The Daily Hacks To Live Longer & Reverse Your Age | Dr. Peter Attia

if someone was only going to watch or listen to the first few minutes of this and you could give three to five main keys to living longer what would you start by saying with that well the the the the slightly nuanced answer would be it's going to be highly dependent on where you're most deficient today across the different call it levers that you can pull okay but if you were going to try to take a view that on average where are most people failing to capture benefit I would say first and foremost it's around exercise I think everybody knows exercise is good for them the question is how much and it turns out that there's really no upper limit to the benefits you accrue from exercise so I would say the first piece of advice I would give is however much you're exercising you can probably do more and you will extract more value and yes there are going to be people who I'm speaking to that are already probably exercising at the point where there's diminishing too much yeah and they're hurting themselves yeah so so but acknowledging that we're talking to kind of 90 of people watching this you can be exercising more to which the next question is great cardio or weights the answer is yes you got to do both and they you know the the benefit of having incredibly High cardiorespiratory Fitness and being incredibly strong is so significant that it dwarfs even the harm of type 2 diabetes smoking and kidney failure in other words the magnitude of benefit that being strong and having high cardio respiratory Fitness brings is greater than the harm and magnitude of those other things wow okay so that's got to be number one on the list so it can't just be oh I'm a runner I like cycling and I like swimming and that's all I'm going to do you've got to incorporate some type of resistance strength training that's right body weight training even just something and to be honest with you if we're going to be really technical even body weight training is probably not enough really if you think about kind of the Aging muscle it has a few characteristics that define it and the most important characteristic of the Aging muscle that we can see is the loss of what are called type 2 fibers so if you think back to your life growing up playing sports what was the thing that most defined your athletic ability was probably your explosiveness yes an explosiveness those are what type two fibers are those are fast twitch muscle fibers that give you explosiveness and power even more than strength those muscle fibers shrink as you age really and it's the shrinking of those muscle fibers that is what defines the Aging muscle so we have to be able to resist against that as much as possible we our goal should be to slow and delay that as much as possible because as we lose those type 2 or fast switch muscle fibers that's when we start to get into trouble as we age and unfortunately you can't exercise those muscles without heavy weight really yep or at least super heavy weight or just more weight than you're comfortable with more weight than you're comfortable with and um you know you're not going to do that with body weight alone body weight alone it's going to be very difficult too I mean you could there are tricks around it but you can you know you you can you can certainly make body weight very complicated look if you're doing upside down you know presses that's that's sufficient body weight yeah yeah um certainly for some people push-ups wouldn't be sufficient but probably for someone like you it's not right right so um and similarly like if you're only in the gym and you're you're getting all of that strength training but you're not paying attention to your aerobic efficiency and your Peak aerobic output you're also just leaving you know money on the table really yeah so man okay so we need to be thinking about both cardio and also strength training I think uh Dr uh Gabrielle line talks about like the the need for building muscle and and having more protein yeah so we can have bigger stronger muscles it doesn't mean you have to look bulky or something but you want your muscles to be stronger so you can live longer yeah muscles serve two really important purposes the first is a metabolic purpose the second is a structural purpose so the metabolic purpose is your muscles are the most important repository for glucose glucose regulation is such an important part of controlling disease risk so when glucose is unregulated It ultimately leads to a condition called type 2 diabetes but even long before you get to having type 2 diabetes if you have glucose dysregulation in the form of insulin resistance you're still at increased risk of cancer heart disease and Alzheimer's disease and it's significant it's not like a minor increase in Risk it's in your doubling of risk so the most important organ in the body to regulate glucose is probably muscle right I mean the pancreas and the liver obviously play an important role but the muscle is the storage unit for glucose and when we build more muscle or have more muscle essentially we can process the sugars through that we have more place to store it and we can do it with less insulin so insulin is an important hormone that drives glucose into the muscle but if the muscle is resistant to that insulin that's called insulin resistance you need more and more insulin to push and force the glucose in and while that initially works and it gets the glucose in it eventually leads to a problem with very elevated levels of insulin which if chronically elevated are synonymous with disease right and just transform body fat too right well yes because then insulin of course when it's chronically elevated is driving more fat accumulation and less fat breakdown so chronic insulin is not something we want and the best way to avoid that is to have muscles that are both big enough and sensitive enough to bring glucose in well and so that's the metabolic side on the structural side yeah I mean it comes back to strength which is um you know I always say this and it's everybody nobody's ever come up with a with it with a contribute to this but there has never been a 90 year old person in the history of our civilization going back 100 000 years who said I wish I had less muscle I wish I was less strong when you're at the end of your life sarcopenia the loss of muscle becomes an enormous limiting factor on your quality of life because you can't pick yourself up you can't put yourself off the couch or the bed you can't if you fall you know those are those commercials when we were growing up was like I've fallen and I can't get up for it you watch that all the time it's like because they didn't have the muscle to be able to push themselves up and even if you think about something less extreme than that although that's still very realistic it's um hey I can't get on the floor and play with my grandkids and I have a hard time getting out of the chair let alone picking up my grandkid out of the crib or pushing them on the swing because I don't have the balance and the strength to do that so I just think that for most of us we take for granted what we're blessed with today in terms of strength and flexibility and freedom from pain and as that starts to be taken away from us so too I think there's a lot of our quality of life yeah is it hard is how much harder is it to build muscle past 50 60 70 80. you can always sort of well it's a complicated answer because it depends on where you're starting from right so a person who is completely untrained will have a much easier time building muscle even if they start in their 60s right so if you took a completely untrained person in their 60s they're going to respond remarkably well to even the smallest amount of stimulus if you take a person who is well trained and has been well trained their entire life and they're in their 60s they're gonna have a very hard time making gains but that's okay because they're starting at a much higher place so that that person who never did anything is here they're going to very easily get to hear the person who's always been here they're just trying to hold on so this person's still in a better place so the question really ought to be how high can you get relative to your genetic potential as opposed to what's the rate of change so the good news is you know even though this person can't get any higher they're just holding on and maintaining they're still functionally going to be integration sure with everything that you've known even even writing this book for seven years but you've been studying this most of your life really uh what is the thing that you try to that you're afraid of if you don't do in terms of moving your body exercise and lifting weights like one of your big fears personally at your age so you're like I know I need to do this weekly daily to give myself the best chance for longevity so there's two separate things going on the first is you know when I was 27 I had a really devastating back injury um so it was a bad back injury but it was made much worse because uh the surgeon who operated on me operate on the wrong side and really really ruined my back oh my God so I how do they do that well they exit and say this is before the days of like Mark actually this side was before the days of that oh my gosh and so not only did they screw up the operation when they went back to clean it up they kind of did an unnecessary operation so they ended up really doing a lot of damage to my back how were you 27. oh man so I sort of lost a year of my life in terms of pain and movement I was bedridden or floor written I didn't even lay on a bed I laid on a floor for three months couldn't walk um and it took about nine months for me to get to the point where I could have a day of not being in excruciating pain so even though today I'm a hundred percent pain-free and a hundred percent functional if you look at my back on an MRI you can't believe I can walk oh it looks so bad really yeah if you have screws and bars no luckily I don't have Hardware it's just what was removed it's so much bone was removed that it looks like my spine is the most unstable thing just it's basically just asking to be fused at two levels oh my God and the discs are dead from L4 L5 to S1 but you look great look great I feel great and I have no pain but you know that's been a lot of hard work and that requires daily work to maintain that so if I don't stick to a very strict regimen of Spine Care that can vanish overnight right if I'm you know if I decide I'm going to travel for three days and not do anything I will start to have a sore back so that's just one example of something where I'm incredibly um in a way fortunate to have suffered so much for so long because it left such an impression you know I think if people only have a bad experience with their health for a week it's easy to forget but if you know when you think about people who have cancer and who survive