Julian Dorey Podcast - #230 - Neuroscientist Exposes Biohacking's Biggest Scammer | Louisa Nicola

Episode Date: August 22, 2024

(***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Louisa Nicola is a Neurophysiologist and Performance Based Coach. She focuses on Alzheimers Research and hosts the Neuro Experience Podcast. LOUISA’S LINKS:... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/louisanicola_/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@louisanicola?si=BGz-VSmJeDurd1Oe Website: https://www.neuroathletics.com.au/ EPISODE LINKS: - Julian Dorey PODCAST MERCH: https://juliandorey.myshopify.com/ - Support our Show on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey - Join our DISCORD: https://discord.gg/Ajqn5sN6 JULIAN YT CHANNELS: - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP ***TIMESTAMPS*** 00:00 - Studying Brain Health (Alzheimer's, Dementia, etc.) and Human Performance 10:31 - Most Important Blood Markers & Predicting Long Term Health 21:16 - Breaking Down the Brain & Making Elite Athletes Better 34:13 - How to Preserve Brain Health & Create Lasting Longevity 42:51 - Importance of Supplements & The Most Important Habit that Can Change Your Life 55:53 - How to Improve Sleep & Dangers of Lack of Sleep 01:07:11 - Taking Drugs & Its Impact on Health 01:16:03 - Pharmaceutical Industries Corrupt Nature & Ozempic 01:24:33 - Alzheimers & Tragic Rise & Possible Cure, This Hormone Can Make or Break You 01:36:01 - Inflammation & Beware of Certain Supplement Brands 01:46:51 - Why People Struggle to be Healthy 01:56:33 - Reacting to the Man Who Wants to Live Forever & Exposing Gary Brecka 02:15:09 - Louisa On Career, Having Family & Kids, Social Media Causing Infidelity 02:26:03 - How Divorce Causes Major Health Complications 02:34:31 - Sunlight & Most Important Supplement To Take 02:41:11 - Valuable Accessories & Cancer Research 02:51:29 - Find Louisa CREDITS: - Hosted & Produced by Julian D. Dorey - Intro Editor & Producer: Alessi Allaman: https://www.instagram.com/allaman.docyou/ ~ Get $150 Off The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Mattress / Mattress Cover (USING CODE: “JULIAN DOREY”): https://eight-sleep.ioym.net/trendifier Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey ~ Music via Artlist.io ~ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 230 - Louisa Nicola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:00 He's not even a scientist. Yeah, what is his background? He's nothing, I don't know. He is a businessman. He was working in insurance and he was calculating when somebody would die based on blood work and based on how risk, like their risk profile.
Starting point is 00:00:18 So he was predicting death, basically saying like, if we take you on on our insurance, like he would give the insurance companies, yep, this guy, you know, he's gonna probably live for the next 20 or 30 years i don't know too much about him all i know is that a lot of things he says is so bad it should be it's so unethical and so illegal he's just working with grant cardone and grant cardone we know has made millions upon hundreds of millions of dollars in the real estate industry. Now he was like, let's attack the health industry because it's big right now.
Starting point is 00:00:48 How do I make a lot of money? Gary knows how to talk. Gary just speaks out of his, he has no idea what he's saying. He contradicts himself every day. He says things are just so false. Like for example, he openly said that the brain is a non-metabolic organ. The brain is the most metabolic organ. He also said, by the way, he said the reason the national football team for New Zealand. Okay. So they do this dance, this historical dance. The haka, yeah. And the reason why the Australian football team, the All Blacks, do the haka is to increase oxygenation to the brain. And it's like,
Starting point is 00:01:28 first of all, Australia is not New Zealand. You fool. Okay. Not only did he get his geography wrong, but he also stated that this historical haka, the haka is a historical dance. It's got nothing to do with oxygenation to the brain. What's up, guys? If you're on Spotify right now, please follow the show so that you don't miss any future episodes and leave a five-star review. Thank you. Louisa, it's great to have you here. Hello. It's good to be here. How's my Australian accent coming along? I've been working on it. Really?
Starting point is 00:02:02 Just for you. Just for you to come in here. You know, no one can actually ever do an Australian accent. Every time they try to mimic it, they're getting like an English accent, a South African accent. Yeah. Yeah. It's a tough one. There's like little flows on some of the words. It's like a little different. It's very subtle. But anyway, you actually back in the end of February when I was talking with you, really changed my life in one simple way. You told me that I had to sleep with an eye mask, to which I was like, fuck that shit. And then you're like, no, no, you should really do this because I sleep in a room that has a skylight and then the room is right outside. I remember it's all glass, So all the light is coming in. And I was telling you I was having severe like – oh my god.
Starting point is 00:02:47 Why am I blanking out on the word? The word for stress? Cortisol. Yeah, cortisol increased problems. Like even my doctors were like, dude, you got to calm it down. And I'm telling you within a week of wearing that, completely gone. Changed your life. It's like actually uncanny.
Starting point is 00:03:05 When I went to the Amazon with Paul Rosalie, we're out there in the jungle. I was sleeping with an eye mask. Like I literally won't sleep without it. So thank you for doing that. No, I am obsessed with my eye mask. I don't go anywhere without it. Yeah. It's like sometimes the answers to certain things are so simple and I think you just
Starting point is 00:03:24 kind of overthink it. And that's just – that's a prime example right there. And welcome to the fitness and supplement industry. 100%. We're going to get into all that today. But at the very beginning, just for people out there who aren't familiar with your work, you have an amazing Instagram. I'm going to put the link in the description below. You are the brain expert. You're the performance brain expert, I might say. So how did you get
Starting point is 00:03:50 into this in the first place? Is this something you dreamed of as a little girl? You wanted to become an expert on the brain? No. So I was a triathlete, a very competitive triathlete in Australia. I raced for Australia. I was training anywhere from 30 to 40 hours a week. So I was a high performance individual myself. And I was always a swimmer growing up. So I loved sport. I loved human performance. I loved competition and I loved medicine. So I was obviously, I was at uni at the time, college, if you will. I did an undergraduate degree in exercise physiology. I then went on and did a master's of pure mathematics. And it was during the master's degree, you know, I was working on algorithms for pharmaceutical companies.
Starting point is 00:04:36 And that's, I was around 22 at the time. And I got my firsthand look at the brain because I was in a cadaver lab where you cut open bodies and you were able to examine them for research purposes. And when I saw the human brain, I thought, this is unbelievable. And so at the age of 22, 23, that's when I started to dedicate my life to it. Discover the exciting action of BetMGM Casino. Check out a wide variety of table games with a live dealer or enjoy over 3,000 games to choose from like Cash Eruption, UFC Gold Blitz. Make instant deposits or same-day withdrawals.
Starting point is 00:05:11 Download the BetMGM Ontario app today. Visit BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. 19 plus to wager Ontario only. Please gamble responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. Then MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. I went to Sydney Medical School. I graduated in neurophysiology, which is a subspecialty of neurology. And now 10 years on, I'm well and truly deep in the weeds of research.
Starting point is 00:05:43 And it all starts with looking at dead bodies. That's it. Some about women. You guys love the whole like... Really? Oh my God, like the whole true crime genre. Yeah, the morbid stuff. It's like 85% women. Oh wow, I didn't know that. There's something in that. I don't know what that is. But what does a brain look like? Like when you see it outside the body? Well, okay. First and foremost, this one had no blood flow, so it wasn't pink in any way. But look, it's about two pounds and it feels like hard jello. If you feel the consistency of jello, imagine it in a bowl, you put your fingers in, that's pretty much what the brain feels like. And it's got four lobes and then it's got this
Starting point is 00:06:21 tiny little brain at the back of it called the cerebellum. But it's just, it's got four lobes, and then it's got this tiny little brain at the back of it called the cerebellum. But it's just a marvelous organism, a marvelous organ, depending on how you're looking at it. If you're looking at a diseased brain, such as Alzheimer's disease, which we'll get into, that looks remarkably different to a healthy young brain. Oh, it literally physically looks different. Yeah, you get a reduction in brain volume, brain size, synapses. Whoa. Yeah. The most amazing thing is in Australia, I've connected with the Australian Brain Bank.
Starting point is 00:06:54 So they're getting all of the donations from football players who have been hit in the head and they've passed away from chronic traumatic encephalopathy. You can cut open their brains. You can literally see like holes in there. Yeah. So you hear some of the stories is not supposed to take like a car crash every play. It's not. For a decade. That's correct. And it's quite scary what actually happens to it. And I'm sure we're going to go through a bit of a neuroanatomy lesson for
Starting point is 00:07:37 everybody as well without boring them, of course. Oh, no, you're not boring. You're a very good teacher with this stuff. We'll have fun with it. Yeah. So when you say you are, what's the exact term? Neurophysiologist. Neurophysiologist, and you focus on performance. I focus on human performance, yes. So I work with a bunch of executives. I have 25 clients with me that I work full time with, but I'm also an Alzheimer's disease researcher. So I'm currently completing a body of work and doing a doctorate just solely focused on looking at the correlation of exercise for mild cognitive impairment patients, Alzheimer's disease, which is a very
Starting point is 00:08:19 big undertaking. I love that. We're going to put a pin in that. I want to talk a lot about Alzheimer's today and the work you do there. But just on the first part with you focusing as a neurophysiologist, focus on human performance. You also work with some athletes too, right? Yeah, I work with some NBA players and some soccer players and some NFL players. Why do they come to you and what types of things do you do with them? And if you want to use an example across an executive or then an athlete as well, feel free. First and foremost, most of the people that come to me are around 40 years old and above. There seems to be something different. Now, you and I haven't hit that 40-year-old milestone, but from what I see observationally and in the data, it seems like a pretty scary age to get into because we see a decline in many things. We see a decline in our
Starting point is 00:09:10 cognitive performance. I'm going to be using that word a lot today, that term, which basically references our ability to think, process information, react to certain things. So we see a decline in that. We see a massive decline in our strength and our muscle mass. In fact, strength outweighs muscle mass. So we lose strength faster as we get older than what we do muscle mass. Can you explain that a little more? Yeah. So there's muscle mass, which is literally the growth of our muscle cells, how big they are, but then there's strength. And if you imagine yourself holding onto a bar and just holding yourself there, that's like, how strong are you? And that seems to decrease as opposed to muscle mass. At 40.
Starting point is 00:09:57 At 40 and then at 50, it just keeps, it's a rapid decline. So there could be a reason as to why many folks are coming to see me at that 40, 45-year age mark. A lot of men and women by that age have had their kids. So they're starting to feel things, things that you don't feel when you're 25. You know, I'm sure you can, even me, I'm mid-30s. The way I used to be when I was 25, I'm a completely different person now. So when people come to me, they're really looking for getting that extra edge. So I don't work with diseased patients, if you will. So I don't work with people who've got chronic complications
Starting point is 00:10:34 anymore. Guys, if you're not following me on Instagram, you can get me at Julian Dory podcast, or also on my personal page at Julian D. Dory. Those links are in the description below. You can also follow me on X at Julian D. Dory. Those links are in the description below. You can also follow me on X at Julian D. Dory. That link is in the description below. And as always, please smash that subscribe button if you haven't already and hit that like button on the video. It is a huge, huge help.
Starting point is 00:10:56 I appreciate all of you who have been subbing and all of you who are liking all these videos. Thank you. So people are coming to me. They're like, you know what? I'm just not feeling the best. Maybe I'm fatigued. I'm not thinking as fast as I was. I'm not as sharp as what I used to be. So I go through everything to examine who they are from every single cell. I'm doing blood work.
Starting point is 00:11:18 Oh, you do blood work. I do blood work, but I don't just do the regular blood work that you'll get from your practitioner. How's yours different? Oh, I'm doing intense blood work. We're taking around, I think around 200 different biomarkers. Yeah. And for people out there, when you say biomarker, what are you referring to? That's something like, you know, vitamin D is a biomarker. So when you go to a regular physician, maybe they're just checking a metabolic panel.
Starting point is 00:11:42 There's about 25 biomarkers in there. So I'm doing everything because I'm getting to know every organ, everything that's happening in your blood. I'm then doing DNA. I want to understand what is your predisposition to certain factors such as chronic disease, maybe how you handle stress, food intolerances, et cetera. We're doing urine. I'm doing sweat.
Starting point is 00:12:07 I want to understand all the different metabolites that come out during your sweat and urine. Do you just literally collect it? I don't, but they go and do that. Yeah. So we're doing blood. Thank God. That would be a very invasive, invasive form of coaching. After that, we're doing a VO2 max test. I want to know how well can your body utilize oxygen? I want to know how fit you are. We're doing strength tests. We're doing muscle fiber testing. We then move on. We do a brain scan. I want to understand how efficient is your brain. This sounds really expensive. It is. It's expensive. But look, it gives not just life extension, we're improving healthspan, we're improving lifespan. We're picking up on things that these people didn't know that they
Starting point is 00:13:00 had. And not just that, we're making them perform better, essentially making them more money. And I know that for a fact now, I've been on Wall Street for, I've got some major hedge funds that we work with as well. Yeah, Wendy Rhodes over here. Yeah. And let me tell you, the combination of everything that we do accumulates in an increase in their bottom line. It doesn't surprise me. I mean, all the things you're testing, I kind of want to go back to the beginning of that though and run through these because it's very cool to me. But with the blood work, like you said, if people out there have done their blood work with their primary physician, it's usually 25, 30,
Starting point is 00:13:37 but you're doing 200. So out of the, call it 170, 175 extra biomarkers you look at, what are the most important ones that you think generally doctors don't usually check out? Well, first and foremost, we'll just look at the lipid panel. That's your fats, your cholesterols, et cetera. You'll go to a standard physician and maybe they'll just test something called your total cholesterol, total triglycerides. They'll do LDL and HDL, right? That's a standard measurement. And normally they'll look at you and say, you know, your LDL is, that's quote unquote,
Starting point is 00:14:11 which I hate saying this, the bad cholesterol, right? They'll say, you know, that's a, it's about 110, you seem to be okay. So you're fine with that. And then they won't do anything else. But we now know from the data that we can go further to test for things such as atherosclerosis. That's when you end up with cardiovascular disease because you're clogging up your arteries with plaque, fatty plaque, right? So I go deeper than that. And I test something called APOB, for example. I will test LP little a. You can ask your doctor for this. LP little a is a genetic risk factor for cardiovascular disease. I had one guy, 52 years old, huge, he's a partner, he's a lawyer. So not a trader or portfolio manager. He said to me,
Starting point is 00:14:59 I'm coming to you. He goes, I've seen the cardiologist. He just had prostate cancer. He got over that. He goes, I've seen a cardiologist. I seem to be fine there. He goes, I've seen the cardiologist. He just had prostate cancer. He got over that. He goes, I've seen a cardiologist. I seem to be fine there. He said, but my dad passed away suddenly of a heart attack, and so did my uncle, dad's brother. He said, my cardiologist just told me that was just a freak accident. That's just what happened.
Starting point is 00:15:18 He said, I want to mitigate that. I said, great. Can you show me what your cardiologist tested? I looked at it. I said, that's really great. I want to go a bit deeper. I went deeper and I did the LP little a, lipoprotein A. And I found that his was, it was 170. Why is a cardiologist not checking that? You tell me. And that's the problem that we're having now with mainstream doctors. They're
Starting point is 00:15:41 around 20, 30 years behind what we know today. And that's because of regulatory boards. That's because they've got a high patient load to deal with. They don't have time to look outside of that. But anyway, standard measurements show that if you have an LP little a over 60, you should immediately go and see your cardiologist. Okay. Because that's a scary mark. He had 170. What was the one you were fucked up on, Alessi, we were talking about? It was- Was that APOB or- No, it was LDL. It might have been LDL. Yeah. So American Heart Association will say, which is where we get the guidelines from,
Starting point is 00:16:23 right? Where physicians are like, okay, this is our guidelines. We'll say, you have an LDL of 110, that's fine. The benchmark is less than 100. But what I look for and what my team looks for is we look for two things in blood. We look for trends and we look for ratios. So we couple it with your age and we say, well, if you're 50 years old and you've got an LDL of 110, that means you're trending upwards. By the time you get to 120, 130, you're going to be prescribed a statin, which is a cholesterol-lowering medication. So at 50, I don't want you... Even at 30, I don't want you to have an LDL of 110. So we don't just have a problem of not ordering biomarkers. We have a problem of standardizing the test and figuring out where do you sit on these
Starting point is 00:17:08 lines. So we believe you should have an LDL less than 80. I got to get mine checked on that. I still have to do that. So I got to share that with you when I get that done. And then outside of lippers, we do hydration. I want to know, what's your electrolyte balance? How hydrated are you?
Starting point is 00:17:27 Hydration is huge. Most of us are chronically dehydrated. Not you. You said you drink like 150 ounces a day. That's a lot. Yeah. I don't know if you're having any electrolytes. I have.
