Giles Yeo, Mindy Pelz, Matthew Walker: The Top 7 Belly Fat Burning Hacks For 2024 That Are PROVEN To Work!

00:00Here’s the most important question. People ask me this question all the time. They say, "Steve, what is your favorite ever episode on The Diary of a CEO podcast?" I think the more important question is actually, what is *your* favorite episode on The Diary of a CEO podcast of all time?

00:20And so, I went out to try and answer that question. What is your favorite episode? What is your favorite moment on this podcast of all time? Using a data scientist and a big team of analysts, we’ve found the most replayed moments of all the hundreds of episodes we’ve produced this year to show to you today.

00:43These are the moments that you replayed and shared more than any other moment on this podcast. Theoretically, this should be the most valuable Diary of a CEO episode you ever listen to, because it’s a compilation of the most valuable moments that we’ve ever had on this show in 2023.

01:03The seventh most replayed moment is my conversation with Giles Yeo, where he takes on some of the biggest myths about health, weight, and obesity. He answers the question: do we have to get fatter as we age? Is it genetic? What are the easy ways to manage our weight?

01:23After I read it in your book about us gaining more and more weight as we age, I Googled it. The Healthcare Research and Quality Agency said that we naturally tend to gain weight as we age to the tune of one to two pounds per year according to their review. I found that quite startling.

01:46It is completely accurate. So, the numbers that we have—I think that’s right, actually—between 20 and 50 years old, those 30 years intervening, the average person will gain about 15 kilos in weight, which is 32... yes, two pounds a year, one to two pounds a year. 15 kilos in weight is gained over 30 years on average. Some gain very little, others gain a hell of a lot more. We look at ourselves in a mirror—I look at myself in a mirror—but it’s true.

02:18I don’t want to be that guy.

02:20Mate, I don’t know how much choice you have!

02:26What can I do to try and stay...? For me, it’s not really about the weight thing or how you look. It’s more about... I don’t know how to say this, but there was this big set of stairs the other day. A really, really long set of stairs leading down to this lake. I was in Indonesia a couple of months ago and I remember thinking about those stairs and thinking, "God, if I wasn’t athletic and strong and didn't have good knees and things like that, there’s no way I’d be able to get down this long, winding, hand-carved set of Indonesian stairs so that I could go on this boat trip."

03:00It was a weird thing, and I know this is kind of a strange story to tell, but it crossed my mind. I got to the bottom of the stairs and I turned to the person I was with and was literally like, "That’s why I’ve got to stay in shape as long as I can. Because I want to do these boat trips and I want to go on this little rafting thing, but I won’t even be able to access it unless I can go down up and down those stairs." It was like 200 meters of stairs down this cliff.

03:26So, that’s what I care about. I care about being active and strong and fit for as long as I possibly can. From what you said about gravity and weight, being overweight is going to inhibit my chances of being able to do those stairs.

03:41I think there are two elements there. First of all, there is doing the things we want to do, like that. You’re exactly right. These are the things which... I can still do that. I can still walk up a mountain or down a mountain because I’m still fit enough to do that, and I want to stay as fit as long as I can to do that. Weight will inhibit that undoubtedly.

04:06But then there’s a second element to actually consider. Now there’s healthy... Look, none of us are going to live longer, hopefully. Anyway, if we lived longer but were unhealthy, would you want to live longer? So, you want to live longer but healthier for longer.

04:22Undoubtedly, the thing that is closest related to health when you age is not your total weight—though there’s a role to play there—it is the amount of muscle you have. It is your muscle mass as you age, independent of how much fat you have, that will determine how healthy you are as you age.

04:41So, now I’m talking about going into the 60s and the 70s rather than when one is able to go down a 200-meter set of steps. Now, as you get older, the most crucial bit of information is to maintain resistance training. Not lifting—that’s not what I’m talking about. Sitting on a wall, getting up and down a chair, because that—the amount of muscle mass you have—really marks the level of health that you’re going to get. The science is startling; it is so, so related, independent of weight. Muscle mass is the most important for healthy aging the moment you get 60, 70 plus.

05:22Interesting. Okay, so I’ll keep doing resistance training.

05:26Correct. Always. Keep resistance training and lifting weights as long as you can. At some point, you won’t be able to lift weights just because...

05:35Don’t write me off, Giles!

05:37The hubris of youth!

05:40That’s the naivety of youth. You just assume you’ll always be able to do what you can do now. I think a lot of people will watch this podcast because, probably especially this time of year in January, they’ll probably be trying to find ways that they can cut fat. They want to be a bit skinnier. Most people want to lose a half stone or something. What is the way that you would suggest to do that? The simple way? Sustainable weight loss.

06:11The first is the amount of protein you eat. You need to try and focus on trying to keep to about 16% of the energy in your day from protein. There’s a sweet spot. If you eat too much and you’re not lifting, you’re stressing your kidneys because your kidneys have to get rid of the nitrogen from the protein. So, 16% is a sweet spot, and it doesn't mean steaks only; it can mean beans, tofu, any kind of protein from anywhere.

06:40Second is fiber. We need to eat as much fiber as physically possible. 30 grams we want to aim for, although we’re looking at the moment on average in this country, we're probably only eating 15 grams. We need to double the amount of fiber we actually eat.

06:55Third, we need to limit the amount of added sugars in our diet. Added sugars meaning sugars not tied up in fiber. Powdered stuff, maple syrup, agave, nectar—all those are added sugars you put in. Keep it to 5% or less of the energy content in your day. Those are the three numbers that I want you to think about: 16% of protein, 30 grams of fiber, 5% or less of added sugars. Apply that to whatever you want—keto, whatever you want to do—apply that, and I think that will be a sustainable, healthy way to eat.

07:23The sixth most replayed moment is a conversation I had with Dr. Mindy Pelz, who talks about the belly fat burning diet. Nutrition is a huge thing at this time of year, and so she lays out exactly how to eat and behave in order to reduce belly fat and to improve your overall health.

07:46You told me about the first two styles of fasting. The first one was intermittent fasting, which is 12 to 16 hours, which is good for weight loss, brain fog, that kind of thing. The second is autophagy.

07:56Autophagy.

07:57What did I say?

07:58"Autography." But I like it!

08:01I said autophagy. If I didn't, we’ll fix it with AI. Autophagy fasting, which is 17 to 72 hours, good for balancing sex hormones and preventing illness, broadly. Number three, we haven't spoken about: gut reset fast. What’s that?

08:18So, that’s based off a study that came out of MIT that showed 24 hours without food and your intestinal stem cells inside your gut actually start to reboot themselves. Now, a stem cell is a cell that can go to anywhere in the body and repair itself. But at 24 hours, you get a plethora of them in your gut.

08:41In the gut, we’ve got a damaged microbiome from everything that we’ve just been talking about. So, what I discovered in this 24-hour fast is I could take women that had been on birth control pills for years, people that had been on multiple rounds of antibiotics, people who had been eating horrible food, and I could actually put them through a 24-hour fast once a week, once every couple of weeks. These stem cells would come in there and they would start to repair.

