The Dr. John Delony Show - Living Longer and Better With Dr. Peter Attia

Episode Date: July 3, 2023

On today’s show, author, podcast host, and founder of Early Medical Dr. Peter Attia joins us to talk about medicine, mental health and the four diseases most likely to kill you. Lyrics of the Day: "Ready For It" - Taylor Swift  Sign up to receive Dr. Peter Attia's newsletter here. Let us know what’s going on by leaving a voicemail at 844.693.3291 or visiting johndelony.com/show.  Support Our Sponsors: BetterHelp DreamCloud Hallow Thorne Add products to your cart create an account at checkout Receive 25% off ALL orders Resources: Own Your Past, Change Your Future Questions for Humans Conversation Cards Redefining Anxiety Quick Read John’s Free Guided Meditation Listen to all The Ramsey Network podcasts anytime, anywhere in our app. Download at: https://apple.co/3eN8jNq These platforms contain content, including information provided by guests, that is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. The content is not intended to replace or substitute for any professional medical, counseling, therapeutic, financial, legal, or other advice. The Lampo Group, LLC d/b/a Ramsey Solutions as well as its affiliates and subsidiaries (including their respective employees, agents and representatives) make no representations or warranties concerning the content and expressly disclaim any and all liability concerning the content including any treatment or action taken by any person following the information offered or provided within or through this show. If you have specific concerns or a situation in which you require professional advice, you should consult with an appropriately trained and qualified professional expert and specialist. If you are having a health or mental health emergency, please call 9-1-1 immediately. Learn more about your ad choices. https://www.megaphone.fm/adchoices Ramsey Solutions Privacy Policy

Coming up on the Dr. John Deloney Show. This show today is a special show. Do not miss this thing. So buckle up, put your earphones in, and turn the volume up a little bit, and stay tuned for my conversation with the great Dr. Peter Attia. What is going on?

This is John with the Dr. John Deloney Show. A show where we talk with real people who are struggling with real stuff. Trying to figure out what in the world to do next. And in a sea of nonsense, nonsense about health and wellness and fitness and nutrition and mental health and emotional health and blah, blah, blah. I'm dedicated to dedicate my life to trying to cut through some of that nonsense. This show today is a special show. Do not miss this thing. When we laid out the idea that I was going to have my own show and we sat down with a team and it was back in the OG days with Kelly and James Childs and the whole gang. And we sat down and said, what's a dream list of people that you would one day

like to have on your show? The number one guy, number one was Dr. Peter Atiyah. Dr. Atiyah is a guy who has, I found in 2011, 2012, when I was a ball of chaos, my life was mayhem. And he was just starting to write blogs and just starting to put information out and just starting to challenge conventional wisdom about medicine and challenge conventional wisdom about diet. And I found him to be a cup of cold water in the desert. And over the last five, six years, he has transformed into one of the world's leading voices in how we look at medicine, how we look at being well, how we look at emotional health and physical health. And he wrote this new book, which is an absolute masterpiece. It's one of the rare books that I believe should be on every shelf in every home

in America. The book's called Outlive the Science and Art of Longevity by Dr. Peter Attia. It's a masterpiece. It's so good. And I'll tell you this, there's a couple of chapters in here that are worth the price of admission alone. Here's how much I value this book. I bought it with my own money. Now, if you don't know, behind closed doors, publishers will send books, try to get you on media outlets.

It didn't work this way. I bought this book and did my best to get a hold of outlets. It didn't work this way. I bought this book and did my best to get a hold of Dr. Tia because I wanted him to be on this show. A couple of days after we recorded the show, I saw he was on Oprah, right? So he has left the stratosphere, but he did give an hour of his precious time for me and our team and our 17 or 18 listeners of this show to really take a deep dive. And we talk about some hard stuff.

He's one of the most gracious men in the country. I'm so grateful you get to hear this conversation. And I don't really hold back, ask a lot of hard questions. And it's one of the great blessings of my life so far. So buckle up, put your earphones in and turn the volume up a little bit and stay tuned for my conversation with the great Dr. Peter Attia.

So we're gonna dive into this and I've intentionally not listened to some of the media you've done on this book because I wanted to just talk about this book and your work globally in ways that it's impacted me because I think that's the most honest way we can talk to our listeners. But I do want to touch on this real important, I mean, the cornerstone of this book. Can you talk about the four horsemen? You've had a ringside seat both as an N1, you experiment on yourself and

countless patients. We all end up dead, but many of us die long before they code us. And many of us live less than our best up in these last days. So can you talk about the four horsemen, what you even mean by all that? Well, I mean, the four horsemen are just reference to kind of the four big chronic diseases that shorten lifespan, which is a part of longevity. The other part being health span, which I'm sure we'll talk about as well. Um, but you know, for the most part, if you're over 40 and you're a non-smoker and you don't engage in really, really ultra risky behavior, um, unfortunately that includes, you know, using, you know, illicit drugs now given fentanyl, uh, poisoning, um, there's pretty much an 80 plus percent chance you're going to succumb to one of these horsemen, cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative disease,

cancer, and metabolic disease. The most obvious example of this is type 2 diabetes. But of course, long before you get to type 2 diabetes, you've passed through the station of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, insulin resistance, hyperinsulinemia. And so collectively, at least one way to think about how do I live longer is understanding what are the impediments to a longer life. And for most of us, it's going to be one of the horsemen. So it's a moment of shame that I carry around with me. I spent 20 years working in higher ed with scientists and professors as a dean of students, as a professor. I spent my years with some of the most lovely, caring, wonderful people who are trying to solve big problems.

