1046 How to Heal Stress, Trauma & Mental Health Issues w/Peter Attia

On today's podcast, Lewis interviews Physician Dr. Peter Attia. Peter focuses on the applied science of longevity, the extension of human life and overall well-being. Peter trained for five years at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in general surgery, where he was the recipient of several prestigious awards, including resident of the year. He’s spent the last few years being mentored by the top medical scientists and now hosts The Drive, a weekly, deep-dive podcast focusing on maximizing longevity, and all that goes into that from physical to cognitive to emotional health. Lewis and Peter's conversation covered a range of topics like what the main causes of stress are, how we can develop our emotional resistance, the importance of therapy, how food affects our mental health and so much more! Part 1: www.lewishowes.com/1045For more go to: www.lewishowes.com/1046Check out Peter Attia's website: https://peterattiamd.com/The Science of Sleep for Ultimate Success with Shawn Stevenson: https://link.chtbl.com/896-podA Scientific Guide to Living Longer, Feeling Happier & Eating Healthier with Dr. Rhonda Patrick: https://link.chtbl.com/967-podThe Wim Hof Experience: Mindset Training, Power Breathing, and Brotherhood: https://link.chtbl.com/910-pod Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is episode number 1,046 with Dr. Peter Attia.

• 0:05Peter Attia?

  Sounds very cliche for someone who's so interested in science as I am, but I think once you cease to live in a relational way, I think you're on that path to a very slow death.

• 0:15Lewis Howes?

  Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:38Lewis Howes?

  Jim Rohn said, take care of your body. It's the only place you have to live. And Arianna Huffington said, when we know ourselves, the sources of our stress, how we respond, and what actions help us recharge, we're far better able to minimize the damage. I'm so glad you're here. If you listened to part one already, then get ready for an incredible part two. And if you haven't listened to part one yet, that's okay. You can listen to this as a standalone episode and then go listen to the previous episode. My guest is Dr. Peter Attia, and this will blow you away. He focuses on the applied science of longevity, the extension of human life and overall well-being of your lifespan. Every

• 1:23Lewis Howes?

  time I talk to scientists and doctors and people working on the body and medicine and health and nutrition, it fascinates me when they come to this realization that there's only so much you can treat the body. There's only so much you can treat the material. There's always so much you can do with the proper sleep, with the proper nutrition. And until we truly heal the mind, the emotional side of things, sometimes all that other stuff... Will only get you so far. And in this episode, we dive deep on the causes of stress and how to become happier. The main cause of mental health issues and trauma, ways we can develop our emotional resistance and how this is key in life to be happier. We talk about the importance

• 2:08Lewis Howes?

  of therapy, the main things to do to live a healthier life, the foods Peter does and doesn't recommend for the quality of your life, the danger of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. This is big. How food affects your mental health. Yes, it will affect you in a big way. And the biggest lessons Peter has learned from his work as a physician. Do me a favor and click the link wherever you're listening to this right now of this episode and share it with a friend while you're listening. You have the power to help inspire and transform lives just by sharing this episode or just copy and paste the link lewishouse.com/1046. And you can send this over text or social media and make sure to tag me, Lewis Howes, and Peter Attia as well. And click

• 2:53Lewis Howes?

  that subscribe button right now on Apple Podcasts to stay up to date of all the greatest information from the greatest minds in the world on the School of Greatness. Okay, in just a moment, the one and only Peter Attia.

• 3:10Lewis Howes?

  We aren't able to have control or learn to navigate our emotion and the way we think, then we're going to make bad decisions, which will turn into bad results for our health and our life. Is this, is this off that if we, the root being mental and emotional health is potentially the thing that could cure and help us live longer. But if we take care of everything else but that, then we're always going to go back to these negative patterns that hurt us? Or is that off?

• 3:39Peter Attia?

  I don't think it's off. I think, I think they all have to be in place. I mean, I think the, you know, I'll share with you one sort of illustration. So I've been working on this book for

• 3:50Peter Attia?

  Four years now, and it's evolved a lot because it started out mostly just being a book about the science of longevity. So, you know, to me, a very, very technical book, but one that I was incredibly proud of, and one that I think would have been read by the 15 most respected scientists in the field, who would have thought it was amazing and nobody else would have read it. So then it basically got reworked and it became, you know, more accessible and more personal. And it kept getting reworked and reworked until it basically got to a point where it was a pretty good overview of every single thing we've talked about today, except for this emotional and mental health piece.

• 4:36Peter Attia?

  And that's, you know, that's, that's basically the piece that's delaying it, but it is that realization which said, there could be no greater torture than to figure out how to live longer and how to preserve cognitive and physical health, but without that emotional piece being in check. In other words, to extend a miserable life is, is torture.

• 5:02Lewis Howes?

  So at the, at the root of what we're trying to figure out here is how do we cultivate inner peace, inner happiness, peace of mind, peace of emotions during our life? That's a big component to health span, right?

• 5:17Peter Attia?

  It is. And I won't represent that I fully have this figured out. I mean, in fact, that would be the hubris to declare that would be embarrassing. But I think for me, I like the word joy, because it just, it kind of captivates one of the things that I have found to be central in my journey in this space, which is it captures the peace about being with others that I've so historically ignored. You know, I had a, I'm very fortunate to have a few therapists, three actually. So I actually have a therapist in each of those disciplines, right? So I have somebody that I work with on the behavioral side,

• 6:02Peter Attia?

  on the psychotherapy side, and on the pharmacology side. And the person who is my psychotherapist, so she's the one that I speak with weekly about. This, you know, the how am I feeling stuff?

• 6:15Lewis Howes?

  Life.

• 6:15Peter Attia?

  Yeah. Her name is, her name is Esther Perel.

• 6:18Lewis Howes?

  Oh, I love Esther. I've had her on many times.

• 6:20Peter Attia?

  She's, she's amazing. And, and, you know, she said to me a couple of years ago, maybe, maybe two years ago, and she said, look, you know, you've, you've run a playbook

• 6:32Peter Attia?

  that has only had three plays in it. You've, you've, you've executed them as well as anybody could execute those three plays, but you were really at the end of this. And it's, it's, and, and those three plays were

• 6:47Peter Attia?

  obsession, detachment, and rage. And that's it.

• 6:52Lewis Howes?

  Oh, wow. Very strange.

• 6:55Peter Attia?