09:08Now if I teach that person how to eat right, their food is actually starting to build a better microbiome in the gut. So, that 24-hour fast became this go-to in my clinic where I could take all these gut challenges and I could start to unwind them just because I knew the body had this capability of making these intestinal stem cells. It was crazy. We got people off supplements, we got people who weren't making serotonin (which affects mood and comes from the gut) suddenly become happier. People who hadn't had bowel movements in three days suddenly started to put in this gut reset, and it was like a miracle. It was incredible.

09:47Number four: fat burner fast.

09:50The fat burner fast is probably my favorite for those people who want to lose weight. The research was done that 36 hours without food, followed by 12 hours of eating, and then another 36... they actually did it over a 30-day period, but we’ve been using it in our community just dosing it in.

10:08At 36 hours, what happens is that’s enough time where the blood sugars come down where, all of a sudden, the body—it's so smart—it goes, "Okay, blood sugar’s not coming. We’ve been in this fasted state, we’ve triggered autophagy, we’ve brought inflammation down, we’ve made you ketones, we’re trying to go find food, but this extra weight? It’s not serving you." Because remember, you’ve got to go find food. So, it drops weight.

10:35It’s the most beautiful way to get a person to unstick any kind of weight loss resistance. But most importantly, you know where it dropped the most amount of weight from? Where does everybody want to lose weight?

10:48Belly.

10:49Yep. So, it is the... I probably should have called it the "fat burning belly fat burning" fast. But yeah, and so that's what they showed: that actually a 36-hour fast started to unstick weight loss, and it was started with weight around the belly.

11:06Compelling. Number five: the dopamine reset fast.

11:11So, number five, I’ve found some research showing that when people go without food for 48 hours, the whole dopamine system will be rebooted. What’s important to know about the dopamine system is it is our molecule of happiness. It’s actually a motivation molecule and it’s a neurotransmitter that allows thoughts, happy thoughts, to go across from neuron to neuron.

11:37What happens—and I’m sure you’ve talked about this on your podcast—is that we’re so dopamine-saturated right now. But specifically, people who are overeaters, they actually are finding... the study I quote in the book is that they found that people who had food addiction, people who had extra weight like obese situations, they were not getting as much happiness out of their food because their dopamine receptor sites were saturated. So, they had to eat more food to get more happiness.

12:09Food is a state changer; it does make us happy. So, what they found is if they put them into a 48-hour fast, they actually rebooted the whole dopamine system and new dopamine receptor sites appeared. So that when they brought food back into the equation, they actually got more enjoyment out of food with less food.

12:29This kind of got me thinking about a conversation I was having yesterday with some of my team here. We were talking about how it almost feels like sometimes if I’ve eaten sugar, I can go into a bit of a sugar cycle. What I mean by that is I’ll have some sugar and then, like a couple of hours later, I’ll have another craving for sugar. And then a couple of hours later, I’ll have another craving for sugar.

12:47But then at other times, specifically for example when I did keto—I was on the keto diet for about eight weeks—throughout that period, I didn't have any cravings for sugar. We had some chocolate come into the studio. I walked over to the chocolate and I smelled it, and I didn't want any of it. It had gone. But then when I’m in what I call the sugar cycle, I’m eating sugar maybe once or twice a day, and I’m getting the craving for it, which I just can’t seem to resist.

13:16Well, dopamine’s the molecule of "more." It’s not the molecule of "enough." So, what it does is when you get sugar, you get this dopamine rush and the brain goes, "Ooh, love that! Give me more of that!" And so, it's endless. You will never be fully satisfied; it constantly wants you to come back for more and more and more.

13:38When you start to go off the ketogenic energy system, you’re getting the same euphoria, you probably felt the same high, the same mental clarity, but you’ve totally taken this molecule of "more" out of the picture. In fact, dopamine will actually... you get those receptor sites that will be repaired, but you’re not getting a big dopamine buzz when you’re in a ketogenic state; you’re getting ketones.

14:00I was mulling it with my team how long I had to stay away from sugar to kind of get out of that vicious "give me more" cycle.

14:08My experience has been it’s about three days.

14:11Three days. That’s what I thought. I think I said four or five, but it’s just from experience as well. If I haven't had sugar for three or four days—I mean like a chocolate bar, something significant in terms of sugar—then after three or four days, the craving for it seems to vanish.

14:26It’s not far. If you think about that, that’s not hard if you’re trying to overcome a sugar addiction. Just bear it for three days, and then that dopamine stops barking at you. And then if you attach fasting onto it, now you’re getting ketones, and so you’re not needing that as much. Ketones kill hunger and they make you so mentally clear, they give you this euphoric feeling, so you don’t have that urge to go for the sugar.

14:53And the ketones come from fasting, which is when your body switches metabolic state. Got it. The last and final fasting style: immune reset fast.

15:02Immune reset was built off of Dr. Valter Longo’s work. He did a study on people who had cancer and were going through chemotherapy. One of the challenges we know about chemotherapy is that it wipes out the whole immune system. He wanted to see, "Well, what if I put somebody in a fasted state as they went through chemotherapy? Would there be a difference?"

15:25What he found is after three days of fasting, the white blood cells in our system actually reboot themselves. All old white blood cells are sloughed away and new white blood cells emerge. So, people were able to come out of that chemotherapy experience and have a stronger immune system as opposed to what we were seeing was that it was wiping the immune system out.

15:49So, that launched the whole three-day water fast sort of craze, at least here in America. We’re seeing a lot of people that are just going after three-day water fasts to prime their immune system. But you also, also at three days, get stem cells—full systemic stem cells. So, all of a sudden, your body’s got surging with stem cells going to all parts of the body repairing it.

16:13The great example I always use on this one was I had an Achilles tendon injury and nothing was helping it. So, I threw a five-day water fast at it. On the fourth day, I felt this buzz in my Achilles tendon and I was like, "Oh, wonder what that is?" And it stayed all the way through—I went five full days—and about the fifth and sixth day, so sixth day I was entering food back in, all the pain completely went away and it never came back. I tried everything. I tried everything and that was the only thing that repaired it.

16:48It does make, again, evolutionary sense that if our body senses we’re injured because we’re not eating or some other signal that we are on a course to not survive, to put it nicely, it does make sense that it might set about to repair whatever needs to be repaired.

17:08You know, because like if I was a wounded human back in on the savannas of, I don’t know, Africa or wherever we came from, and I’m laid there and I’m not eating, my body should probably go, "Okay, Steve might need something fixed so that he can get back to hunting."

17:25You’re getting it! So survival—that is the number one priority of the body. So when you go without food, you amplify every resource it has to keep you alive. And if repairing my Achilles means I can now go hunt for food, it’s going to do that; it’s going to make me stronger.

17:47In the book, I stumbled upon a really cool hypothesis called the thrifty gene hypothesis. It said that the humans that evolved out of the primal days had a very specific genotype. This genotype allowed us to metabolically flex and be stronger in a fasted state because we had to survive. The people that didn't make it from that time period didn't have that gene.