Starting point is 00:17:36 I was just going to ask you. I have like supplemental electrolytes. I drink at least one of those a day. Yeah, that's wonderful. And then look, we're going deep into vitamin D, vitamin B. I want to know your homocysteine. Homocysteine is this protein that builds up in the blood and it's a risk factor for cardiovascular disease and for Alzheimer's disease. And I know that if I get a homocysteine level of, let's just say 12, which another client of mine had, I want homocysteine below seven or below eight at the very least. If he's got 12, I think to myself, does he have what we call an MTHFR gene mutation, which means that you don't have the ability to metabolize B vitamins. And if you don't have that,
Starting point is 00:18:25 that means once you take in food that have B vitamins, it just goes out the urine and B vitamins are responsible for lowering homocysteine. So that's not on a standard measurement at the doctor either. Yeah. It sounds like you're doing a lot of things that aren't standard measurement. You would also mention you're doing DNA testing. We do DNA, yeah. So how does that work? Because I just think 23 and me and you figure it out. But what do you do? So we've got around 20,000 genes in the human genome. And I want to understand just what are the most prominent ones that you could be predisposed to certain chronic conditions.
Starting point is 00:19:03 Let's take Alzheimer's disease, for example. We know that there are genes involved in that. We've got the ApoE genes. ApoE4 is the gene or the allele responsible for increasing your risk of getting this disease. What's an allele? So you've got two alleles. You get one from mom, one from dad, and that's your gene. Oh, okay. Got it. So if you possess two, like ApoE4, you raise your risk by 12 times. So you're looking, that's mostly to look at chronic patterns. For example, the BRCA gene, which is involved in breast cancer. Oh, that's right. But I do want to be mindful to point out family history
Starting point is 00:19:46 because you do get these alleles from mum and dad. If mum and grandmother haven't had breast cancer, then it probably doesn't warrant you going and testing for this gene, but you can and that's what high performance is, right? Because we're not just – I don't want to get you to just a healthy status. We're all – I think now it's safe to say the three of us are at that status. I want you people come to me because they want to get even higher than that. And so the way that I like everyone to think about it is we all have something called a physiological potential. You right now, if I score it out of 100, and this is what we do, I go and get all of the blood
Starting point is 00:20:26 biomarkers, urine, stool. Sometimes we do hair analysis if we think that there's some- Hair analysis. Yeah. It's interesting. Just maybe if you've got lead exposure, I want to go deeper on that. We get your VO2 max test. We get all of the tests that we've done. Let's say we've done 12 tests and we put it through an algorithm and it spits out a score out of 100. And if I say to you, hey, your score came back as 70. I want to know what's the 30% that we're missing. So you compile now, let's just say for an average guy, maybe he's got a hundred million under asset management, right? If he's doing really well now, how much better
Starting point is 00:21:07 could he do if he was working at 30% better than what he is now? Yeah. Yeah. So if you, maybe at the beginning, just for people out there, obviously like studying performances has been a big phenomenon over the past five, six years. Guys like Andrew Huberman are huge now. So a lot of people are getting more familiar with things. But for those listening who, you know, want to understand exactly how the brain correlates to all this stuff, I think a good thing to do would be to break down the different parts of the brain. You started earlier by mentioning the cerebellum, but like how the brain works and how it, I guess, how it affects us physically and mentally. Yeah. I love this because the brain is responsible for everything that you are, everything you do, everything you see, how you think, how you feel, how you perform is
Starting point is 00:22:00 controlled by the brain. And the brain is nothing but neurons. And neurons are brain cells. We've got around 87 billion of them. That's a lot. That's a lot, right? And what happens is these neurons, they're just like the cells in your body, but they have something called an axon that comes off it, like a leg, right? We'll get into that. And these neurons communicate with each other via something called a synapse. It's just a chemical reaction that occurs between each brain cell. Every neuron, so you take this and maybe Alessi can pull out a calculator right now. You've got 87 billion neurons each having around 10,000 connections, right? So if you multiply 87 billion times 10,000 connections. So if you multiply 87 billion times 10,000, and by the way,
Starting point is 00:22:49 some of them can have 30,000 connections. That's huge. And those connections are how we think, how we breathe, how we do, and how we perform. Do we build those? We build those as we get older. It matures and it stops at around 25. Got it. So we got 8.7, 8 of the 14. A lot. A lot. That's the answer. And so these connections are what we're worried about. And once these connections die off, we start to get a decline in our performance, our ability to contract a muscle, our ability to run fast, our ability to just be who we are. So we lose connections as we age. And that's scary, right? And I'll get into that later because it's about how do we preserve those connections. But the
Starting point is 00:23:36 stronger the connections are, the better you're going to be with thinking, processing, moving, et cetera. You're going to be a more high performance person. So the brain, 87 billion neurons, it's got four lobes and they're all responsible for something different. And the most primitive part of the brain is the frontal lobe. It's the biggest in terms of how many neurons it has. And that's controls our functioning, our cognitive performance. Now the brain has, we've got, it's the most vascular rich organ as well in the entire body. That means it has the most blood vessels. So it's a very hungry organ. Okay. 2% of the body weight of our entire body weight, but it takes up 20% of the total calories that we eat. So it's a hungry organ. And then the brain is part of what we call the central nervous system. You've got
Starting point is 00:24:26 the brain and the spinal cord. But then we move over to the side of it and we've got something called the peripheral nervous system. And that houses our sympathetic nervous system and our parasympathetic nervous system. Have you ever heard of the fight or flight? Of course. Yeah. So the central nervous system is the brain and spinal cord. The peripheral nervous system is all of the connections that come off of the spinal cord and they go into our muscles and our organs. So that's how we communicate with the muscles and the organs because our brain sends a message down to what we call an upper motor neuron. It goes down the spinal cord.
Starting point is 00:25:08 It goes into the peripheral nervous system, and that's how we maybe throw a ball. I'm sorry if I'm way off with this, but it's coming back to me. Is this where neuroplasticity comes into? So neuroplasticity is the brain's ability to wire together. So when one neuron fires together, they wire together, meaning that we can build new connections every time we do something. Right. So let's use your example of throwing a ball.
Starting point is 00:25:33 If I want to, let's say you're working with an athlete and you're working with an NFL quarterback who wants to improve his release time, right, from cock to release, would that pretty much involve slowly building up a new pathway to be able to get that quicker? Yes, but that would also involve understanding his reaction time, which is what we do when we do an EEG brain scan. A what? So we do, when I told you earlier, we do a brain scan, we use something called an EEG, an electroencephalogram. So it's one of those caps that you put on your head with all these leads coming out of it. Yes, right.
Starting point is 00:26:13 Usually you'll see a neurophysiologist, such as myself, to use this if maybe you've had a stroke or maybe you've had a seizure afterwards. This assesses the functioning of your brain. So it's important to understand that with the brain and with neuroanatomy, there is something called structural components, which is like how your brain, the structure of it. Then you've got the functional components. That's how the brain cells are functioning. So I want to assess that. And that's where reaction time and information processing speed comes down. So it's not assess that. And that's where reaction time and information processing speed comes down. So it's not about how fast can you release the ball? It's how fast can your brain speak to your arm? So how would you train something like that?
Starting point is 00:26:55 Well, it's a very interesting question. We take into consideration how well is your brain functioning? What's the metabolism of the brain? energetically, is it up to scratch? And then it comes down to eye contact. Like we look at vision as well. And then it is, it's just doing perfect practice of the ball. Yeah. So I'm just thinking about the difference between maybe in baseball, to use another example, the best hitter versus a guy who can barely stay in the majors. You're talking about a hundredth of a second. Correct.
Starting point is 00:27:32 And we're measuring that. And you're measuring that. Correct, yeah. So if you can improve that, you can effectively take a guy who has a great baseline skill and make him a superstar. Yeah. And the thing that people don't understand, yeah, and I'm trying to like bang it into people, rarely does it have anything to do
Starting point is 00:27:50 with physicality because a major league baseball player, how many times has he hit a ball? A lot. A lot. So he knows how to do it. He knows the positioning. So it doesn't become, you end up tapping out once skill is really at its maximum, which it should be if you're already in the major league, what is it then? It comes down to neuron energy. It comes down to how you- Neuron energy. Well, it comes down to how well is your brain performing? Even if you have a mere 2% of dehydration, you can muck your speed up by even a 10th of a second, which means a lot. Yeah. So when you're working with people, it's not so much,
Starting point is 00:28:33 well, of course it is to, to improve them and fix them on all their different markers that you set out, but they also have to develop a lot of long-term habits to keep that production. So what are the most important things? We've got extreme habits. We've got this pyramid, right? And the pyramid consists of exercise, sleep, and nutrition. They are the building blocks to a high-performing individual. Everything else is an accessory.
Starting point is 00:29:04 Okay, let's start with exercise. Exercise and what it does for the brain. Yeah. building blocks to a high performing individual. Everything else is an accessory. Okay. Let's start with exercise. Exercise and what it does for the brain. Absolutely fundamental, right? But you're probably thinking now, but Louise, if you're working with high performance athletes, of course they're exercising. Of course they are. That's great. Exercise does many things. The first thing that it does is it delivers more oxygen and nutrients to the brain. And the way it does this is our heart has the biggest vessel in the heart is called the aorta. And after the aorta, we have branching out into the brain from there. The aorta comes up and we've got carotid arteries that sit here. Then we've got vertebral arteries that go at the
Starting point is 00:29:45 back. They supply the posterior part of the brain with blood. The anterior part is through the carotid arteries. So every time your heart pumps, you get a flush of oxygen and nutrients. That's what blood is. So we're delivering oxygen and nutrients to blood. That's the first thing that exercise does. The second thing is we get cardiac remodeling. Cardiac remodeling, that sounds heavy. Yeah. Well, all that means is your heart muscle is made of actual muscle, just like the muscle here. And we can remodel it. We can make it stronger. We can make it more durable and more efficient. So every time we are utilizing it in that way, we get a stronger heart. So we remodel our entire cardiac system. That sounds, some of the things you describe, it's like, I understand Western medicine, certainly there's some things we're behind on
Starting point is 00:30:39 and some say accepted orders of business that maybe shouldn't be accepted anymore. But like, you know, obviously you're incredibly knowledgeable and you study all this stuff, but do you ever get from people like, wait a second, you're not a doctor. Is that ever something where people have hesitation on that? Because you're doing things to me that I'm like, this sounds like all the shit a doctor needs to do. Yeah. But the thing thing is doctors you've got to think of like what doctor are you talking about a cardiologist are you talking about a neurologist yeah well i mean every single year something new comes out yeah okay it's very hard for you know my mother
Starting point is 00:31:18 and my father see uh their regular doctor i think she's about 75 now. And she says to them, you know, we fight a lot. And she's like, and your daughter keeps ringing me telling me to order you an LP little a and we didn't study that back then. Like LP little a is like a, so you've got to think of it like that. Yeah. I mean, well, that's, that's, that's not the right attitude to have either. Like we're constantly developing new innovations on how health is tracked. Yeah. And most of the information that like anyone can argue with the information that I'm giving, but everything is, can be 100% backed by academic resources. Yeah. Yeah. So in, in your exercise part of the pyramid though, what are, you know, we were talking about
Starting point is 00:32:04 athletes. That's not the best example. Cause like you said, they, they are technically like they should be exercising a lot before you work with them. But with, let's say with some of the executives who aren't exercising at all, how do you like, do you have a specific protocol to ramp them up? Are there things you want to see them doing in the gym more than others or things you want to see them doing in the gym more than others or things you want to see them stay away from? You know, the most important thing is actually behavior. I can give you all the knowledge that you need. I can tell you what to do. I want to understand your behavior. You know,
Starting point is 00:32:40 I think that a wonderful coach knows how to take a person from where they are today to where they want to be. But a wonderful coach really understands the individual rather than understanding their dysfunction. I want to understand what are the behaviors that have led to this state today. There is a reason why you are today. There's a calculator we can do with blood work as well. It's called understanding what your biological age is.
Starting point is 00:33:10 So you could do, we could get a round of blood tests and you could tell me that you're 35. Your blood work could come back and say that you are 42. So I want to understand what are the behavioral traits that have led you to where you are today? Why are you obese? Why do you have a low testosterone level? Why are you chronically deficient in vitamin D? Because they're going to give me the answers. So before I even prescribe you an exercise intervention, we need to understand what the hell, why are you so fucking lazy? Yeah. What are the most common, I guess, like biomarker problems you run into? Stress. Louisa, I'm too stressed. I've got a wife at home. I've got three kids. The market opens at eight, then it closes at four. I'm like, I need to do work, and then I need to be present for this. And they just run out of time because they don't make
Starting point is 00:33:58 exercise a priority. Exercise should be part of your personal hygiene. Just like brushing your teeth, go for a run. Then they're sitting behind a desk. So they're sitting. And that is sitting is, quote unquote, the new smoking. I've heard that. Why? Because you're not getting blood flow.
Starting point is 00:34:16 We are getting a small amount of blood flow to the brain, obviously. But it's restricted. It's restricted. You're not moving. You're not moving. You're not body. So now we have something called exercise snacks. What's that? but it's restricted. You're not moving. You're not moving. You're not body. So now we have something called exercise snacks. What's that?
Starting point is 00:34:36 We can get a lot of benefits by just doing 10 minutes or even five minutes of aerobic exercise or high intensity exercise. So I have this goal with all of them. It's like every hour, set a thing on your phone, get up and give me 20 squat jumps. Run on the spot for 15 minutes. Love that. Yeah. So it's an exercise snack, right? I'm doing anything I can to take out of your mind that you have to get dressed and go to the gym. Something that activates the whole body though. That's exactly right. Yeah. So exercise does more things. It stimulates the release of something called neurotrophic factors. I'll go into what that is. Please. So as I mentioned earlier, your synapses, right? They decrease. They also decrease not just with
Starting point is 00:35:17 age, right? So the brain cells, 87 billion neurons with each having around 10,000 to 20,000 connections. They decrease due to stress, due to the environment, due to the food we eat, due to the sleep deprivation that we have. So the connections decrease, right? How do we preserve them? Well, we have something in our brain. It's what mother nature gave us. They're called neurotrophic factors. So they are certain molecules that are literally responsible for growing new connections in the brain. But how do we get them? Through exercise. So exercise stimulates the release of these neurotrophic factors. We've got one- That's the only thing that does it? Other things do it too, but exercise isn't the major component, yeah.
Starting point is 00:36:06 We've got one called BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, and this is the most important one. It's the one that we all hear about. It was, you know, we found this, I think, Marion Diamond found this back in 1960, and that is responsible for the growth and maturation of neurons, but also it helps with the connections. So we can say now, we can safely say in humans that exercise can have an 85% change on the brain, the structural part of the brain. So do you have any really busy clients who come
Starting point is 00:36:45 to you and this is a place where they're missing in their life right now, so they're not exercising, who you are able to, through all the different things you do with them, build them up successfully where the exercise portion of it is they don't necessarily go to the gym, but they work in just those two to five minutes here and there throughout the day and that's it. Yes, but do I want them to be exercising on the weekends? Yeah. That's why we do a VO2 max test. And can you explain the VO2 max test? Yeah. It's a measure of our peak aerobic efficiency. So how fit we are. So we actually have an in-lab VO2 max tester where you're putting an oxygen mask
Starting point is 00:37:26 on and we're testing how much oxygen can your body utilize at its peak. So we get you to a position. It's a really hard test, by the way, if you haven't done one. Can we pull this up, Alessi, an example on YouTube while Louise is explaining? So you get on a treadmill and the idea is to get you to gas out. So we put you on a 2% incline and we get you walking first, then running. And then every single minute we ramp it, we go faster and faster and faster. And it's measuring everything. And we get you to the point of absolute exhaustion and we measure your oxygen, your CO2, and we're really trying to understand like how much, at what pace, at what speed, at what your heart rate, at what heart rate can you utilize oxygen?
Starting point is 00:38:12 How can you take oxygen from the air, breathe it in, have it go through your lungs and dispel it through to the rest of your body? And this is something you build up through physical activity, obviously. Yeah. You have one right here on the screen. VO2 max is one, I believe it is the strongest predictor of longevity. Really? Yep. Why do you say that? VO2 max is the one predictor because it measures how fit you are. It measures how young your heart is and how efficient your lungs are at delivering oxygen. Why would we need that? Because that's what we need to stay alive. Why would we need that? It's because that's what we need to stay alive. Yeah. But does it affect... What about people who maybe do less cardio and are just really ripped and maybe wouldn't do as well on a test like this?
Starting point is 00:39:09 And I've had many people in that position. What happens is you go through different zones in training. You've probably heard of zone two, zone three, zone four. And your zone four and five are your maximum. That's when you're going at like your maximal aerobic capacity. What happens with these unfit and untrained individuals, they'll go from zone one, which is what we're in now. They'll skip zone two and go straight up to zone three. And zone two is in fact, probably the most important zone to stay in. Zone two is when you're working at around 65% of your aerobic capacity. And this is the zone that builds
Starting point is 00:39:46 the base of your pyramid. It builds the base. You want a big base. I want you to be so efficient. I want your heart to be so efficient at utilizing and pumping out blood to the rest of your body. And that's built during zone two. So I'm prescribing around three hours of zone two per week. That's not that much. It's not, but that's minimum. That's very doable. And let me tell you, for anybody listening, if you want to live a long life, you've got to build the base.
