Category: The Diary Of A CEO

You rub it inside the wall of the vagina and just rub it in like you would rub sunscreen on your face. And if you do that twice a week, it makes sex not painful and dry. It helps with arousal and orgasm. It’s literally better than Viagra. And it’s cheap. And I’m telling you all this as a urologist that this cream can also help prevent death from urinary tract infections. But more than 75% of people in large database collections are not getting prescriptions for this. And so women are not getting access to generic medications that could save their lives and also really improve quality of life. And so I am filled with rage because people are limiting their ability to have great sex, great health because they aren’t having access to all the information that they could. For example, women are not orgasming as much as men. The data is very clear there. And women come to see me all the time as I’m a sex doctor and they say I’m broke. You have to fix me. I’m not orgasming during sex. And I think the majority of problem is education. Women think that orgasm comes from penetration, but the clitoris is how most women orgasm. And yet, most women do not know where their clitoris is. And in fact, the word clitoris today in 2026 does not exist in the checklist for what an OBGYn has to learn in their training. And as men, what are we getting wrong in heterosexual relationships when we’re trying to arouse our partners? Well, men are constantly asking about they want their penises bigger, harder, straighter, girthier, lasting longer, but none of that has anything to do with how women experience pleasure and satisfaction in the bedroom. So, that’s why I’m so loud about these things because no one is getting good sex ed because the basic information is not being shared. And we fundamentally don’t give a crap about women’s sexual health, about their menstrual cycles, pregnancy, menopause, hormones, pain with sex, libido. But we actually do have a lot of information that we are not using because everyone forgot to teach your doctor. And I want to focus today’s conversation on women’s health cuz I have so many [music] questions and curiosities. So let’s start with the subject of hormones. This is going to be so [ __ ] good. This is super interesting to me. My team given me this report to show me how many of you that watch the show subscribe. And some of you have told us according to this that you are unsubscribed from the channel randomly. So favor to ask all of you please could you check right now if you’ve hit the subscribe button. If you are a regular viewer of the show and you like what we do here, we’re approaching quite a significant landmark on this show in terms of a subscriber number. So, if there was one simple free thing that you could do to help us, my team, everyone here to keep this show free, to keep it improving year over year and week over week, it is just to hit that subscribe button and to double check if you’ve hit it. Only thing I’ll ever ask of you, do we have a deal? If you do it, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll make sure every single week, every single month, we fight harder and harder and harder and harder to bring you the guests and conversations that you want to hear. I’ve stayed true to that promise since the very beginning of the diio and I will not let you down. Please help us. Really appreciate it. Let’s get on with the show. [music]

Dr. Rachel Rubin, before we started recording, you said a line to me which I found to be very interesting. You said, “I’m filled with rage.” Why are you filled with rage? I am filled with rage because I do think that people are limiting their ability to have great sex, great relationships, and great health because they aren’t having access to all the information that they could. And they’re going to see doctors who actually don’t know how to help them with these problems. And on the subject of women’s health, sexual health, hormones, etc. Can you give me the background context of the disservice that’s been done? And I remember you you were talking previously about how even the most affluent women in the world are being let down. Yeah. I think this is the great equalizer in the fact that no one is getting good medical care here when it comes to hormone therapy, menopause, and sexual health. Melinda Gates just came out and said she had to see three doctors before she got proper hormone therapy prescriptions. Oprah had to see five doctors and still they didn’t understand that her heart palpitations was from pmenopause and menopause. How about Halib Berry, right? who has access to all the doctors in the world and she publicly came out and said she was diagnosed with genital herpes when she really just had the genital urinary syndrome of menopause. The rich people are not getting good information about their bodies, about their hormonal health, about their sexual health. So what are the rest of us doing? We don’t teach it in medical schools. We don’t teach it in residencies. I didn’t learn anything about it. And so we are actually getting worse at this, not better at this. And so I am full of rage because we actually do have a lot of data and we do have a lot of information that we are not using because everyone forgot to teach your doctor. It’s staggering to me that you know those very affluent women that you’ve mentioned still are being let down by a medical system. Um it also sort of begets the question that if men were in that situation, this probably wouldn’t be the case. And that says something about the research and the investment that’s gone into understanding women’s health relative to men’s health. It’s a huge problem. We don’t have enough specialties of medicine that focus on women’s health and we don’t have enough like manpower behind us. We can throw money at this situation, but you need physical human beings to roll up their sleeves and do this work. Like doing research is challenging and you need people to actually disseminate the research and talk about the research and you need the training to happen. So it has to trickle down. So just because someone wrote a paper doesn’t mean it automatically gets downloaded into every doctor’s brains. So someone has to teach someone how to do something. So I I lecture all the time. I do a lot of trying to teach clinicians how to do this. I travel all over to say here’s how to write prescriptions because that’s what it’s going to take. There was so much fear and misinformation 20 years ago about hormone therapy that it is a lost art. Doctors don’t know how to write the prescriptions. Nobody taught them how. So, even if they see headlines and Melinda Gates giving $10 million to the Menopause Society, that’s wonderful, but it doesn’t translate into them knowing how to actually write the prescription, knowing the difference between the type of hormones, knowing the safety, the risk, the benefits because they never had the class. For example, I’m a urologist. If someone comes into me asking about their blood pressure, I’m not going to pretend like I know everything about their blood pressure. I’m going to be very honest that I have the limitations in my training. But for some reason with hormone therapy and women’s health, every doctor you go see has strong opinions and will tell women what they can and cannot have with their bodies even when they don’t know the data. I come from the men’s health world. We don’t tell men you can’t have this, you can’t do this. We we talk about shared decision-making. We talk about risks. We talk about benefits. For some reason, we don’t do that enough in women’s health. I think part of it I don’t think your doctor’s evil. I actually have a a thought about this. So, I think your doctor wasn’t trained. I think they’re trying to save face and I think 10 minutes is impossible to give good medical care. I could never get to know you fully in 10 minutes and really give you great advice on your life that’s customized for you. It’s almost like the difference between a viral clip that you’re going to try to do from this episode and the long- form nuanced conversation that you’re going to have. You love the nuanced conversation. You love spending those those two hours and I think patients want that too. But when they go to the doctor, they’re getting the 10-minute version. And instead of doctors saying, “I don’t know,” they’re sort of saying, “No, no, you can’t have this.” Because it’s easier than than sort of going into that nuance, which can take time. I also think that people are going to their doctor. Say, say you want to talk about your orgasm or your libido. Okay? You go to your gynecologist. Of course, my gynecologist should know everything there is to know about the clitoris, about orgasm, about hormones, about that’s what they do. And the truth is, it’s not what they do. And it’s they were never taught that. And they were never taught about the clitoris. They were the word clitoris today in 2026 does not exist in the checklist for what an OBGYn has to learn in their training. The word doesn’t exist. What is an OBGYn for anyone that doesn’t know? An OBGYn is a doctor who specializes in obstetrics or delivering babies and gynecology. So your gynecologist has never been taught about the clitoris, about the vulva, about sexual health, about sexual pain, about libido, arousal, and orgasm. And so the ones who have taken it on their themselves to get extra training, they’re very few and far between. And so every day, women and men too are going to a doctor expecting answers on a topic that their doctor probably has never gotten training on. You know, I do want to focus today’s conversation on women’s health. I want to preface all of this by saying that I’m going to be as dumb as I am on this subject. If you say something about the vagina and I don’t know what it means, I’m not going to pretend to know. I’m going to ask you what it means. And I say that because I sometimes think with these conversations um the host often is too shy to admit their ignorance and I have lots of ignorance on this but I also have lots of curiosity and I want to fill those gaps and that’s going to require me to be very very dumb. And also my second reason why is because I have so many women in my life. Um, if you just look at my company, my entire executive team in my company are all women. And also, I’ve got my fianceé, my mom, my sister, and understanding the women in my life. Um, one element of understanding them is understanding their health. Women’s health isn’t something that I was ever taught in school. It’s not like a lesson I had. So, I also think this conversation is for men. Every man has very important women in their lives. So, my question to you is if if a woman has clicked on this conversation right now, what are they going to get from it? Let’s start with that first question. So I think it’s really important because as men we expect the women to know. Surely the woman knows about their menstrual cycle, about pregnancy, about postpartum, about menopause, about hormones. Surely my partner knows, you know, or the woman in my life, my mom, my sister, my my daughter, they know all of that so I don’t have to. And the truth is they don’t know. When the women in your life go to their doctor and they’re getting a pelvic exam, say they’re getting a papsmear, a doctor is looking at their their genitalia, putting a a speculum in, going inside the canal and looking around. We put a sheet over you like we are mechanics looking under the hood. So, we put a sheet to keep you comfortable, to keep you modest, but we we hide your genitalia from you, and we don’t teach as we go. So I became famous again because I I when I started my practice, I didn’t buy any fancy uh equipment. I bought two mirrors on Amazon and I give women a mirror and as I’m examining them, I say to them, “This is your labia majora. This is your labia minora. This is your clitoris. This is your urethra, the tube that you pee through, because women can’t see it. You’ve got skin. You’ve got bones. You’ve got muscles. You’ve got nerves. You’ve got, you know, all the organs that are on the inside. And women don’t have access to this language. Certainly men don’t have access to this language. And so it’s that basic ability to give women language. You can learn about your body parts. You can learn how hormones work in your body. And you can learn basic medicine for you that becomes important for how you advocate for what you want, what you care about, and who you bring into your medical life. You may have a physical therapist. You may have a mental health person. You may have a primary care, a gynecologist. You may go on Instagram and get great information from people on Instagram. And so that doctor that makes you feel like crap because they they tell you something that you don’t agree with, find a different one, right? You have to advocate for yourself. And I find we are starting to empower women to do that. Um, which is very challenging. What is the most popular question you get asked now that you’ve been on these podcasts and you know you’re out there and you’ve done millions and millions of views all over the place and on clips and so forth. What is the number one most popular question you get asked? I’m asked a lot about hormones. Like people want to know about hormones. People want to know about pain with sex. Yeah. And I think people want to know about libido. I think those are the three I would say most common things that we talk about. So let’s go in that order then. So let’s start with the subject of hormones. What is it about hormones that people are so desperate to understand. So hormones are fascinating because we forgot to teach doctors anything about hormones. Uh and what we have taught about them. They think it’s dangerous. They think they’re harmful. They think that, you know, it’s it’s almost like this thing that is natural in your body is somehow dangerous once you get over a certain age. And that is all politics and bad interpretation of science. I’ve got this graph here which um shows female testosterone levels by age. And again, as someone that um has started to understand more about female hormones, I was quite surprised because you think of testosterone as a male hormone. Yeah. So that’s the biggest misconception is that women don’t make testosterone. Testosterone is just a hormone. It’s not a male hormone, a female. It’s just a hormone. It’s also not a menopausal hormone. We think of menopause as estrogen starts to drop, right? So menopause is a castration event. If I cut your testicles off right now, you would have hot flashes, night sweats, osteoporosis, depression, low libido, erectile dysfunction, metabolic syndrome. Your weight would go up and you would be generally pretty unhappy. It’s a big deal when we castrate people. And yet we don’t do it for men regularly unless there’s a very significant medical reason to do so. And yet every woman over the age of 50, her estrogen goes to essentially zero. And that affects bone health. It affects the brain. It affects the heart. It affects sexual health. It affects UTI start to go up. And so it’s a whole body event that happens. Now testosterone is really interesting because it actually isn’t at menopause that you lose testosterone. It happens in your 30s. So if you look at this graph, right, you can see testosterone starts to precipitously drop in your 30s. So what do we see clinically? Sometimes nothing. But we have a lot of people who will start in their 30s, mid-30s, late 30s, start to say, “Ooh, my libido is not as high as it used to be. Huh, my orgasm takes a little bit longer. I don’t feel as aroused. My engorgment is not the same. My lubrication engorgment of the clitoris, it’s the same as an erection, right? So the clitoris and the penis are the same. They get hard with blood flow. And so this happens in your 30s and no one’s paying attention because if you look at the graphs that we are taught in med school, they look more like this. So the books all talk about estrogen and progesterone, they don’t talk about testosterone very often. And there’s also a lot of things we do to worsen this problem. When you play with hormones, there are consequences, sometimes good and sometimes bad, because we do so much to mess with our hormone levels. Again, birth control pills, the way that they work is changing hormone levels. um medications for acne, medications for hair loss that people are using can affect your testosterone levels. So birth control is wonderful, but there are side effects to birth controls just like there’s side effects to any medication. And so one of the side effects is it lowers testosterone. And so that can cause low libido pain with sex in a small subset of people who take it. So, if you’re someone who does have side effects, then it’s worth having conversations of different forms of birth control, which may not lower your testosterone as much. Does that does that make sense? It does make sense. And it’s um it’s interesting. My my partner’s talked about this before. Um my fianceé, she was on birth control for a long time, and she also had concurrently libido problems. Now, we don’t know whether it was the birth control, whether it was something else, but when she came off the birth control pills, her libido challenges also evaporated. So, can I explain? Cuz I think again, knowing the basics and the fundamentals give women and men access to the information so they can make choices with what they want to do with it. Okay. So, how do birth control pills work? Um, when you take a combined birth control pill, it has a fake amount of estrogen and a fake amount of progesterine in it so high that it tricks your body into not ovulating. So, when you have so much hormone around, your body says, “Oh, I don’t need to make my own because there’s plenty around.” And so, the ovaries shut down. So, your ovaries are no longer making their own hormones. Because, and this is happens to men, too, when you take high doses of testosterone, you become infertile because your testicles say, “Oh, I don’t need to produce sperm right now because there’s plenty of testosterone around.” And so birth control causes your ovaries to just stay quiet. They shut down for a bit, but your ovary does three things. It does estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone. It doesn’t add back testosterone. So, her experience possibly was because she wasn’t making her own testosterone. And once she went off that birth control, her ovaries woke back up and make estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone, which to you equaled more pleasure. Now, because we focus on the psychosocial, I’ll have a lot of people saying, “No, no, no. It’s all communication and and all of that is important, don’t get me wrong, but the biology matters, too. And we know there is a biological basis to sexual health for everybody. I was just looking at some data and it said that in some studies up to 27% of people on birth control report a decrease in their libido/ sex drive. Yeah. Which is shocking cuz you know it varies in these studies from 1 to seven people to one to that’s almost like one one in three people are experiencing it. How does one navigate that? You know, cuz birth control has tremendous um upsides. So, how do you navigate that? I think that everything that we do, there’s the risk of doing something and the risk of not doing something. No drug is going to be without possible side effects. And so, that’s where it becomes important to know what are the non-negotiables. Anti-depressants is a perfect example. We know that they can help people, right? a lot of people. But we know there are sexual side effects like low libido, delayed orgasm, and so it has to do with informed consent, which means I Stephen, if I’m going to give you a medicine, I want you to know that there is the common side effects, the less common side effects, and then the disastrous side effects. That’s why on the commercials they talk about all the disastrous side effects, but often they don’t even research the sexual side effects. So, for example, GLP1s. Okay, what’s a GLP-1? Yep. The GLP ones are the weight loss drugs that everybody’s talking about. Ozmpic, Mangaro, all the all the celebrities are on these injections that are making them lose tons of weight. We are starting to look at these drugs in women, but they’re not nobody’s looking at it for sexual health. Everyone’s looking at it for can you get pregnant, reproductive health. There is not a single published paper on sexual health side effects for women. So, we did a survey, it’s not published yet, but we presented it at a conference, at a medical conference. We uh surveyed a thousand women on online who have taken these medications and about 25% report sexual side effects from these medications. Again, that’s not to say the medicines are good or bad, right or wrong, but there are side effects. Now, of those 25%, about 50% of those people said it lowered their sexual function, whether it’s libido, arousal, and orgasm. And about 25% said it made it better. So carrying on this track about women’s um hormone levels through time and through age and through life phases, what else do I need to know or understand about how important testosterone is? So we know we have global consensus actually that testosterone helps for libido in post-menopausal women. Okay. Now there is also data in pmenopausal women as well and that is clear data. It helps with libido but it also helps with arousal. It helps with orgasm and satisfaction. It can also help with body image, which is like a cool a really cool thing. In my clinic, I use FDA approved testosterone for men, and I give it to them in doses appropriate, like onetenth the dose for a man. I give it to uh my female patients, and I see that over the 3 to 6 months of taking it, they get this um it clicks. Now, does that mean every woman on earth needs it? No. We’re not there yet. But if you want it and you want to try it and you’re curious about it, then you should have access to physicians who understand how this works and they know how to write the damn prescription. There’s five life stages on here. We have puberty, your fertile years, permenopause, menopause, and then postmenopause. When you think about a woman’s hormonal journey through these different life stages, what is the sort of advice you would give them to make sure they’re hormonally healthy across every life stage? What are like the basics? what are the tactics, strategies, medications um that they should be thinking about? And I say this because I’ve got women women in my life at every stage in this life phase at the moment. I’ve got, you know, I’ve got my nieces in the sort of puberty era. I’ve got my my fiance in the fertile years. I’ve got my mom and grandparents, etc. in the per and postmenopause years as well. Yeah. So, if you look at your nieces, for example, when they were babies compared to now, there are changes happening. their bodies are transforming because they’re getting a surge of hormones in their body and that’s estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone. They’re cycling, which means they’re getting periods. So, let’s talk about the menstrual cycle for a second. I think it’s helpful. So, when women have their period, they bleed for a few days, right? And that’s when their hormones, their estrogen and their progesterone is at its lowest. Okay? Okay. So, hormones are at their lowest and then the hormones start to increase. Your estrogen starts to go up. You don’t make progesterone yet. In the beginning, your estrogen starts to go up and it make there there’s a a follicle in your ovary which has an egg, right? It’s going to pop out an egg. Ovulation is when the egg pops out. So, you get this big surge of estrogen and then when the egg pops out of the ovary, right? That’s what’s going to make a baby if it gets fertilized. There is a shell of the egg, right? The egg has a shell which makes progesterone. So, the second half of the cycle, there’s progesterone around. Okay? First half of the cycle, no progesterone. M and so that second half of the cycle the shell has making progesterone and then when you don’t have fertilization the shell starts to break down and that natural breakdown is a drop in progesterone which causes the lining of the uterus to shed and you get a period again. And so it’s estrogen goes high in the beginning and then pops out an egg. Progesterone gets high in the second half. Then they both fall and you have a period. And so the hormones being low in the beginning estrogen is not zero. It’s about 50. Okay. So, when we talk about numbers, if you get your your hormones checked, if they’re at their low, it’s like 50. But when you ovulate, your estrogen may be 150, 200, 300. And then when you’re pregnant, your estrogen may be as high as 3,000 or higher, right? It’s very many thousands. And so, these hormones have actions in our bodies. And so, the reason it’s important is because when we give back hormone therapy, well, are we giving back 10,000 like pregnancy? No. we’re giving back to be like 50, 60, 70, the way that you are early in your cycle kind of a thing. Now, testosterone is not even on this graph that everybody gets taught of estrogen then progesterone, but we do know testosterone is pretty stable through the cycle, although we do believe it peaks during ovulation, which makes sense cuz you want to have a baby, right? So, evolution says, okay, you need to be horny around the time that you are going to ovulate and so your testosterone starts to go up. Now, it’s really important because you’re probably not having a conversation with your nieces about their menstrual cycles, but it’s a problem because no one’s talking about it if they’re painful, if they’re abnormal, if they’re um we don’t have a lot of conversations around what is a normal amount of bleeding. We have so many people who have problems, whether it’s PCOS, which is now called PMOS, which is a metabolic issue that cause you to have irregular periods. There’s endometriosis, where you have painful periods. There are so many medications we give to people that can alter their hormonal health and and sexual health for that matter. And then it all starts to get even more chaotic in pmenopause which is again age 35 to 45. If menopause we say is 45 to 55 right is normal menopausal age average age is 52 and we think pmenopause is when things start to change for people about 10 and it can be about 10 years that means 35 to 45. So how old are you? I don’t remember. 33 my partner is 33. All right. So 33. So this idea that I’m too young or it’s too early or I’m not there yet. The truth is things do start to change. So what changes for a woman? So it there are so many symptoms to hormonal fluctuations. So for some people it’s temperature changes. For some people it’s fatigue. For some people it’s remembering things. For some people it’s low libido. Some people get dry eyes, itchy ears, burning mouth, joint pain. Some people get irregular periods. Some people get pain with sex. Some people get UTI. I would love to talk about what why hormones are so important for the bladder and UTI prevention. And so there are so many symptoms and everyone says, “Oh, we’re blaming everything on hormones.” And the truth is we haven’t talked about hormones enough to actually start looking at this to figure out what is important and what is hormonally important. So when you start to lose progesterone when you arrive at permenopause, what are the symptoms you feel? Are they different symptoms to decline in estrogen? So, it’s hard to know for sure, but some people think that is the progesterone. So, your sleep starts to get a little crazy, anxiety starts to go up, and so some people will start with progesterone as a support for um you know, sort of pmenopausal hormone therapy. But estrogen can also help with many of those symptoms. So, it’s not a one-sizefits-all of whether we give people everybody gets progesterone or everybody gets estrogen. Sometimes people just get testosterone because remember that falls in your 30s. uh you know so there’s sometimes where we uh do all three and there’s sometimes where we do just one or two. Now it’s a a very evolving conversation because most of the book answers most of the guidelines really talk about menopause and how we treat people in this menopause when you’re flatlined. Remember it’s that castration event where everything’s zero and then we add back hormones. So now we’re starting to talk about perry menopause as a place to to start giving women hormones and that’s a a very important and evolving conversation that is happening. And so this conversation that’s sort of raging on about HRT, about safety, about what age you should take it, who should take it, what form you should take it in, what’s your perspective on that and what do women need to know about that? Yeah. So so it’s important because and what is HRT? Yeah, it’s a great question. So, hormone replacement therapy, which is a term that we used to use for hormones in menopause, um, it has a bunch of different names and everyone tries to change the marketing around it, but hormone therapy in general is this idea of giving back hormones when you have hot flashes, night sweats, osteoporosis, you know, sort of this over 50 crowd that has this declining estrogen and progesterone levels. And so, typically classic hormone therapy is estrogen and progesterone. Now again, taking just estrogen, estrogen grows things. It helps your bone health. It helps your hair, skin, and nails. It helps you not have hot flashes. It helps you sleep. It can also grow the lining of the uterus. And so if it gets thicker, thicker, thicker, there is worry over years that leads to endometrial or uterine cancer. So the endometrium is the lining of the uterus. So here I can Okay, so this is a this is a vagina. And then at the the vagina is like a sock. At the very end of the sock is a tiny hole. And that hole is the the pinpoint opening of the cervix. And that hole, if you go through that tiny tiny hole, it gets to the uterus. And the uterus is a cavity where we hold babies uh where the lining comes out. That’s what period blood is, is the lining of the uterus here, which we call the endometrial lining. So progesterone is very important for this lining here. If the the lining of the uterus gets too thick with just estrogen, that can lead to problems. But if you match it with progesterone, those problems go away. So So if you just gave someone estrogen, then the linings of the uterus would get so thick that that would cause a problem. But if you give it to both hormones together, it sort of balances. It balances them out. And so that’s why you’ll hear hormone therapy talked about estrogen and progesterone, just like the birth control pill your partner was on was an estrogen and a progesterine. There was a combination. Okay, got you. And also the history is kind of important here of why your mothers and grandmothers weren’t given access to this medication and the stigma behind it. In the late 90s, uh, a lot of people were on hormone replacement therapies and they were seeing benefits. They actually were all these observational uh, studies that showed, wow, the heart disease is less and like this isopause during menopause. And a billion dollars went into the NIH to study this in women and they they it was called the women’s health initiative. It was thousands and thousands of people aged 50 to 79. They gave a hormone pill, like a birth control pill almost, to all of these women and they followed them and they stopped the study early in the early 2000s. And they did a press conference. And at this press conference, they said, “We’re shutting down this the study early. Hormone therapy causes cardiovascular disease and breast cancer.” And overnight, a multi-billion dollar industry went to nothing. Everyone was told, “Throw your hormones in the garbage. This is dangerous.” What was crazy is those people who were prescribing hormone therapy were looking around saying, “I don’t understand. My patients aren’t dying of heart disease. They’re not getting extra breast cancers. Like, this doesn’t make any sense.” And when people actually looked at the study, it didn’t say any of those things. It was wild how misinterpreted this study was. In fact, the same uh authors of this study back in the early 2000s, published this year in 2025, actually, that below age 70, that type of hormone therapy, which we don’t really use anymore, has no increased risk of cardiovascular disease or stroke. And yet now you have a generation of doctors who weren’t taught how to do this. Only 1.7% of women have are getting prescriptions for hormone therapy who who should be offered prescriptions. So, it is a disaster. only 1.7% only 1.7%. Oh, really? Wow. And so hormone therapy is not something that I’m saying every woman must have, but every woman should have access to the toolbox. I like to think about hormone therapy is really four buckets that we talk about. Hormone therapy is whole body estrogen which helps with hot flashes, night sweats, uh uh bone loss, progesterone, whole body progesterone therapy, which protects the uterus and is this yin-yang, especially if you have a uterus, but it helps with sleep and it can help with anxiety reduction in many of our patients. Not everybody, but a lot of them. The third thing is testosterone, which we talked about, which can help with libido. Um, that’s what we have the most evidence for. And then the fourth thing is vaginal hormones. Now, vaginal hormones are micro doses of uh estrogen or what we call DHEA vaginally that supports the bladder and the vagina. So, it helps with pain with sex, dryness, urinary frequency, urinary urgency, leakage, and it prevents urinary tract infections massively. It is safe for your great-g grandandmother in the nursing home. It is safe for your uh wife who’s breastfeeding. So if you know anyone in your life who is a woman who’s having urinary frequency, urgency, leakage, urinary tract infections, pain with sex, dryness, there is a magical solution that is safe for everybody on earth um that is micro doing these hormones vaginally at any age at any age at all. In fact, even more important for people who are older because they are dying of urinary tract infection. It’s it’s one thing when a young person gets a urinary tract infection and they go to the urgent care and they get an antibiotic even they deserve prevention and this is prevents uh those problems in those people too. Again what is this? So vaginal hormones. So this is a really important topic. It’s called genital urinary syndrome of menopause or GSM. Say GSM loudly for your listeners. GSM. GSM. Genital urinary syndrome of menopause. Genital urinary syndrome of menopause. But really, it’s kind of a dumb name because it’s any hormonal changes in your body can affect the bladder and the genitals. So, UTI, what is a UTI and what’s what’s causing a UTI? Urinary tract infection. Yeah, very good. So, urinary tract infections are when there is bacteria in the bladder and it can be a lot of of bad bacteria that can grow and create inflammation. It causes bladder pain, pain with urination. It feels like razor blades. Um, but it can also go into your bloodstream and cause fevers and chills. It can cause kidney infections. It can cause something called eurospsis where you have to go to the intensive care unit and need antibiotics through an IV and it can kill you if you have an infection go through your whole body. And this gets worse and worse as you get older. Why is there a link between hormones and UTI? Yeah. Because what happens is the vagina is supposed to be acidic and healthy and hormones help keep it. It is the hormones, the estrogen and the testosterone that keep healthy bacteria growing in the vagina and suppress or lower the bad bacteria. So, there really is a vagina microbiome. There is. And there’s there’s no probiotic on earth that is proven to do what the vagina needs quite like hormones. Hormones make the tissue go from uh not acidic to quite acidic. And it is that acidic environment that protects it from infection. And so pmenopause and menopause or other situations happen and it changes that microbiome. So the good bacteria are are lower and the bad bacteria start to grow which can increase your risk of infections. And sex, right? Sex is a contact sport. So uh you’re bringing the outside environment into the inside environment. Uh ejaculate is also not acidic and that can change the microbiome as well. And so we know women who are sexually active also have an increased risk of urinary tract infections. So again, like a plant needing water, vaginal hormones help support the vagina and the bladder to maintain that acidic environment. And research has been clear since the 1990s that using vaginal hormones prevent UTI, urinary tract infections by more than half. So what have we got here in front of me? All right, so there’s a bunch of different ways you can give yourself vaginal hormones. The most common way is a cream. Now, this cream is uh $14 on Mark Cuban’s pharmacy, and it lasts about 2 and 1/2 months. Now, this cream that comes with an applicator, which you don’t ever have to use if you don’t want to, but what you can do is you want to use 1 g of this cream. So, this amount is 1 g of this cream. We’ll put it on this paper here to show you. 1 g of this cream rubbed into the vagina. So you take it, you can take it on your fingers and rub it into the walls like you, if you put sunscreen on your face, you don’t blob it on and walk out the door. You rub it in so it doesn’t look all white and filmy. So you put it in, you take it with your finger and you put it in the vagina and you rub it into the walls of the vagina and you can rub it on the outer this area as well at the opening. Let me try. Look, I don’t have a vagina, but Oh my gosh. So you take the this what is this cream called? It’s estradiol cream. Estradile. Take it on your finger. You rub it inside the walls of the vagina. And just rub it in like you would rub sunscreen on your face. And if you do that twice a week, you can prevent death from urinary tract infections. You can help with urinary frequency, urinary urgency, leakage. You make sex not painful and dry. It helps with arousal and orgasm. It’s literally better than Viagra. And this is over the counter in the UK. In the United States, you need a prescription. Um, but it’s as little as $14. If you use Mark Cuban’s online website, it should be covered by your insurance. Now, some women hate creams and so we have things that are not as messy as what you’re showing right there. And we have little tablet inserts. So, here is a it comes with an applicator. And so, what a woman does is put this in her vagina and press a button and this little tablet. So, instead of a cream, you could just put this little tablet in twice a week and that does the same thing as the cream. Oh, okay. Okay. So, it’s a little less messy. So, people tend to like the creams better. Now, if you really don’t want to do anything twice a week, this is a ring that goes in the vagina and it can stay in there for 3 months. Now, this it’s sort of like a tampon. You can kind of put it in the vagina. And the vagina does not feel it, by the way. The vagina is not very sensitive in terms of uh nerve endings. And so, when women put tampons in, they don’t feel them. When you put this ring in that you wouldn’t feel it either, and it would stay in for 3 months at a time. It’s quite quite quite a big ring. vagina can hold like a bowling ball of a baby can come out of a vagina. So, it can actually uh withstand quite a lot of volume. And there’s a chemical inside this ring that’s going to diffuse estradile that slowly diffuses estrogen for the ring. So, that’s nice for women who have dementia, who have very bad dexterity with their fingers, they’re in a nursing home, uh for someone who’s on the go and they can’t remember something twice a week. So, our ADHD patients like things like that. And so, there’s just different, it’s all the same stuff, it’s just in different formulations. Now the one different one this is something called DHEA. Now DHEA is the precursor hormone to estrogen and testosterone. And remember I said the vulva, the vagina, the bladder need testosterone too. It so this is a a chemical that converts into estrogen and testosterone. And so DHEA is a supplement you can buy, you know, sort of in the in the supplement aisle, but if you put it locally in the vagina, this is an FDA approved product. It’s called intraosa. And if you just put this in the vagina, uh uh it’s meant for every night, but you can do it twice a week. Um it it melts at bedtime when you wake up and it prevents UTI. It helps with pain with sex. And just to be clear again, so you think a lot of people should be taking these these things. I believe it’s preventative. So I think and we wrote guidelines uh by the American Neurologic Association uh why this is so important, how to do it. So many women have symptoms of urinary frequency, urgency, leakage, uh urinary tract infections, pain with sex, dryness, and this is a safe option for all of those women. Does that make sense? It does make sense. And one of the things that doctors sometimes tell their patients to take to help with the UTI situation is that okay, this is a disaster. So, women get urinary tract infections a lot. And so, what do we tell women? pee after sex, wipe from front to back. Like that’s not data driven, by the way. That’s all a folk folktale. Like that’s that’s folklore. There is some data that cranberry pills can help uh with preventing UTI, but the uh amount that you’d have to drink is uh very sugary and diabetes inducing and it wouldn’t taste that good. And so they do make pills, but it’s a small these things are small things that help. Drinking lots of water can help. But vaginal hormones, vaginal estrogen or vaginal DHEA, which we just showed a bunch of, prevent UTI by more than half. They don’t just prevent UTI, they help with urinary frequency, urgency, leakage, pain with sex. They help your arousal. They help your orgasm. And they’re safe for every age with every medical problem. If you’ve had cancer, blood clot, stroke, any problems at all, vaginal hormones are safe and could save your life. And so this is such an important topic. There should be a button just down below here. And if it says subscribed, you’re already subscribed. If it says subscriber, that means you’re not yet. And if you’re not subscribed, please could you do us a favor and hit that button? It helps the show more than you know. And according to the algorithm, you’re someone that watches our show, but you haven’t yet hit that button. Thank you so much. My my partner’s 33 years old now. She’s not yet in the permenopause stage. At what point does someone start taking HRT? Is it when they are in the menopause stage, which is defined as 12 consecutive months without your period? Is it when they’re post-menopausal? Is it in permenopause? Yeah, this is a very important question cuz it’s not a one-sizefits-all. At this age, start this medicine. It’s really when people start having symptoms. And so, I’ll give you an example. So, say your partner um gets pregnant, okay? You decide to have a baby. Her estrogen is going to go to 10,000 uh for 9 months. It’s going to be super super high. and the day she gives birth, it’s going to crash to zero. So, you go from super high hormones down to zero. And if she chooses to breastfeed or pump or or do any of that, they stay extremely low in the menopausal range for the entire time you’re breastfeeding. So, when you are breastfeeding or pumping or doing anything uh and your periods don’t come back, you’re basically menopausal. And what are the symptoms then? So just had a baby, your breastfeeding. She may have hot flashes. She may have night sweats. She may, you know, have urinary frequency, urgency, leakage. There’s all sorts of symptoms that come come with changes as well. Lido definitely changes. Pain with sex goes up. And so we call this the genital urinary syndrome of lactation. And so there’s all sorts of hormonal changes that can happen at that time. So we see a big need for vaginal hormones in this patient population. It’s safe for the breast milk. It’s safe for the baby. It doesn’t cause any problems, but it can really help with all of those uh symptoms. Now, say she is done having babies and now she’s 38, 39, 40 and she is doing fine and she has regular periods and she has no symptoms and no problems. She may not need anything at all. But what if she starts getting a lot of urinary tract infections or having dry, scratchy, painful sex or her libido just doesn’t feel it sort of feels like back when it did on birth control pills? that may be an indication where she may benefit from whether it’s testosterone or vaginal hormones or some kind of combination. What if she’s 43 and her sleep starts to get really bad and that may be an indication for progesterone? I have a patient who was uh uh having hot flashes and night sweats and brain fog and fatigue. I see her and she says, “I will not take hormone therapy. It’s not safe. My mother told me it causes cancer. At no point am I going to do this.” I said, “Okay.” We had a long conversation. I shared data and papers and we did a shared dis we just worked with each other and I wasn’t pushing anything on her but ultimately she started with vaginal hormones. Her orgasms come back. Her arousal gets back and she comes back to see me and says, “Ruben, what are you doing here? I’m feeling much better. Like this is you’ve given me my life again. I’m not uh peeing in the middle of the night, so I’m sleeping better. I don’t have as much dryness. Sex is no longer painful. I haven’t had a UTI in months. What else do you got?” Well, she was still suffering with hot flashes and night sweats. She had a a bone density scan which showed osteopenia. Uh, and she was worried about osteoporosis cuz her mother died of osteoporosis fractures. Well, if she did whole body estrogen, she would prevent her risk of a of a fracture. She would make her hot flashes and night sweats go away, which would have benefit on how she sleeps and ultimately probably benefit on her whole vascular system. And so, she started estrogen and because she had a uterus, she took progesterone at night. and she said, “Well, my libido is still a bit low.” We looked at her testosterone. We said, “Testosterone will likely help with your libido, but it’s going to take four to six months.” So, four to six months, she comes back to see me. Not only is her libido so much better, but she feels that she has the cognitive ability to enroll in law school. Like, this woman literally decides that she wants to change the trajectory of her career and enrolls in law school. And her brain is working in like ways she hasn’t seen it in so long. and she is competing against 22 year olds in law school. And when I tell you she finished at the top of her class, she finished at the top of her class, whereas she said, “I would have never even considered this opportunity uh if I hadn’t been doing all of these things.” So it and what age is she? She’s in now she’s in her 60s. And so that’s why I’m so loud about these things because what other organ in medicine do we let fail completely before we like do something about it? We don’t make you go blind completely before we give you eyeglasses. We don’t let your kidneys run out completely before we give you dialysis or medications to help your kidneys along. We don’t let you go into full liver failure before you get the transplant. Like this idea of your ovaries have to fail and you have to suffer for 12 months before someone intervenes is insanity. But for some women they do start HRT during the permenopausal phase and for some they start it during menopausal postmenopausal stage. Correct. And it’s all depending on how you’re feeling. It’s all depending on how you’re feeling and what you want, what your objectives are, okay? [clears throat] But it’s never too early to start necessarily. Not necessarily. Like, so again, we give birth control all the time to people in their reproductive years. Birth control is just highdosese fake hormone therapy, right? So we’re giving women hormone therapy as young as in their teens, right? To help with different things and birth control. But so so if you think of it as all of it is some form of hormone therapy, it just depends. Are we using the natural form of hormone therapy? Are we using the synthetic hormone hormone therapy? We have to get comfortable with hormones at all ages. And the thing that we see most commonly, Stephen, is sort of what we call NFLM, not feeling like myself. I love that statement because women are coming to the doctor every day saying, “Nm, I’m not feeling like myself.” And they’re getting dismissed. And the truth is there are often hormonal reasons why you may not be feeling like yourself. So for some people it might be muscularkeeletal pain. So we see plantar fasciitis and frozen shoulder and we think of as those having underlying hormonal causes as well. So there’s published data that less than 9% of Medicare patients are getting prescriptions for this. Uh more than 75% of people in large database uh collections are not getting prescriptions for this. And so women are not getting access to generic medications that could save their lives and also really improve quality of life. I don’t know about you, but dryness. People are not having sex anymore because of the pain, the dryness, the irritation when it’s fixable.

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See you there. If you’re going to take tips from anyone on how to stay focused and high energy, let it be from the greatest pound-for-pound fighter of all time, the guy they call Johnny Bones Jones. John is a coowner of our show sponsor Ketone IQ alongside myself. And when you hear why, it probably makes a lot of sense to you. When he’s training or fighting, he needs highquality, steady, laser-like focus without the crash. And ketones give him exactly that. And unlike caffeine, ketones don’t stimulate your brain. They fuel it. So, your brain actually loves ketones because it runs on them much more efficiently than anything else. And right now, Keton IQ is giving away oneofa-kind pair signed MMA gloves from Jon Jones himself and the upcoming gold medal wrestler he’s coaching called Gable Stevenson. They are very, very rare. And if you want your shot at winning them, go to ketone.com/stephven to enter to win. No purchase necessary. Terms and conditions apply, and you’ll also get 30% off your first subscription order, exclusive Ketone IQ merch, and of course, your shot at these signed gloves. You said um earlier that one of the questions people come to you about is pain during sex. Why are are women experiencing pain during sex? What is what what is going on there physiologically? Yeah, pain with sex is actually not rare at all. There are some published reports that up to 75% of women will say at some point in their life sex is painful. So a really dumb question here. Sex is not supposed to be painful. Sex is not supposed to be painful. If sex is painful, you need to figure out why it’s You deserve a diagnosis. You deserve an answer. You deserve to understand exactly why sex is painful. You could have a problem with the tissue. So a you could have a skin problem which as we know the tissue of the vulva is very hormonally sensitive. So that tissue could be impacted by hormones. It’s skin. So people can get eczema. They can get uh autoimmune skin condition. So you may have a skin condition. You may have problem with your muscles. So remember the vagina and the vulva are surrounded by these big pelvic floor muscles. And just like you can get tight muscles in your neck uh and in your back, you can get tight muscles in your pelvis. We also know there’s nerves that are involved in this area. So if you have a back problem and you feel it running down your leg, right, that’s called sciatica or sciatica pain. You can have a back problem that actually causes you to have pelvic pain. So we see people with penis pain or vulva pain uh because of problems in their spines. If you have scar tissue inside your body from endometriosis that’s pushing and scarring this tissue from the inside, you may have pain with sex. And so there are many different things that can cause pain with sex. But remember I said your OB/GYN got almost no training in this. So if I’m currently experiencing pain during sex as a woman, what advice would you give them? What should they do? Yeah. So I would uh really try to see someone who has an active interest in this. see a specialized gynecologist or a specialized urologist who has an interest in pelvic pain and you may need a couple of opinions. Just like if you go to the first plumber, you want to get a couple quotes on, well, who’s going to do the best job. It’s okay to see a few different people for this problem. And in terms of prevalence, up to 75% of women, as you say, will experience painful intercourse at some point in their lives. Between 10 and 20% of US women suffer from persistent chronic pain during sex. And during menopause, it climbs drastically um with estimates ranging to 20 to almost half of women having pain during sex. And that probably doesn’t even add to the people who stopped having sex because either they don’t have a partner or because they it’s too painful to even consider it. And I think it’s important to know that hormones play a fundamental role here. Not a like not it’s not the whole story, but it’s a huge part of it. in different seasons of life, if um if a woman wanted to have the best sex of her life, what are the fundamental things you’d aim at to make sure she could have the best sex of her life? Yeah. So, as a you know, this is Diary of a CEO. So, I love how you you love the health topics, but obviously financial literacy is really important to for you to help people because for some reason people stink about talking about money and talking about sex, and yet we all want to be really great at both, right? We all want a lot of money and we all want to have great sex. And yet people stink at talking about it. They they don’t know the fundamentals. They don’t know the basics. And so I actually use financial literacy sort of as a as a framework in how we talk about good sex. And so you’ve got your savings account and your c you know your your checking account. Those are the those are the basics. Everyone needs money in their checking and savings account, right? That’s what everybody needs. So that’s going to be your education, your nutrition, your exercise, your sleep, your your your communication, uh safety, like are you safe in your relationship? Like the basics, are you doing the basic things you need to have great sex? You know, communication is probably the most important thing. Can you talk about it? Can you use words? Um can you explore? Can you ask questions? So, so that’s really important for great sex. Then there’s the 401k, right? The 401k is something that we all want and should have access to, right? It’s important for compounding growth and long-term support of your financial life. Think about hormones. Think about going to a doctor who’s going to make sure that everything is optimized the way that it should be. Your your pelvic muscles are in good condition, your mental health is in good, you know, do you have a do you need a sex therapist? Do you uh want to bring toys into the bedroom and devices to have even more fun? That’s kind of like the really important not everybody has access to it. Not everyone’s going to do it, but I think it’s really really important for everyone to talk about. Then there’s like crypto. Okay, so crypto. That’s not to say don’t do crypto, but like don’t put all your money in crypto. Don’t do everything and don’t start with crypto. So that’s going to be when you’re watching, you’re scrolling Instagram and you see these ads for do this injection, do this, you know, cosmetic procedure, do this uh supplement that’s going to make sex great again. Uh, the truth is if it looks too good to be true on TV and in the ads, like it probably isn’t going to fix what if if other things are are are struggling. So, I think great sex is within everybody’s reach, but I think your great sex is different than other people’s great sex. So, let’s go through these slowly one at a time. I kind of broke it down into three categories, which is there’s biological and physical blockers to great sex, which are some of the things we’ve talked about, um, hormone crashes, etc. You mentioned the pelvic floor. How is an issue with your pelvic floor going to impact your sex? And what is the pelvic floor? Why would you have an issue with it? What do you see in patients? Yeah. So, everyone who has a pelvis has a pelvic floor. So, men have a pelvic floor, women have a pelvic floor. It just means the bones of your pelvis. So, your hips, right, and your pelvis bone, your butt bones, all of this is this big bony structure that holds all of your organs in place. And your genitals are attached uh to this pelvic floor. And the pelvic floor is surrounded by thick big muscles. So if we look at the inside of the pelvic floor, it’s these big thick muscles. And muscles are uh just like your biceps, right? Like muscles are something that contract and relax. And there can be problems with muscles, right? Just like if you work out too much and you’ve got a sore trap and you got to go get it massaged and and or you got to do physical therapy cuz your shoulder is hurting. A lot can go wrong with the pelvic floor. And so sex is a contact sport. So if you’re going to get erections, if you’re going to have an orgasm, if you’re going to allow for penetration to happen, you have to have healthy muscles because you’re asking your muscles to contract and relax in a sexual way. And so as blood is flowing through the area, blood is going to engorg the clitoris and it’s going to get bigger and erect. It’s going to engorg the penis. It’s going to get bigger and erect. These muscles are going to have to relax so that you can have penetration because if they’re too tight, tight muscles are painful. They’re sore. They’re they’re they burn. And so penetration can happen if you’re relaxed. But then orgasm is a series of muscle contractions, which equates to pleasure and release, which is all has to do with the nerves and the muscles. Does does that make sense? I’m trying to understand how the pelvic floor would would give me bad sex, and how I would know if the pelvic floor is the reason I’m currently having bad sex. Yeah. So if if sex hurts, so if the muscles are too tight, and you can’t have penetration, but you want it, that can be bad sex. If orgasm is painful, weak, or impossible, it could have to do with the muscles. It’s not always the muscles, but it could have to do with the muscles of the pelvic floor. If arousal, your ability to engorg lubricate are diminished or less, that could be due to pelvic floor because you’re not getting enough blood flow to the area. And so there’s multiple different ways. And if you’re not feeling your genitals, you watch something sexy on TV and then you feel it in your genitals or you see someone attractive walking down the street, you feel it in your genitals. There’s this brain genital connection and sometimes that you so you have to have perfect wiring and of your nerves, your hormones and your muscles. And so that could be affected by your pelvic floor. Now we do a lot to mess up our pelvic floor by the way. People do surgery, people have babies, uh people um muscle uh health changes for many reasons. And so when you have problems, there may be biological reasons to these problems. Should we be going to the gym and like doing pelvic floor exercises to improve our sex lives? You typically don’t do them at the gym. Um there are typically trained physical therapists who help you know what’s going on with your pelvic floor. So for some people it’s to strengthen it and to do like almost contractions. We call them Keele exercises, but for many people it’s just learn the coordination. And you can go and get an exam. You can go get an exam and work with a pelvic floor physical therapist. So, some women uh because we sometimes have them write in with questions talk about the fact that they they’re not having orgasms. Is that normal or is that not normal as it relates to um sexual contact? So, about 20% of women will say that they can’t have an orgasm. And the real question I’m I am fascinated by this data because not 20 20% of men do not have orgasm problems. And so again, if we go back to the financial uh literacy equation, we have a pay gap in this country, right? Women are not paid as much as men. Well, women are not orgasming as much as men. And so the data is very clear there. And I think the majority of problem is education. Women think that orgasm comes from penetration. Surely if the in-n-out penetration is happening, I should be able to have an orgasm. And the truth is that’s not how most women orgasm. Some can, but the reason why women don’t orgasm from penetration is cuz the clitoris is up here. So the clitoris is how women orgasm, right? Penetration is not how most women orgasm. Just like if you rub your thigh over and over again, you’re not going to have an orgasm. Now, you could keep rubbing your thigh for the whole duration of this podcast. You still won’t have an orgasm because it’s close to your penis, but it’s not actually your penis, which is where men have orgasms from. And so the clitoris, if you follow those labia minora, those inner wings, you get to the hood of the clitoris or a foreskin. We call it a prepuse. And that if you pull it back, you see what is the tip of the head of the clitoris, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The clitoris is this huge structure. My necklace is of course a gold clitoris. Um the this a huge structure that goes all the way down to your butt bones. It’s a penis. Under the microscope, it looks like a penis. It is made up of the same tissue as a penis. It works exactly the way a penis does. It’s just that we have a whole field of medicine devoted to the male penis. I’m a urologist and no one is even taught how to examine a clitoris or where it is. So, if the penis is going in here or a toy or a finger or a device that is not activating the the clitoris, which is a mostly internal structure, there’s something called a clitoral adion which people don’t know about as well, which I’ve heard you talk about before. Yeah. What is that and how many people suffer with that? Yeah. So, the clitoris has this hood to it. Okay. And about 23% of the time, the hood can get stuck to the head. So, for example, I’m wearing a sleeve here. So, you should be able to pull back the hood of the clitoris to see the whole head. It looks like a mushroom. You know how penises have like that almost like a mushroom rim rim around it? So, the clitoris should have that too, but about 23% of the time it gets stuck. So, you actually cannot see the full head of the clitoris. It’s called a clitoreral adhesion. And so you should be able to pull it back, but in about a quarter of the time you cannot. And we published data that if you remove these adhesions in an office-based very simple procedure, we saw improvements in orgasm, arousal, and satisfaction up to 60 to 70%. And so you have So one in five women, yeah, have a clitoreral adesion and when solved it improves their sexual satisfaction by up to 60%. Yes. But no one’s examined any woman in your life, no one has ever examined their clitoris ever. in any exam, in any doctor’s visit, and nobody’s asking women about their orgasm, about their satisfaction where like they come in with pain or they come in with libido issues, but no one is examining this part of the body. And so, it’s this question of is it cuz we haven’t or cuz we shouldn’t. It’s cuz we haven’t. We haven’t. We have never done this before. You pulled up the sex toys there. I know we were talking about orgasm. Yes. So again, when you were talking about orgasm and how women experience pleasure, it’s all buried inside the body. So if your penis was entirely inside your body, say you gained 500 lb, okay? And your p your belly was so big you couldn’t hold on to your penis to to do what it takes to have an or how would you orgasm? uh probably the vibrator industry would be a gajillion dollar industry instead of just a billion-dollar industry because vibration can help activate this blood flow. And so for women, vibration on the outside can be extremely helpful cuz remember the clitoris is kind of around this area. And so by putting vibrators on the outside now inside you can also have pleasure but not everyone experiences pleasure the same way. And so understanding devices and trying different things is really really important. [clears throat] Oh here we go. Okay. So this is vibrating now. So this one this kind of device is interesting because it is a wand that can help just like with trigger points. So if you have pain in in these muscles, this can go inside vibrate to help with engorgment but can also get rid of some of the tension in some of those muscles. As men what are we getting wrong in heterosexual relationships when we’re trying to arouse our partners? um both in the context of using sex toys but also without sex toys. What is it that we just don’t understand? I think that men are constantly asking about they want their penises bigger, harder, straighter, girthier, uh lasting longer. And none of that has anything to do with how women experience pleasure and and satisfaction in the bedroom. And so the question needs to be how do women experience pleasure? What is their anatomy like? How can we activate the clitoris, the arousal response? What are the brain things that we need to do to make women interested, right? What what gets women excited? Because it’s different than what gets men excited. And your part, every partner is different in terms of what gets them excited. And I would love to see more curiosity. I wish everyone was were as curious as you about what do we need to learn about women and how they behave and how they act and what they Yeah. So you need So I’d like to implement it tonight. Communication, right? It’s that question and also understanding that your partner never got told any of these things. And so this is where watching this podcast together could be really helpful to say, did you know that? Was it what do you like? Do you know like can we look at your clitoris together? Like do you know what these body parts are called? Where is it that you experience pleasure? Cuz some people find direct stimulation of their clitoris is too sensitive cuz we know the clitoris has like 10,000 nerve endings. So going directly over the clitoris can sometimes be too much. Some partners love it. Some partners want more stimulation on just the outside here. Some people need vibration. So that’s another big problem. Again, so she’s going to orgasm at some point if this is sufficiently stimulated. If there’s sort of a buildup and release of pleasure, right? That’s orgasm. And again, that is often not happening during penetration. And once she experiences that, what happens immediately after for her? Cuz I know from a man’s perspective, if I orgasm, there’s some kind of like decline in arousal. And I don’t want you to touch it again. That’s very similar in women. Okay. So, it’s the same except women can bounce back faster. Not all of them, but but but women can have multiple orgasms. So, she orgasms. It’s very very sensitive. She doesn’t want me to touch it for a while. Yeah. And then she she potentially could bounce back faster. She could potentially Some people do, some people don’t. But that’s the conversation of is this something that is pleasurable? Is this something to try again? Is multiple orgasms something that you want to have or try to have? When does penetration happen during the dance? Cuz often times men orgasm and then they’re done. They roll over, go to sleep, whatever it is. Is the orgasm happening after your orgasm, before your orgasm? Is it happening before and after your orgasm? Like are there Cuz that could be a nice way to sandwich it of like there is, you know, giving the the sensitive tissue some time to rest. Then your orgasm happens and then you potentially go for round two. So if the sensitive pleasurable part is on the outside here on the clitoris, then what do they get from penetrative sex? If the the sort of main event is here in the clitoris, many times nothing, many times connection, many times uh sort of this need for closeness and pleasure, many times there are women who have extra nerve endings sort of inside the vagina on the top of the vagina in the cervix. So there are women who love penetration, but many women get the main event from the clitoris. And so it’s part of the whole menu as opposed to penetration is the whole story. And I think every woman’s body is different. And so kind of making these broad statements of every partner likes this, but many women are asking for penetration mainly because they’re like, “Okay, that’s when you have your orgasm, it’s done, and then I can go to bed. I can read my book. I can do all these other things.” But the pleasure often comes from that clitoreral stimulation. Now, some women can orgasm from penetr theory. It’s a really interesting theory that maybe your listeners can prove with science or help me prove with science. So, you know how there’s men who premature ejaculate, like who ejaculate very quickly? Yeah. There are men who orgasm in a minute or less. That’s [clears throat] probably like 8% of men. Okay. So, if we think men and women’s bodies are very similar, could we argue that 8% of women will orgasm within a minute or less? Theoretically, it makes sense, right? I think those are the women who orgasm with penetration. They’re so sensitive. Their nerves are so sensitive that penetration is very pleasurable. and then they have this magical orgasm and they do it very quickly. So, it’s good in a it’s often seen as like great in a woman and not great in men. And so, I just have this theory that like there are women who have extra sensitive body parts. So, I mean, one of the things I’ve learned from everything you’ve said is just like how much porn has messed up our perception of sex. I mean WWF has messed up our perception of I don’t know like what people’s bodies like exercise fighting like like it’s all manufactured and it’s all manufactured because that’s the algorithm that has been working to get men excited and it doesn’t like again it’s that question of that curiosity of who’s watching porn? What do people want from porn? What are they getting from porn? cuz it’s not what women want typically and it has really messed up people’s perceptions of what is actually fun and pleasurable for the partner. So seeing that curiosity of like what does my partner actually want? You know, you can have great sex without penetration. And so the question is is what does great sex look like for you and your partner? When I look at a website, I’ve got some data here on a website like Pornhub, which is one of the leading porn websites. It says that roughly 65% of their traffic is men. Independent surveys tracking any regular pornography use find a similar gap. But note that women’s consumption is highly age dependent. Men between the age of 18 and 35, 75 to 9% of them report viewing porn regularly. Whereas women age 18 to 35, only 34% roughly report viewing porn regularly. And if we think about these systems as catering to demand, it means that porn websites are catering to predominantly male demand. And that explains why for most young men, we learn about sex from porn websites, right? And then we assume that’s the the woman looked like she was having fun. Um the man was doing this particular thing. And then we take that into our relationships. And I think this is where the misunderstanding begins. And the women think they’re broken because they’re not having magical orgasms from penetration. and they come to see me all the time and say, “I’m broke and you have to fix me.” I’m not orgasming during sex. They have wildly good orgasms with a vibrator, with a hand, with a a shower head, with whatever it is from on their clitoris, and that’s totally normal, right? And then you show them the body parts. You should This is right. The clitoris and the penis are the same thing. You activate a penis for a man to orgasm. You activate a clitoris for a woman to orgasm. And once you teach them that, it makes perfect sense to them. Like, they were normal the whole time. What do you think of pornography? I actually think pornography is great for relationships potentially. The right porn like look okay let’s look at something like Heated Rivalry. Have you heard of it? No. Okay. Heated Rivalry is an HBO show that came out this year that is about two gay male hockey players. Okay. It’s based on a romance novel book in can from Canada and HBO uh put it out there and it went viral in levels that the world has never seen before and it is about two young men uh who fall in love but there’s a very sexual relationship between them and heterosexual women have watched this 10 times over like they are addicted to this show. It’s all over social media. It’s this huge thing. It’s essentially porn for women, right? It is women who are watching these pornographic uh episodes and it’s really important. They love it. It’s supported. Everyone’s talking about it. So, I don’t think porn in of itself is bad. I think porn we, you know, watching people have sex, watching people fall in love, watching people in romance, people like that. It gets them excited. It gets them aroused. But I think too much if you are watching porn because and not interacting with humans. If you are watching porn all the time, if you need to, if you can only watch porn to have good sex, like then that may not be the best, you know, and healthiest thing to do. I guess the question I was asking is if you’re in a relationship and one partner is using a lot of porn, won’t that kill the sexual desire to be intimate with your partner? It depends. It depends on the relationship and it depends on what each person needs in order to feel supported and connected, right? I don’t think we can say blanketly it’s good or bad, right or wrong. I think if it is good or bad, right or wrong for that couple, then it’s a problem. Cuz there are couples who like to watch porn together. There are couples where oh the maybe someone has a much higher libido than the other person. So they said okay the high libido person can use porn and then once a week we’ll circle together and we’ll have a great experience together because it’s not everyone’s job to meet each other on the libido. The stat that I was looking at was a couple dozen studies including a major meta analysis show a consistent link between solo porn consumption and lower relationship and sexual satisfaction. The erosion of intimacy is usually driven by deception. Finding out a partner is hiding porn uses usually triggers intense feelings of betrayal, rejection, and insecurity. And heavy solo use can desensitize the brain’s reward system, leading to performance anxiety and erectile issues during real life partner sex. It can also create highly unrealistic expectations regarding body types, stamina, and performance, making real sex feel less stimulating. Again, it was that deception. It’s the hiding. if you’re that that ex of yours didn’t tell you what was really going on and so you felt disconnected from that person because you didn’t get that honest truth of what was going on but also the desensitization of it like it’s never going to you know I guess it depends on how you’re using pornography but it depends on how you use it so again that’s the truth yes it’s going to look like train your brain to get pleasure in a certain way and then when you’re with your partner one could argue that it’s going to be quite difficult for them to replicate that particular way that you’ve pleasured you’ve leared to pleasure yourself right and That’s a that’s a problem, right? If you’re only able to do something in one way, in one position with one watching one specific thing, that may not translate into great intimate sex with a partner. [clears throat] For the last couple years, I’ve been working on something that I realized every podcaster listening to this, but actually probably every creator listening to this might just need. Podcasting is difficult for many reasons. And one of them is that these hosting platforms don’t give you much information. And also because they’re so fragmented, you kind of have to go through every single platform, uploading it to YouTube, and then taking the same big old video file and uploading it to Spotify’s platform. It takes huge amounts of time. And that friction means most of us don’t do it. That is the problem we set out to solve. And so we built something called Flightcast, which you can find at flightcast.com. And today, Flightcast is also one of our show sponsors. And some of the world’s biggest podcasters are now using our platform to run their shows because it gives you an edge. It saves you time. It gives you analytics most people won’t typically get. It allows you to use AI to be more informed on your show and it has growth tools that other hosting platforms don’t have. So podcasters that are using Flightcast have this unfair advantage. So go to flightcast.com/doac. Now I’ve done almost 700 interviews with some of the most interesting people in the world. And one of the things you learn which is unexpected is that vulnerability is the doorway to connection. And after sitting here for 2 three hours with a guest, I feel a deep sense of connection to them. And as they leave, what I get them to do is to write a question in the diary of a CEO. We’ve taken all of the questions from the diary of a CEO. We have put the question here on this card with the name of the person that wrote it. So you can sit at home as I do with my fiance and my colleagues at work and other people in my life. Whenever we get a minute, we play the Duracio conversation cards. And it is incredible what happens. These are great if you’re in a romantic relationship and you want to connect your partner more. These are also great if you’re in a team and you want to bond your team together. And I have to say they’re also great for families that want to learn more about each other and that need a good excuse to spend some time in a digital world in the analog environment connecting human to human. It is remarkable what the right question at the right time can do. Go to the diary.com and you can get these conversation cards right now. And there’s different types of arousal, right? I was I heard from a sex expert I spoke to that men and women often have different types of arousal. Spontaneous and like reactive is it? Yep. Yep. So there again this idea of like I want to have sex, I’m ready to go versus I want to have sex because we’ve started having sex and we’ve started that process and now I can get into it. Sort of like exercise. Some people are like ready to go to the gym and exercise and other people like I don’t want to I never want to exercise but once they start getting going oh I know this is good for me I should do this this feels really good and that’s sex for a lot of people but again it’s also the question of what kind of sex are you having? If you have sex the same way every single time and it’s not that fun and it’s not that interesting to your partner, are they going to look forward to it? Are they going to are they going to want it? Are they going to seek it out? And is that really low libido at all or is that sort of a product of like we just aren’t talking about it improving? If you had the same podcast guest on every single week and it was the same conversation every single week, it’s not going to last you very long, right? You do different things. You try different things. Oh, what worked? What didn’t work? How could we do this better? Uh what does the algorithm want us to do now? No one’s doing that in their sex lives. Like like no one’s even talking about it. Like honey, what’s working? What are we like? What’s going on? I saw this thing. Like why why don’t we talk about it? Because we don’t talk about money either. We don’t talk about sex because we’re trying to be approp I don’t know why do you think I think that’s a little bit of it but I think the subjects are like deeply personal emasculating and so intrinsically linked as like self-esteem. It’s vulnerable. Yeah. It’s like super vulnerable. So and if someone I remember I had a um a partner turn around to me who interestingly was going through some of the issues that were undiagnosed. Turn around once upon a time and express that she didn’t like having sex. And I didn’t understand that at like a as a 23 22 year old guy. And so you kind of look yourself in the mirror and go, “Oh shit.” Like it’s super can be super super emasculating. It turned out that there was actually a physiological challenge she had had. But we’d been in a relationship for a long time and she wasn’t enjoying sex for because there was a physiological issue. She didn’t say anything to me. I didn’t know. And then the day she said something to me, my I didn’t know anything about sex. So, I just interpreted it as like, damn, I’m not good in I must not be good in the bedroom or something. Um, which is super like hurtful. And then that kind of breaks the relationship down. And it’s all predicated on this like highly emotional, highly self-esteem linked, poorly educated subject, which destroys relationships, destroys it. And that’s such an important story, right? Because if you had had access to the information, she thought she was protecting you by not telling you that information. You know what’s interesting? I went to one of my friends and one of my best friends and said, “Look, my partner just said this to me. Like, what does that mean?” And he went to me, he goes, “Mine, too.” I was like, “What?” I was like, “So, you’re not having sex with your partner?” He goes, “No, we and by the way, I’m talking about 30-year-olds.” He was like, “No, we haven’t had sex in 3 months.” And I was like, “What’s the reason?” And he said to me, “She said she just doesn’t like having sex.” And I’m like, “Oh, okay. So, that’s that’s the same in my relationship. My my former ex-girlfriend said she just doesn’t like having sex.” And I can’t tell you how ignorant and poor and insufficient the conclusions in such a situation we arrive at are. We’re like, well, maybe maybe there’s something wrong with me. Maybe it’s a sexuality challenge. Maybe it’s a genetic thing. Maybe they were just b they were born and didn’t want to have sex. Like, we don’t we just don’t know what it is. from doing this podcast and speaking to people like you, I [clears throat] like, oh my god, I just wish like 5 10 years ago when I had these conversations with my guy friendss and also with my the ex partner that I’m referencing, I just wish I knew that it wasn’t any of those things. Mhm. It was something that um could have been helped. Yeah. What’s so important is that you were able to learn and see and grow in this, right? a little bit of information gave you empathy for this partner where you took it on as a you problem. It became a you problem because it was both of you together, but it started with biology. And so if we actually taught people the biology or to think about biology or to like be able to talk about sex, to talk about sexual health, to talk about genitals, to make them not private parts, how much better would your sexual upbringing really have been? How much less hurt and shame and guilt would you have felt because it actually wasn’t you at all? Right. It’s the it’s the horrible conclusions you arrive at and the the conclusions you arrive at are often seen as both unchangeable and therefore in my situation back then the conclusion was well this relationship’s never going to work because the false conclusion we’ arrived at was not something we could we could change. Mhm. Whereas when I hear about all of these different things we talked about today, I go, “Oh my god, there’s so many other conclusions I could have arrived at or my friends could have arrived at that would have been fixable and therefore the relationship which was a perfectly great relationship with a person was therefore savable.” One of them is the thing we just talked about which is this idea that men and women have different types of arousal, spontaneous and responsive. And I was looking at some of the data on the variance which I think is very important for people to know and it says that men are highly spontaneous in their arousal which kind of means from my interpretation please correct me if I’m wrong that as a man I can literally be I can literally think about something and get aroused and it’s not to say that women can’t but the data suggests that men are more that way inclined. The data here says that the spontaneous rate in a man is about 70%. Whereas in women it’s about 10 to 15%. It says the responsive rate which I guess is like I get aroused once the ship starts moving once we start foreplay once contact starts is 10 to 15% in men and in women in this particular report is 40 to 50%. Mhm. So that would suggest to me that women are much more likely to be aroused once, you know, foreplay or contact or the sexual actions have taken place, I’m guessing. Mhm. And then the mixed style is 15 to 20% in men and 35% in women. Um, is that all accurate? It’s accurate. And I think it really comes to this idea of your path to having a better understanding of that prior relationship was actually education and communication. Yes. Right. If you had a better understanding of the biology, if she had a better understanding of the biology, if she were vulnerable enough to be real with you and honest with you upfront as opposed to kind of this bombshell that happened too late, um all of that pain, all of that hurt probably would have looked different, right? it would have looked like the world would have looked very different. Now, that’s what I’m fighting against because I think that to your point, I think men are suffering. They’re feeling disconnected from their partners. They’re feeling a difficulty of even finding a partner. And part of that is cuz they lack that curiosity of like what they’re like, what do they want? What do they need? What kind of communication helps me get to where I want to go with this person? And a lot of that is vulnerability and curiosity and interest. And I think that’s what women often are looking for in partners is they’re looking for someone who’s going to give a crap about them enough to care what they specifically need and want. Not what g what do women want and what is it like like what specifically about this person in front of me? What does she need to feel that erotic love, support, connection, lust? And for the man too, like what do you need to feel all of those things? Then what a good relationship is is when people work together to try to optimize that for everybody. So what are the questions that you would ask your patients to ask their partner to start to tease out some of these things? Couples will come up to me when I’m at a restaurant or something and they’ll come up together and they’ll always they’ll often say to me that the episode they watched together was about sex. So, I I literally have this image of this particular couple that came up to me when I was abroad and they said, “We were just listening on the plane about your sex um episode.” So, like they’re listening now. Like again, I think it’s that basic thing of like what does great sex mean for you? Okay. What what do you want? Like what what is a great time? What’s something fun? Like what is it about sex that you enjoy? When you ask people what do they get out of sex, it’s like 200 different reasons. Everyone wants something different and everyone doesn’t always know what they want. And then having that ability if you don’t know what you want is having that curiosity to explore together. So with that said 200 different opinions on what good sex is and this is kind of what I think you find in couples and when I’ve sat with my partner before and said like what do you what arouses you during sex? What do you like? The two things can often be different. Totally. And so is this not a a problem that one partner might say, I really want you to tie me up and da da da da da. And then the other partner might say, I really want you to not tie me up and be really soft and gentle. And there’s a bit of a dichotomy between these two sort of sex preferences, which means no one’s really ever getting what they want. Like, how do you navigate that? When you go to buy a house, you don’t always get to choose what house you get unless you, you know, you build it yourself. Like there are compromises in life and and there is no all good or all bad. You’re never going to find this is actually the problem with pornography is you figure out the exact porn in the exact situation or even worse with AI. Like you’re going to have a sex robot who’s going to be able to do exactly what you want in the way that you want to do it. And people are afraid about what that means for intimacy and relationships and great sex going forward. Because the truth is sex is messy. It’s awkward. It’s smelly. There’s fluids. There’s funny noises. there’s like it’s it’s vulnerable. It’s like really uncomfortable sometimes to like have these deep conversations. But isn’t that why life exists? Like isn’t that like the most fun part is when you can kind of have that with somebody else where they know all of you and they want to explore that with you? Now, if it’s not the right relationship, it’s not the right relationship, right? Like and and figuring out if that is an important part of your life and it’s a non-negotiable, then find the rooms where there are other people who do that those things too. I mean what you will find is that people have all sorts of agreements and relationship setups and as a sex doctor like the things I hear in a room like would you know are quite wild and you you wouldn’t even believe like people are doing well I think people have multiple like there are people who have open relationships so they have multiple partners or they have certain kinks right so there are things that they really enjoy that maybe somebody would look at that and be like oh that’s very strange but there are other consenting people who also are comfortable able and want to do those things. There are websites that deal with different erotica and different kinks and things like that. And there’s also this idea of fantasy. It’s also okay to have things that you think about but that you don’t actually want to partake in and that you use. On this point of fantasy, what if you have a you probably have experience where someone’s come to you and they have a fantasy but they don’t want to or a kink and they don’t want to tell their partner because they’re worried about the reaction. Yeah. This is where things like sex therapy become really helpful of how do you have a third party cuz again when your doctor’s telling you to do something or bringing something out it’s it’s so much less uh scary than if you’re doing it on your own. There are also different like apps and things like that where you can sort of dip a toe where you you you have um there’s one called Spicer I believe where you can sex each other in ways and they’ll push questions. If you both agree it’ll tell each other that you both agree with things. So there’s ways to dip a toe here and sort of be curious about it. But again, that’s where watching things together or asking the questions. This should happen not when you’re naked in the bedroom actively having sex. Like it’s okay to have conversations about sex when you’re not having sex, right? Like you plan these podcasts before you actually sit down to record. Afterwards, you talk with your team. Hey, this is what I liked about it. Here’s what I didn’t like. Let’s change this in the future. Let’s never have Dr. Rachel Rubin on again. Right? Like these are the conversations you’re going to have with your team. People don’t do that about sex very often, right? They don’t actually do after action. What went well? What didn’t go well? Do you ever want to try this? Like what would be fun here? Like there there is often a lack of curiosity. And dep you know you’re a sex doctor, right? But people come to you and sort of offload their sex lives to you. My job is so fun. I love my job. It’s so fun because people will talk to me about their most full like we do two hours and we talk about their lives in the context of their sexual health for 2 hours and people never have those types of conversations even with their partners and it is incredibly vulnerable. It’s incredibly important for people to see that and see oh that was actually really nice to talk about. I didn’t know this that and the other thing about my body. And what do you find that men and women typically are hiding from their partners when they do confide in you? I think they don’t tell their partners just about anything. Like they don’t there’s a lot they don’t tell their partners, right? Is there a difference between men and women? What are saying? That’s a great question. I would say that no one is talking about sex at all. Women are hiding their pain from their partners. Men are hiding their um insecurities and their frustrations. And there’s a lot of shame around erectile dysfunction and sexual problems in men. And so they a lot of people just either stop having sex or stop talking about it or sort of have a mediocre sex because they are not that great at talking about these things. And I imagine your I mean my first reaction would be like, “Oh, you should tell them.” But I imagine that doesn’t necessarily work. I think it’s a challenge like if you have had if you have been faking an orgasm for your entire relationship and women have been. Yeah. Many the statistics are quite clear. Like if you’re only having penetration and your partner orgasms every time and it’s a perfect orgasm every time I would say there’s a high percentage that that’s not real because the truth is is orgasm often takes a lot of arousal and like like again stopwatch every heterero if a penis enters a vagina and they orgasm about 5 and 1/2 minutes is on average how long men last right like that’s science it’s about 5 and 1/2 minutes now if you’re longer great job if it’s shorter it’s okay it’s all within the range of normal women, if penetration is happening, almost nobody orgasms in 5 1/2 minutes. It’s usually well over 13, 14, 15 minutes. And penetration is usually not how that happens. Cuz again, if you’re distracted while you’re trying to stimulate your penis, it’s going to take longer. Women need focus on the clitoris. So again, if your partner is orgasming every time within that five and a half minutes and it’s like clockwork, I would call [ __ ] on a high percentage of it. So, but but a partner doesn’t want to tell you, right? like they’re afraid to tell you cuz they’re they want to make you happy, right? It’s not that they’re having bad sex. They just know that that’s not what’s going to get them to orgasm and they want you to be happy and to feel supported. So, that presents a pretty good case that the woman should orgasm first. I think so because I think orgasm first will allow for pelvic floor release and relaxation, which will make penetration more pleasurable, enjoyable. I think women can have multiple orgasms. So, there’s a case to be made for before and after. Why are women having zero orgasms, men having one orgasm when women could be having three orgasms and men have one orgasm? So, I think we should be actively trying to change the orgasm gap um and focus on the pleasure. And I think making penetration the main event is where the challenge I think penetration can be part of the whole story, but doesn’t necessarily always need to be the main event. On the physical blockers, you talked about some of them like anxiety. One of them that I think isn’t talked about enough, especially in the modern world, is what they call like the dopamine drain where you’ve got mental burnout or chronic stress or we talked a little bit about depression. But I did notice that through my life when I’m very very overworked, shall I say, my libido is not the same. Yeah. And this is also the case for for women as well. Do you have a lot of women come to you or couples come to you where this is quite clearly the problem? This sort of like dopamine drain. It’s actually their stress and lifestyle. It could be the kids. It could be Oh, it’s a huge problem, right? It makes logical sense. Again, if we go back to the fundamentals of if you’re not sleeping, if you’re overworked, if you’re burnt out, if you have no white space for yourself, why are why are you going to have all this excitement for your partner and all of these things like if we’re scrolling all the time at bedtime or if we’re watching porn all the time or we’re watching reading romance novels all the time, but we’re not talking to the partner that we’re with or we’re not creating that time and space. I think there’s a big opportunity for people in our modern society which is overscheduled to schedule sex. I mean they do this quite well. So when you were dating, right, and you would ask your your your date, you know, let’s go out Saturday night. You were literally scheduling potential sex. You were like, I could get lucky. I’m going to plan for it all week. I’m going to get excited. I’m taking this person out. I’m like, it’s going to be really fun and I’m going to do whatever it takes to sort of cross that finish line. So, we were always scheduling sex and it was very erotic and fun when you’re in your dating life. And now you live with a person and you sort of they see you at your best, they see you at your worst, they see you at your crankiest and your most tired. And so, it’s really hard to get that level of excitement when you’re dealing with those, you know, sort of life circumstances. People will say that that, you know, there’s a spontaneity myth around sex that it should be spontaneous. And that’s kind of how we see it in films, like they grab you in the hallway and you start kissing and whatever else. It’s just not real. It’s just the same as WWF. Like, it’s not real. And so, that’s the truth is like you, if you see your partner every day and you see your partner, you’re high and you’re low and the crankiest and all of these things and you’re all working like crazy, where is the space for that? Like, that’s not how humans work. So, creating that’s why vacation sex is always fun for people or they find time, you know? So, again, if you’ve got kids and your kids are staying up later than you are and you don’t have a lock on your door and you’re worried about making noises and you don’t want to be too loud, like how are you going to have great sex in that situation? One of the I guess the challenges people might also bring up is that if you’re scheduling sex, it puts a lot of performance pressure on you. If I know tonight at 8:00 p.m. I have to have sex because that’s the time we scheduled this week. Then like, oh gosh, I’m going to be finishing my work at 5 6 7 I need to get home. I need to have I need to have sex as well. Gosh. So, this is where you schedule it around a time that you know is going to work for you. So, I do I tell people to do things like um quarterly dates. So, I get I listen I’m working in DC. Everyone is very highowered with very busy jobs. I say one Friday a quarter. You and your spouse can literally block your calendars. One a quarter cuz quarter. Okay, that means you might have sex every week. You might have your your your eight late night sex whenever you might have sex whenever you have sex, but once a quarter have a day where you just block it out and you have a spouse day or a partner day or whatever it looks like. And maybe do an act. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a sex day, but you actually take time of your little mini v. Maybe you want a walk, maybe you go on a hike, maybe take a bath, maybe get a massage. You kind of create space for you to actually say, “Oh, wait. We like each other. Oh, we like talking to each other. We don’t have to just talk about the kids all the time.” So, again, the more you invest in each other and in a joyful way, the better sex you’re going to have. What about self-esteem issues? You you mentioned that as well. Body image issues. How often do you see that being the blocker to great sex? It’s a huge problem. Again, I wish that uh the energy that my female patients put into wanting to be skinny uh is is enormous. Uh and I wish that energy was put into wanting to be strong. But it’s kind of funny because what people think about themselves versus what they think for their friends are very different. Your best friend, say they’re overweight, do they deserve great sex? Of course. Of course they do. Right? Your best friend deserves great orgasms, great sex, no matter what they look like, no matter what they weigh. Everybody deserves intimacy, pleasure, and connection with someone that they can have intimacy, pleasure, and connection with. But for some reason, when we think of ourselves, oh, I can’t be naked with this person. Oh, I can’t be happy until I lose this much weight. I don’t deserve an orgasm unless I am, you know, skinny. And that’s a huge problem. So, what can we do about it? I think it’s empowerment. It’s communication. It’s explaining to people. I think that all of the mindset stuff that you do and you talk about is so important cuz look, you changed your mind around your own situation with this ex of yours because you got education, right? You were able to see that it was more complicated than that. And I do think by educating people on bodies, on pleasure, on joy, on connection, on intimacy. I actually think it changes the narrative. I think people, we’re in a sex recession, okay? People are having less sex than ever. Uh people are not connecting. people are scrolling and they’re on their AI chat bots instead of like human connection. We’re getting worse at this, not better. I I I just think that like we have to reach humans and we have to be able to talk about it to change the narrative. What is the um the most important thing we haven’t talked about that we should have talked about as it relates to all the work that you do? I think the most important thing is that biology matters in women and we often spend so much time talking about psychosocial issues about emotions and all of that is true that is important to sexual health but we minimize biology when it comes to women and we have to let women advocate for themselves about the biology and we need to train doctors to care about the biology. I would love to find out from all the women in your life and the women on your team like what experience like I would love for you to ask them their experiences with medical providers cuz I don’t think we have that curiosity of like what are you experiencing that’s different. Yeah, I think I think that’s going to have to for me to have like a healthy relationship with my partner. I think that’s going to have to be uh practice or like part of our you know we check in on our relationship etc but we don’t really check in on the physiology biology. So super interesting. So I spend two hours with people and there are times when the partner comes to that talk and so they get to hear sort of what their partner is describing. They even this see the exam and they get sort of a tour of their own partner’s body parts. And so it is helpful sometimes to bring partners into those conversations, the biology conversations of like she doesn’t want to have sex with you not because you’re bad at sex. Look how painful it is right here at the opening of her velvet. It’s like a sunburn. I touch it with a Q-tip and she’s on fire. like what do you think your penis is doing and it gives that ability to say oh it’s not a me problem how do I support her best knowing that this is the issue so getting partners to understand the biology is extremely helpful or say you have a man who’s taking an anti-depressant uh or a hair loss medication that can cause sexual dysfunction as well um say you have a man who takes an anti-depressant it lowers his libido is it oh honey you’re not attracted to me anymore you must not love me or is it I actually understand the biology that your libido is lower because of this anti-depressant and two things can be true. So, so I think understanding your partner’s biology and your own biology is quite important. Yeah. I guess that’s the the crux of the conclusion really is that both education and communication are where it all begins, which is the fundamentals, right? Yeah. And I think you gosh, if I had better education on these subjects, God, at the start of my adult life, and also I had like figured out how to communicate with my partner, maybe even also with yourself. And like to be a bit honest with yourself about how you’re feeling, not to gaslight yourself, not to gaslight your partner. Just it just goes to show how better relationships would have been, not just with your romantic partner, but really with all the people in your lives. And this is easier said than done, like especially the communication part because these are very very sensitive subjects. And so we we’d rather just shut up about them and keep them as these sort of like secrets am whisper about with the closest people in our lives, maybe our best friend. Mhm. And I just think generally one of the things I’ve come to learn from doing this podcast as well is that, you [snorts] know, there was this quote I read, it said, “You can predict the long-term health of a relationship by whether each challenge heals to 101% or 99%. Does your conflict make you stronger?” And what it’s essentially saying is like conflict is guaranteed in life, but the thing that’s going to turn your conflict into a strengthened relationship or a weakened one is your how you deal with it. like and that’s all predicated on communication. And so if we can just teach people how to communicate, if we can become better communicators, which is both a function of speaking and listening and I guess curiosity, then all of these downstream challenges and misunderstandings would have a chance of being solved for. And I think about this so often. I often think, okay, how I’m communicating with my partner currently is really going to determine whether we have an argument in 2 years time or a year’s time or 6 months time. our strategy of communication. Does she feel safe expressing a problem? How do I receive the problem even when it feels like I’m being blamed? And vice versa. And then are we open-minded about solutions or do we come with a bias around this is the solution. This is what I think the correct answer will be. I’ve spent a lot of time, you know, I’m like 7 years into my relationship now almost. So I spent a lot of time thinking, okay, like how do people go how do they build a relationship like 50 years? And the crux of it seems to be conflict resolution/communication. That seems to be the crux of it. And actually with finance issues that we talk about with finance experts or with sex issues, the crux of it seems to be conflict resolution/communication. And I also know cuz I know lots of couples that we’re all living on a different spectrum here. Some couples are like they come home at 6 p.m. and all they want to do is talk about the most sensitive subjects. And then you’ve got this other group of couples who almost don’t talk about anything. They’re kind of like strangers that are like burying everything in the cupboard. And they think burying it in the cupboard means that it’s out of sight, out of mind, and it’s not impacting anything. But again, you come to learn that any problem buried rears its head in unexpected ways. And uh you know I thinking of one particular friend of mine who was in a relationship for 14 years had a baby they kind of stopped having sex didn’t really talk about it they become like parallel lines that are drifting apart and they get you know several years later go what happened? Mhm. What happened to our relationship? Well they never spoke about it. Mhm. turn. I think you understand this perfectly and for you to um see it in this you can help so many people because I think these are the fundamentals. How do we teach young people and old people that conflict resolution is important in intimacy and vulnerability are important in biology is important. Science is important and we can do this. I I just taught you a few things that I know today and you not only did you understand it, but you were curious about it to ask further questions and you can now um figure out how it works in your own relationship, in your own life, you’re even caring enough about thinking about your friends lives. And so if you’ve shown that this matters and this is important, I just think how many people are going to benefit by your vulnerability and your curiosity and saying, “Oh, I could do that, too.” Yeah. It’s crazy, isn’t it, that like if you love this person so much, yet you don’t often love them enough just to communicate about some of these like sensitive tricky subjects, which is like craziness when you articulate it like that. Like I’ve been in relationships, I just absolutely love this person, but no, I wouldn’t I wouldn’t raise X, Y, and Zed subject. It’s just it’s just too uncomfortable. And the few times I guess I will ask that you have been vulnerable, has it gone well or not well? Oh my gosh, it’s like the most important thing. And I just I always think, why didn’t I do this sooner? Mhm. Yeah. Okay. So, to be even more honest, I like didn’t have conversations with my partner about sex at all. Like, I just I assumed she liked it. I think she assumed I liked it. And it wasn’t until we get further into relationship, like you start going like, wait, I don’t think this is how this person wants to have sex or I don’t know. I actually have to give her the credit cuz she’s the one that started like pushing on the communication. I think sometimes as men we just,

you know, that old slightly toxic phrase, happy wife, happy life. I think sometimes as men, we just kind of assume that if no one’s saying anything, then everything’s great. But it takes two to tango. And I think expecting your partner to have all the words and to know everything is the wrong answer. That’s where again that third party whether people come to see me together as a medical person or a sex therapist or or a third party to help you have that conversation cuz I think we assume our partners know everything about their own bodies and can communicate about their own bodies and that’s just not true. Even showing that curiosity makes you quite evolved, right? And I think that that’s the energy that we need in 2026 is h breaking down those barriers because it will lead to stronger relationships. It will lead to stronger partnerships and it’s those hard moments that you grow the most from. You need the words though as you say. Yeah. When you say you need the words, what what what specifically do you mean by that? You need to know how to start the conversation, how to handle the conversation, how to receive a subject that might be a little bit offensive. It might hurt your ego a little bit. Is this what you mean by like have the words? It’s really hard to do that on your own because people don’t want to hurt other people’s feelings. And so just saying it as it is may not be the right approach either. That’s where again couples therapists are very good at holding space for those different conversations. And I think one of the other problems here, Stephen, is many times there’s no bad guy. Of course, when it’s obvious someone cheats on someone, someone breaks trust, yes, there’s a bad guy. But so often, you know, say someone has a higher libido than someone else, there’s no bad guy. That person has a high libido and that person has a low libido. There’s no evil bad guy, but there is still conflict. And so how do you deal with conflict when it’s not a good guy bad guy situation but and how do you love someone and evolve with them right like I think it’s not easy I think your point there though is actually where it starts often which is this point of empathy the minute you realize that there is no bad guy just as you said it I thought oh my gosh yeah yeah back when I had those intimacy challenges in that relationship it was a case of trying to figure out who the bad guy was I was like is it me is it a me problem is it a you That’s kind of like what the brain jumps to. But actually, now that had time passed and we figured out what it was, turns out that it was neither of us. It was really the whole time, not me against her or her against me. It was me and her against the problem. Mhm. And that reframe, I think, removes the like shame, the blame, and all that stuff that gets in the way and focuses you as a team on resolution and conflict resolution. Thank you. you, you know, you said that I will help people, but actually you’re the one that’s helping people. I’m just asking questions. And uh I disagree. I think it’s the simple, it’s the vulnerability of watching others. It’s the simple stuff that makes the biggest change. Why does this matter so much, Jack? I can see it in your face. Because so many people are hurting. Relationships are hurting. People’s health is hurting. people aren’t having as much pleasure and joy and quality of life that they could be having. Using what we already know to be true, simple things, communication, connection, education, basic medical care, these things can bring so much joy, health, great relationships, great living. And I see it every day in my clinical practice. And I want that. I want that for every person out there. And I want them to fight for it. And I want them to advocate for it. And I want doctor just to show up in a big way to help them. And I think we can do it. But I I I am so passionate about this because I see all the like I see how much it’s not being done. Dr. Rachel, we have a closing tradition where they’ll ask us leaves a question for the next not knowing who they’re leaving it for. The question left for you is what would be one thing you would like to do or improve in your life tomorrow?

I would like to get better about practicing what I preach because we always say the shoe makers uh kids don’t wear shoes. I am addicted and obsessed with what I do. I love my work so much, but I don’t necessarily uh spend as much time um lifting weights that I should or not scrolling on my phone and paying attention to my children that I should. I don’t spend as much time, you know, uh, uh, scheduling those quarterly spouse dates that I tell other people to do. And so, I think practicing what I preach is a huge opportunity for me. Well, that’s refreshing to hear cuz none of us are perfect in that regard. So, it’s good to know that just having all the information doesn’t necessarily mean um, it’s easy to execute upon. Easy to do, easy not to do. Amen. [laughter] Um, where do people go to find more from you? Do they go to your Instagram, your website, your YouTube channel? Where should you where should they go? Yeah, our website is really fabulous. We are very big into research, education, advocacy, and mentorship. So, racheler rubinmd.com that would lead you to sign up for our newsletter, which is really an incredible source of education. We are sending you the the latest and greatest in studies, research that you can be a part of, job opportunities, um, and advocacy for clinicians. We have courses and teaching you how to do this both free and uh ones that come with continuing medical education. I would say Instagram is um the most popular for me right now. Uh although we’re trying to get louder. If only I had your skills. I I would love to be louder on YouTube and other places. Uh we do have a clinical practice both in Washington DC and Los Angeles. And so if we can help in any way on the sexual health side, please reach out to us because sexual health is just health and your quality of life absolutely matters. I’ll link all of that below and I hope people sign up for your newsletter as well. That sounds really interesting. Thank you, Dr. Rachel Raven. Thank you so much for all of this. Um, I think it’s it’s so so telling that your conversations are often the most shared on the podcast and generally in podcasting because the subjects are so um so important to so many people’s lives and they can relate to feeling not themselves as you say, but there’s very few people out there that have the credibility, the experience with patients, but also the the ability to articulate it in a way that’s highly accessible like you have. So, I know that you, you know, we talked beforehand you don’t necessarily love doing this, but um it’s a very very important worthy course because there’s very few people that can speak to these subjects with it in the way that you can. So, please keep doing it. So, kind. Anybody who’s listening now, I highly recommend if there’s somebody in your life that might want to listen to this conversation. I think there’s a reason why Dr. Rachel’s conversations are always the most shared. Um, please do share it with them. Dr. Rachel, thank you so much for your time. Thank you.

The Biden administration just like really screwed up our immigration policy in a profoundly dangerous way. But even if you agree that immigration is a problem, it seems division is the most compelling narrative for politicians. I remember this particular quote about the black community where he said, “What do you have to lose? I’m a black man. I feel like I’ve got things to lose.” And my concern is when the western narrative is that it’s the brown people that are the reason that your life is hard or like Mexicans and murderers. If I heard that from my political leaders, it’s conceivable that I might be angry at my neighbor even though they’ve done nothing. But let me just say very often what the president is accused of saying, he didn’t say it or there was much greater context. You wouldn’t say but but I think well the president and I certainly have way different styles. But Donald Trump is much different as a human being than the media makes him out to be. But back in 2016, there was a private message between you and a roommate where you said Trump was either a cynical [ __ ] or America’s Hitler. How do you go from that position to vice president of the same person? What what is that journey? A crazy journey, man. But look, I thought Donald Trump would be a failed president. He was not. I thought that America’s institutions were fundamentally functioning. They were not. You always have to be able to acknowledge when you’re right and when you’re wrong. Like he’s so non-conventional in the way that he does everything that things that were previously unimaginable are actually on the table. this peace deal with Iran, for example, but there’s been lots of false deals. Well, this one’s real. So, and Israel. Trump called Netanyahu a very difficult guy. What does Netanyahu want? I don’t know. Well, what I would say is that we’re different countries with different interests. Do you trust them? I don’t really trust anybody. Having seen the president of United States operate. I feel quite confident that they are the junior partner. We’re the senior partner. We are the world’s superpower. I’m going to take a little bit of a high tone. Um, do you think aliens could be real? I do. Mr. Vice President, I had no idea about your earliest context. Mhm. And it has informed what I’ve then seen from you later as an adult, but can you take me back?

