November 26, 2019 • 36 mins
Deepak Chopra is one of the most profound voices in modern medicine. He’s on the front lines of bringing new ideas, different medicine traditions, and novel ways of healing to the masses. In this final episode of season 2, Chopra sits down with Dr. Oz to ask him about the way he views the marriage of spirituality and medicine around the world.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
M Well indecent wisdom traditions, awareness never leaves you even
in deep sleep. The mind goes blank in deep sleep
the activity of the mind, but awareness never leaves you.
And that is a hint as where we are going
after that as well. M Hi, I'm Dr Oz and
(00:47):
this is the Doctor Oz podcast. So I actually want
to undergrad at Harvard, so nice far from you. And
then I went to medical school at pen because at
the time the university has a man you had a
really innovative program where you could study medicine at the
med school, but you could also study business at the
Wharton Business School, which is its business school. And I
(01:09):
didn't do that to investment portfolio. I didn't have any
money anyway. But I did realize even at that age
that money drove medicine, and if you really wanted to
invest in programs that could change the way we heal people,
you needed to be able to have enough money to
do that. And it has benefited me tremendously to have
gone to business school. First of all, in business school,
you don't just learn about money. You learn about management,
(01:30):
you learn about marketing, and you learn about how to
organize your ideas. The concept of triash was really a
medical idea. You're in a war zone and you only
have a certain amount of blood. Not everyone gets the blood.
There are some people who are just so sick. You know,
you'll use up a lot of resources to save that
one life, but you could use those same resources to
save ten lives. You don't really practice medicine that way
because we're not constrained by our resources. But business you
(01:53):
do practice that way. So I learned a little bit
about how business people triage ideas, get rid of bad ones,
promote the ones, and so I began to use that
technique at the hospital to promote programs that made sense.
For example, the initial mechanical heart devices and heart transplants
that we were doing. We're expensive, right, It's not like
doing a Hernie operation. You're taking really sick people. You're
(02:15):
putting them through a huge procedure. Some of them get
sicker after the procedure. There in the iqu for a
long time, and we would have these knockdown, drag out
debates with people on the finance side of the hospital saying,
my goodness, if we didn't do these transplants on these
hundred people, we would make this much more money as
a hospital, and I'd have to respond by saying what
our mission is the following But by the way, even
(02:35):
though we're losing money saving lives, we're making more money
because more people are coming to this hospital cause we're
a better hospital because we're saving lives. And so those
arguments and not once doctors are usually comfortable making too.
Did you get an empty and a degree in business?
I didn't know that you got an m b A
and And now it's becoming a lot more common as
(02:55):
you know, and a lot of great schools offer the
joint degrees. And I encourage anybody who is aggressively curious
to think about it, because when you go into one profession,
you end up with a very um I wouldn't say, well,
maybe it's right words skewed view of the world as
a doctor. I know exactly how a doctors to think
about the world, but it's not the only way to
(03:16):
think about the world. And it's nice to bend yourself
a little bit to think about the world way a
business person, whoor a lawyer or an engineering might think
about the world. Because medicine ultimately impacts every aspect of
our existence. Helped him back to every where did you
do your intention? So this is a fascinating story as
(03:36):
a dilemma, and I'll share with everybody. I would talk
about it too much, but I had gone through medical school,
uh my first year relatively unscathed. And then I met
my wife, who just captured my heart at least, so
you know, well, and I began dating, and by time
I finished medical school and I was a guy was
everyone said would never get married because I was always
(03:59):
so passionate about what I was learning and what I
was gonna do. But Lisa had you know, we tamed me,
but it actually a way awakened me to what I
should be doing, the bigger ideas that I should be
pursuing in my life. So I was also prepared to
go live in Delaware, which is where I had grown up.
And she said, well, you know she wants to be
an actress. Well there's you know, you can't do that
(04:19):
outside of a major city, and New York is as
an obvious place to to do it. So we, Uh,
you go through this process called the match and as
a resident you as a medical student, you write down
the residencies you want to go to and you list
the one through whatever and she took my match list
and changed it. She raised some of the programs because
(04:40):
she couldn't yes, and so she moved up on my
match list to New York City programs and Columbia University
is a great historical programs, the oldest residency in the country.
I actually went to the there's a there's a board
examination question on this. I don't know why, but they
asked me the oldest college, the oldest medicals school, and
(05:00):
the oldest residency in the in the country. And I
got the question right because I went to all three
of them. Harvard is the oldest college, Penn is the
oldest medical school, and Columbia's the oldest residency program. So
I came in New York and while I was here,
you know, she did act and she learned a lot
about media. You don't remember the vising commercial bloodshot. Those
are my wife's eye so but I never know anything
(05:23):
about it. I had never thought about entertainment, and to
Lisa continuous reminding me, I began to appreciate that by
stepping out of the safe silos that we live in
and the evory tower that you and I grew up in,
you can and you take some hits because people come
after you because they don't like that you're stepping outside
the norm. But you can change a lot more lives
than you could ever imagine that. People want desperately to
(05:45):
hear from professionals who are not hockeing stuff but talking
about things that need to be heard. And so, why
did you choose cardiology cardiac surgery chose me? It's it's
I couldn't have For example, I couldn't have been a
new chronologist the way you are. I don't have the
personality the patients, and new chronologists are network thinkers. I've
(06:07):
always thought you can correct me, but I would. But
people who understand hormones understand how one chemical can do
sixty things and it influenced another chemical together they do
thirty things, and so on and so forth. Ultimately of
things happening in the body, and and you've got to
figure that out and diagnose people who are manifesting a
few of those up from all the options they have.
(06:30):
In heart surgery, it's a lot simpler, the hearts beating
or it's not. It's pretty binary. If the patient dies,
it did not go well, and you have numbers that
tell you as you're heading towards death or getting better,
and so you have a lot of information rapidly coming
at you. And it's not just the signs, not just
the quickly signs of one thinks of the heart. You
actually hear in the operating room the patient's heartbeat and
(06:53):
respiratory rate, and you also hear their oxygen nation. So
it's going beep, that's a aren't going at a good pace.