  Yeah, those are the only three tools you have. And you, they're the only tools you've had since you were five years old. And you've gone very far with them. But, you know, it's led to incredible isolation, incredible pain, and, you know, and all these other things. And it took a while to understand how that could be the case and how to begin to fix that. But as I, and it's not something that you change overnight, of course, but what I'm so much more appreciative of now is the fundamental difference that comes from fighting back the urge to detach. So, so again, this is just one very, very narrow example, but there are probably some people who can appreciate this, which is in periods of fear, it's, it's sometimes

• 7:40Peter Attia?

  easy to pull back and to retreat. And to me, that's a joyless state, right? That's, that's basically saying, I don't want to be connected to anyone. I don't want to have, I don't want to be relational, to borrow a word from another amazing therapist I had, Terry Reel, who actually met through Esther. So, so, once you sort of stop living a relational way, I just, I mean, it sounds very cliche for someone who's so interested in science as I am. But I think once you cease to live in a relational way, I think you're on that path to a very slow death.

• 8:20Lewis Howes?

  When you isolate yourself more and you don't cultivate strong relationships, you die. Faster, is that what I'm hearing you say? Or are you?

• 8:29Peter Attia?

  Well, whether you fit, whether you die faster in the death certificate or not, some data would suggest you do, but I think those data are difficult. Yeah, you suffer more. So what does it matter? Like, even if you don't, even if you don't end up in a casket sooner, you might as well, because you're suffering.

• 8:47Lewis Howes?

  You're suffering, yeah. You're lonely, you're isolated. So what were the three?

• 8:51Peter Attia?

  And you're miserable and you're, you know, yeah, yeah, so.

• 8:53Lewis Howes?

  What were the three plays that you added? To bring more joy in your life?

• 8:59Peter Attia?

  Well, I think it's, I think it's basically looking at how to reverse each of those patterns and, and working very hard to do so. And that's been a, that's been a lifelong, I shouldn't say lifelong journey. It's only something I've been working on for three years, but it's, it's definitely harder than anything I've ever done.

• 9:15Lewis Howes?

  So from rage to, uh, what would be the opposite for that?

• 9:19Peter Attia?

  Oh, to, to an expanded emotional vocabulary, right? So, so you could, so, so rage for me, think of a funnel where every possible, every possibly, every possible negatively valenced emotion funneled into rage.

• 9:35Lewis Howes?

  Anger and rage.

• 9:37Peter Attia?

  Anger becomes rage. Fear becomes rage.

• 9:41Peter Attia?

  Uncertainty becomes rage. Anxiety becomes rage.

• 9:43Lewis Howes?

  Defensiveness.

• 9:45Peter Attia?

  Becomes rage.

• 9:45Lewis Howes?

  Resentment, yeah.

• 9:47Peter Attia?

  Rage, right? Okay, so, so the first step in that is, is mindfulness. So, so meditation obviously is a very important exercise that we can do to learn how to stop and identify that. And so if you look at me today versus if you look at me three years ago, when, you know, I literally was on the verge of, you know, killing somebody in a parking lot at some point. A big difference is now, if something upsets me, I now have the gap between stimulus and response to examine the emotion and say, oh.

• 10:26Peter Attia?

  You know, that email really upset me because the person implied something that is

• 10:36Peter Attia?

  threatening to my credibility or something like that, right? So, so it's like, it's like having the space to go through that process and then having the vocabulary now to do it. Now, literally, it means I've had to print out worksheets like I'm in grade school again with sheets and I go through exercises. So I have homework every single week where I go through, okay, when this happened, how did you feel? What was that emotion signaling to you? So there's, you know, part of it is going through, going through that type of an exercise. So I think that's, that's been the biggest tool there. I, I think as far as the obsession goes, part of it has been, that's been more of a displacement.

• 11:21Peter Attia?

  So that's been more of a, you know, I created a contract, basically, much in the same way that a person who goes into a 12-step program does. So I do consider myself a recovering addict. And I just think that I, I have more of a socially acceptable addiction. So I think we look at people, yeah, perfectionism and hard work are socially acceptable addictions. But the reality of it is they can be quite damaging to your offspring, which is, I think for most of us, our biggest fear is that we hurt our kids. And so after going into, you know, I did effectively go into rehab.

• 12:04Peter Attia?

  And after doing that, I, you know, have a contract and I have people that function as my sponsors. And there has been some very, very deliberate changes in practices.

• 12:17Peter Attia?

  And it sounds silly, but it had to start out with creating very structured things that.

• 12:24Peter Attia?

  You wouldn't think a parent would need to do, but you know, mandatory 30 minutes of playtime each day.

• 12:30Lewis Howes?

  I just think people have lost the art of joy and play. It's one of the reasons I have a, it's funny, I'm in this like, you know, high-end condo building here in Los Angeles, right in the middle of Century City. I'm not sure if you've been this area, but there's a lot of corporate buildings and so everyone's in their suits and ties. And I literally am right next to my studio about two blocks away and I have a scooter that I get on, not a electric scooter. I have like a manual scooter where I push myself on a scooter. I come down the elevator with a scooter and walk out my front building hallway and there's literally every luxury car you can think of, every

• 13:13Lewis Howes?

  one of a kind Lamborghini to Ferrari. It's kind of obscene, these types of cars that you see that Rolls Royces, all of them. We're in like the heart of Beverly Hills and I come out on scooter and I just don't care. I'm scooting around. I don't care what people think about me. I'm gonna have fun because I've, I feel like a lot of people have lost the art of being a child of joy, of play. And I'm trying to enjoy it myself and also cultivating others. Hey, it's okay to just be goofy and playful and have fun, right? So mandatory playtime, I think is a powerful thing.

• 13:42Peter Attia?

  This is a big part of the playbook. It's just, it's, it's, I mean, it's, it's grunt work actually, but it, you, you have to do it to create new habits and it doesn't take as long as you would think. I thought it would take a lifetime to change and yet I would say, even, even when I look at how much I've changed in the last six months, I would have never believed this much change was possible in this short period of time.

• 14:08Lewis Howes?

  How important is health span and lifespan related to healing the past? Whether that be yesterday's past event, childhood past, relationship past, all past hurt. How important is healing the past with health span?

• 14:25Peter Attia?

  I don't think, first, again, that's a very good question. Assuming we're not talking about things that are so suppressed that we can never understand them, but which we could debate how much that could still be impacting today. And the answer is it could still be a lot and it probably is.

• 14:44Peter Attia?