And when I left that ecosystem, if you will, and came here, and as my 12-year-old son says, dad, you're just a YouTuber now. As I transitioned to this new ecosystem, I've been frustrated, humbled, whatever word you want to say, by the fact that I was talking over people for 20 years. As, quote unquote, as we tried to dumb things down or put things on the bottom shelf for people to understand, I I was talking over people for 20 years. As quote unquote, as we tried to dumb things down or put things on the bottom shelf for people to understand, I just was talking over people. And it wasn't until I was sitting with single moms and truck drivers who just want to be better dads,

just want to be better moms that I realized, man, this is such, there's such a chasm here. How do we bridge that chasm between like, what even is metabolic disease and the single mom with three kids who's just trying to say, dude, can you just give me one or two things so I can breathe? Right. What feels like such a gap there. And I don't know how to bridge it. I don't know that I have the answer to that, John. I mean, I think I would say the way to bridge it is the, uh, in a resourceined world, and for most people, the most precious resource is time, not money.

So the question is, how much time does it take to reduce risk of these things and take action today to have more time later? I mean, that's basically what you're doing here. It's a time swap. And it is an arbitrage in your favor. So the, the more time you can put into this thing now, the more absolute time you get on the backend and the better that quality of time. I think most people care more about the quality piece than the absolute piece. I think if most people were really confronted with what it means to suffer in quality of life, cognitive suffer, physical suffer, they would accept that it's a really worthwhile decision to make when you still have your health to do something about it.

And what one does about it is a function of how much time a person has. But, you know, you have to compare it to the alternative, right? So if a person is exercising, not at all, right, which is more people than not are not exercising of all-cause mortality, meaning death of any cause, certainly inclusive of the horseman, cuts that risk down by 50% in any given year. Golly. I mean, we just don't have other things that compare to that. There is no drug on the market on planet Earth that could touch that. No, not even close. So, so, you know, I'm not going to be the one that sits here and says that is or isn't worth it, but, but those are just the facts. And I, I don't, I don't see it as my, my job, frankly, to, to, to, to tell people what to

do. I think it's just, I'd like to lay out the info and let people decide how much of the menu they want. You mentioned, gosh, it may have been on your show a while back, this idea of reframing the paradigm between we've gotten really good in our medical system and in our mental health system, which again, the fact that they're separate is a whole other conversation, at when somebody gets sick, coming in and solving that problem. And you've completely shifted the paradigm to, what if we prolonged the time we were healthy and well and whole before we got sick? In the face of just live your life and we've got you, you can eat what you want, you don't have to move,

you can just absorb life. And then when it hits you, we'll be there. How do you flip that paradigm on its head? Is it just what you said? Just give people the alternative? Like, hey, you could live just a qualitatively better life if you started doing something. I mean, I think it depends on if you're trying to think through that at the policy level or at the individual level. So in some ways, it's easier to explain what's wrong at the policy level or at the individual level. So in some ways it's easier to explain what's wrong at the policy level because it's the way medicine 2.0, which is how I describe it in the book, is fundamentally constructed. So medicine 2.0 came along to solve a certain type of problem,

which was what I call fast death. So for most of our history, we died a fast death. You basically died from infections and trauma. That was how we died up until several hundred years ago. And we had no treatments for those things that really worked. And in the span of a couple of generations, we've figured out how to solve those problems. And it's been miraculous. It's literally doubled human lifespan from about 40 to 80. But in the same time, we've demonstrated that that playbook, which you describe as come to me when the problem is really bad, we have a solution to fix it. That problem doesn't work for slow death. That problem doesn't work very well for cancer, doesn't work very well for

Alzheimer's disease, it doesn't work very well for all these chronic diseases. It works slightly, right? Meaning we do extend the period of time people can live with disease now. But if you actually look at the data, which I think I have an entire chapter devoted to this, I think it's chapter four, I go through and I think make the case that that strategy won't work. In fact, the only strategy is the reverse. You have to extend the period of time that you are free of disease, not the period of time that you have disease. So medicine 3.0 is about lengthening the period of time before you have disease. And medicine 2.0, which is in my book, failed against chronic diseases is the opposite. That feels like something, if you distill from policy down to individual, that feels like

something that needs to be implemented at starting a kindergarten with how we move and how we sit and just the life lessons that say, here's what this looks like. I mean, it's got to start in the home too, but sometimes that's a tough sell. Yeah. I mean, it's got to be everywhere. I mean, our healthcare system isn't set up for that. So that's, unfortunately, I think it's much easier to solve the individual problem. And that's why this book is written for the individual, not for the policymaker. It's basically my way of saying, I'm not convinced we will solve this problem at the policy level. But at a minimum, even though it's harder if you want to solve it for yourself than if the system solved it for you, we're not going to wait around for the system to solve it. You're going to, you're going to,

you know, here's a playbook for how to solve it yourself. You've been at the medical level, been behind closed doors. I've done the same with the mental health professionals, incredible people trying to do incredible hard things. Where have you seen the roots of this entropy and we all know, we all see the data and we're going to go do it anyway. And so I think of something like, well, I'll let you answer it because I can kind of get on a little tangent here. Well, do you mean why is the current system the way it is? I have not met a doctor, friend, researcher,

or somebody that I'm going to see that likes the state of things and likes the machinery with which they operate. I don't know a mental health professional that is keen on having to label everybody that walks in their door. But the system gets stuck there, right?