18:21But think about this for this moment: so they think we *all* have this gene inside of us right now, this thrifty gene, where we can go long periods without food and we can survive. So what happens when we’re eating all day? What happens when we’re ignoring and we’re not actually activating that genetic profile? So what they are now believing is that diabetes, metabolic syndrome, all of that is largely happening because we are going against the genetic profile that we are now seeing in humans. We’re like on the opposite end of this spectrum.

18:55We’re overloading our bodies.

18:57Yeah.

18:58Which is meaning that the survival gene you referenced there is not being activated to help us.

19:04That's right. That's right.

19:08The fifth most replayed moment is a moment from my conversation with Matthew Walker, who is the world’s number one expert on the subject of sleep. He explains the importance of sleep on our overall health, on our weight, and everything in between. But most importantly of all, he gives us a roadmap for how to sleep better. I know so many of you are struggling, so I’m not surprised that this is one of the most replayed moments of The Diary of a CEO of 2023.

19:34I’ve had a lot of health experts on this podcast recently, but none of them have really talked to me about the role that sleep or sleep deprivation plays in weight. Is there a relationship?

19:45It’s probably one of the most well-defined relationships that we know in all of sleep science. It is at least a three-part story. The first emerging evidence came in terms of hormones. There are what we call appetite-regulating hormones, and the two principal ones of concern here are something called leptin and ghrelin.

20:11Leptin, when it’s released, will signal to your brain that you’re satisfied with your food, you are satiated, and you are no longer hungry. Ghrelin does the opposite. When ghrelin is released, it says, "No, you’re not satisfied with your food. You are not full. You still want to eat more. You are still hungry."

20:34Some of the first studies they started to do, they just restricted people’s sleep to six hours, or five hours, or four hours. What they found was that firstly, that signal leptin that says, "No, you’re satisfied with your food. You don't want to eat anymore. You’re full," that signal of fullness, satiation, was decreased by 18%.

20:58If that wasn't bad enough, ghrelin, which is the hunger hormone, that leapt up by 28%. Overall hunger levels rose by about 26%. So, firstly, it’s almost like double jeopardy: you are getting punished twice for the same crime of not sleeping enough—once by losing the signal of "I’m full, I don’t want to eat anymore," and once again for the signal of "No, I’m much more hungry and I’m just going to overeat," which is ghrelin.

21:35What that produces is a profile of increased eating. So on average, under-slept individuals started to eat in those studies about 300 to 400 extra calories at each sitting by way of insufficient sleep. Then what they discovered is that it’s not just that you want to eat more; it’s *what* it is that you have a craving for when you are under-slept.

22:04This is the problem. What they found is that when you are under-slept, you eat more of everything, but you especially eat more of these heavy-hitting, stodgy carbohydrates: bread, pasta, pizza. The next thing that you started to eat, have a preference for, was simple sugary foods: sweets and chocolate. And then finally, you started to crave very salty food, and high sodium food intake will increase your blood pressure.

22:32So that was the first of the three mechanisms. Then we did a study where we said, "Perhaps it’s not just the circulating hormones in the body. The brain is the ultimate arbiter of your food decisions." So what’s going on in the brain?

22:47We took a group of perfectly healthy individuals and we put them through the experiment twice: once when they’d had a full eight hours of sleep, and once when we deprived them of sleep. The next day, we placed them inside an MRI scanner and we showed them images of lots of different foods that range from being very healthy to being very unhealthy: ice cream, chocolate, pizza to leafy salads, nuts, and green vegetables.

23:15We asked them to rate how much they wanted that food for each item. Now, we did something a bit dastardly to make it more ecologically correct, so they weren't just saying, "Okay, they probably think I should say that's healthy." We said, "We’re going to randomly select one of these images, these food images that you see, and after you get out of the brain scanner, we’re going to give you that food and we’re going to politely ask you to eat it all." So it made it a bit more realistic so the choices were as much as they could be.

23:44What we found is that when they were sleep-deprived, the deep hedonic centers—the emotional centers of the brain, these desire centers, these reward centers—they ramped up in their activity in response to these highly desirable, highly unhealthy foods. So these more basic, guttural parts of the brain, as it were, these reward centers were lighting up much more strongly when you were sleep-deprived.

24:13Worse still, the impulse control regions in the front of the brain—what we call the prefrontal cortex—they were shut down; they were taken offline. So as a consequence, you lost your impulse control. That’s why you start to then say, "You know, when I’m sleep-deprived at the food buffet, I’m not going to do salad. I’m just going to... that pizza looks awful good, or that pasta with the cream... I’m just going to go into that, all go."

24:40So it’s what we call a pattern in terms of brain activity in neuroscience of hedonic eating, that your brain goes into this hedonic desire profile. So now we understood it’s not just hormones in the body, it’s also changes in the brain.

24:56Then came the finding that there’s another chemical in the body that’s responsible. This comes on to cannabis. When people have smoked cannabis, they’ll often say, "I get viciously hungry. I get the munchies. I get really hungry." That’s no coincidence because cannabis will stimulate appetite. Now, we all have naturally occurring cannabis compounds in our brain and our bodies; they are called endocannabinoids ("endo" meaning "comes from inside us").

25:42Endocannabinoids do many things for the brain and the body, but one of the things that they do is control your appetite and your hunger. What we found is that when you sleep-deprive individuals, these naturally occurring endocannabinoids rocketed up by over 20%, cranking up people’s appetite.

26:02These three ways lead you to start packing on... you know, when insufficient sleep is occurring, when sleep gets short, your waistline typically starts to expand. We now understand the reasons. If that wasn't bad enough...

26:20It *is* bad enough. I know, you just stop, Matt. Honestly, I’ve had really...

26:24The last thing that we discovered is that let’s say that you’re trying to be really careful and you’re trying to diet and you’re trying to lose weight. If you’re not getting sufficient sleep, then 60% of all of the weight that you lose will come from lean muscle mass and not fat.

26:44Oh god, no. Not the muscle.

26:46I know, exactly. So in other words, when you are dieting but you are under-slept, you lose what you want to keep (which is muscle) and you keep what you want to lose (which is fat). So again, it’s not an ideal situation. Sleep is important.

27:04I get it. I’m sold. How do I... my question is what are the things that in the modern society are standing in the way of sleep? We’ve touched on some of them loosely, but some of the big obvious things? The things that you would suggest doing, very actionable things we could do straight away to improve our chances of having that healthy, deep sleep that we need to be optimal in every regard of our health and performance?

28:02There’s probably I think five standard tips, what we call sort of sleep hygiene, that you can do. Then I’ll come on to maybe just some unconventional tips that we’ve sort of touched on. We’ve spoken about many of these. The first thing I would recommend people to do—and this is why when some people say, "Oh, what about this new sleep supplement?" or "It’s 40 quid for this bottle of these new sleep natural medications, I’m going to give it a try"—I would say try these tried-and-true things first before you spend your money on supplements.