If it's boo boo boo, boo boo boo, that's a
low auction in because it's lower tone at a fast
heart rate. So you have auditory input, the visual input.
You can smell what's happening around you a lot of times,
(07:14):
and then there's a lot of people all doing the
same thing and yelling things out to you. So if
you like that commotion, that action, and you like a
lot of information coming at you that you have to
very quickly discerned down to a couple of action steps,
then hard church is a good good field for you.
If you don't like that, if you need it to
be a bit more toned down, if you need a
little more time to figure out make the right decisions,
then definitely not be a hard surgeon. But I learned
(07:36):
something very important from a colleague of mine who was
a mentor as well. And he was having a bad
day in the operating room and you know something, I
got cut the wrong way and it was bleeding and
people are running around that everyone's yelling and screaming. And
he looked around, he said, in my time, and everyone,
by the way, is offering your two sets about what
to do. Everyone's got an idea, and he's looked up
and he said, in my time of need, I do
(07:57):
not want to be surrounded by intellectuals. I want to
be surrounded by people of action. You know, what are
you actually gonna do? And that's very much a heart
surgeons actually any surgeons mentality, because ultimately your biggest enemy
is indecision. And that's a pretty good metaphor for life,
because when you're not deciding, you just decided. And it's
(08:18):
very dromantic. What the way you do is the patient
comes in acutely distressed, you act fast, and then the
results of dramatic. It's a slap in the face. When
it doesn't go well, you can't hide from the pain.
You have to go tell the family exactly what went down.
Obviously it didn't go the way you planned it, or
you with be having that conversation. Um, thankfully, it's you know,
(08:41):
it's been remarkable to see the advances in the field,
but especially early in my career. You're doing operations when
there was mortality rate. We think about that one in
four people would would not survive a lot of these operations.
That's that's hard as a person to take home with you.
And I thought that was difficult that I was talking
to a guy named see Walton lily High. I don't
(09:02):
remember that name, iconic heart surging at the dawn the field,
and he was doing heart surgery in Minneapolis, which is
where a lot of this started, only because the inventors
were sitting in their cold garages because they couldn't go
outside because it was so cold inventing things. And so
these guys built an incredibly uh advanced mechanism of taking
care of people, kids in particular, who had congenital heart defects.
(09:25):
And See Walton Lily High would hook mother's up to
their children, and the mother would become the heart lung machine.
The mother's blood and her heart pumping would once again
pump blood through the child's vessel so they could stop
the kid's heart and then rapidly fixed the hole in
the heart or you know, whatever the comment condition was
that was causing the child be blue or or what
(09:46):
you know, the many pathologies any case. I was telling him,
lamenting to him the fact that I was doing heart
transplants and mechanical hearts and they were high risk cases.
And he said, I was the only person who did
an operation where there was a two mortality because I
could actually lose the child and the mother the same
operation I took, you know, And I thought to myself,
(10:07):
that's really heavy. And then he said, in reality, the
biggest challenge he ever faced in his life. And just
think about this. This is in the mid fifties. You're
doing things that people don't think are possible, and sometimes
they don't think they should be done. And you're operating
a child who's going to die from a heart defect,
and you fail, and it's twelve noon and you just
pronounced a kid dead. And he said, you'd have to
(10:29):
go out and talk to that mother and delitary emotions
and the pain that you'd never see your child again,
And then you'd walk right next door and take a
child out of another mother's hands, a mother handing her
child to you, so you could save that child's life,
and you have to go back into the operating room
and do it again, knowing what had just happened that morning.
(10:51):
He said, it took remarkable, unbelievable emotional resilience just to
be able to believe you could do it. And that
actually is what separated those giants. It wasn't that they
were brave enough to go forward, is that they were
strong enough to keep going forward. There's lots more when
we come back. So you're you're still appracticing dirty excursion, right,
(11:23):
A prepperaid yesterday. Actually, I had a friend of mine,
how only it is to opera one day a week.
I go to the offering room and all kinds of
cardiac surgery. I do all the different cases my specialties. Valves. Actually,
I invented the devices that we used to fix the
mitral valve from the groin UH. And there's a technology
that we commercialize that does the same thing for the
(11:45):
aortic valved, the heart valve that that regulates blood coming
out of the heart, and those two technologies now have
been proven to save lives. The one that that when
I'm that I invented actually reduces not just the chance
of dying by in some conditions, but it cuts the
costs in half as well. So that's that's a unique combination.
Usually valular heart surgeries your specialty. But you also do transplants, right,
(12:10):
transplantster a young man's game. I don't do those as
much anymore. When I was young, I did all of them.
I loved it because you didn't come into three I
think about it. I mean, start transplanting. The most important
thing you need is a donor. So waiting for somebody
to die, yeah, I mean literally, people in the heart
transplant list when the weather gets rainy and I see they,
you know, they're happy because they're praying. Someone gets anative
book about that once about somebody who's on a waiting
(12:33):
list for heart transplants, and he would watch construction workers
and hope that one of them would have an accidents.
New York City when when I was starting in practice, um,
and this is you know, the nineties were there were
two thousand homicides a year in New York City. Now
they're four hundred and homicides usually are young, healthy people
who are shot in the head so their body is
(12:56):
completely normal, So you could take their hearts and their
kidneys and livers, everything else, but their hearts in particularly,
you needed and and and say people's lives. But because
of that, it was you know, people get shot at
crazy hours and you you have to get your heart
out quickly. So it's the middle of the night case.
