This is Anthony pump Keanu. Most of you know me as pump you're listening to the podcast. Simply the
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PD. Mangan is a 65 year old author and scientist focused on using pharmacology biochemistry and microbiology to better understand how diet and exercise can be used for anti aging and longevity in this conversation. We discussed the importance of lean muscle mass.
This science behind caloric restriction why he is a proponent of high-intensity resistance training and the
difference between life span and health span.
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All right guys bang bang super excited to have PD on the on the podcast here. I was telling them beforehand that he gets to spend all of his time worrying about things that actually matter in the world like Health diet and anti-aging. So thanks so much for doing this man.
That's thanks Anthony. It's my pleasure for
sure. So for those that don't know you maybe let's just start with with your background kind of where did you grow up? And then what did you do through school before you
You
start really creating content on the internet.
So yeah, so I have a background in my education is in microbiology and biochemistry and studied pharmacology as well. And as you know, I was pointing out to you. This is you know, I'm not a research scientist or anything like that, but it is my field. So let me give you a little bit of
Other background I've been interested in health and fitness for a long time and you know, I basically followed conventional wisdom for a long time. But then when I found myself with an illness, this is already been a couple of decades ago and I couldn't get better my interest definitely deepened because I had to try to figure out
How to take care of myself how do how to heal myself how to improve because doctors couldn't do it. They were getting nowhere and I saw a number of them so, you know, so I jumped in and you know, I definitely made progress. I definitely figured a few things out and so I started writing about it and after I had written about
And I thought well, what do I do now? I guess I'll keep writing and in keep researching and and so on so I did that and I've written several books and then you know got on Twitter and and that's basically, you know fast forward today here. I am.
Yeah, and so you obviously are incredibly humble. You've written I think six books at this point. You've got a fairly popular blog in the road health and fitness and the part to me that
Initially caught my attention was so you Tweeting a bunch of stuff that I thought was interesting and when I click through to the website, there's these photos of you and one is from 2008 and the way I would describe it for those that are just listening is essentially you look like kind of your standard computer programmer, right? You've got basically a kind of a button-down collared shirt on some khakis and overly skinny, but by no means kind of out of shape.
But more of just look like never been around a weight room before and then you fast forward to 2017 and you're like wait a minute the guy in 2017 looks like he's in way better shape and actually younger than the guy in 2008 and I think that's kind of, you know, a great just visual example of the work that you've done around. Hey, this looks actually really really important as you get older and that's really where you've kind of hung your hat. Right,
right. It is very important.
Yeah, as my starting point as you mention was definitely, you know, not not quite where most people are starting from these days, you know, I mean, I was I was on the underweight side and and that was when I was ill as well so, you know, one of the things I figured out was that resistance training AKA weightlifting was one of the best things I could do and I got very much into it.
Put on a lot of muscle right away based basically in the first year after I started it and started eating different we as well, so my my reading in and Studies have convinced me that that it's that resistance training is just a very important thing for everyone to do whether they're men or women young or old we lose muscle as we age. This is a really underappreciated.
She dated fact that that it's eve it's even detectable when someone is in their thirties, and then this accelerates over the years and it's such that by the time someone is 80 years old. They can have lost half the muscle mass that they had when they were young if they don't do something about it. And of course most people aren't doing anything about it. So yeah, that's a condition known as sarcopenia. Its
of loss of muscle mass and then a lot of people overlay pretty high amount of body fat over that and that's that's just a health disaster. I think that this is this is the muscle part is that is underappreciated and and everything about that is underappreciated, you know in why do people get sicker as they get older and to my mind
Is you know right there is the Crux of the matter as far as why they do metabolic dysfunction from losing muscle excess body fat, of course, the wrong kinds of foods enter into it and on and on but you know, you know right there. I tweeted something just just this morning. I was you know thinking about this.
I tweeted that that all chronic disease is just a manifestation of a single cause and okay. That's that that's a huge generality. I realize but I think this is something that is not appreciated very much that that metabolic dysfunction that comes from being out of shape and eating the wrong kind of food. This is what under
Wise virtually everything that people go to the doctor for the you know, the crime diseases that are seen in the developed world, you know as opposed to the acute things that are there more common elsewhere. So yeah, that's that's a big big idea that that I think you know is one of my main themes that you have to you have to have
Good metabolic function to avoid chronic disease.
Yeah, and part of what I think is so interesting about your work is you literally named the blog Rogue health and fitness, right? You're going rogue from kind of the standard ideas around what to eat how to exercise and things like that. And so I thought maybe what we could do is let's start on the diet side, right? Most people are taught kind of a low-fat high-carb type diet.
And they basically eat you know, what they consider to be that food pyramid you obviously have a different view of the world may be kind of talk about the work you've done and why you've arrived at something that's different or kind of Rogue to those traditional recommendation.
Okay, great. So I think that a lot of this a lot of the way people eat and you know how they're recommended to eat and so
So on it flows from one one single light idea and that idea is a wrong idea and and it's basically the idea that saturated fat causes heart disease. This this goes back to you know, the 40s and 50s and the nutritionist and selkies and the cholesterol idea and so on and they hit on the idea that saturated fat was killing.