And it has to take a rogue member like yourself to just break off and say i gotta do something different yeah and and let's be clear i'm not alone a lot of people of course of course chosen to do this but uh i mean in a word money right so um you the system is built around a system of diagnosis, treatment, and billing. And we have an insurance system that reimburses, and this is true whether it's private insurance or whether it's public insurance, i.e. CMS, Medicare, Medicaid. All of that reimbursement is still based on the same algorithm, which is what you just described. So you have to come up with a diagnosis. You have to have an ICD-10 code on this thing to get billed. And our treatments are not,

we don't reimburse for exercise. We don't reimburse for nutrition. We don't reimburse for sleep. We don't reimburse for emotional health. We reimburse for mental health. And there is a difference. And even within that, we think about it through the DSM-5, as opposed to maybe a more nuanced look at what constitutes emotional health. So I don't say that to sound jaded. I just think that that's the truth of it is. It's reality. I think everything is just predicated around a system. But at the end of the day, if you're a doctor, you have to make a living. And if your choice is, this is the way I'm going to make a living because this is the

way the system works, then it's the way it's going to work. And yes, if you're willing to take more risk and go out there and go outside the system, you can do something a little bit different, but it's really not scalable. And the reason it's not scalable is because, you know, the majority of people need their health insurance to be covered by another entity. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. October is the season for wearing costumes. And if you haven't started planning your costume, seriously, get on it. I'm pretty sure I'm going to go as Brad Pitt because we have the same upper body, but whatever.

Look, it's costume season. And if we're being honest, a lot of us hide our true selves behind masks and costumes more often than we want to. We do this at work. We do this in social settings. We do this around our own families. We even do this with ourselves.

I have been there multiple times in my life and it's the worst. If you feel like you're stuck hiding your true self behind costumes and masks, I want you to consider talking with a therapist. Therapy is a place where you can learn to accept all the parts of yourself, where you can be honest with yourself

and where you can take off the mask and the costumes and learn to live an honest, authentic life. Costumes and masks should be for Halloween parties, not for our emotions and our true selves. If you're considering therapy, I want you to call my friends at BetterHelp. BetterHelp is 100% online therapy. You can talk with your therapist anywhere

so it's convenient for just about any schedule. You just get online and you fill out a short survey and you'll be matched with a licensed therapist. And you can switch therapists at any time for no additional cost. Take off the costumes and take off the masks with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com slash Deloney to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com slash Deloney. I want to take a little bit of a left turn here. So actually, pull this apart for us, mental health and emotional health. You're very careful to speak about emotional health, which I appreciate. What's the nuance there? Well, I mean, I think when we talk about mental health,

we're typically talking about diagnosable conditions. And these are things that obviously people are familiar with, you know, depression, anxiety, things of that nature. But of course, it also includes more severe conditions, schizophrenia, bipolar, hypomania, or personality disorders, narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder. These things all probably fit somewhere under the umbrella of mental health. And those are very significant, right? So the prevalence of these things within the population to varying degrees is significant. And it's not necessarily always to the point where it's pathological right i mean a person can have some anxiety and it not

be a pathological condition so um you know the system does tend to pathologize these things a bit i i'm not i know nothing about that system so there's nothing and you know there's nothing i write about that there's nothing i speak about there i know nothing about that that is not my field of training uh what i'm really talking about is something that's a little more broad and something that every person ought to be considering, which is emotional health. And emotional health, while inclusive of mental health, should there be mental health issues, is probably a lot broader. And it probably includes more. It includes, for example, happiness and joy, fulfillment, sense of purpose, the state of one's relationships, the state of one's relationships,

not just with others, but with oneself. These things are probably the lattice upon which one really defines the quality of their life. In other words, if the state of affairs in emotional health is poor, it's hard to make up for it, if not impossible, with anything else. I want to double-click. What you just said is really powerful, because we try to solve that with infinite number of charlatan hacks and that's that's well not even charlatan hacks i mean i i think i think we we would all try to solve those things we we would all try to fill a void there with other things that on the surface

seem reasonable work money success um you know shallow friendships um the approval of others you know there's all sorts of things that we would we we will try to use to fill a void if there is indeed a void there and um i think if most people are being honest and they think about it they realize that nothing else matters if that is in disarray. And therefore, that's why I felt that that arc of behavior, an arc of a body responding. But emotional health seems like a much more honest way to look at it. But again, it's hard to codify that and to reimburse for how much joy do you have versus how many times have you felt anxious in the last six months? That's a, golly, man.

I think that is paradigm reframing in a really powerful way because if I'm seeking joy and I'm seeking beauty and I'm seeking happiness and I'm seeking good relationships, that's gonna impact movement and sleep and metabolic health and eating and also staying up too late and having

some beers when a buddy comes into town it's going to impact all of that as the i don't know that she feels like window number one and not window number afterthought after you get all these other things lined up that's completely true um so i think that those are those are basically different sides of the same coin so on on the one hand, if that emotional house is not in order, for many people, not for drugs, antisocial behavior, all of these things stem from a breakdown in that emotional health bucket. And then similarly, that breakdown is also leading to just misery. So now you have poor physical health and poor emotional health, but the core problem is often the same. And I guess the heartbreaking part for me, and I know you've sat with countless patients just kneecap to kneecap, is when the ticker tape

running underneath your life is that you're worthless or you're a piece of crap or it's your fault that your parents fill in the blank. Choosing misery, that makes sense. That's a deserved punishment for your life. And so there's almost, there's this really important need to change some of those core messages so that I believe I've got value beyond misery. Or I don't have a picture

for what non-misery life looks like. My mom smoked, my dad smoked, my dad yelled, my mom left us every couple of weeks. That's just what I, that's the picture I got. That's the, that's the scale. And being able to paint a new picture that says, man, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's something else here. It's just tough, man. Yeah. And I think it's, I think it's all of that. And I think it's also believing that you can change the current state internally, I mean, right? So it's one thing to think, yeah, I can get out of this situation. But a lot of times you can escape one situation.

