Hi guys. Can you hear me? Yes. Hi. Okay, everyone stand up. We're going to do an age test. Okay, I'm going to count down from three and you're going to choose your left foot or your right foot and you're going to stay on that foot as long as you can. Okay? You're going to see when you fall over and then I'll call out the time. Now, you can't move your foot around. It's got to be stationary. You can't put it out and your arms have to stay in. Okay? So, left or right foot. I'm going to count down 3, 2, 1, then you're going to stay upright as long as you can with your eyes closed. Okay? But don't... And women, if you want to take your heels off, like, you want to have a good score, I'm telling you. Okay, ready? 3, 2, 1, close your eyes.
5 seconds. Yeah, be careful.
10 seconds.
15. We'll stop at 20. 20. Okay. So, we're going to do this again. So, this is a biological age test. As you age, your brain atrophies and your ability to maintain your balance goes away. That's why when you get older, if you fall down, it's no good. You have a high chance of all-cause mortality. So, you want to maintain strong balance and this is a muscle that kind of gets hidden because you don't really test your eye-closed balance very often. Okay? So, the age range is if you fell over between 0 and 7 seconds, that's age 60 to 80. 7 to 15 is age 40 to 60 and 15 to 30 is age 20 to 40.
Okay, let's do it again. Now you have motivation. Women, you want to take your heels off? I'm telling you. You want to get a score. Okay? So, you want plus 15 seconds. That would put you in the 20 to 40 category. Okay, the best one. You ready? You can choose left or right foot. And it helps if you have like a little bit of weight on the ball of your foot. Better balance. Okay? 3, 2, 1, go.
5. 10. 15. 20. Anyone still going? Go. Great. Great. Great. This is super. Okay. 25. Hold on. Hold on. 30. Okay, yeah. Good job. Good job. Okay. Okay, take a seat, guys.
Okay. So, what you just did is a biological age test and that's the game I've been playing for the past 5 years. So, we have measured my body as much as we possibly can. We try to measure the biological age. So, I'm 48 years old and we try to measure the age of my liver and my kidney and my lungs and my hair and my everything. So, for example, my left ear is 64 years old because I listened to loud music and shotguns as a kid. You cannot correct hearing loss. And if you have hearing loss, you don't correct for it, like with hearing aids, you can have neural degeneration risk five times more than normal. So, these are all like things you learn. All right. So, what I'm going to do, I have 6 minutes and 52 seconds. I'm going to try to distill the core things I've learned over the past 5 years so they're useful to your life. Cool?
Okay. So, the single most valuable biomarker I track above all things is my resting heart rate before bed. Okay, so when you go to bed tonight, head on the pillow, you take a few deep breaths, you calm yourself down and look at your heart rate. Either take your pulse or on a wearable. Let's say tonight it's 60 beats per minute. That's your baseline. Okay? Your life goal is to drive down your heart rate. Okay? The reason is because the lower your heart rate goes, the better your sleep, the better your sleep, the better willpower. More willpower, better exercise, better food. When your heart rate is high, bad sleep, bad willpower, no exercise and bad food. Okay, forks. So, resting heart rate is the most important marker of your entire life. Okay? So, the question is how do you get your heart rate down? Okay, one is you have your final meal of the day 4 hours before bed. So, if your bedtime is 10:00 p.m., food cut off at 6:00. Nothing after that. No snacks. No food. The reason why you want to do that is because your body needs time to digest. Okay, it allocates metabolic resources to digest food. Then before you go to bed, the body has capacity to release melatonin, cool the body down, and dumps all the heat, and get ready for sleep. Okay? So, you'll notice when you push food earlier, heart rate goes down. So, I have my final meal of the day at noon. Okay? I did that after a few hundred experiments. What I found is that if I cut off my food at noon, by bedtime, which is 8:30 for me, I'm going to be around 41 to 43 beats per minute thereabouts. If my heart rate is that, perfect night's sleep.