People it was it was a huge problem at the time heart disease. It's still a big problem, but it's mostly much older people. Now at the time they were looking at a lot of middle-aged men dropping dead of heart attacks and so on so they hit on this idea and in retrospect, you know looking at looking at what we know now and the research it seems
wholly mistaken nevertheless by the late 1970s the US government had latched onto it and put out official dietary recommendations that we should avoid eating a lot of saturated fat that we should eat a lot of whole grains that fruits and vegetables were uniquely healthy and so on and so forth.
And that is basis for how how most people are eating now. I let me back up a little from as far as the saturated fat goes there have been several meta-analyses which are basically reviews of studies done in the last decade that have shown that intake of dietary saturated fat is not related to coronary heart disease.
So I come from a perspective of thinking why do why does the Western World the modern Western World suffer from these diseases like heart disease and cancer and Alzheimer's diabetes and so on and why I have these all increased in recent years, and why do some other
Our societies not have them essentially, you know, for example, there is there's a there's an island in the South Pacific the top events the island of Catawba where these people live and they have no chronic disease whatsoever. It's far as they found, you know, people have gone there and investigate him and that too despite the fact that 75% of the men.
Cigarettes so, you know, I mean, I'm not, you know, not saying that cigarettes are benign by any means, but I'm just saying I'm pointing out this fact, why do these people have seemingly no chronic disease? If you go back in time, why did these even even in the Western World? Why were these diseases so scarce and why are they common now? Well,
My my main conclusion is that chronic diseases are as someone has said they might be better term to diseases of processed food. So in the late 19th century, there were Technologies developed for example that were able to make white flour. There was there was little to no white flour before that, but then they you know with with the Industrial Revolution.
Lucien in these gigantic Milling machines. They World make white flour and everybody started using it sugar has been around a little bit longer, but it became a lot cheaper and so as it became cheaper and cheaper people started using more of it a couple hundred years ago in the in the u.s. You know, per capita consumption was like 5 pounds a year or something like that. Whereas its you know in the range of a hundred and fifty pounds now,
And then one other one other invention that happened in the late 19th century was they figured out how to extract oils from seeds. So they this started out actually as a way to try to make cotton seeds which were a waste product profitable to get something out of them and they did and
Italy they made Crisco the the laughs the CEO on that last part of Crisco stands for cottonseed oil and they apply this to a number, you know of different oils. So now for example soybean oil is most common oil and you know corn oil canola oil and you know, etcetera all these oils so you put those all together and you've got modern food and you put them.
You put them together in a certain way in certain combinations and you got modern altar processed food that people eat huge amounts of so in the United States approximately 60 percent of calories in the average diet comes from these ultra-processed Foods. So that's a huge amount. So these are these are the what I'm talking about specifically the kind of foods that come in boxes.
Boxes and bags that are brightly labeled have brand names that are found in the middle aisles of the supermarket and and that's what most people eat. So that is what has caused our modern epidemic of crime disease in my estimation. Now we've had even you know, a lot of this goes back to the invention of agriculture.
Right, so it's so before agriculture. Everyone was a hunter gatherer everyone ate meat and whatever whatever wild vegetation they could gather and as far as we know they suffered from none of these scribe diseases that we have now, then when agriculture agriculture was invented people started eating lots of grains and they started suffering from
A lot of chronic diseases for example a really good example of this is that before agriculture. The average man was something like 5 foot 9 inches tall after agriculture. They were five foot three and there was all kinds of you know with and with same, you know, proportionate decrease in women and you know, they found in skeletal 's is skeletal remains that have been studying so on chronic diseases osteoarthritis.
Wanted so forth infectious disease also became very prominent at any rate. We live like that for a long time in recent years. Say the 19th century people started getting much taller again due to better nutrition, but then we took a second hit we took this industrial food hit that I was just talking about starting around 1900 say heart disease started, right?
It it Rising as an epidemic basically in 1900. There was essentially zero heart disease famous cardiologist Paul Dudley white who was the most famous cardiologist at mid-century said that when he was training and the early years of the century. Nobody ever talked about coronary artery disease because nobody had no they didn't know it existed and then people started having heart attacks and
on Till by midnight mid 20th century you had huge, you know huge numbers of heart attacks and so on heart disease epidemic, so then you know fast forward to a couple of decades ago and then we had these dietary guidelines after they decided that saturated fat was bad and then the Obesity epidemic started going
Right about that time. Is that a coincidence? I don't think so. There are other factors, I believe but the fact that people were told to eat less meat and animal products and to eat more carbohydrates. I believe very much contributed to it. So there we are there. There's there's the food element and that's that
That is my explanation of why this has happened.