You find yourself in a better place by external metrics. But the internal milieu is the same. And I think that's the harder one to confront. And I think it's also the harder one for people, certainly for me, to believe that there's plasticity there, that that thing can change. There's been few scarier moments than last year. My wife and I sat on our front porch out here. We live on some acres out here in Nashville, overlooking our dream. We'd had a financial year that neither of our families, just like family trees could have imagined.

And we just lost a friend. Our marriage was pretty tough, man. Like it's tough to think, cause man, I really hedged my bets on these metrics and they didn't like the amount of money in the account and the amount of this, it didn't come through. And it's harrowing a guy like me thinking I got all the answers and I got there and it wasn't there, right And it's harrowing. A guy like me thinking I got all the answers and I got

there and it wasn't there, right? What's that old saying? Like, I went with me, right? I showed up there too. And until I deal with that guy, there's no dollar amount that brings peace to my home, right? Yeah. Yeah. All right. So let's turn left here. How do we find balance? And this is a global Dr. Atiyah question here. How do we find balance between And this is a global Dr. Atiyah question here. How do we find balance between achievement on a grand scale? And here's what I mean. You have accomplished many wonderful things. And as I embarrass myself in the intro here, you have done so much productivity-wise and you've presented it to the world in a way that helps all these people. And I want my buddy Peter to have a great marriage and like his kids want to come home when they graduate college

and want to come hang out. At what point, how do you find that balance? I feel like the narrative is one of two ways. One, we get one narrative, which is crush it and kill it and go and go and go and go and go. And if you have a feeling and if you get tired, it's because you're weak and you just need to suck it up. And the other path is the 7 million men who just said, dude, I'm out of the workforce, I'm out of here. Or quiet quitting or sitting at home or just like you mentioned earlier,

I just feel so disempowered, man, I'm out. There has to be a new third way here to both achieve things, do well, contribute to society, and not melt yourself in the process. But if I look back on those who have really made a mark on society, they left a wake behind them. And I don't know how to find that balance. And this is a macro, this is Dr. Atiyah, global voice, you know, best-selling author, but it's also Tim, the Boy Scout leader, who's got two kids, right? Yeah, I mean, I don't, I was kind of younger and my wife will talk about this, if, um, you know, the way I would talk about it to her when we first got married is I wanted to

build a skyscraper. And I just said, look, if you go into, if you, if you look out at the world, it's mostly just townhouses and there's only a few skyscrapers out there. And there's, there's people who have done unbelievable, exceptional things that have stood out. And I want to be one of those. I want to build a skyscraper. And I just was adamant about that. I had to do this. I had to build a skyscraper. And, um, there's just, there's just no question in my mind now where that was coming from and how unhealthy that was. And that's kind of the irony of it is, I think a lot of people who do build skyscrapers, whether it means through some enormous financial

success or even through something more productive, right? Like, you know, literally creating a technology that is, you know, valuable. A lot of times there's probably a void that's being filled there. And while the world may benefit from what they've done, it might not necessarily be ultimately filling that void. I can only say that today, first of all, I realize how kind of grandiose that aspiration is. And that's not surprising. It's congruent and consistent with everything that I now know about myself and my past. And it's not an accident that I would find myself in a very grandiose position as the defense mechanism. Statistically, the probability that any one of us really matter cosmically is pretty much zero. Right? So, like, we just have to be honest and think about this, which is, you know, even when you think about the most significant people dying, it just, it, you know, to borrow that phrase, bending the arc of the universe, I'm not sure who first

used that expression. Very few people bend the arc of the universe. And I'm much happier today, not trying to build a skyscraper and not trying to bend the arc of the universe, because first of all, I just know it's, it wasn't making me any happier being in pursuit of it. Two, if I'm going to be brutally honest, I wasn't going to do it. And three, it's allowing me to optimize more for something that I think is more valuable, which is the time I have with the people who matter most to me. And I don't think I have this figured out. Like, I mean, I'm clearly trying to be the guy in the middle. I'm not retiring. I'm not saying I'm not going to work. I'm not working 40 hours a week. I'm not taking weekends off to not work. I'm still working probably harder than I would even like to work, but, um, it's just, it's just

different. It doesn't feel like I'm trying to change the world. Um, and I, I think my priorities have really shifted and, um, but I think I'll always still struggle with, you know, just as a, just as a, a former alcoholic is probably always going to have to be on guard against having another drink. I think a former workaholic is always going to have to be on guard when it comes to making choices that very quickly can put you back into destructive habits. The way I've tried to make peace with it is I need people. I got two little kids. I need people out there solving some of these big complex issues at the local level and at the national level, the global level. I want people out there really going for it. And I've had to look in the mirror and say, you can go for it. But that call from dad's not coming. That certificate's not going to come in the mail that says, hey, I'm really that that certificate's not going to come in the mail

that says hey i'm i'm really proud it's not going to come right it's not going to solve me and that may be the ultimate skyscraper i wanted to build right um i want to do all this and achieve all of this because then it it then then i finally sew up that hole inside and it just, I don't know. So I guess I want people to achieve. I just wanted to know that it's not going to heal you. You got to do that work somewhere else. Yeah. And I think that, you know, building off what you're saying, I mean,

