Please note, this is an automated transcript so it is not 100% accurate.

Dr. Mario:
Gratitude brings up oxytocin, which is a powerful neuropeptide that helps, including repairing heart tissue. It happens when they’re breastfeeding, orgasms, connection with people. But you kill it if I say, hey, guy, I really think you look a lot younger. Oh, well, I don’t know about that. Kill it. Forget it. If you say, thank you for noticing oxytocin. And the latest research that shows how powerful this is in psychognathology is that the oxytocin is waiting for you to say thank you. If you feel gratitude and you don’t express it, or if you just minimize it, no oxytocin. If you say the word, the psycholinguistics of, thank you, I appreciate you saying that, oxytocin goes up.

Guy:
Hey, hey, hey, Guy here. And today I welcome back to the podcast, Dr. Mario Martinez. And if you haven’t, if you enjoy this podcast, definitely go and check out the first one as well. And today we get into the conversation of longevity, but longevity from how cultural beliefs and the way we are raised and live our lives is affecting the state of being from a wellness perspective, if that makes sense. For me, these conversations are vitally important. When we dive into the realms of spirituality, one thing I want to ensure that I do during my lifetime is look after the vehicle that allows me to have this physical human experience. The constant curiosity of applying things and bringing things into my life that nurture the body, the vessel, that allows me then to have the maximum amount of energy, to live life, embrace my family and soak up each day as much as I can while I’m blessed to have a life and a body right here, right now. So this conversation dives deep. Mario is a beautiful person. Honestly, dive into it. Get swept away with it, and I have no doubt you will get a lot out of it today. If you do, be sure to let me know in the comments below what you thought of this conversation and things that you’re applying in your life. I love connecting with people, and nothing warms my heart more knowing these conversations are going out around the world and impacting people’s lives. Anyway, let’s go over to Dr. Mariam Martinez. Enjoy, much love, and I hope to meet you in person somewhere, someday. Mario, welcome back to the podcast, my man. So good to see you.

Dr. Mario:
Thank you. It’s been a while.

Guy:
It’s always good to see you. It has been a while. It has been a while. And whilst I certainly don’t want to cover all ground in our conversation today with the second podcast, I will, you will be introduced to new people. So just to connect the dots for everyone, if you were say, traveling to Australia right now, and a stranger asked you what you did for a living, what would you say?

Dr. Mario:
trying to stay young forever, but based on good science. So that’s what we’re going to be talking about. A lot of the myths about growing older and a lot of the things that appear to be something that we need to do to grow older, and none of that is true. So I’m going to be debunking a lot of myths about longevity based on the experts. The experts are not Myself or gerontologists, the experts are the centenarians, people who are over 100 and are healthy. Those are the experts. Those are the evidence of what works. And that’s what we base our research on.

Guy:
It’s amazing, mate. It’s certainly a passion of mine, especially becoming a dad, I guess, not a young dad, but not an old, old dad either. But it’s something on the back of my mind. I want to make sure that I’m healthy, fit and strong when my kids are all grown up and really appreciate my life that I have now as well. And there seems to be a lot of conversations on the internet at the moment about the potential of the length, the life of a human and what science is now showing. What do you feel the potential is or do you think we have not even tapped into our true potential of longevity yet?

Dr. Mario:
Oh, yeah. Now we’re just beginning, but I’ll give you something about Australia, for example, which is good news. Australia, the population, I guess, is a little over 25 million, 20, 26. And you have about 4,200 centenarians, which is what we look at is not how many centenarians, but what is the per capita, how many centenarians per total population. And right now it’s one per 6,000. But now you have 4,200 centenarians, right? In the year 2050, you’re gonna have 50,000 centenarians in Australia. So it’s really growing. The other thing that’s going on is that many countries are either slowing down on the life expectancy, like the United States, or maybe going back a little bit, like some places in Japan and other places. But in every country, including Australia, centenarians are the fastest growing segment of the population. So they have some secrets that are not the same for the rest of the population. And it’s not genetics, genetics 20%.

Guy:
Yeah, wow. And one thing that kind of conjures up in my mind, and I guess would be good to pull apart a little bit, is in some respects we see the medical system developing as well, but I quite often see that We’re getting older in life, but our quality of life is diminished in those last five or 10 years, quite often through illness, disease, and our body breaking down. And then Western medicine is kind of dragging us across the finish line, if you like. And then would you say a centenarian is completely independent from many of those things?

