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Episode: Dr. Mark Hyman: To Live Longer You Need...

Author: Simon Sinek
Duration: 00:48:04

Episode Shownotes

Close friends are the best thing for your health. Friendship, it turns out, is one of life’s best medicines.If you don’t believe me, believe Dr. Mark Hyman. Mark is one of the leading voices in the functional medicine movement, which is all about taking a holistic approach to our health

for natural healing and preventing disease. The smallest changes in our daily lifestyle habits, or what we eat and drink, or our positive social interactions can have huge impacts on our long-term health.I sat down with Mark to talk about my most recent obsession – friendship. I was eager to get a physician’s perspective on all the ways friendship is beneficial for our health. In this conversation, we discuss the biological benefits of talking to a good friend and why you’re only as healthy as your five closest friends.This…is A Bit of OptimismFor more on Mark Hyman and his work, check out:The Doctor’s Farmacy podcastFunction Healthdrhyman.com

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_02
Loneliness is as big a killer as anything else. Some have said it's equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. There's a huge biology to it. Why aren't doctors prescribing to spend more time with friends?

00:00:11 Speaker_00
I do. We are what we eat, or so the adage goes. But it turns out that statement is actually medically true.

00:00:23 Speaker_00
Dr. Mark Hyman is one of the leading voices in the field of functional medicine, which basically means that if we feed our bodies the nutrients it needs, not only does it help us prevent illness, but we can actually supercharge our immune systems to heal us when we get sick.

00:00:38 Speaker_00
So I wanted to talk to him about something we need in our lives as much as we need food, friendship. World leaders ask Mark for health advice.

00:00:47 Speaker_00
He's the author of 15 books, many of them New York Times bestsellers, and the host of the podcast The Doctor's Pharmacy. So I really wanted to get his take.

00:00:55 Speaker_00
And it turns out, if we give our friendships the same attention as we give our diets, it benefits our minds, our spirits, and our bodies. This is a bit of optimism. Mark, thanks so much for coming today. It was such a treat to sit down with you.

00:01:13 Speaker_00
There's so much I want to talk to you about. My big thing right now is I'm writing about friendship. Yeah. Sort of mildly obsessed with it. It's a good thing to be obsessed with. It's a good thing to be obsessed with it.

00:01:22 Speaker_00
So I want to go down the path of the connection between health and community and health and friendship. You made a comment that you can't be a good friend if you're not healthy.

00:01:30 Speaker_02
If you feel like shit, you know, you can't show up and be present and

00:01:34 Speaker_02
Engage and be there and yeah, just even be present to have a conversation if you're foggy and fatigued and You feel like crap and you're dealing with all kinds of issues It's hard to really be present and that's what you need to do to be a friend It's a paradox because you need mental health to be a good friend, right?

00:01:51 Speaker_02
but if you don't have friends, it's hard to have good mental health.

00:01:55 Speaker_02
We have such a crisis of mental illness in this country, and part of it's because of loneliness, isolation, disconnection, social media, all the things that you're thinking about and actually writing about, hopefully with your new book on friendship.

00:02:10 Speaker_02
But from my lens, when I look at people's mental health, I look at it through the lens of biology because we now understand that the brain is obviously connected to the body, which has not actually been part of medicine.

00:02:25 Speaker_00
Isn't that a weird thing that that's a discovery that the brain is actually a part of the body?

00:02:28 Speaker_02
I mean, the old joke in medicine is psychiatrists pay no attention to the brain and neurologists pay no attention to the mind.

00:02:35 Speaker_02
But now psychiatrists are paying attention to the brain and they're finding that brain dysfunction, brain inflammation is actually driving much of mental illness. Everything from depression to anxiety to OCD to bipolar to schizophrenia to autism.

00:02:47 Speaker_02
All these things are connected to brain dysfunction. And yes, it can be caused by an external stressor, like a spouse dying, or trauma, or things that are external.

00:02:57 Speaker_02
But it also can be caused by nutritional deficiencies, and your microbiome, and environmental toxins, and things that actually are treatable and measurable. There's a very famous trial in Australia called the SMILES trial.

00:03:09 Speaker_02
They come up with all these great names for studies.

00:03:12 Speaker_00
But it's Dr. SMILES?

00:03:13 Speaker_02
No, I forget the acronym, but it was essentially, they swapped out, you know, did a randomized controlled trial of giving people healthy whole foods and then versus processed food.

00:03:23 Speaker_02
And there was a huge improvement in mental health by eating whole foods on a depressed population. They've done studies, for example, in juvenile detention centers where there's a lot of mental illness.

00:03:35 Speaker_02
And these kids, by swapping out the crap for healthy food, had a 97% reduction in violence, and 75% reduction in use of restraints, 100% reduction in suicide rates, which is the third leading cause of death in teenage boys.

00:03:49 Speaker_02
Profound in presence the same thing you'd get prisoners healthy food compared to the crap 56 and it's not like you're putting them on like you they eat the food you give them It's not like they're going to the fridge and choosing.

00:03:59 Speaker_00
No, so it's a great. It's a great space for a controlled choice Involved it is yeah, and so it's not like they have a mindset of health They're just eating whatever they're given.

00:04:10 Speaker_02
And then they violate crime to down 56% in prisons. If you add a multivitamin, it goes down to 80%. And with Function Health, we're finding huge amounts of nutritional deficiencies.

00:04:18 Speaker_02
I just had a friend who's a vegan, and he was severely omega-3 deficient, very depressed. And he's piling on omega-3s and his mood is completely different. And we know that omega-3s play a huge role in mood.

00:04:29 Speaker_02
We know that folate and B vitamins play a huge role. And we know that many people are deficient in these nutrients. And we can measure those biomarkers with testing that wasn't available before for people. Now it's accessible to anybody.

00:04:40 Speaker_00
Do you know what I think is really significant about this little insight?

00:04:43 Speaker_00
especially as we're relating it to friendship and having the mental capacity to be there for someone, to having the strength of mind to be present for someone else as they're dealing with happiness or sadness or whatever they're dealing with, just being there to be a friend.

00:04:54 Speaker_00
So often when we talk about nutrition, we talk about eating right, we talk about you, we talk about so that you can be healthy, so that you can live longer, so that you don't suffer from chronic disease.

00:05:03 Speaker_00
And most of us, let's be honest, it's the same reason we don't save money, If it doesn't have an immediate impact, it's a slow-boiling frog. You know, nobody plans to get diabetes.