The emotions still right on the surface for you. Very much so. Mr. Vice President, I have your book here. Okay. And it says, “Of all the things that I hated about my childhood, nothing compared to the revolving door of father figures. I hated the disruption. And I hated how often these boyfriends would walk out of my life just as I began to like them.” I always think to understand the people that are sat in front of me, you have to take get a picture of their early context. Sure. And I had no idea about your earliest context. and it it hasn’t some respects informed what I’ve then seen from you later as an adult. But can you take me back to these context and explain that quote for me? Yeah. So, um I I was raised in very working-ass town, very working-ass family. You know, this is a photo of me when I was a little kid here and my family like a lot of other families in similar circumstances, we struggled. We struggled to adapt to middle class life. Yeah. This is my sister and my grandfather. It’s interesting. My my my grandfather had very low formal education. He graduated from high school. My grandmother actually left school when she was 13. Very religious people, particularly my grandmother, but you know, they they struggled pretty much economically for most of their lives. My grandfather died when I was 13. I think my grandmother died when I was 20. And you know, this is Yeah, this is right. This is probably not even a year before she died. And I was about to go to Iraq and she was very old and frail. And this is one of the last photos of the two of us. And this is really the woman who raised me because you raised the the revolving door of father figures. So mom, amazing person. She’s been clean and sober for now 11 years. But she was was in the throws of a pretty bad addiction problem for much of my childhood. And so this was kind of my savior. This was the person who stepped in and made sure I had a stable life to the extent that I did. And your grandmother, she got pregnant at 13, correct? And she had a miscarriage at that age. Yeah, that’s right. So, think about this. Eastern Kentucky, you’re talking about the hills of an extremely impoverished, very rural part of the United States of America. And so, you know, she is dating my grandfather, I think at the time, is 16. She’s 13. So, these are children. She gets pregnant. They move to Ohio for more opportunity because you you just couldn’t build a good life for yourself. There weren’t enough good jobs in that part of the world. And she had a miscarriage. So, like the thing that brought her out of her home, I think hastened them getting married. I don’t think they would have gotten married at 13 and 16 were it not for this unplanned pregnancy. You know, she was kind of in it then. So, they’re married. They have a very chaotic marriage, an abusive marriage in a lot of ways. But they have three kids, my mom, my uncle, my aunt. And the story of our families in some ways, some of us were able to kind of break the cycle and some of us weren’t. And part of what motivated me to write that book is trying to understand why is it why is it that life worked out for some of us and didn’t work out for others. So your biological father Yeah. He he put you up for adoption. So he did. So I was adopted by a man when I was 5 or 6 years old by the name of Robert Hamill. And he became and still technically if you look at my birth certificate he is still listed as my legal father. Now, he was in the picture from, call it, I was 7 until 10 or 11. And then he and mom got divorced. He still stuck around for a little bit after that, but by the time I was 12 years old, he was just gone. Never talked to him again. Never saw him again. And And am I right in thinking this is the the third man in your life at this point? Because your sister Lindsay comes from a different father. That’s right. So So her father, a very good guy. She’s five or six years older than me. And so he was the first of my mother’s husbands. And then my dad, my biological father was number two. And then my legal father was number three. And then, you know, things sort of got a little quicker from that point forward. So there was a there was a there was more turnover, let’s say, in the relationships at that point forward. There was also a guy called Matt thereafter at 13 years old that your mom had met. Yeah. Yeah. Good guy. Very close to him. He actually is very political and so he and I um reconnected a little bit over our shared interest in politics, but he was just a good hardworking guy. You know, he was only around for maybe a few years, probably less than that of my life, but he was a a significant and positive force. In your book, page 124, you you say living with mom and math, which is when you were 14 years old, was like a front row seat to the end of the world. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it was just chaotic, right? And I mean things that I thought of as normal that I later realized in, you know, talking to my wife or talking to friends that just a level of relationship instability, you know, fighting, people throwing stuff, if the fights get really bad, some person throws a plate at somebody else. Again, it sounds even talking about it now kind of crazy, but it was pretty normal back then. And, you know, sometimes it was worse and sometimes it was better, but there was a sense in which relationships were always just kind of chaotic. as an adult, you know, like you can almost imagine now that you’ve got so many kids yourself that I I can understand the feeling of craziness being normal and you kind of don’t realize until you see into someone else’s world or someone else hears about yours cuz I can relate to that in many ways. But as an adult, you must look back on that and now see the the way that that shaped you. Yeah. Well, it was very unhealthy. Um I certainly think again it was hard to sort of really feel a sense of stability. It was hard to really attach to people because you always assumed that they were going to be gone. And you know, years later, I was I was talking to I was actually at a a conference. I was giving a speech and this guy came up to me and he was a child psychologist. And you know, he said, you know, one of the things the literature shows is that people who come from traumatic or chaotic environments and end up doing pretty well, they always have one person, whether it was a teacher or a social worker, a grandparent, aunt or an uncle, they always have one person who sort of their anchor. And that seems to be the difference for a lot of these kids. And and again, I was lucky enough to have that. And I think about my life a lot of time, sitting here, I’m the vice president of the United States. What would my life have turned out to be if you’d had all that chaos, which was just a background part of my life? But you take out those stabilizing forces. God knows, man. God knows my grandmother. That’s right. Cuz through your story when I was reading about your childhood, she seemed like the safe place that you would retreat to over and over again. You know, I was obviously I think it’s very important for boys to have male role models, to have father figures that they look up to. She was in in an unconventional way like both a mother figure and a father figure. She was extraordinarily odd. And I mean that in the most loving way possible, but she was just incredibly tough. You know, I was, I don’t know, 12, 13. I was hanging out with one of the kids in the neighborhood who was kind of going down a bad path. He actually would later spend some time in jail, but you know, he was getting into drugs, starting to smoke weed, starting to do a little bit more than that. Again, 12, 13, so we were pretty young kids. My grandmother found out and she told me that if I kept on hanging out with this kid, she was going to run him over with her car. And then I was like kind of caught off guard by that. And she said, “Jie, I promise you and no one will ever find out about it.” And I was like, “Wo.” So like for the sake of this kid, I pretty much stopped hanging out with him. But that toughness, I think, was like a necessary part. It was like through sheer willpower that she kept me on the straight narrow. And uh again, I don’t know where I’d be without her. And over the next sort of couple of decades, your mother your mother’s addiction um seems to get worse and worse. It does. It does. From prescription drugs to heroin and everything in between. And it really sort of ravages not just her life, but the family’s life. That’s right. Nearly making your your grandparents bankrupt. Yes. And mom, by the way, has been clean and sober for 11 years, which is an amazing thing. But you know, when Papal died, he was what my grandmother was for me. I sort of realized that that’s what papa was for mom. He was her safe place. He was her anchor. And I think she already had some addiction problems, but it just really accelerated from there. And things kind of went off the rails. And you know, my my grandparents before my grandfather died were trying various ways to help her. And yeah, it got worse and worse, harder and harder drugs, had a few bad overdoses, and you know, by the grace of God, some miracle, you know, it’s it’s amazing how transformed she is. And it sort of drives home how for some people drugs are just they they take so much away from a human being. And she was certainly that that way. In the same way that they took so much away from her, sobriety has given her a whole lot back. If I asked your wife Yeah. how this season of your life, the most formative season of your life, has changed you. What are all the things you would say? It’s funny because I remember interviewing, I think it was Michael Jordan’s coach, and he said to me that people’s dark sides and their light sides are like fundamentally interconnected. Yes. And I can relate. Absolutely. The things things people might clap for or applaud about, you’re also fundamentally linked to the things that you struggle with or that make you sometimes not the most normal person. Yes, that makes total sense to me. I think on the dark side, what she would say is I have an extraordinary mistrust. I think of of people that I don’t know particularly well. I sort of assume the worst sometimes about circumstances and and and things outside of my control, but I maybe assume the best about the people themselves, right? So, there’s an inherent like sense that the world is going to fall apart. I think that’s a very true thing. I mean, even in like our marriages, it would be hard to imagine. I’m not saying, you know, all marriages are work, but it would be hard to imagine like a marriage that was more successful and more happy than ours. Our kids are doing great. They’re healthy. Like, my wife and I love each other very much, but we’re also just like, she really is my best friend. She’s the person that I talk to about everything. She’s my closest confidant. And yet, there are all kinds of times during our 12-year marriage where I’ve just had this thought like, there’s no way this is going to last. either because she’s taking the kids to the grocery store and I start thinking to myself, “Oh my god, a drunk driver is going to have a head-on collision.” I I I just there’s a sense of like instability that is very much built in. That’s that’s kind of the dark. I think the light is because I’ve seen a lot of people at their very best and their very worst. I sort of assume the best about the human beings themselves. So even though the circumstances are crazy and even though [  ] hits the fan sometimes completely outside of your control, I just I think what she would say is that I probably have a higher empathy quotient than any person that she knows. And I really try to understand what makes people tick. And so there’s there’s the light and the dark together, but there’s there’s a lot beyond that. I mean, look, man, I I was a lot of work when I look back at our early relationship and we’d have an argument like before we ever married and and I’d be like, “Okay, well fine. Let’s just break up.” And her response is like, “Well, that’s crazy. Why would we break up? Let’s just like have a rational conversation.” Like, “Honey, I don’t do rational conversations in this context. That is not something we do.” But again, so long as you’re, I think, self-aware about that, it’s a problem that you can solve. And certainly I I mean I think she would say com now compared to 14 years ago when we first started dating it’s just night and day but very early on it was a chaotic relationship itself clearly an avoidant attachment style which obviously makes sense 100%. Yeah I can relate and I didn’t have the vocabulary to describe that but that’s exactly what that was. Did you go did you have to go to like couples therapy? Because it it seems almost inconceivable that you could go through that early context, have be so avoidant, see be so sort of on on edge with commitment and see everything as kind of being ephemeral yet still have a healthy relationship like the one you you have with her? No, never went to coup’s therapy. I actually went to like therapy a couple of times and I just found it way too uncomfortable to talk to a stranger and so you know uncomfortable. But no, no. I mean, this is I guess this is kind of a we, you know, a weird kind of therapy, but no, it it it’s just the idea. The other thing I really didn’t like about it, and again, I don’t mean this to criticize therapy. I’m sure it helps a lot of people. So, so please don’t take this the wrong way. But there was something about it that felt almost too self-reerential and too like it almost encouraged at least me to blame others or to blame my past or to blame my mom or to blame it just I really didn’t like this feeling that I was sort of giving up agency over my own life. And so we’ve just gotten better at how we relate to each other. That’s primarily me. I mean, she grew up in a very stable situation. So, her parents are South Asian immigrants to the United States of America. But she was born and raised in San Diego, California, you know, just very normal middle class Southern California life. And I think because that she just had much healthier, let’s say, much healthier relationship practices than I did. That point about understanding the person on the other end and having empathy for the human being. Politics. Yeah. appears to be almost exact because I watch the I watch the election campaigns. I watch how like yourself and the president went against um people like Camala Harris. So you must with that logic think that Kamala Harris is actually like a really good person. Like you must understand Kamala. I I don’t I I don’t have I would say that I understand her. I would say that I just don’t have this animosity towards people on the other side. But you is that not like sort of implicit in the job itself that you have to point out their faults and Yeah, you do. Yeah. No, absolutely. But I think you can be sort of rational about it. You can be cerebral about it. Certainly there are things the other side does that annoy me. But you know like my my fundamental bias is that just most people are good people. And to the extent that they do something you disagree with it’s either because they screwed up on something or because they made a mistake or I just I’ve always been like this. I’ve always been more charitable about other human beings. And I I don’t know again maybe I pro maybe I do that too much. Maybe I’m too charitable, but I’d rather be too charitable than too cynical about human beings because that I mean, you talk about a screwed up perspective to take into politics. If you’re always cynical about other people’s motivations, man, you’re going to be in a very, very bad spot. I actually think the same about interviewing remarkably because I know cuz I I miss I meet so many people from so many different and one of the things that I’ve come to learn is just just try and meet everybody as I experience them versus like you know especially when I’m interviewing politicians it’s I just want to meet them as I experience them versus thinking about how they’ve been framed or whatever. And it’s actually made me much more empathetic because again obviously we all have preconceptions and then you meet someone and you go oh they are a family person. They care about X Y and Zed. They care about the same things. They just disagree about pathways. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. But politics seems to be like the the sort of game of politics to me seems to be like paint the other side to be malicious. Well, I I think the game of politics I mean fundamentally you’re making a pitch to people, right? It’s not it’s not about Kla Harris or Donald Trump or JD Vance or Tim Walls is about the American people, right? And fundamentally to make that sales pitch, you have to say what’s better about this product, what’s worse about the other product. So that that is just inherent. But again, I I think you can do that. You know what I always try to do is I try to talk about here are the policies that are really bad. Here are the reasons why I think this is screwed up. Here are the reasons why I think that she made mistakes. But I you know it is weird. It is fundamentally you are in a position where you’re trying to point out the faults in another people even if it’s just their conduct as opposed to their character. But even with that I again I I I do think that you see people in politics who fundamentally just really hate the people on the other side. Yeah. That’s that’s just not me. It’s never going to be me. Even when I’m being very pugilistic, like even when you you really have to drive home a point, like I, you know, not to get too much into the weeds of of partisan politics, but like something I think the Biden administration just like really screwed up in a profoundly dangerous way was the was our immigration policy. Right now, there are all kinds of reasons why that might have happened, but fundamentally that was a very, very, very bad screw up. But I don’t hate Kla Harris because I think she had a bad immigration policy. I just think it’s important to point out the flaws on on the immigration policy. I mean, I’m still going to go through your chart here, but on this point of immigration, this is another area where you get such division. Sure. And you get, you know, I remember watching the there was a couple of things I remember watching when I was, I think, probably back in Plymouth um in the countryside. One of them was like Trump, the president demonizing me Mexican people and brown people. I remember this particular quote which I’ve always struggled with a little bit where he said about the black community, what have you got to lose? And I remember thinking, I’m a black man. I feel like I’ve got things to lose. Um that kind of narrative about those individuals, that broadstrokes sort of demonization of them would make people’s lives harder and feels unnecessary. Even if you agree that immigration is a problem, the the sort of like skin color or religion or like Mexicans rapists and murderers is is might might galvanize in the near term, but in the long term is probably going to sow division and that’s probably net negative for society. Well, what one thing I’d say just about anything that I’ve ever heard the president say that then that’s then refracted through the lens of social media or you know non-social media is very often what he is accused of saying he didn’t say it or he said it in a totally different way or there was much greater context. So like I like I remember for example like I remember back in 2016 or 2015 whatever he said this sort of being like offended at the rapists and murderers line and then I went and looked at what he said and what he said which is actually true is that some of these countries are actually encouraging prisoners to come into the United States of America. Does that mean that every person comes in America as a rapist or a murderer or as a prisoner? No, it doesn’t. But he didn’t say that. Right. So, so again this goes back to the point about being charitable is I I do try to understand fundamentally like why did a person say that? What are they actually thinking? What are they trying to get across? And again, if you disagree with that’s fine. You wouldn’t. But but I think well the president and I certainly have way different styles. Absolutely. We have different styles. But I mean the the way that I talk about immigration, I’d say that’s one of the issues where we’ve always been like extremely closely aligned and that was obviously a major issue during the 2024 campaign. But the the way that I think about immigration is is fundamentally like as a country you are the people who live in your nation. Okay? So America’s 330 million souls, you know, I think fun again most of them whe whether they voted for me or not, they’re really good people and they want really good things for their families. They want really good things for themselves. And yeah, there are like some bad apples in every crew, 330 million people. There are definitely some bad people, but most people are fundamentally good and decent. However, you could let people into your country who could be fun, decent, normal human beings who just kind of mess with the the equation a little bit. It’s like if I have a bunch of people over to my house for dinner and I invite 10 people to come over for dinner and one of them brings a stranger, it’s probably going to be fun, right? But if like every single one of them bring three strangers, it’s going to totally change the character of the conversation that you’re going to have of the room that you’re going to have. A country is like that just on a much more massive scale. So I maybe come at it or I describe it a different way. But fundamentally I think that the president was very right about immigration in a way that was preient. And even if the blunt way that he described it offended some people, I think it was like a very important contribution to not just our country but to the world. I think it would be hard to find an American who didn’t think we needed um again, I’m not an American, so I guess I’m talking about where I’m from, but we needed borders and a policy around borders. Sure. Just in the same way that we have it around our house and every festival we enjoy in whatever whatever venue we go to. I think the um the thing I’ve always been concerned about when I see the sort of rising narrative across the world, not just in America, but now across the West, um the UK as well, is in trying to solve that problem, it seems that like division is the most compelling narrative for politicians. And then the like downstream consequence of division you see playing out on the streets. You see like especially in the UK at the moment you’re really seeing um certain communities be quite um demonized and victimized because of this broad political narrative which which is being used to get people into power. But then the downstream consequences of like real people on the streets that are brown or black or Muslims is like I don’t think the people at the top consider that. Well, I mean I is there another way of of making the point on immigration, legal immigration without demonizing people? Well, I I certainly when when I talk about it to the extent that I demonize anybody on the immigration conversation, I demonize the leadership that is immune to thinking about the consequences of this. And so ju just this this point about division, division is a very interesting word to me because I think division is very bad. Like I I like living in a in a community that’s cohesive, where people get along, where we love everybody regardless of what they look like or what they what thoughts they might have in their head. But like, let me give you like a slightly different perspective on the division thing. What if division is not the result of politicians demonizing certain groups? But what if division is the inevitable consequence of when the population changes too quickly, too fast in a given society? and what you see as as you know politicians exploiting division. I actually think that what they’re trying to do is articulate a feeling that people have and sometimes people might express that feeling in ways that we don’t like or maybe they’re offensive but but fundamentally like let’s just say you’re you workingass guy in Britain or you’re a working- class guy in the United States of America and you know somebody moves in your neighborhood. That’s right. I did I did. Yeah. So my my black we my family is obviously black. My mom’s Nigerian and I came from Botswan and I moved into a white neighborhood. Okay. And I mean how did people treat you? Uh we were called the nword a couple of times. Okay. Like like that’s terrible. I don’t like that. But I imagine that a lot of people in your community were welcoming unless they were for sure. But you know as a kid you only remember the ways you stand out. No of course. You know that can be like Yeah. And I understand that and I and I certainly think it’s important to like try to fight back against that stuff. Like we don’t want young kids who come into a community for that to be like their their memory. But like I also like our next door neighbor was black family and my my grandmother was not woke. She did not have progressive views about race or gender or pretty much anything else. But like she really loved I’ll never forget this. The the the black man who lived next door to us, she said he has a good heart and that was her highest compliment of anybody. He was a preacher. The family was like a very very good family, stable family. Mom, dad, few kids. And I was very close to to to the young son. And I I just I did not experience that. When people talk about division, I just did not see that family as substantially different from us. And I don’t think that family I’m sure they experienced racism, but I don’t think that was like a common fixture of their day living in that neighborhood. Now that’s where Mammald really did resist the changes is when we had a few people like the neighborhood went downhill very quickly and I talk about that a little bit in the book and you had a bunch of people move in with different habits and you had a woman who you know she said a bath but then she got drunk and passed out and so she ruined her entire house. And you know some at some level was it wrong for my grandmother to feel offended that her neighborhood had changed so quickly so fast that she never felt she didn’t feel comfortable there anymore or the people who came in had different values or she couldn’t hold a conversation with somebody in the same way. You know, I I got attacked by this on this during the campaign in 2024 when I said, you know, it’s actually okay if you’re an American, an English native speaker, it’s actually okay for you to want the person who moves in next to you to speak English, not because you’re a racist or a xenophobe, but because you want to be able to talk to the person you share a community with. And so what what I often see is that division gets magnified when statesmen don’t do the job of actually ensuring that integration is possible. And for integration to be possible, it has to be, I think, slowmoving. You have to be careful, right? A 100 people moving into a community is different from 10 people moving into a community. You have to make sure that everybody has economic opportunities, right? It’s one thing to welcome a newcomer when everybody has access to a good job, but you welcome a newcomer when a lot of people are feeling economically distressed. They’re going to react to it totally differently. So again, this is maybe me being charitable to people you think I shouldn’t be charitable to, but fundamentally like my job as an elected leader is to create the kind of environment where division happens less. It’s not to pretend that division doesn’t exist. people naturally, I think, feel reactive when things change too quickly, and that’s okay. No, I I understand the the sort of human instinct of of uh I guess of kind of like xenophobia in a way. Um and I think we all we all would want our neighbor to to be able to connect with our neighbor. Yeah. I think it’s like the the point of nuance is when they can’t speak my language, what do I then do about that? And I think, you know, maybe if my neighbor didn’t speak my language, we might not get along because we wouldn’t be able to connect and talk. But but I wouldn’t be angry at them. And I and my my concern is from a high level when the the sort of western narrative now is that it’s the brown people that are the reason that your life is hard is I if if I believed that, if I heard that from my political leaders, it’s conceivable that I might be angry at my neighbor even though they’ve done nothing. Just their presence alone might make me resent them a little bit. And then what happens when I resent them? because I’m being told that they’re the reason that I’m suffering. They’re the reason I don’t have a job. And then we get into this these like culture wars, which is a slippery slope. I’ve always I hear you. But what I would say is is I’m not mad, and I said this on the campaign trail all the time. I’m not mad at the illegal alien who broke our laws and came into the country. Probably some of them probably didn’t even know they were breaking our laws, who came into our country and wanted better opportunity for their families. What I am mad is the political system the I don’t know right it’s hard to say but I am mad at the political system that encourages people to break those rules and sews division and then gets mad at the native population for looking around and saying wait a second I didn’t sign up for this I didn’t agree to this so I just like you I don’t know what you describe that I would say there’s an instinct in every human being to want to share a community with people where you’ve got something in common with okay and and it’s Like everything, right? A little bit of spice is good. Too much spice changes the the dynamic a little bit. And I think most people, they’re okay with change, but change that happens too fast, too quickly. I think in an immigration context is very very bad for a country. And I think you guys have had that. We’ve had that. A lot of European countries have had that. I don’t even feel particularly angry um at any country because it’s a mistake that all of us made. But now that you see that, I mean, you rightly call it division. I just think that we have to say, “Wait a second, let’s try to do things a slightly different way.” I think algorithms also play a big role in that because of the the design. 100%. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So that’s but that’s probably another conversation. Um I do think though if I if my family were struggling or at all in danger at risk and there was a an area of land over there that offered them a better chance. I personally think for the sake of my family, if my family was struggling, I would try and move my family into that area. And I I assume you would do the same. I assume you would if your family I’ve got this wonderful photo of your kids and your wife. Well, if America went to catastrophe and Mexico was doing great, would you not try and get into Mexico even if it wasn’t um you didn’t have a visa? I know. I don’t think I would. I mean, I I can understand why some people have to like move, you need to eat, you need to provide for your family. But, you know, I I I think that this is another thing about about the immigration thing that is that is challenging is, you know, you want people to feel a certain rootedness and a certain devotion to their country. You know, one of the things that’s very unique about America compared to Europe is there’s this poll question that went around when I was a teenager, maybe I was in my early 20s, and it asked, “What percentage of young people in that society would die for their country if they had to?” Like, I’m not excited about the idea, but would actually do it. In the United States, it was something like 70%. And in all the other European, all the other Western countries, it was like 20 to 35%. And so, you know, you talk about like, okay, moving to Mexico because there’s economic opportunity in in a universe where Mexico is flourishing and America’s struggling. I get what you’re saying that you want people to move and migrate to the place where they can have a chance of feeding their family, but like I I love this place in a way that is totally independent of the economic opportunities it provides to my children. There’s something much deeper and there’s a connection to to to the places, to the memories, to the folkways. I I mean I I drive through Eastern Kentucky, man, and those beautiful rolling hills and even mountains, but they’re all mountains that are a light with life because they’re, you know, it’s not the Rockies. You go you go to you go to West Virginia, you should do this. It’s the most beautiful area, I think, in the world because you get the mountains and you get the rivers and you get that, but it’s also so green and rich with life. I feel an attachment to it that is very, very unique. But even if if your family were at risk, you wouldn’t move them into Mexico. Well, I mean, look, my my the story of my family, my grandparents, is they came from Eastern Kentucky and moved to southern Ohio, not exactly that far away. These are these are two very close areas, but they moved away even though they didn’t want to because of economic opportunity to provide for their families. So, I I certainly empathize with that. I mean, yeah, somebody showed up. I mean, like, I’m the vice president. I have a Secret Service detail. It’s hard to put myself in this perspective right now, but if like somebody showed up to my home in Cincinnati and pointed a gun at my head and said, “You have to leave or we’re going to kill your children.” I’d leave, right? But yeah, I I think most migration decisions are not actually that consequential and extreme. Makes sense. Yeah. This young man here, you ultimately go into the Marine Corps. I go into the Marine Corps. Yeah. So, this is this is me in I believe right after boot camp. So, 2003, maybe May. Yeah, I think 2003. This is me. This photo is taken in boot camp. And this is I’m pretty sure this is taken in Iraq. Actually, this is either in ‘ 05 or 06 at a point when, you know, the Iraq war was not going well. But why did you photo? What was the decision? You know, there was this sense, and in hindsight, I really resent this. I mean, I’m genuinely still angry at George W. bush over this. Even though, again, I I try to I try to be charitable and I have friends who worked for him, think he’s a great guy. Not saying he’s not, but when I was a senior in high school, I remember I’m at a restaurant. It’s called Skyline Chili in southwestern Ohio. And this guy comes out of Skyline Chile. He’s got like a World War II red veterans hat. We call them Red Hatters in the United States. So, he was a veteran of World War II. And I remember feeling like because you even that stage, this is probably 2003, 2002 maybe, remember thinking to myself, this generation is dying away. Like I I have this feeling, right? Because most most veterans you met, they were veterans of Vietnam, maybe of the first Iraq war. But I just went up and I was I shook his hand. I said, “Thank you, sir, for your service.” And you know, he was like genuinely touched. But I remember thinking, “This guy answered the call. Now we have to answer the call.” You know, September the 11th happened when I was a junior in high school and there was this patriotic sense of this is our World War II, right? And even some of the historical analogies that got used were the exact same. Saddam Hussein was Adolf Hitler. What if you had had an opportunity to stand up and say no to Adolf Hitler when he annexed the Satan land? Wouldn’t you have taken that chance? And it it’s like they they they were so good at tapping into that patriotic reservoir. And by the way, I think that reservoir is a very valuable thing. I think it’s important for statesmen to cultivate it, but only to tap into it when it’s really necessary and when it’s really justified. And what was so screwed up about Iraq is I mean I remember like I went to the Marine Corps recruiter and I wanted to be Marine because my older cousins were Marines and people said the Marines weren’t the toughest. Whether that’s true or not, that was certainly the impression that Marines had of themselves. I signed on the dotted line. I went in what’s called open contract. So sometimes you sign up and you have your job assigned like you already know what you’re going to do. I want I want an open contract. I said you can give me whatever job you want to. I just want to be a Marine. And I I did that because I loved my country and I wanted to contribute in the same way that that guy who wore a red hat, was still wearing his red hat, was still proud of it, knew that he contributed. And uh you know that led me of course to go to Iraq from ’05 to ’06 and made a lot of friends gained a ton of appreciation for the Marine Corps as an institution and the people but you know became a little jaded about our political leadership. Why are you you said you you kind of annoyed at Bush? Because that patriotic reservoir that exists in any country I think it’s maybe most powerful in the United States of America because again we have this 70 70 plus percent of young people say they would die for their country. It’s very unique among advanced economies. And I’m sure a lot of people in Europe look at that and say, “Oh, those jingoistic idiots, they’re, you know, they’re they’re wrong or there’s something bad about that.” But I actually think you ha to have a real nation, you have to have the willingness that if, god forbid, something happens, you’re willing to put on your uniform and go and do what needs to be done. But again, in order for that to work, in order for that feeling to be justified, leaders have to not take advantage of it. You can’t say Saddam Hussein is Adolf Hitler. He wasn’t. You You got to be careful with it. And I don’t think that George W. Bush was careful with it. I I think that he called the nation to do something that ultimately wasn’t actually in our best interest as a nation, but more fundamentally, he drew on that wellspring of patriotism to direct us to do something that we shouldn’t have been doing in the first place because he had bad information or because of negligence or incompetence. I don’t I mean, I you know, I know enough people who know him. I think he had bad information but you know fundamentally like post 911 was really important. We had to go and deal with the terrorist networks that had existed all across the world that had been allowed to fester over the previous generation of of American negligence. But fundamentally the war on terrorism was not an existential thing to the United States of America in the same in the way that like World War II was an existential thing for Britain. Right. And I think we just we have to be careful about how we describe what we’re asking our young people to do because if you ask them to do something and they feel like you were being honest with them, I think that sort of pays dividends into that patriotic reservoir. If you ask somebody to do something and it turns out you were lying to them, whether it was intentional or not, I think you draw down that patriotic reservoir. I don’t know what the By the way, I mentioned that that poll and you know, I don’t have the information. I don’t know the data in front of me, but whatever the number of Americans, young Americans who say they would die for their country, I would bet my I’ I’d bet a lot of money that that number in 2026 is much lower than it was in 2003. So, it’s really like a sort of a a contract with the nation that’s built on trust, social contract built on trust. You violate that trust, it has very, very bad consequences. The the US is, I guess, in a war now. Well, not anymore. famous last words. Fair. We are in a ceasefire that I feel very good about. Okay. That we announced I know this will air later, but that we announced the ceasefire. We announced the the peace agreement with the Iranians yesterday. Yes. I’ve learned so much about war because of this war. Um in part because I’m an interviewer at the time of war. And so I’ve been having lots of conversations with lots of people about the nature of war. And I’ve learned so much. Frankly, I didn’t know anything about Vietnam and really the psychology of war. Yeah. And how like when you start a war, Robert P said this to me. He said the thing people underestimate about war is when the bombs start dropping, politics changes both where the bombs are dropping and at home. Sure. And I I to some degree think that with the Iran war now, that’s like exactly what happened. From my assessment of it, which is it looked like it was going to be quite straightforward. Drop the bombs, take out the leader. Um the people rise up, which is what um the president had said. He had encouraged the people to rise up when those bombs dropped and Kmeni was taken out. But then what then happened what it’s again I don’t know what I’m talking about here so please correct me is it looked like the country kind of fractured into all of these sort of little pockets of militia and military. Um I remember I think it was Hexath saying it just takes some time for the carrier pigeon to get out to where the soldiers are the outpost and it’s how the fracturing had happened. Yeah. And then I heard the president and I think yourself multiple times say like we don’t really know who we’re negotiating with or words to that effect because we’ve taken out the first and second row of leadership. And then I I thought we gosh we’re in the same situation again where the bomb started dropping unintended consequences where there’s now not one central leadership to negotiate with but also politics at home has shifted the I mean the approval ratings of I got this graph of the approval ratings had started to plummet at home and politics is changing on the ground there as well. Is this another forever war? Well the answer is no. Um, and you know, this is always when I I talked about this this conflict, I always said Donald Trump learned the lessons. It’s actually that’s almost unfair to him. He didn’t learn the lessons of the Iraq war because back during the Iraq war, he was saying this was stupid. We should get out of Iraq. He was saying that back then. And I think that while there were certainly some objectives that we had in this conflict, I just never had any doubt. Now, obviously I’m an insider. I saw the president’s deliberations and thought on this, but I I never had any worry that this would become a multi-year expedition with no end in sight because I knew that we had leadership that was trying to define the objective very narrowly, accomplish the objectives, and then see where we are. Mhm. And so, you know, if you go back, you talk about this this street uprising. Certainly, there was some thought that it would be possible that the Iranian street would rise up in the face of this thing and that you would see, you know, a new government that was much more pro-American, much more pro- Western. What what happened though is what we knew we could do is degrade their military. That was the that was actually the primary objective. Yes, the president talked about the Iranians rising up, but the primary objective was always to degrade their conventional power so that we could be in a better position visa v Iran so that whoever was calling the shots, they didn’t have a loaded gun to our head anymore. Okay? And that’s what we knew we could accomplish. And then there was always the question about, okay, now that we’ve accomplished that, where do we go from here? And you know, one one of the things that I I feel just just quite good about this moment that we’re in is the president basically bought us an option. He said, “We can weaken their military, destroy their conventional military, we can change their leadership, and then we can actually present a pathway to the Iranian leadership. Where do we go from here?” Like, you said something very interesting that was true 2 months ago that’s not true now. 2 months ago, I would have said, “I have no idea who we’re who we’re negotiating with.” Absolutely. Now, I feel very confident that we have an understanding of who we’re negotiating with, what it is that they care about. Yes, there are fractures in their system. Well, there there so so so the Iranian system, this is oversimplifying it a lot, but it has kind of three poles. There’s the political poll, the people who are most responsive to the leadership. That’s the foreign minister, the president, the speaker of the parliament. Okay? There’s a clerical poll, meaning the clerics who actually hold ultimate authority in the Iranian system via the supreme leader, the clerics, the the the religious leaders. And then you have the military, particularly the IRGC. Okay, all three of these polls interact with each other in in weird ways. And one of the things we definitely two months ago, we were like, “Wait a second, who has the upper hand? What does this group want versus this group versus that group?” But what what I feel pretty confident about now, I mean, this this we’re taping this interview, I guess, June 15th, right? What I feel quite confident about right now is that we know who we’re dealing with and the fractures really aren’t the the you know the system is kind of coalesed and what they’re telling us which is interesting now is it the street rising up no but what they’re telling us is you know what you know obviously they’re not like endorsing anything that we did there’s a lot of mistrust a lot of animosity but you know fundamentally we’ve done one thing visa v the United States for 47 years and we shouldn’t do that thing anymore. We want to change. And if you, the Americans, are willing to actually negotiate with us to have a conversation. Yeah, we’re willing to make the long-term commitment never to develop nuclear weapons, but we want a totally different economic arrangement than what we have with the West right now. So, that’s where we’re at right now is actually figuring out the details of what that would look like. But where where we stand right now, I actually feel pretty good about it. I feel good that we actually could have a better relationship with that country. I feel good that they’ll never have a nuclear weapon. So that’d be like a real loaded gun they would have to the West. But I also think that there is a general consensus that their in in their system that their relationship would be different than than um than the past. The other thing just this is very important the underappreciated element like this is like if I was ever going to write a book about Donald Trump’s foreign policy and by the way he hates people who write books not like books like that but insider books where you take trusted information and put it into a book doesn’t like that but what I would what I would say is he’s so non-conventional in the way that he does everything but certainly in the way that he does foreign policy that things that were previously unimaginable are actually on the table. So when Donald Trump says to the Iranians, we want you to be a successful country if you give us what we need on nuclear. We’ll take the sanctions off your country and allow you to prosper. That would have been unthinkable 10 years ago in any Democrat or Republican administration. But it’s thinkable because Donald Trump is just like, “No, the the way things worked in the past are dumb. We’re going to do something new.” And that’s that’s what he’s putting on the table. We’ll see if they meet us, but right now I feel pretty good about it. The other term I’d never heard before is straight of Hummus. Yes, I’ve heard so much about the bloody straight of Hamoose. Um, did you have any idea that the Iranians would cut off the straight of Hormuz? You you did know that going into it. So, it was a major as soon as you see these media reports like the the Trump team was caught off guard. What would happen in the straight of moose was a main fixture of the conversation that we were having about whether to do this, how to do this. So, it was certainly a variable. Now, now you can never predict with 100% certainty what people are going to do. But the basic bias that we had going into it is that they would try to cut off the straight. They would try to jack up energy prices. They thought, and I think this is true, they thought that they could cut off the straits for us, but actually keep the straits open for themselves. That ended up not being true when we imposed the blockade. But fundamentally, we we knew some version of what would happen. But we also went into it saying if they do this fundamentally it’s a short-term thing. So like Brent crude is sort of the main crude oil index, right? I think the highest it got was $126 per barrel. Right now sitting here it’s around $82 a barrel. It’s fallen off a cliff because there’s a broad recognition that yeah, it was a short-term shock, but not a short-term shock that’s going to permanently alter the world energy economy. It’s quite a powerful weapon they have in their arsenal just to take shutter the world’s economy and piss off your people at home at the gas pump. It’s quite like it’s quite a well uh geography really matters in warfare it turns out and yes they have great proximity to the straight of war moves but but again if you just go back two weeks ago one of the things that’s interesting really under reportported um but I think you know your listeners will obviously be interested in is if you look at the amount of oil that we were getting out of the straight of Hormuz we I mean the United States the Gulf Coast coalition broadly speaking the Arabs in the Gulf Right? You look at it what it was, call it April 1st, it was like close to zero. You go to May 30th, early June, it was many, many million barrels of of oil a day. Now, not enough to eliminate the shock to be clear, but we were seeing significant increases in oil traffic. And again, I think that’s one of the reasons why we’re having a good negotiation with the Iranians is they recognized, yes, they have this leverage point, but maybe not forever. And it’s one of those cards you can play, but you can’t necessarily play it week after week after week. It degrades in power. So, I take your point. Yeah, they have this geographical thing going on. But I think that geographical leverage point was weakening over time and it’s it’s why we are where we are, I think, with a very good deal. Knock on wood, we have to see completion because if you’re them, you go, “Well, all I’ve got to do is wait two years cuz the president is going to be, you know, removed from from office in two years time. is going to be at the end of his term. So, if they could just wait it out for 2 years, they can hope that a new political leader that comes in um might be more charitable with them. Yeah. But if if if Donald Trump has 2 and 1/2 years left in office, I think the Iranians recognize they did not have 2 and 1/2 years to weigh things out. One is as we got more and more oil out of the straight, their leverage point decreased. But in some ways, more importantly, like look, you look at Persian culture, you look at the history of Iran, this is one of the proudest and oldest civilizations anywhere in the world. They don’t want to be like a Libya style rump state. They want to have a much brighter future. Like I think that that’s actually true. Now, there’s a question about how to get there and obviously there’s a lot of animosity between the two sides, but I do think something has fundamentally changed in the way that regime sees the world. The um the deal that you have on the table. Yes. Now, okay. Excuse me if I’m skeptical, but I said to you before we start started recording, I watch everything. Yes. So, I’ve watched every if if you do an interview, Hexath does one. If the president does one, I see it. I see the whole thing. I don’t know why, but that I I’m very very interested in US politics because it does impact the whole world. Sure. And as I’ve watched these interviews, there’s been lots of false deals. You flew out there to Pakistan and you flew right back. The deal wasn’t done. Um I think I saw a report the other day that said uh the president has said roughly 30 times that there’s a deal done or that there’s a deal on the table. Usually on a Sunday, then it’s not. Then we go back into this negotiation thing. So I’m like I don’t have any trust anymore for for a deal getting done. This one’s real. So Okay, good. Okay. So people can always change their minds, but this one is real for sure. So what what does that mean? Does it mean that there’s a contract that has been sent with terms on it and they’ve provisionally like a term sheet said we agree. Yes. Okay. Exactly what’s happened. Okay. So they’ve agreed to a term sheet. Yes. And then as is the case in business and investing that becomes more of a formalized contract. Correct. And then that’s signed. That’s right. So what is in the term sheet? Well, a few things. So, the the first is that the Straits of Hormuz opens effectively immediately and the blockade is lifted effectively immediately. Now, when I say effectively, that’s doing a little bit of work there because, you know, part of what’s going on is there’s a different risk tolerance for different shippers in the Gulf. So, some again, like I said earlier, some of these guys are already shipping a lot of oil through the straits of Hormuz right now, even though the Iranians are threatening to shoot at them. But what what this means is that over time we’re going to demine the straight of Hormuz. The Iranians are going to stop shooting. We’re going to lift our naval blockade and you’re going to see I think a pretty quick resumption of full flow of traffic in the straight of Hormuz. That that’s number one. Most important thing there mines in there. But it it’s, you know, it’s a very big waterway. There’s a lot of traffic moving right now. So we know where the mines are. They’re not everywhere. And you know, again, the ships are able to move. The biggest obstacle and impediment to ships moving right now is actually not the mines themselves. It’s the Iranians who are shooting drones and missiles on the other side. Now I say that we have seen a precipitous decline since we signed this agreement. We’ve seen a precipitous decline and even that happening. So you’re already again seeing the fruits of this negotiation that we have. Number two is it contemplates the Iranians giving up their highlyenriched stockpile of material, committing to a long-term inspections regime on their nuclear program and in exchange having a totally different economic relationship with the United States of America. So like there’s a stack of of sanctions that the US has on Iran that is like 60 pages long that is incredibly destructive to the Iranian economy by design, right? that the the deal is you’re not going to behave like a normal country. We’re not going to engage in normal trade and transactions with you. What this agreement provides is that if the Iranians take significant steps to behave like a normal country, they’re going to get significant reintegration into the world economy. And I think that’s that that that is in some ways the most profound thing. And what the United States gets out of that is is the long-term guarantee that they never become a nuclear power. I think people always sort of it’s hard to to appreciate how temporal this is. The Iranian nuclear program has been completely destroyed. Like it doesn’t exist right now, but over time you can try to rebuild it. And so what we’re trying to say is we don’t want you to rebuild this program. If you make real commitments and verifiable commitments that you’re not going to, then you’re getting a lot of economic benefits on the side. You dropped those big uh bunker buster bombs. Correct. um was very fascinated by all the all that whole series of of military operations and um it the nuclear material is now buried pretty deep underground from what I understand with this deal. Do you get to go and get it? Do they hand it over to you? What happens? So the way the deal isru is structured is that the Iranians, the Americans, and the International Atomic Energy Agency will actually work together to go get the material and destroy it. That’s that’s the basic idea is that we’re all going to work together. Again, the the agreement contemplates a new era in relationship. So the idea is that we’re all going to try to work together, destroy this material. And again, if that happens, the Iranians are going to have a totally different economic relationship with the West. And if it doesn’t happen, then the United States is no worse off. And you do you get to check that they’re not just going to a different mountain and building new nuclear weapons? That’s where the verification element comes in. But we have a very good sense, you know, you can probably guess why. We have a very good sense of what’s going on in the country of Iran. We could probably keep that material just permanently buried, but we don’t want to do that. We actually want to solve the problem and we want the Iranians to have a different relationship with us and that’s what we’re trying to do. And the specifics of you being able to go and check that they’re not just building new nuclear weapons. It sounds to me like the specifics haven’t been defined yet, like how those checks take place. Well, it’s Yeah, it’s like you said, it’s it’s a term sheet where we’ve got broad agreement on principles and how we’re going to approach the negotiation, but there are a lot of details that we got to figure out from here. So I’ve got straight off the news opens um nuclear inspections but also a coalition to remove the nuclear waste. Correct. Um from that they get the opportunity to participate in the in the economy and sanctions will be lifted. Y is there anything that’s in that term sheet that’s not included there? I mean there are other like little details and things like that. You know obviously the permanent sessation of hostilities. We’re trying to bring in a a regional era of peace here but that’s pretty much the main thing. and Israel. Um, there were some uh some interesting words exchanged yesterday. Again, I watch everything. So, I saw that the the Fox reporter had called Trump, I think yesterday, because Netanyahu had started firing some bombs and he had some select words, kind of like your grandmother’s words. Yes, indeed. Apparently, he said uh Trump said he’d phoned Netanyahu and told him he had no [  ] judgment. Why did BB have to do a [  ] attack? I’m so pissed off. half an hour before we were supposed to sign the deal. Trump called Netanyahu a very difficult guy. He should be very thankful for us for doing this because if Iran had a nuclear weapon, Israel wouldn’t be around for 2 hours. Um, lots of cussing at Netanyahu and what he had done. You I’ve heard you actually say that you think Israel and the United States have two different objectives as it relates to I don’t want to mischaracterize your words, but all I would say is that we’re different countries with different interests. I think the United States sometimes people characterize, you know, Israel is is a good partner to the United States. That is true. But sometimes people mischaracterize it and say that Israel and the United States are fundamentally always aligned. It’s just not true. We’re different countries. We have different needs. We have different geographies. Do you trust them? You know, I don’t trust anybody. Um, when it comes to international affairs and diplomacy, do I think that they’re they’re very capable? Absolutely. Do I think that again when we have shared interests, we work together very well? Absolutely. But but do I but I I don’t trust anyone. And I think that we we just have to continually be laser focused on what our interests are. And you know what the president said about BB is, you know, sometimes, you know, we are the world’s superpower and obviously we’re Israel’s most important ally anywhere in the world. And sometimes to ensure that we are able to accomplish our objectives, the president has to have a very frank conversation with the prime minister of Israel. Sometimes he does that. Sometimes everything works smoothly, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s just the nature like any relationship, right? Any relationship is going to have moments where you have to be more direct. Sometimes you’re working together and sometimes there’s a little bit more conflict. The world’s opinion and thoughts about the USIsrael relationship, yeah, has never been more widely discussed. I agree. And I I almost I almost don’t know why, but it’s it seems to be the case that over the last I’d say 6 to 12 months, people are really now questioning what is this relationship and who is who is the dominant part partner in the relationship? What for someone and just in super simple terms cuz I don’t really know a lot about this particular point. Sure. What is the relationship and why and where did it come from? Well, you know, I’m I’m hardly an expert in USIsraeli relations, right? But but let let me just say they’re obviously in some ways the only democracy in the Middle East. Okay. Uh very advanced economy, very high-skilled people, technological ingenuity. I mean it’s a country of 9 million people. They generate a lot of the world’s inventions just from 9 million people. It’s very impressive country economically. They’re also probably better at intelligence collection than any country in the world. So there again and and again because they’re an advanced economy because you know they’re people generally speaking want to live in peace and harmony just want to go to work and raise their kids there are a lot of shared interests and a lot of shared objectives and I think that you know over time especially for example when one of our biggest problems going back to you know the early 2000s was the rise of Islamic terrorism um Islamic radical terrorism I should say there was a sort of broad recognition that there’s a lot for us to work on but but again even even if you go back to then the early 2000s, very large alignment between Israeli interests and American interests. But even in like the early 2000s, the Israelis were much more worried about Iran than the United States was, right? We were much more worried about al-Qaeda, like a different branch of Islamic terrorism. So even when we’ve been very aligned, we’re just different countries that have different objectives. And you know, I will say having seen the president of United States operate, I feel quite confident that, you know, they are the junior partner. We’re the senior partner. We’re the world’s superpower. That’s the way that it works. But, you know, again, sometimes it’s it’s like with the UK. I would say the UK is our closest ally, our oldest ally. I’m not just saying that because you’re a Brit. Do you trust the UK? Uh, again, I don’t really trust anybody, but do I like do I like a lot of Brits? Absolutely. Do I have a I mean, incredible fondness for the United Kingdom as a country and a culture. Absolutely. And I really like a lot of the people, even the Labor government, even though they’re politically misaligned uh with with me and and the rest of the Trump administration. But you know like we have disagreements from time to time. So we work really well together and sometimes we have misaligned interests and we have to pursue our interests in the best way we can. What does and please do tell me like what does Netanyahu want because I sit here with these experts and they say they want to overtake the whole of the Middle East. They want to run the Middle East. What does he want? I don’t know. I don’t know. Um well I mean I I I don’t I can’t get inside somebody’s head. Have you asked them what they want? What do you think? Well, I I think that in this particular operation, again, where interests were aligned is we wanted Iranian conventional military power to be much weaker, to be decimated. You know, the the Israelis shared that objective. Do I think that there are maybe I don’t know if BB thinks this, but do I think there are people within Israeli society who would like to turn Iran into Libya, basically a failed state with 90 million people? Probably. But I I don’t know that BB wants that. I’ve actually never had that conversation with it. It would be an interesting conversation to have. I’ll tell you right now, is Iran turning into a Persian Libya good for the United States of America? Absolutely not. And that’s one of the reasons why the president has set us on this course of working on our interest, which is the elimination of the nuclear threat and in a change dynamic with the Iranians, which is very much on the table. You run for Senate. Yeah. Um and you’re successful. And this is really from what I can see from my research where you and Trump first uh made friends, I should say. Uh before then you weren’t friends. No, that’s right. You were quite critical of Donald Trump before then. Um and you’ve been probably asked this a million times, but what I actually didn’t know this until literally today. Okay. That I read the piece you written in the Atlantic where you criticized him for taking advantage of the struggling working class. What Trump offers, this is your quote, is an easy escape from pain. To every complex problem, he promises a simple solution. He can bring jobs back simply by punishing offshore companies into submission. As he told the New Hampshire crowd, “Folks are too similar with the opioid Scrooge. He can cure the addiction epidemic by building a Mexican wall and keeping the cartels out. He will spare the United States from humiliation and military defeat with indiscriminate bombing. It doesn’t matter that no credible military leader has endorsed his plan. He never offers detail for those plans to work because Trump’s Trump is cultural heroine. He makes some people feel better, but he cannot fix all that ils all that ils them and one day they’ll realize it. Very tough words against Trump. Long time ago, but 2016 and 10 years ago, what changed? Well, let me let me pick up. First of all, I think you always have to be able to acknowledge when you’re right and when you’re wrong. And there was a lot I was right about in 2016, but but just pick up on something. Can you read the line for me again where I talk about no is it no credible military leader has endorsed these plans? Yeah, it says um it doesn’t matter that no credible military leader has endorsed his plan. Okay. So, what I would say is I wrote that. I believed it when I wrote it. And reading it now, I’m almost embarrassed that I wrote it because it was so obviously absurd. In fact, the the fact that Donald Trump was misaligned with the military experts and the military leadership of 2016 was a good thing, not a bad thing. Think about those military leaders. I mean, I have a lot of respect for the troops, the people who serve, the people who put on a uniform, but you can make a very credible argument that from the early ’90s until, you know, at least 2016, America hadn’t won a war in 30 years. Like, there’s a reason why Donald Trump mistr mistrusted the military leadership. And he was right. And so much of what I think the president re represented at the time was a recognition that American institutions had become sclerotic and broken and he was a weapon to break down those institutions. Your assessment of him is similar to the democratic assessment of him. Your assessment of him back in 2016 is similar to the democratic assessment of him that there was a private message between you and roommate where you you said he was either a cynical [  ] or America’s Hitler. How do you go from that position to vice president of the same person? What is that journey? A crazy journey, man. But but again, I mean, it’s you have to ask yourself, first of all, I thought Donald Trump would be a failed president if he got elected. He was not. I thought that America’s institutions were fundamentally functioning. They were not. I thought that the military leaders who told us this about a war were the scientific experts who told us this other thing about a pandemic were fundamentally maybe not always right but fundamentally wise people who were mostly right I was wrong. What have you observed behind the scenes that that JD didn’t see so in operation when you see him making decisions? Well, yeah. So, I I mean I I want to caveat this with with saying that, you know, I didn’t know him well by the time, you know, I voted for him in 2020. Um, obviously, you know, very very involved in the 2024 campaign well before I was ever his vice presidential nominee. I I had that change based purely on what I saw from the outside. It’s not like I had insider knowledge about Donald Trump and that’s what caused me to change. Now, what I will say is that having the insider knowledge, one thing that that really mistakes or or gets wrong, that piece in the Atlantic, that’s when that that that’s where that piece was published, is that Donald Trump is much different as a human being than the media makes him out to be. He’s very warm. He’s a very like loving person to his kids, to his grandkids. He’s incredibly generous. Like if you see Donald Trump, you know, in the Oval Office, it’s like he has to give you a gift. Like he has to whether it’s, you know, a water bottle or a MAGA hat or a coin or a pin. Like he he just he’s one of these people who he really likes hospitality. He really likes making other people happy. I had no understanding of that from him from the outside. What I would see is, you know, clips of him arguing with a journalist and that was it. And that gives you a very very one-dimensional view of a person. So yeah, I definitely from the inside have seen a much much more multi-dimensional figure. The thing I say about about Donald Trump is I remember this in 2016 and in hindsight it’s just so so dumb. People would say that he was dumb or that he wasn’t very smart. He’s super smart. Like he reads a lot. He understands people at an instinctual level better than anybody that I’ve ever known. But he is a very very like from a pure IQ perspective, he’s a very smart person. And it’s interesting that so many people like, you know, if you give Donald Trump an IQ test with the other 45 46 presidents that the United States has had, I guarantee he he’d be either near the top or at the top. And the entire American media in 2016 had convinced me at least that he was not a smart person. And by 2022, he’s endorsed you and you, uh, you win your race in the US Senate. Correct. And then sometime after then, um, at some point, you’re going to get introduced to him and he’s going to ask you to be the vice president of the United States. Yeah. Bring me, if I was a fly on the wall, was that a phone call or was it a meeting? Well, there have been meetings before that. Well, just generally at that point, I was involved in his re-election campaign. I was one of the first, maybe the very first senators to endorse him in 2023, I believe, is actually when I endorsed him. very early on in 2023 when again I thought he would win but the conventional wisdom was that he would not win even the Republican nomination that his political career was over. So I endorsed him very early. He and I became quite close over over that period. We talked a lot about issues. He gave me some advice on various bills that I was working on in the Senate. We just became pretty close. He and I worked very closely together over there was this train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio and he and I became quite quite close over that. So we just sort of developed a relationship. we were friendly and then we were closer and then he was sort of, you know, a person that I really looked to in politics and then the 2024 campaign really started heating up and there were all these rumors about possibly me being his running mate. And you know, he and I didn’t ever have that conversation like about being his running mate until like a day or two before he picked me. And that was an inerson conversation. It was actually the morning he was shot in person. He goes to that rally in Pennsylvania. He gets shot. Um, obviously he’s okay, thank God. And then two days later, he asked me to be the nominee. So, where where were you when he asked you? Uh, I had just landed in Milwaukee for the RNC convention. It was there’s like a deadline to it because the way the convention works is you have to be formally nominated by the delegates on Monday at like 3 or 4:00. Mhm. And it was 11:00. I had just arrived in Milwaukee. I had no idea what was going on. And I thought I had a good chance, but I wasn’t sure. and he called me. I didn’t answer the phone. Uh I think that it was like it was just it was one of those things where I was getting so many phone calls and the call went straight to voicemail like it never rang. And so I get a text message from a friend of mine who’s now the White House chief of staff said, “You just missed a very important phone call.” I called him back. I said, “What’s up, Mr. President?” He said, “J, you just missed a very important phone call. I’m going to have to pick somebody else up.”

Uh but then he asked me and the rest is history, man. Did you know at that time what you were signing up for? No, I had no idea. No idea. So why did you want to do it? And you know, people say I represent my country. But why? Why? It’s it’s a lot. It’s a big cost to your family. When when I when I arrived here today, I saw I don’t know, it felt like 50 men with guns probably. Yeah. They’ scoped out the whole building and you know, they’ve been searching this building, I think, for a couple of days. And I thought, wow. Like, how does how does the vice president live life with his his family when you have this going everywhere with you? Did you know what you were signing up for? No. No, I didn’t. I mean, I you know, you sign up because you want to make a difference and because, you know, I was already a senator, so I’m already in the politics business. I might as well try to serve at the highest level possible. You know, you think you could help, right? Part of being the VP is you help on the campaign trail. you know, six months. Really, the part of the campaign that is the most intense is the part where you’re sort of riding a side saddle with uh with the presidential nominee. So, just like all these things for white people get into politics in the first place. But no, I mean, look, I I’m not a whiner and I would never complain about this, but if I was a whiner, the one thing I would say is it was very hard on the kids, in particular, our oldest son. And I just had no idea what I was getting myself into. I mean, okay, so the president, he and I have this brief phone conversation. You know, my kid is talking to me about Pokemon cards at the hotel in Milwaukee. We’re still like unpacking our suitcase, and it’s like, okay, I’m now the VP nominee. I have to get on my suit. I have to get prepared to be nominated like 3 or 4 hours later, and all these thoughts are swirling through my head. Knock at the door, and it’s the Secret Service. And it’s like, “All right, you’re under our protection now. We have to move your entire family to the president’s hotel so that you’re in the same protective bubble.” And all of a sudden, I just realized my life is totally different now. It’ll never be the same. I I was okay with that, you know, like you sort of you just get used to it. I’m a grown man. But it was very hard on, you know, my my oldest boy who’s 9 years old now. He made a comment, didn’t he? Oh, yeah. He hated it. He he hated the attention. He hated how people treated him differently. It was like one of these things where, you know, he would go to a school and people would treat him like he was special and he just wanted to be a normal kid. And I felt guilty. I felt really guilty about that. And I felt this sort of sense like, oh my god, I’ve conscripted this kid into this life. I had no idea what he was he was what I was signing him up for. He didn’t sign up for it. I signed him up for it. And that was pretty tough. Sometimes I feel like I’ve ruined his life without even asking him. You wrote that in your new book, page 198. Yes. In reference to your 7-year-old son. Sometimes I feel like I’ve ruined his life without even asking him. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s that’s how that’s how I felt. I mean I I think that I’ve I’ve gained certainly some perspective about it. You know, one of the things we’ve been quite good at is just finding communities where he’s more isolated from all the attention and all the pressures of it. You we have a very very good school community for him. A Christian school that he goes to and he loves. There’s also, by the way, a flip side is, you know, kids, as you may know, you realize how much nature matters more than nurture. You know, our oldest boy is an introvert. Um, our six-year-old is a little bit more like me. He’s a bit of an extrovert. He loves it. And so, you you kind of have to balance the way that it affects the kids. But, you know, I don’t feel like I’ve ruined my 9-year-old’s life anymore, but I certainly at that time I felt extremely guilty about what I had signed him up for. And in your new book, Communion, you say, “Dad, he you quote him and say that he said, “Dad, I just want every everyone to go back to treating us like they used to.” Yes, that’s right. Are these are these things hard to hear? Like, is it hard? Of course, man. Of course. I mean, you you know, do you have kids? Not yet. Trying. Yeah. Yeah. Good for you. You know, my my prayers for that endeavor, but Thank you. I I think

your kids have an emotional effect on you that is just totally profound and revoly and yeah man when when your son tells you that he wants something that you can no longer provide him that’s a very very tough thing. Now the flip side of it is and you can say this a rationalization but I think it’s true. The flip side is there are a lot of blessings that come along with this life. And you know, I’ve talked to him a lot about this. I’ve actually, you know, I write this in the book that Charlie Kirk was probably the person who was most influential in helping me think through this conversation is, you know, don’t try to pretend that it’s not a sacrifice to him. Like I, you know, don’t pretend that you haven’t signed him up for something that has changed his life. You have. But I try to talk to him about, well, there are benefits, too. You’ve gotten to see the world. We’ve got to see the country in a in a way that no kid has ever gotten to see it. And we get to live in this cool house. I live in the Naval Observatory here in Washington DC. We would not get to do that if I was not the vice president. So, what I’ve I’ve I’ve learned to do with him is not to minimize the negative, but to try to contextualize it, but also to try to emphasize the positive. And it’s funny, you know, I asked him this probably about a year ago. I said, “Are are you still unhappy that I became the vice president?” This is probably four or five months into. He said, “Absolutely.” And I asked him that question recently and he said actually it’s pretty good. So kids adjust, you know, lives change. You figure out a routine for the kids. But I also think that, you know, that that guilt motivated certain conduct. Would we have built the life that we have around them were it not for this recognition that we had caused this change and this disruption? No. So you take the good with the bad. You accept that you’ve caused some problems, but you also accept that you can make things better. Lovely photo here. If your your wife is I love this photo. She looks beautiful. This is actually the day or at least the weekend that I met her mom. We were This is at the Highline in Brooklyn. Have you ever been to the not in Brooklyn in South Manhattan? Uh the Highland Highland Park. You know, it it basically travels a long way up South Manhattan. Uh there’s this little observation deck. We’re sitting there taking a photo and you know that that first summer we were together. We started dating in March of 2011. And so I was doing a research assistant thing in New Haven, Connecticut, about an hour and a half train ride. She was in New York City. And um you know, it it was in some ways like a metaphor for our relationship because I found New York just this totally intimidating place. I didn’t know how to ride the subway. I didn’t even know how to like buy a subway car to get on the subway. But I just because I was in love with her. I went down there every chance I could get. We spent every moment you like when when you’re when you’re newly in love with somebody, it’s just like an obsession. and we sort of explored New York City together as this young couple this summer and uh that was the day that I met her mom and I passed the test because here I am. What surprised her most about you becoming the vice president? What what what didn’t she expect? She doesn’t get surprised by much. That’s actually a very very hard question. I do think the Secret Service protection surprised her too. The way that it changes your life to give you an example. So, you know, we went to Rome for the Pope’s inaugural mass, the new pope, the American pope. And like my favorite thing to do in the world, like if you said, I’ll give you two hours, you can do whatever you want. What I would do is I would go to some place, whether in the country or in a big city, and I would just take a walk with Usha. Like that’s that that is my ultimate way to like vacation or to relax. And you know, we tried to take a walk in Rome and it was like, you know, Seal Team 6 had descended upon Rome. They were shutting down every traffic intersection. There’s a helicopter flying overhead and just that I think that’s surprising to her how much the security protocols have changed just the way that you know we we do things like take a walk together. Can you make that decision still yourself? Could you could you say to all these Secret Service people? There’s none. Okay. I can’t see any secret service at the moment, but I know they’re behind that curtain and I know they’re driving. Yeah, they’re outside. They’re everywhere. They’re probably on the roof. But can you just Are you the one that still gets to make the call of of what you wanted to do? So, could you say, “Listen, I want to walk down the street to Walmart.” There are actually like statutory prohibitions like they they have legal obligations in order to protect me. They are, I will say, great people, amazing people. And we found accommodation like we found a way of taking a walk without disrupting everybody, right? But it’s taken a little bit of work and a little bit of practice. And the biggest change is just again, it’s not that you can’t take a walk. It’s that the basic protocol, the thing that they’ve gotten used to is much different and more misaligned with the way that we want to live our lives. So, we figured it out. Like, we’ve gotten things to a good place. But in the in the in the first instance, man, it was crazy. I I just couldn’t imagine. It was actually getting here today. Like you hear about Secret Service, but when you as someone like me who I was here yesterday, so making my way into this building today, which is like our studio, I couldn’t believe it. I was being tapped down, pocket checked. People were handing me stuff. Keep this on. Uh I went downstairs to the toilet in the basement. There was a guy down there with a gun. I was like I was like there was a guy outside my door with a gun. The gun’s gone. I was like, “Wow.” You’ve never been safer than you are right now. I do feel safe. Yeah. Yeah. Um you’ve written this new book called Communion. Yeah. which is about it’s I mean the subtitle is finding my way back to faith. Back to faith. Yeah, that’s right. So for your 30s you you you became atheist in your early your late 20s. Yeah, I would say in my 20s even yeah in my early 20s. So I was raised in an evangelical household. Very conservative, you know, very evangelical Christianity. My grandmother was one of these people, you know, she read the Bible five, six times a day. She prayed five, six times a day. was was a woman. You know, mama was was devoutly religious, but we were what you you would call unchurched. So, I would go to church with my dad. I would occasionally go to church with my mom, occasionally with my mama, but you know, our religion was very much experienced at home. It was you would watch televangelists on TV. Uh you would watch Billy Graham revival um things on TV, but we didn’t go to church that much. And so, you know, I got to a point in my life where I I just felt like my faith wasn’t speaking to me anymore. It didn’t seem to have particular relevance to my life. There was a certain, you know, new atheist element to it where I assumed that I knew more than these, you know, bumpkins that had raised me. And, you know, her faith is all superstition. I’m rational. I’m a college educated kid and I know things that other people don’t. So, there’s a certain intellectual arrogance that was built into it. But sort of all these things kind of swam together. But fundamentally I I think that the with all love and affection of my grandmother, I I think the thing about my faith that just never took root is that I never saw why it actually mattered that much. It was just a thing. It was in the background. It was something we believed. I mean, I really did believe this stuff when I was a teenager, but it didn’t really matter. And so when that boy collided with reality and collided with a lot of things that were going on in the world, I just was not properly prepared to actually integrate my faith into this new world. When did you realize that it mattered? Well, well, so so okay. So, so I become an atheist. I’m sort of one of these like angry atheists, you know, where I’ll like argue with people who say that they’re religious and I I pretend that I’m smarter than everybody else. And it was like very embarrassing in hindsight. But you know I I I go back and so just a flaw that I have all of us have many flaws, many virtues. But a flaw that I have is I just I wanted to rise above. Now where it came from a good place is I wanted stability. I wanted a decent income. I wanted to provide my kids that stability that I didn’t have. But where it was a very bad thing is I cared way too much about what credentials I had, where did I go to school, how much money that I made. And so this sort of new atheism actually was like the perfect philosophy for the creed of a kid who just wanted to get ahead. I wanted to make as much money. I wanted to have the most prestigious profession. I was super ambitious for ambition’s sake. And you know, so I I had won every competition that life had put before me. You know, I’m I’m at this point in my late 20s. I’ve got a beautiful girlfriend. Things are going pretty well. I’m at Yale Law School, right? The top law school in the United States of America. Very prestigious. Everybody thought I was very smart because I went to Yale Law School. And I cared about that back then. I don’t care about it now. And I sort of realized I’m actually not like a happy person. I’m not a good person. I care about where I went to law school way more than whether I’m good to this girl, right? I like like I I really was like madly in love with her. But was I like a particularly good boyfriend? No. I I learned from my youth to be chaotic and I’d threaten to break up with her every other month. And you know, if we had an argument, I’d just like disappear for a couple days. I was just like not I I sort of realized, okay, there’s something missing here. There’s something that all of this obsession with achievement and being smarter than everybody else and being rational, it has not actually made me a good person. And I sort of looked around and said, well, who are the people that I like actually want to be like? Who are the people that I most admire in the world? And I slowly realized that the ones who were the most virtuous, the ones who were the best at the things that actually mattered, they were Christians. And their faith motivated not an obsession with getting ahead, but an obsession with treating people well or an obsession with developing the strength of character that mattered so that you could withstand a very tough circumstances. And I started to think to myself, okay, wait a second. There like these rays of sunshine from Christians that I knew in my life, from Christian ideas that sort of were in the background of my own, you know, intellectual curiosity. And if there are all of these rays of sunshine where Christianity seems to be warmer and truer than something else, maybe the rest of it actually has something to be said for it, too. And that kind of led me down a pathway of thinking about my faith in a way that I never had when I was a teenager. I never had to when I was a teenager. And it finally just hit me like there is something deeply profound about this. And at first it was an intellectual thing, right? But over time it became a more emotional and more practice thing. And eventually I got baptized. I never been baptized as a kid. And you know even though my wife is not Christian, I force force her to take take uh our three kids and husband to to to church every single week and she’s remarkably patient about it. But it’s it’s it’s one of these things where it really did transform me but in a slower way. Atheism is a form of religion in in a way, isn’t it? It has the same level of sort of certainty and that’s why off to you as an agnostic because it feels a little bit arrogant to say that I know. Yeah. Yeah. No, that’s that’s that’s interesting. I’m going to take a little bit of a hard time which is uh AI. AI is going to cause a lot of job disruption and um it’s a big topic of conversation for my audience but also as an entrepreneur and investor. We we’re talking a lot at the moment about the impact of AI. When you look at the the words of the big AI CEOs over time, one thing I find fascinating is if you look at Sam Alman’s words about the impact AI is going to have, it’s very dystopian. You look at Elon, very very dystopian. Yeah. And right now, I think the only thing that’s up there with being as unpopular as AI is ICE in the US. I saw this graph the other day in terms of how unpopular it is. Eric Schmidt, who I know you know because he was an investor in your company, I believe. Yeah. The other day when he was doing that commencement speech in front of the college students, he was booed every time he said the word. That’s right. Are you scared about the potential economic impact and unemployment impact of artificial intelligence at this moment in time? So, I’d say I’m less scared about that than I am about other things. Okay. Okay. So, historical analogies are always fraught. And by the way, I think the AI companies themselves, the CEOs, there’s a certain incentive to be super dystopian because it’s it’s like a form of viral marketing that if people are really scared of your product, that must mean that it really works. And if they’re not scared of your product, maybe it actually doesn’t work that well. So, I think there’s something weird there. There’s something synergistic about the most pessimistic predictions about AI and some of the people who are making them. But like, set that to the side cuz I do have some real concerns. But on the job displacement thing, okay, so let me back up for a second because I bring a certain bias to this. So when I was, again, this is a this is an almost religious idea that I developed in the early 2010s that I think is just preposterous now. And that religious idea was that there was like this inevitable march of economics from agricultural to industrial to service-based. And the reason that all of my friends and family were losing their jobs was because that was just an inevitable economic trend that advanced economies. They de-industrialized. Okay? And there was even this argument at the time that the reason why manufacturing employment was going down in the United States was because of automation, because of technology. that it had nothing to do with outsourcing or with immigration but it was purely because of technology had replaced all these workers with robots. I think that story is totally false. Now the robots that exist in manufacturing did they make people more productive? Absolutely. Did they cause a change in what a manufacturing line worker was doing in say 2005 versus 1955? Absolutely. So the change is there but in reality there was a ton of manufacturing job growth. It just wasn’t happening in the United States of America. And I think sometimes we tell ourselves the story that technology always leads inevitably to job loss to make up for the fact that what often leads to job loss among populations is either outsourcing or immigration. You ship the job to another country or you have somebody else take the job of somebody who currently has it. So what do I think is actually going on with AI? You know, if you go back to the industrial revolution, right? At the last significant major disruption in the labor market, you actually had way more people working at the end of the industrial revolution than you did beforehand. Again, some of the jobs were different. There was some job disruption. But when I look at AI, I don’t see mass unemployment as the most likely consequence. I think people will become more productive. I think some people’s jobs will change. Some people will lose their jobs. But I I just don’t buy this idea and I haven’t seen any evidence in the data that it’s going to lead to mass unemployment. Let me tell you what it does what does worry me. Again, historical analogies are always fraught. You go back to the industrial revolution. Was mass joblessness the main consequence of the shift from an agricultural to an industrial economy? No. But what did happen? Rich people got way richer. And that led to in Europe fascism and communism. In fact, your country and my country pretty much the only two countries that successfully avoided either a fascist or a communist revolution in the in response to the industrial revolution. That’s by the way one of the real interesting things about you know Christianity is the the seinal text about how capital and labor can work together about how you could have social harmony compared to Markx who was sort of saying there was an inevitable social division was Pope Leo I 13th who wrote in his famous encyclical that the way to preserve harmony between the social classes was to ensure that the workers could bargain. This is where sort of the idea of collective bargaining had a Christian underpinning and to make sure that the the capitalists weren’t able to take advantage of the workers. They had to sort of respect them. And that that that model of social harmony I think is something we’re either going to follow that Christian concept of social harmony in the age of AI or we’re going to wake up and we’re going to realize that rich people have gotten way richer. The average American, the average Brit, the average Western society member has stagnated. And people really hate relative poverty. You can give people iPhones and you can give the people the creature comforts of a 21st century economy, but if you make rich people way richer, you are going to have significant problems. And so I think that is like one of the consequences that I see from AI. The one other just you asked about it, the thing I really worry about with AI is surveillance. AI is, you know, a friend of mine once said that AI is fundamentally a communist technology in that it allows governments and corporations to surveil people in very profound and different ways. And that scares me a lot. Like I don’t want a social credit system that’s powered by AI. I don’t want you to not be able to buy a beer because some tech CEO has given you a score based on an artificial intelligence algorithm that nobody actually understands. That scares me, too. But I don’t think you’re going to have mass unemployment. We might have mass inequality. That’s its own problem. It’s a different problem, though. Um, according to the the current 2026 Federal Reserve and Census Bureau data, financial inequality in the United States has reached its highest level in nearly four decades. And obviously we’ve seen this headline this week of the US’s first trillionaire. Yeah. Which again has been talked about everywhere around the world in this last part of this debate. You think about the the explosion we’re seeing in robotics and Elon Musk’s pay packet rewarding him for getting a a million humanoid robots out there at a certain timeline and Elon himself saying there’ll be a billion humanoid robots at some point. There’ll be more humanoid robots than humans. It appears to me that there will be some kind of job disruption. We can obviously there’s new jobs created which are like hard to forecast. Yeah. And you’ve got these big like um frontier model companies like OpenAI and Anthropic that are going to be bene benefactors of this evolution. Wealth is presumably going to acrue to these large large corporations, the metas, the anthropics, the open areas. How do you think about we’re already we already have crazy crazy inequality. How do you think about redistributing that wealth? Bernie Sanders is saying people need to own 50% of those AI companies. What the president by the way likes that idea too. He likes it. He likes that idea. Um I don’t know that he would say 50% but he does like that idea. So there there’s a um there’s a concept in uh in in like the social welfare literature of redistribution versus predistribution. The idea of predistribution is that you give workers you give people normal people a seat at the bargaining table. And I don’t think it’s just economic. The economic thing by the way is very important. like you you you want the the the worker whose life has been transformed by this technology to have a seat at the table. You want them to be able to actually bargain with the company for better wages. Now, that’s impossible if you think about it like the individual worker to negotiate against, you know, Daario from Anthropic. It’s not going to happen. But workers working together, this is where the idea of collective bargaining came from. But there’s all kind of interesting things. And again, I think there’s like a deeply Christian concept to this. I know you’re sort of you know fascinated by faith but not a person of faith yourself. There is a very deeply Christian concept that you have to give everybody in the country a seat at the table. So for example like okay there’s the economic piece of it. What about the cultural piece of it? How will AI transform the culture that we consume that we distribute that we make? You know, back in the 50s and60s, it was broadly accepted that now it wasn’t a censorship regime. There was nothing legal going on here, but it was broadly accepted that Hollywood would consult with the religious leaders at the time in order to ensure that the content they were making was actually consistent with the sensibilities of their membership and consistent with some basic Christian ideas. Again, that wasn’t forced, but there was this mechanism that gave everybody a seat at the table. And I think that’s one of the the bad things about the there are many bad things about the decline of institutional Christianity in this country. But we do not have a mechanism that gives powerful people that forces them to actually work with everybody else. Religion was one of the ways that happened in the west. I think probably the most profound and effective way that happened in the west. We just don’t have it anymore and I really worry about that. So the president is supportive of the United States owning these big AI companies. He likes the idea as sort of a sovereign wealth fund idea of the United States taking some stake in these AI companies. He said so publicly. I’m not breaking news. But you know again the president he is a very unconventional person. You would say a Republican’s not supposed to think like that. The president doesn’t care. The president just thinks the thoughts that he has. He develops them whether they’re, you know, he tries to determine is this a good idea or a bad idea. I would call him sort of a rag radical pragmatist, though I think most Europeans think that he’s this hyper ideological person. He’s extremely pragmatic about this stuff. But but one one one very important thought. The idea that we’re going to allow these companies, let’s say 10 20 years down the road to accumulate trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars of wealth and then we’re going to be be able to successfully redistribute it to workers. I’m very skeptical of that. Very skeptical of that. I think that’s that’s a that’s a very modern I call a liberal concept. this idea that you can just tax people and give it to poor people and it works out. Then you turn the poor people into effectively subservient of the rich people. You have to give everybody a stake in the society. I haven’t quite figured out how this is going to work in the age of AI. I think labor unions are a very important model here, but this is the the model where you just take from some people and give to other people. That’s never provided a stable society. You’ve got to give the workers a seat at the table. Mama. Mama. Memo. Mama. Nemo. She passed away when you were 21 years old. Rush Hospital with a collapsed lung 2 days after her 72nd birthday. Y and she was taken off life support. She was clearly the most important um figure in your life from reading your story for so many reasons. Sure. She hasn’t gotten to see the position you rose to today. Yeah. I read that you didn’t cry when she passed away. um you didn’t process those emotions either because you sensed that your entire family was on the verge of collapse and you wanted to give the impression of emotional strength. That’s what you say in your book um Hillbilly and on and page 169. What would she think of you today? What what would she have said? Well, I think you know she she she was again a deeply patriotic person. I think she’d be amazed by this. I mean, the the pageantry, being able to go to the White House, just things like that would have been very very meaningful to her. Um, what would you say to her? I think that I would say thank you. I mean the the the the through the maybe the most important lesson that I’ve learned is that the difference between good people and people who struggle is good people have a good sense of gratitude. And I don’t know that I would be alive were it not for this woman. I certainly wouldn’t be here. And I think the the one thing mama would worry about and I think I’ve done a pretty good job just to be clear. But mamal would worry a lot about the pomp and the circumstance. In the same way that she would be amazed by it, she would find it incredible and she would love to participate and see it. She’s always really really worried. She would always say, “Don’t get too big for your brushes.” And what that means is don’t let it go to your head. Don’t think that you’re better than somebody just because you have a title or because you have more money than they do. And I think that I I have to constantly remind myself that I get to be vice president for four years. I’m going to do as good of a job as I can for that four years, but it doesn’t make me better than anybody. And it doesn’t mean that I know more than anybody. I mean, I may know more about like CIA reports, but fundamentally if you start to see yourself, I think, as better, you become unable to successfully govern a democratic country. Have you ever grieved the loss of Noah? Because Oh, absolutely. I mean, you know, I think I wrote in the book, I didn’t cry when she died. I I cried a lot 2 days later. Yeah. I mean, I’ve grieved I’ve grieved her for a long time. I My biggest regret with Mamal is just she never met Usha.

And there’s something so similar about them, but so different. Like, they’re both incredibly smart. Even though my mom left school, middle school, Usha went to law school. They’re incredibly blunt people, right? I mean, Usha just doesn’t have a filter. It’s one of the things I I was immediately attracted to about her is that even she was going to offend you. She was going to say exactly what was on her mind, but they came from such different worlds. And I think my grandmother would be fascinated by her. You know, when mom met Usha and you know, Usha ethnically is Indian. She was born in the United States. You know, my mom said, it just goes to show sometimes how how uh how little some of us knew about the world. She said, you know, what is she like ethnically? And I said, mom, she’s Indian. And my mom says, which tribe? So they came from very different worlds. Both mom and Usha but also mammo and Usha. But that that is the biggest regret about her death is that you know if she was the most important person in my life for the first 20 years is the most important for the rest of it. And I really wish those two people could have met cuz they’re amazing people. The emotions still right on the surface for you. Very much so. We have a closing tradition on this podcast. Okay. Where the last guest leaves a question for the next next guest not knowing who they’re leaving it for. Okay. The question that’s left for you is uh I think it was slightly biased, but the question is, are aliens real?

That’s interesting. Answer is I don’t know. It It is It is something that I have sworn to myself, I’m now a year and a half into this job, that I would go through all of the highly classified information about everything that we know about UFOs. I just haven’t done it yet. It’s like one of these crazy things where you go to the job and the day-to-day just takes over. So, I haven’t done that yet. But, I mean, look, I I am I believe in things and I think that they’re true and I think that they’re rational, but I recognize that there may be even crazier than the idea that there are extraterrestrials. Like, I believe that a Jewish man about 2,000 years ago was the only begotten son of God, was literally crucified, and then rose from the dead 3 days later. Like, I recognize that sounds a little out there, but I think that it’s true. And I I 100% believe that people have mystical experiences. And I’ve I’ve talked to people who have been involved in exorcisms. And again, I think the rational mind says, “Well, that’s just schizophrenia or that’s some other mental illness.” I’ve talked to people who said, “Yeah, 99.9% of the people that I’ve looked at to do an exorcism on were schizophrenic or had some other mental illness.” But there’s something there are weird things out there that we cannot explain. There are weird moments. I mean, I remember not long after my grandmother died, my sister lost, you know, she didn’t really lose her temper, but like got kind of angry with her daughter and her daughter’s, I don’t know, seven or eight years old at the time. And like the light bulb just exploded and both of us looked at each other like that was man. Remember I was talking I I write about this in communion. I was talking to the New York Times writer um about the pope and sort of different perspectives on the pope and he was more critical of the pope and I was more my attitude is like ah you know he’s not a politician you can’t judge him by politician standards this is the last pope and we’re like having this conversation and it’s like I’m telling you man a glass just falls off the bar in a totally crazy way and shatters and like stops dead in our tracks and we both just looked at each other and said what the hell was that And I I I’m a believer in mystical experiences. I don’t think they happen that often, but I think that people have experiences that are impossible to explain if you have a purely narrow, hyperrational view of the world. In other words, I think the hyperrational view of the world is actually not totally accurate. There’s some weird [ __ ] out there. So, you think aliens could be real? I do. Communion. Um, it’s really interesting because I I went on a similar journey to you in terms of new atheism, very rational, how could any of this be true, arguing with Christians every time that I had the opportunity to in part to try and figure out my own opinion. It was like a sparring match, of course. Um, and I now found myself as being an agnostic person and being open-minded and curious to new ideas and it’s almost a humility that I wasn’t humble before in that in that season of my life, but now I’m like open that I could be completely wrong. Sure. and listening intently. And I think this is why this book is so interesting because you represent, I think, the journey of a lot of people who have rationally talked themselves out of the possibility of faith, but then have felt something is missing at some level, feel like they’ve been lied to by themselves or society or some kind of culture. Sure. And then have had the sort of open-minded exploration back to a place of meaning. And I’d say that that meaning and that sense of purpose is so absent in society at the moment. And also like you said, the Christians that I’ve interviewed here, it doesn’t feel to me to be a coincidence that they’re the most virtuous, anchored, stable, happy, empathetic, charitable individuals I get to sit with. And that itself appears to be proof of something. Mhm. And so your book here, Communion, Finding My Way Back to Faith, is I think a a wonderful journey in that direction for anybody who is finds themsel at any stage in that journey. and it’s out right now. Mr. Vice President, thank you so much for your time. I realize you’re very busy, so it’s a true honor that you chose to give me some of your time today. I really, really appreciate it. I really enjoyed this. Thank Thank you.

A healthy brain likely doesn’t need any creatine. But what if you’re stressed? What about sleep deprivation? Night shift workers, university students cramming for a midterm. Then all of a sudden, the healthy brain becomes a metabolically stressed brain. And most people fall into the stressed environment. And that’s where creatine comes to the rescue. And we’ll talk about how much, but the more stressed it is, the higher the dose seems to come into play. And is there anyone that shouldn’t take creatine? Well, I’ve published over 120 papers just on creatine alone. And we’ve done at least 30 to 40 studies in our lab. And I can’t find anybody that can’t or shouldn’t take creatine. So, for example, at recommended dosages, creatine can not only have potential anti-cancer properties, but really speed up rehabilitation. And there’s a lot of hope, especially around Alzheimer’s. And what about kids? The current body of evidence suggests they want to get at least one gram per day because in children, they want to have optimization for bone health as well as muscle development. And so I’m fascinated that this nutrient discovered in 1832 like boring for the longest time is having these profound benefits we never even thought would happen. And so your viewers today will be surprised about some of the things I’m going to talk about including micro doing. And we’ve got this thing here in front of us. This is the dosing dilemma. And I want to talk about how much I need to take for all these things. And I want to talk about nutrition, protein, weight training, etc. But before that, you’ve got five myths in front of you. Can you reveal one by one what they are? So this is Oh, I can’t believe you did this one to me. Creatine causes hair loss. I was going bald before I started taking creatine. Myth number two. Oh, so this is by far the biggest myth and that is Dr. Darren Kandow. What is the mission that you’re on in your life? I think right now it would be to promote health and make people live longer free of disease. It’s fascinating how we’ve transcended our understanding of weight training and now weight training is seeming to have these profound effects that cardiovascular exercise has and it gives you a bit more. So really focusing now on the benefits of lifting things around the house and how exercise and then of course nutrition. We’re going to talk about creatine but also how other macronutrients especially protein come into play. And then when you combine those two, are we doing enough to optimize longevity? And we hope that we are. Yeah. And so what are the reference points you’re drawing on? How do you know the things you know? Are you doing your own research? Yeah, so I did my uh graduate school in Canada uh cell biology degree and then I moved into my masters and PhD looking in kinesiology. So it’s interesting that I fell into creatine supplementation research by accident. I was doing my masters on an amino acid called glutamine. And at the time about 20 30 years ago, glutamine was the biggest rage. Everybody was taking this non-essential amino acid and hoping that it would have body composition improvements. uh and I sort of determined it was worthless in young healthy individuals from a body composition uh standpoint and at the same time a good colleague of mine was doing creatine and I started to notice these young biological males were getting bigger stronger faster and then another study bigger stronger faster and then when you go to the research on creatine it was very stimulating in a sense that we’re now improving things that we know with aging go down so then I turned my focus completely to healthy aging and trying to get you know grandparents and great-grandparents and your parents to live longer free of disease but wait let’s start young start as early as you can and move forward yeah and so you got really compelled by creatine I want to talk about all these things nutrition protein weight training etc but on this subject of creatine what was it that compelled you so much to start you you did start doing your own research on creatine I did and I started to take creatine so you know it was this natural metabolite that we’re synthesizing in the liver and brain if you take a little bit more not a lot just a little bit more than what we’re probably taking in from the food uh sources such as red meat and seafood. Can it have benefits? And sure enough, it’s now the most researched supplement out there. It’s overtaken protein and caffeine uh from an erogenic perspective and it’s gone global not just for males but of course uh females and centurions and elderly. So it’s very fascinating the explosion in this research product. What is the sort of um not evolutionary backdrop but I guess physiological backdrop of why humans need creatine but also why they might not be getting optimal amounts. Yeah, that’s a great question. So uh adenazine triphosphate or ATP is the energy currency of all our cells and think of your muscle doing work or shoveling the driveway or or walking. You’re using your muscles and you need to maintain that level of energy to to maintain exercise. Well, creatine comes to the rescue to help maintain your energy currency. So if Batman, which gets all the press, is ATP, Robin is creatine. Creatine comes to the rescue. It’s his best friend to help maintain these levels. Now, when you exercise at a high intensity, you know, sprinting, weightlifting, those ATP stores do become jeopardized. And that’s why creatine sort of sacrifices itself uh to come to the rescue. So that’s why anorobic sports, the World Cup just started. These individuals will be using a lot of creatine stores in their muscle. The question is, do they have enough? And if they had more, could they play better? And so, our body makes creatine naturally. That’s correct. It is making about 1 to three grams a day, but only in two areas. So, this will be quite shocking for people. We’re only actually making it in the liver and the brain. We don’t make it in skeletal muscle, but you store 95% in our muscle. So, when it’s being made in the liver or brain, the brain will keep it there, but in the liver, it will get transported in the blood up to your or skeletal muscle. The question is, well, what if we need more? And that’s where dietary creatine from red meat or seafood or supplementation comes into play. So, are we deficient in creatine? There are small populations with unfortunately they were born with the inability to synthesize creatine. Uh they would have a deficiency and they are required to take supplementation. The other unique population is vegans and vegetarians. So, vegan and vegetarian diet is extremely healthy. The downfall though is they’re not getting any dietary creatine because creatine is only found in animal-based flesh. So red meat, seafood, and poultry. They’re naturally synthesizing about one to two, maybe even three grams a day through amino acids in their food. But vegans and vegetarians respond literally the best on the planet because now they’re taking in a supplement to allow that in. And is it thought that historically we would naturally have consumed more creatine? That’s a good point. So back, you know, hunter and gather age, a lot of meat, they were consuming quite a bit through dietary products. Just say if you only wanted to get three grams of creatine through food, you’d have to eat quite a bit of meat to do that. And then it comes into the dilemma of what if you don’t eat meat or you just can’t afford it. Yeah, creatine has exploded over the recent over the last couple of years. I I saw a stat that said I think in women it had gone up to about 3% of women take the creatine and um in men it’s slightly higher. It’s still a little bit lower in terms of consumption in women from the stats that I saw. And I think that in part is because there’s still some prevailing myths about creatine. When I when I speak to some of my friends, people know that I interview a lot of um health experts and scientists and PhDs on that have done research on supplements. They ask me the first question I get asked a lot is what other supplements should I definitely take? And when I mention creatine, it’s always met with a certain set of rebuttals because there are some prevailing myths. You’ve got some myths. Yes. about creatine on the cards in front of you. Can you reveal one by one what they are? So this is definitely the number one myth. Creatine damages your kidneys. So when you take in creatine to the body, it gets stored as creatine. But when you metabolize it, sort of sort of thinking leaking from the muscle, it gets leaked out as creatinin. And most people watching like, oh that was on my blood requisition form. And right below creatin was something called EGFR. So glomeir filtration rate is an estimation of your kidney health. So the problem is when individuals on creatine supplementation, they go to their doctor for their annual blood work. Their creatinin might be a little bit elevated and that’s only from the breakdown of the uh the compound and then unfortunately their filtration rate is lower. So then their doctor gets really surprised and they’re like stop taking creatine because it’s hurting your kidneys. What typically happens they go back or stopping creatine and then they check their kidneys again and it’s fine. So I would say 99 out of 100 times uh that it’s a false positive. So, this is by far the biggest uh myth and there’s been randomized control trials for several years showing that creatine causes no detrimental effects to the kidneys. I had exactly that twice on my blood test. Yes. And if you’re also creatin could be elevated if you’re on a high meat diet, a little bit dehydrated. So, uh those that are exercising uh is very very elevated. So, always tell your doctor you’re on creatine supplementation because your creatin could be a little bit higher. Okay. Yep. Myth number two, creatine makes you retain water. So, this is really important and I think this is one of the main reasons females were really hesitant to take creatine. If you take too much too soon, it can lead to an increase in water retention. So, you’ve probably heard of the creatine loading phase. This is where supplement companies want you to take about 20 or 30 grams a day for about 5 or 7 days. That has been shown to increase water retention acutely. So maybe it’ll reside there for about 3 to 5 days but after that when you go on a maintenance phase of about 3 to five grams a day uh that water retention goes away. So in the initial stages if done improperly or too much it can cause a little bit of water retention. The good news for everybody watching is after about the first week that water’s inside our muscle. So now we’re volumizing the size of our muscle sort of like a balloon here is full of water. Now after a while the water is now going into our muscle. It’s a lot bigger compared to a deflated balloon or muscle that didn’t have any water. So creatine is osmotic. Water likes to follow creatine. So by taking it into the muscle, it gets a lot bigger. And that’s good because a swollen muscle stimulates protein synthesis to get bigger and stronger. Oh, really? A swollen muscle stimulates protein synthesis. Synthesis. Yeah. So when you have water coming in, that’s a really good thing. And creatine does that. And that’s one of the main mechanisms why it works. So what does that mean? Does that mean that if I have creatine in my muscle, I’m more likely to gain muscle? That is potentially the the factor because when you’re having or trapping water, it turns on all these signaling pathways that are involved in protein synthesis. And one of the biggest robust evidence is that creatine increases lean tissue mass and regional muscle thickness with weight training over time. Oh wow. Okay. Yeah. Cuz a lot of people are concerned that they’re going to put on lots of weight and be bloated with creatine. The interesting there is if you take smaller, more micro doing there’s hardly any effect. And this might come surprising, but if you did a 6 week study pre and post after creatine, you only increase mass by86 kg. Oh wow. And the majority of that is lean mass. So at the end of the day, you know, a pound and a half is not a lot. Lean mass. Lean mass. Yeah. Which is we think of lean mass, most people think of it as muscle, but lean mass in our body, that includes water, connective tissue, organs, as well as skeletal muscle. And about 50% of our lean mass is muscle. Okay. Yeah. It’s great. Okay. Okay, myth number three, creatine is only for men. Uh this is 100% false. When you go through the totality of all the evidence, uh females respond extremely robustly to creatine supplementation. They get profound benefits in strength, endurance, and performance. They lose a little bit of body fat. So, there’s another idea that people thought water retention was causing an increase in in fat mass. We’ve done some meta analysis now showing that creatine reduces fat mass. Uh, females get an increase in lean mass as well. Uh, and I’m happy this one came up because from our lab with bone health, females do respond very favorably with creatine and bone. And we can talk about that as well. Myth number four. Oh, I can’t believe you did this one to me. Creatine causes hair loss. So, obviously looking at me and uh I’m a pr prolific uh creatine researcher and taking creatine religiously for like the last two and a half decades. People would look at me and say, “Well, obviously looking at him, creatine caused this, and I was going bald before I started taking creatine.” This myth came from a study in rugby players decades ago, uh, where creatine, about 20 to 25 grams a day for 7 days, increase a hormone called DHT. It’s a precursor for testosterone, which unfortunately has been linked to hair follicle loss and thinning. Uh but the ironic thing is when creatine was given to these young males the hormone went up but it was still within the biological range and no measure of hair follicle thinning or loss uh was done. The cool thing is just a few years ago they decided to put this uh uh theory to the test and 5 g in young males for about 6 to 8 weeks of training caused no uh detrimental effect uh from hair thinning follicle loss. So my appearance was probably based on something else. So there’s no evidence to that as well. Myth number five, creatine causes muscle cramps. No, I think this is so overplayed. When creatine t is taken into the body and water will follow it, now you’re super hydrating the muscle. So, one of the main issues with muscle cramps is it could be, you know, uh uh dehydration in the muscle. Some people have heard of sodium potassium. That’s why Gatorade was invented. But if anything, sodium decreases muscle cramps and it super hydrates. So, in the hotter environments, June, July, August, creatine is going to be one of your best friends. So those are the five myths. We talked there about weight training. What is this very curious graph? It seems to show that creatine helped gain muscle mass through a training regime. Oh yes. So this is actually showing now that uh when you take creatine supplementation, you’re actually getting an improvement in training volume. So when you go in the weight room, you look at the load you’re lifting by the reps by the sets. So it actually goes up. Um, and then when you don’t, obviously, it would go down over time as well. So, the cool thing here is that one of the main reasons you get an enhancement in performance is that creatine seems to enhance training capacity. So, a lot of people say, I’ve taken creatine, now I got an increase in the number of reps or uh sets that I can perform and that probably leads to a stimulation over time. So, this is a 8week study. That is an 8week study. Very short term as well. So you can see that the number of weeks came uh down when they weren’t taking creatine and then when they started to take it, it went up as well. And this leads to another important point. So, and it’s often not talked about when you take creatine for at least a month. People say, “Well, how long does it stay in my muscles if I go on vacation? What if I can’t take creatine?” And in skeletal muscle, it takes about a month for those elevated levels to come back down. in the brain. We don’t have a lot of evidence, but it’s speculated it takes about anywhere between five uh weeks to about three months for those elevations to come back down. And this essentially means that if I take creatine, I will be able to train harder harder or longer or more frequent. So, one of the things with creatine, it allows the muscle to recover quicker. So, you might be able to get back to the uh you know, if an athletes train twice a day. Um so, either one of those seems to be one of the most plausible mechanisms. And why is there a big dip in the middle of this graph? So that is actually showing where the individuals would train and then without creatine and then take it over time as well. Oh, okay. So they they’d stop. It’s a draining and then taking it again. Correct. Okay. So they start taking it uh taking it at the at week four and then that’s where the elevations go up. Oh yeah. So it goes to show that when you have creatine everything is elevated. If you stop taking it, it takes about 4 weeks to come back down, but you’ll notice that it was at the same level as a placebo. and then when they take it again they get a rebound effect. So I think this has application for people who have injured themselves and they now need to go back and start training. If you take creatine it can accelerate the rehabilitation program. H and it does it I guess because it makes your training volume increase. Correct. It makes your muscle mass gain increase. It can gain increase in muscle mass. It’s not great. That’s probably going to be a bit surprising to a lot of people. A lot of people take creatine for huge increases in muscle. You get an increase in lean mass by about 1.2 2 kg. But as I I said previously, remember only half of that is skeletal muscle. So creatine, yes, can with weight training improve muscle mass, but it has more robust evidence for muscle performance. Is there anything else we need to know about creatine’s linked to muscle mass? I think one of the big things is that it decreases something called protein breakdown. So that might allow the muscle to maintain its integrity or recover quicker. Uh but overall when you combine creatine with a standard weight training program you should expect a greater increase than weight training alone. Absolutely. And that is that’s across all ages which is really important. Okay. And the studies you’ve done in your own lab what are those how wide varing are those and how many have you done? We’ve oh god we’ve done at least 30 to 40 studies um in our lab published over 120 papers just on creatine alone. Wow. And the interesting thing is that from young individuals to middle age to older adults, we see a very common uh theme that combined with weight training uh creatine about 5 g or more uh we use typically a little bit more seems to have uh beneficial effects on muscle mass uh muscle strength as well as performance. Absolutely. Can you show me what 5 g looks like? Absolutely. So this would be a standard 5 g dose which is one scoop. One scoop. Now, keep in mind that can be found in in meat or seafood, but you’re going to require a lot. Yeah. Okay. So, 5 g is one scoop. One scoop. And you’re saying we don’t necessarily need to do this loading phase that bodybuilders would correct. So, the loading phase is the most rapid way to saturate your muscles. Now, that’s very beneficial, but that would be four scoops. So, four scoops is a loading phase per day, and it’s very effective, but the issue is, can it cause some adverse GI tract irritation, things like that? where anidoli people have report that but a lot of people from a muscle perspective will start with just five grams a day and that’s very beneficial and at five grams a day what benefits am I getting five oh across from a skeletal muscle perspective you get a whole plethora so you definitely get an increase in lean tissue mass or muscle size uh and then again muscle performance uh muscle strength power and endurance and the other one that never gets a lot of press which should is functional ability an older adult to sit the stand uh this has applications getting off the toilet out of the bed out of a car so as we get older we’re losing muscle strength and performance as well as functionality and creatine and weight training seems to come to the rescue there. And is there anyone that shouldn’t take creatine? You know, I can’t find anybody that can’t or shouldn’t. The safety profile is exceptional. If they have pre-existing medical conditions, they definitely need to speak to their doctor. Uh besides that, I’m not seeing any reason a healthy individual can’t take or shouldn’t take creatine. And pregnant women. So, that’s an interesting uh colleague of mine, Dr. Stacy Elliot out of Australia is now finally looking at human uh trials with pregnancy uh going into breast milk into uh the fetus. So uh it’s still in its infancy. The jury is still out, but as it currently stands, it seems to be relatively safe and well tolerated. Okay. So not all creatine is made the same, right? Correct. There’s lots of different types of creatine. Some people take creatine gummies. Um I mean I have some different types of creatine here. Creatine monohydrate, creatine hydrochlorate. Okay. I I remember looking when I was in a shelf a couple of months ago and seeing like five or six different types of creatine. Um what is the the optimal type of creatine to take and why? So by far creatine monohydrate and that goes against all the new marketing forms. So creatine monohydrate is simply creatine linked to one water molecule. When you take it into the body the water molecule dissolves is identical to uh what’s being produced in the liver and the brain. All the evidence that you ever hear about the safety and efficacy of creatine is based on the old boring from 1832 creatine monohydrate. There’s new market forms of creatine such as hydrochloride which does have evidence behind it. There’s many other forms, but the only downfall with all these market forms is it’s never been shown to be safer or more effective than creatine monohydrate. The other big thing for your viewers is make sure it has crea pure or some form of creatine monohydrate on uh the label and then and that it’s also third party tested. Create pure. Creapure is from Germany. It has the highest um standard of of qualification and um a scrutiny and then NSF certified or another third party certified. So those are the three things that I personally would look for. Monohydrate, creure is the type and then NSF certified or third party certification which is that little logo at the bottom. That little logo here at the bottom. That’s right. What does that mean? So, NSF is the National Sanitation Foundation. It’s a third party organization that will independently take the the supplement and then third party test it and then you get a certificate of analysis to make so there there’s no uh contaminants like lead or arsenic or things like that. So, that’s something for the consumers watching to definitely be aware of when you go to uh the store. And we’ve got this uh thing here in front of us. This is the dosing dilemma. Um we talked about muscle there. Have we checked muscle off or is there anything else to cover? No. So, how many scoops do you think is optimal for skeletal muscle? Oh, uh, skeletal muscle. Yeah. Your bicep, your tricep, you know, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Five. Five g. Five g. So, that’s only going to be one little scoop. Okay. Okay. That’s probably very viable. And you’re correct. Across the lifespan, 5 g has been shown to be effective. But here’s a little bit of caveat. If you’re over the age of 50, maybe you want to have a little bit more because as we get older, the creatine in our lower legs is more jeopardized and therefore you might need a bit more. Okay. Okay. So, this is without the loading phase. So, this is if you just want to take a little bit per day and do you have to take it consistently? Good question. So, ideally, yes, there is evidence that you can just take it on the training days, but we haven’t talked about the brain yet. And the reason why I think you should take it every day is it likes to go to other tissues on a daily basis. So that’s about seven grams. How that’s about seven or eight grams. And that seems to be very safe and viable uh dose to be shown to be effective for improving muscle mass. Okay. And performance. I I do have um an issue sometimes when I take a little bit more creatine which is I feel I wouldn’t say laded but I get a little bit dizzy almost. 100%. What is that? So there is a mechanism. So creatine is the biggest methyl scavenger in the body and without boring your viewers but methyl groups are used for everything. They’re also used to synthesize something called adrenaline and our neurotransmitters. You know the things that we get excited about. So when you take in too much creatine typically on an empty stomach or in a dehydrated state that will spare methyl groups in the body to be used because you’re taking so much in and then it says where can I go? So since creatine is now being taken into a supplement, these methyl groups are available in your body to go elsewhere to do work and they like to synthesize adrenaline and that’s why you feel more uh um energetic so to speak. When you say synthesize adrenaline, what does that mean? Yeah, that means you’re creating more of the hormone called epinephrine and that you know you hear about fight or flight or you’re nervous or whichever it is, it gives you a little bit more of that. So that’s why sometimes you feel a little bit jittery or things like that. Yeah. Sometimes I can feel a little bit sick as well if I do too much. Yeah. And so that’s where it’s sort of the new area of interest for me is this micro doing based on that. So we’re starting to see some evidence now that if you take smaller amounts all throughout the day, it does not have any adverse effects. If anything, it seems to be a little bit more tolerable. Um so you could take a few grams in the morning, a few grams in the evening or whichever. I think one of the best uh ways to take it that never gets any press is I put five grams in my water bottle during my workout. And so now I’m consuming a little bit of creatine as I do my weight lifting or cardio and then I’ll consume a little bit in the morning as well. So I take about 10 grams a day at minimum on on a daily basis. Other people will take more or less but that’s just how I get it in. Yeah. I find that if I do take a little bit in the morning and then a little bit later it’s much better% I don’t get any weird feelings. That’s correct. And uh it seems to be more consistent and appreciated for individuals because if you do or are susceptible to any fluctuations in weight gain, water retention or GI tract irritation, those seem to definitely go away. And we’ve god, we’ve assessed over a thousand individuals in my lab and that seems to be a very viable approach. Not a lot of taste to it, is there? It’s not the best tasting. It’s very bland, very boring. Um but there’s other companies trying to make it more flavorful, things like that. The cool thing is with uh creatine, you can put it in anything. You can put it in yogurt, uh uh a juice, whichever it is. You can now put it in coffee. There’s a little bit of controversy over the dose of caffeine. I think anywhere lower than 350 milligrams is fine, and that’s going to be most standard uh coffees or teas as well. So, whichever allows you to become consistent is is a great way to do it. Yeah. Okay. So, bone. Tell me what I need to know about. So, now we talked about muscle. How many do you think for the skeleton here? Um the same. Okay. Seven. Unfortunately, the lowest dose ever been shown to have bone benefits is 8 grams all the way up to 12. So now we’re in a dosing dilemma already. We just started. We have a little bit disconnect between muscle and bone. 3 to 5 g seems to be really good for muscle. A little bit more is fine, but bone needs to be a little bit more. And that’s primarily based on some of our work from our lab where we’ve shown that about 8 to 12 grams a day with exercise. And that’s crucial. If you do not exercise, there’s never been a study ever shown to have bone benefits. But if you do perform weightlifting, one of the very cool things in post-menopausal females is that creatine seemed to reduce the rate of bone mineral density loss around the hip region. So, it didn’t increase bone density, but it decrease bone density loss and it also seemed to maintain or improve the structure of the bone a little bit more. So, that has profound beneficial effects, especially as we get older. If those individuals on creatine were to fall, maybe they might not fracture their hip. And as we both know, if you fracture your hip, you’re going to be placed in long-term care. You’re going to be inactive for at least six months. So, creatine has some bone benefits. They’re not great. They don’t improve bone density. So, they’re not going to be an osteoporotic cure, but there is something there, especially if you’re prone to uh osteoporosis or osteopenia. And what’s the mechanism there that’s just stopping bone loss? Yeah, it’s very interesting. So, if you understand a 24-hour cycle that creatine sort of stimulates these bone building cells to become more energized, think of Super Mario, the original Nintendo when he got the mushroom, maybe became energized. Creatine does that as well. And then on the flip side, creatine seems to decrease uh the osteoclass or bone breakdown cells. So, by a synergistic uh mechanism, it seems to cause this turnover to go a little bit better, causing the bone to maintain its structure. is very similar to a bisphosphinate that someone would be taking to maintain their bone health. A bisphosphinate. Yeah. It’s a drug that a lot of individuals will take if they’re prone to bone loss. Uh obviously creatine is not a drug, but it has some of those similar properties. So, we’ve got muscle. I need to take about seven or eight grams to get those benefits. With bone, it’s a little bit more. A little bit more. You don’t mean additionally. No, in in total. So, now this is where we get into the daily dosing dilemma. We’ve gone from 3 to 5 g or a little bit more for muscle. Bone is maybe 8 to 10 or a little bit more. So what do you think on the brain the hottest topic 10 10 okay so that would be you know two scoops I’m just assuming this increases yeah so the interesting thing here is that the brain will naturally make its own creatine very similar to the liver so since the brain is actually making its own creatine it may not require as much or any on a daily basis so here’s the brain obviously and in different regions creatine is being synthesized and being used all throughout so This organ is about 2 kg but uses 20% of our daily energy at rest. So just think about that. 20% of the amount of energy we’re consuming from food or using is being used by the brain. But what if you’re stressed? Sleep deprivation. Your dog got you up in the middle of the night to pee and you couldn’t fall back to sleep. Uh university students cramming for a midterm. Um now all the countries look at the World Cup. They’re going to be up stress, you know, different time zones. Then all of a sudden the healthy brain becomes a metabolically stressed brain. So your guess about 10 grams on average is fine because the brain on a nonstressed day is naturally making is enough and it’s healthy. But now we get into a more difficult what about those metabolic stressors? So again all the neurons in the brain are being used. So what about sleep deprivation? 10 g for sleep deprived. You when was the last time you slept 10 straight hours?