28:32The first thing is regularity: go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time, no matter whether it’s the weekday or the weekend. Your brain expects regularity; it thrives best under conditions of regularity. When you give it regularity, you can improve the quantity and the quality of your sleep.

28:51The second thing is get some darkness at night. As I said, we don’t get enough darkness in the modern world. And so the trick that I would offer—and I don’t use, I don't like the word "hack"—but the suggestion would be in the last hour before bed, try this experiment for everyone listening for the next week: dim down half of the lights or switch off half of the lights, or even three-quarters of the lights in your home in the last hour before bed.

29:21All of the lights in every room?

29:23In all of the rooms. Switch off almost all of the light. Now, I’m not suggesting be unsafe and walk around in the darkness in the last hour, that’s not what I’m saying. Just dim down, switch off half of the lights. You will be surprised at how sleepy that darkness will make you feel, and it’s also an incredible behavioral trigger to signal to your brain that it is time for sleep, that darkness is around me. That’s the second tip: darkness.

29:54The third tip is temperature. Most people sleep in an ambient bedroom temperature that is too high. You need to aim for a bedroom temperature of about 18, 18 and a half degrees Celsius, or around about 65 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit. You need to get cool. Now, you can wear thick socks, you can have a hot water bottle—that’s fine—but the ambient needs to be cold because you need to drop your core body temperature and your brain temperature by about one degree Celsius to fall asleep and stay asleep. It’s the reason that you will always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that’s too cold than too hot. So make your bedroom cold, make it dark like a cave.

30:42The fourth suggestion would be "walk it out." We’ve spoken about this: the 30-minute rule. Get up, do something different, or meditate. Don't lie in bed awake for too long. Then the final two things we’ve spoken about: well, we’ve spoken about caffeine. We haven't spoken about alcohol, but let me just say as the headline of it: alcohol is not a sleep aid. Many people use it as a sleep aid; it is not your friend. Alcohol, again, is a sedative, so it knocks you out.

31:14The second is that it fragments your sleep, so you wake up. Your sleep is littered with all of these small awakenings; most of them you don’t remember because they’re too brief, but it makes for miserable, lousy quality sleep. And the final thing is that alcohol is very good at blocking your REM sleep (your dream sleep) which we know is critical for many other functions as well. So alcohol’s not your friend. That’s the sort of the final tip. Again, you know, just if you’re with friends, have a glass of red wine, just know, "Okay, my sleep’s not going to be great tonight."

31:44No, thank you, Matt. Nice job. I’m joking. I’m joking. Of course, I’m not saying don't live life too, I’m not saying that.

31:53The fourth most replayed moment is a moment from my conversation with the world-leading neuroscientist, the man who has scanned more brains than anybody else, Dr. Daniel Amen, who is a favorite on The Diary of a CEO. He tells us very, very clearly how to grow a healthier brain.

32:10I can change my brain. It’s the most exciting lesson that I’ve learned. You’re not stuck. I’m not stuck with the brain I have. You’re not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better. I can prove it. In fact, every day, what I’ve come to believe is you’re making your brain better or you’re making it worse by what you’re doing.

32:36Let’s start there. What things make the brain worse? What are the common things that most of us do without thinking that make the brain worse?

32:45When my daughter Chloe was in second grade, I went to her classroom and I wrote 20 things on the board. I went, "Separate them for me: good for your brain, bad for your brain." Seven-year-olds! They got 19 out of 20 right. So most people know.

33:02The only thing they got wrong was orange juice. They put it in the healthy category when, in fact, when is it rational to unwrap fruit sugar from its fiber source? Because it turns toxic in your body. So I’m not a fan of fruit juice; I’m a fan of fruit, not fruit juice.

33:26What’s bad about sugar for the brain?

33:28It’s pro-inflammatory. It makes you diabetic.

33:32But I mean, as it relates to the brain, why is like orange juice or the ice cream bad for my brain?

33:38Because it’s ultimately going to give you high blood sugar levels, which erode your blood vessels and you’re going to have lower blood flow to your brain. That’s a bad thing. I mean, there’s so many things about it: it’s addictive, it’s pro-inflammatory, it makes it more likely you’re going to have diabetes and obesity.

34:02So 72% of Americans are overweight, 42% are obese. I’ve published three studies on 35,000 people. As your weight goes up, the actual physical size and function of your brain goes down. That should scare the fat off anyone. I used to be chubby, but when I figured out *that* connection, I’m like, "Oh no." It was *that* that gave me the motivation to drop about 25 pounds.

34:36So sugar is the gateway drug to diabetes and obesity. Not to mention inflammation, which is the cause of depression and dementia. So you want to avoid things that cause low blood flow: caffeine, nicotine.

34:56Caffeine?

34:57Caffeine constricts blood flow to the brain.

35:01And what does that do to my brain?

35:03Well, it constricts blood flow, so you’re going to get less blood flow. And remember I showed you that progression with age? No, you don’t want that. You want to do things that increase blood flow to your brain: exercise, Ginkgo (this is one of the supplements I’m going to give you), eat foods like beets, oregano, rosemary, cinnamon—they increase blood flow.

35:31While we’re on blood flow, 40% of 40-year-olds have erectile dysfunction; 70% of 70-year-olds have erectile dysfunction. What that means is if you have blood flow problems anywhere, it means they’re everywhere. And so, like, "No." It means either you’re too sedentary, you’re overweight, you’re smoking, or having too much caffeine, or using marijuana because marijuana lowers blood flow to the brain.

36:12So just in that one of the 11, it’s exercise, Ginkgo... and for you, not for everybody, but for you, hyperbaric oxygen. Those three things will make a big difference in blood flow.

36:28Ginkgo?

36:29Ginkgo. It’s a supplement. It increases blood flow to the brain. The prettiest brains I’ve ever seen take Ginkgo. There’s actually a SPECT study; they gave people 120 milligrams of Ginkgo twice a day, significant improvement in blood flow to the brain. And so, in one of the supplements I’m going to give you, we have Ginkgo. I’ve taken it every day for the last 20 years, at least.

36:59And then, this is where the US government got an F for the pandemic: loneliness. Loneliness accelerates dementia and brain problems. And so when they isolated us, the whole significant increase in brain problems. So get connected to other people.

37:21The "I" in Bright Minds is inflammation. So what increases inflammation? Low omega-3 fatty acid levels. And we are deficient; 93% of the population is deficient in omega-3 fatty acids. 93%! So all of us should be either eating more fish or taking an omega-3 supplement like fish oil.

37:47Gum disease. Like, who knew? Like, I wasn't really that good at taking care of my gums until I started reading the studies. You have gum disease, you have inflammation, you’re more likely to get depressed and have dementia.

38:04The third most replayed moment is a moment from my conversation with Gary Brecka, where he lays out how you can become a superhuman, strip the fat off your body, and get yourself healthy with free, easy, simple exercises that will cost you nothing at all.

38:20When I heard the story about Dana White and I saw he had gone from respectably being a man that had a little bit of weight to having these six-pack abs on Instagram... of course, the six-pack isn't the outcome. It's, as you’ve said, the stuff going on inside him that’s really the transformation. But what can someone who’s just heard that at home, where do they start with getting... extending their life by triple and getting the...?