And so what it really sounds like because it's super interesting like one is there's a direct correlation between add food get other problems, right? It is kind of a very general way to look at that. And then the question really were the debate lies is like what's bad food and what's not bad food? I think your general kind of conclusion sounds like
real food is good anything that's not real is worse right now. I'm just saying that it's bad. It's just when given the choice between two separate types of meals if one is made with real food that doesn't come with the oils and the process process all that kind of stuff versus the stuff that does that real food will in almost every way be better for you said correct
that that is correct. Now there's you know, there's endless debate in like
In my corner of Twitter for example about you know, what constitutes the best diet. What should be what should human beings really be eating optimally and so on and so forth, but I think as you just put it that is a very fundamental divide there. So like for example, you have you have the vegans. So now the vegans I mean I
I don't have a lot of sympathy for veganism nevertheless, you know, they will point out. Well, you know a whole food plant-based diet makes people healthier and there's you know, a fair amount of evidence that yeah, it does and in my view the reason for that is because they've stopped eating processed garbage. So when you talk about a whole food plant-based diet
It's not the plant-based. It's the whole food that makes the difference. So, you know you you could also formulate different diets. But if you're talking about using these ultra-processed Foods, he's you know, garbage Foods then you know, those are those are going to be bad. So like I say, you know, there's a lot of debate about what constitutes the optimal or the best and
I have my own opinions on that. But yes this what you just mentioned real whole food versus alter processed food is just a fundamental base there.
Yeah, it's almost like look whether you want to go vegan paleo, whatever else diet that everyone is, you know, kind of debating everyone pretty much agrees eating processed food is bad, right? And so if you can if you can stop doing that as step one for most people listening to this,
Like you're headed in the right direction and then everything else is kind of optimizing from there.
Right? And I think that you know that a lot of the people a lot of the vegans for example who proselytized for their diet for lack of a better word. They don't really quite understand that they they you know, and even let's get back from the vegans, but let's see even talk about mainstream.
Health authorities the kind of stuff that you'll there'll be an article in the New York Times. So and so says this and this they don't seem to realize the difference either they don't seem to get for the most part that that you know, these ultra-processed foods are causing the problem the for example the the oils that I mentioned so
I refer to them as seed oils, they're more commonly known as a vegetable oils, but they're not made out of vegetables. They're made out of this Mass industrial process from seeds. In any case there's still a widely recommended by Health authorities that you know, we should be using them and so on so forth. So a lot of that just goes they they just don't get it unfortunately.
Yeah, and what do you eat on a daily basis? So processed food is bad kind of how do you come out on this in terms of what solution you found for yourself? And and I should have caveat at the beginning you are. I'm 32 years old. You are not 32. You frankly look like you're in your mid 40s, but how old are you?
I'm 65. I just I just got on Medicare a couple months ago.
You sure.
Be the poster boy for moving the Medicare age up because
you do
not look like you're 65 years old. So what do you eating on a day-to-day basis?
So I guess you could probably characterize it as low carb and very neat based. So I eat meat and eggs. Basically a lot of them and ie non-starchy vegetables.
Yes, and I drink coffee and tea and some red wine and I think little bit of dairy. So, you know some no sugar yogurt that is some cheese that sort of thing that about covers it for the most part unless I'm cheating or something
got it, and then I'm really interested in and we'll get to some of the anti-aging stuff and a little bit but part of the diet.
Is when you eat right and so the two things that is really interesting to me and I cheated a little bit because I spent a lot of time looking at like David Sinclair's work around longevity and all this but one of the key pieces is caloric restriction, right? And so there's kind of two ways to do it either one literally eat less which can be very difficult for a lot of people to especially in today's society or this idea of intermittent fasting which has frankly appeared to
Load in popularity and I think that you do the intermittent fasting as well.
I do so intermittent fasting is just going yeah. I like you said it's exploded in popularity. So I don't know how much of an explanation people need but yes, it's just a practice of going without food for some length of time and there are there are a number of intermittent fasting regimens. I mean, you know the tons of different ones almost
As many as you know, the number of people who practice it, right? So 16:8 is a very common one and that's what I usually do. So that just means nothing nothing to eat after the evening meal then sleep time counts as well and then not having anything to eat in the morning until approximately 16 hours after you the evening meal the night before so you mentioned
lauric restriction. So yeah, this is interesting from an anti-aging point of view because many decades ago scientists working with lab animals found out that if you fed animals less they lived longer and they had less disease and so on and the idea that all diseases are inhibited means that aging itself is inhibited so caloric
striction has you know turned out to be the most robust most reproducible life extension intervention that scientists have found so
Like you say caloric restriction is very difficult to do and in my view is not really necessary. So there are people there are people who practice caloric restriction there is a calorie restriction society that you know with I think several thousand members who do this or way their food very carefully every day and all this and they're all very lean and so on but there's there's an easier way and intermittent fasting.
Appears to be just as effective as caloric restriction for life is sex extension, but without act really actual caloric restriction, I mean, you know for example myself and other people who practice intermittent fasting were of normal weight, right? We're not, you know, super skinny or something like that. So, you know presumably I and and those other people are eating, you know a normal amount of calories, so
You know what it appears to be is it's a whore it's a hormetic stress that gets into another topic but it's a stress much like exercise is a stress that results in the organism becoming healthier. So yes intermittent fasting I practice it many people do it also appears to be pretty effective for weight loss from
When combined with a decent diet because people simply have difficulty eating as much during the time when they're eating, you know that they skipped before so yes intermittent fasting I do it and a lot of people do it very very healthy practice.
