walk from the astronomers building up in North Dublin, the observatory rather, in North Dublin to Trinity College every day. It was a walk of about 14 or 15 kilometers, thinking about quaternians. Wow. And the one day he's walking without a pen or paper. He solves the equation. And he had a pen knife, or a tobacco knife. So he cut the equation into a stone on a bridge so that he wouldn't forget it.

And he has a beautiful phrase where he says, I had been contemplating and thinking about quaternians. And then like a flash, an electric circuit seemed to close. And the solution was obvious to him. And of course, he did it on these walks. So there's a mathematical walk for Hamilton every year in October. in Dublin if any of your listeners care to fly all that way to join it. Anyway, but the more serious point is that many creatives think of walking as at the core

of their creative practice. That it's a great way to generate ideas, a great way to clarify your thinking. And if you're walking with somebody else to problem solve with that other person. And the question is, is there something to do? this and if there is how could you how could you demonstrate this well there's a psychologists being what they are there are fiendish tests of creativity which predict pretty well the kind of occupation you have in terms of whether you're a knowledge worker or not one of them is the creative uses tests so you might be passed a pen and you're said you're asked

to come up with as many uses for this pen in the next 20 seconds as you possibly can, then you're handed a cup. You have to come up with as many uses as you can. There's a book. How many uses can you come up with for the book? And what appears to be reliably and consistently to be the case is if you get people to walk for eight or ten minutes prior to them engaging in creative ideation, in other words, where you're challenging them to think creatively, they will come up with about twice as many ideas after having had a walk compared to people who are seated for the same time. And there are lots of ways of running this.

As I've said, the creative uses test is one. There's another test, the remote associations, where you have to figure out linkages between very disparate words in as few moves as possible. Or you have to think up creative analogies to describe something. And in each of these cases, what you see is that having walked about, will usually hugely improve your performance, perhaps twofold compared to the person who was seated.

Now, there's a twist to this, which I love. That original group, our study was by a group in Stanford. And a group in Taiwan conducted the same study, but instead of focusing on just college students, what they did was they did the same study in a group of college students and compared them to a group of older citizens, people in their late 60s, early 70s.

What they were able to show was that when you get the older people to walk, they were able to generate about twice as many ideas as the seated sedentary college students. In other words, walking is a really good hack to get your creative juices flowing. So my advice always is, when you've got an intractable problem, that you're finding it difficult to solve,

stop banging your head off the laptop. Get up, put your shoes on, go for a walk, think of nothing if you can at all, think of something else, give a friend a ring, send some texts, listen to a podcast, it doesn't really matter, just get away from the problem, get up on your two feet and get moving.

Now, why is this important? Well, there's lots of reasons why this is important, but one is a straightforward one. We now know for creative problem solving that time away from the task is just as important as time on the task. You need to focus on, focus off kind of cycle and you've got a difficult problem to solve.

But there's something else going on, I think. When you're seated, the general level of activity in your brain is lower compared to when you're moving around. And when you're standing up and you're moving, you're kind of vaguely half thinking about the problem you're trying to solve. Ideas will bubble into consciousness and hit the threshold for consciousness because you've generally increased the level of activity in your brain compared to when you're seated.

And now you have access to those ideas which you wouldn't have had before. And the other possibility, I think, which is also a perfectly reasonable one, is that the kinds of random collisions of ideas, the kind of associations between one thing and another that wouldn't happen when you're seated now can happen because you've taken. yourself out of the context that is driving you crazy and you've put yourself into a place where you can make your problem a little bit smaller and you can see the bigger picture more easily. That's so powerful. You know, I took a quote a few, a couple weeks ago as I was preparing for this podcast and I sent it to my wife because my wife would often notice she's in this phase of building this new business and she's a very used idea of sitting down as a former investment banker just being

in your desk all day, sitting in your chair all day, and just, you know, quote unquote, banging it out, like, you know, doing all the work that you need to get a chance to do. And she would complain sometimes that she would hit these moments where she'd be so stuck on something. And I might pop in from my office to the house because I live very close by. I'm very lucky in L.A. I get to walk to work. I get to walk home.

And I say, sweetie, how are you doing? She's like, I'm just stuck on this problem. And I would say, come with me. Let's go on a walk real quick, right? And she knew. She knew it made a difference. She felt it, first of all, and I love her, and I asked permission from her to share the story ahead of time.