I think a bigger skyscraper for me is after I'm dead, like nobody remembers me other than my kids and my grandkids and my friends. Like that, that's, to me, that's a legacy worth having. Um, not that 10 years after I'm dead, someone's writing an article about me. Like I, I, that just doesn't mean anything. Zero. Yeah. Um, yeah. So, so, so knowing that after my kids go to college, they actually want to come home, knowing that after my kids get married, they actually want to be near us,

they want to call me when they have a problem. I mean, those are things that are going to matter far more to me than anything else I'm doing. Can you give us some granular, not even granular, some simple, let's go with simple. If somebody's listening to this and they don't even know what metabolic health means, if Alzheimer's is something that happened to their grandmother and that's a problem for future them, can we talk through what's metabolic health and what are a couple of things people can start thinking about right now,

wherever they happen to be? And cognitive health down the road. Can we start thinking about some of those things? What are some things we can do right now to be intentional about playing a 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 year game? So metabolic health basically comes down to, does your body know what to do with energy? Does it know where to store it? And does it know how best to access it? That's the simplest definition I can come up with. And what differentiates a metabolically healthy person from a metabolically unhealthy person is that distinction. So let's consider somebody with type 2 diabetes versus someone who's in perfect metabolic health.

One difference is that the person with type 2 diabetes, by definition, has very elevated blood sugar. The glucose in their plasma is probably twice as high as the glucose in the plasma of the healthy person. So right away, you know they have a storage problem. They don't know how to dispose of all that glucose. The other storage problem they have is they are putting fat, which can be safely stored in fat cells, subcutaneous fat cells, they're putting it in places where it's unhealthy to store it. They're putting it around their organs, in their pancreas, inside their muscles directly. And all of these things create inflammation, exacerbate insulin resistance, and kick off the cascade that is the reason why somebody with type 2 diabetes has a 50 to 100% higher risk of succumbing to cancer, heart disease,

Alzheimer's disease. On the retrieval side, there's also something broken when you're metabolically unhealthy, which is when you're doing low-rent work, you should be consuming fatty acids. When you're just sitting around doing nothing, not demanding incredible amounts of energy, you should be oxidizing in the most efficient way possible fatty acids. In fact, even under moderate levels of exertional stress, low intensity exercise, you should still be able to do this mostly with your mitochondria. But again, a metabolically unhealthy person can't. They're basically constantly on a glucose treadmill. And so again, we could get into kind of the weeds on all that, but at a fundamental

level, that's the problem, right? The metabolically unhealthy person doesn't store energy correctly, and they don't access energy correctly. And so if you think of nothing else, simply making sure you're as metabolically healthy as possible is the most important thing to do. More important than specifically thinking about what do I need to do around Alzheimer's disease, heart disease, and cancer. I mean, again, if someone wants to go deep down the rabbit hole, as I do, great. Lock yourself out. There's an operating manual sitting right next to you. But if you just want to think big picture, what do I need to do to be as metabolically healthy as possible? Step one is exercise. I mean, there is no substitute for the benefit of exercise. In fact, it is impossible to

be metabolically unhealthy if your muscle mass is at the 90th percentile for your age and sex, and your VO2 max is at the 90th percentile for your age and sex. If you are in that category, if your cardiorespiratory fitness and your muscle mass and strength are at the 90th percentile for your age and sex, which, by the way, is not impossible to do in this society. But the problem is solved. Now, you can't get there without exercising, without being somewhat mindful of how you're eating, without sleeping adequately. If you're sleeping three hours a night, it's going to be very difficult to do that.

You could get away with it when you're younger. It's going to be a lot harder when you're older. So everything else really just needs to be in service of that. And again, people, I think just major in the minor and minor in the major on some of this stuff. It's like, oh, should I be on this diet or this diet or this diet? It's like, it doesn't matter that much. Be in energy balance, get sufficient amounts of protein and, you know, focus on how much you're exercising in your sleep. And you're going to get like two-thirds of all the benefit is going to come through that type of adherence. I had a great, I call it my come to lane meeting.

And I kept hitting lane. Lanes are close. But hey, what about this? What about this? What about this? What about this? What about this? What about this? What about this? What about this? And he finally said,

if you will exercise and you will control energy consumption and you will sleep, then call me about your cold tub and we'll talk. Like, man, it's just, I just want it to be such bells and whistles and it's just not.

It's just not sexy at all. Do you have any... lane and i have had that i think lane and i joked once that um you shouldn't be allowed to make a single comment on twitter about nutrition until you do 100 push-ups first so every time you want to tweet something about nutrition do 100 push-ups then you can go back to your phone or computer, put your little nutrition tweet out there. And then if you feel like doing it again in 10 minutes, get back down, do 100 push-ups, and then go and do it again. That's it. You can tweet as much as you want about nutrition.

You just have to do 100 push-ups before you do it every time. The same can be applied to your sauna protocol, your cold plunge protocol. Look, I love sauna and cold plunge. But, you know, if you think that that's the thing that's going to get you to the promised land at the expense of doing any exercise or watching what you eat. The promised land. The promised land is going to be a dark place for you. Just, yeah, sitting in the cold plunge with your tall boys and a hot dog and just being real excited. Do you have any sort of framework that I might be able to communicate broadly?

When I think of frameworks, I think of one grad school professor I have and Dr. Atiyah. Like, just, it feels like you think of the world in cubes. Maybe I'm wrong. Just in frames. How, folks, without years of training, I know how much graduate school I had to sit and just chip away and chip away and chip away.

And I know how much I struggle to just consume a headline and then click through it and try to find the original source and then go find, and I don't have access to my journals like I used to have at the university. So it's behind a paywall or it's got some very broad, you know, introduction. How do you find good information in this Magnet ecosystem that just comes at us 24-7?