00:05:16 Speaker_00
It kind of just shows up after years of being like, I'll deal with this tomorrow.

00:05:20 Speaker_00
In other words, we're crap at doing things for ourselves, even though the data is overwhelming, that if you just exercise, sleep and eat right, you'll be fine and healthier.

00:05:28 Speaker_00
But to think about eating well as an act of service, that I choose to eat well, not for me, Though I may get benefits from it, you know, as an unintended byproduct. Yeah. I choose to eat well so that I can be a better friend to you.

00:05:45 Speaker_00
I choose to eat well so that I can be at a better parent to my kids. So I'm less grumpy and less agitated. That's right. And to think of that, I think as a, as an act of service.

00:05:53 Speaker_02
Yeah. Yeah, that's right.

00:05:55 Speaker_00
Right.

00:05:56 Speaker_02
Well, illness, illness starts with I.

00:05:58 Speaker_00
Wellness starts with we Isn't that true and so and so I think the correlation and this is the thing that it drives me nuts When we think about things like innovation or health is we make it a very I thing You have to get healthy.

00:06:13 Speaker_00
You have to take a multivitamin. You have to exercise you have to sleep Yeah But we don't make it about a we.

00:06:19 Speaker_00
And you know the data better than I do that when there's a group of people who are overweight and one of them decides to go on a diet, the disproportionately high number of them will decide to go on a diet.

00:06:28 Speaker_00
If there's a group of smokers and one of them says, I'm going to stop smoking, a disproportionately high number of them will decide. Yeah, getting healthy is a team sport. Getting healthy is a team sport. And we are absolutely influenced by our friends.

00:06:38 Speaker_02
Yeah, you're only as healthy as your five closest friends.

00:06:41 Speaker_00
So it raises the question. Because clearly we're failing as a people, as a nation, at doing all the things you recommend. Because most of the things you recommend, at the high level, what you recommend is a lot of work, right? It can be or not.

00:06:56 Speaker_00
It's just what you set up for yourself. But at a functional level. A lot of the stuff that you recommend is not difficult, not expensive, and pretty basic. Yeah, it's kind of silly, but it is. Right?

00:07:08 Speaker_00
And yet, for not any more money, I mean, you can buy broccoli cheaper than you can buy McDonald's, you know? For not more money, a little bit of effort, but not complicated things, we can all live much healthier lives. And yet, We're not.

00:07:25 Speaker_00
And so it raises the question, you know, are we banging our heads against the wall? Are we repeating the same behavior, expecting a different result?

00:07:33 Speaker_00
That maybe the drumbeat from the health establishment of change the way you eat, get more sleep, maybe work out. Like we're all exhausted. We all know that.

00:07:45 Speaker_02
It's not like you're... I think a lot of us know it, but there's a whole subset of our population that doesn't know what it means to eat well. Different problem. Yeah, different problem completely agree.

00:07:57 Speaker_02
It's shocking to me, but it's true even in the and it's because the food industry has been so good at manipulating the public to think that Certain foods are healthy that are not and they put health claims on labels of stuff.

00:08:09 Speaker_02
That's the worst possible food So all natural which means yeah, we might my basic rule is if it has a health claim on the label It's bad for you. Don't eat it If it has a health claim on the label, don't do it.

00:08:19 Speaker_02
If it's trying to hide something, it's trying to hide something. It's like low-fat, low-sugar, sugar-free. What else is going on in there? High-fiber Cheerios.

00:08:29 Speaker_00
My favorite ones are new and improved formula. What was in the old one?

00:08:34 Speaker_02
Uh-oh. You were kind of going into the trap hole of, we know what to do, why don't we do it?

00:08:39 Speaker_00
Why don't we do it? I'm asking the question, maybe if we refocused our attention in a different place, Let's call it friendship.

00:08:46 Speaker_00
With the rising rates of anxiety and depression and mental fitness challenges and inability to cope with stress and in the worst case, suicide, even the obsession with longevity, I'll go and I'll throw that one as well.

00:08:56 Speaker_00
Friendship is the ultimate biohack. It is. Friendship literally fixes all of those things. We know the data that people who have close relationships live longer. People of close relationships are happier. And you look at Dan Buechner's work.

00:09:08 Speaker_00
Yeah, and the blue zone.

00:09:09 Speaker_00
Yeah, and so much attention is put to them walking to the house and to the And so much attention is put into what they're eating and how they're eating Yeah, but not enough attention is put into the fact that they're eating with their friends every single day You're so right Simon.

00:09:24 Speaker_02
I I actually I would spend a lot of time in Sardinia and in Ikaria or Akari however you pronounce it and It was just stunning to see the level of community and connection.

00:09:33 Speaker_02
Even if someone, for example, like this woman, Julia, was 100 and she was like, I'm 103 months. Like, you know, like I'm five and three quarters. I'm 103 months. I think when you're very young and you're very old, the half, the quarter count.

00:09:45 Speaker_02
And now she didn't have kids, but she lived with her niece and nephew and there were no nursing homes. People just took care of each other. And it was really remarkable.

00:09:51 Speaker_02
And there was this guy, Carmine, who basically had this huge farm that he had his whole life and his family had, and he was 86 years old and he was raising animals and had fruit trees.

00:10:02 Speaker_02
gardens and he, you know, he was feeding his whole community and family had meaning and purpose and he would live with his kids and his wife had died. But it was all this incredible sense of connection and community and it's so essential.

00:10:13 Speaker_02
And I learned this lesson when I went to Haiti after the earthquake and I was the first medical team on the ground at the main hospital. the general hospital in Port-au-Prince. And it was a disaster. I mean, you can't imagine the scope.

00:10:26 Speaker_02
It was 300,000 people injured and 300,000 people dead.

00:10:30 Speaker_00
Wow.

00:10:31 Speaker_02
It was an unbelievable massacre that was a natural occurrence, but it was horrible. And so we got there and there were people helping. Everybody was helping. There was a sense of community and service and connection.

00:10:44 Speaker_02
And I got to meet Paul Farmer who was a hero of mine. He was a doctor who went to Haiti and decided that even though the whole world had neglected

00:10:54 Speaker_02
this community of people who were suffering from TB and AIDS because they were poor, they didn't have sanitation, they didn't have clean water, they didn't have watches, they couldn't take the drugs because it's complicated at that point to take the drug regimens for multi-resistant, drug-resistant TB or for AIDS.