Starting point is 00:40:16 100%. Within the neuron, right? Within the cells and the cells in our body, we house something called the mitochondria. It's the powerhouse of the cell. We have around 5, 10, 30,000 mitochondria per cell. We have them in our brain as well. That's where we produce energy in the form of something called ATP. When we work out in zone two, we're building more efficient mitochondria. So your ability to produce energy is enhanced. We get that. So when we eat food like a banana, it'll go through and that's how we produce energy. It gets broken down and that's how your mitochondria will give you energy. Sometimes though, we get something called mitochondrial dysfunction. So we've got
Starting point is 00:41:03 mitochondria in the cell, but they're not working well. The factory has broken down, again, from lifestyle factors. So we can not only improve the efficiency of these mitochondria, but we can improve the density, how many that we have per cell. So we can grow new mitochondria. And we do that with many, many ways, but one of the primary ways is zone two training. Yeah. I, so before the pandemic for like nine years, I was six to seven days a week in the gym, lift and cardio, do everything. I loved everything from benching and deadlift into boxing.
Starting point is 00:41:39 Right. And when shortly before the pandemic hit, I got sick and didn't know what I had. It turned out it was like severe allergic reaction asthma. So it just shut down my whole body. And the after effects of that on the rest of my body were crazy. It just took a while to figure out what it was. And so for the better part of three and a half, four years, I pretty much had working out taken from me. It's not that I didn't do it, but like
Starting point is 00:42:11 when I did it, it was a home workout because I was building this business at the time. I always felt like shit and I couldn't do anything that I wanted to do. I started getting all kinds of injuries on my body too, because my joints were just dead. So those are still there right now. But when I was, while I was building the business, I was also increasing stress like crazy because you know, I'm editing till four or 5am in the morning. I'm getting up at 10, 1030. This gets into the natural light stuff. You and I were mentioning at the beginning with, you know, wearing a mask, which I wasn't doing at the time. And so I was just constant, like it was, it was like, it was an exponential explosion of all kinds of problems in my body at the same time. And I was always in a bad mood. Always, you know, somehow we made this happen.
Starting point is 00:42:57 And that's great. But when I got up to Hoboken, last fall, I at least was like, I joined the gym here, I was at least getting in there a few times a week, my workouts were shit compared to what they used to be. But it was like getting myself back a little bit. I still had all the symptoms from the allergy stuff, because I hadn't started treatment on that. And then in late November, I started doing the weekly allergy shots, which has changed the game for me. But that about a month later, it was Christmas night. I realized like I was still feeling like shit. And I was editing something at 4am on Christmas night. And I was like, we got to stop this. Yeah, 100% like this can't go on like this.
Starting point is 00:43:38 We have to find a new way. And when I was down at my parents place for Christmas, so when I came up here two days later, I started waking up at 6.35 a.m. I think I started at like 6.55,, I finally am starting to look like myself a little bit again, but my energy levels and my ability to do this job and feel better all day in addition to the allergy shots, thank God working, it is insane. So I always swore by exercise, but like once it was, it's not that I took it for granted. It's just like, it was taken from me because shit happened to my body. Once it was taken away and now I've come back around to do it again, I will triply swear by it because it is the thing that it's my one time a day to me and it gets my day going. And you just mentioned, you just brought up a really interesting fact, which we're going to
Starting point is 00:44:41 get into during sleep. But so many people don't understand what they are, what is attacking them. We wake up every day and you believe that you're high-performing. But something as little as a zinc deficiency can put you behind by miles. Sure. Just a zinc deficiency. And that's like one of the 150 plus biomarkers that we could be doing. And you've just had an attack on your innate immune system. And that's huge because it
Starting point is 00:45:15 affects the way you think, the way you breathe, the way you perform, the way you sleep. We now know that even one day of sleep deprivation can be detrimental to our immunity and our brain function. So imagine what it's doing over time. Everyone just thinks, but this is just a natural part of aging. Newsflash, dementia is not part of the natural aging process. Diseases are not part of it. So why are we getting it? Why do we have 55 million people worldwide that have this chronic disease? We have to start thinking about this. And it's not just because people are living longer. No. So they can get it.
Starting point is 00:45:51 It's the way we're living. It's preventable. Yeah. 100% it's preventable. Yeah. So maybe we should talk about sleep. Yeah. Because that's so critical.
Starting point is 00:46:03 That's another thing. Like I said, I got on a schedule with this, which I'm going to bed when it's dark. I'm waking up when maybe it just got light a little bit ago. And I hadn't done that in four years when I started doing that. And it also makes sure that I get like at least seven and a half a night. Game changer. Game changer. 100%. When you refer to sleep, what I refer to is stages. The only things we're really caring about during sleep is slow wave deep sleep and REM sleep. So when we go to sleep, we cycle through these four stages. We've got stage one, it's when you're falling asleep. Stage two, if we're, and by the way,
Starting point is 00:46:45 as a neurophysiologist, we work in a lab called a PSG. So you go and get a polysomnography. That's called a sleep study. Big words, man. I know. It's ridiculous. But if you were to get a sleep study, that's what it's called, right? PSG. And so I've spent many, many hours in this PSG just looking at people sleeping, right? It's like ridiculous. Yeah, just staring. I'm like, this is invasive.
Starting point is 00:47:09 But so what you go through at these four sleep stages, when you get to stage three, it's called non-REM sleep. It's when we get these on the brainwaves, we see these big delta brainwave patterns. We know that you're- Yeah, we know that you're in deep sleep. What do you mean by delta? So we've got alpha, beta, gamma, delta brainwaves. Yeah. They operate at different hertz. And so we know right then you're in deep sleep. So that's deep sleep. Then we've got REM sleep, which is stage four. And during REM sleep, REM stands for rapid eye movement sleep. That's when literally your eyes during that stage are moving back and forth in a horizontal fashion.
Starting point is 00:47:52 That's why it's called rapid eye movement sleep. And during that stage, your brain actually mimics an awake patient, but you are completely paralyzed from the neck down. And Mother Nature created this because it's during that stage that we have a lot of our dreams. We have memory processing, learning that takes place during that. But she did this, she wanted to paralyze you so you don't end up acting out your dreams. For example, if you were dreaming of flying, we don't want you to get up and walk to your, your balcony and fly. So, um, but sleep, the most, I think the most beautiful part about it is during like REMS, during deep sleep, for example, we get two major things that happen. One is you get the release of all of your hormones.
Starting point is 00:48:40 Most of the hormones, most of your testosterone is released during deep slow wave sleep can you explain like what that means though because like it's not like we're using it during that right it's just released no that's where you're built so when so sleep is a repair process for the brain and the body right that's why we sleep we don't sleep just because we've got nothing to do we sleep. We don't sleep just because we've got nothing to do. We sleep so we can repair the body and we repair it in many ways. And the repair takes place during deep sleep. So during deep sleep, that's when your body's like, okay, he needs to wake up in the morning. And actually a really good indicator of health for men is a morning erection. And so we take that into consideration as well. So you get a lot.
Starting point is 00:49:34 It's always fun doing these podcasts with two young men. Go ahead. I'm sorry. I hold in so many jokes there. You should be proud of me. There are so many backspaces in my head. We won't go there. So you get a lot of the, your, um, the release of testosterone during that stage. Uh, we get, that's why when we measure testosterone, we look at waking measurements of
Starting point is 00:49:57 testosterone. We get the release of growth hormone. Growth hormone is responsible for the repair of your muscles. So this is why I think that the recovery marketing industry is such a Ponzi scheme because it's like the best recovery you can do is sleep. And I see so many people trying to ice bath their way out of proper sleep. It's like you're going to sleep four hours. You should do both. Well, you don't need to do both. Ice bathing is part of the accessories that we'll go into. Okay. So you've got the release of growth hormone and testosterone.
Starting point is 00:50:30 And for women, a lot of it, there's estrogen as well that gets released during that stage. You've got something else that takes place during deep sleep, and that's the activation of something called the glymphatic system. What's that? So it's a lymphatic system, you know, the lymph nodes, but we've got one in our brain. Really? Yeah. So during deep, slow wave sleep, your brain acts like a washing machine. So all of the fluid, it's called cerebral spinal fluid. It goes through the brain and it washes through and then it gets expelled. So it's taking with it debris and toxins that build up.
Starting point is 00:51:06 It just gets expelled through your digestive system? No, not through your digestive system. Like through the blood? Yeah, it just, it gets, yeah, it gets rinsed out. Just like the same way as like when you do a lymph node rinse out, like if you're going to go get a lymphatic drainage massage. Okay. So same type of mechanism, right? And what we're seeing now is that during that stage, that's when you're releasing the toxic proteins that build up that are responsible for Alzheimer's
Starting point is 00:51:33 disease, amyloid beta. That gets cleared out if you activate your glymphatic system. So sleep is like a key to holding off Alzheimer's. It's not just sleep. It is slow wave deep sleep. Yeah. So when we had been talking back in february and you were going through the whole eye mask thing and too much cortisol in your system one of the questions you asked me was how many times a month do you dream if you had to guess and i think i said like one or two maybe three you probably dream more often you just don't remember it well no i really didn't dream much at all because i was never getting deep sleep as it turns out i was never getting
Starting point is 00:52:13 deep sleep i was never getting REM sleep i dream every single night now do you measure your sleep with anything a wearable i actually don't i want to to, but I know how I felt versus how I feel now. I'd love to measure it just to be, I think that's the next step, but it's night and day, no pun intended. I mean, and that's just from one sleep mask. So then it becomes about, okay, great, Louise. And now that we understand that these two stages are important, what next? Well, we have to take many things into consideration. The quantity, like how many hours you're sleeping. The quality is, you know, are you getting into deep and REM sleep?
Starting point is 00:52:52 We have to understand what time you're sleeping. Timing is really important. What is that? Timing is timing and the consistency of your timing. So, you know, the reliability, we want you to go to bed every night at 10 PM, right? That is a far better predictor of sleep performance than just sleeping eight hours a night, every night. Does it matter what your window is?
Starting point is 00:53:18 Yeah. So 10 PM till 6 AM is so much better than 12 p.m. till 6 a.m. – 12 p.m. till 8 a.m. Right, right, right. I got you. Yeah. Why is that? Because you want to be able to sleep before midnight, and that comes down to the circadian rhythm and Mother Nature and the sun rising. Yeah. So we have this really great molecule. It's called dopamine.
Starting point is 00:53:53 And so dopamine is that neuromodulator, neurotransmitter, if you will, that's really involved in our reward system. And it gets released in response to achieving a goal. For example, if you say, today, I'm going to go out and I'm going to run one mile. If you run that one mile, you'll be rewarded with dopamine. And that motivates you, it excites you, it tells you, you're going to do it again. The problem that most people have is they set themselves to go and run 20 miles, they don't achieve it, they don't get any dopamine, and they hate themselves. And they never run again. But we won't get into that. Dopamine is released also during sleep. And what happens is we wake up with a jolt. We have a lot of dopamine, which propels us to get up out of bed and move on through the day. What happens is dopamine release is blocked. if you see light from the hours of 12 p.m. till 4 a.m.
Starting point is 00:54:51 12 a.m. you mean? 12 a.m. till 4 a.m. So if you have light exposure during that time. Any kind. And if you're awake, that means you're getting light exposure. Yeah, of course. So it blocks your ability to produce dopamine. So you wake up and you're already behind the mark because you're not getting the dopamine release.
Starting point is 00:55:10 That's some weird mother nature shit because it's like it knows what dopamine knows what time it is. Exactly. It all comes down to the sun rising and setting at certain times. So that's one reason. The second reason is you just want consistency in timing. We're now like we see in the academic literature that how like when you sleep and the predictability of your sleep is extremely important. We're not robots, but if you can be sleeping every night at 10 p.m., that'll be perfect. Yeah. So I set it to, I go to bed at like 1030 now.
Starting point is 00:55:46 So it's close enough, I guess. And I wake up at 635. So on a weekend, sometimes if I got to really work hard on a weekend where I work later, I will literally take an air mattress into this room right here because this is blacked out and still wear the eye mask and have no light exposure. Like if I go to bed at 1230 or one or something like that. And that makes a difference, too. Like at least getting some of the things right whenever you can, if your schedule has to change, better than nothing. And the topic of the eye mask keeps coming up, and that's because we want to be completely blacked out at night because that's how we produce melatonin.
Starting point is 00:56:33 And melatonin is that hormone that's responsible for our sleepiness hormone. Melatonin puts us to sleep. Okay, so we need it. A lot of people are having exogenous melatonin. So they're going out and they're supplementing with it. And I don't recommend that just because it's a hormone. As soon as your eyes are completely blacked out, there's no light coming into your retina.
Starting point is 00:56:57 It turns off the signals and it tells your brain, all right, it's time to sleep. Yes, it does. Yeah. I believe that. And the great thing about the eye mask is because A, you black out everything, but B, if you don't have blackout curtains, anything can happen in the outside. We live in New York. I live right in the city. I've got lights everywhere. People are still letting off July 4th fireworks.
Starting point is 00:57:21 I'm like, what? I'm like, what? I walked outside. I had a firework show on my balcony. That's what we do in America. Yeah, I reckon. And they're doing it at 1am. It woke me up. So apart from the sound, you can be woken up at night due to the light. So that's why we do the eye mask. That's part of our protocol as well for enhancing sleep performance. Now, what about when I got to get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night though? Terrible.
Starting point is 00:57:46 It's terrible? Yeah. Yeah. I found a way like usually I make it there in the dark and nothing bad happens. But sometimes like when I wake up and I'm like a little disoriented, I have to turn on the light real quick. And I'm like, did I just ruin everything? But see how you just said that?
Starting point is 00:58:02 I would question why are you even waking up at night i would look at your face 150 ounces of water a day i understand that maybe it's cutting back before you know an hour before you go to bed maybe we do a but see you say that but i investigate more okay you're very young yeah you're you're very young but i would investigate more could it be a prostate problem? Like this is a phenomenon that happens in most men. Over the age of like 60, they tend to wake up at 4 a.m. and go to the bathroom. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:58:33 We could completely dehydrate them and figure out what it is. Is it a habit of yours that we need to break? Because you don't want sleep disruptions during the night. You want beautiful sleep, long sleep cycles. So never get up to go to the bathroom? No, I don't want sleep disruptions during the night you want beautiful sleep long sleep cycles so never get up to go to the bathroom no i don't i don't i mean i've always had the world's worst bladder there's also like some family history with that like that's there you go right so i mean i don't know how i'm gonna stop that you know what i mean you can i can but we won't do it on today's
Starting point is 00:59:00 it involves all right what would go what would go into, if you were investigating, do you have an example of, without naming a name, obviously, or pointing out who it is, do you have an example of a client where they had an issue like that and you investigated and you found something that then you were able to fix? No. Well, I would understand. I would look at vasopressin, for example. First of all, I would eliminate things. I would say to you, just for the next two, three nights, try not to drink water for three hours prior to going to sleep or two hours prior to go to sleep, just so we can see if it's you just being over hydrated or if it's just a habit of yours or getting up or if you really need to go to the bathroom, then we'll work our way up from there. Again, it's all done from blood work. We can even look at your hydration status.
Starting point is 00:59:43 You may think you're hydrated, but maybe you're not. How would that work? Well, you're drinking a lot of water, which is great, but do we have an electrolyte imbalance because you're drinking too much water? Interesting. But even like at the rate, so when I wake up in the morning, I have a very clear routine that gets done in a period of time, the same every day, like clockwork. And one of it is I drink probably like 60 to 70 ounces of water. And then that just... What's that in liters? This thing right here, I'm drinking it today. It's filtered air and it's down here.
Starting point is 01:00:21 Where do you get that water from? It's through a filtration system. Okay, great. Fantastic. I'm not drinking the Hoboken water. I mean, yeah, we're pretty close to Bayonne here. Not the cleanest water around here. Hey, guys, if you have a second, please be sure to share this episode around on social media and with your friends, whether it's Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, doesn't matter.
Starting point is 01:00:43 It's all a huge help. It gets new eyeballs on the show, and it allows us to grow and survive. So thank you to all of you who have already been doing that. And thank you to all of you who are going to do so now. But look, it's all about managing. You know, we want to know, we want to put you in the best position to sleep. This one always like surprises people when I say that you have to be healthy to sleep. You have to be healthy to sleep. You have to be healthy to exercise.
Starting point is 01:01:09 What? Yeah. So if you're not healthy, and when I say not healthy, I mean, you could have, you know, we see in people with mild depression that they have problems sleeping. Okay. in people with mild depression that they have problems sleeping. We know that things that kick you out of sleep, such as deep sleep and REM sleep, are medications. Serotonin is involved, the happiness neurotransmitter. That's involved in actually keeping you asleep. Yeah. So we've got a play between serotonin and melatonin that helps you fall
Starting point is 01:01:46 asleep and stay asleep. So if you are mildly depressed, quote unquote, I'm not saying that these people are unhealthy, but let's just say you're not at the complete health status, that could disrupt sleep. Have you had any alcohol? Have you got any disruptions in other different biomarkers that could kick you out of deep sleep and REM sleep. I've had a patient who had a DHEA deficiency, so she was low, right? And so we supplemented her with DHEA. And because of that, it completely dropped her REM sleep. And then I then found a really great human randomized control trial that shows that there is a correlation between REM sleep and DHEA. DHEA, they call it the hormone of youth. It's a precursor. So it's needed to make testosterone and to make estrogen. So it's
Starting point is 01:02:39 needed there to make these two molecules. So when I say you have to be healthy to sleep, I mean, you can pass out right now. Let's just say we give you marijuana and alcohol and you just pass out. You just sedate yourself. Some people are just doing that at night. They're just sedating themselves. They think that they're sleeping, but they're not. Oh, Louisa, but red wine puts me to sleep. No, you're sedating yourself. You're not getting into deep sleep and REM sleep. I don't care if you're knocked out. I don't care if you sleep at 1am and you woke up at 10. That's not high performing. So you have to be healthy to sleep. Yeah. Maybe we should stay with that for a second. The effect of alcohol and weed on the brain. I
Starting point is 01:03:22 know you have a lot of, a lot of, a lot of thoughts on that. So let's start with alcohol. Is there a way to have alcohol in some moderation that doesn't have poor effects on the brain? Yes. And that comes down to having at maximum two drinks a week yeah right i always say that every drop of alcohol is doing damage to your brain for many different reasons right but if you have one glass a week will it be detrimental to your overall health and well-being probably not it what we see is that you start to get more of a detriment to the the gray matter the brain. That's the cell body and the white matter, which is the axon that I mentioned earlier. You've got gray matter, you've got white matter of the brain.