Is there any sort of roadmap you can give us? No, unfortunately, there's a pretty low, if not non-existent, signal-to-noise ratio when it comes to information about health. One thing you can do is find some reputable aggregators of studies. There are a couple of newsletters I subscribe to, you know, a couple of weeklies, monthlies where, you know, somewhat people who I trust are aggregating and sending out links to, depending on the newsletter, 20 to 50 articles. So I can pretty quickly skim through that and say, OK, like these are the 10 this week that I'm going to, you know, skim. Um, of course I'm also a cheater because I have a research team. So I get to at this point now, because I'm being pulled in many directions, kick a lot of it to them and say, okay, these three look interesting. Let's, let's, let's go deeper on these things. But basically there is kind of no substitute for learning how to read scientific studies. Um, and you do have to go, I mean, you certainly can't rely on what, you know, pop news is doing. I mean, any, any, you know,

the headline sort of grabbing nonsense is you shouldn't be reading that at all. You should at a minimum go to the study. Even sometimes you'll just read the abstract and you'll realize the abstract is completely at odds with what the headline of the article was. And usually at that point, you know, it's really problematic. Nothing is worse than reading the abstract and then getting through the conclusion conclusion and thinking that's not what that was at all that's not what this study was at all for those listening the abstract is simply a summary of a paper that they put at the introduction so

a lot of my colleagues and friends will read a bunch of abstracts and think they know a lot of stuff and actually not pull the article apart which makes for all kind of chaos down the road especially journalists can be guilty of that. But it's a strange ecosystem where you've got Dr. Atiyah, you got Lane, you got these folks putting up this information that has been hidden behind grad school professors for centuries, just putting it up for free. Here you go.

And then you've got the essential oil salesman and the new hot Pilates in mud. I don't know, whatever, you know, just drop flowers over your head and I don't, whatever charlatans and it's all in the same channel. It's all in the same river. And the number of times I sit with people at a conference, if I'm speaking at a conference and they've got a, Hey, I just read that you got to have a bowl of blueberries with, it's like, man, that's, I just want to,

I don't know what to say. Cause you just nod and have a great day. I mean, we, we do, you know, if folks are interested, they can sign up for our newsletter.

And every Sunday we put out an article and usually that article is some examination of a paper and,, you know, a popular press article that was referencing some study. And it's kind of just one of those things where you just got to get the reps. Like you just have to go through and see, okay, look, this is how Peter and his team dissect this over and over and over again. And it's, I mean, we have a treasure trove of these things. If people ever want to go back and read them, it's, you know, we've only been doing it for 12 years now. I'll tell everybody all the way back from your nerd safari days, there are a few things worth your investment in time than to go the way you so simply pull these things apart,

these research studies apart and show, yeah, it looks this way, but here's what it's actually saying. And here's the problems with this study. And here's why you can't just start mainlining Diet Cokes because of this, or they did this in a Petri dish, or they gave this to a bunch of rats. It's so helpful. And so for the last, yeah, you've been doing it a long, long time, but we'll link to that in the show notes, man. Yeah. And I forgot about Nerd Safari. So there was that whole series we did in the Nerd Safari called Studying Studies. I think it's a five or six part series we did in 2018. And then I think Lane has recently come up with something called Reps, which is a program that he's launched that's similarly geared towards kind of helping people understand how to interpret scientific papers.

Yeah. All right. A couple more and then we'll get out of here. I want to dig into movement and particularly stability. One of the stunning things you've brought to my life was that falls, falling down increases your mortality risk, especially as you age, like nothing else does.

So why is movement and stability the way we move so critical to our long-term emotional and physical health? I mean, I think it's just kind of an empirical observation of having watched people later in life that even if they're cognitively sharp throughout life, the total destruction of their capacity to move, you know, I think diminishes quality of life in a way that I don't think we talk about enough. So, you know, we lose power, we lose strength at a relatively young age. I mean, we lose power lose power you know our power probably peaks in our mid-20s our strength probably peaks in our 40s um and it's sort of a downhill slide from there if we're not really really working hard on those things um and when you couple

you know this i so stability is such a complicated topic that it warranted its own chapter in the book, because it's really that difficult to explain what it means. But, you know, it's basically the property of the body that allows the body to transmit force to the outside world without energy dissipation and injury, and vice versa, for the outside world to transmit force to us without energy dissipation and injury. And virtually every chronic injury you can think of, and frankly, many acute injuries that are basically just acute injuries on chronic weaknesses, are the result of some sort of instability. And, you know, if you look at, you know, the typical repetitive use injury, you know, someone who walking upstairs, their knee is hurting. I mean, if you study their biomechanics, you'll very that is transmitting pain or transmitting a force laterally through the knee. So all of these things, you know, constitute what I think of as an important part of strength training that's somewhat distinct from strength training itself. You can't overstate the value of lifting heavy things. It's just so important. I mean, my kids are, my boys are, you know, six and almost six and almost nine. And when they come in the gym with me and, you know, they like to do pushups and sit-ups and things like that. But mostly I'm like, guys, just pick up those dumbbells and walk around with them. Like, that's kind of the only thing that matters right now is just let's develop that grip strength. Let's develop the scapular stability. Let's develop the balance

that's necessary to move something heavy. But on top of that, I think you do want to be training in these movement patterns. In the book, I talk about two, but you have to be sort of Bruce Lee about this stuff. You have to sort of look at all modalities, absorb what is useful, disregard what is useless. I talk at length about DNS and PRI as two systems, which for me have produced the best results. It might be that Pilates is the way that they're going to sort of stabilize everything from their core to their shoulders to their hips to their knees. So if this doesn't happen and you find yourself in that situation where in the last decade of your life, you can't pick up a grandkid off the floor. You can't sit on the floor and play. You can't get up off the floor. You're confined to a chair. You can't really walk a grandkid off the floor. You can't sit on the floor and play. You can't get up off the floor. You're confined to a chair. You can't really walk up a flight of stairs.