00:11:09 Speaker_02
And he realized it wasn't a medical problem, it was a social problem. He called it structural violence. What are the social, economic, and political conditions that drive disease?

00:11:17 Speaker_02
And it wasn't that we needed better drugs or surgery, we knew how to solve it. But the entire public health community had given up on them.

00:11:22 Speaker_02
So he started to help by building a network of community health workers, neighbors helping neighbors, friends helping friends. And he called it accompaniment. It was French, but I'm not good at pronouncing French, so I'm going to skip that.

00:11:36 Speaker_02
Accompagnement. Accompagnement, yeah, something like that. And he built this whole model and he scaled around the world. It was adapted by the Clinton Foundation, the Gates Foundation to help. He did this in Peru. He did this in prisons in Russia.

00:11:46 Speaker_02
He did this everywhere where people were struggling in Rwanda, built hospitals. And it was an incredible model. And I realized that most of the diseases we have now in the West are not infectious diseases.

00:11:56 Speaker_02
They're chronic illnesses, which are called non-communicable. What's the difference? Well, infectious diseases like malaria or measles or TB, right? These are the things that were killing us a century ago.

00:12:08 Speaker_02
Now they're pretty much not except in certain parts of the world. But the disease we now have are what we call non-communicable diseases. But that's a fallacy because they are very communicable. They're not infectious, but they're contagious.

00:12:21 Speaker_02
And chronic diseases like heart disease, diabetes. cancer, dementia, autoimmune diseases. These are diseases that are driven through our diet, toxins, but also through our social networks.

00:12:32 Speaker_02
And I realized that our social networks were more important than our genes. The social threads that connect us are more important than the genetic threads. And the data is really clear on this.

00:12:41 Speaker_02
Chris Stock is work out of Harvard outlined this very clearly. He wrote a book called Connected about this, but he's published the research that showed you, for example, if your friends are overweight, you're 170% more likely to be overweight.

00:12:50 Speaker_02
Then if your family's overweight, you're 40% more likely to be overweight. Your social networks are driving your behaviors for good or bad.

00:12:58 Speaker_02
So I realized that yes, we have a society where the default is to do the wrong thing and that we as a society aren't supporting each other to do the right thing.

00:13:08 Speaker_02
And I realized that community was medicine, just like food is medicine, and that love is medicine.

00:13:14 Speaker_00
And that's, I mean, look, that's our anthropology, right? We're tribal animals that grew up historically in tribes, about 150 people, and that's how we lived. We lived in these relatively small, we help each other communities, communes.

00:13:26 Speaker_00
I mean, that's the history of humankind. We've only started farming 10 or 12,000 years ago. But for most of human history, we lived in these small groups where we couldn't have populations larger than about 150.

00:13:36 Speaker_00
What's very interesting about the little statistic that you threw out and the thought that I had which is when our family is overweight We're 40% more likely to be overweight.

00:13:44 Speaker_00
But when our friends are overweight, we're a hundred and seventy times percent I mean you're likely to be overweight and that's you know The immediate thing that popped into my head was when you think about children, right? children

00:13:58 Speaker_00
All they want is their parents' approval. Hey mom, hey dad, watch me, watch me, watch me, watch me, right? And they have no inhibitions in the outside world. They don't care what the world thinks about them at all.

00:14:09 Speaker_00
I'm going to dress like a princess, I'm going to dress like Spider-Man, but I want mom and dad to watch me jump off the step. And I would desperately want mom and dad's approval.

00:14:17 Speaker_00
And that's where all of the learning about what's appropriate and what's inappropriate comes from. Strictly from our parents, nothing else. Until they reach about adolescence.

00:14:27 Speaker_00
And adolescence, we convert to only needing our parents' approval to only needing our friends' approval.

00:14:33 Speaker_00
frustrating for the parents, but very, very important for social animals because what we're doing is acculturating outside of our families, beyond our families, into the broader tribe. And that lasts for the rest of our lives.

00:14:44 Speaker_00
We don't actually go back to the family.

00:14:46 Speaker_00
It's all friends, which is why I have to believe, and I'm just sort of thinking about this out loud now, I have to believe that's the reason so many of us go on Instagram and wish our parents happy birthday when our parents aren't on Instagram.

00:15:01 Speaker_00
Right? It's for the social approval that I'm a good kid and showing you the pictures of my dad holding me when I was a baby. Like scroll through all those pictures and everybody likes that I'm a good son. And yet my dad's not on Instagram, right?

00:15:16 Speaker_00
And so I have to wonder if that same drive, that same weird need to want social approval for being a good son is the same. It comes from the same root.

00:15:27 Speaker_02
I mean, a hundred percent of your, if your friends are all drinking green juices and doing green juice, then you're going to do the same thing.

00:15:32 Speaker_00
If all your friends, the amount of shit that I take simply because of friends, like you should do, you know, you know, because you're, because you're in the industry, I'm going to say something that's potentially insulting to you.

00:15:41 Speaker_00
That's what I like to do. I like to have, I like to, I like to talk to guests and then insult them. So this is potentially, we're friends, everybody. So this is potentially insulting. So I need you to work this through me. It feels like,

00:15:54 Speaker_00
I can't say that it is, but it feels like that the complete explosion in the supplement industry where nothing is evaluated by the FDA and every influencer now has a vitamin or a supplement or powder or a drink with all kinds of nonsense claims.

00:16:17 Speaker_00
Maybe they're good, maybe they're bad. It feels like we're living in the dot-com boom of supplements. That, you know, in the dot-com boom, you were like, I'm investing in this tech company because my neighbor told me I had to.

00:16:32 Speaker_00
And now that's been replaced with, I'm now taking these 87 pills per day because one friend told me to take these four. And just like the dot-com boom,

00:16:44 Speaker_00
It can't live in a bubble like that It's gonna have repercussions and it's gonna be it's gonna be unexpected and it's gonna be pretty violent, right? So riddle me this like is it time for the FDA to get involved?

00:16:56 Speaker_00
Like I can no longer tell the difference but between a claim on a product you're selling Yes or a claim on something that some right like literally their only qualification is they have a following on Instagram Yeah

00:17:09 Speaker_02
Isn't that a job, being an influencer? Where was my course in college? Influencer 101?