  I'm a huge believer in, in understanding previous trauma. And in fact, I've interviewed several people on the podcast about that. Lori Gottlieb, who I think you've had on the show, she's excellent. A very close friend and remarkable psychiatrist, Paul Conti, Corey McCarthy. I've talked about this with a lot of people. Corey was a guy who was incarcerated for many years, kind of turned his life around in jail. But again, you could peg so much of his tragic life story to, you know, getting molested at a ballpark when he was a seven year old boy. And so I don't think you can disentangle these things. And I, you know, just as I said at the outset, we are, we're in a world where people don't want to talk about mental and emotional health as much. I think that's changing, by the way. And I

• 15:28Peter Attia?

  think people like Lori and Paul are a huge part of that change. I hope with that comes an understanding that we have got to figure out a better way to deal with trauma. And it, and trauma is not all big T trauma. It's not all, yeah, it's a lot of little T traumas add up. And most of us, I think, have had some sort of adaptations to things in our past that have come at a cost. And so, so a lot of those adaptations are positive, right? A lot of those adaptations are what got us through those things. And that's why I think many people are reluctant to Right. face them and say, hey, this thing's bad. I mean, I certainly refuse to ever acknowledge

• 16:11Peter Attia?

  any of my traumas as problematic, even though I always, I never had an issue not understanding what they were. But I just thought, well, they're very productive. Like, in a very convoluted way, they, they told a story that I thought was very good. And they resulted in all of these traits, like rage, obsessiveness, and isolationism. Well, you got results. I got amazing results. If you know, you can put your head down and do anything. So it's when you sort of let that armor down, when you put that guard down, and you allow yourself to sort of crack open. And Lori wrote about this in a way that I thought was beyond amazing in her book, which is why I wanted to interview her. There was

• 16:54Peter Attia?

  a particular story about two, two of the people she wrote about in her book that I thought most amazingly demonstrate how a traumatic past can just

• 17:03Peter Attia?

  You know, create for a devastating life, no matter the success. It feeds into all of the above. So I think that to answer your question, does that impact the physical? Yes. Does that impact the emotional? Yes. And I'll, and I'll share with you a story that I think even Paul and I discussed, which was about six years ago, I had a patient who had looked, you know, was really on the verge of being diabetic. So she wasn't, but she was close and she was probably 20 pounds overweight and was very frustrated because she was incredibly compliant with everything I asked her to do. Right? So, you know, I said, we're going to change your nutrition this way. She did it. We're going to change your exercise this way.

• 17:47Peter Attia?

  I need you to sleep more this way. We did everything right and her numbers got a bit better. She didn't really lose any weight. She wasn't really feeling much better. And I was really feeling like if it were anybody else, I would say she's probably not doing what I'm asking, but I really knew she was. And one day we were just sort of sitting there talking and I don't know how it came up. I knew that her father had died when she was young, like in college, but something about the way it came up this time made me think it was, it was creating a much bigger imprint that had been dealt with. Now she'd been on an antidepressant since college and this she's now, she's in her mid 40s. So we're

• 18:30Peter Attia?

  talking 25 years later, but I just wondered, I said, is there an issue here? Is there sort of a psychological pain that is literally impairing her body's ability to get better? So I said, look, this is going to sound crazy, but I'd like you to go and see this other doctor. He's a psychiatrist, but he's, he's really, really smart and I, I want to explore this mind body connection in a way that doesn't sound so hokey. Are you, would you be up for this? And to make a long story, she said, yes. And within a year, you couldn't recognize her. You know, yes, he'd made changes in her medication. So maybe it's possible that some of the medic, you know, changing her from one type of antidepressant to another could have made a difference. But I do believe that a bigger part of the difference was

• 19:15Peter Attia?

  just that she got so much more.

• 19:19Peter Attia?

  In touch with what had happened and came to grips with it and had began, had begun to work through that trauma, that kind of letting that go, and you've probably read The Body Keeps Score, and there, there are lots of people who have really talked about this idea. And I've seen now enough empirical examples of this that I'm inclined to believe this is true, and therefore it shouldn't be ignored.

• 19:41Lewis Howes?

  Huh. What do you think are the main causes of emotional and mental health, disease, I guess? What are the main causes of the lack of a strong mental and emotional well-being?

• 19:55Peter Attia?

  If you come at it through the lens of trauma, so, so, so let's take off the table for a second, the sort of genetic causes, because there's a clear genetic relationship with mental health. So I know, for example, in my family, there is a non-trivial amount of genetic mental health problems. So I had, I had an uncle who had schizophrenia. I had a, I had, I basically have the following in my family, I think schizophrenia, depression, and probably maybe some bipolar. So there's, there's, there's clearly a genetic component. I'm inclined to think that trauma plays a great role in this, and I think trauma comes

• 20:38Peter Attia?

  in different flavors. So the most obvious form of trauma is abuse. And abuse can be physical, sexual, spiritual. Those would be sort of, you know, obvious forms of abuse.

• 20:56Peter Attia?

  Another one would be neglect. So neglect is a form of trauma. And that can be a kid who grows up in a house with two parents who never lay a hand on him or her, but completely ignore him and, you know, don't parent him at all, or, you know, he's raised by a nanny, but, but, you know, really never gets the attention that a child needs from a parent. Abandonment is another form of trauma. So this is different from neglect. This is, you know, obviously more extreme. And it's, it's when a child is actually abandoned by one or more parents. Another form of trauma that most people don't think of is enmeshment. So this is when a child

• 21:43Peter Attia?

  Basically has to grow up too quickly and is forced into the role of sort of being an adult with one of their parents. And, you know, that doesn't at all imply a sexual connotation or anything, but it's, you know, The responsibility is very early. Yeah, that's right. Or and and also just the emotional burden that comes with it. Right. So, you know, an example might be a single mom who basically relies on her 10 year old son as her A confidant, yeah. As a exactly as a confidant and complains to him about her boyfriend and, you know, and basically makes, you know, he has to grow up far too quick and things like that.

• 22:28Peter Attia?

  And then I think another part of of of trauma is basically witnessing tragic events. And that could be like in the case of my patient, you know, losing her father suddenly, or, you know, post nine 11, many people were obviously traumatized by, you know, things like that. So there are lots of, you know, tragic events that can do it. Now, within each of those, Lewis, any two people can have a totally different response. So Based on your emotional tools that you have Based on your resilience to begin with. So again, one of my favorite examples of this is, do you know who Rick Elias is? That name ring a bell? I'm not sure if I do. So amazing guy. He was on that US air flight that crashed in the Hudson River

• 23:14Peter Attia?

  11 years ago, January 2009. He has a beautiful TED Talk. It's very short. It's like seven minutes long that talks about it. And it's titled something to the effect of the three most important lessons I ever learned in life. And it's basically what he learned in the couple of minutes, thinking he was dead. Rick is one end of the spectrum, right? He lives through this plane crash. That night, he was back on a plane to fly home to Charlotte. Crazy. You know, right? Like four hours after he's almost dead, he's back on a plane flying. His life is taken off.

• 23:48Peter Attia?

  They had a 10 year reunion for the survivors where they all got to meet up with, you know, Captain Sullenberger, you know, the guy who had this amazing landing.

• 23:56Lewis Howes?

  Sully.

• 23:57Peter Attia?

  Yeah, Captain Sully. You know, he mentioned to me there were people from that night whose lives have been destroyed and who've never been able to get on a plane since.

• 24:04Lewis Howes?

  Oh, man.

• 24:05Peter Attia?