Dr. Mario:
They’re very different and we’re beginning to find out some of the reasons why this is happening. So for example, there’s something called inflame aging, which is the usual inflammation that you get as you grow older. So that inflammation is really what ages you more than anything, more than stress or anything else. So the inflame aging, they look at the inflame aging of, let’s say somebody 30 and it’s over here. The inflame aging of somebody 80 is over here. and the inflammation of centenarians over here. So they should be getting sick. They should be getting sick because it’s much higher. What happens is that there’s a compensatory component here that with T cells that they overwrite the effects of the negative effects of inflammation. So let’s say here we have the 30-year-old ratio that helps with keeping you away from illness. The 80-year-old here and the centenarians here, just like the young people. So they develop compensatory methods by the longer you live in healthspan, the higher probability of you staying in healthspan. So healthspan is how long you’ve lived healthy. Lifespan is how long you live So centenarians have some kind of process that kicks in, and it’s not genetics, we don’t think, that actually allows them to even reverse inflammation. There’s some research that we’re doing with, there’s a lab in UK and Croatia that we’re working with, and they’re finding that what used to be inflammatory With centenarians, it begins to become anti-inflammatory. And what we’re finding with the research that we’re doing with them, we’re taking 50 centenarians and looking at their blood work and looking at my tests. And on the average, they’re coming out 25 years younger in their biological age than their chronological age. So it doesn’t fit the model of gerontology at all.

Guy:
Wow. What i’m seeing as well because obviously i podcast and i’m constantly on the internet just. Looking at different information coming in and and conversations are happening and there’s definitely a new order i know you’d be aware of this but there’s a buzz around what’s called like biohacking and. Yes. We got to take the supplementation and do these things and constantly to reverse, like you talk about that biological age. So even though if I’m 50 years old, I’ve got a body of a 30 year old kind of thing. Right. And But I’m curious to know from, especially with you studying, I believe the term psychoneuroimmunology, if I’m pronouncing that correct. I’ve been practicing all morning. But I’m curious to know from Your perspective actually how much is it is actually just psychology and how we show up for ourselves and cultural beliefs and belief systems and how we actually perceive ourself and perceive the world.

Dr. Mario:
How much of that is playing on a roll reception is most important i don’t like biohacking the system the brain and the music don’t like to be hacked we’re not machines. And the other thing that happens if you’re taking this and you’re taking that, you develop a false sense of security. It tells you if I take this and I’m going to be okay. Centenarians hardly take anything, but how they live is what matters. Do I take any supplements? No, I just take something that it’s called Cardiomet, which is a liquid that has all the vitamins and minerals. That’s it, nothing else. So the biohacking is kind of a way to market longevity, but it really doesn’t do that much for reversing biological age. And that’s my take on it based on really good research that’s going on out there. There’s a person, I’m not going to mention him because he’s an authority and I think he’s wrong. He takes over 14, 15 supplements a day. You don’t need that, and it’s obsessive to do that with a body. There’s certain foods and there’s certain things, and there’s certain things that actually you don’t metabolize as well as when you’re younger, but this is why you can take these supplements always in liquid, not pills or anything like that, because it doesn’t work as well. So I think what we’re offering the world is a way to change your perception, not just intellectually, but the way you perceive the world and your emotions. And we found eight factors, and every one of this is either anti-inflammatory or anti-stress. That’s what we’re working on.

Guy:
Yeah, okay. Now, when we were speaking off air as well, because you said you’ve moved back to Nashville, and you’ve been doing a lot of research, lots of research at the moment. And I love your passion for this topic, Mario. I still subscribe to your newsletters, and I’m constantly seeing. new discoveries coming through and everything. And, you know, and we spoke about Affair that you’ve been passionately working on a few things at the moment and discovered things that haven’t been discovered before. Would you be happy to share them for us? Sure.

Dr. Mario:
For example, what I do, as you know, is I bring several disciplines together in biocognition. I bring psychoterminology, neuroscience, and anthropology together. And that’s how we can actually look at everything, not just from… As I started as a neuropsychologist, I always looked at, okay, what are the genes? What are the genes? And I found that it’s not the genes, it’s how they live. But one of the eight factors is your perception of time. They perceive time as if they have all the time in the world. They don’t live in the urgent present, or they don’t live a step ahead of the present. That reduces your anxiety, it reduces your inflammation. But let me give you an example how important the time is. Ellen Langer at Harvard, a colleague and friend, has done a lot of research for the last 40 years on perception of time and aging, and I have done my work also with centenarians. What she finds, for example, one study, very simple but very profound, is that she’ll have people who have diabetes type 2, that’s pretty significant biological problem, that’s a glucose problem. And she’ll have them do a task, a task that has nothing to do with the compartment, it’s kind of like the sham part, so they can spend 90 minutes doing something. And they tell them, okay, we’re gonna measure your glucose, since you have diabetes type 2, in the 90 minutes. One group, they have real time, Another group they have half a slow clock and the other twice as fast clock. The glucose will respond to your perception of time rather than real time. That’s just an example of the power of time. It’s been done with pain, it’s been done with many other things and time is a very powerful way of interpreting the world and then your biology will respond to a great degree to your perception of time, not the passing of time.

Guy:
Wow, isn’t that incredible? Because that leans into a lot of what actually we do at our retreats and events and bringing people into the present moment because we’re so anticipating the future of what’s coming in, almost like a state of threat. So it’s kind of leaning into then where instead of just being present and behaving like we got all the time in the world and just dealing with the task at hand, our body is practicing the anticipation of a threat that might not even be coming.