00:17:17 Speaker_00
I think we're living in a supplement boom. It could be. I don't know how it suddenly kicks back, but this can't last forever. It's counter to everything you're trying to do.

00:17:33 Speaker_02
Yeah, what I want people to do is do the right thing. It's what I've spent my whole life trying to do is help people understand how to create health.

00:17:40 Speaker_02
And part of the new company I co-founded, Function Health, is really empowering people with their own health data to make choices that are personalized, that aren't just random because somebody said do this or do that.

00:17:50 Speaker_02
And so that's what I love about the testing. I had a, for example, a friend the other day who showed me her results from function and she was low in zinc, she was low in iron, she was low in vitamin D, she was low in omega-3 fats.

00:17:59 Speaker_02
I'm like, oh, that's why you feel like crap. You know, you need to take these things and here's what to choose.

00:18:03 Speaker_02
But most people don't have a way of navigating this sort of morass of products that have, again, no regulations in terms of quality or efficacy.

00:18:11 Speaker_02
Now, because people aren't protected in the sense that they don't know if the product they're taking has the exact ingredient it says, if the dose is what it says on the label, if there's any contaminants in it, if there's any fillers or products that kind of may be harmful to you.

00:18:26 Speaker_02
So it's kind of a shit show. And so as a physician, I've spent a lot of time investigating which companies are using pharmaceutical manufacturing practices, which do testing before and after their product.

00:18:39 Speaker_02
So they know that the purity and potency is exactly right. And they throw the product out if it isn't. So there are good companies that are doing that, but it's like- I don't even know. You can't, unless you know what to ask.

00:18:50 Speaker_00
I did a thing a while ago. where they took my blood and they evaluated all of everything in my blood from, I mean, you name it. all the minerals and everything I'm supposed to get and have. Yeah.

00:19:05 Speaker_00
And then they made a personalized cocktail, a personalized smoothie. Yeah. That replaced all my things. And I'm supposed to come back every six months.

00:19:13 Speaker_01
Yeah.

00:19:13 Speaker_00
And it was really interesting. And they introduced that I talked to a doctor who walks me through my results. Yeah. And then they give me my smoothie. And the only choice I get is what flavor. And

00:19:24 Speaker_00
And it sounded good until I was like, I don't even know if this is bullshit.

00:19:29 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:19:29 Speaker_00
If they're just like, I don't, that's a problem.

00:19:31 Speaker_02
If someone's, if someone's selling you something off of something else, that can be a problem.

00:19:35 Speaker_00
It's not always a problem, but if you're saying, I've done all of the things for a little bit, like I took AG one for a few months and. I mean, I do all these things, I feel the same. I've done AG1, I've done colostrum.

00:19:48 Speaker_00
And again, all because somebody's like, you should try it. And there are people who I trust, that's why I did it. And you take these things, it boosts your immune system. How do you measure that? Yeah, exactly. I got a cold.

00:20:02 Speaker_00
So does it work or does it not work? Well, it would have been worse if you'd, I mean, like, I don't know. And I, you know, I start, I get very cynical. Sometimes I'm all in and sometimes I'm very cynical. I'm in a very cynical mode right now. I hear that.

00:20:13 Speaker_02
And I think it's fair and you're right to be cynical. And I think there's a lot of garbage out there and a lot of people pushing stuff. And there's a lot of companies, for example, doing tests. Selling you products on the back end.

00:20:22 Speaker_02
I think there's a problem with that. Okay, for example function health.

00:20:25 Speaker_02
We don't do that at all We just say okay, for example You have these things that you found that you need to fix that are affecting your health and well-being and here's how to make a decision For example, we have a 30 page guide on how to choose the right you don't take we don't sell and you don't take kickbacks from the product No, no kickbacks.

00:20:41 Speaker_02
No, we don't know. We're completely agnostic. We don't have any do whatever you want. You just need this and

00:20:46 Speaker_02
No, but not only do I want, but if you're going to, if you need something, here's how to choose the right product and here's how to investigate the company. And here's the questions to ask and here's what to look for.

00:20:55 Speaker_02
And here's how to make a good decision. So we teach you how to fish, not giving you a fish.

00:20:59 Speaker_00
I like that you're doing this, but I remember I'm in a cynical mode. What else is new? Which is when there's a good business model, even if it's for the greater good, because money is fuel and that's totally fine.

00:21:17 Speaker_00
That means you will have competition and other people will start doing similar things. And then we're back at square one, which is all of these companies are going to be funded by VC.

00:21:26 Speaker_00
And you and I know too well, unfortunately, the way VC and PE works, which is they all are wonderful. They're all fantastic in the beginning. And they're so behind you and your vision at the beginning and just wait three to five to seven years.

00:21:40 Speaker_00
And all of a sudden the pressures start to show up and the growth, we want growth because that's our business model, not your business model.

00:21:47 Speaker_00
And then all of a sudden, especially if you've given up controlling interests, you will have built up this beautiful brand. you get fired from your own company.

00:21:55 Speaker_00
I mean, the number of companies that have like the brand Aveda, Burt's Bees, Kashi, Amy's, these were well, they got bought by Kraft. You know, they were all great brands that built their brands based on natural ingredients.

00:22:10 Speaker_00
And we believed it because the founders were true. And then they sold. Yeah. to Kraft and L'Oreal and whoever buys these companies. They strip the beautiful things out, put the shit in because they can increase margin, but we're none the wiser.

00:22:25 Speaker_00
We don't know which CEOs get fired from beautiful companies.

00:22:29 Speaker_00
We don't know that these companies are owned by large conglomerates that are driven by shareholder value, and then we end up suffering for these products that we were told were good, and they were good until they weren't good.

00:22:40 Speaker_00
And we're back at square one. So I think we should just have friends.

00:22:45 Speaker_02
Well, let's get back to the conversation about friendship because I think that the fundamental thing is- We should garden and farm with our friends. That's good. And then eat our own food.

00:22:56 Speaker_02
I mean, when you look at the problem- Subsistence farming, that's what- I think it's right. I mean, I think community gardens are amazing. I think they're a great service for people. And I think that when we're finding

00:23:10 Speaker_02
is that loneliness is as big a killer as anything else. Some have said it's equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. And how many, especially men, don't have someone who's a good friend?

00:23:23 Speaker_02
How many people don't have somebody to call when shit goes down?

00:23:28 Speaker_00
I go back to the work that I did some years ago when I was writing Leaders Eat Last with Alcoholics Anonymous. If you want to overcome alcoholism as a 12-step program, Most of us are familiar with the first step, you know, admit you have a problem.