38:43So, you know, he also started something called the superhuman protocol. The superhuman protocol is using magnetism, oxygen, and light. Right? So the only things that we really get from Mother Nature, the big benefit we get from Mother Nature, is we get magnetism from the earth, we get oxygen from the air, and we get light from the sun.

39:02The truth is most of us are not contacting the surface of the earth that much anymore. So he bought $150,000 worth of equipment: a PEMF mat, an oxygen... what’s called a hypermax oxygen to do exercise with oxygen therapy, and a red light therapy bed. I had him use that equipment every single day, seven days a week.

39:21But if your listeners want to do it for free, you can take off your shoes and contact the surface of the earth. And I’m talking about bare feet on soil, dirt, grass, sand. Because earthing and grounding is a very real thing. We actually discharge into the earth. We actually, human beings, build up a charge.

39:39Do you know that pH, the acid-alkaline scale, pH stands for potential hydrogen? It’s a charge. It’s a complete fallacy that you can get alkaline by drinking alkaline water; that’s the biggest marketing myth ever sold to the public. But you *can* get alkaline by contacting the surface of the earth.

39:55So if you don’t have 150 grand—which I don’t expect anybody listening to this podcast to spend 150 grand, but he did—I said you need a PEMF mat so that you can be alkaline. You need to spend 10 minutes a day breathing 95% O2 under mild exercise, and you need to lay in a red light therapy bed.

40:15So in the absence of the superhuman protocol, you can become superhuman by contacting the earth and by learning to do breathwork.

40:22Let’s talk about breathwork.

40:23I spend eight minutes every day doing a very specific series of breathwork. People do not realize the power of something that is so accessible, so free, and so easy to do. Right? They want things to be more complicated, but it’s not. And when I said the presence of oxygen is the absence of disease, it’s absolutely true.

40:42Remember that every elevated emotional state that a human being can experience actually has in its molecular structure oxygen as a component of that emotion. So if you look at the difference between passion, elation, joy, arousal, libido, and anger, for example, it’s usually only one neurotransmitter and the presence of oxygen. The reason why no human being has ever woken up laughing is because you don’t have the oxidative state to experience laughter right out of deep sleep. But can you wake up angry? Yes. Because anger doesn't require oxygen.

41:17So every morning, contact the surface of the earth and then spend eight minutes doing... I do a Wim Hof style breathwork. I give credit where credit’s due; he’s the father of breathwork as far as I’m concerned. So I do three rounds of 30 deep breaths—like, obnoxiously deep breaths. I start by trying to take my belly button and pull my belly button out towards the wall. Imagine there’s a string pulling your belly button towards the wall, and then you fill from the lobes of the lung to the apex of the lung, and then you exhale and just relax.

41:53God knows what they think we’re doing out there right outside this podcast! They’re like, "Oh, a bunch of freakos. I knew it was a cult. I knew he was a cult leader." But so you do three rounds of 30 breaths. On the 30th breath, you exhale and you hold, allow the carbohydrate receptor to reset. When you don’t feel you can hold anymore, you take a deep breath in, you hold again, and then you let it out slow, and you start again.

42:19I would suggest that you start with three rounds of five breaths, then work to 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30. If you get lightheaded, this is a good sign that the oxygen tension is changing in your brain. If your fingers and toes get tingly, this is a good sign that you’re changing the oxygen tension. If you feel some kind of heat or temperature change in your neck, these are all great signs. You will get to the point where you can actually hold your breath for two or three minutes, sometimes four minutes, between rounds of breathwork.

42:48And then the last thing is to expose yourself to natural sunlight. First thing in the morning, the first 45 minutes of the day, God gives us a very, very special type of light called first light. There’s no UVA, there’s no UVB rays in this light, so it’s not the damaging rays from the sun. It still generates vitamin D3, it has a positive effect on cortisol, on vitamin D3. First light is the best way to reset your circadian rhythm. So by contacting the surface of the earth, doing breathwork, and getting first light, you can get to the same place that Dana White did with 150 grand in equipment.

43:21What about oxygen masks? Because I’ll be honest, when I read the Dana story, I went on Amazon soon after and I was like, "I’m just going to buy an oxygen canister." Good idea, bad idea?

43:31Good idea! So what you want to do is get an oxygen concentrator, which takes 21% oxygen from which is what the concentration at sea level is. It turns it into 95% O2 and it fills this bag. It can refill this bag over and over and over again. I use one called the Hypermax; you can see it on my Instagram. You plug it in, you turn it on, it fills this bag, and then you go in, you put an oxygen mask on, and you exercise for 10 minutes. Only 10 minutes.

43:56Cycle for three minutes, sprint for 30 seconds, cycle three minutes, sprint for 30 seconds, cycle three minutes, sprint 30 seconds, and you’re done. What this does is it raises something called the partial pressure, the storage of oxygen in your blood. The only two-time Nobel Laureate prize winner in medicine, Dr. Otto Warburg, won both of his Nobel Prizes for his work and exercise with oxygen therapy. You want to be a superhuman? Do mild exercise every day while breathing 95% O2. It’s important that you’re exercising.

44:27And then after that, you move into a red light therapy bed (photobiomodulation). So if you don’t have access to a Hypermax oxygen machine, just do the breathwork, get the breath in, exchange the oxygen tension in the tissues, and expose yourself to first light.

44:42What about cold water plunging?

44:44So I’m a huge fan of cold water plunging, but probably not for the reasons why you think. I also sit on the board of the NFL Alumni Association Athletics as a health services director. There was a time when we used to think that putting athletes in cold water after exercise was good because of its anti-inflammatory effects. We know now that that’s only about 15% of the benefit.

45:05The majority of the benefit comes from something called a cold shock protein. If you really want to be fascinated, Google "cold shock proteins." These are reserve proteins that are in your liver. They’re dumped into the bloodstream in an effort to save your life when you put yourself in cold water. They scour the body of free radical oxidation, they increase the rate of protein synthesis, muscle repair. They are free. You get them when you put yourself in cold water. I use 50 degrees for three minutes minimum, six minutes maximum.

45:33Cold.

45:34Yes. It’s actually not that cold. I see people getting in 37, 38-degree water; there’s no evidence that I’ve read that shows that colder is better. You get a peripheral vasoconstriction, so it forces all the oxygen into the core and up to the brain. And you get an activation of something called brown fat. Thermogenesis comes from brown fat.

45:53And for the women that are listening, for some reason I seem to ensnare the women when I say this: remember that the definition of a calorie is a measure of heat. Right? I mean, the definition of a calorie is the amount of energy it takes to raise one cubic centimeter of water one degree centigrade. So if a calorie is a measure of heat, then this means that when heat’s leaving your body, calories are leaving your body.

46:17So if there is nothing, nothing—no amount of exercise hits cardio, no type of cardiovascular or weight training that comes anywhere close to immersing yourself in cold water in terms of what will strip fat off your body fast. If you want to strip fat off your body, get in cold water three to six minutes a day.

