BUILD HABITS

“Number one, prevention is better than cure. Number two, it's a very, very personal and individual topic, so people should take responsibility for it. You can listen to all the advice, but I like Pancho's point of, take the time to go on the journey yourself, experience some of the stuff which works for you or not. The best habits are those you can sustain, so try to think about what works for you and what mechanism works best for you.”

“if you take just the traditional ways of thinking, many societies inherently had prevention at the core of medical science. If you take Chinese traditional medicine, Ayurveda in India, many other mechanisms. Even very simple dictums, and I was reading the other day, there's a well-known Japanese dictum. I would say it in Japanese and I'm sure I wouldn't pronounce it right, but it's hara hachi bu, which is essentially stomach 80% full, which is a very simple idea to say, look, keep portion control as you actually think about what you're eating.”

“It absolutely is teaching. And that's actually according to the research and according to not just my personal experience. It's very clear that the best teachers are 40, ideally over 60, and many even over 70, as a matter of fact. That's when you actually have the best ability to synthesize information, to recognize patterns, and to express ideas with greatest acuity in the language that nonspecialists can understand.”

“I actually did come up with a phrase Keystone Habit. My wife is a biologist and there's this concept of Keystone Species. And so I was talking through this idea... it just makes it so easy to like take the next step and like go out the door, right? Like you probably at this point, when you are running, you're not even thinking about running as you start.”

“Our brain actually is kind of skeptical of our stated preferences, but it pays attention to how we behave to figure out who we really are. And so this act of cleaning up every day at three o'clock... it's not about organizing the clutter, it's about revealing to ourselves, proving to ourselves that we are the kinds of people who do this.”

“The key is, don't try and extinguish the habit, rather try and change it, find a new behavior, like eating M&Ms, that corresponds to the old cue, and that delivers something similar to the old reward. And in doing so, you're kind of overriding that neural pathway inside your brain.”

“He's looking at my form compared to a fresh form. And he's like, yeah, when you're dropping into the pace you're going to run an ultra and you're forming a technique there, there's a little bit of instability in that area we got to work on. And just finding weaknesses. And I like that.”

“You often will explore certain thoughts and certain feelings that we often sometimes just trying to distract ourselves from. Especially as men, I often find it's a lot hot, a lot, this resonates more with men. It's like we do kind of bottle a lot of things up more so than women.”

“I've had a fantastic attitude towards my training, my, this process of improvement, how I come about things every day, the excitement I have for training, the joy I found in training this year. And then the other side to it is effort. Am I trying as hard as I could do?”

“Understand, you know, I'm a big believer in you aren't your feelings, you're the person experiencing those feelings. So as soon as you can get them on paper, this allows you to understand them a little bit better. And also they can go, OK, that's there, have the shower, park the feelings and you can kind of move on with the day and go, right, that session was great, awesome, let's move on.”

“Sleep is a big part of metabolic health. If you don't sleep well, by the way, one week of deprived sleep can put you into essentially a diabetic state in terms of sugar management. Diabetes is not only, okay, now I have diabetes, I know medically that's how it works, but impaired glucose metabolism can be the result in three days of poor sleep. Your body would not process glucose the same way.”

“Children who are obese and overweight is an even more alarming statistic. And that's been increasing dramatically. Again, according to some statistic, between 2010 and 2020, the childhood obesity rates in Asia have gone up by 100, 120%. This is actually quite a big issue.”

“What do they do every day? And the the answer is they pay attention fundamentally to four big things. Their faith or life philosophy, they think deeply about the why questions, and and also they stand in awe of something bigger than themselves so they're not stuck in the looking in the mirror. They have strong family relationships. They have close friendships. They have real friends, not just deal friends. And they're certainly not isolated and lonely and spending all day on the Internet. And last but not least, they're doing something productive where they feel like they're earning their success through their merit and hard work, and they're serving other people.”

“The most important part of any training block isn't the outcome, isn't the middle, the end of the finish, the marathon finish line. The most important part is who you become in that process. It is that becoming, that time where you spend 99% of your time anyway.”