If you walk, you can't walk quick enough to walk with anyone. I mean, these things that we all take for granted today physically, for most people, they become very difficult to do in the eighth or ninth decade of life. So again, there's something about being intentional at 20, 30, and 40. It's just investing, right? I'm just putting money away. I'm doing something hard in the short term, in the future. I mean, the present, so that my future's got peace in it. It's very much like investing. Yeah. I mean, it really is. And there is a matter of hyperbolic discounting. It's not natural to us to invest. I think what's even better, what makes everything we're talking

about here better than just the 401k analogy is there truly is no upside in the present to saving for your 401k, right? Like if you get a thousand dollar paycheck every week after tax, and you choose to put 200 of that into your 401k, there's no other way to look at it. You have 200 fewer dollars today. You're not getting, you're not getting anything out of that. Now, I think any financial advisor will tell you, you're still net positive in life because of what that's going to mean when you're 65 or whenever you decide to start making withdrawals. But here's the thing. If you've got eight hours a week when you could be screwing around and you choose to put six of those hours a week into exercise and screw around

for two hours, you actually get something for it today. Everything in your life is better. Yeah. Everything is better today and in the future. Imagine if a 401k were that rewarding. Imagine if putting 200 away today gave you 400 today and 400 tomorrow. Yeah.

That's what exercise is. That's an incredible analogy. I love that. I love that picture. Hey, what's up? Deloney here. Listen, you and me and everybody else on the planet has felt anxious or burned out or chronically stressed at some point. In my new book, Building a Non-Anxious Life, you'll learn the six daily choices that you can make to get rid of your anxious feelings and be able to better respond to whatever life throws at you so you can build a more peaceful, non-anxious life. Get your copy today at johndeloney.com. Let's wrap this up um one of the so when i left the academic environment the research environment and came to a media company one of the things i noticed right out the gate was my friends that i had dinner parties with that i was rubbing shoulders with during the day

the my friends who regardless of their discipline, I just call them all scientists, who are studying things, their goal was to always be less wrong. And so the most acute example of that is when COVID kicked off and maybe it was, I think it was King's College, whoever it happened to be, throws this model down and says, 30 million people are going to die. To my scientist friends who are in that world, it was game on, like excellent. We're going to take our models and our people and our computer systems,

and we're going to use their models and new data coming in. And within two weeks, hey, we think it's going to be 15 million. And so if you look at that in the community where I come from, there's this cheer. 15 million less people are going to be dead per this model. And on and on and on it goes. It was looking at the political realm and the media realm, which I was blissfully unaware of, that realized there's no – we got new information button here. So one of the great gifts you've brought to my life for the last decade is approaching

all the things I think I know, all the people who I'm honored to sit kneecap to kneecap with and be very humble about it. So I want to ask you a couple of questions about humility. First one is, you surround yourself with the best of the best voices across the world. And if I were to look at you, I don't know anybody who has the conglomerate of knowledge

in one skull like you do. What's the value of bringing in coaches and other people to watch you when really you've got the answers, right? You've got these great therapists and great coaches and great people behind closed doors walking alongside you. I would look at you from the outside and say, dude, you don't need that. You've got all the information. What's the value of a coach?

Well, I mean, look, we could answer this broadly or we could answer this personally. Let's just start with the obvious. Is there one top performer that doesn't have a coach? I mean, last time I't the wouldn't I mean, last time I checked, I'm pretty sure LeBron James had specific, you know, coaches and gurus, Tom Brady, you know, right up until he retired would have been surrounded by people who were doing anything and everything to give him the edge and make him better. So yeah, it's hard for me to imagine that there's anyone who would ever get so good that they would not want any help they could get to be better.

And if that's true of the top performers in the world, then it's clearly true for me. Because if you think about it, where I'm, I mean, I think of this in two ways, right? I think of this on a personal level, you know, therapists and things like that. Well, yeah, they're helping me because I'm actually not very good, right? Oh, there you go, yeah. I mean, I'm not even in the professional leagues yet, right? I'm the fledgling arena quarterback who's trying to get good, but he's fortunate enough to be able to get good coaches and people to try to help them. And then on the professional side, I mean, to me, that's the joy of having a podcast is it's just a fantastic reason to be able to sort of sit down and talk with people who are subject matter experts on things that I find

interesting. So, um, at least for my podcast and my subject matter, they're aligned, right? Like I get to, you know, this, my professional interest is in doing this thing. And now I get to interview expertise is saying the magic words, I don't know, let me find out. Not, I've got this just infinite system running at all times in my mind that has every answer and every nuance to every rabbit hole, right? I guess maybe that's the most unmooring part of the social media ecosystem, which is this idea that there is a person with all of the answers versus true expertise and true wisdom is, I don't know, man, let me find out. I know a guy, I know her, she's brilliant, which seems to be a much, it just seems to be a much more peaceful way

to make your way through the world. But you're somebody that on the outside, yeah, I totally agree with you. I don't know anybody who's the best at what they do? But man, I know a lot of folks who are very proud to not ask for help and a lot of folks who have all the answers because google said so and i'm just plowing ahead through life and um, man, what a gift to have people in your world that you take a knee to and say You can look at this problem from a different angle. That's such a gift

Tell me something you've changed your mind on in the last decade. You're so deliberate. It appears to be that you're so deliberate on decision-making and choice. What's something you were pretty bullish on back in the day and you thought, nah, it's kind of a waste of my time? Oh, I mean, I don't think we have another hour, so I'll try to limit this. Well, certainly around nutrition, I've changed my mind on a lot, right?