But the first thing that she did is she said, I don't know, is a walk really going to make a difference? And you mention all the time that people regularly do not, they underestimate how different they'll feel, you know, in anticipation of going for a walk, right? And there's been studies that have been done on this. But then they go on a walk and they report. feeling so much better, you know, during and after the walk. And it genuinely had made an improvement in their mood. So today, as a reminder, because I was headed out the side of the house and I saw

she had a bunch of meetings, I texted her this quote that you had shared before that I'll just share with the audience. And it's something that you wrote and he said, constantly focusing on a problem that is difficult to solve is the worst way to solve that problem. You need time away from the problem through walking. And I added in rest there for her to be better to come back and actually make true progress on there. So just summarizing exactly what you've shared. And I think this is why, you know, you mentioned Stephen King and a few other people, also Steve Jobs.

If people read the biography of Steve Jobs, he was regularly known for getting his design team to go on walking meetings with him to change their perspective and not be stale when approaching a problem. So it's just a reminder that so many of us know. And yet our modern world does not always encourage this behavior. So we have to remind ourselves that if we're, stuck creatively, if we're stale, we need to get up and actually start walking and shift perspectives. And here's the simplest rationalization that you can offer yourself. It will enhance

your productivity for zero cost. And everybody's looking for a route to enhance their activity. I think, you know, especially when you're, you know, we we thankfully largely come out of it. but for quite a while we were stuck with this lockdown life where we were doing Zooms or teams and there was no break between one meeting and another. And of course people were feeling terrible Zoom fatigue. They were tired. They were listless. There was a whole series of problems.

Make the meetings shorter. Get up for 15 minutes between meetings because the cognitive demands of sitting at these meetings where you're having to pay continuous attention to. to people whose faces are the size of a postage stamp and hear what they're saying is actually really tough. And one of the best ways you can look after your own health and look after your productivity is by actually making your meetings shorter and making them more focused in getting up and moving around between them.

People forget that, but I think it's actually a really simple and important thing to do. Absolutely. So, you know, you were going through a list of the different types of walking that are available to us. And you started off with the history of sort of, you know, walking as a social change. In every country around the world, well, not every country, you know, there are some authoritarian countries that want to squelch these protests because they know how powerful they are. But pretty much every democracy around the world, there are people that have protested at different time periods. and that's a uniquely human phenomenon that's there. And then you went on to talk about the area that we just mentioned,

which is creativity, when we're stuck, when we're stale. Walking is a powerful tool that can help us change our perspective and also boost our mood as well too. I think there's at least one other major category. There might be other ones, but the next one that I'd love you to talk about is the health component. We've chatted a little bit about this in the beginning, but the one aspect of this that we didn't talk about as much,

is the aspect that is walking related to VO2 max. And you know, you did mention heart health, but connecting those things together. Can you talk about the health category, the health aspect of walking and how we might approach that? Yes. So there's a couple of different ways of thinking about this. And I think, you know,

if you're trying to improve heart health, a little stroll is not going to do it. You actually need to impose a bit of cardiac strain in order to get improvements in heart health. So one way of figuring out whether or not you're getting cardiac strain is if you're walking at a sufficient pace that it's difficult to talk and breathe at the same time. In other words, you should be walking at a pace where it's difficult for you to engage in a coherent conversation with other people.

That would mean you're walking at roughly three and a half, four miles. per hour, which is a fairly decent pace to be walking at. And that will get your heart to health or get your heart rate up. Now, there's something that's not realized very often. If you compare people who are jogging slowly to people who are walking quickly, what you get is much better health outcomes from people who are walking at a decent pace compared to people who are jogging slowly. There's a much greater level of cardiac strain imposed and you're getting much more activity, sorry, you're getting much more benefit from that. There's a different way of thinking about this, and it's worth thinking about it in the context of frailty and changes that happen as we get older.

So there's a fantastic study, which I like to reference, which was conducted in France, couple of years ago, where they took young males in their late 20s, early 30s, who were very healthy. And they subjected them to what's known as dry immersion. So they take water beds, basically, and they float them in the waterbed, but they've got a water bed over them, so they're kind of almost in a little kind of an envelope. So their body is completely supported. So before you pop them into these waterbeds, what they do is they measure the structural integrity of the muscle in the legs. So what they're doing is really they take images using MRI of a cross section of the leg.