Starting point is 01:04:13 The white matter is where all of our myelinated neurons are. We tend to see problems there when you're drinking, when a female is drinking around four to six drinks a week, a male about 12. And what about weed or THC, I guess, to be more specific? Absolutely terrible. And what does it do? Well, it does not allow you to get blocks REM sleep. It blocks deep sleep.
Starting point is 01:04:39 But not just that. You have that added component of inducing psychotic episodes, yeah, with long-term use. So you're deteriorating different parts of your brain, especially the learning centers, the memory centers of the brain. I don't understand. I always tell people, I don't know who needs to hear this, but marijuana isn't helping you sleep. Are there other ways, because everyone has CBD gummies and stuff like that now? Completely different to THC. Completely different. ways, you know, because everyone has CBD gummies and stuff like that. Completely different. Completely different. Well, not completely. They come from the same plant, but they're the non-psychoactive component of the plant. Right. So it's not firing at the brain in
Starting point is 01:05:15 the same way at all. Okay. And it makes sense, by the way, when you say don't use that to sleep, because you're, it's, it's essentially just blocking you into thinking you're sleepy. Exactly. And it's sedating you. I keep saying the word sedate because it's like if you go into surgery, which is one thing that I do. I go into- Oh, you're a surgeon too? I don't know. A neurophysiologist intraoperatively goes in and does all of the brain, basically the electromyography during surgery, right? The electromyography.
Starting point is 01:05:48 During surgery, yeah. That's a big word, electromyography. Well, that's a very normal word for me. So if you were to go and have a tumor cut out, let's never say that you have to do that. During that, we can predict if you're going to have a stroke on the table during that time. And that's what an intraoperative neurophysiologist will detect. An intraoperative, so that's you?
Starting point is 01:06:15 Yes, correct. So you work hand in hand with the doctor on something? With the neurosurgeon, yeah. And he will say, is this patient about to have a stroke? How can we get some eye movement? Can, you know, this person during surgery, like move their feet, et cetera. The reason I brought that up is because when you're going to surgery, you have something called propovol, for example, to sedate you.
Starting point is 01:06:39 So you're not going into deep sleep. We're just sedating you, knocking you out. That's actually, to a lower extent, what alcohol is doing. Alcohol is a sedative. Ethanol is a sedative. Not just that. When it's broken down, once it goes through the liver, it's actually broken down into something called acetyl aldehyde.
Starting point is 01:07:00 Acetyl aldehyde is poison. Leslie, if you just type that in, it'll probably come up with weed killer, like for the gardens. Oh. I'm pretty sure it will. Just type in acetyl aldehyde. Don't ask me how to spell it. But it becomes poison, and that's what deteriorates the brain. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:07:16 Acetyl aldehyde is a colorless, flammable liquid with a pungent, fruity odor. If you go to what does acetyl aldehyde do in the body? Yeah. Acetyl aldehyde is highly reactive and toxic. Acetyl aldehyde causes damage at the cellular and genomic levels. Acetyl aldehyde is implicated in the development of many diseases, including those caused by alcohol, AD, and stroke. Alzheimer's disease and stroke. So you are putting yourself into this toxic stew by drinking tons of alcohol. Now, what about going back onto the THC? You were talking about it mostly in the context of like before bed or stuff like that.
Starting point is 01:08:03 Well, I mean, anytime. But yeah, if you're having that to help you sleep better you're not you're just sedating yourself right yeah i i that's one thing i never did like even in college like some people would smoke for them like now like just it wasn't interesting to me i always i could get myself to sleep pretty good back then but But, you know, there's something in those things, particularly some drugs like weed or even psychedelics and stuff that has created so much great creativity and art in the world. Right. So not necessarily people using it for sleep, but, you know, people get in the studio. They're going to write what's going to be the number one song in the country. They're rolling a blunt, getting it, getting the people going and like beauty happens so i think of it in the sense that there's got to be something that put it here in the universe to be able to unlock stuff like that
Starting point is 01:08:54 like i know me and my buddy chas if we got to do like a really big marketing session we'll rip some sativa and like magic comes out okay right but But you know, is there, is, is there any way to balance it in, in your daily activities versus like having it before bed? Like, like, is there a way that it, that if it's interacting with your system during the day, while you're working, it doesn't have the same damaging effects that it would if you're using it to mass sleep. That would involve looking at the half-life because if I was to say anything, if somebody said, but Louisa, I need to drink. Like my life revolved. Like I need to drink.
Starting point is 01:09:29 I would say, okay, let's look at it this way. If alcohol maybe has a half-life of six hours, maybe it stays in your system. I think that's right. Okay. Sounds right. I mean, that's what caffeine has. Can we get you to drink during the day? Can we get you to be a day drinker?
Starting point is 01:09:44 It might have the same effect if you are a day drinker? It might have the same effect if you are a marijuana drinker. This is not my area, so I don't know for sure. But then I would question, first of all, let's look at the half-life. Then I would question, why do you think you need this? Because it comes down as well to cultural norms. In fact, I think they released something, maybe it was the New York Times, so they're not very reliable on this. They released that more people, actually they're seeing a reduction in the amount of people, young people going to festivals and buying alcohol. Yes, I saw that. So that's what, so then it becomes about like, what does alcohol represent? For me, I'm not completely, I don't know, completely abstain from alcohol. I may have one glass of red wine
Starting point is 01:10:26 every two weeks. And that's the best one you can have with health benefits. I mean, look, it's all the same, but I'll have a glass of red wine. I'm social. So maybe I'll be like, yeah, let's have a glass of red wine. But you got to look at the social aspects. I've got one, I was just referred a patient from one of my friends she's an endocrinologist and she said louisa this woman has um two apo e4 alleles so she's got increased risk of getting alzheimer's disease plus her mother had dementia and passed away at an early age when she came to me she's like i drink a bottle of wine every night a bottle a bottle of wine it's a lady too yeah well let Well, let's not, that's men and
Starting point is 01:11:06 women. No, no, I know. But like a guy's more likely to be taller and way more, he can handle a bottle of wine better. Yeah. So she's doing this purely to mask the pain of maybe getting Alzheimer's disease. So people are drinking for different purposes. Again, why are we doing it? We're doing it. Do we have to? Does it make you feel better? Why does it make you, do you like the taste? That's the hardest one. I just like the taste. So we have to figure out why. Like, why would you take THC in the first place? Does it make me more creative? What else can we do to make you more creative? You know what? I got to say this because like, it's easy for me to talk about this stuff because when I tell you I really am moderate with it. I mean I'm seriously moderate with it. I only ever drink socially. I never ever drink during you know, when I go out, that's when I drink and I don't drink like I did when I was in college at all. And then with weed,
Starting point is 01:12:10 it's, I think I smoked weed twice in the last year, right? So I do it very, very lightly. Whereas if there are people who are habitually doing this stuff and filling their days with it or making it a part of, they need it to do what they do, as you were describing with some examples a minute ago, there's no way that that can be good for you. Absolutely no way. And I'm in the business of making people perform better. I don't take, and I don't take it very lightly. If you want to come to me, I don't care what you're paying. I mean, I do care. I mean, I don't care if you've paid me, right? If you don't adhere to the protocols, that looks bad on me. You're not going to come to me
Starting point is 01:12:57 just because you've got so much money. Throw me the money and then tell me you're still going to drink. It's like the client success story. You ever see the guy who stood up close to the camera and then stood back far away from it and said before and after, and they're like, oh, this dude did his step back. Exactly. So, but look, it's, we can move on from that talk, but it's, it's not good for you guys. Stop drinking, stop, stop engaging in these behaviors. If you really want a high performing brain. Quickly though, it's interesting. You bring that new york times report on the kids doing less of festivals and stuff i've seen that in multiple different publications with like pretty hard data it's interesting to me that like this generation that they're talking about which is now the
Starting point is 01:13:38 youngest parts of gen z who came up with all the access to technology and YouTube their entire life are refraining from some of that now some of it could also be like because of the pandemic they're a little less social that's not a good trend but I think part of it is they're also more informed due to access to resources in ways that previous generations including you know I'm a back-end millennial like we didn't always have that, right? YouTube came out when I was like eight or something like that. But for females as well, there's a huge association between alcohol and breast cancer. Really?
Starting point is 01:14:15 As well out of most of the cancers. It's, there's a high correlation. So it's, it's another thing. And maybe some women are walking around, they don't know that they possess maybe a gene that is raising their risk of getting breast cancer. And then they're drinking. It's another thing. And maybe some women are walking around. They don't know that they possess maybe a gene that is raising their risk of getting breast cancer. And then they're drinking. It's like, listen, we just let's take a step back. Let's assess. Yeah. There's so much.
Starting point is 01:14:36 When we get into these conversations, I get like almost stressed out because there's so many different things to think about. It's hard to keep it straight. And then the thing that worries me as well with kids is I've got three nieces. My brother has three girls and they're 14, 11, 8. When I go back to Australia, I spend time with them. We do sleepovers. They're on their phones at 1 a.m. on TikTok. And it's damaging their brain.
Starting point is 01:15:03 They're damaging their reward centers. They're damaging how their brain is developing. They're not getting the deep sleep, the REM sleep. So I'm actually scared about that. And another thing is they're just raising the risk of getting ADHD. I was actually mentioning the other day, it's not my area, I don't want to go into it, but I was mentioning, I went to a networking event. Do you know how many women, for some reason, when people find out what I do and who I am, they want to talk to me about their brain and their issues. I'm like, okay. And do you know how many women actually now, and I'm talking 40 years and above, who are telling me they've got ADHD? So we're seeing a rise in even adulthood ADHD,
Starting point is 01:15:40 therefore a rise in Adderall. Yeah and and what does that do to the brain like there's obviously a use case for it as there are with a lot of these drugs that are made but it's like it seems to be over prescribed yeah right because it's an amphetamine yeah and it's funny because it's basically has the you think well if somebody's already hyperactive why would you give them an amphetamine because it kind it's's like two wrongs make a right. It's like they – it balances it out, right, to make them less calm. But people are now taking Adderall to give them energy and focus. You can't do that.
Starting point is 01:16:18 It's like what are we doing? Anyway. Yeah. The whole – I mean obviously that's like the college drug too. I've never touched it. You've never touched weed? No, I haven't touched any of that. You've never smoked weed in your life?
Starting point is 01:16:30 Never in my life. I don't even like the smell. I got a fat blunt in there for you if you want it. Not for me. Not for me. We might need to figure that out afterwards. I actually credit my triathlon career for that. I never drunk a drop of alcohol either until like I quit triathlon.
Starting point is 01:16:45 Stay with me. You'll be all right. We'll get straight now. But what was the third thing in the pyramid? We went through exercise and sleep. And then we move up into nutrition. Okay. Yeah, nutrients and what nutrients are good for the brain and how can we have a healthy performing brain with certain nutrients and body.
Starting point is 01:17:05 And that falls into macronutrients. Like, do you know, it's surprising. I've got so many of my male clients who come to me and they're not even having a high amount of protein because they just didn't know that they needed protein. Yeah. And what, what, how do you determine the optimal amount? Because it's different if someone's like a heavy weightlifter. It's also different based on age. I'm getting them to have at minimum 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight. So that's a blanket type thing? That's a blanket. Yeah. And most of my clients are, like I said to you, they're executives.
Starting point is 01:17:41 They're not bodybuilders. If they were, maybe we'd bump it up to 2.2 grams, but standard 1.6 to 1.8 grams per kilogram of body weight. So if you have a male who is 75 kilos, you do 1.6 times 75. That will be your total protein intake for the day. What we then do is, let's just say for argument's sake, it's 100 grams. We then say, well, we want you to have four meals in a day. We'll split that 100 grams up into four. And then every meal you need to hit these four protein requirements. Is this different though with like your NBA guys or MLB guys or something? Because like they're athletes, so you may change that number? We would change that number.
Starting point is 01:18:25 Yeah. Okay. So, but the regular, I'm talking for the regular, you know, gen pop, you want to be having that. And I think the standard American protein intake, the RDA states that you should be having, I think it's like 0.9 grams. So we're not even meeting the RDA. Yeah. And also like, I don't, I don't even look
Starting point is 01:18:46 at a lot of that stuff anymore because it's been, it's basically been like a conspiracy the entire time. Like the food pyramid was such a joke. Oh, don't even start me on that. Look, get started on it. Let's go. It's the biggest, it's the biggest scam of 2024. And can you explain to people why? What's the most profitable force in the world is sickness. Yeah. So how do we keep people sick? We feed them this idealistic view of nutrition, which is absolutely detrimental and unethical and should be illegal to give this food pyramid out.
Starting point is 01:19:24 I look at it, right, and I think, well, if the government is giving us the standards for what we should eat, how we should sleep, what our blood biomarkers should be, why are they all wrong? Why are they on path for making us sick? Because the government is fed by three ways, from the five food conglomerates, from the pharmaceutical industry, and from the industrial military complex. No arguments there. Exactly.
Starting point is 01:19:51 So if the pharmaceutical industry is feeding the government, the government is feeding us through mainstream media. Where does most people get their news? From mainstream media. Where do they get their information, their dietary information, their exercise information? Mainstream media, which is funded by the pharmaceutical industry. Why would the pharmaceutical industry not give us the right answers? Because they need to make you sick.
Starting point is 01:20:18 Why? Think about Netflix. How does Netflix make their money? On subscriptions. Mm-hmm. It's a subscription model, 100%. Pharmaceutical industry is a subscription model. We need to ensure that you get sick at a certain age so we can ensure that you have a prescription for an ACE inhibitor, which is
Starting point is 01:20:38 something that brings down your high blood pressure, hypertension. We need to make sure that you're going to be getting your monthly dose of cholesterol-lowering medications. And that's just the start because that will occur at what, 55, 60? What's going to happen at 65, 70, 75, 80? More, more, more. So they just keep making money, making money. So back to the trends and ratio in blood work, That's what we look at. Doctor isn't going to tell you, well, you're trending upwards. You're trending to be on a statin by the age of 50. They're not going to tell you that because the doctors are also paid from the pharmaceutical industries. They're getting a kickback every time they give you a new prescription. So it's all just absolutely
Starting point is 01:21:21 horrific. Yeah. One of the things that's come up on my podcast a lot with different guests I have and guys who became friends of mine is often some of our veterans who went over, had to do a lot of insane shit, and they come back with PTSD. And they have to pay out of their pocket tens of thousands of dollars to go to other countries to do psychedelic treatments, which every guy I've spoken with changed. It worked. It changed his life. Didn't they legalize that in California? There are some. I don't know that one specifically, but there's some slight legalization starting to happen. But like, you know, the fact that we even have to get to this point where they have to argue for it
Starting point is 01:22:08 tells you all you need to know, because they're going there to get things that they don't need again. Right. Or they need very little of. And so the pharmaceutical industry is like, oh, fuck. So we're not going to be able to get out SSRIs. Yeah. exactly. So even certain prescriptions have effects on different areas. You take one prescription, right? You take one drug, an SSRI, it's going to disrupt sleep. You disrupt sleep, you're going to increase your risk of getting type 2 diabetes. Maybe your hemoglobin A1C goes up. So what do we do then?
Starting point is 01:22:48 Oh, okay, then maybe you'll get on some metformin. Or maybe you'll go, what is everyone having now? A GLP-1 agonist. What is Ozempic? How many people are now on Ozempic? Which you'll actually be surprised when we exercise. Sorry to the endocrinologists out there but when you exercise you are activating glp-1 bring that back into english to ozempic so ozempic is a it it basically
Starting point is 01:23:16 gets rid of your hunger so you stop eating yeah it completely obliterates it i've got people around they don't even want to eat they don't even want to drink water. But it eats their muscle mass. Of course, because they're not eating. And they're dehydrated as well because they don't want to drink water. Oh, you don't even want to drink water. You don't even want to drink water. So they're completely going into this state. And so they're activating.
Starting point is 01:23:40 Yeah, see, look at that. Yeah. I mean, that looks great. She obviously needed to lose some body fat. Yeah, see, look at that. Yeah, I'm not going to. I mean, that looks like a great, that looks great. She obviously needed to lose some body fat. Maybe she's healthier now. Don't get me wrong. There is a, there is, I'm just, I just want to know why we're pushing that out there instead of pushing dietary guidelines and exercise guidelines. And getting bright light exposure.