What is the target number of calories that like the caloric restriction Community? What do they normally try to Target?
Is there some kind of either one set number or to some math that they do? Well, you know as
far as the people doing it, I honestly am not sure but in the laboratory when they've studied animals, they found that basically the more restriction the longer they live. I mean they've taken anyway anywhere from ten to fifty percent of you know fewer calories.
For these animals and you and and the more restriction the longer they seem to
live. Yeah, that's absolutely crazy. And then in terms of kind of the diet, right? So the takeaway is really for me are eat less processed food. I think maybe Sinclair talked about this in one of his books to is this idea of when you eat is almost more important than what you eat in some circumstances, right?
So kind of caloric restriction or intermittent fasting but then you overlay exercise on it. Right? And I think that most people if I said to them, hey, you are tasked with losing 10 pounds. They would immediately one think of exercise right? They wouldn't think of diet which obviously is a kind of a false way of thinking about it. But to is the type of exercise they say I'm going to go wrong, right and I'm going to go run as far as I can for as long as I can and hope to God that I lose weight.
Is that you have a very different view of the world? So he kind of helped me understand why you again kind of go Rogue from the traditional exercise advice,
right? Very interesting question. This this is another topic where people have it just all the wrong way around. So yeah, so, you know, if you told somebody they had to lose 10 pounds and they think about exercise so that that's the common idea. I'm going to go burn it off and in there.
Number of things wrong with that idea. First of all, the evidence is is very poor. So, you know, as you can imagine there's been a lot of studies of this sort of thing, you know, where they take a group of people and want to lose weight. So one group will exercise and when one won't and so on and if it's not coupled with diet, it is almost completely ineffective. It just doesn't work exercise alone and there are there.
Reasons for that good reasons for that one is that you don't burn as much energy exercising as most people think right. I mean you can go have a pretty solid aerobic workout in the gym and you know, you might and you know for 30-40 minutes or something like that you might end up burning 300 calories, you know, and then you go to Starbucks afterwards get a frappuccino.
Which is 400 calories well that you know, that's all shot and and that leads to a corollary which is that exercise makes you hungry. So people exercise more thinking they're burning all off but then they just get hungrier and they eat more and so on. In fact, it's really interesting at there were doctors in the 19th century that said that if you want to lose weight stop exercising and if you want to gain weight
Exercise so, you know completely different point of view. So my point of view as far as exercise and weight loss is that your you don't exercise to to burn fat or burn calories or whatever so that you know diet diet is just supremely important in in weight loss. So, you know, if you if you want to lose weight, you know using the parade
No rule, it's you know, it's 80 to 90 percent of it is going to be your diet. However exercised resistance training is important. So
one one big
problem with conventional reducing diets. So, you know low calorie diet, which is you know, the most common thing portion control all this or thing. Is that if good.
Is aren't taken. A lot of the weight loss is muscle and you know anywhere from a quarter up to half of weight loss can be muscle and that is something that you really want to avoid at all costs. If you when people talk about I want to lose weight, it's fat. They want to lose not muscle not not the rest of their body weight, right so resistance training
Is important in my view when people are wanting to lose weight because it helps them build in and retain their
muscle.
Yeah, and part of this is you know, getting all goes back to science which is if you have two people who weighed the exact same so let's say you have a 180-pound man one has a lean muscle mass and the other does not even though they weigh the same amount from like a pound standpoint. Their bodies are actually in very different states, right that the lean muscle mass kind of more actively burns the calories versus not having that and that's
really what it sounds like a lot of the work that you've done is to drive people to not be ascared of kind of developing that lean muscle mass but actually seeking it out right and trying to put your body in a position where the muscles themselves or burning the fat or burning the calories and therefore the diet plus that lean muscle mass really does the work for you
right the you know, the example you gave of, you know, two men each way.
A hundred eighty pounds, but with with different body composition is you know is a good one because they do not have the same health risks at all. So the health risks that are associated with being overweight or obese are due to body fat and they're not due to muscles. So, you know, this this is one of the drawbacks of most commonly used measure body.
D mass index. So it's a it's an idea. You know, it's a good idea to normalize body weight for how tall you are and and and so on but the fact is you know, there are you know athletes mainly and some other people who you know are clinically overweight or even obese, but it's all muscle and and they don't have the health risks.
Conversely, there are people who are normal weight. There's a phenomenon called normal weight obesity and they have a very high level of body fat even though they are a normal weight and they have the exact same health risks as somebody who is obese. So yeah, it's all driven by body fat the more muscle and less body fat you have within limits of course, but you know speaking very generally the
healthier, you are the more it's not just it's not even just a matter of
The muscle burning the calories to keep you at a normal weight. It's also a matter of your metabolism is functioning properly so that you don't have these high risks of all the chronic diseases that are so rampant in our society.