Dr. Mario:
Yes, and even good fortune, even if you’re expecting good fortune, you’re not in the present. So one thing that centenarians do, I mentioned before we started, is that they believe they have all the time in the world. So I asked one centenarian, and this is how they answer it by how they live. I do the anthropology for it. I say, oh, this is really a nice garden you have here. Oh, really nice, yeah. Wait till you see it in three years, and the man is 101. So what happens is you project time and space You live in the present, but you project time and space and your biology to a certain degree will follow that. And then I asked one, okay, all the time in the world, what is that? What if you die tomorrow? Then he said, that’s all the time in the world. So they don’t live in the anxiety of the future. They live in enjoying the present and living the present. And that’s extremely important. What do we do? We micromanage, we multitask. All those things are anti-staying young. It’s an aging process. I work with many CEOs And 75% of them have gastrointestinal problems and blood pressure problems. These are things that you teach your body by being outside of the present, or by eating with your computer, or being on the phone with your iPhone, or whatever phone, or being on the phone when you’re driving. If you want to reduce your cortisol, in addition to working out and doing all the other things, get away from going to your phone. If you do, for example, If you go to your phone, the first thing you do, you go to your phone, your cortisol is gonna be up high for the rest of the day. If you eat with your computer, cortisol high for the rest of the day. If you’re driving and you’re on the phone, cortisol high. All those three, you bring them down. We worked some people and they brought the cholesterol down in the cortisol, both in six weeks.

Guy:
That’s wild, isn’t it? How do we… Break that circuit, though, from your perspective, because I find we’re just addicted as a society. We’re addicted to those hits. And the moment we create that space and stillness in a person, they don’t know what to do with themselves, because that stillness is what’s constantly keeping them, their momentum in their day, or what they perceive momentum is, if that makes sense.

Dr. Mario:
That’s right, and to your point, we can see how you can live this kind of experience rather than trying to think it or anything. Centenarians, many don’t exercise. They don’t know what meditation is, many of them. Some eat meat, some don’t. Why is it that it works? Because although they don’t exercise, they stay active. Although they don’t meditate, they’re very introspective, to your point. And although they’re not concerned with meat or vegetables or whatever, they eat in moderation and they eat with family and friends or by themselves, treating themselves great to the meal. Breaking bread is one of the causes of health unless you’re interfering with the I self, the phone and all these other things. So although they don’t do the usual things, I work out and I meditate and everything, but I realize that that’s not sufficient. I have to live in introspection. And as you said, you ask somebody, okay, just do nothing. What do I do now? They just don’t go inward. They don’t go in. How do you feel right now? Well, I feel like I should. No, that’s not a feeling, that’s a thought. How do you feel right now? I feel that you’re asking me. No, that’s a thought. So even the language get confused. I feel angry, happy, sad. That’s a feeling. And they’re very aware of their feelings, centenarians.

Guy:
Yeah, I remember we did a trip. I don’t know if I mentioned this to you. We did a trip to Sardinia. This has gone back about five or six years now. Oh, yeah. Into the blue zones. It was about 18 of us that went and spent five days up in the mountains there. And it was phenomenal. And I remember towards the end, we got to sit down with the eldest people in the village at that point, which was the centenarian blue zone. And I’ll never forget this husband and wife, and Gino was his name, and he was 93 years old. And they were all sitting outside all the time in the world. They would all come and congregate and meet together every day and play dominoes and have a coffee and everything. And we got to ask him, I said, do you ever feel, do you ever get stressed? And he didn’t know what the word stress meant. He had no concept at all. And our interpreter was trying to explain stress to him, and he was lost. He was like, I don’t know.

Dr. Mario:
That’s typical, typical centenarians. And I have some news also. The blue zones are good. I think that you can go beyond the blue zones. We’re finding now that one of the things in the blue zones is that they don’t really look at the per capita, how many centenarians per per population. And when you do that, then you’re just getting numbers and also they’re mixing 90 with 100. I believe, and we’re going to declare this from Institute, that Spain is the lost child. Spain has the highest number of centenarians per capita than most of the blue zones. They have a very high life expectancy, 83, very much like Japan. And they have the per capita number of centenarians only second to Japan. And they’re not even included in the blue zone. So we’re going to include them in our list, which is the nouveau centenarians. They’re going to be number one. Wow. Spain is really wonderful. And what have they done? About 20 years ago, 30 years ago, you would hear the Spanish would say, oh, we’re getting like the German. We’re getting more efficient like the Germans, or we’re going to be more on time like the Germans. And now they’ve gone back to being Spanish. And eating with your family, taking times, maybe having a siesta, that kind of thing. And they have increased their, uh, not only life expectancy, but the number of centenarians per capita, number two in the world. So those are examples of the things that are happening.

Guy:
So. for someone listening to this today and goes, you know what? I actually want to start taking care of myself more and my health span, not just my lifespan. And where do we start? What have you determined in ways of even measuring our progress? So it’d be nice to know that a year from now, two years from now, five years from now, we can reflect back and start to look at our own data. to see that we’re actually going in the right direction, as opposed to, oh, I’m just gonna bring in these lifestyle aspects in and hope for the best.