“It's a case of durability and how long can you last for. That suits my nature quite well. So for me, it was like, finished last year, knowing I was like, okay, I believe I can do really, really well in this format and go a lot further than I did last year.”

“I was talking to Jim Collins, the guy who wrote Good to Great last night on stage because he has a new book out. And he talked about the bewildering fog of success. And that year, 2013, was exactly that for me. Like on paper, it was the best year of my life. I had a best-selling book. I won a Pulitzer Prize. In reality, it was like the hardest year of my life.”

“Confidence is an action, not a feeling. That's been the biggest part of this. You know, you don't feel confident. And then go into something, you go into something, and then you gain confidence as a byproduct of consistency of hard work.”

“Now there's a practical consideration as well, which is the Catholic church is kind of like Starbucks. It's ubiquitous and has a uniform high quality product. The great thing about being part of the universal Catholic Church is literally its ubiquitousness. The fact I go to mass every single morning and I travel forty eight weeks a year, and the fact is there's one every place is what it comes down to.”

“People get to acceptance pretty fast, and they're happier during the acceptance phase than they were before they were told they were gonna die. Now this is important. Right? This is an important thing because what that says is I mean, if you're taking it at its face and and, again, I mean, the data or the the research is the research, and it could be updated and everything's contested. But it what this suggests is that if you're doing it right, the more time you have, the more meaningful your life is going to be and the more you'll actually savor it.”

“if you want to put some numbers to it in terms of the economic impact, we've quantified with the McKinsey Health Institute that in Asia alone, this comes down to about a trillion dollars in cost for governments just by obesity. If you take the metabolic syndrome at large and all the consequences that it has for people and families, we're speaking about a potential uplift of two and a half trillion dollars if that were to be properly addressed.”

“But Tyler just said, hey, Arthur, I got a big problem. Both my parents were drunks and all four of my grandparents were bootleggers and and I guess I'm doomed to alcoholism. I'd say, Tyler, I have a new whiz bang technology for turning the genetic proclivity from 50% to 0%. It's called not drinking. In other words, when you understand your genetic tendency, you can tailor your habits and that's a beautiful thing.”

“The key is, don't try and extinguish the habit, rather try and change it, find a new behavior, like eating M&Ms, that corresponds to the old cue, and that delivers something similar to the old reward. And in doing so, you're kind of overriding that neural pathway inside your brain.”

“AI is a magnificent extension of the left hemisphere of your brain. It's a how to and what engine, but it's not a why engine. Any real why question that matters, you can't put into chat g p t and get something meaningful to you. To say, why am I alive? For what would I be willing to give my life? You put that into chat GBT, it'll start by buttering you up and telling you what a smart question it is. Then it'll tell you how five different people have answered that question, and you're left completely unsatisfied as a result of that.”

“Our brain actually is kind of skeptical of our stated preferences, but it pays attention to how we behave to figure out who we really are. And so this act of cleaning up every day at three o'clock... it's not about organizing the clutter, it's about revealing to ourselves, proving to ourselves that we are the kinds of people who do this.”

“I was talking to Jim Collins, the guy who wrote Good to Great last night on stage because he has a new book out. And he talked about the bewildering fog of success. And that year, 2013, was exactly that for me. Like on paper, it was the best year of my life. I had a best-selling book. I won a Pulitzer Prize. In reality, it was like the hardest year of my life.”

“That's Dennis Brain, of course. Dennis Brain, who was the wunderkind who picked up the French horn at age two. And by a very young man, was the principal hornist in the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, was did the first major recordings of the Mozart concertos, of both Strauss concertos, died tragically at the age of 36, coming back from the Edinburgh Music Festival at night driving his high powered sports car, ran it into the base of a bridge, and died in a fiery accident, leaving the world without the world's greatest French horn player.”