I talk about this in one of the chapters on nutrition, but look, there was a day when I really thought that carbohydrate restriction was probably the most important tool to health. I don't believe that today. There was a day when I believed that nutrition as a broad topic was more important to health than exercise. I don't believe that today. Wow. For those of you who don't know, that's massive. That's a significant shift.

I would say there was a day when I didn't believe that emotional health mattered at all in any of this equation, if you will. And I clearly don't believe that today. So those would be just the top three that come to my mind. What would be something that you thought was awfully woo-woo 10 years ago that has become a core part of your life? Sauna. Tell me more. Well, I think, you know, I had previously looked at the sauna data and which are from an epidemiologic standpoint, pretty impressive in terms of disease risk reduction, especially around cardiovascular disease and neurodegenerative disease. Well, dementia specifically and Alzheimer's

disease. And I had just consistently discounted those data and said it was all healthy user bias. There were too many confounders. I just didn't buy any of it. While I don't believe that the benefit of sauna is as strong as the epidemiology suggests, because I do think that there are still confounders and healthy user biases and all those things, I don't think it needs to be to still be valuable. If the benefit is half as good as the epidemiology, I think it's still a very valuable ROI. And I say that for many reasons, but of course, the epi is very consistent. It's all in the same direction. You have the mechanistic data, you have the dose effect. You can go through what's called the Austin-Bradford-Hill criteria of epidemiology and start to try to infer what's the probability that there is causality in this

association. And I think there is causality there. And so- Well, there I go learning something. Now it's something that I do. I had still had that behind essential oils, man. So that's, well, that's another conversation I need to have with my wife then. We're going to have to move some stuff around the garage, then we got to get one. Hey, wrapping this show. Um again, thank you. Thank you um I know there's nothing more precious in the world than your time. So thank you. I usually wrap this show up. Um, i'm a long time

Music lover and I grew up going to the punk clubs there in houston where I grew up and in west texas out there And now I live in n, of course. I end the show with a song of the day. Do you have a favorite song that when nobody's around, you turn it up and you may still get a little emotional and you sing a little bit too loud? No, but because you're in Nashville, can we just do like, I don't know, something by Taylor Swift? Hey, was she amazing? She was amazing. The associate producer.

She really is something else. The associate producer went to all the shows. Yeah, we've talked about Taylor quite a bit on this show. Just truly incredible. I'll explain that as we wrap up the show. You can go back to your world. You have quite the love for Taylor Swift. Yes, we'll pick it. You have a favorite?

What's your favorite? I mean, my daughter and I talk about this endlessly. No, no, no. It's hard for me to give you a favorite, but I really love Ready For It. Excellent. I love The Great War, Maroon, The Man I, I love the, the, the great war maroon, uh, the man, like there's just so many, like I could give you my top 10 and you could pick how's that.

That, Hey, you know what? You've just shamed all of us fathers. But now, but now this means my daughter's going to, I'm going to actually have my daughter watch this podcast and say, you got it. You got to watch the whole thing, the whole thing all the way through. Do not turn it off till the very, very end. That's awesome. This just gave me an awesome reason.

Well, brother, the book is Outlive. And I'll talk about this extensively in the show opener. I've even worn, I've torn the cover off. I've been digging into this thing so much. And this needs to be on. I was about to say, did Amazon rip you off? No, my wife tells me I don't treat books with the dignity they deserve.

And I like, I just, once I get one, I get my hands on it, I just kind of become a mess. But no, this is mine. Well, that's good. At least you get to see the little design that I fought for with the little archer on the cover there. Man, I'm grateful for you.

Thank you for changing hearts and minds and little podcast earbuds all across the country, man. Starting with me and my family. I'm grateful for you. Thank you for changing hearts and minds and little podcast earbuds all across the country, man, starting with me and my family. I'm grateful for you. Blessings to you there and take care of my home state of Texas. And we will connect soon. Thank you very much for having me.

Appreciate you, man. All right, we are back. Man, that guy's amazing. He's a national treasure. We're going to link to everything in the show notes. We'll link to his website and to his podcast and to his newsletter. It's a newsletter that I subscribe to.

It's worth your time reading it on Sunday mornings or Sunday afternoons. As we wrap up this show, per his request, and shout out to his lovely daughter. Today's song of the day is by the great, almighty and powerful Taylor Swift. And the song is called Ready For It. And it goes like this. Knew he was a killer first time that I saw him. Wondered how many girls he had loved and left haunted, but if he's a

ghost, then I can be a phantom. God, she's so good. Holding him for ransom. Some boys are trying too hard. He don't try at all, though. Younger than my exes, but he act like such a man, so I see nothing better. I keep him forever, like a vendetta.

Jenna, I gotta give it to you, man. She's the best of the best of the best. I see how this is gone go. Touch me and you'll never be alone. Island breeze and lights down low. No one has to know. In the middle of the night in my dreams, you should see the things we do, baby. In the middle of the night in my dreams i know i'm gonna be with you so i take my time are you ready for it so good so good and i'm smiling like a little kid walking away from a high five god i'm so grateful for you guys we'll see you soon