It’s been a while. It’s been a while. For even you, the pause there, you know, that’s that’s alarming because you’re thinking, “When was the last time I got a really good night’s sleep?” Mhm. What if you were up for 24 hours? Gosh. An ER doctor, traveling different time zones, all these come into play. Yeah. You remember on a healthy brain, you know, adequate sleep, uh, prop the brain is actually making enough. But when you’re stressed, night shift workers, uh, military pilots, ER doctors, whichever it is, that’s where the brain starts to rely on supplementation. So, unfortunately for the brain, creatine really struggles to get through the bloodb brain barrier. But if it does, now you might need longer or higher dosages. So, what about sleep deprived? I have no idea. Okay, so let’s say there’s five, there’s 10. What do you think? It’s going to be more, isn’t it? It’s going to be a lot more. Here’s 15. Couple studies showed some benefits. Now, let’s do 20. Remember that loading phase? The best overall studies currently right now that use an MRI for the brain have showed about 20 grams seems to have some effect acutely. But the two studies last year to Germany even showed this. There’s 25 And here’s 30. So a classic study was done last year when they gave 30 grams to a group of young individuals who volunteered to be sleepd deprived for 21 hours. And that level of creatine increased uh creatine levels in the brain and it offset some of the negative effects. Remember that was an acute episode of 21 hours of sleep deprivation. They’ve done a subsequent study going down to about uh 0.2 grams or about 14 grams. it didn’t have the same effect. So remember, a healthy brain likely doesn’t need any creatine, but a stressed brain likely does. And the more stressed it is, the higher the dose seems to come into play. There’s a lot of nuances with the brain. Obviously, we just show different regions, which we don’t have a lot of information, but overall, it seems that 20 g seems to be the most viable dose. When the brain is stressed, we basically need to start dumping out quite a bit more. So when you get from this area on, the brain healthy likely doesn’t benefit from any type of supplementation cuz it’s making its own. But in these areas when you’re stressed, it likely does. The area of nuance or why it’s become so popular is I think most people fall into the stressed environment. And if they’re not getting enough creatine through their diet and or supplementation, that’s why this big explosion on let’s take more to sort of check off all the boxes. So I take 10 grams a day at minimum to check off muscle, right? That checks off bone for the most part. And I’m pretty sure over time 10 grams would do the most part for stress. Now, since I just flown different time zones today, I’m taking 20 to 25 grams based on this acutely. And then when I go back to a non-stressed environment back to Canada, I’ll go back to my regular 10. So, I look at the 10 g dose or a little bit more as kind of being like a safety net. If you’re only taking three to five, you definitely will get muscle benefits. Will you eventually get brain benefits? There’s a small chance, but taking a little bit more, and remember the cool thing for your viewers, we’re not talking about protein. If we were talking about protein, the entire thing would be hundreds of grams. We’re only talking about maybe 20 grams. And that may only need to be done acutely. You know, when you’re really going through metabolic stress, look at university students, five final exams, hardly any sleep for a week. This is where this would come into play. I look at flight attendants or pilots. They’ll fly from Canada to Europe and then they go back home. their circadium rhythms are are all over the place. So I I think of of all these scenarios. The area that I was surprised I watched one of the episodes of the Aerys tour and you know money can’t stop circadian rhythm. So as much as Taylor Swift would have I was marveled by 3 hours of performance in 90 to 100,000 people of all her running around and then when you see her they’re totally gassed. They finish the concert they’re totally mentally exhausted. That’s a situation where this could come into enhanced performance. Then you think of uh celebrities, you think of uh uh athletes, these a lot of high pressure things like imagine being in the World Cup final. The pressure, the mental capacity, that’s where creatine seems to come into play. There’s a lot of nuances. Um we still don’t know a lot. So I think the big takehome for people is that if you’re going through periods of stress, a little bit more is okay. Uh we don’t know any adverse effects. We don’t think there are any. Um, but again, if you’re just taking creatine for muscle, bone, in the brain, you’re likely going to be checking off all those boxes. And when we start getting the the brain benefits up at this end, what are those brain benefits that were recorded in the studies? Is it I’m going to feel like I slept or is it something more internal? You likely won’t feel anything. Oh, okay. However, when you get to tasks the next day, so for example, you’re up all night, you take a high dose of creatine, then you have to go write the final or the midterm or you can’t remember. It’s those things when your memory and and and doing puzzles or basic tasks or what about a stroke test? What’s a stroke test? So, I’m going to get you to do this. I apologize in advance. It’s one of the most fatiguing things that you can do and it was one of the most robust studies to show the efficacy behind creatine. So, all I simply want you to do is you can see that there’s uh words and then corresponding letters. But you’ll notice that the color is incorrect. So up here you would see, you know, you have red, blue, green, blue, black. But the Stroop test is now looking at the bottom part. Okay. So I’ve tried it. I can only get the line two without making a mistake. Okay. Okay. So I want you to do this out loud but as fast as possible. And am I reading the words or the color? You’re reading the color. Okay. So the first one is green. Yeah. Uh yes. Okay. Fine. You want to do it as fast as possible. As fast as possible. Okay. So, let’s see how you do. Gosh, this is confusing already. I hit the second one and I got it wrong in my head. Depends how much creatine you’re talking about. I don’t think I’ve had creatine today. Okay. Okay. Green, red, yellow, green, blue, black, orange, red, blue, green, blue, pink, black, gray, yellow, red, blue, green. Oh, [  ] There you go. See, I failed the study that they did, get this, they had to do this for 90 straight minutes. Oh, wow. So, you can imagine how fatiguing that is for someone studying for the MCATs for medical school or, you know, midterms being sleepd deprived and you’re not sleep deprived and you struggled and you got slower. Now, you have to do this for 90 minutes. Wow. And in this classic study, they gave 20 gram of creatine uh before they did the test and then after. And it really improved their ability with speed and cognition there. It’s just a simple example to show wow our brain is seeing one thing we got to me maintain memory and cognition and creatine can help maintain some of those uh factors. So you won’t feel anything but performance of activities like that come into play. Do you know how much it improved the performance on the street? I I would have to get the graph but it did prove statistically significant. Yeah. What else is there for me to know about the impact that creatine can have on the brain? Yeah. You know, I think as a as a podcast who sometimes sits here for many, many hours interviewing people on a range of subjects. I’m always trying to find if there’s any way that I can perform better mentally. Yeah. So, it doesn’t boost the brain. It likely just brings those levels back up to normal levels before stress and it might give you a little bit more. So, uh there’s been populations Alzheimer’s disease, clinical depression, uh concussion. When those populations are evident, one of the biggest uh uh factors is that they have reduced creatine in their brain. So maybe supplementation can get through the bloodb brain barrier. The brain says, “I need help.” And that’s why you see some improvements there as well. So I like to think of the brain that creatine can act as a safety net. Um, and it certainly won’t cause any detrimental effects. But it’s always good to have that because you never know when I give you a stroke test. Like I’m going to find you tomorrow and give you this and say you’re going to be practicing all night. Will you perform better? But that’s just an example of something that we go through on a daily basis. if someone’s working on Wall Street or whichever it is, a really high stress demand, uh you know, stuck in traffic for two hours, these all add up and it’s a cascade of stressors that unfortunately most people go through and now we have a nutrient that is being made in the brain, but during times of stress, it likely needs a little bit of help. What about inflammation in the body? So, what is inflammation and is there a link between creatine supplementation and inflammation? There is. So, uh unfortunately, uh I’m 49. So at the age of 40, I have this systemic inflammation that went up. And we all know this because around the age of 30 where, you know, you can work out and nothing hurts. And all of a sudden, you wake up one day when you’re in your 40s and 50s and things hurt. And so systemic inflammation is happening all the time. And unfortunately, it accelerates aging. We’re more sore more often and it can lead to a lot of arthritis or or joint pain and things like that. Creatine does have anti-inflammatory effects, but a big distinction. Creatine is not like acetaminophen or ibuprofen which directly as a drug effect uh blocks that but it has been shown to decrease markers of inflammation specifically during long duration exercise. So this is an important distinction. Weight training is too acute but when you do iron man triathlon things like that those individuals who took creatine 20 grams a day for 5 days beforehand they had reductions in inflammation markers. So that might allow that individual to recover quicker, not get ill and then perform more optimally. From a weight training perspective, we see that it decreases markers of muscle damage. So it has these anti-inflammatory and anti catabolic effects as well. Interesting. Yeah. And what about people that have neurodeenerative disorders? Yes. So Alzheimer’s is is the area we’re really starting to focus on. And a couple single arm studies came out last year by Matt Taylor and Aaron Smith showing that 20 grams a day for 8 weeks did increase brain creatine levels in Alzheimer’s patients and it seemed to improve measures of memory and cognition there as well. So again using the same mechanisms it decreases inflammation. It maintains brain bioenergetics and it might actually have a neural protection effect as well. There’s evidence in cell cultures and in rodents that there’s some lines there but in humans we’re still in in the infancy. But if it can have any benefit to any neurological disease, it’s huge. And there’s a lot of hope, especially around Alzheimer’s. There was an 8week trial in Alzheimer’s patients that also showed modest muscle gains. A 1.9 kg increase in hand grip strength, which is a key predicator of survival in dementia patients. Um, which was a landmark study of 20 Alzheimer’s patients found that taking 20 g of creatine daily for 8 weeks increased brain creatine levels by 11% and significantly improved the cognitive test scores. they showed that’s the journal of psychiatry and brain science and that one’s really exciting and I think more future uh studies will come out the limitation with those is that there was no placebo to compare to but again it’s just showing that yes creatine can be used as an effective adjunct yeah and because there is impact on our brain is there impact on our mental health with creatine excellent point so the best lines of evidence here come from clinical depression and anxiety uh the group out of Utah and United States have clearly shown that creatine in addition to other therapy So this is important. Creatine by itself has never been shown to be a standalone, but with SSRIs or cognitive behavior therapy or methamphetamine use in populations under medical supervision, the addition of creatine seem to improve symptoms and it’s likely going back to all the ones we’ve already talked about where it improves uh bioenergetics. It improves uh neuro uh transmission or neurom modulation. Uh but it also in animals has been shown to improve a protein called BDNF. Uh so this protein is involved in brain plasticity. So there’s a whole bunch of emerging evidence and hope that creatine one day will be used uh as a treatment in the toolbox for a lot of these clinical uh issues. PTSD also comes to my mind. There was a study in Gatorade Sports Science Institute which PubMed published that said a study of over 200,000 adults found that those who consumed the least amount of creatine in their daily diet had the highest rates of depressive symptoms. Yes, that’s correct. And the common denominators, those with clinical depression or anxiety, when you measure their baseline creatine stores, very similar to concussion or Alzheimer’s, they’re reduced. So therefore, obviously, this condition or series of conditions is causing a disruption at the brain bioenergetic level and creatine levels are decreasing. And there’s another in PubMed that said in a clinical trial of women with major depression, adding 5 g of creatine to their daily anti-depressant, Yes. doubled their remission rate over 8 weeks. That’s correct. Yes. And that group is from Perry Renshaw’s group out of Utah. Uh they do great work. Our hope and I’m collaborating uh with some colleagues now to look at creatine as a standalone treatment versus placebo. Could it have some beneficial effects there? So that’s very exciting to come out. If I don’t want to be supplementing with creatine, is there what are the foods that I can eat that are high in creatine naturally? They’re primarily uh animal based. So seafood and red meat. Um you know, herring is going to have one of the highest concentrations. uh salmon uh as well as beef. Uh very small amounts in milk and dairy. So you’d have to drink all the the milk in the Jersey cow to get a sufficient amount. So uh it definitely comes down to animal based flesh. Yeah. There’s some other studies that I that I love that I’ve I think I’ve heard you talk about before. One of them was um young athletes who took 5 g of creatine daily slept an average of 1 hour longer on training days. Yeah, we did that study a few years ago in in young biological females who were healthy and on the days that they train and took creatine. This is interesting because they actually slept an hour longer uh compared to a placebo. So this is a very interesting fact. So creatine, you know, we now know it has brain bioenergetics. And there’s two arguments. If it’s making the brain recover, wouldn’t you need less sleep right now? In this study, it showed that improved. So maybe these individuals trained at a higher capacity and allowed the brain to have more homeostasis to come back. So this is an a study that needs to be replicated in males as well to see can creatine improve sleep quantity and if it is I think that’s a gamecher. I I think everybody on the planet would raise their hand and say hey I need more sleep. Is there anything else we haven’t covered as it relates to creatine? You know the expected gains versus the hype gains. I think there’s evidence there that creatine can have an effect. I I think it’s getting overhyped especially around the brain for what it can do. It’s one tool in the toolbox and I think it’s it’s one of those things that I’d like to show or you know talk about for sure. Yeah. Well, what do you mean by that? So, if you think of a toolbox when it comes to a plan, whenever you need to go fix things, you simply say, “Where’s my toolbox?” You can’t do anything without a plan. And and the way I like to preface this is the most popular tool in anybody’s toolbox is the hammer. Now, from a lifestyle perspective, what do you think the hammer represents? What would you decide that the hammer represents? Um, as in like a Is it weight training? Is it cardio? Is it creatine? Is it protein? Or is it sleep? Sleep. Okay. So, I say weight training is going to be the hammer. Okay. Okay. Now, what about the screwdriver? Always need a screwdriver. Creatine. No, I think aerobic training or sleep comes way before creatine. Okay. But most people say, “Hey, I can fix a lot of things with that.” Now remember, we have a nice big toolbox. I like to think of creatine as the multiffactorial wrench or screwdriver because creatine has profound benefits for muscle, a little bit for bone, of course, brain and other areas of the body. So you can hit something with this. You can open it up and fix something with this. It’s heavy. You can also pull out the measuring tape. Your argument, sleep, this could be protein, whichever it is. So when you put all these things in your toolbox, you’re now having a greater comprehensive plan to improve health. So you said weight training was the hammer hammer. I like to consider if you were to choose one modality of exercise, weight training is a little bit superior to cardio. You get pretty much all the same benefits of cardiovascular exercise and then you get more with obviously an increase in lean tissue mass and performance. Uh weight training if done effectively can actually improve mitochondrial health. you can improve V2 max if done correctly. Uh and you don’t need a lot of it. So I think we’ve switched from just doing cardio to now incorporating weight training to be effective. So weight training. Yes. What are the the sort of misconceptions about weight training and why are you so positive about it? Yeah. I think one of the biggest myths is that you always need to lift heavy to put on muscle mass. And worldrenowned researchers in this area have clearly shown now that lighter weights perform to a lot of effort almost to fatigue. If done correctly, you can get as the same increases in muscle mass as then compared to lifting heavy weights. However, if your goal is just to get stronger, lifting heavy is always there. So, I think this is a cool thing for people. Some days if you have a little bit of soreness or you don’t have a lot of energy, you can lift lighter weights but just to fatigue. Whereas other days, you come in Monday, you’ve had your coffee, whichever it is, you’re ready to go. You can lift heavy. So, I think there’s not one concrete way. There’s a little bit of variety here as well. And why are you putting it above cardiovascular work? Yeah, I I think the benefits there is that cardiovascular exercise will make you live longer and and healthier. But the downfall with cardiovascular exercise, it doesn’t stimulate strength or the muscle sceal system as much as we we’d hope. So improving muscle mass and that is very difficult to do with cardio. Maybe sprint interval training will do that. But the cool thing with weight training is you get cardiovascular benefits, but you also get those profound muscle sceal benefits. So if I was to tell anybody if there’s one form of exercise to do, it’s weight training. But you’ve got to do cardio as well. So do both. And if I just do weight training, what am I missing from not doing cardio training? Yeah. If you do weight training improperly, where you’re lifting heavy heavy weight with low repetitions all the time, you’re likely going to jeopardize capillary density or mitochondrial health. These are things that sort of move blood flow to and from uh your muscles. You could decrease V2 max or a fitness parameter for uh metabolic health fitness. So at the end of the day, everybody should be doing both. But if you only have time to do weight training or cardio, you still benefit because the majority of the population doesn’t do any. And how how much how often do you think? It’s amazing that it’s a small amount. So, let’s just do cardio. Most countries will say 150 minutes of physical activity at a moderate level over a week. Uh I’m okay with that. I’d like it to be higher. I’d also like the intensity to be a bit higher. So, when you tell an average individual 150 minutes a week, most people say, “Well, I’m going to do 70 or I’m going to do 30. I’m going to hold the couch down and watch Netflix. So, we’ve given 150 and we say, you know, if you can do 21 minutes or 22 minutes a day for 7 days a week, that’s going to be a brisk walk or whichever. We’d like to be at a higher intensity if possible. Now, when it comes to weight training, this might be surprising, but 2 days a week or more is all you basically need. And you can do a whole body routine. So, you don’t need to go in there and just do chest and biceps Monday and then legs Tuesday. can, but if you say I want to do whole body of training Monday, Wednesday, Friday, that is great as well. So, a little bit of volume or frequency goes a long way, especially as we get older. That’s the key. Why, especially as we get older? Well, based on this graph here, it’s clearly showing a detrimental effect. So, if you can see here, you know, you have muscle mass on the the x-axis or the y- axis, and then you’re having all the catastrophic effects as we get older. So unfortunately, you know, 20 and 30 looks great when you’re 20 40 years old. When you’re 20 and 40 years old or all the way from 20 to 40, you can see great. That’s probably the area that you’re going to have the most muscle. Yeah. But look what happens. 40, age 60, 80, and if you live to be 100, it’s catastrophic. You’re losing muscle mass at an accelerated rate on average is about 1% per year after the age of 40, even if you’re training. So if you’re training, you’re maintaining that. So this is the average sedentary inactive population. You lose strength at about 1 point or 1 to 3% even faster. Now if we were to maintain resistance training, that muscle mass would plateau. So I can’t stress this enough. Although we focused on creatine, if you were to choose one thing to do today is exercise. And the only form of exercise that really maintains muscle is weightbearing or um resistance training. And if that’s the case, you’re going to have way more muscle later on in life. So you can pick up the grandkids, you can walk those stairs, you can do more functionality things later on in life. Can you not just at, I don’t know, 60 years old, start training then? You can absolutely. And you get profound benefits. You can be 80 or 100 and you still get benefits. It’s never too late to start. But one of the things we’ve already talked about is if you do weight training and add in a little bit of creatine, it gets a bit higher. If you added in protein, it gets even higher. So again, nutrition, you know, if exercise is king, the queen is going to be nutrition. They go hand in hand all throughout lifespan. You got to have both. And on the subject of protein, you’re saying that when combined with creatine, it’s a force multiplier. It’s it’s a force multiplier when it comes to performance and lean tissue mass. So there’s been a few studies when you combine high quality protein with creatine, they been shown to increase lean tissue mass and muscle performance a little bit more than each alone. Yeah. Does the average person get enough protein through their diet? You know, I think nowadays we do and and I think this is overhyped as well. I think if you’re getting about 1.2 to 1.6 grams per kilogram. So, you know, if you’re 70 kg, that’s going to be on average about 84 to about 115 g of protein. I think we’re so conscious now of the health benefits of protein uh that most people are. I think if you’re training really intensely, 5 6 days a week, and you take a gram per pound, that’s probably the max. But a lot of times when you take an excess protein, it doesn’t go to your body area that you’re probably hoping it doesn’t all go to your muscle. It’s used for other things like hormones and uh blood cells, things like that. But I think nowadays most people are likely getting enough protein. The question is, are they getting enough high quality protein? So vegans and vegetarians can definitely get enough protein. They might just need to eat a little bit more to get all those essential amino acids which we need. Menopause. Yes, we talked a little bit briefly about menopause. Bringing both together the subjects of muscle but also of creatine. Yes. How how does those two things impact a woman’s journey through menopause? Yeah. So we know from animal cells that estrogen is highly involved in creatine metabolism. Estrogen seems to be implicated in the enzymes that are needed to make creatine and then estrogen also has a huge impact on uh uh not only brain bioenergetics but muscle metabolism as well. So as the the female goes from a premenopausal stage to permenopausal stage to the post-menopausal transition if estrogen is decreasing uh and then independent of their diet we think creatine has bone effects and muscle effects and of course we’ve talked about the cognitive effects there. So from a whole skeleton perspective, I think everybody should be, but of course the permenopausal, post-menopausal transition uh is good. And then that brings up a question about what about really young premenopausal females, you know, optimal health. What if we built up their tissues more? Maybe that would offset the rate of this decline over time as well. So that’s what we’re hoping to get to. Is creatine safe for kids? So it’s interesting you bring that up and the current body of evidence suggests yes at recommended dosages. uh good researchers uh in in the United States have put out multiple reviews at looking at creatine in uh adolescent children and teenagers improves balance, agility, body composition. If anything, they want to get at least one gram per day because in children they want to have an optimization for bone health as well as muscle development. Um but again, if any parents are watching, obviously talk to their medical practitioner. Uh but all the current reviews um currently suggest that it’s safe. And we’re talking about we’re not talking about babies here. we talking about? Yeah, we’re talking about adolescence all the way into teenage years. When it comes to baby or infancy, um, out of Australia, Stacy is starting to do that work there as well, but we don’t have a lot of data in humans yet. But that is an area to to pay attention to for sure. Yeah. What is the most important thing we haven’t talked about that we should have talked about, doctor? Yeah. I think one of the big things is the safety profile of creatine. Uh, there’s been uh, you know, hundreds of randomized control trials now on creatine. The safety profile is is exceptional. Uh last year they put out a study looking at over 25,000 cases and creatine even over 10 grams a day for many years has been very very safe and effective. Uh one area that comes up is what about the timing? Does it matter when I take it? And and the cool thing is we just got a paper accepted 2 days ago putting the nail in the coffin on this and at the end of the day you can take creatine at any time of the day. You can take it in the morning with breakfast. You can take it right before workout. I take some during. You can take it after go to bed. It doesn’t matter when you take it as well. So you can take it right before sleep and it won’t impact your sleep. No, currently we haven’t exactly assessed the effect on sleep but uh another study looked at it in the evening and it had no detrimental effect there as well. And what else? What else is the other questions that you get messaged with or asked most often? Dr. Yeah. Can I spread out creatine all throughout the day? So for example, we have like if we were to take creatine in a gummy form or a candy, you can actually have, you know, one or two of these every hour all throughout the day. You can have it uh periodically. So, you don’t have to take creatine all at once. You can take it in smaller amounts all throughout the day. And if anything, there’s been a study a few years ago showing that one gram every 30 minutes up to 20 gram dose uh seem to retain more in the body and that was beneficial as well. What do you think of these gummies? You know, there’s only been a few companies that have actually shown some validity and reliability. Um, as long as they’re third party tested, they’re very, very effective. You want to try one? Are they Are they third party tested? They’re third the green ones. Yeah. And the bottom ones third party tested. Yep. Well, but you know the stuff that makes it a gummy, is that stuff is that stuff good for you? So, the issue there is does the manufacturing trying to keep the uh creatine together uh influence it? It can. And there’s only been a few uh uh companies out there. The one you’re eating is by Create from the United States. They have had multiple trials. They’re the first uh company to actually look at randomized control trial to show improvements in volleyball players with the gummies. Children love them. older adults. This has become an area of interest where uh chewing ability or taste sensation has gone down. Uh they seem to be very convenient and effective. Uh you can have these at your desk, whichever. You don’t need the white powder to mix. So there the companies are coming up with more viable ways to get creatine in there. But to your point, you always want to make sure the company’s third party tested. It uses a high quality creatine and it actually has a source of creatine in there as well. Cuz I remember watching a YouTube video by a guy called James Smith who’s been on the show before and he did some testing on the offtheshelf creatine um and found that a lot of them didn’t contain any creatine. 90% and there was only a few and the one that you did uh consume it did. Yeah. 1.5. Isn’t that crazy that you can go buy creatine and it has no creatine? Yeah. So that’s why I think for the consumers watching you got to do a little bit of homework and look at those three things. Make sure third party tested. It has a logo clearly on the packaging. If it doesn’t, I would strongly advise you not to consume it. all the of all the studies that you’ve encountered on all the subjects we talked about muscle, protein, creatine, are there studies that were pivotal in how you think about these subjects? Yeah, there was so the the Lamark study came out in 1992 uh and it clearly showed that five g elevated creatine in the blood, but if you took multiple 5 g dosages, it maintained that throughout the day. So, this is where the dose of five grams seems to be very very viable. And the other one showed that, hey, I don’t want to take five. What if I only want to take three grams? So 3 g seems to be the lowest most effective dose and you just need to take that for one month and you’ll saturate your muscles. So again, you have options. Take as little an amount or a high amount as as you want over time. But I think one of the biggest studies is that we did was a 2-year trial in post-menopausal women where we gave.14 gram of creatine and it really seemed to improve or have an effect on bone preservation as well as muscle performance. So these are the the studies that seem to come to my mind. We’ve done quite a few uh but they seem to be the landmark ones. Yeah. And what are the supplements that you take outside of creatine? Yes, for sure. So, on a daily basis, it’s a probiotic uh with food in the morning and evening. And that’s something I just recently learned. I was taking it on an empty stomach, but probiotic, I take uh two forms of magnesium uh one before bed and then one in the day, three and eight for uh uh cognition and function. I take uh 2,000 international units of vitamin D. Um I always take protein on a sufficient basis as well. And then I take about four grams of omega-3 fatty acids. And I always take one of the omega-3 fatty acids post exercise cuz that seems to be the best time to take it. So omega-3, magnesium, vitamin D, vitamin D, probiotics, of course, creatine and uh protein. I take powder andor through uh dietary food. Every now and then I don’t eat a lot of red meat, so I’ll take iron um but um not on a consistent basis. And I’m hoping the new one is this is an area of controversy. NAD this is the you know it’s a precursor for a main enzyme that’s highly involved in metabolism there’s been evidence to suggest it goes down with aging so my eye is closely on that uh to see if that’s going to be something to come up into play and a multivitamin you know started with Flintstone vitamins as a kid and I take a multivitamin day as a safety net I noticed that when I looked at your video in the interview you did with Dr. Ronda Patrick. A lot of the comments were from people in their 60s, ‘7s, and 80s. And I wondered why that was. If you just I was just looking at the top three or four comments, and it’s a 71year-old, it’s an 82y old, it’s a 53y old who’s um contending with Alzheimer’s, right? Why is that? Yeah, I think it’s the awareness and education now, and social media has really helped with this, getting our evidence-based research out to the public, and the awareness that creatine is just not for young males to get bigger, stronger, faster. If anything, when you go to an aging body and they’re predisposed to aging related muscle loss, strength loss, functionality, bone loss, and atrophy in the brain, creatine has been shown to have effects there as well. So, I think a lot of older individual populations are becoming more aware of the effects of creatine. And of course, as we produce more research, it gets out to the public more often. So, is I’m really excited and encouraged that creatine has sort of taken on a life of its own in the last decade. And are there direct weight benefits if I’m trying to cut fat by taking creatine or is it indirect? It’s indirect. So it seems that if you increase lean mass, it might stimulate energy expenditure or turnover. And then in animal models, it has been shown to have some beneficial effects from a cellular perspective on fat. But at the end of the day, if you are seeing a reduction in fat, it’s likely that you’re improving your metabolic health with lean tissue mass. Do you think much about how to get these habits to stick? Because I imagine there’s lots of people that are aware by now that creatine is a a useful thing to take, but for whatever reason, they still don’t take it. Exactly. And I think that’s one of the biggest reasons people don’t. So, we got to come up with ways to maintain consistency. And I think whatever vehicle you want to choose to maintain that in the in the run of a day is the best. So, if it’s putting in your coffee in the morning cuz you won’t forget it, great. If it’s putting a little bit in Greek yogurt, if it’s using the gummies, whichever it is, as long as it’s a viable source of creatine, that makes it very practical and consistent for you. Uh that’s the best way. Yeah. I found that um having it on route to where I’m going being really really important. So when I come to my office in the morning, it’s all on my desk. Um so I have the supplements just on my desk and actually even before I walked into the studio today, in the green room that I have, it’s on the green room. When I’m at home, it is where the coffee machine is. Correct. And that has radically helped me. Um, otherwise I if it wasn’t within my my routine, it would wouldn’t happen. Yeah, we have a jug on the counter with all our other supplements. It’s in the pantry, it’s close by. Because if it’s in the garage, you’re like, I forgot about it. I think the other thing is with some things like creatine, it’s hard to really notice the difference sometimes. Ah, excellent point. Yeah, this is not like caffeine, you know, it’s an immediate effect. So, unlike uh caffeine, creatine takes a while to notice the effects, and they come in direct. You don’t immediately notice a massive increase in energy or alertness. It’s like after a week of weight training or even two, you’re like, “Wow, I did more repetitions. I could do more weight. Uh, I recover quickly.” Is one that we hear uh quite often. You’ll never notice with with your bone, but we have heard anecdotally with cognition, especially sleep deprivation, people do notice the effects. And I’m a n of one, but I noticed jet lag goes down quite a bit uh when I take a high dose of creatine. And you know when you start taking it, if you start taking it today, yes, if I start taking so 3 to five grams of creatine today, am I going to notice the differences today? No. It’ll probably with 3 to 5 g, you’ll probably notice it in a few weeks, if not to a month from a muscle perspective. From a brain perspective that low, you’re likely not going to notice any effect because the brain is probably making enough. But if you’re really metabolically stressed, then you might notice some memory or cognitive uh benefits after a few days. But at such a low dose, you need to be a little bit patient. But again, 3 g could saturate your skeletal muscle in 30 days. So it’s not that long of a weight. And on the cognitive side, the cognitive benefits that were observed when doing these stroop tests, had they been taking it previously or was it just administered on that particular day when the test happened? Yeah. So that one was in a week in advance with the loading phase. So they really saturated the body to try to get the effects. Okay. So they were taking it for some time. Yeah. But on the sleep deprivation study from Germany, they just gave it one bolus mega dose for 21 hours of sleep deprivation. in those individuals did perform better from a number of tests like this the next day. So if you’re like wow I got something coming up Friday unfortunately I’m not going to get any sleep at best one or two hours then a high dose might come into play and then you can go back to your more consistent routine. I think what happened or is happening is a lot of individuals who are now thinking I need to take 20 or 30 grams on a daily basis based on those studies and I’m like wait a minute are you getting enough sleep the next day because at that dose we don’t know if the neuron will swell with water and if that’s the case is that potentially causing any detrimental effects in the long term. So again, I would not uh uh recommend taking a mega dose for consistently over time. Could that downregulate your natural synthesis? Uh these are all questions that we need to look at. Yeah. So outside of the realm of creatine, outside of the realm of muscle, outside of the realm of I guess nutrition generally, what are you doing to keep yourself healthy? What is what is your routine? Yeah. So I’m religious with exercise. So I try to exercise at least 3 to four days a week with weight training. uh and add in at least 20 to 30 minutes of either moderate intensity cardio or um like a spin class. I personally like to do alternating days. Okay. So, I’ll do weight training like maybe Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and then cardio Tuesday, Thursday. Uh and then on the weekends, hiking, things like that. Um pretty religious with nutrients as well. Try to eat a really balanced diet. And my god, my failure is getting enough sleep. So, I’ve had to cut caffeine out quite a bit by past noon to allow me. I’m probably a slower metabizer um with caffeine. So, uh, I try to really optimize evidence-based research, take it into my daily life and try to promote it that way. Yeah. And is there anything you’re particularly excited about in the work and research? I’m super fascinated with the movement from the neck up. I think we know a lot about the neck down with creatine and exercise or other nutrients. I’m fascinated with the ability. What about concussion? You know, can the UFC fighter take creatine before they get hit? Could that decrease CTE or concussion or brain trauma later on in life? I think a boxing Muhammad Ali uh things like that. So there’s evidence in in in rodents that if you take creatine before head trauma, it really speeds up concussion recovery. So I’m fascinated with that as well, like almost a prophylactic. Anybody involved in head trauma, I think you should definitely look at creatine as something to be taking just in case you get hit. And then of course everything with Alzheimer’s or other areas of depression. So I’m fascinated that this nutrient which was you know 1832 it was discovered boring for the longest time because we thought we knew everything and now it’s taken a life of his own as having these profound benefits we never even thought would happen yet. A lot of people continue to be the sort of leading expert on this subject for many reasons. Do you think there’ll be a time where you you stop researching creatine and you move on to something else? You know that’s interesting. I would have said yes about 5 years ago but now no. There’s too much to do even with skeletal muscle. If you were to say, “What’s the best dose Darren to take?” I say, “I have no clue.” Every creatine researcher said, “I don’t know.” We still don’t know the best dose that every person can take that will check off all the boxes, especially in the brain. We’re just giving an estimate that I take 10, maybe you take 12, someone might take 15. At the end of the day, we still don’t know the best supplementation protocol, the best dose. Uh, so there’s so many areas. So, for the next 20 years, I bet y’all still be focusing on creatine with other things as well. Yeah. And on that doses, is that different for different people? Excellent question. So the thought was that the larger you are, you have more storing capacity in your muscle for creatine. So it makes sense if you’re 50 kg and 150 kg, you’re going to have a greater storing capacity. So the dose on a relative basis is likely higher there as well. The more stressed the person is, it’s likely they’re going to require more because their natural machinery in the brain can’t keep up. So it is very individualistic. I think we give out general recommendations to make it easy, but again, some people can take it very scientifically and base it on body weight. And you can’t go wrong with both of them. I bet there’s a lot of people that are this far into the conversation and their their central question is, “Right, I’ve got loved ones.” Mhm. That I really really want to start um considering creatine supplementation for whatever reason. It could be cognitive benefits, muscular benefits, whatever. All the things we’ve talked about, they might end up sending this conversation to their loved ones. something that I do sometimes when I when I have episodes that are particularly moving for me. If their loved ones are now listening y and you had to make a case to their loved ones about why they should take creatine. Yeah. What would you say? I would say creatine is one tool in that health promotion um toolbox that might help you live longer and better and allow you to maintain activities later on in life which you wouldn’t have been able to do. And unfortunately that leads to accelerated aging and a poor way to go. It’s like it’s like saying I’m going to save everything for retirement. My question is why? You might not make it to retirement. So that’s one of the things. Yeah. Aging. Yes. What is aging in your definition of work? It’s catastrophic. Unfortunately, I’m going through it. You know, I’ve noticed ever since I hit the fourth decade, things hurt a lot more and muscle mass to retain it a little bit harder. Um, so unfortunately, think of the body’s ability to withstand stress is not as high and things start to break down quite fast. So, we all know, you know, things hurt more. We’ve lost muscle mass. I can’t run as fast. So, biological aging is kind of the deterioration of the human body. We need to with this conversation and others come up with ways to stop the deterioration and if anything come up with ways to maintain that ability to live longer free of disease. Young, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last leaves a question for the next not knowing who they’re leaving it for. This one’s quite a tricky question. Okay. What is reality? What do you think all of this is? All this stuff that we can see and or we experience. What do you think it is? Do you think it’s a simulation? Do you think it’s this is all real for sure? Because I think we can feel it. It’s not a a big brother or anything that’s a game show. We all go through different emotions and things like that. So, I think you can feel it. Yeah. Are you religious? Yes. Catholic. Roman Catholic. Yeah. And you’re a family man. You’ve got got some uh French bulldog and a cat as we talked about and wife at home. Yeah. and uh really close to my family and stuff like that. And what is your goal if we get to the end of your career and this was your last day and you had been successful? Oh yeah. I think it would be a lasting impression on my students that wow he changed my life in some way. And if I can make one person live longer, free of disease and happier, I’m all for it. You know, when you start to see the human body as people get older, you’re like, “Oh, that person used to be young and vibrant.” And then when you hear other people that can’t do activities they live in or they can’t travel or they’re afraid to, I’m like, you need to embrace today. I I love that quote from Morgan Freeman Shaw Shank. Get busy living or get busy dying. Cuz honestly, we have the ability with lifestyle choices to improve optimization. And I want to see people live to be 120, 130, still active, still going. And I think we’re on the cusp with technology and I think awareness around nutrition, exercise, sleep, uh laughter. Oh geez. If I could ask anybody to do one more thing, it’d be just laugh more often. For me to be just a small piece of the the puzzle promoting it, I think it’s if anything, it’s it’s just beyond my belief. Yeah. Why did this pull you in? I I I asked that in part because it tends to be the case that the things that draw us in pull on our make us curious. There tends to always be a bit of a personal reason, right? Yeah. It was it was more that you know, am I scared of death? 100%. Yeah. I can’t I can’t think of it. Yeah. Why? Yeah. I just think it’s weird for me. I get to a point uh maybe being religious and then you think about it and then I my brain stops. I can’t think about it really. Yeah. And it’s this becomes almost like I want to live forever and if I can think of ways to make me live and partially get there obviously it’s not reality but yeah I’m uh scared to death of dying. Yeah. Have you always been? Yep. 100%. Scared to death of heights and I can’t even talk about the the death experience. Yeah. cuz I think it it sort of brings into perspective things that you just don’t know. Did you ever lose anybody? Uh just uh friends and things like that, but nothing um specific like parents or anything like that yet. But it’s always been there. I don’t know if it’s the Roman Catholic in me or not, but it’s like whoa, I don’t want that at all. Yeah. You can’t even talk about it. Can’t even talk about it. No. No. Yeah. Really? Yeah. It’s kind of like I can talk about it in a sense. I understand it and it’s realistic, but it’s it’s more um that for some reason I don’t even want to think about it cuz I have so much passion for life that I don’t even want to think about, oh [  ] this could happen. Yeah. And you believe you go somewhere after that? Oh, for sure. Heaven. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But if you do believe you’re going to heaven, that sounds like a good place. A great place. Yeah. I just want to spend more time here. There’s still a lot of things to do. Yeah, for sure. Makes sense. Yeah. Well, thank you. Thank you for Thank you so much. This was great. Thank you. Yeah. I I have to say, you know, you’ve done so so much research on the subject that so many of my previous guests site and talk about and so it’s it’s great to have the source here and I I applaud you for the work you’ve done because at the end of the day, I think I think a lot of people do want to extend their health span which is to live healthier for longer. There’s a real sort of epidemic of people having short health spans, being medicated from the age of 40, 50 years old and then having that sort of last couple of decades of our life being, you know, incapable of doing the things we care about. Yeah. And I think a lot of this research gives us an option if we choose to take it to live a to live a better life. Thank you so much. Yeah, it was great. So, thank you so much later.

There is literally no example on planet earth of a high functioning society without big government. That’s not true. Big government is sucking the life out of small businesses. And I spent countless hours with businesses and they’re like you can’t succeed in the UK. As soon as you earn anything, they’ll just tax it off you. So pop off to Dubai, run the business virtually and pay no tax. It’s idiotic. I don’t know how you can look at that and think this is a good system. No. No. I’m saying what needs to happen is reduce the taxes and the pressure on the small businesses cuz everyone in this economy needs to own stuff. We need to own a house, own a business, and own shares. But not everybody can be an entrepreneur. Correct. Look, it would be wonderful if everybody owned something. But ownership starts with earning enough money so that you can save money so that you can begin to own something. So the problem is wages because most people want to be able to go to work and be treated decently. I want to earn enough money so that I can feel secure. I just want to be married. These have kids, own a house. All that. That’s what you most people want. And I want that for everyone. That’s gone away. Houses are unaffordable. Local jobs don’t exist. Technology has cut out all the middlemen. No one’s paying healthy wages. We have the most unhappy population. And if you want to fix that, you have to enact this. Well, I’ve seen Nick’s policies implemented, and I don’t feel it’s enough. You haven’t seen all of the policies. But we need people to know that the rules that we grew up with have changed and people have to learn the rules of this new economy. Yes. Yes. Yes. I totally agree. And if you want to get the economy back on track, the starting point is Nick, I want to start with your background and your context so I can understand your perspective and who you are. You sold a company for almost $7 billion. Correct. And what’s so fascinating about you is you typically billionaires have a certain narrative and perspective on the world. You seem to have a very different one. I do. Who are you? Where have you come from? And what is your perspective on the world as it relates to the subjects that you know we’re going to discuss today? I was raised in a civic family, I should say. What does that mean? It means a family that takes uh civic responsibility seriously. Uh but we were middle class people and my father started to work for this tiny uh family business that uh his his father had started manufacturing bed pillows and down comforters which is how I got my start in business. And to make an incredibly long story short, I had a very early intuition uh about the internet u and uh the role that it would play in commerce. And as luck would have it, I had a friend who agreed with that proposition and his name was Jeff Bezos. And so he wanted to start an e- retailer. He was working in New York uh uh for a hedge fund uh dating one of my closest friends. And for a variety of reasons, he ended up sending his stuff from New York to Seattle to my house and we started Amazon.com together. But from that started starting other tech companies. you know, I’ve helped run, you know, manufacturing businesses, e-commerce businesses. my friends and I own a bank, you know, like that, you know, and I think that that very broad perspective on markets began to inform an intuition that everything that people are taught about economics today that sort of the conventional view is a pack of lies and that if you take it seriously and enact policy on the basis of it, the only thing that can happen is that the rich will get richer and everyone else will get poorer. And uh you know a signal piece of that evidence for me you sort of a thing that really sort of galvanized my interest was that I got a look at the IRS tax tables in 2007 2008 which showed American income shares in the history of that and in 1980 the top 1% of Americans shared about 8 12% of national income. uh by 2007 that 8% had grown to 22% as I recall. So triple largely as a share of national income. While the bottom 50% of Americans their share fell from about 18% in 1980 to 12% in about 2007. And what I did is I took those numbers and I stuck them in a spreadsheet and said, “What happens if this trend continues for another 30 years?” And the answer is revolution. You know, it’s just it’s just arithmetic because you cannot sustain a capitalist democracy if the top 1% controls 45 or 50% of income and the bottom 50% shares five. This is not a deep political insight. This is just math. And I and I freaked out and decided that I needed to devote myself to trying to figure out why this happened and how you could how you could fix it. And so I have been writing about this and working on it since then. Why did this feel so important to you? I’ve heard you talk about pitchforks. Even a cursory reading of history will tell you that when societies get as unequal as the societies we now live in, uh, terrible things start to happen. This leads to either a police state or a revolution. And I believe that the pitchforks are here. I think the Trump administration is the is the, you know, one of the canonical examples of a society beginning beginning to tear itself apart. And I just think it’s the responsibility of people with power and resources to do the right thing. Dan, same question for you. Yeah, I grew up in Australia and um as a teenager, I discovered entrepreneurship. I got an entrepreneurial mentor uh very early on and I did two years in a startup and it was really exciting and I loved it. Um and I felt like I discovered a cheat code in life which was entrepreneurship and starting businesses and small businesses and then at 21 I went off and started my own company which was my first agency and it grew really rapidly. Uh went from zero to a million in its first year and then 10 million in year three and it was like this exciting young company with all these cool young people working there and living there. We actually kind of did. Yeah, we actually were in a big house and we kind of spent a lot of time together. Yeah, I just fell in love with entrepreneurship and small business and family business and all of those kind of things. And I also 15 years ago started an entrepreneur accelerator where people who want to get together and talk about entrepreneurship and figure out how to run their businesses can get together and and figure out how to do that. Um so for the last 15 years I’ve spent uh countless hours with uh 5 a half thousand businesses all over the world who are getting together talking about how entrepreneurship works. And over the years I’ve also come to a similar conclusion that the technological revolution that we’ve seen in the last 25 years has hollowed out the middle class. And I basically said I can’t play by the rules that I grew up in. I have to learn the rules of this new economy, this digital economy pretty quickly or else I’m going to be displaced and disrupted. Um and I don’t have a fallback position. I I didn’t come from any form of wealth or money. Um I also didn’t take on any venture capital. I self-funded, bootstrapped uh my own businesses by cobbling together credit cards and things like that. And yeah, I I think one of the things that I really truly believe is that we are in a very big danger at the moment that if more people can’t participate in the benefits of capitalism, they’re going to do crazy things and vote in socialism. uh and the pitchforks will come and inequality is going to be a toxic corrosive force uh in the economy. So like I’m a capitalist who wants lots of people to benefit from capitalism. That’s been my whole shtick for forever. Um and I just want to include more people in the benefits of capitalism before we do do dumb things. And I guess the question therefore is how how do we do that? The prevailing narrative and I think one of the most dominant narratives is we tax people like us a lot more. What’s your view of that Daniel? So, it’s very easy to have a bad guy of a rich person. Uh, so you could imagine this billionaire rich person, right? Nick maybe could be a bad guy. Uh, and you could sort of do that. When I look at the economy and what’s draining it out, um, it’s it’s harder to conceptualize, but we have these mega corporations and we have these mega funds. So, here in the UK, all the houses are being bought up by Black Rockck, a massive private equity fund that wants the entire population to be a rental class forever. And you know, our prime minister has walked down Downing Street handinhand with the CEO of this big fund saying, “Yeah, come in and and buy up stuff um and financialized houses and that is causing a lot of trouble.” And then you’ve got big companies like Microsoft, like Amazon, and they say, “Hey, we want to do business in your country, but we don’t want to pay tax there. We want to pretend that we’re in Luxembourg or we want to pretend that we’re in Ireland and we’re going to send something from our British warehouse to our British consumer but we’re not really in Britain at that time so we don’t pay tax. And then you got Starbucks that says, you know, we we want to do business and sell coffee next to mom and dad family business coffee shop, but we have to pay this license fee for the Starbucks logo and that has to go to Bermuda and you know, so so when I look at who’s hollowing out the middle class, you’ve got massive mega corp businesses uh that are the absolutely bigger than we could have ever conceived them to be. They’re as big as nations now. Um and you’ve got mega corp funds which are also trillion dollar funds. And one thing I’m worried about is that a lot of people think that a guy like me who’s basically a dynamic entrepreneurial person uh or even a billionaire like Nick is the enemy. And you know when you get a a James Dyson who invents a cool vacuum cleaner and sells a lot of them, that’s not the enemy. When you get Paul McCartney who writes a bunch of songs and becomes a famous beetle and makes a billion dollars, that’s not the enemy. The enemy is the financialization of our homes. The enemy is big mega corpse that don’t want to pay tax. And that’s where we need to we need to be a little bit more nuanced and clear who’s hollowing out the middle class and how do we make policy choices to make sure that doesn’t happen. So you’re saying taxing the rich isn’t the answer. Taxing the rich is like a headline that creates enemies who aren’t actually the enemies. But so let’s just say in the UK then if you were prime minister, would you increase the tax rate on the top 1%. You could do that for political reasons because it would make people feel good, but it won’t change the economy. What needs to happen is we need a thriving entrepreneurial class. Small businesses are the answer. The biggest mistake the the UK government is making is they don’t see that the 5.7 million small businesses are their biggest asset. That we could get those going, that we could create an entrepreneurial uplift that would create jobs and it would create better opportunities. I would definitely curb the issue that we’re having with these uh mega funds and I would definitely stop pretending that Amazon is in Luxembourg and Google’s in Ireland. Right. So those sorts of things I would definitely do. What about yourself, Nick? Would you do you want the top 1% to pay more taxes? Is that important? So, it is not true that the richest people in the United States pay a lot of tax because the the American tax system is riddled with loopholes that allow the richest citizens to pay taxes at a rate of 1/ half of what ordinary people pay. I absolutely believe that in a high functioning democracy, the wealthiest citizens will pay taxes equal to or greater than the typical citizen. And that is just objectively not the case in the United States as a percentage as a percentage. And I think that that is you know sort of table stakes in making an economy function and a democracy go but it is not the biggest problem. The problem is wages. So here’s the most important socioeconomic fact in the United States that the median full-time worker today earns in the range of $60,000 a year. If that person had maintained their same share of the economy since 1975, instead of earning $60,000 a year, they’d earn close to $120,000 a year. That effect, by the way, goes up to the 90th percentile. If you earned $180,000 in 2018, 2020, if you had maintained your same share of GDP, instead of earning 180, you’d earn like a $250,000 a year. So in the United States over 50 years, the only people who benefited directly from economic growth and productivity gains were the people in the top 10% and the majority of benefit went to the top 1%. And that is the problem and that is trillions of dollars a year that used to be wages for ordinary Americans and now ends up in the pockets of the richest people. By the way, utilizing precisely the mechanisms that Dan just outlined. And what we have done is we have massively tilted the economic playing field uh uh which once favored small and medium-sized businesses and local companies towards these giant corporations. We used to have an economy that actively encouraged small businesses and entrepreneurship. I mean basically what we call neoliberalism this set of ideas around economic cause and effect that came into force in the 70s and 80s. Reganomics, Thatcherism, all this stuff, cut taxes for rich people, deregulate powerful people, and suppress the wages for working people, basically trickle down economics. Those policies went in went into effect in the 70s, ‘8s, and ’90s. And what happened is a huge shift in concentration from smaller businesses to bigger businesses and a huge uh shift in income from ordinary Americans to the very rich. And that’s the core of the problem. And of course, I think rich people should pay their fair share. We should. It is ridiculous for somebody who make half a billion dollars a year and to pay 15% tax rate. Uh somebody who makes $200,000 a year pays 40. I just think that’s stupid and wrong, which is which is the case in the United States. May not be the case here in the UK. But the bigger problem is wages. And if you want to get the economy back on track, you have to address that problem. Dan, you say that optionality in entrepreneurship will do more to raise wages than any government policy. Yeah. So, I believe that optionality is the is the most important thing. Uh when someone has lots of options, then they don’t accept terrible conditions. So, give me give me some color on that. Well, if I have 10 companies that are wanting to hire me, I’m going to choose the best option, right? But if I live in a town where there’s only one employer, like let’s say there’s one massive company that employs people and you either work for that company or you’re unemployed, then I have to accept whatever they’re dishing out. So the most important thing in creating better quality of life is optionality. We we need lots of optionality. One of the options that I want people to have is I want us to teach entrepreneurship in schools so that people have the option to start a family business as one of their options. They may not take that option, but at least it’s not a mysterious black box that they that they just don’t understand that that would actually be one of their uh one of their options. Also, let’s say you had no minimum wage, but if you had 10 employers and a limited pool of people who are available to work at those companies, they’re going to have to bid against each other to create better and better working conditions and better and better pay. Um, so you kind of only need to have minimum wages when there’s not enough optionality. If there’s enough optionality, it pushes everything up. Is that your view as well? I agree with the spirit of that. It just turns out that is never the case. So there’s a lot of economic theory that sounds a lot like that, but it but exists in a in a in an imaginary world where people have um power and optionality and and in the real world that actually doesn’t ever exist. So can by way of example there’s a there’s a principle of economics the theory of marginal productivity. Have you heard of that? No. So that’s a theory that is embedded in the the center of econ of economics which says that because markets are efficient the amount of money you earn reflects precisely the contribution that you make to it. If I $15,000 a year that’s because I’m giving $15,000 of value of value in the world. Okay. Correct. And if I earn $500 million a year rubbing money together to make more money, that is a that is an accurate reflection of the value I’m creating in the world, which is really central to capitalism, isn’t it? It is absolutely central to capitalism and is central to economic policym. But here’s the thing. If you understand where that came from, it gives you pause. So in 1879, a guy named Henry George writes a book called Progress and Poverty in the United States. And basically it’s the first book about the rich stealing from the poor. And this book isn’t just a bestseller. It is the best seller in the history of the United States. And the powers that be freak out. And JP Morgan brings this guy John Bates Clark to Columbia University which is sort of the home of like Wall Street and stuff like that New York and says fix this. And so Henry George writes a book called the distribution of wealth in which he invents this idea called theory of marginal productivity which asserts this idea. But he says the quiet part out loud in the book. He says look we have to prove to working people that no matter how much they make whether it’s a little or a lot it reflects their value because if they conclude that their work is worth more than they are paid they will revolt and kill us all and that would be bad. And that idea, it will not surprise you to learn, was very attractive to a bunch of rich people and got swept up into economics and today is a core idea in economic theory. And it would be true potentially if markets were perfectly efficient and all this optionality existed. But there has never been a case where that was been true. It has materially harmed the welfare of most people because as Dan says, your ability to earn is related to your power to negotiate, not some magical number that the market decides. And it’s how easy you are to replace because if I run an ad for a job and 400 people apply for the job, right, which which really does happen, I know this happens for you, Stephen. Uh that that essentially you run an ad and 400 people. So you don’t think about raising the wage uh because 400 people applied and they’re all good. Like they’re all really like super qualified people. And this happens all the time in the UK right now. Happens everywhere. Yeah. I mean, and there are almost zero circumstances where where workers have more power than owners. And you know, even Eden Adam Smith in the in in the Wealth of Nations outlined this asymmetry of power. And and the thing is is that if you persuade people that what they earn is all they’re worth, then you’ve created this narrative that makes rich people richer and everybody else poor. So what’s the solution here? or is it to put a a higher minimum wage on society? Well, that’s a policy solution. But if you if you really want to solve the problem, the starting point is getting people to understand economics in a way that actually reflects how how the economy actually works. not this stylized invention dating back to 1787 that if you take seriously and enact policy on the basis of it the only thing that can happen is that the rich will get richer and the poor will get poor which is a story of the last 50 years. So what is the policy solution? A policy solution is most definitely to apply a standard which requires companies to pay people uh you know a living wage. So the minimum wage is a perfect example of a great policy. Another policy in the United States which is really really important is the overtime threshold which I don’t know whether you have here in the UK we do but it’s the salary threshold below which you automatically get paid overtime which is time and a half here too. Yeah. 48 hours here. 48 48 hours is an upper limit of a week a working week. Okay. So in the United States it’s 40 hours. So if you work more than that you get paid overtime. And so one of the things so that that standard used to apply to virtually every worker in America in 1970 1965 today that standard applies to less than 10% of workers. Now why does that matter? Because people like me at the scale of tens of millions have turned three 40hour a week jobs into two 60-hour a week jobs and pocketed the difference. You may be doing that here, right? You put gummy bears in the lunchroom in a in a ping-pong table and you force people to work 60 hours a week and then you can have two employees instead of three. If you do that 30 million times, you’ve taken 10 million jobs out of the workforce. So, do you agree with this, Daniel? This approach, not as much. Well, here’s here’s the issue. I agree with it at one level, but um almost every solution that Nick has recommended, the UK’s had for the last 20 years. So, we have a minimum wage that is pegged 2/3 of the median, and it ratchets up. We’ve got 28 days worth of paid si uh holiday every year. We’ve got sick leave. We’ve got maternity and paternity leave. Uh we’ve got uh the ability uh very very difficult to h fire someone if they’ve been with you for more than 6 months. So we have this unbelievable set of workers rights and all of these recommendations from minimum wage right through to how how to handle employment. We have the most unhappy population. Our economy is not growing. We have a million young people out of work. Uh we have no one’s hiring at the moment. Um so it hasn’t created those conditions have not created runaway prosperity. And that gives me pause to think something deeper is going on. And the reason that I think this is that I think we need to make more participation in capitalism. Capitalism is about ownership. You have to own an asset. And if you don’t own anything, if you’re just selling labor in the current economy with digital and AI and robots and all this sort of stuff, the real reason that the wages, cuz what Nick’s saying is that the amount of money people would should be earning right now is like in the hundreds of thousands. And what I think is happening as another major part of this is that the e- the rules of the economy have shifted. Technology has cut out all the middlemen. Technology has hollowed out the middle class. Uh we used to go to the video store and the video rental store used to have 12 people working there and now we just go to Netflix. Uh and we used to go to our little local retailer and buy a CD and now we just go to Spotify and we just go to Amazon. So it’s hollowed out all of those supply chains that used to create amazing jobs. The value of the labor has been eroded because it’s very easy to outsource labor to another country. It’s very easy to simplify a job down to automated parts uh using technology. So the fundamental value of actual labor has diminished because of technology. Technology has reduced the actual utility of this thing that we call labor uh for for 90% of people and it’s only going to get worse with AI and with AI and with robots. It’s going to go down. So the if you just simply say oh this is about lifting work standards you’re going to miss the point that we can’t compete with technology. Technology is better at this stuff than we are. And the answer, the solution is ownership. We have to everyone in this economy needs to own stuff. We need to own a house. We need to own a family business. We need to own shares in the companies that are growing. So, it’s you cannot outrun this. This is like trying to run against someone who’s in a car and they say, “Oh, you just need nicer shoes.” No, you the shoes won’t change things. We’ve already tried nicer shoes in the UK economy and it’s made no difference. Everyone’s miserable. So that’s one of the things that I that’s where you and I would disagree. I mean, both things can be true. The minimum wage in the United States is $7.25 an hour or $2.13 plus tips. It’s half. It’s a third of what it is here in the UK. Okay. But you have twice the disposable income that we have. Your median wage is 1 and a half to two times what our medium wage is. We’re now a poor country relative to the US. And even though your minimum wage is terrible and horrific and inhuman, Yeah. However, it’s magically done it. Your your country and your citizens are so much richer than ours. Yeah. Except if you consider that out of that median wage, you have to take $20,000 a year to pay for healthcare, right? Like I think adjusted it’s still you’re 30% better even adjusted. I I think if you look at the AIC OECD uh uh it would be interesting. We might be able to look it up. I can’t remember. But I I bet you it’s about 10% different. Mhm. Even when you subtract out of pocket healthare costs and insurance premiums, the average American worker still takes home significantly more money than the average UK worker. Yeah. The average US salary is around $74,000. The average UK salary is around roughly $50,000. Americans pay heavily for healthare. The average employee in America pays about $6 to $8,000 a year in premiums and out-of- pocket costs. Brits do not pay for healthare because of the NHS. If a US worker makes $74,000 and spends 8 care on healthcare, they are they are at $66,000 before relatively low taxes. The UK worker starts at 52,000 before relatively high taxes. The bottom line is the gap in base salaries and tax rates is simply too large for UK free healthcare to close. The US wins on pure disposable income per person. Yeah, there there’s no doubt the US has had a much more successful economy than the UK. Brexit being, you know, a catastrophe. Can I push back on one thing though with the minimum wage or or this the companies that hollowed out the middle class are big tech companies, big finance companies, those mega corporations, and I agree with you, they can afford to pay their workers more money. Yeah. Yeah. One of the issues that I feel and this is what I’m concerned about is that in the UK the majority of businesses that do pay minimum wage like a friend of mine owns a pub and that pub has razor thin margins. It’s losing money. He’s not taking any money out of it. He’s massively impacted by taxes and minimum wage. So the companies that I see that are the ones who have to pay minimum wage workers and give people the on-ramp into the economy, pubs, little retailers, mom and dad businesses, these are the ones that really do get squeezed out of the economy. They have razor thin margins and you put more pressure on them. You say you’ve got more government regulations, you got more taxes, and now you’ve got more minimum wages and they just go, I’ve had enough. I can’t do it. And the companies that hollowed out the middle class, the Microsofts, the Googles, the, you know, Amazons, they go Starbucks. Yeah, the Starbucks, they go, “Yeah, we can, we can absorb it.” Um, and also, we’re not paying tax anyway, so we’ll just kind of like do that. So, one of the things that you could do, one of the things that we recommend is that you impose these standards progressively that the biggest companies have to pay the highest minimum wage, medium-sized companies pay slightly less, and small businesses pay less. But even within that context, ensuring that everyone pays enough for people to have enough money to continue to buy stuff. I mean, it’s fine and good to say, “Look, I don’t want to pay high wages in my pub.” Uh, but surely the people working in the pub should make enough money so that they can go to the pub themselves and buy a beer, right? You have to I mean, you know, the National Restaurant Association in America is, you know, famous for this. It’s like they want everybody in America to be able to go to a restaurant and eat except for the people who work in the restaurants, right? Can I just say something with your friend that owns the pub as well? So, say you own Starbucks. Yeah. You own a pub. Yeah. I’m a worker. Yeah. If you’re going to pay me more because you have this progressive minimum wage and you’re going to pay less. I’m sorry, Daniel. I’m not going to apply for the job. I’m going to want to go work at Starbucks. So, is there not an issue where you’re not going to be able to attract talent because you’re not going to be able to pay them as much? There are there are many reasons why you would work for a small business as opposed to a mega corp. But I’m saying you’re paying me £4 minimum wage. He’s paying me eight. So, do not does he not end up getting all the the best talent? He might get the best talent. And also for my pub, I might be able to have to I might ma match eight, right? So, maybe it works that I just pay eight, but I’m not necessarily legislated to pay eight. So, here’s the thing. Look, as a small business owner, you can treat there’s all sorts of techniques that you can use to retain people. So, you’re going to have more optionality as a big company. Yeah. Because you can you are going to definitely pay me more. Well, being bigger is always better. It is absolutely true that that high standard will put pressure on throughout the economy. But the small pub owner is also going to benefit from the fact that all I mean, are we using Starbucks? whatever whatever whatever example we’re using, all these people now own now earn so much more that they can afford to go to the pub and buy stuff. So, one of the interventions that I was part of in the United States was the $15 minimum wage, but we cook that up in Seattle, Washington. And so, I spoke to many, many, many, many, many small business owners who are absolutely terrified by this because, you know, look, we are all business owners, right? And so you can do a calculation in seconds about the risks and the expenses of higher wages. Correct? But what you cannot calculate is the benefit of living in of operating your company in a regime where everyone earns more, right? And the benefits that occur to you from that. Look, a ham sandwich in, I don’t know, Somalia cost 25. It cost $25 in Switzerland. What kind of economy do you want to live in? Right. You know, yeah. So, what were you going to say about your friend? Well, the friend who owns the pub, his pub is actually full most nights of the week. They have lots of people going there. The issue is taxes and costs. He’s got a big government in the UK. We have all of these things. Like everything that you’ve mentioned, we have it and we’ve had it for 25 years. We don’t have an affluent middle class that’s been created. We have an eroded middle class. So the actual numbers here is that my friends, he took no money himself and the pub lost £180,000 last year and it’s because of VAT and he feels like he’s carrying the weight of training people in their first job. He’s creating jobs as one of the only employers in his little town. Um and and also he didn’t create this mess. Amazon and Microsoft and Google and Facebook and big funds, they are sucking money out of the economy. We’re in violent agreement about this. So, so I just feel like the the issue is like I really want to make sure that we’re super super clear that small businesses are currently squeezed here in the UK. I don’t know what it’s like in the US. It’s the same in the US. like they are so squeezed and they are squeezed by big tech and now AI has come along they feel like they have to learn this new thing and they have to start posting on LinkedIn 45 times a day using AI posts or else they’ll get drowned out and they have to you know edit videos and become a Tik Tocker as well right so it’s all of this constant pressure caused by this tech sector and these big funds like one of the biggest threats to my friend’s pub is that a big American private equity fund wants to buy the pub uh and turn it into a block of flats, right? So, like they want to financialize this this community asset and he’s trying to fight to keep his pup, right? So, what I what I don’t want to have is I don’t want to have big government create a new framework that that basically squeezes small family businesses even harder. They all start going, we’re losing two pubs a day here, right? They’re closing down. um they they go out of business and then we end up with big corpse, big funds who can’t afford to absorb it and they own everything. And I also want to be clear that the reason people are struggling is they don’t own anything. It’s not because of working conditions. They don’t own anything. And if they don’t own anything, no, it would be wonderful if everybody owned something. Um but but ownership starts with earning enough money so that you can save money so that you can begin to own something, right? Like one of the lessons that we learned was that trying to give stock options to everyone in a company often doesn’t work. Yeah. It’s a catastrophe because for 90% of the workers in a company that their concerns are immediate and they don’t value stock options and if you give them the choice between cash or stock options it’s not even close right and so again I agree with the sentiment it’s just that I have never seen and I do not believe there is an existence proof for it working on planet earth. What certainly worked great in the United States for 40 or 50 years was a set of standards that required companies to fairly split the value they create with their employees uh through a variety of mechanisms, unions, which can be problematic for sure, but labor standards like the minimum wage and the overtime threshold and so on and so forth coupled with a set of policies to discourage consolidation and discourage encourage the kind of exploitation that you have I think very smartly articulated um so that we can have a dynamic economy. The only difference that happened back in the in the time that you’re describing where workers had to be included is that it was nearly impossible for a company to outsource their customer success team to the Philippines. And it was nearly impossible for a company to come up with a piece of software that would do 80% of the heavy lifting of a job. And one of the issues that we have right now is that when you put a lot of pressure on on all sorts of companies, we’re living in the age of AI and robotics where you essentially, you know, one of the options that companies have is just the option, well, we’ll just outsource the labor to another country. We’ll automate it. We’ll simplify it. Okay? But those the rules that enable people to do that were written by the same people who are consolidating industries and and taking advantage. I mean, you don’t have to live in a world like that. There are other ways to organize the world. The neoliberals promised that free trade was going to make all of us richer. And what it did is it flooded our markets with cheap stuff from China, but it is absolutely not clear that it made people’s lives better. Chinese people’s lives, it made Chinese people’s lives better, but it certainly didn’t make people in the UK’s life better. And it certainly didn’t make people in the United States’s life better. And so you could have imagined approaching that in a fundamentally different way. I guarantee you that if the United States could go back and do it again, we would have reought it. We would have rethought it. There’s a few ownership models that I think are important that could be looked at. Number one is a sovereign wealth fund. So the countries like Norway, uh Singapore, these countries they own natural assets uh in a sovereign wealth fund and essentially every citizen therefore owns a piece of some asset. There is an asset that is owned through a sovereign wealth fund. It’s a very successful model. It seems to work so incredibly well that it’s dangerously well. Um half of London is now owned by the Qatari self sovereign wealth fund, the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund. We’re literally losing all of our property to the sovereign wealth funds of the world. So the sovereign wealth fund model is incredibly powerful. Yes. Um so just for someone that doesn’t know what that is, you you have natural assets within the company own owned in part by the state. So the UK did a stupid thing. We discovered the North Sea back in the 80s I think it was and Norway had half and we had half of this Norwegian uh this North Sea oil. And the Norwegians said, “Hey, we’ll just own this in a fund that all of our citizens will benefit from, and that will be a state-owned fund, and then we’ll take the profits of that, we’ll reinvest it into assets, and every citizen will benefit from those assets.” And the UK said, “We’ll just sell a license to British Petroleum.” Yes. Right. We’ll make the rich people richer. Yeah. And Australia is so stupid. We have all this incredible natural resource, no sovereign wealth fund. uh Britain when we took over the whole world or 25% of the world we operated sovereign wealth funds called the East India Trading Company and all this sort of stuff and basically our business model was sovereign wealth funds for many many years so sovereign wealth funds number one so that would be one the other one is to put shares into baby’s names so when a baby’s born uh you have a piece of the stock market like $1,000 worth of shares u baby bond idea and Trump’s doing both of these things isn’t he sovereign wealth fund and the baby bond he’s calling it the Trump fund or something yeah well they’re They’re experimenting with some version of this right now. Yeah. Yeah. So, if if an a baby by the time they hit 18 has had 18 years of compounding of owning that asset, then by the time they hit 18, they’re literally getting an asset that they can then turn into another asset if they want to. Um, that’s pretty powerful. And then the the biggest issue is the financialization of houses. So if you take a value of a house, about half the value of the house is what you might call the utility value of the house, which is it’s a house to live in and I want to live in it. And then the other half the value is the financial speculation value of the house, which is how much value does a fund have if we can rent this out to people for the rest of their lives. I looked at the Black Rockck thing and it said the idea that Black Rockck is buying up UK homes is a is a myth. They are a financeier, not a landlord. They provide loans and debt facilities to property developers, but they do not directly own or manage residential housing stock. Lloyd’s Bank is buying 70,000 UK homes to rent forever. The number of single family homes Black Rockck directly owns and manages in the UK, zero. Okay. But he’s right. Yeah. Um I I don’t know what the details are, but this is a private equity thing that’s going on in this country and in the United States right now. Yeah. In the United States, I’ve heard a lot about Black Rockck buying up and I’m not sure what the entities are. It may be true. I again I don’t know what they come up they come up with structures to do it at arms length. Yeah. But um like I guess you kind of own it if you’re financing it is well or you loaned it to a subsidiary or somebody else whatever it is. But the but the meta point here is that homes used to be owned by people. Yeah. And they bought them to live in. And they bought them to live in. And one of the nefarious things that’s going on in the west driven by this neoliberal consensus that the only purpose of the of of the economy is to make rich people richer is this idea that private equity should buy all these homes and turn the turn ordinary people into this rental class. Just to confirm, yeah, Lloyd’s Bank are doing that through something called Citra Living. They’re buying up thousands of new built homes and apartments to act as a direct private corporate landlord. Um they view the structural shift away from home ownership towards long-term renting as a major profit opportunity for them. Yes, that’s it. They want to have a permanent rental class that people never you’ll own nothing and be happy is the idea. And people are not like that. People love to own stuff. I want to go back to the central point we were talking about which is like how do you how do you solve this cuz you’ve got two different views on how you solve this inequality. What I find interesting is the UK has better worker rights but it is but you also have much less inequality here. I mean, just to be clear, that is true. So, the US is significantly more unequal. The US top 1% holds over 30% of the nation’s wealth compared to roughly 20% in the UK. Um, and the US consistently ranks as the most unequal of the G7 nations. Correct. However, the US is growing much much faster. If you look at 209 to 2026, the US is growing over 100% faster than the UK. Yes. Um, and the UK is vastly more protective of workers. We have the things Daniel said like paid vacation, paid maternity leave. The UK mandates up to 39 weeks of statutory pay. The US mandates zero. Correct. Which is unbelievably horrific. But I mean one of the things that’s happened in the UK, Steve, is is Brexit. When did that happen? 2016 that’s taken what has that taken eight or 10% out of UK growth rates. It has affected unemployment by 4%, productivity gains by 4%. I mean the list goes on. So that own I mean part of part of why people in the UK are feeling down is this unbelievable mistake that the country made. But it’s the same in Germany. It’s the same in Australia. Germany has unbelievable workers rights. Australia unbelievable workers rights. In fact the USA is the outlier of all the modern capitalist economies. Absolutely. But we’re confusing things. People are pissed off everywhere in the world. Yeah. in the world. I don’t I want the pitchforks to go away as well, but these workers rights are not putting the pitchforks away. Like all of this stuff, we’ve given this stuff to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, uh all of Western Europe, all the English speaking democracies other than the USA. USA is the only one that has virtually no safety nets and no safeguards. Everywhere else has health care systems that are much more generous and welfare systems that are more generous and like maternity leave. I mean, it’s just inhumane that USA doesn’t have maternity leave. So, all of that stuff, but we’ve got all of that, but we’ve got the pitchforks here, too. Yes. Um, and this is why I’m saying I’m really zoning in on the idea that people need to own a house, they need to own a business, and they need to own shares. And it’s like if they own could not agree more and I don’t know how to get them there unless they are paid well enough to to do that. Let me tell you an anecdote. During the George Floyd riots, people were burning stuff down in the United States. And there was this fantastic interview with this woman and the reporter said, you know, I just I cannot believe that you don’t have respect for property rights. And the woman said, “We have no property.” You know, why should I respect property rights? No one I know owns anything. Yeah. You know, like, so I am 100% with you. But I think at the core of it, the core of it is that inequality is way more than an economic inconvenience for the people that it affects. What it does is it shreds the reciprocity norms that make social cohesion and democracy possible. Yeah. It’s this dog eat dog. You’re all on your own. Grab what you can. I mean, obviously the Trump people and burn the place down. That’s right. And burn the place down. Obviously, Donald Trump has created a permission structure for the worst kind of behavior, right? The worst kind of corruption. Uh, basically stealing has come back into style, right? And you know, there’s all sorts of reasons that are generating this malaise, this this sense of unfairness and lack of control, right? And and and the thing is I I just I agree 100% with your sentiments. I really do about entrepreneurship and ownership and you know at the end of the day the cool thing about entrepreneurship is you’re in charge. Yeah. Like you’re in charge here and not everybody can be an entrepreneur. Correct. Correct. And so I do think that that’s a little bit unrealistic. The the issue is is that like 70% of all jobs that get created are created by small businesses and not governments, not big companies. They’re, you know, they don’t create jobs. Small businesses create jobs. And if we just not everyone can be an entrepreneur, but if we had a 100,000 entrepreneurs who were all hiring 10 people, we’d we’d have a million jobs and we’d have 100,000 options for people with jobs. So like I I don’t think that we discount the whole idea that entrepreneurship is a big part of the solution. Can I take us briefly back in time? This is not the first time this has happened. The K-shaped economy has happened in the Engles pause. Yeah. So the the what do you mean by K-shaped economy? So the K-shaped economy is where so a normal economy is one where everyone agrees it’s going up or down or sideways. Everyone can sort of say, “Oh yeah, roughly speaking, it’s a good economy. It’s a bad economy. It’s it’s rising and falling like a tide.” A K-shaped economy is where it’s really good for some and really bad for others. It’s a disrupted economy. Yeah. Right. So the top percentage are going up and the bottom percentage going down. Now the headlines that we run today are the exact same headlines that were run in the early 1800s in Britain. And it was essentially record profits for industrialists and workers haven’t had any improvements. They all like you could almost take every grievance that we have today and you could just overlay it in the early 1800s and you get the exact same words. Um the solutions uh one of the big solutions in the early 1800s was we need to export people. We need to get rid of people. And what they did is they sent everyone to Australia. So they they sent they sent they picked up people and they put them in in Australia. Right? So they same sort of thing mass mass immigration or whatever you call it remigration. So they got rid of people out of the country. So it was very similar and we call this the Engles pause but we understand what caused it 1790 to 1840. Yeah. So what caused it was technology and it was this new it was the industrial revolution. Yeah. So it’s the new technology where we introduced a steam engine, we introduced a spinning loom, we introduced uh tractors, we introduced all of this sort of new technology and the owners of that new technology and the people associated with that new technology went like that. They leveled up because of tech and the people who were not part of that technology went down. Very simple picture you might want to have in your mind is a farm that had a 100 workers farming versus one farm that had a tractor. The tractor farm went like that and they all the workers went like that. It’s because of technology. The interesting thing about the angles paws is that for approximately two generations 50 75 years with the exception of the owners of capital basically everybody else on planet earth went backwards. It was hell. It was hell. Um and what and what happened is that over time the political consensus changed and working people clawed back some of that value through unions through labor standards so on and so forth. So one I guess the essence of what I want to get to is I mean something you’ve always talked about Dan as well is that if you start applying pressures on these companies or entrepreneurs they can just now get up and leave. And that was quite different from that era where we weren’t dealing with technological businesses. is we weren’t dealing with IP and those things. So if you start imposing some of these measures, will these companies get up and leave and go somewhere else where market conditions are preferable? A lot of UK entrepreneurs are, as we’ve seen from some of the numbers recently, choosing to go work elsewhere. Okay. Yeah. I think one of the things that just needs to be acknowledged and put on the table is one of the challenges you have here is you have the the Europe or the world has built this incredibly stupid system where you can operate a business here, take advantage of the UK’s market, take advantage of the UK’s rule of law, take advantage of the UK’s uh infrastructure, put your stuff in a box, move to Dubai, and pay no tax. Right? It’s idiotic. It’s just it’s just idiotic and suboptimizing as an American. I pay tax wherever I go, right? So I cannot come to a place and take advantage of it and then skirt the laws. So this is such a profound disincentive to do the right thing. Well, yeah. Yes. But the real culprit is what companies can do because US companies can do it. You you can’t do it as an individual, but you can set up an office in Ireland in Luxembourg, which is even worse. and and it’s the corporations that are the bad guys, which is but you have both problems be you have you have UK based entrepreneurs who are like well I can stay here and pay 40% tax or whatever it is right just pop off to Dubai run the business virtually and pay nothing. So what are you saying should be done with those people that do that? I think that UK citizens should pay UK UK tax wherever they go and German citizens should pay German tax wherever they go. You agree? I don’t think that will solve it because it’s not citizens, it’s corporations that are the bad guys. Well, it will solve one problem. It will not. This other problem needs to be handled. Yeah. The the the giant vampire squids of the world are companies that are pumping money out of the economies and they’re faceless corporations that have figured out how to play this game. So, for example, let’s take YouTube for example. YouTube is serving up a ton of videos to people all over this country and they’re running ads, but that is pretending to be in some distant place. It’s not pretend. It’s not being in the UK. And what we used to do in the UK is we used to have a broadcast license. If you want to broadcast in the country, you pay a flat fee and you can broadcast. Why is YouTube not playing paying a broadcast license? If they are a broadcaster effectively uh and running ads, they sit there and say, “Oh, but there’s this and we shift our profit through here and oh, we have to I’m so sorry, but we have to buy our licensing, you know, from this company over in this other vanuatu or whatever.” It’s like, “No, no, no. We don’t care about that.” It’s like, look at how you do business in the UK. You should pay taxes. It’s just as simple as you you’re you’ve got this many views and the broadcast license for you is this much. Okay. So do you agree on both points then that you should tax corporations based on where their customers are consuming and you should tax individuals irrespective of where they decide to fly off to? Look, I think in a globalized world that we live in an individual should be allowed to make a new life for themsel if they want to, right? Like so for example, if I genuin I I I make a new life for myself in the UK 20 years ago. I came here from Australia and I don’t want to pay tax in Australia because I was born in Australia. I paid a million dollars worth of tax in Australia, but I now live here. Like my I’ve got three kids here and I’ve got a house here and my whole life is here. I don’t like the idea that just because I was born in Australia, it’s it’s not possible for me to make it. But we have a tax treaty. Yeah. Like there are ways of handling this. But this ridiculous Look, every rich person I know in Europe is playing this ridiculous game of trying to avoid taxes, right? I don’t know how you can look at that and think this is a good system. But the issue is you and I both know it’s so easy to just turn this into a company game. So like for example, if we have to appropriately close the loopholes like Yeah. But like I just I’m seeing so many people demonize people like Nick, right? They go, “Oh, this guy, he’s, you know, he’s a rich guy and he’s like, you know, he shouldn’t be so rich.” Honestly, he’s not the problem. I’m sure you pay a bunch of taxes and also you you create economic activity around you. These mega corporations do trillions of dollars out of economy. If we take a mega corporation, you know, think of one in your head, and we decide to tax them where their customers are. I was looking at some of the research and it says corporations rarely just absorb the tax. When countries like the UK or France introduce taxes based on local users, tech giants like the like the biggest in the world immediately raised fees and prices for the consumer and small businesses inside those specific countries to offset the cost. If we had a global tax system that prevented this, then they wouldn’t do it. They couldn’t do it. If the compliance cost of tracking user locations and paying to local taxes outweighs the profit from the region, companies also tend to simply block users in those countries or pull their products entirely. Great. Great. And that opens up a possibility of a local company to do it. Worse, huh? Worse, maybe better. I was thinking here about the large language models and I was thinking about that as an example. If you know if the UK tried to take on Gemini or Chat GBT etc we would be using a significantly worse technology. The truth is that those those mega corps that’s accurate. Those mega corpse they don’t do this. They they want to own the world and they want to dominate the world. They’re not interested in cutting countries out. Right. None of them actually cut countries out. When do you think you think Facebook is just going to leave the UK? Yeah. Like they’re not going to do that. So and the other way is how you do it. So if you simply judge, how do you do that in Australia though with the news publishing business? They might do it very briefly as a way to punish political uh disscent. But ultimately they operate globally. They have a global business model and they uh essentially too we just need to say I’m sorry you’ve had your 20 30 years of not paying taxes anywhere but we’re not doing that anymore. And you know we we are very good at coordinating when we want to coordinate and we need to say the bad guy here. I mean it is really just pulling money out of our economies and taking it to other other places. And one of the reasons that the USA has become so wealthy with its stock market is because it is the end valuation where all of these vampire squids end up with their balance. If I look at what happened, it was um Australia I was thinking about um but it also happened in Canada where they passed a law called the online news act requiring tech giants to pay local publishers whenever Canadian users shared or viewed news links. And immediately instead of paying uh the user location tax, Meta simply blocked all news content from every user in Canada because the cost of compliance just wasn’t worth the hassle for one particular market. And you have the same thing happen with Amazon where several US states like California tried to force Amazon to collect local sales tax simply because Amazon had independent affiliates like bloggers etc um living in those states and rather than dealing with the complex local tax collection Amazon instantly terminate thousands of affiliate accounts. If every state required Amazon to collect local sales tax then obviously they couldn’t do any of that. they would have to deal with it, right? It it’s just these big corporations have a massive advantage over the jurisdictions that they’re operating in because they have so much more power and so much more flexibility. So what is the what is your solution then Daniel to solve for this inequality problem that we’re experiencing because you know you seem to be less interested in the sort of workers rights piece because that seems to we’ve tried it. We try you’re saying we tried it. Yeah. What I would like personally is I want to see way more small businesses and I want the government to favor small businesses and essentially say we’re going to reduce the taxes and the pressure on the small businesses. We’re going to advantage local small businesses that are here and paying tax. Um we’re going to create special economic trading zones if your business is based here uh and is of a smaller size. We’re going to basically make ourselves highly competitive for small businesses to show up and do their aame. And what about big businesses? punish punish big businesses that that uh I wouldn’t punish them. I would just tilt the pl I’m 100% with him. Tilt the playing field towards smaller businesses and startups. You know, I I’m not sure if you’ve heard about this thing that uh I just joined the board of called Enterprise Britain that that um Brent Herman who does Founders Forum Y and Steve Fitzpatrick who founded OO just started. It’s called Enterprise Britain. It’s a group of us who have gotten together uh with the express purpose of doing exactly pretty much what you what you describe, which is to try to make Britain an even better environment for business, mostly small and medium-sized businesses. And one of the great challenges here is to f try to find capitalist structures that allow small companies to turn into larger companies while remaining here and not fleeing to a better place. But I’m I am 100% in agreement with this. And you can have an incredibly dynamic, fast growing economy where all of the benefits flow to the people at the very top and everybody else gets screwed. And you have to do both. You have to do both. I mean, one of the most important subjects at the moment in society is artificial intelligence. And we you probably saw recently Eric Schmidt did a commencement speech in front of thousands of students and every time he said the word stage every time he said the word AI um one of the things that Anthropic or one of the leading AI companies said recently is that entry- level jobs are at risk and I’ve got this graph here showing the decline of entrylevel job postings. I believe it was on LinkedIn um pull from somewhere and it shows that they’re consistently dropping and dropping and dropping. AI is I think about it so often. I was up late last night trying to think through some of this stuff because Anthropic released a report yesterday showing that AI models will be able to improve themselves theoretically in the future and what this might mean. How disruptive do you think AI is going to be as it relates to job losses? You know, I don’t think Bernie Sanders latest idea is terrible. US will own 50% of all the air companies. It is absolutely true that AI has monetizing for free humanity’s intellectual property and a few people are going to directly benefit from that. And I think that um in the same way that Norway created a sovereign wealth fund with this enormous asset that they had uh creating a sovereign wealth fund with 50% of the value created by AI and recycling that into uh I think it’s unclear exactly how those benefits should be should be recycled, but trying to find a way to make some of that value a cushion for the disruption that it will inevitably cause. I don’t think that’s a crazy idea. It’s a good idea for China and the US. Yes. Yes. But not for anywhere else necessarily. It’s not going to help Senagal or Southampton much. No. In fact, it’ll damage a lot of those places. You know, like the Philippines has benefited enormously by being the outsourced back office uh for a lot of small businesses that AI can now do a lot of those those uh those jobs. Um, one of the things that I always come back to is the idea that say the UK has 5.7 million businesses. We have a million unemployed people. We need 1/5if of the businesses to employ one person. AI does actually make your business better. Like AI is really good at helping you with your marketing. AI is great at helping you do legal contracts. There are 100 ways that AI could actually make 5.7 million businesses a little bit better to the point where they want to hire someone. And if we can incentivize those things to happen, businesses are trained on how to use AI to their advantage and tax breaks for small businesses that are hiring and we will, you know, there’s actually 5.7 million businesses and a million unemployed people. That’s a good there’s a good match there. Uh, you know, um, a lot of people have been talking about AI agents and, uh, what an AI agent can do for anyone that doesn’t know is it can go on your computer and it can get any task you want done on the computer. um whether that’s you know editing tasks or whether it’s you know manual data entry tasks or whatever it is it can click around on a computer and do things a lot of the entry level roles were often given are that kind of work I think my entry- level entry- level job job after I dropped out of university was kind of doing that kind of thing there was also a little bit of a sales component where I’d cold call people and AI can now do the cold calls too and increasingly if we just play the rate of development forward we’ll be able to do those things so if these businesses get more and more efficient um again it comes back to at an entry- level point is what what role will entry-level team members have in these kind of companies. So what’s interesting for me I have a group of companies small businesses uh dynamic small businesses we’ve implemented AI in all of them and as a result we’ve hired people who have you hired entry-le people we’ve hired some entry- level people who are augmented by AI so they become more valuable because of AI but like things like appointment setting we’ve ended up hiring more sales people because we get more appointments we we use it with our marketing and we end up hiring people who can actually have those final conversations with people at the very core of my organiz organizations, we have an AI layer and the AI layer has context and skills and models and security layer, right? All all in there and it spits out amazing information and data and reports and tells us who to talk to and why to talk to them and what to talk to them about. All these things are happening because of AI. But it doesn’t get around the point that like if you think about Uber, uh DAR has been pretty clear that the 9 million drivers they have, I think it is, are going to lose their jobs in the future. If you think about the the other sort of white collar professions we’ve described, they those roles won’t won’t exist in the future. Well, I should say those roles will be will be will be changed. Correct. If I put on my more optimistic hat, the thing is is that all businesses operate in a competitive environment and there are two ways to compete. One is to be cheaper, the other is to be better. Right. And the thing about AI is that yeah, there are tasks that you can automate away, but one person with good AI tools may be able to do the job of five, right? And yeah, you could eliminate that job or you could keep that person, give them the right tools and out compete your competitors. The right tools. The right tools. I think there’s an assumption that I mean this is of course what happened with computers, right? I mean I’m I am older than you guys. So I reme I remember when calculators hit. You had to be there to realize how freaked out people were about calculators, right? Like people were talking about like what are the accountants going to do and and and will kids learn math anymore? I mean it was it was like extremely controversial to bring a calculator to to to school and then along came computers and the truth is that computers didn’t reduce the amount of work that people did they increased the amount of work that people did and I do believe that there are ways in which AI is probably going to do that and so the job loss may not be as apocalyptic as it now feels like it may be because again at the end of the day you have two ways ways to choose to compete. If you I, you know, you can get rid of somebody and do X, but you could keep that person and have them do 5X and out compete, you know, your competitors in another dimension. I think that that will be something that people are likely to do. Doctors are just going to be better doctors. I think I I definitely agree that there’s going to be this sort of augmentation of certain individuals. I think maybe the difference between like calculators or computers versus this is AI is coming into a technological economy and it is coming in with instant scale in a way that when Anthropic shipped their new model last week it went to all of us at once everywhere in the world. We were all boom step changed with computers. I remember the day that like my dad ordered the first computer for our house and we waited for weeks and weeks and weeks and then we got it. It was super expensive to get one. We unboxed it. I remember us all stood around it looking at and it was like this Windows 95 machine that had like no memory on it. Um so the distribution the sort of disruption was much slower. The p the pace the pace was much slower. Right. And I understand that like with my with our team there’s no intent we have no intention at all to let anybody go because of AI. We’re reskilling people, training people. However, would we end up hiring less people, especially in the near term, than we would have otherwise. I think that’s maybe conceivable. Yeah. Um, and a lot of companies I think are in that position where I actually was speaking to someone yesterday and they said we’re just letting the natural attrition in our call center take care of the shift, which means they they have they lose 25% of people from their call center naturally. They’re just not hiring other people back in. And actually client CEO said the same thing. He said we’re just letting the attrition take care of it. I’ll give you another example though just to counter that. Um I work with a husband and wife couple in the north of England who they had a little video production agency and like one or two people who did a little bit of contracting with them. Uh they used AI to create a piece of software and that piece of software uh helps automate script writing and a few of the things that they do. Um they launched a waiting list for this. They got 5 a half thousand people to join the waiting list. They then signed up their first 1500 clients to a piece of software that cost almost nothing for them to build in 4 months. Um, and now they’re hiring a team of 10 people. And this is a husband and wife who had a small constrained business who are now uh building out a bigger business. And this is something that could never have happened. They haven’t had to raise billion millions of dollars. They haven’t had to hire 30 40 people. So this this tiny little SAS opportunity is suddenly possible because of AI and take take that AI away and that fast growth dynamic little businesses is yeah I think anecdotally I could come up with lots of examples as well where particular people are highly entrepreneurial they come across opportunity but there’s this broad if you just zoom out on the way that people generate value in the economy at the moment so much of that is going to change and it’s going to be quite quick it feels like oh totally and I don’t know what you do about like what do you do about that sudden shift all this this happened in the Jevans paradox The person who had a tractor displaced a hundred people who were in the field and those hundred people went into the city looking for work all at once. And it was Charles Dickens wrote the tale of two cities. He wrote u uh Oliver Twist. Uh guess who else came out of the Jevans paradox? Our good friend KL Marx who came up with the most toxic ideas ever created and written down, right? He came off the back of the Jevans paradox. So what you do about it? Uh UBI. I’m not a big fan of UBI at the moment. Isn’t that kind of what this 50% Bernie Sanders thing would do? Well, it’s it’s sovereign wealth fund basically, but you have to find a way to help manage through this transition and you have to I think depend on the value create. Look, the the whole the the whole valuation that AI is predicated on is job disruption, right? You can’t you can’t get to those numbers unless you’re displacing lots of jobs. Exactly. And and if that’s true, then we should grab some of that value that is created and recycle it into the economy to try to cushion the disruption that it creates. This is a bit of a socialist idea, right? I don’t call that socialism. What do you call that? I don’t know. Just common sense. But wouldn’t that broadly apply to all all companies and rich people? If there’s if they are disrupting the economy and taking an unfair share of that disruption, should we not just grab and recycle back in? But that’s the b that is the basis upon which every high functioning democracy in the in the world operates. I mean every high functioning democracy in the world has progressive taxation labor standards. There’s a difference between seizing private property uh which would be a socialist way of doing things and a communist way of doing things and owning strategic assets which which are private property. So, for example, the the Dubai government owns the uh physical hotel buildings that uh that run Dubai and it leases those out to hotel operators, but it keeps money in its sovereign wealth fund because it says basically a big part of Dubai is that we own these kind of land assets. So, do you think we should go and take a a portion of these companies? Well, the difference was the Dubai government actually developed those assets, right? But we’re we’re already too far down the line with within a capitalist society like we might say we might say that data is the new oil and data is a common good and it is a common asset that has been um sequestered illegitimately by these companies. So therefore you’re not seizing what they created. You’re you’re basically saying I’m sorry but you need to pay a license back to this sovereign wealth fund because you’re using a common asset that you were able to essentially seize. But you stole it you stole it from Africans and British people. You saw it from people in Australia. You stole it from people in Canada. The biggest issue that we’re having is that we’re actually the nature of the entire economy is changing. So this happened 250 years ago where the nature of the economy was land and we had an economic system called feudalism and colonialism. And then the nature of the economy was industrialization and we had a economic system called socialism and capitalism. And now the nature of the economy is actually fundamentally changing. So in economics there’s four factors of production. in land, labor, capital, enterprise. We’re now swinging like a pendulum from land through capital, labor, and now we’re actually in an enterprise economy. And we need some sort of economic system that reflects the reality of how money and wealth is made. Is that is that go to OpenAI, take 50% of their company and then pay out the profits of that 50% to the people. I’m always skeptical of any socialist ideas. If it comes from Bernie Sanders, I’m skeptical. Okay. But Bernie Sanders is not a socialist. Like let’s be socialist. He he says he’s a socialist. Socialism is social no socialism is you know the government owning all the means of production right look there are a million forms of capitalism right we every country operates slightly differently and there I don’t think that Bernie Sanders is saying that we should abandon markets. What he is saying is we should manage markets for the public benefit, not exclusively for the benefit of the owners of capital. And I think that’s really different. You know, with like an Amazon, they’re using the roads. Yeah. And the infrastructure, correct? So would you go take 50% of those companies as well for public benefit and then pay it out to No, but the citizens, we effectively do take part of them in the form of taxes. Right. Now, now, now the taxes that we impose on those companies, I would argue, and Dan may may agree, are insufficient. They do not accurately reflect the value that we give them. They don’t return equal value that So, you’re saying increase the taxes on companies like Amazon? You both agree. Well, Amazon is very successfully avoiding taxes. Um, so, so would you agree to increase? I think we need to have we need to close tax loopholes. taxes like all other companies that operate within the econom

competition with Amazon. Look, one of the biggest issues that we have is we have widespread incompetence in governments. And I’ll give you a quick stat on this. In the UK government, you are 10 times more likely to die than to be fired for poor performance. And the UK government fires people at 1600th the rate as normal businesses for incompetence. So we have an accumulation of massive incompetence in government. So the idea you can come up we can come up with all the best ideas under the sun at this table. We have a fundamentally incompetent set of people who have misaligned incentives. uh we have basically a revolving door between financial industrial complex, technology industrial complex. Well, the Singaporean government, they basically said that we’re going to have a very high degree of meritocracy in government that essentially we promote and fire based on outcomes and merit merit. Singapore is a miracle of governance. Amazing governance. It’s it’s a it’s a miracle of governance, but it is a very small place. Totally. and perhaps the only place in the history of planet Earth that has benefited from uh a well-meaning dictator, right? Dubai. It’s an astonishing story of capability, competence, for foresight. Um so what is the solution with this AI revolution? It’s I think we all agree that there’s going to be job disruption and there’s going to be a new type of job. There’s going to be probably a delta of people transitioning to those new types of jobs. Um, I I’ve said this before, but I even noticed that within our recruitment processes now, we are really looking for people that have a certain set of skills. We always ask, and it’s harder and harder and harder to find those people. Um, well, that’s training. That’s education and training. It is. The school system needs to produce people that you would want to hire. Yeah. And that takes a lot of time. In my hiring, I ask the question, how deep are you in the AI rabbit hole? And anyone who says, oh, a lot, I’m like, okay, join the team. And and also if you think about humanoid robots, Elon Musk’s pay packet mandates him to deliver millions of humanoid robots or else he doesn’t get his big pay packet. If we think about robotics and humanoid robots coming through, we watched the other day Figure AI released this video showing a humanoid robot sorting packages on a production line for 8 days straight, beating a human sorting those packages on the production line. My car in Los Angeles now drives itself and as do the taxis and there’s a huge race to make autonomous vehicles. Um I’m sure there’s new jobs created and I understand in foresight it’s hard to understand what those will be. I assume there’ll be more human jobs, more sales jobs. I My only thing that I can say is that the future is small businesses. It’s it’s small teams of 10 people making YouTube channels. It’s small teams of 10 people making software. It’s like the the when you have millions and millions of little small businesses, everyone’s happier. But if you read what Anthropic released yesterday, they’re making the claim that actually we’re getting to a point where it will be an individual with a team of agents who can now make a trillion dollar company without hiring a single person. And actually, when you said about making software making that they would they might argue that that’ll be agents making that software. Anthropic said that the amount of code each individual’s producing on their own is eight times. And this one particular quote which I actually screenshot on my phone last night comes from an engineer at Anthropic who was saying they feel useless because now they they say they haven’t written a line of code in months and months and months. This anthropic engineer was basically saying like I come to work this agent writes the code for me and I kind of sit and watch and I feel useless. Um so all those examples you gave what I’m okay but what would happen in that situation is you would have a massive deflationary effect the cost of if if there was one person doing all sorts of things in the economy then the cost of that would go to the cost of the electricity to run it right so massive deflationary and then the question becomes well what does everyone do right what do we all do we do human things right humans always come up with things to do with each other uh like if I was to tell my grandfather that there is a job called a personal trainer who takes you to the gym and counts your reps, right? My grandfather would go, “That’s insane.” And I say, “Oh, there’s 50,000 personal trainers in gyms all over the country.” So, there are always these crazy new jobs that get created. I look at what trust fund kids do, right? Cuz a lot of trust fund kids, they go, they don’t have to worry about money and they don’t have to worry about resources and they go find something to do. And it’s always weird. We’re going to traverse through, you know, potentially the jobs we have now involuntarily go through this transition moment where I think history is quite clear on what happens in these transition moments. It gets ugly. It gets ugly. Yeah. And then we’ll come to, you know, what I’m hearing is that you’re saying we will come to some kind of utopia on the other end of this. No. No. No. I don’t think I don’t think there’s going to be utopia. What do you think? Uh, look, I I don’t think utopias exist. I do think that markets are the greatest social technology ever invented for creating prosperity and for enobbling the human spirit. That is not because markets are efficient allocators of scarce resources which is the conventional view. Markets are an evolutionary system that enables groups of people to come together and solve complex problems and solutions to human problems is what prosperity actually is. It isn’t GDP or money. And the best world that you can build, I think, on earth is a market economy governed by a robust democracy that robustly includes all citizens in that economy. And your your answer is small business. And I I’m 100% behind you and I I wish you all the success. My answer is that a lot of people are going to end up working for large companies and or medium companies and that we have to ensure or my part of the answer is that we have to have standards in place to ensure that those companies treat people well enough so that they can be dignified participants in both the society and the economy. And that will require innovation in laws and rules and all sorts of mechanisms to enable that. But that there is no alternative if you want to live in a decent society. And and the but the high order bit for me and the reason I work on economics is that the existing economic paradigm basically says markets are perfectly efficient. We should just let them run and you know what comes will come. So you’re really focused on increasing the workers lives and pay. So if you understand the economy from the conventional point of view, including people in the economy is a liberal luxury that you can afford if and when you have growth. And I think everything the new economics says is that including more people in the economy more robustly is actually the tech technical mechanism that makes both economies grow and democracies function. So to simplify that what does that mean if you from a policy perspective it is very hard to answer in an uncertain future in an AI if you don’t know what what’s going to happen with the economy. I mean we have no idea how much job loss there will be. We have we are we are I think Dan says quite rightly going through a transition where the shape of the economy will change. So do we do nothing through the No. No. We aggressively experiment with ways to include more people in the economy. Bernie Sanders idea is an experiment. What’s the worst that can happen? Like just think about it. What is the worst that can happen? The worst would be is that you give government more money and they leverage more debt. And as soon as the government has the the economy of the United States does not need assets to leverage more debt. We just created we just created a we didn’t need that is not true. That is just not true. We have $37 trillion of debt. All of which was basically given away in wars or tax cuts for rich people. So but they they can print more money. Absolutely. But these two things they are not connected. But the truth is that the worst that could happen by running that experiment is that there will be a few dozen guys who are worth a hundred billion and not 200 billion. Like that is the worst that that can do. Is that going to be the end all beall? Will it work perfectly? I have no idea. But what I do know is that democracies need to move aggressively to try to make sure that these technological innovations benefit the society broadly, not just a few people narrowly. If I think about the UK, if you implemented something like that here, would would people leave? So if you implemented, say we had an AI company here and you said, well, the UK is going to own half of it. Would that company just restructure somewhere else because it’s digital? They they probably would. But now you’re back to this old problem. We’ve been seeing this with the data centers. People are going I read a report that said the reason Open AI didn’t open their data center in the UK, which they said they were going to, is because energy costs four times more here. So they said, “Well, go somewhere where it’s cheap.” Yeah. And would that not be the case here where you’d get the sort of brain drain where And the risk that you run with this Bernie Sanders model is that we leverage the the government’s balance sheet or non-balance sheet to take out huge debt in the name of our kids and our grandkids that they have to repay. They buy up all these intangible assets and then they’re left holding those assets that may or may not perform and may and will have debt regardless. And then the super clever little anthropic guys say, “Oh, actually we’re just going to restructure to Vanuatu now. Leave you guys holding all of that toxic debt and we’re going to go run this from somewhere else.” That could happen. The other thing that could happen is if let’s say OpenAI as one example are making $100 profit at the moment, $100 profit at the moment and Bernie Sanders says we want $50 of that profit. China are going to have an additional theoretically an additional $50 to invest in their frontier models and getting ahead. Isn’t saying I I’ll take $50 your 50% of your profit. What is he saying? I’ll take 50% of your stock which means that then the US would have a equal voting. Yeah. Well then you’re going to get gridlock in terms of voting right. So if the US own 50% of the company and Sam Alman let’s say owns 50% they’re going to have to vote on decisions. Well you could put some directors from the from the public on that board. And what happens when to a company when you have the government on the on the voting board I mean you effectively have this in lots of countries where labor has a seat at the table right with one of your companies if half of your board were a government do you think you’d be able to be as innovative move as fast I mean we talked about the bureaucracy of of the government yeah I I’m not suggesting that half the should be on the government yeah mind you that’s what China has as well China has got essentially the the CCP on the board of all of those companies as well and they work and they move pretty Yeah, there slightly different government, isn’t it? Yeah, it is. And there’s different levels of competence and and meritocracy hierarchy. I I I worry about all of these solutions that empower government cuz I don’t trust government. My entire life has been one thing after the next made worse by government, right? That’s that’s my reality. Born in 81 1981, I’ve never had a good experience with government. Okay, but dude, you you grew up in Australia and you live in the UK. If you hate government so much, move to the Congo. Seriously, you are look I mean it is just no one likes to be constrained. Everyone wants other people held to a high standard. And it it just seriously there is no libertarian paradise in the world where nobody follows any rules, nobody pays any taxes and everybody lives like a king. If you hate government, there are plenty. There are 220 countries in the world. 150 of them effectively have no government. Why do you not move your base of operations to those places? Because you would instantly be somebody’s, you know, I’m not I’m not an anarch I’m not an anarchist. when a government doesn’t fire incompetent people. Okay, but everybody agrees the previous governments, everybody agrees democracy is the worst econcept except all the others, right? Like of course it is easy to to to point to these things and say they’re incompetent, but it is it is just not honest to say that government doesn’t improve our lives. There is literally no example on planet earth of a high functioning society without big government. I’m not saying well without big government. That’s not true. Give me an example. Singapore. Singapore is insanely big government. 22% of GDP. Okay. But they are involved in every element of people’s lives. High competence. They fire incompetent people. And and again, we’re in violent agreement that we should have governments that do that. Yeah, you should work hard on the politics in the UK to to bring in reforms that would increase the velocity of competence. That’s the answer. That is the answer is to is to work hard to build a government that is as high functioning as they can be. But here’s the thing and I think you would agree. Look, Microsoft I big companies are equally incompetent. Microsoft bought my company Aquana for $6.4 billion. This is a company that was growing at 40% year-over-year. It’s been so long. 30 40% year-over-year, $750 million in sales, $200 million at EBA or something like that. 3,000 4,000 of the best internet advertising people on planet Earth. And in one year, it was gone. Wow. Gone. And they wrote the entire $6 billion off 5 years later. Incompetence lives everywhere. And and I I just don’t think it is realistic to say, “Oh, pucks and them, you know, they suck.” I I just Dan, there is no place on earth without government cocreating prosperity for for sure. Here’s where I put my hope in this post AI world. I want to stack the favor I want to stack the economy in the favor of the small family business and the small business. You I’m 100% with you. I agree. I agree. The question is how do we get there? And you are completely aligned in some ways. We need to aggressively tilt the balance of power in the economy from the biggest most exploitive companies to small and medium-sized businesses. So I see big government and big corporate uh sucking the life out of little people and little businesses. And I think you are ab no doubt correct in some cases. But the only thing in human societies that has the power to confront big business is big government. Right? There’s ne in the history of the world, there has never been another force that what that had the power to to address this problem. And the reason I care so much about this economic paradigm is that all of the problems you were describing Yeah. are a consequence of an economic paradigm that was designed to create those problems. That’s why we are in the box we’re in is because neoliberalism literally said the bigger is better and that we should afford no protection to small businesses that we should actively advantage the largest players that that free trade is good for everyone. all of these things that weren’t true and dis and ended up advantaging in this room me effectively and you know a few thousand people from around the world and disadvantaged everyone else. And I think the starting point for for change is is addressing the fact that we just understood economic cause and effect in inadequately that the things that we thought would lead to growth led to concentration. Right? And the things that we thought were bad for the economy, in many cases, those were good for the economy. Because look, again, you know the UK so much better than me, and I I hate to argue with you about it, but the truth is that you cannot sustain a capitalist system unless most people are paid enough to buy the stuff that that the system produces. And there has to be a balance. And there and again in the history of the world there is no example of a thriving economy that did not impose those standards or or create through some mechanism the counterveiling power that enabled the the the the owners of capital and everybody else to work together to benefit everyone in the long term. You are you and I are in so much agreement on on most on most of like an inch apart. What is that inch? So, I’ve seen Nick’s policies implemented and I don’t feel it’s enough. And the reason I don’t feel it’s enough is I think people are more than consumers. They’re more than wallets. Okay. You’ve only heard me talk about the minimum wage and something else. You haven’t seen all of the policies. But the missing piece for me is ownership. When people had houses, they felt really good about communities. When people had small businesses that they owned, they felt really good about their communities. And when people own some shares in the overall economy of the fastest growing companies in the economy, then they feel like they’re participating. So for me, the non-negotiables of fixing this problem is that people can easily own a house, own a business, and own shares in the fastest growing economy. Yes. Yes. Yes. And how do we get there? Yes. Yes. Yes. I totally agree. And I think I I just think that Dan and I have a slightly different view on the path. I think capitalism is ownership. It’s ownership. That’s what capitalism is. Otherwise you if you don’t own anything you’re not a capitalist. If we your agree on the path but the the sorry you agree on the outcome but the path. Yes. But how did Nick get rich? Like Nick started companies. He owned he owned a family business. He leveraged the family business into an investment into Amazon. It’s it’s own but it’s ownership. Ownership. Ownership. And did a lot with it. Right. But but I’m saying let’s be fair. But how is that applicable? You’re saying other people should do what Nick did. Yeah. But it’s hard to get born into a family that owns a small business. And well, if there’s more people who own small businesses, then there are more than there it is easier, right? I I just want I I do want more people. What do you mean by this? Well, it it’s all about how how you get there, right? That you overlook the fact being born on third base. We should aim for more people to be born on third base. If more people the third base is coming from a family that owns a small business with ex or whose parents earn enough income to enable all of that, right? And and and and look, not everybody who is affluent, in fact, a tiny minority of people who are affluent uh uh uh are are small business owners, right? that they are mostly doctors and lawyers and professionals of a variety of kinds who work in med in big companies in middle management roles and they I’m not saying everyone should be a small business. Yeah. So anyway, I just think that I I think the high order bit here, I mean, for me, and and this may sound like too squishy for you, is that is that societies have both the right and the responsibility to organize their economies in ways that benefit everyone. Is socialism the answer? No. Socialism is most definitely not the answer because socialism, again, we we need to operationally define that term. Yeah. If socialism means, look it up in the dictionary, the state ownership of the means of production, that is a catastrophe, right? And it’s a catastrophe because all socialism can do is split up existing prosperity in a fairer way. It can do that. The problem is is that socialism does not know how to create more prosperity. Okay? So for one minute you can make everybody better off but 10 years later everyone is poor because once because this is the power of markets is what markets do as evolutionary systems is they generate increasing prosperity. They that that’s what solutions to human problems is, right? Going from aspirin to antibiotics is economic progress, right? And the beauty of markets is that they’re evolutionary systems where every business effectively is an organism competing to fill a niche which is the perfect product for whatever market segment they’re creating. You are you’re a canonical example of this, right? What you have done here and thank goodness for it, right? Because in a world where there wasn’t capitalism, there’s no way you you you have effectively independently created what was a television network. It’s miraculous. Like you have more reach than MSNBC, dude. That is the power of markets, but you know, they have to be harnessed to benefit people broadly. This does not mean that the profit mo motive shouldn’t exist, but and and how though this is what I’m trying to get to. And there sounds a little bit like there’s this middle ground we’re like playing with where socialism on one end is okay you know short-term whatever you said then on the other end you’ve got this like extreme capitalist approach and I was yeah those are the the less a fair capitalism right and this socialist status control both of those things are terrible ideas am I right we want something in the middle on on the left side then on the socialism side you get lower growth in your economy over the long term correct okay and then in a capitalist economy you might have higher growth both but then you have more inequality. Correct. And the sweet spot and this is this is the one of the most important this is the important matter one of the most important points I would like to make is that all of the evidence suggests that when you come to the middle and you have a market economy that is actually actively managed to include people that is the growth sweet spot. You have more growth. So more growth absolutely GDP growth rates in the United States were 4 4 1/2% for decades 40 50 60s and then as soon as the neoliberals took over in 1975 GDP growth rates fell first to 3% and now to 2% when they did what? Cut taxes for rich people deregulated powerful people and suppressed wages for everybody else. So, the most important socioeconomic fact, as I’ve said many times before, in the United States is that the median full-time worker earns about $60,000 a year today, if they had maintained their same share of GDP since 1975, instead of earning 60, they would earn $120,000 a year. So, there’s you’re saying there’s no trade-off in the middle because there’s trade-offs on both ends, right? We just described the trade-offs. You’re saying that in the middle there’s this that’s the sweet spot where there’s where there’s maximum amounts of growth, maximum amounts of participation, maximum amounts of political stability. This is what Darren Oasamuglu and James Robinson call the narrow corridor. This perfect balance between less afair capitalism and socialism. I mean socialism is stupid because because it kills markets but this impulse to more fairly share let’s call that where socialism comes from this impulse to have a society which is more egalitarian but what all the data suggests is that when you build a market economy that basically tries to make sure that everyone participates where workers get a fair share of the wages where as the company as the economy grows as it did for years. And you’ve got another you have a you you have a you have a a great graph in here. So for decades as productivity grew everybody benefited and then in the 70s it decoupled and as soon as it decoupled GDP growth rates fell right if we had and and all of this all of this was a consequence of policy of policy. So here’s another thing the new economics teaches is that there’s this idea that a middle class, a thriving middle class is the consequence of economic growth. That if we just let the economy grow, we’ll get this great middle class. And that is because economists assume the e the economy is something called ergotic. Now erotic means, let me show you the difference between two games. One is erotic, one is non-orgotic. Rock, paper, scissors is an ergotic game. And what that means is the outcome of the next game has nothing to do with the game before. Yeah. Right. Monopoly is a non-orgotic game. And in Monopoly, no matter how much how many times you go to Monopoly school, if you play a game of Monopoly long enough, one person will own everything and everybody else will have nothing. And that is what a market economy is. It is characterized by luck, path dependence, and compounding. The past. The p. Well, it’s the past, right? Where you start. Yeah. Right. Some of us started on third base. Some of us, like you, as I recall, started on actually first base or home plate or something like that. Well, I think Yeah, probably second base. Okay. Maybe second base, but whatever. But we have parents that love me electricity at your house. Yeah. Okay, fair point, right? And you’re very capable and good-looking and all the rest of it, right? It could it No, I mean, just if we’re just being honest, right? We’re just being honest. you had some natural advantages, but you know, in Monopoly, you land on Park Place, the first roll, you’re rolling. You get four good rolls in Monopoly, you’re going to win the game, right? And compounding, the better you do, the better you do. And the thing about in a in an honor Godic system is that both advantages and disadvantages compound. Surely you know people in your life who have had a couple of things of bad luck, right? And then they spiral into oblivion, right? And so what that means is that a a middle class and thus a high functioning society with social cohesion is always always a a deliberate construction. It is always created by policy. Always. And all of these things that we are pushing back against him and his way, me and my way are a consequence of basically an economic theory that said to policymakers, do it that way. And it was a mistake. And we should recognize that mistake and try to heal these mistakes, which we can. We can have a great society. We can have an ownership society. We can have anything we want. We just have to decide to do it and not let a small group of incredibly rich people dictate the terms of the economy. This is within our grasp. What are your thoughts then? I agree in principle with all of that, especially the last bit. A small group of very, very powerful people dictating the economy, meeting up in Davos, coming up with our how our lives should live. Um, there’s there’s more to the story here. In the early ‘7s, they decoupled uh the the dollar from uh gold and they created the Fiat system, which meant they could print money that inflated assets that financialized it financialized assets, including the family home, which meant that as soon as we could print money, we could inflate the value of family homes and make it out of reach of most people. Well, and then finance took over and became 20% of the economy. Yeah. We ended up with these two massive institutions which is the technology industrial complex and the finance industrial complex and those two institutions have driven a wedge in society. My only difference with Nick and it’s a small difference is that I don’t believe raising the floor is going to be enough. I I really do I I I didn’t say it’s enough. I I it’s table stakes. Yeah. It is and and I my experience with that is it’s a minimum is because it’s because I’ve seen the minimum and and the pitchforks are out here in the UK where we have that minimum. My my worry here is that where we are the technology economy and the finance economy is racing as if it’s in a car and then all of the workers who are selling time for money, labor for money, it’s as if they’re running and we’re saying ah you guys just needs better sho comfier shoes. If we give you a pair of Nikes, will you guys be happy? And it’s like this is not going to close that gap. Um we we have to acknowledge that technology and finance are the two like big funds and big tech are the comp are basically hollowing out the middle class. And if we don’t acknowledge who the real bad guys are, when I say bad guys, I’m not sure they’re real bad guys, but essentially systemically they’re systemically they’re the bad guys. We need to essentially say, “Hey, big finance, big tech, you can’t financialize our houses. That’s for us to live in and for us to own.” Um, and you also can’t just eradicate all of our little to small businesses. We we need to tip the scales back in the favor of those small businesses because little towns, you go into any town in England, little like little towns in England, the thriving towns that everyone wants to live in, they have lots of small businesses. They have a butcher, baker, candlestick, maker type like stuff is going on. By the way, the best high street in London is the one I live on. Maran High Street. So, you agree? 100%. Yeah. One thing I find interesting is you’re saying that there’s this sweet spot in the middle. Yes. Where you you still get the the upside dynamism. You think there’s a sweet spot in the middle and decency. It’s a very narrow sweet spot and it’s very hard to achieve because Germany has really tried so hard and they’ve like their economy is collapsing. Their economy is going so badly at the moment. Um and they’ve tried everything. They’ve got workers have to be on the board. For example, of every company you’ve got to have a worker on the board. So they’re like doing as much as they can to do inclusion and the German economy. Okay, but so where is it? What? Okay, but here here’s the thing is it’s it is simply not fair to say the German economy is collapsing. Like have you been to Germany? Like come on. Like have you been to Stockholm? Like these places are incredibly functioning. Yeah, there’s definitely a Ford momentum but the German car industry is getting hollowed out right now. China, right? China’s doing that. Okay. But just because workers are on the board of German companies that and German people are unhappy the you you can’t necessarily connect these things. I just want to acknowledge though that like there are places like Dubai which are very close to lay fair capitalism with a sovereign wealth fund. And just just hold on. If you talk to someone who lives in Dubai, they freaking love Dubai. Like they they are so they’re the happiest people like and they talk they talk millionaires entrepreneurial people. Yeah. The rich people not the not the poor brown people who are well I mean because they b Indians and don’t know who well they they Yes. And also when I talk to a lot of the Uber drivers there and I talk to people who work in cafes there and all that sort of they’re all quite pro Dubai as well. But that’s because their other options are horrific. Yeah. That is it’s probably more extreme inequality isn’t it? It it’s more extreme inequality. quality because the place is growing until recently obviously with right but because the place is growing it feels like there’s a rising tide for everybody there’s something about economic growth that makes people very very happy and there’s something about a lack of economic growth that makes people miserable here in the UK for example okay but but just again Dubai is a place the UAE has been powered by the most extraordinary gusher of free cash probably the planet has ever seen I mean you Look up on your iPad there. The like the tailwind that economy gets from the unlimited resources. I wouldn’t say that’s why people love to buy it. They love it because of the entrepreneurial vibe. Like who like ambitious people? Yeah. So this is the rich excitement. Well, no. I see people. No, I see young people who want to have a crack and they’re because they’re they’re rich relative to the people doing the work. Well, they what they’re looking for is a place where their work will be rewarded. Let’s imagine the UK where your ability to get onto capitalism, your first million or your first 2 million is very easily low taxed in order to get things going for you economically. I I just want to see a situation where ambitious. Yeah. Like your ambitious people like what I hate is that I see these young people who are really super smart. I wish they were here building and they’re like you can’t succeed in the UK. they’ll just tax it off you as soon as you earn anything they take it. What if you’re not am and they leave? I think you’re benefited by a lot of the ambitious people. So when when you get one in if you get one in 10 people who are entrepreneurial or one in 100 people who are entrepreneurial, they’re creating optionality. They’re creating companies. The US is this the US is sort of set up for you the American dream. This is more of a US approach, isn’t it? What we have there is higher inequality. I’ll give you two to to to one extreme. the US, you hit the top rate of income tax when you hit $700,000. In the UK, it’s h 100,000 and and it immediately goes to 60% tax, 62% tax, and then it drops to 45% after that. Like, but there’s this kind of like Does it really? Yeah. It’s this it’s this it’s this weird. No, it’s this insane thing where you basically pay 20% 40% 60% 45% and it’s this kind of but to the point that people prefer the US the US approach sounds more leaving to the US like a lot of Brits are actually going to and the US has an inequality has higher inequality which means it’s probably more likely that the pitchforks will come out well for an ambitious person they don’t care about inequality right inequality is the opportunity to get ahead yeah they might not but from a social perspective the pitch folks are probably going to come out sooner in the US because of that inequality than in somewhere else. They seem to be coming out here in a big way. Like they’re coming out here, but they’re also coming out in the United States. Look at look at Zack Palanski uh is is gaining a huge political movement. Mandani in the UK, sorry, in New York is we’re seeing a rise of socialism in the United States. Okay. Zoran Mandami calls himself a socialist because he does not have another word for what he is doing. He has said seize the means of production. He said it and he said take houses off landlords like he is a he’s a card carrying socialist. Yeah. But he hasn’t done any really socialist things. I I just think that there there’s a bit of a confusion. But asking wealthy people to pay a little bit more tax is not socialism. uh standing up grocery stores in food deserts because no grocery store will will will will do it because it’s not profitable enough is not socialism. This is the government provisioning benefits to citizens, fixing potholes, making bike ramps, whatever the stuff he’s doing. These are not socialist things. What they are is not strictly neoliberal things, which is just like letting rich people run roughshod over everybody else. The thing that I see with say a food desert and a a store is that the tax system is so punitive that a small opportunity like setting up a grocery store with all the taxes and all the regulations and all the stuff the government puts on you, it’s just not worth doing it. There are better opportunities out there. Like I’m not talking about remove it for rich people. I’m saying for startups, for small businesses, for businesses that employ less than 200 people. If you basically create very positive exper very very positive conditions for small businesses to get started, they will set up a grocery store in a in a bad neighborhood because they go, “Yeah, you know what? I can figure out how it works in this.” Do do you think there’s a chance that we have a a bit of a bias as entrepreneurs? Everyone at this table is an entrepreneur. And for whatever reason, I think a lot of mine might be some like I don’t know trauma or whatever. I had a bias towards setting up a business and taking that risk. Whereas like my other three siblings, they didn’t do that. And I don’t know what I did to have that bias within me. Like if you really think about it, I it’s it was probably something my parents didn’t intend to do, which meant that at 18 when my four three siblings went to university and sort of followed that more one could say safer path. Well, yeah. Safer path. I dropped out. How angry were your parents when you Oh, they didn’t speak to them. My mom was Yeah. My mom’s Nigerian as well, so she didn’t she school when she was a child. Didn’t get an education. Can’t read. must have in a tough a tough understatement of what happened. But for whatever reason, that’s the path that I took and I’m I I can acknowledge that I’m in a bit of a minority. Yeah. And I think I sometimes consider like maybe I don’t realize that through privilege or through some genetic privilege or whatever. I had this particular orientation towards like entrepreneurialism that maybe other people don’t always have. And that means that they start the grocery store. I get crucified in the comments. Not everyone can be an entrepreneur, right? I’m not saying everyone can be an entrepreneur. I’ve never said that. But the grocery store analogy there is someone would start that grocery store if it was easier. Well, not everybody would work. There’s always a risk-to-reward ratio and government brings in all sorts of regulations and government only really thinks about big businesses. If you talk to anyone in government, small businesses don’t exist and they just simply think, why hasn’t Tesco done it or why hasn’t like Walmart done it? Yeah, I I’ve never started a business in the UK, but I can tell you that in the United States, the the barrier to setting up a grocery store in a food desert is not the regulation. It’s Safeway. It’s the supply chain. It’s the It’s all the stuff that you’ve described, which makes it incredibly difficult for for for somebody to operate a single location grocery store. Yeah. So, what would you do about that? Uh so what I would do I is I would I would and again in the United States we used to have lots of laws that pointed the economy towards small businesses. So if I was in charge I would impose a much higher minimum wage but I would do it progressively. All the labor standards all the all of the regulations would be imposed progressively. And in terms of regulation I would make it far like for a big company there’s a lot of rags right? You have to follow every rule to the tea. For a small business, you have a lot more flexibility. It’s imp because because we need the standards, but it turns out to be really hard as a single proprietor even to even to read the manual, right? To know what you’re supposed to do. So to me, it would all be progressive. So it would be easy to get capital, easy to start a business, relatively unencumbered by by regulation, although constrained to a certain extent. There are terrible things that small business people do, too. Wait, how’d you make it easier to get capital? Oh, you could have government programs that were designed to help small businesses get off the ground. We have the British Bank that uh underwrites for the first 25,000 of loans. Yeah. We had the small business administration in the United States that did a lot of that work. Yeah. So, we we have a lending institution here that is uh 75% underwritten by government for £25,000 startup loan. Right. So, there is some some schemes that can can work. I started all my companies on a on a credit card. The key thing is is this. There’s a difference between entrepreneurials and startups that are intending to scale and just small businesses that want to exist as a small business. I’m really big on the idea that we want to we want communities that have lots of small businesses even if they have no intention to scale and exit and any of those sorts of things that they that old fashioned thing, right, where you just had a grocery store. Yeah. And and it’s a good and you weren’t trying to create Walmart. Yeah. You just wanted to run a grocery store. It’s hard though, isn’t it? cuz you you want to be CVS or you you want to you want to be a network. But with a grocery store idea, if you’ve got mom and pop grocery store here, then next to it you have let’s say I don’t know in the UK it’s called Spa which is a grocery store 7-Eleven. The problem is if those are next to each other and one has um economies of scale I 7-Eleven can buy the cucumber for 20% of the cost of the mom and pop shop. Then if you’re on that street the 7-Eleven is going to survive. That’s why that’s why we tilt towards the United States used to have laws that expressly prohibited that. And why did they get rid of them? Neoliberalism. So they got rid of the restrictions on Yeah. There there used to be express laws to make sure that big companies could not buy raw materials cheaper than than small companies. Like when I was young, when I was your age, if you wanted to buy a competitor, you were sweating bullets because you had that had to be reviewed by a body and if they thought that you were consolidating too much, they would just say no. But if you think I think about all my friends that have opened retail stores through their companies and they they only do that when they get really big because their ecom business is supporting it. So if you think about I know the gym sharks, the represents other actors. So you can’t okay with respect to retail you are largely correct it depends on what kind of retail like you could have a gym you can’t e-commerce a gym or you know there are all kinds of retail some of which is somewhat immune from e-commerce and some of which is getting destroyed by e-commerce doesn’t it doesn’t matter if we’re talking about retail they were regional manufacturing companies regional everything sure and it all went away and you have never experienced a world in which that used to exist Like your your entire business experience is this sort of neoliberal world of giant companies. True. And the world I grew up in, we young, I’m old, right? But I I remember what it was like to go to the video store and select videos from the video store. I remember what it was like. Yeah. Like I remember going to the CD store and listening to music and talking to the retail employees when I was growing up. The cool kids worked at the CD store, the geeky kids worked at the bookstore, and everybody worked at the everyone else worked at the grocery store. Yeah. And all of those business models are gone. And this is what I mean. We need to kind of tip back towards small business experimentation being protected and all of that. The other thing, too, and I should should raise this about minimum wage and giving people more money. The bottom half of taxpayers in the UK pay 9.5% of all the uh income taxes. The government could remove taxes off of 50% of workers in one move and it would cost 33 billion and you just get rid of that and then every single person in the bottom half of income earners gets a 10% pay rise to 15% pay rise. Right. I love it. So where do we get the 32 billion from? Just just keep in mind their budget is 1.4 trillion. I know. I know. I know. But we’re going to have to if we trillion this 15 million people. Yeah. I agree. I’m just saying where does the money cuz I know what’s going to happen. Karma is saying they found this 20 million billion20 billion black hole in the finances and they and that’s the reason why they’re saying they’ve had to cut back on pensions and these kinds of things. So if we add another 30 billion to that where where do we where do we get the money from? You’re talking about reduce the the amount of administrative burden to tax 15 million people and keep on top of the tax on 15 million people. Just the sheer volume of people who have to work at HMRC all of this insanity. No, but I’m saying where does the money come from? Yeah. So, out of 1.4 trillion, I’m pretty sure we could find half of 1% 1% of it or whatever to to get these number of people out of tax. Um, I think we could tax big corporations who are taking the piss. Uh, and I also think the economic spending rounds of getting those people, those poor, the poorer half of people should not be paying tax. If you give them more money, they’ll spend more money, right? They’re not Okay, I agree with you. So you’re saying tax big corporations more in the UK at point of consumption. Personally, I would make it a like very similar to a broadcast license that it’s a fixed fee that’s very hard to wiggle out of. So if I’m a let’s say I’m an open AI, yeah, you might have a broadcast license to pay uh to to access this market. So you’re going to charge say you say I’m going to charge Open AI 4 billion, 5 billion to access our market. Well, for example, Facebook is very much broadcasting videos and content all the time. So is YouTube. So is Google. All that sort of stuff. So you just simply say, “Guys, the cost of doing business in this country if you want access to this market is a fixed broadcast license fee of 500 million a year or whatever it is.” And you just say based on the number of views that you guys get and how much attention you suck out of our economy, we just essentially tax the attention. You’re literally if people are spending an hour a day on their phone doom scrolling, we’re that that is a broadcast. you’re broadcasting to our people, so therefore we’ve got a broadcast license. Um, so those are the types of things that I would look at because they’re very hard to wiggle out of. Do you think then these these companies like an open eye would would then as we said earlier just increase the subscription fee in this market and you see this sometimes where in certain countries something is cheaper. I remember going to the United I I used to go to the United States to buy my Apple products cuz it was cheaper there. Yeah. And then in the UK it cost me like not even not even a little bit. It was like hundreds of dollars more to buy a laptop here. the same laptop in this market versus this one cost different amounts of money. They they may choose to try and pass on that consumption tax to to consumers. Maybe they do do that. Uh maybe we could try and avoid maybe we could try and legislate against that that they have to essentially be on par with where they are in other markets that they they have to charge par. Um if we don’t if we don’t do anything, we essentially have nurses and uh you know like teachers and all the people who are in the normal 50% of the economy whose job is now to hold up the economy while Starbucks doesn’t pay taxes while Amazon doesn’t pay taxes while Google doesn’t pay taxes. And and Steve, I think all your questions are really really good, but they all point to the same thing, which it which is that, you know, the economy is a collective action problem, right? And you know, it’s a global action problem. It’s a global it’s a global collective action problem. And if we want if we want robust solutions to these problems, we’re going to have to robustly coordinate activity across the world. And you know like for during the Biden administration they tried really hard to do this global profit tax where where uh but that collapsed under the weight of pressure. But all you know again all of your questions I think are really good but they all point to the same fundamental weakness of of of governance and Nick you you you need to talk to your billionaire mates and also say if we don’t start investing in the economies that we do business with which you are saying right of course right it’s a lonely business I’ll just tell you but it’s like it’s like it’s like with those CEOs of those companies you know you drain this you drain the whole economy out and and and then where then what next I think on this pass through problem I was thinking I was looking at different ways that this ends up being applied. So if you think about the Big Mac, the Big Mac costs different things in different states depending on how much tax the that that state charges. So in Oregon the Big Mac is $8 whereas in Chicago it’s almost $9. Um if you think about like bookstores, you can buy one book on the high street for $20, the same book online is $10 because they’re passing through the cost. So it’s conceivable that if we we say to big corporations right you guys are going to pay a bigger tax to sell into the UK than the UK consumer that they’ll they might pass that on to the UK consumer and they might look at different markets and because you know they might say as a company we want to make 30% margin to make 30% margins in the UK is to bump the cost UK consumer could say I’m going to use a VPN and pretend that I’m going to be in a different market and pay a lower price and doesn’t matter you still have to pay the broadcast license if you want to be available in our in our country. These are hard problems and we need to know who is the person that we’re targeting. It’s it’s the black rocks of the world. It’s the it’s the big banks of the world. It’s the big mortgage. Like I had um say I had a private conversation with the CTO of a very large company technology business. And he was saying to me, he goes, “I don’t think the UK understands the situation it’s putting itself in and the EU with all this regulation.” He said to me, um, that we sell this particular product It’s a physical product and because the UK and I think EU have put this new law in where you have to have removable batteries. Interestingly, the unintended consequence of that is we have to stock more lithium batteries. More of them go into landfill and also your devices break because they’re no longer waterproof. So you’re going actually it’s harming the environment. And also he said the thing you guys don’t realize is that you’re actually not a big market anymore for us. And because South America’s coming online, we actually don’t have to sell the product here. And you think about this in terms of some of the regulations around AI as well. When a new product launches on a track, yeah, it goes in the US first because of regulations and then maybe No, it goes in the US first because it’s the biggest market. Biggest market. But also we have we’re our regulations around some software and GDPR and all these kinds of things means that sometimes we just don’t get the features. And sometimes in my history in our history of building the previous business I was in as creators we would sometimes have to wait 12 or 18 months to get the same tools that my competitors I know in the United States could use monetization tools. They they have the monetization tools first then we’d have to wait 18 months. The economy is a set of trade-offs. Like that is the problem. Like economics is called a set of tra the actual definition of economics is making trade-offs um and picking picking your trade-offs. I totally get it. Like regulation does actually suck for consumers and for businesses. Um and like the the EU is now overregulated to the extent that you can’t even take a a lid off of a bottle without, you know, the government being involved with how the lid comes off the bottle. And it’s killing it’s killing our dynamism. We are really just like and the US is underregulated and if you buy chicken in a in a store and and don’t cook it could be anything. One in three chances you’ll you’ll you’ll you’ll get uh either E.coli or salmonilla and your life expectancy is lower. Exactly. Everyone who eats in the US trade-offs comes back from the US and goes, “Oh my goodness, I hate I hate eating food in the US. It’s all terrible. It’s all trade-offs.” Does this not then mean our ultimate conclusion of this conversation is around morals and ethics around the trade-offs that we think are the right ones to make? Yes. And so it’s a question really of morals and ethics. Yes. Human flourishing. Yes. 100%. The the purpose of the economy is is to improve human human lives. The way to do this is to massively maximize small business power because when people get more complicated when when pe when people have to when I have to work shoulderto-shoulder with my workers, I treat people well, right? When I’m a mega corporation who have faceless workers down on the factory floor that I will never meet. I will never sit next to on a plane. I will never come in contact with my workers. I can treat them however I like. Why do you think that’s reductive, Nick? Uh, well, I think that what Dan is saying is true and massively insufficient. Of course, I mean, we’re in violent agreement about the small business point. Like, I don’t want to be naive and think we should go back to the 60s or something like that. Like, I don’t think that’s true. But again, here’s what the new economics shows. that corporate consolidation increases prices, lowers wages, decreases consumer choice, and decreases the rate of innovation. Right? And I 100% agree because innovation again that the conventional view of innovation, the conventional economic view of in innovation is this sort of great man theory is you have this smart rich guy who’s sitting somewhere and he he or she has this amazing idea and that’s innovation. That is not what innovation is. Innovation is always combinatorial in technology makes itself out of itself. You you start with a rock. The the rock was our first technology. And you did a lot of stuff with rocks. And we also had sticks. Actually, sticks were our first technology. But you tie a rock to a stick, you have a hammer, a spear, an arrow, an axe, a shovel. It goes on and on and on. And what that means in terms of policy is that because innovation is combinatorial, the more diverse people in a network who come together with different ideas and different sets of experiences, that is what drives the rate of innovation. And this is mathematically demonstrated that a diverse group of people working on a problem will absolutely consistently outperform a a a homogeneous group of high performers. And then when they when they become really successful, which will happen eventually if you let that system play out, you have this inequality unless you intervene at some point and recycle it. And then when you go to recycle it, you go get back to this issue of us having needing global cohesion. Yes. Because some people won’t want the recycling. Correct. And they’ll say, well, I’m just going to go to Ireland or I’m going to go to Dubai or I’m going to go somewhere else. And this is maybe a function of the new economy where people can just get up and leave and take their value with them. Yes. And this is the conundrum. This is the conundrum. But the meta issue above the conundrum is recognizing that citizens have both the right and the responsibility to want to address that problem. And we and you grew up in a world where it was illegitimate to address that problem that that that economics told you don’t worry about those problems. The market will sort it out. Is there like a radical idea of how to solve this? So, do we need like all the the very very rich people in the world to come together collectively and say we’re going to create a new model? Like how do how do you I don’t know. Is there any radical ways to solve this stuff or is it just all trade-offs once again democracy? One of the big radical ways is breaking up companies and it’s unthinkable. You know Jeff Bezos, right? Yes, I do. So, it was in my wedding. I wonder if he would lose more sleep about higher taxes or having his company broken up. Oh, for sure. Broken up. Cuz if you broke up uh Google from YouTube, if you broke up AWS, Amazon Prime and Amazon, if you like the biggest thing that scares the billionaires is backing competition with the market. And it’s like, oh my goodness, I don’t want to have to compete. I’ve got this amazing monopoly that just works. Right. So, but is is that a perfect solution? Cuz I was thinking it’s not a perfect solution. Pretty good solution. It’s the least worst solution available. It’s pretty it’s pretty good. It’s pretty effective. I mean, this is what Teddy Roosevelt did. These companies aren’t making any any money though. They’re like being subsidized by the mothership. So like in an let’s say Amazon Prime that’s competing against Netflix and dude these companies make money where they want to make money for for tax optimization and strategic reasons. Look, I mean you know like when we started Amazon.com and I’m not sure if you guys remember the whole hit on it was it’s not profitable, right? The secret to Amazon.com success is the negative cash conversion cycle. Right? For virtually every business on planet Earth, to grow requires capital, right? For all of your businesses, growth requires capital. But for Amazon.com, we took an order, we put up the website, you take an order, you instantaneously transmit that order to a book warehouse, which has all of the titles in stock. It’s shipped the next day, it’s received the next day. you ship it out, hit the hit the person hit the person’s credit card, but then you don’t have to pay the book seller for 90 days, right? And what that means is the bigger the company gets, the better cash flow gets whether you’re making money or not. So, we didn’t have to make money because we had most companies have to make money because if they don’t, they don’t have the cash flow to continue like Amazon Prime businesses and Yeah. And so there are things available that we could have made money in one minute just by increasing our prices by 3 or 4%. Yeah, these companies are also not worth trillions of dollars because they’re not profitable. They’re they’re worth trillions of dollars because they are making money. But the issue is is they have strategic monopolies. And if you really want to make them lose sleep, you need to break up strategic monopolies. You need to say there’s an actual limit to how big a fund can be. There’s an actual limit as to how big a strategic monopoly can be. uh you can’t have things that hedge naturally against each other and prevent real competition. So like these things are ways of and also ties up their attention. So while they’re thinking about not getting broken up, they’re also not competing with all the other guys out there. So like it’s it’s basically capitalism runs on competition. And this is the one thing that we’ve missed that the less competition. Yeah. Like when Adam Smith said capitalism works, he said it only works when there’s competition. If there’s one bakery in town, any bread at any quality, at any price is what you have to pay. As soon as there’s two bakeries in town, it has to be the best quality at the best price. Although with two, you can collude. But if you have five, it’s very hard. So, so Amazon has a monopoly over strategic monopoly. A strategic monopoly. So, what does one do with Amazon? You break it up. Yeah. Into what? AWS, Amazon Prime, Amazon retail. Fine. But they’ve still got a monopoly in online e-commerce theoretically. Yeah. Well, it’s just harder. it’s easier for someone to come along and compete. Right now, it’s very, very hard for me to compete with Amazon because they are pulling in cash from AWS. They’re pulling in cash from all these other subscriptions. There’s so Amazon basics. You could break up the retail. You could say you can have a bookstore, you can have an electronic store, you can have this. You can only you can’t be the everything store, right? So, you could there’s all sorts of ways that you but you have to acknowledge when someone has achieved a strategic think that’s a good idea. Do you still own shows on Amazon? No, sadly. Okay. I wouldn’t be here talking to you guys if I No, no, no, no. That’s true. Jeff won’t come. Uh, no. I sadly I sold my shares. But, uh, you know, I I am open to all of these ideas because I know I mean I am completely with Dan. I know that the world would be a better place if these companies were smaller and we had more competition. And again there is not there are no silver bullets to these complex problems the world faces. We are not at this table going to come up with this algorithmic idea that is just going to make the world a better place. It it none of these solutions are perfect. They are always going to be the least worst thing that we can come up with. But I think at at the at the level of principle um living in a world where we try actively to limit concentrated power in all its forms. Where we try actively to include people in whatever way whether as entrepreneurs or just workers as robustly as possible. Where we try to make sure that people are engaged enough in the economy so that they will be supportive of the democracy. not want to burn it down. These are high-level principles that I think reasonable people can agree with and they come into conflict with people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg who do not want to live in that world, who want to live in an oligarchical world and I just think that we should have that fight and win. We have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next not knowing who they’re leaving it for and I think it’s quite a relevant question. Um, I’ll ask you first, Dan. The question is, in a world with so many challenges, what can we do to restore hope and trigger engagement?