They take muscle biopsies and they do a variety of other things to these volunteers. And what they show is really, really terrible and a little bit disturbing. that as little as three days of immersion in these conditions. So they're not wet, it's dry immersion, results in the loss of muscle volumes. The muscle itself shrinks. Muscle strength goes down, and a very important property of muscle,

what's called its viscoelasticity, is decreased. So for people who are watching, I'll give an example of visco elasticity. This is a hand strengthener. I squeeze it, it deforms, and it comes back to its shape again. That's viscoelasticity. So this has got normal visco elasticity. If I put this in a drawer and didn't touch it for a couple of years, it would squeeze it, it would deform, and it would just stay in that shape. So it would have lost its visco elasticity. Muscle has this very profound viscoelastic quality. So if you push muscle

when it's either when you're contracting it or when it's flaccid, it should take its shape back again very quickly. And what you see is that in these healthy young males who are there in this dry immersion for literally as few as three days, viscoelasticity drops. Now, why is this important? Well, one of the problems, as we've been repeated, is that we sit around an awful lot much more than we should do. So we're not challenging the muscles in our legs and by extension the rest of our body by getting up and moving regularly.

But equally, this is a problem for people who are bedbound in hospital, perhaps because they've had a serious operation or something like this. They become frail through the lack of use of muscle. So physiotherapy for those people is really, really vital. But again, they have. the message that I want to get across here is not one of catastrophe. The message that I want to get across here is of activity. You can reverse these changes by doing something, getting up, moving, and actually exercising. And there's quite a bit of data now to show that the optimal kind of thing that you should be doing is a bit of regular aerobic challenge. And walking, especially as you get older is a very accessible form of aerobic challenge, but also do a little bit of

resistance training. Get some loose weights and if you're seated in your chair at home watching TV, just pump them a little. It'll be good for you. It'll keep your strength up. If you're going for a walk, maybe wear leg weights just to add a little bit of challenge to your legs so that you're actually building a little bit of strength. Body and brain both benefit. There's all the bees, body and brain, both benefit, from giving yourself this challenge. And fighting frailty as we get older is actually a very important thing to do because if you maintain regular levels of activity,

you're much more, sorry, you're much less likely to fall as you get older. Your bone health will be much better than it is. is so you're much less likely to fracture your hip, for example. And hip fractures are a catastrophe in people who are old. They typically end up bed bound and their chances of death go up really dramatically. So exercising yourself in all of these kinds of ways is really, really vital. Such a powerful reminder. You know, longevity is on everybody's mind these days. And there's been a lot of books that have been published and there's this whole industry of longevity. And a lot of times the things that get the attention are the flashy new supplement that might

have this marketing or the crazy exercise that somebody's doing in this new gym that's out there. But really, you know, your message here is that some of the things that we inherently evolved to do. This is baked into our evolution. Just doing those. is actually the key to unlocking our natural longevity. And that natural longevity is one that typically throughout history, minus accident and war and infection and famine, which was a big problem, you know, we generally were individuals that if you had lived to the age of 50, 60, you know, years old, you would be somebody who could live the rest of your years without chronic disease.

That's how we evolved typically as human beings. And it's so easy, even, you know, in this world and day and age that we live in, and I'm so thankful for technology, social media, Netflix, and all these things, but just doubling down on the basics for so many who are listening and getting in those correct amount of steps that are there, you know, each day and getting that and avoiding that inactivity, those are going to be the simple unlocks that are going to lead to a healthy life. Absolutely. And it's something that's really easy to overlook.

It's easy to go down. a path of least resistance, but just being a little bit conscious about these things. And ideally doing it, you know, having a partner in crime, having somebody that you can go and take a walk with, somebody that you can be active with. That makes such a difference.

You know, we humans are social animals and we have to stop this idea of saying the answer is entirely within ourselves. The answer is between ourselves as well. You know, going for a walk with somebody. If you're not somebody who enjoys walking very much, you'll discover very quickly. Actually, going for a walk on a chat with an old friend. It's one of the most wonderful things you can do as a human.

In fact, time flies when you're doing it. You're not even thinking about how much you're walking. One of the reasons I was so excited to interview you after I first heard about you through my friend, Dr. Rungan Chatterjee, is that every week for the last seven, almost eight years here in Los Angeles, there's a group of my guys. friends that meet every Thursday morning, typically at around 8 o'clock, and we call it man morning. It's a men's group, and we all get together. A lot of them are also in the world of entrepreneurship or health or, you know, own their own business.