Type 2 diabetes has just risen, you know tremendously like something like 8 to 10 fold and I'll just in the last several decades. So those those of us who talk about this topic I think are very well aware of this but I think this is one fact is not very well appreciated by most people who don't take a deep look at it and that is
That type 2 diabetes is just the end result of a long chain of events that that lead ultimately to type 2 diabetes. So it's so somebody becomes diabetic when their blood sugar is no longer under control and it rises but all the events that lead to that are happening in the vast majority of people in the United States today. There was a recent study that showed that
at 88 percent of American adults had some kind of metabolic dysfunction and only twelve percent were clinically metabolically healthy. So what that means is that all those people that 88% there they're traveling traveling that road to type 2 diabetes. That's the road you want to stay off and by having good body composition, which is a high relatively high level of muscle low little body fat.
For both men and women you stay off that road.
Yeah, one of the interesting things I saw you talk about. I think it was in an article that you wrote was the difference in using like a body mass index as a measurement for health versus literally just measuring somebody's waistline, right? So maybe kind of talked about that kind of the difference there and most people hear that they kind of like well that's really simplistic. But but but you, you know, you met basically the argument
Hey literally measure the waist line could be a better way to measure
Health. Right? Right, and and it is so body mass index. You know, like I was just saying it doesn't take into account the proportions of muscle and body fat that somebody has so a very simple measure and this has been studied a lot is and I want to let me back up just a little bit. I just want to say a lot of people make this point.
I ain't about that. I just made about okay, they're all the you know, they're these athletes that you know that have high body mass index, but they're in good health and so on and as yeah, you know sure I agree. However that does this just does not apply to most people BMI is actually more likely to underestimate health risk because of this phenomenon of normal weight obesity, right? So people have high body fat and
A lot according to BMI. They look normal when in fact they have high health risks in any case yeah waist size is actually better. So if somebody is their waist size should be one half or less of their height and that is a better measure of metabolic and crime disease risk, then body mass index. Really?
If somebody is 6 feet 6 feet tall, they should have 36 inch or less waist size to be healthy. Yeah, it's pretty crazy.
How you know, once you start to wrap your head around this stuff it simple to understand what the benchmarks are and kind of where we're at. If all the hard work is in is really disciplined one of the things that I know a lot of people so I was military played football in college and there was always kind of
Weird sayings that at the time seemed a little crazy but as you learn more may not be so crazy. So I literally would have a friend who always say I always will be able to run a sub 7-minute Mile and I used to give him shit and say like, you know, why and he said you ever seen a fat person who can run some seven minutes. Okay, like, you know, like there's some truth to that I guess in the many of those people most of the military and from from playing football have now gone on to
do a lot of this like high intensity training. So whether it's CrossFit or other types of exercises, they have elements of strength training, but they also have kind of a cardiovascular element to them as well packed into, you know, somewhat short 30 to 45 minutes. I work out what's kind of your take on that and how does that fit into kind of the exercise type routines that that you think are best for people?
Yeah that that's that's interesting. So
High intensity training, you know is a relatively recent phenomenon as far as his that's been studied by exercise physiologist and so on and the results have been remarkable in the lab studies. They've done on this mean for example, one one study. They had they had people riding on a stationary bicycle. So they would go all out for 30 seconds, I believe.
Leave it was and then have a you know, then they would cycle leisurely for a few minutes and then do it again. So for a total of three all out bouts on the exercise cycle. Meanwhile, they had a group on also on an exercise bicycle doing steady. You know, what we would see like what you would typically see when you walk into a gym people pedaling on their cycle. So steady state aerobic exercise for 45 minutes.
So these these groups each did three sessions a week and in just a few weeks the people that were literally only working out. I don't know where it came to Six Minutes a week or
something
got just as fit as the people who spent 45 minutes a day riding their exercise bicycles. So by ramping up the intensity of the exercise you
you you decrease the the need for duration and and for frequency. So yeah high-intensity exercise is great how that fits into my philosophy of exercise is high intensity resistance training. So that's that's the for my practice in that I advocate and there are a lot of you know mistaken ideas about it, but because it doesn't
Early people hear this word high-intensity. I think. Oh my God, you know, it's you know, I'm not going to do that and it does but it does not necessarily involve what most people think of is heavyweights and it doesn't involve moving quickly either. In fact quite the opposite slow movements generally speaking, but it involves basically doing a set until momentary muscular failure, which
Ins until you cannot do another rep. So this turns out to be a very good cardiovascular exercises as well because it's a form of high-intensity training. That's what I do. That's what I advocate
and so let's take a simple exercise like the bench press right walk me through kind of how much weight right so 50% a hundred percent of somebody's kind of one rep max. And then what does that look like from a
Of reps that they normally would be able to do right. So if somebody came to you and said hey, I'm going to go bench press today. How do I do the high intensity resistance training? What does that look like?
Right. So as far as the the weight goes is somebody is moving to a high-intensity way of training the the choice of a weight is going to be a little bit of trial and error at first as compared to say what they do on a one repetition Max.
Lift it in general. The first couple of reps should be relatively easy. You should be able to always move in good form. You should always be able to control the weight without heaving or jerking the weight around now bench press is is perhaps not the best example of what I want to illustrate here. And the reason for that is because in a
Bench, press you have the possibility of a barbell with weights getting stuck on your chest and you don't want that to happen. So, you know, I always tell people that being free of injury is the most important thing you can do as far as any form of exercise. That's just the most important aspect of it. So if somebody wanted to do a bench press
Press to momentary muscular failure. They should either have a spotter or a chest press machine would probably be better for the average person. So they're going to move that weight in you know, slowly and in good form and do it until they can no longer do another repetition. Now in terms of reps repetition repetitions are not the goal.