46:35That’s fascinating. Because the oxygen rushes to my head, that’s why it has a really profound impact on mood.

46:41That’s why it has a very profound impact on mood. Because if you think about it, what’s the reason why we need deep sleep? What happens in deep sleep that’s so special? There’s a secondary oxygen transfer. We transfer oxygen from the periphery, from the extremities, to the brain. Remember the brain’s a non-metabolic organ. So in other words, it’s unlike a muscle. If I pick up a weight and start to work out my muscle, my arm, my body will send more blood, more amino acids, more oxygen to that muscle because it’s working.

47:04Well, if I’m sitting at my computer and I’m watching reruns of The Simpsons, or I’m sitting at my computer and I’m solving the most complex joint venture agreement, partnership agreement with all kinds of mathematical equations, my brain gets the same amount of nutrients, same amount of blood flow, same amount of oxygen. So it eats the same meal whether it’s in a dead sprint or whether it’s just chilling on the couch—except in deep sleep and when you’re in cold water, because it’s forcing the oxygen up to the brain.

47:34The second most replayed moment is a moment from my conversation with Dr. Tim Spector, a favorite on The Diary of a CEO. Here, he talks about health more holistically and some of the biggest myths that most of us believe that are currently standing in our way.

47:52We’ve got a fitness group amongst some of my friends, it’s about 10 of us in it, and we’ve been tracking how often we work out and how frequently we work out and the workouts that we do. And one of the things I have to say is pretty much no one in the group has lost any weight. We’ve been doing this for a year.

48:07And that kind of bucks what you would think. So the only time that I lost weight was actually when I went on the keto diet. I went from 14 stone 8 to 13 stone 8 in roughly several weeks. But exercise, and exercising almost religiously for the last two and a half years, doesn't really seem to impact my weight at all in the way that the fitness experts might tell me on Instagram. What’s your stance on the role that exercise plays in weight loss?

48:34It has very little role in weight loss, and all the long-term studies show it doesn't help weight loss. It’s been grossly exaggerated as an easy fix for our obesity problem.

48:50Exercise doesn't help weight loss?

48:51No. All the studies show that. The only caveat to that is if you have changed your diet, improved your diet, and you’ve lost some weight, maintaining some exercise *does* help prevent it going back up again. But as on its own, if you don't change your diet, it’s of no use. And that’s well-known now by all the obesity experts and all the studies.

49:16Does sugar make us fat? Is that the culprit? Is that one of the main things that’s contributing to...?

49:22No, again, that’s reductionism. But the reason exercise doesn't work—it’s important to realize this—is because we all know this: you go for a walk, build up hunger before a meal. That’s what your parents told you! Everything about exercise is after it, your body slows down, your metabolism slows down, and it tries to regain the energy that you’ve lost. That’s just our evolution. And so that’s why you’re not going to... it’s great for your health, I exercise—fantastic for your mood, it’s great for your heart, anti-cancer, all kinds of things. We should all do it, but absolutely not if your goal is weight loss.

50:11You have to do something about changing your diet. And I think that’s the big, a huge myth, particularly perpetuated by gyms and fitness apps and everything else. And it is complete nonsense.

50:24I read that when you looked to studies over 30 years and you looked at how many studies had been done on the relationship of exercise and weight versus things like sugar and weight, there were 12 times more studies done on the relationship of exercise and weight versus sugar and weight. Why is that? Why is there less research done on the latter?

50:47I think that’s the influence of governments and the food companies and the drink companies. So a lot of the exercise research done in the last 20 years was sponsored by large corporations who wanted to make this link between exercise and weight loss so that they could continue to sell sugary ultra-processed foods and drinks and just say, "Childhood obesity is because we don't have playgrounds and we don't encourage this." And that’s why the Cokes and the Pepsis are always there at the Olympic... sponsoring the Olympic events and associating themselves with sport.

51:36And they gave hundreds of millions to various physiology departments, sports departments, nutrition departments to do research in this area. Basically, it was really hard to get anyone to do research into how sugary drinks make you gain weight or cause problems because the amount of money for nutrition has been abysmally poor from governments.

52:00And that’s why, you know, the only first-ever study of ultra-processed food in a controlled trial was only about three years ago, and it’s been around for, you know, 30, 40 years. So such is the power of that lobby that it doesn't necessarily distort the research in a sort of evil way, but they point it to make sure that the researchers are working in an area that they want people to work in and distracting them, keeping them away from talking about sugars or even artificial sweeteners, which in my view are nearly as bad because they’re sort of hidden. And deflecting us from the idea that yes, giving kids sugary drinks or even artificial sweet drinks is going to be bad for them and cause obesity.

52:49Wait, so I’ve cut out sugary drinks about a year ago. I still have the same brands, but I have the no-sugar version.

52:58Oh dear.

53:00"Oh dear." What do you mean, "oh dear"?

53:03All the summary of the trials shows that if you take young adults and kids and they were say on two cans of full-sugar sodas and you change them to the diet version, there’s no real difference in weight or metabolic changes in their blood. You will go to the dentist less, so you don't get as many fillings, but and yet, you know, you should be gaining 300 calories, right, if you were doing two cans a day?

53:40So it doesn't work out as it should do, and that’s because these chemicals are not inert. So the sweeteners in kids, they change their brains to give them... they want more sweetness in their food. Okay? So it could reflect your wish for your late-night milk chocolate, who knows? It makes it very difficult to train kids to have more bitter foods or sour foods if they’ve got these artificial sweeteners in their diet all the time.

54:10But they’ve now shown that all these sweeteners actually affect your gut microbes. So even stevia, you know, these sort of so-called healthy ones, have an effect on your gut microbes and they’re not inert. So we know that saccharin and sucralose also cause spikes in your blood sugar. When I did it, you know, I have a trace... they’re not supposed to, but they actually do things they’re not supposed to.

54:36So we know very little about these products, and my view is that they are harmful. Probably not as bad as having the sugar, but they are absolutely not a health drink. We should be encouraging people to have teas and kombuchas and more bitter-tasting, interesting flavors and foods than just this ultra-sweet chemical concoction.

55:04Is this sugar conglomerate that have been funding much of the research that points towards some of the things you were talking about there, they're also the conglomerate that wants us to believe the calories in, calories out approach. Because if I just view all foods as kind of equal on this sort of calorie number, then I can drink some of the sugary fizzy drinks and some of the processed foods as long as I keep it within that sort of calorie deficit, I’ll be fine. And so are they... is that sugar conglomerate, is the processed food conglomerate for the calorie model?

55:37Absolutely. They need that. It’s vital. You know, zero calories or one calorie on the can, that’s what you see. And you’re fooling people into thinking this is a healthy drink and "Oh, if I used to have full Coke or Pepsi and now I’m having the diet version, I’m getting 300 calories less a day, I should lose weight." It’s exactly what they’ve been doing, and they’re also desperate to show that artificial sweeteners are really healthy and they come down on anyone who tries to say that they could be anyway dangerous. And yet they’re not obliged to test them.