Dr. Mario:
No, of course. What we have, and this is what I wanted to share with you, we have now that CCI, we call it Centenarian Consciousness Index. You take it and it shows how close you are to centenarian consciousness in eight factors. Four ways of looking at the world and four emotions. Then we do blood work with just a few drops of blood from your finger, and you get your biological age. We look at it a year later, two years later, and you can see that if you’re doing the right things, your biological age will drop. When I did it, my biological age was 21 years younger. So you can do exactly what you’re saying, and for the first time, There are a lot of sophisticated blood work there, but there are none that go as specifically as we do. What they do is they go to what I call the usual suspects of wellness. They do these sophisticated blood work and they say, okay, you have to exercise, you have to diet, you have to meditate. The same thing that we’ve known for 50 years. We don’t say that. We say these are the emotions that you need to cultivate and this is the perception that you need to cultivate and that’s what actually does that in addition to the usual suspects of wellness.

Guy:
And that’s what we can discuss if you want. What was that index called again?

Dr. Mario:
The Centenarian… CCI. The Centenarian Consciousness Index. And it’ll be up online by the end of the month on my website.

Guy:
So you can literally then… Yes. …go into a survey, survey yourself honestly, I’m guessing.

Dr. Mario:
Yes. Well, you have to be honest, otherwise it’s worthless. But then what you don’t have to be honest is your blood. When you do the blood work, it’s going to show you where you are. But it’s good if you want to be kind to yourself, to be honest, so you can find out where you are. And then the beauty of it is no matter what your biological age is, it can be reversed as we’re finding over and over. Wow and then and then with the blood work can we do that through you how do i love to work is love it’s it’s in combination of our website will have the you can do the cc i don’t. What is the cc i would call it’s called like an age is a great product. And then when you do the glycan age, what they do is you get immediate results on our test. It’ll tell you where you are, centenarian. But the glycan age, they mail it to you. It’s a little card they mail to you. You prick your finger and a few drops of blood, you send it back. Within three weeks, they send you the biological age, and then you can compare with our CCI. The reason it takes about three weeks is they measure it several times to be very precise.

Guy:
Wow, that’s fantastic. So if I, let’s say I go and do that and look at my biological age and just say, oh, I want to continue to bring this down. And as I age, as my chronological ages, You mentioned the perception of time was a big factor in starting to reverse that biological age. Are there any other factors within us that we can be aware of that we can sort of start to look at immediately?

Dr. Mario:
Yes. Let me go over all eight, and I’ll tell you what brings them up and what brings them down. Okay. The four perceptions are how you perceive time, how you perceive aging, how you perceive health, and how you perceive self-valuation. Very important. On the emotions, generosity, gratitude, admiration, and curiosity. All anti-inflammatory or anti-stress. Now how do you bring them down? If you have all the time in the world, it goes up. If you’re living in the urgent present, it goes down. Health, if you believe that you are a slave of the genetic sentence, it goes down. If you believe that aging is a process of what you do with time based on your world and your cultures and everything, it goes up. If you’re living with a sense of aging as inevitable again, as opposed to, I differentiate it as you know, Growing old is a passing of time, there’s nothing you can do. Aging is what you do with time based on your beliefs and your cultural training that you’ve had. So it depends on how you deal with that. And in the health has to do with family illness. They say, well, there’s diabetes type two in your family. Well, that’s it, high probability. No, look at the people who have not had The diabetes in your family and see how different there are you gonna see that there are outliers and the fourth which is very important to itself valuation. It goes up when you value yourself when nobody’s looking it goes down when you excuse yourself what do cultures do cultures teach you to go against all those eight factors. So for example, if I say, hey guy, I like your glasses. Oh yeah, I got them cheap because of, or I like your shirt. Oh yeah, excusing it or minimizing it. You look younger. Well, it’s too early to tell that kind of thing that kills. The gratitude, which is, gratitude brings up oxytocin, which is a powerful neuropeptide that helps, including repairing heart tissue. It happens when the breastfeeding, orgasms, connection with people. But you kill it, if I say, Hey, guy, I really think you look a lot younger. Oh, well, I don’t know about that. Kill it, forget it. If you say, thank you for noticing, oxytocin. And the latest research that shows how powerful this is in psychoneurology is that the oxytocin is waiting for you to say thank you. If you feel gratitude and you don’t express it, or if you just minimize it, no oxytocin. If you say the word, the psycholinguistics of thank you, I appreciate you saying that, oxytocin goes up. Well, the system is set up for you not to age well.

Guy:
I have a question, and before we go into the others, then. If, like, thinking back on my own life, when I wanted to create change, there’s immense, almost pressure, unconscious pressure, whether it’s me perceiving it or not, from others. it’s almost like by me wanting to change and break away from the herd mentality of what all my friends and families have been living their life, and all of a sudden I become a black sheep. And it’s like, oh, you know, and it’s like this pressure to stay in that mold felt big. And it could have been my perception or not. I really don’t know.