And there's a captain each month. And the captain says, hey, okay, we're going to go walk by the beach or we're going to go walk by this trail or this hike. We're very lucky that there's a lot of different areas that you can pretty easily drive to in L.A. You may not be able to walk there, but you can drive there to. to then go walking. You can get there. And you have a lot of great places to walk. And we'll get together for an hour at 8 a.m. every Thursday. And we ask each other a simple question that I borrowed from this,

you know, friends of mine at the group summit series. We ask ourselves, you know, tell us one thing that you're celebrating this week. And tell us one thing you're navigating. What's one thing that's kind of tricky or you're stuck with or, you know, it's kind of, you're pondering it in the back of your head. And then we all just go on a walk and we talk. You know, first of all, men typically don't always open up about what they're going through in their life stereotypically. So that's a great thing because a lot of men suffer from mental health challenges of bottling everything in. But then we're also doing it in a way that is, you know, social and we're getting our steps, which typically, because we walk at a decent pace, would be about, you know, 3,000 steps that we'd get in that

hour period of time of us all walking together. And it truly is one of the top things that I look forward to every week because I am able to habit stack all these different aspects that bring me so much joy into my day-to-day life. Well, let me say two things. First of all, if I do get to L.A. in the near future, I must go on a walk with you. Yes, we'd love to have you. You'll be our honored guest. But you've also done something very clever there, which is you've engaged in cognitive of offloading. You've got something diaried that you do. It's not something that you have to take a decision about every week.

Yes. We overlook how important habit is as a regulator of our behavior. And habit can actually be a very powerful way of enhancing our health status if we get into these habits where, you know, my friends expect me, every day. week. I walk to the train station every day. I do this because this is what I do. In other words, it's not something that you have to take a decision about. You can spend the time that you would be thinking about it, thinking about something much more interesting because this is just what you do. Offloading in this kind of way is a really, really smart thing to do. And when you add in the social

component to it, so that you're doing it with others, because something that you want, to. So, you know, it's got a reward inherent in the fact that we humans are actually social species and we really do like being around other people. It makes a huge difference, especially in this day and age with, you know, it's so easy to just turn on the news and get so caught up in all these reminders of how terrible the world is. And there are many very terrible problems in the world, many of them that we can't immediately do anything for, which is. Which is why it's so important that we have these routines in our schedule that anchor us to the present moment in our own reality, because if we don't feel good, if we're not healthy, it's hard

to make the world a healthy place. You know, I want to talk a little bit about just while we have some more time here as we sort of wind down the interview, I want to talk about your personal passion in this space. I've heard you share before that, you know, walking with something as a narrative that was sort of baked into your life, but it only took years of further reflection for somebody to you know, you should be writing a book about this topic. Can you chat a more? Yeah, to my great embarrassment. The funny thing is one of my things that I absolutely love to do is to walk in cities. Much more than walking in the countryside. I think walking the countryside is great.

But I think I love cities. I love urban environments. And the day that this was suggested, to me by somebody. I had just done, I was over in London for a meeting and I was arranging to meet somebody and we were talking about various things and I had just done this fabulous walk from somewhere up in North London to the centre of London, maybe a four or five mile walk and London is just a, depending on the bits of it you're in, it can be just. It can be just this most glorious walking city because every street changes and it's one of my favorite cities

to walk in. Yeah, no, it really is. It's fabulous to walk in. So I had walked from somewhere north of King's Cross to the center of London and it was just great. And my

colleague said, you ought to write a book about this. Damn it, I should. Why have I never thought of this? and it was immediately obvious to me what a book like that should have in it that it shouldn't be a dull bones and stones as they say story of how our hip was changed in the following way and all the rest of it that actually walking as a human phenomenon is at its core a social phenomenon

that it's something that we humans do together. And I think it's worth reflecting on a core component of that. When humans evolved in Africa and started to make that great walk out of the Great Rift Valley, we conquered the world on foot. We didn't have mechanized transport at the time. We probably maybe were able to tame a few small pack animals to carry goods, but probably not many. We don't really know.

But what we do know is that one guy with a spear wasn't conquering anything. You know, you can go off into the wilderness with your spear and that's it. You might live for a little while, but eventually you'll be taken. What humans did was conquer the world and foot together.