Repetitions are a way of keeping count. So the number of repetitions that anyone can do is going to vary between, you know, the person who's doing it how much weight they choose and so on what you want to look at is time under tension and going to momentary muscular failure. So a fairly wide range of time under tension is a totally effective for
For building muscle and for getting fit so I usually tell people you know, 30 to 60 seconds, maybe a little more of time under tension is about where you want to be reps or a method of keeping count. Not your goal and always go to momentary muscular
failure for sure. One of the things in this is it's been years since since I looked at this so you'll have to excuse me if I misspeak here, but there was a gentleman who
I want to say was an Arizona. He was playing college football. I think maybe even with the NFL I do not think it was Pat Tillman, but it could have been him there's somebody and basically what they were doing is they were training with somebody who the entire thought process was that time under tension didn't have to only be arrived at through repetition. Right? So if I wanted to for example put my pectoral muscles Through Time under tension,
Tension I could do that simply by going down into a push-up position kind of at the at the most tension point and just holding it and I can hold it for 60 seconds come out of it and I would get the same if not more benefit than the person who sat down and did you know 10 or 15 reps that whatever the weight was and I always thought that was interesting because to a lay person like me who has no scientific background other than what Google provides, huh?
It makes sense. Right? But it was just very interesting because again that was a different view of the world but seemed to arrive at the same conclusion. So just interested on your thoughts there and if that has any validity or made he's been disproven that this point
no, no, it's today. It's absolutely correct. So what you're interested in is the muscle doing metabolic work and so this actually leads to an interesting point. You know, what?
It is the purpose of lifting weights. So if you ask the average person average guy in the gym, you know, what you're supposed to do in the weight room. He says, well it's to pick up a weight and to move it in a certain way and move it, you know and move it back again. And I think that's that's an incorrect answer. The answer is you're supposed to load your muscle your load your muscles with tension and work your muscles.
With this tension until you you get to momentary muscular failure in order to put the proper stress on your muscles that will make them stronger and make them grow. So as far as what you're talking about this, you know being stationary certainly you can go down into a push-up position and as long as you're not locked out,
At the top, but if you're just halfway there you are certainly putting your muscles under tension. You stay there you are exercising them and you can provide the stimulus for your muscles to get stronger by doing that.
Yeah, super interesting and then I guess, you know, there's the diet and exercise component that we've talked about but ultimately a lot of this feeds into the anti-aging kind of talk tracker or thought process and to me anti-aging has kind of two.
It's right the average person simply wants to have a healthier life, right? So they think hey the average person dies around 77 years old give or take. That's what I'm going to die, you know based on the data. I want to be as healthy and happy as I can be for my 77 years here on Earth and you know see you guys later. There is another group that basically says if 77 is the average I want to live to a hundred and fifty and kind of they actually want to extend life.
Diet and exercise plays into both of those categories of longevity,
correct, right? Sure. Yeah. So I'm sorry. Do you did you want to complete that what you were saying or
what? We'll just like, how do you think about let's let's take the first bucket first writes. Like hey, I want to be healthier for the time. I am allotted here diet and exercise feeding into that is basically what you focused on right?
Right. So yes, this is a very interesting question. So I think most
people
think about this in the wrong way. So the idea of anti-aging or life extension. Most people the really most common reaction is people think that means they're going to spend an extra decade in a nursing home. And that is absolutely not what we're talking about here. So there are a couple of
Concepts, well, there's a concept that I think is helpful in thinking about that. And that is healthspan. So people talk about life span. You want to have health good health span to write the typical the typical way that people live now that is that somewhere in middle age. They develop some health problems and they gradually go downhill for a long time for decades until finally they get to the end of the road.
Ideally you would want I mean we know we're all going to get to the end of the road someday, but ideally you want to be as healthy as possible while you're doing it so that any any diseases that come along they only come along at the end of life and that that pattern is in fact what you see a lot of very long with people. They're quite healthy until 100 or something like that and then they come down with something and then that's it.
So
the
other thing is is that this is related to the first point is that anti-aging or life extension? It is necessarily about more years of healthy life which in which even if it isn't a longer life it necessarily means a healthy life most chronic diseases occur in older age from middle-aged on up and that indicates that
Are all closely related to aging so if you can postpone aging you you you postpone all the diseases of Aging that that that's that's what it amounts to is not about more years in a nursing home. It's about extending years of healthy life
span. And would it be fair to say that if you had to choose one or the other health or Diet versus exercise?
For most people the simplest thing and that would have the biggest impact is actually the diet side rather than the exercise side or do you feel like it is you have to have both I well,
you know, if forced to choose I would agree with that that diet is the most important thing and there are a couple of reasons one is that the amount of fairly small amount of exercise has large benefits.