Dr. Mario:
No. Here’s what’s happening. Australia is very individualist like the United States, but all cultures are collectivist in that they don’t want you to break away from the herd. They don’t want you to break away from the pale because you’re no longer serving the collectivism. You learn things from your culture editors, people that are important in your life, parents, teachers, doctors, and then you have co-authors that support that. Support it in the present. So now you want to be an outlier. You’ll be admonished as the black sheep or whatever. So when you want to make changes, you ask yourself, where did I learn this behavior? And who are the people that are supporting it now? And then let me take the label of black sheep or whatever as a compliment, because I’m going to outlive these people. So if they say, for example, oh, now that you’re a father, you shouldn’t go back to school and try to get another degree. You got to save your money. And you say, oh, that’s a really good thought. I have to think about it. And you do whatever the hell you want. If you don’t, you’ll be admonished back into the portals that you know, the portals like middle age. This is why when people turn middle age based on their culture, they start looking middle age, dressing middle age, and getting sick like the middle age. Because it’s a portal, not a biological. It’s a cultural admonition that you get.

Guy:
Yeah, so we don’t necessarily then have to uproot and move and leave all our friends and family behind because that pressure is there, you know what I mean? But it’s something I think about as well, because even with what we are doing and we’re actually creating a community of people, which I feel like is for all the black sheep in some respects, because they’re all the ones. And to me, this is life. This is the normality of how it should be, not what’s actually

Dr. Mario:
You’re right on target. What you’re calling the black sheep, we’re calling the subcultures of wellness, same thing. You gotta have people, and someone will say, well, if you’re all liars, you’re all the same. No, no, it’s a culture that supports and gives value to your individualism and allows you to be yourself without having to influence you into being something else. So it’s a herd of individuals, not in the herds of sameness. And there’s no pressure for you to be anything other than yourself. So that’s what you’re doing, and that’s what we’re doing with different names, but the same thing. So you’re right on target.

Guy:
Yeah. And did we cover the whole eight that you mentioned?

Dr. Mario:
What we did, but not how the culture punishes it. Gratitude and generosity are very important. They both secrete the same hormones of oxytocin and endorphins, serotonin, all of those. But if you are in the quid pro quo, You do this i do that you don’t get anything. We’re going out to dinner i’m paying now but next time you have to pay forget it i’m paying now and i’m leaving it to your goodwill i’m paying because the process of me paying for dinner in itself is the pleasure not the outcome. Aristotle said that you have to live in the pleasure of the thing not in what’s gonna come out of what you do. Now, you can’t do that with an abuser or a sociopath because you pay all the time, but you got to do it with people that have goodwill, people that are willing to—and when my friend says I do that, I don’t think I pay, they pay. In the long run, there’s a goodwill. That’s what kills it. Admiration, dopamine, very good dopamine, very good for anti-aging and anti-dementia and all that. What kills it? Envy. I say, hey, hey, guy, you’re doing really, really well. I know, but I mean, you know, you’re an Australian. It’s easier. Forget it. You’re doing really well. I admire what you’re doing. Dopamine. See how the cultures kill it. So, and curiosity, also dopamine. Centenarians are very curious. It’s anti-dementia to be curious. So, I’ll say, I’m curious about this. I want to learn. I want to do this. I want to do that. Good for you. If you’re afraid of the future and exploring and staying in the sameness, not good for you, not the dopamine. So the cultures are set to keep you within the pale, which is what ages you within the pale. All centenarians are outliers, whether they live in Sardinia or they live in Nicoya. Same thing, they’re outliers, very different than their families.

Guy:
Yeah, okay. What about belief systems then, and when we start to come up against ourselves, and we don’t even know it, because quite often we self-sabotage, we do these things, and it feels like it’s embedded in us like a tick, you know what I mean? Why do I keep doing that? Why do I keep repeating those patterns?

Dr. Mario:
Well, that’s the default mode network. It’s called default mode network in the brain. That’s the part that basically manages you when you’re not paying attention. You’re driving your car, you’re not thinking, you’re kind of going off, and all of a sudden you get there, you don’t realize that’s the default mode. It’s very good. But that’s the one that has the learned process of who you are. So I’ll give you an example. I was going to, five days a week I go to the gym, and then on Saturdays I go to a place to recycle. So i was driving on saturday supposed to go to the cycle but i wasn’t paying attention so the default mode kicks in and i drive up to the gym so what am i doing the phone. Stop and what gets you out of the phone mode is curiosity. Curiosity so for example you come up with a one of the self sabotage you say. I’m gonna i’m gonna work out now because. I want to stay young. And all of a sudden, he’s like, I mean, look at your uncle. He was your age, and he looked terrible. You stop, say, oh, wait a minute. Let me take a deep breath. What is different from me and my uncle? What is different from me now and then? What is different? And that’s a way of indirectly creating curiosity. And then you’re creating new neural maps, but the neural maps need to grow by practice. And then you have to say, how can I get evidence to show me that I’m different than my uncle? How can I live different than my uncle? Then the new default mode will give you permission to be different than your uncle. It’s neuropsychological, but it has a lot of psychoterminology in it too.