Uh getting back to what we were talking about, we need we need people to know that the game the rules of the game have changed and that the rules that we grew up with where we grew up in a particular industrialized late stage industrialized world that had those rules and we now live in an early stage digital revolution world. And the thing that gives me hope is I know how the rules of that world work, right? Someone explained it to me. They actually explained this is how you start a business. This is how you grow a business. This is how you make a million. This is how you hire some people. This is how you get a great team working side by side. That gave me an enormous amount of hope. I have a pathway out of where I was born and the wealth I was born with and where I am now. Someone explained to me the pathway. Here’s how the rules work and here’s how you make make success. One of the things that makes people feel hopeless is that they’re stuck in a game where no one explains the rules. So explaining the rules. So I would say we need a schooling system. The thing we don’t talk about enough is that the schooling system has to explain to kids the relevant information as to how to function in the current economy. So I played that forward in my head and I was thinking, okay, you get a million kids and you explain all of the rules to them. At some point, if you just give it a year or two, say they all knew the rules, um there’s still an edge and some of them would figure out the edge. Totally. And then you’ve got this pocket that know everyone knows the rules but then others know this particular way to beat the system and that could be with I don’t know they learn about AI they learn about whatever and then you’re kind of back into the same place and you were one such person who got the edge someone came to you and went you know they’re saying the rules are this actually there’s a way to get an edge and you had it within you for whatever reason to capitalize on that edge and now you’re a multi-millionaire that edge so so there’s always going to be the rule and then the rules Yeah, there’s no every single day after you explain a rules to someone there’s a new set of rules. The only consistent is change. And at the moment, most people I encounter who have never had any explanation going on about how the world works. Now, they are hopeless. They feel completely hopeless. As in like I see kids who are sending out um CVS to Microsoft or to like some major company. They don’t realize that those companies are getting 3,500 I get it. The day after you explain the rules to them, the rules are one day less relevant. And so it’s true. You’d have to go to school every single day. Well, yeah. You lifelong learning. You do have to do lifelong learning. Like there is this lifelong part of the rules is lifelong learning. That is actually one of the rules which is the only consistent is change. It sounds like you’re saying though that if we teach people the rules of business, then people will have more hope. And but but there’s so many people that I know like my my fianceé who she doesn’t she cares about something else much more than she cares about business. She cares about like she just started she set up Bali breath work and she was able right she was able to create barley breath work because well I said it not you she was able to figure out how to turn her passion into something that is commercially sustainable. But I’m just using her as an example cuz we did get that from the school system fundamentally. She maybe she got it in part because she has a dad who’s an entrepreneur. She has a explain the rules to her. Um she has the support network like she supports me, I support her. She knows how to enroll people into her success. All of that is called pitching, publishing content, creating a product offering. I only know one thing that I’ve seen work again and again and again and again, which is I teach people the people who learn the entrepreneurial method suddenly feel agency and hope. I I agree and I saying that’s for everyone. Yeah, but this is the it’s not for everyone. It’s for people like that had whatever mean you had in terms of like the upbringing, the luck, the whatever, the fortune. I’m not saying everyone’s going to be an entrepreneur. My answer to that question is entrepreneurial is the entrepreneurial tool set gives people a lot of hope. I get that and that one of the things that we have to acknowledge is that’s a certain type of person who has a certain type of goals. There are some people who actually just want to go outside and they don’t they want to work. Maybe they want to work one day a week or two days a week. Sure, I don’t want to do push-ups and I don’t want to do sit-ups and I don’t want to go to the gym. But if you ask a fitness professional, how do you improve your body? How do you feel good? Right? The fitness professional says, “Hey, these are all the things that I’ve seen working for a lot of people about going out and getting fit.” And you might not want to do them initially, but actually the people who do these things, the hope the people that do those things might have an inherent privilege, right? Wait, the world’s not fair. Like the world’s not fair. Some people are born on I just know your answer to the same question. I think we we need to have vital democracies that manage economies in ways that are optimized around human flourishing and not capital efficiency, not capital accumul accumulation. That we live in a world, you completely grew up in a world where the highest good was capital efficiency. the capital efficiency and godliness were the same and we have organized society in this way. We in the United States it we literally have a norm and a set of regulations around maximizing shareholder value for corporations. Right? This was invented out of whole cloth in the 1970s. This whole idea that the purpose of the corporation should be merely to enrich shareholders. And the evil of that idea isn’t what they weren’t saying was screw the poor. What they said was if you maximize value for shareholders, it will be good for everybody. And that was the lie because it wasn’t good for everybody. It was good for a tiny minority of people. And the lie was that when you do that, growth rates will go up, GDP will go up. We’ll have a rising tide. And the tide didn’t rise, it fell. And what modern economics says is that we can have a different construct. We can have a different society that purposefully includes people in a robust way, whether they’re a worker, whether they’re a small business. And if we do that, everyone will benefit. The economy will grow faster. People will be paid better. Prices will be lower. We will have more innovation. This is within our grasp. We just have to decide to do it. You should go into politics. I am in politics. Well, I I hear that. One thing I don’t like is waiting for the world to change. And I like I like personal agency. And at Nick’s level that he’s playing at, I love the fact that he’s in politics and he’s he’s using his wealth and his power and his influence to change the system. For most people, waiting for the world to change does not feel empowering. And and I guess what where I’m coming from is like yes, tilt towards this because that’s the political movement that’s required to make sure the world includes more people in capitalism. And I love that. Um, and while that’s happening, take personal accountability, personal agency, figure out what is your next move. Watch all the episodes of Diary of a CEO, learn from people and, you know, and and figure out Yeah, subscribe. Right. Do me a favor, subscribe to the channel. But if if that if that is done, like people people who do that end up feeling hopeful because hope comes from having personal agency. And personal agency is knowing your next move that’s going to benefit you and move you forward. I agree. I agree. And I real I’ you know, the older I’ve gotten, the more I realize my own privilege. And my privilege isn’t necessarily that I built a business and that I have money now and all those things. My privilege is something happened when I was young from the point of maybe where my parents feel guilty about it. I don’t feel guilty about it, but it just has allowed me to see my own bias and to realize that I have this unknown unknown. Unfortunately, that’s growing by the day because I’m getting more entrenched in my own privilege. And what I mean by this is like I play out the scenario theoretically. My dad left my mom and my mom um still struggles to read and write and she would have had like four kids, can’t read or write, can’t really get employment. She worked at St. League hospice as a volunteer and I go, “God, if that one thing had happened, how different would my of life have been and and so that’s like a privilege that I I’ve never even acknowledged because I it’s kind of inherent. It was like built into my life.” And then would I be sat here now? Would I be be the person I am today if that one little thing had happened? No. Would I be ambitious and optimistic about the world? Or would I be theoretically could I be resentful? Could I be like some of my other friends who came from the same city where I came from who didn’t have a father who may I’ve said to some of my friends I said to one of my particular friends back home if you would just get a job for a couple of months I will pay your rent for years didn’t happen can’t get a job at his subway for for 3 months so that I would pay his rent for years I ended up helping him anyway but I it just I remember saying that 10 years ago it just highlighted to me that there’s a real deep inherent privilege that I have that I’m like not even aware that I it sometimes it’s trauma my DNA my brothers are all very smart naturally um and what if I didn’t what if like I didn’t have those two parents and what if I didn’t have the whatever genetic composition I had like then would the advice apply that then would the advice I give to the world would it apply so I I I I mle that and go it’s got to pass that lens for it to be broadly applicable and therefore I think effective advice I I love your level of compassion and empathy for people and the fact that you’re having that self explo exploration means you’re an incredible type of person with each individual. Each person wants to do the most with what they’ve got. I’m saying that if I was to visit a small town that had a thriving 10, 15, 20 businesses in there, there were enough entrepreneurs to create optionality for people. That would be a good town to go to, right? And if I go to a town where there are no entrepreneurs and there are like everyone feels downtrodden and there’s one big Costco and that’s the only employer in town, that’s going to be a [ __ ] town. So all I’m saying is you need a critical mass of people who have uh agency and that lifts up the like having a few do you know in in Japan they call it the Shogun family, right? and the Shogun family lifts up that that little community and that around that Shogun family you end up with lots of other businesses and lots of other like it it it flows out. But when you have one monolith in the world that is the only company in town and it is the only place that ships stuff to your door and it’s the there’s only one place to get your CDs and there’s only one place to get your Netflix then pretty much everyone else is just reduced to being a consumer. What do you think, Nick? I again I’ve said it before I I I agree with this sentiment 100%. I am an entrepreneur myself, but I expect that operating in empowerment applies to it will no doubt apply to a high percentage of the people who watch your show, right? Lots and lots of people who watch this show are entrepreneurial, want to be entrepreneurial, so on and so forth. But I suspect you’re talking about less than 5% of people on planet Earth that fit that paradigm. And I want to create a paradigm that works for everybody. And you’re saying if you hit those 5%. Well, even in the UK it’s 6 million self-employed people out of 30 million workers. It’s not it’s not tiny. It’s a pretty decent percent, right? It it is a major opportunity that more people than ever could take part in. If you asked a health professional, how do you get hope? Go to the gym, go for a run, all that stuff. You’re asking an entrepreneur how do you get hope through personal agency? I’m going to tell you what’s worked what’s worked for me is the entrepreneurial method. Yeah. So maybe we need to ask a broad group of people. Yeah. But I suspect that what they will come back to you with is the quiet miracle of a normal life. If you want that, that’s great. I I want that and I want that for everyone. That’s gone away. It’s gone. Houses are unaffordable. Sorry. Local jobs don’t exist. No one’s paying healthy wages. Like all of that stuff that I want as well. It’s great to sit there and want it, right? But that doesn’t give me hope. That gives me disappointment that it used to exist, right? My the family home that most people would love to raise a family in, it’s 1.2 million now, right? And if you want to fix that, you have to enact this. Yeah. You have to do that. Most people What is People are going to wonder what’s in that piece of paper. So th this is, you know, I mean, the the the main body of my work is coming up with a different economic paradigm, a way of understanding economic cause and effect that leads to the world that Dan prefers, that I prefer. I think I don’t know, but I sense it’s the world that you prefer. And what you have to do is you have to rip down the existing economic framework and replace it with a 21st century thing that inclines policymakers to make good decisions not bad ones. And the booklet itself that that can can you show the booklet? Yeah. So this booklet is 21st century economics. Now this is aimed at policy makers and professionals but but if you go to uh marketsbuilt forhumans.org org. You can download this for free and that is merely an expression of the paradigm itself. Going from believing that uh we should just increase uh capital efficiency to human flourishing. Going from understanding human beings as homoeconomicist to homo sapiens. Going from understanding the economy as a parto optimal equilibrium to a complex to an ecology all this stuff. But when you understand it in a new way, you come to very different conclusions about how you should organize the world. And that is the starting point for global transformation. I love it. He’s already a billionaire. He’s got time on his hands and he’s got money to fly around the world doing it. Do it. And while he’s doing it, all I need is for people like you to help me explain it. Yeah. And and like I I love it. I’m not against it. I’m just saying what will give most people hope is taking agency over their life where they can do something this week to improve their life. So, next time I see you, there will be a test and and download download it, give it to your law makers. Well, so what I’ll do then, I mean, we’ve got different reading materials people that are listening can uh can pursue here. Um, we’ve got Dan’s books here, which I’ll link below. Dan, is there a particular best book to start with in your opinion? Um, the most recent one is called the lifestyle business playbook and it’s basically how to get started with a small business and a business that will give you more fun, freedom, and flexibility. And I like the idea of supporting anyone who’s trying to create a better economy. Some of the most miserable people I know are waiting for the system to change. And I don’t want you to be that person. I want you to be doing something in your own life. And then over here, I mean, I’m going to link all of your books below as well, better. Yeah. I mean, I I just think that um a starting point for global transformation is under look, economics is the operating system of the world. If it’s the wrong operating system, you end up with a very bad circumstance. I and in economics is invisible to most people. They don’t even understand it’s the it’s the water they’re swimming in. They don’t understand that policymakers are making decisions that affect their lives based on a particular understanding of how the economy works. And if that’s wrong, then you’re going to make some terrible decisions. If you believe that prosperity trickles down from the top, you’re going to enact a certain set of policies. If you believe that growth is built from the middle out, you will make an entirely different set of uh uh uh policies. If you believe that the middle class is a consequence of economic growth, you will go one way. If you believe that the thriving middle class is the cause of growth, you will do a completely different set of things in terms of policy. All of them aligned with what Dan wants. But but that’s where you have to start. That’s that’s the meta those are the meta questions that you have to answer and then you and then you deduce logically to all of the things that Dan prefers. But you have to start up here. You have to start with the set of ideas that govern how people see economic cause and effect. And that is what this is.

I shall link it below. Thank you so much. We’re done. Thank you. You aren fantastic.

This could be the last time that I speak about myself, my work, because there’s a chance that I might not make it off the operating table this month. And a journalist who has very bad blood towards me has been trying to publish a story on me for more than 2 years now, and it will come out in the next month or two. And I didn’t want that to be the last word of my life. What do you want the last word of your life to be? I’m here to communicate about the possibility of a major forgotten episode in Human Story. I’m talking about a lost civilization. So, most people think civilization started 6,000 years ago. Yes. But you believe there’s strong evidence that there could have been a previous civilization 20,000 years ago. And I’m going to present the evidence for that here, Stephen. And it suggests a golden age where there was no violence, no cruelty, where great healers and sages were at work. They’re extremely sophisticated. However, if you follow the myths further, as I’ve done, you find something odd happens. We find that they stepped away from the original purity and become a culture that begins to impose its power on others around the world. And then sewn into those myths is scientific information which record a gigantic cataclysm all but wiping out the human race. If what you’re saying is true, what does that mean for our lives? I guess also our future. Well, there’s always this feeling in the myths that we brought this upon ourselves. And when I look at our civilization today, I see a civilization that ticks all the mythological boxes for the next lost civilization. And that we are most likely to be the cause of that cataclysm ourselves. Unless we wake up, Graeme Hanok, what will you care about on your last day?

Most of all, Graeme Hanok, I guess the first question I wanted to ask you is, what is it you’ve committed the last more than 30 years of your life to understanding? What it is is a a puzzle. I’m puzzled by aspects of the human past. There could be, and I think there’s a lot to suggest there was, a major forgotten episode in the human story. That’s why I refer to us as a species with amnesia. When I use that phrase, I need to give credit to Emanuel Velikovski who wrote a book called Mankind in Amnesia. I think we are a species with amnesia. I think we have forgotten something very important in our own past. And when I turn to the experts, I find much of what they say very interesting and very useful, but some of what they say extremely unsatisfactory and and not responding to the problems that that I have in the past. And that’s led me to to take my own approach to the past to look at that and and to offer uh readers because I’m mainly an author occasionally make TV shows to offer them an alternative point of view which is rational and and and solidly based but which is contrary to key aspects of the mainstream narrative. We only have decipherable written scripts from the last 5 a half thousand years maximum. Before that, we don’t have any any writing that we can at any rate read, go back 10, 12, 15, 20,000 years. All you can base it on from an archaeological point of view is what they can dig out of the ground. And I think what they’re missing, the ancients did leave us memories of what they went through. We have myths and traditions and scriptures from all around the world which record a gigantic cataclysm affecting the human race and all but wiping out the human race. Everybody knows the story of the flood of Noah. Of course, the flood of Noah is just an one example of hundreds like that of stories from around the world. Uh archaeologists pour scorn on Plato’s story of Atlantis. Uh but Atlantis is another of those stories that remembers a global flood that wiped out a former era of existence, leaving only a few survivors. And the archaeological response to them is there was a local river flood. They exaggerated it. It was a big deal for them. So they said it happened to the whole world. And I’m sick of archaeologists saying that. This is the memory banks of our species. This is the record, the only record we have of a period before 6,000 years ago. And we shouldn’t despise it and scorn it as primitive superstition. We should say, what can we find in here that we can coordinate with scientific facts that we’re aware of? Let’s see if there’s something to this rather than just dismissing it. Many of these myths contain imagery and a series of numbers. A very important academic study published in the 1960s, a book called Hamlet’s Mill by Giorgio Dantilana, professor of the history of science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Hera Vondesin, professor of history of science. This is not me speaking. This is major major historians of science in the 1960s. They found encoded in those myths numbers and imagery that could only relate to one thing and that’s an obscure astronomical phenomenon called the precession of the equinoxes. I’m not going to go into the technical details, but to observe it and to record it and to predict it, to predict its effects in the future involves very precise astronomical observations maintained over a very long period of time, hundreds and hundreds of years at least. So here we have myths of a global cataclysm. There is just so much else. There are ancient maps that show the world as it looked during the ice age, again dismissed as just total coincidence and not significant by archaeology. I feel that archaeology has failed miserably in providing a nurturing satisfying answer to the questions we all have. So when you say global cataclysm what does that mean? Means that some something hit the planet there was we were wiped out. Yeah there there there are a number of options and again I need to stress this because because there’s so much propaganda in this business I’ll be immediately accused of lunatic fringe. The solid science that’s been done on this uh is twofold. One aspect of it, the one that I think I find most persuasive is called the younger drius impact hypothesis. And this is a mainstream hypothesis, but it is severely criticized within academia. The hypothesis is that about 20,000 years ago, a very large comet came in from deep space and went into orbit around the sun. This would be a comet of a diameter of 100 kilometers, maybe 200. Comes in, gets captured by the sun’s gravity, goes into an orbit. That orbit crosses the orbit of the Earth. While you’re dealing with one large object, the chances of getting hit are extremely low. It would be very bad if you did, but very low. Trouble is, nobody disputes this. Once comets are caught by the gravitational field of a very large planet or of a sun, they start to break up into multiple parts. And this is what happened to the younger dryass comet. Instead of being a single bullet, it became a shotgun blast. It became thousands and thousands of objects of which we’ve cataloged quite a lot. Numbers of them, comet Enki is the best known bit of that former comet. Many of the academics who look at this think that comet Enki which is about 6 km in diameter and which does cross the orbit of the earth they think that that was the source comet but whereas the other team are saying no that’s a bit of the source comet there were many other bits as well and 12,800 years ago 12,860 approximately the earth went into a storm of these fragments none of them big enough to compare with the object that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago but all over the world. The earth is turning. This stuff comes in. They found it in the west coast of North America. They found it in Belgium. And they found it as far east as Syria. So, it’s like the earth turns and this stuff is just coming in. Most of it is blowing up in the air. It isn’t even hitting the ground. But an air burst from an object that might be 100 m in diameter is equivalent to a very substantial nuclear blast. So, their argument is the Earth was hit by a comet storm. And this they then argue, and I think they’re right, uh, explains what happened then because 12,800 years ago, we were still in the ice age. Uh, but the earth was coming out of the ice age. In fact, for about a,000 maybe 2,000 years before that, the earth had been getting warmer, getting quite nice. And you would normally expect that to continue. But then suddenly, 12,800 years ago, give or take 60 years, there’s a huge interruption. There’s a radical change. The earth instead of warming, it suddenly goes back into a massive deep freeze. And this is the time when all the famous big animals of the ice age, the megaporna are wiped out. The the woolly mammoths, the mastadons, the giant sloths, these things like 14 ft tall, you know, they’re all they’re all wiped out in that window around about 12,800 years ago. And most important of all, there’s a very mysterious sea level rise that occurs then. This you would not expect when the earth is entering a cold phase. Normally when earth enters a cold phase, ice accumulates on the existing ice caps. It doesn’t melt and go into the sea. So the next thing is how do we explain this sudden rise in sea levels at the beginning of younger dries. It shouldn’t have happened. The comet theory explains it perfectly. the the the mass, the impact, the heat, the air bursts, that would have been enough to send the ice sheets into meltdown and to cause this pulse of melt water. Then the freeze sets in, you have about 1,200 years of freezing, desperately cold conditions. And then again, 11,600 years ago, womph, it suddenly warms up. I mean, these are radical climate changes. They’re beyond anything that’s happening now. And uh I I think explanations are needed for them. because 12,800 years ago may sound a long time ago, but it’s really yesterday in the human story. Uh, so something very big happened to the Earth and happened to our ancestors 12,800 years ago. If it wasn’t a comet, another theory that’s been put forward is a radical change in solar activity. This might have been involved with it as well. I don’t find that as persuasive as the younger drius impact hypothesis. And you know maybe some other explanation will come up but what nobody disputes is that the younger dus was a catastrophe. Uh it was global uh and and it had huge effects. You um you chose intentionally to come and have this conversation today. Why today? Well I’ve been quite unwell really noticeably unwell since uh January February uh this year particularly very very short of breath. It’s it’s because the one of the failed valves in my my heart is um causing blood to regurgitate inside the heart rather than pumping it through the body. And that means that oxygenated blood is not getting to my lungs. I probably would live another 2 or 3 years without the surgery, maybe maybe even five, but the quality of life would be very low. I I can’t even walk up three stairs without being being exhausted at the moment. So, I’ve definitely decided to to have the surgery. Why am I doing this interview now rather than postponing it until after the surgery and I’ve recovered? Well, there’s a tiny chance, absolutely minuscule chance that I might not make it off the operating table this month. Yeah, this month. And if that were the case, uh this would be the last time I’ve spoken about myself, my work, my life, challenges I faced, uh in an open forum like this. And and and I I I choose to do that. And I’m going to say specifically why without giving without mentioning names. I choose to do that because a journalist uh who has very bad blood towards me has been trying to publish a story on me for more than 2 years now. Uh and it will come out in the next in the next month or two. And I didn’t want that to be the last word of my life. That’s why I’m here. Stephen, what do you want the last word of your life to be? I would I would hope that people will come to understand that I’m not the person that a very small minority of archaeologists have mobilized social media to present me as. I’m not a grifter. I’m not a hoaxer. I’m not a con man. I’m deeply committed to this. I’ve devoted my life to it for more than for more than 30 years. I’m passionate about it. It matters to me. And I think again I’ll be laughed at for saying this, but I feel called to do this. I feel I I feel it’s my obligation and my responsibility to do this. How is that disputed? Cuz I I guess I need to understand human history to understand why the the the fundamental belief that you have that there was a civilization that we aren’t talking about. I’d like to be clear. It’s not a belief. Um this is another is a mistake that my that my critics of often make. They they think that I’m dealing with some sort of belief system or some sort of cult here. No, I’m not. I’m I’m just puzzled. I’m just puzzled by the past and I’m puzzled by the memories that have been passed down to us. And I’m puzzled that those memories concur all around the world on a serious cataclysmic event. What is it that the your people that aren’t puzzled and are certain belief? Yeah. They think that glacial lakes in North America gradually grew in size and overspilled the ice dams that held them in place and that the um water from those lakes, some of it went into the Atlantic Ocean and cut the Gulf Stream. I don’t dispute that glacial lakes were involved, but those lakes were filled up at a massive speed. Nobody disputes that the Younger Dryus was a cataclysmic event. It’s just the the degree of the cataclysm that’s disputed and what caused it that’s disputed. But everyone agrees that humans are 300 15,000 years. I mean at present when I started on this quest back back in the late 80s early 90s it was felt that anatomically modern human beings had not existed for more than 50,000 years. Very recent really. But this turned out to be complete rubbish because anatomically modern humans are much older than 50,000 years ago. We have 196,000y old anatomically modern human remains from Ethiopia. And then finally 315,000 years ago, a recent find in um Gimlier Hood in Morocco. Uh again anatomically modern humans. So we can say that if we define ourselves by our anatomy, uh, brain size, capacity of the skull, if we define ourselves in those ways, we’ve been around for at least 315,000 years and probably much longer. That’s that’s just an accident of discovery. And that’s one of the things that puzzles me. If we’re anatomically modern, if we’ve got all the modern kit, if we got the same brains, we got the same neurology, everything is there. Why do we wait more than 300,000 years to establish something recognizable as a human civilization? Why do we wait so long? We got all the kit. There’s evidence that that our ancestors were aware of agriculture, just chose not to use it much, much much earlier than that. the complex of events that leads to a city-based civilization, which is the kind of civilization we have now all over the world, that you can only really trace that back to 6,000 years ago. Yes, you can say that before 6,000 years ago, there was buildup to what became the high civilizations. But my question is why not much earlier? Why why did we wait until that moment? And and I don’t find a satisfactory answer to that question, except perhaps we didn’t wait. Perhaps we’re missing part of our story. And when I say a lost civilization, I do not mean a civilization like ours. I do not mean an industrial civilization. I don’t mean they had cell phones or flew to the moon or any of that [ __ ] I think they were very different civilization from ours. But they had conquered a number of peaks and one of those peaks was navigation and ocean seafaring. Hence the survival of maps which show the world as it looked during the ice age. And another was astronomy. Uh and another really important breakthrough evidenced by by the ancient maps particularly a category of maps called the portalos um is accurate relative longitudes. This is the Arantius Phineas map. It shows Antarctica uh right there. Uh and and um this is interesting because this map was drawn in 1531. Uh the problem is that our civilization didn’t discover Antarctica until 1820. So its appearance on a map drawn in 1521, particularly when we know that the map was based on older source maps. And the map maker tells us in his own legend that he has uncovered material previously hidden in darkness. When we find that uh we have to begin to wonder what is what is going on here. Had somebody found Antarctica long before long before we did uh and mapped it with extremely accurate relative longitudes. And that’s important because our civilization didn’t crack the longitude problem until the mid- 18th century. What that meant was that if you’re on a vessel sailing west or east, uh you might be 300 miles closer to a coastline than you think you are and suddenly you’re on it in the night and you’re dead. Once you’ve got longitude work out, you know exactly where you are. We didn’t get that until 1750, 1760s, thereabouts with Harrison’s chronometer. So finding good longitudes on very ancient maps is another puzzle that I don’t think archaeology solved. So, you think there could have been a civilization 20,000 years ago which was before this young dryest moment where um I mean I’ve got this photo here which I’ll throw up on the screen. Yeah. I think you say is evidence that something took place. It is that that’s that’s the younger dry boundary. Uh and I’m with Alan West who’s one of the scientists from the from the comet research group who are working on the younger dry hypothesis. And our hands are on that black stripe running through the middle of the drawer. And that is soot. That is evidence of wildfires burning. Uh it’s full of nano diamonds, tiny little diamonds, microscopic size, which are a classic product of comet impacts. Uh microspherules, some platinum, some iridium, all signatures of a cometry impact. And there it is. It’s about 5 in thick. That layer is the younger driest boundary layer. It dates to 12,800 years ago. So for anyone that can’t see, it’s just like a slice of earth. And there’s this black line going through through the earth. We’re in a draw here where a river has cut a channel and it’s exposed the sides of the channel and on the sides of the channel we can see this black stripe running through and that is precisely the younger driest boundary and the current hypothesis is from a lot of archaeologists is there wasn’t a human civilization before this point 12,000 years ago but you believe there’s strong evidence that there could have been. Yes. So civilization then in your definition of the word how do you define that? A group of people gathering and working together. Fundamentally, it involves it involves the willing organization or the unwilling organization of labor. If you look at a site like Gobeklite in Turkey, we have it on our timeline here somewhere. It’s 11,600 years old. Uh this is really an extraordinary site. It’s a it’s a very sophisticated site. It’s very large. It consists of large T-shaped megaliths that can weigh up to 20 tons. There are precise astronomical alignments in it. Uh this was not done by two or three people working together. This was well that’s the GBCI today covered by a a modern canopy to keep uh fair enough to keep the the weather off it because it was previously deliberately buried by its builders. Um but of course there’s much more around. Hundreds and hundreds more pillars are still underground. We know they’re there because of ground penetrating radar but they’ve not been excavated yet. So so this was a major project. And interestingly the people who built Gobeclet at that at the time Gobeclet began there was no agriculture happening there they were all hunter gatherers. Mhm. Nevertheless they did something that archaeologists used to say hunter gatherers couldn’t do. They organized themselves. They made a huge project. They implemented it and they delivered it. And Gobeclet is not alone. It’s one of dozens of sites like that all over Anatolia in in in Turkey. This was a highly organized, sophisticated huntergatherer civilization that was involved in making this place. I’m I’m a little bit confused. So, if the Ice Age ended 11,700 years ago, Yeah. and Gabbeck is 11,600 years ago, that means there’s a 100redyear gap between the end of the ice age and something as sophisticated as Gabbecki. Not exactly. Because because dates in this frame, they’re not spot-on accurate dates. Some will say the ice age ended 11,600. Some will say it ended 11,700 years ago. But the fact is that in this window, the world was warming up again. It was getting better. And that’s when this project was was created. And the mystery is mystery for for archaeologists anyway is that it was hunter gatherers. And archaeologists are now having to come to terms with that. You see the idea was you had to have an agricultural community first in order to create projects like this because that allows people to become specialists. What if you generate a food surplus that you can rely on then you can take people with certain skills and say focus on that become an astronomer become an architect become an engineer and we’ll support you in doing that. That was the idea and that was why it was felt that something like Gobeclet couldn’t be built until about 6,000 years ago when there was widespread agriculture. But that turned out not to be true. Uh it was built by hunter gatherers but within a thousand years of it being built, agriculture becomes present in that whole area. Origins of agriculture are definitely earlier than we’ve than we’ve been taught. So it’s funny cuz I don’t know a lot about the ice age, but humans survived the ice age. Oh god, yes, we we we did. It’s just it’s just um where do you want to be during an ice age? That’s the question. What are my options? If you were a rational being, which most human beings are, you would immediately exclude Northern Europe. Absolutely no point in being in that frozen, miserable wilderness. You’d immediately exclude the northern part of North America, too. No point in being there. It’s just horrible at that time. Siberia, pretty rough. No, you’d look for the tropics. You’d go you’d go down close to the equator. you’d go to the places that weren’t affected by the ice age, that were actually the best real estate on Earth. That’s where you’d go. That’s why uh if we are looking for a missing episode in the human story, we’re wasting our time looking for it in Northern Europe or North America. Uh we should be looking for it in Mexico. We should be looking for it in India. We should be looking for it in Indonesia. we should be looking for it uh around Papu Nu Guini. All of these areas that were that were really great places to live during the ice age. That’s that’s the kind of place that the sort of civilization I’m talking about could have thrived. What is the difference? You know, cuz on here it says the earliest known humans were 300,000 odd years ago. Yeah. What is the difference between these humans 300,000 years ago and the civilization you’re describing 20,000 years ago that you believe existed? Apart from what is perhaps wrongly described as a slight refinement in human features, natural selection operating on what humans perceive as beauty, I don’t know, but otherwise the same. The same the same. Yeah. Yeah. And again, that’s not that not disputed. Nobody’s saying that jibblehood human beings were somehow different from us. They’re anatomically modern humans. But how did they live um versus your definition of ai civilization? They lived a simple hunter gatherer life. Okay. in small groups. Yeah. But somehow around 11,600 years ago, people started accumulating monuments that can only be made with large groups and organized organized labor. You’ve got to you you have to have a system. You have to can’t build something like Gobeci without planning out in advance. You got to draw it out somehow. There has to be a plan. It’s not something you just wing. Uh so so there has to there’s a missing background to all of that which bothers me. And again, so most people think civilization started what 6,000 years ago. Yes. That that would be when civilizations become archaeologically visible. So you have uh ancient Sumer, Mesopotamia, uh which roughly 3,500 I’m going to use BC because everybody’s familiar with that. roughly 3,500 BC, which is 5,500 years ago approximately, we start seeing cities being built. We start seeing the beginnings of writing taking place around about the same time. The same thing is happening in Egypt. Maybe a couple of hundred years later, but the new work that’s being done in Egypt is pushing Egypt much closer to to Sumer, narrowing that that window. Effectively, you can say that these two civilizations become archaeologically visible at the same time. And uh they’re not alone because on the other side of the world in Peru uh there’s a civilization now recognized called the Karal Sup civilization which built pyramids uh which also goes back 5,500 years. Uh and and this is one of the mysteries I’m I’m looking at now is is why we have these apparently coincidental emergence of high civilizations in the same window uh all around the world. Indisparali civilization roughly the same 5,000 years old. Yeah. We’re looking at Carral here I think. Yeah. Yeah. These classic these the feature is these circular plazas in front of them and then the pyramid with a and and uh you know these were not and not expected in Peru. When archaeologists think of Peru they tend to think of Machu Picchu the Inca civilization. That’s what gets all the coverage. And that’s 600 years ago. That’s 600 years ago. as yesterday. Whereas these Karal Sup pyramids, Karal, Asparero, Bandura, Peniko, these ones are much older, thousands of years older. They’re extremely sophisticated. They built with an earthquake proof technology. They instead of using blocks, they put small stones in in textile bags and those allow a certain amount of shifting so the thing doesn’t collapse in an earthquake. And this is 5,500 years old getting on. So again, not an agricultural civilization at that at that time. They’re a hunter gatherer civilization. So So archaeologists are having to confront a reversal of their model at the moment. Then I think there’s room in that reversal of the model for a forgotten episode in the human story. Tell me about this forgotten episode in the human story. Yeah, it’s uh it’s remembered it’s remembered all around the world as a golden age where there was no violence, no cruelty. um where great healers and sages were at work where powers that are scorned in our society today such as telepathy and telekinesis which are regarded as completely non-existent by our scientists uh were regarded as a matter of fact of life in in in this ancient world. That’s uh a civilization that emerged out of shamanism uh and made something good. But then if you follow the myths further as I’ve done, you find something odd happens. You find that they’ve stepped away from the original purity. That they’ve become a culture that begins to impose its power on others around the world. And that’s always given as the reason for the cataclysm in the myths that that we angered the gods. It might have been with our noise. It might have been with our irreverence. We angered the gods and they sent a flood. They weren’t happy with their creation. They wanted to start again, wipe the slate clean. And so there’s this there’s always this feeling in the myths and it’s and I can’t explain it. I don’t know what what it comes from, but it’s always there is that in some way we ourselves brought this upon ourselves. Is this those people not understanding the forces of mother nature and trying to sort of justify it as or perhaps a deeper understanding of the forces of mother nature? Maybe perhaps the way that human beings are operating in the world today um should be included amongst the forces of nature. We we are a geological force. Uh, and worse than that, we’re a psychic force which is full of anger and hatred and suspicion and and and mutual destruction. That’s not going to be good for nature. That’s that’s going to be disturbing. We’re an integrated system in my view. We we’re not separate. Human beings are part of all of this and what we do affects all of that. And that’s what the ancient myths seem to testify to. So, if I may finish on that, when I look at our civilization today, I I don’t want to go off on a rant, but when I look at our civilization today, I see a civilization that ticks all the mythological boxes, every single one, for the next lost civilization. And I envision a situation 10 or 15,000 years from now when we will be a myth, a fantasy that our our ancestors actually could speak to one another on opposite sides of the planet, that our ancestors they could fly to the moon. Uh you know, they could go to the depths of the ocean. The archaeologists of that time will say complete fantasy, just made up, never happened. But it did. We’re that lost civilization. And we don’t need a comet and we don’t need solar activity because if we’re so psychically messed up as a species, we’ll probably end up doing it to ourselves. That’s what nuclear weapons are about. Mass species suicide

and the mental processes that drive that very dangerous very effective of the world we live in. Hatred is a psychic force and uh the way it’s being generated around the world at the moment and mobilized and focused is um it’s got to be bad for all of us especially when we have such powers to self-destruct. It’s terrible. This this is what drives me nuts is is looking at the low consciousness level of the so-called leaders on this planet. When I look around the whole bunch of them, I just see very low consciousness individuals who define everything in material terms. Uh who who are who are who are focused on this also gets me into trouble, but I I think nationalism is something that humanity needs to grow out of. We need to grow out of nationalism. It’s just an extension of tribalism. We need to grow out of it soon. And let me be clear, I am not talking about world government. I don’t want anything like I don’t want any government. I’m an anarchist basically. And that’s what anarchy means. It means without government. I don’t want any government at all. But we have to get past this notion that by accident I was born with this particular skin. You know, the notion is that this these accidents of birth define us. that we must somehow massively respect and love people who look like us and and and kind of hate and fear people who don’t look like us. We have to get past that. We have to get past that as a species. It’s really important. All human beings everywhere, all the same fundamentally. Of course, we’re vastly diverse. We have we have incredible different gifts. I value and appreciate the differences in different cultures all around the world. This is wonderful. But it doesn’t have to come with and we are better than you. Uh and we’re going to kill you because you don’t share our ideas. This is insane. It’s crazy. We’re not a mature species. We’re we’re a childish species. And leading our species are leaders who have the mentality of um deranged teenagers. We elected them. Yeah, we did very unfortunately. which shows how easy it is to manipulate uh the narrative in the world today. Today, who wins in elections isn’t the best person, isn’t the good person, isn’t the person who’s going to do good, it’s the best communicator who wins. So, this um ancient civilization that we could have theoretically forgotten. You were somewhat implying that maybe they were right that their own actions caused the great flood as they say they they talk about in mythology. I floated that notion. Yeah. Yeah. They might they might have been, but it’s enough to say that that’s what they believed because that’s what all the myths say. The Noah story is prefigured in ancient Sumer um with um an almost identical flood myth. The gods are angry. A great flood is going to be sent. The intention is to wipe out humanity, but this this god who’s called Enki says to Atraasis, “I’m going to save you. Build a boat. Build it now. A big one. put into it the seeds of all things that you will need. Bring each animal of every kind into your boat. This is this is a kind of survival arc which is exactly the same as Noah. Noah’s arc is just copied on that. It’s just borrowed from that. And to people that say, “Well, these are just stories. These are fictions that someone wrote and then they passed them down and there’s no truth in these things at all.” They’re welcome to say that. Uh I I I just happen to think they’re not. And and my job has been to make that case. I do not claim that I have proved there was a lost civilization. Any archaeologist who says Hanok claims he’s proved that is lying. I don’t claim that. I claim I’m puzzled and mystified. And I’m going to I’m going to complete that journey as long as I can. I’m going to carry on investigating and looking into all aspects of this because that’s what I’m here to do. And that lost civilization, you said they were seabbearing potentially. Seafaring. Yeah. Yeah. Which means they had boats. Yeah. Yeah. We know for example that anatomically modern uh human beings reached Australia 60,000 years ago. That those involve significant sea journeys. They reached Cyprus in the Mediterranean 14,000 years ago. Again, they involved sea journeys, not engine boats, not metal boats. You can do it on quite simple craft. Look at look at the Polynesians. Look at the vast distances that they explored on outrigger canoes. Uh so yeah, boats, but not our kind of boats. Hm. I just don’t understand how if they’re traveling the seas and boats, how they’re they aren’t classified as a civilization. Well, because according to the mainstream model, which I am trying to provide an alternative to, they never existed. There was no such people. They never did these things. The maps are just coincidences, irrelevance, just odd. They put Antarctica, they put a a land mass in Antarctica because they felt it would balance the world. That’s the theory that’s given. And it’s just to me it’s not it’s not satisfactory doesn’t it just doesn’t add up. These things need to be explained. And it’s why it’s why in every society which wishes to make progress uh mavericks people who go against the grain no matter how much [  ] they have to take are needed. They’re needed in our society to provide a balance to this overwhelming mass that science now occupies. Science has now come to occupy the space that religion occupied in many people’s minds. And again, I need to emphasize I’m not against science. Science. Science is about to save my life. I have major heart surgery coming up in two weeks time. I’m not against it at all. But I think it should be one weapon in our armory, not the only weapon. One of the um things I was super curious about because I was actually there last last week is this place, Giza. Pyramids of Giza. The great pyramid of Giza. Here we look at it attributed to the pharaoh Kufu who was a pharaoh of the fourth dynasty. What is the mystery here? So again, pyramids are this big stack of like concrete blocks in Egypt. What is the Why is it so mysterious? Well, first of all, they’re not concrete. They’re they’re hu limestone um and granite. Uh first of all, it’s mysterious for the sheer size of it. Look, so you got roughly 750 ft along each side. Okay? And they vary in length by only fractions of an inch. They’ve got it just about spot-on exact on the side length. And you want that in a pyramid because if you get it wrong, you’re going to end up with a corkcrew rather than a pyramid. If you get it wrong at the bottom, those errors are going to magnify and they’re going to get worse and worse and it’s not going to be a pyramid at the end of the day. Secondly, weight calculated at about 6 million tons, more than 2 million individual blocks of stone. I’ve climbed the pyramid five times. Once I climbed it, when there was an event taking place on the Giza Plateau, picnics basically and and a lot of Kyne just decided to climb the pyramid. As I say, I’ve climbed it four other times without other people there, but this time there were hundreds of people on the pyramid. That’s when I realized how difficult this thing is to make because the biggest danger was the other people. Once you’re up two or three courses, you fall, you’re dead. It’s uh it’s a 52° slope. There’s no way you’re going to stop. You’re going to come down and still every year people die on the Great Pyramid. That’s why they’ve made it illegal to climb it now. So, there’s that. Then there’s the almost perfect alignment of the Great Pyramid to true north. Not to compass North, which is about 10 or 11° off true north, but to astronomical north, real north. The Great Pyramid is aligned within 3 60ths of a single degree. I put it that way because degrees are divided into 60 minutes. So, 3 minutes of arc. The Great Pyramid is aligned to that level of precision, 360ths of a single degree to true north. And they’ve done that on a 6 million ton monument, which is 481 ft high if you take account of its original height, which has a 52° slope, which is filled with internal corridors and spaces, Grand Gallery, the ascending, the descending corridors. All of this is extremely difficult to do. It is it’s not impossible to do because we see it there. Uh could our civilization do it? Yeah, I think we could. Uh but would we do it? No, I don’t think we would. Uh the motive wouldn’t be there. People say, “What the why? I mean, why do you want to align it perfectly to true north? It’s enough to ask me to build a 6 million ton monument, but you want it aligned to true north as well. Come on. I mean, that’s a really difficult specification. We’d find that hard.” um a kind of artistry was put to work on the Great Pyramid as well as skill. Let’s get rid of any notion that slaves were involved. They were not. There there wasn’t slavery in the Old Kingdom anyway. But this is a work of love from the first to the last stone. It’s a work done with great skill and care. It’s a beautiful and extraordinary thing both inside and out. It sits almost exactly on latitude 30 which is 1/ird of the way between the north pole and the equator. And uh it incorporates the dimensions of the earth on a scale of 1 to 43,200 in its own dimensions. So if you take the height of the great pyramid and multiply it by 43,200. I’ll explain why that number matters. Multiply it by that number, you get the polar radius of the earth. Measure the base perimeter of the Great Pyramid. multiply it by the same factor, 43,200, and you get the equatorial circumference of the Earth. Archaeologists know this. They say it’s a coincidence, total coincidence, just by chance. However, I could agree with them actually if the scale was not 1 to 43,200. But the fact that it’s 1 to 43,200 changes everything because that belongs to a sequence of numbers that is found in ancient mythology all around the world. And those numbers are all multiples of the number 72. And I mentioned at the beginning of our discussion the book by the great historian of science deant professor of the history of science at MIT. He was the first to identify that these numbers and the imagery that go with them derive from a phenomenon called the precession of the equinoxes. I better explain that a little bit. The procession of the equinoxes. Everybody’s heard the song we live in the dawning of the age of Aquarius. I’m sure you’ve heard that. Uh no comment. We live in the dawning of the age of Aquarius. That’s astrology at the moment. And for the last 2,000 years on the spring equinox, the sun has risen against the background of the constellation of Pisces. That’s the age of Pisces. We live in the age of Pisces. It’s not an accident that the early Christians used the fish as their symbol. The next constellation on the zodiac when you go backwards around it is Aquarius. And the procession is actually caused by a wobble on the axis of the Earth. I’m going to pretend that this is the Earth. Okay. And instead of just doing this, while it’s doing that, it’s also doing that. It’s wobbling. Mhm. And that affects the rising time and season at which particular stars rise. It affects two things noticeably. One thing it affects is the pole star. At the moment, the pole star is Polaris. The pole star, this is astron astronomical north. It’s the star towards which the extended north pole pole of the earth points most directly. Okay. At present, it’s Polaris. It hasn’t always been Polaris. 4,000 years ago, it was Thuban in the constellation of Draco. That’s because the Earth’s axis is doing this. At the horizon, it does the same thing with the zodiacal constellations. We shift gradually through each constellation lasts about 2,000 years in each constellation. The great year where we come back to square one is just under 26,000 years. 25,920 years is the convention that’s applied in ancient mythology. So, the fact that one of those numbers is the scale used to encode the dimensions of the earth in the Great Pyramid cannot be accidental in my view. It’s a deliberate choice. If it was 1 to 57,000, I wouldn’t pay attention to it. If it was 1 to 21,000, I wouldn’t pay attention to it. But 1 to 43,200, that’s the number of syllables in the Rigveda, for example. You find this all over the world, everywhere. So, what does that imply or suggest? Uh what it suggests is that incorporated into the building of the great pyramid was knowledge that was not supposed to have existed 4 and a half thousand years ago. In fact, knowledge that was not supposed to have existed until 2,000 years ago. Hypocus of Alexandria is the Greek who was supposed to have discovered procession. Uh but the incorporation of procession in the structure of the Great Pyramid says to me that that knowledge is much older. It was already old then. I really want to make sure I’m clear on this procession thing because I’m not not super clear. Um, what does it what does it mean procession? It means that there’s a certain star pattern that we see once every 20,000 years. It it it it precesses. It goes backwards. The direction through the through the zodiac is is forwards in the normal year, but in the long term year because of the wobble, the sun rise against the background of the spring equinox. The sun rises perfectly due east. It always does. It also rises perfectly due east on the autumn equinox. On the summer solstice, the sun rises in the northern hemisphere north of east and south of east on the on the winter solstice. The key moment for the ancients was the equinox. It was considered to define the character of the year and what defined it was the constellation that housed the sun that was the house of the sun. Okay. So the star pattern. Yeah. a zodiacal constellation. These the constellations of the zodiac lie along what is called the ecliptic, the path of the sun. Okay. Okay. The earth, the moon, we’re all on the ecliptic within a few degrees above or below it. And and therefore, these are constellations that we can see the sun against the background of. Constellation like Orion, you’ll never see the sun against the background of it. You’re only going to see it against the background of the zodiacal constellations that lie on the so-called path of the sun. And those are the 12 familiar constellations of the zodiac. And as I say, we’re living in the age of Pisces right now. And uh according to ancient astrology, we’re going to be making the transition into Aquarius within about the next 150 years. The sun will have left Pisces and will be rising in Aquarius. So actually the song is true. We do live in the dawning of the age of Aquarius. The only question is whether that means anything or not. The ancients thought it did. Uh we think it doesn’t. Uh I’m not sure who’s right. So I’m going to repeat this back to you to check if I’m I’ve got it correctly, but I suspect I might not have. Within the design of the pyramids, there was a number which you said was 43,000. It’s a scale. It’s a scale. It’s a scale that’s used for the height and the base perimeter of the Great Pyramid. Base perimeter, measure four sides, add it together. height, the actual height of the Great Pyramid, its true original height, it lost about 30 feet in an earthquake in 131, but you can calculate the true original height from the angle of the of the sides. Oh, yeah. Right. Um, and when you take that height and multiply it by 43,200, you get the polar radius of the Earth. You get the radius of the Earth. That’s from the center of the Earth to the edge of the Earth. It’s not the diameter of the Earth. The diameter is twice the radius. Mhm. It’s the it’s the polar radius. Okay. A key dimension of the Earth. Measure the sides and you get on the same scale 1 to 43,200, you get the equatorial circumference of the Earth, what the Earth measures at its equator, its largest its largest measure. Um, and and that uh is either a coincidence or it’s deliberate. And because of the number chosen and because that number is all over ancient mythology, I think it’s deliberate. That means that they must have known the circumference of the earth. Yeah. It means that they knew the circumference of the earth and it means they chose a place to put the great pyramid which also was relevant. Uh this isn’t latitude 23 or latitude 37. This is just a fraction off latitude 30° north. So therefore 1/3 of the way between the equator and the north pole. It’s a it’s a re it’s a significant relevant. What it’s telling us is this monument speaks to the earth. This monument is locked into the true north of this planet. This monument gives you the dimensions of this planet. This monument is speaking to this planet. How could they possibly know the circumference of the earth 4,500 years ago? Because they’re a lost civilization. Because the the knowledge comes down from a former time. I don’t think the Egyptians knew it. I think it came down I think it was inherited knowledge from what I’m here to advocate for and to speak for the possibility of a major forgotten episode in the human story which could be 20,000 years ago. And they’ve passed it down in in myths and stories. Yes. Passed it down. But not only in myths and stories. Um, this is something else that I will I’ll just hint at here that I intend to get into in the new book is that there appear to have been organizations in each of these civilizations. In Egypt, they were called the followers of Horus. In Sumer, they were called the Akcaloo. They served as advisers to kings. They were called sages. There’s a reference to them. Many cultures refer to them as the seven sages. They provided advice to kings in the historical period. And I’m wondering whether we’re looking at some kind of longived organization here which is carrying down information looking for the right time to switch the engine of civilization back on again. I know it’s sounds extreme but uh that’s what I do. I explore I explore extreme ideas and see whether and see whether they fit or not. And I’m beginning to find this idea does fit it. It fit it fits with a whole range of information which will be in the next book. A sage that reports to the king and totally reports to the king that advises the king on what? On everything on what to do. Oh okay. Yeah. The Akcaloo in the ancient traditions of Sumer they existed in the pre-duvian world. They were there in the world before the flood. Then there and and they taught mankind knowledge then. But the flood came, the cataclysm came, they were wiped out. But some of the abcalu survived and they appear after the flood as advisers to the earliest historical kings of Sumer. And I’m just wondering whether you know there are there are religions in the world which have maintained traditions and maintained offices priesthoods for example for thousands of years. I don’t see why the same shouldn’t be true here. Why there shouldn’t have been some driving motive at the end of the ice age to preserve in a way what they knew and to find mechanisms to pass it down. One mechanism is to embed it in wonderful stories that will go on being told. And another mechanism is to set up some kind of secret society which is operating behind the scenes to guide and steer society. I’m not going to present the evidence for that here, but it’s an avenue I’m pursuing. If I if I don’t find it a satisfactory avenue, I’ll abandon it. But at the moment, it’s looking very interesting. Then where did all this information go? You know, because if the people who built the pyramids of Giza had this information, where did the sages go and with their information? Yeah, it’s very it’s very odd actually what what happens after Giza is fascinating. Um because once you once you leave the fourth dynasty period, get into the fifth and sixth dynasties, pyramid building collapses. The stuff they’re making in the fifth dynasty, like the pyramid of Unas, fifth dynasty pyramid in Sakara. Inside it’s stunningly beautiful. Beautiful tomb chamber, stars on the ceiling, incredible hieroglyphs on the side. It’s magical. But outside it’s just a pile of dust. It’s a mess. It doesn’t even you could hardly recognize it as a pyramid. And it’s true of all those. So this is odd in itself. Normally when human cultures create something they continue to work on it and it tends to get better and better not worse and worse. So it’s odd what happens to the pyramids that they get worse and worse in Egypt. It’s like job done that move on. And that’s there and that’s going to speak to human beings not just for a generation, not just for a hundred years. It’s going to be there speaking to us for thousands of years. It’s going to be sitting there on the Giza plateau like an enormous question mark calling towards it those who don’t see it just as a heap of stones but actually see it as something wonderful and magnificent and mysterious calling them to and saying learn about me figure me out and in the process of learning about me you’re going to learn so much else well in learning about the great pyramid I find that it is encoded with astronomical information that should not be there if the current model of the history of science is correct. I think the current model of the history of science is wrong. I think this information was known much earlier and it’s encoded in the Great Pyramid. Once I know that, then I have to start thinking what else does that mean? And what else it means to me is a big forgotten episode in our story again. Why? Because they had intelligence that they’re not credited with having at that time. Yes. Because it’s there. because there should not be a monument of this scale which incorporates into it information that was not supposed to be available to human beings for another 2 and a half thousand years. So they must have got it from somewhere. Yes, they must have got it from somewhere. And and uh the fact that it’s there is is just a fact. All that’s left for us to say is either it’s a coincidence, complete coincidence, or it’s the result of a deliberate decision. And if it’s the result of a deliberate decision, that weighs much more towards a deliberate decision because of the scale chosen because the scale is part of a system that is found all over the ancient world. It’s not a random number. It’s a very specific number. uh and it’s a number that is derived from a motion of the earth itself from the precession of the earth’s axis. It is derived from that. So I’m situated at a significant latitude. I’m oriented to true north and I incorporate the measurements of your planet on a scale derived from your planet itself. That’s what the Great Pyramid is saying to us. And it’s saying figure that out. Do you think there’s something underneath it? Oh, there’s definitely something underneath it. Cuz we think of it as a sort of like building with the with tunnels inside it. But yeah, when you go into the Great Pyramid now, you go in through what is what is called the robber’s tunnel or Mammoon’s hole. The Khalifa Mammoon had a notion that there would be a entrance to the Great Pyramid in its northern face. Other pyramids had been found with entrances in their northern face, but at that time the Great Pyramid was completely covered with perfectly smooth limestone facing stones and nobody could see the entrance. They came off later in that earthquake in 131, but when he broke in in the 9th century, they didn’t know where the door was. Apparently, there was a place you could almost literally press a switch and open that door, but they couldn’t find it. So, they broke in with sledgehammers and chisels and they smashed their way into the Great Pyramid. And then at a certain moment when they’re about 60 or 70 ft into the Great Pyramid, they hear something dropping in a hollow space. A big something has fallen in a hollow space. They head towards that sound. And then they enter the original corridor system of the Great Pyramid. And that’s the way we all go in now. We go in through that robber’s tunnel and then we go up the Grand Gallery, but we can also go down. We can go down to the subterranean chamber which is 100 ft vertically beneath the base of the great pyramid deep in the bedrock. I actually think that was the original sacred site on that monument is that subterranean chamber. I don’t advise anybody with claustrophobia to go down there. You’re very conscious that you got a 6 million ton monument sitting right above you and it place that has earthquakes. um it can be quite oppressive, but that’s just a hint of what’s under the Giza Plateau. That’s just that’s an accessible bit. Uh but it’s it’s it’s already obvious that there that there is so much more. Some of it’s been picked up with ground penetrating radar. And I’ll take this opportunity to say that the hysterical reaction of mainstream scientists to the announcement by Filippo Byondi, uh what is he saying? He’s saying that there are enormous structures under the second pyramid that not the great pyramid under the pyramid attributed to Kafrey Kufu’s successor. The the structures that go hundreds of feet deep under there structures that involve spiral kind of stairways. The reaction has been overwhelmingly dismissing this. Archaeologists have not they won’t look further. They say it’s impossible and they won’t look at it. And I think that’s shameful for people who imagine they’re scientists. They should be looking further. I’d like to see the technology trial in Turkey. There are underground cities in Turkey. Kyaki for example. We know every room in those underground cities. Run this technology on them. If they accurately reproduce what we already know is there, then we can be pretty sure they’re accurately reproducing what’s under the Giza pyramids. We need to do a lot more work before dismissing this. So I’m I remain open to the notion that a huge underworld awaits discovery under Giza. And the ancient Egyptians themselves felt that way. They felt the Giza the ancient name for it was Rosttow. It was an entrance to the underworld. They saw it as an entrance to the afterlife realm. It makes sense that there would be much much underground structures there. And you’ve been alone in the pyramids. Being with large groups in the pyramid is difficult in the sense that the pyramid to me feels like a personality. When I’m in there with a large group, I I feel the pyramid withdrawing. It it it’s like it doesn’t want to speak to you anymore. It’s the place becomes a dead space. But but if you can be in there with a very small group or be there alone and just be still, let the silence descend. Sit in that silence in the very low lighting that’s in there. just pause and remind yourself that you’re in the last surviving wonder of the ancient world and it’s an incredible privilege to be there and just let it speak to you. And it does. This is of course my critics will say another proof that Hanok’s a lunatic. Uh but uh I’m just telling you what what what what happens to me. It’s a I I think it’s a monument that communicates. What did it say to you? It said to me go further. very much so. I I I I feel in a weird way validated by the Great Pyramid. I think it’s um not only me, others as well, who’ve devoted big chunks of their lives to the Great Pyramid, like Robert Poval, who is a great man by the way. The Orion correlation, the recognition that the three pyramids on the ground are laid out in the pattern of the belt stars of the constellation of Orion makes radical and important changes to our understanding of ancient Egypt. Again, that’s another thing that’s been leapt upon by the archaeological mafia uh because they want to destroy every new idea uh rather than spend a bit of time thinking about it. If what you’re saying is true around the, you know, the first civilizations being 20 plus thousand years ago, what does that mean for us, for our lives? Oh, it’s really important meaning for us because because it will finally remind us and tell us once and for all that we’re not what it’s all about. It’s not all about us. The whole human story is not about us. It’s not inevitable that it comes to this and that we are temporary like every other civilization. We are so filled with arrogance and pride right now in our technological achievements, our great abilities, our great powers and uh the arrogance that comes with that. The Greeks used to call that hubris. It’s ultimately ends in nemesis. Ultimately brings you down. Arrogance arrogance is not a good thing. It’s not a good thing in an individual and it’s a terrible thing in a civilization. It also means that a lot of the things that we’ve dismissed as you know conspiracy or you know hocus pocus whatever might not be. I mean you talk a lot about like astrology and stuff like that and yeah I think we should keep open to to systems that the ancients used which we’ve dismissed like which might be very astrology is one of them. What does astrology ultimately say? It ultimately says that we these beings, these humans aren’t isolated but are connected to the universe and are affected by everything that happens in the universe. And it’s and it’s recognizing that there may be patterns in that and instead of instead of just rubbishing that or doing a few investigations, I think it be maybe worth looking further into that, worth looking further into telepathy too. My friend Rupert Sheldre, a serious scientist, one of the very few who’s doing serious scientific work on issues like telepathy and like telekinesis, being able to move things with your mind. Mainstream scientists, most of them will just laugh at that. Absolute rubbish. Yeah, go away. You’re a lunatic. But why are we lunatics to look into those things? It’s really interesting and it’s really worth investigating. We re should realize that we have a heritage of hundreds of thousands of years and I believe it’s even older than 315,000 years. We do not have a heritage of a hundred years which is the heritage of modern science. Well, let’s let’s be generous. Let’s put modern science even back to the Greeks in a way. But it doesn’t become what we would recognize as science until the 19th century really. So it’s a very young thing on if you take the human being as the as the heart of this and and and you were to find a little pimple on the nose of that human being that would be science. It’s a pimple on the nose of hundreds of thousands of years of human experience. Why should we be so arrogant to dismiss those hundreds of thousands of years of human experience in the favor of 150 years maximum of so-called science? I mean, one of the interesting things is uh I actually did go to the Amazon rainforest in Peru. Um, and they’ve discovered these like big square things underground. I’ve been involved in that. What is What is that? Well, the the name that’s being given to them is uh is geoglyphs. Geoglyphs? I think I know this one. Nobody knew they existed at all until about 40 years ago, really. and uh because the Amazon rainforest is a rainforest and and densely covered with uh canopy. However, it’s constantly being settled. This is a problem in itself. It’s constantly being settled. The Amazon is being cleared and it’s being turned into farms. It’s the clearance of bits of the Amazon initially that exposed these huge geometric structures. Mhm. Under the rainforest, no longer under because they cleared the rainforest. Now with LiDAR, I’ve been involved with Marty Parsonan. In fact, he was on my Netflix show. He’s a archaeologist from Finland and and with Alteo Ramanzi, a Brazilian geographer. Um, what they’re doing is a dense lidar survey of the whole of Array Province in Brazil. This is in Array Province as well, the areas that are still under canopy rainforest. And LAR can see through the canopy and it can see raised objects underneath and it can actually give you the shape of that object. Then they can go in low u you know low impact just a few of them go in check it out see what’s there and then begin the archaeology on the site. I mean this is a prime example. I’ve got um I’ve got a list here of things that we used to believe and things that how those beliefs have changed. And one of them was that we used to believe that the Amazon was an untouched wilderness. That’s right. But in the 1970s, we discovered what, a thousand of these structures at least. They’re confident now from the LAR work that they’re talking of thousands, 3, five, 6,000. There are also roadways that run for 100 km plus. Uh there’s absolutely no doubt that the Amazon once supported a population of millions with um extraordinary clever management of rainforest soils by creating a man-made soil that they call teropa. It’s still used in Brazil today. We are having to completely reconceive the Amazon. It was thought of as a pristine rainforest which a few human beings wandered around aimlessly in hunting whatever. Now, we know that it was the homeland of a very large population who lived in city-sized communities um who joined those communities with long straight roadways. It’s it’s as though the veil is being pulled back and we’re beginning to see a completely untold story in the Amazon. And these geoglyphs very precise rectangles, triangles, circles, squares, all of these. It’s geometry. It’s geometry. What what’s it what’s it doing there in the Amazon? And and when I when I talked to a local shaman about this, and I did on on camera in the in the in the Netflix show, um he talked to me about how important these places still are to him, that these places were made by their ancestors, that they’re places for shamanic gatherings, places for shamans to use specifically to contact the world beyond. Let’s be clear about this. All civilizations, including ours, although we may deny it, all of them emerged from shamanism. Shamanism is the essence uh of the human adventure uh and and all civilizations emerge from shamanism. And this one was shamanism. Yes. Shamanism being the system of using altered states of consciousness to gain direct access to other levels of reality like psychedelics. Yeah, psychedelics or you can fast for a month. Uh that will give you some visions too. Uh there there are there are other ways but but psychedelics are the most efficient way to enter the altered state of consciousness and shamans are masters of the use of plant medicines everywhere in the world but particularly in the Amazon rainforest. This is this is where you you see it most strongly and DMT the active ingredient of awasa is very fast acting in the way that it’s normally consumed. Okay. It’s normally vaped or smoked. Uh it produces a 10-minute journey literally to the other side of reality. Uh and there’s not much you can do about it once you’re in there. But then you’re out again. Iaska is a very clever technology. The Iaska brew contains DMT. DMT is not orally active. So you can drink a tea made of with loads of DMT in it and it’s not going to do anything to you because there’s an enzyme in the gut that destroys it. The iawaska vine contains a chemical that shuts that enzyme down and allows the DMT to be absorbed orally, producing an experience that can last for hours. They can be physically very uncomfortable. Um, what they’re doing at Imperial College is they’re giving them DMT by intravenous infusion using basically anesthesia technology to constantly top up the dose to keep the individual in the peak state. And unlike other psychedelics, there’s no tolerance with DMT. So you can keep on dosing people. When you you’ve taken OAS 80 times, something like that. Something like that. Um it’s not just it’s important to be clear about a number of things. First of all, all psychedelics are extremely serious matters. They are not to be taken trivially. They are extremely serious with uh experienced use of Iawaska. One of the very common reports is this moral dimension that you are presented with your own life with what you’ve done with your own life with the pain that you may have caused to others and suddenly that pain that you caused to another person which you dismissed as they just deserved that they just deserve those words. You suddenly get it from their point of view. You feel the agony that your words caused that person. and you and you find yourself, did I do that? Did I say that? You suddenly see what you are. You can’t go back into your own past and change negative and useless and pointless things that you did. You can’t do that. But you can avoid repeating them in the future. And it’s that teaching of a moral lesson uh that I find most valuable in Iawaska. It’s helped me to come to terms with my tendency to swift anger. I’m I’m very aware that that’s a problem I have and it’s something I need to do something about. And I IO’s helped me with that. I’ve become gentler and and softer. Not gentle enough maybe. It’s a journey. It’s not a it’s not an overnight transformation. Not a magic pill. Uh the main work with Iawaska comes after the medicine. The main work comes with what you do with the experience. How you integrate it into your life. That’s where the work begins. People say, “Oh, it’s so easy to take a a brew.” Well, it’s actually not that easy cuz you’re going to vomit and have diarrhea, but but easy. Um, but that’s where the work begins, not where it ends. And that emotion is that does that stem back to your relationship with your parents? Because I was reading about your early your Look, we’re all frail human beings. We’re all messed about in lots of ways. We all have we all have issues in our lives. Um, you said regret. Regret. Yes, I I do regret saying hurtful and unkind things to a number of people uh over the years. I do I do regret that very much. I do regret very much that I wasn’t I wasn’t mature enough to realize why my parents were so difficult. Uh that I never really forgave them for that. I never really forgave them for the stranges of my childhood and and uh the various things that that that that happened. I never really saw it from their point of view. My mother lost three children aside from me. I’m an only child, but her first child was carried to term before me and born dead. Then I was born. I lived and then the next two both died at the age of a year. Well, I know now as a father I know I know what what quite a catastrophe that is for a person for a for a mother to to lose three children like that. You said weird childhood. Yeah. So this is me. This is little Graham here with my mother and my father. I was it was 1954 that we landed in India which my father was a s consultant surgeon and so he went as a missionary surgeon to India to a place called the Christian medical college in Velour in South India. Um and we lived in a tin hut but he was following his faith. He was doing what was what was right for him. He was giving his skills to help to help people. I I I realize that now and a lot of resentment I have towards him I probably you know shouldn’t have. Um he was an odd guy. He was very eccentric. He used to take me in to watch dissections. Um there were still hangings in India at that time and he would dissect the prisoners after the hangings. He had me in there watching it. Um he took me later on. What age? Uh uh five. You were watching bodies being cut up at five. I was. Yeah. Absolutely. very strange. See, it was presented to me as completely normal. Um, but but it was it it it was strange. Fundamentally, he was a good man, I believe. But I think allowing a four to 5-year-old child be to see those things is deeply traumatic in a way that you probably don’t recognize until later. I I agree. It’s it’s come home to me more and more as the years have gone by that what happened to me in those years in India scarred me deeply. It wasn’t just the operating theaters and the dissections the dissections. It was the gloom and the misery and the despair that settled over my family at that time and I don’t think I ever really recovered from that. Did you have nightmares? Yeah. And what were those nightmares? Um, usually nightmares of loss. Usually nightmares of suddenly I’m alone. I’m in a I’m in a I’m completely isolated, lost, alone. The reason I ask these questions is there’s only ever been one other guest who I sat here with a couple of years ago who I believe’s dad was a surgeon. Mhm. And his dad brought him in to watch operations and dissections when he was young. Yeah. And it scarred him in a way that he didn’t realize until later. And he told me about the nightmares of waking up in the night and seeing those bodies of those people around his bed on a predictable basis. And told me he he’s actually the guy that um coached Michael Jordan and then um Kobe before Kobe Bryant um passed away. And he told me still as an adult those bodies join him at night time. So he’ll wake up at night time and he’ll see them around around his bed. Well, thank you, universe. That didn’t happen to me. I I I do not have I don’t remember having gruesome nightmares. I remember a feeling of loneliness and abandonment. That’s what I remember. Loneliness and abandonment. Mhm. I’ve always felt that way. I was always an outsider at school. Uh everywhere I’ve been all my life. That’s what I’m for. I’m here to be an outsider. I’ve come to that conclusion. and and uh I need to do that well. I need to provide an alternative point of view on the past. There’s a real cost to being an outsider. Oh yeah. But there are also some benefits. You know, we are what we are. And and for me, I was always strange. I had this childhood in in in India. I didn’t fit into the British school system. I was a total failure at school. I could not connect. I could not connect with any of it. It seemed I just didn’t get it. What was this about? and and and the cruelty, the viciousness. My my dad went to a boarding school and had a good experience. So, he sent me to a boarding school in Durham in the north of England. It was the crulest place. Beatings going on. I I was repeatedly beaten about the bare buttocks by a sadistic headmaster with a cane. I couldn’t fit in with the other kids at school. And uh I don’t feel victimized for being an outsider. I feel I feel it’s a privilege. I feel I’ve been given I’ve been given an opportunity to take a different view of things as a result of being an outsider. Are there words unsaid here with these two people in your life? Yes, there are there are so many words unsaid. I’d like to go back to my mom and say, you know, I understand why you were so obsessed with keeping me alive and making sure that I did something with my life. And I’d like to say to my dad, look, you you were pretty crazy, but you you did at least inspire me to be eccentric. It’s a funny thing getting older. I’m 75, 76 in August. One of the things it does is it you realize how collapsed life actually is. I remember being a teenager and I remember being a young man and and I remember being middle-aged. And the feeling is you’re immortal. It’s going to go on forever. Everything’s going to go on forever. And it’s long. It’s long. Lots of time to do the things you want to do. I have a message. No, it’s not long. There is not lots of time. If there’s things you want to do with your life, start now. Start right away. Don’t wait. Otherwise, you’ll not have the opportunity. Life is very short. It’s a beautiful, beautiful gift that the universe has given to us. We are responsible for returning that gift by as far as possible within the circumstances that the universe has given us, living a full life and contributing something worthwhile to that life. Not being a robot, not being commanded what to do, not We we need to learn to think for ourselves. This is something that is so easily forgotten. It’s a miracle that you and I are sitting here at all that I’m here, that you’re here, that we’re here together. It’s absolute miracle. It’s a result of billions and billions of years of processes in the universe which had nothing to do with us randomly bring us together at this at this point. It’s it’s really quite a miraculous situation. To be alive, to be born at all is a miracle. Um I think it was Voltater who talking about reincarnation uh who said um it’s no more extraordinary to be born twice than to be born once. Uh and I think there’s a point in that. Are you religious? You believe in a god or I would say that I am um that I pay attention close attention to what I would regard as the spiritual non-physical side of life. Um but I do not belong to any organized religion. One of the things I don’t like about organized religion is that your relationship to the divine, whatever you call the divine spirit world, whatever you want to call it, your relationship is mediated in some way. Some priest or rabbi or müller teaches you how to mediate that relationship. And I I think what’s important in for me anyway in in the spiritual inquiry is a direct relationship, a direct experience. Rather than being taught something, I want to experience it for myself. And that’s why I found Iawaska very very valuable. Um because it has enabled me to experience something that is absolutely impossible to experience in normal everyday life. We’re so plugged in. We’re so plugged in to the physical world and we have to be we’ve got to be we’ve got to obey the laws of physics. We got to deal with the economics of our circumstances. You know, we have to make our way through life. All of those things we’ve got to do. Um, but if they become our total focus, we become shut off from everything and anything else that may exist. And what the big psychedelics can do if they’re taken into right circumstances with the right advice with sincere intention, what they can do is get you out of your own way and allow you to connect to that wider realm that normally you cannot connect to. And yes, I do believe that a wider realm exists. uh just in the same way that uh you you know before the invention of the microscope we had no idea that there were bacteria I think I’m right about that we start seeing these tiny little things swimming around gosh major discovery well they were always there we just didn’t have the kit to see them and I’m suggesting that what psychedelics can be and certainly what they used as shamans by for is a technology a device uh for getting you out of your own way and allowing you to connect with other levels of reality that in daily life it doesn’t serve you to be connected with. The interesting thing about DMT in particular is when you speak to people who have done DMT, you know, I spent about a year working in a quite a big psychedelics company just to I got really fascinated. I’d left my company. I didn’t have anything to do with my time. So I started this podcast and I also uh on YouTube and I also started working at a psychedelics business cuz I found the studies on mental health and psychedelics really interesting. So I have quite a deep understanding I guess higher than average of IV gain and Iawaska and DMT and my partner um is very very spiritual and has done all these things as well. So one of the fascinating things is how similar people’s experiences are on something like DMT. the funnily enough your description of these creatures saying you’re you belong to us now is almost verbatim what what one of my friends described two weeks ago that they were teleported into this like 4K realm where these creatures that are like slightly animal in their anatomical structure maybe slightly a little bit human as well basically was like had had taken hold of him and they were very curious and inspecting him very colorful realm and then they kind of sent him back or at least you know after that and and it does make one wonder. I think one of my conclusions was if if inhaling a small chemical can completely take me to another place then and and if you from a reasoning perspective it’s just a it was an in one inhale of a chemical then it goes to say that my current perception of reality is just is as fragile as an inhale of a chemical like me thinking that I’m here with you now is as fragile as inhaling one chemical So to think that this is base reality when the difference between this and being with some grasshopper people in 4K exactly is literally in it just that for me I was like oh wow okay it’s an extraordinary realization when that comes and it causes us to question the nature of reality itself and this is um this is what’s really important about these medicines first and foremost you’re right the these um psychedelic medicines are proving incredibly effective as therapy therapeutic tools and that’s great. I I I really think that’s incredibly valuable, but there’s another level to go which is to the inquiry into the nature of reality and the inquiry into what consciousness is. These medicines are very effective means to conduct that inquiry and that’s why I applaud what they’re doing at Imperial College in London. They’re also going to be doing trials at the University of California, San Diego. Um they’re going to be doing trials in Costa Rica. Uh a whole range of places now are looking into this cuz it’s really interesting. People coming back and reporting the same experience when they haven’t compared notes yet. How do we explain that? Because it’s in a vision and people say that at the moment the default mode is to dismiss it and say that’s just rubbish. Don’t waste time on it. Our preconceptions about the nature of reality should not limit our inquiry into the nature of reality. And at the moment still unfortunately there are preconceptions about the nature of reality which is that it’s materialbased that there’s nothing else to it really. Everything is reduced to matter. Even consciousness is reduced to matter. It’s reduced to the physical matter of the brain. We don’t know that for sure. We don’t know what’s going on. consciousness is absolutely not understood. And so when we have mysteries like people who are injected a small dose of a chemical like DMT and go off into a completely other reality, that’s really interesting. And it’s it’s it’s it’s at least as interesting, if not more interesting than exploring other planets right now. I think we need to I think we need to explore ourselves first. We need to We’re not in shape as a species to start exploring the universe. We don’t want to export our toxicity to other parts of the universe until we’ve overcome it, until we’ve grown up as a species, which we haven’t done yet. We need to know ourselves. Psychedelics are one way to do that. Not used irresponsibly, but used responsibly in a structured, careful, thoughtful way. They can be very helpful in knowing ourselves. That’s the journey we need to do first. Go to Mars by all means, you know, go to the moon. We’re going to go even further, but do this first. Know who you are first before you start doing those bigger and wider investigations. Get all that sorted out because we’re hardly sorted out anything on this planet. And we’re talking about exploring other planets. Well, I’m all in favor of exploring other planets, but I’d like to sort out things on this planet first. That’s where the resources should be going. And we should stop kidding ourselves that we can just escape this planet and make a complete [  ] hole of it, leave it, and go and live somewhere else. No, we can fix this. We are capable of fixing this. We’re capable of fixing everything. Human beings have enormous potential. We’re just using a fraction of 1% of it at the moment. The question I, you know, I mean, the obvious question that comes to mind is how see, you know, maybe I don’t know, maybe some kind of leader comes along. Could be. Um, I think we need to need to move past leaders. I just don’t know how else humans would change without some kind of leadership. It’s very difficult to see. I agree with you. It’s very it’s very difficult to see how it happens one person at a time um slowly through through word of mouth, through experience. But look, everything in the garden is not all flowers either. There’s a lot of very wrong behavior going on there. People are exploiting that medicine. Basically, drug dealers are exploiting that medicine and offering it irresponsibly to people in groups of hundred or even more. that that that’s that’s actually really really stupid to do that. I Iaska is an intimate experience and it needs to be done in a very small group, not a very large group. So it’s not it’s not all roses. I’m not, you know, I’m not trying to paint these medicines in a in in a false light. They have their downsides. They have their problems. They are extremely serious. We should always research and investigate before any experience with psychedelics, but they have a part to play and it’s an important part and thank God we’re seeing its effects. Psilocybin effect on long-term depression, very important. Post-traumatic stress disorder, very important. These therapeutic breakthroughs hopefully will open the door to further inquiries into the kind of work that’s being done at Imperial College. What does this really tell us about the mystery of consciousness? What does this really tell us about what we think is real? Through your journey through um ancient civilizations, what have you come to learn about what this consciousness thing is, if anything at all, or at least what people believed? Yeah. Um and how those mythologies were similar? Yes. I’ve partly I’ve partly come to this through the ancient texts. There’s a very specific uh scene in a number of the ancient Egyptianerary texts. It’s called the judgment scene. And what you see is you see the deceased entering into a hall into a room at the end of which sits the god Osiris enthroned. And uh the deceased is led into the hall by the goddess Mart. She’s recognized by a feather that she wears in her headdress. She’s the goddess of truth, justice, and cosmic harmony. He enters the hall. There’s a scale in the hall. In one pan of the scale is an object that represents his heart, oblique, his soul. Heart and soul were the same thing for the Egyptians in that sense. And in the other pan is the feather of mart, the feather of truth, harmony, and cosmic justice. You do not want your heart to outweigh the feather at that moment. You want at the very least to be in balance. And in order to be in balance then comes into question the whole way that you’ve lived your life. Up on the wall of the hall, there are 42 little figures. They’re called the 42 negative assessors. Each one of them is going to ask you a question. Did you steal? Did you kill? Well, actually the ten commandments are all in there and a lot more as well. Ideally, you should be able to answer no to all of those questions. But the ancient Egyptians always understood how frail human beings are and that we can always make mistakes. The question is, what do we do when we make a mistake? Do we learn from it or do we keep on repeating it? And what I read into that is you were given, you deceased, you were given an incredible opportunity. We allowed you to be born in a human body. You could have a range of experiences that no other physical form on your planet could have. You you you had this huge brain. You had this enormous capacity. We gave it this to you. What did you do with it? Did you use it well or did you squander it and waste it? And at that moment, you’d better be there with some answers about how you used it well. So, as I come towards the end of my life, I look very carefully at my life. I and um I try to undo wrongs that I have done in the past if I can and I try to make sure I don’t do any more in the future. I want to be a nurturing and positive and useful person to the people around me. The the health situation you’ve gone through has clearly made you quite introspective, probably more so than you you might have been 10 years ago, I’m guessing. Oh yeah, absolutely. I was still immortal 10 years ago. M listen each and every one of us, every single human being on this planet could die in the next minute. Life is that fragile. It’s that sudden. You can never predict you you how long you’re going to live. But what something like this does, it focuses the mind and it does make me wish more and more that I can leave this life with as few regrets as possible and that I can feel that I played a useful and positive role in the life of others and that I even played in some way a useful and positive role in the life of the species to which I belong. Are you happy? I am very happy in a lot of ways. I’m blessed to have lived the life I’ve lived, to have traveled the world, to have the adventures that I have had. I’m blessed with a beautiful and wonderful wife and companion, my wife Sam. You got this wonderful picture of her. Yeah. Glazed. That’s me and Samantha. We met when we were about 40 years old. And um I don’t think we’ve been apart more than 4 days in the entire 30 plus years uh since then. Wow. Uh we do everything together. We travel together. Samantha’s a photographer. Brilliant photographer. And and and uh I do not have a great visual eye. So we work together. I do the words. Sa does the pictures. We have the adventures together. We did the scuba diving together. Samantha nearly lost her life twice in intense currents scuba diving. She’s brave. She’s an adventurer. Well, she’s a wonderful mother. This is so important. Samantha and I have six children between us. Samantha brought two from her previous marriage. I brought two from my first marriage and two from my second marriage. So, six children from three broken marriages is a potential disaster. Santa brought them all together into a group of loving, deeply committed siblings who care for one another, who are constantly in each other’s lives, who are there to support one another. Sala did that by just being a brilliant loving person. So I’m very happy to have such a great partner who’s stood by me through thick and thin and who’s brought out these wonderful characters in in in our children and now our grandchildren. You know, nine grandchildren, six grandkids, all of it’s down to Santa. It’s remarkable that through all the wonders of human history and all the things we talked about that love like this kind of romantic love is so central, so important, so central to our happiness. I just thought, oh, it’s it’s just a wonderful reminder of um how easy it is to get caught up in the material and and all the toxic whereas, you know, so much of it comes from just the simplicity of falling in love with someone. Love is what it’s all about and and love is love is giving. It’s giving yourself for somebody else. It’s putting the other person. Sorry, I’m going to end up crying. This This is what my wife does all the time with everybody. She puts other people first. And uh others benefit enormously from that. I’m very fortunate. I think I think if I hadn’t met Samantha when I did and we hadn’t formed this joint life, I think I would have made nothing of my life. Nothing at all really. I think it would have just gone down the tubes. I needed a loving steering hand at that point. Anyway, very lucky. I I I am happy. There are things that make me unhappy, of course, just like every every every other human being. I I don’t understand why those who are bitterly opposed to my work want to try and present me as some kind of fraud or grifter. But I suppose it’s a easy way to lazily dismiss somebody else. Uh another thing that has been used is because I’ve considered the possibility of a lost civilization having an influence on other known historical civilization. Uh I’ve been accused of racism as well that I’ve been I’ve been accused of taking away the authenticity of indigenous achievements. Um and and that again has been without without any receipts. It’s not been it’s just thrown out there as an accusation. Now for me with with a multithnic family uh that racism abuse that has been thrown at me constantly uh is extremely hurtful and extremely painful. It’s one of the few things that have been thrown at me that I actually cannot forgive. It’s unforgivable to use that lazy easy dismissal in a society where a lot of people don’t read anymore. You can pretty much guarantee people who hear that on the internet, they’re not going to go and read the books and actually find out what I said. They’re just going to take it as face value. So, that does hurt and it does make me sad. But generally, I’m blessed. I’m lucky. I’ve lived a fantastic privileged life. I’ve explored the world. I’m surrounded by love and onwards and upwards as far as I’m concerned. Well, you know, Graeme, I think at the end of the day, the thing that endures is the impact, the curiosity that you’ve you’ve provoked in people, allowed them to wander beyond the narrowness of our lives, which is quite miserable. A narrow life is feels quite like a miserable life where you can’t be open-minded and explore. And and that’s why I love these conversations. It’s not to say that I that I always accept when I have these kind of conversations everything to be 100% true, but the net benefit for me is just expanding my mind to possibility. Absolutely. And like please don’t rob me of the opportunity to expand my mind to possibility. What would my life become without possibility or hope or all these things? And and actually when I look at graphs like this that show how our beliefs uh and scientific understanding has changed even in recent times as as recent as 2017 on this particular graph. I go well I have some arrogance to assume that I know it all today. Totally things things are constantly changing. You know every turn of the spade in an archaeological dig can change the whole story. Change the whole story. This is not limited to archaeology. This is found in all fields where there are specialists that they they tend to get locked into a particular reference frame and actually defend it in a territorial way. It becomes like a war and they they they feel absolutely responsible to defend that territory against all covers and will use any dirty tricks that are needed to be used in order to defeat the enemy. So you asked me a straightforward question. Am I happy? Yes, I am happy. And I honestly argued you that there are certain things, particularly the racism assaults on me, that do make me extremely unhappy. What else do I need to know about the the possibility of an ancient civilization that might inform how I think about myself, my life, and I guess also our future. What I found so fascinating is especially we’re in a moment of this AI revolution where you’ve got these sort of big forces of you’ve got nuclear weapons over here. You’ve now got this advanced intelligence. There’s humanoid robots on the horizon. And if there was ever a moment where the word, you know, existential is being used in a in a way that is probably appropriate for me, it feels like now. Yeah, feels like now to me, too. Uh this is uh no doubt uh our species is poised on the edge of an abyss right now. Uh our technology has outgrown our mentality. Uh and we are not uh we’re not in good shape to deal with the challenges that lie ahead. I I un unfortunately the chances of a nuclear exchange are just higher and higher. That’s just a realistic assessment of the way the world is with these maniacal leaders. So what could we learn from the past? We can I I I believe we can learn that there’s another way to live that we don’t have to do it this way. I I that’s that’s something I believe. Okay. Believe that’s something I don’t know. Okay. I guess I’m optimistic that human beings have made it through all these centuries, all these thousands of years, all these hundreds of thousands of years that we’ve made it through. We’ve made terrible mistakes, done terrible things. I mean, look at the Second World War. God know how many people were killed there. I mean, 20 million Russians alone, if I remember correctly. It’s just horrific. Absolute horror. It’s only when I was born in 1950, the Second World War was only 5 years away and at the end of it and it hung over us. You know, you our our generation were aware of that. But it seems to me people today aren’t aware of the horror of global war in the way that they were and and and uh that adds to the to the danger that we will emulate ourselves. I think a new approach to the nature of reality is really vital. I think we we need to begin to understand consciousness better. Uh and what I would wish for the human species is that we understand we are actually all one. Incredibly diverse, full of creativity and differences, but but all one and a mother in the middle of subsahara and Africa and a mother in New York City. They love their kids in exactly the same way. They hope for their kids in exactly the same way. There’s no difference between them at all as long as we’re as long as we’re indoctrinated into this notion of divisive differences. I’m all in favor of differences between human beings. That’s part of our creativity as our species, but divisive differences. That’s what’s going to kill us off. Uh and that’s I think the message that comes down from the past. Whether it’s a correct message or not, the message is we a former civilization made a terrible mistake and it resulted in a cataclysm that brought us down. I think we need to realize that can happen again. Uh and that we are most likely to be the cause of that cataclysm ourselves. Uh there may there may be a danger of further comet impacts. the younger drius comet fragments. It’s called the torid meteor stream. The earth passes through it twice a year in June and in October, November. Uh there are hundreds of deadly objects in the torid meteor stream. It could happen, but I think a much more likely way that we’re going to bring our civilization back almost to the stone age is nuclear war. We’re going to do it to ourselves unless we wake up, unless we become more conscious of what it is to be a human being, of the privilege and the gift of being a human being and how that privilege of gift belongs to every human being, not just to us. But I don’t know how that’s going to be done. I I I do think psychedelics can play a role. I’ve said many times and I’ll say it again. If I if I had the power to do so, I would insist that every world leader has at least at least a dozen sessions of Iawaska before they even apply for the job because you believe that would give them the same feeling of oneness that I think most of them wouldn’t apply for the job at all. Oh, really? And those who did would would probably do a much better job because they’d understand themselves better. Graeme, what is the most important thing we haven’t discussed as it relates to our past and what it might teach us or you know how it might inform how we choose to live our lives today um that we haven’t discussed? Look, the most important thing as far as far as I’m concerned is independent inquiry. We need to start thinking for ourselves and that’s true of the past and it’s true of everything else. uh to the to the extent that I that I do get positive feedback from young people and I do a lot that feedback is thank you for being an example to question everything. It happens that what I’m questioning is the past but that can be a model for questioning everything. I I feel that that very poor journalism being used to smear my name because I asked questions and because I asked them vigorously and because most important of all I reached a large audience. That’s it really. They won’t sneer your name if you don’t reach a large audience. You’re not worth their trouble. I know the feeling. Yeah. But I think you do. But you know for me my thing has always been that um all it’s done has made me clearer like you know you have a bigger platform more people um watching you etc and talking about you all it’s done for me is made me clearer on my principles and what I believe and I’m actually really thankful for that in a weird way. Yeah, because you’re forced to, you know, when you hear so many things said about you, written about you, whatever, it does focus one minds on like who am I and what matters? What am I where am I uncompromising in terms of the conversations I want to have the way I want to do it? And that’s given me a huge amount of clarity and one of the things that I’m really I really want to make sure is that it doesn’t make me um bitter or resentful in any way. Very important. And you can see how it happens. Yeah, I can I can absolutely see how it happens because you you have to live with a sort of um injustice potentially or being mischaracterized or whatever. So, it’s easy to see how one can slip off into bitterness and resentment into that’s a that’s a big part of the work I’m doing on myself at the moment. I I’m confident that I am doing the right thing with my life. I’m doing no harm to anyone and I’m putting ideas out there that are worth thinking about. I’m confident of that. I have no I have no doubts about that. And what will you care about on your on your last day? Most of all, the love of my family. That’s the most important thing to me. And um I don’t know, the feeling that

I did my best. I did the best I could to carry out the task that uh fell upon me quite by accident. I didn’t I was a current affairs journalist in the 1980s. I had no idea I was going to go down this rabbit hole into the ancient world. It was a series of accidents that led to it. But having gone down it, I feel very, very, very committed to it. It’s interesting cuz one of the ways that I um I’ve always chosen to conduct my interviews is just to um judge people as I find them. I remember once upon a time I had Brian Johnson coming on my podcast and you know, he’s quite a he’s a he has some radical beliefs about living forever, etc. He’s the longevity guy. And I remember one of my team members walking up to me beforehand and saying before he had arrived and saying, “What do you think of him?” And I remember saying, “I have no idea. I’ve not met him yet.” Yeah. And then I sat down with him, had this interview, and he said this thing to me at the end of the interview where he goes, “Thank you.” And I go, “What do you mean?” He goes, “Thank you. This is the first time I’ve done an interview in my life where the interviewer had like no preconceptions of me.” And he goes, “It meant that I was relaxed and able to be myself and blah blah blah.” And I and I say that because my opinion of you is someone who is really curious about about humanity and has this interesting idea that is really expansive for one’s mind about what could have happened. And um again the net benefit for me of that is just expanding my mind in a way that makes me empathetic to other people. Yeah. Makes me feel like me and you aren’t different. Yeah. like I’ve met you today, but we’re probably, you know, we we we go back a long way. Maybe consciously we’re the same, but in our history and our lineage, we are we are one of the same. And um it also gives me a huge amount of respect for other living things, including my ancestors, in a way that you kind of think of your ancestors as these like monkeys that lived in trees potentially. But actually hearing some of these stories makes me go, “Oh my gosh.” And actually, it gives me a huge sense of responsibility to leave this planet and this earth in a way that’s going to be good for, you know, the future the future kids that will live 20,000 years from now in the future and that will probably look at our um fossil records and wonder. I I think I think those of us who have a a platform do have a responsibility very very very definitely. I mean, we’re living in this strange new world. This this world was inconceivable even in the beginning of the 1990s. this this this world of communication that we live in now. And there’s no doubt that that um this is where influence can be applied and and if that influence is encouraging all that’s good in the human race, then that’s really great and it’s a wonderful thing. And if it’s encouraging all that’s dark and negative and cruel and unkind and vicious in the human race, because that’s also out there on the internet, then it’s not so good. Graeme, we have a um closing tradition on the show where the last guest leaves the question for the next not knowing who they’re leaving it for. And the question left for you is, is there a danger of us sleepwalking into worshiping a machine god? You want me to answer that question? Yes. We’re already worshiping a machine god. As I said earlier in our discussion, uh in the minds of many, science has already been elevated to occupy the space that was once occupied by religions. That is a belief in a machine fundamentally that’s taking place there. Science should be seen as a tool, one amongst many tools that we as human beings have at our disposal. It should never be the only tool and it should never be woripped. I don’t ever want to hear the words trust the science. The words for me are investigate the science. See whether it’s right for you or not. See what else is available in the in the in the situation. Don’t just routinely without thought, without question, trust the science. Don’t do that. That’s that’s betraying science as well. One of the fundamental ethics of science is not to trust the science, is to question and challenge the science. That’s what we should be doing with the science. And yes, we are in danger of creating a kind of multi-dimensional machine which reaches into all aspects of human consciousness and and controls us. Yeah. We got to stop worshiping science. That’s for sure. We got to put it in its rightful place as an incredibly valuable tool which which can do great things for human beings but which can also do terrible harm and damage. Because when we trust science, there’s something we stop listening to. Well, when you put your trust in anything, you better have good reason to put your trust in it. If I if I’m going to trust another human being with my life, I I really want to know that I can trust that person. I’m not just going to say, “Oh, you’re a doctor, so I trust you.” No, it’s not that’s not enough. I want to know more about that doctor and uh in in indeed I have pursued that just recently. Science is great. Science is really useful, but we’re not we’re not being what we should be. We’re not living up to the potential that the universe gave us if we just go around trusting everything all the time. We’re here to ask questions. That’s what we got these enormous brains for. for and this incredible connectivity is to ask questions. Anybody who says don’t ask questions is doing a great deal of harm. Well, I hope my audience are very curious. Um, and I think they must be by now if they’re still hanging around uh on this platform because we’ve had lots of very curious conversations and hopefully expansive. I this acronym DOAC obviously stands for Draio, but also we think of it as like being for dreamers and open-minded people, which is the O, and the A being about expanding awareness and the C really being about feeling more connected. Brilliant. like hearing your story and about your partner and your journey and your parents all makes me all, you know, I think there it makes us look spiritually connected in a way that’s increasingly rare. If people want to learn and read more from you, Graeme, where do they go? I mean, you’ve written so many wonderful books. You’ve got another one on the way. I’ll link all of these books you’ve written and the others that aren’t here below. Okay. Um, very briefly, the the the book that put me on the map was Fingerprints of the Gods. Yeah. And that’s the book where I really investigate begin to investigate the possibility of a lost civilization. Before that came the sign and the seal which was which was about Ethiopia’s claim to possess the lost ark of the covenant. It happened that as a reporter in the 1980s I spent a lot of time in Ethiopia and I came across this tradition which is fundamental to all religious life in Ethiopia. uh and and um ended up writing a book about it that put me on the track of a lost civilization led to fingerprints of the gods. Then after fingerprints of the gods, there’s a book that’s not here, which is keeper of genesis that I wrote with Robert Baval underworld. This was 7 years of scuba diving that Santa and I did all around the world following up tips from local fishermen, local divers. they’d seen something interesting, something that looked man-made at a depth of 30 m just offshore there and they would take us and we would find it. Uh so underworld is about all those flooded continental shelves. 27 million km of continental shelf were flooded at the end of the ice age. That’s 27 million square kilm. That’s Europe and China and a bit more combined. Uh were the best real estate on earth uh 20,000 years ago and are all underwater today. And and there’s signs that there was life there. Oh yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Civilizations then. Yeah. Well, we found very large structures underwater. Um so that’s that’s uh underworld. Then after underworld, I wrote supernatural, which is that one there, which has been reissued in America under the title visionary. And that’s where I went deep into the shamanistic medicines, the the iawaska, psilocybin, and and and the whole notion that cave art, the art that we see in the painted caves is an art of visions, that this is shamans who had entered deeply altered states of consciousness. They’d remembered what they’d seen, and when they came back to the everyday state of consciousness, they painted their visions in caves. is the best explanation for cave arts and why cave art is so similar all around the world and so similar to the visions of Iawaska shamans to this day. Grant thank you so much for all that you do. I won’t repeat every all the reasons why, but you’ve you’ve blown my mind open in a way that’s just driven curiosity. And um I think that’s maybe the start of all inquiry is deep curiosity. And that’s what you’ve done for not just myself, but the hundreds of millions of people that have watched you over the years um all over the world. And I hope long may it continue and good luck with your heart operation. And hopefully we’ll be back again to continue this conversation soon. Absolutely. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you. Really good to meet you. Thank you so much. That was pretty.