Starting point is 01:24:09 It's vanity and ease. And money for the pharmaceutical industry. I mean, I'm not going to name the names of some of the suspected celebrities, but people can go Google and probably make their determination. It looks, they don't look good. This is where I have a problem. So obviously I harp on about Alzheimer's disease because it is my area. I'm doing a body of work and a doctorate, and so it's constantly on my mind. We just had in the last three months a newer FDA approval of a drug, an Alzheimer's disease drug, licanumab or licanbi. It's a monoclonal antibody. We don't have to go into that.
Starting point is 01:24:41 Oh, really? So it is an IV drug that you get. And what it does is it breaks down, removes the amyloid that builds up in the brain, the toxic protein that I said that if you sleep and get deep sleep, it washes it out. But let's just say the Alzheimer's disease patient has around four grams of this amyloid built up and we can clear it out with this new drug. First of all, the drug is around $60,000 to $70,000 a year. That's the first thing. The second thing is it is eating away at your brain tissue and causing brain bleeds on most of the patients that have had it. Yes. Are they reporting this? Yes, that's what we have from the reports,
Starting point is 01:25:23 but the FDA is still going to approve it because it gets rid of the plaque. But during the time that it gets rid of the plaque, not only are you increasing your risk of hemorrhage and actually eating away at the rest of your brain, you're building up more toxic protein because you don't have the money, the means, the resources to actually go out and exercise. So you're building up more protein, more amyloid in the process of it. But this is an FDA approved drug now. Why are they approving something that literally causes worse problems than what it pertains to, what it proclaims to fix? That is the question that I ask myself every day. It's because we need we need something to give to these patients right and at the end stage when you have out there is no there is no reversal of it there is no like once you've got alzheimer's alzheimer's disease is an accumulation of 20 years in the making congratulations you did it was 20
Starting point is 01:26:22 years that you got yourself here. Took 20 years. Now you're here. Now what do we do? Unless you are extremely like I unfortunately, I hate to say this. You have to have money at that stage. You have to have the means. You have to have the people around you, the help and support around you to get rid of and to have a healthy performing brain at that age and at that stage of the disease. But most people don't. So then they'll go onto this drug, which is promised,
Starting point is 01:26:51 we're going to remove the amyloid from your brain, but it's causing so much more damage, not to mention the economic cost. Oh, the economic cost is insane. Yeah. To the healthcare system, to the people involved. With every person that has Alzheimer's disease, you've got another two people that are getting affected by it, by becoming carers. Which is the huge tragedy of that disease. I mean, any debilitating, deadly disease that someone has to have caretakers for, it's's it's so sad because people have to like stop their lives and help them out this one in particularly it's like you know you forget where you are who you are what you're around you don't remember how to eat and the thing that upsets me is that you've got your brain is everything about who you are like i mentioned. Imagine going to sleep not knowing who you are at night.
Starting point is 01:27:46 That's the one thing that is sacred to you. Even if you've got a husband or a wife of 30, 40, 50 years, you still go to sleep by yourself. Not only do you not know your kids or your spouse, you don't know who you are. You look in the mirror, you're like, what's my name? Yeah, I can't. That's my nightmare.
Starting point is 01:28:12 That's the one. I mean, there's a lot of scary diseases out there. That's the one I really want to do everything I can to make sure I don't get. And here's the kicker, right? You've got around, like I mentioned, 55 million people currently worldwide that have this disease. That number is said to triple by the year 2050. 3%, and that's a generous amount that I'm giving them, 3% of this population possess the genes that are responsible for Alzheimer's disease. So the other 97% of people getting it, why are they getting it? If they don't have the predispositions, what is it? It's lifestyle factors.
Starting point is 01:28:49 Yes. And why are they not – why did they not learn how to exercise properly, how to eat properly, how to sleep well? Because the guidelines from the government are all messed up. They're all, yeah. They're all messed up. But why are they? Because the government is fed by those three, the five food conglomerates,
Starting point is 01:29:07 industrial military complex, and the pharmaceutical industry. So it's all just like we're all just – it's scary. I feel so bad for people who don't understand what I understand in terms of like I see what's happening, you see what's happening. Of course. I understand medicine. I understand science. I understand like what happens, you know know if i don't do something if i do do something i understand
Starting point is 01:29:29 genes and blood work but like my one of my best friends yesterday i did her blood work she has absolutely zero idea of anything and she's a she's a smart woman so she's she's a lawyer and i'm like she's got not doesn't understand anything about blood work. And I'm like, imagine the people who are just at the mercy, at the mercy, who they've got to look after kids, maybe they don't have a high socioeconomic status. That's right. How would you fix it, though? Because I mean, I completely agree with what you said about the three things that, you know, it's like the circle of life with the government and power structure. But how do you fix that? Can't we fix it through doing podcasting free education? That's what I do. I try my hardest. It's a piece of it.
Starting point is 01:30:14 It's a piece of it. But I think, and I think that's great. I think what you do and what some other people in your field, your colleagues do is amazing, but it doesn't solve the economic incentivization because i always look at this and i've known a lot of people in my life who work in big pharma right who are really high up in some cases and they're great people you know they have a job to do and unfortunately and we see this in other industries as well. I've cited this example for example with like tech companies and stuff. They're public companies in most cases, at least the ones that matter. And every three months, they have to fill out a quarterly report. And every three months, they have to report to the market that this is what we did and you therefore need to keep buying our stock or hold our stock. So the people who have to report this who are on the highest rungs, they are economically incentivized to make sure that at this quarterly report, they have the best results possible.
Starting point is 01:31:15 Otherwise, they're out of a job. So it's less like, yeah, are there in anything? Are there a handful of evil people? Sure. I know that exists, but it's a lot less of that. And it's much more the circle of life of economics that keeps saying like, oh yeah, all right, we got to come up with something that's going to make sure we hit this quarterly report. Oh, do we have a drug over there for that? All right, let's take care of that.
Starting point is 01:31:37 And they're not thinking about that. Like it's kicking the can down the road. Correct. Actually, JP Morgan, when they held their annual conference in January this year, they got up and said to their investors, make sure you invest this year in the Alzheimer's disease drug market. I saw that. So they are betting against us. They are ensuring that we get Alzheimer's disease just so they can be running around in a Ferrari and so their kids can be going to these high-profile schools.
Starting point is 01:32:12 But that's the thing. It's betting against their own kids too because I'll bet their kids are doing a lot of the habits that cause that stuff and they don't think of that. They're not consciously going home, looking at their kid riding bikes around going, he's going to have Alzheimer's when he's 80. But when you look at some of the risk factors for Alzheimer's disease, one of them is stress, chronic stress or chronic inflammation. I think about this from a systemic standpoint and think to myself, what causes most stress in people's lives? When you look at marriage breakdowns, I was actually reading about this. I think the divorce rate now is around 60%. They said the number one is coming from, scary, right? Good luck, Aless. Good luck, Aless. Three weeks into it, pal. Lifetime to go.
Starting point is 01:32:56 And you're just a baby. The thing is, they say that the first one is financial stress, right? So then people have to keep up with so much stress in their lives, let alone think about exercising, eating well, maintaining good social circles. There's so much to think about. What does cortisol do to your body in flame stress at all times? Like what are all the things it does? Cortisol isn't a bad – it's not bad, right? It's like that Goldilocks hormone, right? It's – we need it for certain reasons, right? We need cortisol.
Starting point is 01:33:42 It's when it becomes chronically elevated. Correct. That's what I mean. That's what I'm referring to. And you can get this checked. Again, you could get something called C-reactive protein or high sensitive C-reactive protein checked in your blood work and it'll come up with a marker and it'll tell you. We go deeper than that and look at many different inflammatory biomarkers, or I think we'll do around six. So it does many things. One thing is it can deteriorate the blood vessels in the brain. It can deteriorate brain cells. Remember, if you're blood vessels, right, you've got arteries, you've got veins, and you've got capillaries. Now, stay with me on this. Capillaries are one cell thick.
Starting point is 01:34:28 They don't have muscles on the walls of them. So in the moment that you get hypertensive, high blood pressure, or even chronically inflamed, it eats away at the capillary. That capillary, one capillary is supplying blood to a certain area of the brain. The moment that that capillary dies, that area of the brain doesn't get any blood flow. What happens then? That neuron will die. And you think, well, there's 87 billion neurons, maybe a collection of them die. But that's the start. Yeah, it's habitual. Yes. But then you've got
Starting point is 01:35:07 arteries as well. Now, these arteries have walls around them, so it makes them strong in order to pump blood and squeeze blood, making them effective. Inflammation over time ends up making the walls weaker. So it can deteriorate the walls of those arteries as well. Now it feels like everything around us is trying to make us inflamed. Like having inflammation in the body to say nothing of when I walked down the street, knowing the little bit I know, even as a novice, but like I look into this stuff at least, I pass every restaurant and every food place and I know they're not trying, but I'm like, inflammation, inflammation, like it's all around us. It's a cytokine storm. So funny because when we were talking about sleeping,
Starting point is 01:35:59 you're talking about immunity as well. There's really great studies now that have been shown that even having one week of sleep deprivation, which is considered six hours or less, it was a study that was published in PNAS where they took a group of healthy men and they subjected them to six hours of sleep a night. And they actually measured their genotype. So they looked at their genes. So like I said to you, you've got around 20,000 genes in the human genome. They saw a change of one week of sleep deprivation in 711 genes. So they messed with 3% of the total human genome. The genes are like light switches. You can turn them on, you can turn them off. The ones responsible for immunity were turned off. The ones responsible for tumor growth were turned on, right? So
Starting point is 01:36:54 lack of sleep, right? You can cause yourself to be in an inflammatory state. The foods that you eat can end up causing leaky gut, which can get you into a chronically inflamed state. Can you explain leaky gut to people? It's not my area, but what I do know is that your brain speaks to your gut, right? And your gut speaks, your gut microbiome speaks to your brain. Your brain speaks to your gut via the 10th cranial nerve, which is called the vagus nerve, right? But your gut has so many more nerves that go from the gut up to the brain. So you've got one that goes down, but you've got around 10 that go up, right? And you've heard that most of the serotonin, 90% of the serotonin produced is produced in the gut.
Starting point is 01:37:49 So what we eat determines how we feel and how we act. So if we're having food that is just bad for us over ultra-processed food. Ultra-processed, by the way, for people wanting to know what's the difference between processed and ultra, processed food is anything that food is anything that didn't come from a tree. It's just considered processed. But the ultra-processed are the fries, the deep fried food. So they're overly ultra-processed. Having that can put you in a toxic stew of inflammation. Yeah. There's this phrase going around, if you will, now that like the gut is the new brain or like is the second brain. And it makes sense because it drives so much of what we do. I mean there's the old phrase like eat like shit, play like shit, right? So what you're putting into your body determines how you're able to function. Now I've seen people who are the exceptions to the rule. They can just eat like
Starting point is 01:38:50 shit all day and, you know, be amazing athletes. Sometimes that happens, but like, it's so rare that someone can do that. And, you know, even I started thinking about that this year with all the changes I was making and, you know, I like to get into good habits with the stuff outside of my work because I don't want to spend time thinking about other shit than my business. So like with food, I can't be thinking about, Oh, what am I having for lunch? What am I having for dinner? I need to have like set go-tos. And like, I started having chicken breast with olive oil, apples, avocados, bananas. Olive oil is great for down-regulating inflammation. Yeah. I mean, and cashews, like all natural stuff. And my body feels different. Like during the week,
Starting point is 01:39:37 that's pretty much what I just told you, those things. And then like some blueberries and pears, like that's what I'm putting in my body. And I have, with every meal, I have a big bowl of actual broccoli, not athletic greens, not something like that. Not to say there isn't a place for that, but to actually get real vegetables in your system, I notice a difference having that in my day as well. So one thing that I find really interesting when it comes to inflammation is when you exercise, when you release these trophic factors, there's one thing that gets released from the cells of your muscle and it's called interleukin-6, IL-6. It's IL-6. It's part of the interleukin family. We knew all along that interleukins were pro-inflammatory.
Starting point is 01:40:26 So they get released in response to, let's just say you've got an infection, IL-6 will get pushed out. We now know that IL-6 is also anti-inflammatory. So when you exercise and IL-6 gets released from the muscles, it becomes anti-inflammatory. So it down-regulates inflammation. Another thing that down-regulates inflammation is EPA, DHA, omega-3 fatty acids, which you've got. Right there. That's it. Now, I want to actually understand brands more more so i just interviewed um the founder of momentous because i wanted to understand the manufacturing process of certain uh of certain
Starting point is 01:41:13 supplements because i know that supplement brand momentous yeah so they so supplements are not fda approved drugs right but they act like a drug and ep EPA DHA has the safety profile of an FDA approved drug. It is, let me tell you, it is remarkable what it does. If you actually understand EPA DHA and omega-3 fatty acids that come from fatty fish, by the way, oh my God, everybody would be taking at least like three or four grams a day. Yeah. So this, you said that you need to keep this in a fridge, right, which I've been doing. Good. So it doesn't become rancid.
Starting point is 01:41:50 And that also, you know, a big problem with a lot of these supplements, like I use now because my endocrinologist said this was a solid brand because she thinks most of them suck. But even with companies like this, if you're ordering off Amazon, you can order it and it'd be wrong. There's been scandals with that. Yeah, there's scandals with that. There was one company that, I think it was Thorn, which is a really reputable company. Some guy was just slapping the Thorn, like he copied the Thorn labels and he just put it on a bottle and people were buying it off Amazon. Yeah, that's horrible. But with something like Ultra Omega-3 fish oil fatty acids here, you're supposed to keep it in the fridge.
Starting point is 01:42:30 And if you taste test it, like chew it, and it tastes rancid, problem. Get rid of it, yeah. But it should taste like fish. Fish, of course. Which is kind of rancid. Well, just make sure. The thing is you've got to make sure that you're going to a reputable company, having a look at their third-party testing,
Starting point is 01:42:48 having a look at how many third-party testing sites, like what is the third-party testing that they got. The NSF-certified ones are really great because you know that they've gone through a – What does that mean? It means that they're getting certified by a governing body to say that it is what it is. But isn't this the same problem with like, we have different government organizations certifying things that shouldn't be certified? Exactly. So there's many different types of third party testing. NSF seems to be the best one. Why are supplements not required to go through the FDA? Because they don't replacement therapy, where she will get some estrogen,
Starting point is 01:43:49 maybe it's some estrogen gel, whatever she gets. It doesn't mean that you're having the same estrogen as me, a younger woman who's producing it naturally, but that's what drugs aim to do. They aim to mimic in a synthetic way, the biology of an actual hormone, right? Things such as vitamin D, which is still a hormone, it's both a vitamin and a hormone, isn't as, I would say, isn't as dangerous if you take it as opposed to an actual. But if someone made a supplement that did damage to you,
Starting point is 01:44:28 which could very, I mean... Damage in what way? It depends on what goes. So what I'm talking about, these supplements, you may think you're getting vitamin D, but it could be half of vitamin D, maybe half of, I don't know, Baking soda?
Starting point is 01:44:41 Baking soda, yeah. Washing liquid, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I guess that would – but then you're taking something every day that maybe then it does do damage to your body. Correct. So that's why I'm saying you've got to look at like what you do. But you know what else is also doing damage? How much of something that you're taking. Let's go back to blood work.
Starting point is 01:45:00 Ratios matter. You've got in your brain – to have a healthy brain, you have to have a really great ratio of copper and zinc, the zinc and copper ratio. If you're going out and you're just taking a whole bunch of zinc and you're not deficient in it, you're going to mess that ratio up, zinc to copper ratio. So you have to know why you're supplementing. This is why getting bloodwork, anyone can take your blood, but who reads it is really important.
Starting point is 01:45:29 Yeah. So you've always been picky about your produce, but now you find yourself checking every label to make sure it's Canadian. So be it. At Sobeys, we always pick guaranteed fresh Canadian produce first. Restrictions apply. See in-store or online for details. Why do fintechs like Float choose Visa?
Starting point is 01:45:50 As a more trusted, more secure payments network, Visa provides scale, expertise, and innovative payment solutions. Learn more at Visa.ca slash fintech. This is why I think that we do so well is because we look at that aggressively. We actually take blood every 90 days. Every night on all your clients? So you're constantly checking it? I'm constantly checking it. And it also reinforces to them, hey, what we're doing is working.
Starting point is 01:46:17 And how much, I mean, can you see massive shifts inside of 90 days? Oh, 100%. It takes 90 days to actually see a shift in blood work. For example, if we get a vitamin D deficiency score, let's just say somebody comes in, they've got a vitamin D of 20. That's like severely deficient. I think even the guidelines, the American guidelines state that anything under 20, I think, or 30 is deficient.
Starting point is 01:46:42 We want you to be at 60 nanograms per deciliter. So if I've got you there and I start supplementing you with 5,000 IUs of vitamin D per day, make sure that you get out in the sun. We'll see a difference in three months. Yeah. That was like a huge thing during the pandemic where people were realizing they were deficient in vitamin D. And then vitamin D also turned out to be something that at least helped combat COVID if you had it. We have vitamin D receptors on our brainstem as well in the areas that are involved in deep slow wave sleep. So if you have vitamin D deficient, you won't be able to get into deep slow wave sleep.
Starting point is 01:47:16 Whoa. Interesting, right? Yeah. And interesting that when we have so much sun, we feel tired. Yeah. Why is that? Because of the vitamin D receptors on the brainstem. Because it's using... Yeah. Because when you get the vitamin D from the sun, when it's converted, we improve our vitamin D in our blood on that day and we just get tired.