The bypass operations sort of the bread and butter of
most heart surgeons. And that's a problem that more than
(13:17):
any other, drove me into television because I haven't questioned
to ask you since I have this opportunity right now,
you do value heart surgery. You've done transplants? Are you
doing by us? Is also a coulinary busy stands. I
don't do stands. Stands are done generally by cardiologists. M
So if the cardiologists can't open the vessel, then we
(13:39):
do surgery. But there is a big issue here the
back because most of the bypass operations we do, I
believe could be avoided through lifestyle change, and we're going
to come to that in a moment. But it is
still culinary artual disease still the number one killer of
our culture right number one by far, It's number one
(13:59):
operation that's done by heart surgeons. Number one cardiac procedure.
It's a it's a massive, massive problems. So here's a
question that I ask cardiologists and sometimes cardiac surgeons, and
they sometimes don't like to answer this question. You just
brought it up. But from what I've read, if a
person has stable angina, then a bypass corner, the arty bypass,
(14:26):
or a stent at most improves mortality by say two
some people say one percent if you have stable angina.
On the other hand, if you have unstable anginet, it
could save your life. But from what again I've read,
and that's why I'm asking you this question, is most
of the bypass has done in this country, which could
(14:48):
add up to a few hundred billion dollars a couple
of hundred billion dollars a year, are actually done for
stable angina, which doesn't really change the mortality. Is that true?
It's not true the way you said it, But I
think I know what you're getting at. Stable engine is
not the real issue because pain is not the cree issue.
(15:08):
It's what's causing the pain. So if your pain is
caused by a blockage of a major blood vessel, that
if it were to close, you would die. Then stable
engine is a god bless process because it's a blessing
is warning you that you have a life threatening problem,
so get it fixed. Most people with stable engine that
don't have that, they just have blockages of blood vessels
(15:33):
that through lifestyle and medical therapy could probably be managed
without more aggressive treatment. And that's the reason that a
lot of people say we overdo procedures because if you
had a if you deep actually a head a sixty
percent blockage of your major artery, you probably wouldn't want
to have an operation until you tried, really tried a
plant based lifestyle, physical activity of the nature that you'd
(15:55):
be prescribed at the appropriate medications if you're candidate for them,
and most of time you'll be okay. Because we can't
prove there's a mortality benefit of operating on you. It's
not even one or two percent. There's just no mortality benefit.
There's a quality of life benefit. Maybe if the pain
is bad and is hindering your ability to have, you know,
sexual relations with the women you love and um then
(16:15):
be able to out and play with your friends and family.
You know there's some quality issues there, but you don't
actually live longer in those settings. The key is whether
or not the arteries that are that are that are
at risk or life threatening or not. And here's the
thing that might shock the listeners. Probably half the people
who have heart blocking just don't really have chest pain,
the typical chest pain that we talk about. And yet
(16:38):
and a lot of them end up with the US yeah,
and and but there are also many who die who
never had a symptom until they actually had their massive
heart attack, which is why it's very hard to test
the safety you need to live. The safety The kinds
of things that you've espoused and others have gotten behind,
and I talked about in the show all the time
are things you gotta do anyway, because they're better for
(16:58):
all the parts of your body. But there's a side benefit,
which is your heart is that less risk and your
brain as well of having an issue. If you're diabetic,
the number one risk of death is your heart. That's
what diabetics die from. And unfortunately diabets often don't feel
their hearts. They kind of because they have in the
(17:19):
nature of the nerves of the heart and diabetic means
they don't feel the pain as much, so they're going
through life thinking they're okay untill they drop dead. And
so it's true that there's probably operations done for conditions
that aren't they don't require it. But then there's also
the nihilism that I think many of the medical community
have about the real desire of people to take action.
(17:39):
That's what shocked me the most when I started the
show business my leventh season now, so it's you know,
I've been doing this wrong. I did the Oprah Show
for six seven years before that, so it's quite a
long time that I've witnessed the transition. I mean, I
remember doing my first shows this is back in two
thousand nine and using the word quinoa and no one
could spell it right. So we take it for granted.
(18:00):
No one, No one ate kale Now Greek orgert. I'm
positive that it was. It was probably two percent out
of the market when I started, And we've talked about
it a lot because I loved Greek. It's Turkish yogurt really,
by the way, kidding, But these become issues that people
are they didn't know what they didn't know, and that
was the big misperception that I think afflicted America in
(18:20):
the second half of the twentieth century because we didn't
know what we didn't know, and medicine didn't give it
to us. You know, we didn't get the message more
questions after the break. So you know, when I was
(18:43):
a resident, it was the same time that dian Or
Nish was at Harvard. He was beginning to talk about
reversal of heart disease. It wasn't kind of meme then.
I personally know through the US have seen people with
significant colinary artrac disease who have actually realist some of it,
(19:08):
and not only have the symptoms gone away, but the
adogram shows that the arteries are not as clogged as
they were before. So do you buy into the rehistle
of heart disease? Absolutely? And Dean Orness program, which is
Medicare supported program, they pay for it. Actually, that's how
concrete the data is is remarkable. I mean, I don't
(19:29):
understand why everybody who has at risk for heart disease
is not taking his program. It reduces the chance of
going back to the hospital if you've had a problem,
if you had a central bypass, you don't have to
go as often, you don't have more complications, you have
less challenges to living in normal life, you avoid problems
with other parts of your body. And it's not rocket science.
It's again a primarily plant based die. He's very careful
(19:52):
about some of the fats and the sources of those fats.
Um having to grips with the emotional issues that often
are around you. And that was the thing I always
used to strike me measing heart transplants, people who actually,
when your heart rejects you, when your heart fails you,
you feel abandoned. And Dean was one of the first
people to really pick up on that and say we
(20:12):
got to deal with those issues as well. Whatever anger
hostility is driving you, because it's it's not being mad
at someone that causes the problem. It's wishing they would die.
It's the hostility that's the problem. Not feeling like your
rain drop falling into the ocean of humanity is a
really big issue that if you only treat that with
the medication for cholesterol, you're missing the boat. So I
(20:33):
want our listeners to take note of what you just said.