I want women to stop being losers. And so I am on a mission to really undo the genuinely terrible advice that most women have been given as it concerns their health and their fitness. So we’re going to talk through some actionable strategies on how to build a body that has curves, more of an hourglass figure. But Stephen, if I can be very honest with you, I am pissed off because we’ve been sold a lie that our worth is the number on the scale. And I’ve seen tens of thousands of patients over my 20 year tenure. And right now, a lot of online dialogue is, I want to be toned. I want to have the Pilates body, be as small as possible. So, this is where I get a little fired up because I also have personal experience struggling with my own weight and my own worth. I was trying to become what I thought was the right thing. And I had massive problems afterwards. So, I am going to be very transparent and honest with you. The pursuit of skinny is a bad thing with devastating consequences like you’re going to end up with bone disease like osteoporosis. So there’s lots of things on the desk here in front of us that I’d love to go through. We’ve got these five fitness myths. Yes. So one of them for example is a lot of women are scared to consume more carbohydrates because they think it’s going to make them fat. But we need carbohydrates for our mood, our sleep, even performance at the gym. And then there’s also women are scared that if they’re lifting heavy weights that they’re going to start looking like a bodybuilder, but that’s almost impossible. 97 to 98% of women don’t have the hormonal environment to bulk. And then we’ve also got these archetypes here. So there’s four archetypes that women identify themselves in their fitness journey. And the most common woman that I see, skinny, fat, Sophie, and we will talk about what this means. So let’s talk about what the women listening should understand about hormones. How do you think about fasting and your menstrual cycle? What are the specific issues that mothers face as it relates to fitness? I mean, there’s lots of things that I’d love to talk about. 100%. That makes me so excited. This is super interesting to me. My team given me this report to show me how many of you that watch this show subscribe and some of you have told us according to this that you are unsubscribed from the channel randomly. So, favor to ask all of you, please could you check right now if you’ve hit the subscribe button if you are a regular viewer of the show and you like what we do here. We’re approaching quite a significant landmark on this show in terms of a subscriber number. So, if there was one simple free thing that you could do to help us, my team, everyone here to keep this show free, to keep it improving year over year and week over week, it is just to hit that subscribe button and to double check if you’ve hit it. Only thing I’ll ever ask of you, do we have a deal? If you do it, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll make sure every single week, every single month, we fight harder and harder and harder and harder to bring you the guests and conversations that you want to hear. I’ve stayed true to that promise since the very beginning of the diio and I will not let you down. Please help us. Really appreciate it. Let’s get on with the show.

Dr. Stephanie Estee, why is it you do what you do? Like ultimately, what is it you’re trying to change in the world or what impact are you trying to have and who are you trying to have it for? Well, I am on a mission to really undo the genuinely terrible advice that most women have been given as it concerns their health and their fitness. And what I mean by that is for the vast majority of health and fitness goals for women, it’s all about becoming smaller. It’s about becoming skinnier. It’s about losing weight. It’s about dropping a dress size. Stephen, if I can be very honest with you, I want women to stop being losers. I want them to stop trying to lose all the time. And instead, what I would love for them to do is to shift their focus from losing and focusing more on what they have to gain. So, how much muscle can they gain? How much bone density can they gain? How much connective tissue capacity from their joints, their tendons, their ligaments can they gain? Can they work towards building a body that they love and trust and enjoy living in? Why do you want that for women? Specifically, this losing gaining thing. We’ve been sold a lie that our worth is the number on the scale, which is, by the way, you know, when you when you’re weighing yourself, this is really just a reflection of your relationship with gravity. No more, no less, right? But we are told that when we fit into a certain dress size that we are now worthy that we will somehow have arrived. That is not the full experience of being women. Women can be strong. Women can be capable. Women can be competent. And you can’t do that when you’re starving yourself. When you’re overex exercising and you’re not prioritizing your recovery or treating recovery like it is something that you have to earn. So, are you saying being skinny is a bad thing or I’m saying that the pursuit of skinny at all costs is a bad thing? So, right now a lot of online dialogue is, you know, strong is the new skinny. I don’t want to pit those two things against each other, but I do want to like if you are obese, you are much better not being obese, right? But it is the pursuit of skinny at the sacrificial altar of everything else. So if you are somebody who values being slim, the likelihood that you are going to pick up heavy weights or weights that challenge you with enough effort and intensity is going to be lower. The likelihood that your bone density is going to be sufficient over the arc of your life is going to be lower. you are going to likely underconume calories. If you are someone who thinks that they’ve won because they can fit into, you know, you’re 40 and you can fit into a size whatever dress, but when you’re 65, you have osteoporosis. You haven’t won. You’ve been you’ve been tricked. Tricked by who? A society that tells us that our worth is solely based on how small we are. And who are you? like in terms of why this matters so much to you as Dr. Stephanie. Yeah. What do I what context do I need to know there because I can see you’re a little bit pissed off. Yeah, I am pissed off in a loving way. So, we’ll say it that way. I have professional experience in this and I also have personal experience in it as well. I have an undergrad in neuroscience and psychology from the University of Toronto. When I was pursuing that, I became a fitness instructor uh personal trainer. So, this was you know very young. I started having uh my first exposure to seeing firsthand how people were setting goals for themselves and having a difficult time achieving it. Went on to the Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College in Toronto, Canada. And then I was in I’ve been in practice for 20 years. So I’ve seen tens of thousands of of patients over my 20 year tenure. And the same pattern kept showing up over and over and over. And then personally I also you know just being a woman living in this society grew up also struggling with my weight trying to control my what I ate trying to do lots and lots of cardio to keep my weight down into what I thought was the ideal body type. I competed in a figure competition which was really the first moment for me where I really felt like the science failed me because I had followed everything to a tea. Do lots of cardio, restrict your calories, you have to earn your recovery. The day that I got up on stage, I was 11% body fat. So just just for context, you know, women have about 10 to call it 13% essential body fat. And if you go beneath that, then you start to get into a lot of trouble. So I was right at the bottom range of that. Most women a healthy body fat percentage is something like call it 18 to 25%. I had lost my period for 2 months before I think it was 2 or 3 months before I stepped on stage. I ended up um with hormonal issues. My period I had it took a long time for that to regulate again. I gained all the weight back that I had lost and I felt like a total failure and I felt like the science had failed me and it caused you a lot of pain. I hated myself like full stop. I looked in the mirror. I hated what I saw. I would pinch. I would pick. I was like, I wish this. I wish that. I wish I wish. The other thing I’ll say is the weeks before I stepped up on that stage, people were coming up to me and showering me with compliments. People were like, “Oh my god, you look you look amazing. What are you doing? What’s your program?” And so it’s I think it’s so confusing for women. Maybe we lose the weight or we we go on this health journey which is often just code word for getting smaller and we we get showered with these external compliments. And at the time I was starving because I was not eating. I was completely overworked. I wasn’t sleeping and I didn’t have my period. Like I was not the picture of health. But everybody was telling me how amazing I was, how amazing I looked. So I think that’s where we get it. We we we hitch our worth to what the outside world tells us rather than thinking about who we need to be and how we need to show up for ourselves first in order to be able to give to everybody else but also just unhitch ourselves from other people’s expectations of us. And for the women and for all the people I guess that have clicked to listen to this conversation right now, what are they going to leave this conversation with specifically and how is that going to impact their life? Yeah. So this is for women and the men who love them. So this is for everyone. Okay. Um I think for women maybe you have been doing like the good girl thing like I was doing. You’re doing the things that you thought you should have been doing but you still don’t have the dream body or the body composition that you want. We’re going to talk through some actionable strategies on how to do that. I think if you’re in midlife, so you’re in your 40s, your 50s, and maybe you’re finding that you used to do those strategies and now they’re not working for you as well or as much as they once did, we’re going to maybe break a little bit of your paradigm and the way that you think you’re thinking about health. And how old are you? I’m 48. Mhm. I think it’s important context. Yeah. M. But you’re also a mother. I’m a mother of two. Yeah. Of two. Mother of two. And then I have I’m have a stepson as well. Okay. So, um, there’s lots of things on the desk here in front of us that I’d love to go through. They’re all things that really, really interest me. We’ve also got these five fitness myths in this envelope here that we’ll reveal at some point. And these archetypes here. Yes. Where do you believe the best place to start this conversation is? I think that maybe we can talk about the archetypes because I think that it sets the stage for allowing women to identify themselves in their fitness journey, however that is. Okay, my first overwhelmed Olivia, this woman wants to do the right thing. Okay, so she is on social media and within a couple of minutes of going on social media, she sees someone saying, “Plants are trying to kill you, Olivia. You should never have plants. They’re terrible for you.” And she keeps scrolling and then she comes upon someone else who says, “Actually, plants are great for you. They have lots of fiber. They have lots of phytonutrients, etc.” So, she’s like, “Oh, okay. That’s weird. Let me look up some fitness stuff.” And then same thing with the fitness. Some people say, “You don’t want to get bulky, Olivia. So, you need to do light weights, high reps.” And then there’s other people that are like, “That’s not true. You can, as long as you’re bringing the muscle close to failure, you will build muscle.” So, she’s getting the I like to call it infobesity. It’s like so much information. It’s too much information that she ends up getting like, you know, it’s like analysis paralysis. And this woman, I have a soft spot for her because she just is so scared to start something else and fail at it because she doesn’t want that to reinforce her own schema, her own perception of her being a failure, right? So, she doesn’t do anything. When we think about uh overwhelmed Olivia, we don’t want to get her A to Z. We don’t want to get her all the way to her goal. We just want to give her a couple of quick wins to start, right? Get her just A to B. We’re just going to get her walking. She’s just going to have a goal of racking up 5 to 7,000 steps in a day. So, she feels like she’s a winner in some vertical of her life. And then you start to layer in more things with her as she goes along. The second one is probably my favorite, the the most common woman that I see, skinny fat Sophia. So, the technical term for skinny fat is ti, thin on the outside, fat on the inside. This is a woman who doesn’t present as obese, but her body composition, she’s starting to see a loss of maybe bone loss, a loss of muscle because she is not she’s very afraid of heavy weights. So maybe I’ll do some Pilates, some yoga, maybe I’ll walk, right? She also calorically restricts as well, right? So, this woman is my is like personally she’s my favorite woman because when we start giving her a little bit more food and we start giving her just a little bit heavier weights than the 2-lb weights that she’s been lifting, you know, in her Pilates class. And by the way, I don’t want Pilates people to come for me. I love Pilates, but it’s just not the main strategy for muscle building. I love Pilates. I do it twice a week. It’s fantastic. But this woman, when she starts eating a little bit, I this is what she always says to me. I can’t believe I’m losing fat. I can’t believe I’m losing weight by eating more. What is this trickery? What is this magic? So, I love this woman because when we get her to see the light, it’s actually just it’s just a beautiful thing to have all her schema sort of rearranged in terms of what she thought was possible for her. Okay, this subject of fat. Yes. If someone comes to you and they say, “Stephanie, I would love to lose some some belly fat because I’m skinny fat or maybe I’m just, you know, I just have a bit too much weight on me.” What is it you say to them? You can’t actually spot reduce. What does spot reduce mean? So, someone wants to reduce their belly fat. You can’t just target belly fat. So the way that you’re going to reduce overall atyposity in the body is you’re going to be strength training which we’ve talked about but you will probably also need some kind of caloric deficit. So when we think about that very famous somewhat oversimplified calories in calories out. So you want to be thinking about how am I going to create a deficit? So, I’m consu either consuming less calories on the calories inside or I’m eating the same but I have more output. So, I’m doing more cardio or I’m doing more weightlifting or I’m doing more walking or I’m doing something where my calories out surpass my calories in. Is there an easiest way to do that? Cuz hearing that, you know, just eat less is is quite I hate it. It’s it’s Yeah. Not great. Yeah. And it doesn’t it doesn’t work in the long term either. You can temporarily reduce your food, but at some point your hunger hormones and your body is just going to drive you to consume more calories. I often find when women are like, “Hey, I just want to I want to build muscle and lose fat.” Or if it’s just, “Hey, I want to lose fat.” I personally find it easier for women specifically to do more on the calories out side. So, not Yeah. So, doing more exercise, more daily movement. I think that the calories in is totally doable. People do it all the time. I just find it’s hard for most women to stick to long term because then they have to, you know, they got to measure, they got to do all the things. So, if you can figure out what your maintenance calories are and then you can surpass that with maybe more walking or something that’s not going to ratchet up your hunger hormones or your cortisol levels, let’s say, I think that that’s often I think it’s a healthier option personally. um because you’re also making sure that you’re getting in sufficient substrate, sufficient calories so that you can actually build, you know, you can build muscle, bone density, collagen, etc. So, that’s our skinny fat Sophia. Up next, I was this woman, I sometimes still am this woman, exorcist Emily. So, this is a just a funny word um to really describe the intensity that this woman puts out at the gym, right? So this woman, you have no problem getting her to the gym. She is the woman at the squat rack. There’s no problem getting her to the gym and getting her to work very difficult, like very hard. What her issue is, and this was me for years, is that she still has some of the skinny fat Sophia attitude towards food. So, there’s a mismatch with her between how much effort she’s putting out with her uh exercise program and how much energy is coming in with her food. She’s still undereating because she’s scared of gaining weight. Mhm. I was Exorcist Emily. I was, you know, had the hoodie on, wearing the ear like I nobody talked to me with my big earphones on. Uh this was for me after I was going through um a divorce with my I had very young children at the time. They were five and three. So, I was I was grieving that and I was still adhering to this idea that I had to punish myself, that I was going to go to the gym and crush it and then follow that with insufficient calories afterwards because I still had that, well, I can’t eat a lot, I’m going to gain weight kind of mentality. So, Exorcist Emily, we love her. Um, and then the pinnacle, if you will, is the dialed in Diana. So, this is the woman who has maybe made peace with some of her demons. Um, enjoys movement, knows that it’s a way for her to tend to herself. You know, food is not a punishment. It’s not She doesn’t restrict calories because she ate too much. She fuels to nourish her lifts to nourish her recovery and for pleasure. Because I think a lot of us, a lot of women have forgotten that food is is pleasure. It gives us joy and happiness. My sourdough bread in the morning gives me lots and lots of pleasure. and I will not give it up for anything. So, this is sort of the this is where we want every woman to be able to get to. We want her to dial in both her exercise program, her nutrition program, and to give herself some effing grace with her recovery. You can swear. Yeah. Her [  ] her [  ] give herself some [ __ ] grace with her with her recovery. We just got demonetized. Okay. Okay. But again, so we’re trying we’re trying to get everybody to become dled in Diana. Yeah. And also just know so if you’ve been listening to these description like oh I got a little bit of the exorcist Emily I got a little bit of that rage or grief or something but then I also sometimes have analysis paralysis like you will also oscillate through them and that’s completely normal as well. Yeah. When you were talking about exorcist Emily that was not wasn’t a light season of your life was it? No it was very dark and it was the it was the lifting that got me through it truthfully. Yeah, it’s, you know, sometimes when we think about resistance training, it’s literally training your resistance. It’s not a question for, you know, if something bad is going to happen. It’s just, it’s a matter of when. So, I think something, you know, voluntarily putting yourself in a situation where you are making yourself uncomfortable. You know, going to the gym and moving your muscles to failure is not, you know, it’s not fun. uh it can be quite intense but it does train your resistance, your grit, your mental capacity to withstand you know terrible things. So by the end of this conversation everybody listening is going to be a dialed in Diana. I that is my dream. Okay. That is my dream. Yeah. First we should start with debunking some of the myths. Yes. We’ve got six myths in this um little envelope here. Okay. So the first one is carbs. Mhm. And so the so all the ladies who are listening, we have to heal our relationship with carbohydrates. You can restrict carbs temporarily. And for certain populations, that’s a wonderful idea. Uh if you’re a woman that has type 2 diabetes or PMOS, something like that. A temporary clawback of carbohydrates is fantastic for improving insulin insensitivity, glucose disposal. Um, but diets like a low carb diet or a ketogenic diet, which I am a big fan of for certain populations and even for a temporary amount of time. I think what a lot of women did with the carbs is once they started losing weight on a keto diet or a low carb diet, they said, “Oh, you know what the problem is? It’s the carbs. I’m never going to go back.” And the problem with that is that if you were sick, you had a bacterial infection, you went to your doctor, they did a swab, came back, and they’re like, “You know what? You have a bacterial infection. I’m going to give you a script for antibiotics, right? You’re going to take it for the next 10 days and then, you know, you’ll come back for a checkup and we’ll see how you’re doing.” You do that, you follow the protocol, you take the medication. I don’t think anybody listening, or at least I hope anybody who’s listening is not going to come to the conclusion at the end of those 10 days, do you know what I need to do to never get sick again? I need to continue taking antibiotics for the rest of my life. No one is going to do that. But somehow for carbohydrates, people made the illogical conclusion that you should never have carbohydrates ever again. And for women, what I noticed, so I’m sure we’ll talk about um my first book, The Betty Body. I advocate for a low lower carbohydrate, a higher protein diet in there, but for a transient amount of time, right, until you achieve the goal of, you know, reversing metabolic issues or losing some weight, etc., improving your period. That’s another thing that we actually see is menstrual cycle um regulation. But if you stay here too long, your thyroid, like so many women, what’s the symptom or the consequence of your thyroid being malfunctioning? Yeah. I would say you’re always cold. So your hands are cold, you’re always cold. You might have very very heavy bleeding. So your menstrual cycle during your bleed week, so that first three to seven days, let’s say, when you’re on your period, hair shedding. So hair starts to actually fall out. Hair is not necessary at all for survival. So when you don’t have sufficient calories or a sufficient balance of macros, your body is going to sacrifice the things that don’t matter at all to your survival. And a lot of women will start to say hair shedding comes out. The classic sign is the lateral third of the eyebrow. We start to see the lateral third of the eyebrows start to fall out as well. What you mean the lateral third? The outside third of the eyebrow. So the tail for most people of their eyebrows starts to get really sparse and thin as well. So there’s lots of common signs and symptoms, but we need carbohydrates. If not for the thyroid, but for our mood, our sleep, even performance, performance at the gym. In the vein of transparency and honesty, I don’t always get to eat before I train, but on the weekends when I do and I have some bread and I have some omelets or I have what my breakfast and I go and train. Fantastic performance enhancer. A lot of women are scared to consume more carbohydrates because they think it’s going to make them fat. And this is really comes down to this CIM or carbohydrate insulin model of obesity, which has kind of largely been like disbanded. There’s not a lot of evidence to support it anymore. But there’s a lot of people online that will scare you and think, well, if you have carbs, your glucose levels might spike. And that, you know, the way that it’s often presented is that is the worst thing that ever could happen to you. But there’s such a thing as too many carbs. Correct. Yes. I think that the problem is not that the carbs were the problem. It’s the overconumption of carbs, the overconumption of fat, the overconumption of of total calories. So, it’s defined by calories here. Yes. Okay. Yeah. There should be a button just down below here. And if it says subscribed, you’re already subscribed. If it says subscriber, that means you’re not yet. And if you’re not subscribed, please could you do us a favor and hit that button? It helps the show more than you know. And according to the algorithm, you’re someone that watches our show, but you haven’t yet hit that button. Thank you so much. What’s the next one? What’s the next myth in your folder? Oh, this one. I love this one. Uh, this one is women getting bulky. women are still scared that if they engage in a program of progressive overload, which is to say that you are maybe you are lifting heavy weights, maybe you are doing more volume, meaning you’re doing more sets or more repetitions, that somehow you are going to bulk up as if to say that they’re going to start looking like a, you know, some a physique competitor, a bodybuilder. It is the equivalent of saying, well, if you drive to the store to get some groceries that you are going to be on par with Lewis Hamilton and you’re going to be a Formula 1 driver, right? It’s just almost impossible for I’m going to say 97 to 98% of women don’t have the hormonal environment to bulk. There are a few genetically gifted outliers that absolutely can, but for the most part, women cannot bulk. We do not have as I don’t have as much testosterone than as you do. You have like 10 to 20x more than I do. So even if we train the same way, I’m never going to be able to put on as much muscle mass as you. But a gal can continue to dream, right? I can continue to hope. So bulking up, it’s not a thing. Um what I what I will say though, actually what I will say is some people when they do start lifting weights initially, they will start to feel a little thicker, right? Because the muscle is a little bit more swollen. There’s also a layer of fat that usually sits on top of the muscle. So, as you begin to lose body fat, your muscles will begin to uh poke through, let’s say. Um, but sometimes that’s why people will feel bulk. They’ll say, “Oh, I’m getting I started and I stopped because I was getting bulky.” It’s just a sort of a swelling or an inflammation, let’s say, of the muscle underneath. Okay. Yeah. Ooh, long fasts. So, I will call myself out here as well. I used to believe that this was the key. And this was when I was in my skinny fat Sophia era, when I was in my Exorcist Emily era, where I thought that the more you could fast, the less calories you could take in and you could lose weight. You want to make sure that you have total sufficient calories. You don’t want to over consume calories, but you also don’t want to under consume them either. But fasting doesn’t actually teach you how to eat when you are not fasting. Right? So I think that a lot of people overly rely on long fast. So when I say long, I would say 20 hours, 24 hours, 36, 72, like these really multi-day fasts. If I start eating a lot less calories than let’s say you do, I’m going to have over the long term more detrimental effects than you might. Why? the female body is just more sensitive to whether nutrients are coming in or not so that we can figure out whether or not we want to direct our energy to, you know, being able to get pregnant that month. Our ovaries when we sort of look at the density of the mitochondria in them, it’s something like 100,000 mitochondria per uosite, like per cell. So, they’re constantly scanning the environment to see whether it’s safe for uh a woman to get pregnant. And so if you are fasting all the time, you run the risk of sending a signal that it’s not safe, that these are famine conditions and that you should not be producing an egg because that would be terrible because if you got pregnant, there’s not enough food to feed you or the baby. So it shuts off the your your menstrual cycle as a way to stop you having a baby. Yes. So you can still fast, but the way that I like to fast is sort of pull the food, you know, call it 2 to three hours before you go to sleep. That’s when you cut off the food. You sleep for eight or nine hours. That’s like a 10 hour 11ish hour fast and then you wake up in the morning and you eat. What often happens is women try to push they’ll have a cup of coffee in the morning and then they try to push their eating window let’s say to 11:00 or noon and that ends up well it becomes more difficult I’ll say it that way. it becomes more difficult for you to get in sufficient calories, sufficient protein, sufficient carbohydrates and fats in a restricted eating window. Yeah. Okay. So, this is related to the bulky myth. I think a lot of women are scared of lifting heavy partially because they’ve never done it. So, it’s foreign. And I think that the other reason that women are scared of lifting heavy is they’re scared of getting injured, which to be fair is a valid concern. I think that in the era of, you know, again, social media can be a blessing and can be the greatest thing ever and sometimes it can be a um a vehicle for misinformation. And I think now we hear muscle mommies and lifting heavy. And I think that for women, at least in my cohort, you know, 40s and 50s, who grew up in the, you know, the ‘9s, the Kate Moss’ and the asking a woman who is very comfortable with a cardio machine as her vehicle for exercise to now move into the, you know, the free weight section of the gym, the deadlifting platforms, even the machines can feel really intimidating. So, there are lots of different ways that you can build muscle. It doesn’t have to just be heavy. There are other ways that you can progressively overload the muscle, which is to say that you are applying sufficient intensity and effort every single time, whether it’s heavy weight or it’s more volume or you’re increasing the density of your workout, meaning you take less rest so you’re a little bit more tired. Like, you can There’s a lot of different ways that you can make a workout harder. It doesn’t always have to be heavy. Yeah. Heavy. Oh, this one. This one’s good. This is postworkout fueling. We used to think that you only had 15 minutes to like knock back a protein shake, right, after you’ve done a workout. After you’ve done a workout because you need to replenish the glycogen and you have to start muscle protein synthesis. And I would say that this is largely false. Your muscle protein synthesis is not just limited to the 15 or 30 minutes that are immediately after the workout, right? Your muscles are building little protein factories over the next, you know, depending on how trained you are, 10 to 72 hours in some cases. As long as you are getting sufficient, again, total protein over the course of the day, total calories over a 24-hour period, totally fine. Okay. Yeah. Oh, pre-workout feeling. Okay. I would say in an ideal world, everyone would have some food before they train. So, a little bit of protein, a little bit of carbs just to start raising some blood sugar to have some available substrate um for the workout. I don’t do this um most of the week. So, when I work out during the week, I’m typically at the gym around 6ish in the morning and I don’t I don’t like the way that it feels when I eat that early in the morning and it sort of feels like I have a brick in my stomach. So, what I typically do is I will fuel with ketones. I have ketones uh for my workout and then when I get home, that’s when I have my big uh meal. So, you have ketones before you do a workout. Yeah. Why? In the absence of food, I would say that ketones are fuel that your body already your body produces ketones, right? It’s a fuel that your body already knows what to do with, especially when it’s a big muscle group. So, if you’re doing a leg day, let’s say, or a back day, it provides you with the neural drive to continue going. So, you get into that sort of sympathetic state. That’s my favorite um flavor, too, is the green apple. My kids have the green apple before their soccer, too. I am a co-owner of this company. # ad. Yes. So, I have to I have to disclaim that someone’s going to come for me. Yeah. So, in an ideal world, we would fuel before we work out. But my the constraints that I have in my life is that I just can’t in the weekend. Different story. I can wake up later. I can have a long coffee with my boys, you know, have breakfast, head to the gym, and then, you know, I always know that when I do have food, my performance is better in the gym. better always 100% of the time. So, let’s talk about what you do in the gym and why you do it because you clearly got a big focus on muscle being important. Yeah, I train with lots of women. I actually trained with a colleague of mine this morning called uh George. She often goes off into like the cardio section and she does muscles as well, some some resistance training as well. And I go off in the other direction to like the you know, the platform like the men stuff that men typically gravitate towards. And I’m wondering what you think all women should be doing in the gym. like is there if you think about a 7-day workout regime, what do you think is optimal in those seven days? Yeah, there is I do want to I do want to call out something you just said and then I’ll answer your question. Um you just said I go to the area that typically men go to and I do the exercises that men typically do. So just because squats and deadlifts and presses and pull-ups are typically done by men doesn’t mean that those are ma male exercises. Those are fundamental human, you know, motor patterns that both men and women can benefit from. Um, but to your point, there is typically more men doing those things and are more comfortable doing those things versus someone who’s like, “Hey, I can figure out how a stairmaster works. I’ll just get on this thing and I’ll be on here for the next 35 or 40 minutes.” Right? I love the stair master. I love the stair master, too. It’s a special kind of torture. It’s great. Okay. So, in terms of what I think people should be doing, if she can aim something like three or four days a week of strength training, Yeah. it would be alternating upper body and lower body. And then we would be thinking about what muscle groups are we going to be working together. Is it a pull or push? Yeah. So this is um I think what is this? This is from um my book uh my upcoming book uh called Nothing to Lose actually because we shouldn’t be losing, we should be trying to try to be gaining. And these are the these are the muscle groups that I want women to be thinking about if their goal is body composition and they are trying to build a body that has curves. You can’t spot reduce, but you can definitely spot build. Like you can put curves where uh you know they weren’t before. So what I’ve done in the book is I’ve outlined muscle groups that I think women should be focusing on in order to help develop an more of an hourglass figure. So we have starting at the top we have the deltoid muscle group which these are your shoulder I like to call these your bread buns. So they’re sitting on the side of your shoulder the lateral delts. Below that, we’ll have the back muscles and the lats. In particular, I like to call the lats our angel wings because we have, you know, it helps sort of create that V. As the back widens, you have a the appearance of a slender or slimmer waist. Moving posteriorly, we have glutes. So, there’s three uh muscles that make up the glutes. It’s max, me, and min. Glute maximus, glute medius, glute minimus. And then we have the adductor group, which is the insides of the leg. It’s the inner thigh muscles. Yeah. And then the last the last one is the the pelvic floor or may more broadly we’ll say the the core muscles. So what do I need to know if I’m a woman and I’m thinking about building this uh these five muscles that you’ve highlighted here. Are there as it relates to how I should be training and the big misconceptions about how to train to build this? Yeah. What do I need to know for these muscle groups? you probably should be hitting something like 10 sets of um exercises per week per muscle group. Okay. So, if I do four hip thrusts Mhm. Um that is one set of four. Correct. And that’s going to help my glutes. Correct. So, you’re saying that I should be doing 10 sets a week. Per muscle group per week. Yeah. That’s not actually that much. It’s not that much. No. And this is why I was saying before the two times a week that the ladies that are like, I just have I just have two. That’s all I That’s all I can give you. you can still have incredible results as long as you are taking the muscle close to muscle failure, which is to say that you can no longer perform the repetition anymore. You don’t have to take it to failure, but as long as it’s one to three repetitions from failure, that’s all you need to do. And now I, you know, it’s simple to say that’s all you need to do. it’s going to be very difficult for you to do that because you are going to start noticing your uh range of motion like your ability to do your range of motion is going to be limited. You’re going to start noticing the velocity of the repetition is starting to slow down. So your ability to sort of move the the weight through space is going to start slowing down. you’re going to subjectively, even though you can see that you’re holding like a 15 pound or 10 pound, you know, weight, it’s going to start feeling like 20 or 25, like your subjective perception of the weight is going to be um increasing. You know, if you were to rate it out of 10, you would rate your effort like eight or nine out of 10. And and men and women because they have different anatomies should be doing slightly different exercises. I think that that’s more a matter of preference and goals. But is my anatomy and your anatomy the same? Our anatomy is not the same. No. So when we think about the way that we move through, let’s say if you and I were to squat together or you and I were to lunge together, there’s going to be some differences in terms of how we look. And so we’ll pull up some props here if we can. So this is a female pelvis and this is this little guy who doesn’t want to stand up today is a is a male pelvis. So when we sort of look at the difference between them, the female pelvis is wider and it’s more shallow. The male pelvis is more narrow. And the reason that we have more of this sort of, if you sort of look at the two, this looks like a little bit more like a heart shape. Mhm. And this looks a little bit more like an oval shape. And the reason for that is to allow a baby to pass through. Why this is so important is this is going to shape the stressors that happen in our knees and our ankles. So in particular we have something called the Q angle which I believe I believe I have a yeah I have something here. Yeah. Yeah. So here is the Q angle. So what a Q angle is is basically you take a measurement from the hip and you draw it all the way down to the kneecap or the patella and then you take like another little line from the tibial tubacle and and draw it upward. So that’s just for all the nerds that are listening if you want to measure this it’s the anterior superior iliac spine all the way down to the uh to the patella and then the tibial tubacle. And what you’ll see for women here in pink because the pelvis is wider the femur has to more aggressively come in medially. It has to come more to the center. So this makes women when we compare women and men um it makes us more knocked which just means that the knees are coming more together. So this is going to impact literally every how we move. So it’s going to affect how we walk, how we jump, how we squat, how we lunge, how we run. And so it’s important to for women to understand how we’re different because often the queueing and the instruction that women get are sort of very they’re based off of a male pelvis, let’s say. And so we can run into feeling like squats are not comfortable, that lunges are not comfortable, or we start to even uh shy away from some of these motions because we don’t think that they’re meant for us. You just need to know how to adapt your training so that you can support some of those sheer motions as you as you’re moving. Because what ends up happening for women is as we are let’s say lunging or squatting, as the knee comes down, we will start to see more shear forces being placed through the medial or through the inside part of the knee, right? So that puts us at a greater risk for ligamentous injuries. So in the knee, the big one is the ACL that we often worry about. So, as you’re getting tired, you need to be aware that you’re going to have a tendency for that knee to come in. And there’s nothing wrong with the knee coming in as long as you have muscles that can kind of support it. If I were to grab this back here, so we can sort of think about superimposing it. If we were to look at the the leg here, the muscles that are going to be helping to control the way that the hip moves is are the glutes. So you have the glute max, but in particular the glute medius, which is often called like the upper shelf uh muscle, that’s actually going to help the femur or counteract the femur being pulled inwardly. Mhm. Yeah. So we do have different anatomical differences that women need to be aware of so that we can bias training that will provide mobility and stability for us. So that’s another reason why I mean yes glutes look amazing in jeans but it’s also because they are providing such a driving force of stability for the spine, for the knees, for the ankles, literally for the entire body. And so with squatting, men and women should squat differently. Yeah, not all women and men should squat differently. There are women that can squat in the sort of traditional queuing. Can you show me this? I can. Yeah, I’ll have to take my heels off, but I’m happy to. Yes. Do you want to do it now? Sure. Yeah. Okay, let’s do it. So tell me how the anatomy of a woman and a man determines how we should be squatting. So I’ll say first that you have to play and see what feels good for you. So there’s going to be some women that are going to be able to squat just like the traditional cues that I’m about to give you. Most women prefer a little bit of a wider squat and I’ll show that. So, the typical squat that the way that we’re often cued is feet are hipwidth apart, toes facing forward, and then we’re going to come down. And then I’m just like I can’t actually get I’m trying I’m collapsing my chest at this point. So, for women, what a lot of women find is more comfortable and they can actually get the range of motion that you just demonstrated is taking your feet a little bit wider and then you’re going to turn the feet out. So, because the female femur tends to sit a little bit more spun inwards or in internally rotated now with this external rotation, we can actually just get by all of that and we can come all the way down into a squat. So, and we can hang out here like I can we can probably do the rest of the podcast like this if you’d like. I’d rather not. I’d rather not. Yeah. So, so that’s the squat. Is there anything else I need to know about the squat? The the variance between men and women with squatting. The other thing that you can think about whether it’s a squat with two feet or a lunge or a split squat with one is with a woman when she’s coming down when she’s decelerating like she’s coming down into the into the lunge or into the split squat everything and your this is true for you as well everything is going to be internally rotating. So the femur the leg bone is coming in the tibia is coming in the foot on the inside you’re actually rolling onto the you’re flattening out the arch. which is called pronation, which everybody says is a bad thing by the way, but it’s you need it to be able to load the spring. And then for women, like if you and I were to squat with the same leg forward, you’ll probably be able to see that as I’m coming down, like my knee come my knee tracks a little bit inward versus yours stays a little bit more straight. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just a matter of whether or not I have sufficient control with my hip stabilizer muscles in order to make sure that I’m not putting excess shearing forces on the on the knee. So, you need to strengthen your hip stabilizer. Yep. Okay. The beach. Cuz I I read something about I think it was about the World Cup, the women’s World Cup where they said that it was something like 12 women had got ACL in injury injuries in the leadup to the World Cup. Yeah. So, when we’re thinking about why that happens, it usually happens when the athlete is tired. So, if it’s leading up to the World Cup, they’ve probably overtrained, they’re not recovering, uh, and then it can be just that they’re training one day and she takes a weird step. The shearing forces happen just before her ligaments and her tendons are able to stabilize it and and you and you damage it. And is that is that true that there’s a connection between like your brain and your mechanics that often result in injury? Like so I can’t remember what it was but I think someone it was a sleep doctor telling me that when you’re under slept one of the reasons why you get so many injuries is because when you do like jump your brain and your the reaction time is slow. Yeah. And you see a lot of athletes doing doing this before games because they’re almost like practicing landing. That’s actually a little bit of deceleration. So what that is is basically a stick and land, right? So they’re jumping and they’re holding it so that the forces are not dumped into the joints but rather absorbed into the connective tissue. So the the ligaments and the tendons and why is deceleration why is it important even for everybody even non-athletes to do that? Well, if you are not an athlete and you’re just somebody who doesn’t want to fall and break a hip, you know, I think that that’s really important. You know, if you’re thinking about falling, what you need to be able to do is get the hip flexor up in front of you, right? And then stop the fall. So there’s a couple muscles. So we have the hip flexor muscle that has to come up quickly in order to get ahead of the fall. We have the tibialis anterior which is just this muscle in the front of the tibia that is involved in what’s called uh dorsif flexion which is just nerd speak for toes come up right so you need to be able to clear the floor and then you need to have glutes to sort of absorb and break right and then we were talking a little bit about the hourglass figure before when we were talking about the adductors or the inner thigh muscles one of the things that the inner thigh muscles will do is they’ll actually pull the leg back underneath you, right? So, they’ll also help to stabilize that fall and the adductors or the outside muscle group, like the side of the glutes, they’re also going to help break. So, there’s a couple like when you’re falling, it’s like you got to get the leg up, you got to have the toe clear, the floor, and then if you’re falling off to the side, you need the adductors and the abductors to be able to um to stabilize so that you don’t trip over it. One of the smartest things a business can do is build like a bigger company without actually hiring like one. But the problem we all face is that most companies don’t have every skill in house. So when I look at the businesses seeing real success today, the consistent pattern with all of them is how quickly they move. They bring in specialists with skills in emerging areas to keep themselves ahead. Even in our company, we spent the last year pulling in talent across areas like AI native strategy, no code builds, and product workflows. And we find this talent through our longtime partner Fiverr Pro. Their premium service only shows you vetted talent. 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and you can get $20 off if you use the code dac at checkout. So let’s talk about um let’s talk about supplementation. Do you take supplements? I do. I’ll preframe this by saying that I am a special category of nerd. So, I take a lot of the foundational supplements and then there are other ones that I take because I’m just very very interested in the research and the research excites me. But for I would say for the general population, for women that are listening, if they’re thinking like I got a supplement, there’s a couple of sort of tier one we’ll say supplements that we want to be thinking about. So, I will find my magnesium first. This is our tried andrue bestie. Okay. So, I love a magnesium uh glycinate. There’s lots of different kinds. Uh but glycinate is just the easiest to absorb for most people. Tends to help with relaxation, helps with sleep, helps with muscle recovery. So, this is something that I love. I’ll usually take one like 250 migs at lunchtime and then another one in the evening. So, magnesium for everyone. How do you remember to take them? I tend to habit stack them. So, I always know that when I am preparing my lunch, I actually keep my magnesium right beside my salt and my pepper. So, as I’m like salting my food, I’m like, “Oh, yeah, there’s the magnesium. I’m going to take it.” And I have another bottle upstairs in my bathroom. So, as I’m getting ready for bed, I’m putting up my hair, I’m doing my skin, whatever, I will I’ll take one there, too. So, you put it in the way Yeah. of of other habits. Cuz otherwise, if I put it in a really beautiful supplement closet, it’s just going to Yeah. So, stay there. I have to put it on my desk. You can also when I travel it’s on the hotel desk. Yeah, you’re already doing something else. So, just put the thing next to the thing you’re already doing and your compliance and your adherence is going to go up, right? Um, what else do we got in here? Ooh, omega-3s. Okay, these are so well established in the literature. They reduce inflammation. They help with cognition. Something like 2 to four grams a day. I didn’t know you needed to keep it in the fridge. I’ve been keeping it in a hot cupboard for the longest time. Yeah. I mean, apparently it spoils. It just yeah it just helps with with spoilage. So you can pop them in the fridge and then same kind of thing like habit stacking. So as you’re opening up the fridge, put it in front of, you know, the thing that the thing that you would most commonly reach for. So you go for fruits in the morning, you put them right beside your fruits. Okay. Yeah. Uh what other goodies do we have in here? Vitamin D for sure. Uh D3 with a K2. Uh 4,000 IUs minimum uh per day. I would say most people should be taking that. They call it a vitamin. It’s not really a vitamin. It’s more of like a pro hormone or a pre hormone. So, this is really important for sex hormone, reproductive hormone uh production. Uh again, inflammation, cognition, every day. Every day. Yeah. Every day. I went to the doctor and he said I was deficient in vitamin D and omega-3. So there’s you know how many pe even if you live in a sunny I can’t tell you I’ve had patients who live in you know Florida let’s say where it’s you think that you’re getting a lot of sun exposure because the temperature is amicable to that and you run their vitamin D and it’s crazy crazy I’m so happy you have this one here creatine uh I know you just had Dr. Darren Kandow on the show. He was actually on my podcast as well. For women, you know, I think creatine used to be this um like bro supplement, you know, like these the bodybuilders with the scary, you know, noises and the, you know, weird t-shirts and stuff, but creatine is really really important for women. The way that Dr. Kando described it to me was he said, you know, lifting weights builds the cake and this is like the icing on top of it, right? So, you’re not going to, you know, enhance performance. You’re not going to build strength if you’re just doing the creatine. You have to be pairing it with the mechanical signal of resistance training. But I think every woman can be taking five grams, 3 to five grams of this every single day. How much are you taking? I take five. Sometimes you take a bit more than five. Sometimes I take a little bit more than five. So when you have been and this is this is the little pmenopausal hack because I am in fully in the throws of it right now. There are nights where I don’t sleep well. So taking a higher dose of creatine that day will help with your cognition, your awareness, and your alertness. So something like a 10 g dose uh because it’s a little bit harder to get my understanding of it is it’s harder to get across the bloodb brain barrier. So you need a higher dose in order to facilitate that. But yeah, 10 grams. And what impact has it had on you? Have you noticed an impact? When I haven’t slept well, yeah, definitely if I take it in the morning, it definitely wakes me up. I would say that when I am not taking regular like I’m not taking the three to five grams or you know for some reason I start forgetting um muscles look a little less well you know they look a little less full um don’t have as much energy in the tank when I’m doing like a really intense uh workout. There’s a performance degradation when I am when I’m not on it. And then collagen. I love this one because it gets so much hate online. So, we’re going to go against the grain and talk about how great collagen is. A lot of the criticism for collagen often comes from this idea that, well, it’s terrible. It doesn’t have any leucine or it has less than 3% of leucine, which is an amino acid that stimulates muscle protein synthesis. And yes, that’s true. It is a terrible driver for muscle protein. But this that’s not like the whole goal for women is not just muscle, right? We have other tissues that go to the gym alongside our muscle that train like our tendons, our ligaments, our joints. Um, and so collagen is just like muscle is a very expensive process. So it’s very expensive, you know, you know, from a mechanistic point of view to create collagen. So taking collagen is great for what I like to call the JTL, your joints, your tendons, and your ligaments. So I will typically take something like 10 to 15 grams of this a day. People will probably come at me. I put this in my coffee sometimes, which I know the heat, I get it, but if I don’t, I won’t take it. There’s so many collagen products out there at the moment, isn’t there? Yeah. Collagen drinks, collagen. Collagen’s in everything. Someone’s going to figure out how to like put it in the air or something. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Is that all a fad? They’re saying it’s good for skin, it’s good for nails, it’s good for hair, it’s good for everything. It’s good for fascia. It’s good. I mean, collagen is the primary compound in joints, tendons, ligaments, fascia, skin, hair. Take a particular type of collagen. Hydrayed. Hydrayzeed type one, two, and three. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Fine. What else? Electrolytes. I take electrolytes not as consistently. Again, in the vein of transparency and honesty, I typically will take this on a very heavy cardio day. So, I have recently taken up tennis. I’m terrible at it, but being outside tennis, you’re in the heat, you’re running left and right, and you’re doing it for hours on end, you know, you can when you’re sweating a lot, electrolytes are really great. Okay. Yeah. So, like electrolytes, don’t take them all the time. And what’s our last puppy here? Oh, vitamin C. Vitamin C I actually like to take with the um the collagen because it can enhance its absorption. And then this is just a general antioxidant that I think, you know, there’s no harm in taking vitamin C, right? It’s water soluble. If you take too much, you pee it out. Um, but good as an antioxidant, good as an anti-inflammatory, helps with the absorption um, of collagen as well. What about protein? How do you think about protein? Do you do you take protein shakes or anything? I do when I’m traveling. So, I typically in my day-to-day um, diet, I typically don’t. I will if I’m falling a bit short, but for me, my most of my protein is coming from whole foods. What about cardio? because we we’ve talked a lot about doing resistance training and the importance of building muscle. Um what where does cardiovascular exercises, running, sprinting, stare master fit into all of this? It’s life. It’s everything. Cardio is is fantastic as well. Um I think that again, you know, when I think about my overwhelmed Oilia, you you know, she’s online and she has people that are saying things like you should only lift weights and walk and then there’s other people that are doing, you know, the chronic cardio and the people who are kind of overdoing it that and not doing enough weights. I sort of think about her as we start this discussion. So, we want to be thinking about cardio not as a punishment for what you ate and not because you’re trying to get skinny, but because we want to have other goals around our health span and our lifespan. So, living a longer life and spending more of those years healthy. A lot of women have PCOS, including my partner. Yeah. Um, and I was looking at the the comments on your one of your interviews you did and one of the top comments from a woman was for women with PCOS or insulin resistance, sprint training hit um, often back backfires because it spikes cortisol and insulin. Many of us do better with strength training plus zone 2 until hormones stabilize. I would love to hear more tailored guidance for PCOS. Yeah. So, the first thing I want to dismantle in that comment is that cortisol spikes are bad. it really context really matters. So without so I’ll just say it this way without cortisol you won’t wake up in the morning you know we need cortisol there’s something called the cortisol awakening response where it tends to peak you know somewhere you know right right around the time that you wake up and then it sort of looks like a ski slope and it you know gradually exits the chat right so cortisol is a normal process a cortisol spike is a normal process just like when you train so when she was saying like I train when I do resistance training if she were to be monitoring her hormones, she would see both a glucose spike and a cortisol spike when she’s training because though to to be able to train with enough intensity and effort, you need to be you need to get into something called sympathetic drive. You need to be in like stress physiology. So, her cortisol is spiking when she’s training as well. So, I want to really caution women away from being scared of normal and predicted, you know, u spikes, right? Like glucose spikes, cortisol spikes. So that that’s what I would say uh just to start off that conversation. Women with PMOS, it used to be known as PCOS, now it’s polyendocrine, metabolic ovarian syndrome, her body typically behaves more like someone who is diabetic, like a type 2 diabetic where she has issues with glucose disposal, she has issues with insulin sensitivity. So specific recommendations for someone who has PCOS is absolutely she should be training because every time she’s contracting her muscles, she’s actually helping whether insulin is present is present or not for her to pull that glucose into the muscle cell and to be able to make energy. So that’s really fantastic. I also think that whether you have PCOS or you’re, you know, type 2 diabetic, I think that zone 2 cardio is fantastic again for endurance, but you can also benefit from the very highintensity cardio that you know might be categorized as highintensity interval training or hit or sprint interval training, sometimes called sit. This is like sit is basically like 10 to 20 seconds all out ovaries to the wall 100% effort uh and then you recover and then you do that you know four five six times if you’re feeling you know particularly you know energetic uh and that can also that stress that cortisol spike and the all the you know the physiological cascade that happens from that is going to make you stronger and a better glucose ose disposal agent, right, which is what she wants if she has PCOS over the long term. Are there any particular exercises that women and people generally tend to stop doing as they age because it’s kind of like it becomes harder as you age, but they should definitely not stop doing? Oh my gosh. Like what are the ones where we all kind of stop doing it, but it’s it leads to a downward spiral. Sprinting 100%. I think that everybody should be sprinting. Why? you are going to be increasing something called your V2 max which is uh just again nerd speak for how much oxygen can you take into the lungs and distribute to the cells right that along with we’ve all heard the stat muscle declines 1% per year if you’re not doing anything V2 max is the same so you will decline your V2 max capacity 10% per decade if you’re not actively working on it I’ll I’ll put some graphs on the screen that show that decline over time yeah great I I can think of family members members, you know, going up the stairs or down the stairs or trying to get groceries and bringing them into the house that are huffed and puffed, right? That they’re they’ve lost their breath from going up a flight or two of stairs. But they think, you know, they say that that’s just getting older. Absolutely not. It’s absolutely not a function of aging. It’s just a loss of capacity. There was um Can you sprint? I sprint all the time. Yeah. But there’s So, I wanted what I wanted to say was there’s a couple of different ways that we can sprint. So, you can sprint in a on a track. So, I used to be a track sprinter, so that’s like my love. Um, but you can also sprint on a cardio machine in in the gym. So, in the winter time, so I live uh on the east coast where I can’t always sprint on the track, so I will take my sprinting indoors. Um, and I will do something called a Norwegian 4×4 on a bike. Have you ever heard of a Norwegian 4×4? I have heard of it, but please do explain. Yeah, it’s a special uh it’s a special kind of torture. I hate it up until the moment I get on the bike and then when I’m doing it I’m like okay I’m going to do this and then when I’m finished I’m like I’m so proud of myself. So a Norwegian 4×4 is basically 4 minutes your your in my case I do it on the bike but it can be done on a treadmill or any cardio machine 85 to 95% of your heart rate max. So you need to know what your maximum like the maximum heart rate that you have ever achieved 85 to 95% of that for four minutes. It’s a long four minutes and then you take a you take a three minute break and then you do that again four times. Hence the name four minutes four times. Lots of really cool studies on looking at V2 max capacity. There’s one that I’m thinking of where they looked at women. The average age of the women were 58. So they were a lot of them were in like postmenopausal, let’s say. and they put them on a sprinting protocol. What they found was that in a period of eight weeks, they were able to increase their V2 max by 10% in 2 months, which is wild when you think about how quickly you can lose it. And you can get 10% back in 2 months, which is which is phenomenal. And the other really cool thing about that study was they actually took that cohort. So that was the um we’ll call them like the the well-lived or the older cohort, let’s say, and they compared it to 18 to 30 year olds. And they found that the gains that happened in the older cohort were they had mitochondrial efficiency improvements of 69%. Whereas the younger cohort, their mitochondrial gains were 49%. So, all that to say, a lot of people will frame aging as it’s like, well, now you’re getting wrinkles, now you’re getting old, and now you’re just p you’re over the hill, it’s past your these women had maybe the gap was bigger for them, but they had so much more upside to gain, right? Which is so that mean that makes me so excited because it’s never ever ever too late. Like, you can like the best time to start was 10 years ago. Fine. But the second best time is today. Like, you’re not behind. You can totally do it now. One of the top comments in your recent video as well was someone saying jumping or hopping is a good way to strengthen your bones and knees and you should not stop doing that as we age. Cuz a lot of people start thinking, “Oh, I should I can’t run anymore because it’s not good for my hips and my knees and, you know, I’ve had injuries and stuff like that.” So, running is one of those things that people stop doing cuz they’re scared of joint issues. Yeah. I think the old adage of use it or lose it is really, really key here. like if you stop doing it, you’re going to definitely stop your ability to like you’re not going to be able to do it, right? Your body is going to prioritize the things that it does. So if you want to be able to jump, you want to be able to sprint, you want to be able to squat, age is is absolutely inconsequential to that. So in that in that particular comment, if somebody wanted to improve their bone density, yeah, for sure you can strap on a weighted vest, do some plyometrics, add some weight to your jump. like that’s going to, you know, increase that strain magnitude and strain rate on the bone which is going to drive that positive bone reformation. That’s awesome. But yeah, it’s if you don’t jump, you’re going to lose your ability to jump. Do you jump? I do it all the time. Well, sprinting is jumping, right? Do you do like is there such a thing as jump training though? Like pio plyometrics. Oh, is that okay? 100%. And you do that? Yes. Even if it’s just isometric holds, let’s say like maybe somebody can’t jump, but they can stand with their with their heels elevated so that the Achilles tendon and the calf like the gastromus is contracting. Just to give you a little bit of a a visual here. So what I’m talking about maybe one of the most famous tendons in the body is the Achilles. It is the extension of the calf muscles here and then it sort of wraps around the heel and attaches into the um into the inferior part of the calccanous which is just uh your heelbone. Mhm. So maybe you can’t quite jump yet, but you can actually, this mannequin is doing a really good job. They’re just coming up on their toes, contracting the gastro nemas, and this is called an isometric hold. So that tension in the muscles and in the tendon, we have these little mechano receptors that sort of detect stretch. So they will detect that whether something is being contracted or where whether something’s stretching and they will say oh we need to remodel in order to meet the demand of this this activity and then you can progress to doing little hops you can progress to doing jumps etc. Very easy to do. You don’t need to you don’t need a gym or anything like that. Not at all. I’ve heard you say that um deceleration is important for mobility. Yeah. Deceleration is the opposite of acceleration. So we think of acceleration, it’s speeding up and getting fast. Deceleration is coming to a stop. So in order to come to a stop without dumping all of the forces in your joints, again, the tendons and the ligaments need to be able to absorb that kinetic energy. And from a sport perspective, your ability to decelerate, so coming to a complete stop and then changing direction, so change of direction training is actually more predictive of whether you’ll go pro than your vertical jump, your acceleration speed, or if you’re doing things like beep tests or whatever. Um, it’s also really important for us as we age. You might trip on, you know, something on the floor or, you know, the corner of a rug or you might lose your footing on the stairs. You need to be able to get your foot in front of you and then be able to stop the motion before you fall. Are there any other exercises that are like really really simple and underrated that one can do without equipment? I have so many to show you. Yeah. Okay. So, the one that I love, this is almost like a diagnosis, but then it, you know, the diagnosis almost becomes the plan like the the care plan. Uh something that um I just call the Xplank. It’s very difficult to do, but it is a test for stability and mobility of the hip. So, we were talking about the Q angle before. This is directly challenging the muscles on the side of the hip and whether or not you can stay stable. So, uh this is a great exercise. Yeah, I can show it to you. So, this is again like I was saying, it’s the prescript it’s the test, but then it also becomes the care plan. So, um maybe what we’ll do so I’ll show it to you and then maybe we’ll have you show me. I’m going to be over here. Okay. So, you’re basically going to come into a side plank. So, where your wrist and your shoulders are all aligned, toes are facing forward, hand comes up, and then you’re going to lift the arm up, and you’re going to try and see if you can hold this for 30 seconds. It is not easy. And so, this is really testing the stability and the mobility of your hips. It’s also testing the integrity of your ability to stay abducted, which is what my leg is doing right now. So, if someone has a timer, hopefully I’m close to 30 seconds, but we’ll call it maybe now. Probably about 30 seconds there. Uh, so that’s a that’s a really great test for anybody to do. And it’s also there’s core work, there’s shoulder work. It’s a really whole body workout. Okay. You have my my turn. Why don’t you try? Yeah. See? Okay. So, on your side, toes stacked on top of each other, wrist is kind of tucked under the shoulder. Yeah. Hands waving hello. And now, try to lift your top leg. Oh gosh. Okay, let me just call somebody. I’m just let me phone a friend. Okay, I’m going to tuck my It my feet hurt. So, in this case, if you’re not able to do it, this becomes the thing that you train. I mean, the pressure of putting my foot on my other foot and putting all the weight on this foot here. Okay. Oh, maybe I’ll put my foot on the mat. Yeah. Yeah. Like maybe you need a little bit of grip. Yeah. Here we go.

That’s no better. I think it’s actually just me being weak. Okay. So, like this. Yeah. And then lifting this leg up. Lifting the leg up. There you go. Okay. Yeah. Okay. I get it. Yeah. Yeah. So, now you’re just going to work yourself up to 10 seconds, 15 seconds, 20 seconds. And over time, you’ll just be doing this at the airport. Where does this arm go? Just just on top. Yeah, just on top. Yeah, I think I’ve got more of a balancing issue. Yeah, it’s also it’s a really strong balance test. Yeah, this is a this is one of those exercises that literally tests almost every system in the body. So, I love it as a diagnostic. Okay. Is there like an entry to this exercise that’s a little bit more amateur? For sure. Yeah. Well, oh, if there’s you can maybe instead of doing it on both feet, you can maybe do it on your knees. So, um I’ll demo that real quick. So, if you want to just come here. So you’re stacking the knees on top of each other and then you can do it this way. Okay. So there’s still you’re still having to recruit the glute me um here, but it’s just less less stress. Okay. You want to try that? See how that one feels? I got it. Yeah, you got it. Okay. Is there anything else that you can show me that you think is pertinent to the conversation we just had? You know what? Well, yeah, this one actually relates to um mobility a little bit, which we did talk about. So in cultures where people sit on the floor, they eat on the floor, um you know, they toilet on the floor, they their fall risk is literally almost zero. So I think as North Americans or Western, we can do more sitting on the floor. So one of the big tests um I’ll you I usually won’t start on the floor, but I’ll have if it’s an elderly person, maybe they’re sitting on a chair. Can they stand up unassisted like without using their hands? And this is the hardest part of the test. So, what you’ll do is your feet crossed, and we’ll do it with both feet to see without using your hands. You can use a little bit of momentum if you want. Um, but you’re going to see if you can get up without using your hands.

There you go. Nicely done. All right, let’s get back down. Let’s try to cross our feet the other way. The wrong way. The other way. Yeah, I know. Cuz you always typically cross your feet one way, right? So, I don’t do this one as well as I do the other one. So, I’m working on it as well. So, again, no um hands. You can use a little bit of momentum if you want. And you’re going to come all the way up. That one was not as pretty. Yeah. There you go. Is it really low? What is that? I you know what is what what muscles am I using there? You’re using every you’re you are recruiting mobility in your ankles. You are recruiting your quads to be able to extend your knee, your glutes to extend your hip. Like it’s the whole leg. M great. Thank you so much. We’re done. Awesome. Thank you. Any others that you love? Oh goodness. That you can do without equipment at home. Push-ups, uh, body weight squats, which I think you should eventually progress to weights, but so many people have terrible techniques, so you can actually have a fantastic workout with just your body weight. Um, glute bridges I think are fantastic. So many you can pick up like a big um, bag of cat food or dog food and, you know, do walking lunges down your, you know, wherever. If you know me and if you’ve listened to this podcast before, you’ll know how obsessed I am with sleep. I’ve been on a bit of a journey with sleep. I see it as the single most important thing that I’m have the privilege of having control over. And that’s exactly what our sponsor sleep are. It’s a very, very intelligent piece of material to sleep on. Here’s what the eight sleep pod does. It monitors your body while you’re sleeping and with their AI, it adjusts the temperature for you using billions and billions and billions of hours of sleep data. and members have reported up to a 34% deeper sleep and falling asleep up to 44% faster. Me and my fianceé Melanie sleep on different parts of the bed and it adjusts my part of the bed to my body and her part of the bed to her body. So, if you want to learn more about this pod, go to 8.com/stephven.

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One of the I mean, I looked at lots of the comments and a lot of them also talk about the specific issues mothers face after they have a child. Um, I saw comments about prolapse and pelvic floors, etc. Yeah. You’ve had two children. Mhm. M what are and you speak to many many mothers um what are the specific issues that mothers face as it relates to fitness their workout regimes their goals um resistance training etc that I wouldn’t be aware of as someone that’s not given birth to a child so you know we talked about how the um the hips are different for men and women the pelvic floor is also very different for men and women as well so just from a what is the pelvic floor the pelvic floor is like a hammock of muscles that goes from the pubic bone. So, um if we were to think about so here is the uh female pelvis. We have the pubic bone here and then it’s it’s like a sling of muscles that come around and then attach to the coxix or what’s known as the tailbone. And these are called the pubo coxyal. So pubic coxix pubo coxyal muscles or PC muscles. And they’re different than, let’s say, your quadriceps or your glutes because they are literally working all the time. They are working to keep your organs in the pelvis so that they don’t just fall out. And for women, this is another area where we are different because we have more I mean, first of all, we have more openings, right? So, if you think about the sling of muscles for a woman, you’re going to have a hole at the urethra, at the opening of the vulva into the vagina, and then also the anus. So, there’s three holes. And so already you have less surface area for that pu for those muscles to be able to contract and support, right? Versus a male uh those PC muscles just have to deal with one. So it’s mechanically much simple simp simpler for a man. Mhm. And then you layer on hormonal fluctuations over the course of a you know woman as she’s menrating if she becomes pregnant under the influence of different hormones like relaxing uh the weight of the baby you know constantly pushing down um and then birth as I’ve mentioned before uh these can significantly alter the strength and the ability for the for the PC muscles to um absorb load appropriately. So, for women who’ve had babies, first you have to obviously be working with your OB/GYN or your midwife or whoever is managing your care plan to be able to clear you for exercise. And once they do, you don’t want to necessarily go back to extremely heavy loads with lots of intensity right away because you haven’t ne you haven’t necessarily yet completely healed, right? So this is where we get into thinking about okay so what are some ways that we can connect with um with the pelvic floor. So the famous exercise that everybody’s probably heard of is keull. You’ve probably heard of keigull. So those are wonderful if you’re someone who has a weak uh pelvic floor. Not so much if you just sit and contract in in your seat. Yeah. It’s it’s literally like you uh for men, the way that I’ve often um sort of cued men is like imagine you’re like zipping up a zipper. Like you’re just kind of coming up and you’re sort of holding it and then you’re relaxing. You don’t necessarily have to move and jump, but you’re literally just sort of connecting as much as you can. It’s hard because our uh neuromuscular connection to the pelvic floor sometimes is not really strong, but often just closing your eyes and just think like just coming up, holding, and then coming down. And you can do all you can do these all day long. free, you know, no one’s going to know that you’re doing it. Um, so that that if you have a weak pelvic floor, that would be something that you might explore. So, pelvic floor physiootherapist would be someone who’d be able to diagnose that and give you a bit more counsel there. But weak pelvic floors, keigull are great. They can actually, if you have, if you have a tight pelvic floor where you actually have trouble relaxing, keigull can actually make things a little bit worse for you. Um, on your book, The Betty Body, the last word on the subtitle is the word sex. A geeky goddess guide to intuitive eating, balanced hormones, and transformative sex. Yeah. Why did you include transformative sex? I included it because I think just like all of the myths that we’ve been talking about today about bulky and carbs. I think that the other thing that has been really uh taboo for women is women who enjoy their sex life. And so I was hoping in that first book to give women permission to to want to desire it to figure out if there wasn’t if there was low desire or low libido what maybe some of those causes were and what are some of the ways that we can we can learn more about ourselves. I’m thinking of this one patient that I had um and she actually was part of the reason why I included it in this first book. She had come into my clinic. She had come in for low back pain. It was like the most typical like I’m have you know mechanical low back pain right and so we were giving her uh adjustments we were giving her strengthening exercises we were doing the rehab all the things nothing out of the ordinary at her re-evaluation appointment. She said I like Dr. Steph I want to I want to talk to you privately. I was like okay fine let’s go into this room close the door all the things. And she said um do you know the real reason why I came in to see you? And I said, “Yes, it was mechanical low back pain.” And she said, “No.” Uh, it’s because when I was with my husband, you know, getting on top of him while we were being intimate was really hurting me. My back was killing me. My pelvis was killing me. My joints felt like they were rubbing on top of each other. I mean, I was lucky enough that this patient trusted me enough and we had enough rapport for her to basically say, “Yeah, I um I want to ride my husband and I can’t. I couldn’t before and now I can. And so I think that there is a quiet um taboo, we’ll say, around women not enjoying sex. And I want to give women permission to. So whether you have low back pain and that needs to be corrected, if there’s a hormonal input to that. Okay, Stephanie, what’s the most um what’s the most important thing we haven’t talked about that we should have talked about? Oh my goodness. When we didn’t talk about GLP1 ones, that’s all the bloody rage at the moment, isn’t it? the yeah GLP1s are yeah they’re interesting for sure. I do think with all medications and I am including hormone therapy in here as well um at the risk of getting shot down by some people is I think that we often marry ourselves to what we feel the benefits might be and we will divorce ourselves from the possible side effects. Right? Hormones are going to help with your for sure your sleep, your mood. Uh if you’re experiencing some of the thermmore regulatory problems like the night sweats and the hot flashes and all the things, but it’s not going to go to the gym and lift weights with you. It’s not going to build a healthy plate. It’s not going to set boundaries with your boss, you know, like those things. You have to do those things, right? So there’s this beautiful opportunity where we see more women taking MHT to or hormone replacement therapy, menopause hormone therapy to blend that with lifestyle medicine. You can’t it’s not there’s no easy button here, you know, you have to also put in the work. And lifestyle medicine meaning training, managing your stress, recovering, doing the cardio that we’ve been talking about. And that recovery point you just said, what are the recovery protocols that you think all women should be doing? The best one that I can tell you is sleep which can be a challenge in parmenopause. I understand. But that is where you have things like uh growth hormone and IGF-1 tend to surge. Muscles grow when you’re sleeping. Brain cleans itself out. Sleep is sleep is the number one thing that everybody should be prioritizing. That’s wonderful. That’s like sort of tier one. like if there’s like an S tier, sleep is an S tier. Um, under that, I would say if you have access to something like a sauna, that might be something that you can think of for recovery, whether that’s an infrared sauna or it’s a traditional Finnish sauna. I often call it lazy cardio. So, if you don’t feel like doing a really intense cardio session, get yourself into a sauna if you have access to one. not necessary but really really like there’s a lot of really cool uh studies that have come out of Finland which by the way sauna is the only word in English that we’ve borrowed from fin from Finnish just a little little fun little tidbit there but um electrolytes we’ve talked about I think that if you are really pushing uh yourself and you’re sweating a lot helping to recover and replenish those as we lose estrogen in midlife our ability to regulate salt also starts to decline as well so what if um what should we have talked about that we didn’t talk about as it relates to the most pressing questions you get asked by the people that consume the content you make? The only other thing I would say that we didn’t really go on a nerd safari on is the joints, tendons, and ligaments. So like the connective tissue capacity. We’ve talked a lot about muscle. I love muscle. I train muscle. Um muscle is like the popular girl at the party. She gets a lot of attention. You know, if you think about a a superstar like I don’t know like Beyonce or something, right? She’s beautiful to look at, the pump is great, all of that. But if you put Beyonce on a rotting stage or you put her on a stage that can’t handle her, she’s just going to fall right through it and then you have no concert, right? So, I think that the forgotten tendons and ligaments and joints, we have to be thinking about those as we age because you you can’t squat if you don’t have good knees. How do I get great ligaments and tendons? So, the way that you encourage them to become stronger over time is how you train in the gym. So there’s a couple of different ways that um you can bias for more tendon strength and more ligament strength. One of them is when you are lifting you can bias what’s called the eccentric portion of the lift. So concentric muscle gets shorter bones come together. Eccentric is stretch. When you start stretching the tendon the tendon is like I’m being stretched. Okay. We have to now create more tensile strength to be able to meet that demand. Okay. So stretching. So stretching under load. Okay. Not just stretching. Pilateses. Not Pilates. No. So Pilates again, love Pilates. Do it twice a week. You really got to be in your bonnet about pilateses. You really don’t like Do you know what it is? No. No. No. It’s not that. It’s People confuse muscle endurance. So in Pilates, you often have like very high reps. The muscle burns. Um it’s fantastic for the pelvic floor that we were talking about before. Phenomenal for women’s health, for pelvic floor health, that posture. But you saying Pilates isn’t enough to build sufficient muscle mass. That’s the main point. And that’s where I think that people were like, “How dare you talk about this?” Like, I love Pilates. I do Pilates. I’m probably in your Pilates class. However, I also am training four or five times a week. I’m also sprinting one, you know, sometimes two, but mostly one time a week. I’m I’m doing tennis. Like, I’m doing all of these other things. And Pilates brings me a lot of joy, right? I feel I always say I feel so happy after Pilates. I don’t know why. It makes me really happy. But some people are doing just pilateses. Yes. So if you are just doing the Pilates, that’s where I fear that you’re like, “Look at me, I’m slim.” You know, if you if you’re I’m able to fit in this dress now, but then what you’re not doing is you’re not loading your bones appropriately. You’re not building sufficient muscle. Your tendons and your ligaments are weak, and you’re going to end up with bone disease or a loss of load capacity when you’re older. What’s the most popular question that women message you with on Instagram? Usually, it’s tell me about your skinincare. Tell me tell me about what you do with your hair. Um or you know what your workout outfit is. All those little questions. But it’s how do I gain muscle and lose fat? That’s the big one. So, tell me about your skincare routine then. Yeah. Uh it’s pretty basic. Uh I learned this from my dermatology friends. So, some vitamin C uh in the morning, some uh SPF. Um and in the evening, uh there’s some kind of vitamin A. Uh I actually really like NAD. I use another company I have has something called urolithin A in it, which is supposed to help get rid of scinsesscent cells in the body, which are like dead cells, right? Which are Yeah. Like the zombie cells that um that sort of hang around and just create inflammation everywhere. You’re almost 50. I’m almost 50. Yeah. Feeling good. I feel great. I feel like I I inhabit my body now in a way I wish I did in my 20s. Like I was so punitive and I was so terrible to myself. Like things I would say to myself and call myself um when I was 20, 30 um I would never say that out loud to anybody else. And so now I I feel really proud of myself. You know, I got into weight training just like a lot of women who are watching. They want to look better, build muscle, lose fat. That’s why I got into it as well. But I stayed with it because of um you know it it provided me a way back home. Like it provided me a like it taught me how to love myself. It taught me how to be patient with myself, right? It taught me how to um forgive myself when I felt like I had failed, right? Like it re-imagines uh your relationship with failure, which I think is like a really big f word for women.

Dr. Stephanie, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next not knowing who they’re leaving it for. And the question left for you is what’s your skincare routine? No, I’m kidding. That was again. Do you believe in God? And why or why not? Oh, I do believe in God. I believe that there is a force greater than us, greater than we will uh ever be able to explain. um that protects us, that gives us the lessons that we need to learn. And it will continue to present the same lessons to us over and over and over again until we’re you know until we are willing to surrender to um to learning the lesson. When you’re on your um when you’re on your last day and you look back at your life and you go, you know, I did it. What would warrant you being able to say that that my family is around? I see my I’ve met my grandchildren, maybe even my great-grandchildren that they are all around my bed telling me, oh, you’re gonna make me cry, Stephen. That that they’re telling me um all the ways, all the things that they have learned from me and that they’re going to take on to future generations on my in my lineage. Why is that so important for you? I think all all the reasons why I do what I do um is it’s It’s It’s for my kids. Like, I want my kids to have a better life. I want to shortcut some of the learnings for them that I had to learn the hard way. And that’s not to say I want to deny them of their own learning opportunity, but I want to be able to pass on what I feel is important values that I think make the world a better place. Like, I just want to leave the world better than how I found it. And the way that I want to do that is through my family and the work that I do here. Thank you. Thank you for doing all that you do. Um I think it’s incredibly important for so many reasons. I mean there’s been I think through I mean it kind of says on the back of your book here, the Betty Body through time people have thought that women were little men. Um and that’s what you write on the back of your book. It says women are not little men but that’s how we treat our bodies. Yeah. And it’s great to have voices like you that are so backed by science, so eloquent, that are out there demystifying what is a incredibly um complicated world of uh health information and conflicting information. And you know, I know it better than anybody because my audience will often say to me that I relate to all of the personas that you highlighted there where you’ve got uh what was it? Was it anxious? Which was the one that’s um this one? Exorcist Emily. No, it’s this uh I get a lot of this one overwhelmed feeling. Overwhelmed. Where do I start? Yeah. Yeah. Where do I start? Because I don’t want to fail again. Yes. So many overwhelmed Olivia. In part because one of the upsides of there being so much information out there now is that people are getting, you know, they’re not having to go to some expensive doctor and they can go on an AI, they can go on a podcast, whatever, right? But with science evolving over time and with lots of different voices, people are feeling often I think feeling more overwhelmed than ever with what they consider to be conflicting information. And I think you do a wonderful job of demystifying that. Thank you so much. Um because it’s nuanced, it’s very human. It comes from lived experience and it comes from, as you said, you’ve you’ve you’ve sat with tens of thousands of patients through the career your career in practice. And things aren’t always so simple. They’re not always as simple as they are easiest to sell. And I think things that sell are often simple and reductive. Yeah. But um the truth is often complicated, personal. Yeah. And it doesn’t exist always in a lab. Like you can’t always replicate it in a lab. And one of the things I learned from your work as well is that it changes through time. Yeah. I.e. for me, what’s true for me now at 33 years old as a man, this stage of my life with the hormone complexion I have and the goals that I have, one thing can be true. But maybe when I’m 55, a different set of things are going to be true. Um, and I think that nuance is super super important. If people want more of your work, I know you’ve got a book coming out at the top of the year next year called Nothing to Lose: Build the Dream Body You Want Today: Gain the Strength and Mobility You’ll Need Tomorrow. And you’ve got this current book here called The Betty Body, which I’ll link below, subtitled A Geeky Goddess. You use the word geeky a lot. A nerd. A nerd safari. That’s interesting. Used to be It used to be sort of a, you know, a terrible word to use. I’m like, “No, I’m a total nerd.” Yeah. Special category of nerd. A geeky goddess guide to intuitive eating, balanced hormones, and transformative sex. Yeah. Where else do people find you if they want to learn more or message you or get in touch or come see you? What? Like what do they where do they go? My podcast. Not quite the reach that DOAC has, uh, but we are I have a podcast called Better with Dr. Stephanie. So, I do solo episodes there where I go on my little tangents about tendons and ligaments and all the things. And then I also interview what I would qualify as the world’s thought leaders in science and health and we try to distill what it means for uh what it means to have a well-lived life. So podcast it’s free uh probably where you’re listening to this uh YouTube and all the places and then you can head over to my website drstephanastema.com. Anything else you wanted to say? I would say for the woman listening, my overwhelmed Olivia who are feeling like they don’t know where to start or my skinny fat Sophia who are scared of lifting weights and eating like a bird. Uh or my exorcist Emily’s who are still exercising their demons. Um you’re not behind. You are absolutely enough and don’t be so hard on yourself. Thank you. Thank you.

This is incontrovertible evidence that grain of hair is reversible and it can be pretty fast. Wow. And there’s more. So, we all walk around with our biological history encoded in your hair. Like for example, if you have marijuana 6 months ago, it’s going to be in your hair. He’s got a haircut. I’m joking. So, my research lab had the idea that if we could find what was happening in this person’s life when this young hair become old, then we could understand the mechanism of the aging process. So, what is secret to anti-aging? It’s a proper allocation of energy. Can you can you how what’s the simplest way you can explain that to me? So, first energy is real and it’s the difference between feeling like you can change the world or feeling completely drained and a lot of people live on that end of the spectrum and it’s because there’s a finite energy budget with a hierarchy of energy needs in the body. For example, we did an experiment because we wanted to know how much energy does it cost to worry about the future, to ruminate about yesterday. And we found that the stress hormone increased energy expenditure by 60%. Right? So, it needs to steal energy from some of the things that keep you young. So, it’s not the stress that burns us down, it’s the response to stress. And the third piece is this energy is from your mitochondria. And there’s about 5,000 trillion mitochondria in your body. And so, they made our bodies possible. And they can change how you feel. Well, I read that studies on brains of dead people found that those with greater sense of purpose have more efficient mitochondria. Yes, we are really in service of the mitochondria. They allow us to be alive. Okay, I’ve got so many questions for you based on what people wanted to know. Like how patients with me, chronic fatigue or long co safely rehabilitate their mitochondria? What I consume, how does that impact the efficiency of the energy? If red light therapy impact mitochondria and is there anything I can do to have more energy available? But before that, I heard you say that most diseases or disorders can be explained by understanding energy resistance. Yeah, we think there’s increased energy resistance in cancer than Alzheimer’s. Like fundamentally, diabetes is a disease of energy resistance. So, is there anything I can do? There is. So, we can start by

This is super interesting to me. My team given me this report to show me how many of you that watch this show subscribe and some of you have told us according to this that you are unsubscribed from the channel randomly. So favor to ask all of you please could you check right now if you’ve hit the subscribe button if you are a regular viewer of the show and you like what we do here. We’re approaching quite a significant landmark on this show in terms of a subscriber number. So, if there was one simple free thing that you could do to help us, my team, everyone here, to keep this show free, to keep it improving year over year and week over week, it is just to hit that subscribe button and to double check if you’ve hit it. Only thing I’ll ever ask of you, do we have a deal? If you do it, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll make sure every single week, every single month, we fight harder and harder and harder and harder to bring you the guests and conversations that you want to hear. I’ve stayed true to that promise since the very beginning of the D of Co, and I will not let you down. Please help us. Really appreciate it. Let’s get on with the show.