Starting point is 01:47:39 Yeah. But do you see what I mean? You have to be healthy to sleep. Yes. I really think that's your baseline right there, that and exercise. And you said those are two of the three, the pyramids. That makes sense. Yeah. The reason why I do it in that order, I used to struggle between sleep or exercise. It turns out that you can reverse the detrimental effects from one night of sleep deprivation with exercise. You can. Yeah. So if you have a bad night of sleep, maybe you slept five hours, go to the gym and you'll
Starting point is 01:48:13 feel a lot better. I always, when I was in college and we'd go out and rip it, always the next day, a couple of us would go get a good workout in. So that's good. Yeah. I think the rise also in like in diseases and and people understanding now more about like high performance is because we're just living in this world where we just like new york is expensive in and of itself just to eat healthy 100 just to eat healthy yes that's the problem with healthy foods. They cost a lot more. The processed foods are what's on the dollar menu. That's where it feels like the fix is in. But also when I think about what it took to get that there versus the processed food that they can make in mass quickly, it does mathematically make sense. It just creates a poor incentive structure that's why we're a society where even in say like our our lowest impoverished communities we have obesity problems whereas all previous societies
Starting point is 01:49:11 on the face of the earth the poorest people are the ones that were the skinniest because they couldn't get any fucking food yeah but the food we're feeding people that they can afford at the lowest level is so bad for them that they're getting fat. Well, look at the foods that are subsidized in this country. What are they? Cereals? The white grains? It's the ones that are just going to put you into metabolic dysfunction, increase your risk of type 2 diabetes and obesity. Yeah. That feels like a fix because I know Jesse Etzler is always hitting on the cereal thing. Oh, he hates the cereal. He'll take a thing of Raid and like spray the cereal. And he's not that wrong. Like it's pretty accurate because they're giving you – I guess it ties into some of their food pyramid bullshit.
Starting point is 01:49:56 But like they're giving kids like the worst possible things they can have at the start of the day. They're getting sugar in their system. They're getting processed grains. That's even what it's called. And we wonder why we see a rise in things like ADHD and stuff like that. Yeah. And even with Alzheimer's disease, you know this amyloid, right? It is an antimicrobial peptide, meaning that it is there and we need it because it's antimicrobial. So once it thinks it's under attack, it raises the level to protect itself. It's like the brain is like, hey, I'm under attack. So then
Starting point is 01:50:34 amyloid comes out and it's like, okay, well, I'm going to fight off whatever's coming towards us, right? I'm going to fight it off. But then it just sticks there and it just stays there. And if we don't sleep and don't clear it out, it just sticks there. And so it's funny because once you get mild cognitive impairment, which is a pre-dementia state, which I hate that term, by the way, because it's the first state before getting Alzheimer's disease. It's not like we say to you, you have mild metastatic cancer. No, that's not what you have. Mild cognitive impairment, there's nothing mild about it. So once you're in that state and then you then progress to Alzheimer's disease or Alzheimer's dementia, that is your brain saying, that's it. I'm at the mercy. I've give
Starting point is 01:51:19 up guys. I've all the amyloids out and the amyloid is here and it's here to stay. And that I did that Louisa for you because over the last 20 years, you put me under so much stress. You didn't feed me the right foods. You didn't even let me get the adequate blood flow because you weren't exercising. You didn't put me to rest. So here we go. I've got four and a half grams now of amyloid in my brain. You want to get rid of me? Go ahead. It's going to be 70K a year, but also I'm probably going to bleed and hemorrhage from the back of my brain and maybe eat away at the other tissue of the brain. So I'm probably going to be demented anyway. So what do you want to do? When you get to that, I forget the term for it,
Starting point is 01:52:01 but the pre-dementia phase. Yeah, mild cognitive impairment. Is there a way working with someone like you that you could reverse some of those effects? I wouldn't use the word reverse, but slow the progression. So if you had it and we say, maybe you're going to get dementia in 10 years, we could say, well, let's do it in 20. That's still so sad. It's still true. But let me tell you something dementia right and amyloid you can have a brain full of
Starting point is 01:52:28 amyloid but still have your cognitive functions yeah can you explain that so amyloid you know you've got it's alzheimer's disease is a multi-proteinopathy so there's two proteins involved you've got amyloid which sits outside of the brain cells, which interferes with the connection. But then you've got tau, and tau sits in the microtubules, right? So it breaks down the microtubules of the brain. So you've got two things at play here. If we can preserve the connections, we've seen people that don't have dementia
Starting point is 01:53:03 and they've got their cognitive functions, but they've got a brain full of amyloid. So that's why it's a disease that we still don't know that much about. But if someone's not in that pre-dementia phase, they haven't gotten there yet. Correct. That's where you might be able to use the word reverse. Yeah. Well, I still wouldn't use the word reverse. Dr. Dale Bredesen, he's a wonderful neurologist who works on this. He uses the word reverse. Yeah. Well, I still wouldn't use the word reverse. Dr. Dale Bredesen, he's a wonderful
Starting point is 01:53:25 neurologist who works on this. He uses the word reverse. I still would be cautious of that word because it's extremely hard and individualized. But then you can get about doing things that can help you clear out those proteins. We've seen in multiple studies that saunas can ameliorate this. We've seen at a low level that omega-3 fatty acids can ameliorate these. Simple things. Simple things. Yeah. Sleeping well.
Starting point is 01:53:57 Yes. Yeah. Like I said, I'm a huge believer in that. I feel like your energy levels are a really good determinant of how healthy you're going to be in the long term for all types of debilitating diseases. Of course. It's not the only thing for sure. But like if you constantly feel pretty good and ready to attack the day, chances are you're probably doing some of these habits correctly. Oh, 100%. Fair to say.
Starting point is 01:54:23 Or you've just been given the gift from your parents. Now, did you have a personal experience with Alzheimer's disease that got you into really caring about this? No. In 2019, my father had a stroke and we've seen some decline in his cognition over the past four years. However, nothing other than me looking at society and thinking 55 million people, that number is going to triple and we don't have a cure, but we can get to space. That's not okay with me. Especially because it is a preventable disease. Do you think we'll see a cure for it in our lifetime?
Starting point is 01:55:03 Mining yours? I don't know. I hope so. I don't think there's going to be a cure for it in our lifetime? Mining yours? I don't know. I hope so. I don't think there's going to be a cure just yet. What I think is that we're going to have better ways of managing the disease. It's my dream to have a cocktail of different things if someone has Alzheimer's disease, whether it be through some form of the FDA approved drug, not a lot of it, maybe clearing out some of the proteins, building up some of the other neurons, looking at different gene profiling, like with CRISPR, how can we use stem cells and gene manipulation to help the process? Can you explain CRISPR to people? That's really fascinating to me. I actually can't. No? No. Can we pull it up?
Starting point is 01:55:48 C-R-I-S-P-R. So there was a documentary on Netflix that came out maybe like a year before the pandemic. I remember I watched it shortly before the pandemic where it was showing a bunch of biohackers with this stuff. It gets a little crazy but crisper short for clustered regularly inner inner space short palindromic repeats is a technology that research research scientists use to selectively modify the dna of living organisms crisper was adapted for use in the laboratory from naturally occurring genome editing systems found in bacteria so essentially people are trying to change their genome yeah yes yeah to then be able to fight off potential diseases that they're predisposed to or also you start getting into like changing your biological age with that essentially yeah and you know there's genes responsible for you know everything right Longevity, for example.
Starting point is 01:56:45 There is a gene called Klotho, K-L-O-T-H-O. It was named after the Greek god Klotho as well. You Greeks get everything. We've got everything, right? And I always put it out there, right? So that can be used. I know that there's some early work that is being used to look at the clotho gene for Alzheimer's disease patients as well. And this gene is downregulated during neurodegenerative diseases.
Starting point is 01:57:13 So they're thinking, well, how could we include clotho as a method of helping these patients? But that involves gene manipulation. And this is a very, isn't this like criticized as well, you know, going against God? Of course. This is what, no, not in my opinion. This is what I think is the controversial aspect of it. Yeah. And I think anytime when you look throughout history where there's innovation, that is
Starting point is 01:57:40 always a question that comes up. I'm not saying that that means just do it no matter what. Every time I think you kind of have to evaluate things as they come, but we are getting to a point now where, you know, science is starting to bend the rules, if you will. And it's certainly a gray area. But have you seen this guy, Brian Johnson? Yes, have I seen Brian Johnson. All right. Now, what do you think of what he's doing? Look, I don't know why people get upset with him. He's got a lot of money. He can do whatever he wants with it. He wants to live a very long life and he's doing, that's his thing to do, crazy crap on your side. That's not the way that I want to live.
Starting point is 01:58:26 You know, he's got this seat that he sits on to improve his erection time, right? It's a seat. It's a seat that lights up and it vibrates. I don't know what it does. I was just like, what? I don't know why he wants to do that because I don't know. He mentioned that he's not having sex because he does – I don't know what he's doing. But like – There's a lot going on.
Starting point is 01:58:52 There's a lot going – so he's doing crazy things. He looks good. Yeah. He feels good. For people out there in the context, he's a former tech entrepreneur who – Who made billions of dollars. Right? So what was he?
Starting point is 01:59:06 Was he Venmo? I forget what he was. He was something. But he's trying to – He retired and he's like, I've got all this money. What do I do? Well, let me reverse my age or let me live longer. But he's doing it in the most craziest way possible.
Starting point is 01:59:22 He's got like a team of doctors, scientists. He's doing regular blood work. But he's doing like things that are just like. He feels like a lab rat when I look at it. He is, yeah. Like, hey, he can do what he wants, like you said. If it makes him happy, great. But, Leslie, can you pull up a before and after, before, after, and after brian johnson and like the regiment he's like there's something to be said as well of just like happiness if it's making you happy
Starting point is 01:59:51 like i don't know how happy one can be living this life that is so constrained i agree 100 but i mean do you think it's feminized him totally it has totally feminine why is that why does he look feminine there which he looks like a female yeah i maybe it's the outfit as well in the hair i've thought that as well i don't he looks doesn't he look better in 2018 he looks better from a masculine perspective for sure yes but like all when he goes through the results like his biomarkers and stuff like that, I mean, I, I don't want to say it offhand what it is, but he has de-aged effectively like a de-aged. Yes. A decent meaning, you know what I mean? Like, like his, his biological age, according to his markers is now way lower. Can I just tell you that there is really no
Starting point is 02:00:43 scientific validity around that. I mentioned that earlier. You can get a biological age test done and it's just a calculation of certain biomarkers. Like they'll look at your lipid panel. They'll go to a few different things. They'll put in a calculator and they'll say, okay, well, yeah, you've got the biological. I did mine. I had the biological age of 27.
Starting point is 02:01:04 Am I 27? No. And I've spoken to longevity scientists, ones who are actually looking at longevity, and they believe. Gary Brekker? She just gave me a dirty ass face. I wanted to go an entire day without mentioning his name. Oh, we'll get there. No.
Starting point is 02:01:24 He actually was one of the ones who studied NAD. But we won't go into it. But they even said to me, they said, Louisa, you are the age that you are. Well, I mean, mathematically, you are. I could go and stuff up that biological age, right, of 27. Let me just go and eat ultra-processed foods for the next three months. What, I've just aged eight years? Yeah, but like you ever see the – like look at – I mean it's a horrible thing to say,
Starting point is 02:01:55 but think of like a 60-year-old guy you know who looks old and terrible right and then think of like brad pitt who's almost what's he like 55 something like that is he 61 yeah okay he's doing so he is not the same age as that other person brad pitt was just in once upon a time in hollywood four or five years ago the guy's still fucking jacked and everything looks great, looks younger because I guess he works hard at what he does. And then you got the guy who's going to the pub after work every day and sitting at a desk under fluorescent lights and looks like he's 10 years from death. So you can't tell me – mathematically, you can't change it. Math is math. But they're both 60 in that case but you
Starting point is 02:02:45 can't tell me the biological age on brad pitt is the same as guy who should can be dead soon i guess so i do believe that i mean like i do believe that there is something to be said of slowing down your age i just it's i just when i talk to actual scientists in this field they tell me louisa there's yes biological age but it's not a it there's, yes, biological age, but it's not the be all and end all. And it's not 100% valid and scientifically proven. It's the underlying things that go into it though. Because if you looked at the blood work of Guy One and the blood work of Brad Pitt- But where are they determining it? What do you mean?
Starting point is 02:03:23 So when we do a brain scan and we can figure out your brain age, right, I can scan the brain, which is what we do, and we come back and we say to these guys, oh, you're 42, but you've got the brain age of someone who's 60 years old. Where am I deriving that from? It's coming from a normative database, meaning that they took scans of millions and millions of people and they put them through an algorithm and they say, well, according to these scans, this is what a healthy brain looks like at 25.
Starting point is 02:03:50 And so then they plotted against that and it's based on a normative database. The one that we use is called the Loretta normative database. Is that what they're doing with biological age? Are they just getting a bunch of 25-year-olds and saying that this is what a 25-year-old blood work looks like? Is that what they're doing? I see what you're saying. Do you see what I mean?
Starting point is 02:04:08 So it's like, and then really, is that real? Because like in 20 years, that a 25-year-old's blood work might be different. And so it's just, there's just so much to consider that I just think that, and if you do focus on that, I had one woman who was so focused on that. She's 45. Her blood work came back as 57. Oh, not 57, sorry. No, 53.
Starting point is 02:04:31 And she hated her life. She hated the world. It's just might be doing more damage than good. Interesting. Yeah, so. Yeah, I got to look more into that. But, you know, you're talking in some themes today about some of the drawbacks of Western medicine. And we've seen that up close in society over especially wrong that now people's understandably society's trust is broken in entire institutions. Not necessarily talking about big pharma right now.
Starting point is 02:05:16 I'm talking more about medicine in this case. So there was, you know, we bring up Gary Brekker. We should talk about him because you have some thoughts there. And we'll explain who he is in a minute. But there was a video of Dana White, the head of the UFC, who works with Gary on his health, where he said something. I'm going to paraphrase it again after what they did with the pandemic. They meaning now he's saying all of them. To which I immediately say, okay, so when you have a UFC fight and you have someone ringside next to the octagon. Are they a medical doctor?
Starting point is 02:06:07 So it's kind of doublespeak. But he has turned to someone like Gary, who is, I believe, not a medical doctor, and has, I guess, focuses in his own way on biomarkers. He's not even a scientist. Yeah, what is his background? I don't know. He is a businessman. He was working in insurance and he was calculating the, I think it was like when somebody would die for the health insurance policies, right? Based on blood work and based on how risk, like their risk profile. So he was predicting death, basically
Starting point is 02:06:46 saying like, if we take you on on our insurance, like he would give the insurance companies, yep, this guy, you know, he's going to probably live for the next 20 or 30 years. Right. So he was looking at that, looking at that. That was his, I don't know too much about him. All I know is that a lot of the things he says is so bad. It should be, it's so unethical and so illegal. He's just working with Grant Cardone and Grant Cardone, we know has made millions upon hundreds of millions of dollars in the real estate industry. Now he was like, let's attack the health industry because it's big right now. How do I make a lot of money? Gary knows how to talk. Gary just speaks out of his ass. He has no idea what he's saying. He contradicts himself every day. He says things
Starting point is 02:07:28 are just so false. For example, he openly said that the brain is a non-metabolic organ. The brain is the most metabolic organ in the entire body. Can you explain that to people? The brain uses metabolism. It has an energetic component to it because it has brain cells. That's what our metabolism is, how it's utilizing energy, for God's sake. So he doesn't think the brain utilizes energy? No, exactly. Based on what? You tell me.
Starting point is 02:07:57 So that's what he said. I don't know. He also said, by the way, he said the reason why the All Blacks, do you know who the All Blacks are? All Blacks? Yeah, they're the national football team for New Zealand. Okay. Okay.
Starting point is 02:08:13 So they do this dance, this historical dance. The haka, yeah. He said, after he said that the brain is a non-metabolic organ, he then went on to say that oxygen is life and the reason why the australian football team the all blacks do the haka is to increase oxygenation to the brain and it's like first of all australia is not new zealand that hit you fool okay that's just like me saying like mexico is in america but like so the thing is not only did he get his geography wrong but he also stated that this historical haka the haka is a historical dance a historical and it's not it's got nothing to do
Starting point is 02:09:04 with oxygenation to the brain they get some good energy in that thing though yeah but they weren't thinking to ourselves how do we get energy so like just the little things that he says and you know what when you've got to think of somebody who is at and like it's it really it makes me emotional because you think about somebody who thinks to themselves like a mother who thinks and i've been in surgery the last surgery that i went into as a, like it was in Australia where I was helping the neurosurgeon obviously, and the neurosurgeon said to me this is going to be her last surgery.