It's hostility. Hostility is a rispective for and for premature
death as well. From whatever read it's not anger, it's hostility.
Anger could be the release of energy or an emotion,
but hostilities this desire to get even for vengeance, and
(20:58):
that eats your heart of and anger is actually, as
you mentioned, cathartic for a lot of folks, which is
why when someone says, you know, calm down to an
angry person, it's the worst thing to say, but you
wouldn't act. That's why we take this very simplistic perspection
um and perspective on our emotions. So depressed people, not
(21:18):
that you want to be depressed, but people who are
depressed who have depression for a good reason because their
life is not good, and then they change their life
because they don't want to be depressed about it anymore.
That's a good thing, right. People. Some of the most
creative people argue they do their best work when they're
depressed because they want to alter that reality. And now,
of course, if you have a chemical cause for it,
that's the whole different ball game. But there are a
(21:39):
lot of people in that category who would benefit from
just changing the world because it needs to be changed
for them. If you're angry about something, deal with it.
This this season on the show, one big theme that
I'm going to focus on is the power of one
it's the eleventh season. I mentioned I was born on
the eleventh, but I just focused on number one, which
is the number that I've always enjorged just looking at.
And it's not just that, you know a selfish desire
to be number one, and we all aspire to that
(22:02):
number in a way, but we realize it's just a path. Right.
We want to be we have we we want to
any part of a community, but yet we want to
be special. And those two feelings go opposite to each
other because to be with the community, you want to
be like everybody else, but to be yourself you want
to be a little unique. Well, I think you need
to do both. That. You have an obligation and responsibility
(22:23):
to use the power you're given to be the person
you can be so that you can make the community
work better. And I think part of the debate that
we're seeing happening in America, especially in politics, is a
result of people not believing they do have that power.
They have much more control over the world around them
than they would ever imagine, and if they don't use
that power, things begin to fall apart. And the best
(22:45):
way to use your powers tell the truth. Tell the
truth about the things that are happening to you. Tell
yourself the truth first. That's the biggest person you lie
to is yourself. And then start telling the truth to
people around you. And that's what's always allowed our species
to thrive. We have a unique ability to can pleasely
disagree with each other, but that particularly in a way
that you respect the view. And then once in a while,
(23:06):
not usually, but once in a while, you change your mind,
which is why it's supposed to be. Since I was
trained during that whole period. Now I've realized that, and
I'm asking you this question. The risk factors for coronary
artigies or stroke are also the risk factors for diabetes
(23:28):
type two risk factors ultimately even for cancer and and
autoimmune illness, propensity to infection. It seems like they're all
connected to inflammation in the body at some level, and
too from again from what I've read, there's a low
(23:50):
grade anxiety, depression, inflammation in all these conditions that precedes
even Alzheimer's. It's it's actually we might be by focusing
on different illnesses. This is cancer. This is a minimalist
than doing this whole diagnostic thing that we were trained in.
We forget actually that you might have predisposition to certain diseases,
(24:15):
but epigenetically the disease that you get is actually has
the same common rispect as exactly the same common rispect.
Is that true powerful insight. And I think it's beautiful
stated by you. It's it's easier to teach medical students
the codified system when you break everything down to its
(24:36):
silo and you teach them nephrology and then neurology and
cardiology and whatever alogy you want to learn. A real
artism pulls it all together, like teaching an artist how
to use individual colors, but you gotta put the colors
together at some point. You can't make a painting. You
can't take care of people the way they need to
be taken care of. And the people that I respect
(24:56):
the most medicine were the generalists who could do just that.
And you articulated beautifully what the journalists would begin to find.
And I think we've proven that, which is the fundamental
role of inflammation, which we want in a way, right,
we want inflammation to protect ourselves. Of course, information your
life saves your life, so like most things. There's a
great book written by Frank called Survival of the sickest.
(25:19):
It's a great story of humans and how we evolve
to have certain illnesses that were tolerated because the side
benefits were good. I mean, everyone knows about sickle cell anemia,
which we had the first cured patients of. By the way,
these crisper just saw they were able to read re
engineer red cells, so they go back the way they
are in in utero. Uh, a different kind of red
(25:42):
cell that allows you not just to jump past the
sickle cell problem, but there's other problems that that many
folks know about that actually have survival benefits, including signal
malaria resistance. Sickle cell is a classic one. But hemochromatosis,
which is the iron storage disease, well, it's a weird
problem to have it to store iron in your liver,
and when you get older sometimes you can cause liver failure.
(26:04):
But if you have that problem of storing iron in
your white cells in particular, you cannot get the plague.
The bubonic plague couldn't affect you, which means when the
quarter of Europe was being slaughtered by the Black plague,
you couldn't your family couldn't get it. I means you
survived they didn't, So there's much more of you now,
you know, even visually, like both of us have a
(26:26):
reacent amount of hair in our arms, right my my
My friends always joked that I've got hair in my blood.
I'm Turkish. Now why do I have hair my my
my arms? Why do some people have hair and others don't. Well,
we think it's because people with hair grew up around mosquitoes,
and where there's mosquitoes, there's malaria. And my dad, who
had malaria, could test what it was, how miserable it
(26:48):
was to have malaria. But mosquitoes don't like hair, and
we can sense mosquitoes when they touch our hair before
they sting us. So it makes people with hair a
bit more resilient. So if you've got a lot of
hair in your family, you probably were near a river,
basin or a body of water that had a lot
of mosquitoes on it. You know, their Eskimos don't have
a lot of hair because in the in the Arctic circle,
(27:10):
you're not going to be stung that often. They can't
get through the you know, whatever tide you're wearing. But
people who grew up in Eastern Mediterranean that by almost
for sure had mosquitoes in their lives. So that's just
an example. I mean, that's that's a great example that
Actually I want to share a story since you mentioned
Mediterranean areas. You know, when I was intern in New
(27:31):
Jersey at a community hospital nineteen seventy, um married, my
wife was pregnant, and my chief of medicine called me
one day and he said, um, your wife has tyle
a semia. And I said, if she had tall semia,
(27:52):
she shouldn't be alive. And she's pregnant and she's you know,
I've seen a lot of tallisemia in India and kids
and so on. He said, come look at the red cells.