  So think about that for a second. The exact same experience will produce an entirely different set of responses in people. And that's why I think we have to be very humble when we think about trauma. And that's why I get a little annoyed when I hear people say, well, you know, this person had this happen to them and look at how great their life turned out. And somehow they say that as though to minimize what has happened to somebody else.

• 24:27Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 24:27Peter Attia?

  And to me, that's just utter nonsense.

• 24:29Lewis Howes?

  And judging people's experiences and making them wrong or telling them, you know, step up or whatever is what I'm hearing you say is not the best approach, which is probably something that I would have done in the past as this football mindset of like just tough it up and quit being a wussy and, you know, quit crying about some scrapes here and there. But that's not the best approach.

• 24:50Peter Attia?

  No, it's not. It's not. It's not a great long-term approach. We have to be, we have to be pretty nuanced in this and we have to be, we have to be able to really kind of treat everybody's pain like it's their own pain and nobody else's. And now.

• 25:04Lewis Howes?

  And not compare.

• 25:05Peter Attia?

  Yeah.

• 25:06Lewis Howes?

  I said, well, I went through all these tragedies and I'm able to deal with it, but you went through this little trauma and you're stuck on this? Not doing that.

• 25:13Peter Attia?

  Yeah, the two fastest ways to not recover from trauma are to compare yourself to others and to minimize your pain. It sounds crazy, but the most, and I, you know, believe me, I went through, I could tell, just horrible experiences of going through kind of this, this journey and, and having to, to fight the, the, fight the urge to do those things, but just the constant desire to minimize and say, it's not that bad. It's not that bad. It's not that bad. Let's stop making a big deal out of this. Or, yeah, but this person went through so much worse and, you know, none of that matters. You know, like this, this, you know, whatever, a hundred people on that airplane all experienced

• 25:56Peter Attia?

  the same external truth, which was the plane crashed.

• 26:01Peter Attia?

  But there's a hundred different internal truths that came out of that.

• 26:04Lewis Howes?

  So emotional resilience is a massive key. And what I'm hearing you say in some of the ways to develop more emotional resilience is to have psychotherapy, pharma therapy and behavioral therapy to gain tools, awareness, acceptance, forgiveness.

• 26:24Peter Attia?

  I would say when indicated, you know, certainly, most people probably don't need pharmacotherapy, meaning they don't need any medications to aid in these things. But there are, you know, I mean, there is such an amazing toolkit of medications out there that do aid in the increasing this buffer, this, this, this, you know, what I think of as this bandwidth of distress tolerance, right? So again, if you, it's the difference between, if you think about a person who can only live between the temperature of 97 and 98, boy, they're going to be in for a tough life compared to somebody who can live between 95 and 105. So similarly, a person who, anytime they fall below here, they're going to be depressed. And anytime they go above here, they're going to flip into a fit of rage.

• 27:09Peter Attia?

  That's a miserable life compared to somebody who can live here.

• 27:12Lewis Howes?

  What would you say are some of the things besides going to therapies as gaining tools? What would be some of the things that we could develop more emotional resistance or emotional fitness? As someone like Tony Robbins calls it, emotional fitness, to be able to, you know, stay more calm on the range of emotions, kind of like when you see Tom Brady, where you throw an interception or you throw a touchdown, it's a similar emotion and not allowing yourself to get too high or too low. How do we, what are some key tools we could do to develop more emotional resistance in your mind from your personal experience?

• 27:44Peter Attia?

  You know, for me, I think it's been several things. I do think mindfulness meditation. So a Buddhist style of meditation or a Vipassana style of meditation has been very helpful because it is a tool that teaches you to examine your mind. And that's effectively what we're dealing with here. So when, when somebody is all over the place with respect to their emotions, what is probably happening is they're being hijacked by thoughts.

• 28:18Peter Attia?

  That's generally what's happening. And that's okay, because that's innate. Like, that's, that's as common as the day is long.

• 28:26Lewis Howes?

  Is mental illness, negative emotional fitness, I guess, is that our thoughts are being hijacked over and over in a negative way? And therefore, we get stuck in states of depression or?

• 28:37Peter Attia?

  Yeah, this, and again, this is so complicated, right? Because you want to separate out some of the really clear pathologic states that I think fall outside of the purview of this. But I'm, you know, but I think for many people, it's, you have a genetic predisposition to depression or dysthymia that then gets exacerbated with negative thought patterns. And so the question is, how do you break that cycle? I think step one is learning to recognize it. So just, do you see it?

• 29:09Lewis Howes?

  Being aware of your thoughts.

• 29:10Peter Attia?

  Are you even aware that you're thinking? Like, you know, I don't know if you meditate, Lewis, but for most people, when they go, when they become early in their meditative practice, it's like the first time they realize how much they're thinking, like when they're not doing anything else. Like, they're walking down the street and you realize, oh my God, thinking, you know, Dan Harris, who's a good friend, Dan is one of my favorite people to talk about this stuff with, because I think he's so down to earth in being able to communicate sort of the humor of this, right? And his book, 10% Happier, which is actually the reason, it was his book, 10% Happier, that got me to start meditating. He just does such a funny job of explaining how ridiculous our minds are, like the dumb,

• 29:53Peter Attia?

  dumb, dumb stuff we keep saying to ourselves. And like the loops of just complete stupidity, right? So step one is recognize that. Step two, can you not judge it? Can you instead just label it unemotionally? Oh, that's a, that's a planning thought. Oh, that's a regretful thought. Oh, that's a judgment thought. Okay. So that, to me, that's really hard to do. And if I can do that 20% of the time, I'm doing well. But being able to do that 20 or 25% of the time, which is probably where I am.

• 30:34Peter Attia?

  Has had like an 80% improvement in the quality of my life, which I actually wouldn't have expected that. I would have thought you needed to get to 80% there to have 80% elsewhere. So it tells me that some of the other things I'm doing are probably moving the needle as well. And a big part there is journaling. So yeah, another good friend of mine.

• 30:54Lewis Howes?

  I love a doctor is telling us to journal. You know, physician is telling us to journal.

• 31:00Peter Attia?

  Yeah. Have you interviewed Ryan Holiday?

• 31:02Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, a few times.

• 31:03Peter Attia?

  Yeah. So, so, so you know this, Ryan is a big proponent of journaling and I find it to be really productive. And at times I go in a structured way, meaning like there have been periods where I've said, look, I'm only, I'm going to journal through these three things every single day. So I'm going to journal something that I thought about that upset me, something that I'm really proud that I did, you know, something blah, blah, blah, blah. And so you've sort of forced yourself to come up with these three things. But that becomes a very, that becomes a very good pattern because it now gets you into that thinking process. And then other times, like right now, I'm not doing structured journaling, but I'm doing, you know, really sort of deep, deep, insightful journaling

• 31:46Peter Attia?

  on, on, on sort of threads that are relevant. And that I sort of bring into therapy and they become kind of the substrate for those discussions.