00:23:41 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:23:42 Speaker_00
Okay. Let's say I'm depressed or I'm lonely. Let's let's admit that's the problem, right? But it's the 12th step that people don't talk about. Right. And Alcoholics Anonymous knows, exactly.

00:23:52 Speaker_00
Alcoholics Anonymous knows that you can master 11 steps and not the 12th and you will succumb to the disease. And it's exactly to help another alcoholic, it's service. Yeah.

00:24:01 Speaker_00
And so I think the people who are the most lonely are the ones who have to go first. Because the way to solve your problem is to help your friend who's suffering from the same problem. If you're an alcoholic, you help another alcoholic.

00:24:14 Speaker_00
If you're lonely, help a friend who's lonely. And I think that the therapeutic benefits of helping someone who's struggling with the same thing that you're struggling with, rather than worrying about yourself, goes right back to the gym.

00:24:27 Speaker_02
There's a huge biology to it, dude. I don't know if you know, but there's a whole field of sociogenomics, which is how our social interactions affect our gene expression. Say more.

00:24:36 Speaker_02
So if you're in a conflictual relationship with someone, your inflammatory genes are turned on. Literally, not just your emotions are inflamed, but your biology turns on the inflammation system. Like fight or flight kind of stuff?

00:24:49 Speaker_02
Not fight or flight, just if you're like in a shitty relationship or if you're fighting with someone or you have a conflict, you turn on inflammatory genes that then increase expression of cytokines that cause inflammation and that cause disease.

00:25:02 Speaker_02
And all chronic disease from depression to heart disease to diabetes to obesity, Alzheimer's, are all inflammatory diseases. Conversely, if you have a connected, loving relationship with somebody, it turns on anti-inflammatory genes.

00:25:16 Speaker_00
And inflammation is the core of like everything.

00:25:18 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:25:19 Speaker_02
And they did studies with entrainment, you know, where you have, where if you sit with someone and you have an authentic connection that you can put EEG and EKGs on, basically brainwaves and heartwaves, you can see the heartbeat of someone you're having a deep connected relationship with in your brainwaves.

00:25:39 Speaker_02
It's wild. So it's not just a feel-good thing on an emotional level, it's a physiologic response that happens of being in connection.

00:25:47 Speaker_02
If you take animals and put them in cages and separate animals and feed them exactly the same thing and have everything else the same, the one that's isolated versus the ones that are connected will shrivel and die and get sick.

00:26:01 Speaker_02
And so humans are the same way and we've gotten into a situation where friendship and connection is sort of like

00:26:08 Speaker_00
Okay, so why aren't doctors prescribing to spend more time with friends?

00:26:13 Speaker_00
I do Like doctor I'm suffering from XY and Z. Yeah, okay I'd like you to try and get an extra hour of sleep go to bed and a little earlier I'd like you to stop eating before you know, eat No, don't eat past 8 o'clock at night And I want you to spend at least three hours a week with with a friend.

00:26:28 Speaker_00
How come? that's not on the prescription.

00:26:30 Speaker_02
It should be. It should be. I mean, I prescribe it. In fact, based on this work that I did in Haiti, I met a pastor after Rick Warren, who wrote The Purpose Driven Life, and had a church with 30,000 members.

00:26:42 Speaker_02
And I met him, he came to my office, and we started talking. And I said, hey, you know, Rick, tell me about your church, because I'm a Jewish doctor from New York. I don't know much about evangelical Christian churches.

00:26:51 Speaker_02
He's like, yeah, we've got 30,000 people. I'm like, wow. It's a lot of mega church. He's like, yeah, we got 5,000 groups that meet every week, small groups in the church to help each other live better lives. I'm like, oh, this isn't a mega church.

00:27:02 Speaker_02
This is thousands of mini churches. And I had that, the light bulb moment. I'm like, well, I just come back from Haiti. I said, why don't we put a healthy living program into the groups and see what happens?

00:27:11 Speaker_02
He says, great idea, because I was baptizing my church last week and after about the 800th person, I'm like, man, we're a fat church and I'm fat and we got to do something about it.

00:27:20 Speaker_02
And so we put a program together through the small groups where people were just helping each other. There was no doctor, nutritionist, health coach, nobody. There was just a curriculum.

00:27:28 Speaker_02
We had a big rally, sort of a big event where we talked about, and Rick talked about the biblical rationale for why God wants us to be healthy. I gave a bunch of speeches and talked about how, you know, God lives in you, why are you feeding him crap?

00:27:40 Speaker_02
Things like that. I mean, you know, if Jesus came to dinner, what would you feed him? You know, big Mac fries and a Coke. And they got it. Ain't that the truth.

00:27:48 Speaker_00
Ain't that the truth.

00:27:49 Speaker_02
If Jesus came to dinner, what would you feed him? Exactly. So they got it. I said, you know, if you feel like crap, how are you going to serve God? How are you going to serve each other? You've got to take care of your body. And so they got it.

00:27:59 Speaker_02
And they did this together in community. It was jogging for Jesus and all these incredible It was incredible. And they lost together a quarter million pounds in the first year and they did it together.

00:28:08 Speaker_02
And then I took that same model and I applied it at Cleveland Clinic where we created small groups where people helped each other. We did research on us and published it.

00:28:16 Speaker_02
There were three times better health outcomes on validated metrics of health outcomes compared to one-on-one visits for the same condition with the same doctors. So the doctors at our clinic could see them in one-on-one or support them in a group.

00:28:32 Speaker_02
The group was three times as good as seeing the doctor one-on-one in terms of health.

00:28:36 Speaker_00
But why aren't these things then being implemented across the medical field? I'm trying. I'm trying. Why aren't we going to the doctor with our friends? to dealing with similar issues. Why aren't we like, everything's so siloed.

00:28:53 Speaker_02
It is essential.

00:28:54 Speaker_02
I mean, I think, you know, the models of support, whether it's coaching, whether it's one-on-one coaching or support, whether it's group models, they have to be the thing that's going to change because we get healthy together or we get sick together.

00:29:06 Speaker_02
What did Benjamin Franklin say? We must all hang together or surely we'll all hang separately. I mean, and I think that's kind of where we're at in society where we are.

00:29:15 Speaker_00
Yeah One of the problems we have in our society is community things, you know, bowling leagues don't exist anymore Church attendance is down.