We did it in families. We did it in tribes. We did it in groups. We carried children. We carried food. We walked together. And that's the only way we can have done it because we didn't have flight, we didn't have cars, we had nothing else,

and it had to be in tribes and groups and families. And that means to survive, we have to be exquisitely attuned to the movement of others when we're walking. And as it turns out, we are. You know, if you watch people walking along footpaths and crowded cities, how many times do people bang into each other? They don't. Or if they do, there's something gone very, wrong. We know that the person who shoulders you is being aggressive for no good reason. What we do is we accommodate to each other all the time. And we're so good at this that we can do it even while our heads are stuck on mobile phones because we use our peripheral vision to monitor movement. We can't really see what's there in terms of identifying it,

but we know there's something there because we can detect the movement in our peripheral vision. And this makes good sense because, of course, if you're undertaking these very long walks under what might be very hostile circumstances, the physical environment is very demanding. There's creatures around you that would like to eat you and all of that kind of thing. We have to be able to look out for each other. We have to be attuned to signals of danger from each other. If people look up, we will all look up quickly because, you know, what's that thing up in the sky? if everybody stops because they hear a sound, we all do it together. You know, we're very, very good at this kind of coordinated movement

through time and space together. We can set goals about where we want to go. Tomorrow we're going to walk to that mountain. When we get to that mountain, we're going to look for a stream and we're going to stop there for a few days and replenish ourselves. We're not going to eat the berries on that bush because I know back where we came from, one of our friends was very sick or whatever it happens to be and somebody has to stay awake

and keep an eye out so that the local tigers don't come and feast on us or whatever it might happen to be. But this is my kind of key point that walking is underestimated as a social phenomenon and the profit we get from it is maximized when we do it together. A powerful reminder. You know, the other aspect that I want to add into this mix over here is that as we start to think about how to make this a more regular thing for people, there's a few different approaches. For sure, education like these podcasts, your book are helpful because immediately people now see something that they thought of as such a simple aspect. Walking, what do I need to know about walking? I do it on a regular basis.

How much could it really matter? I don't hear anybody championing it. You know, my doctor's not out there giving me a prescription for, you know, walking at the most, they're saying, you know, the advice that hasn't worked for many years, eat less and exercise more, but nobody's really championing walking, but then you hear you want a podcast. So you see your book, you get a chance to read it and all of a sudden a light bulb goes off and says, wow, there's magic, there's gold in this thing that is so simple and you see the pathway and the vision of yourself doing this on a more regular basis. Now you get fired up and, you know, on this podcast, we know, never know who's getting a chance to listen and you now think well how can I make this more of a

regular habit for my family and then my community like my men's group okay great man morning is a great idea and then you're thinking on a city level and a global level you know you've mentioned you like to walk in different cities and you've also shared that in Japan Japan has one of the highest degrees of walking and daily steps out of any other culture that's out there what are some lessons that they've figured out that we can start to bring into our sitting planning or people are designing office space or other areas to just make it more likely that people don't have to think about walking. It's just happening naturally as part of their life. Well, they've done something which I think is a miracle of the modern world. You know, you take a city like Tokyo, it's the biggest

urban conservation in the world depending on your estimate it's at least 40 million maybe 42, 44 million people spread out over an area of several hundred square miles they don't have on street car parking

if you look at pictures of Tokyo there's no on street car parking at all. Japan is a small set of islands with a large population 130 140 million people and Tokyo is by far the largest city

absorbing, as I said, maybe 40 million or more people. So they have superb public transport and people have to walk to their local train station, but the train is every couple of minutes. So you never, ever have to worry about the frequency of the train. And then when they get to the other end of the train, they walk to their office. So that's where they're building up all the walking. And because there's no on-street parking, your car either has to go into an underground car park or you just can't bring it at all. And remember, Japan is one of the world's great car manufacturing companies. It's not that they don't manufacture cars, you know, Toyota and Honda and all of the other great brands that come from there. But cities for them are for people.

They're not car-centric cities. They're people-centric cities. And they're exceptionally dense, and the easiest way to get around them is on foot. And that's how they clock up the miles. I think in the US you've got loads of space so the natural thing for people to do is just to spread out but your kind of design codes depend on where you are you know Manhattan is basically built out as an environment

so the only place you can go is up and the consequent room for cars is restricted. Boston is somewhat similar So, you know, I think the key thing is to focus on individual movement and densifying neighborhoods in a way that allow people to do all of the things that they want to do in their daily lives, but in such a way as they're easy to get to. Now, there's this mad conspiracy theory about the 15-minute city where there are all sorts of mad ideas going around about. I'm not familiar with this.