56:16So none of the chemicals added really go through rigorous testing on how they affect our gut microbes. And this is... you know, their testing mechanisms haven't changed in 50 years.

56:29And here is the single most replayed moment as it relates to health on The Diary of a CEO of 2023.

56:36So the first thing I came up against—because this was around the time of the financial crisis—was the lack of understanding of the brain-body connection. So these high-performing executives were kind of acting like their body was just the vehicle that was moving their brain around from meeting to meeting. And both disrespecting their physical health but also not understanding that what they were actually really being paid for was to use their brain, and they weren't creating the best conditions for that brain to operate in.

57:12And I’m talking about really basic things like sleep and a good diet and hydration and not being sedentary, managing your stress, etc. So, you know, this tiny organ, if it’s not in an environment that is giving it the best chance of doing its job, it’s not going to. A crack’s going to appear somewhere.

57:32And the first time I really kind of had a big confrontation with a bank was when people were dropping dead on the trading floor of heart attacks, and they asked me to work more in my capacity as a former medical doctor to help with the physical stuff. And I said I can’t do that if we don’t address the mental and emotional piece, because that’s what’s causing this. And they just could not get that.

58:00What did you want to do with those people in a specific and practical sense? If you could have been in charge of preventing them from dropping dead on the trading floor, where would you have started?

58:11The understanding that stress—so everything that you’re experiencing mentally and emotionally that’s challenging, and things like a lot of travel, which is challenging for your body—that that raises levels of the hormone cortisol, which comes from your adrenal glands. And that cortisol courses around your blood through your entire body and brain, and the brain has receptors for understanding what’s going on in terms of threat to your survival.

58:40So in a 24-hour cycle, depending on your age and your gender, there’s a normal range for cortisol. So it can go up and down like this. You know, if something challenging happens, of course we need to adapt and rise to meet that challenge. But when that level is above the top range all the time, these receptors in your brain basically think that there’s an imminent threat to your survival.

59:02So there’s this whole cascade of hormones, and basically cortisol causes inflammation in the body. So inflammation of your vascular system, inflammation around your heart and everything else—gut and other things—but particularly around that time we were seeing a lot of heart attacks caused by stress. This was in the absence of high blood pressure, high cholesterol, smoking; it was all stress.

59:28Once upon a time, I Googled... because I had a thesis, I Googled "is stress contagious?" And it came up and it said it was contagious. Is it contagious? In what circumstances do we need to be aware of that contagion, and more importantly, how and why is it contagious?

59:46Okay, I will tell you the answer to that, but I’m going to ask you a question first. Have you ever walked into a room with someone and by the time you’ve left that meeting with them, you just feel so drained?

60:00Of course, yeah.

60:01Okay, so you know the feeling. So I’ll tell you how it works physiologically. I’m going to start with something else to like build you up to this story. So did you know that women who live together or work closely together will synchronize their menstrual periods within two or three months?

60:15So whenever I want to explain something that’s complex or I don’t actually know the current neuroscience, I always take it back to what happened in ancient times. So when we were living in the cave, the men hunted and gathered and lived quite nomadically. So sometimes they would go away for months at a time. And in those days, the most fundamental, important thing for the survival of the human species was that the alpha male *must* pass on his genes.

60:46So if he was going to be away for months and he couldn't, you know, there weren't men there to defend the women from predators, maybe there was going to be a spell of the ice age and they would all freeze to death or they wouldn't have food... he needed to make sure that at least five women were impregnated with his sperm at the same time, so that if there was a food shortage or there was like stillbirth or miscarriage or whatever, at least one out of five would survive. So to be able to do that, they had to be fertile at the same time. So that’s why that mechanism exists.

61:20Now, we don’t need that mechanism now, but it’s still wired into the way that we operate. So those sex steroid hormones like estrogen and progesterone, they leak out of our sweat about this far around us. And that’s why if you’re living with another woman or if you’re sitting across the desk every day, then particles of hormone from my sweat would go into through the skin of the other woman.

61:50If she’s within what distance?

61:51I mean, it’s not... if you live together, that means you’re interacting enough that it would happen.

61:56But not if you work together?

61:58If you work together and you sit right next to each other every day, then it does happen too. So you know, in a small office that’s got like six girls in it, that the menstrual synchronization will happen. Interestingly, it’s led by the alpha female. Yeah.

62:15So you can work out if you don’t know already who the alpha female is... Well, if you, you know... basically let’s say my cycles don't change and everyone says, "Oh, I got my period early" or "I haven't had my period yet, but now it’s started," then that would mean that probably I was the alpha female.

62:30How does the body know who the alpha female is?

62:33That will be to do with levels of testosterone.

62:36Why did the body... why does that matter? Why does it matter that they sync up with her?

62:41I don’t know if it really matters; I think it’s just a case of physiology. So it’s a little bit like in the troops of gorillas, the stress levels of the silverback gorilla affect the other gorillas more than gorillas who are peers to each other. So there is we have a natural hierarchy; it must be related to survival as well.

63:04So she was probably the person who the alpha male was going to impregnate first.

63:09Probably.

63:10So everyone needs to kind of fall in line because when she starts having sex, they need to be ready.

63:14Yeah.

63:15And also it’ll probably be to do with things like, you know, survival genes, so it’ll be the people with the hardiest genes because that’s what you’ll want to pass on as well. Okay, makes sense. Most resilient. Okay. Okay, so where were we?

63:30Stress and contagion.

63:31So basically, cortisol is a hormone that works in that same way. So cortisol is the main stress hormone, and this one doesn't matter if you’re male or female, but it does matter where you are in the hierarchy of the organization as I just mentioned.

63:48So usually in that kind of conversation I mentioned to you where you go into a room and you just feel completely drained afterwards, usually the person that comes out feeling drained is less senior than the person that’s had that effect on them. And that’s why this is so crucial to leadership, because your stress levels as a leader, as a CEO, are going to have more impact on everybody else than the rest of the people put together, basically.

64:15So managing your stress is obviously important for you, but it’s important in terms of what happens to other people. And the first issue I came up against was CEOs and CFOs that said, "Well, I won’t show them that I’m stressed. I won’t tell them what’s happening with the numbers. I won’t display emotions in front of them." And I said they’re still going to know physiologically; it’s going to impact them. So now you *really* have to do something about it.

64:44And the other thing about cortisol, which is quite funny—well, one of the side effects is quite funny—is that as a survival mechanism, it will help you to store fat around your abdomen. So you know, again, in the cave, if you were potentially going to like not find food for a month, then if you had extra fat around your abdomen, you could digest that and survive until you could find food.

65:11So with my clients in financial services, it got to a point where as soon as I walked into the room, they just lift their t-shirt up and say, "Now you know how I’ve been in the last month."

65:21So stress causes belly fat?