00:29:22 Speaker_00
Yeah and church attendance and faith are not the same thing You know, you can have faith and not go to church and you can go to church and not have faith That's right. The church would rather that they're overlapping.

00:29:31 Speaker_00
Yeah, but the idea of doing things in commune in community This is why I love things like comic-con or burning man or whatever. You're you know, you've never been to burning man I have been to Burning Man. You have? Yeah.

00:29:44 Speaker_00
And Sturgis, the motorcycle thing. Hells Angels? Like all of these things, doing things in community with people who have common interests.

00:29:53 Speaker_00
And one of the questions I'm getting since I've started talking about friendship, it's amazing how many people are coming up to me who are of all ages, of all income levels, who are saying to me, I don't know how to make friends.

00:30:08 Speaker_00
I struggle to make friends. Cause we're afraid to be authentic.

00:30:11 Speaker_02
I mean, that's the hard part, right? Have you ever struggled to make friends? Uh, when I was a kid, I didn't have any, I was a weird kid. I just was in my head, read a lot of books. It was a little weird and uh, you know, kind of a nerd.

00:30:24 Speaker_02
I just, I was living in Toronto in the seventies. It was a spiritual wasteland.

00:30:27 Speaker_02
And in fact, I actually, my first real friend I met on the top of a mountain in the Canadian Rockies, we were backpacking and it was a week out in the middle of nowhere by myself. And he was a week out.

00:30:39 Speaker_02
And we crossed over on Badger Pass in Banff National Park and we just had this kind of moment of connection. And we both found out we were going to be at Cornell in the fall. He was in Ithaca College, I was at Cornell.

00:30:53 Speaker_02
We got back and we got together and we didn't know if we were going to be friends or not. But we became like brothers. Still friends today? He's my best friend. Yeah. 46 years later. Wow. Yeah. 46 years later, we do mountain bike trips all over.

00:31:08 Speaker_02
We're very close. And we help each other. And when one's down, the other picks one up. When I'm down, he picks me up. When he's down, I pick him up. And we've had this really sustained, deep, authentic, intimate relationship for 45 years. That's amazing.

00:31:23 Speaker_02
And we love each other. We hug each other. We cry together. We laugh together. And it was a place where I could say and be and do anything. And it was a remarkable experience for me to actually feel seen and loved.

00:31:38 Speaker_02
It was like the first person who loved me who didn't actually have to love me like my parents.

00:31:43 Speaker_00
Here's something I discovered about close friendships, which is we always talk about close friends as the person you would call when you're in need, when you need help, the person you can cry with, the person when you're in pain.

00:31:55 Speaker_00
And I actually think that's true. That's a level of close friendship that you can call that person in a time of struggle or need.

00:32:01 Speaker_00
But I think there's even a closer level of friendship, which is when you can call somebody when something amazing happened.

00:32:08 Speaker_02
And they're not jealous.

00:32:09 Speaker_00
And there's no jealousy and you can call them and what you're doing is bragging, but not really. You just need to tell someone about this amazing thing that you accomplished or that was given to you or that you won or that, you know, whatever it is.

00:32:21 Speaker_00
And if you were told anybody else, they'd be like, They think you were bragging. But to that friend, they have unbridled joy with you and for you.

00:32:29 Speaker_00
And what I've learned is the number of people I would call with good news is actually smaller than the number of people I would call with bad news.

00:32:37 Speaker_02
That's interesting. But you can call me with good news.

00:32:39 Speaker_00
Oh, thank you.

00:32:40 Speaker_02
I'll celebrate you. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Well, it is. It's important to take it in the inventory of your life and your friends. And if you don't have good friends, it's really important to cultivate them, to invest in them, to find them.

00:32:51 Speaker_02
And there's ways to do that. I mean, there's ways to put yourself in environments and situations. And I know you probably saw those articles in the New York Times about men and friendships, and it was just so heartbreaking.

00:33:01 Speaker_02
And when COVID happened, you know, we're all isolated, we're all alone. And September 2020, my wife and I split up. I had just had back surgery. I was alone. It was COVID. And what did I do?

00:33:14 Speaker_02
I sent an email to my closest men friends, six other men who I've done men's work with, done men's retreats with, done medicine journeys with. And I said, hey guys, can we start a little Zoom once a week for an hour maybe? And they're like,

00:33:33 Speaker_02
how about we do two hours every week you know and we've been going for it's plus four years now um and it's it's remarkable to have this container and what's been interesting to watch is that even though these these were all my close friends for 40 years 30 years

00:33:50 Speaker_02
that the depth of our friendship has gotten more profound, the more vulnerable we've gotten, the more we open our hearts, the more we share our fears, the more we share our successes, the more we share whatever is going on in our life doesn't matter.

00:34:04 Speaker_02
There's always something with one of us and to me it's like an anchor.

00:34:09 Speaker_00
Another friend of mine is struggling with one of her friends.

00:34:13 Speaker_00
She asked herself if I was in a marriage or just a romantic relationship a long-term romantic relationship and the relationship was struggling We wouldn't just break up we would get help we would seek therapy couples counseling Yeah, and so she went to her friend and said this is tension has been going over too long We're gonna go to therapy together

00:34:31 Speaker_00
Friends therapy. And again, why do we instinctively understand that if a marriage or a relationship is struggling, that we expect people to at least try, to at least try the couples therapy before you call the whole thing quits.

00:34:46 Speaker_00
And yet we don't do that with the friendships. When we have tension with friendships, we're quicker to end the friendship or sit in weird tension or avoid the person than to go to the therapy with the person to try and work through the struggles.

00:34:59 Speaker_00
We may still end up breaking up, but let's at least put in the effort to rescue this friendship that we claim we care about. Yeah. I love the idea of friendship counseling.

00:35:10 Speaker_02
And it speaks to that same point about, like, not just co-living in a sense of just doing things together.

00:35:16 Speaker_00
Existing together.

00:35:17 Speaker_02
Going to movies together and having fun together, but rather... Yeah, just superficial dinners.

00:35:21 Speaker_00
And by the way, I will stress that I don't believe all friendships need to be at this level. Like, it is perfectly fine to have friends... You need at least a couple. Two or three? You need at least a handful. Some have more, some have fewer.

00:35:32 Speaker_00
But having friends where they're not deep, bonds of vulnerability, you just have fun together, totally fine. Adventure partners or activity partners, totally fine.