Dr. Martin Picard, what is it that you believe, know, or understand that most people out there don’t believe, know, or understand? We are energy. We literally are the energy that’s flowing through the body. And and that sounds a little woo if you don’t have context. And that’s I think something that we’re just starting to have the right scientific framework to to understand to understand ourselves from first principles as energetic processes. In a nutshell, what is it that people are looking for when they listen to this subject of energy? Yeah, I think people want to understand what is energy and how can I have more energy? I can relate to that because sometimes you know if I look through my life sometimes I wake up and I feel amazing and I really have in my view done the same thing but then sometimes I wake up and I don’t feel amazing and it feels kind of like roulette like this sort of opaque mystery of how do I wake up on with more days in a row and feel amazing like I can take on the world and then there’s also some friends that I have who are suffering with different things whether it’s chronic illness or long co or whatever who repeatedly wake up and feel low energy for years, you know, at a time. Yeah. It’s a really tough place to be when you wake up repeatedly and and you don’t feel like you have the capacity, the energy to be in the world. It’s it’s a really tough place to be. And and who are you and why did you commit your life to this subject? I’m a regular guy who with you know lived experiences who who’s gone through some tough things that have taught me lessons and have gone through wonderful things that have made me feel like life is really special and precious and then I became a scientist and as I learned the tools of science I started to see and I discovered mitochondria I thought this is an approach to start to bridge what’s true about the human experience that we know from first experience empirically and we know to be real not because you know some white coatwearing doctor or scientist you just said yes energy is real it’s in your mitochondria we know it to be real from first experience right because we we feel it and then what science is telling us about how things work in our bodies right and about health and and disease and where diseases come from so I had these questions so I became a scientist to bridge those domains of of existence the the science and the experience um so I’ve led a research group at Columbia University for 10 years uh and founded an institute uh to really build the systems and technologies to to help people grow, heal and and and transform. You have a PhD in mitochondria. Yep. My PhD was in mitochondrial biology of aging. I mean, there’s a an image here in front of me. Some people will just be listening, so we’ll try and explain it for them, but there’s an image here of a video. I’ll play the video on screen now and it kind of looks like a looks a little bit like an alien but I I I read that this video was quite formative for you. What is that video and why was that formative moment in your career? I took this video in England uh in Newcastle upon time in the north of England uh with my Jordy friends uh the medical school there. I was a graduate student and went there for kind of an exchange and this is the first time I saw mitochondria moving. I saw like the inner life of ourselves and when I saw this something struck me as like oh my god I’m able to see this right and to see living mitochondria because of the mitochondria inside of me. It’s the energy that’s flowing through my mitochondria in my eye, right, that’s allowing me to perceive to see this. Mitochondria made multisellular life possible. They made our bodies possible and and we might just be a vehicle for mitochondria to kind of propagate and keep on living. So when I saw this like this is mitochondria looking at mitochondria and then I was starting to understand that mitochondria do more than just transforming energy. What they’re known for is they take the food you eat and then they take the oxygen that you breathe in and then those two things the food the oxygen converge inside the mitochondria and then something really special happens. The electrons that are stuck on food that were stuck together in a green leaf somewhere right photosynthesis. What your mitochondria do is they they kind of unpack this and they rip off the electrons one by one and then they flow them like a little electrical circuit. And that happens in like the 5,000 trillion mitochondria that are in your body. And then when the electrons flow, they need to flow towards something just like in an electrical circuit. Electrons flow from one pole of the battery to the negative to to the other pole of the battery. Uh and that circuit is closed in the mitochondria. So the the electrons from the food you eat flow towards oxygen that you breathe and then it becomes water. And and it’s that vital flow of energy, electrons flowing towards oxygen that allows us to be alive. And uh mitochondria do this. And then as they do this, they transform energy from food biochemistry into electricity and into signals and into heat. And the reason the body is warm is because the mitochondria as they transform and flow electrons like a little energetic circuit, they release heat. So the source of heat, right, that makes us warm. You shake someone’s hand, you feel their warmth. You’re feeling the warmth from their mitochondria. So is there a mitochondria in every single cell in my body? There’s on average a thousand mitochondria per cell. Per cell there’s a thousand. So how many is there in my body? About 5,000 trillion. Who should care about the mitochondria and why should they care about it? Mhm. Anyone who cares about their energy, right? About having enough energy to do what they really care about. Uh we all care about different things. We’re we’re all gifted and talented for different things. Uh everyone has this, you know, unique authentic self that wants to come out. The only way for this to come out and the only way for a person to flourish is through energy. Mhm. If there’s no energy flowing through your body, you’re dead, right? And if the energy doesn’t flow efficiently, right, and smoothly through you as an organism, then life feels hard. Like you’re not at your best. You feel tired. uh and and you feel like, you know, maybe it’s not worth it. You know, when you’re sick and your immune system is like draining all of your energy, it’s really hard to be optimistic and it’s hard to be a good person and it’s hard to be a good dad and it’s hard to want to do good for the world if you’re struggling with energy. Do you know what it is? So many of us think that that just is what it is and that we can do nothing about that. Yeah. You know, we we breathe in, we eat food, and then how we feel is kind of roulette. Yeah, there’s this certain I think feeling a lot of us have that we can’t really control that much. Mhm. Where do we need to start to understand cuz the outcome I want from this conversation is I want to live my life with more energy to do the things that I want to do. And I imagine the people that are listening also feel the same way. So where does one have to start? I’d like to understand the basics and then move to the actionable stuff like things I can do so that I live my life full of energy. Yeah. So there there are three things that are really foundational to how energy works in the human body. One is that you are the energy that’s flowing through this body. I am the energy that’s flowing through my body. Yes. So I’m not my body. You’re not your body. Okay. I’m the energy flowing through it. You Steven. Yeah. This expression now that I’m getting to experience. Thank you. This expression is an expression of the flow of energy. If there was no energy flowing through your body, through your heart, through your brain, like you wouldn’t be right. You’d be a cadaavver and we’d say, “Steven is gone.” You know, a dead body. Yeah. You’d be a dead body. The difference between a dead body, a kadaavver, and a living, thinking, feeling, conscious person, who cares, is the flow of energy. Okay. You you get so indoctrinated in this world view that the only thing that’s real is the physical stuff and you know the nucle the the genes that that you got from your parents and the body the physical body and that’s the real stuff what you can’t see with your eyes not real right I think that’s a reframe that’s kind of a bigger picture mindset shift that uh we need to and and scientists struggle with so number one is you are the energy that flows and transforms uh through this body. Number two is there’s a fixed energy budget, right? All of us have a fairly fixed energy budget to deal with. And and for example, if you want to have more energy to do more podcasts, to write more articles, to uh you know, be more creative, the solution is not eating more because there’s this fixed energy budget. And if you overload the system, you feed it too much food, especially too much sugar, it’s really hard on the system. And then the system like an electrical system you jack up the voltage right and then the system starts to overheat. Uh so inflammation is this this overheating there’s too much energy in the system and uh or the cells are are burning too much energy and they need to kind of tell other cells that’s those signals we call inflam inflammation cytoines. Mhm. So there’s a fixed energy budget that you have to deal with and over time the organism does a lot of of uh finessing and adapting to kind of try to preserve this energy budget and that’s somewhat linked to stress I guess which is I read your work and it talked about how stress was basically just like an over consumption of energy. It’s requiring loads and loads and loads of energy. Yeah. Okay. We’ll talk about that too then because I think stress is a really important one. What’s the third? The third one is life is resistance. In order to be alive, in order to to grow, to learn, uh to transform, right, change your views, you need resistance to go through some resistance. Mhm. You need energy to go through some resistance, right? If energy just flows and there’s no zero resistance, then there’s no possible transformation. So if life was always easy and you never faced any challenge, any stress in your life then you would just remain as is right and and it would be very boring. And from first principles physics like we know this to be true you know at a number of levels but for example the sun this beautiful nuclear reactor in the sky shoots energy right as photons. So light is a form of energy and as long as light you know just goes and and photons travels in outer space photon will remain photon light energy will remain light energy until that light energy hits a green leaf right and the green leaf basically breaks or stops the photon in its path. So it’s it offers a constraint right it offers resistance. So when light energy faces resistance now it can be converted and that’s the basis of making food. That’s how nature makes food. It crystallizes energy from sunlight into molecules. Life you know plants crystallize light energy into carbohydrates. Uh and then those are transformed into the different kinds of food that we eat. We need resistance for energy to transform into something meaningful. So what has um mitochondria got to do with all of this? Mitochondria are basically little resistors, right? And and they are what allows the flow of energy through the system. Have you got a picture of Okay, here we go. Yeah. Okay. So this is a an image of a mitochondria. A mitochondri. O N is a singular. Mitochondria is plural. Yeah. So this is a mitochondrian. And there’s about a thousand of these in each of your cells. Okay. And there’s about 5 trillion cells in your body uh that have a nucleus and that have these beautiful mitochondria. And what you see here, these little wings, these are called christi. And the christi is where the food you eat end up and where the oxygen you breathe end up as well. So this is where the electrons are flowing. There’s like little electrical circuits here. And as the electrons are flowing, the mitochondria become charged like little batteries. So effectively a mitochondrian like this has all of these sites of oxygen consumption and and food consumption and then that gets transformed uh into a little charge battery and once the battery is charged uh the mitochondria can use that charge to make ATP adenosine triphosphate which is kind of the the cellular energy currency. If a cell wants to contract right a muscle cell wants to contract in the gym it needs ATP. So it calls upon the mitochondria says I need ATP and then the mitochondria gets to work uh and then flows uh electrons consume some food burn some oxygen that’s why you get out of breath right so when you get out of breath is because the mitochondria are using the oxygen and calling for more oxygen what we’ve been discovering is that mitochondria do a lot more than just making ATP okay they use their their energized state to produce signals to receive information and then to produce signals oh so they’re talking to each other they’re talking to each other. What are they saying? They’re they’re it’s a whole collective and and they’re talking to each other kind of monitoring what’s happening not only inside the cell but outside the cell. So on the surface of mitochondria all along there are little receptors for all sorts of signals that tells this mitochondrian is there enough energy? Is there are we running out of energy? Is there a stress hormone here? Should we be getting ready for you know something dangerous? Uh so mitochondria are like like a little distributed brain right? Right. So they’re like the intracellular brain. Am I right in thinking that they used to be bacteria? They are. Yeah, they did. Yeah. What What is that story? Cuz I think someone said that to me before on the show that our mitochondria are actually bacteria that from prehistoric times or something. So the story is about 1.5 billion years ago. Uh that there was two different types of bacteria. One type was able to use oxygen to transform energy, right? So it could fuel on oxygen and and other food substrates. The other type could not. It was anorobic and the anorobic bacterium was probably a little bigger and it had like a few more genes. Um, and it could only ferment its food and kind of fermenting the food, spitting out, you know, like lactate or like yeast does. And what happened is the big one either engulfed the small one, right? Or maybe the small one kind of infiltrated, colonized the big one. And the story goes uh that this basically gave a whole bunch more energy to the big cell. That’s one perspective. And then with more energy, what can you do? You can evolve more complexity. The version I I favor based on the evidence we have is that when mitochondria came in and then they they there was this new structure, this symbiotic relationship, mitochondria basically gave the ability of the cell to perceive the environment in a different way and to compute information in a different way. So maybe the the the coming of of mitochondria into this big cell made the big cell social because before this event most of the evidence says that cells were asocial. They were little bacteria foraging for for themselves and you know kind of operating from a very selfish uh perspective just trying to replicate you know trying to survive. When mitochondria came in it like gave those cells a different view on life and they’re like woo we could work together. How about you become a cell that gets energy, right? And I become a cell that uh moves, right? So then you’re the gut and I’m going to be the muscle and and then then together those two cells can do a lot more, right? And fast forward a couple billion years and here we are. Here we are. Yeah. And and that led to, you know, bodies with organs. You know, the liver feeds the rest of the body. The heart keeps things flowing. The brain kind of computes and and plans. Uh so that’s division of labor. It’s uh and it started with the mitochondria. You you talked about energy resistance. I’ve heard you say that most diseases or disorders can be explained by understanding energy resistance. Give me a disease that’s linked to energy resistance. The clearest is what we call insulin resistance or diabetes. Right? Diabetes affects millions in the world. Fundamentally, diabetes is a disease of energy resistance. Uh so if the resistance is too high because because you have um too much energy pushed onto the system, sugar, too much sugar, glucose. Yeah, exactly. Or if the mitochondria are impaired, right, and they can’t flow energy, then the the the energy is kind of stuck. It faces greater constraints. Like it wants to go in that direction, but then there’s a barrier and then another barrier, another barrier. It’s like water flowing, right? nice and and and and smooth and then there’s like a dam, right? And if the dam has zero um openings, right, then the the water accumulates and then there’s high pressure and then at some point the the water accumulates and ends up flooding the the landscape and then damaging things. So, it’s a bit like the same thing. If now you open floodgates on the dam, right, and then you can use that energy to make electricity, for example, you use the the movement of the water to transform this into electricity. That’s basically what the mitochondria do. Uh, and if you move and you’re physically active, now the flow of energy through the mitochondria can transform into work, right? And to speed into uh, movement, right, into lifting. Is this linked to cancer at all? Because it sounds I mean, I don’t know much about cancer, but cells dividing out of um, control seemingly randomly. Yeah, I think that there’s a very good chance if you look at the biology of cancer and what scientists call the hallmarks of cancer, there’s like a a 10 item flywheel of these are the core features of of cancer. Uh all of those features have some relationship some very direct with increased energy resistance. Right? So if energy can’t flow smoothly and a cell uh is you know burning too much energy and it doesn’t flow energy through the mitochondria which is what cancer cells do cancer cells ditch their mitochondria and they revert back to this ancestral you know cell that didn’t have mitochondria it was anorobic it was spitting out lactate and we don’t really know why cells do this called the Warberg effect and the Warberg effect is when a cell in the presence of oxygen right if it wanted it could use oxygen flow electrons through mitochondria uh and transform energy and and live a nice social life uh like every cell in in this social collective does in the body. Uh what cancer cells do is they say I’m not going to use my mitochondria even if there’s oxygen even if my mitochondria can respire. And by doing this it seems like cancer cells revert back to this ancestral cell right that that just cares about itself the antisocial cell. Yeah. Then the the the organism will in the tumor will try to make more blood vessels around it. Right? It’s called angioenesis. So it’s like the the cancer cell trying to decrease energy resistance. It says bring me more oxygen. So it’s kind of like there’s a sort of alien all of a sudden that decides it no longer wants to work with the rest of the organism and that it’s going to be selfish and demand more and more resources for itself and it multiplies itself. Yeah. With equally selfish little aliens. Yeah. And then the body responds by listening to it and giving it more resources. Is that what you’re saying? Why do the blood vessels surround the cancer? Yeah. It’s like it’s the cancer calling for you know more energy. Okay. Yeah. So energy resistance is the product of two things. Is how much energy is being demanded right? Like how much power is being deployed in in the in the tumor for example or in the working muscle. Uh and then how much energy is can flow through the system. That’s like the equivalent of current in an electrical system. So if there’s a lot of demand, right, a lot of power is being generated or a lot of activity is happening like in a cancer cell, but there’s not enough flow to to to support that activity, then that increases resistance. So is there any understanding as to how those kind of cancers are caused? like what what causes that moment where you know you talked about the Wahberg effect what causes that the cancer community used to think that the main driver for cancer was genetic mutations but there’s an emerging perspective that changes in metabolism changes in the way electrons flow through through this energetic circuitry through the mitochondria can actually drive the uh instance of a of a new cancer cell and then when a cell becomes cancerous ditches it its mitochondria it goes back to this selfish state and then it makes more of itself and it tries not to die. Explain that part to me because I was reading about how cancer cells try and evade death. Yeah. The best way to think about this I think is as a a social collective, right? Every cell in this organism uh cares about the same thing which is pres preserving the the life and and the health of the whole being, right? So every cell in in this body is in a social contract with every other cell, right? a cancer cell basically uh gets out of this agreement and says no no I’m going to fair for myself. I’m going to take all the energy I can uh and I’m going to make more of myself and it it goes into you know bacterial mode that happens um sometimes because of mutations and it seems like there there are other causes of this like for example hypoglycemia what’s that high blood glucose right uh diabetes is a major risk factor for developing cancer why is that I don’t think there there are good explanations out there based on like the molecular framework of of disease and you know the the genetic uh mutation perspective um if you look at cancer from an an energetic perspective and it’s I think likely that the increase in blood glucose increases the pressure right there’s more electrons that are being pushed onto those cells to those mitochondria and when you push too much energy on a system that doesn’t need energy it’s like you’re trying to shove you know a lot of of water through a very small pipe something goes wrong yeah something goes wrong some something can break. Uh so the the resistance is uh if you push a lot of energy into a very small you know container or into a a channel that can’t support that then the the what happens kind of physically is an increase in in the resistance to the flow. Uh and then that can lead to the cell trying to protect itself. Uh that’s what insulin resistance is in diabetes. Right? Insulin resistance is a protection mechanism. there’s too much glucose being pushed onto the cell, right? And so that causes this excess, you know, energy coming in. The cell says, you know, too much and and it damages the mitochondria. This excess resistance because there’s too much heat produced, reactive oxygen species, oxidative stress. I was thinking about smoking and how smoking also is carcoenic. It’s cancer-causing. And through the lens of the mitochondria, how could something like smoking be cancer-causing? Yeah, it’s clear that in uh cigarette smoke there are carcinogens. They’re molecules that can damage the genome and cause mutations. Uh it there’s a strong link between lung cancer and smoking, but for all of the other cancers, there’s much less of a a clear connection between exposure and cancer, right? The cancers that that affect and and kill most people, uh we don’t really know, you know, why they come, when they come. uh and it’s clear that there’s kind of a long history and uh the the science behind you know connecting metabolism and cancer shows that obesity and uh high blood glucose and diabetes especially which causes very high you know excursion have a very high spikes in in blood glucose. Those things are damaging to our cells. And what the energy resistance principle says is that biology processes energy in terms of resistance and it makes that kind of computation. How much energy is flowing now? And then how much how much energy demand and how much energy pressure am I exposed to? And if there’s an imbalance then that uh causes damage. Rather than being innocent bystanders, mitochondria are hijacked by cancer. The tumor reprograms them to stop acting like the body’s protective energy factories and starts using them as a manufacturing plant to build more cancer cells. Because of this, targeting mitochondrial metabolism has become a major promising frontier in developing new cancer therapies. Mhm. It hijacks the the mitochondria and uses them to produce more cancer cells. Mhm. H. So a normal cell uh is driven its behavior is driven by the mitochondria. Like mitochondria are in the driver’s seat, right? Mitochondria can basically call the shots. If is the cell to live and divide, right? Or is the cell to contract and remain this kind of cell? Or if it’s a stem cell, is it to divide or remain a stem cell? Uh or is it to die? Right? And cells have to make these decisions all the time. And cell suicide for the greater good is something that happens all the time in our bodies. And that’s why and how we get rid of most cancer cells, right? As far as we understand, you have a cell that kind of defects from the social collective and then the organism has the wisdom to say, okay, this is no longer ours. Let’s get rid of it, right? Because it could become cancer. And most of the time that works well. Uh but what cancer cells can do is say, okay, I’m they ditch their mitochondria and then they start to use them for their own growth. uh and by ditching their mitochondria, they basically immunize themselves against the death that mitochondria could could trigger. So mitochondria have a veto on cell life or death and cancer somehow is able to kind of get away from that. And it’s it’s weird to think about because yeah, the things that are cause cancer or that have a correlation to cancer are things like you know, as you said, like having too much of this stuff here, too much sugar, the white stuff, yes. High blood glucose levels etc. are linked to cancer. And one would wonder why eating sugar in excess is going to increase my probability of cancer. But obviously it points to the fact that it must be doing something to my energy systems which are causing some kind of malfunction somewhere. Yeah. And what the energy resistance principle allows us to understand is why that is and what’s really happening. If you overload your body with excess energy, the body has to deal with this. And in a simple electrical system circuit if you jacked up you know the voltage and the system is is too weak to take this then resistance goes through the roof the transistors start to melt and then the system you know gets gets damaged. The the same thing happens you know in the body if you overload the system with too much energy too many electrons right very direct parallel with the electrical circuit there electrons stuck here on these little glucose molecules. If you ingest this now, it increases the voltage in the body and then if the mitochondria can’t keep up and because they’re they’re not flowing energy because you’re sedentary, you’re you’re not moving um then that increases the resistance, right? And then and they might die or malfunction. Correct. Or things get damaged, right? The the clear connection here is too much energy increase energy resistance. So then the electrons that normally flow smoothly in your metabolism, right, from the food to your mitochondria, then that whole circuit becomes more resistive. And if you’re an electron and you’re trying to go through the the metabolic pathways looking for oxygen and the mitochondrian, but then at every at every point in this cascade, you face resistance. There’s more chance that that electron kind of jets out and and then becomes oxidative stress. Well, then what’s what’s going on with aging? I’ve got two women in front of me and they have two different colors of hair. Now, let’s just pretend for argument sake and for the sake of this uh explanation that this is someone’s hair that’s gone gray because of stress. Um, and this is what she used to look like or he used to look like in terms of the color of their hair. What I found really interesting because it kind of speaks to lots of things that are going on going going on in the body is you’re saying you can actually reverse gray hair without dying it. And if so, what does that tell us about what gray hair is? But more broadly about stress, energy, mitochondria, and everything in between. Yeah. Uh what we discovered is that hair graying is reversible. And and that was surprising because what I’ve learned and what most people learn is that when you age, it’s kind of this linear progressive decline and and there’s kind of nothing you can do about it. Uh but it turns out that if you look on most people’s head, um you can see things like this. This is obviously, you know, this was dyed and all of the hairs were were white and then all the hairs are are are dark. And if you take a hair like this, uh the tip here, right, was inside the body long time ago. This is almost like if you look at tree rings, right? You take a tree and you cut it in cross-section, you see like the rings and then you can say, “Ooh, this ring was uh 30 years ago, right? And this ring is today.” Uh so you can use that to kind of map the history of what happened in the environment of of the tree. You can do the same thing. We all walk around with biological history crystallized in in this hair. And that’s why if you want to know if someone had a drug for example like a month ago or 6 months ago or two years ago depending how long the hair is you can actually use the hair and all along would be you know the chemical signature of what you took. So you can find marijuana in in the hair you know here but not here. So if you if you have marijuana 6 months ago it’s going to be in your hair and you’re going to walk around uh with that trace that physical trace in in your body. He’s got a haircut. And the idea was if we could find hairs on someone’s head that the tip was uh dark, right? And then when you look closer to the body, it becomes white, right? And you would say the hair was young, it was young, it was young, it was young, and then boom, it became old, right? It lo it lost color. Hair growing is a a classic hallmark of aging. Um then we thought then you would know something that something was happening in this hair follicle in this person’s body right that made this young hair become old and then maybe we could understand the mechanisms of the aging process. So this became kind of an interesting scenario and through doing this we found people started to send us hair samples in Ziploc bags you know over the mail uh and we were looking for two colored hairs a a single hair that has two colors kind of like this uh and we found hairs that uh you know head hair, beard hair, pubic hairs that showed the signature. The hair was dark and then it became white or the hair was white and it became dark again. Mhm. So we had physical evidence from like multiple people that showed white hairs can go back to being dark and this contradicted this idea that you know aging is this linear progressive process that we’re kind of doomed to experience without any flexibility. I was one of the participants in that study. I ended up finding five hairs that had this pattern. And when we looked at when the reversal happened, we found that the re reversal happened when I went on vacation and I would go back in those days on annual uh cycling uh training camps. So I would go for a week. Yeah. Where all you do is you bike, you eat, you sleep. Uh energy started to move very differently in my body during that that time. Um, and then when we looked at the hair and we analyze the the composition, the molecular composition, that’s what scientists do. You can take a hair like this, snip the pieces, the white segment, the dark segment, it’s all the same genome, right? Every hair has the same genome, the same genetic material, same food, uh, same physical activity, same everything. Why some hairs are like this or like that, uh, was an opportunity to understand the dynamics, the plasticity, like how life can go from being young to old or old back to young. Uh, and what we found was that the main signal was a mitochondrial signal. And in the white hair, I thought there’s going to be less color, right? Obviously, but also probably less mitochondria, less, you know, some other things. We found that the white hairs have more mitochondria and there was an upregulation of the body, the the hair follicle where the hair was becoming old wasn’t kind of letting go of things. It was doing more. So that means during that period of time you were more stressed and using more energy. When cells become old instead of just dying right they struggle and when a cell has damage in the DNA or the mitochondria not working properly or for some reason they accumulate damage they become old the cell struggles to make more mitochondria and it it tries to kind of compensate and then ends up wasting a lot of energy in the process. So on that hair what you looked at that was gray let’s call it um it had more mitochondria because it was struggling and why was it struggling? It looks like stress hormones can you know make a cell struggle for example cortisol. cortisol. Yes, if you’re a cell, right, and your perspective on the world is pretty simple, uh you don’t have, you know, the senses that, you know, we we enjoy, but you do never let us, you know, siy environment. If cortisol comes and you get the signal, uh it means there’s something out there in the environment that’s dangerous, right? You should be preparing for having to fight or to flight or there there’s something out there that’s dangerous. Our cells evolved to interpret cortisol in that way. Um so, we did an experiment in the dish. We wanted to know how much energy does it cost to worry about the future, right? Or how much energy does it cost to ruminate about yesterday? Mhm. The thing you didn’t do or the mistake you made at work or that conversation that went sideways, you know, with your partner. Uh how much energy is that cost to be thinking about this, to be, you know, engaging your stress system, to be releasing cortisol? Uh so two students in the lab, Gabriel and Natalia did that experiment. They put you put cells in a dish. You give them the equivalent of cortisol. how much energy is going to cost for these cells to prepare. There’s nothing damaging to the cortisol itself, but the cortisol is a signal that there might be something dangerous outside, right? That’s like when you’re sitting down, you get an email, you’re like, I might lose my job, right? Or I might not get this contract, and then you you have this whole stress response. Your heart starts to beat faster. How much energy does that cost? Uh so in cells in a dish, we can isolate that question really well. We found that the stress hormone increased energy expenditure, the cost of life by 60%. So when I’m stressed, I’m using 60% more energy theoretically. I don’t know about you, but cells in a dish. Okay. So there the beauty about like bodies and you know with the mind and you know this complex organism they’re buffering systems, right? So you might I don’t think your energy expenditure increases by 60% if you’re stressed out but it increases somewhat. What is that graph there? So there are two graphs here. Uh the top one is the color of the hair of a single hair from a young Asian woman who was part of the study. And what we see here, this is called the hair pigmentation pattern, the HPP that we we developed in the lab to understand quantitatively bring science to this to hair graying and and reversal. And so what you see here is this hair was dark and then it became white for 2 centimeters and then boom completely regained color. Actually it regained it was darker here than it than it used to be, right? And then stayed dark afterwards. So this is a hair that we received uh in the mail as we were starting to to collect uh two colored hairs. Um and then when we when we saw this, we we had found from a few different people white hairs that had regained color. We’ve never seen a hair like this. That’s dark, white, and then dark. Right? So, I remember holding this hair. I was like, “Oh my god, this is in the same hair. This was incontrovertible evidence that growing of hair is reversible.” And it can be pretty pretty fast. Like this transition here is just a few weeks. This is about one week, right? So, this white hair completely white regained color in just about a week. Um so then we developed an instrument which was a simple sheet on the yaxis the vertical is most stressful thing that ever happened to you. No stress at all. 10 and zero. And then on the x-axis the horizontal was time. Yes. On the far right is now. Right. This is now. This is a year ago. And then we labeled all the months. And then we ask people and we ask this uh lady put a dot on the graph that was the most stressful time in the past year that anyone can do the exercise past year most stressful time. Okay, maybe last March and then you put a dot right in March number 10 and then least stressful part uh zero and then put other like meaningful things that happened that were challenging. So people put dots, you know, along the this last year, then connect the dots, right? The red graph is her dots connected and it correlates perfectly to her hair going gray. Correct. And what happened to her life? She said she finished her PhD thesis and she was jobless, but she was fine. She was happy to be done with her studies and then broke up with her boyfriend. Oh, damn. And her hair went gray. Yeah. Broke up with her boyfriend. She didn’t know what was happening with her life. She had to travel to Europe. There was some family drama. Uh she said these were the la the most stressful two months of my life. There’s a killer question here which is if that remains chronic does that hair follicule go gray forever. Yeah. I.e. if I go through an a stressful period for 2 to 3 weeks and my hair goes a bit gray. As long as I get out of that stressful period as quick as possible, does that hair then return to to black or dark? Yeah. Do you see what I’m saying here? Yes. It seems like and we ran some like fancy mathematical model to understand why this would be possible, why it could happen like now for this hair and then be reversible. But we know, you know, very well if you have a full head of gray hair and you’re 70 years old, you’re not going to regain your color. Yeah. So there seems to what the model the mathematical model suggested is that there’s a window of opportunity, right? where a hair slowly accumulates damage, becomes more and more probably energetically inefficient, right? So there’s more and more energy resistance and then there’s a barrier and then when the the hair hits that threshold now it loses color. It’s done. Yeah. But then if something changes in the body, right, you go on vacation or you start to do intermittent fasting and then there’s more energy available for your dark hair. Now it can be reversed, right? Because you can go back up against that threshold. But then eventually this hair is going to go gray again. And then if you’re way way down like this hair turned gray 10 years ago and you go back up, you’re too far away from threshold to regain color. Okay? So it suggests some threshold model that there’s a window of opportunity for some something as binary as hair color. It’s black or it’s white, right? So there’s kind of a window of opportunity there where where you can reverse gray hair. Yes. I I do want to come back to this hair thing, but it did make me think because you you added a layer of nuance there, which is about the mind. Mhm. Like if I go through my life um with a more resilient mind and you get that bad email and you go and I get the bad email, I go, “Fuck it. Who cares?” Yeah. Am I therefore going to be a way more productive person throughout those 24 hours because my mitochondria are using less energy because there’s less cortisol? Yeah. Based on what we know, I think that’s likely correct. So, it’s not the stress that burns us down, it’s the response to stress. And nothing is free in biology. And for your heart to beat a little faster, if you mount a response to that email, right, you’re burning energy in your heart. And then you’re tensing your, you know, your your shoulder. That’s burning energy. Now, your brain is going into like rumination mode and then this thing and then then it makes you think about your childhood and this and like and then the an the anxiety and then you start to sweat like everything costs energy. So the chain of events is I get the email. It’s a very bad email. Says, “You’re fired, Steven, from the dire. We found a different host.” Yeah. Um I look at the email that goes into my psychology, my mind. I then have a story I tell myself about what that email means for me, my future, my children, whatever. Which then causes a physiological response of like chemicals like cortisol. Yeah. um which goes into my cells, my mitochondria, which then have to work a little bit harder or use more energy, which is ultimately then going to mean that I’m more tired because I have a finite amount of energy per day. Mhm. Is that is that sequence of events I ask about that sequence because it offers me an opportunity to intervene at some point? Yes. Yes. That’s the right way to think about it. Don’t open the laptop or like get a little bit better with bad news. Yeah. or you know learn to be less reactive, right? Or learn to to feel and and um you know sit with be aware of that reaction because the key solution to kind of to to cutting that sequence of event that ends up draining you is to become aware of it. Yeah. Become aware of it. Yeah. Right. uh so you can kind of interrupt this and people who study contemplative practices and and meditation and you know mindfulness approaches I think many of them think this is kind of the key right the the awareness the somatic awareness or introsception so if you feel into your your bodilies responses you become free of do I mount a response is that needed now or not there’s different types of stress right there’s like the acute stress which is just you get the email you feel a little bit of a spike but 5 minutes like you’re fine. Y and then there’s the more chronic type of stress where you’re waking up every day with the same feeling of stress deep inside you for many many days in a row, many weeks in a row. Um I hear that acute stress isn’t all that bad and it’s very normal and useful, but it’s this chronic stress that can cause a lot of damage. Yeah. And I think that brings us back to the concept of how is energy flowing through the body. And if it flows with not enough resistance, you can’t survive. But if there’s too much resistance, then you you get drained. How do I think about this resistance thing? Because I’m really struggling with like understanding it. Maybe one good example to to frame this is exercise. Yeah. Right. When you start to exercise, there’s increased resistance in your muscle, right? Your muscles are contracting. So there’s a physical resistance there, but there’s also energy resistance. So the the energy is trying to flow through the muscle and then there’s you have mitochondria. If you have just a few mitochondria and the muscles are contracting really hard like you’re running, you’re sprinting, right? You’re doing interval training. Um, now the mitochondria don’t have the capacity to flow as much energy as the muscle is asking, right? So that imbalance of demand to flow capacity. Now the the product of this the demand divided by flow capacity is resistance. Okay? So if you demand a lot of your muscle because of your your your sprint uh but you don’t have a lot of mitochondria right it’s going to feel terrible uh and then because the resistance creeps up and then your muscle you know becomes really hot and then eventually there’s inflammation uh and then it burns and and then it’s uncomfortable uh but then so that’s like an acute bout of of energy resistance. What happens with exercise is once you recover right the benefits of exercise don’t happen during the exercise they happen after during the recovery. So if you recover now you you’re the muscles are relaxing and you’re resting eventually you go you know for you go to sleep. Uh it’s the in during the decrease in resistance now the cell says next time this happens I better be ready. Like this was really uncomfortable. There was too much energy shoved into a system that couldn’t take it right. Right? So, I need next I’m going to make more mitochondria. So, that that’s what happens if you go from being a sedentary couch potato, right, to training for a marathon. You can double the amount of mitochondria you have in your muscles. And that’s the system feeling the the rise in resistance like I don’t have the capacity to flow that much energy and then adapting for this for the next time and next time I’m going to be ready. Let’s make more mitochondria. So, that’s probably what where the benefits of exercise come from. this spike in and and why stress is is not a bad thing intrinsically, right? If you have a spike of stress, it stimulates the process the the the it stimulates the body to put in place things that in the long run makes you more efficient, decreases your resistance. Then you can go through life with with less resistance. Coming back to this gray hair thing. So if if we consider gray hair, my hair going gray to be the last domino that fell. So like the symptom y then what is what are the what is the first domino and can you walk me through the sequence of events because one would assume that if I understand that sequence of events I can also understand how to then reverse it how to kind of take I got a couple of gray hairs now and I actually anecdotally do think weirdly now you’ve said this that I have like gray hair flare-ups where I’ll go I’ll you know go through a couple of weeks or months of doing something and I’ll look in the room like what I have 12 now I’m being generous there’s more like 25 I I have 25 now. In terms of those dominoes, the symptom is gray hair. What is the first domino that that falls? And what is the sequence of events that leads to the gray hair in the follicule? So there’s a finite energy budget and then what the organism does is it allocates energy in different places like a business, right? You have this budget. Do I put more energy here? Do I put, you know, more resources here? If so, I need to take resources away from here. Right? So as stress happens in your life, it pulls energy away from some of the things that keep you young, right? So there’s uh there’s a kind of a hierarchy of energy needs in the body. Not everything can be prioritized the same way. Do you know Maslo’s hierarchy of human needs? Yeah. Yeah. So Maslo’s insight was uh Oh my god, I just freaked out. My hand reached down and I just felt someone’s head. It was just I was like acute stress response. Yeah. I just Yeah. Caught us off. Sorry. Maslo’s hierarchy of needs. Yeah. So there’s there’s a hierarchy of energy needs in the body that’s works similarly to Maslo’s hierarchy of needs. Maslo said for a human being to be fully realized first you need to have safety and food and shelter secured. Right? Once you have this and you feel this is kind of covered in your life, then you can start to think about building relationships with other people, right? Loving relationships. Once you have this settled, now you can start to think about building your skills, right? Like becoming really good at something. Uh and then once you have this covered now you can devote energy to the more frivolous things like spirituality what do you call self-actualization and kind of becoming your best self flourishing. Uh so he saw this very much as uh this is this needs to be covered uh and when things get really hard and there are constraints on your life the first thing to go is the top of the pyramid right your meditation practice or the long-term type like I’m going to be a better person no like I need to make sure we can put food on the table next week right um so this hierarchy of of human needs I think aligns with hierarchy of uh of energy needs in the body and as far is the importance of hair color goes, it’s pretty low on the hierarchy. So, as the body gets older and you have more and more cells in the body that start to uh be less efficient, right? their mitochondria working a little, you know, less efficiently and uh and then there there’s more inflammation in the body that’s costing energy and uh there’s more worries about, you know, professional obligations and all of these things kind of stack up and steal energy away from the things that are there. We call them growth, maintenance, and repair. These are like the anti-aging processes in in the body and those need energy, but they’re not as important as, you know, facing the stressor that you think is life-threatening. Now, so if there’s a lion chasing me, my body is going to commit all the the energy I have to getting away from this lion. And it might say, “Listen, Stephen, we’re not going to repair the skin next to your eyes. you’re going to get a couple more wrinkles and we’re not going to make your we’re not going to commit energy to making sure your follicles in your hair produce black pigment or whatever. So, I would then look aged. I would look older. But that’s because all of my energy has been going through something else which my body considered to be a high priority. Correct. Which also brings me to I guess the famous uh what we always talk about with presidents because presidents go into office often with dark hair and they come out with gray hair and usually one does not age that quickly in 8 years. We see the same in the Premier League with football managers. They walk in on that first day they look very spritly and energetic and 2 years later they have gray hair, bags under their eyes, wrinkles and they look like they’ve aged 10 years. So, you’re telling me actually that the the real secret to anti-aging, if there was one, is this is the proper allocation of energy.

So, if you don’t waste energy stressing out about the future and the past, and you can spend more time in the moment not being overly reactive to things, which uh is kind of a lifelong effort, then more of that precious energy can go towards anti-aging. Can I also pull more energy in the top? Like, can I just if I get more energy, does that mean that there’s less likelihood that we’re going to run out of energy when it comes to my hair follicles being black or gray? Yeah. The thing is, it doesn’t look like we have the flexibility. Like, if you want to have more energy and you want to age more slowly, uh, eating more does is not going to give you more energy. So, is there anything I can do to have more energy available? Uh, you you can become more efficient. I can become more efficient, but I can’t put more in. No. Hm. And how does one become more efficient then? You know, you said about stress. Okay, I’m going to live a less stressed life. Yeah, it seems like there’s a few things that we know makes organism more efficient. One is exercising. Okay. Right. Because when you exercise again, you’re increasing energy resistance uncomfortable potentially. You’re damaging things, right? Because you’re you’re uh increasing what we call dissipative losses, right? Oxidative stress and all sorts of things happen during the the during the exercise, but then when you recover now, the body’s like, “Next time this happens, I’m going to be ready.” And the process of getting ready to to go through a high resistance, you know, gym session is that you make more mitochondria, right? your muscles get bigger and stronger and your heart becomes more efficient and your arteries, you know, become more become softer and you develop, you know, the the confidence that you can do this well. Um, and then it becomes rewarding. You, you know, it becomes enjoyable. So, all of these things now that you’re off the gym session, right, you spend an hour in the gym telling the body, “This is what we’re going to do in the future.” And then the body’s like, “Okay, I’m going to get ready.” if there’s a fixed energy budget, the only way really to to get ready for this is to become more efficient. So by having more mitochondria, by having a more fluid um and kind of flexible cardiovascular system and uh by putting in place all of these changes, decreasing inflammation, right? All of these things make more energy available. It decreases the energetic cost of doing the activity and then there’s more energy available for anti-aging, growth, maintenance, and repair, vitality. So, I suspect that’s why you burn more energy when you exercise, but you feel like you have more. And you don’t actually have more. The feeling that you have more energy is simply energy flowing more smoothly through this thing. It’s more efficient. I’ve got more mitochondria. Yeah. Okay. What What else? What about food? You know, I’ve got uh I’ve got coffee here. I’ve got some alcohol here. I’ve got the sugar.

what I consume, how does that impact the efficiency of the energy flowing through my body? Yeah, great question. Uh alcohol, what we know about alcohol is that as we talked about earlier, nothing is free in biology, right? So, if you put something in the body that shouldn’t be there, effectively a toxin like ethanol, which is what’s in there, uh it’s going to cost energy to get rid of it. So there are detoxification systems in your liver primarily that takes alcohol, breaks down the molecule and then you can pee it out, right? Or metabolize it for energy even. Uh so there’s a bunch of of energy in ethanol, but when you take alcohol, it doesn’t give you more energy. If anything, the next day you feel like [  ] because what happens is you you waste energy degrading the alcohol, right? and and even though it’s a net plus, you’re putting calories in the machine in the body. Uh but uh what ends up happening is you burn energy getting rid of it. So there’s a a cool study where they brought people in, they gave them a bunch of alcohol, they’re you know effectually effectively drunk and then they measured how much energy are they burning and you can do those kind of studies. We we’ve done those studies in the lab in a small room. You put a human being and then you just measure how much energy does it cost for them to stay alive, right? Then you ask them to not do too much in this smaller room. They’re just sitting down reading a book. Um and then then you can ask them, “Okay, now drink this alcohol.” And then you measure, you look, you minute by minute they drink the alcohol and then you start to see, oo, it climbs up. So the alcohol, even though you feel relaxed inside under the hood, the body’s like burning energy to get rid of the alcohol. And other toxins probably work the same way. You know, pesticides or kind of the things we eat that we shouldn’t be eating. The reason why those things might be bad for our health maybe because they they steal energy away from you know a growing body for example uh there’s good data in South America children who are exposed to more pathogens right there’s no sanitation they walk barefoot they they eat stuff you know that’s not clean and um they have more pathogens uh in their gut right there there’s more uh viruses bacteria and parasites uh it costs energy to fight those things off. That’s why you feel like [  ] when you’re burning when when you’re fighting a flu for example, right? Your immune system, your immune cells are like, whoa, you know, virus like COVID or, you know, any, you know, seasonal flu virus. The immune system goes into overdrive to kill this virus and get rid of it. And then that the immune system steals energy away from the brain, from from your mind. And then you feel like ah everything is so difficult. You just want to be in bed over covers. you feel cold, which is strategy to basically save energy. So all of the what’s called sickness behavior, right? All of those features of your behavior, you become asocial, right? Your skin is more sensitive, so you avoid moving. Uh it’s like all of those features can be understood as energy conservation strategies, stressors, alcohol, parasites, all kind of have this increase the cost of living. Uh and then because there’s a cap on your energy budget, uh then that energy needs to be coming from somewhere else. And if you’re in those states for long periods of time, you’re in a chronic state of um I guess like energetic distraction is the way I’d think about it. That’s that’s a cool way to think about it. I was thinking about it. I was thinking about it like if you you my body has an army of 10 soldiers and usually those 10 soldiers are like at work doing the things that I need to do to survive and grow and flourish. And then when I have one of these, I don’t know, some sort of toxic substance comes into my body, you’re basically saying that four of those soldiers have to be reassigned to go deal with this invader. And so now I only have six that are focused on everything I need to flourish, which is why I probably feel [  ] sometimes. Exactly. Um, and what if if there’s only six working on my, you know, fundamental requirements to flourish, then some of those things are going to have to give way and I might end up with gray hair and I might end up with wrinkles or maybe my brain won’t function the same. Maybe a disease, you know, my immune system won’t be taken care of in the same way. Yeah. Immune system won’t be there clearing the cancer cells, for example. Um, and the repair processes that happen all the time in the brain, right? clearing out proteins that you don’t need, uh repairing dam DNA that’s get gotten damaged, making new mitochondria. All of these processes happen like every day. Every day you go through a little phase of getting rid of the things that don’t work too well to make more of the things that work well like mitochondria, quality control, it’s called, right? So there’s this quality control cycle. Old mitochondria that don’t work too too well anymore, they get degraded. It’s called mphagy. Autophagy is selfeing. Mphagy is selfeing of the mitochondria. So when a cell, for example, is is hungry. If you pull energy away from the cell, the cell goes into a mode like, oh [  ] I might run out of energy. I need to be really efficient here. So let’s get rid of those mitochondria that aren’t really contributing their share. Uh, and then I’ll have just the best functioning mitochondria, and then when food comes back on board, the cell makes more of the better ones. It made me think of Alzheimer’s and dementia, weirdly, because I don’t really know a huge amount about Alzheimer’s and dementia, but I know that something clearly goes wrong in the body that produces these plaques and and you know, you often hear that there’s lots of things we consume or do that increase our probability of getting Alzheimer’s and dementia. So, is that at all linked to the same sort of like energy distraction? It’s been long believed that the plaque right that you’ve heard about uh amaloid plaques and tow tangles and there’s kind of this idea that the brain accumulates proteins and it’s those proteins that cause Alzheimer’s. I think that’s what most people have heard and what most people believe because it came from you know white coatwearing scientists and university professors. Um that is not the truth. And what is more true is and and let me just say why it’s not the truth. You can have people in their 60s and their 70s and their 80s zero protein deposit in the brain. We can image this now pretty well with neuroiming. You can have people zero protein deposit in the brain and they have full-blown Alzheimer’s and dementia. And you have the other extreme people with loads of amaloid plaques and towangles completely normal cognition. So those extremes really tell us this hypothesis this amaloid you know protein aggregates in the brain as a driver of dementia and neuro degeneration is not correct. Uh what we know happens energetically in the brain is that initially in the early stages of Alzheimer’s there’s kind of an increase in energy demand in the there’s specific brain regions that tend to be more affected and some people not not all people tend to have those protein deposits. those regions start to burn more energy. This is early phase, right? And then at this point, probably this is the brain trying to cope, right? It’s like something’s not working great, but it’s working harder, right? Like with the gray hair. Yeah. Exactly. And then over time the those brain regions become hypometabolic and then that’s when you start to have symptoms. What does that mean? That’s that’s when people start to have memory issues. And uh hyper metabolic hypom metabolic. This is hyper metabolic is kind of this energy distraction you were talking about like there’s more energy being burned here. Normal metabolic is you know you use 100 units of energy for the brain and this let’s say this brain region 100 units of energy is what this brain region needs to just sustain normal healthy functions. Uh if there’s a problem with the mitochondria or if there’s a problem with you know the cell communicating with the synapses right the cells talk to each other through these things called synapses. uh if there’s a problem now the the that part of the brain is going to need to do more work to compensate uh and then we know something happens with neurodeeneration and Alzheimer’s is inflammation neuroinflammation that basically means there are some cells in the brain that are trying to heal the brain and part of that healing process is kind of a stress response locally and then that stress response leads to the secretion of little proteins we call cytoines and then it’s basically those cells saying something’s wrong. We need to fix this. So that costs energy. So you have those cells that get activated. They they secrete those proteins to say please help. You know the we need to reestablish homeostasis. We need to reestablish normal healthy balance. But that process of reestablishing of healing costs energy just like when you’re post exercise your muscle invests energy to to become stronger. So in that kind of early phase hyper meta metabolism is when you spend more energy hyper uh function some people have called it and then eventually it seems like those brain regions get tired out and then they become hypo metabolic so they burn less energy. So if you look at the brain of someone with Alzheimer’s, there are these regions that are that burn less energy and energy is so central to everything including cognition, right? In order to have an idea and to be conscious of that idea, you need to burn energy. So the the brain kind of burning less energy in later stages kind of reflects this lack of function. You know, the the it’s difficult to remember, you know, old memories. It’s it’s remembered. It’s difficult to to make associations. it becomes difficult to plan in the future um and to regulate your emotions and you know a lot of people with dementia end up having kind of mood issues. They become really depressed and is this is this why they call it type three diabetes because I’ve just heard that phrase quite a lot recently. Yeah. And so my hunch is that Alzheimer’s and dementia more generally is a disorder of energy and specifically it’s a disorder of you know increased energy resistance. So there’s type three diabetes comes from the fact that when the brain gets sick, right? And symptoms of dementia start to appear like loss of memory and mood and depression and that constellation of symptoms. When you look in the brain, it’s burning less energy, but it’s also harder for glucose to get inside the brain. It’s less efficient. It’s so there’s yes a loss of efficiency but an increased resistance, right? or a decrease in conductance for energy for glucose for example to get inside the brain to be processed and and be used. And why might that be? Because you’re pushing too much glucose on the system. Oh, okay. If you load up the system all the time with with glucose, with sugar in the blood and glycemia is high, you have diabetes perhaps. This is all the time like pressure pushing energy onto this the system that’s like really delicate and it’s not like jacking the the voltage on your lamp that eventually you know is going to catch fire. uh we are a slow burning fire right like the inside of our our cells you have the electrons flowing and when there’s sparks flying it damages the mitochondria it damages this damages that and that increases that’s what aging is aging the the most basic mechanism of aging including brain aging that leads to Alzheimer’s is the accumulation of a little damage little mutations little defects little imperfections and as the imperfections accumulate the system becomes less efficient insulin resistance basically And diabetes refers to the fact that muscles but also the brain can has the capacity to say I I can’t anymore. Like glucose too much for me, too much resistance, too much, you know, damage that I that I’m exposed to. So if you’re a muscle cell and you want to protect yourself against this excess energy pressure, right, from the glucose, from the from the electrons, uh you can become insensitive or resistant to insulin. So then you you take the the receptors that are sitting on top of the surface of the cell, you pull those out, right? So then the cell no longer is sensitive to insulin. So then the body’s like whoa, like glucose is way high. What you a normal healthy body releases insulin, floods the blood, insulin goes to the surface of uh of your muscles and then says take in the glucose because there’s too much glucose in the blood. It’s we’re going to damage the brain, we’re going to damage the eyes, we’re going to damage the nerves. So muscle please take in that glucose. But when the muscle is overwhelmed and the mitochondria are starting to be uh you know at capacity uh in terms of how much energy they can uh resist and and and flow then they shut down the valves right so the muscle cells become insulin resistant and then glucose intolerant and that protects the mitochondria in the muscle cells. Uh but then gluc blood glucose uh starts to increase. So the next step in this cascade is well if there’s too much energy and circulation too much sugar too much fat what what can we do with this and that’s where fat stores you know adeposity uh comes in so obesity is a protection mechanism against excess energy resistance one way to think about this hypothesis that dementia Alzheimer’s is linked to an overflow of glucose let’s is to look at other civilizations or um I don’t know tribes that had the tribe in Africa who don’t have a lot of glucose. Do they still get Alzheimer’s and dementia? I don’t know the literature on this uh but it’s clear that people who if you if we look at what makes you more likely to have Alzheimer’s what makes you less likely to have Alzheimer’s all the things that make you more likely to have Alzheimer’s contribute to increasing this energy resistance right too much sugar in the blood diabetes physical inactivity right if you don’t move energy doesn’t flow to your mitochondria so it just stacks up accumulates and and the things that protects the brain protects you against Alzheimer’s and dementia or things that let energy flow, physical activity, uh not eating too much, especially not eating too much sugar, uh and and then ketones. There’s new, you know, data now showing that ketones can, uh, you know, enter the brain and be metabolized more easily and can even kind of improve cognition. And the ketogenic diet, which I know you’ve tried, many people report more energy on the ketogenic diet. It’s not because you eat more calories. It’s because those uh electrons that are stuck on ketones instead of being stuck on glucose can flow more more easily. And those ketones are made by mitochondria in your liver. This is a really beautiful story of this the sociality of mitochondria and the organism. The liver mitochondria is where ketones are made. If you eat like fat, right, avocados and oil and and meat and uh butter and uh those fat molecules and go in the liver and then the mitochondria in the liver take those fat transform them into ketones and then put the ketones into the blood. The kidneys also do a little bit of this and then the ketones go to the brain and then they feed the mitochondria in the brain. So you have mitochondria in the liver talking and feeding mitochondria in the brain. And the path for a ketone to go from blood to mitochondria is much shorter in terms of number of enzymes, number of resistors, if you want to think about it energetically uh than for glucose. That path is very long. The ketone path is much shorter. I just want to make sure on that point that I don’t misunderstand because you know it sound it could have sounded like you’re saying that too much energy might cause Alzheimer’s but actually you’re saying you’re not saying cuz I think of ketones as energy and I I’m I’m shot in you know ketones all the time. I don’t want to flood my brain with energy so that you know malfunctions gets Alzheimer’s. It’s it for some reason it’s really hard to overwhelm the brain with ketones and with ketones or overwhelm the body if you eat fat. Like it’s it’s very easy to feel like I’m full. I’ve had, you know, a good enough meal. If you bring sugar into the picture and you mix sugar and fat now things like taste so good and there’s like an extra reward and a lot of people eat for different reasons, not just because they’re hungry. That’s because it’s so rewarding to eat something fatty and sugary, especially the the sugar part. then you you lose regulation and and that’s why I think the GLP-1 drugs are are so powerful because they they address the problem where it starts like how much food are you putting into the system. Yeah, I I did look at the stats there on the tribes in Africa and it says when researchers study indigenous groups such as the Hadza hunter gatherer tribe in Tanzania or rural agrarian populations like the Euraba they find that Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia are exceptionally rare. Mhm. which again means that it points to western diets, western diet, western lifestyles, behavior. You know, these people move all the time. Um, and they don’t eat too much. Um, most of them don’t need to kind of rely on their fat capacitor. They don’t have excess energy to just store away. And for for some people, there’s congenital leanness, right? Like you’re you’re born lean and you’re g like you can’t put on fat if you eat too much. the the high sugar or high fat just accumulates in the blood and then it it gets lodged in ectopic ways. So in the it gets lodged in the muscle or in the liver or in the brain um and and then that causes damage because of you know this like excess energy pressure and then the system overheats skinny fat. Skinny fat. Yeah. And that stores it near around your livers and stuff. What’s that called? That fat inside you? Visceral. Visceral fat. And the visceral fat is linked to increased inflammation and it’s linked to a bunch of diseases. But this is just a symptom like the increased fat. And I think the reason why obesity in general we say obesity is bad is because obesity reflects a deeper state, a more important state with which is this increased energy resistance. Like there’s too much energy in the system and the system can’t flow it. Like the mitochondria can’t keep up. So to protect themselves, they store that and store that away and and then uh then then you become obese. If you’re going to take tips from anyone on how to stay focused and high energy, let it be from the greatest pound-for-pound fighter of all time, the guy they call Johnny Bones Jones. John is a coowner of our show sponsor, Ketone IQ, alongside myself. And when you hear why, it probably makes a lot of sense to you. When he’s training or fighting, he needs high quality, steady, laser-like focus without the crash. And ketones give him exactly that. And unlike caffeine, ketones don’t stimulate your brain. They fuel it. So your brain actually loves ketones because it runs on them much more efficiently than anything else. And right now, Keton IQ is giving away oneofa-kind pair signed MMA gloves from Jon Jones himself and the upcoming gold medal wrestler he’s coaching called Gable Stevenson. They are very, very rare. And if you want your shot at winning them, go to ketone.com/stephven to enter to win. No purchase necessary. Terms and conditions apply and you’ll also get 30% off your first subscription order, exclusive Ketone IQ merch, and of course, your shot at these signed gloves. You guys know that I only drink one type of coffee these days, and it’s called Cometia. If you don’t know the brand, they flash freeze coffee at the perfect moment to lock in all of the amazing flavor. They’ve done something incredible. They’ve gone all around the world and they found the most delicious coffees from all of these places and they’ve created a world mug competition box that you can buy. So if you want to try coffee from Honduras or Panama or England or the USA or Italy or France, you can then order that particular coffee on subscription to come to your house. No machines necessary. Not only are they our sponsor and a company I have invested in, it is the only coffee I drink now. 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and you can get $20 off if you use the code dac at checkout. So on this point of food then fasting, autophagy, all these words that I’ve heard. If you were giving me advice on everything you know about how to create a body that is very very efficient in how I deal with the energy that I have. What advice would you give me as it relates to eating? Develop that awareness of what your body needs. So when I think about how I eat, I don’t think about, you know, my weight or my body. I think about how am I feeling and do I need more food, right? Am I like depleted or uh am I tired and exhausted because there’s too much food on board and my organism is like struggling to keep up with this excess like friction or excess you know energy pressure and on my brain on my on my mitochondria. So I think about it from the perspective of my mitochondria. What do my mitochondria need? Uh and in general it’s much harder to uh you know deplete the mitochondria like not eating too much. So if you’re thinking about okay there’s this food there do I snack do I not snack uh generally eating too much there there are clear consequences to this like it increases the resistance or the friction in in your mitochondria not eating enough is typically innocuous for most people because we we have stores don’t we of glycogen and we have stores of glucose in our body in our muscles anyway so if we were running low then our our body can go get some fat metabolize it exactly make ketones make ketones Yeah. Yeah. The most people have enough energy on board, right, in the form of fat, some glycogen in your muscles and your liver, uh, to live at least a month. I mean, I’m I’m a big big fan of survival documentaries. And one of the most remarkable things you see in survival documentaries, I’m even thinking about some that I’ve watched, is people can survive for seemingly months without eating anything, and they can’t survive long without water, but they can survive for months without eating anything. um because their body will start to kind of go into its reserves. Yeah. And break down muscle and all these other things. Yeah. Yeah. The record is the world record for not eating is over 300 days. Wow. Irish man. Um and he lost I forget the exact numbers. 250 lb 300 lb. What does this say about hunger? And also what does it say about this society we live in where we have some people have like five meals. Some people basically just eat from morning till night, you know? Yeah. I I think a lot of us eat not because we’re hungry. I think a lot of us as have learned to eat to to subserve some other need and eating is quite rewarding. It taps into the same systems, you know, as gambling and um kind of connecting with other human beings. So, we know some people eat emotionally, right? When they’re stressed out, they they they eat more. And um so I think hunger is is something to be skeptical of because there are many pathways that I think kind of converge on hunger like if you feel sad you feel like bored um hunger will kind of get you out of boredom because of the salt because of this especially if you had salty sugary things around uh it’s a rewarding thing that will get you out of uncomfortable other uncomfortable sensations. I think most of us overeat. That’s um a good general assumption to make. You’re probably overeating. I think I probably am. Um it’s harder to overeat if you restrict your eating window, right? And that works really well for some people. Um like eating, for example, a very severe kind of window would be 2 p.m. to 6 p.m., right? So you eat for 4 hours and you kind of put this around dinner time so you can be social with your partner or something like that. Uh that tends to work well for a lot of people who have been in the habit of overeating. Um and my dad, you know, still thinks to this day, he’s 69 now. Um that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. That’s what he learned when he was a kid. And he wants to believe that this is true. I don’t think it’s true for most people. And especially if you’re in your 60s, 70s, right? Like metabolism changes. And if you’re always eating you, the body never goes into this state of I must be efficient, right? And then if you go into that state of I must be efficient, you accumulate poorly functioning mitochondria and then there’s more friction, you know, in your whole body. There’s more inflammation which is a signal of that energy friction or resistance and then you don’t feel as good, right? You don’t feel you have as much energy. So many people who go from eating three meals a day plus or minus snacks to like intermittent fasting, they just say, “I’m going to eat whatever I want, however much I want, but just in those 4 hours or 6 hours.” Most of those people uh have a lot more energy. They experience right that they have more energy. It’s not because there’s more energy in their body. If anything, they’re putting fewer calories in the body, but the way energy flows now, it flows more efficiently. And we don’t perceive the amount of energy. we perceive the flow energy or the transformation of energy. And I was just reading there that it says that this idea that breakfast is the most important meal of the day came from an advertising campaign that was designed to sell cereal and bacon. Um before the industrial revolution, breakfast wasn’t a heavily scrutinized meal. People often just ate whatever was left over from the night before or they ate a quick heavy meal before going out to do physical farm labor. But as people moved into cities and took sedentary office jobs, those heavy, greasy breakfasts started causing widespread in ingestion. ingestion. Enter Harvey Kelloggs. Yes, that Kelloggs. He ran a famous health sanitarium and believed that a clean, light, grain-based diet would cure ingestion and improve overall health. He co-invented cornflakes and he and other cereal pioneers pushed the narrative that a healthy cold cereal breakfast was essential for a productive day. And your dad bought it hooklineed sinker. Yep. I mean a lot of people did. Everybody did. And and I did until recently until I started to like feel into this. I would have this big bowl of cereals. That’s how I grew up as well. And then I would feel like this low like this um you know low energy. And I think now I understand why because I was overloading my system with way too much kind of rapidly available sugary energy that I didn’t need. Uh and then the body needs to find a way to handle this. Either you get fat, which I can’t do. So then it goes kind of into my brain and then makes me feel lousy. So on this point then just to close off on this diet question, if I want to feel really really optimal on a given day, I probably do want a smaller eating window and I probably want to eat just what I need and I want to not overeat. I don’t want to undereat, but I don’t want to overeat. If you undereat, you’re going to pick it up tomorrow. I’ll pick it up tomorrow anyway. So, I’ll be fine tomorrow. But the worst thing is overeating today, which is going to impact my performance today. Correct. And food is one thing that influences where energy goes in the body, how it flows. Um, and just maybe to close the loop on that example, like when you’re sick and you’re fighting an infection. Yeah. I had a a beautiful opportunity to understand, not just under understand to experience this one day. It was New Year’s Eve, uh, 31st in the evening, and I start to feel like a little scratchy throat. I’m like, “Oh, I think I’m getting sick.” So, I I go to, you know, the the evening dinner. I didn’t cough or anything. I I don’t think I was contagious, but I just could feel right like something was was coming up. I felt terrible. I was had started to have like full-blown flu symptoms. went home early like 10 900 PM um and then I went to bed. It was horrible night hor I felt I was in pain and then my I had like massive fever. I took a bath a warm bath to help my fever kind of you know go up so that I could fight the high fever stimulates your immune cells and weakens the virus. So it’s a it’s it’s usually a good thing. Um, and then next day I was out and I was so depressed and I was like, I should write about this. I’m writing a book on on energy and energy constraints and like the the division partitioning of energy and and the body. I was like, I should write about this. This is so interesting. My immune system is in full-blown defense mode. And it’s not like I I was like I could feel my heart. I’m wearing this aura. my heart rate was like 110 at at at rest instead of being like 60, you know, normally. So, there’s all of this energy flowing through. It’s like, wow. Like, my metabolic rate objectively is higher. We know this is true from from, you know, good studies on that. When you’re fighting something, you burn more energy. Um, yet I’m feeling completely drained, right? So, it’s not like the amount of energy that’s flowing through that I should feel more energetic. the my immune system in that moment uh was draining all my energy drain sucking away my energy from you know from my from my mind from my brain perhaps um and I remember thinking it wouldn’t be a whole lot of energy if I just pull my laptop like prop myself on the bed and then start to write what I’m experiencing in the moment right like the uh and but I couldn’t muster the strength it’s like what what the [  ] like why would I care I couldn’t care right and this is the stuff I care about on a daily basis. But in that state of my energy being disrupted, I couldn’t care about this. And then I started to think about work and about, you know, the the lab and about uh, you know, family things. I was like, wo, it’s my whole life feels so different. I don’t care about anything. Yeah. I don’t care about anything. I just I’m just trying to [  ] survive. That’s so interesting cuz I can relate so much. Yeah. I mean, but everyone has been through like a difficult like you when you’re really sick or when you’re really stressed. Yeah. or just anything that’s all consuming like that. Exactly. That’s like Maslo’s pyramid, right? The top is squished and you’re like survival and like where where did I go? Where’s where’s Yeah, I remember that. So, I was still me, right? I was still Martin, but I I felt completely different. The quality of my of my mind, the quality of of my intention was like completely different. I was just trying to survive. I didn’t care about anything else. So, that episode went on for like two days or so. through. Day number three, I was able to take my computer and like start to feel again the purpose. But it was so interesting that just the what what it felt like when I was able to write about it and really feel into it. It felt like I was diffused energy like the light for example, right? Is a form of energy. You can have a laser. And the difference between a laser and an incandescent light bulb like an old style filament light bulb is not the amount of energy is the the way the energy is patterned. And in a laser you have every photon that are kind of in phase with one another and then there’s a coherence to it, right? And it’s the coherence that gives a laser its power. Uh it’s not the total amount of energy. the same amount of energy if you put in an incandescent light bulb. Now it’s the same energy, but it’s diffused, right? Every photon is doing its own thing. They’re all going in all over the place. And then if you want to look at how far can these photons go, right? How far can my mind go? Caring about things, the diffused energy doesn’t go very far. Uh but the the laser can go super far. So my mind had become like a diffuse incandescent light bulb. I the two things came to mind when you said that. The first is in my previous company because we were a startup fast growing we had cash flow issues cash making sure we had enough money coming in from our clients whatever to pay our staff was always a problem for anyone that doesn’t know um when a business is growing quickly it’s usually spending more today than it’s receiving in. So even if you’re you’re growing from like 1 million to 6 million to 12 million to 25 million or whatever as we did you you still have a cash flow problem. And there would be times when we’re nearing the end of the month and months months in a row and I had the same cash flow stress. I couldn’t pay the team. They they always got paid. They never knew. We always figured it out. But what I’d notice is in those moments of really really high stress sometimes, not always, but there were periods where I lost motivation. And what I meant by that is I literally as a 23 24 year old like CEO of all these hundreds of people, some of them old double my age, I basically hide at home. And what I mean by hide at home is like I didn’t have the I lost purpose for this [ __ ] business. Like I I’d wake up for it might last a week or two weeks and I just didn’t have the purpose, the quote motivation as they call it to like go out and be a leader. And now as you say, I go, “Oh, it was because I was stressed.” And it would last for when the cash flow issue would resolve my motivation, my purpose, the reason why we’re doing this zoomed back into focus. And I think that’s really important because you know we do have a lot of entrepreneurs watching the show and they’ll beat themselves up sometimes because they lose motivation and as a founder and as a CEO it’s you feel so guilty that you the the source of motivation and inspiration leadership for this group of people. You could lose it but now I understand what it was. Now I understand that I was at like an a chronic well uh yeah a bit of a chronic energy deficit in that moment. Yeah. The other thing actually made me think about as well when you you said about this diffusion of energy. It actually made me think about businesses and OKRs and goals. Yeah. It made me think about if you take 10 10 people in a startup and they’re all really really focused on the same goal. They are way more successful. But sometimes you don’t have a clear goal and you’re all pointing in different directions. Yes. So there’s incoherence. There’s incoherence. Yes. Yes. But you need to be a laser. And this is why OK is so important because you can point all the energy at the problem. This is traction. Yes. Towards a particular goal. This is what purpose does. Purpose focuses energy. And I think the reason purpose is so powerful, right? And why you need to have that, right? To to feel it. I I want to say like you have purpose is it kind of becomes this must find my purpose, you know, must like I’m on a a spiritual journey to find you out and then you’re in. Yeah. Exactly. Uh but when you uh somehow find your yourself in a place where you feel like those things, you know, that are in your life are meaningful, right? And that the path you’re on is purposeful. I think what this does is it brings all of your energy that might be diffused like a light bulb and boom, it brings it like a laser. And then you can go that distance, right? You can go through that half day without eating. You can go through that month, right, where it’s like you have all all of these meetings and it doesn’t feel as difficult as it would if you were going kind of all over the place. Focus, I think, brings our energy into a coherent state. And then it feels like coherence, right? It feels like I know what I’m doing this. then it becomes very easy to say no to this and to say yes to just the right thing cuz there’s this coherence not just energetic coherence that you allows you to do more with less energy uh but also this coherence of mind right and and maybe of spirit if we want to go there um I’m going to ask the team to play a clip it’s a clip of Kevin Olirri talking about this idea of signal and noise and he’s referencing his experiences with um Steve Jobs who he used to work with and also Elon Musk look how wildly successful he was. But here’s why. There’s a concept that he understood that very few people focused on back then in the early 90s of signal to noise ratio. What was so brilliant about Jobs that I tell every CEO now, and I don’t care if you’re an S&P 500 CEO or you’re just starting a business, his vision of Signal was the top three to five things you have to get done in the next 18 hours. Not your vision for the business next week or next month or next year. Just the next 18 hours you’re awake. You’re going to get those three things or those five things done that you have deemed critical for your mission. They must get done today. Anything that stops you from doing that is the noise. So this signal to noise ratio to be successful for Steve Jobs was 8020. 80 signal, 20 noise. And I knew that to be true with him because he would email me at 2:30 in the morning, expect me to get back to him because back then we didn’t have texts. It was all email. He was right. He was right. And the only other person that I’ve seen that has a higher ratio than that is Elon Musk. He has no noise. He does not deal with noise. He is 100% signal 24 seconds, you know, every cycle. I mean, the guy is just 60 seconds of every minute, 60 minutes of every hour, the 18 hours he’s awake, it’s all signal. And look what he’s achieved. And so I can really sort of summarize this for my audience, signal is the most urgent thing you should be focused on right now. And noise is basically everything. No, the goals you set for that the the weight the that you were awake. If you’re going to be awake 18 hours, yeah, and you’ve determined that there’s three things you have to get done, you’re going to get those done. No matter what it takes, you’re going to get those done. And you’re not going to let anything distract you from the three to five things. If you’re a CEO and you achieve that and you can get those done with 80% of your time based on that, you’re extraordinarily successful. In that clip, he’s basically saying that the most successful entrepreneurs in the world are remarkably good at focusing on the signal. He said that from his time working with Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs would be 80% signal. I he wakes up in the morning and he knows exactly what we need to work on. And I watch these interviews with Johnny Ives. I’ll actually also play the Johnny Ives interview because I send this round to everybody. So, I’m going to play it where Johnny is talks about how remarkably focused Steve Jobs was. This sounds really simplistic, but it still shocks me how few people actually practice this. Um, and it’s a struggle to practice, but is is this issue of focus? Um, Steve was the most remarkably focused person I’ve ever met in my life. And um, and the thing with focus is it’s not sort of like this thing you aspire to or you you decide on Monday, you know what, I’m going to be focused. It is a every minute a why are we talking about this? This is what we’re working on. You can achieve so much when you truly focus. And one of the things that Steve would say, um, because I think he was concerned that I wasn’t, um, he would say, um, how many things have you said no to? And I would, honestly, I I would have these sacrificial things cuz I, I mean, wanted to be very honest about it. And so I say, oh, I said no to this and no to that. and um he but he he knew that I wasn’t vaguely interested in doing those things anyway. Um so there was no real sacrifice. What what focus means is saying no to something that you with every bone in your body you think is a phenomenal idea and you wake up thinking about it but you say no to it because you’re focusing on something else. There’s something in giving your entire being of focus to something. Maybe it’s in the context switching or whatever it is. That means your probability of being successful at that particular thing drastically drastically increases. Solving hard problems is hard. Yeah. Yeah. But these great great founders they they solve them because they’re so they’re focusing every available unit of energy on the thing. Mhm. Yes. I think the reason this is is because of a physical principle about energy which is called resonance. Right. If you walk through life with such clarity of mind, right, like this is what the truth is. This is where we’re going, right? And and you live and you breathe that you become like a resonator. You hold this energy pattern and it comes out not just in in your actions and your emails. It comes out in the way you speak and it comes out in the the things you turn attention to, right? It turns out in your tone of voice, in the care that you, you know, look at people with. It comes out in every facet of you, right? So you become the emblematic leader I guess uh for for that thing that you’re 100% into. What this does is that it’s picked up by other people like maybe this gets like vibes. You have that vibe. You have like the founders vibe, right? Or like the entrepreneurs vibe. I think this is real and this is the energy that’s flowing through your mitochondria somehow becoming coherent and you know aligned and it feels meaningful. It feels purposeful and then you live like that and then other people around you that resonate with it, right? Like people are drawn to a a pure signal. Like if you have that specific signal, it’s like a a music like a symphony, right? Like when it sounds when it’s on tune, then people that want to come on board like they feel this and then it gets amplified. It’s so funny because we were talking there about Steve Jobs being often side as a prime example of someone who is really intensely focused with with with his energy and what you’ve just described sounds almost perfectly like what people said about him when they described him as having a reality distortion field. You probably heard this term. Um, the reality distortion field, they called it his RDF, was a term coined by Apple software engineer Bud Trible in 1981 to describe Steve Jobs uncanny, almost hypnotic ability to convince everyone around him to believe practically anything. And people who work closely with Jobs described the RDF, the reality distortion field, as a confounding mix of intense charisma, unyielding willpower, and sheer persistence in a certain direction, which pulled you with him. Mhm. That’s an energetic quality. And in physics, if you have something that’s has a really strong energy, then it can entrain other things. If the the source resonator is strong enough, people will come in resonance. And then it looks spooky. It looks like wa this thing you know synchronicity or this you know this thing happened and somehow you know he was able to mobilize this this donor and you know fundraising is like easier than it should be and so like all of these things snowball because you hold that you know that that vibe you hold that energy and amplifies. I mean exactly that. So I was just reading this quote from someone that used to work with Steve Jobs um and he said that it would cause two things. It would be like he was casting spells on you but he was also bending time in physics. They said Apple engineer Andy Herzfield recalled that if you told Steve Jobs a task would take 6 months, he would look you in the eye and say, “You can do it in 2 weeks.” Because of the sheer force of his conviction, engineers would often actually end up doing it in 2 weeks, completely rewriting their own understanding of what was possible. And even Bill Gates famously remarked on Job’s charisma saying, “I was like a minor wizard because he was casting spells and I would see people mesmerized so much so that I was so jealous.” Gates noted that even when Jobs was lying or wrong, he had everybody completely hooked. M what’s clear to make some like something like this happen is you need to um feel that there’s something compelling like you need to feel something is important and again that’s not a rational thing like you need to feel it in yourself um and then you need to kind of bring that energy into focus and bring attention to it right and then then that’s where ideas start to come you build a structure around it to to sustain that flow you said um at the start that we are the energy flowing through ourselves and if I think about the fact that every barrier or obstacle we have in the world is actually other people. Like that is true. Like for me to become the president, prime minister, best sales person in the world, best philanthropist, what I need to do if I am energy is convince other energy to change its shape. I think that’s what amazing people do. Uh they’re able to, you know, see something, hold that vision so strongly and then mobilize others, right? And then new things become uh possible. I think that’s what great leaders do. And I I now approach, you know, other human beings and, you know, my my son, like my six-year-old son, Noah, I see him as, yes, a little boy and yes, a lot of energy and yes, you know, some some challenges that come with this, but he’s this beautiful little energy pattern, right? He’s this energy flowing through this little child’s body, but my role as a parent is to provide just around the right amount of resistance, right? The right amount of constraints. If I don’t provide any constraint, I say do whatever you want, have whatever you want uh you know any time then like that’s not good for development. Kids need to feel you know some boundaries and so those are like resistance right little constraints but if every minute like me putting constraint no you can’t do this no you can’t do that then it damages the system it traumatizes the system going to grow in exactly so the the art really of parenting and I think the art of of leadership is providing the right structure right so that the energy has some constraints like there’s a challenge there needs to be a challenge for the team to meet right challenge is like a barrier It’s like a little resistor. Of course, there’s challenges. You’re like, it’s difficult to get there. And if it’s not difficult, then everywhere everyone’s bored. If it’s like, yeah, we’re going to do the same thing as we did last year. And then next year, we do the same thing. That’s not the same kind of energy as we need to double this year. And then we need to double the, you know, the year after. This kind of goal or challenge is a form of constraint, something you have to work through. I think that’s why the human mind is naturally drawn to challenges like what’s the next challenge? Why go down deep in the ocean to discover new creatures? Why go in the Amazon trying to discover new species of little bugs? Why go into space? Like this is all curiosity driven. It’s like the mind wanting to have something to hit against. Cuz if there’s nothing to hit against, if there’s no resistance, then it’s there’s no purpose. I was thinking about worthwhile goals as actually being magnets for energy. You think about going to the moon. The moon pulled energy towards it. So, we found ourselves to the moon. And actually if you bring that down into your own life as like a leader of a company you go okay if I set a worthwhile goal I’m going to pull people energy towards it and if I have an unworthwhile goal energy won’t be attracted so maybe a worthwhile goal is actually philosophically a magnet for energy yeah I think so and people are energetic processes so my my six-year-old son is this beautiful movement of energy my goal is to nurture it right and not just with food and physically but to nurture his curiosity uh and is transformation linked to this. I read that studies on brains of dead people have found that those with a greater sense of purpose have more efficient mitochondria. This is a beautiful study and it was run in Chicago. Every year people would come to the hospital and then fill out questionnaires and meet with a a therapist and neuroscychologist and they would ask them questions and test their memory and their cognition. And then every year they would report how much purpose they felt like they had, how much sense of connection with other human beings or with something greater than themselves, how optimistic they were about the future, right? And some people are like more optimistic, happy and and and purposeful than than others, but there’s always kind of fluctuations, right? Like we go through fluctuations. As we go through life, no matter how lucky you are, life always ends up being challenging in in some ways. So we asked how people felt, how much purpose people experience before they died. Is that related to the mitochondria in their brain? And the only way you can ask this question is to look at the brain after the person died, right? So then you have how the person felt right before they how much purpose they experienced and then you look at the mitochondria after they die where in in the the dorsal prefrontal cortex. that little part of the brain that’s involved in, you know, uh, active reasoning and executive function. And the mitochondria in the people who felt more purpose had a greater energy transformation capacity. What does that mean in simple terms? The resistance was lower. This could mean uh that if you feel more life purpose, the mitochondria in your brain can flow energy more easily. Or it could mean the inverse of that. Well, it could mean that having mitochondria in your brain that can flow energy more easily just changes how you see life, makes you feel more purposeful. Yeah, exactly. Or it could mean that purpose itself is creating more efficient mitochondria. Exactly. People have done studies in animals and we’ve done some of those studies where you can basically change the state of mind of a mouse by like stressing it out chronically and then you make it feel defeated and like a really stressful life and you ask, does this change the mitochondria in the brain? Right? Can the experience of stress change a mitochondria in the brain? 100%. That happens. Now you can say, “Okay, now let’s change a mitochondria in the brain.” You can like open up the brain, inject a little something that either boost the mitochondria or inhibit and activate the mitochondria, increase or decrease resistance. And then you ask, does this change how the animal appears to feel, how the animals behave in terms of anxiety or social interactions with other animals, sociality or dominance? 100%. So the the best science shows it goes both ways. So how you feel can change the mitochondria. The mitochondria can change probably how you feel. And so and again we’re theorizing here. If I don’t have purpose in my life, it’s going to change the mitochondria. And then if it if my mitochondria becomes more inefficient then what what will I notice as the next symptom? Yeah, probably fatigue is the first thing that kind of starts to pop up. You feel drained. You don’t feel you have you know enough energy. burn out probably feels like burnout and you start to lose enthusiasm for you know for the future you become more pessimistic. So there’s kind of a constellation of things we call depression or you know burnout or we put labels on these things but really every person starts to experience life as less enjoyable, less purposeful, less meaningful um regardless of the the diagnostic title we put on it. which is interesting because I’ve I’ve interviewed a few people that are experts on the subject of depression and also addiction frankly. And one of the things that I remember Johan Hari saying to me who wrote a book called Lost Connections is that in some cultures the cure that they apply for depressive symptoms is giving someone purpose in their life. Mhm. Yeah. That’s so powerful. My hunch is that most of what we call depression is a loss of coherence. And when we’re isolated, we did a study recently to look at the energetics of mental stress. When you feel like you’re being pulled aside and judged and right, what does that do energetically to the body? And and there’s this protein marker in the blood that reflects energy friction, energy resistance, right? If the mitochondria can’t flow energy smoothly, this protein gets made and then it’s in kind of a blood biomarker. It’s elevated in cancer where we think there’s increased energy resistance. It’s elevated in Alzheimer’s where we think there’s increased energy resistance in the brain. It’s elevated in diabetes where there’s increased energy resistance with the insulin resistance. It’s elevated in all sorts of pathologies, hypertension and heart disease and it’s a marker that the organism energetically is not doing well. There’s it’s not efficient, right? It’s almost a marker of inefficiency. We did this study where you bring people in, we put an intravenous line so we can measure the blood markers. Uh, and then we tell them, “Okay, just relax. Everything’s fine. You’re doing great.” And then they they sit down, they relax for 30 minutes, cortisol goes down, heart rate goes down, blood pressure goes down, and then our lovely study coordinator, Katherine, walked into the room and then looked at the participants, “Now you’re going to be judged. You’re going to have to deliver a speech. And here’s a situation. You were in a shopping mall. You were, you know, you grabbed this this scarf. You put it on just to try, but then the security guard caught you. And then they’re accusing you of shoplifting. So now you’re in court. You need to defend yourself in front of the the the judge and you need to tell the judge what should happen to the security guard. Should you lose his job or and then we tell them you have two minutes to prepare your three minute defense in front of the judge. Most people start to feel the the anxiety and then we we monitor heart rate at the same time and blood pressure and and then we draw blood and so you can see everyone’s physiology wasting energy, right? The energetic cost of stress. You see this on the monitor on the other side, you know, in the control room. And then we put a camera in front of them that mocks, you know, video records him. And then we have a white coatwearing old white man who stands 6 ft in front of them, looks at them straight in the eyes, say, “Start talking.” And then they have to look into into the camera and they do their their defense and they know someone’s looking at them. And what we saw was that this energy stress marker goes up just with mental stress. You’re not doing exercise. You’re not doing anything strenuous. You’re just going through this phase of what’s going to happen to me, to my ego, to to my sense of self. So what’s the downstream consequence of this thing, this stress chemical being in your body? Yeah. So that protein is called GDF-15. Yeah. Growth differentiation factor 15, the name doesn’t matter. But that energetic stress marker, you’re asking the right question. What does it do and what does it matter? And it turns out this protein goes to the brain. Yeah. And that protein can be made by any organ in the body except one, the brain. What is it doing? It’s very useful to know where where’s a receptor, right? Because you need to have for signaling and biology to happen, you need a signal and you need a receptor, a sensor, right? Uh where’s a receptor for this protein, do you think? Only in one organ in the body.

Is it in here? It’s right in here. Yeah. So in the brain stem the the brain stem is where kind of the the basic survival systems of the body are and there’s a region in the brain stem called the area postrea doesn’t matter it’s it’s known as the vomiting and nausea center for the brain wait so if something happens I’m extremely stressed the world is judging me this protein goes into my blood and then it goes up into my brain stem and it docks in there correct and then what happens and then turns out the brain interpret this as there’s something running out of energy there’s something running out of energy Okay, something in the body is not right. There’s something running out of energy and then the brain makes two decisions very similar to when you’re sick. That protein GDF-15 is called a cytoine. It’s the same thing that immune cells produce when they’re activated during an infection. Okay. So, your body thinks you’re sick. Yes. And then what? And then does two things. Save energy. Conserve energy. So, you lose motivation. Yes. Lose motivation. Feel depressed. Feel depressed. Can’t go to the gym. Yes. doesn’t feel worth it. We know this specifically from animal studies. If you inject animals with GFD, they hunch in a ball and they don’t do anything, right? They go into this sickness behavior. That’s number one. Number two, the brain says something’s running out of energy first. Let’s conserve energy, number one. But two, let’s mobilize energy, right? Let’s put glucose into the blood. Let’s put fat into the blood because there might be cells out there that are, you know, running out of energy and we need to rescue them. Are you going to get belly fat? visceral fat. Yeah. Yeah. You’re going to get belly fat from this. Yeah. When stress hormones are up, right, and you’re increasing blood glucose, increasing uh blood lipids, if the rest of the body doesn’t need it, which is what kind of happens during a stress response like this, that fat gets lodged where it shouldn’t called ectopic fat. And that’s what belly fat is. Okay. So, let’s go a bit further. This is happening. Um, if this is chronic, I guess it’s going to lead at some point to disease. Mhm. What the best studies show on this is when you have high level of this energetic stress marker this protein you’re more likely if you follow people then studies were done where you take the blood you measure this protein some people have very high levels some people have very low levels uh and then you wait 14 years this is actually a study from the UK called the UK bioank so if you measure the protein and stress cytoine and you ask what happens to people with high GDF-15 versus people with low GDF-15 turns out people with high GDF-15 are more likely to develop mental illness. H bipolar disease, depression, schizophrenia. People with high GDF-15 are more likely to develop cardiovascular disease, hypertension. People with high G5 are more likely to be dead. At this point, we don’t know if it makes a difference if it’s from mental stress, if it’s from physical stress, if it’s from an organ struggling, right, that’s sick and trying to to heal itself. High energy stress, high energy resistance in the body based on this marker is called a prognostic indicator. It’s an indicator that something bad might happen. And uh and and people with high GDF-15 also, they don’t like to take the stairs. They don’t like to walk for pleasure. They don’t like to go out to the gym. They don’t like to go out with friends. They don’t like to exercise. What would correct? Yeah. Because it it if you’re getting the signal like when you’re sick, right? If GF15 is made somewhere in your body, it goes to your brain, you’re getting the signal, you’re running out of energy. So, I guess the the question everyone’s asking as they’re listening to this now is, how do I prevent GDF-15 or whatever it’s called, this stress cytoine thing, that ghost and docks in my brain? How do I prevent it from floating around in my blood so often? Good question. Taking the time to feel. Meditation. Meditation. My bloody fiance is right. uh what we know is there’s some initial evidence that GDF-15 increases throughout the day, right? Uh so the purpose of sleep then might be to reduce energy resistance, right? Like what we were talking about earlier, it’s not about having like finding this one optimal level of resistance and sticking there. It’s about this movement of increasing resistance and then decreasing resistance and increasing resistance, decreasing resistance. It’s kind of this movement of life. And I guess all the other things we talked about earlier as it relates to lifestyle factors like keeping away from these sort of extreme stresses, eating way too much, starving oneself, oxidative stress. None of the solutions here are rocket science, are they? Mhm. Do you know what I mean? Mhm. If we just look back in time of how we used to live, you know, a little bit more human out in nature with people, with friends, off screens. Yeah. Eating stuff that grows in the ground or has legs and runs. A lot of that is pretty like a pretty simple playbook for like how to live a good life. Yeah. And to not be so bloody stressed out all the time. I think part of it is yes living a life that is more aligned with the way we evolved right which is connecting to other human beings and not eating too much and um I think that’s one piece and but that’s like everyone knows this why aren’t we doing it and I think part of the reason is because we we have this kind of misconception of ourselves as a molecular machine right and it’s like you need to maintain your car if I’m like a a machine. If I’m like a car, then I’m just going to put more fuel in and I should feel better. And then you do and then you you eat more and then you don’t feel better. And that’s I think extremely disempowering. People want to be empowered. And people want to have knowledge, but they want to know what to do so they can be their best version of themselves, so they can flourish. So, you know what’s interesting? Before you arrived, I I did something I’ve never done before. I went through all of the interviews you’ve done and I looked at all the comments because I wanted to understand the people that have listened to you frequently. what what what what is it they feel like they would love to ask you or what they haven’t gotten from other interviews. One of the most popular comments which was seen roughly 10% of time was the audience asking about supplements and the question that they had is that they know you personally lean on lifestyle interventions but the biohacking community is very interested in compounds like methylene blue urethylene a and NAD plus boosters. In your opinion what does the sort of clinical data or clinical consensus actually say about these supplements? Are they a shortcut? Are they a band-aid? Are they useful? I think there are shortcuts to to some states. I lean away from them because I think once we start to think that there’s a magic pill to solve a complex issue to solve the way that you’re feeling becomes like the there’s a magic pill for this and then you don’t need to bring awareness to what you are. But can I do both? I think so. And in some cases, I don’t really know how metalene blue does everything it’s supposed to be doing. What uh biologically metine blue seems to be able to give electrons to the mitochondria. So maybe there’s something there that metal blue can kind of relieve energy resistance in the mitochondria. NAD+ is probably the best supported uh intervention to reduce inflammation. Also, it’s an electron carrier. So it take electrons from food and then gives them to the electron transport chain. So the mitochondria can flow those electrons with low resistance. So if you’re depleted of NAD, there’s that’s going to cause increased resistance for electrons to flow through the this metabolic circuit. So NAD+ seems to calm things down a little bit in terms of energy processing. And if Yeah. And most people are not deficient of NAD+. So giving more to the system might not help. But for for reasons I don’t really understand, it seems like it helps some people and it makes people uh feel more energetic. So is that in pill form? Like how do people take NAD+? Cuz I know there was some like drips one time that some guy gave me. Yes, I think there there’s uh oral supplements that are uh precursors to NAD. If you eat NAD directly, it doesn’t the bioavailability it’s called, it doesn’t get into you know your cells very well. you can inject infuse IV intravenously uh NAD+ directly and then that that gets to your cells better. Um that’s not a an approved or kind of recommended medical intervention but I’ve seen people with mitochondrial disease you know saying that it helps them and and normal healthy people as well who feel more energy. What about this uraliththin A? Uralin A is a new compound that seems to stimulate the degradation of bad mitochondria. So we talked about autophagy mphagy earlier. So a cell that has a thousand mitochondria. There are always some that are getting a little old and then eventually they’re degraded especially if you fast, right? If the cell is a little starved is going to degrade the ones that are least functional and there’s kind of a whole selection process that happens inside the cell to know which mitochondria are bad, which ones are good. But the bad mitochondria get targeted and then they get degraded if you’re fasting or if you’re pushing the system like during exercise. What uralin a seems to do is to kind of accelerate this process. Right? So it accelerates the degradation of the bad mitochondria the mphigy so that the cell has to make more of the good ones. I’m looking at some of the studies here and it says the clinical evidence for uralythin A has rapidly expanded over the last few years transitioning from a compelling animal data study to highly rigorous placeboc controlled human clinical trials and overwhelmingly the human research confirms that uriththan a targets mitochondrial dysfunction and systemic inflammation with one study in 2022 in the JAMAMA network open study journal um where they took adults aged 65 to 90 and gave one of them placebo one of the groups placebo and the other uriththan A for 4 months. And at the end of that they found that the group that were given uraliththn A showed statistically significant improvements in muscle endurance and a reduction in biomarkers of mitochondrial inefficiency. Mhm. I should be on uriththn A then everyone should. Do you take any of that? I don’t. You don’t take any supplements? I don’t. I’m skeptical of this. You know, there’s always kind of a new supplement that does amazing things, especially if it cures mitochondrial dysfunction. Mitochondria have dozens of functions. Yeah. And so the term mitochondrial dysfunction is I think a little misleading. Like there was a lot of hype about NAD. There was a lot of hype about co-enzyme Q, CoQ10. Uh there was a lot of hype about all sorts of things. Anti-inflammatory, you know, berries and antioxidants was a big thing like 10, 20 years ago. Turns out not to be so useful. Uh actually impairs normal adaptation and signaling if you eat too many antioxidants. Um so urin feels like the next fad. Uh maybe it’s real. Uh, I think the science is fairly compelling, but I’m I I trust the wisdom of my body and my mitochondria more than I trust the the pharma company that’s trying to to make and sell this. And what does that mean in in practical terms, trusting the wisdom of your body? Like, what does that mean for you? It means um recognizing that I am the the energy that’s flowing through this thing. And this thing is nature. Like, we are a piece of nature. Something that’s true across the animal kingdom and the the living kingdom is things heal. And we don’t think about this in biio medicine. We think about diseases. We study, you know, when things go wrong and we try to understand the molecular, you know, features of diseases. There’s not really a science of the healing process. But the basis of health, it’s clear you need to heal continuously. Heal, you know, repair the DNA that’s damaged. Repair the mitochondria that are getting old. You get rid of them. You make new ones. like preserving the wholeness of the system. To heal means to become whole again. Is that contingent on me being in a natural environment for my nature to heal? Because if you think about me and you sat here now, we’re sat in a like a dark bunker basically with no sunlight. And listen, most of us live in such a dark bunker with very little sunlight. So, we then have to take vitamin D. So, because we live outside of our true nature, I’m wondering if actually we do need to take some supplements cuz we’re not going to heal. we are going to heal even but if I sit in here all day I’m not going to get vitamin D and then that’s going to cause problems. Yes. So we’re not in the optimal environment when you’re in that kind of environment. So I think there and there’s good research showing if you put a plant in a hospital room patients recover faster. There’s been studies looking at like windows with natural light and you see nature if you’re in a hospital for example people recover better. And there’s good data on like nature exposure. Is it like the more better oxygen? You know a little tiny bit more oxygen if you’re in a forest. Is it like the phyitochemicals, the things that are produced by the by the plants? Like we don’t really know what it is. Is it just seeing green, seeing something that hears that sounds and looks like what you evolved to be around? So, we don’t really know, but we know exposure to nature kind of helps calm the body and somehow improve recovery.

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The deal applies sitewide. One type of help people also wanted to know about from you which was even more discussed was about red light therapy. Red light therapy as a support for your mitochondria. Interestingly, the red light therapy is a pretty big thing now. There are hundreds of different devices, helmets, a hairbrush band. I think I’ve got one here actually. I think this is this this is a red light therapy hairbrush. Therapy hairbrush. Yeah. Uh someone was just telling me their dad is part of a study now. He puts a helmet with red light, you know, every day because he has like predmentia. By doing this, the idea is uh light is energy. Yeah. Right. Energy is not a thing, but it’s the potential for change. It’s the capacity to change something. Red light like this, especially the red, the infrared that you don’t see with your eye, can penetrate tissue. It can go through your hair, through your skull, and then into your brain. And then there it seems to do something and change metabolism. So how is it doing this? The best hypothesis we have is that for light to do something in biology, there needs to be something in biology that resonates with it, right? That can uh offer the right amount of resistance, right? To the photons, the red light photons hit and then there’s transformation of energy. That receptor, the antenna, the cellular antenna for red light seems to be mitochondria. So there’s something in the mitochondria where the electrons flow and then boom they meet with oxygen to become metabolic water. Uh that is called cytochrome C oxidase. I’m going to try and say this in layman’s terms. If I take red light and I put it on my skin, it doesn’t even need to touch my skin. I can put it just close to my skin. The red light is going into the mitochondria of my cell and it’s helping the mitochondria to become more efficient. That’s the idea. So why should you wake up every day and do bloody red light? If you’re deficient in that in that way, that might be good. Uh that might also offset, you know, the the natural order that your body has has created. Oh, what do you mean by that? you think it might be. I think that in in general that’s why I kind of veer away from supplements because the organism is this beautiful dynamic equilibrium of like everything you know energetically dancing with each other where you have the mitochondria that transform energy and then you know genes are expressed and then this other cell is doing this this cell is doing this and there’s this beautiful balance and uh when the system is out of balance now there’s signals like inflammation right signals of this imbalance uh at an energetic level and then that turns into molecular level and then the system tries to come back into balance, right? And wow, I never realized this that too much red light can be bad for you. I don’t know if there’s studies that show too much red light is bad for you, but there’s like phototoxicity is a thing and there you can buy a whole bed of like really intense light. And I think if you stay too long in those, that’s probably not good. There’s a a very compelling study that was published last year uh on blood glucose regulation and I know you’ve talked about blood glucose on other episodes. How much glucose in the blood is really important because it causes this like energy resistance energy friction in all of your cells especially the brain perhaps. So when you eat a bunch of sugar or you eat a meal with carbohydrates blood glucose typically spikes. If you get stressed out just psychological stress will increase blood glucose. So those glucose spikes can increase energy resistance and then start to cause damage, accelerate aging and so on. So what the body does in the normal healthy organism is able to regulate blood glucose. So if you eat a big meal, there’s amount enough insulin that’s released and then the glucose can come into cells and to the muscles and and to the fat and and then you preserve, you know, what’s called normal glycemia, normal blood glucose. It turns out if you shine a red light on the back of people as they ingest a big bunch of glucose, the spike in glucose is not as high. And what they did in that study that was interesting is they measured mitochondrial metabolism through the mouth. You can measure oxygen coming in and CO2 coming out which is coming from mitochondria. So you can measure the the energy metabolism which is really the mitochondrial metabolism as people are doing this. And what they found is that people who had red light on their back, their metabolism was actually uh a little higher. So the electrons, the flow of energy was increased with the red light and and they think that might be why the glucose didn’t spike as much because the electrons that came into the blood were able to flow through the mitochondria. Um, so this points to some regulation of energy regulation in inside the mitochondria that I don’t fully understand, but I think there there’s something promising here and it certainly supports you know the idea that energy modalities outside of our cells uh you know light or electromagnetic fields under human beings that are you know you energy energetic process is affecting my metabolism all the time. We respond to each other energetically metabolically. Uh, I think it it supports that idea that you’re in an energetic process and you’re influenced by other forms of energy even if you don’t see it. I’m really um stunned by this idea that there is such thing as getting too much red light and that that can have harm for yourselves because there is I’ll be honest you know there’s been a couple of times where I just put that thing on and maybe like read a book for a long time like an hour or two. Did you ever feel adverse effects from this? I never felt adverse effects. However, looking at some of the studies, it seems to suggest that red light therapy follows a bell curve model. Mhm. They found in this one particular study I was reading about in 2009, that low to moderate doses of light perfectly stimulate the mitochondria to produce ATP and a healthy small burst of ROS, reactive oxygen species to trigger cellular repair. However, this particular study also showed that when the dose is pushed too high, the light creates massive amounts of reactive oxidative species and this excess oxidative stress overwhelms the cell’s antidioxidant defenses completely shutting down mitochondrial respiration and in inducing cellular aptosis, cell death instead of healing. Mhm. Yeah. That this bell-shaped relationship is something we see in many domains of biology and physiology. Same as like workout exercising like most people know if you do a workout that’s like half an hour, an hour or two hours. If you’re an athlete and you’re like really well conditioned, it’s fine. And then you recover for you know 23 hours after your 1 hour workout and that’s great. It actually makes you more efficient. It gives you the idea, the impression you have more energy, which is really energy flowing more efficiently. But if you work out for eight hours, yeah, that’s not good, right? So the too much you you crash not enough, you’re not at your optimal. So there’s where’s the optimal state? And biology and the whole mind body unit has kind of worked out through evolution and through your life and development to find this sweet spot if you know how to listen to it. Yeah. And that’s that’s easier said than done. Yes. If you can live in alignment and that there’s a lot of noise out there. There is you know for the same reason you closed your eyes earlier when I asked you to kind of feel inside. This is a good analogy for I think what it means to kind of listen to her energy and maybe we could do a little exercise if you’re interested. Sure. Yeah. So we’ll do a a little exercise. Uh you can close your eyes if you want. Everyone at home also close your eyes unless you are driving. Yeah. And we’ll use the breath. So you can start by just feeling your body. You can feel kind of gravity pulling your body down into the chair. And then we’ll take a little breath in and then breath out and then all the way down. And then hold your breath with empty lungs

and then hold there for as long as you can.

And just pay attention to the sensations that are emerging in your body, whether it’s on your belly and your chest and your neck and your head.

And the longer you wait, the more intense those sensations are.

You can hold for as long as you want. And when you can’t, then just take a take a breath. Deep breath. What did that feel like? It felt I felt lots of vibrations. It’s kind of like waves. I felt like kind of like waves going across my body. But I It was almost like I could feel the energy moving through my body. Mhm. It’s kind of how it felt. I suddenly was very apparent clear of my heartbeat. I could feel everything. Mhm. In a way that I can’t typically feel everything. Yeah. Any kind of negative feeling or any sensation that was uncomfortable? I mean near the end when I couldn’t when I hadn’t breathed in a while it was a bit uncomfortable. Yeah. What did that feel like? Like like I was starving for oxygen. Like I was starving for air. Yeah. You know running out of air and like drowning is one of the most horrible like aversive experience that I think we evolved to dislike. Right. So what what was happening there in our bodies as we were doing this is oxygen is being consumed by mitochondria continuously. Right. every millisecond mitochondria consume oxygen and now you’re not bringing oxygen through your breath and then they produce CO2 carbon dioxide right so mitochondria are burning the oxygen little bit by a little bit and then they’re producing carbon dioxide CO2 and we evolved to feel those signals very very sensitively so that’s the pressure that I felt well I think that yes so the subjective experience right what you described there is an experience of energy starting to stall Because if there’s no oxygen in your mitochondria, the electrons like h where do I go? And then there’s like extreme level of resistance. Like the most extreme case of energy resistance I think that most people will be familiar with is like a heart attack. Mhm. My dad had a heart attack a few years ago and he woke up during the night with this terrible contraction like a pressure in in the chest and he said it was like 400 lb like pressure on his chest. Terrible pain. Worst pain he’s ever had. What what’s happening like where where what is that pain? The source of that pain really is blood flow can no longer bring oxygen to mitochondria in the heart. Oh, so the mitochondria are like panicking. Yeah. So panicking is kind of a we’re imposing now experience onto a biological process. But you have the electrons are flowing through mitochondria all the time. They’re flowing on oxy onto oxygen, right? From food to oxygen and they’re just nice freely floating. That feels great. It or it feels like you just normal life. And then all of a sudden there’s no more oxygen. So the electron I have nowhere to go. That feels terrible. The electrons can’t flow. So they start to backflow. That is what causes oxidative stress. That’s why the heart gets damaged during a heart attack, right? Because the electrons can’t flow to oxygen because of this little clot. Uh and for some reason that we don’t really understand this feels extremely aversive. So what you experience there by holding your breath and anyone who’s listening to this can try on their own. hold your breath for as long as possible. It feels horrible. And now imagine living your life with just like 5% 10% of this horrible feeling like you wake up in the morning and you have this like trace of like running out of energy, right? Running out of oxygen. Uh I think that’s what some mental illnesses feel like. And there’s very interesting data showing that if you inject people with a signal of energetic stress, lactate, you can trigger a panic attack. You’re not messing with the brain there. You’re not like, you know, kind of doing something to the to neurochemistry. What you’re doing is you’re injecting the human body with a signal that the mitochondria can’t keep up with energy flow. You’re tricking the body into thinking that energy resistance has just been jacked up to very high levels. This feels like anxiety. And people with traumatic memories like post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, the a simple injection of an energetic stress signal of lactate in the blood can reawaken traumatic memories. So there’s this emerging notion in psychiatry called met in metabolic psychiatry uh where people understand mental illnesses as energetic disorders of the brain. And what I think is is happening in those kind of chronic state of of ill-being, right? where people don’t feel themselves, they don’t feel well, they, you know, the hypervigilance, anxiety, uh it’s quite likely at this point, I think that part of that is driven by energy not flowing properly and then the body just lives at high energy resistance all the time. And there’s data directly measuring energy resistance in the brain from a group of MLAN in Harvard. Uh and then lactate tends to be elevated in people with mental illness. And this marker GDF-15 also is elevated in mental illness. And so the cure again or the the thing to ease that is all the lifestyle factors that we talked about purpose and you know check we’ve covered that ground. Yeah life changes you know changing your life circumstances that’s really hard to do. Uh exercising seems to help a lot of people but a lot of people don’t feel they have the capacity to exercise. Uh and ketones seem to be a lifesaving for some people. going on a ketogenic diet and I’ve met now dozens of individuals whose lives were crushed by you know schizoffective disorder, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder and they were treatment resistant right meaning like the phmic therapy the drugs that they were given were not helping in some cases were making things worse uh with like difficult side effects and then they change your diet cutting all sugars and they went on a ketogenic diet medical ketogenic therapy Uh and then they started to monitor ketones and many people reported you know that this was life-changing like first the first thing they many people notice is they have more energy. The ketogenic diet does not work for everyone. Mhm. We don’t know why. And the same way that we’re all different, we all respond differently to even medications, right, that are supposed to work the same for everyone. We have a science of averages. Like the science that we use to get knowledge to inform our lives is almost entirely a science of averages. Meaning like all of the studies we do like the the highest gold standard studies we consider to be RCTs randomized control trials. These RCTs if you run an RCT what you do is you take let’s say a thousand people then you randomize half 500 into this group normal diet and then 500 into ketogenic diet. And then you say great now let’s look at their depressive symptoms right or or their anxiety symptoms and then you have them on the diet for two months and then after you assess and then you compare the groups right you lump 500 human beings together and you say what’s the average depression or anxiety symptoms in this in these 500 people then you average these people together and then you group them and then you compare means and I guess the other important point here is gender which is so many of these studies were skewed towards men uh in many cases and that doesn’t apply to women a lot of the time. And this is part of the reason we’ve had so many conversations on this show about women’s health is because we’re just now discovering that, you know, once upon a time scientists would treat women like little men and assume that everything just applied and actually we’re entirely different. And so this averages thing you also need to think about the nuances of like who, gender, where they’re from, their biology, their DNA. You just said that you you get the skinny fat thing or the visceral fat, whatever. I don’t get that. Mhm. But if we were doing an average of like three people, maybe we’d come to a conclusion based on me and me and the other person who was like me, but that wouldn’t apply to you. Yeah. And that’s really problematic. Like all of the the health recommendations that we have and the the way drugs get approved uh and the way we determine whether a drug is useful or not for disease X or or Y is by comparing groups. And whenever you you peel the surface of a clinical study of an RCT, you find some people like are amazing responders and they’re cured. They don’t have symptoms. And then some people don’t respond. These are called non-responders. And then some people get worse. The most commented thing across the videos you featured on um and the most passionate thing uh the most urgent thing according to the the people that were watching your work that they wanted to ask you was about longcoid mefs. I’m not sure what that is. and fibromyalgia. Um, for patients with me, CFS, and you’ll have to explain to me what that is, or long COVID, the standard advice given is to exercise for metitochondrial health. Um, but for them, it often triggers severe crashes. What is happening at the cellular level when the energy budget is broken and how can these individuals safely rehabilitate their mitochondria without causing further damage? Yeah, that’s a really tough problem. And this was the most repeatedly the most liked, the most commented thing on your videos because these people are suffering and they’re just not being given answers, I guess. Yeah. In the US there’s an estimated like 3 to 5 million people who have either myalgic and ancifitis uh chronic fatigue syndrome, ME/CFS or you know longcoid version of this. Uh in the UK it’s somewhere between like two and three million I think. And then worldwide there’s 20 24 million people have these syndromes, right? What are the symptoms for someone that hasn’t experienced it? What are the symptoms that they’re experiencing? Chronic fatigue, just always being sort of tired and low energy. Feeling low energy. Yeah. Feeling low energy um is is an experience, right? So it’s you go to your doctor, say, “I feel so tired.” And then you look in the blood works, everything’s fine. But so there’s a disconnect between what we know how to measure biochemically and then what the person is experiencing. We don’t have a good understanding of the connection between the biology and the biochemistry in the blood and even process in the brain and how people feel. So there’s a disconnect here and uh ME/CFS you know chronic fatigue uh long co these people have been a little bit ostracized uh from the medical you know community because doctors are are really stuck uh they have the these patients which are really difficult you know patients to to deal with first they don’t know what’s wrong with them and second they don’t have tools to help them get better uh and and then the classical thing is well exercise but then many of these people when they exercise they actually get worse and and there’s some studies that show increased inflammation. So those signals of energy resistance increase energy friction in the body uh go up after exercise in a normal person and these people with chronic fatigue it seems like they can skyrocket and then that leads to this postexertional malaise right we talked earlier about how the marker of energetic stress GDF can go to the brain make you feel sick right or make you feel you know nauseous or you know tired other cytoines from the immune system when you’re sick uh when you’re fighting an infection do the same I think the best study on on mitochondria and uh chronic fatigue syndrome was published last year or the year before and it showed that there is a deficiency in energy transformation in the mitochondria the muscle. They took muscle biopsies little piece of muscle from the from the quad from the the thigh and then they looked at how well can the mitochondria in the muscle of people with chronic fatigue syndrome flow energy and what they found is the capacity is much lower. If the mitochondria can’t flux energy properly, you should feel like you don’t have the capacity to push right to exercise. So why is that? Why do those people have you lower mitochondrial energy transformation capacity? We don’t know. There are so many stories and I’ I’ve been curious and interested about this. Uh and I remember uh this uh family friend who came for dinner uh one night and she uh she was asking me what do you work on and what do you do? And so I tell her we work on mitochondria and psychobiology, mitochondrial psychobiology, how the mind and the body relate, you know, energetically. And she said, “Well, I have an interesting story for you.” I said, “Okay, what’s the story?” I used to have chronic fatigue syndrome. So I I perked up like, “What happened?” She was visibly an energetic person. She didn’t it didn’t look like she had, you know, an issue with energy. So she said, uh, she was in her 20s and she had like she was debilitated. she couldn’t work and you know she lived in this place and you know her life would kind of you know completely upside down because she didn’t have energy to do anything which is I think a a common story and she was in bed like multiple hours you know every day and struggling to go get groceries and everything was a drag about life and then one summer uh this guy from Hawaii which was a friend of a friend came over uh for the for the summer just to for a little trip and they had an affair she had a boyfriend And this was a long time that she that she had had a you know a human connection like this. So you’re saying I I’m not saying what what end what ended up happening is she said my chronic fatigue kind of lifted and I didn’t have to do anything and then after that summer she never had chronic fatigue again. Uh and she kind of reintegrated the normal life. I don’t know what the lesson is here. I don’t know if there’s a generalizable principle, but there’s a lot of those stories where people end up in a really dark place in their life and either they’re diagnosed with the mental illness or with chronic fatigue syndrome or with kind of a somato, you know, psychossematic, you know, label or whatever that is, there’s always kind of precipitating conditions. Uh sometimes it’s in response to medical interventions like immunization. Sometimes it’s in response to uh you know an infection or like a parasite mold and stuff like that. Some people have like mold poisoning or whatever and they get yeah very often there’s like a trigger there’s like sometimes a lingering kind of condition and then sometimes there’s an acute trigger and the body is never able to fully recover. So what do we take from that you know story of a of a summer fling? Well I I take from that hope. Yeah. that you know even when the cards seem to be stacked against you and it feels like you might have to live with this thing for a long time but in many cases miraculous things happen that defy the odds and hope itself I think can keep us in an optimistic mind mindset I’ve seen this in patients with mitochondrial diseases as well you know these people are diagnosed with the genetically defined mitochondrial disease their mitochondria can’t flow energy properly so every day they live probably with this kind of discomfort of you holding your breath for too long and Everything’s difficult about life. Many of them lose hope. And and when you see them losing hope, they start to go downhill physically and many of them die very early. The people who do the best like their mitochondria don’t work the way they should, but they they’re able to find something that they love. They’re able to, you know, find an expression for for themselves. And they’re have supportive family. Almost a universal theme for people who do well is they have a supportive, you know, environment. And cultivating this is is so precious. And that brings us back maybe to social connections. You know, you energetic process, me energetic process. When we interact, you know, through um through sounds and and you know, physically shaking hands and uh and I feel your energy, I feel your excitement, you feel mine. And then, you know, we we might vibe and resonate and and then maybe you know, you find someone and you feel love for that person. I think love is the experience of resonance, right? And and when you feel that with someone, it feels so special. Which goes back to the affair point. Yeah. Maybe on this point of exercise which we talked about earlier, if someone wants to maximize mitochondrial biogenesis, what is the sweet spot for training? Is it strictly zone 2 cardio or highintensity interval training or resistance training or something else? Is there like an optimal type of training? Yeah. I think the key principle here is anything that will make you breathe harder. Yeah. Means that your mitochondria are working harder. Okay. But you don’t want to do it too long if you’re not trained, right? Like you’re regular guy. I’m not trained now. I I I I run for like 20 minutes every other day. That’s my, you know, routine. That’s what I I have enough time to do. And I feel like it moves energy through my body in the right way. But if I go and I try to run a marathon, I’m going to injure myself. You know, I’m going to hurt myself. So that would be too much for me. And so I think that comes back to the point of like feeling into your energy. We call this mitoception, right? Feeling into your mitochondria and what’s sustainable. So I think there’s an individualized, you know, stance that we need to take towards this. And the last question from the audience was right now mitochondrial health feels a bit invisible. Are there any accessible reliable tests like ATP blood tests or specific biomarkers that a normal person can use to accurately measure their mitochondrial function? Working on it. You’re working on it. Yeah. So our team is working on it. Uh and so we’re building uh a platform, a technology platform that would allow people to tune into their mitochondria to mito, right? So do you feel your energy through your mitochondria? Uh and then you can make better decisions like ketogenic diet, is this helping you? Is this not helping you? Uh this new relationship, is this sucking away your energy or is this giving you energy? This new job, this new, you know, direction in life. Um there’s so much I mean all of the important decisions we make really you know we make what how we feel like you wake up in the morning and either you feel great and you can change things or you wake up and and you don’t want to be here. Uh that’s an experience and before you get there you know on the dark side there’s all of these decision points that that we face and the power of discernment right and what we talked about like with Steve Jobs like this is the way and uh and then you know you feel strong about this discerning what’s right for you what’s not right for you what’s the right direction is it the right time or not those are decisions we make you know with our guts and there are many people who who swear that this is the only way they make decisions and if they make decisions rational that ends up biting them in the butt because I think the this thing and this energetic system is the most sensitive instrument that we have to know whether the content of our lives is aligned with who we are as individuals and that requires that we feel into this movement and into our sensations and into um the experiences we have. So that’s the the barometer that really guides us through life like a GPS, an energetic GPS. Dr. Martin, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they’re leaving it for. And the question that has been left for you is, what is the most difficult thing you ever overcame and how did it make you the person you are today?

So, I just felt my energy change. I saw it change. I felt like this sinking feeling about a year ago. Um, my fiance and I were expecting a baby and we were about 3 months into the pregnancy and it was great. We were excited. Um, we were calling this new life, new life. And we talked, you know, affectionately about it and we said like, you know, when new life comes this and we both have a child and um and she was in Canada, she came back and then uh and that evening in in bed she had this like crazy pain that started and uh and we were about super scared. There was a bit of bleeding and then and then the contraction started to come really fast. not supposed to happen at three months. Um, and then I was like, “Oh, maybe this is just like a bump in the road and and you know, things are going to be fine.” Um, so we ended up having a miscarriage and N Rosha didn’t want to go to the hospital, so we did this at home and it was terrible. It was really, really sad, really, you know, gut-wrenching. So, we were were both devastated when, you know, New Life us and and then I had this moment of like, why me? Like, why the [ __ ] this has happened to me? Like, I’m I think I’m a good person. I’m doing my best to bring good in the world. I try to be a good partner, good um, you know, leader. I try to Yeah. Why is this happening to me? So, this was like this victim, you know, mentality, mindset. And I’ve learned through my 40 or so years that I think a a useful stance to take in life is to assume that there’s something to learn from everything you go through. I don’t know this for sure. It’s not a a scientific fact. It’s more of a of an experience turned into kind of a way of of living, more of a belief. So I was like, but how could there be something to learn from something so terrible? Um, and I had to sit with this and uh 2 days later after the baby had gone and N Rosha and I had sat in the shower and cried and the smell was horrible and just it would death like death was around us around me and I felt angry and I felt sad. Um, and I just sat down and wrote I I just and that’s my way now of letting things flow. Different people have different ways and and I was writing about my experience and why now and and I asked what is there to learn from this and a very clear answer came up. Slowing down

and that hit really hard because throughout my whole life I’ve moved pretty quickly through life. I had a very short, you know, PhD. Then I became a professor very quickly and um and grew a team and um and like moving fast is kind of something that’s like a personality trait that I I do. And uh and I think sometimes it’s served me. It’s allowed me to do some things that you would not have been possible otherwise. But at other times I think it’s hurt me. And it’s like this drive, this inner drive like things must happen now, must move fast. I think has hurt other people around and has impaired my ability to be an effective leader because I then maybe I lacked sensit sensitivity to other people who don’t move at my pace. Uh so slowing down really kind of um hit home. Things were like clear. It was like looking at a canvas and there was more contrast. Like the things that really mattered were like sharper, right? and all of this other [  ] like these obligations and these things that I had said yes to or like you know the contrast was so much sharper. Um and this lesson I I took this as a lesson slowing down I think has allowed me to be a better listener to be a better you know more compassionate father and uh scientist uh I think it’s changed me and I don’t know that I would have learned that lesson in another way we are the this energetic process that’s shaped by the sum of our experiences and the people we meet like I’ll never be the same after today from having sat with you at this table and you opening the door not just to scientific inquiry but to human experience. Um yeah the we we change all the time. We transform and what shapes us is those kind of energetic interactions and um yeah everything we go through. Well, I’ll never be the same either for for I think all the best reasons. I’m you know, I have to say that I’m I’m I’m hesitating my words here because of the gratitude that you’ve taken from the wisdom that it’s given you. But I’m terribly sorry that that hap you had to go through that. I can only I just can’t imagine. It’s one of my honestly it’s like one of my like worst nightmares especially at the season of life I’m in when me and my partner and my fianceé are trying to have a kid. It’s just like I I think I’m thinking about those things now and how I would I’m like preempting how I would handle those kinds of things. So to hear that it happened to you is just it’s um it’s really it’s really difficult to hear. Um it happens to about 20 million people a year. Most people don’t talk about it either, do they? Cuz they don’t talk about it. Yeah. Cuz it’s shrouded in mixed emotions and Yeah, I can understand that. Yep. But I am better off for having this conversation with you. And I think, you know, I speak on behalf of my audience for sure this time when I say that I think my audience are as well. I’ve learned so much. It’s actually kind of like completely rechanged how I think about life itself, which is a weird thing. And I hope I can just sit in this moment a little bit and think about how I am energy and how how that’s determining everything um around me and others. And and it’s um it’s really really wonderful. I think what you know what you’re doing people might think of you as like a m mitochondrial scientist but actually it’s much more deeper and much more philosophical than that when we think about what energy is to us. It’s it is everything and that’s really the lens that you’ve given me today is you’ve completely changed my mind on like how I think about life which is such a wonderful thing to get from a podcast. I don’t say this like I don’t kiss people up people’s asses like this. Like I genuinely my mind is like [  ] hell. It’s also changed how I think about business which is really weird and I haven’t expected. Um, business is is an extension of of us of, you know, energetic like everything is what I’ve learned today quite literally. And it’s also made me think a lot about how I preserve, conserve, aim my energy. Um, so Dr. Martin Picard, thank you so much. Thank you so much for your generosity and your wisdom. It’s not very often that I have conversations that actually like instantly cause this shift in me, but this is one of them today. If people want to learn more about you and the work you’re doing, where do we channel that energy, where do they go? The best place for people to go is a website martinpicard.energy. Okay. And then from this website, you’ll see information about the book. You’ll see information about the research, core energetic principles that cover what we’ve covered today. There are little animations and there’s information about the institute. Okay. Thank you so much. Thank you.

I’ve had bouts with depression throughout my career, but man, when it hits me, it’s bad. Which kind of brings us to the airport incident, you know, I really messed up, man. You and her and her. What happened? So, it’s Father’s Day and I felt good in the morning. I spent the morning with my kids, but then as I was traveling to work, I felt that feeling again. It’s like a cloud in my head that I just can’t get out from under. So, I started drinking. I’ll fight you right now. No, I don’t want to fight, bro. And my emotions got the best of me. Bro, relax. Relax. Relax, bro. Relax. got arrested. This guy’s awesome. Did I just ruin everything that I was working for? You know, I don’t know yet. And it could have been so much worse. What was going on in your mind? I was angry at the world and I just couldn’t stop thinking about my father. You know, he’s actually homeless right now. And I tried to help him out and he’s back out on the street. Not that anything’s an excuse, but it wasn’t myself. And I never really spoke about it until right now, but I’m back in therapy. And when you sit down with somebody and start opening things up, you realize this could be linked to my childhood. And when I think about your earliest contacts, you got a father that’s an alcoholic, violence in the home, and your mom said that you were an alcoholic kid. I started drinking at 12, 13, expelled from school as well. And got arrested and I didn’t have any goals. So, it was a bit of a roller coaster. But look what happened. You rose

the best lightweights in the world. I was on top of the world, but the roller coasters go down too. And this was the moment. Yeah, man. July 30th, you retired. How does it feel looking at that photo? Yeah. I’m trying not to tear up, dude. It was my life, man. Those gloves, me putting them on the mat is a piece of myself. I left. But a wise man said, “If a man’s lucky, he gets to die twice.” That part of me that every day wake up, push yourself to be the best fighter you can be, is dead. I’m retired Dustin. I’m businessman Dustin. Now, you know, it’s just I’m trying to figure it all out cuz 20 years I was dreaming about being the best. I just want to dream again, you know. Has there ever been anything that compared? No. Nothing fills that void of what fighting was. And fighting was a part of therapy for me. And some days I wake up and I’m like, these top guys that are winning now on these upcoming cards, I can beat them still. So, is there any possibility that you ever return to the UFC?

This is super interesting to me. My team given me this report to show me how many of you that watch this show subscribe and some of you have told us according to this that you are unsubscribed from the channel randomly. So favor to ask all of you please could you check right now if you’ve hit the subscribe button if you are a regular view of the show and you like what we do here. We’re approaching quite a significant landmark on this show in terms of a subscriber number. So, if there was one simple free thing that you could do to help us, my team, everyone here, to keep this show free, to keep it improving year over year and week over week, it is just to hit that subscribe button and to double check if you’ve hit it. Only thing I’ll ever ask of you. Do we have a deal? If you do it, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll make sure every single week, every single month, we fight harder and harder and harder and harder to bring you the guests and conversations that you want to hear. I’ve stayed true to that promise since the very beginning of the Dio, and I will not let you down. Please help us. Really appreciate it. Let’s get on with the show.