Second thing you're going to do is screens off. 30 to 60 minutes before bed. Now, this is hard. We're all addicted. Okay? It's true. Okay? But it is an arousing device. Okay? You cannot have your phone. It doesn't matter if you're like scrolling pictures of flowers. It doesn't matter. Or kitty cats. It doesn't matter. If your phone is out, you're aroused. Okay? So, you can't have it. So, 30 to 60 minutes, you got to have the phone off. And in that time period, you want to go for a walk, read a book, talk to a friend, journal, breath work, anything but be on your phone. Okay? Now, if I saw any of your heart rates, like your wearable data, I would know your soul. More than any Catholic bishop. It tells me everything about your diet, your stress, your sleep, your screens, like the imprint is all there. And you will see it yourself, too. The other day, my heart rate was up two beats per minute and I thought, what in the world is causing two beats per minute? I asked my chef, 'Did you measure the calories today?' She didn't. She approximated it. So, 150 calories raised my heart rate by two beats per minute. Okay? So, I've done over a thousand experiments experimenting with what happens to my heart rate when food, stress, screens, time, and etc. So, it really is a science. The body is a predictable machine. It will respond to the inputs. Okay, so food 4 hours before bed, screens off 30 to 60 minutes. I mentioned a book in hand. So, reading a book, an actual physical book, is as good as a sleep medication. The evidence is just as good.
I do a night routine where I do this internal dialogue. So, a big problem we all have is when we go to bed, we have unresolved things from the day. So, we will ruminate on the day, like thing you didn't get done or thing you did poorly or something you're mad about or like whatever you have going on. So, those voices will show up in your heart rate because you have more nervous system activation. So, what I do is I work through my own stuff. Okay? So, I imagine a line of Brians. They all line up. And they all have their stuff. Okay? So, the first Brian is ambitious Brian and he says, 'I've got an amazing new idea for a new experiment. Okay, we're going to test this new biological age.' And sleep Brian says, 'We love you, ambitious Brian. You're doing a great job. Also, we are in sleep mode, so write your idea down and tomorrow morning we'll address this.' And he, you know, pushes a couple times. The next Brian is like anxious Brian. 'Today in that conversation, you said something bad. They probably think you're a jerk.' 'Thank you for the self-awareness. Really appreciate you.' Okay? If you don't do this, you guys know what happens, right? You lay down, you ruminate, you finally fall asleep, and you wake up 3 hours later. And what happens? You ruminate again and you can't fall back asleep. That rumination releases hormones and you can't go back to sleep when you're doing that. It raises your heart rate. So, before you go to bed, you need to see yourself. Talk through whatever's going on. Journal it, talk about it, whatever you're doing, you have to calm yourself down because those versions of you will pop back up. You just can't avoid it. Okay?
There's other things like you want to have no blue light. Like this light would not work. For example, this is ruining my sleep, by the way. For you, though. But you want reds and ambers. Okay? So, in my house, we come up with the sun, we go down with the sun. The only light we have in our house is a red lamp and some amber light. No low flicker light. Otherwise, we just don't use industrial lights. I think that's really it. So, like what I would convince you of, okay? The big meta is that we have a society built around death. Okay? Death has always been inevitable. And when death is inevitable, the only game you play is YOLO. Right? Like you might as well. So, we live in a moment right now where we are the first generation where death may not be inevitable. That does not mean no mortality. It means we may extend our lifespans just a bit, then a bit more, and a bit more until somehow we don't really know how long we can live. That changes our relationship with death. So, right now we have the die economy where companies are literally trying to kill you. They make money when they kill you. It's true. It's really gnarly, but it's actually true. So, we're on a cusp of changing society and these core things are you saying yes to life and no to the cultural norms of a generation before us that didn't have this opportunity. So, I promise you, I know it's counterculture to make sleep a high priority. I know it's counterculture to go off your phone. It's counterculture to prioritize your health because there's rewards of grinding, right? Of not sleeping, of bragging you only need 4 hours of sleep, of being the person who sleeps under your desk. There's all these social status signals of like, 'I don't need to sleep. I'm just above that.' But it's not true. Right? Science is science. All right, I'm out of time, but I hope that landed and I hope that when you're up to your no good naughty selves, I know it, all right? I will be a voice in your mind, you'll think, 'Huh, maybe I'll try a different route.' All right, thanks, guys.