cancer and they're you know they're laying there on their death bed and they miraculously make it back I think those people are forever changed for the better they're scarred but they're also for the better and they really have a a lease on life that we can't relate to a sense of gratitude appreciation and and really a presence of like I've got to make sure I take care of myself today for my future self yes and while I don't think I can relate to that from the standpoint of life I can relate to it at least in this domain with respect to my physical body pain uh and and the freedom to be able to do anything physically yeah so yeah my kids tease me but I always Park as far away as possible in the grocery store to celebrate that I can walk wow easily because I used to not be able to do that wow so you're taking every stairs you can take your walk exactly either way I was in New York later I was in New York this weekend we were in a building and we had to go up to the sixth floor and I was with some people and they're like there's the elevator and I was like why would if they live they're gonna take the stairs and they're like you have two suitcases I was like I know it's awesome right like let's do it a little mini workout yeah that's amazing okay so what is the the routine that you will never miss to support you to outlive um and live a healthy life well from an exercise standpoint um you know I I lift weights four days a week I do cardio four days a week and I do this thing called rucking two to four days a week rucking is carrying a heavy backpack have you never fall off um how heavy how heavy and how long so in Rocking an ideal place to get two is a third of your body weight so I carry 60 pounds um and I have a little route around my house that's three miles very very hilly and um you know I go I'm I'm walking as quickly as I can up and down Hills so getting you know a good cardio workout going up the hills and getting a really good kind of leg workout down the hills as you have to basically prevent yourself from going too quickly what are the benefits of rocking I think there are so many right so so you do get this short burst um aerobic or anaerobic workout as you're bursting up the hills and you really work on what's called eccentric strength when you're going down the hill so eccentric strength of course is the strength of a muscle as it is lengthening which is not something we mostly train so if you're doing a leg extension or a leg curl you're strengthening the muscle in its shortening phase which is concentric that's important but it's equally if not slightly more important at least in an aging individual to be training the muscle to get stronger as it's getting longer that's how most people end up hurting themselves most people don't fall walking upstairs or walking up a curb they fall walking down the curbside because they don't have the deceleration and the balance and the stability and the strength that's going to go down interesting so so you're getting that benefit and then frankly I would say at least 50 of the benefit is just is the psychological benefit because I don't rock with music or my phone not listening to an you know uh podcast or anything like that I'm it's a very specific activity that I do to be um you know out in the middle of nowhere um so you've read Michael Easter's book I'm sure the Comfort crisis I haven't read this one yet but I'm but you know my concept yeah yeah yeah yeah and so Michael writes a lot about this in the comfort crisis and um sort of the benefits of being in nature without any Interruption and I think that that's probably something that we don't fully appreciate the importance of for for humans right it's like we didn't evolve out of Nature and yet if you think about how many people don't spend any time in nature that's very jarring I think to our psyche to our nervous system um this environment we're sitting in is incredibly foreign we've only had an environment like this for 100 years or less right uh so so that's that's not even a fraction of time from an evolutionary perspective so I feel strongly that being outdoors every day is really important and this is a great way to be outdoors what are the other so okay so is it more for strength then because you're carrying a third of your body weight or is it more for cardio because you're walking you're getting your heart rate you get the you get the cardio when you're kind of walking uphill you get the strength when you're walking downhill and you get the psychological benefit all the way through how long is the should you be going for it takes me on my route a little under an hour to do that three miles three miles yeah is there any side effects to that for people you know should people who oh I think you should I think you should start on a bunch of weight and just walk no I mean I I sort of recommend people typically assuming you you can walk with no difficulty I recommend people would start with a sixth of their body weight six yeah so that would be me starting with 30 pounds gotcha um and working your way are you wearing a specific vest do you like because yeah yeah there's a company that I love it's called go Ruck go wrong okay I've heard of this yeah yeah so go Ruck makes specific rucksacks and even the plates that you slide into them so it's really true yeah yeah now what do you think you're how long you've been doing this a little over a year maybe a year and a half well I used to do it with a weighted vest long before that but the this is much better using the rucksack is a much better setup than the weighted vest what is What are the things that you're noticing the main benefits to adding this to your routine versus before not doing this type of activity um my eccentric strength in my quad in my lower quads and my ability to just be comfortable like I so you know going down yeah hunting is something I love doing so archery bow hunting is a big part of my life is a big passion and that's almost by definition in really difficult terrain and so it used to always be the case when when you're out there and you're having to scale you know very very steep grades um that that's that's always like the hardest part frankly is the is the hills and I certainly feel better doing that now I I think I also just I can't overstate the the the psychological benefits of doing this like it's a real I always feel just so much better and you know I live in Austin Texas so you can imagine it's not cool in the summer and I always do this at the hottest time of the day so I try to do this at four or five pm and so there's also another sort of hormetic stress of doing this when it's 105 degrees last year we had an especially hot summer it was above 100 degrees probably for 90 out of 100 days crazy and being out there in that heat going at it I mean it's just you come back it's almost like you've also had a sauna as well like a spiritual experience yeah yeah yeah think of all the amazing things in life that are expressions of just you for instance the song You Stream over and over again while you're in your 13th Hour of gaming at 4am in the morning with all the lights off trying not to wake up your roommates or the recommendations that you share with your friends on the top six comedy podcasts that are the best to listen to on your way to the gym and back or even your new haircut which may or may not be an epic bowl cut from the 90s and hopefully is everything that makes you you makes all the difference State Farm believes Insurance should work the same way your plan your coverage they need to be personalized to you and the ability to choose the plan you want by picking the options that fit you like building your home and auto policies is exactly what the State Farm personal price plan is all about getting the coverage you want at an affordable price just for you so are you ready to make things personal call or go to statefarm.com today to create your State Farm personal price plan prices vary by state options selected by customer availability and eligibility may vary now what do you think are the the things that hurt people the most is it the stiffness in the joints is it the their bones essentially feel like weak or is it more the muscles are not strong enough it specifically with rucking in General Life yeah what are the of the of the joints the bones or the muscles what causes people the most pain later in life that well the root cause I think is a lack of stability and stability is a neuromuscular problem so stability is hard to Define but there's actually a reason that it warrants a whole chapter in this book so there's 17 chapters in this book and one of them is just on stability because I think it's such an important topic and yet really difficult to explain but it's um I think it's easiest to explain using an analogy and the analogy that I use is one of a race car versus A Streetcar right so a race car can have less horsepower and still go much faster than a street car and part of that is due to being lighter part of that is due to having slick tires but a big part of that is having a stiffer chassis that wastes less energy so when a race car's engine is humming all of that power is going straight to the drivetrain straight to the wheels and those tires have more grip and it's going straight to the road so more power from the engine is making it to the street and less energy is being lost and dissipated a street car doesn't have that stiffness it's optimizing for something else it's optimizing for a comfortable ride and in the process it's willing to lose energy all the way through the chain well the problem is in us when we lose energy energy dissipation is coming out in joints so that's you know everything from the scapula you know if you're doing a pull-up that's your scapula winging up you're losing energy there because you can't stabilize the scapula so now you're putting more stress into your elbow and your arm is doing more of the work than your lats uh it's it's when for example when you're Landing if you're walking if your your leg is collapsing inward because you don't have the strength in the foot or in the medial part of the Quad to resist that force and transmit Force down so basically you want all the force you transmit from your body to the outside world and from the outside world to your body to have the least amount of energy dissipation dude the shoes we wear matter in terms of like what the energy from striking the ground and how it's transferring through the shoe throughout the whole body yeah absolutely I mean if you think about it we didn't have shoes for most of our existence right so if anything we would have had something to cover our feet to protect it from abrasions but this idea of wearing you know big sneakers that are meant to kind of buffer you know or spring us is a relatively modern phenomenon that's like a less than 50 year ago phenomenon even 1970 running shoes were largely just you know thin thin things that were meant to protect