So you know, I went to his lab and sure enough,
the cells didn't look normal. So at that time, there
was no Google, nothing that I came to the New
(28:13):
York Library. I spent the whole weekend in the library
looking for tallisemia trade And you know, now, of course
we do hemoglobin testing. You know, it's easy to diagnose,
but then it was not so easy to diagnose even
then though there was hemoglobin electrophoresis. But this is what
(28:37):
I found out, which was amazing. What I found was
that there was tall simia trade along the exact route
that the armies of Alexander the Great took um in
three d and twenty three BC from Macedonia, all through Greece,
(29:00):
all through Afghanistan to the exact village in Multan which
is now part of Pakistan, where my wife's ancestors come
from from her parents come from Ultan along the exact route.
So you know, I said to my my wife, you know,
some ancestor was growing around. You know, either it was
(29:20):
a rape but which is frequently what conquerors do, or
it was a one night stand or whatever. But we
have evidence right here. And you know my kids have
tall semi trade to now. But you know, your genes
are actually the history of human kind. Everything from what
happened as an epidemic and malaria and by cycle cell came.
(29:44):
What is the protective value of as you just said,
you know, iron storage, and you can now look at
jeans and track the history of our culture and of
our civilization. Well, one thing I love about what's happening
in the world now is we're getting a new found
amongst scientists, especially new found appreciation of our legacy, of
(30:07):
our of our history. I was in a place called Gebee,
which is it means pot belly hill in Turkish. It's
the oldest civilization we know of, twelve thousand years old.
They had temples there, these big tea temples about seventeen
eighteen feet tall. They were worshiping ancestors probably, But here's
why this is important. This is three times older than
(30:28):
the Pyramids, four times older and stone Hedge. I mean,
it's a long time ago. And just to make make
the intrigue deeper, the civilization fell apart at some time
for reasons we don't know. But Abraham met Sarah there
same place, and hodd On It's in the Bible. So
this place somehow kept coming back. Something is in the
water there. They caught everyone's attention. But here's why it's critical.
(30:50):
We always thought I always taught Most of the guys
people listening now probably feel the same way that the
reason we started having religion was because we were able
to domesticate animals and get agricultural crops going, and then
we had a little free time. And with free time, well,
you know, a couple of people can take some extra
effort and study religion and the stars and creat stories.
(31:11):
Always in the desert, seeing right. However, in Quebeca Tepe,
they had a religion, but they didn't have any free
time because they were not agricultural. These people were hunters.
And what happened is that they began to worship their
ancestors or gods, and they began to realize that they
(31:32):
could talk to the deities, they could begin to control
the world around them, and they could begin to hunt
in packs, and they could begin to take them those animals,
not kill them, but do mesticate them, and take some
of those wild wheat crops to iron horn wheat, the
oldest wheat and we know of is in that area,
and begin to domesticated. And so it wasn't that they
started their religions because they were agricultural and had free time.
(31:53):
They became agricultural and got free time because of their religion.
And so the role of believing in something beyond yourself,
the role of consciousness comes in the question. And they
were probably I don't know this for sure, but they're
the archaeologists that I've been working with there. Some of
them believed that they were probably doing peyote or other
types of hallucinogens and de shamans in order to transcend
(32:17):
what they could see and get a vision to what
could be. And that's pretty cool that it's that process
that allowed us to become agricultural and prosper in the
way we have, which means you can't throw it away
so easily. So when people ignore the learned behaviors, the
learned behaviors that they've appreciated from watching other humans for
(32:39):
twelve thousand years, there's a risk to that. You know,
you mentioned Abraham right now, and you mentioned religion, and
of course today when we look at the world, religion
is Quarrelsome divisive genetics here could help us a little bit,
because if you examine the genes right now of somebody
(33:00):
like in Osama bin Laden and Abraham, the father of
both the Jews and the Arabs, you probably won't be
able to tell the difference between the genes. They're both
semis rightly. And and yet we're fighting over which version
(33:21):
of transcendence is ideologically accurate or art because all religious
experiences just that transcendence, the emergence of platonic truth, love, compassion, joy, equanimity,
and the loss of the fear of death. Because the
transcendent is not in time the rest is all theory,
(33:42):
you know, it's all ideology and philosophy and theology. The
religious experience is common to every religion and every gene
expression of every human that has ever So let me
if I can't ask you some advice and thoughts that
might be valuable for a lot of the listeners. If
(34:03):
that common platonic, blissful experience that it seems to transcend
all religions is there, and yet people still feel the
need to have a codification of that a series of
rules and rules, again essentially watching people who seem to
succeed in life and writing it down. You know that
(34:24):
guy finished school, got a job, got married, to care
of his family, lived long, and seemed to be happy.
I want to do that, which, by the way, is
but we now statistically seems to result in people living longer,
doing better, feeling that they did the right thing. And
that's in a lot of different religions expressed in very
different ways because people those rules are different in different
(34:45):
tribes and different parts of the world. Uh not. Sometimes
you know, how you carry out your social relevant for
the culture and the period and the age and so,
but we become intolerant of other people's rules because our
rules were better in our culture. But this based on
the same experience the rules, and you know, self righteous
morality ultimately ends up being jealousy with the halo, you know, right,
(35:09):
But morality is a byproduct of the experience. It's not
a quotified set of rules like the tell ten Commandments.