Guy:
Yeah, okay. It’s like we have a saying in our events and retreats when something starts to come up, is to be the observer and say, ah, isn’t that interesting? Which creates curiosity.

Dr. Mario:
That’s right. And then go, next step would be, okay, now what am I gonna do about it new? What am I, and what, all of this comes from the old brain, the reptilian brain. About maybe 30,000 years ago when we didn’t have awareness of our awareness, the cave people or the ancient chromagnums and so forth, there’s a theory, bicameral brain it’s called, that actually said that before that, people thought that the thoughts they had were coming from God. and God was one that was leading you. Then we became aware of our awareness, and we know that those thoughts are coming from us. But you have some residuals there, and what I do is I call them either sirens or demons, and that’s what you have to differentiate. You get up to go work out. I’m getting up at six to work out. Either the demon or the siren will come on. From Greek mythology, a siren will say, come on, you can sleep another hour. Pleasure seeking only and avoiding pain you can sleep another hour the demon put you down or brings you fear look it’s raining you might have an accident you might hurt your back you might and if you pay attention that you’re done. What is not just turning it off there’s a way to do it say okay like you said yes that’s possible guess what i’m gonna do something different you put on your shoes. Then the demon comes on and says, well, remember, it’s raining. Yes, it is raining. Put on the other shoe. It has to be curiosity with action. If you don’t take action, you’re done. Action is what gets you out of that mindset.

Guy:
Yeah. So get moving. Get moving. Yeah.

Dr. Mario:
It’s not an easy thing, but if you practice it, you’ll see how the demons and the sirens go away because they don’t have a function anymore.

Guy:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It literally is. Even as a fitness trainer, I used to say 90% of the work is showing up. Just get here and then the rest will take care of it.

Dr. Mario:
That’s right. That’s right. You know, and when you finish, you don’t have to be, you don’t have to reward yourself like a rat. So I did it. What you do is you stop and say, I just finished working out. How does it feel? That’s it. No reinforcement, how wonderful. How does it feel? And that is the mind-body code for reinforcement. Not I’m good or I’m fine, just how does it feel? That’s it, done. You don’t have to do anything.

Guy:
Wow, so you spoke about as well, just pulling apart some of the things you mentioned about this concept of time and also this, so if an inflammation, an inflammation, so inflammation being a contributor to aging, which I know there’s studies as well that leads to chronic disease and therefore, so if we’re constantly inflamed and things like that. So, so often though in today’s Western society, only once the symptom arises and we can physically see it, do we then treat the symptom and never really the root holistic cause of how that could have been manifesting for many years. When, what have you witnessed in your studies or in time to, I guess, conditions that might have been there for a while, but by actually adopting this lifestyle and this thinking process, have you seen things start to manifest and show up in a healthy way? So the body then

Dr. Mario:
Yes, but you have to be aware of the pressure that we talked about, the pressure that the culture, including doctors, because doctors are part of the culture, the theologians, everybody. So you go to the doctor, and there’s nothing against doctors. This is how they’re trained. I was trained by doctors. But you go there and you are 30, and you have a little bit of inflammation, If you have a good doctor, say, let’s see if we can work on it by working out or getting rid of some of the sugar that you’re eating, that kind of thing. Ways for you to take care of it. If you’re 80, what do you want for your age? It’s inflammation. That’s your age. That’s what you want. That’s it. And that’s it. And then anti-inflammatories and this and that. And for the rest of your life, you’re on medication. The attribution given is what the medicine’s going to be based on the age in many cases. We train doctors when working in these longevity clinics that never ask the age till the end of the interview. And they get very surprised. Because when you say 90, okay, you’ve been put into the 90. If you’re 30, you never tell your age, never. Because they’ll put you in, unless you have to, they put you into a portal, and they begin to treat you based on that, and you become a co-author of that age based on the culture, not your own individuality.

Guy:
Yeah, interesting. So, how do we, How do we start to then adopt these things? I’m thinking about, for instance, my wife, funnily enough, when she was over 40, when we had our baby, the fact that she was over 40, the medical system treated her completely different as if she was 39. And it’s just a number, it’s just a digit, and it’s just a bracket. And that can be terrifying. Fortunately, we do what we do and we’re very health conscious and understand. But even that pressure that was coming on and that we’re having a baby and there’s certain unknowns into it, especially if you haven’t done it before as well. And it’s just imposed upon you instantly.