your the surface of your feet and so yes I do believe that the the shoes that we're wearing are playing a huge role in kind of the the problem with our feet what type of recommendations do you have with shoes in terms of size of Soul or style or Brands is there anything that you recommend I mean I like Minimalist Shoes for almost everything that I do so I there are lots of different brands out there I'm partial to a brand called zero which is spelled x-e-r-o I have no affiliation with with any of these companies um but but they make a great minimalist shoe um I I also like another brand called Ultra I think it's a l t era they make a zero zero drop shoe but also with a wide toe box that's another problem we have is we get these little Narrows shoes yeah you know your your fingers and your toes are similar so imagine if you spent your whole life with your hands in things like this like how useless would your hands be and similarly when your toes are constantly kind of mashed into a tight shoe you lose the dexterity of the foot the foot shouldn't be nearly as dexterous as the Hand by the way uh it's not quite doesn't it's not quite the same um but it's most people myself included don't have nearly the dexterity of their feet that they should have if you look at a child right like I'm lucky I have little kids right so at least one of my kids like you know I still look at his feet and just marvel my wife actually just sent me a video of my son's feet the other day he was laying on her kind of watching something on the couch and his feet were just sitting here and she just sent me like a 15 second video of his toes he was just watching whatever he was watching on TV control oh what he was doing with his toes and I was just like I could eat those little things they're so freaking cute but it's amazing like what he still has the capacity to do because he's you haven't conditioned him and put him in a box and in his case like with my kids we're never gonna right like they're all they're either Barefoot or in Crocs you know if they really feel like being that or mostly they're in a wide box minimal issue Crocs are those good for us probably not I think they're a bit too much yeah right yeah too much Soul yeah yeah too much it's better for the it's fine for the toes but I still think it's I still think it's a bit wobbly got it yeah okay you're a bit disconnected from the ground I know uh Mark Sisson I don't know if you know him I know Mark well he has launched a new shoe company kind of yeah the Finger shoes as well um does that help with dexterity I guess I think so if you have like some individual flexibility with it yeah yeah those shoes I mean they're they're literally putting a spacer between your toes so they're really kind of spreading it out okay what is the benefit to having more space with the toes as opposed to it basically allows the the foot to to act as it should right so so again if you just think of like the stability of a surface like this versus this this is a much more stable yeah and control yep interesting okay so we we've covered a decent amount on exercise and that was number one of the top three to five things I'm curious and I could go even farther in this but I think that's good place to start lifting resistance training um some type of cardio and you're saying it sounds like it could be any type of cardio as long as we're doing it for what 30 minutes or something a minimum a few times a week yeah I mean I think you know again it depends where you're starting from so if you're doing nothing look to get a mile walk yeah to you know getting to three 30-minute sessions a week would be amazing um I think if you're kind of not to just trying to hit minimum effective dose but if you're actually trying to see like okay where do I really start to hit that curve at you know where I'm getting like 80 of the value here you're probably talking three hours a week of cardio would be kind of The Sweet Spot three hours not one not at once but say you know 45 minutes four times a week got it for example or you know 60 Minutes three times a week you need to be pushing yourself in the cardio more just consistent I mean we we talk about something called zone two which is where I think eighty percent of your cardio should be at the intensity of what's called zone two which is what's the heart rate of that I guess it's not really a function of heart rate I think there's a very technical definition for it that I get into in the book but I think the easiest way to describe it to people is it's the level of intensity at which you can still talk but you're uncomfortable doing so if you can't talk you're past it too much too much if you can talk relatively easily you're below it so you've got to find that zone where if you're out there and you're doing something and your phone rings or you're on the stationary bike and your phone rings and you answer it the person knows you're exercising gosh that makes sense so for that so that's 80 that should be 80 of your cardio volume by time gotcha and then 20 should be at a higher intensity higher intensity gotcha okay um and then you like also just adding rucking for the extra benefits psychologically being in nature the stability yep on the knees all these different things and you probably feel like amazing when you take that weight off too yeah I feel like oh it's on a hot summer Austin day to jump in the pool right after that is the greatest deal that's incredible okay so this is number one on longevity and the science and art of longevity is the exercise and these are the kind of the categories you're talking about what would you say is number two for maximizing our longevity um I think you know you this is almost a an extension of that and you already alluded to it but I think most people are probably under doing it on protein to support what we just discussed so it you know uh and I see this more with female patients than with male patients but I'd see it across the board with people um that that most people are limiting their ability to put on muscle mass by being deficient in protein intake is there ways to increase muscle without that much protein intake I mean it's challenging you're going to be limited at some point by amino acids obviously you know anabolic steroids and things can sort of help I mean naturally yeah but at the end of the day you're you're you know you do require exogenous meaning from the outside world you have to put amino acids in your body as the building blocks to undergo this process known as muscle protein synthesis really so the RDA the recommended dietary allowance is 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight that's off by a factor of two it should be at least twice that is what we should be doing daily yeah in other words we're we're being cold to eat half the protein that we really require how much is that I guess in pounds yeah so how much do you weigh right now 245 okay so that wouldn't for you be you should be eating at least 200 grams of protein a day is there a maximum that is yeah inefficient it's not yeah so so there's two issues so so three um three grams per kilogram would be considered too much too much so what is that so in Your Case 350 grams of protein a day or something yeah yeah yeah yeah um so minimum for you and if I did less what if I did 100 grams of protein a day say for a year would I not be able to put on muscle it would have a very hard time putting on muscle well the muscle size it'd be hard or the muscle strength like the quality of the muscle strength yeah probably clearly size at 100 grams a day and it also but but of course not all 100 gram a day you could have four people eating 100 grams of protein a day and they could get different results if depending on the protein Source right so you know plant protein is going to be less efficient than animal protein it's less bioavailable um if you ate all of that protein in one meal versus someone who spread it out across multiple meals the person who's spreading it out is going to get more efficiency really but if you spread it out too much so a hundred given as 10 grams every two hours is an awful way to give protein because the liver is going to utilize a lot of it for a process known as gluconeogenesis which means turning protein into glucose you don't want that so if you were going to only eat 100 grams of protein a day you'd probably be best off going 100 sorry 30 30 40 or something to that effect and at 200 gram so what is the so at 200 grams per day you're probably looking at 50 four times a day is the optimal dosing wow and that will support me in maintaining my muscle strength maintaining my muscle mass as well yep and the ability probably to just recover faster you know sleep better train better well and it's also I mean it's a very important nutrient it's also you know associating nutrient um and so that's hungry yeah yeah so it's going to provide more more satiation because you know the challenge with nutrition is um for many people they're kind of oh what I call overnourished they have more fat on them than they need but under muscled that's probably the most common body type we would see right now in America is not enough muscle too much fat so that's a that's a complicated problem to solve nutritionally but an important one to solve because you have to reduce total energy intake while typically increasing protein yeah it's interesting so you've got to eat more protein less carbs and fat to make that what is the Obesity number at right now in America and versus the world uh I so I don't think I could tell you the world number at the moment obesity in the U.S is probably a little over one-third of the population now one-third of the population yeah and what is the determining factor of obesity yeah it's a crap definition it's definitely it's defined by BMI body mass index over 30. uh kilograms per meter squared got it I think that's a weak definition I understand why it's used it's basically easy to measure uh all you need to know is a person's height and weight but it's pretty useless because it doesn't take into account body fat and muscle is quite heavy so you can have a person who's quite lean muscular and they're obese or at least overweight but like I'm significantly overweight by BMI um but you know by body fat I'm not so I think actually a more helpful definition and if someone's just thinking about this like hey do I need to be worried it's take your height and your waist size your circumference of your waist actual measure not your pan size and divide them and if that number is if if your waist size divided by your or it's easier to do this if your height divided by your waist size is more than two that's a problem so if you're six feet tall and your waist measures more than 36 inches that's probably a better indication of you being obese okay I'm glad it's not that that's good I'm 6'4 and I'm 34 waist so hopefully oh yeah yeah yeah I got to get down a little bit more but