You know how many people follow the Ten Commandments or
how many people say it turned the other cheek, but
you know that comes only from the experience. It cannot
come from a codified set of rules. What happens is
(35:30):
the person, whether it's Jesus or Mohammad or whoever, or
Abraham or Moses, has an experience, tries to explain it
to the people who haven't had the experience, and instead
of wanting the experience, that by into the rules and regulations,
which are a byproduct of the experience, and that creates
(35:51):
problems ultimately, because it's not easy to follow those rules
just because you want to follow the rules. It has
to come from an experience where you feel inseparability and
love and compassion. As a result of the transcender h
M Well indecent wisdom traditions, awareness never leaves you even
in deep sleep. The mind goes blank in deep sleep
the activity of the mind, but awareness never leaves you.
And that is a hint as where we are going
after that as well. M Hi, I'm Dr Oz and
(00:47):
this is the Doctor Oz podcast. So I actually want
to undergrad at Harvard, so nice far from you. And
then I went to medical school at pen because at
the time the university has a man you had a
really innovative program where you could study medicine at the
med school, but you could also study business at the
Wharton Business School, which is its business school. And I
(01:09):
didn't do that to investment portfolio. I didn't have any
money anyway. But I did realize even at that age
that money drove medicine, and if you really wanted to
invest in programs that could change the way we heal people,
you needed to be able to have enough money to
do that. And it has benefited me tremendously to have
gone to business school. First of all, in business school,
you don't just learn about money. You learn about management,
(01:30):
you learn about marketing, and you learn about how to
organize your ideas. The concept of triash was really a
medical idea. You're in a war zone and you only
have a certain amount of blood. Not everyone gets the blood.
There are some people who are just so sick. You know,
you'll use up a lot of resources to save that
one life, but you could use those same resources to
save ten lives. You don't really practice medicine that way
because we're not constrained by our resources. But business you
(01:53):
do practice that way. So I learned a little bit
about how business people triage ideas, get rid of bad ones,
promote the ones, and so I began to use that
technique at the hospital to promote programs that made sense.
For example, the initial mechanical heart devices and heart transplants
that we were doing. We're expensive, right, It's not like
doing a Hernie operation. You're taking really sick people. You're
(02:15):
putting them through a huge procedure. Some of them get
sicker after the procedure. There in the iqu for a
long time, and we would have these knockdown, drag out
debates with people on the finance side of the hospital saying,
my goodness, if we didn't do these transplants on these
hundred people, we would make this much more money as
a hospital, and I'd have to respond by saying what
our mission is the following But by the way, even
(02:35):
though we're losing money saving lives, we're making more money
because more people are coming to this hospital cause we're
a better hospital because we're saving lives. And so those
arguments and not once doctors are usually comfortable making too.
Did you get an empty and a degree in business?
I didn't know that you got an m b A
and And now it's becoming a lot more common as
(02:55):
you know, and a lot of great schools offer the
joint degrees. And I encourage anybody who is aggressively curious
to think about it, because when you go into one profession,
you end up with a very um I wouldn't say, well,
maybe it's right words skewed view of the world as
a doctor. I know exactly how a doctors to think
about the world, but it's not the only way to
(03:16):
think about the world. And it's nice to bend yourself
a little bit to think about the world way a
business person, whoor a lawyer or an engineering might think
about the world. Because medicine ultimately impacts every aspect of
our existence. Helped him back to every where did you
do your intention? So this is a fascinating story as
(03:36):
a dilemma, and I'll share with everybody. I would talk
about it too much, but I had gone through medical school,
uh my first year relatively unscathed. And then I met
my wife, who just captured my heart at least, so
you know, well, and I began dating, and by time
I finished medical school and I was a guy was
everyone said would never get married because I was always
(03:59):
so passionate about what I was learning and what I
was gonna do. But Lisa had you know, we tamed me,
but it actually a way awakened me to what I
should be doing, the bigger ideas that I should be
pursuing in my life. So I was also prepared to
go live in Delaware, which is where I had grown up.
And she said, well, you know she wants to be
an actress. Well there's you know, you can't do that
(04:19):
outside of a major city, and New York is as
an obvious place to to do it. So we, Uh,
you go through this process called the match and as
a resident you as a medical student, you write down
the residencies you want to go to and you list
the one through whatever and she took my match list
and changed it. She raised some of the programs because
(04:40):
she couldn't yes, and so she moved up on my
match list to New York City programs and Columbia University
is a great historical programs, the oldest residency in the country.
I actually went to the there's a there's a board
examination question on this. I don't know why, but they
asked me the oldest college, the oldest medicals school, and
(05:00):
the oldest residency in the in the country. And I
got the question right because I went to all three
of them. Harvard is the oldest college, Penn is the
oldest medical school, and Columbia's the oldest residency program. So
I came in New York and while I was here,
you know, she did act and she learned a lot
about media. You don't remember the vising commercial bloodshot. Those
are my wife's eye so but I never know anything
(05:23):
about it. I had never thought about entertainment, and to
Lisa continuous reminding me, I began to appreciate that by
stepping out of the safe silos that we live in
and the evory tower that you and I grew up in,
you can and you take some hits because people come
after you because they don't like that you're stepping outside
the norm. But you can change a lot more lives
than you could ever imagine that. People want desperately to
(05:45):
hear from professionals who are not hockeing stuff but talking
about things that need to be heard. And so, why
did you choose cardiology cardiac surgery chose me? It's it's
I couldn't have For example, I couldn't have been a
new chronologist the way you are. I don't have the
personality the patients, and new chronologists are network thinkers. I've
(06:07):
always thought you can correct me, but I would. But
people who understand hormones understand how one chemical can do
sixty things and it influenced another chemical together they do
thirty things, and so on and so forth. Ultimately of
things happening in the body, and and you've got to
figure that out and diagnose people who are manifesting a
few of those up from all the options they have.