Starting point is 02:09:37 She's had six surgeries. She had a double mastectomy, breast cancer that has traveled to her spine, so we were going in, and she had a traveled to her spine. So we were going in and she had a tumor on her spine that he wanted to try and give her an extra six months of life. She is at the mercy thinking, I will do anything to stay alive for my kids. When you're at that stage of desperation, you are going to believe Gary Brecker. When you're at the stage of maybe you lost a parent, you don't want to get sick, you're at the mercy of Gary Brekker. So he's making so much money because everybody wants more life. Everybody wants life and they don't know who to turn to because they don't
Starting point is 02:10:13 have the education. They don't have the resources. They don't have the means. They don't have the people. So they just think Gary Brekker is going to save my life because he's great at marketing and he says things that are so outrageous. What else does he say that you find outrageous? I mean he lives and swears by the methylation test. What is that? It's saying that, you know, I mentioned earlier that, you know, I think it was around, don't quote me on the statistic,
Starting point is 02:10:42 but around 40% of the population has this MTHFR gene, meaning that you can't methylate B vitamins. And he's going around saying it's the holy grail to health, right? And so he's come up with this methylation test. Maybe it's around $800 or $900. And he tests these five different genes to see if you have those genes, which means that you won't be able to methylate certain vitamins. And therefore, if you can't, you're not going to get the nutrients you need to have a proper performing brain and body. And while there is truth to some of that, of course, there is so much more to consider than that. Yeah, it's got to be frustrating.
Starting point is 02:11:24 He's saying he can heal depression by looking at your consider than that. Yeah, it's got to be frustrating. He's saying he can like heal depression by looking at your methylation test. Yeah. Good luck with that. I haven't thought about Gary probably since you and I did this last. He doesn't seem to be coming up on my Instagram. Maybe he's taking a break and he's like. Yeah. I remember when he went on Di diary of a ceo you know and and
Starting point is 02:11:48 steven will have on it on his show like the thumbnails are supposed to get people's attention so i don't i i i get that but like the thumbnail maybe we can pull it up unless he had said something like this man cured cancer i can predict the day you will die there you go that's what he was doing at insurance companies yeah and it's like the minute to me and again you point out there's people who are in desperate situations and they turn to stuff like this and i feel horrible for that and i understand that but the minute you start making a claim like that i do think red alarm bells should be going off in people's heads. Like, oh, so you're going to tell me the day I die based on what? Like, who are you? God?
Starting point is 02:12:33 Look, there are, I got to tell you, once we're born into this world, you've got a genetic gift, if you will. There are just some genes that if you have a mutation on this gene, you will get a certain disease. For example, if we have a mutation on chromosome four, you will get Huntington's disease. What is that? If you have a mutation on chromosome four, we know, unfortunately, there is no cure, you will get Huntington's. However, there are other genes that if we know that if you have them, like the APOE4 gene, we know that you may just increase your risk of getting Alzheimer's disease.
Starting point is 02:13:14 So at the end of the day, you're born with certain gene pool, right? Yeah. It then becomes about how do we live in the best possible way? There is no – trust me. I would be handing it to my clients. Like I would be doing all of this if I really, truly – but the seat at your entire health comes down to sleep, exercise, and the food that you put in your mouth.
Starting point is 02:13:41 Everything else is an accessory. You know what else is also on there? The quality of your relationships. Yeah. There it is. I can predict the day you'll die. I tested 20,000 people per month. This is what's killing you.
Starting point is 02:13:55 Yeah, Gary Bradley. The algorithm. The algorithm was. Whoa. Bradley. What do you mean the quality of your relationships you mean like in general like friendships and stuff like that correct so um harvard did a an 80 year follow-up study where they followed people for 80 years and they determined why do these people
Starting point is 02:14:16 live the longest why do these people have the the best performing brains at age 100 and they they they said it came down to the quality of their relationships, not the quality of their, like if you've got a husband or a wife, who's around you? How do they measure that when you say quality? How did they? Deep relationships. Do you have somebody that you can really, truly talk to and trust? And I think that comes down to, it can even come down to inflammation as well. Like, are you stressed because maybe you don't have anyone, an outlet to talk to or somewhere where you feel safe and come somewhere where you feel safe and comforted
Starting point is 02:14:57 by. Right. Yeah. And that's a huge epidemic right now, especially in society. Yes. Loneliness, they're saying now. Loneliness, you know, can kill people. Yeah. But something like that, even before you get to the science behind it, that kind of should be obvious. Because, like, you get humans live for interaction. Yeah. live for interaction. So when it was all taken from us, you know, in one fell swoop with the pandemic, you know, people also formed habits that then kept them away from interaction after that fact to say nothing of the kids who are developing, who were still forming social skills that now you can't like, I don't care if they were third grade, fifth grade, seventh grade,
Starting point is 02:15:48 ninth grade, you can't get those years back. You can't get those two years back where they weren't building those skills and they were essentially going backwards. Yeah. So the study predicted that the strength of your social relationships predicts how well your body performs, right? And how healthy you are. So then you have to question first and foremost, because I take this into consideration now, I take into consideration who is in my immediate circle, which can be very scary as well, but not just that. Who are you following on social media? Because if you are the product of the top five people that you spend the most time with, then you really are the product of the people that you follow on Instagram. Yeah. I mean, I think that's pretty much
Starting point is 02:16:38 applicable to everyone now. So are you filling your mind with, you know, inane hot Instagram models? Are you filling your mind with people providing value from an educational perspective? Something as simple as that. Yeah. And you can be extremely manipulated by the people that you spend the most time with as well. And if you're spending time with, you know, the five people in your group, if they're all smokers, you'll probably become a smoker. Yeah. How do you determine who your friends are? Oh, longevity, right? How many times has somebody gone through something with me? One of my, you know, my best friend back in Australia, she, you know, we met at, I think age 18. She's been through, we've been through, you know, our adult life together. Like, so she stands as like, there's longevity there.
Starting point is 02:17:33 She's gone through so much with me. She's always, you know, she's always with me to go through things. So I determine it based on that. But also I've had to get rid of a lot of people in the last three years from my life. Why. What's the most common reason? We're moving in different pathways. You know, something that really bothers me is, you know, and it's sad, but I'm very, like, I'm really, if you've just come into my life, there's a, I don't know if we'll ever be friends because it's like, it's very hard now to get my friendship at this age. But I had a girlfriend who was in a relationship that is just so detrimental to her. It brought
Starting point is 02:18:11 her down. It brought me down. Every single day, she just wouldn't get out of it. She's still in it, by the way. Five years of just toxic behavior and she became extremely pessimistic. and every conversation was built around that. So it's like, I just couldn't do that anymore. Then I have other friends who like, I've moved into an area of my life where now it's become more about, um, you know, uh, finding the one, having kids, settling down, building my business and being really, really healthy. I no longer can be with somebody who's in a different area of their life where it's like, I just want to party and I just want to hang out. And I just, so things, you just go in different directions. Yeah. You have to have things in common. Are you
Starting point is 02:18:55 like, it seems like you're highly selective. You keep a tight group. Is that fair to say? Very highly selective. Yeah. Do you think, cause like you're a really hard worker and you're literally an entrepreneur like you've built this whole amazing business for yourself you have to travel around for a lot of it it's intensive you work a lot and then you also keep on track of your health because you practice what you preach and all that so you're into your protocols and everything but like you know do you feel like sometimes that that keeps delaying your life as well? Like doing this and delaying happiness? What do you mean delaying?
Starting point is 02:19:34 Because I feel I'm very, this makes me really happy what I'm doing. That's very clear. But like also so many entrepreneurs I talk to who like haven't gotten married yet or haven't looked at having a family or something like that. There's like a price you pay for doing that. And do you think about that a lot? I do. It's never come. I mean, I'm not married, but I've never blamed my career for me not being married.
Starting point is 02:20:04 For me, it's like not finding the compatible person just so it's maybe if i wasn't in this career look i have to tell you a lot of men have had the same opinion um of me which is an intimidation opinion they're like you know you spend so much time with other men it's like well that's my that's my job i mean the fact that a lot of the men are maybe not clothed in in my instagram stories because i work in the fitness industry might have something to do with it but look at the you know so that seems to be a regular so would that be maybe i mean maybe we could look into that yeah um but that feels like a cop-out. I think that's a cop-out. I don't think that the reason – my mother would probably say,
Starting point is 02:20:49 well, stop posting half-naked men on your Instagram and maybe you'll be married. It's like I don't think it works like that anymore. Yeah, I don't think that's it. But I think it's more important to find who you are. I have a lot of friends back home who got married at age, you know, 24, 25 and now 10 years on, I look at them and it's like, they're very unhappy. Yes.
Starting point is 02:21:12 And they don't know who they are outside of their marriage and they have their primary role, which by the way, I absolutely love. If you are a full-time mother, I think that's wonderful. And it's probably the most important job in the world. And one day that'll probably be my job. You want to be a full-time mother, I think that's wonderful. And it's probably the most important job in the world. And one day that'll probably be my job. But- You want to be a full-time mother one day? One day, I mean, I do want to be extremely present. I'm not the type of, although what I put out on social media, people probably think I'm like that, but I do want to be extremely present for my kids.
Starting point is 02:21:42 So look, I think that, but I have other, I've done my, my, my degrees. I know what I, I love that. I've built my business. I just see my friends who never went down that path and now they don't know who they are and they're full-time mothers and they want more than just that. And they don't know how to access that. Yeah. I kind of think it's, I, I, I think it's burning on both ends in the sense that, you know, you you can easily go wrong either way. You can put off your life so much that then you never love it or you can try to jump right into it and not really know what you want, not be ready in the world or know where you are or what's going on. And also, it's a natural thing, as you already pointed out, with just regular relationships. Like people can grow apart too. And I have tremendous empathy for that as well because it's like you might be really in love with somebody and they might be really in love with you.
Starting point is 02:22:36 And then you start to get out into the world and get older and it's just natural. It's not like you're bad people, but you're different, you know? And now far be it for me to speak on the matter since I've never been married, right? And I've got this really big thing. I never take advice from people who haven't done what I'm doing. You know, so many people give me, so many people give business advice. It's like, what do you do with your life? I just can't understand.
Starting point is 02:23:01 It's like, why are you giving me? But you know how many of my, do you know what's funny? Out of all of my closest girlfriends who are all married, they come to me, the unmarried one with like advice on their marriage. I'm like, why are you coming to me? They're like, you just give the best advice. I'm like, I don't think that's, that's correct. So, but what I mean is, yeah, I don't know what they're looking for, but I think there's definitely something to be said of marriages and social media.
Starting point is 02:23:29 Now I'm finding, I'm like, it's really easy to scroll through and look at what you don't have and paint a picture through neuroplasticity to your brain that you are in lack. They look happy. They look successful. They look like they're in love. They've got the perfect family. I don't have that. And they're all fake in lack. They look happy. They look successful. They look like they're in love. They've got the perfect family. I don't have that. And they're all faking it. Yeah.
Starting point is 02:23:49 A lot of them are faking it. Or, you know, my wife, you know, doesn't, you know, she's not as hot anymore. But look at this guy's wife. She's hot. Or look, there's so many girls out there I could be with. And it's just like, or, you know, maybe a female is like, oh, my husband, leaves the toothpaste open and he farts in bed and he does this and does that. But look at this guy, he's hot. It's like, I think social media is right, you know, giving rise to a lot of maybe
Starting point is 02:24:17 infidelity, which is another, this article, I have to find it to you, the divorce one, because it was great. It came up with like, you know, why is the divorce rate at 60%? It was coming up with infidelity, money being the number one, stress. And then if you look, and then it broke down, like, why infidelity? What does it come down to? And it's like, well, social media was one of them. Absolutely. Because it's- Accessibility. Yes. It's constantly putting something in front of our face. Before social media, for you to go out and be unfaithful to your spouse, you had to really work hard for it. Now you can be unfaithful by getting someone
Starting point is 02:24:55 sliding into your DMs. Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah, it's true. Do you know how many married men are hitting me up on the DMs? Oh, I'll bet. Yeah. Do you know how many married famous men are hitting me up on the DMs? That's crazy. Yeah. It's so funny. I'm like, not that I ever would. It's like, but don't you know I can screenshot this? Yeah.
Starting point is 02:25:15 I would never do that. I'd never respond. No, I understand. But it's, you know, I see it. I am looking at your messages. i know what these messages say i know that you have a wife and two kids yeah it's that that's that's this that's the scary part for me because like my my parents have a great marriage it would definitely be different in style than mine would be because my personality is different to both of them. But the example of that is great.
Starting point is 02:25:45 And I also have other people in my family who have amazing marriages and stuff. And, you know, we all, as you said, the divorce rate is so high. We all know so many people whose parents got divorced and stuff like that. And it's nasty. And I never, like, I want to find the right girl where it's like, it's never going to be perfect. You know, you're, you're going to have changes. That's how life is. But like you grow together. That's such a, such a key to be able to find that because I never want to go through that.
Starting point is 02:26:15 Yeah. And I always look at my parents who are happy and they've been married and for their, you know, their entire marriage, like what is it now they're um both you know 70 years old they got married and like in there when mom was like 23 but they were like an arranged kind of like set up marriage and old school old school yeah my mom said that they were married six months after they met she's like i couldn't think of it any other way and it's like it's is it better to do that because it it's like, got no choice. We both have the same values. We both have the same outlook on life. We both have the same culture. Let's just move forward. They weren't without their problems. I think just having three kids, I've got two
Starting point is 02:26:54 brothers, that in and of itself is going to raise some form of problems, right? Well, you mentioned one of the keys is financial stress and everything. Financial stress, yeah. And now think about all the people who are having kids now. They still are carrying loads of college debt. They were sold the American dream in a way that maybe isn't as accessible to them right now. They're working a shitty job. They're both working.
Starting point is 02:27:16 They have a couple kids. Now they got to put the kids in daycare. It becomes – their life becomes a job. It becomes a chore. Yes. Better way to say it. And that – when that happens, then what's the best escape you get? Scrolling away on social media.
Starting point is 02:27:31 Exactly. And they grow apart. It's the same – it all happens in different ways uniquely with relationships. But the core can be the same type of story in many cases. I've seen what divorce does to people. Oh, horrible. Not just, it doesn't just like bankrupt them. Like you, it's, it plays on their emotions and then you can end up in a chronically depressed state. And then that leads to, you know, different disease states. Yeah. You're, you're, and you're living,
Starting point is 02:28:03 you live in limbo when that happens. Like my friends who have gotten divorced, they're all older than me, so they've seen a lot more. But, you know, talking with them when it's going down, like I don't – I would not handle that well. Apparently by 35 you've statistically dodged your first divorce. If you're still single. Oh, man, Alessa, you're statistically dodged your first divorce. If you're still single. Oh man, Alessia, you're fucked, bro. Sorry. This kid over here is like 24. But, you know, I think sometimes when you look at society and the different trends that happen, you're kind of
Starting point is 02:28:40 saying this as we're having this conversation, we are having health problems that impact these results and then the impacts of these results are causing health problems. It's this vicious cycle that occurs. Yeah. It's just like Alzheimer's disease because in order to ameliorate these plaques, we have to be getting into deep sleep. But once these plaques occurs, it actually messes with sleep. So it's this vicious cycle. But it's just, you know, the way I like to think about it, we've got something in neuroscience called cognitive reserve. You want to build up as much reserve as you can in your brain and body. This is why building as much muscle and strength as you can in your younger years can help you because you
Starting point is 02:29:26 do start to get a huge decline in it as you get older per decade. But if you've got a lot of it, the decline will be slow. Build up as much reserve as you can so when you are faced with an issue, you're able to handle it. It's just like having savings in a bank, I guess. Yes. I'm not a financial guru, but it's just like if I have 100K in the bank or I have zero and we're both walking along in life and then something hits us, like something detrimental, at least you've got 100K there just to throw at it.
Starting point is 02:30:00 But what if you're at zero? Then you need to go into the minuses and that's when it's going to start to cause disruption and pain. This is why being really healthy and happy can help you be a better wife, husband, mother, father, which can help have a happier marriage. It's just, everything affects everything. Yeah. And we're on this topic of like relationships and marriage right now, but you know, in a similar light, there's also statistical changes in like when people are having kids and also some difficulties in having kids. We have like an infertility crisis going on. But I think like... Do we? Why do you say do we?
Starting point is 02:30:39 I think unexplained infertility is just a cop out. Really? Why? Yeah, because you're seeing all these women saying, I've got unexplained infertility. Then they just go on a holiday and then they fall pregnant. And I've spoken, by the way, with multiple, multiple fertility specialists on my podcast. And it's not that it's unexplained. It's that this is what I'm seeing. There is an education issue there. A lot of women just are not educated in when to conceive. You can conceive only five days out of the month. Where was that information? Yeah, that one went right past me. Yeah, during high school. I wasn't sexually active in high school though.