“My favorite president in my lifetime is George w Bush. And how do I know? Because all the mistakes he made, I probably would have made too. And this is actually how you see somebody that you you really admire. You don't look at what they've done that's successful. Look at the things that they did that were unsuccessful and say, honestly, would I have made the same mistake? And if the answer is yes, then that's somebody who's in a way admirable in their view.”

“GLP-1s, to your question, is a pharmaceutical way to handle it. And so what GLP-1s are are essentially drugs which mimic an internal hormone in the body. So when we eat certain substances, most food actually, our intestines secrete GLP-1s, glucagon-like peptides. And they work by having three different effects. So they give one signal which goes to the pancreas and increases insulin secretion, decreases glucagon secretion. Second, GLP-1s decrease the emptying of the stomach. And then third, they actually have an impact on the appetite centers in the brain and hypothalamus and decrease appetite.”

“if you look at just the incidence of type 2 diabetes in Asia between 1990 and 2020, that's almost 2x in Asia now. So just the number of people who have type 2 diabetes. By the way, interestingly, if you age standardized mortality rates and the incidence of deaths happening due to metabolic diseases, that's pretty much the same. So we are not in the middle of some slow change. We are actually in the middle of a fairly significant metabolic health issue in Asia.”

“Happiness isn't a feeling at all. Happiness has feelings associated with it like the smell of the turkey is associated with your Thanksgiving dinner. But the the smell of the turkey isn't the same thing as the turkey dinner. The turkey dinner is protein, carbohydrates, and fat, which are the macronutrients. And and similarly, you can define and, you know, I think the most compelling definition of happiness is the combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.”

“What I am is called the spiral, which is a series of mini careers of your own design that lasts between seven and twelve years. Sometimes it's for profit, sometimes it's nonprofit, sometimes it's making more money, sometimes it's making less money, But it's your career is an adventure where you're impelled to go learn a big new thing.”

“One of the things that I'm really interested in is this new field of applied philosophy. Have you heard about this where you you study a philosopher and you try to live according to their precepts strictly for two one or two or three weeks at a time. I tried to live like a Kantian and tell exactly zero lies, and it's a miracle that my marriage survived. That's all I can say. And I'm not a Kantian, it turns out.”

“I actually did come up with a phrase Keystone Habit. My wife is a biologist and there's this concept of Keystone Species. And so I was talking through this idea... it just makes it so easy to like take the next step and like go out the door, right? Like you probably at this point, when you are running, you're not even thinking about running as you start.”

“There's this phrase in the CEO world, something like you don't rise to your willpower, you fall to your systems, or something like that, where it's like the system is what dictates whether you're going to be successful or not, not like willpower or not how you feel. And the point being at a company, you have to have systems because that's what you default to.”

“Here's actually how you learn something and make it permanently part of your repertoire. Number one, you understand it. Number two, you practice it. And then number three, you share it. So it's an interesting thing. My father used to say this. My father was a PhD biostatistician, a lifelong mathematics and statistics professor. And I one time I saw him giving a graduate seminar in advanced calculus, a ninety minute lecture with no notes, and it was like watching Jascha Heifetz playing the violin.”

“one example I would love to mention is relatively recent still, but what Abu Dhabi is doing. They have now institutionalized a healthy living unit whose job it is to take care of the cross-functional coordination of initiatives, and I think right now they have over 20 initiatives. They're not just in health care, they're in education, they're in infrastructure, in municipalities, sports, a holistic portfolio of initiative that are evidence-based. And hopefully, the promise is, this is going to be maybe the first place where we manage to sustainably revert the trend.”

“And no matter how bad I felt about myself each day, I always had the evidence there that I did something kind to myself. I took myself outside, I moved my body, I ran, even if I could run for two minutes, walk for one minute, and that was the basis of respect that I gave myself. And from that, it built forward.”

“There's this phrase in the CEO world, something like you don't rise to your willpower, you fall to your systems, or something like that, where it's like the system is what dictates whether you're going to be successful or not, not like willpower or not how you feel. And the point being at a company, you have to have systems because that's what you default to.”