Can you explain what that is? Okay, so in the UK, the country next door to us at the moment, there's a conspiracy theory going around that the 15-minute city is an idea that is to restrict people to within a 15-minute walk of their house or where they live. But actually, the invention of the 15-minute city is a Parisian thing. And the idea is very, very simple. Paris, again, is a, I hope any of your listeners who haven't been there should get the chance. to go there. A very, very dense city. It's really, really packed with people. The idea in Paris is that when you walk out of the front door of your apartment, all of the things for your daily life should be within a 15-minute walk for you. You should be able to get to a local shop easily. You should be

able to get to a metro station easily. You should get to a school easily. The local restaurants should all be close. So the idea is that people aren't going to walk more than 15 minutes to anything. It's a rule of thumb rather than anything else. And I think if we take this idea a little bit more seriously, what you'll find is that people will walk but within limits. So if you're providing, for example, new metro services or new high-speed rail or whatever, people won't walk to a train station that's more than 15 minutes away. If it's 12 minutes walk, they will do it. But if it's 17 or 18 minutes walk, they typically won't. They will look to drive to the station. So we've got these weird kinks in how we see things. And the idea behind the 15 minute city is literally just to make

everything nice and handy. So in terms of city design, the idea is very straightforward, which is that give less space to cars, don't have so much space for car parts. Don't have so much space for car parking, have much more space for amenities for people, give space to cafes, to trees, to shops, to places for people to live, make places compatible with multiple lifestyles, working from home, working from the local office, have your library close, all of those kinds of things. And over time, we can create cities that are much more human-centric and that are focused around the needs of individuals rather than on the needs of cars. It's a hard ask.

We've been spending 100 years building out of towns and cities, you know, since the widespread advent of the car in the 1920s in one direction. But I think the next maybe 100 years, we're going to try a different experiment. Shane, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for being on the podcast. As we wind down here, last couple questions, are there any ways that, that you, in particular in your life, have found to sort of combine the social aspects and the power of walking together. Are there any calendar events or reoccurring things that you have,

any traditions, rituals that you have with your family or any of the people that you work with or colleagues that has just been something that has made it easier for you to regularly get in your steps and enjoy the benefits of walking? Yeah, so I like to walk and walk a lot, as you might surmise. My favourite walking partner in the world is my wife. So I walk with her. When you guys typically, what's your routine together? We would typically try and go for a walk together every evening.

If we're both working from home, we would typically go for a walk directly after lunch. We would typically try and build walks into things. things regularly. At weekends, we always say we're going for a walk in X, wherever X happens to be. It's just one of those things that we just get walks in wherever and whenever we can. We have a great conversation all the time. And I have a 15-year-old who affects not to like walking, but when we can get her to go for a walk, she loves it after the fact that she hates it just before we do it. Typical teenager. I'm sure I was the same way. And on a practical level, do, you know, at this stage right now, do you or your wife track? You know, I'm sure you probably keep your smartphone. Oh, I keep my smartphone on all the time. And I track the number of steps that I do every day. A happy day for me is when I get to 12 or 14,000 steps. An unhappy day for me is when I'm below eight. Sometimes that happens. But that's life. But I, I, I, What I do notice is in terms of feeling good and feeling at one with the world,

when I'm somewhere decently north of 10,000 steps in the 12, 14,000 range, I really feel good about that. Yeah, one of the best features about a lot of these new smartphones is that I don't like Apple, you can add your family and you can see how many steps they're getting. And so every so often, my mom, I'll check in on her like, like, hey, mom, like dad's at 18,000 steps today, you know, we got to get you up to like, at least. 7,000 and then now I you know it's working because now my mom is checking it on me and she's like you must have had a really busy day because your steps are like 3,000 I'm like I know I didn't get a

walk in those days are the worst they're the worst you feel stale you feel stuck you don't feel energized about life every problem you have is sort of magnified and the thing is you don't know why but as soon as you start walking in you're like oh I get it I was stuck and you don't sleep properly which is something we haven't really talked about is oh could you just mention that just because it's so key. What's the relationship between sleep, sleep pressure and walking? Yes. So there's a lot of things to say about it. But I think the first thing that we should say is we've been talking about walking as a great health enhancer. The other absolutely amazing health enhancer is regular good quality sleep. Sleep resets your body every night. It does all sorts of