• 31:57Lewis Howes?

  How important is it for you to have consistent therapy, whether it's weekly or monthly, but having something consistent to go to, to share thoughts, feelings and emotions? And where would your life be if you didn't have it in a consistent base? Would you be able to do it on your own? Or is the accountability so much greater than self-discipline, mental fitness?

• 32:21Peter Attia?

  There are some things that just naturally come to me and I don't need any accountability on them. So exercise is one of them. I love exercise. I've loved it since I was a kid. It's, you know, there are probably times when it's bordered on unhealthy and addictive.

• 32:35Peter Attia?

  That said, once a week, I still work with this amazing woman named Beth Lewis, and there's a great structure that's provided. And, you know, she sometimes prevents me from, you know, doing more than I should and is constantly fine tuning and honing what I do. In terms of mental health, I've, you know, I've struggled with this a lot in the sense that it There have been many periods, even recently, where there's still a tiny bit of shame associated with it. Like, there's this thing that says, man, why am I not more together as a person? Like, why, why does my wife not need to do this? And I still need to do four hours of therapy a week? And am I going to be doing this for the rest of my life?

• 33:20Peter Attia?

  You know, because I don't think there's ever going to be a day when I'm not going to be doing therapy. Maybe it will be just two hours a week. But I don't, I've been, personally, I'm not sure I see a day when I'll ever be, you know, just not, not doing it. I don't think it's possible. I, I think it's, um, I don't ever want to go back to where I was. So, so similarly, it's sort of like the alcoholic who says, I'm in a 12-step program. It's really working for me. I go seven days a week. Am I going to be going seven days a week in 10 years? Maybe not, but I'm probably still going to be going. And it might be once or twice a week.

• 33:58Lewis Howes?

  You know, it's interesting you say that because I wrote a book a few years ago called The Mask of Masculinity. Actually, three years ago, this next week coming up is the anniversary. And it was all about the, uh, the mask that men wear to project something, a false image in the world, with their friends, at work, sports, all that different stuff. And as I was doing this kind of book tour during this time, there was a lot of women that would actually show up because they wanted to understand the men in their lives better, why the men are acting this way, why they're not emotionally, have a range of emotions, uh, seemingly. And so the rooms were typically 50% men and 50% women. And I would ask the rooms, I would say, okay, for the, the women in the room,

• 34:39Lewis Howes?

  raise your hand if, if once a week you get together with a couple of girlfriends or a girlfriend, and you talk about your, your issues, your body image, your stresses, your concerns, your fears, your insecurities about relationships and career. Almost 100% of the women raised their hand. And I go, keep your hands up if you do this daily. You're on the phone with a girlfriend, you have tea, you're eating for lunch. Almost all of them keep their hands up. And I go, for the men in the room, put your hand up if once a month, you get together with a group of guy friends and you talk about your emotions and your feelings and your body image and your insecurities around this at work. Maybe two or three people would put their hands up in the whole room. And I would say, are you guys part of a church group that kind of forces you and schedules this?

• 35:22Lewis Howes?

  So you can show up and do this. And most of them are like, yes. Very rarely would it be men that say, I do this on a regular basis because I enjoy it. And imagine, and I would say to the women, imagine not doing this, only doing this once a month. Never doing this once a year, ten years, never talking about these things, how to make you feel. And I'm not saying it's right or wrong for what the way men have shown up and the actions that men have done in the, in the history to, to harm people. But I tell women, they're like, yeah, it would drive me crazy. I would be unswell. I would be sick. I would be emotionally unstable if I didn't have a friend to communicate. And whether that's therapy in a private setting, or a friend you trust, or a group of friends.

• 36:06Lewis Howes?

  I just think it's important to have these conversations and share and not hold back our shame. Because I think that's what makes us emotionally and mentally sick.

• 36:15Peter Attia?

  I couldn't agree more with that.

• 36:16Lewis Howes?

  And I, and I think it's important for, for men and women and all human beings to have some consistent conversations. And for you, it's been therapy that's worked really well. And I think I'm a big proponent of it. So I'm glad you're talking about it. And I'm glad that this is the thing that's part of your book that's, you're adding more and more of this. Because the more I hear you talk about these things, I just feel like the emotional resilience. It's like you can, even with some of your students, your, your, your clients, it's like you've given them all the practical things and the physical, the nutritional. And they still weren't having the ultimate breakthrough until the mental health, emotional health breaks through.

• 36:53Peter Attia?

  Yeah, I, I, I'm pretty privileged in that my, my patients give me an interesting insight into the world because many of them are very successful people. So many of them have, I've been able to learn at, it sounds awful, but at the expense of some other people, that all the success in the world isn't necessarily enough. So I've seen that money is virtually not correlated with happiness. So, and, and by the way, money is not correlated with quality of a person. So I've, I've seen some people that are staggeringly wealthy, who are the most beautiful souls you'll ever meet. And you know damn well that they were beautiful souls before they had money.

• 37:35Peter Attia?

  Basically, money just became a multiplier of how good they are. And similarly, I've seen people that have a staggering amount of money. And they're just the nastiest creatures on the face of the earth and their money has just given them a megaphone to be more obnoxious. And the same thing is true of happiness and misery and all of these things. So I think the thing that has been sad to watch is the people who have, for example, in the case of resources, the ability to do so much for so many, but they don't understand how to share because they don't have this joy, right? Like they just like, you know, I mean, it sounds ridiculous to say this, but you know, can you imagine

• 38:19Peter Attia?

  meeting somebody who's, who says, look, I, you know, I'm only worth half a billion and it drives me nuts, or I'm only worth $2 billion and I can't stand it. And I'm not saying that to be critical of them, by the way, because I would argue that I say things equally nonsensical, though maybe not about money.

• 38:39Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 38:41Peter Attia?

  But it's, you sort of realize like, that is important to address. That contributes to the quality of their life. And in that case, probably to the quality of countless other people's lives, if their focus could shift.

• 38:56Lewis Howes?

  If you could give one main thing for people to focus on in each of these categories, cognitive, physical and emotional resilience, if all they had time to get started was to think about one thing for each to apply to their life, what thing should they apply after this?

• 39:14Peter Attia?

  Hmm.

• 39:15Lewis Howes?

  To improve the quality of their health span, which would hopefully improve the quality of their lifespan.

• 39:20Peter Attia?

  Well, maybe we could do it the other way. We could do it through the, sort of through the food, the exercise, the sleep and stuff like that. I mean, on the food front, we didn't really talk about this, but I would say there's, I think there's sort of three variables that you're constantly able to manipulate with respect to food. One is how much you eat.

• 39:41Lewis Howes?

  Intake.

• 39:43Peter Attia?

  Yeah. Well, and just how much, like a little bit or a lot. The second is when you eat, you know, do you go 12 hours not eating and 12 hours eating or 16 hours and not eating, you know, and what people refer to as time restricted feeding. And then the quality of what you're eating. So for example, you know, are you?