00:35:43 Speaker_00
And I think that's one of the problems we have in our country, if not the world, I don't know about other languages, I only know about English. But like, one of the problems I think is language.

00:35:52 Speaker_00
So for example, if you have stage four liver cancer, or you have a mild melanoma, the problem is both of those things are called cancer. But they're clearly not the same thing. But we use the same word. Right. I have a skin cancer. Right. Exactly.

00:36:05 Speaker_00
I was like, you're fine. You know? What did Larry David say? It's the good cancer. And I think we do that. I think we have very few taxonomies. We have very few words for friends. And so I've started using... Best friend, friend.

00:36:19 Speaker_00
Yeah, that's pretty much it. And even then best friend is sometimes a little overused. When somebody says, hey, aren't you friends with them? I go, I'm friendly with them. Or somebody says, aren't you close with them?

00:36:29 Speaker_00
I'm like, no, they're an acquaintance. Or they're a work friend.

00:36:33 Speaker_01
Yeah.

00:36:35 Speaker_00
And so I've actually started to use the language for my own clarity and for other people's clarity. Not everybody I know is my friend that I'm gonna like... You can't have an infinite number. I can't have an infinite number. It takes time.

00:36:46 Speaker_02
It takes time.

00:36:48 Speaker_00
Investment is a real thing.

00:36:49 Speaker_02
This is a central part of happiness, of joy, of longevity, of health.

00:36:56 Speaker_00
By the way, go back to that longevity thing. You're in that space and you know more of them, but I know some of the folks who are sort of like the longevity folks. Yeah. And I find a lot of them are very unhappy people. Yeah. Joy, right? Where's the joy?

00:37:10 Speaker_00
These guys, mostly men who are obsessed with longevity and they're taking all of the measurements and they're taking all the vitamins and supplements and they're doing all the exercises and they're doing all the things and everything's scheduled and highlighted.

00:37:25 Speaker_00
And I find them not very happy people. No, no, you know, find the joy. Like where, like maybe work out a little less. Don't worry about if you miss the supplement and maybe just hang with friends. I bet. I mean, the data will prove it out.

00:37:40 Speaker_00
Like we have to wait a bunch of years because the longevity obsessives, the only way we'll know if it works or not is when they die. Yeah. And if they will be happy and healthy and old age, because nobody wants to live a long time and be decrepit. No.

00:37:55 Speaker_00
You know? And so we have to wait it out.

00:37:59 Speaker_02
Most of my friends are in their 30s and 40s now because a lot of my older friends have just sort of checked out.

00:38:06 Speaker_00
But we have to redo this podcast in 40 years and see if all the longevity obsessives, if they're still around or if they're dead.

00:38:14 Speaker_00
I'm going to do a Vegas betting pool here, which is I would bet that the people who are healthy-ish, like they're not unhealthy, but they're not obsessively healthy. Yes, they get enough sleep. Yes, they eat mostly well. They do the basics.

00:38:31 Speaker_00
They're not unhealthy, is the way I would define them. But they spend a ton of time with friends, and they have a fantastic sense of humor, and they love to laugh. I will bet money

00:38:42 Speaker_00
that those people will live longer than all of the folks who are measuring and powdering.

00:38:48 Speaker_02
I mean, it's evolutionary. I mean, I don't know if you know, Ian Wilson wrote a book called The Social Conquest of the Earth about from ants to humans, how we have to work together to survive.

00:38:58 Speaker_02
And in fact, altruism is a built-in phenomena and that it activates the same neural circuits as heroin or cocaine or sugar in terms of the nucleus accumbens and the pleasure.

00:39:10 Speaker_02
And I remember this, it sounds kind of weird to say, but when I was in Haiti and I was sleeping four hours a night and I was working, helping people all day, barely eating anything, probably dehydrated in the hot sun, I felt like this sense of happiness and joy like I'd never felt.

00:39:25 Speaker_02
And it was weird because I was in the middle of this disaster with people with limbs amputated and dead people everywhere. But something was happening in me where I was in service of others. I wasn't thinking about myself.

00:39:37 Speaker_02
And it's sort of why do what I do.

00:39:39 Speaker_00
I mean, I'm happiest when I'm serving others There's a book called survival of the friendliest.

00:39:43 Speaker_02
That's good.

00:39:44 Speaker_00
And it makes it makes an argument that we've completely misunderstood darwin that The idea of survival of the fittest we have always attributed to brute strength Yeah, and so if you can overpower someone you're more likely to survive and they make an argument for social animals and mammals

00:40:02 Speaker_00
That that's actually completely incorrect that what he meant by fittest was most fit to create community and take care of each other And survival of the fittest is actually nothing to do with brute strength fascinating But it's actually to do with the ones who were better at taking care of each other So as you start to think about this book Simon, and I can't wait to read it even though you haven't written it yet.

00:40:21 Speaker_00
That's a good sign. I should put it up on Amazon. Drive those pre-sales before. I'm going to order it. I'm going to pre-order it. Cover to come. Title to come. Yet untitled book.

00:40:33 Speaker_02
As I think about it, I can't think of a lot of books on friendship.

00:40:37 Speaker_00
Well this is the reason my friend Will and I decided to write this because it seems to make sense that you should write a book about friendship with a friend. Writing a book about friendship by yourself doesn't make sense.

00:40:47 Speaker_00
So Will and I decided to write it together and we came to the realization that there's an entire industry

00:40:53 Speaker_00
to help us be better leaders, an entire industry to help us be better parents, an entire industry to help us thrive in our relationships, how to eat better, how to exercise better, how to live longer, and yet precious little... I've written many of those books.

00:41:08 Speaker_00
You've written all those books, and yet precious little on how to be a friend. That's right.

00:41:13 Speaker_00
And when you look at all the challenges, as we said, in the world of depression and anxiety and all these epidemics that doctors and well-intended folks are talking about, no one is talking about friendship as the antidote.

00:41:25 Speaker_00
And I think that friendship is the ultimate biohack. I think if you can master friendship, a lot of those other things correct themselves.

00:41:32 Speaker_02
It's true. It's true. People listening, I imagine, are thinking, oh, this is great. I feel this. I know this. How important. And I feel the disconnection. But I don't know how to make friends. I don't know where to start.

00:41:45 Speaker_02
I don't know how to take the friends I have and make them better or find new friends. I don't know how to make friendship the medicine that I need in my life.