(06:30):
In heart surgery, it's a lot simpler, the hearts beating
or it's not. It's pretty binary. If the patient dies,
it did not go well, and you have numbers that
tell you as you're heading towards death or getting better,
and so you have a lot of information rapidly coming
at you. And it's not just the signs, not just
the quickly signs of one thinks of the heart. You
actually hear in the operating room the patient's heartbeat and
(06:53):
respiratory rate, and you also hear their oxygen nation. So
it's going beep, that's a aren't going at a good pace.
If it's boo boo boo, boo boo boo, that's a
low auction in because it's lower tone at a fast
heart rate. So you have auditory input, the visual input.
You can smell what's happening around you a lot of times,
(07:14):
and then there's a lot of people all doing the
same thing and yelling things out to you. So if
you like that commotion, that action, and you like a
lot of information coming at you that you have to
very quickly discerned down to a couple of action steps,
then hard church is a good good field for you.
If you don't like that, if you need it to
be a bit more toned down, if you need a
little more time to figure out make the right decisions,
then definitely not be a hard surgeon. But I learned
(07:36):
something very important from a colleague of mine who was
a mentor as well. And he was having a bad
day in the operating room and you know something, I
got cut the wrong way and it was bleeding and
people are running around that everyone's yelling and screaming. And
he looked around, he said, in my time, and everyone,
by the way, is offering your two sets about what
to do. Everyone's got an idea, and he's looked up
and he said, in my time of need, I do
(07:57):
not want to be surrounded by intellectuals. I want to
be surrounded by people of action. You know, what are
you actually gonna do? And that's very much a heart
surgeons actually any surgeons mentality, because ultimately your biggest enemy
is indecision. And that's a pretty good metaphor for life,
because when you're not deciding, you just decided. And it's
(08:18):
very dromantic. What the way you do is the patient
comes in acutely distressed, you act fast, and then the
results of dramatic. It's a slap in the face. When
it doesn't go well, you can't hide from the pain.
You have to go tell the family exactly what went down.
Obviously it didn't go the way you planned it, or
you with be having that conversation. Um, thankfully, it's you know,
(08:41):
it's been remarkable to see the advances in the field,
but especially early in my career. You're doing operations when
there was mortality rate. We think about that one in
four people would would not survive a lot of these operations.
That's that's hard as a person to take home with you.
And I thought that was difficult that I was talking
to a guy named see Walton lily High. I don't
(09:02):
remember that name, iconic heart surging at the dawn the field,
and he was doing heart surgery in Minneapolis, which is
where a lot of this started, only because the inventors
were sitting in their cold garages because they couldn't go
outside because it was so cold inventing things. And so
these guys built an incredibly uh advanced mechanism of taking
care of people, kids in particular, who had congenital heart defects.
(09:25):
And See Walton Lily High would hook mother's up to
their children, and the mother would become the heart lung machine.
The mother's blood and her heart pumping would once again
pump blood through the child's vessel so they could stop
the kid's heart and then rapidly fixed the hole in
the heart or you know, whatever the comment condition was
that was causing the child be blue or or what
(09:46):
you know, the many pathologies any case. I was telling him,
lamenting to him the fact that I was doing heart
transplants and mechanical hearts and they were high risk cases.
And he said, I was the only person who did
an operation where there was a two mortality because I
could actually lose the child and the mother the same
operation I took, you know, And I thought to myself,
(10:07):
that's really heavy. And then he said, in reality, the
biggest challenge he ever faced in his life. And just
think about this. This is in the mid fifties. You're
doing things that people don't think are possible, and sometimes
they don't think they should be done. And you're operating
a child who's going to die from a heart defect,
and you fail, and it's twelve noon and you just
pronounced a kid dead. And he said, you'd have to
(10:29):
go out and talk to that mother and delitary emotions
and the pain that you'd never see your child again,
And then you'd walk right next door and take a
child out of another mother's hands, a mother handing her
child to you, so you could save that child's life,
and you have to go back into the operating room
and do it again, knowing what had just happened that morning.
(10:51):
He said, it took remarkable, unbelievable emotional resilience just to
be able to believe you could do it. And that
actually is what separated those giants. It wasn't that they
were brave enough to go forward, is that they were
strong enough to keep going forward. There's lots more when
we come back. So you're you're still appracticing dirty excursion, right,
(11:23):
A prepperaid yesterday. Actually, I had a friend of mine,
how only it is to opera one day a week.
I go to the offering room and all kinds of
cardiac surgery. I do all the different cases my specialties. Valves. Actually,
I invented the devices that we used to fix the
mitral valve from the groin UH. And there's a technology
that we commercialize that does the same thing for the
(11:45):
aortic valved, the heart valve that that regulates blood coming
out of the heart, and those two technologies now have
been proven to save lives. The one that that when
I'm that I invented actually reduces not just the chance
of dying by in some conditions, but it cuts the
costs in half as well. So that's that's a unique combination.
Usually valular heart surgeries your specialty. But you also do transplants, right,
(12:10):
transplantster a young man's game. I don't do those as
much anymore. When I was young, I did all of them.
I loved it because you didn't come into three I
think about it. I mean, start transplanting. The most important
thing you need is a donor. So waiting for somebody
to die, yeah, I mean literally, people in the heart
transplant list when the weather gets rainy and I see they,
you know, they're happy because they're praying. Someone gets anative
book about that once about somebody who's on a waiting
(12:33):
list for heart transplants, and he would watch construction workers
and hope that one of them would have an accidents.
New York City when when I was starting in practice, um,
and this is you know, the nineties were there were
two thousand homicides a year in New York City. Now
they're four hundred and homicides usually are young, healthy people
who are shot in the head so their body is
(12:56):
completely normal, So you could take their hearts and their
kidneys and livers, everything else, but their hearts in particularly,
you needed and and and say people's lives. But because
of that, it was you know, people get shot at
crazy hours and you you have to get your heart
out quickly. So it's the middle of the night case.