um okay this is interesting so more protein what I'm hearing you say is animal protein is better protein or more efficient protein more efficient protein so I think people get so hung up on this whole plant animal nonsense um I again I just you know you work with the science yeah just let's just do it with the science right yeah so if you don't want any animal protein that's fine but you just have to acknowledge if you're going to eat vegetable protein you're going to need more of it you're going to probably need to cook it and you're going to need to be more fastidious and deliberate in paying attention to the types of amino acids there's 20 amino acids and you're going to have to pay a little bit more attention looking at you know how much methionine how much leucine how much lysine am I getting so again you don't have to eat animal protein it just makes your life easier if people eat animal protein we give them guidance on total protein intake when people only want to eat animal plant protein we give them guidance on both quantity of protein and quantity of specific amino acids wow and both can work but bladder just requires more effort what are the three most efficient types of meat to get the protein that that you need do you think the most quality types of well I'm privileged and biased at the same time right privileged because I get to eat wild game most of the time so most of my meat is venison and Elk both of which are wild game so this has the advantage of having a much better nutrient profile than you know uh pastured or grown meat um unfortunately not everybody is going to have access to that um you know either because they don't hunt themselves or they don't know people who do um or you know in truth it's more expensive I mean unfortunately our food system is pretty broken um and based on the way that we subsidize food we've created a really perverse economic incentive for people to eat very low quality food um so uh you know the only thing I would offer on that statement is that you know we all have disposable income that's going to go somewhere I think we should really emphasize the quality of our food as a worthwhile thing to splurge on right what types of I guess animals would be the best quality of meat though if you're not doing game yeah if you're if you don't have access to Elk and Venison and these sorts of things um you know I I think all of them have their limitation it's more it's less about you know whether you're eating chicken or beef or fish I think all of them have limitations if they're if they're grown the wrong way really so what I'd really be looking for is the closest thing that you can buy that is wild and by the way I still think a great thing to do is when whatever Town you're in you find local farmers that are doing things free range right that are doing things organically that are doing things where you know the animal is eating as close to possible what it would have eaten in nature um and and for most people like in a especially in towns like where I live in Texas like it's not that difficult to find Farmers that that you can go and work with directly and make that happen and again I'm sure someone listening to this is gonna be like dude are you freaking kidding me man that's too much too much work expensive this and I'm like that's true but what's more important than your health so it's it's like you you kind of have to decide like is it is it worth a few less dinners out in exchange for spending a little bit more money on what you eat at home right I don't think there are easy answers but but I do think it matters right so so chicken beef fish they all have they can all be crap if they're grown the wrong way that's the bottom line and they can all be valuable if they're not that's true of eggs that's true of dairy I mean all of these things are um unfortunately very different from the way they were 50 years ago so more protein and if we work if you're going to be plant-based what would be the main sources of protein you and gain or which plants would you want to eat most the time to give you the most benefit yeah I mean pea protein is pretty good and soy protein unfortunately has to become kind of part of the Mainstay of your of your of your protein intake I can say unfortunately well I mean you have to be to be kind of mindful of how much of it you ingest um you know certainly you can get some aromatizing you can get you can sort of get a little bit more estrogen than you might want out of some of those things um pea protein is actually a pretty decent quality protein but you just have fewer options right like if you're truly plant-based I think it's a lot easier for persons a vegetarian because at least they're willing to eat eggs and dairy and you can get a lot of benefit out of you know yogurt cheese and eggs eggs are an amazing source of protein and they're very rich in some of the most important amino acids okay more protein number three what would you say is the the third thing we should be thinking about to extend our life in a healthy way well although I didn't write about it in the book due to the uh the folks at the at the publisher thinking okay this book's long enough already take this out um I I actually think that people could be very um deliberate about paying attention to when they're in cars uh it's not a it's not a particularly often talked about cause of mortality or injury but car accidents are a real problem still um there are over 3000 people a year that die in car accidents and many many more who are injured in car accidents and those things are in some ways equally troubling right I mean if you get hit very badly in a car accident and you're T-Bone and maybe you don't die but if you suffer you know a horrible neck injury that debilitates you for the rest of your life that's you might not show up on that statistic but it's still an enormous detriment to your quality of life so about three years ago my research team did a really good deep dive into understanding how people die on the road because that's effectively in some ways what a part of this book is about it's like well if you if you want to maximize how long and well you live if you start with the length part you got to know how you die you have to go to the death and work backwards and so in that particular domain how do people die on the road and there are really predictable ways that people unfortunately die on the road mostly on their phone or texting well yes yes but location wise right location so location wise your big three are intersections so four-way intersection T intersection or t Junction so this can be either an intersection that's a t or like a parking like you know you're coming out of you know one like you're coming out of a parking lot onto a under Road Street yeah yeah and then uh head on traffic without a median so there's a lot of you know we have a lot of those rounds in Texas right so high speed two lane four lane exactly two lanes four lanes no feet away that's right and parking cars are going 60 miles an hour trusting oh it's good at this little line this little yellow line is going to keep us and it just takes one person to get distracted for one second and boom it's a head-on collision that is now functionally you hitting a wall at 120 miles an hour because if it's 60 and 60 the relative impact of that is deadly and so so those are such high fatality accidents it's difficult to put in words and every I feel like every month I see a bad accident and about every three months I see a fatal accident on the street nearest to my house that is like that it's brutal wow so being mindful of so so what can you do about that so knowing that how would you change your behavior well so a couple things right so one let's just talk through the two-way street thing so the street that I'm talking about in in Austin is two and two so two and two it's a six mile stretch of two by two at 60 miles 50 to 60 mile an hour speed limit so rule number one unless I'm passing someone I'm never in the left lane why because that's the lane that's going to get ding I'm going to be in the right lane and you know what if I have to be a little slower I don't care I do not want to be in the left lane because that I want my margin of safety with an extra Lane secondly unfortunately for this particular Street it is a direct East-West run what that means is in the morning half of those people are blind as a bat when the sun is low and in the afternoon the other half our blind as a bat when the sun is low for those 30 to 60 minutes or whatever it is where it's right there yeah brutal blindness you couldn't have built the worst Road oh my gosh so what I'm thinking about when I'm out at those hours which I hate is if I can see really well by definition the sun is behind me the other people can't see worth a damn so I'm even more careful knowing that guy can't see coming to intersections most fatalities at intersections are caused by an individual who runs a red and hits a person who had the right-of-way so it's a it's an especially tragic event because the person who's getting hit the most fatal injury is in a green light is a person has a green light goes straight and they get hit from the left T-Bone on the driver's side by this person ran a red light today when I was driving here I was on I was on Santa Monica Boulevard I don't remember I was the first one stopped at a red it was a it was a red as red as could be 20 seconds later a Prius went straight through and didn't even stop 20 seconds 20 seconds after there was this road attention we're not paying attention one bit they didn't it wasn't like a yellow then red no no no no no no two seconds later it was the one piece it was so long after that I assumed the light had turned green right and I almost went wow and then I looked and it was like still red and it was red for another minute I mean this person absolutely did not notice a red light anything could hit luckily didn't hit anyone didn't I mean I couldn't believe this guy he clearly didn't even know because they didn't even slow down you would have thought like he would have recognized it and been like freaked out or something no just gone right through so this is happening all the time so what do you do so what it means is every time you're going through an intersection you assume there is someone getting ready to run it and you scan three times so I always scan left right left before I go through an intersection with the right away um so again is that does that guarantee I'm not going to die in a car accident not at all yeah I'm hoping that this attention to to these things maybe reduces my Risk by 50 wow um there's nothing you you know you there's nothing you can do to fully protect yourself but I think being mindful of those things um having that sort of situational awareness uh gives you I think a little bit better odds in in an otherwise you know unsexy problem I think that's smart yeah and what would be the the last two things of