You know, you don't have to be an athlete or do all kinds of stuff to have get large benefits. Just just as opposed to being sedentary, you know, of course. What I advocate is people do optimal exercise and that's what I try to do with my resistance training and so on but the fact is that you can get these large benefits from a small amount of exercise on the other hand.
There's an expression that people often use in my neck of the woods is you can't outrun a bad diet. And so I mean there are cases of athletes who have become diabetic because they're eating the wrong diet, you know, really high carbs, you know back in the day when I used to do a lot of running. I mean all the running magazines are telling you you'd all these carbs all the time all the time and you know, I did that and people have done that and they have become.
Diabetic despite a very high level of exercise. So for those reasons, yeah, I would come down on diet as being the most important thing for most people. I think
it was Von Miller a Denver Broncos and NFL player a couple years ago. He sat out a practice right in the media. Of course you hey, you're like the star player why you sitting at a practice and he very kind of embarrassingly went in front of
The cameras and he said something to the effect of I had mozzarella sticks yesterday and in the quote he used was that's like putting regular gas in a Ferrari, right? It just does it's just going to screw it up. And so he was basically saying look, you know, I felt sick because I eat so healthy. I'm such this like, you know Elite athlete and then I ate some shitty food and next thing, you know, like literally I missed practice.
Next
day and you know, look that's not gonna happen to everyone every single time whatever but it was just very very kind of Illuminating. I think when I heard him say that I said, look the guy's super in tune with his body and obviously it had an impact for an NFL player to miss a practice simply because it's something yeah the day before the night before
absolutely. I mean those guys need need to be careful with what they eat and I think most of them are my
You know read a lot about Tom Brady and his diet and he's very very careful about it. So, yeah, it's very important even even at eye level of exercise you, you know, there are some exceptions and maybe you know for short periods of time like the swimmer whose Name Escapes me at the moment the Olympic medalist who was supposedly eating 12,000 calories a day and and so
Maybe you can get away with that for a short time period of time but you know this this phenomenon is real about not being able to outrun a bad
diet. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. Before we go to wrap up where oh where can people find out more about you and your work. Where do you want to send them?
Sure. So thanks I my website is called Rogue health and fitness.com, and I'm very active on Twitter or mine.
Handle is Mangan. That's my last name Mangan 150. And that's where they can find me
awesome. I end each episode with the same two questions and then you'll get to ask me a question to end and the episode. But the first one is what is the most important book you've ever read?
That's a good question. I could say that a book that had a big impact on me was thorough bye Walden by thorough. Excuse me. I read that many times when I was young and it impressed upon me the idea of living life that life was to be lived.
I love that. I thought I see in the background.
And the Bitcoin billionaires I thought you were going to throw that out there.
Well, that's current reading for sure.
Yeah, Ben mezrich the author's been on the podcast and he did a fantastic job with that one. But the book Walden what exactly is it a fiction book? Is it a nonfiction?
It is nonfiction It Was Written in 1843 I believe and
Henry David Thoreau is the author and he went out to live in a cabin on a lake in Walden Pond in Massachusetts, and he just wrote about spending a year there and it's very philosophical and there are a number of quotes from the book that you probably find familiar like the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
There's another one about marching to A Different Drummer. So these these come from that book. It's about living life as you see fit about another quote coming to the you don't want to come to the end of your life and find out that you have not really
lived.
That is a very very true statement for sure. We spent a lot of time talking about humans. And the last question I ask is a more fun one about aliens believer or non-believer.
Non-believer.
Wow, okay, why a non-believer
because the evidence shows the evidence points to
the idea that human beings may be unique in the universe as far as intelligent life goes. So there may very well and probably is some form of life elsewhere. But as far as intelligent life there would ask the question that Enrico Fermi asked where are they?
I mean if are question there are billions of galaxies and vast space and and it's all been in existence for billions of years. Why haven't we heard from anybody? Why isn't there any sign of
anything?
I think that is the most compelling anti-alien argument that there is I've had you know hundreds of people at this point. I've asked this question to on the podcast and I'd say 95% of people believe and they basically sum it up to like it would be ignorant for us to not believe in the world is so vast and you know, they kind of all that but there's only one answer that I ever hear on the anti belief side that makes sense to me and it's that which is hey, they're not real.
Hopefully find them later or they find
us. Right right. They're just you know, you couple that with some theoretical thinking about the the odds of intelligent life evolving and so on and the fact that we don't have any evidence for that and there ought to be abundant evidence one would think so so at the moment I'm in.
The negative
Camp. I love it. I love it. What? Uh, what's the one question you have for me to wrap this up. I am
curious about your work day. You seem to be incredibly hard-working you put out your letter five days a week. You do regular podcast. I think maybe 5 5 a week or so.