• 40:05Peter Attia?

  Like eating anything you want, or are you limiting certain things in the nutrition? So we call that last one dietary restriction, the middle one time restriction, the first one caloric restriction. The most important piece of advice I would give on nutrition is you should always be incorporating one of those.

• 40:25Lewis Howes?

  Restrictions.

• 40:26Peter Attia?

  One of those restrictions you should always be doing at some throughout the day. Sometimes you should be incorporating two of them. Occasionally incorporate all of them. So these days I am pulling very hard on my dietary restriction lever. So I'm being much, much more diligent about what I'm eating.

• 40:47Lewis Howes?

  The quality of your food.

• 40:48Peter Attia?

  The quality of my food is extraordinary. I'm not paying any attention to how much I eat. I'm just eating till the point where I'm satiated. And I'm not paying outrageous amounts of attention to when I'm eating. So I'm not like fasting forever, though I probably only eat within an eight hour window most days, sometimes 10. But I'm not, you know, doing very long, I'm not certainly not doing any major fasting or anything like that. But I'm really pulling hard on that dietary restriction lever. Now, if I were to let up on that a little bit and relax a bit on what I ate, I would have to start pulling harder on the other two.

• 41:24Lewis Howes?

  You would need to do longer times of restrictive or intermittent fasting.

• 41:29Peter Attia?

  Or just restrict the amount that I'm eating when I eat.

• 41:31Lewis Howes?

  Of calories.

• 41:32Peter Attia?

  Yes, yes, exactly.

• 41:33Lewis Howes?

  Interesting. So right now you're focused more on the quality.

• 41:36Peter Attia?

  Yep.

• 41:36Lewis Howes?

  Of the food, which is what are those main foods that you're eating that you believe are increasing the, the quality of your health span and your lifespan?

• 41:46Peter Attia?

  So basically the things that I'm avoiding in spades are any form of refined carbohydrate. So I, I'm just not eating any junk food. I'm, I have zero added sugar in my diet at this point.

• 41:59Peter Attia?

  So, you know, the carbohydrates that I'm eating are virtually all vegetables plus berries, quite a bit of like macadamia nuts and almonds. I'm eating a lot of venison is, you know, is one of my main sources of meat, a lot of fish.

• 42:18Peter Attia?

  And. Yeah, I mean, like, pretty, pretty simple repetitive meals.

• 42:26Lewis Howes?

  I eat the same thing pretty much every day, chicken, broccoli and sweet potato. And I restrict the sweet potato at night.

• 42:32Peter Attia?

  Yeah.

• 42:33Lewis Howes?

  And I'm just eating that pretty much throughout the day.

• 42:37Peter Attia?

  Yeah, I, I, I could probably eat the same thing. I'm sort of eating two meals a day. Um, and, and they're, they're sort of being repeated. And what I'm avoiding is just what I, what I'm prone to do. Um, during periods where I'm not paying enough attention, which is eating off my kids' plates and nibbling on, you know, crap in the pantry between.

• 42:56Lewis Howes?

  Snacks here and there.

• 42:57Peter Attia?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 42:58Lewis Howes?

  So if you could, I asked this question to, uh, Rhonda Patrick, and I said, if you could only eat five foods a day, that would help, you know, you be a healthier human being and live longer, what would those five be? I'm curious, what would those five foods a day be for you that?

• 43:16Peter Attia?

  For me or for, so not necessarily for someone, but for, well, it's, it's hard, right? Because, you know, you know, you take somebody who has an APOE4 gene. Um, that, you know, you might have to deal with this in a different way. So I don't, I don't think one could actually answer that question definitively for people. I could tell you for me what it would probably be.

• 43:34Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 43:34Peter Attia?

  Um, if I had to limit myself to five foods, I would probably rotate. You know, I'd say, oh, boy, that's tough.

• 43:42Lewis Howes?

  Um, if you're on an island and you gotta live off these five foods to have a quality of life.

• 43:47Peter Attia?

  So I'd take avocado for one.

• 43:49Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm.

• 43:50Peter Attia?

  Um, cause I could get a huge amount of mono unsaturated fats. So I would want my, I'd need a spreadsheet to figure this out, Lewis, because I, I would want 50% of my cal, I want 50 to 60% of my calories probably to come from fat. And I'd want most of that to be mono unsaturated. So I'd probably want the avocado to be high. Um, from a protein perspective.

• 44:13Peter Attia?

  I'm a huge fan of eggs. I think the choline is an awesome source. You know, it just does so many amazing things for you, but I'm also a huge fan of salmon. Because of the dose of EPA and DHA that you can get at such a low mercury content. I'm also really, really fond of of wild game. But I guess we don't want to waste all of that. But in terms of a vegetable standpoint, now we're getting pretty limited because you want to be able to balance enough insoluble and soluble fiber. You're certainly not going to waste it on something like lettuce. I'm a huge fan of like string beans, string beans and broccoli.

• 44:52Peter Attia?

  I don't know if they quite have the nutrient density. I guess I would say, Lewis, I don't know that there's a way to pick just five things.

• 44:59Lewis Howes?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 44:59Peter Attia?

  Do a great job, but it's probably in the ballpark of what I just described.

• 45:03Lewis Howes?

  I like that. What's your thoughts on fruit?

• 45:06Peter Attia?

  You know, it's one of those things that really fits into the category.

• 45:08Lewis Howes?

  You didn't say fruit here at all.

• 45:10Peter Attia?

  Well, fruit would fruit wouldn't make my top 10, not not a chance, right? So. You know, again, I think fruit being described as one homogeneous class of foods is as ridiculous as describing men as one homogeneous class of species, right? Like it just doesn't make any sense, right? So, you know, to put, you know, blueberries and raspberries in the same categories as mangoes and bananas and, you know, grapes. They have virtually nothing in common, right? The latter is basically all sugar. The former is very little sugar.

• 45:49Peter Attia?

  So if we're optimizing for antioxidants, then the goal would be to have as much of an antioxidant as we can have, but with the lowest cost possible from a sugar standpoint. And then, you know, the manner in which you take it, dried food versus not, you know, smoothies versus not. So, you know, the only thing that you can do to make fruit worse is to, you know, put it into a shake or, you know, to juice it, right? So if you take the fiber away from it, that's the worst thing.

• 46:16Lewis Howes?

  It's all sugar.

• 46:17Peter Attia?

  Yeah, you basically reduce the one thing nature put in there to regulate the speed at which it hits your liver. Your liver, of course, is the primary, though not the only organ that is responsible for metabolizing fructose, which is the primary sugar in fruit. So you want to think about fruit through that lens. So whatever benefits come in fruit, and there are certainly benefits, it comes at a bit of a cost.