the top kind of five that you would say well I think you know if we could sort of pick one disease that is the the number one cause of death um it's it's clearly cardiovascular disease right so so globally and in the United States heart disease kills more people than any other disease really how much does it how many people die a year so globally about 19 million people die per year of a heart attack a heart attack yeah around the world yeah 19 million people a year heart attack yeah cancer number two about 12 million so I mean it's almost twice the mortality of the next closest disease Heart of heart failure heart attack heart disease yeah atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease and that's is that more on the emotional side of things and stress or is that more that you just don't have good cardio no no I mean I think there's you know well so going the other thing I would point out before we even talk about that is this is true of men and women as well so so I think there's a belief that an erroneous belief that it's heart disease is a male disease no it's the leading cause of death in men it's the leading cause of death in women it's the leading cause of death in men in the U.S and the world it's just by every metric it's the number one bestseller what is the main cause of a heart attack or the main causes yeah so so a heart attack is shorthand for a process where there is an occlusion of blood flow to a significant enough part of the muscle of the heart that uh that that a process known as ischemia takes place and that heart muscle dies that's the attack yeah the hard muscle dies and there's an attack that that is the heart attack and that can be you know that can occur in a very small blood vessel and it can result in a non-fatal heart attack people can have small heart attacks where not as not a big enough part of the heart muscle dies people can also get medical attention quickly enough and the blockage in the artery that's causing that death can be opened up right they can put a stent in there in the emergency room or you know you get to the emergency room they take you to the cath lab and they stent it and give you clot busting medicine and it opens it up and if you do that quick enough you can get blood back to the area and minimize the damage that takes place but about 50 percent of people who have a heart attack die first time and that's their first sign of heart disease so they didn't have chest pain before that it's not like they were having chest pain for years with heart disease is sudden death because you hear about these I mean I don't know how common this is we hear about someone that had a heart attack and died on the treadmill who is yep 45 years old healthy you know good looking not overweight and just had a heart attack and died right and you hear these stories so what is them the cause of it happening so it's a complex disease but fortunately of all the diseases it's the one we understand hands down the most now that's the good news the bad news is it's going to take me a minute to explain it and I'll do my best to not get terrible technical you're good so it starts with cholesterol which everybody's heard of and uh cholesterol certainly gets a bad rap you know everybody kind of understands cholesterol is bad stuff but it's important to sort of get the context right so cholesterol is a substance that every cell in our body makes it's a very important chemical it's a lipid it's a type of fat but it's important for several reasons it's the most important building block of the cell membrane so every one of our cells has is like a sphere and it has this membrane and it allows the cell to be fluid it allows the cell to change its shape and have little channels across its surface that allow things like glucose and sodium to come in and out and all sorts of things like that so naturally something that important the body would figure out a way to make it and the body does it makes a lot of cholesterol now um cholesterol because it's a fat doesn't dissolve in water so if you've ever made salad dressing and you dump oil and mix it with vinegar you know that they separate completely so there's a bit of a challenge the body has to solve for which is how do you transport this fat throughout the body you have to put it in the highway well the highway is our circulatory system and even though it might not look like it when you get cut if you look at your blood it's just water your blood is just water the reason it's so red is there's a bunch of red things in it like red blood cells and platelets but if you've ever seen what happens to your blood when you put it in a tube and spin it in a centrifuge it separates immediately so all the red stuff goes to the bottom and then you can see it's basically just clear so it's just basically water called called plasma so we can't move this cholesterol through the body because it's it's water insoluble we need a trick and the trick is the body made these little spherical submarines that are water soluble to put the cholesterol inside and those little spherical submarines are called lipoproteins okay okay those lipoproteins have different densities so there's high density lipoprotein a low density lipoprotein a very low density like a protein and the low density lipoproteins in the very low density lipoproteins LDL and vldl people call those good and bad cholesterol but that's a bad name it's the lipoproteins that are the problem those things get stuck in artery walls and in particular in the coronary artery system which are very small arteries this becomes especially problematic so these lipoproteins they get up into the artery wall a lot of the times they come back out and nothing goes wrong but often enough they get stuck in there and when they get stuck in there the body reacts I guess appropriately in that it thinks there's a foreign invader and it kicks off an immune response and it sends immune cells to the artery to go and eat or ingest or what's called phagocytose those cholesterol particles and when it does that it kicks off an enormous inflammatory Cascade that ultimately results in the body trying to repair the damage it's causing all the while what it's doing is setting itself up for a disaster it builds this thing called a plaque and eventually when that plaque ruptures and all the platelets that are clotting cells come to repair it that's what stops the blood flow so the heart attack is caused by one of these plaques rupturing and the blood flow getting stopped got it okay so knowing that what would you do so what are the biggest drivers of that the first is the number of those lipoproteins so the more of those low density lipoproteins you have the greater your risk of this happening the more of those you have the greater the rest that's right the more you can think of it as kind of like a random process so you know the the more cars going down the road the more chance that one of the cars is going to bump into a curb sure okay so fewer cars on the road is better for everybody so how do we minimize the cars so there are some dietary ways to do it and there are some pharmacologic ways to do it uh and you know the the how much of each you need depends on the situation you're in but the reality of it is if if you really wanted to prevent heart disease you know it's funny I think almost everybody would benefit from lipid lowering drugs to take that lipoprotein down as far as possible and I'll explain why in a moment I'll come back to it the second thing that drives cardiovascular disease is blood pressure so elevated blood pressure causes a mechanical stress on those artery walls and it makes them more susceptible to those little lipoproteins going in so you can think of it like the Integrity of the wall is what keeps those lipoproteins out if you damage the Integrity that while more and more of them get in and the third thing is smoking and that's blood pressure yes high blood pressure the higher your blood pressure The more stress you're putting on that wall the more shear stress and how do you decrease blood pressure what's the efficient ways to do that I mean weight loss is an enormously efficient way to do it exercise is an important way to do it in some people sodium reduction matters if their kidney function isn't perfect okay and if all else fail I mean sleeping adequately does it so correcting things like obstructive sleep apnea can help and ultimately pharmacology helps if none of those other things work and then the third one is smoking yeah yeah so smoking is an enormous driver of cardiovascular disease and it has a chemical irritant on that same thing so smoking sort of chemically irritates the artery wall so basically all roads to cardiovascular disease have to do with the Integrity of the artery wall and the ability of the lipoproteins to get in and do their damage we know about how bad smoking is but how bad is vaping compared to smoking yeah it's a great question and it's one that I don't think we know the answer to yet my view is the precautionary principle is uh in order so if a person said oh I'm going to choose between smoking and vaping like I'm a lifelong smoker and the only way I'm going to ever stop smoking you know two packs of camels a day is if I go to vape I think it's the lesser of two evils so that's a different situation than if you said to me I'm not a smoker but I'm I'm really I'm kind of thinking about taking a vaping I'm going to try to talk you out of it all right and um what are the what are the negative side effects to vaping so I again I think there's a big unknown we don't know yet about the following I don't think we understand what's happening when those filaments are burning inside that device like I don't think we understand what particulates are there so so the pro-vaping person will say well there's no tobacco in it yeah there's no tobacco okay that's that's great so that problem is resolved I don't know what there is in there and until I do I'm very uncomfortable with the idea of taking anything down into my lungs over and over and over again uh without a lot more data yeah so again if someone is saying look this is an alternative to smoking I would say there are far better Alternatives there are smokeless ways to get nicotine because nicotine is the addictive component of tobacco nicotine by the way is actually not harmful nicotine is actually quite beneficial nicotine has a lot of benefits in the brain so the other chemicals that are that's right yeah so so nicotine is addictive that's problematic but otherwise it's a very positive molecule for brain health so if a person is saying I'm stuck on nicotine I would say use a gum use a patch use like a lozenge there are lots of ways to get nicotine that don't put you at risk the way vaping does and you would say over vaping do those other things the gum the pasture I just I I if any person who I meet who's vaping I'm going to try to talk about but yeah that makes sense and if in 20 