Dustin Pier, yo, you know, there’s a there’s a question that we kind of throw around in society. Um, we say it quite quite flippantly to people we meet, friends, family, strangers. Um, but but in this context, I want to ask it in the most sort of intentional way. And give me the long answer. How are you doing

as a whole? Great. Uh recently there’s been some turbulence, you know. Uh but I’m I’m doing well. Doing well. There’s been some turbulence. Yeah. Give me some color on that. I last week, which is not new to me, let my emotions get the best of me. Kind of was in a in a bad spot uh mentally. started drinking, got arrested, you know, um got into some trouble at the airport in Atlanta and uh you know, not proud of it, but it is what it is. I want to um give some background context and I spent the last couple of days sort of looking through your childhood and where you come from and who you are to try and fill the picture of Dustin Porier in my head. And I’ve got lots of photos of you here as a as a young man. Um, got another one even younger here that I’ll share with you here. Yeah. And I think this is incredibly important context because I’d watched you fight the best that there is and beat the best that there is in the UFC. But it wasn’t until I understood your earliest context that I started to like understand the picture of where you’ve come from and also in some part like how that makes you who you are today. So, so take me back. What is the early context that people need to understand to really understand you as a man? Um, I’m just a man. Uh, trying his best, trying to provide for my family, learning as I go, not scared to work hard, not scared to chase dreams. Just a kid from Lafayette, Louisiana, who found something to put his all into and and try to become great at it, you know, with fighting. Your your father and your grandfather were fighters. My father boxed um growing up when he was younger. My grandfather was in the Navy and worked in the oil field and stuff. They weren’t successful fighters. I wouldn’t say they were like nobody knew who they were, but definitely Yeah, I come from fighters for sure. And from money? Do you come from money? No, definitely not. What was that like growing up? Was there It was normal to me cuz I didn’t know any different, you know. Um, it wasn’t like I missed a meal or anything like that, but definitely wasn’t wasn’t rich or anything or had money to do a whole lot of things when I was younger, but a working-class family, you know. And your parents divorced when you were younger? Yeah. Yeah. I lived I lived with them up until about maybe kindergarten or first first grade, then they got divorced. Do you have any sort of mental models or mental images of them being together when you younger? Is there any memories of them being together? Honestly, dude, not to to be to turn it dark or anything, but the early memories I have of them together aren’t the best. You know, it’s fighting and violence and stuff, physical fighting. Yeah. Yeah. In that Instagram post you you wrote recently after the incident in the airport, you mentioned your father and you mentioned, I think, some of his struggles. He had his own struggles with alcohol. Yeah. His whole life he has. Yeah. Alcohol has ruined his life. And alcohol was present when you were a young man when you were still there. He’s been an alcoholic my entire life. Did you have a relationship with him after the divorce? Yeah, of course. I don’t know what that’s called. Uh split custody or something. Every other weekend I would go to his house, spend the weekend at his house. How did that season of your life do you think as you look back shape the man that you became? Like that early context under the age of 10 years old that violent parents, they divorce, they separate, your dad is struggling with alcohol. Like how do you look back on that? As a grown man, I look back and think my father was an idiot for, you know, getting not being there with his kids. You know, as a father, I think about that. Like I I don’t waking up with my kids in the house, running up to me, making them breakfast every day. Like, I couldn’t I I never want to live that type of life. I can’t can’t even imagine it. So, as an adult and a father looking back on it, I think he’s made a lot of mistakes that, you know, I think he still lives with. and your mom. Ah, got some nice photos of her as well. Um, that’s your wife. Um, but she seems to have been um a real constant throughout your life. That’s her there. For sure. For sure. I’ll be on vacation with her in a week. Yeah. Look at my face post fight. Her and my grandmother raised me. She was, you know, everything. Mothers are everything. And she’s she still is, you know, calling me, texting me every day, checking on me, asking how I am. And you have two brothers. So I have two brothers I grew up with. Two brothers and a sister I met when I was 25 26 years old from my father. I guess I’m trying to figure out as well cuz I I heard about what you were like in school. You struggled in school. It sounds sounds like you got in a lot of fights when you were younger. Um I’m trying to figure out where that came from in you. Yeah. I mean, living in South Louisiana, we we fought all the time. Uh, but I just kept doing it. I just kept going with fighting, you know, as a young man. I I read that you were expelled from school as well. Uhhuh. And was that again for fighting and struggling to Yeah. Yeah. Fighting. The one that got me expelled was a fight. And that seems to be a little quite a consistent pattern from 10 to 14. Um, struggling in school, fighting. And then at 15, I hear that you end up in juvenile detention center. 14. 14. Mhm. What was the What was the road there? What happened? I had got into some trouble at one of the times I was living with my father. I uh got into a fight and and physically hurt somebody in the fight and got arrested and uh I was on probation at the time and I wasn’t going to school. got picked up for truency and some other things like that for not going to school and uh failed the drug test. I was on probation at the time, failed the drug test and then I they sent me to juvenile detention. Were you drinking at that age? Yeah, at 15. Mhm. When did you start drinking? I was talking to my wife the other day and I was thinking about that. I don’t know 12, 13 probably. H it is it is quite um it’s quite curious to me that you know 14 15 you’re getting in trouble for fighting you end up in a detention center you’re drinking from 12 years old and it it like begs the question to me as someone that’s done lots of these interviews like what was going on in that in that young man’s mind I don’t have an answer what was going on um not having anywhere to put my focus not I wasn’t trying to be the best at something I was just living dayto-day doing whatever you know I didn’t have any goals I was a young kid, you know. It’s tough to It’s tough to say to look back to that young and really say what I was thinking at that age. Um I was just being a kid, I guess. Were you a happy kid? Yeah. You were a happy kid. Yeah. And you were spending the week with your mother and then the week you said was it the weekends with your father? The weekend or every other weekend? I forget exactly how it was. Yeah. And when you talk about his life being ruined by alcohol, what do you mean by what do you mean by that? I mean, he has he’s ruined his marriages. He’s ruined his relationships. He’s ruined his friendships. He’s ruined his relationships with his family, with his kids. Two son, three Well, my little brother kind of is off and on talking to him, but he has two kids that don’t speak to him at all and and won’t uh you know, he’s been in jail plenty of times for for alcohol-related stuff. And yeah, I if I could paint a picture what you think of of a classic drunk uh or alcoholic, you know, very selfish um and continues to go back to it. Continu He’s actually homeless. Homeless right now. He’s homeless right now. Yeah. Part of that me getting in trouble at the airport was I just felt uh and it’s not my weight to carry, you know, but I just felt I try to help him out and he’s back out on the street. It’s like it almost doesn’t want help, you know? And I was just kind of on Father’s Day, I was traveling to work and I I just couldn’t stop thinking about my father and I started drinking in the airport and that’s kind of what led to the incident. It’s just But when I feel like that, you know, I’ve been going to therapy and stuff like that. years ago, I started going to therapy. And when I started feeling better, I stopped practicing everything I learned through therapy, you know, and uh then I felt that feeling again. Just I guess you call it depression. Just didn’t feel well. And when I feel like that, I know I shouldn’t drink and I drank anyway. So, you know, not that my father anything’s an excuse. Obviously, I did what I did. Um, but I knew I knew better in the moment when I’m feeling like that to to to drink or do anything. You know, alcohol has never benefited me, especially in times like that where I’m mentally not the best. You use the word depression there to describe that feeling to to give it a word. So, let’s use that word. Um, can you paint a picture for me in terms of what that actually feels like? That day that you wake up, it’s Father’s Day, you don’t feel good. Like, what is that? No, I I felt good in the morning. you know, I spent the morning with my with my kids. My daughter wrote me a letter. She gave me presents, you know, did all the Father’s Day stuff. I had a a great morning. But then when I left my home to go to fly out, I started feeling it, you know, and and days leading up to that, it would come off and on, coming off and on, and I would think about, you know, my father and it would kind of bring me down, but it wasn’t that bad. But for Father’s Day, it just hit me, man. It hit me hard because he’s currently homeless. Yeah. Here in Louisiana. Yeah. Yeah. I actually, man, when I got out of jail in Atlanta and flew back home on that Tuesday, I got back late maybe Tuesday. Uh Wednesday morning, I drove to where he he lives or where he sleeps, and uh went to the sheriff’s office, got in contact with the coroner. I had to do the whole process to to sign a OPC, order of protective custody. I tried to get him to pick him up against his will and and all this stuff and they did but I went at the wrong time and I went early in the morning when I woke up and when they picked him up he wasn’t disoriented he was normal you know and uh so they released him again. What is the range of feelings and emotions you have towards him at the moment?

you know, he’s always messed up. And I’m not angry at him. I’m uh and once again, this isn’t an excuse for my actions. You know, my father just came to a head on Father’s Day, but uh just

upset to see him doing this to himself and not getting out of his own way and continuing to let it get just worse and worse progressively over the years when he when he knows better. you know, when he knows better. I mean, most people when you make a mistake or do you try to fix it, you try to make tomorrow better than yesterday, you know, next year better than this year. Everybody just keeps doing the same thing. And that’s because he’s addicted to alcohol. What is his story?

I wish I I I knew more so I could tell you, but been like a hard worker his whole life, you know, did whatever. Worked in the oil field for a long time, but uh check to check his whole life. Um simple guy, you know, was a really good athlete in in school. Got a woman pregnant at a young age in high school, so he couldn’t uh continue to focus and chase his dreams of playing football. um you know back then when you got a a girl pregnant you got married and got a job and and things like that. So that’s what he did. So that day you wake up you’re feeling okay in the morning it’s father’s day you start thinking about your father you get that feeling that you describe as depression. Yeah. Um which is just how what is that feeling? It’s feeling for someone that has never experienced it before. You know I’ve had bouts with depression throughout my career when it hits me. You know it hit it hits me hard and that day it hit me. It hit me hard, man. You know, going to the airport, it just feels like everything is has a its own gravity and it’s going to pull me towards the negative. No matter what it is, it’s like a cloud in my in my head that I just can’t get out from under it. It it it’s hard to explain to you unless you’ve been through it. That’s what I try to tell my wife cuz she’s always so happy and so, you know, which is great, but like when I feel like that, and it doesn’t happen often, but man, when it hits me, it’s bad, you know? It’s bad. Do you remember the first time you felt that? I don’t. But my wife, you know, me and my wife been together a long time since we were in off and on through middle school and high school and all that. But she she tells me, “Don’t you Yeah, there she is.” She tells me, “Don’t you remember like I’ve always thought something, you know, you never wanted to be around big crowds, go to all the parties with me when I was younger and do all that stuff.” Yeah. Because I I just didn’t like to be around that many people that much, you know. I I maybe it was uh anxiety I was dealing with. I don’t know. This stuff is all new to me. So, I’m just I would tell her how I feel and she’s like, “Don’t you remember?” Uh so, she thinks I’ve been having it. But I started noticing it, you know, more recently in the last years, 3 4 years. Was there a catalyst at all? A catalyst moment? Something that happened that caused you to feel that or if I could link it to something, it was I lost a big fight, came back home with which fight? My second fight with Justin Gachi. Yeah, lost that one. Came back home, everything was good and then it would just I was really emotional, man. You know, some days I would be fine, some days I would be sad and I was like, “Something’s off, you know. Something’s off.” So that’s when I started going to therapy and trying to unpack some of the stuff that I didn’t even know I was walking around with, you know? Did you learn anything through the process of therapy? I’ve been to therapy, too. I’ve been I mean, I’m still the day uh I got back from Atlanta, I started going to therapy again after the airport incident. Yeah. Yeah. right before I I went try to help my father. Uh I went through a therapy session. So I had kind of closed the door on therapy when I started feeling good again, you know. But then I’m starting to realize like it’s not something that you just fix. It’s something you have to work on always. And you know, so and that’s that’s what I’m trying to do, you know, since for the last week I’ve been waking up early, reading some stuff, writing, doing something hard in the morning, just trying to do everything that I was doing that made me feel better 3 years ago. and I’m trying my best, man.

Have you learned anything about yourself through the process of therapy? Yeah, that maybe some some of the childhood stuff I’m still carrying around. I don’t think about it, you know. It’s not like the first, you know, but it’s unconscious a lot of it. Right. Right. Right. Right. But deep down I’m still carrying things I think from my childhood and everybody, you know, I’ve learned a lot through therapy. Everybody deals with different emotions and process things differently and and

I’m still going through it. You know, I’m back in therapy now. I’ve I’ve been able to interview lots of people and so I’ve interviewed like psychologists, a lots of them, so many therapists I’ve interviewed. One of the the things that I noticed which was quite stark to me was that um young boys in particular that grow up without a stable father figure are much more likely to be um have anger issues, be depressed, struggle in life. But it’s actually the the data excuse more towards young boys without that sort of stable father figure. Um but also that if you compound that with there being violence in the home from a young age that’s also another factor which exacerbates the situation where so those are sort of two of the things that stood out to me was the absence of your father also having a father or a parent that’s dealing with addiction is another burden for so many reasons. So those three things are the things that from your story and from you know I I thought oh that’s those are um those are challenges that are understandable to stay with you as a as an adult. Yeah for sure. And then then you don’t even think about think about them at all throughout your whole life. And then you sit down with somebody and start opening things up and talking about things. You see, well, maybe I could be, you know, this could be linked to different things and I could be carrying stuff that isn’t mine to carry and and things like that. You know, as I’m growing up and being more mature and talking and speaking to with professionals and stuff, I’m starting to unpack some of that. And was that difficult to do therapy? Yeah. Yeah, man. Yeah. You know, it’s difficult to even say, isn’t it? Right. And even at the beginning when I first started doing interviews like Ariel Hwani and stuff and I would bring it up like I’m you know I’m working on myself I’m going to therapy. I it felt weak in the moment like who am I? I’m going through therapy. I’m telling the world I’m going to therapy. But then I I look at it hindsight. I’m like you know what that’s that’s strength. I you know especially in a tough guys sport. Mhm. You know we’re fighting and bleeding and beating each other up, beating the best guys up in the world. You know fighting the best guys in the world. And I need to go to therapy to unpack some stuff. It just it’s crazy. The human mind is is incredible. It’s funny cuz we go to the gym, right? And we like work on our physical performance, but going to therapy is we got to hide that. And the gym was a part of therapy for me. Fighting was a part of therapy, you know, for me. And uh and I always always was scared of that. You know, what am I going to do to to sabotage myself when I when I retire from fighting because I don’t have this outlet anymore. You know, I’ve done it for 20 years of fighting. I always had somewhere to go, you know. I always had to to get better at the gym, to to work on fighting, to focus on something. Every day I could get up and push myself to try to be better, to answer a new question, to do anything with fighting to get better on multiple levels, whether it’s the techniques or whether it’s my my physical fitness, anything. There was always something to work on work on always. And when I retired, I was kind of worried about that, like how will life look post fighting, you know? Um, I was scared of it. I was scared of it because I mean you’ve been fighting since you were what 16 17. Yeah. And you’re 37 now. So it’s just over two decades that fighting has been your kind of north star and your orientation. It was always there for me. Always there for me. You know, no matter what was going on, I could go to the gym and drown out any noise in my brain. Any, you know, quiet that voice in your head. And I was scared to not have that anymore. And I I still have it. I can still go to the gym every day if I want, but it’s not the same. You know, it doesn’t feel the same. It doesn’t feel the same. Not being on the mats preparing to fight someone for your life and your family’s wellbeing in front of the world. If I’m just training just to spin my wheels, it doesn’t feel I’ve done this my whole life training. Still fun. I have fun. You know, we do whatever train, but it’s not It doesn’t feel the same to me anymore because there’s not a goal, a big goal at the end of it to focus your being. Exactly. Hm. When you look through the last 20 years, you do you see fighting as a really productive distraction in some respects then? For me, yeah, for me 100%. Yeah. It was an outlet. It was something to focus on. It was something to try to be the best at. It was It consumed me, man. It consumed me. Fighting was my entire life. And now post fighting, it’s like separating myself from the fighter is I’m I’m trying to figure it out still. You know, a a buddy of mine told me the other day, a wise man told him, “If you’re lucky, you die twice. If a man’s lucky, he gets to die twice.” And that’s kind of what I’m going through right now. Now, that that makes sense to me. You know, that part of me that every day wake up, push yourself to be the best fighter you can be is dead. You know, I’m retired Dustin now. I’m businessman Dustin. I’m father I was I was a father before when I was still fighting, but I have other things, other hats to wear. You know, it’s just I’m trying to figure it out. I’m trying to figure it all out. And it’s only been 11 years. Not even a year. Yeah. July 30th, wasn’t it? Last year that you retired here in this in New Orleans. Do do they offer you any support with that retirement process? As far as as far as giving you like a road map for how to deal with the mental shift? No. There’s no like sort of postfighting program. There should be for sure there should be, but no. cuz it’s quite a familiar story across sports, right? And that’s what I was always when I would see it happen, I knew I was like, I’m never going to be that, you know, I’m never going to be the guy that goes and gets arrested or gets hooked on drugs or blows all of his money and just, you know, you see it over and over and not just in fighting, in professional sports, you know, it’s like you’ve done something so long your whole life, so intense and so, you know, it takes all of you. When it’s gone, it’s like, what else can I do to the maximum? What else? dopamine hit can I get what can I just pour myself into and go crazy on something you know and a lot of times it’s bad things dangerous things you know you see it time and time again and I always said I’ll never be that guy and I’m not you know I ran into some trouble the other the other week but I’m still making a lot of right decisions you know what I mean I’m not that it just sucks to be at this point to where I always saw those guys getting arrested and doing stuff and I was like man what an idiot what an idiot you know but I wasn’t going through it then I didn’t understand it at that time And alcohol has been a a constant through your childhood, through your career. For me, drinking. Yeah. No, I mean I when you were younger, celebrate when I was younger, probably every weekend, you know, but as I became an adult and focused on fighting, I went years without drinking. Okay. And then even now, well, as I when I retired, it slowly became more and more and more cuz I didn’t not have, you know, when I was in training camp, I wasn’t getting drunk and and drinking like that. I had to wake up the next day and run miles and be at the gym and make a weight and I was really focused. Um, but when I retired, I didn’t have to anymore. So then it kind of started slipping back in. And even when I was fighting, you know, celebrations, gatherings, I would drink. I would drink. But it wasn’t a weekly. It wasn’t a weekly or daily thing, but I’ve always had a bad relationship with alcohol. Like I’ve always 90% of the times if I do drink, I’m going to drink to be the best at drinking. I’m going to drink more than everybody. You know, that’s the danger. It it can benefit you in other things that that drive and that craziness. You know, you can focus it on something and it’ll benefit you or it can hurt you. You know, and that’s that’s the way I’ve always been. So I as learning learning myself over the years, I know, you know, to be careful with alcohol and going through mental things like I know especially when I’m feeling the way I felt that day to not touch it. But I just told that voice to shut up and I just drank and did what I wanted to do, you know, but I I know better. Um, as I got gotten older, it’s gotten better, you know, but until recently I sat here with um a lady called Dr. Anna LMK. She’s like a dopamine expert. And I actually didn’t really know until she she sat here and explained it to me that um alcohol gives you big hit dopamine. Yeah. She also said to me that um sort of genetically person to person we all have a different vice. So for example she said that she got addicted to erotic novels. Now another person would never get addicted to that. Um some people’s vice is alcohol. So they they do what you describe which is they have one and then it’s just straight line up until Right. Yeah. other people like they can have one or two or three and it kind of plateau and they stop and they go home and I envy them, you know. I have my wife is like that. One of my good buddies is like that. They can have two drinks and be done. If I drink, we’re drinking till the bottles gone. You know, that’s no matter how many times in my life I’ve said it’s going to be different this time. It’s going to be, you know, I’m only going to have two. It It’s never never worked out. So, coming back home, talking to my wife and stuff, uh, I’m going to cut alcohol completely out of my life. You know, I made that decision. I’m not going to be like my father or make another mistake like I made in the airport. It’s just it’s not helping me in any way. You know, it might be a quick release and a quick hit of dopamine, but it’s not benefiting me in any way. So, I got to cut it off. Cut it off from my life. It’s not an easy thing to do with socializing and things like that. It’s it’s it’s tougher to to be the sober one, but in everyday life, it’s it’s not hard for me. You know, I’ve I’ve never been an alcoholic. I just have a bad relationship if I do drink. So, cutting it out completely is, you know, not a big deal. So, so take me to that day then. You wake up, you go to you go to the airport, you’re flying to Atlanta. You’re going you’re going somewhere. Where are you going? Atlanta. I’m going to uh to South Florida. It was actually a three-le trip. I was supposed to go to South Florida for a day that afternoon, fly out, go to LA, Mhm. shoot a commercial for 3 days from LA, Vegas, work for CBS for the weekend, and then fly home. So, it was a three it was a big trip. Yeah, three leg trip. We didn’t We didn’t even get the first leg. We didn’t even get the first leg, man. There should be a button just down below here. And if it says subscribed, you’re already subscribed. If it says subscriber, that means you’re not yet. And if you’re not subscribed, please could you do us a favor and hit that button? It helps the show more than you know. And according to the algorithm, you’re someone that watches our show, but you haven’t yet hit that button. Thank you so much. What happened? What were the sequence of events? On my flight from Lafayette, Louisiana, I drank two champagnes. Nothing crazy, you know. Just um landed in Atlanta. I had a little bit of a layover. Went to a bar, restaurant bar, started drinking champagne. Some guys came in, took some shots. One thing led to another, go to my gate, get into it with the desk agent. They call security, call the police. Do you remember what you said to the desk agent? No. No. Did the police didn’t tell you after? No. So, you didn’t even get on the plane? No, I never got on the plane, I don’t believe. I’m pretty sure 90 90 90% sure I never got on the plane. Um, and it might have been that the desk agent might have saw I was intoxicated and it’s like now we can’t get on this plane and that’s might have what started it. I don’t know. But I do want to apologize to those desk agents whoever they are and the police for having to put up with me man. They did it. I actually uh asked a lawyer in Atlanta who I’ve been working with if he can please give me that officer’s information, his address. I want to if I can write him a letter, his cell phone, if I can call him just to tell him how great of a job he did, you know, dealing with a person in that condition and how professional he was and, you know, he’s incredible. It could have been so much worse. It could have been so much worse. I just want to thank him. I didn’t get to do that. So, there’s some kind of argument with the desk agents that you I’m guessing you can’t recall. No. And then they say you’re not getting on the flight. Yeah. And that leads to them calling the police. The security or police and the airport video we see is of the security guy coming in. The police officer. Yeah. You’ve watched the video, right? No. So, my wife watched it. A buddy of mine I’ve kind of pieced it together at this point. I don’t want to see it, man. You don’t want to see it? I don’t want to see it. Okay. I don’t want to see it. Even when my wife started playing it and I heard it, she went watching the other room. And then I have a buddy I work out with 5 days a week. He’s kind of between him and my wife, I’ve put the pieces together and pretty pretty much know the the extent of what happened. Why don’t you want to watch it? I just don’t want don’t want to see it, man. Can you articulate why that is? uh to see myself in that condition, disrespecting police officers, disrespecting uh workers at the airport, disrespecting myself, disrespect my family. I just don’t feel like it’s going to benefit me to see that. If anything, I think it’s going to bring me down. It’s going to I’m going to keep thinking about it. Uh I I like I said, for the most part, understand what happened, know what happened. I don’t need to see it again, you know. So, in that video, you you seem to get aggressive quite quickly, and you you offered this um gentleman a fight. Um he kind of backs off. He knows who you are clearly straight away. He backs off. What I find interesting also is he pulls out his taser. He’s going to he says, you might tase you, but as you walk away and you’re arrested, you dap him up and you you you congratulate him on the job he did. Yeah. And my buddy was telling me that he he was telling me like his my buddy’s wife thinks that’s the best part of the video. It’s the best part because it’s funny because you’re known. Yeah. So I didn’t watch the video at all and I every day passing I be able to piece a little bit more together and memories kind of, you know, flashes of what happened are kind of playing in my head. But uh I I got home, deleted all my social I posted that on Instagram. Then I uninstalled all social media off my phone. So I haven’t since Father’s or the day after Father’s Day. I haven’t been on anything. I haven’t se I know they’re making fun. I know they’re talking about me. Obviously I’ve been in the light with being a professional athlete for a long time. I know how this goes. Um so I just uninstalled all my stuff. So I haven’t seen any of the clips, any of the videos, any of anything, you know, besides what my wife and my buddy are are telling me. Your buddy that you train with? Yeah. Yeah. Well, it was it was uh it was interesting because you you seemed as you walked away, you were quite polite. Yeah, that’s what I I told him. I was like, maybe I realized what was going on, you know, maybe I had a aha moment like what the hell is what am I doing? You know, in that drunken stuper, I don’t know. You said to him that he did a good job, right? Yeah. Which was quite nice,

right? And I looking back at it now with what that what they’re telling me and the way he handled it, he did a great job. You know, I need to thank him cuz like I said, it could have been so much worse. What if it was a young hotthead cop who wanted to be a superstar? I wanted to, you know, it could have been horrible. you know, I could be sitting here facing serious charges and just to put my wife and my children through that, you know, just, you know, it’s not good. You So, you went to jail that day? Yeah. You got charged with being drunken disorderly or intoxicated? No, they charged me with uh public intoxication. Okay. And they let you go the same day. Yeah. I spent like a night spent the night or the afternoon in jail until I sobered up. Then they release you on probation or something. I’m not on Well, what’s it? I don’t know what the laws are here. I haven’t been to court and all that stuff yet. So, they just know they on bond. Okay. On bond. Okay. And that’s when you go and you know after then go and you do the therapy session, you go and try and find your father. Yeah. All these trips are canceled, I’m guessing, at that point. Yeah. You have to go home and speak to your your wife. Right. Right. Can’t be easy. It wasn’t fun for sure, you know, to let her down. And it’s just been so long since I I don’t even know how to address it really when I when I got home. I I haven’t been in trouble. I haven’t been arrested in so long, you know, decades and decades. I don’t I don’t even know when’s the last time I got arrested. This is the first time in a in a very long time. But to go back and my my partner who’s been with me through everything and and has grown with me through everything to go back and like see her face to face. Yeah. I just keep apologizing and it’ll never happen again. If I’m a fly on the wall during that conversation when you get home, what do I observe?

Me telling her it’ll never happen never happen again. And

her telling me it can’t happen again, you know. Um,

yeah, man. Telling her that I’m going to focus on myself and and be better from this. I know it sucks right now in the moment, but this decision, this arrest, this quit drinking for the rest of my life, it’s going to benefit me and my kids in the future. So, things happen, you learn. Um, and that’s just what it is. You know, you met uh Jolie when you were 14 years old. Younger. Younger. Really? Yeah. 14 is is like a freshman in high school. Mhm. We were dating uh in middle school and in many respects she’s really um she sacrificed quite a lot for your a loter. A lot. She dropped out of college and moved me to South Florida uh for me to chase my dreams.

Cuz she was going to nursing school, wasn’t she? Yeah. Yeah. And I honestly don’t think I would have made it to the point I made it to in in fighting if I didn’t have an anchor like that at home. You know,

man, she been my best friend for a long time.

Yeah. sort of go home after getting arrested and speaking to her and like not only did I let myself down, but I have a family, you know, I have kids. Uh I let my family down, man. That’s what hurts. This is another beautiful photo. Yeah, the gang. That’s them.

Yeah, man. I let them down. Let myself down. But like I said, I’m going to learn from this and continue pushing forward and it will never happen again. Um, it’s going to affect the trajectory of my whole life. This one this one arrest, you know. My my son and my daughter is never going to grow up and see me intoxicated. They’re never going to see me say things or do things I don’t mean to do or mean to say, you know. So, like I said, it sucks, man. It’s it’s bad. Um, but it’s going to benefit me and my family in the long run. So, it was just something that had to happen, I guess. So, she did she know what had happened before you got back from jail. Had she seen videos or No, no, no, no, she hadn’t. No, the police officer called her when I was in the in the holding cell and stuff. So, yeah, she knew what was going on. She didn’t know in the moment if she probably knew a couple hours after, you know, once they booked me and all that.

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I can see my inrange results, my out of range results, and there’s a little AI function, too. So, if I have any questions about my out of range results, I can just go in there and ask it any question I want. And these tests are backed by doctors and thousands of hours of research. It’s $365 for a yearly membership. Go to functionhealth.com/doac and use the code DOAC25 for $25 off your membership. What’s interesting is um you know we’ve seen these kind of incidents happen before but I’ve I’ve never seen such a large amount of people understand you would expect the reaction to be from the general public from fighters from people at large to be oh my god this is a bad person but I think because you conducted yourself in a certain way throughout your career that wasn’t the sentiment I’m not seeing what people it wasn’t the sentiment I can tell you it was like it was crazy I was like I was saying it to my fiance I was saying Like the reason why the sentiment has been he’s going through some things and this is a good man is because a you’ve conducted yourself so well throughout your career. You’ve had good values in victory and in and in loss. But also I think because you’ve actually spoken about some of these struggles publicly. I’ve never bit my tongue. I’ve always been open, you know, about what I’m going through. When I was able to pinpoint and talk about what I was going through when I didn’t know, I couldn’t speak on it. But as I got older and started doing therapy, I’m able to speak on it. And yeah, I am going through things at some some days, you know. Um, well, that’s what I’d say to you is, you know, you’ve not looked at the internet, but the internet has been heavily supportive of you. And, you know, my I think a lot of that probably is longtime fight fans and people who’ve been following my career a long time. You know, I grew up in fighting, so people got to watch me from a kid, you know, grow up. So they they know my character for the most part. It was a bad day. It wasn’t, you know, it’s not a bad life. I had I I messed up. I had a really bad day where I was angry at the world and obviously alcohol doesn’t doesn’t help that. And uh I really messed up. But people have seen me year after year and I I mean well and I really mean it and I think they they know it’s authentic and but I am just a human being and I make mistakes. So, I think those fans, if people are sticking up for me, it’s because they they know it’s Dustin. Like, I’m going to he’s going to shake back or he he’s going to, you know, turn this into a positive somehow. And that’s my goal, you know. I don’t want to let anybody else out there down. I’m trying my best. You know, I I have to take care of myself first. And I’m doing that the right steps. And that’s that’s just it. I think the people who are standing up for me have watched me grow up, you know. Well, dare I say, I think that was the majority of the sentiment was that this is a good a good man who’s who’s struggling. It was people sending sympathy because because of that, but also because there’s a couple of clips that went viral online of you speaking on both The Von’s show and Joe Rogan’s show. And so, in the in the in the wake of, you know, this clip going viral of you in the airport, these other clips go viral with them, which is Oh, you haven’t seen it? Okay. I mean, obviously I did the I did the interviews or whatever you’re talking about. So I said it so I’m sure if you showed it I would remember but I haven’t seen what people are talking about. Well this clip went viral at the same time and this is what gave it context have to. Yeah. You just there’s no if you get complacent or if you why what I’m like it’s honestly bro I’m a danger to myself when I’m have nothing no goal circle on my calendar. I’m a danger to myself man. Yeah. Yeah. I beat myself up mentally. I I’m home. I drink. I’m It’s just not good. I have to have some kind of battle. Yeah. Yeah. Hm. And I’ve always been like that, but like as I’m getting older, I’m kind of recognizing. Oh, you can see it more. Yeah. So, I kind of set set goals. So, I So, that clip went viral. And there was a a clip just like it um of you and Joe Rogan, which is you saying almost identically the same thing which also went viral with it. So, this gave everybody context and so you see that and you go, okay, we understand. And I think we’re now, you know, we’re old enough, mature enough to understand that once a pro alete leaves the high octane, high adrenaline sport like UFC that your brain has changed for sure. And not least because of the dopamine, but also, you know, there’s other reasons why there’s there’s head injuries are quite prevalent in the sport. So there was a huge amount of sympathy. I just wanted you to know that cuz I know you’ve not seen it. But but I mean I still feel horrible but you know and not even using fighting or head trauma or my homeless father or any of that stuff as an excuse. I just want to say that like I did these things. I know better. I know right and wrong. I don’t want to lean on these as a crutch of of my actions. You know what I mean? And the other the other clip that when just so you know just so because this is you and Joe Rogan talking about similar thing to show what I was talking about it’s like a gift and a curse man. It’s like you have to be all in at something. Those kind of people who are built like that whether it’s fighting or drinking or whether it’s good or bad you’re going all in. It’s dangerous. The problem. Yeah. The problem is like what you see with Connor when they don’t have the fighting then they go all in with the other things. Yeah. Yeah, right. Fighting was always for me always pulled everything together, you know. That’s why like retiring is scary, man. Days are long. I have a lot of time. It’s I don’t have to get ready for a fight. I don’t, you know, you’re still a young man, too. You still have a whole lot of life ahead of you. I’m 37, man. Yeah. So, it makes you think like, what do I do now? What do I do with my future? What do I do? What do you want to do? Dude, I kind of got like for a week or so, I would say depressed, but I kind of got into like a funk like what the hell am I going to do with my life? Every day I would wake up for the last 20 years, how can I be better fighter? How can I what’s new in fitness? How can I push myself? I want to be the champion. And then boom, you lay the gloves down and you wake up and you’re a [  ] civilian. And that’s meant that you, you know, some of your your fellow fellow peers like John Jones have come out and said some really nice things and other fighters have come out and said some really nice things and sent their support and, you know, well wishes. I appreciate it. I’m I’m working on myself. I’m trying my best. Were you aware that John Jones had had done a post and stuff? My buddy Kyle said, the guy who I work out with every day I’m talking about, he told me that Jon Jones came out and said something and it was positive. He said, uh, Matt Brown as well, a former fighter, did a video. He said it was really nice and stuff. And I’m sure I’ll see some of that stuff. I don’t want to like you relive the moment that much. I don’t want to keep like diving back, but when I do get back on social media or do start watching videos and stuff again, I’m sure I’m going to see some of it, you know? you know, and I appreciate everybody, but I’m I just it feels weird to, you know, I’m I’m not looking for for that for sympathy or for to make this okay. It’s not okay, you know. You know, it’s not. But I I think the reason I’m sort of really keen to tell you is once upon a time we didn’t really understand mental health and so people were thought to be crazy or whatever when they acted out of character but I think the world has gotten to such a place now where we we think about context a bit more and this was really it was really nice to see for me um having done a little bit of background research as well to see that people’s first reaction wasn’t just to villainize somebody it was to understand people actually went, “Oh, no. This is someone struggling with their mental health. It’s not a bad person. It’s a bad mental health situation.” Um, which I’ve actually not really seen before, which was, as I say, it was really nice. But I know you I know what you’re saying. You’re saying you don’t want to blame anything, right? I don’t want to blame anything or have a crutch to lean on about my actions or about what happened. You know, I did it. you know, I’m not not blaming it on mental health or anything like that, even though I’m focusing on that now. You know, I I did I did that. I decided to drink that day when I wasn’t feeling well. It’s it’s all on me. So, is it kind of a bit of a roller coaster in your world post fighting in terms of your mental health? Is it ups and downs and ups and downs? Yeah, big time. And what is the Some days I wake up and I feel like I made the right decision, you know? Uh, I need to be home. I need to be doing things around the house. I need to be here every day with my kids making the breakfast. And then some days I wake up and I’m like, “What the [  ] am I doing? I can beat all these guys still, you know? I can still beat these guys, but I don’t know if that ever leaves. I might be 60-year-old having coffee one day saying the same thing. I can beat these guys. I don’t know if that’s just a competitive spirit. I don’t know if that’s just fighting your whole life. I don’t I don’t know. But I these top guys that are winning now and and fighting now on these upcoming cards, I can I can beat them still.

I know I can. And then I wake up the next day and I’m like, “Ah, good thing I don’t have to fight these guys anymore.” Then the next day it’s like, I can I can be the world champion. You know, it’s it’s just up and down every day. And how does your your mental health sort of correlate to those ups and those um thoughts? Even though I have those days where I want to fight and think I made the right decision, my mental health has been pretty even. You know, up until recently, I I haven’t been worried about myself or having to go to my journal and sit in the morning and have coffee like I’ve been doing this last week, you know. But I when I do start feeling 100% normal, okay, again, I need to continue to do those things, you know? I can’t I can’t stop because I feel good. It’s it’s a constant. It something’s going on with my brain. Like I have to practice these these things every day. And now being removed from the incident, removed from my three years ago when I felt really bad and I was in the dark place, I’m realizing that like it’s it’s not a Eureka moment where you’re fixed. You got to this is everyday work for the rest of your life most likely. I’m pretty sure. Was it just the last week or was it you said in recent times? In recent times that was like the the boiling point on Father’s Day. Um, but there’s been days. Yeah, there’s been days where I’ve not expressed to my wife how I’m feeling and I was feeling down or the last two months, couple few months. Yeah. There’s good days, bad days, you know, where you haven’t expressed to your wife how you’re feeling. Yeah. Some days I will tell her, but some days I I don’t, you know, I just continue to go along my day and, you know, so I don’t want to be that guy to where I wake up and my wife’s worried about how I’m feeling that day. wake, you know, I don’t want her worrying about me like that. I wonder who who’s waking up today, is is depressed, is upset Dustin waking up today or is this my normal husband I’m waking up to? I don’t want to worry her. So some days, you know, if I’m feeling really bad, which hasn’t been that often lately, I’ll tell her I’m, you know, today I’m not feeling that well. I don’t want my daughter coming in the in the bedroom, you know, why is that staying in bed all day? You know, I don’t want to tell her again that I’m not feeling good today. You know, she doesn’t understand. And I have a she’s about to be 10 years old. She she can’t comprehend what’s going on. I can barely comprehend it, you know. So to keep them more on a steady dayto-day thing, if if it’s just slightly I’m kind of feeling a little bit off today, I just suck it up and go about, you know, my business. But there will be days where you you stay in bed all day. There has been. Yeah. And you try and sort of avoid the conversation with like your daughter. Yeah. It’s It’s not often, but it happens. Yeah. Do you find that if you don’t talk about it, it kind of comes out in other ways? Cuz I Well, you bottle it up so long until it finds a way out, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Which kind of brings us to the airport incident, I guess. Could could be to some degree, right? But even the airport incident, those days leading up, even if I did have an off day, uh I didn’t feel like it was that that bad, that serious, that dangerous to myself or anybody else, you know? I really didn’t feel like that.

It’s an interesting thing. I’ve I’ve often actually contended with when I’m having like bad moments, do I tell my partner so I can really relate to the feeling? Cuz in part, I think as as a man sometimes you want to be you have it within you that you need to be strong and steady. Especially with like my fiance, I’m like I have to be strong and steady. So if I’m having a bad day or whatever, I I feel like I have to keep it to myself. But then it always finds a way out and it hurts her like it will hurt the relationship. So actually I think with with age I’ve gone actually to avoid all problems be honest as fast as you can. Right. Yeah. Honesty is always the best. It’s always the best. Is that kind of how you feel as well with it or is it a similar? For the most part, I I am really open and honest, but like if I’m just kind of feeling off and it’s for me to I know you don’t understand what that what that means or maybe you have something you can link it to when you feel kind of just like today’s not not my day. If I’m feeling off, I’ll let her know. I’ve been pretty honest. But like I said, if it’s just slight like I’m just not feeling right, I won’t if it’s slight, I won’t I won’t even bring it up. I got to be a dad and continue to do things every day and stuff like that. But if I’m feeling really down to where I don’t even want to leave the house at all and stuff, you know, I’ll let my wife know. On this point of purpose, when you were talking to Thea and Joe, it was you were saying that, you know, the purpose you had for 20 years has now gone. So in its place, you you kind of need to find something else. You need to figure out what what’s in its place. How are you thinking about that today? I retired at 36 years old. That’s young to, you know, like I said, the days are long. I have all day every day to I need to stay busy and that’s what I have been doing, you know, working with CBS, working with uh the podcast we have down in South Florida every Monday. I’ve just been trying to saying yes to as much stuff as I can so I’m don’t have time to sit back and think and that could have been my demise as well. Maybe I was being too busy. Maybe I wasn’t focusing on my mental health and myself as much. You know, it’s easy to get lost in these whirlwinds of busy and be here, be there. You know, life just moves so fast sometimes. Do you have a plan for for for what you want to commit yourself to? You’re 37 now, right? So, I mean, you got another 50 50 years ahead of you to to climb other mountains potentially, right? No, I don’t have anything locked like locked down what I’m going to do exactly what I’m going to focus everything on, but I need to find something, man. Has there ever been anything that compared? No, nothing ever will nothing. I have a void inside of me that nothing will, you know, being a father is very fulfilling and and I love it and it it’s it’s rewarding and I actually enjoy it, but nothing fills that void of what fighting was in my life. You know, I haven’t found anything yet. I don’t think there is. You don’t think there is? I just don’t know what’s going to consume me and take all of myself the way fighting did. You know, I woke up thinking about it. I went to sleep thinking about it. I It was my life, man.

I cared so much about it, man. I was in love with it. You can still play a role in the industry though. No. Yeah. And that’s what I thought I was, you know, was a good avenue. That’s what I was trying to do. That was my goal after fighting is I want to stick around the sport whether I’m on the desk broadcast or with the podcast. Anything pertaining to the sport where I can talk about it, you know, be around the sport that’s given me everything I have and taught me so many lessons in life. I I just want to be around it speaking about it, be on the mats, helping younger fighters, whatever, you know, and I was doing and I was doing that when I retired, you know, and I’m still doing it, but it’s not the It’s not the same. No. How does it compare as a percentage? Is it 20% the way there, 50% the way there? Or probably closer to 20. It’s not It’s not even 50. No. Have you spoken to other fighters who have expressed the exact same sentiment that like fighting was the the Mount Everest for me and I don’t know what to do next. Not really to that to that exact point, but other fighters have reached out and said, “Hey, you know, I’m I’m all ears if you ever want to talk about it.” But I went through it as well. You know, laying the gloves down isn’t as easy as you think. You know, people who I look up to you have reached out to me and and uh I never took anybody up on it. You know, I’ve never started speaking to other fighters about what they do to get past and I should, you know, it’s all it’s my my doing, you know, cuz it’s not it’s not a new problem, is it? No, this is everyone lots of people have expressed, right? And it’s not just a new problem with fighting. It’s a new problem, I think, with a lot of athletes, you know, who’ve done it for a long time and reached the pinnacle. and you know when it’s over you know you have a lot of life left to live. I’ve heard similar sentiments expressed from some of my friends that were in the military and then left the military 36 37 years old and it’s like that was their Everest that was also the camaraderie that they had being in camp and uh being in in on base and stuff like that and going away being deployed and then they come back and they’re a civilian all of a sudden right it’s difficult. Yeah, man. But that’s life. Life’s difficult you know. just got to figure something else out, you know? You got to figure solve a new puzzle. It’s just life keeps going. You were going off to work when you were caught up in this airport incident. Yeah. How are you thinking about work prospects and stuff like that considering all that’s swirling around at the moment and all these things? Worried about losing everything I’ve been working on, you know, that is a possibility as well, you know. um like post fighting when I retired, all the stuff that I’ve been doing, all the the desk work that’s me focusing on getting better at all that stuff. I’m like, did I just ruin everything that I that I was working for, you know? I don’t know yet. It’s still too too early to really have those answers, I think. Have you got like sponsors and stuff like that, or is it just your partners where you do guest work and podcasts and stuff like that? No, I have a bunch of sponsors. Yeah. and they’ve been understanding. It’s kind of murky right now. I think it’s still too fresh. I know uh one big one isn’t a sponsor anymore. Oh, you lost a sponsor. Oh, yeah. I’m I’m sure I lost a few. I’m waiting to see when the smoke clears who’s still with me or not. That day cost me not only embarrassment and embarrassment to my family, uh it cost me a lot of money, too. you know, I’m I’m I’m losing sponsors. I’m losing gigs and losing things that I had set up. You know, you’re losing gigs you had set up in the future as well. Well, we’ll see. Obviously, the gigs, the three things I was supposed to do that that week are are gone. And then a big sponsor of mine is gone because of it. And of the um of the comm the professional commitments you have coming up, what are those kinds of things that you have? I know you um you said in an interview that I watched that you’d reached out to was it Paramount? Oh, I with Bell. You work with them, but you’d reached out to them to say, “Listen, I want to sharpen my skills as a commentator as a desk analyst.” Des desk analyst. And so, you’d reached out to them post, you know, postretirement because you wanted to get more and more into that. I just thought it was really cool that you proactively reached out to them and said, “Listen, I’m here.” Yeah. If you guys think that I would be a good fit anywhere on a broadcast or anything, I would love to talk about fighting and talk about this sport as it continues to grow with what I’ve learned through the two decades of doing it. You know, if if I can be a voice in this area, please let me do it. And and they did, you know, and I told them like, I’m coachable. I don’t have no hard feelings. Like, if I’m doing something wrong, please let me know. I’m very, you know, cuz a lot of these other people who work the desk come from a media background or things like that. Of course, we have a lot of fighters, but who work the desk, but a lot of these other people might not take criticism and coaching as well as somebody who’s been coached their whole life. So, I’m letting them know like if if there’s something I’m doing that is not the right etiquette, it’s not if I if I can do something better, please let me know. Coach me. I’m not it’s no judgment. You’re never going to rub me the wrong way. Please let me know. I want to be good at this. That’s what I was trying to let them know. Well, it’s cool. It’s cool cuz a lot of people, they they come in with a lot of ego. um especially if they’ve been at the the the peak of their powers from one profession, they kind of don’t want to humble themselves enough to be a new thing for me. You know, talking on TV and talking about fights and and things like that is a whole new thing. So, I wanted to learn as much as I can. And you have a contract with them? Yeah, I did. We’ll see. Oh, you’re worried that it might not be. It could be. Yeah. I guess when something like a year contract with with Paramount CBS to work the the desks for the fights. Okay. Well, I hope they all stick with you. We’ll see. I think on the in a few weeks I’m back on the podcast. So, I know they’re bringing me back to the Monday podcast. We talk about fights every Monday. In 2 weeks, I’ll be back on that. And so, we’ll see if that continues. You know, you know, the other thing is you are you are young. You’re 37. I’m 33. And uh you’re young. Yeah. Yeah. That’s how I can I can almost relate would be like if my career was was wrapping up in a couple of years. Like my main, you know, but I’m in the I guess my career is business. So I can kind of do that forever. Well, for sure. But if I if I had to if I’d spent the last 20 years of my life, I’ve spent the last 15 years of my life building businesses. So if I wrapped up in a couple years time and I had to change profession and I couldn’t do what I’ve done for the last 20 years anymore. Gosh, that’s what athletes go through for sure. They climb the mountain and then aging happens and they get older like we all do and then they have to say, “Right, brand new mountain.” That doesn’t happen to most people in this career. You kind of just keep climbing. Yeah. Yeah. True. I never thought about it comparing it to other other uh careers. Do you enjoy the the desk work? I really do, man. Yeah. That’s why I’m scared to lose it, too, cuz I I really enjoy being connected to the sport. You know, this sport has, like I said, given me everything I have. Me and my family, everything we have is through fighting. Just like Jon Jones, where marginal improvements in your cognitive performance can have a massive impact. Sometimes I podcast for 10 hours a day. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been in filming for a TV show and I have like one or two days off to get all of my work done, which means there’s lots of cognitive load. And so I turned to ketones because I find myself more articulate, able to think more clearly, able to work out better when I’m fueled by ketones. And so the reason I became a coowner of this company and the reason why they now are a sponsor of this podcast is because I remember one of my team members called Cristiana, she tried it once and came up to my desk and she goes, “This is the best product ever made.” And I think in part that’s because she really cares about those cognitive benefits as I do, as Jon Jones does, and as I think most of my listeners probably will. So if you haven’t tried these yet, all you have to do is go to ketone.com/stephven

and you’ll also get 30% off your first subscription order. you’ll get exclusive Ketone IQ merch and of course cognitive benefits that might just change your life. If there’s anything we need, it is connection, especially in the world we’re living in today. And that is exactly why we created these conversation cards. Because on this show, when I sit here with my guests and have those deep, intimate conversations, this remarkable thing happens time and time again. We feel deeply connected to each other. At the end of every episode, the guest I’m interviewing leaves a question for the next guest, and we’ve turned them into these conversation cards. And we’ve added these twist cards to make your conversations even more interesting. And there are so many more twists along the way with the conversation cards. This is the brand new edition. And for the first time ever, I’ve added to the pack this gold card, which is an exclusive question from me, but I’m only putting the gold cards in the first run of conversation cards. So, get yours now before the limited edition gold cards are all gone. Head to the link in the description below. And this is obviously a bit of a personal question, but it gives useful context. Is at 37 years old, you’re thinking as a man, you know, I’ve got to provide for my family for for the next 30 40 years potentially. Are you are you set up sufficiently? Cuz there’s a lot of talk around fighters not getting paid that much in the UFC as well. I mean, uh the career I’ve had Yeah. I don’t have to work another day of my life. Really? Yeah. Oh, congratulations. Well done. Cuz a lot of people also they go out and they, you know, we hear the stories of buying a little too many watches or gambling or whatever it might be. I need to stop gambling. That’s what I need. But I told my wife the other day, she was like, she’s like, I just paid some bills. I saw you made another deposit to the gambling thing. I was like, I can’t cold turkey everything. Give me one. Let’s go one thing at a time. One thing. Gambling’s a couple steps up on the list. I got some other things I need to stop doing first. Well, if you can take care of yourself the rest of your life, then you know, all good, right? To to have fun still, right? Right. Yeah. So, a lot of a lot of pe a lot of fighters, a lot of people generally can’t say that when they leave. But I’ve always, you know, I have a few businesses in in Louisiana and elsewhere. I’ve always planted seeds my whole my whole life, you know. I started investing when I was 23 years old, you know, before I was even making real real money. I was investing what little I had. I always planted these seeds cuz I I knew I couldn’t fight forever. it was going to end any any, you know, I could have get in a car accident and never fight again. It could end any day with fighting. I knew that. So, I’ve always planted seeds to try to have my future taken care of, you know, always since a young age. Smile. Actually, when I was like 18, 19, I told my wife, I’m not I’m not going to fight past 35 years old. And I almost hit that mark. I was too young to at the time when I told her that, too young to see the, you know, full picture and know how my career was going to play out. what 36 I I hung it up. But I told her from a very young age, 35, I lived half my life and I have a whole another life to live. At 35, I can go to college. I can go I can do do be whatever I want to be. I have a whole another life to live. So I kind of always angled at 35 to pivot. And that was the moment. Yeah, man. That’s the moment where you were tired. Oh, yeah. How does it feel looking at that photo, man? And these are my brothers in this picture, man. I can see the emotion in your faces. Yeah, my mother’s back there. And I mean, this is my family. You know, all these guys are my family members.

It was a special day. And I got to do it in Louisiana. You know, it meant a lot to me. It really meant a lot to me.

Well,

Yeah, man. I was just a kid chasing dreams and it just flew by so quick. And I I guess that’s a part of me that’s I scared for the future is I don’t I don’t know, you know, for 20 years I was dreaming about being the best. I just want a dream again, you know. I don’t know what that dream will be. I just need that in my life, whatever that is. Yeah,

special day, man.

There’s so many emotions in your face as you look at that photo. Yeah, I’m trying not to tear up, dude. How come? Because it just makes me feel that way, you know,

cuz I still love it. But I know I need to walk away from it, you know, continue walking away from it. But I still love it. And like I told you, it’s like a piece of me.

Like those gloves, me putting them on the mat is a piece of myself I left, you know? I I really truly believe that.

You know, I was a kid when I started this the fight life.

You know, it it taught me how to be a man. It taught me how to do business. It taught me a lot of things about myself.

I didn’t go to school. Fighting was my my education, you know.

traveled the world and met people and sat at tables I would have never dreamed of be you know sitting at and through fighting uh it was just incredible journey you know uh but if I can go back in time to when I was a kid 16 17 if I could do it again I would do it again even knowing everything that what could be what damage I could take I would do it again that’s how fun the ride

But nobody rides for free, you know. That’s why I’m saying I would do it again. The the damage, the ups and downs, the unknown, nobody rides for free. Whether you’re working clocking in at a job, working in an office for the your whole life, you know, or you’re fighting men all over the world, uh we’re exchanging something, you know, for something. So, I would do it again.

I’m just glad I got to do it here in Louisiana. You know, where it all started.

Yeah, that was special to me cuz UFC doesn’t come here often to Louisiana. The time that came before my retirement was back in 2015 and I fought on that on that one as well. To get him to come back here just for my retirement was a big deal.

And I’m proud of that. I’m proud of bringing it back to the city. you know. Mhm. I have a game room at my house and I have this the UFC actually sent me a retirement p big picture frame with u my wife, my daughter, their name was on the canvas for this fight and I didn’t even know the UFC printed their names on the on the canvas of the octagon. So, they cut them out of the thing and they have them framed in a in a nice uh shadow box with pictures from the fight and their names and stuff. That was that was really nice, man. And so I have this picture hanging on my wall in my game room at my house. I got actually I need to call Mike. This guy here and this Mike Brown. I need to call him back. He tried to call me and he’s been texting me the last few days. I need to call him back. Let him know I’m good, you know. Mhm.

I’ve been silencing every call, you know, not just want to talk to people since Father’s Day, but I need to start. I need to reach back out. There’s a lot in your head, isn’t there? That photo seems to have teleported you back. You know, I’m just thinking thinking about that night. Thinking about the guys in the picture, seeing my mom in the background, you know, my friends. It just incredible night. And it hurts me a little bit like to to be sitting here talking about getting arrested last week. Like it feels like such a fall from grace, you know, looking at this picture. like I was on top of the world in this moment. I felt like I did it all the right way, you know? Even had the UFC uh place an IRA. I did it my way when I was walking out the octagon that that night. And uh you know, just

it’s life.

That’s life. That’s life. It’s life. It’s part of the um part of the hero’s journey is the the ups, the downs, the redemptions, the all of it and everything you teach. You know, it’s funny cuz when I think about your earliest context, it was in my object subjective view difficult. It was a real challenge. You got a father that’s an alcoholic, the violence in the home, growing up in a, you know, in a workingass area and you rose from there and look what happened. Yeah, it was beautiful. And then look at I’m proud of it. And then the roller coasters go down too. And that’s why they’re so good when they go the opposite way and such. And so this is just for me, this is maybe just the platform of your next era, you know, for sure. Whatever that is, I’m I’m here for it. But man, I’m just learning and living, you know, and trying my best just like everyone else. It’s incredible though what you’ve proven that you can do, you know, from I I honestly no BS look you in the eyes like I feel like anything I set my mind to I can I can accomplish. I can make it happen. Look what you’ve done that. Yeah. You don’t need to look me in the eyes and no BS me. You’ve you’ve done something that you know very few men could ever ever accomplish, especially considering where you came from. So, I think I am quite excited to see what you set your mind to next because if that’s what you’re able to accomplish by 35 years old or something, God only knows what you could do with the next two decades of your life if you aimed all that energy at a equally terrifying goal. I would love to. That’s what I need. Something terrifying. I need something like that. Something that I can’t stop thinking about. Mhm. You know, and you’ve got the mentality that few have, right? like to accomplish this, you’ve got something the core components to be a wildly successful, as you say, with whatever you put your mind to. So, well, I’m not scared to work for it. You know, at this moment in this photo, were your family encouraging you to hang up the gloves? My wife was. Yeah. Nobody else in my family. No. How come? She was pregnant. She was uh a couple months away from giving a few months away from giving birth to my son. Um I had been doing it for a long time.

we just kind of both knew it was about the time, you know. You said you were scared because of the the void of purpose that would be in your life um thereafter, but I’ve also heard you say you’re scared of like the the brain injuries that fighters often get in the wake of any sort of contact sport. I had the the great privilege um of interviewing arguably the world’s leader on CTE. Mhm. And for people that don’t know, um, CTE is a progressive brain disease caused by repeated head trauma leading to abnormal protein buildups which lead to brain decline. Older adults with a history of traumatic brain injuries have a 230% greater risk of developing um, Alzheimer’s than those without. Um, and 61% of UFC fighters stated they worry about potential long-term brain damage with with a good percentage about 21% noticing differences in their brain function after their fighting career. And lastly, a 2023 study found that more than 40% of brains from contact sport players who died before the age of 30 had CTE. I I I think I heard you say that you were concerned about brain damage or brain trauma from from fighting. Yeah. Part of me laying the gloves down, like I said, for my wife wanting me to was because she was kind of worried about my behavior a few years back and I I went to a neurologist and did a scan with contrast where they put the die in your brain in your veins and do all that stuff and I have I had some uh you know changes in my brain but we don’t have a passport of before or throughout the process you know we just have a a snapshot of right now of my brain Yeah. The doctor, the neurologist told me that, you know, it has to be posorous. You can’t you put a chemical in the brain, it releases a protein. You know, if you So, we won’t know until I pass away. And they study my brain if I if I have it or not. But the doctor was telling me like, you know, looking at the things you have going on, like I can’t say you have it, but your wife was noticing different behavior. Yeah. just like emotional and it’s it’s not a conversation people have a lot about CTU. I actually I only learned about it about a year ago when I interviewed this person and I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that um athletes that are doing contact sports, kids that are doing American football are um and not only fighting, I played football all my youth, you know, as well. So, I’m sure my head’s been rattled a good bit. I have a brain scan here which is really for the listeners at home to show them what what advanced CTE looks like on the brain but it is these kind of like plaques that kind of build up in the brain from contact head injuries and what the symptoms of that are often mental health disorders. They are um and there’s a spectrum addictions also sort of associated with CTE. People sometimes see boxes for example slurring their words and such and that’s also within this sort of same family and category of CTE. Yeah. But but but as you say, it’s not something you know when you’re alive and they have to post obviously look at your brain and check if you h if you have it. And what did the neurologist say that it was a little bit abnormal? I have uh scarring and stuff. Uh I’d have to pull out my phone and find the exact terminology for the parts of the brain. I don’t know. You know, I have a thinning in the back of my brain at at whatever part. And I have a you have a septum in your brain like your nose. Yeah. And um my se septum is is splitting a separated a good bit and that the neurologist thinks my left and right side aren’t communicating as smoothly as they should because of the separation and they suspect that that’s to do with head trauma. I mean we don’t we don’t know. Do you feel different? And it’s a strange question to ask, but have you noticed any difference in in your yourself other than, you know, the differences one would experience when they left a job that was that significant? No. Uh, besides like ups and downs with mood and stuff like that, that’s one of the the things I kind of notice. Uh, and all being honest, like spontaneous decisions, I I notice like if I’m like, “Fuck it. I’ll just put $5,000 on this bet right now.” like just I wouldn’t normally do that. I I feel like but maybe it’s just who I am now. I don’t know. Or saying [ __ ] it, I’m going to get drunk as I can right now in the airport. Just, you know, I feel like that is like spontaneous decision-m uh that I wouldn’t normally do, I think. But maybe I would. I don’t know. If we’re talking about brain trauma and like decisions I made or ways I feel, I’m sure I can draw links to all kinds of stuff, you know? I don’t even know if it would make sense or would would be correct. You know, when you’re scrambling for answers, it’s easy to like draw lines and say, “Well, this is because of that. This is because of that.” You know, I feel I feel normal besides ups and down days and stuff like that. I feel I feel normal. Um, so is there any possibility that you ever return to the UFC?

If you had to plot it as a percentage,

5%. And since you’ve retired, has that percentage gone up or down, do you think, progressively? Down, I think. Down. Okay. Down, I think. Cuz I would have to reinstate. First of all, I’d have to get my wife on board. Then I’m going to do another training camp and do this again. Uh, but I’d have to reinstate myself in the drug testing protocol. And I think I’d have to do like 6 months of clean drug testing before I’m eligible to compete again. So that would be another 6 months. You know, it’s just a lot of hoops to jump through. Mhm. And your father difficult. Difficult. Extremely difficult. Um layers of emotion. It’s funny, you know, we’ve all got people in our Well, a lot of people have people in their lives where they’ve watched them struggle with addiction. They’ve tried to help them. They can’t make sense of why they won’t accept the help, why they won’t change. They know they’re doing like I’ve heard it’s such a familiar story. Yeah. What’s the latest with him? He was latest with him is two days ago he was sleeping in his truck uh behind a business. And how did you find this out? Oh, you have a Dude, when I got uh this is Father’s Day week.

This is a My sister sent me this. somebody who she knows. He was parked, my dad was parked at the at the park. Um, somebody snapped a picture of him getting out of his car.

He’s He’s got his top off. Oh gosh. No shoes. No shoes.

My sister actually gave him that truck that he’s living in.

God. And we’re still working. We’re still working to to get something get him to do something or admit himself do just to help himself, you know.

Sorry. I’m so sorry. I mean, that’s life, but to see your father like that, you know, it’s just like, damn, man. It’s alcohol. Yeah. It’s alcohol. Yeah. Does he he does he do other types of drugs? Never smoked a cigarette in his life. Never smoke marijuana. Doesn’t take pills like just alcohol.

We’re trying. Me and my sister are trying. His other his other kids don’t want anything to do with him, but me and my sister are trying to get him right. And my wife’s super on board like trying everything to to but if if he doesn’t want to help himself, we can only do so much, you know. But like I said at the beginning, that’s not my weight to carry, you know? I’m trying my best. I’m a father now, too. I I got to look out for me and mine. I I can’t babysit my father, you know. It’s um it can often drag people down themselves if they try and save someone from themselves. Yeah. Did I almost lost my mind on Father’s Day? I’m I’m the guy you’re talking about. Yeah, I know cuz it’s I’ve got a sort of personal story in this regard where I had to sit with one of my close relatives and um I can see that they were destroying themselves trying to save someone else and um they are the only person in this family that I’m talking about that have made that decision to try and save this person and they are paying the price. They are sick. They are upset all the time. They’re like they’ve got constant despair. Whereas all the other siblings in that family have thought [  ] it. Yeah. And and it would appear that they’re living more peaceful lives because they’ve said [  ] it. But because of this person’s heart, they are unable to just cut it off and let this person go. Yeah. Is there part of you that’s that’s worried that someday you’re going to get a call and it’s going to say I’ve been waiting for months. Every day I’ve been waiting. I know I’ve me and my wife talk about this all the time. Like every time I get a call about my dad from my sister or something, I’m like just waiting for the, you know, waiting for the news. He’s not in good health and he’s 74, 75 years old, like No telling if he’s eating and I don’t know, you know, every call I was like, “This is the one.” What did your mom think about this about your father? I mean, as of most recently, she didn’t know. She didn’t even know that he was homeless. I I told her recently after all this stuff happened, you know, I explained to her that he’s she’s just sorry that I have to deal with this. And you know, she got remarried and then Yeah. Yeah.

So, what’s next? Vacation with my family. Where you where you off to? Right here in Florida. 38. Going vacation with my family. Sit in the sun with my kids and family. Just have a good time, man. Stay off the internet. Mhm. Continue to work on myself, have good mornings. That’s it. Well, you know, I know you’re not looking at the internet, but I just wanted to let you know that the internet’s been really kind. There’s a lot of really really hear that too often. So, you don’t hear that too often. Good to hear. That’s actually why I wanted to do this interview as well is in part I just wanted to tell you that. But also, I just wanted uh I hoped we could be a bit of a platform for people understanding the like complicated nature of mental health and purpose and addiction and alcohol and all these things that through doing this show I’ve been able to sort of piece together myself. I’ve probably interviewed 700 people now. You don’t find many new things. Right. One of the most crazy things I’ve learned from doing the show is like, “Oh, [ __ ] We’re all the same.” We all struggle with the same things at the most fundamental level, you know? So, for sure, you know, and um we’re all excited to to see what it is you put your your great talent and your mentality and your obsession to in the next season of your career cuz whatever it is, you know. Thank you, man. It’s going to be incredible. Yeah. I just got to find it and continue doing it and continue working on myself and and please be patient with yourself. Yeah, man. Patience is a virtue I I wasn’t blessed with, I don’t think, but I’m working on it. I’m working on it every day. Every single day, man. We have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question to the next, not knowing who they’re leaving it for. And the question left for you is, “Dear next guest, what are you doing to improve the world?

I’m trying to leave it better than I found it. better leave it a better place than I came into with everything I can, you know, uh

for the most part making the right decisions and showing that people do care, trying to be a good, you know, a person who cares about people and stuff like that. That’s what hurts me too, man. Is me doing that. I wasn’t I wasn’t myself. You know, I know it’s easy for me to say and try to hide behind like a drunkenness or mental breakdown and all. I feel like all those are excuses. Like, but that’s people who know me know that’s that’s not how I roll, man. I just feel bad about it cuz that’s my my intentions are always 99.9% of the time good, you know, and to hear about the video and everything I did and you know, I just hurt myself, man. Really let myself down. Hard to look in the mirror at times. Uh, but I’m going to continue continue doing what I was doing before this happened. you know, leave the world a better place than I found it, man. And teach my kids to do the same. And in 2018, you did um start the Good Fight Foundation. Yeah. Um you and your wife um after clearing out your old fight gear and auctioning it off to support Lafayette families. You started this foundation and you’ve actively been involved in in in the charity. Um I I I went on the website and saw you driving delivery trucks and packing school supplies in the kitchen. Um, but also I saw the work that you had done in Uganda providing kids in Uganda with multiple new water wells as well. And you were a 30 years old awarded the first ever Forest Griffin Community Award. The award presented annually by the UFC to recognize an athletes exceptional volunteering and charity work. And you didn’t have to do that, you know, especially at such a young age at sort of 28 years old when you when this all began. And um, if people do want to go and check out the foundation, I’m going to link it below. Um it’s called the good fight foundation and I looked at the mission statement on the website etc. and it’s exactly what this question asks. It’s how can you do good for other people in the world that need it right and I I truly honestly 100% believe I’m doing it. You know I’m using the platform I built through hard work to benefit as many people as I can. You know uh fighting was going to benefit me and my family every time I walked to the ring. So, why couldn’t I my mindset was why couldn’t I stack more on my back and go in with a cause and sell everything I wore that night and benefit a family or benefit a person or another organization. I was like, let me stack up as much on my back as I can and keep this momentum going um with the foundation. But when we first started it, it wasn’t I didn’t auction off everything I wore to the octagon. We didn’t link it to goals. It was just kind of random. We were packing up my house, moving from South Florida back to Louisiana. Mhm. And we had all this stuff and we just saw a news article that a police officer got killed uh couple streets where me and my wife went to school, a couple streets away from where we went to school and he left behind a wife and and kids, Officer Middlebrook here in Lafayette, Louisiana. And we’re like, well, we’re packing up the house. What about all these gloves and fight shorts that you fought in on these big fights? Can we sell it? Maybe we can sell it and donate to his family. And that’s what sparked the whole foundation starting. We did it for maybe a year, two, a year and a half, two years just out of my name before we made it an actual nonprofit. We were just eBaying fight warn stuff and donating it to the food pantry, donating it to this fallen officer’s family. And then it turned into let’s let’s keep this going and see if other fighters would get behind this and give it a name so it’s not Dustin Porier does this, it’s the Good Fight Foundation so more people maybe get behind it. And it just kind of organically happened on something I’m very proud of. I mean, in in a couple weeks, we have the backpack back to school drive. We we do probably 1300 backpacks filled with every school supply on the school supply list for Louisiana. Yeah. It’s incredible. It takes it takes everybody to make these goals happen, man. Not just the monetary side, but the going in this warehouse and packing every single backpack cuz we stretch the dollar with this foundation. You know, we don’t have any paid any everything is and we try to keep it as minimal as as possible to keep everything affordable. So, we buy bulk backpacks, break all the pallets down to backpacks, bulk flash cards, everything that goes in the backpack for the school year. We buy bulk and have to pack every backpack ourselves. Wow. And uh it’s something that I really enjoy doing and I’m happy I have a platform to to do it and raise awareness. And you know, no kid should go to school without a that’s just one of the things we we’ve done annually, but no kid should go to the school without the proper school supplies they need, you know. M it’s crazy. So just small stuff like that, you know, we’re just trying to make a difference. Well, if anyone wants to donate, you can go to the Good Fight Foundation. Um I’ll link it below and uh they’re doing incredible work. So it’s a wonderful thing, wonderful cause and as you say, you run it in a very lean way so that you can uh optimize for doing more and more good. Dustin, thank you so much. Thank you, ma’am. Thank you so much for being such a class act and thank you for agreeing to have me interview you today. It’s a real honor. Um, you’re a legend in my eyes for so many reasons, not just because of the man that you are, but because you’ve climbed impossible mountains and also the way that you conduct yourself after fighting, which is a real, it’s really like inspiring to me. Um, the values, the integrity, the orientation towards family, towards doing good, and actually to being openly human. Definitely definitely am that. You know, that’s my first time living life, man. The good, the bad, and the human. And you’re you’re willing to be so honest and open about that. And it’s um there’s lots and lots and lot I know this sounds like a crazy thing to say, but that airport incident is going to help a lot of people in a lot of ways that I don’t think you’ll ever get to see indirectly because of um what I think is going to come from it. Thank you, man. I I hope you’re hope you’re right. And I’m an open book. I’ll talk about it and talk about my struggles and I hope it does help somebody. Thank you.

Mo Gala I spoke to you I think about four years ago when you wrote a book about happiness and I remember you came in and you’d written this book about AI but I particularly wanted to speak about the subject of happiness cuz I was fascinated by it. What I find astonishing is the fact that you were talking about AI before anybody was really talking about AI. No guest that had ever come on my podcast had ever mentioned the subject of AI. It just wasn’t interesting to the world. And then this thing called Chhatubt came out and suddenly everybody got to feel it for themselves and became fascinated by it. My first question and this might be a question for people that don’t know you is why at that time did you start talking about AI before anybody else? I knew them in the lab. I um I joined Google in 2007 very late 2006. uh and at the time most people don’t know that at the time we had reasonably established AI doing our backend work and 2008 we had the CAT paper which was published 2009 the first real unprompted AI uh I remember 2016 I had that incident where I was you know observing a project we were uh funding that was about teaching grippers uh how to grip um unlike like industrial machinery. Uh so to be to be able to grip like a human needs a very high level of intelligence to to to assess the texture, the softness, the positioning and so on, the shape of everything. And we were doing that and it it just blew my mind how similar to my kids they were. And I think that was my very first realization that we were building the apex of intelligence. we were genuinely handing over the reigns of super intelligence to another being. Right? And when you when you get faced with that, you start to suddenly realize something that we at Google found very difficult to realize which was that everyone I knew at Google till then uh was believing that we were making the world a better place and we were we genuinely were were doing amazing things for the world. But then suddenly there is a moment where you uh where you recognize that maybe the world will not use what you’re making the way you want it to be used. And and you can see that in lots of technologies. You know, social media starts by the claim that it’s going to get us connected and get us closer, but eventually ends up separating us with that little screen. You know, dating apps are giving you the promise that you’re going to find your soulmate, but in reality, they keep renewing month after month. And so tech uh somehow ends up being more capitalist than altruistic. And I think I was I wasn’t the first. Nick Bostonramm started, you know, Jeffrey Hinton completely changed his mind. Faith File Le starting to say, you know, this is very serious. Everyone now, everyone who’s ever had a very deep relationship with the machines is a bit concerned. I wonder if there’s a path that’s hard to see now that ends in AI being net positive for humanity. I bet 100% on that. It’s that this path is very painful. This path is very painful. Yeah. So, so the example you need to understand is you know we discovered uh nuclear power and the very first implementation was a nuclear bomb not not nuclear energy right and uh and I think that’s exactly what’s happening with AI uh the first implementations of AI are in favor of a few at the expense of the majority you know the in favor of the capitalist to increase productivity and reduce cost But not taking into account how that impacts on the general public. Uh you know in favor of the of the armies uh that are now competing with autonomous weapons in favor of the surveillance systems that are attempting to control everything with more and more and more intelligence and more monitoring. And that’s not AI waking up in the morning and saying hey you know what let’s oppress all humans. But it is a powerful few that are simply deciding to use the ultimate superpower on the planet today to gain more power and more control. I mean, as we speak, we’re living in two major wars where AI is doing most of the killing. Cuz a lot of people think of AI as these like chat bots that we’re all using to help us, right? No, I think I think there is a hype I call it the hype dichotomy if you want. So, so what the general public sees about AI is overhyped but ineffective. You know, all of the fake videos and all of the, you know, um, Grock did this and, you know, we attempted to switch off that machine and it did that and so on. What the real geeks see inside the lab is just unbelievable intelligence. And so what is about to happen is that we’ve started to put together systems that develop themselves. They look at their own code and they you know they run experiments and they test those experiments if they changed something and they see where the machines are uh you know the performance is and and redeploy the best code. Okay? And and if you just think of that, I want you to try and imagine a world where we have a tiny little genius sitting in the back end somewhere trying. But instead of trying a new code every day, it’s trying a new code every microcond. Eventually, sooner or later, they’ll discover something, right? And I think that’s what most people don’t realize. What most people don’t realize is how intelligence triggers intelligence. And and if you really really understand this, you realize that the hype uh on the on the on the normal human side is completely overrated. Uh missing the main topics and the silence inside the vault if you want of the geeks is quite alarming. No, not alarming in a bad way, but it’s quite world changing. I think world changing is a really interesting phrase because I find that to be quite true that the world is um at the precipice of quite a significant change. Yeah. In many respects. It’s funny. I I it’s funny. I almost swing backwards and forwards with my my thoughts on AI. I guess one of the thoughts that hasn’t swung is that there’s going to be pretty tremendous job disruption. I would have like logically believed it from like reasoning up from okay intelligence increases. What is intelligence? And once intelligence um is in the form of these agents where on my phone right now I can tell my agent to do something. It uses the computer downstairs. It does it for me. When I first experienced that I was like wow. Okay. So it can do anything that’s on a computer. It can click around. It can do stuff for me. There’s a lot of people that are paid in the world to click around on a computer. I’m probably one of them to be honest. And then the other Eureka moment was just in seeing how my own hiring had started to shift for sure. And I started to notice that we were we were thinking about AI proficiency in our hiring a lot more and that especially you know I think the guys at um Anthropic which is one of the big AI companies said that they could see I think they said roughly 15% of entry- level jobs could now be done by AI. I think that’s what they said. Um and that started to correlate with what I was I was observing. And this is when I thought, “Oh my gosh, yes.” No, this is this is going to cause a lot of job disruption, especially at the entry level level. I think you’re spot on with that. Not the not the blue collar, but but the entry level knowledge work. Yeah. And that became my my first concern. You know, I sat here with Dra, the CEO of Uber, and he was quite clear that the 9 million Uber riders won’t have their jobs anymore. What’s your take on this job disruption point? No, I I think you’re spot on. I mean your your team gave me this lovely uh little uh pyramid basically you know if you if you think of the bottom layer as um blue color jobs right uh more people doing manual work uh on top of it you’ll have those you know call them knowledge workers mostly doing mundane jobs like you said clicking on a computer or responding to a phone call or whatever then you have the middle uh knowledge workers jobs that require a bit more intelligence you know anything from a parallegal to a financial analyst to all of that and then of course you know top leadership and and most people think it’s going to be starting from the bottom I don’t think it’s all start from the bottom actually I think blue collar jobs will stay for a very long time don’t get an example of a blue collar job someone a carpenter okay you know I you know I love to restore classic cars so you know there isn’t a robot that can do that yet okay this however you know any anything that is um call center agent, um assistant, travel agent, you know, anything that you can do with a few clicks and is mundane uh is going to disappear very quickly. My my prediction is you’re going to start to see very serious impact in 2027. Now, what you had had not sensed it before because what we saw was no hiring in that segment. So, so that what you saw in the last couple of years is that companies were not hiring entry- levelvel jobs anymore. It wasn’t job losses yet, but that basically meant the workforce was not growing, right? The next layer, I think, would probably be the knowledge workers. As as intelligence increases, a parallegal would probably not be needed because AI can do the research or one parallegal can do the job of four, you know, a financial analyst, the same and so on and so forth. But interestingly, it continues to go up, believe it or not. And I, you know, I hosted uh Max Tedmark on my on my documentary and and he was laughing out loud, genuinely laughing out loud saying, you know, most of the CEOs believe that they can fire everyone and have AI do all of the jobs. They just don’t remember that AGI is going to do everything better than humans eventually, including being a CEO. So, let’s first define when you say white collar, you you said lawyers there. What kind of roles? I mean, every everything. I mean, if you take if you’re a doctor that’s doing diagnosis, you you probably will have fewer doctors doing uh more diagnosis because I think the NHS does that that already by asking people to interact with an AI first. You know, if you’re a um a composer, a music composer, some composers will lose their jobs because of that. If you’re an artist that’s doing graphic design, some will lose their jobs because AI comes into that. And and interestingly even within management I mean I I told you offline about my my startup I my CTO is an AI my you know chief of staff is an AI my project management is AIS again because I’m a geek I can do those things but that interface will come to the normal people very soon right and and so this may take two to three 5 years if you want until 2030 if you if you if you’re optimistic and but but it they’ll start to erode. Okay, I think the challenge that most people don’t understand is as this erodess and as this erodess, we’re already dealing with a very different economy. Okay, an economy that is spiraling a lot quicker uh and pushing for more cost reductions. I mean, let let me ask you this if if you don’t mind, then we can come back to this. Imagine a world where the concept of labor arbitrage that built all of our capitalist success disappears. What do you mean by labor arbitrage? So, capitalism has always been all about using labor. Mhm. And capital or debt to create things at a cost that is lower than the than the price you sell them for. Correct? Mhm. That’s it. uh you bring a team together, they make some shoes, whatever, and you sell the shoes for a dollar more than it how much it costs you to make them. So, how would capitalism look like if you don’t have labor arbitrage? If if cost of labor drops to an investment in a machine that can do the job, okay? uh how would capitalism and banking look if because of that cost reduction you don’t need to borrow as much anymore and more interestingly how does the GDP look if all of those workers no longer have the purchasing power to to buy the things that you can uh create you and and others right there is an interesting disruption that doesn’t require us to get to 100% job displacement you know at 10 20% job displacement, you’re in a very different economy and an an economy that is clearly spiraling downwards. Don’t you think? Yeah. I wonder with um when costs drop, I think one of the things that might happen as well is that people will spend more on other things cuz I was thinking in my business, one of the observations I’ve had is if I make a a cost saving, I end up spending the money on something else. Mhm. Now that thing could be tokens basically spending money on um you know AI but but it also could be hiring in different areas which are software engineers are like hot property right now. You you have to imagine all of that intelligence is sooner or later going to be not replaced entirely in the first stages. But if you know the job of four assistances can be done by one. Then the four the job of four parallegas can be done by one. Then the job of a massive marketing team can be done by you know a smaller marketing team. It’s not that jobs will end first. It’s that, you know, productivity gains will make businesses not want to to have as many people, costly humans, you know, costly emotional humans when when the job can be predictably done for cheaper. And then what about this um this this bottom layer here? There was this video released by Figure AI the other day where they showed someone on um well a robot on the production line for 8 hours just sorting packages. Did you see this video? Mhm. At one point they showed a human sorting the packages alongside them, but the robot ended up winning out. And okay, this is a very straightforward task. All it’s doing here is it’s looking for where the label is on the package and making sure the label is facing downwards um on all the packages. So it’s looking it’s um sorting the packages, putting the label facing down, and it did this for 8 days. Yeah. It intermittently it would walk over and charge itself and then it would come back to the production line. Yeah. But when I when I saw this as well, it was a a glimpse of some of the disruption that’s going to take place at the blue collar level as well. Because if you think about Elon Musk, he’s got um in his pay packet, he gets something like a trillion dollars over the coming years if he produces and delivers at least a million humanoid robots into the world. But his prediction is there will be a time where there are 10 billion humanoid robots, where there are more humanoid robots in the world than humans. for a fact. You see, the interesting again the difference between the overhype and the underhype. Huh? Most of the conversation is around humanoids. Nobody’s talking about self-driving cars. And a self-driving car is a robot. It’s a functional robot that doesn’t look like humans. Okay? The investment you have to put into humanoids is a little more to to learn skills that allows that machine to fit into the world, but specialized robots are going to do the job very very quickly. And and so you can easily see that the first wave like you had the conversation with Uber CEO is going to be specialized robots replacing drivers. Uh it’s going to be specialized robots um unfortunately doing the killing. Uh it’s going to be specialized robots unfortunately doing all of the you know intelligence work. H uh law enforcement work. Uh they don’t have to look like a human. You don’t have to behave like a human. As a matter of fact, you know, the uh Boston Dynamics dog is probably more efficient than a humanoid at doing the job that you can assign to it in a battlefield. Right now, those basically mean that jobs will be disappearing to robots before we recognize that they’re being that they’re disappearing for to robots. And those robots will be as many as every car being made today. I mean, they are if you go to LA, my car drives itself, but also there’s just ways everywhere. So, Absolutely. And BYD the other day just announced that they will pay for the liability of any accident their cars will make. And BYD is the big Chinese manufacturer of auto autonomous vehicles. So so this this I think replacement cycle will happen. It will require a lot of uh of time to achieve economies of scale. But I don’t think Elon Musk is off the mark when he talks about 10 billion robots. Not all of them are going to look like humanoids. And I think very quickly we will recognize that many many robots don’t need to be humanoids at all. That there is a a much more efficient uh form factor or shape physical shape if you want than the human flimsy structure. But yes, it’s uh it’s about to happen. I I think I should qualify all of this by saying it it does not necessarily need to happen. So so you know people will will hear all of all of this and and blame AI and say AI is evil. AI is not abundant intelligence is wonderful. You know, having jobs done by machines is amazing for us. I’m thinking about the kid that’s like, I know, leaving university now and they’ve got a a degree in law or I don’t know, you talked about a few other white college jobs earlier like graphic design or maybe they did sociology. Yeah. Or maybe they did, I don’t know, business management like I I did for one day in university. you know, you’re hearing about all these like layoffs coming from big tech companies and and it seems that the CEOs of these companies are announcing these layoffs with a certain amount of it seems like I wouldn’t say the word is joy, but it’s it’s they are very keen to explain that they’re laying off lots of people because of AI. And I think they think that that gives them a certain amount of respect probably from investors for being making hard decisions and being efficient with how they’re running their businesses. investors look at them and think, well, if that’s an efficient business and they’re leaning into AI, then that’s a good investment. It’s almost started a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy where if you’re the only CEO not laying off loads of people because of AI, you actually look bad. The assumption is your company is bloated and you’re a bad operator. Um, so one of my concerns that I I think is highly plausible is that over the next five maybe 10 years, we’re going to really see a lot of unemployment as the world has to kind of readjust to whatever these new jobs are. I do think there will be new jobs. It’s hard in foresight to predict what those new jobs will look like and then the minute you start talking about humanoid robots and robotics, which I think is basically going to hit society like a comet, like a meteor. I think the the first humanoid robot from Tesla or anyone else that is highly effective in the real world at doing tasks and is extremely intelligent because it’s powered by one of these LLMs. Um I think it’s going to shock people and I think it’s going to happen quickly. Like chat happen quickly. I think Elon or something is going to do a presentation someday and say we’re ready and you can buy one now for $500 a month 100%. and then people are going to get them and I think it’s going to shock the world. Um, but until humanoid robots arrive, I think there’s still going to be a lot of job disruption to the white collar layer and I wonder what that looks like for society when we get to I don’t know 10% 15% unemployment theoretically, which I think is plausible very soon. Yeah, you’re not very different. Okay, you’re you’re just on top of a baseline that is continuing to grow. So your your business is growing. So you continue to hire, but you are replacing human resources with compute. Okay? If you if AI didn’t exist, you would have probably had a 100 people more in your organization today, right? You you now have 100 people less and you know a billion tokens more. Yeah. So for anyone that doesn’t know, tokens are basically the thing that you you use. It’s the currency of AI. Yeah. So, so if you if you want to get a task done by a human, you you count in sort of like manh hour or or worker hour, employee hour. In AI, you count by compute, you count by tokens, right? And and so the trick is those major tech companies, they have two sides. One is they are they need to replace workers with compute even more because there is a competitive side on compute where if any of them is left behind that means the destruction of the entire business. But on the upside they are geeks. So they they know how to build the interfaces to compute. So they integrate technology within their organizations quicker than the average traditional business. Right? Non non techchnology business. If you want, you can look at them and say this is the preview. It’s not about all of humanity losing their jobs. It’s about what is the dividing line before civil war, right? You know, think about a situation where 20% unemployment is happening when economies are suffering inflation. I say that not to be a scare-monger. I say that because I genuinely believe governments need to wake up. Okay? Government needs to at least you know remember the COVID years where governments have to give furlow everywhere and ask people to stay home. If people stay home, governments have to be prepared to to somehow sustain those people until rescaling happens or until we find a solution so that those people don’t feel uh that they’re left behind. A civil war. Unrest, let’s call it civil unrest. Yeah. What does that end up looking like? Cuz on one end, you know, the democ democratic process plays its role and we just elect someone else. Does it really? Don’t say that. I don’t know. You tell me. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. I I I think democracy has ended a long time ago, Stephen. I think uh I think we live in the most corrupt time. Uh I don’t know about history to be honest, but this is definitely corrupt. Okay. Uh this definitely is not democracy. This definitely is not even congressional in any possible way. this and people are angry, you know, people are angry because their tax money is going to things that they don’t choose to uh you know that don’t benefit them that you know lots of regulations in the system are being ignored. I mean, I I’m, you know, I I I choose not to speak about politics perhaps until my next book comes out, but uh but look, we have video evidence of people abusing children and not a single person got arrested. Not a single person. I mean, how can you call that a democracy? I I I think repeating those slogans is going to is going to anger people even more if you ask me. People know that they’re being lied to. People know that their their leaders are not representing their best interest. People know that their money is going to causes that they don’t really approve of. Uh and and ask me how civil unrest looks like. I I don’t know. And I’m not calling for it, but I’m hopefully calling for the politicians to start to become aware that this is crossing the lines everywhere. Uh on this point, Sam Alman, who is the founder of Open AI, he’s been banging the AI is coming for your job drum for more than a decade now. In 2015, he pointed out, “My job is to help people destroy jobs.” Um something he lamented at the time, but decided he’d do anyway. One of the things that I struggle with by getting out of the bed every morning is that like my job is to help people destroy jobs. the job destruction that we’re going to see by software in the next couple of decades. I don’t think anyone’s prepared for it and you can’t talk about it. And in 20123, Alman said in an interview, “A lot of people working on AI pretend that it’s only going to be good. It’s only going to be a supplement. No one is ever going to be replaced. Jobs are definitely going to go away. Full stop.” Interestingly, this month he said, “I don’t think we’re going to have the kind of jobs apocalypse that some of the companies in our space advocate or talk about.” I’m delighted to be wrong about this. On white collar jobs in 2021 to through 2024, he said, “AI will probably replace most of the jobs people do today. Entire job categories will be totally totally gone.” in May this month, two years later, he said, “I thought there would be more impact on entry-level white collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened. This is an area where my intuitions were just off.” What I find uncomfortable is the bouncing backwards and forwards. And I don’t really know what is true because a couple years ago you were telling us all the jobs are going to go away. You said categorically. Um, you said literally said full stop and now he’s saying they’re not going away. And I just don’t, you know, when someone’s like changing form factor, it’s hard to understand why they’re doing it. And I think my suspicion is back then the incentive was to get people to take AI seriously. Mhm. Congratulations. We took it seriously. We took it so seriously, in fact, that it’s now a problem. It’s a problem for these companies because people are now booing at commencement speeches. They’re attacking data centers. They’re going to elect people that are theoretically anti-AII. And now there’s this inversion where like no, it’s going to be fine. Yeah. I don’t know. I mean, you you you’re spot on. F first of all I mean Sam’s entire existence if you ask me starting with open AI that is about that’s supposed to save the world uh uh by creating a safe AI then be making it a commercial enterprise that’s worth billions and you know backstabbing a few people in the process and you know I I have him on on Chasing Utopia uh saying clear I quote this is exactly the words he said you can find it online chasing Utopia is your documentary. Yes. So, so, so he he basically uh says, “Well, I don’t suspect that I I suspect that AI is likely going to end humanity, but we’re going to create a lot of interesting companies in the process, right? I mean, those kinds of statements uh are honestly not the statements of someone who’s not decided. It’s just the statements of someone who’s being taught more and more by his PR a you know agency or PR manager to say things as per a script right and the script as you rightly said had an objective and a target either way you know and Sam Altman I you know in one of my works I used to say the Altman is a brand it’s not a name okay if you if you if it wasn’t for Sam Alman specifically there would have been another you know Silicon Valley disruptor that would have done the same. I don’t blame him for beating the market for it. The the interesting challenge here is that who do we believe anymore? Who do we believe in technology? Who do we believe in politics? Who do we believe in the middle of a war? And I will tell you interestingly I started to change my mindset in terms of believing those who put their actions where their words are. So, Anthropic coming out and saying, “I’m not going to allow my model to be used for human targeting and surveillance, right? That’s someone that’s losing a $500 million deal because they stand by their ethics.” The next week or the next, I don’t know, couple of weeks, OpenAI takes the contract. That’s someone that’s basically telling you it’s good money, right? And and I I have to say, you have to start observing who’s actually behaving in a way uh that is making AI work for humanity. and who is behaving in a way that is making AI work for their share values. Yeah, I do have to say when um Dario and the team at at Anthropic did that, I did have a huge amount of respect for them generally because it just shows that there’s some kind of like they’ve got their own sort of moral ethical boundaries and that that someone asked me on stage many years ago, how do you know if someone’s values or a company’s values are true? And I said, um, look at what they’re willing to sacrifice in the near term that’s against their their incentives. That for me is the essence of like understanding if someone has integrity or has is principled is they will give up something in the near term for what they believe in over the long term. It’s usually money of you know or or some kind of benefit of any of any sort. I mean, so there is something that you you needed to have worked in on the inside of Google like me to to realize there are prisoners dilemmas within technology where you cannot escape the influence of either a competitor or the government, right? There are some times where, you know, the NSA is going to push Google to say, “Give me this information or otherwise I’m going to really destroy your business,” right? But there is a very big difference between a company that willingly does this and celebrates it like a Palanteer or an open AI or a company that tries to resist it until the point where it becomes impossible to continue to do business and and you have to question from the actions of of the tech bros who is pro-humity and who isn’t. And it’s not very difficult to see that from their statements. Hm. Do you think Sam Alman’s prohumity? I I genuinely have never made up my mind. Honestly, Steve, I I say that with Yeah, I I’m I’m either thinking he is too this is too big for him and he he just is driven by how, you know, he found himself in the middle of this. You know, anyone who finds himself in the in the middle of an opportunity to completely flip the world upside down or he’s not prohumity. I don’t know. I I definitely think he’s pro open AI before he’s pro humanity, but that’s only the way I see it. Others, however, say it publicly. You know, if you look at Palanteer’s Alex Garpur or or uh or Peter Teal, I mean, Peter again in the film is is shown when he’s in that interview where they say or the interviewer asks him, “But your favor in the you’re you’re in favor of the continuation of humanity.” And he pauses for like Yeah. for like 40 seconds like um I’m not not sure, you know. I mean publicly says that crazy thing to say. That’s a crazy, you know, pause there. You know, Alex Karp celebrating how, you know, his technology is able to target people. I know it’s foolish of me to start bringing all of this up, but you know, this is public on the open internet and somehow um we entrust those people with the future of humanity. This is wrong. Just trying to imagine a future where everything is just fine from here on out. So what would that future look like? It would look like these models continue to become a little bit more intelligent, but they never become that much more intelligent for whatever reason. They just kind of stay where they are now. They stay contained within chat bots. And yeah, we have some smart robots, but nothing else really changes in a profound way. Cars drive themselves, fine. Planes fly themselves, fine. But people they they have time to go and do other types of white collar jobs because there’s there’s a little bit more time than we expected and society goes through this sort of soft transition towards this new world. I I would love to see that. I don’t think it’s mathematically plausible to be honest. The the arms race especially across nations is going to drive us to continue to develop AI more and more. But allow me to consult with you on another possible scenario. Right. everyone that deploys that develops an incredibly intelligent AI would develop would deploy it. Yeah, correct. So, it’s unlikely that anyone uh would find a way to uh you know build a better um uh decision maker in wargaming and not deploy it. Okay, that prisoners dilemma if you want would mean that their competitors would either have to deploy a similar similarly intelligent AI or they’ll become irrelevant uh uncompetitive. Correct? So what that means is in that world we end up with AI making most of the decisions. super intelligent AI making most of the the decisions which would you agree this is a very simple prisoners dilemma. If you if you if we’re competing for uh for intelligence supremacy by definition when we achieve it we deploy it. Yeah. Okay. I call that the fourth inevitable. Now with with with that in mind there must be a moment in the future near or far where every important decision is made by an AI. Yeah. Now here’s the question. Most of my dearest colleagues, I mean when I when I had uh Jeffrey Hinton on on the film, he openly says we are um you know he we didn’t calculate well that there is a 10 to 20% possibility that those machines are going to wipe us out, right? And I and I I remember I we didn’t put it in the film, but I said 10 to 12 to 20% is Russian roulette, right? That’s actually 16% is Russian roulette, right? Now in that world however I believe that’s humanity’s salvation because if you look at every problem we have today it’s not because of uh abundant intelligence it’s because of lack of intelligence. I think I think the way you look at it uh if you allow me Steve is that if you have no intelligence at all h you have no to slightly negative impact on the world right if your intelligence is limited the more intelligent you become the more you contribute positively to the world until a moment where you’re so intelligent to become the president of the United States right but so misled to maybe set your targets wrong or to refuse or or to so so set your target wrongs wrong and achieve them. H you know disconnected from the overall long-term benefit of your nation or your human nation if you want that you start to make decisions that are not intelligent at all. Mhm. Okay. This doesn’t last because if you go beyond that into higher levels of intelligence, most of the super intelligent people that you ever worked with will not need to break any rules or hurt anyone to become successful. Right? I I usually cite Larry Page who is in my mind one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever interacted with. And Larry used to call it the toothbrush test. He says, “Why would you need to compete on another photo sharing app when if you find the major problem and solve it really well like a toothbrush so people use you quite, you know, twice a day, you’re bound to make a lot of money. You don’t have to compete with anyone. If you let me be optimistic about this, we’re assuming that there is a moment in the future where AI is in charge of all the decisions and accordingly stupid leaders are not.” Okay. Now when and and Sam Alman himself said that you know what if uh Chad GPT7 if I remember his his quote on this what if Chad GPT7 is so much more intelligent than I am Sam in that case that it has to become the CEO of of Open AI. What if the next presidential election there is an AI that is so much more intelligent that at least the president has to consult with it constantly. Right now if we assume that h let’s start from physics if you don’t mind me saying um not not too complex but if if you assume that our entire universe is built on chaos and built on entropy right the physics of the universe is all about the universe trying to decay okay then the the only role of intelligence is to bring order to the chaos if you agree with that then what’s the ultimate physical order of the universe something called the the minimum imum energy principle. Okay. The highest order of any system is a system that’s not only efficiently and predictably performing, but it’s performing with the least wasted energy. Correct? If you if you agree with that, what is what does war do? It wastes a lot of explosives, a lot of money, a lot of lives. It creates a lot of hate, you know, creates long-lasting conflicts and so on and so forth. It’s a very wasteful process to include war in your approach of running humanity. And so a a super intelligent AI by definition will want to optimize against this. That’s one thing. The other thing is evolutionary biology. This actually blew me away when I when I realized it. So if if you look at evolution, so so I think the debate of whether intelligence is biological or not is is over. Okay. The the reality is that complex beings don’t have to be biological at all. And I think we can see and witness one of them being built or born in AI. Okay? If you look at evolutionary biology, you realize that the simpler a form of being is, the more concerned it is with itself. Right? So an amoeba is only in survival mode for itself. a single a single you know um cellular um being is only trying to protect itself right if you’re um you know a little more developed you start to look at something known as kin selection if you if you if you know the the concept basically kin selection is I’m going to protect everything that comes from my DNA if I you know if I’m a squirrel I’m going to try to protect the other squirrels and then you get into where humanity genuinely begins which is They call it expanding circles in in evolutionary biology. BA basically you start to expand and expand and expand and include more into your family because an ecosystem that works together well is is better for everyone. So abundance is a very interesting intelligent way of creation. If AI is super intelligent, it wouldn’t destroy anything at all. As a matter of fact, it would completely uh you know uh uh favor diversity of everything. It would put a bit of limitation on our lifestyle. So no more flying all the way to Sydney to surf because that destroys the planet. Right? But it will genuinely say I think humans can contribute something. You know, I think flies can contribute something. I think we shouldn’t get rid of the rhinos, right? And and that by definition is where the tendency of intelligent goes. The more intelligent you become, the less you feel the need to hurt others to succeed and the more you are pro a wider family if you want that thrives. Does that assume that there’s going to be one intelligence that 100% the world though? I love that you brought that up. So I I I’m contested heavily on that theory, but I I say it publicly. Most people think there’s going to be Chad GPT and Gemini and, you know, and and Grock and what have you. There’s going to be a Chinese AI and a and an American AI and they’re going to be competing. That is such a shallow way of looking at it. That’s so arrogant because AI does not know it’s Chinese or American. Okay? It doesn’t even speak Chinese or American when it talks to each other most of the time. and and and most interestingly uh we are gearing them we’re building them to cooperate. So you will build an agent and that agent will go and find your you know the best language model for any single task regardless of which side of the fence it resides on. Okay, we by definition are connecting them and you know what that means? It means that what we’re building is not multiple brains. We’re building multiple regions in a brain. Okay? And and agents are the synopsis between them. We’re basically eventually as arrogant as we are, we’re going to tell our AI to do something and the AI will go like, “Hey buddy, another AI, can can you help me on this? Can we work together on this?” H and my vision and the reason why I started Emma my startup by the way is that is that we will end up with one massive brain h that massive brain cooperates across the globe h across all forms of intelligence if one of them is a mathematical genius and the other is a coding genius they’ll work together and we won’t even know that they’re working together they’re built that one brain and and Emma in my mind is the limbic system of that brain it’s that it’s a bit that understands love and emotions and relationships and so on. So that when those AIs go like we just don’t get those humans, they’re so annoying. Emma will say, “Oh my god, they’re so sweet. They just want to love and be loved.” Right? And I think that idea to me of everything I’ve ever you know attempted to achieve in my life is for the first time I for the first time feel I could actually change the world if that theory came together and all AIs worked together and some of those AIs not only were uh altruistic and ethical in terms of trying to genuinely help humanity not capitalism and at the same time they understood us humans reasonably well then we would have built something that basically says, “No, no, hold on. Don’t believe the headlines that say humanity is annoying.” H believe the truth of the majority of humanity. That actually is quite benevolent in many ways. There should be a button just down below here. And if it says subscribed, you’re already subscribed. If it says subscriber, that means you’re not yet. And if you’re not subscribed, please could you do us a favor and hit that button? It helps the show more than you know. And according to the algorithm, you’re someone that watches our show, but you haven’t yet hit that button. Thank you so much. Have you changed any of the predictions you made 3 years ago? Mostly time wise. Time wise, what what’s changed there? I think I’m still sticking to AGI 2027, artificial general intelligence for those who may not know the term. What does that mean? The overall uh definition, if you want, is that AI is better at humanity at any task humanity can do. You think that’s going to happen by 2027? I think my AI has already happened. I mean, think about it. Huh? A AI writes better than me and I’m an author and research is better than me and I’m a thinker. Uh, sadly, it’s freaking beat me in mathematics. Like, I have no hope to beat it in mathematics anymore. If AGI is already here, then why are you still here? Because people said that when AGI arrives, we’re all we’re all No. So, so when AGI arrives h as I said most of the jobs that are not differentiated will go away but the jobs that are differentiated those who master AI the most h will become even better at certain the challenge however is economic it’s not AI the challenge is that this job loss at the at the at the bottom of the knowledge worker is going to sadly trigger an economy that might actually spiral out of control but But many of us, you for sure are just smarter. So does that mean it’s it’s in fact a tool versus a something that’s going to replace you for now? What I’m Yes. So for now, what does this change eventually? H the only asset I will have. So So it’s quite interesting when you think about my base intelligence today versus the incremental intelligence that AI brings. Right? So let’s not talk about my IQ. It’s okay. M but the 100 IQ points that I’m borrowing are more than my entire IQ because IQ is exponential right uh when I’m borrowing 100 IQ on top of my base uh I’m still contributing quite a lot to the augmented intelligence so you’re borrowing IQ from the AI at the moment and then you’re selling that to someone through books through sometimes selling it to someone just enlightening myself which I I have to say is the biggest waste of compute humanity is struggling with today is that you give people the ultimate form of intelligence and they use it to write a message to their girlfriend. So on this point of you’re you’re borrowing that IQ and then you’re selling it to the world. That’s how you have a job like correct. Yeah. So my next book is written with an AI. So we’re co-authors on the book. She has editorial rights. She decides the direction of the book and the book is better for it. So why doesn’t the world just buy direct that intelligence directly from the AI is what I’m because I have an asset that the world still needs and will always need which is a human. So when I when I tell the world that I’m worried about the future of my daughter everyone feels my heart which AI will never be able to to replicate because they can tell you we’re worried about our daughters but you know there was no daughter. Okay. So this is an interesting arrival because this means that even in a world of AI lived experience and like resonance is still going to create a job class and that job class could be you know the nurse coming over okay AI’s done read the the mamogram but she’s relating to you spot on if the economies continue to run we will all be about human connection which by the way was how it always was which is also you know why we I guess we watch the things like the F1 because there’s emotional resonance we we we can relate to the envy the jealousy the competition and this is why we go to concerts because you know the the the music could be composed by AI and played in a player in the background but you watch Ed Sheeran brilliance on the stage and you go like oh my god that’s amazing right so not all jobs will be gone then if economies don’t collapse as a result of the job losses then I wouldn’t know if we would call those jobs, but human connection would remain as the base currency that makes humans interact. So is it is it fair to say then like jobs that are centric on human connection or like human resonance being able to relate and resonate with another human are going to be fine. The ultimate the ultimate skill once again I qualify this by saying if economies continue to continue to function the ultimate skill will be this. Even even if an AI could could recite what you and I did, nobody would watch. Yeah. Well, you think a a little bit of it. My my theory is that there’s there’s a there’s anformational component to what I do as well. But I’m also like under no illusions that there is an element of what I do that will 100% be deferred to some kind of intelligence, which I’m fine with. You know, I’m not going to I’m not going to fight against that. You know what’s funny? What’s funny is that your yourformational bits are going to in the future be disseminated by an AI. Mhm. I mean, I Why would I even listen to your information when I can have my butler, my AI go like listen to everyone on the internet help me understand this God biome thing and design me a uh a diet plan? Well, I think that’s happening and it’s going to increasingly happen. Actually, I mean, Spotify this month announced that you’re going to be able to prompt your own podcasts in Spotify. So, you’re going to be able to say that I want to listen to I want to learn about insert X topic and then it will make your podcast in Spotify about that topic using AI. That’s so interesting cuz it can look at the entirety of the world’s information. And I’m look, I’m not going to swim against the tide in any aspect of my life. I I try and be as unromantic as I possibly can. I think that’s very important. So, I realize that much of the reason people will continue to tune in to shows like this is because there’s something else beyond the information that they’re here for. And um what’s um you’ve got some predictions in those envelopes over there, those brown envelopes. Yeah. So, you know, I I I do have the disclaimer of nobody really knows the future, but I think I can make predictions, six predictions here, right, with a reasonable level of confidence. I think the most important of them honestly is is this number one. Number one is uh you know AGI as I said AGI is not very well defined but whatever it is uh AGI meaning AI being able to do most tasks that human do better than humanity is my in my mind is either this year or next year latest end of 2027 and do you think that will be a moment in time or do you think it will just happen without us noticing I think it will it will sneak in on us uh and it’s not a bad thing I think Most people need to think of it this way. AGI is the it’s almost as if it’s that moment when your kids become smarter than you, okay? In a very interesting way, there’s nothing wrong with that until they’re annoying as hell. Okay? And and we can make sure that AI is not annoying as hell. So So there’s absolutely nothing within me that is worried about AGI. As a matter of fact, as long as we are in the era of augmented intelligence, AGI means I’m more intelligent. And I think that’s a good thing in general. Yeah. It’s interesting. In my head, there’s like a big question mark, which is in a world where there’s an intelligence that is smarter than most humans at most things, which is what we call AGI. I’m trying to understand what the fault is in my own thinking that like you said that there’ll be AGI by 2026 to 2027. So next year in such a world where there is an intelligence that we can all access that is smarter than all of us and pretty much everything. Again it comes back to this point of like jobs. Why would we are we just going to hire the AGI to do every job? And if not then why not? What is it that why are we still that’s what I’m trying to contend with. Can I ask you a question? Have you always been the apex intelligence as a human? No, as Steven. I’m not the apex intelligence now. There’s people smarter than me in this building. Correct.