00:41:52 Speaker_00
So I think starting with common interests. Sign up for a ceramics class and go buy yourself. Or if you're too nervous to go by yourself, go with a friend, but talk to the person you're sitting next to.

00:42:02 Speaker_00
Because the great thing about doing a thing with common interests is the icebreaker is really, really easy. You just have to say, is this your first time here? Have you done this before? And it pretty much starts the conversation.

00:42:13 Speaker_00
You don't have to form a deep, meaningful relationship out of it. But I think starting to do hobby things. And I think having hobbies, and we've seen a decline in hobbies even, you know, and doing hobbies with people. That's why I said... Join a club.

00:42:25 Speaker_00
Yeah, that's why I said, go play chess, you know, in a park, you know. That's why I said, I think things like Comic Con and things like that are spectacular.

00:42:35 Speaker_00
Because when you find a group of people who, when people laugh at your hobby, and you find a group of people who we've all been laughed at, but now we're the norm here. It's incredibly easy to make friends. I've been to Comic-Con many, many times.

00:42:50 Speaker_00
And, you know, it's nerdvana. What is Comic-Con? You don't know what Comic-Con is?

00:42:55 Speaker_02
No. Vaguely.

00:42:57 Speaker_00
Well, it's changed over the years, but basically... It's a comic book convention. That's what I thought. That's the that's the history But these days comic books are only a part of it.

00:43:07 Speaker_00
It's also science fiction and hero movies You know marvel stories and star wars and you know dc and all of that and it's all that nerdy kind of pop culture-y stuff People will dress up as their favorite cartoon character or superhero or you know some obscure character and some of them are super creative and some

00:43:24 Speaker_00
And some people are there for the content of the convention, and some people are there just to walk around in costume and have fun. And what's so wonderful about it is it's an incredibly polite group of people.

00:43:37 Speaker_00
So if you are in a great costume, or you see someone who's in a great costume, and you want to have a picture with them, or they want a picture with you, everybody asks. Everybody goes, can I have a picture with you, please?

00:43:45 Speaker_00
Or, hey, may I have a picture with you, please? And so there's a lot of interaction. You can go up to somebody and say, I love your costume. And they will be friendly back. There's not a lot of cynicism. I met one of my ex-girlfriends there.

00:43:57 Speaker_00
I literally went up to her and said, you look amazing. Can I have a picture with you? And she goes, absolutely. We took a picture together because I just loved her costume.

00:44:05 Speaker_00
I don't remember how the conversation started, but we ended up talking a little bit for just a few minutes. I don't know how we got to it, but we ended up trading phone numbers. And then we ended up having sort of a really great relationship.

00:44:17 Speaker_00
And the best part about that is I still have the photograph, not from our first date. I had the photograph from the moment we met, which doesn't happen in relationships. You don't say, nice to meet you. Let's take a selfie just in case.

00:44:29 Speaker_00
But I have the photograph of the time, the minute we met.

00:44:33 Speaker_00
And uh, I think when you go to places Where people like the things you like it's going to increase the odds It's not the increase the odds that you'll find deep meaningful relationships But it makes it easier to break the ice to just get started to get started.

00:44:47 Speaker_02
So what's what's your what's your goal with your book? What's the sort of aim you're you're targeting?

00:44:53 Speaker_00
You know, I'm somebody who has had very few long-term relationships in my life and the world criticizes me for that. I'm seen as unhealthy or I've been judged as having commitment issues. You mean love relationships or just friendships?

00:45:04 Speaker_00
Love relationships. You know, I've never been married. I don't have a 10-year romantic relationship. I haven't had it. And even some of the women I've dated, they're like, what's wrong with you? You mean either. I've been divorced four, five, four times.

00:45:14 Speaker_00
What's wrong with you is what I hear a lot. And I have a friend who was in a 16-year relationship, an unhealthy relationship for 16 years. She freely admits that she should have stayed in that relationship for one year.

00:45:28 Speaker_00
And yet society looks at her and says, she got it right and I got it wrong, which is twisted. And if you look at the quality of my friendships, like I have a lot of really, really good friends.

00:45:39 Speaker_00
And I am fulfilled in almost every aspect of my life, but just not necessarily all from one person. And look, I like relationships, and I love being in a relationship, and I love being a partner to someone.

00:45:52 Speaker_00
And people say, well, why haven't you been married? I'm like, isn't it obvious? I haven't met the right person yet. That's such a stupid question.

00:45:58 Speaker_00
But I found comfort in recognizing that by fostering friendship, I don't have to feel guilty or bad or explain myself why I haven't had a marriage or a 10-year romantic relationship. And friendships outlast relationships.

00:46:12 Speaker_00
And friendships outlast, and friendships are there to help you through relationships. And if you don't have good friendships, you'll struggle in your relationships because you have to have somebody to ask advice or vent to.

00:46:20 Speaker_00
You can't always go to one person. It won't work. And so I think we don't give enough credit to friendship. We don't give enough credit to friendship, and we don't give credit to people who are good at friendship.

00:46:31 Speaker_00
We give credit to people who stay in relationships, even if those relationships are unhealthy. And I think we just need to reevaluate how we're managing relationship in general in our lives. I want to be a part of the friendship movement.

00:46:43 Speaker_02
I love that. I mean, it's interesting that one of the chapters of our book around how to get healthy is Friends, all the five Fs.

00:46:50 Speaker_00
Yeah, exactly. Amen. Mark, I so appreciate you coming in to get a physician's perspective, especially the work that you do, because your work is so different than traditional medicine where we treat illness.

00:47:03 Speaker_00
where your work is really about staying healthy and living healthy and you'll never get ill, or your body will know how to fix itself.

00:47:10 Speaker_00
That friendship is a core part of staying healthy and helping the body fix itself and prevent itself from getting ill. Yeah, the biology of friendship. And on that note, my friend, thank you so much for having this conversation with me.

00:47:22 Speaker_00
This has been great. So good. So fun. If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts.

00:47:37 Speaker_00
And if you'd like even more optimism, check out my website, simonsinnick.com, for classes, videos, and more. Until then, take care of yourself, take care of each other. A Bit of Optimism is a production of The Optimism Company.

00:47:53 Speaker_00
It's produced and edited by Lindsey Garbenius, David Jha, and Devin Johnson. Our executive producers are Henrietta Conrad and Greg Rudershed.