Dr. Mario:
And not only your wife, but your child is getting the stress from your wife and you’re lucky because you know better and you say, okay, fine. But you’re right, 39.364 days, you’re not. But 40, okay, now it’s different. We gotta treat you differently. Your blood pressure is at two points, you have hypertension. You don’t have hypertension. It’s based on numbers rather than the individual. And a lot of the research that this place is doing, the genus glyco, the product is glyconate, they’re doing extensive work. They’ve published in more than 300 of the best professional journals in the world, science and nature and all that. And what they’re finding when they look at What’s better, to eat meat or not eat meat? What’s better, to exercise or not exercise? What they’re finding is depending on the individual. Exercise is good for some people, not for some people. Some food good for some people, not good for some people. But what is good is activity and moderation. Activity and staying active and moderation in what you eat. Now I’m not suggesting you eat all junk food because it’s not good. But Warren Buffet with 93, He goes to McDonald’s two or three times a week. And his parents died early, by the way. He’s not genetics. But he loves what he does, and it has an overwrite. What is the best thing? Not to eat junk and love what you do. It’s even better.

Guy:
Yeah, that’s right. I try and fall into that bracket these days. That’s for sure. I’m curious about your lifestyle, Mario. Can you give us a typical morning or a day? How do you embrace all this that you’ve learned?

Dr. Mario:
Well, I have to fight it because I come from a culture, Spanish-French culture, and you have all these things about growing old. And what you have to look at is the markers, what I call the landmark of meaning, And you have to ask yourself, when I was about 9 or 10, how did my grandmother look? She looked real old. She was only 50. You got to be careful with that because you’re telling your body, at 50, this is how I have to look. So you have to be aware of that. They asked children in the fifth grade, Listen to this. How does a 40-year-old person look like? And they go, oh, give me a glass of water, a 40-year-old person. What do you think they’re doing to their landmarks? They’re creating, at 40, this is what you are, decrepit. And so you have to be aware of that, first thing. And then second is that you have to determine and you have to label yourself an outlier. I don’t have the illnesses of my family. I don’t have the epigenetics of my family. They can only be triggered, the probabilities. So I get up at six. And I do a little meditation, watch my emails, and then I go work out. If I don’t work out around 7 or 8, the sirens will beep me and I’ll stay without working out. So I know that the sirens are coming in. So I go. I work out. Then I have lunch. I have a nice lunch. And then I do all the work I need to do, more meditation. Then I take that cardio fit And that’s it, then I have dinner, that’s it. I go for walks, no supplements other than what I told you. And then when the sirens come in, because they’re gonna be there, and the demons come in, I said, well, come on, look, what’s going on? Just allow yourself to be old, it’s okay to be old. You stop again, and you become an outlier again. You have to jump into outliership every time that happens. Because, for example, gerontologists will tell you, the ones who are not up to date, that as you grow older, time is gonna go faster. And they say, well, it’s the chemistry of the brain, and it’s that you’re getting older, you have less time to be around. Nothing like that. It’s a lack of curiosity that stops at 30 for most people. Curiosity elongates time, monotony shrinks time. So what they call the first 30, is your first love, your first broken heart, your first this, and the brain pays a lot of attention to the first, and it elongates your perception of time. After 30, I’ve already been married, I’ve been this, I’ve been that, and you stop being curious, and then time compresses. You ask a centenarian, do you believe that time is going faster now? It’s going the same as it always, because they’re very curious. If I were a centenarian and say, hey guy, what kind of microphone is that? Very, very curious, like children, and that’s dopamine.

Guy:
Yeah, it’s like very wondrous, isn’t it? Yeah, very wondrous. What about connection? What are your thoughts on that in terms of ensuring that we connect with other people and we’re around that companionship as well? Like you spoke of the breaking bread and the family times and things like that. Because family can also generate a lot of emotion if you’re you don’t connect with your parents, or your mother-in-law behaves in a certain way around your kids all the time. There’s so many.

Dr. Mario:
You want to limit it. There are toxic people in the family that you don’t want to write off. What you give them is the milligrams of love that they can handle. If you have a mother-in-law who’s toxic, and you say to yourself, if I see her every day for three hours, am I going to feel guilty, or am I going to feel resentful? I’m going to feel resentful, so I got to cut it. You give the milligrams of love, I can handle her once a week for an hour, and then I give her all of me for an hour, and then I’m gone. What happens is that love is toxic for people who are like that. So if they’re having a good time with you, and all of a sudden, without even being aware, something’s wrong here, I’m feeling too good, and say, hey, guy, you’re looking older, you’ve gained some weight, they do that to disengage you from the joy, and when that happens, you know the milligrams of love are over, and you say, well, maybe I have, I don’t know, I have to look at myself in the mirror, I gotta go, I love you, bye. If you engage, you enter the world of toxicity.

Guy:
Yeah, okay. Just a caveat, my mother-in-law is great. I’m just used to her. You better say that. So just as we start to tie up the podcast, so what about then companionship as opposed to isolation and things like that? Like quite often we could be craving other people or craving love in our life, or is that still a perception?

Dr. Mario:
There certainly creates a perception. For example, if you’re not in a relationship, You don’t have to be lonely. You could long for someone, but you don’t have to be lonely. So examples, monks live alone. They don’t have a lot of relationships. So the differences between aloneness and feeling lonely, and solitude, and feeling good. It’s good to have connections with people. It’s very important. But the most important connection you have is how you treat yourself when nobody’s looking. If you have that, you don’t go look for something missing. You cooperate with someone. Rather than, I’m lonely, so I need somebody. When you’re lonely, someone’s not gonna help you. You have to help yourself. And then when you feel the solitude, then you can go for longing for a relationship, and that’s okay, but not lonesome. That’s the difference.