• 46:43Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 46:43Peter Attia?

  Depending on your metabolism. So do I like fruit? Yeah, I like berries. I like an apple here and there. I mean, I love all fruit, but I'm not, I never eat dried fruit. And it's outside of, you know, when I'm on vacation, like we, you know, we love going to Hawaii and there's an area where you can get like your fresh coconuts.

• 47:04Lewis Howes?

  Banana is off the street.

• 47:04Peter Attia?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. When you can, when you can do that kind of stuff, I'm going to go all in, of course. But these aren't parts of my staple diet.

• 47:10Lewis Howes?

  So.

• 47:10Peter Attia?

  Because the glycemic response is just too high.

• 47:12Lewis Howes?

  So I've, I've heard this from other doctors that I've had on that are not a fan of fruit really at all. I mean, very limited fruits or smaller apples opposed to the bigger modified apples that people talk about. And, you know, I've had some backlash from people that are all fruit eaters who love fruit, who see the benefits of fruit, who are like, fruit is not the enemy, so don't say it is the enemy. What is the balance there from your research on, and the facts saying like, okay, have some fruit every now and then, but every day apples, bananas, lots of sugar.

• 47:52Peter Attia?

  The dose makes the poison and it really comes down to the individual. I mean, I think the real challenge is when people try to talk about things as universally true in science and especially in medicine. So we talked earlier about non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. So this is the most rapidly increasing epidemic in the United States, bar none. In about a decade, it will be the leading indication for liver transplantation in the United States.

• 48:21Lewis Howes?

  What is this called?

• 48:22Peter Attia?

  Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. So it used to be.

• 48:25Lewis Howes?

  How do we get that?

• 48:26Peter Attia?

  Yeah, that's the great question. So it used to be that the only way you got fatty liver disease was from drinking too much. So a lot of alcohol led to fat accumulation in the liver, which ultimately led to scarring of the liver, which led to cirrhosis, which led to liver failure. You know, we're talking Mickey Mantle here, which led to liver transplant. Okay, if you were lucky.

• 48:47Peter Attia?

  So in the 90s, this other thing started showing up. It had probably been there longer, but we didn't really pick it up until the 90s. And we were like, but we're seeing a lot of people with this alcoholic fatty liver disease who claim to not drink, including little kids. What's going on? Couldn't be distinguished, by the way, from alcoholic fatty liver disease. But because it showed up so often in people who weren't drinking, it had to be renamed. Instead of being alcoholic fatty liver disease, it became non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, or NAFLD. And we now know pretty clearly that fructose is probably the biggest driver of that, which shouldn't be that surprising, given the similarity between fructose and ethanol.

• 49:32Peter Attia?

  And so you would blame the majority of that probably on sugar intake, not necessarily fruit intake. Like candies, cakes, refined sugars. Absolutely. And by the way, not all sugar is created equal. Liquid sugar seems to be much more damning than solid sugar. So, you know, sugar sweetened beverages and juice would be the biggest culprits by far. So then the question becomes, well, what do you do about this? Well, we have patients with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. In fact, there's zero chance somebody listening to this podcast doesn't have non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, given that, you know, at this point, probably 20% of the country has it to some extent. So if you have non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, you should not be eating fruit. Like,

• 50:14Peter Attia?

  that's as sure as God made little green apples. If you have NAFLD, you should not be eating fruit until that thing is better. You have to be restricting fructose. You have to be eating more choline. You have to be probably restricting calories in general. You have to be exercising. You have to be doing a lot of things because you're on a very slippery slope towards diabetes, along with the liver damage that comes with it. Now, at the other end of that spectrum, if you're metabolically healthy, fit as a fiddle, can you be eating four or five servings of fruit a day? Sure. So, you know, nobody's right when they say it's all this or it's all that. You gotta, you gotta know how to, you gotta know how to tailor the therapy to the individual.

• 50:57Peter Attia?

  And then identify who's at risk and, and, and, you know, again, like our patients with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, we are limiting them to less than 10 grams of fructose per day, which, you know, if they wanted to use it all in fruit would be like a handful of berries. Like a, a bite of an apple would be that. Yeah, I mean, maybe a bit more, but you know, you have to make the exception because as you said, there are other forms of carbohydrates that still come with sugar. Like most bread is still going to have some sugar in it and you want to make those allowances if they're still consuming things like bread. What about rice?

• 51:33Peter Attia?

  So rice doesn't have any sugar. No, it, rice has, rice is pure glucose. So that, you know, that still can contribute to diabetes wildly if you're an individual who's susceptible. But it does not seem to contribute to NALD as much. And this was demonstrated pretty elegantly by three people on two very well-done studies. By disclosure, I led an organization that funded one of those studies. So I have to disclose that, but I had no part of the studies that looked at kids with NALD and asked the question, if you just restricted fructose, but not glucose, could you fix it? And the answer appears to have been yes.

• 52:15Peter Attia?

  In other words, you, in the kids with NALD, you didn't have to restrict carbohydrates in total. You just had to restricted, you just had to restrict the fructose. So in those kids, at least the rice and the potatoes were still okay. But you had to cut the fruit, especially the juices and the sugars to fix the problem. And what's the difference between fructose and glucose? So they look very similar, but they're slightly different as a molecule. Fructose is sweeter. Sugar is made up of one molecule of each. So fructose, sorry, when fructose and glucose are connected, that's what makes sucrose or sugar, table sugar or high fructose corn syrup to a first order approximation.

• 52:55Peter Attia?

  But the biggest difference, the bar none heavyweight champion difference is every cell in your body can metabolize glucose.

• 53:05Peter Attia?

  And we have an infinite capacity to store it and it's not toxic in any way. You can, you know, you could make you as, you know, fat as can be because as you noted, eventually you'll put it into your fat cells. But there's no toxicity associated with it in that sense. Whereas fructose can really only be metabolized by the liver in any meaningful quantity. And its metabolic byproducts are quite toxic, uric acid being an awful metabolic product of it. And as you start to accumulate it, it becomes quite inflammatory. So as the liver starts to accumulate fat, it becomes very inflamed.

• 53:43Peter Attia?

  And this, this fat accumulation leads to another process called steatosis and ultimately cirrhosis. So it's a much bigger problem.

• 53:52Lewis Howes?

  So sugar is death, essentially. The more sugar you eat, the, the, the worse you are.

• 54:00Peter Attia?

  There's zero upside to consuming sugar and they were varying, but there are varying degrees of downside depending on the individual, right?

• 54:07Lewis Howes?

  So the upside is it feels good for the moment. It tastes good and your brain gets a hit of adrenaline or dopamine, whatever. And that's, and then the other 99.9% is a downside.

• 54:20Peter Attia?