Starting point is 02:31:29 I just wanted to point that out. I feel like my mom might watch this one day. Okay. So that's the first – the boys are like looking at me like really. So that's the first thing, five days out of the month. But then the second thing is you have to be healthy to conceive. So what is your – do you have metabolic dysfunction? Do you have to be healthy to conceive so what is your do you have metabolic dysfunction do you have type 2 diabetes are you obese and all of these are are coming into
Starting point is 02:31:55 summing up in the infertility crisis that you're talking about now is it or do we just have a health crisis that's affecting infertility that That's affecting fertility. Have you had clients come to you to ask for help on something like that? Yeah, I actually have a couple. Really? Oh, they're so high performing. They're both, they're both, they work in the same hedge fund and they've decided, and I think between them, they're bringing in around $12 million a year. That'll do it. Right? Tell them to send me money. That's the least of what a lot of my, that's the least of what a lot of my clients are bringing in. But let's just, so they, when I say high performing, they have the most incredible penthouse apartment here in the city. They decided we don't want kids. So he's 47, she's 43, right? They just want to be as healthy
Starting point is 02:32:42 as possible. They've got other things i was like that's great whatever i optimized them that much 47 43 she accidentally fell pregnant was she happy about it well yeah she's like yeah she she ended up having twins okay that their twins are a year now i think they're actually like 14 months but she said to me i I remember she's like, how did this happen? I said, well, obviously they engaged in intercourse. And she goes, but the second part of it is she goes, but Louisa, I'm 43. And I said, because I've optimized you that much, because conception involves egg and sperm. It's 50-50. No, no. People don't understand that. It's 50-50. A female can have everything right. But if your sperm, which is what you should be saying, we have a chronically
Starting point is 02:33:31 deficient semen quality issue, right? If your swimmers are not strong, they're not going to be able to get to the egg. So if I've optimized them both, of course, you're going to fall pregnant. If a woman is still getting her period, she can fall pregnant. Yeah. And what makes the swimmers not strong? Like what are the most common culprits? Actually, he came to me with a testosterone level of 120, which its deficiency is classified as 300 nanograms per deciliter or less. He was like at 120.
Starting point is 02:34:06 Now he's at like, I think he's at 1,000 or like 980 maybe. Yeah, I'll do it. Yeah. But it's not just, you've got to look at semen quality as well. Lack of exercise, sleep deprivation, drugs, all of these things, alcohol affects the quality of testosterone and your semen quality. But what's upsetting me is that so many women take on the burden of testosterone and your semen quality but what's upsetting me is that so many women take on the burden of feeling like it's them i have a problem
Starting point is 02:34:30 it's me i can't conceive it's my problem it's like no it's it's not it may not be yeah it might be from the other side or it might be the fact that you're just having sex at the wrong time or it's yeah how often should you should like a male get his testosterone checked you can do it twice a year yeah yeah and does it does it the optimal level does it change by age of course you want yeah yeah it changes by age you're going to get a natural decrease so what is what is a 20 30 a 20, 30, 40, and 50-year-old look for at those four ages in testosterone? I don't know, but you should be definitely getting... If you're a young male in your 20s and 30s, you'd be over 1,000. Okay. Yeah. But funnily enough,
Starting point is 02:35:15 in these sleep studies that I mentioned, even getting one night of sleep deprivation drops your cortisol level. And I think they tested sleep deprivation on a 25-year-old and he had that the same testosterone level from sleep deprivation over a week, that of like a 60-year-old man. Yeah, I believe that. Because also like testosterone's peaking in the morning statistically. So I think you also preached the best time to work out would be in the morning, right? When natural levels of testosterone are up, cortisol levels are up, and you want to keep exercise as far away from sleep as possible. Right. So there's also like, you know, guys like Andrew Huberman out there who have all the protocols and everything.
Starting point is 02:36:07 And I mean, it's very fascinating. The guy, I feel like he's dropping new bars every day with like something I've never heard about. He's wonderful, yeah. Similar to you. Like you guys are coming at it in your own lanes. But, you know, you have so much knowledge of all this stuff. You know, one of the things he always talks about is the morning sunlight, right? Which means I think he's like within 20 minutes of waking up, make sure your eyes are contacted to sunlight. What's the logic there
Starting point is 02:36:31 with that? Because when your eyes see the sun for the first time, it signals to an area in the brain that you are awake. So it starts to turn on all of the internal clocks. And the longer that you don't see sun, that's when your internal system starts. So if you start your internal system at 11 a.m., 12 hours after that, you'll start to get sleepy. So you need to set your circadian rhythm by turning on all of your internal clocks. And that happens by getting direct sunlight to the retinal ganglion cells, which sit on the lower portion of your retina. Once those cells are activated, it sends a signal to something called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, which then says to the rest of the body, she's awake. Let's get going. Now you were saying you can't do this through glass because it reflects
Starting point is 02:37:26 light or something like glass attenuates blocks light from the sun shit yeah i love having those skylights out there because i see the sun right away but i do go like i walk to the gym every day and that's that's like a half hour after i wake up yeah that's and look another thing that people hate when i say it they, I hate when you tell us that we need three hours of sunlight a day. I'm like, but that's what we need. And so a lot of these guys are not getting sunlight. And sunlight is correlated as well to testosterone levels.
Starting point is 02:37:56 Weight training is correlated to testosterone levels. So that's another epidemic that we're having. Like people not weight training? People not weight training and people not getting out into the sun because they're in offices. Yeah. So you also preach about how, you know, women in particularly don't like to weight train because they're like afraid they're going to get ripped or something, but that's not true and you need them to do it. To get big and bulky, just to even grow a pound of muscle, you have to be working so hard. And you have to be doing so many sets and reps to failure.
Starting point is 02:38:32 But where I see most of the problems is with the supplementation of creatine. So many women are scared to take creatine. And you want them taking creatine. I want everyone taking at least five grams of creatine per day for the health of the brain and the health of the body. Yeah. What does that do? So creatine is involved in cell energy metabolism. So it helps in the generation of ATP. So more energy for the cell, right? So if we have more creatine, we can help produce more energy in a more efficient way. We produce little amounts of creatine, but not enough. We can get creatine from liver and beef, but we can't get it enough because the bioavailability
Starting point is 02:39:12 is just not there. So we should be supplementing with five grams a day. Now the problems here, first of all, it's got a very high safety profile. It's one of the safest supplements on the market, the most widely studied supplement on the market. I think it's the cheapest supplement program on the market. So they're all safe and effective. We have a problem with women thinking that, A, they're going to get, and this is actually across the board, all genders, that they're going to get kidney dysfunction.
Starting point is 02:39:41 There's been no known case of kidney dysfunction from creatine use. None. Well, no, I don't think so, unless you've got an underlying cause, right? That's the first thing. The second thing is women think they're going to bulk up. No, they're not. Does it push more water into the cell, creating a more fuller effect? Yes. You may feel bloated. Okay, great. Maybe go to two and a half grams a day. Then there's this problem with men thinking that they're going to lose their hair. With creatine? With creatine. So what happens is-
Starting point is 02:40:15 That's a thing? Yeah, it's a thing because they think that they're going to produce more DHT. What's that? Dihydrotestosterone. What's that? Dihydrotestosterone. What's that? So dihydrotestosterone is involved in the conversion of testosterone, right? So what happens when dihydrotestosterone is raised, it miniaturizes the follicles of the cell. And when it miniaturizes the cell, therefore less hair grows out of the follicle and then eventually it closes and it kills the... Oh, so it makes them bald.
Starting point is 02:40:54 So that's what ends up making people have male pattern baldness, et cetera. So this is why if you have finasteride or if you have a drug that can help offset it, it blocks DHT. So therefore, you won't miniaturize the cell. Okay, the follicle, I should say. But you were saying this because people think creatine is going to increase that. Because people think that creatine increases DHT. And it doesn't. And this is because of, I think, one study that went viral many years ago that showed that yes it's doing this and so people just hasn't haven't gotten
Starting point is 02:41:29 off that bandwagon so people think it makes my hair fall out it's like it doesn't so you want five grams a day five grams a day depending on your weight you can go up to seven and a half you can go up to 10 grams a day yeah i maybe i'm misremembering this and it's another one, but like one of the benefits is it helps with water retention? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And that helps build muscle. Well, it helps become more hydrated so you can lift more.
Starting point is 02:41:57 Yeah. And the thing is like women should be doing everything they can to help with bone mineral density. Bone mineral density. Yeah, so they don to help with bone mineral density. Bone mineral density. Yeah, so they don't become osteoporotic. We have one of our primary hormones is estrogen, and that is depleted and nonexistent in postmenopausal women. We know that we need it for bone density.
Starting point is 02:42:19 This is why a lot of postmenopausal women become osteoporotic. Two out of three Alzheimer's disease cases are female due to estrogen receptors in the brain. So women need to be doing everything they can to maintain strength and bone mineral density and muscle mass. You had also talked earlier, I don't want to forget about this, about joking about some of the accessories now that people have instead of just focusing on like exercise and sleep and nutrition, which is your core pyramid there. But things like, I'll just use some examples, sauna, cold plunges, red light sleeping. Are you saying that like none of that we even need to do if we
Starting point is 02:43:02 just focus on the other three? You cannot ice bath your way out of a poor diet. That's what I mean. I'm meaning that accessories are the cherry on top. Think of a cupcake, right? It's the cherry on top. You need to be sleeping well, eating well, exercising. Once that is there, then we can include supplementation.
Starting point is 02:43:27 Then we can include ice baths. Then we can include saunas. But don't go and get in the sauna all day and get in the ice bath, but your blood work is horrific and you're not sleeping. That's what I mean by accessories. Now, I have an ice bath in my apartment in New York City. So you partake in some accessorizing? Of course I accessorize.
Starting point is 02:43:46 But I do everything else well and I check my blood work. Okay? Pristine, by the way. Right. I hope it is. It's pristine. I actually went and did a full body MRI. And how was that?
Starting point is 02:43:56 This new thing that's going around. I'm like, that's a scam. Oh, I saw your Instagram story on that. I was like, let me still do it. Phenomenal. It picks up on 300 different types of cancer. The brain MRI was absolutely incredible. Nothing terrible.
Starting point is 02:44:11 I just had a nodule in my lung, which probably came, I had COVID. I know. I can't believe it. I got COVID once. So the nodule probably came from benign. And I have a nodule actually in my thyroid. Can you just, can they like cut that out or no? I don't believe it.
Starting point is 02:44:26 I'm going to go get the thyroid nodule checked as well. I mean, 95% of thyroid nodules are benign, but. What can cause something like that? I don't know. It just, I'm not sure. I'm going to go get an ultrasound. Okay. To see if it's fluid or if it's dense.
Starting point is 02:44:42 Yeah, that looked really cool. Like doing that full time. I was watching some of that on Instagram. Yeah, but it's fluid or if it's dense. Yeah, that looked really cool, like doing that full time. I was watching some of that on Instagram. Yeah, but it's also scary. You feel like you're in a coffin. Yeah, I don't like that. But, you know, but yeah. Okay, so the other thing I wanted to, that's kind of been underlying what we've been talking about today that I definitely want to touch on was cancer.
Starting point is 02:45:04 Because it feels like everything causes cancer and obviously very sadly cancer is like along with Alzheimer's and some others one of these just widespread diseases that so many of us experience close to us and our families or even people out there listening have had it and hopefully are surviving. But, you know, I think it, to me, a lot of it comes back to the things we're putting in our body, right? But also maybe the environment and us, you know, for example, living in New York City, where there's all kinds of shit in the air all the time. Like what are, what are some ways that you focus on, you know, outside of just nutrition, fending off cancer for people who are afraid of that and come to you for, for help with that longterm? So I, so obviously this is not my, this is not my field, but I interviewed, I've got
Starting point is 02:46:00 a close friend who's a cancer biologist, Dr. Joe Zundell, who came on the podcast and he was absolutely incredible. This is what I think about this disease, right? Yes, it's more prevalent. Now we're seeing it, you know, when we die, we're either going to die of cancer, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's disease, right? We have to first look at family history. You have to think, does anybody in my family have they passed away from anything first that's the first thing you need to look at the second thing you can do is not be afraid of getting tested genetically tested test for the BRCA gene test for the other genes that are coming out I know I'm excited about the, we've got this new test. It's called the Grail test,
Starting point is 02:46:46 G-R-A-I-L. It's going to be- Like a holy grail. No, not like that. I think it's G-R-A-I-L maybe, but it's a blood test that's actually going to be able to determine certain types of cancer. It's still in its infancy. I think we're going to be doing serum biomarkers that can actually now detect cancer at a more rapid place. We now have full-body MRIs. So we're able to detect it sooner. But what can we be doing to offset it? Well, don't smoke.
Starting point is 02:47:20 Don't get lung cancer. That's the first thing. Do the things that you already know to do. But it turns out that maximal exercise is actually can ameliorate circulating tumor cells. So when you have a tumor in one site, right? Let's just say you have a breast cancer tumor. You have a breast tumor. So what happens then when you've got a tumor, little parts of it break off and they become circulating tumor cells. And that's what ends up becoming metastases because these circulating tumor cells go and find another site and they go
Starting point is 02:47:57 there and they form another tumor. This is why they say your stage one tumor now has spread and it's gone now to the lymph nodes or it's gone to the spinal cord. It's now metastasized and now you're at stage two or stage three cancer, right? That's when it becomes scary. During this stage of circulating tumor cells, when you do maximal aerobic exercise, working out at like 80% of your maximum heart rate, it kills off these tumor cells. It kills off these circulating tumor cells and ameliorates them. It's called sheer force of blood. So the sheer force and shunting of this blood gets rid of them. That's the first thing. The second thing is during resistance training, you have the release of myokines, which are muscle-based proteins that live in the muscle cell. When you
Starting point is 02:48:45 squeeze them together, these myokines are excreted and released from the cells of the muscles. They go into the bloodstream and they go to different organs. Cell Press, which is an academic journal, very high stringent journal, scientific journal, showed that it can have an effect and stop the growth of prostate cancer and prostate tumors. Yeah. So we're now seeing the effects of exercise on these tumor sites. But then refer back to the PNAS article on sleep. You're down-regulating immunity genes and you're up-regulating tumor-producing genes. So sleep has an effect on tumor growth. Then, obviously, nutrients. You want to make sure that you are maintaining a great diet. I always say stick to the Mediterranean diet. 70% plants, little meat, lots of olive oil, lots of fish, right? Well, you can have a lot of meat if it's like little meat, lots of olive oil, lots of fish, right?
Starting point is 02:49:45 Well, you can have a lot of meat if it's like lean meat, right? Yes, you can. I would be cautious when I eat everything by the way. But when you're eating red meat, just ensure that you have your lipid panel in check. You don't want to be going and having all this red meat. Yeah. But like you can eat chicken. Oh, you can eat chicken, you can eat beef.
Starting point is 02:50:04 You can eat, yeah, of course you can. And fish just stick to, I always say to 70% plants, right? Eat the rainbow. And then you want to stick away from foods that are just going to cause like this rancid toxic stew of inflammation. Yeah. Which we already covered today. Yeah. Great. And the crazy thing about inflammation though, is that technically like when you're working out, like you're purposely inflaming yourself, but it's healthy inflaming because it causes your cells to then have to regenerate and build. Yes. Yeah. And that's homeostasis. What doesn't kill you only makes you stronger, right? You've got this thing called allostatic load, which is just a fancy science word for stress load you want to be getting good stress which is exercise it's putting good stress upon a system
Starting point is 02:50:51 because you stress it you grow back stronger we've got card you've got so many benefits from it it's the bad stress that we don't want and the bad stress is the chronically overthinking the sadness the you know the sleep deprivation. That's bad stress that you're putting on yourself. How do you decrease bad stress? What are your best go-tos to do that? Just the first thing you have to do, work one thing at a time. Work in months.
Starting point is 02:51:19 For one month, start your exercise. Just do that. And don't even worry about sleep, right? Just get underway with good habits. You've got to build adherence. Month two, now start working on sleep. So then you've got good sleep habits and good exercise habits. Month three, then start working on how can I fix my diet? We're focused, how can, we're focused so much on elimination. Let's eliminate alcohol. Let's eliminate this.
Starting point is 02:51:50 Like focus on what you're not getting. Are you getting the right amount of nutrition? Are you getting the right amount of nutrients? More often than not, everyone probably needs to supplement. Yeah. Now, what if you're doing all three pretty well and you're still stressed? Like you're in a high stress job like me, right? I'm constantly, constantly thinking about a million things at once.
Starting point is 02:52:08 You need to have an outlet to talk to somebody about that. You need to have better coping strategies. One thing is put pen to paper, start writing down all of your stresses, get them out of your brain, put them on a piece of paper. How are you spending your mornings? Are you doing breathing exercises? Maybe you want to engage in 10 minutes of Yoga Ninja throughout the day to calm your nervous system down. There's resources there.
Starting point is 02:52:31 There you go. Okay. Yeah. Well, we covered a lot today. This was- Did we? This was loaded up. Yeah, there's-
Starting point is 02:52:37 And could you believe it? I'm taking notes. Yeah, I could still talk for another 10 hours just on Alzheimer's disease, but we'll do that for another episode. That's exactly the point. So when the great thing about people like you is you're constantly researching and finding new things because you're moving a field forward. So there's always something to talk about in the future. It's not like you have one life story we tell it's like, oh, that's what it is. So we'll keep this conversation going, but thank you so much for dropping so many
Starting point is 02:53:03 gems today. We're going to have the links to your Instagram down below. Are there any other links we should put in there, by the way? Yeah, we'll put the business link in there as well. Yeah. Let's do that 100%. You can work with Louisa and make millions of dollars. But Louisa, thanks so much for coming in. Thank you so much for having me.
Starting point is 02:53:18 All right. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Thank you guys for watching the episode. Before you leave, please be sure to hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video. It's a huge help. And also, if you're over on Instagram, be sure to follow the show at Julian Dory Podcast or also on my personal page at Julian D. Dory. Both links are in the description below.
Starting point is 02:53:39 Finally, if you'd like to catch up on our latest episodes, use the Julian Dory Podcast playlist link in the description below. Thank you.

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