How the hell do you do it? Yeah, I have this weird framework. I some of you have asked me this recently. So I have an advantage in that I took some time to think about it and what I told them was I've really compartmentalized my day and there's a certain Rhythm to it and I know myself well enough I take the the letter I read every morning day that I
Writing that it's over like like the streaks broke in I'll be done right and so I just know every day I got to write something and no matter what happens. I gotta write it and then I'll worry about tomorrow if tomorrow is going to be the day I stopped right and then on the video on the podcast stuff like I get to learn from people who have spent like, you know, take yourself. For example, you spend a bunch of time thinking about things that I don't spend a lot of time thinking about I probably should spend more time. And so
You helped me just kind of cheat a little bit and that you downloaded all your information to me. Right and it's just so happens that we recorded it and bunch of other people are going to listen. So I think that it's it's all really around learning and I generally enjoy doing that and so it's kind of like I would spend my time doing this even if no one was reading it or listening at the same time you who is it a jackal will make I think has a thing.
Like discipline equals Freedom, right? And it's this idea of just I know every day here's how my day is split up. I know exactly how to kind of allocate that time people who are close to me will tell you I will get a little annoyed if I feel like it's off, right so of all of a sudden I realized hey, I don't have the letter written by a certain time. I know I'm behind and then it's like I better speed this up before everything else gets set off. And so when you kind of get in a rhythm and have some sort of
of process and have some discipline around it. It's become second nature, right? It's like I literally don't even I don't even know what I would do in the morning. If I didn't write the letter Rex. I just been doing it for so long that it's just like a world. Of course I do that but at the same time I have had friends who I've got one who actually works for works with a gentleman who writes a very popular email every day. He's got five people working on it and I asked him I said, what the hell do you guys all do?
And I like it like literally if I had five people I don't even know what I would have them. Do. They were all sit there and watch me write pretty much write like that would be kind of weird. So I do think that it it's like anything right if you enjoyed doing it. It's not even work. It's just like I'm excited to have the conversations or order right the stuff and you know, every once in awhile, I get reminded like that's not normal, but there's things that you do every single day that that I'm like, wow, that's
Normal, but to you is second nature and something you enjoy
right Dad that that that's that's great too. Your explanation is great. I really admire what you do and we are in a stance you and I are in a sense in the same space and that we're both online. This is all you know, relatively new. I mean I up until a year ago. I was working my day job, you know as well as doing all
This other stuff now I'm doing this exclusively. So I really like to see how somebody like yourself goes about it. It's similar to what I do. Although you sounds like more disciplined than I am. And
yeah, yeah. Well, what I would say too is I think the tools have changed right, you know, so if you just take literally of everything from emails to podcasts all this kind of stuff like there is a day and age one of the things that
really surprised me but was very kind of cool to hear was Joe Rogan recently had Tom Green did the Canadian comedian who was you know bunch of movies and stuff back in the day come on his podcast and the reason why he did that was that Tom Green used to have a show like literally like a TV station basically out of his house and Joe Rogan went on as a guest in like 2007 and there was a clip
When viral recently from that day that they recorded and Joe Rogan's like a little kid in a candy store. He's like looking around and he's like, oh my god dude, this is awesome. Like oh my God, you turned your house into you know a video set and
light bulb goes off. Yeah,
and he's got a server and like you just see the wheels were spinning and so he credits Tom Green and two or three other people with really pushing him down the path of creating what eventually became the podcast he runs and so when Tom Green came back,
Recently, they had this whole conversation where he was literally buying servers and putting them in his house and every six months. It seemed like there's new technology and his was outdated and had to have a whole staff and any basically was running a television Production Studio, right and then YouTube was born and now you and I can record a video and put it on YouTube right and like like we're spoiled compared to just 15 years ago. What somebody would have to do it?
I do think that like the technology kind of advancement that that Evolution cycle has put us at a time and place in the world where like we can do this pretty effortlessly in terms of like we can just focus on the content and we don't have to worry about a lot of the infrastructure because there's so many solutions, you know, everything from Amazon as a Marketplace to Shopify to you know, email providers all kinds of stuff.
Absolutely. I feel incredibly
a fortunate to you know be able to take advantage of it. I mean there was I think I was 43 the first time I went on the internet it wasn't her around, you know, so, you know now I get a laptop and I go online and and there you go. It doesn't doesn't require a lot else. It's fantastic.
I love that. I could not imagine having never been raised on 32 have never been on the internet.
And go another 10 years and that's the first time you get on the internet like the idea that I can use this thing to get access to information to people to all these different things had to be just a wild experience.
Yeah, it was it was very wild for me. I mean I used to I remember going on and thinking wow, like there's a webcam in the Antarctic. Oh my God, you know that is incredible and I can
see what's going on there right now, you know.
No, you know little did I
know what was to come but you know
before that,
you know to get information you had to go to a library, which I did of course, but but now I mean, you know, the world is the world is out there at your fingertips. And as far as the business aspect of it goes I mean, you know, yeah, it's great. I mean, I think you mentioned Joe Rogan. I mean what he's done is just
Sounding to me and you know, you're you're perhaps on your way to Rogen dumb there, you know with what you're doing. I think that's great. And so I'm always interested in seeing it, you know, really admire what you're doing
awesome. And well, I am just as much of a fan of your work as well. So I think people will really enjoy this and as you as you keep going what through it again in the future,
okay. Alright. Well, thank you very much.
All right guys, thanks for listening to that episode. I hope you enjoyed it. Just as much as I did. My goal is to educate as many people with these conversations as possible. So please go subscribe on your favorite podcast Channel
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