Guy:
Yeah, that’s huge, isn’t it? What you just said, I think. So we’re not seeking the external to fill an internal need. It has to be filling. Yes. Yeah. We’re filling in our internal need by, like you say, what we do by ourselves. We’re already emanating that. And then we take in that. Yes. Yeah, that’s right.

Dr. Mario:
And that’s a big mistake that we all make. We’re taught that you got to be around people because it’s good. You got to be around selective people, not everybody. You only need just a few people, not a lot. And those people matter. But more than that, it’s actually bad, more than that, because you’re gonna find some who are gonna be toxic.

Guy:
Yeah, yeah, no, I can relate to that. Well, we’ve covered a lot of ground today, Mario. Is there anything that I haven’t brought up or you wanted to cover just to ensure before we wrap up the podcast today?

Dr. Mario:
Well, first, there are a lot of good things happening in Australia. you’re gonna bring up your centenarians significantly in the next 30 years, that your lifespan is high, higher than the United States, it’s almost as high as Japan. So you’re doing something right. And I think if you find more outliers and find more of these subcultures of wellness, or as you say, your black sheep group, then you’re going to do a lot better. And I suggest that you take the test that we have that’s going to be available on my website. And if you want to do the blood work, and you’ll be able to see some things that nobody else has to offer.

Guy:
Yeah, amazing. Can you make sure you send me those links as well? I’ll put them in the show notes. But just say it out loud, where can we send people if they want to do the test?

Dr. Mario:
Biocognitive.com is our website. It’s not going to be up till the end of the month, not till about the 22nd of March. But after that, it’ll be up, and then you can take it, and it’ll give you immediate results on my test, and the other one, you order it, and within three weeks, you get results back.

Guy:
Oh, beautiful. Well, this will be live by then, so I’m sure people… Good, yeah, that’ll be good.

Dr. Mario:
So it’s always a pleasure, and you’re doing a great job, and you look good. Thank you, Mario. You’re welcome. You see, thank you for noticing. That’s right. Oh, also, before I go, please tell your audience to never use no problem. because a brain has 150,000 years of problem means fight or flight. So if I say, hey, you did such a great job, no problem, you kill it. If you say, thank you, oxytocin.

Guy:
Wow, the body’s amazing, isn’t it? It’s just triggered one last question for me for us to ponder on when we leave then. Our word needs to be impeccable, doesn’t it, when we speak?

Dr. Mario:
Yes, very much, because your speech is the reflection of your brain. If you say no problem if you saying like i feel like do you feel or do you feel like something you gotta be direct what i call the effect which you go to my website and see it and that is that you say. For example. Like i talk to him and like he said like you know i talk to him and he told me not to go period clean to the point. That reflects on your brain and it takes you away from the deterioration of the brain because you’re clear and you’re direct. But give people permission to not like what you have to say and then look at it as if they’re rejecting your gift, not you. Wow. And the Oviedo effect, it’s really funny because you have to look at it a little deeper. I don’t know if you saw the film, but it’s Woody Allen’s great. Javier Bardem plays the Spaniard painter. And he goes to these two women and he says, are you American? And they say, oh, yes, we are. One is kind of very naive, but open. The other one’s skeptic. And he says, I’d like to invite you to Oviedo. And one of them says, what’s in Oviedo? And I said, well, there’s a sculptor there that I like very much, and I’d like to invite you. I have my friend’s plane, and I’m a good pilot. And the skeptic says, oh, so we’re going to fly right back? No, no, we’re staying over for the weekend. I’ll show you around the town. We’ll have good food. We’ll have good wine, and we’ll make love. And the skeptic says, and who’s going to be making love? He says, hopefully the three of us. Now that sounds chauvinistic and everything, but he’s saying, this is what I am. If you want this, fine. If you don’t, I’m not going to take it as a rejection. I’m going to take it as a rejection of my gift. And that’s the obviate effect, not just for romance, but for anything. Get to the point. That’s it. And then get permission to not like it, but they’re not liking your gift. It’s not you.

Guy:
Yeah. Wow. Yeah, that’s authenticity right there, isn’t it? That’s right. Authenticity.

Dr. Mario:
Very healthy authenticity.

Guy:
Yeah. Are we ever going to see you back in Australia, Mario? Do you have any plans?

Dr. Mario:
I’m thinking about that because I’d like to go out there and do some some work and and take my my research over there. So I’m looking for some conferences or some things that I could do or maybe do a workshop there sometime like I did a few years ago. It was wonderful. I love the flat white. That was great. I learned about that.

Guy:
Absolutely. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Good on you, Mario. Thank you so much for coming on.

Dr. Mario:
It’s lovely to read. It’s great to listen to the work you do. You do beautiful work. I appreciate that. Thank you so much. You’re welcome.