years I'm wrong and we discover vaping is like good for you which is I'm willing to I'm willing to take that I'm willing to take the asymmetry of that yeah of course now what about um smoking marijuana what are the pros and cons to ingesting any type of smoke into your lungs again I think for the reason yeah yeah I think the reason we probably don't see a strong association between marijuana use and lung cancer the way we do with smoking is the dose like you know I I mean again I don't I'm I don't I'm not particularly fond of marijuana personally I've never enjoyed it but I can't imagine that someone is smoking more than a couple joints a day even if they're a heavy user sure how does it affect your brain or other well those are separate issues which we can sort of talk about in a sec but I think just on the basis of like lung Health heart health it's not going to affect your heart I suspect it's not nearly as bad as tobacco because you simply don't do as much yeah now it's unfiltered and there's probably a ton of crap that you're ingesting but it's sort of like smoking one cigarette a day doesn't materially increase your risk but nobody smokes one cigarette a day right people are going to smoke 10 cigarettes a day or 15 cigarettes a day if you were probably smoking 10 or 15 joints a day I would bet that you're very likely in the same risk category if not greater than tobacco because at least tobacco is filtered right with the heart that's right Ed with the heart end with the lungs okay because remember lung cancer is hands down the leading cause of cancer lung cancer oh my God like not even close wow okay leading cause of cancer death that's through smoking mostly uh yeah tragically 15 percent of lung cancer patients have never smoked a cigarette in their life fifteen percent fifteen percent in fact if you just looked at so lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death followed by breast in women prostate in men followed by colon followed by pancreatic those are the big Killers but if you just looked at the people who smoke who've never smoked who get lung cancer that would be the seventh leading cause of cancer death how do they get lung cancer nobody knows it's also a big mystery why women are disproportionately affected two to one interesting yeah we we wrote a piece on this once uh speculating it could be estrogen um it could be lack of testosterone um but we nobody knows nobody understands why women seem much more susceptible to much more susceptible as non-smokers to lung cancer than male non-smokers huh between men and women who attracts disease more well women live longer on average than men at least in the United States that's probably true globally and women tend to get certain diseases later like heart disease the incidence of heart disease and the even though women are just as likely to die of heart disease they die later of heart disease certain diseases favor men and certain diseases the same for women so for example lung cancer in a non-smoker disproportionately women Alzheimer's disease disproportionately women two to one really Parkinson's disease disproportionately men about two to one what's the difference between Alzheimer's and Parkinson's Alzheimer's is a disease that almost con you know consistently are almost exclusively deals with cognition so it affects the brain and it is a dementing disease so it robs people of memory cognitive executive function processing speed Etc Parkinson's disease is more of a movement disorder does it really affect cognition muscular like but it affects it affects motor control and movement and so people with Parkinson's disease have a Tremor and have a very difficult time movie wow so they're both neurodegenerative diseases but they're they're at different ends of the spectrum but one the Parkinson's it'll affect your body but you should be sharp still most Parkinson's disease still have their cognitive faculties right whereas Alzheimer's patients do not what are the causes of both of those and how can we minimize that yeah I mean I I it's hard to say definitively what's causing them we know more about Alzheimer's disease than Parkinson's disease so we know for example that of all the people with Alzheimer's disease one percent of them have it because of genes that are program programming them to get it um so this is very tragic but there you know there are a handful of genes three in particular that make up the majority of these patients who are almost destined to get Alzheimer's disease and tragically to get it at a very young age these are people that are getting it in their 50s oh so um fortunately that's rare again it's only one percent of cases but it's one percent too much and we really don't have any options for these patients so that's once you start getting it it's hard to remember that's right that's right so this isn't one percent of people that have this this is one percent of Alzheimer's cases come with this of the other 99 of people who get Alzheimer's disease a couple things we know one is there is another Gene that predisposes you but not in a fashion that's called deterministic deterministic means if you have the gene you get the condition fortunately most genes are not deterministic most genes just increase risk decrease risk modify risk um but there's a gene called apoe4 that increases risk of Alzheimer's disease so this is is a gene that about 25 percent of the population has um but some so at least 25 of the population has one copy of that Gene about two percent of the population has two copies of that Gene those people are at a much higher risk the people with one copy are at you know about two to three times the risk um and then there are people with no copies that still make up part of the cases so of all the people with Alzheimer's disease about two-thirds of them have that Gene the apoe4 gene one-third do not even though the two-thirds of people who have Alzheimer's with that Gene are only representing 25 of the population so you get a sense of the risk okay and how do we prevent this the gene we can't do anything about so then we get to the modifiable factor so what are the modifiable factors they're basically a handful of really big ones the first is exercise we know that exercise dramatically reduces the risk of not just Alzheimer's disease but all causes of dementia the second is not having Type 2 Diabetes Type 2 diabetes is a massive risk multiplier for Alzheimer's disease and dementia and dementia okay the next one is blood pressure high blood pressure dramatically increases the risk of especially vascular dementia but also Alzheimer's disease smoking does as well um poor sleep almost assuringly does the data are less clear there but I think they're sufficiently strong that I would be very comfortable saying now that short sleep also increases the risk of dementia and the final thing that I think there's two other things that I think we can say with a very high degree of certainty one is elevated uh levels of that low density lipoprotein so same thing that's driving heart disease is driving Alzheimer's disease and then there's another protein in the blood called homocysteine and elevated levels of that seem also causally related to Alzheimer's disease meaning lowering that homocysteine lowers the risk of Alzheimer's disease that was actually demonstrated in a clinical trial called the vitacog study and so that's an important part of what we give every patient as high amounts of B vitamins to keep their homocysteine level low so you basically want low home assisting low levels of low density lipoprotein lots of exercise normal blood pressure adequate sleep not having type 2 diabetes you're really even if you have an apoe4 Gene if you do all of those things you're dramatically improving your odds against neurodegeneration what do people in their 20s and early 30s what are they doing that they should stop doing to start living a longer life you know because you think when you're 20s I'm Invincible I wanna get up all night I'm going to be you know whatever drinking or I never drink I've never been drunk but I would be like Red Bulls all till like three in the morning like dancing techno clubs or whatever uh and just you know eating whatever working out putting double burritos and pizza all night like what are the things that you wish people's in their 20s and early 30s knew that if they stopped or restricted those things it would just benefit them so much in their 40s 50s and Beyond you know I'd hesitate to sit here and suggest that someone in their 20s or 30s maybe live like a monk because at some point you know I I really do understand the value of saying like everything has a season in your life yes and there are things that I did in my 20s and 30s that I don't think were remotely good for me but they were incredibly fun and they you know I mean when I was in medical school the the once a month there was like a 25 cent beer night at the bowling alley and it was all 80s music amazing I have some remarkable memories of that that are so disgusting and I can't believe that we would drink syrup right so I think rather than say never do this never do this never do this what I would say is develop good habits so here's a better way to think about it if you're 20 or 30 years old and I come to you and I say what's the most important thing you can do to set yourself up financially you wouldn't tell me never to spend money you wouldn't call me to save every penny but I bet you would tell me to get into the regular habit of saving and investing because if you get into a regular habit of doing something one you have the compounding benefit of it but it also becomes built in to your behavior yes so what I would say to that 20 or 30 year old is still make it a habit to exercise six days a week make it a habit to eat responsibly most of the time make it a habit to not drink to excess most of the time and yeah I get it like when you're 20 you can recover from an awful night of boozing in the way you or I could never recover today but if you make the Habit the bad thing you it's much harder to break those habits later in life I mean I feel very fortunate that at least exercise has always been in my life that's great so it really doesn't require any willpower now to exercise like it's just it's an embedded part of my existence it's a part of my psyche it's a part of my mental health strategy so I think that's really what I would say is it it's less about what you do on any one given day and more about getting into the habit of putting putting money every week off that paycheck into your 401k and yeah you're going to spend money on stupider things when you're 20 than when you're 50 but still be in the discipline of saving and compounding yeah exactly and if you do that you know those daily habits then you can still go to Coachella for three nights so that's crazy and recovered but make sure when you get back I'm gonna get back on program I mean I'm gonna I'm gonna get a workout