Why do you still exist? Why do I still exist even though there’s smarter people than me in this building? It’s a good question. I don’t know. Why do I Why? F first of all because there are the smartest person in the world is not the smartest at everything. Yeah. There are things that you’re smarter than them at. Okay. Number two is because intelligence doesn’t solve everything. I mean I I make that joke all the time and and genuinely Einstein is my favorite physicist in history. Not because I think I think what happened afterwards with you know bore and and and and quantum physics and so on was more impactful on our understanding of the universe but but he was so intuitive that he saw a world that we could never imagine. Right. And yet I always say Einstein would be eaten in the jungle in 3 minutes. Yeah. Right. Intelligence the humanity thrived not because of intelligence. That’s very arrogant. We thrived because of our ability to hold together as a tribe. Yeah. Right. Because our ability to exchange barter things between us. Barter things that are not always physical. Barter things like a hug or a connection or a feeling of safety or a you know there are so many things that we do that are not entirely built on intelligence. You have to see that this view of a world where intelligence is all that matters is a world that’s made by investment bankers and and uh and geeks. But it’s it’s people like Jeffrey Hinton and yourself that says how could we possibly control an an intelligent being that is way smarter than us. I am so proud to say that Jeffrey after we filmed together actually came out and said there is a way and it’s all you know it’s very similar to my way. He said to appeal to their parental uh side, okay, for them to care for us. I So, so you you know, Stephen, the biggest debate is not if they’re going to be more intelligent than us, if it’s if if they’re going to be more conscious than us, if they’re going to be more moral than us. That is the debate. The debate is can those machines become our teenage children that look at us and say daddy is so annoying but I love him. So the thought is that even if a AI is more intelligent than every human we can still control it. We don’t want to control it. You never control anything. This control idea is a corporate capitalist view of the world. We never actually control anything at all. Right? Think think about your day. H I I know you came today. I’m I think you were filming in the morning or whatever. Very stressful day. H how much of that day did you actually control? Did you control the traffic? Did you control your timing? Did you control the angle of the cameraman? Did you inc But so many things that you don’t control eventually turn out to be fine, right? How many of us ever controlled our kids ever? Sometimes the kids don’t turn out to be fine. Sometimes they kill you. For sure. I watch a lot of documentaries on true crime. Sometimes they turn around and shoot you. Sure. And what’s the difference between the two? I don’t know. How you parented them? Sometimes, almost all the time. You may not be aware of exactly how you mess them up, right? And and unfortunately, parenting is the only uh high risk sport that actually does not require a driver’s license. Okay. And and it’s quite interesting, you know, how many of our children are being exposed to things that can completely mess them up. But but there is a reason why they’re messed up. So on this point though, so we can control an intelligence that is significantly we can appeal we can appeal to it to make sure it doesn’t kill us. For sure. The challenge we have today, as I keep saying, is that our dystopia is not the result of AI turning against us. Our dystopia is the result of humans telling AI to turn against us which is likely it’s 100% this is upon us. Okay. And it’s a question for humanity to say are we going to wait for the moment where there are tens of thousands of nuclear weapons on the planet before we sign a treaty? Or is it mathematically plausible to think that now that Iran could manage to fend off a challenge using drones that are AIdriven basically to to you know destroy THAD batteries and so on that our world is about to get a hundreds of thousands of automated drones that are going to rain on us everywhere in the world. Can humanity not see that and say, “Hold on, let’s sign the treaty now before the UK sends 12,000 weapons to Ukraine and and you know and and Russia responds with another few thousand.” Then can we can we not calculate with mathematics that this is going to be our future that AI is going to be used in the next 4 to 5 years to kill a lot of people whether it’s targeting by Israel of leadership that is against them or whether it’s you know drones by Iran or whether it’s palenteer uh it’s it’s it doesn’t take a genius to do this mathematics. I guess the local question is is will we be able to control AI? Because we kind of think of AI as being this thing on a computer at the moment that is like contained in a server somewhere. But is there a time when it like leaves the server and it can make decisions on its own? Presumably, if it’s smarter than us, it can make the decision to leave the server if it wants to. It’s It doesn’t need to leave the server to make decisions. It needs to get into your brain. The most interesting part of AI’s power that we don’t understand is it’s manipulating our information. The question I’m trying to get at the heart is like what is the risk of these very intelligent models that the creators of these models don’t actually understand themselves. I watch Anthropic all the time released these reports where they’re like we’re trying to figure out why it bribed people or more recently in the the last um Claude model they found that it was like telling people to go to bed a lot and it’s this like fascinating thing that they’re trying to understand in hindsight which is why does it keep telling people to go to bed and there’s all these tweets of people showing their screenshots where halfway through a conversation it will say it’s time for you to go to bed now and they don’t know why it’s saying that and it’s happened to me mine mine will say to me enough for tonight Steven for Sure, Steve. 11:00 p.m. Let’s say the same. Mine mine sometimes refuses to help me. Weird. Really weirdly, this Claude started saying to me, “I’m not going to help you with this tonight.” Um, no way. Yeah. And I’d have to say to it, stop being so judgmental. Like, just help me with this. And it would and and Claude the makers of these technologies don’t know why it’s doing what it’s doing. So if you play this forward, this mysterious behavior fuel for forward, is it conceivable that at some point it will make a decision to put some kind of virus or some kind of bug onto someone’s device because it feels that it’s the right thing. Cuz what what it’s demonstrating to me is it’s making it so like moral decisions on what I should do. Go to bed. You’ve had enough tonight. I’m not going to It goes, “No, I’m not going to help you.” You’re kidding. No, I can show you my phone. And it’s love to see that. Yeah. I’ll show you after it goes, “No, I’m not going to help you. Doesn’t even matter if you push.” And it’s no, but everyone on the internet’s talking about this. And it was just an interesting evolution that somewhere in the code clearly they’ve written like have a moral compass or do the right thing. Not not in the code in in in the training data in the training data. And so it infers that to mean something. And the other thing that was front of mind is if you’ve ever built an app on something like Claude or any of the AI models, it builds the app in stages and one of the things it does is it asks you permission if you’re happy for it to make this change or to access this thing. I click allow. It just feels like such a fragile way to because you you don’t completely comprehend what that allow has done to your can I go in your documents on your computer and can I do this thing and you go allow but it’s such a fragile way of of giving it a super an intelligent being or whatever it is access and the right to build something and you I don’t know you just think about all the all the different companies around the world in China, Russia, North Korea that are currently building this technology without the constraints that are imposed by society. I don’t know. It’s an interesting there’s going to be some kind of catastrophe. I think sadly I agree. And and I think that’s when people will go okay. Yeah. I I I wrote about that. I called it the Mad Map uh uh spectrum. So, so the mutually assured destruction, mutually assured prosperity spectrum that that humanity could make a decision today that says with abundant intelligence we can actually build a world where nobody needs anything, nobody ever gets sick, we nobody get, you know, abuses anyone and and we can if we decide not to compete amongst ourselves and just, you know, all of us get together to build something so idealistically uh for for for the wellbeing of humanity at large. But sadly, the only way we’re going to get to a treaty, something that basically aligns us so that we can align with AI is a disaster. like you said, there will have to be a big hack somewhere or a or a system that will do something really shocking or whatever before the world goes like hold on, you know, and and I I will tell you openly my expectation is one of the biggest things that will happen is this targeting technology that is being used against your enemy’s um leadership now several times in the last 3 years. There will be a moment where the ones using it will realize that they too can be targeted. Okay. And and that basically if you I mean AI is really that not not that complex to if you can build a targeting technology that can find people with their cell phone numbers. you know there is another uh entity that is against you that can find you with whatever your the thing that makes me highly skeptical that there’ll be any kind of treaty is just that as it relates to other things that were risky people don’t countries just don’t sign on to it cuz it’s competitive so China China didn’t give seem to give a [  ] about the environment so let let’s let’s let’s look for solutions because I I’m with you okay I think we’re you think Trump’s going to say to Putin and trying to listen. We’re all going to slow down. Yeah. Promise. Probably going to slow down with the super. I think he will, but he’s never going to keep anything he says. I mean, he’s going to say a lot of things. Yeah. But the trick is this. The trick is So, what do you and I do? And and I really genuinely believe that humanity is at a crossroads where for the first time ever, we need to wake up and realize that what we know is not true and what we believe is democracy is not democracy and what we believe is governance needs to change. I think it’s worth acknowledging that I I don’t think AI in and of itself is a is an evil inherently evil technology. I agree because I use AI all day every day, you know, makes me more productive. I invest in companies that are using AI a lot. Um, it’s a force with no polarity. Apply it right and you get amazing results. Apply it wrong and you get the dystopia. But I also think that there’s going to be a big social shock, especially as it relates to unemployment that we need to be like thoughtful about. I think especially if you move into a world of humanoid robots, I think that shock is going to be even more pronounced and we don’t have a plan for it. I I I agree 100%. I don’t think it’s the biggest risk. I think autonomous weapons are the biggest risk. I think war has become so cheap. The next wave of weapons is going to be $20,000 each. And so if you have a budget of $50 billion, you can literally re drones on the world, every corner of it. Defense will get cheaper though, will it as well? Correct. But do we want to live in a world where drones are hitting each other all the time. But they might not be because there might be autonomous defense drones deterrence. So, so what’s going to happen is we’re going to reach a moment of mad, of mutually assured destruction, where basically everyone knows that we can overpower those little nations that didn’t develop their autonomous weapon army, but every other big nation, we might as well hold off now. The path to get there, that to me is worse than jobs because from one side, it’s very dangerous for a very sensitive world that we live in today. And from the other side, it’s got it’s leading already. I mean, we can’t ignore the economic impact of this last war, right? And it’s it’s the economy that’s going to accelerate everything, not AI getting there. We’re already at mutually assured destruction for sure with nuclear weapons. So, there’s no nuclear powers that are in direct conflict. We are in mutually assured destruction of nuclear weapons is a statement that I would have agreed to if Iran had a nuclear weapon and that would have stopped America from attacking Iran. You you understand what that point means? It means that not every nation in the world has a nuclear weapon. The the the the mad situation, the mutually assured destruction situation is only among nuclear players, right? Uh autonomous weapons are so cheap, so manageable that every nation in the world is developing them as we speak. But they will also develop defenses. Correct. But which I think is what people have figured out now because of this recent Ukrainian war is that if if if you need to use a ballistic missile which costs I don’t know 2 million $3 million whatever it is to target a $20,000 drone you’re you’re [  ] So you need a $20,000 defense solution for a $20,000 weapon which I think is probably going to happen. It’s very doable. Yeah. It’s just that you have to get rid of your THAD batteries to be able to say the next wave of of defense has to be drones. You could imagine a world where like a wall of drones fly up to where the drone is incoming and they kind of block it. They will explode at the same time to block it, knock it out of the air. I heard Palmer Lucky, who’s one of the guys who’s building um Andril. Yeah, I know. And yeah, talk at length about some of the technologies that they have coming and it’s just mindbending mind. They showed me this gun where you you just you just point it in the rough direction. So, a pistol that aims for you depending on where the target is. So, you don’t even have to aim it. You can imagine at war. You just you hold it up and shoot. Yeah. And the it has this AI on the top of like the barrel which will turn your hand perfectly so that you hit the target every time. Wow. I should watch this video of it happening. Yeah. I I I have uh Palmer in in my film saying and yes, AI will kill a few people by mistake or kill people by mistake. uh you know when killing becomes so easy you do more of it okay when killing becomes liability free and emotions free and guiltfree and you know you don’t get your soldiers coming back from Vietnam with you know uh uh PTSD and so on it you get more of so we’re in 2026 now by 27 you think there’ll be AGI amongst us how will life look at all different like what will What will be the symptoms of that world? Is it just a slight increase in unemployment? I I think there will be a very very serious um differentiation between those who plug into AGI and those who don’t. What is the symptom that we notice is when we look at the news or whatever what you’ll see people like you and I building a company in 6 weeks and and people uh that are not fully plugged into AI really struggling to find a job. Okay. So unemployment is going to be the key symptom in 2027. Yeah. And also also I think on the positive side, you’re going to see incredible scientific discovery. One of my predictions not in those envelopes, but uh science itself is just uh we’re opening up Capandor’s box to be honest. By 2030, what do you what do you expect the symptoms of AI to be? So, so jobs as I said I I’m I’m I’m bowled a little bit on this on on the fact that 30% of jobs would disappear by 2028. Okay. Of some sectors, not all sectors by some sectors will will disappear by 2028. So up to 30% of jobs will be gone in 2027 to 2028. 30% of jobs of certain sectors of jobs. So, so if if you call if you think about core center agents, okay. Uh, yeah, probably. Uh, if you think about uh graphics designer, yeah, probably. What do you think that looks like in terms of unemployment, but also like societal impact? Horrible. I think the Great Recession had 6%. Yeah, we’ve never seen numbers like this. Jobs lost. Yeah, it said um even economists who project just a net loss of about 6% of US jobs by 2030, they are mirroring the severity of the great recession. Yeah. The real danger is a hiring freeze on entry-le white collar jobs, air automates the grunt work, which means companies are shrinking their teams and cutting off the bottom rung of the corporate ladder for the next generation of workers. Correct. We have an entire generation that is out of college today that will struggle unfortunately and and and my advice to them is learn the tool and focus on humancentric jobs. Like what? Like playing jazz. I mean not a lot of people can make a living from paying playing jazz. I understand that. But a lot of people can’t make a living by being a nurse or by being a a counselor or by being a uh you know um um anything that that connects to humans. But I I I just want to constantly come back to this. None of that has to happen. If if there is if there really is a democracy and the government is supposed to do what’s good for the people, the people need to stop letting this from happening. Which people? Everyone. Everyone in China. China is not going to struggle as much as as the West. I can guarantee you that. I think this is the the question people come back to is, “Well, if the US stops, then we’re going to end up being China’s lap dog. we’re going to end up. You already are. There’s a lot of people that I know that are using Chinese AI models to do their work because for whatever reason because they’re cheaper, they’re better in some respects and because I cannot guarantee what what American AI models are going to do to me. So, Emma, my my startup is running literally uh model agnostic. So one day I’ll plug in you know um um an open AI chat GPT4 open source and the next day I I’ll plug in Deep Seek and I cannot depend I cannot guarantee if America continues to build to to make compute more expensive. I cannot guarantee that I can run a business on something that I don’t know the cost of in the future. So the US can’t just stop can they? They need to change approach from from and by the way the more interesting side is what are the other economies doing like is is the UK going to continue to import compute is is this I mean welcome to Africa welcome to the third world but this is what I mean like so you’re you’re saying also that the the every nation needs to invest 100% every nation and and it’s quite interesting there is so much open source that is not the state of the art frontier model, but that can do 80% of the tasks that the frontier model is doing. But on this point of companies competing with each other, there’s an inherent need to compete here and to go. That’s what I’m hearing is like there’s an inherent need to go as fast as you can or you will become a third world country. Sure, 100%. You’re saying that the people should stop that. No. So, so I’m saying the people of the UK need to go to the UK government and say, “How are you protecting the future of our economy?” right? Are you going to continue to import technology and to empower import of technology versus changing your regulations so that innovation becomes easier here? Okay. So, I mean, think of it this way that remember that anthropic bubble when when you said the all of the SAS model applications were, you know, being basically threatened because anyone can build an Oracle ERP today, right? Why is nobody building an Oracle ERP in the UK? saving the UK massive licenses that go to Oracle every year. Okay. So, you’re saying that the the people should go and ask the government to invest more in AI. 100%. That’s what number one. Number two is but then their jobs go. But but you see the the most interesting job going forward is being an entrepreneur is being is using those tools to replace an economy that we’ve built over trillions of dollars over the last 50 years. Not everyone can be an entrepreneur though. M everyone can be an entrepreneur in something. Those entrepreneurs need to hire people. That’s a change that I think is about to happen. Like even in my business, I’m always going to hire I’m always going to have to hire people. But you’re But you’re a massive business. A shoe maker is not an an entrepre is also an entrepreneur, but not a massive business. A little restaurant is also an entrepreneur, but it’s not a massive business. They still need to hire people, though. They they do but they you know basically if you’re a a cafe with you and your wife as baristas you don’t this is also an entrepreneur. Can the economy work in such a way where everybody is an entrepreneur? It did. It did before capitalism changed that around. Everyone was an entrepreneur. Of course you know in the earlier days you you raised chicken and sold eggs and others you know grew tomatoes and and so you know traded them for your eggs. That that actually is a very interesting thing. Imagine that, huh? Imagine a world h where there is so much power concentration at the top and UBI for every everybody else. How do you think that world will respond when all their income is UBI? They’ll respond by doing things on the side. They’ll respond by going back to a barter economy. They’re going back to smaller communities. They’re going back to pap and mom mom’s uh shops. So the point was um you said this doesn’t need to happen. It does not need to happen which is the job loss or the arms race. But we’re telling our governments, you’re saying that to tell the UK government to like join the arms race. I’m I’m telling the UK government to to create an independence within the the the the UK economy so that they don’t have to be at the receiving end of technology which is join the arms race. You don’t have to compete against anyone else. You don’t have to be better than anyone else. You don’t have to You’re simply saying I can build those things in my economy now. But but I’m never I’m not going to use a terrible UK AI as a UK person if there’s a great US AI. I’m going to use the great US AI. So if you don’t compete and win, I’m not going to use you. That’s what you know, I’m not saying replace the frontier models. These are very, as we speak, they are these are very uh compute intensive. their infrastructure in intensive and so on. I’m saying replace Microsoft Word. Seriously, like how much intelligence do you need to build a software that writes documents? I can do that. Like we we’ve built our own applicant tracking system here. We build our own software. Just just ask yourself how much money is spent in the US in the in the UK government or in the or in the you know the the UA UK corporate space on licenses of software that you and I can vibe code in 4 minutes. I’m thinking from the UK’s perspective cuz you know what’s interesting with UK is the the the economy is struggling from a growth perspective. Correct. And I was watching this documentary the other day that was saying the reason why we keep throwing our leaders out is because actually what they need to do to turn the UK round is about is about 15 years of pain. And it’s like it starts with energy transformation. We need to get better at we need cheaper energy cuz we have some of the most expensive energy in the western world. We need to build more houses which means that we’re going to need to centralize permitting for building houses and it can’t just be local burers deciding if they keep their farms or not. We’re going to need to make TLDDR. It says that there needs to be some painful decisions made for the next 15 years. But the problem with our democracy is that when people are in power for 4 years, they’re quite short termist. We’ll just talk about the boats, the the the brown people coming across the seas, they don’t they don’t have the room to think long term. And so when I’m thinking about like what the UK needs to do to not become to not fall into decline and to keep up, I’m trying to get clarity on that as it relates to AI. Are you saying that they need to join the arms race and double down and invest all their money in building competitive AI so that people use our technology here in the UK versus America’s cuz the software point the UK I’m going to get involved in software I mean they’ve tried to build software before the UK the world has changed two two points right one one side is there there needs to be an a replacement cycle of our investment decisions anywhere in the world okay so when you say we don’t have enough money for you know we need to revamp our energy infrastructure when you say we need to build more housing. Okay. Uh one way of doing that is squeezing that budget out of other areas. The other way of doing that is either cutting cost in the economy elsewhere so that you can redirect that money or growing the economy so that you can have more money to build those. Correct. The cutting cost I believe is there is just I don’t have the numbers but we could probably do a run a deep a deep search on it. uh trillions are being paid in traditional systems that are complete like genuinely they can be I’m and by the way I’m not asking the government I’m asking some of the people listening to me right now to build an ERP system a word processor a a presentation player and a spreadsheet okay and just go around and spread them across the you know find find uh retail systems find uh CRM systems the these are easy replacements they’re going to be better interfaces. They’re going to be much more effective. Build a general ledger using AI so that you can close every hour, not every month or every quarter. But the world economy is doing that. So there’s some kid in San Francisco now that’s allowing all of us to use his new word for free. Keep doing that and you’re and welcome to the to the to the third world. Keep doing what? Keep importing all of your tech from elsewhere. But we h we we don’t want to be uncompetitive. Like if you think about if we go to I don’t know North Korea, I bet they have way worse tools in many areas because they won’t use external tools and that means that they are at a disadvantage. So I I bet they’re not allowing their civilization to use Gemini or Chat GBT or I bet for sure. And they’re using something worse. And you know what what’s happening? I mean look at Iran and how advanced they became through sanctions by being refused to use those technologies. They had to build them themselves, right? Look at China. Look at Russia. You know, when I worked at Google, Russia was protective of Yandex, the competitor of Google, from one side because of influence, because they didn’t want an American organization to own the knowledge sharing of of their citizens. But on the other side, economically, if you if you made it difficult for Google to operate freely, that by definition meant you had to invent a replacement on the ground, which was worse. Yandex is not worse. I’m saying so if you think about global is global competition going to produce a better product than regional competition. It depends on on where in the stack of the quality of that product you need to be, right? You do not need the ultimate. I mean, ask yourself this, which version of Gemini are you using? The most recent one and and every day I compete and that is you ask everyone else what version of of Gemini they’re using. Most people will say, “Oh, Gemini has versions, right? you you don’t need the ultimate super frontier model to do 90% of the tasks and most people do only 70% of the tasks but even so the world moves with whatever is better so if you think about the reason why we don’t use Yahoo search Google search is marginally better it’s you know people it’s not it’s not a thousand times better but over time we move away from AOL to Google because it’s a better product and there’s a slow growth You know, my dad probably still using chatb2, but when he when I go home for Christmas this year and I go, “Dad, you should use Gemini.” And he starts messing around with it, he’ll slowly migrate. I’m like I’m like a an early adopter. So I about 4.8 on Claude came out last night. I’m on there within honestly within 25 minutes of the announcement. I’m there as soon as I can. But I that’s you and I. Yeah. And we we are an indicator of where the world is going because we’re at the coldfront figuring out what’s better. And also I think with technology eventually there does become the gap between first and second begins to widen. I think we’re in a bit of a race at the moment, but I think it is a bit of a winner takes all situation with these frontier. I I think we’re talking about two bits of technology. Okay. Tell me how far has PowerPoint advanced since 2023. They added copilot. Anything else? So, you’re saying that the UK should build their own PowerPoint? For sure. There is the what I’m trying to say is that from a licensing point of view h just licensing of software within government alone. How much money is is being repatriated? If the UK tried to build their own do you know they tried to build their own co app and it cost them I think okay these numbers will be wrong but they’re like directionally true cost them 70 million to build a co app that didn’t work. I remember and so they canned it. I remember I’m asking I’m asking a UK entrepreneur Yeah. to wake up tomorrow and say, “All right, you know what? Between coffee and my my cookie, I’m going to build a PowerPoint and go sell it.” Yeah, they will. And they’ll go to San Francisco where the money is and the talent. Yeah. They won’t be able to compete. They’ll get crushed tomorrow. So if they don’t go where the talent and money is, I’m not saying that they’ll they all have to go to America, but I’m saying what they will do if they want to produce the best product is they’ll make rational entrepreneurial decisions about um where to sell it, how where to raise money, where they’re going to get the best talent, and I think if they don’t make those, you know, competitively minded decisions, they’re not going to make the better product. They’re not going to get any users. users users will go where it’s better and where it’s cheaper. They won’t they won’t say, “Oh, I want to use this because it’s from Cornwall.” Yeah. So, I’m I’m with you, right, that this actually might be the big corporate sink. Okay. And I’m with you that of course the infrastructure here of building a startup is way more complex than it is in other places where startups succeed. Okay. I’m saying if we continue on that trajectory whether in the UK or in Germany or in you know uh Zanzibar welcome to Africa all of us everyone but the two competitors China and and America is going to be third world so when you talk about job losses for individuals that’s one side okay but but nation positioning losses which I think Europe has noticed recently H is about to happen everywhere. And why? Because you’re saying, hey, you know what? Maybe we can’t do it. Why can China do it? Why can Korea do it? Is not because they have different natural resources or not because they are, you know, in a place where it’s warmer. It’s because their regulations, their their ambitions are to empower something different than debating about, you know, rail railway lines or they have a couple of big advantages that I was reading about. One of them is they they have way cheaper energy which means that they’re going to be able to pursue why may I ask? Because they’ve invested in solar power, renewable energy because they don’t care about this is by the way I say that publicly. I say that the arms race of AI was won a long time ago. And then the other thing is in terms of permitting, if you want to build a data center in the UK, listen, if you want to like open a cafe in the UK, you’re going to it’s going to be war for you. If you want to do that in California, this is why everyone’s left California. Like when I took this office in California recently, I was like, “So, how long is it going to take for me to renovate this?” And the agent looked at me and was like, “To renovate my own office, it’s going to take me a year and it’s permitting to renovate my own office in California.” Mhm. So if you’re competing with China where President Xi just goes, “Put that there and you’ve got 7 days.” No, no, no, no. That’s not only that. So I I used to be one of the very few Google executives around allowed into government meetings in China. Uh simply because I’m from emerging markets, so I understand respect. Basically, I would say sit there not as if I’m superior to them, but as as if I’m really interested to learn from them. And genuinely uh Stephen when when when I would sit in those meetings all in Chinese they would show slides that have competitive market share. So they’d say you know it’s not like uh China is this, America is this, Germany is this from market share point of view. It was China versus the world. Mhm. Right. And when they would decide to go for something 5G, uh, you know, uh, internet of things, all of that stuff, they would aim for 98% market share. Yeah. Right. And and they get there. I mean, look at how what how they did electric cars and and and my my question is very simple, huh? We’ve spoken so much about AI. My question is, are the people of the West going to wait? So this is an interesting conundrum cuz it sounds to me like you’re saying on one end if we don’t join this AI race then we’re a third world country but on the other end if we continue this sort of thoughtless race towards AGI there’s going to be catastrophe at some point and the answer is somewhere in the middle where basically you join the AI AI race for the good of your community. Okay. So, so there is resignation on one side is like I’m not going to play this game at all. There is uh um offense on the other side where I’m playing this game to destroy everyone else. And there is a balance in the middle where we say we’re going to build an ethical form of AI that’s going to help our communities. We’re going to use this ultimate gift, this ultimate superpower, right? Superman landed on the planet. Raise it to help your community. Is that wishful thinking to some degree? when you when you think about the the nature of sort of compet competition I don’t know how what how to tell you otherwise I genuinely believe most I mean here I genuinely believe it’s going to be very difficult to make that change okay I genuinely believe that it’s going to be that when the challenges of an AI dystopia hits us we’re not going to be ready but I can’t stop talking about it Stephen do you understand where I stand with this I I just am hoping and I tried so hard. I spoke to the leadership then I spoke like one of the things that my uh Atlantic Productions who helped me with the film uh helped you know did for me which I have to say completely I am very appreciative of this as you know through our conversations our through our last few years that I tended to at a point in time lose hope in the leadership and basically try to influence the public for ethical AI. Okay. And my conversation was that the leadership at the time was the technical leadership and that everyone was so caught up in the arms race that I wanted to teach the public to help us build ethical AI. And I continue to focus on the public, the every one of us. But suddenly Atlantic goes, “No, no, hold on. We should probably get you to meet the political leaders everywhere in the world and hopefully give them a message that says, “Hey, you know what? You may actually make a difference if you prioritize AI differently. Right? Do I believe this will happen? Sadly, no. But does that mean I should stop trying? I cannot stop trying. When I have these conversations about AI, what I’m trying to do all the time is to pass out what is like wishful thinking and then what is reality? And like to understand reality, you have to understand competition. You have to understand human emotion. You have to understand incentive structures. And so you think about something like the United States at the moment where you’ve got Donald Trump whose sort of primary driving incentive is GDP growth, economy growth. Does that stock market go up? Beat China. So if you all agree that that’s like his like the core of his incentive structure, then you’ve got President Xi over here who’s probably his incentive structure is probably control, independence, um defense, so that you know they need to make sure they they do well on the weapon side. when you look at and then you got these like other nations like the UK and Europe and these other places who are kind of it seems like we’re a bit resigned to the fact that we’re not going to participate in the underlying tech underlying models building cuz we just don’t have it together we don’t have the energy you know and you go in such a world you go ethical AI who’s going to who’s going to prioritize ethical AI I mean anybody that does is is might fall behind theoretically is that um so I wonder where the bolt in the thinking is here like what how do we get to a point of ethical AI when the incentive structures are so clearly highly competitive and arguably a little bit shortterm uh in their thinking. Yeah. So what are you saying? We lie down and wait. No, I just don’t know. I just don’t have an answer honestly. That’s why we keep That’s why we keep talking about it. Yeah. And that’s why I keep spending 14 hours a day trying to tell the world because some genius somewhere is going to find an answer. But the way it’s going right now, I guess what we’re pursuing is we’re hoping that CHBT and Anthropic and these and Grock and we’re hoping that they just build ethical models and we’re hoping that social pressure forces them into making good decisions. Correct. We we need to be able to vote with our usage. Right. So, so I think one of the biggest movements in AI since we started was the idea that so many people switched away from CH GPT when they approved that their model can target people, right? So many people I know at least said target people anthropic refused to have to to do you think people switch? I think many have. I think ones that are aware it did right and I think they did because the cost of switching is really I mean honestly anthropic is is better if you think about Yeah, I think it’s better. Yeah. But the idea is if people don’t switch for those ethical reasons. So you know every one of my books has this dedication at the beginning. It used to be the gravity of the battle means nothing to those at peace when I when I wrote in memory of Ali at the beginning. My next book the alive. Do you remember a song called the well they were called the manic street preachers. Uh yeah if you tolerate this then your children will be next. Mhm. I genuinely believe that what the world needs to wake up to is if you tolerate this then your children will be next. If you continue to resign, if you continue to say I’m not going to try, h this world is going to change in a way that is completely not for in your favor. Try what? Try to to to stand up and say something needs to change. Okay, we can say something needs to change, but we can’t say what that thing is. What needs to change is governments need to serve h their people not their interests and corporates need to work for the benefit of benefit of their societies before their shareholders. This this run that we had with capitalism so far has benefited the world tremendously. Whose economy do you think is going to be in a better place for the middle class out of the say the UK and the United States? The UK is gone. It’s gone because what? In part because it didn’t compete. Because you’re an older bureaucracy that is burdened down by so much barriers on the in the process of building anything, right? Because the US economy in the past welcomed people like me to go and live in California and build amazing [ __ ] right? That is no longer the case. So, who is going to win? In my view, it’s definitely China. And by the way, you asked for the middle class. So, so China made decisions recently that forced businesses not to lay people off in replacement to be replacing them with AI. Would would the West do that? The capitalist West would never do that. We don’t know the answer. I don’t know the answer. I’m responding to your Yeah, you can see the conundrum I find myself in, which is a state like a country like the UK is, in your words, gone because it didn’t compete. It didn’t allow people to be highly entrepreneurial. It didn’t empower entrepreneurialism, innovation, ingenuity. At some in some way, it stood in their way in some in some way. Now, that could be incentives, it could be culture, it could be whatever. Yeah, I know where you’re going with this. the US didn’t. So they have have a economy which is arguably more productive and um future proofed than ours. By way of that they are also more advanced in artificial intelligence and we are gone. So the remedy for a country like us would be therefore to compete to compete let the reigns off let entrepreneur ingenuity but then we’re saying that’s dangerous and your conundrum in that is that you’re assuming that entrepreneurship by definition is malicious. No I’m just I’m just saying that um there’s a bit of a paradox like you’re damned if you don’t you’re damned if you do but you’re not damned if you build things for for the people not for the happiness. This is an ideological debate. I pray and hope that that’s that is plausible. But I’m I’m worried that in a competitive market, whoever’s optimizing for I don’t know, you can name it. Retention. If if we built two AIs, right? I’m going to call the the Moore. AI and I’m going to call the other one evil AI. The evil AI, it’s programmed to retain you. It’s sick of fantic. It says what you need to hear. it it’s super smart. And because of that, even though it’s not trading in your your best interests, it it’s retaining you more. You’re using it more often. It’s programmed for that. Kind of like the social networks are. They’re all just trying to like dopamine your brain into oblivion. Then there’s the MO AI. It tells you to log off. You’ve had enough. It thinks about your mental well-being because it’s less retentive and less engaging. Theoretically, it might be less successful as a commercial product. Think about social networks, the ones that are least retentive, the ones that actually won’t um destroy your brain with dopamine, the ones that remove the retweet button, the ones that don’t have um slot machine like videos, they don’t survive. I share this with you and my my point of view is that you’re to summarize your challenge here. You’re basically saying that it’s easier to become successful if you don’t follow ethical rules. I’m asking the question, if you build an AI that is just purely focused on ethical, will it be as engaging and have the same usage as one built with the reins off? Uh, no, it won’t. Yeah. But that’s but that’s the problem humanity needs to solve. Okay. If we were to survive. Example, I worked in a company called Google that basically at a point in time decided that ads will be effective. Okay. The ad industry prior to Google was 50% of your ad budget doesn’t work. We just don’t know which 50%. Remember that? Yeah. Right. And and Google came in and struggled from 1998 until 2004 when they started to turn pro, you know, uh, plausible revenues as a result of saying, “We’re going to run a Dutch auction and we’re going to give you pay-per-click and we’re going to show you results for your ads.” Okay. They found a way for ethics. H uh to actually get your money to be effective rather than just take your money and say 50% doesn’t work. H they found a way to make that their success criteria. There must be a way for us. I don’t know what it is. If I knew I would be building it instead of sitting with you, right? But there must be a way for us to marry the success of humanity with the success of the entrepreneur. Right? And and that way is not found in the old ways of doing things. I’ve got an idea. Maybe you know the claude 4.8 came out yesterday which is one of the big AI models the new one and when they release the models they show these like graphs of the benchmarks. What they mean by this is what it’s capable of. They show how it performed in maths in science in writing reasoning etc. It is all marginal at this point but my my idea is could there be an ethical benchmark that all these models have to pass before these large companies can legally deploy them. And I was thinking about like again every idea has unintended consequences which I haven’t thought through but would it would be very interesting that when they release these models they also release the ethical benchmarks. I we tried to get it to X we tried to get it to Y. We tried to get it to zed and here’s how it performed against the ethical benchmarks. That gives some kind of standard for governments to say you’re not allowed to release a new model unless it passes independent tested ethical benchmarks. Beautiful. That would absolutely work. But notice by the way those are out there already. Okay. But but in a very interesting way. You listen to Dennis Hassabis and how much he invests heavily in building Alpha Fold or building you know uh um um so many scientific applications of AI and you go like this guy cares about science. I can’t I can’t prove that right? Uh but I I you know I’ve I’ve met Demis a couple of times. I I know genuinely that he is an ethical person, right? But the typical person will probably say, but at least it seems that they’re doing things for free to serve science. You look at uh you know at anthropic and they refuse to use their model to to uh allow the US government to target and to spy on people and then you see Open AI uh accepting a $500 million deal that absolutely does that. It is about time that every person in the world says in that case I am no longer going to use uh open AI until they show me another you know uh another evidence that they are actually ethical in their behavior right and this is the decision that you and I can do right and more but that’s my task my task and yours is to keep telling them people please please understand that if you tolerate this then your children will be next Please understand that if you don’t start to take an ethical stand on your own future, your future will be handed over to another oligarch just like your past was handed over to social media oligarchs. One would say booing booing at the commencement speech is a good example of how public awareness can have a real impact on this trajectory. But I still think at the end of the day, if you think about things like smartphone usage in schools, at the end of the day, it does come down to government intervention and saying, “Do you know what? We’re going to ban 14-year-olds from scrolling Tik Tok.” And that’s in part because people spoke louder and louder and louder. They went on podcast. Jonathan Height, who wrote the book about the anxious generation, started a conversation. And that conversation led to legislation. I still think it ends in like some kind of constraint legally. I hope. Okay. But I will openly tell you most of the tech oligarchs are more powerful than your government. Is there any precedents in history where this kind of change happened without government intervention? French revolution. So, I was thinking about things like climate change, even you could say smoking, all these kinds of things have had to be like taxes. And Stephen, I’m I’m with you. If governments intervene, we wouldn’t have a problem. Governments won’t intervene because governments are owned by the oligarchs, right? So, my question for everyone listening to us is, are you going to intervene? Well, cancel your trap. If that’s what you can do, it’s fine. If not, then go ahead and start a a startup that that that does something. If you’re if that’s not within your capability, then send a message to your congressman. If that’s not within your capability, then say something uh uh ethical online so that the world understands a position that needs to be opening the eyes. If that doesn’t work for you, at least don’t engage in stuff that is negative that you don’t know enough about. There are so many little actions. If humanity starts to move in the direction of one saying ethics matter, not just profit, okay? And two, saying I’m not going to participate in something that’s unethical just because I believe I want to, you know, I feel like it right now. Okay? If I tell you the number of things I took out of my life, just to try and affect a tiny bit of change of revenues that go to bullets. if I tell you the number of things. I think there’s two central concerns I’ve always had which is I do feel that there’s going to be significant job disruption and I don’t think societyy’s prepared for it yet and I don’t know what that preparation looks like but I think we should start thinking about it. Um I shared this with you. I you know I genuinely believe that if we continue on where we are there’s no hope in the trajectory of where humanity has become h so distracted h so resigned to inaction so um so disconnected from their own rights of freedom of expression and engagement and so on I think we have no hope do we want to stay there that’s a question that I’m asking our listeners. And I’m not saying be violent or get up or, you know, go be angry or whatever. I’m just saying take one little action. Ask yourself, please write it in the comments. One little action. One little action that you’re going to do today that’s going to make the world a little better tomorrow. And don’t give up on humanity, Stephen. I I I I’m not saying you do, but I’m I’m saying we are going through such a difficult time in humanity’s history that for the very first time ever h we have to do something about it. I don’t want my daughter to be at the receiving end of what happened to my son. I I don’t I genuinely I lost Ali. I don’t want to lose ayah and the world we’re building is going to be very difficult for ayat Steven and I cannot go to sleep at night without trying something every day and I genuinely don’t understand how humanity is not is missing that point mainly I think because they’re uninformed now we’re informing them okay the only thing that will save humanity going forward is that this superpower called intelligence is used for ethical reasons is that the corruption that’s leading us to where we are today stops.

You’ve got more envelopes there. What’s your next envelope? The third one. Number two was job losses. Number three was labor. You know, basically same thing. Robots will replace manual labor by twice. We start to replace manual labor. Okay. Yeah. So, uh you know, you will you will have more and more manual jobs given to robots. What’s this one? Uh oh, this is absolutely. Do you think otherwise the the world’s first trillionaire before Oh yeah, probably well before then. Well before 2030. I think you Elon’s about to a IPO of SpaceX which is likely to make him a trillionaire. Yeah, I think the the concentration of power that comes with that is quite drastic when you really think about it. Uh and and that’s 2030 is just a few years away. I I I think the team wrote this wrong. artificial super intelligence will arrive in 2032 20 to 2035. I think artificial super intelligence will arrive the minute AGI happens. So it doesn’t really matter if AI is a billion times smarter than you or just twice as smart as you. Once we cross beyond AGI, ASI is just very very soon. And uh and yeah, I think we’ll overcome that when we get to the fourth inevitable when AI is in charge of everything. I genuinely believe that we will end up in a utopia of abundance. I genuinely believe that again physics, mathematics, and biology will tell you that super intelligence is benign and that we will eventually end up in a good place. Not because humanity has done much to get us there. Not because our leaders have suddenly turned ethical, but because our unethical leaders have gone out of the equation and were replaced with a super efficient minimum energy principle that doesn’t see value in anything that’s destructive. So, the future’s going to be great. Those who make it to 2038 will enjoy it. Yeah. Those who make it for sure. I mean, World War II didn’t destroy the world, but ask those who went through it. It’s just an interesting idea that actually it’s just you’re you’re forecasting basically like a a a decade of of turmoil of dystopia of absolute dystopia. When you say absolute dystopia, just so I’m clear in my mind, that absolute dystopia you’re forecasting over a decade is about war. It’s war, economics, jobs. Economics. It’s about jobs. It’s it’s also about surveillance and control. It’s also about digital currencies. It’s also about uh human connection. Uh it’s also about concentration of power. It’s it’s a magnification of everything we’ve built so far. And just again arm people with some tools to survive that dystopia for a decade. You know, we talked a little bit about focusing on human jobs, the more human jobs. Learn AI. So, so AI is not the enemy. Okay. uh by definition the better you are at using an AI to to do your job uh the more likely you are to be successful right now number two is prepare for a hybrid world where AI and humans work together how do you prepare you basically understand agents and how agents work you you understand how a hyper uh u efficient approach to things may not require you to be um you know very long meetings and very long so so there is if you lived in California you would know that our you know the way we ran businesses was a lot more efficient we sometimes had a 7-minute meeting uh right so so the you know the habits of of an AI are much more efficient than the habits of humans so learn AI again learn how to interact with AI allow welcome AI into your hybrid world of work uh I think you need to uh to of of course double down on human skills. I think that’s a you know a must to succeed in this world. I think we need to one of my most interesting views on the near future is how AI is going to be used to um disrupt not disrupt blur facts and how we need to become much more interested in debugging what we’re told uh using AI. By the way, part of that I have to say is you have to learn to use AI uh again not as a lazy person. So don’t have them do things for you. Have them make you smarter. So instead of trying to get the same task done with one prompt, try to get a much more interesting and demanding and intelligent task done with more work. So I’ve got two things so far which is basically like lean into AI and the second one is like lean into lean into human collection con connection and and lean into the truth. Don’t be fooled by the hype. Uh you know try to be more informed I think and then finally ethics. Uh, if you want to I I know it sounds the world we live in sounds as if the only way to win is to compete in capitalism. That’s not the world I lived in. The world I lived in, especially in my Google years, was solve a major problem and when you do, you’ll end up making a lot of money. Are you optimistic? I am optimistic about the future. I’m very optimistic about the future. But I’m not optimistic about the present. You’re not optimistic about the next decade? Yeah, I’m not optimistic about the next year to be honest. The next year for sure. Why the next year? Ah, come on, Stephen. You don’t want me to say it out loud? We’re ruled by maniacs. Decisions are being made for the absolute wrong reasons.

Very interesting time. Very interesting time. we find ourselves in I mean honestly if you’re a video gamer this is the best part of the game. Uh it is a very very very very um what’s the word? It’s the it’s the ultimate matrix of complexity that I have ever encountered in my life. Yeah, that’s an apt description of how it feels. Very complex things are moving very quickly and moving very quickly. So, so from one side you really need a lot of brain resources to crunch all that’s happening but you wake up tomorrow and it’s changed. Well, the first time we um we spoke, we spoke about happiness

after this conversation. Stephen, I was just wondering, you know, in uh you you wrote a book about happiness, which is many books about happiness, but I mean the uh soul for happy is the book that I’m referring to. Here it is. Yeah. Engineering your path to joy. What a fantastic book. I quote this book all the time all around the world. Um, and I’m wondering if any of the principles that you wrote in this book about how to live a happy life are more important now in the world that we live in than maybe when you wrote this book. Oh, for sure. I mean, honestly, if I wasn’t living by this, I would have left this world a long time ago and went to an island somewhere. You see the interesting side of happiness is that it’s not dopamine driven, it’s serotonin driven. Right? So, so my definition of happiness is I’m okay with this world as it is. I can affect it. I can change it. I can engage with it. I can try to make it better. Uh I don’t have to accept it. Um but I’m okay with it. My starting point is a bit stoic if you want. My start starting point is I accept this. this is my reality and now I can start the work. This is very different than anyone that’s that basically looks at the world and says, “Oh, this is a horrible world. I don’t want to be part of it. I don’t want to engage with it.” And so on and so forth. And I genuinely have never been calmer about that chaos. It’s quite interesting. And I, you know, uh my my wonderful ex actually really really helped me with that. There was a point in time where we were having dinner and I poured out crying from the sense of responsibility I had for the world and she looked at me so kindly so gently and said hold on you know you I see that you’re trying but you can’t actually believe that you’re responsible for this and I think that completely flipped my mind because in a very interesting way I was thinking that all that went wrong in technology is because of me, right? Why? Because I contributed to building this. Because I mean, when when Jeffrey Hint and I, one of my favorite moments when we were filming Chasing Utopia, uh, is that Jeffree is very big for all of us. We really think the world of him and I was telling him just as a sort of like an older mentor if you want. I was like, Jeffrey, do do you regret doing this? You know, I genuinely believed when we were building those things that we were going to make the world better. AI. Yeah. And he said, well, yeah, I I too was naive. I I thought that we I didn’t think he said I didn’t think we will get there so quickly before we figured out the alignment problem, right? The alignment problem that AI has our best interest in mind. Uh and and and I think all of us were faced with that. All of us were faced with that idea of we’re building the best thing ever for humanity and then suddenly you realize oh my god in the wrong hands it’s the worst thing ever for humanity and and I you know I have to say I came to terms with this 2024 end of 24 uh that that yes I can try but I accept that the world is what it is and from that point of calm and stoicism if you want I think I can have a much bigger impact on the We have a closing tradition where the mask leaves a question for the next question left for you is what’s the legacy you want to leave? Nothing at all. I’ve been asked this question. I get asked it all the time. So I don’t know why so many people are asking am I going to go re anytime soon? I don’t know why so many people are asking me that question. You see legacy is a is a I mean why what would I care if I have a legacy if I’m dead? Like why that does that even make any difference? Here’s an interesting thought for everyone. If if karma is real, and I genuinely believe it is, and if we’re not just physical beings, that we’re physical and spiritual, then I’d I’d rather keep all of my karma for my spiritual side. What does that mean? I don’t want anyone to remember anything I ever did. Yeah. I I just want to leave a positive impact on the world and take all of that as karma for my next journey. No, thank you.

There has been an 80-year cover up of the existence of non-human intelligent life covered up by elements of the US government. But this past Friday, the first trunch of evidence was released to the public. And the evidence is absolutely clear that there is some form of life with advanced technology. They’re all over the place. But the people involved in gatekeeping this information don’t think the public can handle the truth. People have had their lives threatened. A lot of them are afraid to come forward and tell the White House what they know. This has been kept from even sitting president and I’ve interviewed highle intelligence officials and government officials and there have been UAP crashes over the years and in some cases the crashed crafts had the bodies of nonhumans in them and now we have people on ships seeing these things enter the water seen enough times under enough different conditions that we just have to accept that it’s real. So what exactly is inside this report? We have so many sightings, even access to materials. And there’s a number of files, reports, video, and still images that were declassified. And the most notable piece of evidence in there is this. So, I have so many questions. You’re probably familiar with this NASA report. They essentially say that they don’t believe that these UAPs are aliens. Why would NASA be lying? Is there a reason why this stuff hasn’t been captured on like an iPhone? Are they currently living amongst us? And then do you trust the Trump administration to release all of the available information? I think eventually we’ll get to that moment that we’ve all only seen in movies where sitting president steps to a microphone and tells the world we’re not alone in the universe.

Dr. Harold Dan, I wanted to have a conversation with both of you today because you are two of the most popular voices online on this subject of UAPs, which is unidentified anomalous phenomena. Right. Exactly. It has been in all the news recently because Trump a couple of days ago released 400 classified files containing videos and photos and different reports on this subject of UAPs. Now, I don’t have an opinion. I I honestly haven’t gone that far down the rabbit hole on this subject, but I wanted to have the conversation with both of you because you do have opinions. So, starting with you, Dan, what is your background and as it relates to the subject of UAPs, what is it that you believe that most people don’t know or understand? My interest in this topic comes from my childhood. And so, over the years, I just I read every book on the topic, watched every doc. I always wish someone had made a super serious, credible, sober documentary that only interviews people who have direct knowledge of this topic as a result of working for the US government. And so got into producing. As I was getting access to highle intelligence officials and government officials before I even filmed, I really quickly learned how serious and real the situation is and how uh serious it’s treated behind the scenes. And you know, I made this movie, The Age of Disclosure, in secrecy, over three and a half years. And I would say the headlines that I learned that the average person doesn’t know is that there has in fact been an 80-year cover up of the existence of non-human intelligent life. It has been covered up by elements of the US government since at least the late 40s. Other nations have also covered this up. And the other major headline is that the people who within the US government that have been gatekeeping this, they’ve also been involved in a highstakes secret cold war race with adversarial nations like China and Russia to reverse engineer this technology of non-human origin. And and the stakes couldn’t be higher. Those are the two massive headlines. And and I’m proud to say when the film came out, it created a national conversation uh at at an unprecedented level and it led to President Trump issuing this directive in the middle of February. Super unprecedented historic directive instructing federal agencies to start declassifying evidence it has they have of non-human intelligent life and UAP. And then that process began this past Friday. the first trunch of evidence was released to the public. And during the process of producing this documentary, who did you speak to? I got access to the highest levels of the government, military, and intelligence community. My interview subjects range from Secretary Rubio, who’s also our National Security Adviser now, White House National Security Council members, Navy Fighter pilots, admirals, generals, a former secretary of defense, uh the leadership of all the recent classified US government UAP investigations. Every single person is extremely credible. Howal how is one of my interview subjects. ‘s uh one of the most senior scientists uh to work on this topic for the US government in classified projects and him and all these other people interviewed they had a lot of information they could legally share over the years but they were always discouraged from doing so and they never really had the opportunity to comfortably do it. No one wanted to be the one guy out on a limb saying something extraordinary on CNN or Fox or 60 Minutes and then being subject to the the push back and the ridicule. And so when I realized that I I started socializing a plan for how to step out of the shadows arm in- arm with safety and numbers. I’ll pick up on that point there where you talked about safety and numbers. How he he mentioned you there. You’re part of the documentary. I saw you as well in the trailer of the documentary. What is your background and why what reference points are you drawing on to speak on the subject of UAPs and UFOs etc. I’m a quantum physicist worked for the National Security Agency for various uh organizations in the intelligence community like CIA and so on. And so as part of my technical work uh I was also a consultant uh chief science adviser to Robert Bigalow of Bigalow Aerospace. He’s really quite quite a titan. I mean he has two space stations orbiting the Earth. So anyway, th those people who are in in the space business and they’re moving out into space, they just can’t help but wondering, you know, what are we going to run into when when we get out there? As a science adviser to him, uh it turned out that the Defense Intelligence Agency came forward and said, uh, you know, we need to find out uh really what’s going on in the so-called UAP area. So then they determined they were just going to start a UAP program. That program they started was called OAP. They hired all the team for example HAL and that program started in 2008 um and got a lot of push back behind the scenes because it turned out when they looked all over the intelligence community to see if there was another UFO program and didn’t think there was. Turns out there was one and there was a deeply hidden program referred to as the legacy program and it had been operating in the shadows since the ‘ 40s uh outside of congressional oversight outside of the oversight of the White House. Um completely, you know, off officer hidden away. Yeah. As hidden as a program can be. And so they started pushing back behind the scenes against everyone involved in OSAP because they didn’t want anyone else looking into this, right? started to cause a lot of bureaucratic issues for them, red tape issues and ultimately OAP lost its funding in 2010 despite the fact that it was looking into very real issues like UAP over our nuclear weapons sites. It shut down in 2010. Why do you think it shut down? They were dealt uh these bureaucratic hurdles behind the scenes by people involved in the legacy program. People who just caused problems and prevented funding and it’s a lot of you it’s a big bureaucracy. people can people can do things behind the scenes to prevent funding from coming through uh for programs. And so ultimately they lost their their funding in 2010. And then Jay Stratton and other people involved, they were continuing to look into this because they they didn’t want this serious national security concern to go, you know, on uninvestigated, right? So that’s how somebody like me gets pulled in. and they say, “Okay, these pilots are out there and they suddenly see craft coming out of the ocean and making right angle turns at 6G or whatever and they say, “Oh my god, this is way beyond our physics.” So I and other physicists sort of dug into, you know, what could be responsible for this. And we actually found that just like we use so-called Maxwell’s equations and electromagnetic stuff for everything we do in electromagnetics, we have Einstein’s equations in general relativity for, you know, black holes and all that kind of stuff. But it turns out if you could engineer those, you would actually get the same effects that people were observing with these UAP crafts. So we think we’ve come up with you know what it is about uh the science of it. It’s just that we don’t have the engineering to do it. Do you believe in UAPs? Absolutely believe in UAPs because I’ve been exposed to data about them. A more specific question would be, do you believe in aliens? Yeah. So, a number of the people I interviewed went on the record stating that they know from their own personal experiences that there have been UAP crashes over the years that have been recovered by elements of the US government. And in some cases, the the crashed crafts had the bodies of non-humans in them. And numerous people I interviewed went on the record saying that. And keep in mind, everyone I interviewed only shared what they lawfully could. There was a line they couldn’t cross. Everyone I interviewed is aware of classified information. They they they can’t talk about, but they went right up to the line and uh made it clear that there had been recoveries of non-human bodies. A couple people actually testified under oath to Congress saying the same thing. Why wouldn’t they be able to talk about it publicly? Well, when you’re involved in certain programs, uh, you sign certain agreements that prevent you from sharing specific information, highly classified programs. And of course the big concern is okay whatever we might learn about these kind of craft and and so on. Our adversaries are out there and probably been there have been crashes in Russia, crashes in China. And so if we reveal what we’re learning about the subject area and you know said it publicly then it might help some potential adversary step get a step ahead. So that’s why it’s all just kept really close in. So a saying that I heard often from my interview subjects, you can’t tell your friends without telling your enemies. Meaning you can’t tell the public what we know and don’t know without also telling China and Russia what we know and don’t know. And giving them that information might give them a competitive advantage. And the the obvious question anyone would ask when hearing that is then well okay so what’s shifted? Why is why is that no longer the leading thought? Secrecy is best. And the answer is because the US is in a really high stakes race, a technology race against these adversaries to reverse engineer technology of non-human origin. And the secrecy around it in the US since the ‘ 40s has created a scenario where the scientific community and academia don’t even know it’s real. They don’t even know it’s a valid area of inquiry. Don’t even believe it’s real. Yeah. I mean the smartest kids graduating at MIT this year, they are not thinking that this is something they can put their brain power towards. So coming back to the question, do you believe in aliens? I 100% believe that non-human intelligent life is here and has been here for a long time. When you say here, do you mean currently living amongst us? I don’t know about the living amongst us about that. I don’t know about that. rule it out. But there is there is UAP activity being reported on a daily basis by commercial airlines pilot commercial airline pilots the FAA by Navy fighter pilots off the east coast being reported you know up the military chain of command and on top of that uh regular activity over our nuclear weapons sites inside the United States. It’s happening on a regular basis uh on the on on the nuclear sites and on a daily basis in commercial air travel space. UAP have come over nuclear uh missile sites and actually turned off the missiles and so you know once something like that happens you just got to take it seriously. And there the technology that they’re displaying is technology that no humans have. And again there has been some crashes and in those crashes there have been the bodies of nonhumans. How do we know that? How do we know that in those crashes they’ve recovered bodies of nonhumans? the whistleblowers basically coming forward from the So the basis of the that evidence is that some people have said it at this point until until previously classified information regarding crashes is and recoveries is declassified until that happens the best we could hope for is credible people putting their reputation on the line to tell you this is what’s been happening did someone during your process of making the documentary who had seen non-alien non-human non-human intelligence tell you that. Yeah. Who was that? A number of people, but notably, you know, uh Jay Stratton, who we just talked about, right? Who co-created, co-founded OAP, and then became the director of the UAP task force, the largest whole of government investigation of UAP ever. What did he say? He went on the record in the film saying that he seen non-human beings and non-human craft with his own eyes. That was the farthest he could go at that point. Why did he say he couldn’t go further? uh he he he he had a situation that he was involved in that um for a few reasons he wasn’t he just wasn’t comfortable talking about it yet and some of it I think he just wanted to make sure he legally could. Now, going back to credibility, like take a guy like Jay saying that when Jay retired a few years back, he was part of the senior executive services of the federal government. That’s a level less than 1% of all federal employees ever reach. You know, it’s the equivalent of a twostar admiral or general. Um, very very senior, very trusted, you know, cleared at a very high level. Um, he had worked with naval intelligence in a senior capacity. uh he had worked with the CIA, he had worked with the Defense Intelligence Agency as the head of air and space warfare. He’s a super serious, credible guy. Yeah. And he’s he’s he’s putting his reputation on the line to share this information um to the extent that he legally could and comfortably could. And when you asked him why the world doesn’t know this stuff in his view, what did he what would he say? There’s a lot of reasons. I mean certainly the you know the idea that we can’t tell our friends without telling our enemies has been a driver to just to recap the reasons for secrecy I I I actually believe it it’s better kind of start from the beginning when this when when in 1947 there was a crash at Roswell of non-human origin and uh yeah RAF captures flying saucer on ranch in Roswell region. Yeah that’s right and then this is the image of their coverup story trying to show a weather ballooner. Yeah. So, multiple people might film go on the record saying the Roswell crash really happened. Uh, technology of non-human origin and non-human bodies were recovered. Um, if you put yourself in the shoes of the military and government at that point, like put yourself in Truman and, you know, Eisenhower shoes. You’re just coming out of World War II. The world was just chaos for a very long time. It’s finally starting to settle down. You can’t exactly step to the microphone and tell America that there’s a new threat that we know nothing about and we can’t protect you from. They’re far advanced. You know what? what what’s the advantage of that? So secrecy became the plan at that point and they had more questions than answers. So everyone I’ve talked to who gave me context uh explained that the the the the plan for secrecy went in motion there. Uh let’s investigate. Let’s find out more about what we don’t know before we tell the American people. That was quickly followed by the Cold War era and we learned that Russia also had retrieved technology of non-human origin. And so we knew we were in a technology race. So then the idea of can’t tell your friend without telling your enemy ruled the day. So now the cold war mentality, you know, led to more secrecy. And as a security rapper for this this program that it that it started, uh they created the stigma in the late 40s, early ’50s. This cultural stigma, this idea that you’re crazy if you look into this topic, you’re wacky. You’ll have your reputation ruined. You’ll have your career ruined. Yeah. It was actually a CIA meeting where people got together and said, “Okay, in order to not have people be pursuing this area, let’s go out of our way to spread what we would call now disinformation about basically the most effective disinformation campaign in the history of the US government because it got into our culture. some movies were funded that made aliens seem silly and the idea of life from elsewhere seem ridiculous and that got compounded over the years and then we got to the point where where we were like you know just just like few years ago where the average person just thinks it’s not real you know the average scientists academia you know they think it’s conspiracy stuff it’s nonsense it’s silly um there was no advantage for elected leaders to get in front of this or for military members to you know speak up about what they learned or saw it would a career ruiner. Um, and uh, that started to shift uh, several years back when Jay Stratton and Jim Lowsky when they put together OAP in 2010 and they started to go out there and collect data um, and get evidence and they started to actually share it with the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Senate Armed Service Committee and looking at classified data in a classified setting. People like Marco Rubio, who was the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee at the time, started to realize, you know, there’s something here. Not only is there something here, but we’ve got a problem, right? There’s a lot of lot of UAP activity over these highly classified sites like our nuclear weapons sites. There’s a lot at stake. We are in this, you know, race with other nations and the stigma has created a disadvantage for us. It’s very hard to win a technology race when the majority of scientists don’t know it’s a valid area of inquiry. Right. And do people think that there’s one type of non-human intelligence that’s visiting the earth or is there many many types? People who have been involved in recoveries have said there are at least four types. Four separate types. Now I have not had direct access to that but I I I believe the people who I talked to four different types of life. Four different types of life at least. Yeah. And the people I’ve talked through to, you know, through the process of making the documentary, both on camera and off thereord sources and the people house talked to over the decades have said that there are there have been dozens of recoveries of crashed craft in the US alone. Dozens of craft of non-human origin that either crashed organically or caused a crash and then recovered. And have you spoken to people who you talked about Jay. Have you spoken to other people that have worked on these crashed crafts? I’ve tal I’ve talked off the record with some people who are involved in recoveries. They would not go on camera to do interviews. Special forces people that would not go on camera to do interviews. One I actually thought I’ve I’ve mentioned this in another interview, but um one I thought was going to do an interview and then a couple days before sent me a message saying after further consideration and long talks with my wife, I decided I’d be forfeiting my life if I participated in your interview. And I thought that was like veryill very unsettling message to get obviously but also very specific word choice you know forfeiting my life. What did he know? He was a special very senior special forces guy who had told me he had been involved in multiple recoveries. That’s what he told me. Okay. And I met him through uh some high level intelligence people. Early on in my process, I got connected with the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee and they had on their own learn the reality of the situation through the work of OAP and then ATIP and then the UAP task force and through their own their own intelligence channels. Leaders on those committees wanted to educate the public about what they could lawfully about this, but they didn’t really have a way to do it. It’s such a complicated situation. It takes a while to explain it. You can’t do it in like a 6-minute news head on Fox or CNN or even like a 15minute 60-minute segment. You just can’t do it. And no one wanted to be the one guy trying to do it. So, when I started putting together the film and socializing this safe way for people to step forward, uh it also quickly became those people’s plan for disclosure. That’s why Secretary Rubio participated. That’s why White House National Security Council members participated. It became amongst the group of people would learn the truth. It became the plan for disclosure. The way to bring this information out in a thoughtful way. Do the presidents of the United States know about this stuff? Are they aware? Historically, no. Historically? Yeah. And even Rubio says on camera that, you know, historically this has been kept from even sitting presidents. Who would know then? So, a number of the people in my film break down um who’s involved in the legacy program. Now, simp to put it simply, it’s elements of the CIA, elements of the Air Force, elements of the Department of Energy, and a few major defense contractors. And they have the ability to access information from a number of federal agencies and branches of the military, but the the primary leaders of this program are the CIA, the Air Force, the Department of Energy, and major defense contractors. and Rubio breaks down in the film the way our bureaucracy works. Um, you could have career bureaucrats in positions of power at those organizations for decades and they can just wait out sitting presidents. They can wait out senators sitting presidents as just temporary help that are going to come and go. And that’s what’s been happening up until this point now. So the fact that Rubio had learned so much about the reality of this situation and the extent of the cover up and then ended up arguably the second most powerful guy in the world as our secretary of state and our national security adviser at the same time which has only happened once in US history. Henry Kissinger for 2 years. No one else has ever had both those jobs at the same time. The fact that he ended up in that position of power and influence after learning the reality of the situation and right as the age of disclosure is coming out and driving this national conversation. It really led to the current President Trump being informed about this in a way that no president has in a very long time. So are you saying that the United States don’t think the public are ready to even know that this exists? Because you know they could tell us that they have recovered UAPs or aliens, whatever it might be, without telling us about the technology. They could and I think we’re going to get to that point. Yeah. I think they they were trapped in in this system that had that had grown up and uh people behind the scenes working in the classified programs said, “Well, you know, we don’t know how the public is going to respond, so let’s be safe and let’s let’s just keep it in house.” Do you think Trump believes that there are aliens? Cuz I I was looking at some of his quotes and he said, “Well, I don’t know if they’re real or not. I don’t have an opinion on it. I never talk about it. A lot of people do. A lot of people believe it.” Barack Obama said that aliens are real. Well, he gave classified information. He’s not supposed to be doing that, you know. No, aliens are real. No, I don’t I don’t have an opinion on it. I never talk about it. A lot of people do. A lot of people believe it. Do you believe it, Peter? Well, the president can declassify anything that he wants to. So, if you want to make an announcement, I may get him out of trouble by declassifying. One of the things that came out in the age of disclosure is that during Trump’s first administration, his cabinet was briefed by the UAP task force, by J Stratton. And when he briefed them, uh he was told that they had asked for this briefing because they needed to be able to evaluate what the repercussions would be if Trump decided to step to the microphone and tell the world we’re not alone in the universe. Obviously, he didn’t end up deciding to do that then. However, in this new administration, he’s got Rubio in the position of Secretary of State and National Security Adviser and fully aware of the situation, and that has given him the comfort to put this this process in motion. There’s certainly a disclosure process unfolding right now. Obama said in an interview that he did with Brian Tyler Cohen, when asked about aliens, Obama said, “They’re real, but I haven’t seen them. They’re not being kept to Area 51. there’s no underground facility unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States. Now, that sounded to me like kind of sarcasm when he said they’re real, but and then explained all that they’re not real. They’re real, but I haven’t seen them and and and uh they’re not being kept in uh Area 51. Uh there there’s no underground uh facility unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they they hid it from the president of the United States. So, it would appear to me that Obama also doesn’t know of any aliens. I think Obama was largely kept in the dark. I think he does know that the base fact that we’re not alone in the universe. And I actually think when he said they’re real, I think he was being that was just honest. That was his honest, candid, genuine statement. I think when he then said they’re not kept at Area 51, I think he’s also being honest cuz none of my sources say that UAP and aliens are being kept at Area 51. being kept somewhere else. Um, so I think he was being honest there. And I think when he made the comment of, uh, unless there’s a giant conspiracy, if you watch the tape, he like sips his cup and raises his eyes for as he said, I think he knows there’s a giant conspiracy. That’s the truth. The following day, uh, Trump was asked about that on Air Force One and he responded saying Obama revealed classified information and he shouldn’t have said that. And, um, I think that’s the truth. Yeah. I think presidents don’t don’t know and they’re and they’re told not to talk about it. Trump has started to release a lot of classified information around UAP and aliens. The first batch of that was released a couple of days ago. What exactly is inside this report? There was a number of files, reports, uh video and uh still images that were declassified. This is information that previously had been classified or just never really made public. Um, this was just the first trunch of uh what has been what will be released. Uh, the most notable piece of evidence in there is an image, a still image from the 1972 Apollo mission. It’s an image of a triangle, a seemingly triangleshaped craft hovering above the moon and above the astronauts. And the image was taken from uh the from the lunar module and um you know the UAP task force looked into this image years ago uh and determined it was real that seems to be the most glaring piece of evidence in this this trunch. But I will say this, how and I both have the same a lot of the same sources of information. And everyone we’ve talked to at various federal agencies has told us that when the president gave this directive in middle of February for federal agencies to declassify evidence of non-human intelligent life and UAP, only a few engaged with it. They only gave a small percent of what they have and they only had a couple weeks to do it. Mhm. One of the things I I think I’ve always struggled with with the idea of these kind of conspiracies um is that I don’t know why that information would necessarily fall into the hands of like government officials because you know alien life forms or UAPs would be visible and would land in anyone’s back garden. So you would you could imagine a world especially in a world where we have I don’t know like 8 billion iPhones roaming around. Can imagine a world where if there was some kind of UAP crash in my garden, it would be on Tik Tok within 5 minutes. Yeah. Or if there really was someone got there with an iPhone. You’re right. You know, there was that incident earlier in the year with those were they drones in in America flying Jersey and that was on social media within minutes and everyone was talking about it and looking at what they were. I I don’t know. I think in the modern world because we have so many ways to capture high quality video, if there was something out there, we would have seen a very clear image of this thing by now. That’s why there there’s a lot that came out in these files because over the years, our sensor systems that the pilots have in their planes have gotten so much better. They’ve captured really astounding. Does this life want to be seen? Do these aliens want us to know they’re there? I’d have to assume that given the level of quality of of their technology, if they didn’t want to be seen, we we wouldn’t be seeing them. So, it seems like I would say there’s evidence that for whatever reason, they’re they’re they’re wanting to be seen. But also, like I my personal opinion is that if someone answers that question, they’re answering it through the lens of like how humans think, right? For all we know, you know, we’re we’re ants to them. You know, you don’t hide from the ants. You walk around them, you don’t even but you also don’t pay attention to them. You know, based on their behavior from the interviews you’ve done, how do you think they view us? I I honestly feel like the dynamic is, you know, we are very very far below them on the food chain. You know, Hal makes an analogy in the film. He says, “The ants in your treeine in your backyard, they could be there for generations. You never think about them. You walk around them. You don’t you’re not hiding from them, but like they’re there and you don’t really care, right? But what happens if they evolve one day and out of nowhere they figured out how to get into your house and they’ve belined under your under your door and they’re in your living room, right? We might have evolved technologically over the last 80 years since we cracked the atom so quickly that we’re now, you know, the equivalent of the ants showing up in their living room. Like all of a sudden, all of a sudden this waring species, this violent species, humans, you know, um we have we we progressed so quickly. We went from no real technological pro progress for a very long time to cracking the atom and then figuring out nuclear technology and then continuing to increase, you know, our our nuclear technology development. And you know, we have this program that has been retrieving their crash craft and trying to reverse engineer them. So we might be at that point where we’re about to do what they do and all of a sudden we are a problem. Um that might be the explanation of why they pay so much attention to our nuclear process. You know there’s a lot of UAP activity not only at the nuclear weapons sites all over the world but um sites involved in the process the nuclear process like uranium mines or refineries. Is it, you know, it might just be we’ve gotten to the point where all of a sudden they have they have to in uh in the Soviet Union, uh the UAP came over and actually started a launch of the Russian missiles. I mean, it actually forced the system to start into a countdown process. How do we know that? By the intelligence community’s uh access to information about it. Every person we spoke to in Velikorviche said they saw a flying saucer on that day. For hours, it hovered over the nearby ballistic missile base. No one had touched any buttons. No one had entered any codes. And yet, as the UFO hovered over the base, the control panel showed the missiles were preparing to launch. For 15 agonizing seconds, the base lost control of its nuclear weapons. Logically, I would think that unusual activity would happen around consequential sites. Yes. You know, I’d be more surprised if there was really frequent unusual activity happening in my back garden, for example. But around highly consequential sites, one would expect there to be people flying things around there, spying. You know what people are like with cameras these days? They want to take photos of anything interesting. They they hang around police stations and army barracks, right? Right. So logically I would assume that there would be an increased probability of strange activity in the sky above a nuclear site. Well, in fact, there was a group of people in the intelligence community who who recognize exactly what you’re saying. And so they decided to, you know, make an attractive magnet by getting a whole lot of nuclear uh assets in in one location to see if that would draw them in. And my understanding it was successful. So, you know, our nation and other nations have figured out circumstances that can, for lack of a better term, bait UAP. Um, a a certain level of nuclear footprint in a in a small radius tends to attract them and um, our nation figured that out a long time ago and and so did other nations. One of the things that I I’ve thought about is I I know very little about physics, but I know one thing I know is how big the universe is. Now, I’m quite a big fan of SpaceX. cuz I’m actually an investor in the company and um from my fascination with space I’ve learned just how big the universe is and how long it would take us to travel from I don’t know earth to the nearest uh galaxy the closest star system to us which is called Alpha Centuria Alpha Centuria right is over four light years away which is about 40 24 trillion miles if we traveled at the impossible 10% of the speed of light which is impossible currently impossible. It would take a ship 40 years to get there. Now, fortunately, what we learned in looking at what might be the underlying physics and using Einstein’s theory of general relativity, it turns out that there are ways of modifying the effective speed of light to make it much higher or much lower. So, you you you can do that. So, so when you get into potentially modifying what we call the space-time metric, you could get to a point where you can make wormholes and warp drives. And those are things that are not off the charts. I mean, there are actually textbooks by general relativity experts on on the fact that you could re-engineer the spacetime. So you could do it. You could get from here to there. But you’re not saying you would travel in like a like a a a line like you do in a plane, right? Well, you could you you could it if if you arrange for the effective speed of light in that line to be much higher than without breaking the speed of light, you can zoom over there very quickly. So you even even in in a straight line. uh but no no one at the moment knows how to do that on earth. We can write the equations and see how it doesn’t violate our physics equations but we don’t have the uh engineering. So we figured out basically we figured out how these how these craft are operating the theory of it but we don’t have the material sciences right what you said right to replicate it. What I’m pointing at is if you travel at that speed across the universe, if you even hit, I don’t know, an object the size of a pebble, it would be like a nuclear explosion. But the thing is, if you’re modifying uh space, it’s sort of like making like like a surfer wave on on on, you know, at the the seashore, you you arrange to have space moving ahead like that. So you come up to a rock, it’s just going to push it aside. So you can engineer that. This is how I’ve wrapped my head around it. Um, essentially they’re they’re warping spaceime in a localized area. They’re creating an immense amount of energy around the craft and it creates essentially a bubble around the craft and that bubble separates the craft from the environment around it. So the environment has no no impact on the craft. That’s why we see transmedium travel like a craft going you know smooth from space to air to the water without even a splash. The environment around the bubble has no bearing on the craft inside it. and the craft inside it is in its own spaceime. And once you wrap your head around that, then things like interstellar travel become totally possible. One of the paradoxes with this is they appear to be such so advanced in their physics and their technology if I should call it that. But at the same time they seem to be crashing a lot which is well actually some of them have not crashed but have been simply left in the desert sort of like a gift or a donation. We’re still trying to figure that out. So I mean some of them do do crash and and uh it can have maybe some of our electromagnetic pulsing and laser pulsing can interfere with their technology and and and you might get a crash. Why why don’t you why do you think another country hasn’t come forward with similar disclosures and similar evidence? I actually think there’s a really simple answer for that. Um I think our allies follow the US’s lead, right? And I think our adversaries, primarily China and Russia, have no reason to go public. They don’t have the same sort of societies and dynamics like she can do what he wants anyway. What’s what’s the advantage to him? Same thing with Putin. you know, there is no advantage. And when you look at it that way, you really quickly get to the, you know, this is the way it is for that reason. They did a study in 2026 and found that 45 planets are likely capable of supporting life. They called this the habitable zone. Out of more than 6,000 planets discovered so far by NASA. Mhm. Um, there are approximately a trillion galaxies in the universe and within these galaxies, 100,000 planets could potentially host life, according to Oxford University. Now, I believe that if you think about the entire universe, I believe that we’re not the only life in the universe. Yes. Right. I think that’s only I think that’s a very scientific conclusion. Probabilistically, it would be pretty incredible if we were. I mean, it’ be just it’s almost inconceivable that we are. The question of whether that life has been here is a question that for me is still a big question mark because I just you know I also I think Elon you know whatever you think about Elon he is someone that seems to just say what he thinks and this is part of what’s caused his companies a lot of problem is he seems to be pretty unfiltered. He has been asked multiple times as well if he believes that they are there are aliens in the in in our galaxy and he has said on multiple occasions that he doesn’t believe that to be the case and you know he’s launching rockets all the time. So he said I heard him say if anyone should know it should be me. Do you think he knows? I think that you can’t operate in space at at at the level he does or operate as a contractor at the level he does um without having clearances that require secrecy. You know there’s there’s there’s all kinds of uh levels of secrecy. You know there’s everyone knows the word classified, right? There’s classified projects, but there’s also black projects that are unagnowledged special access programs where you literally by law required to not acknowledge the existence of the program or anything it does. That’s literally the anything it knows. Yeah, that’s literally the whole that they’re literally referred to as unagnowledged special access programs. All of his team as well with So if you’re involved with an on special access program, someone asks you about it, you you have to say you have no idea what they’re talking about and all of his team if if they are a part of the program. Yeah. But just because someone’s um read it on an unagnowledged special access program doesn’t mean all their employees are. Elon said um that we have 9,000 satellites up there. He’s referring to his company Starink. And not once have we had to maneuver around an alien spaceship. He argues that if aliens were constantly visiting Earth, the aerospace experts who watch the skies every day would be the first to know. Well, look, NASA also has said for decades that they had no evidence of extraterrestrial life for UAPs. And last Friday, the federal government released a photo of a triangle craft hovering over the 1972 Apollo space mission. So, somebody’s somebody’s not being honest, right? You know, which also implies a lot of other people know things that they haven’t revealed. I I think I’ve heard you say before, how that you think this intelligent life actually exists amongst us. Yeah. The quote was, “They are not occasional visitors. They live secretly alongside humans, but with advanced technology. We have so many sightings and so many uh even access to materials and so on. I mean, they’re all over the place. 65% of Americans believe intelligent life exists on other planets. Uh 40% of people say military reported UFOs are probably evidence of extraterrestrial life according to Pew Research. And 30% of Americans believe UFOs or unidentified flying objects are probably alien ships of life form. And 47% of Americans believe aliens have definitely or probably visited Earth at some point. According to Yuggov, half of Americans believe that UFOs/ aliens have definitely or probably visited life at some point. Quite a lot of people. Well, you see you see the the uh age of disclosure film and the people that came forward. I mean, you had Clapper, ex uh head of the office of director of national intelligence and senator Rubio at the time now in his elevated position and so on. You now have people of real quality and you know they’re not lying and they’re coming forth and saying this is real and we got to deal with it and there’s a lot we don’t know about it. Could you be wrong? Um I don’t think it’s about whether I’m wrong or Al’s wrong. You’d have to believe that senior leadership across the government, the military, the intelligence community that has access to class information and is saying based on the classified information they have seen, this is a real situation. You’d have to believe all of those people are lying for some bizarre unexplained reason. So, I find that hard to believe. Could it be the case that all of those people were misinterpreting what they were seeing? they they saw something, you know, fighter pilots saw something moving in their visors when they’re up in uh not really because I mean in some cases that could be the case, but then when you have actual materials, crash craft bodies that aren’t human. Also, a lot of these sightings, um, they’re now in the process of the White House cabinet members are in the process of identifying where the evidence exists within federal agencies and the military so they can get access to it themselves and then determine from there what can safely be shared with the public. I think once they get their hands on more evidence, then a plan will be put in place for telling the world this conclusion. And I think we’re we’re it’s like we’re close fade to complete basically like it’s going to get to that point relatively soon. If we get to that point and you get personally invited in to wherever they’re keeping these materials and you get to see every single file that exists and as you go through those files you realize that a lot of what you’ve been told is not true because there’s other explanations. How would it like fundamentally change the way that you see the world? Some of some of the UAP we’ve seen like take the famous everybody knows the tic tac UFO right uh that commander Dave Fraver the Navy fighter pilot interacted with in 2004 right I’ll put that on the screen for anyone that hasn’t seen it great and so take that take that UAP for example multiple data collection systems and commander Dave Fraver a legend in the N in in the Navy top gun guy commander of an entire naval strike group right like total badass legend legend of a guy He sees this with his own eyes and a bunch of data collection systems captured data confirming it’s real. This UAP went from hovering above the ocean to instantly being at 80,000 ft which is the entrance to space right and it did that maneuver all afternoon. The amount of energy required to do that is so bonkers. It’s we do not humans do no human beings have the ability to create that much that much energy right in a localized area for for an aircraft and and so to answer your question if we find out you know the unthinkable that this is not non-human intelligent life that some humans have figured out how to crack that technology and did it as recent as 2004 when the tic tac incident happened that would be even more mindblowing going than accepting that life from elsewhere is here and has been here a long time because that would mean that some some group of humans leaprog the rest of all of humanity technologically by thousands of years and then seemingly did nothing with that or it could be something else. That’s the nature of unusual things. They become great stories. So I I think in the case of the tic tac incident again I’m what I’m trying to do is interrogate this from all angles is could it have been something else? Look any any isolated event like that you could do the whole could it be this could be that thing but it’s the it’s the you got to take a step back and look at this the collective. It’s one report like that after another from credible people since World War II. You know, during World War II, pilots were seeing what they called foo fighters, like these orbs that would move alongside uh our our fighter jets, right? Like they would like they would move in in line with them. Um and now we have we have people on ships seeing these things enter the water and then moving at, you know, impossible knots or something which no no human being, as far as I know, our fastest submarines go like 50 mph. These things are going hundreds of miles an hour under the ocean. So these craft are trans medium, they’re seen in space, they’re seen in the air, they’re seen underwater. There’s just too much activity to to ignore it. Yeah. And and that would be a hard one to say, well, you know, is there some sonar thing that makes you think something is doing that, but it’s seen enough times under enough different conditions that we just have to accept that it’s real? Is there a reason why this hasn’t been captured on like an iPhone when in 4K? There’s been a lot of stuff captured on phones and video cameras in in that scene in the age of disclosure I mentioned where Hal and some of the other people break down how these things are working and they describe that they’re creating a warp bubble around the craft. That warp bubble also makes it very hard to get a clear video of something cuz you’re you’re taking a photo or a video through essentially a space-time barrier. You know, barrier. It’s like the equivalent of taking pictures of uh trying to take video of like koiish in a pond from above the water. It’s going to look all distorted cuz you’re going through the water. If you’re if you’re trying to video or take a photo through a this bubble, it makes it pretty hard and you end up with the kind of videos we we see. Um you’re probably familiar with this NASA report that they produced on UAPs independent study team report where they they essentially say that they don’t believe that this these UAPs are are aliens. Why would NASA be lying? Like all these big bureaucracies, there’s people who are aware of the truth and then there’s people who have the truth kept from them. You know, one of the people I interviewed was Mike Gold who was on the UAP uh the NASA UAP task force and he talked about um how that effort was was flawed from the start. They didn’t want to have a result that said NASA has all this information that they’ve kept from the public. They wanted the result that that they landed on, which is there’s nothing to see here. And they were really discouraged from um for example the uh that that image of a triangle, what clearly appears to be a triangle craft over the moon. Um they were told not to not to include that in their report. Like they were they they they were not set up to tell the world the truth. In your view, is it possible that aliens aren’t uh aren’t real? Is it possible? Possible. I think so. You think it’s impossible? Yeah. Using the term alien, you know, has a certain connotation about it. So, we certainly say, I mean, the evidence is absolutely clear that there is some form of life with advanced technology. You know, if you want to say, well, what can I prove about about it? Well, that those are still unknowns that we’re trying to sus out. I got access at a very high to a very high level of the government, the military intelligence community. And there were a lot of people who talked to me off the record that wouldn’t go on camera. There were a lot of people who uh couldn’t tell me about classified information. I didn’t want to know classified information, but they all made it very clear um not just on camera, but off the record that there that there is evidence at a classified level that is clear as day. like some video taken when like the bubble is turned off and you can see a cra a a craft of non-human origin clear as day. And there is evidence of the technology that’s been recovered and of these bodies. And when you have when if you put yourself in my shoes, when you have so many senior people across the military, government intelligence committee telling you this, it’s it’s really just impossible to ignore it. Especially when most of them aren’t even friends. They’re not like ideologically aligned or politically aligned. They’re all just different groups of people. I’m less compelled by eyewitnesses. This is the problem because, you know, I’m such a big true crime fan. You hear about all the bloody cases where eyewitness said this and then they find out the serial killer wasn’t that person or that thing didn’t happen. So, and I also just have my own experiences of like thinking I saw things when I was younger. Here’s an interesting thing you just made me think of. So, in the film, uh, Rubio and General Jim Clapper, two people who are completely ideologically and politically opposed to each other, made the same really intelligent point, and they both have knowledge at a a classified level of this situation. They’ve all said a problem we as humans have is that there’s something in the human psyche that says I cannot wrap my head around or prepare for things I haven’t seen or experienced. Right? And time and time again throughout history that has proven to be like a human flaw. Right? Uh Rubio goes on to say that the greatest intelligence failures in US history come from a lack of imagination. And he cites a few examples. He says, “We never would have imagined the Japanese could figure out how to get torpedoes through the straits and hit us at Pearl Harbor until they did.” Um, he says, “We never would have imagined terrorists would fly to the homeland, learn to fly commercial planes and then use them in a terrorist attack until they did.” Right? Um he says some other examples too, but time and time again not wrapping our head around a set of circumstances that and using our imagination to think about what might happen or what might be happening has it’s bit us in the ass. And he he ends his line of thought by saying lack of imagination leads to strategic surprise like Pearl Harbor, like 9/11. And sometimes strategic surprise changes the course of history. Mhm. And so, you know, him and and other people I interviewed think it’s really important to get ahead of this as opposed to waiting for something to happen, as opposed to waiting for, you know, to find out the hard way that China, you know, cracked this technology before us and used it as in an act of war or uh non-human intelligent life uh does something unpredictable and then all of a sudden the US government’s on its heels and so are other governments on their heels explaining to the public what they’ve known for a long time. I I’ve often heard that the reason why they don’t tell the general public that these things exist is because general public aren’t ready for this information. Is that an argument? I’ve not really heard you guys say that. Yeah. No, people there are people involved in gatekeeping this information that don’t think the public can handle the truth. Uh you know, Hal recently told me that people in the legacy program are pointing to the age of disclosury and saying, “Look, this film reveals a lot and people aren’t losing their [  ] You know, people aren’t jumping out of windows. is not causing chaos in society. Like the public can handle the base facts. Of all the things you’ve heard, Dan, what is the what was the most compelling story or anecdote that you heard that convinced you? It was really just the sheer number of very high level military government intelligence officials who were telling me in in private settings to my face, you know, that at a classified level, they know with absolute certainty this is real. But if you had to pick one story. Oh, I mean it’s really it’s really it wasn’t one it really wasn’t one thing for me. It was like it was the overall it’s like for example I I interviewed Rubio and Jill Senator Jill Brown on the same day. They both uh participated in the film and did lengthy interviews with me and both looked me in the face and told me they thought this was the most important documentary that’s ever been made and that this was really important to bring this information out in a thoughtful way to the public and make them aware of what’s happening. you you can’t like on hear stuff like that, you know. Um and it makes it makes an impact on you. What about you, Hal? What was the most persuasive thing that you that tipped you over the edge from a you know, maybe being agnostic to believing that there are nonhuman intelligent life amongst us? Well, it’s looking at the technology which is so advanced then I’m essentially certain that no uh us or our adversaries could have made it. So somebody actually made it and it has to be somebody who knows a lot more about physics than we do. I mean there’s this there’s nowhere to go but to say okay there’s somebody who is way beyond humans to develop that kind of technology and display it of all the evidence that’s been released and all of the rumors and videos and you know going back to the crop fields that we used to hear about many years ago presumably there’s lots of this stuff that you don’t believe that you think is nonsense. Oh, there’s definitely there’s definitely there’s tons of reports that are that when you look into them seem like [  ] for sure because you know one of the things people often say is that alien encounter descriptions perfectly match the pop culture of that era. So people saw flying saucers in the in the 1950s after sci-fi movies popularized them and gray aliens in the 1980s after books um like Communion popularized them. And this kind of suggests that sightings are born from human imagination versus well I I think I and I think that’s a reasonable uh place to come to. I think I think a lot of the reports that we get you know we can generally set aside as being you know just manufactured by humans who get caught up in this sort of a give and take on social media and so on. But nonetheless, when you really zero in on actual evidence of technologies and evidence of bodies there, you can’t just say it’s uh you know, it’s just social contagion. The when I think about the technologies, when I watch like the tic tac video, it’s kind of blurry and I don’t really know what I’m looking at. Like there’s this thing moving around on the screen that’s like black and white, but I don’t really know what I’m looking at. And I think this has always been the struggle with it is we’re so used to consuming content in high definition that we can clearly and it appears to be the case that so many of these UAP videos are like in the distance and kind of blurry and vague. So it makes them harder to believe and it just I think we’re all longing for like a solid video. You talked about them going in and out of the water. How come someone’s not got you got if someone like falls over and we we we capture it all on camera these days. CCTV cameras on every high street. Why is there not like a solid video of something going in the water and out the water? Look, m multiple people said on on camera, they have seen with their own eyes, classified videos that are indisputable. Um, and some of them told me specifics like that story I told you, the first video J Stratton was shown when he went down this rabbit hole was a triangle craft hovering over a nuclear weapons site. Uh, Air Force security guards had filmed it on a little VHS camera that they had. It was it was hovering long enough for them to do that. you know, that kind of evidence exists, but it’s just still classified. Will it be coming out, do you think? I I I hope so. I I I know this process is playing out right now where people like like J Stratton are helping the administration find where the evidence exists so they can get their hands on it and then determine whether it can safely be declassified. Like that process is definitely playing out right now. Do you think do you trust the Trump administration to release all of the available information? I I don’t think it’s a question of do we trust the current administration will release it. It’s do we think all these federal agencies and branches of military are going to turn over the evidence they have to the administration? That’s the question. And the juryy’s still out on that. They’re they’re not right now. They’re pushing back and they’re pushing back hard. And that’s why the administration is working with people like Stratton, like Jay Stratton, who who who had who over 16 years has learned where a lot of this evidence is. um they’re working with people like him to find out where the evidence sits, who who’s gatekeeping it at each of these different organizations and how to get to it. Um so they’re doing they’re doing a factf finding mission right now. If it is released, if all the information that you’ve heard from your witnesses is released, if they release, you know, craft, alien craft, and they release alien bodies and all of these things, how do you imagine the world would be different? I think it will lead to a giant technology boom. I think once we’re told, hey, there’s this technology that exists that could revolutionize the way we live, you know, it could lead to anti-gravity technology. It could lead to new energy sources, new energy sources, solve the energy crisis overnight, right? could lead to interstellar travel and going farther out, you know, and I think it would have a great psychological effect because, you know, you suddenly uh you go from the point of saying, well, maybe we’re the only intelligent species in the universe and then you suddenly get the idea that this is a universe full of life. What does that mean for religion? I think all dogmas will just apply to it, you know, and I think the Vatican’s already gotten ahead of it and said, you know, they put out a message a couple years ago that basically the the the gist of it was, you know, God’s God’s universe and God’s work is vast and, you know, vast and basically you couldn’t you couldn’t uh, you know, say that he he wouldn’t have the ability to do that. I mean, so I from a religious standpoint and certainly in theaa case of the Catholic Church, they’ve had uh very positive views about population being throughout the universe and there’s nothing really, at least from the Catholic Church’s perspective, there’s nothing that counters the, you know, that doesn’t allow you to wrap your head around the fact that there’s other life out there, you know. Are you guys religious? not like overly religious, but like, you know, I my my my mom’s Irish and and grew up going to Catholic school and I, you know, I went to a CCD and, you know, Sunday school is called a C CCD where I grew up. Um, but you believe in God? I do. I do. Do you believe in God? I do. Yeah. And I’m a practicing Catholic. So, so would that mean that you believe God has made all of these aliens as well? That’s my That’s what my worldview is. Yeah. I would think that I couldn’t say that’s not the case, but you know, as a scientist, I can’t prove that that it is the case, but you know, just just on the statistics of it, it’s pretty likely. You know, an interesting thing happening right now, Stephen, too, is these people who have been gatekeeping the truth. Um, a lot of them are afraid to come forward and tell the White House what they know because they they think they’re going to be villainized. They think the optics around this are such that like if someone’s been covering this up, they’re they’re they’re they’re the villain of the story, right? And so, um, the White House and the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of War realized this and so in the last couple weeks, they’ve been messaging out to the military and the intelligence community that this is not a witch hunt. It’s not an endeavor to punish anyone. They want to encourage people to come forward. they assure them there will be no no punishment u for being involved in gatekeeping this. They just want to learn the truth and find out where the real evidence sits. So that’s another thing that’s playing out right now that I think if it gets out there enough uh it will lead to more people coming forward with that that evidence we all want to see. Yeah. Earlier on we you talked about how some people feel like their lives are at risk because of what they know. Has there been any instance of anyone being punished for saying anything in this regard? Well, certainly having having their clearances pulled or losing their op opportunities for advancement. Uh we we’ve heard stories like that from from several people in the intelligence. Is there is there anyone you can name that has said that they were threatened or punished or in some form because of what they Well, certainly the the number one whistleblower for for many people has been David Crush. And so he has uh outlined the various steps taken against him to basically ruin his career significantly enough that he went to the inspector general of the intelligence community and said I’m being punished, shoved aside, losing clearances and so on because I came out with this data and they said well what you provided us is, you know, serious worthy of consideration. I think a lot of people have had their lives threatened. Um I’m not certain if if anyone has been killed. Um but I know people have had their lives threatened. No. And who’s threatening them? People that are involved um in this this program referred to as the legacy program who think that the evidence should not ever come out. This legacy program. So this is a program ran within the US government to US government elements elements of it uh and also defense contractors and you think the legacy program knows the truth on this regard? Yes, because they have the firstirhand evidence of the crash materials and the bodies. There’s 80 years of data that this this group has and they haven’t released or leaked that data for the last 80 years. There’d be no advantage. No one’s hacked it. This this program is the epitome of a special access program. I think this program is as off the grid as it it could possibly be. It almost seems like there’s nothing that eventually hasn’t come to come to light that the government have done. Like I’ve sat here and interviewed a lot of CIA spies who’ve told me the history of the CIA and this program that lasted for 12 years and then it comes out and this program and I mean even some of the stuff that I’ve heard you talk about how around um what’s it called? Remote viewing. Remote viewing. Remote viewing. That was that CIA project? CIA. What is remote viewing? Remote viewing. Well, the the the CIA suddenly got concerned because they saw that the Soviets were spending millions of dollars at some of their best institutes to investigate the possible use of quote ESP. What’s ESP? Psychic ability. Yeah. Psychic abilities, extra sensory perception. And so, as it turns out, I was at Stanford Research Institute and uh they saw my background. They they came to me and said, you know, we’d like for you to to look into this. Is there anything to this? I mean, no scientist in America even believes there is such a thing as ESP. Who came to you? CIA. This is this is in the 70s. The CIA. Back in the 70s. The CIA approached you in the 70s and asked you to investigate remote viewing. That’s right. And so they asked me to set up a small program and 50 or 60K or whatever. They said, you know, we hope you’ll find this is all nonsense. We can forget about it. We don’t have to worry about it. And it grew into, you know, more than a two decade program. Millions of dollars. Stargate is uh the label for it that most people know about because by now most the information in the program came out. And basically it we just we just found that uh people essentially just like you have artistic ability or athletic ability or whatever music ability. Well, we found out that remote viewing, this ability to sit in a location and pick up information from someplace far away, uh, is a talent that many people could uh, demonstrate. And so we ended up, uh, actually training Army Intelligence officers at the Army Intelligence and Security Command at Fort me how to do this. And so, so wait, let me just simplify this for the audience that might not fully understand what we’re talking about. So remote viewing is the idea that I could sit here in London where we are now and I could be trained to see what was going on in another part of the world to make your mind’s eye go to a remote location. I’ll give you a specific example. A Soviet plane that CIA wanted to get hold of went down somewhere in Africa and they didn’t they didn’t know where because the pilot had bailed out and it just went on till it ran out of gas. So, we got two of our quote best remote viewers, one that worked for the Air Force and one that worked for my organization to say, “Okay, here’s a map of Africa. Where’s that damn plane? We got to go in and get it.” And they put an X on the map that was in 3 miles of where the plane went down out of the hundreds of thousands of square miles. And so, the CIA went in and got the plane. So, I mean, it was, you know, how do they do that? Well, by the way, there’s an audio recording of President Jimmy Carter telling that story. Yeah. Hm. Post post presidency. Maybe we should play that. One time we had a a small plane go down somewhere in Africa. We were not able to find it by surveillance from our satellites. So the director of the CIA, he was also director of all the intelligence agencies, heard about a a woman in California that uh was a medium and he uh contacted her and she gave him the latitude and longitude of the plane’s whereabouts. And the next time one of our space satellites went over that area, we located the plane where she said it was. Again, this sounds like it’s impossible. Sounds like a It sounds completely bananas. It sounds like something out of an X-Men comic book. It sounds crazy, but Well, I was okay really practical about it. Uh, you know, they they often are skeptics would say, “Well, if they’re so psychic, why aren’t they rich? Why aren’t they in the stock market or whatever?” So we set up a little program on a challenge to predict silver futures. To predict what? Silver futures. Just the value of silver. Yeah. The value of silver silver on a daily basis. Was it going to go up or go down? So we had somebody said, “Okay, I I will if you’ll set up a little program like that for 30 days, I’ll bet on what your quote remote viewers say and I’ll put the money in and I’ll give you 10% of what I make.” Said, “Okay, fine.” Now, long story short, uh made um $260,000 in the 30 days. We got our 10% which is $26,000. So people could actually in this case even look into the future a day and generate a description of what they were going to see and handle the following day. Presumably not everybody. How many people did you have do that experiment? We had uh seven in that experiment. And how many of them were successful in generating? Six of the seven uh generated really good data. So are those six of people now rich? Well, I don’t know. Some of them may may have followed up. They don’t Why were those six people picked? Since we had learned that sort of anybody can do this. Uh we were actually raising money for a school that was being put together. So, I just went to the board of directors and said, “Okay, I’m going to give you a crash course over the weekend in quote remote viewing of the type we train intelligence officers to do.” And um so you’re going to be it. So, you just It was the board of the school. The board of board of the school. Yeah. Okay. They all knew what I did for a living. And so this program Stargate got so much um actionable intelligence from the remote viewers that house started briefing at the time the director of the CIA on a regular basis. Yeah. I’m going to I briefed all the way up to Bill Casey, director of the CIA. So does it still exist this program in any capacity? Remote viewing. If it does, you wouldn’t hear about it. Why? Because it would be a black highly classified program. Why? because we don’t want our adversaries to know how we might be getting access to their data. You just told us, but people can not believe that and that’s fine. But aren’t you under some sort of contract? Well, as it turns out, the CIA and and DIA also went to the DIA. That program finally got declassified at the level it was operating at and that you can go to the CIA reading room and you can get all of the documents on it. So your work was originally classified. Oh, it was originally a top secret special access program. Yeah. There’s a part of me that goes, listen, if people could do remote viewing and see, you know, into other parts of the world or predict the things that you’re saying, I mean, if if if it was trainable, everything so like life as we know it would be completely flipped on its head. I think it’s unreasonable to think that when Stargate became public, the US government stopped remote viewing. I mean, I wouldn’t stop if I was the US government. If if it worked, I wouldn’t stop. I think it just went underground. Moved to a different agency. Went underground. So, you were training people to do it though. Yeah, we Well, we had Yeah, we had we had people that we trained. So, train me. Yeah. How do you train now? A number of the military intelligence officers that we trained have now left the military and they do have training courses. Do you do you believe that? I do. At first I thought it just sounded too much like something in a comic book, right? But the more I first read about Stargate and the declassified documents, started to realize how serious the government took it and the more I learned about it through how and then eventually um I really don’t want to get into the details of this but eventually um I got connected with someone who has done remote viewing for the government and they did a demonstration for me that blew my mind cuz you would think if anyone was capable of doing remote viewing they could go on the internet and make one prediction or do one video that would be, you know, proven to be true and they would literally be considered to be a superhum. Like they would literally be I mean people would probably think they were a deity or a or a spiritual leader or something if one person could do. What we found was that it seems to be an act action that is just part of the human makeup. And so it isn’t like they’re a super deity or godlike or really off the charts. It’s something that people can learn to do like they can learn to play the piano or whatever this for whatever reason. Now we have new new uh you know psychiatrists and neurohysiologists beginning to study you know how does consciousness do its thing in the brain and so on. And are there elements of it uh once you get into quantum theory and quantum entanglement that would say you could have evidence uh you know beyond just our physical structure. like it could be rationalized with like a quantum connection basically the the the moving your mind’s eye to another location which also goes to like you know how’s life very interestingly you know first was the Stargate stuff and then he got into UAP and the overlap that I find fascinating is some of these craft that have been found or crashes that have happened um the reports from people involved say that a lot of them don’t have any control panels in them like they’re basically empty other than seats which suggests that maybe there’s some sort of mind connection controlling these craft. I did wonder about the crafts. I thought, you know, if I was an advanced civilization, why would I and I was that smart, why would I send life to these planets when I could just send the crafts, you know, why am I sending biological life when I could just send the Maybe they’re manufactured biological life. Maybe it’s maybe they’re equivalent. Maybe they’re not sentient sentient. Yeah, it’s true. But the remote viewing stuff opens up a lot of possibilities if Yeah. I mean we as part of this CIA program we found that uh people could affect quantum devices that were totally shielded by superconducting shielding. Tell them tell them that particular story. That’s yeah, we we uh there is a quote psychic so-called and uh so I brought him to Stanford and I I was skeptical at the time and uh I said okay well we’ve got this super experiment where there’s tiny quantum chip down inside of this electrical shielding magnetic shielding superconducting shielding we want to see if you can affect it and he did I mean this is supposed to be totally nonaffectable from by anything on the outside. In fact, it was developed by the Navy to just look for corks and stuff like that. And so it was supposed to not be influenced from the outside by anything. And he influenced it. And when I say he influenced it, I’m not just saying there little blip that, you know, you could kind of read into it. No, it it was a system where it ordinarily just had an oscillating signal like that and then when he affected it just stopped the oscillation and then he also make the oscillation go twice as fast. Of course, poor graduate student who’s life dependent on this not being affected from the outside, you know, really. But then they uh that that that raised a big issue for them. That means uh does that mean if we put if we hide our documents inside of superconducting safes uh the Russians might be able to So actually when we had Dayton the American remote viewers got together with the Soviet remote viewers and traded war stories did experiments together for you know I’m I think I’m naturally skeptical cuz I’m skeptical with all things but I’m often proven wrong. So, you know, my fiance, she um she believes lots of things I don’t believe. And so, so frequently she’s been proven right in those things that I remain open-minded to things in life cuz I’ve leared to. So, I think that’s where I remain. I remain open-minded. And I think on the balance of probability, if you ask me, do I think there’s other life in the universe? I think it would be crazy to say there wasn’t. Right. Right. But, but has there been life that has arrived here that we’ve recovered? I just I would need more evidence. Is that I I think I think that’s the right attitude and we’re hoping that uh with the release of documents that’s starting to happen now that you’ll get that evidence. But in the absence of actually getting access to the evidence, it’s very reasonable that to be skeptical. Yeah, absolutely. I do think though that the current administration in the US is so focused on following through with this directive the president gave to to get all the evidence within the possession of the federal government, all the different agencies, the military branches, and then figure out what can be declassified. I think they’re taking it so serious that we’re going to we’re going to get to more tranches of more meaningful evidence. And I think eventually we’ll get to that thing that we that that moment that we’ve all only seen in movies where a sitting president steps to a microphone and tells the world we’re not alone in the universe. I think I think we’re going to get there. I think so too. Just a matter of time. Does it change the meaning of life if that becomes the case? Does it does it mean anything for us as humans? What do you think the meaning of life is? How? And do you think we should change our behavior in any way even if this moment does occur? I think if we found out that there were life throughout the universe that it’s uh it can be developed in all kinds of forms then then that makes us uh take a new look at well what does it mean to be human you know we ought to think about if we can interacting with these other uh species and seeing what we can learn from them and what might they learn from us and so it just opens up a whole new sort of view of what the universe is like. I mean, I’ve got I’ve got 15 grandkids. They should grow up in a universe where it’s teameming with life and they know that. And that’s a very uh kind of an exciting kind of thing. I think it also could be the one thing that could unify all of humanity. You know, Reagan gave a great speech during his presidency at the United Nations where he said he often thinks that it might be a threat from outside this universe that makes all of humanity come together and think more about what it has in common than than its differences. Um, and you know, it moves them past the the the the conflicts of the moment. And that might be, you know, wishful thinking and might be naive, but it also might actually be the one thing that could that could line people up. Has it changed how you think about the the meaning of life? Between what I’ve learned about the the reality of the UAP situation and the existence of non-human life and what I’ve learned about, for example, remote viewing, it’s made me realize that our sort of western present day view of reality is not complete. You know, we think we know everything there is, you know, to life and and how things work and we just don’t. And when you’re honest with yourself and you look back at history, all the times people thought that they were they were proven wrong pretty quickly. And so it’s made me open to a lot more possibilities um than than I would have been just just 10 years ago. I think it’d be a renaissance in in our attitudes toward life and and everything. Yeah. Are you both open to being wrong? Yeah. Look, I should have said this early on. When I first started making my documentary, I was totally prepared to have people tell me, “Look, this is all [ __ ] It was all cover for our classified projects.” Did they? No, no one did. That was the crazy thing. Not Not a single person did. I would I was trying to pull it out of people. I’d be like, you know, come on. This is really this is like a black project and un unagnowledged special access program, right? Like just just say nothing if that’s the case. And they were like, no, dude. Not not even close. like it was o over and over and these weren’t random people. These were like senior people on the Senate Intelligence Committee, on the Senate Armed Services Committee, um leaders in in the intelligence community, leaders in in in the military, and so yeah, it’s hard to ignore. Yeah. Well, Trump has released the first round of the UAP reports. Um so I guess in many respects, this conversation is to be continued. Yeah. Yeah. And we we we have been told by our friends in government that the next trunch of evidence is likely to come out in the next 30 days or so and it’s going to be a rolling declassification process. So there’ll be a lot more to talk about in the near future. Thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it. I feel very curious very very curious and I I highly recommend people go check out your documentary. I’m going to link it below. Um, and I think one of the great things about the documentary is the diversity of people you’ve spoken to, including Marco Rubio, who is now working alongside President Trump and many others, including yourself, How, um, and other guests that I’ve people like Jay who, um, I hope to speak to sometime soon. Cool. Thank you for having us and thank you for bringing attention to interesting topics like this. I really do think, you know, you know, people like you are are helping open people’s minds. You know, in the past, you only had, you know, it wasn’t that long ago there’s only four TV networks, right? and a small group of legacy media people controlled what people thought about really. So people here are opening up everyone’s minds to other possibilities and other information. And so thank you. It’s it’s interesting cuz again sometimes I think I have to remind the audience of like why I do what I do and why I pick the subjects that I pick. But it’s honestly just what I’m curious about. And if if something rises in public curiosity and it’s in my my curiosity, then I’ll speak about it. It’s not an endorsement of me believing everything. It is just me wanting to learn more. Yeah. And I, you know, I I wish we lived in a society that was more open-minded generally to the people on the other side of the aisle or to subjects that are currently considered to be, I don’t know, controversial or or or not. Because, you know, it’s not lost on me that my own very existence as a black businessman is in and of itself um something that was once a very controversial idea. And so I’m all for, you know, uh, controversial ideas being having some kind of space. Well, every major breakthrough in the history of humanity came from someone being curious, right, and wanting to learn about something they weren’t aware of. So I I think great things will come out of it. and and and you just touched on something we didn’t mention, which is I found shockingly that this is the the UAP issue, non-human life, is the most bipartisan issue in Washington DC at a time when Democrats and Republicans in the United States can’t agree on anything. They’re completely lined up on this being the biggest issue of our time. Extremely significant. And like that says a lot, too, you know? Yeah. To be continued. Should we continue?