  That's right. And for some people, there's, you know, relatively small downsides. There, there are some people for whom, look, they get away with it and it, you know, doesn't cause big issues and that's great. You know, probably 10 to 20% of the population is largely immune to the metabolic downsides. But for most of us, that's not the case. And there is a toxic dose. And I don't mean acutely toxic, I just mean chronically toxic.

• 54:43Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. And how much of an impact does sugar make on our mental and emotional health?

• 54:50Peter Attia?

  Well, I mean, I think there's certainly emerging data that is, there was a paper that actually just came out two weeks ago, looking specifically at fructose metabolism in the brain as one of the, you know, very important pathways of promoting Alzheimer's disease. In fact, I, I think there's a subset of Alzheimer's disease that is effectively an energy disorder, uh, disease. And so in other words, there's a subset of Alzheimer's disease that looks like diabetes in the body. So you could think of it as like this brain diabetes. So in that subset of people who are really becoming susceptible to that illness, you couldn't do anything worse than continue to consume sugar. And that says nothing, of course, on the short term side, as you said, you know, for many people,

• 55:33Peter Attia?

  sugar creates highs and lows that probably itself doesn't lead to emotional lack of resilience, but contributes to it indirectly by probably narrowing somewhat that that band of tolerance that we have. Most people agree when they eat better, they cope better with stressful things. And also, most people acknowledge that when we're under stress, we tend to drive ourselves towards short term comfort foods and we stress eat to get that short term hit that you referred to.

• 56:04Lewis Howes?

  I feel like we've just scratched the surface of so many topics I want to go down, but hopefully we can get you back on for another two, three hour interview because I felt like this went by like that. But just scratching the surface, Peter, I really appreciate this. I've got two final questions for you before I ask those. I want to make sure people check out your content. Peter Attia Drive, the podcast, you're going to get a lot more information on this. Go check out that podcast there. Also, you're on social media a lot. I loved your article about Topo Chico and the downside, potential downsides of sparkling water. I'm a big sparkling water guy myself. You have a fascinating blog where you write about a lot of this stuff with a research and the science backing everything. Make sure to check out your website.

• 56:50Lewis Howes?

  Peter Attia, M D, everywhere, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook as well, with lots of great content and hopefully the book coming out in the next year. So make sure to be

• 57:00Peter Attia?

  Maybe two.

• 57:02Lewis Howes?

  To be on the newsletter, subscribe to the podcast so you can stay up to date when that comes out. This is a question I ask everyone at the end, two questions. This one's called the three truths. So I'd like for you to imagine from a hypothetical question scenario that you're, you live as long as you want. You figured out the rules of hacking, of living health span, lifespan. You've, you're 150, 200 years old as you want to be and you're healthy. But for whatever reason, it's your last day and you've accomplished every dream. You've put out all the content you want to put out there. You've got a great family life, everything. But for whatever reason, all your content has to leave this world and no one has access to your information anymore.

• 57:46Lewis Howes?

  The interviews are gone, videos, books, they're gone with you to the next place. But you get to leave behind three lessons that you've learned that you would share with the world. And this is all we would have to remember you by are these kind of three lessons are what I like to call the three truths. What would you say are your three truths?

• 58:03Peter Attia?

  So we didn't talk about this today, but I think an important principle of knowledge acquisition is differentiating the search for truth versus the the need to being right. So I would say the first thing is knowing the truth is more important than being right. I guess the second one we did talk about today, which is that the pursuit of joy is a good thing. Although we didn't get into it, you know, there's a belief I think that many people have that says joy would reduce productivity, would reduce drive, would reduce ambition, or all of these things.

• 58:45Peter Attia?

  I'm not convinced those things are true, and even if they are, who cares? And then I think the final thing, which at least to date has been a big part of this journey, has been realizing that eulogy virtues matter more than resume virtues. So if you think about who are those people that are going to be there at the end? And what's going to matter to them versus what your CV says? That is a principle that I think is worth preserving.

• 59:21Lewis Howes?

  Hmm, those are beautiful. I love those three truths. Peter, I want to acknowledge you for a moment, man, this has been a highly insightful for me, very powerful. And I'm just so appreciative of your joyful drive to finding the truth, doing the research, diving in to serve all of humanity and serving us to live healthier lifespans and longer lifespans. So I really acknowledge you for the gifts you are and the curiosity and the the effort you put in. Now gratefully in the last couple of years in a joyful state to serve humanity. I really think that more people need to be like you. So I'm grateful for your existence and for being here. And my final question for you is what's your definition of greatness?

• 1:00:06Peter Attia?

  I think it has two components and I want to make sure I represent that. I've never figured out how to achieve this, but I've seen it. I've been able to see it on a couple of occasions and it's really special. The first is the obvious one, which is domain mastery. Right? It's like a true mastery of whatever the domain is, whether it be intellectual, physical, whatever.

• 1:00:31Peter Attia?

  But the few people that I've seen that I think about as great did something beyond that, which is they do it with a level of humanity that elevates everyone around them to a place where those people have also never been before. So we do see the, we do see great athletes who do this, but just as much we see great community workers who do this. I mean, there's this, you know, missionary doctor who's one of my heroes in this world. And, you know, these, these people are exceptional at what they do, but equally important is they somehow everybody around them is at their best when they are in their orbit. So to me that it's those two things that are almost impossible to find together.

• 1:01:16Lewis Howes?

  That's cool. Peter Atia, thank you so much for being here, my man.

• 1:01:19Peter Attia?

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:01:22Lewis Howes?

  Thank you so, so much for listening, my friend. I hope you enjoyed this and if someone sent you this link, then send them a thank you message in return. Just text them or call them and say, hey, thank you for sending this and letting me be aware of how I can improve my health. You've got a great friend in that person who sent you this link and make sure to pay it forward. Just copy and paste the link wherever you're listening to this right now on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or anywhere you're listening to podcasts and send this to someone or use the link lewishouse.com/1046 and text someone, post it on social media and tag myself, Lewis Howes and Peter Atia as well. And make sure if this is your first time here, click that subscribe button right now on Apple Podcasts to stay up to date from the best information from the greatest minds

• 1:02:07Lewis Howes?

  in the world every single week and leave us a rating and review over there as well. That really helps us spread the message of greatness to more people when you do that. So please subscribe and leave a review right now. And if you want inspirational messages to your phone every single week from me, then text the word PODCAST right now to 614-350-3960. Do it right now. Text the word PODCAST to 614-350-3960 to stay up to date on the latest and greatest from me to your phone every single week. And I want to leave you with this quote from Og Mandino, who said, "Always do your best. What you plant now, you will harvest later." And that is true with your health. Isn't it interesting? When we eat horrible, when we

• 1:02:52Lewis Howes?

  sleep bad, it tends to catch up to us later. We start to get affected, we start to get sick, we start to see issues with our health. And when we take care of our health now, it always pays off later. If no one's told you lately, you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. I'm so grateful for you. You know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.