marvelous things. One of the things that we know now that it does is when you're asleep, you get this kind of interesting activity in the brain which sluces out all of the garbage and other crud that builds up in the brain during the course of the day. We know that when you stay up all night, you feel lousy, you get headachey, and your performance is the equivalent of somebody who's suffered a mild concussion. It's a really really, really unpleasant phenomenon. One of the things to help you sleep is to lose body heat. And as we go to sleep, our body temperature start to fall. We typically lose between one and maybe two degrees during the course of core body temperature during the course of the night. But one of the

best ways to help you sleep is to get your ambient light levels down so that your body is pace and ready for sleep. And I have a theory which I've never been able to test apart from on myself, which is that going for a short stroll, not a vigorous one, but a walk at night for maybe 10 minutes or so in the hour or so before you go to bed is a really, really good way of signaling to your body that it's time for sleep. Why is that? Because it's dark.

Ambient light levels are very, very, very good. very low and you're getting that signal that you're not getting. This room is a very bright room. So my body thinks it's the middle of the day. But outdoors, you know, there's only street lighting. My body will know very, very quickly that it's nighttime. I think an issue with exercise at night is that you can heat yourself up too much. So if you want to sleep after exercise before you go to bed, have a cold shower. That's a hard thing to do. But what you really want to do is dump heat from your body, get your body temperature down. Getting into bed when you're overly heated is a bad recipe for sleep.

Great reminder. And a good one to conclude on, especially because it's so late for you and you're probably going to be gearing up for sleep relatively shortly. But Shane. 20 minutes, half an hour, it will be time. Shane, this has been fantastic. Again, I'm such a fan of your work. It's truly the work of a master when you can take something so simple and yet show people

all these areas that they might have looked over it. And you help people rediscover the power of walking in a way that's accessible to them. It's no cost. It's something that we can all. do and incorporate and we feel energized to do it because of all these different benefits that are there. So it's truly because of you laying out that argument inside of your book that we benefit from that. So thank you again so much for coming on the podcast. I deeply appreciate you. Well, thank you so much for the invite. It's actually been, I've really enjoyed this conversation.

Yeah, it's been such a blast. I'm an enthusiast for walking. Fantastic. Well, we'll link to your book that's available. available. And you also have a new book out, which we're going to invite you back on the podcast for. So if you wouldn't mind, just can you mention your books and how people might be able to stay in touch with you? Yeah. So the easiest way to keep up with me is I have a substack, which is at brainpisa.com. And if people want to sign up there, I see Drew has signed up just before we came on. I signed up for a year. I know. I'm very grateful to you for doing that. I post a piece looking at life through a neuroscience lens once a week.

So there's an awful lot of writing on that site. And then I have a new book out called Talking Heads, The New Science of How Conversation Shapes Our Worlds. So I've gone from walking to talking. And some of the themes in my walking book are reflected a little in the talking book. in that many of the brain systems that are involved in walking and navigating our world are also the same brain systems that are involved in imagining how our world can be different, how our future can be different. And the medium by which we do this is the one that we've just

been exercising this other amazing human capacity, which is our capacity for conversation, our capacity for talking. You've basically become an unofficial ambassador for man morning because you've taken the walking aspect and the talking aspects that you've written books about them. We just should be handing out your books to everybody who's out there who wants to start a chapter of their own man morning group in their local city. Well, I can't wait to have you back on the podcast to talk all about that book. But in the meantime, Shane, thank you again for being on the podcast. We'll link to all those links in the show notes.

And please everybody do subscribe to the substack as well. Shane, thank you so much. Drew, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Hi, everyone. Drew here. Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already, subscribe, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app.

And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me. And it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share it with a friend. Share with a friend who would benefit from listening. Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you about something that I've been working on that I'm super excited about. It's my weekly newsletter. And it's called Try This. Every Friday. Yes, every Friday, 52 weeks a year, I send out an easy-to-digest protocol of simple steps that you or anyone you love can follow to optimize your own health.

We cover everything from nutrition to mindset to metabolic health, sleep, community, longevity, and so much more. If you want to get on this email list, which is, by the way, free and get my weekly step-by-step protocols for whole-body health and optimization, click the link in the show notes that's called Try This or just go to Drew. perot.com. That's D-H-R-U-P-U-R-O-H-I-T dot com and click on the tab that says, try this.