in and I'm gonna eat well and I'm going to sleep well do you think it's possible to live in our 90s or Beyond a hundred with with no diseases active mobile and mentally clear and sharp you know there are people who have already done this um I have a whole chapter in the book dedicated to them they're called centenarian I think it's chapter four because I think it's interesting to understand what it is about them now I'll I'll I'll you know I'll spoil it for people and say that this chapter doesn't tell you to do what they do because here's the interesting thing the centenarians um it turns out on average read the opening quote it's my favorite Whiskey's a good medicine it keeps your muscles tender that was Richard Overton who I think is was 110 when he said that wow um and this guy who lived in Austin Texas by the way used to drink whiskey all day and light Stogies on his stove and sit on the porch and he was just this incredibly healthy guy right up until the day he died he didn't Ryan holiday do a piece on him or something yeah he was on this porch sitting on the porch just just hilarious and it's true most centenarians are like this they literally do everything wrong they don't exercise they drink they eat like crap well they just hit the genetic Lottery okay so they have amazing jeans and they they have you know lived long despite their behaviors not because of their behavior and it sounds like they almost they have this lightness to their emotional and mental way of viewing the world some of them but there's just as many that are crotchety old really yeah absolutely yeah there's genes give them alive there is no Rhyme or Reason so there are two enormous cohorts um that have been studied one by a guy named near barzillai um at Albert Einstein in the Bronx and won by a guy named pearls uh in at Boston University and yeah I mean there's okay simply no pattern to their behavior their attitude the way they perceive the world not every single thing can predict their behavior except their genes wow so with that said I I'm going to assume that your question is for those of us who weren't gifted with the genetic Lottery is it possible I believe the answer is yes whether it's 90 95 100 I'm not sure what I do believe is possible is that with enough work with enough compounding benefit of all these things we're talking about that last decade of your life can be a very high functioning decade I call it the marginal decade so marginal decade for most people is a period of significant Decline cognitively and physically it's suffering that's right pain that's right Agony frustration resentment all these things yeah so so there's an emotional component that can be there but even if the emotional stuff is good like I you know I look at people who I know who are you know in their late 80s and they're surrounded by friends and family and love and all those things but physically they just can't do what they want to do you know they can't walk they they they're they they can't drive anymore you know they don't have the reflexes they don't have the they're not as sharp so you know if you start early enough and are delivered enough there is no guarantee you will Ward that off but it's a probability game you give yourself way better chances yeah again is there a guarantee that if you put money away into a 401k and invest it in the most you know Wise Savvy way that you can growing up that you're going to retire a lot of money there's no guarantee right you could be trying to retire uh the day before Lehman Brothers blew up in September of 2007 and your 401k goes to zero I mean those things can happen and you might have to work an extra five years to dig out of that hole but on average it's much more likely that that person is going to do well than had they never saved and they expect to just buy lottery tickets right how do you know 50. 50. so what's your vision for your lifespan how how long if you could predict the year and live as long as you wanted to be how long would that be I I can't even fashion it I think the most important thing to me is to live long enough that my kids um are fine without me I mean that's so that believe it or not is not very long right I mean my kids are almost six almost nine almost 15. so if my youngest kid is I don't know 30. and that what does that put me that puts me in my 70s you know I will have done the most important thing I was put on this Earth to do wow yeah um and really I'm I'm less concerned with how long I live which I'd be lying if I said I want to live I don't want to live a long time of course I do but I'm much more concerned with with that quality of life I'm much more concerned with what am I able to do um and I would happily compromise length of life in favor of quality of life and I Define quality of life may be different from how you would or may be different from how someone watching us would so I do think it's important that everybody have a very honest discussion with themselves about what constitutes quality of life what do you want to be able to do in your last decade we all have a last decade and none of us know the day we enter it but most of us know when we're in it so so what do you want to be able to do in that decade and I have very clear metrics of what I want to be able to do and that's what I focus on what are those main things we want to do in the last decade well I mean I'm assuming so for planning purposes I'm assuming that's my late 80s maybe even early 90s and I want to be as functional in that period of time as an otherwise very healthy fit 70 year old would be which means I want to be able to exercise every day I want to be able to play with small children I want to be able to do archery I would like to even be able to drive a race car still by the way Paul Newman was still driving his race car up until about six months before he died and still driving some pretty quick laps how old was he oh God we'd have to look it up I think late 80s wow yeah I want to be able to hike on uneven surfaces I want to be able to swim every day I want to be able to have sex I want to be able to travel and do so in a manner that's like real like you know not just get wheeled around and go from place to place but like walk around do everything yourself yeah actually get onto the train uh-huh actually carry my suitcase onto a train take my suitcase off the train you know I want to be able to play with great grandkids or probably not great grandkids but probably grandkids um on the floor like play Lego that's beautiful vision and I'm curious I just turned 40. uh a month ago a month and a half ago and when's your birthday March 16th oh and March 19 1983. I'm 73. yeah so 10 years almost exactly um and it hasn't really like I've never put emphasis on my age for the number yep um because I've never wanted to limit myself and that was something my dad taught me early on so we've never really celebrated birthdays which is a whole other story but it's benefited me in believing in myself you know being younger starting the game when everyone else was older being the age I am now just not just always believe in myself no matter the age it hasn't really hit me that soon you know if I'm able to live as you know in my 90s or whenever soon essentially in the next decade I will have been on this Earth how longer yeah then I will be still on this earth right like my first half will be longer than a web ending up have you thought about that being 50 now they're like okay maybe you have 50 years probably not yeah no no I've almost assuredly spent more time on this Earth than I have left right how does that hit you how does that how does that feel mentally emotionally so I don't think of it that way and maybe this is just a coping mechanism so it's possible I'm just delusional but the way I think about it is more in terms of the quality of that life so I would say that we all have different seasons and I don't think for example the first 45 years of my life were a great season really sure I mean I think that physically everything was great but I don't think emotionally everything was great and therefore in some ways I'm still an infant in terms of kind of a level of emotional maturity and level of connection and relationship better relationship with myself and better relationship with others so in some ways I think well I'm a five-year-old who still has 35 years to live maybe so um you know the good news is when you think of all of these things that determine quality of life or health span you're thinking of cognitive physical and emotional well there's no denying the gravitational pull on the first two they're going to go down your cognitive and physical performance have already peaked mine long ago peaked I'm on the down slide I mean it's just that's just reality you can't deny it especially People Like Us who weren't doing horribly when we were younger sure like in other words you're never going to be physically the guy you were when you were 20. not a chance and nor will I because I was already at such a high level I'm not cognitively ever going to be what I was when I was 20. um but the good news is they're wiserable exactly I'll be I I and this is what I don't know if you have you interviewed um Arthur Brooks no no okay so so Arthur Brooks talks about these different types of intelligence crystallized versus fluid intelligence and yes the people who age gracefully are able to transition and accept that different type of intelligence and you you go from that more computational you know what's called fluid intelligence into a more crystallized intelligence that is more about wisdom but the good news is that last bucket of emotional health is not Tethered to age at all not Tethered to biological age so in many ways I I accept the decline of these first two knowing that this last one is going to get better interesting but speak about emotional health and how does that play into longevity and the quality of your life living longer I mean I think it has two clear ways that it factors into it right the first is um I would call it indirectly right so for when a person's emotional health is not well it's very difficult for them to do what is in their own best interest with respect to their own health so a person whose emotional health is not well is not going to be sleeping eating exercising motivated to do the things to take care of themselves and I see this all the time I mean this is absolutely something I see front and center with my patients is they know what they need to do they know what they need to do but they're not emotional stressed there's too many things there's too many things getting in the way yeah there's too much emotional baggage that's getting in the way of their relationship with food their relationship with exercise stress relationships all of those things so so that's the indirect price of emotional health not being optimized and then frankly I think there is the the more uh destructive piece which is suffering and I