65:23Stress causes belly fat. Belly fat that’s really hard to shift. So again, what I would see with people is that they would say, "Oh, I’ve put on a bit of weight around the middle, you know, had to loosen the belt a bit, so I’ve started eating less, I’ve started exercising more, and I still can’t shift it." And again, that’s when I would explain this is the impact of cortisol. As long as you’re still leaking out extra cortisol, nothing is going to change. Even exercising more or eating better, less or differently, whatever it is, wouldn't shift that fat. You had to get to the root cause; you had to reduce the cortisol.

65:57For any of you that are still here, I have a bonus moment for you. I often get asked, "What is my favorite episode of The Diary of a CEO of all time?" And I often try to avoid that question because I don't want to pick one particular episode—it’s kind of like picking your children.

66:10However, because you’ve gotten here, I’m going to reveal it to you and I’m going to play you a moment from that conversation. My favorite ever episode on The Diary of a CEO of all time is episode 101. And it just so happens to be the most shared episode we’ve ever had of all time on WhatsApp. I know that sounds a little bit obscure, but the interesting thing about WhatsApp is it’s one-to-one typically. So it’s typically one friend sending it to a family member or to a friend or something like that.

66:47For it to be the most transferred between one person and another, I think is telling about the value of that conversation. Here is one of the most important moments from my favorite episode on The Diary of a CEO of all time.

67:02To understand what happiness is, you have to understand the cause of it. And you write about that extensively in *Solve for Happy*. So what is the cause of unhappiness as you see it? Especially if you’re building sort of machine learning applications that are going to, you know, solve... help people arrive at contentment or happiness in a personalized way. We must be able to know what’s causing this lack of happiness.

67:22Allow me a bit of time to explain it because it’s simple when we get it, but it’s not simple to get to it. Happiness is very predictable. If you look back at any point in your life where you ever felt happy, there is one commonality across all of those moments that can actually be documented in a mathematical equation.

67:42You’ve never felt happy because of a specific event in your life. Take for example rain. Rain doesn't make you happy or unhappy; there is no inherent value of happiness in rain. Rain makes you happy when you want to water your plants, and it makes you unhappy when you want to sunbathe. Right?

68:00And so it’s not just the event (rain); it’s the comparison between the event and an expectation in your mind of how life should be. If you’re worried about your plants, then life should be generous to me and get me rain so I can water the plants. And if life does that, then life meets your expectations and you’re happy.

68:22And so happiness in that sense becomes equal to or greater than—so it’s really mathematics—your perception of the events of your life minus your expectations of how life should be. Apply that to anything. My favorite example is nature. We’re all happy in nature. Why are we all happy in nature?

68:42I mean, you go out there and there are ants and there are flies and trees are crooked and there are shrubs everywhere and bushes, and it’s just really not that hedged and organized. But that’s what we expect. So nature’s chaos is what we expect nature to be, and so we feel happy.

69:03Nobody ever sits in front of the ocean and says, "I like the view but please mute the sound." You just take it. You know, it’s the monotonous sound and the view and the wind and the sun and the whole experience. Because of that, happiness becomes very different than what was defined to us.

69:26What was defined to us is that happiness is found in a gathering at the pub or a party or a, you know, an activity or some kind of pleasure or fun or elation or whatever that is. That’s not at all true. These I call the "state of escape." Happiness as per the definition of the happiness equation is: events equal to or beating expectations, life going my way.

69:52And so basically happiness is that calm and peacefulness you feel when you’re okay with life as it is. It doesn't really matter what life is; what matters is that you can be okay with it. Right?

70:07So you take any example: if your boss is annoying and your expectation is, "Yeah, bosses *are* annoying. This is what life is about. They become bosses because they’re annoying." And so if that’s your expectation, you’re going to look at it and go, "Like, yeah, I need to learn the skill of managing annoying bosses." And if that’s the case, then you’re not going to be upset about it.

70:31Similarly, anything else. If you look at it then, it’s not just the event; it’s your perception of the event. So you have a something to influence. It’s not just the event. Your partner might say something hurtful on Friday at 4:00 p.m. That’s the event: my partner said something hurtful. By Sunday morning, you tell yourself, "He or she doesn't love me anymore." That’s your perception of the event. That’s not actually the event. The event is something hurtful was said, but your perception of the event is your work; it’s your brain adding color to it. And then you compare that to your expectations.

71:08We blur the happiness equation, we break the happiness equation because of what I call the "six and seven": six grand illusions and seven blind spots, which are the six grand illusions are basically call them pathways that the modern world teaches us to navigate the modern world that are illusions—are not true.

71:36Take for example control. Everyone knows that to succeed in the modern world, you have to learn to control certain events. Right? So you start to believe that the way to succeed in life is to control everything. But the truth is, even if you go down to the basics of physics, that we never are in control. That the absolute design of nature itself, of the universe itself, is entropy and chaos. That’s the actual design.

72:04And so if you try to control it, you’re bound to be disappointed. A lot of events are going to miss your expectations. And yes, I’m not saying don’t control anything at all, but start to understand that you’re going to be selective because you have a finite amount of effort. And by the way, even if you’re selective and you try to control everything, sometimes things will fall out of control. That should be your expectation.

72:30Once you get that right—that was my biggest illusion. I am a mathematician, I am a software developer, I am a physicist, I am an engineer, and I’m a senior executive. It doesn't get worse than that. I’m like the worst, absolute worst. I used to give my wonderful wife—I swear to you, Steven, don’t judge me—I used to give her a spreadsheet that would tell her when to wash the colors and when to wash the whites based on our average consumption as a family to save the environment.

73:00And poor Nibel would actually smile at me and say, "Sure, baby, I will use this." Of course, and ignores the hell out of me because that’s how crazy you can be when it comes to control. These are the illusions. If you live your life through the illusion of control, good luck finding happiness.

73:18Six grand illusions: the illusion of thought, the illusion of self, the illusion of knowledge, the illusion of time, control, and fear. That’s one side, and that disrupts your entire view of what to expect from life because you’re expecting life to behave through a lens of an illusion. The other side of it is what I call seven blind spots. And the seven blind spots are not really defects in your brain; as a matter of fact, they are the very design of your brain. Your brain is designed to tell you what’s wrong. It’s not designed to... if a tiger shows up right here now, my brain has no use whatsoever in telling me, "Oh my God, look how majestic that animal is." It’s a beautiful animal, but my brain will say, "We’re going to die."

74:10And "we’re going to die" is the idea that basically makes our brain constantly look for what’s wrong, blur the events of life. You ask a mother and she will say, "Oh, my daughter’s been sick all winter." No, she just had two episodes of flu, three days each. But to the caring heart of a mother, that needs to be exaggerated to... exaggeration is one of the blind spots. Your brain is trying to get you to take action, so it pushes you by exaggerating the event a little bit so that you jump in and take action. And accordingly, the event you’re comparing to—you’re comparing the wrong event to the wrong expectation—and the happiness equation falls apart.

74:54Do you need a podcast to listen to next? We’ve discovered that people who liked this episode also tend to absolutely love another recent episode we’ve done, so I’ve linked that episode in the description below. I know you’ll enjoy it.