think that you know as as Esther perel uh mentioned to me and I I write about this that you know there what is the point in living longer if you're not happy what is the point of living longer if your relationships suck what is the point of living longer if your wife hates you or your kids don't know you the the it's it's I don't think anybody would think that that's that that's Paradise no matter how long you live on the calendar if you can go back to 22 what did you wish you would have mastered better emotional health mental uh you know mental cognition or the physical health what do you wish you would have put more attention to than to give you the benefits now and the rest of your life to age 22 when you were 22 Yeah you could go back and say you know what the physical side of Health the the emotional side of health or the the brain health where would you put more attention to back then for yourself personally I mean it's it's a it's a hard question the the obvious answer would be emotional health because of course I you know but but but of course emotional health is an impossible thing to fix without awareness so in this thought experiment we would also have to assume that I'm given the awareness that I have a crystal ball that is going to show me the future and say to me if this is not addressed this is what is coming for you well I mean you could have said that for your fiscal Health too if you would have not stayed healthy physically and been obese and had yeah you'd have suffering physically well but but again I I sort of naturally did that anyway got it so so for me personally I think that was the most that was the biggest opportunity but the catch is I would have had to convince myself to do it right and what were those things been that you would have done differently with your emotional health now you feel like would have given you more whether it be peace or emotional abundance or I don't know which is a lightness or an energy that was different what would you have done differently or coach yourself and do it well again I I it would it would only be me today who's able to go back and do this but I think I would sort of say look I'm going to loan you money because you didn't have two nickels to rub together to go to therapy and um I want you to explore the roots of your anger I want you to explore the roots of your perfectionism I want you to explore the roots of your need to achieve and I think if you can if you can really explore what's at the root of that um you're you're you're still going to be able to do things you're still you're not going to lose the ability you're not going to lose your eye to be a productive human being um but you'll do it less from a point of rage and inferiority where did those two things come from the rage and inferiority I mean I think you know there were just various elements of my childhood that um just for reasons I'll never understand like what you know as you've discussed I'm sure many times like you can put five people in the exact same situation expose them to the exact same ingredients in the exact same soil and they're going to sprout different plants you just don't know why for whatever reason the set of circumstances I was in produced several phenotypes you know one of them was a sense of nobody will hurt me so this is the this is the armor that will protect me uh one of them I'm not gonna let anyone hurt me I will never let anybody do this so there is there is an enormous armor that will protect me um I think another one was I will show them how good I can be wow and so whatever it is I'm going to do I am going to be the best person who's ever done that thing I feel like I have both those for myself too yeah yeah I think a lot of people who go through that type of experience um do and of course the the the kind of Insidious nature of that type of narrative is that it's highly rewarding so there's a benefit to how there is an upside to that there's also massive consequences and prices we pay yeah there's collateral damage is the way I try to describe it right it's like it's like a tank driving through a city it absolutely gets where it's going to go you get your results gets it you're the traffic doesn't stop you but the body count in your wake the damaged Street the damaged cars the all that stuff no one's gonna hit you when they run you through the intersection uh but but all the all the the turmoil that you cause around you is is so problematic um but again if the results are good enough you kind of get to sneak your way through life and most people kind of tolerate it and only those people closest to you really see how bad it is and you know and then you start believing a narrative that says this is who you are you this like okay yes I'm not going to pretend I'm not you know I'm not going to pretend I'm perfect but at the same time you know if to to change this would be like to change my height or my eye color like I can't do those things it's the identity about it this is this is hardwired wow so you would have gone back and and done some therapy back then and said a you're not hardwired to be this way B let's understand what's driving this C I'm gonna try to convince you that you can have a lot of The Upside without most of this downside but you're going to pay a price now you're going to pay the Fiddler one way or the other right but if you pay them now there's going to be fewer bodies yeah how long have you been doing therapy now oh at the level that I've been doing it uh six years six years five five and a half years one of the main benefits that you've seen physically cognitively and emotionally through doing that practice well interestingly I mean I would say certainly I sleep better really yeah absolutely which helps your lifespan sure sure I mean I think that's that's that's that's better uh secondly and by the way that's like the least of the benefits right I'm starting with the low hanger right but I think another thing is my my body is less beat up like I don't push myself the way I used to if something doesn't feel right I'll just stop doing it I'm not you don't push her ego to the Limit yeah I'm not proving anything to anyone I I just don't care like if I'm if I set out to do deadlifts on Friday and my back doesn't feel great I'm not doing deadlifts today it's okay I'll do split squats instead it's fine I can come back and try again next Friday um there is no ego involved in what I'm trying to do physically all I'm trying to do is play the game you know you know Simon snack wrote this book infinite games right my life has now become an infinite game it's not a finite game anymore I'm not trying to win I'm just trying to keep playing um obviously the most important thing comes down to just the Harmony in my life yes um so so my life was a life that had no Harmony and now my life is a life that is mostly Harmony and when when I do something to remove the harmony I recognize it very quickly and I'm very much in the mode of repairing it as opposed to digging my heels in and proving that I'm right yeah this is beautiful man um so much good wisdom in this interview we'll have to have you come back on for another episode uh but I want people to get the book outlive the science and art of longevity Dr Peter attia make sure you guys get a few copies this is the Bible of longevity and living a better healthier happier life so make sure you guys get this get a few copies for your friends and family so much good research science seven years poured into this but really a lifetime of of wisdom and experience but seven years in writing so make sure you guys get this get it on Audible if you want to listen to it as well um you've got an amazing podcast if you're on social media how else can we support and serve you um I think that's it I mean if people are interested in kind of the the technical stuff around this stuff yeah the drive is a great place to it's a great resource we have a newsletter that comes out every Sunday uh it's free so it's just something you have to sign up for on our site um and um yeah I I we love creating this type of content yeah you really you're amazing we think that uh we think that you know people absolutely have much more agency than I think they believe with respect to their health I mean most of what's in this book does not require a doctor right you don't need a doctor to put in place what we're talking about exactly I want to acknowledge you Peter for your continual transformation I think talking about the emotional health for me is really inspiring because that's what I've been up to the last few years as well and what you said Harmony I've never felt this much Harmony in my life because I'm doing the emotional practices and it doesn't mean every moment I'm perfect but doing it consistently just like doing the exercise and eating protein more consistently and all these other things give us longer benefits so I acknowledge you for doing that for talking about it as part of longevity and really quality of life because who wants to live alone life if we're suffering so I acknowledge you for for everything that you've created in this book and also doing the emotional work for yourself letting go of the need to prove and protect like I did for most of my life as well and um I asked you about your three truths before so I'm going to link that up for people to go back and listen to the previous episode yeah but I'm curious the final question what's your definition of greatness now I guess it's just being um and this might sound glib but I but I think there's I think there's something I think it's just being comfortable with who you are and and what I what I mean by that is not feeling the need to have the approval of others all the time um and so that can manifest as you know needing to have others who you don't know like on social media which might be the lowest form of that approval um but also even even you know a harder level of that step is having people who who you do know um and that might mean like going your own way when people think you need to do something else so so I think that that's that's probably the highest form of greatness I mean isn't it Joseph Campbell who wrote uh you know the hero is the is the person who has the courage to pursue their own Bliss and what I realized was you know I need to start thinking about a different sport which is the sport of longevity so what does it mean to be a kick-ass hundred-year-old and so that was the beginning of a mental model for me that in the past two years has gained much more traction

Channel: Lewis Howes

Views: 154,706

Keywords: Lewis Howes, Lewis Howes interview, school of greatness, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, success habits, success, wealth, motivation, inspiration, inspirational video, motivational video, success principles, millionaire success habits, how to become successful, success motivation

Id: ORXHya4S_TA

Length: 89min 58sec (5398 seconds)

Published: Mon May 15 2023