The bypass operations sort of the bread and butter of
most heart surgeons. And that's a problem that more than
(13:17):
any other, drove me into television because I haven't questioned
to ask you since I have this opportunity right now,
you do value heart surgery. You've done transplants? Are you
doing by us? Is also a coulinary busy stands. I
don't do stands. Stands are done generally by cardiologists. M
So if the cardiologists can't open the vessel, then we
(13:39):
do surgery. But there is a big issue here the
back because most of the bypass operations we do, I
believe could be avoided through lifestyle change, and we're going
to come to that in a moment. But it is
still culinary artual disease still the number one killer of
our culture right number one by far, It's number one
(13:59):
operation that's done by heart surgeons. Number one cardiac procedure.
It's a it's a massive, massive problems. So here's a
question that I ask cardiologists and sometimes cardiac surgeons, and
they sometimes don't like to answer this question. You just
brought it up. But from what I've read, if a
person has stable angina, then a bypass corner, the arty bypass,
(14:26):
or a stent at most improves mortality by say two
some people say one percent if you have stable angina.
On the other hand, if you have unstable anginet, it
could save your life. But from what again I've read,
and that's why I'm asking you this question, is most
of the bypass has done in this country, which could
(14:48):
add up to a few hundred billion dollars a couple
of hundred billion dollars a year, are actually done for
stable angina, which doesn't really change the mortality. Is that true?
It's not true the way you said it, But I
think I know what you're getting at. Stable engine is
not the real issue because pain is not the cree issue.
(15:08):
It's what's causing the pain. So if your pain is
caused by a blockage of a major blood vessel, that
if it were to close, you would die. Then stable
engine is a god bless process because it's a blessing
is warning you that you have a life threatening problem,
so get it fixed. Most people with stable engine that
don't have that, they just have blockages of blood vessels
(15:33):
that through lifestyle and medical therapy could probably be managed
without more aggressive treatment. And that's the reason that a
lot of people say we overdo procedures because if you
had a if you deep actually a head a sixty
percent blockage of your major artery, you probably wouldn't want
to have an operation until you tried, really tried a
plant based lifestyle, physical activity of the nature that you'd
(15:55):
be prescribed at the appropriate medications if you're candidate for them,
and most of time you'll be okay. Because we can't
prove there's a mortality benefit of operating on you. It's
not even one or two percent. There's just no mortality benefit.
There's a quality of life benefit. Maybe if the pain
is bad and is hindering your ability to have, you know,
sexual relations with the women you love and um then
(16:15):
be able to out and play with your friends and family.
You know there's some quality issues there, but you don't
actually live longer in those settings. The key is whether
or not the arteries that are that are that are
at risk or life threatening or not. And here's the
thing that might shock the listeners. Probably half the people
who have heart blocking just don't really have chest pain,
the typical chest pain that we talk about. And yet
(16:38):
and a lot of them end up with the US yeah,
and and but there are also many who die who
never had a symptom until they actually had their massive
heart attack, which is why it's very hard to test
the safety you need to live. The safety The kinds
of things that you've espoused and others have gotten behind,
and I talked about in the show all the time
are things you gotta do anyway, because they're better for
(16:58):
all the parts of your body. But there's a side benefit,
which is your heart is that less risk and your
brain as well of having an issue. If you're diabetic,
the number one risk of death is your heart. That's
what diabetics die from. And unfortunately diabets often don't feel
their hearts. They kind of because they have in the
(17:19):
nature of the nerves of the heart and diabetic means
they don't feel the pain as much, so they're going
through life thinking they're okay untill they drop dead. And
so it's true that there's probably operations done for conditions
that aren't they don't require it. But then there's also
the nihilism that I think many of the medical community
have about the real desire of people to take action.
(17:39):
That's what shocked me the most when I started the
show business my leventh season now, so it's you know,
I've been doing this wrong. I did the Oprah Show
for six seven years before that, so it's quite a
long time that I've witnessed the transition. I mean, I
remember doing my first shows this is back in two
thousand nine and using the word quinoa and no one
could spell it right. So we take it for granted.
(18:00):
No one, No one ate kale Now Greek orgert. I'm
positive that it was. It was probably two percent out
of the market when I started, And we've talked about
it a lot because I loved Greek. It's Turkish yogurt really,
by the way, kidding, But these become issues that people
are they didn't know what they didn't know, and that
was the big misperception that I think afflicted America in
(18:20):
the second half of the twentieth century because we didn't
know what we didn't know, and medicine didn't give it
to us. You know, we didn't get the message more
questions after the break. So you know, when I was
(18:43):
a resident, it was the same time that dian Or
Nish was at Harvard. He was beginning to talk about
reversal of heart disease. It wasn't kind of meme then.
I personally know through the US have seen people with
significant colinary artrac disease who have actually realist some of it,
(19:08):
and not only have the symptoms gone away, but the
adogram shows that the arteries are not as clogged as
they were before. So do you buy into the rehistle
of heart disease? Absolutely? And Dean Orness program, which is
Medicare supported program, they pay for it. Actually, that's how
concrete the data is is remarkable. I mean, I don't
(19:29):
understand why everybody who has at risk for heart disease
is not taking his program. It reduces the chance of
going back to the hospital if you've had a problem,
if you had a central bypass, you don't have to
go as often, you don't have more complications, you have
less challenges to living in normal life, you avoid problems
with other parts of your body. And it's not rocket science.
It's again a primarily plant based die. He's very careful
(19:52):
about some of the fats and the sources of those fats.
Um having to grips with the emotional issues that often
are around you. And that was the thing I always
used to strike me measing heart transplants, people who actually,
when your heart rejects you, when your heart fails you,
you feel abandoned. And Dean was one of the first
people to really pick up on that and say we
(20:12):
got to deal with those issues as well. Whatever anger
hostility is driving you, because it's it's not being mad
at someone that causes the problem. It's wishing they would die.
It's the hostility that's the problem. Not feeling like your
rain drop falling into the ocean of humanity is a
really big issue that if you only treat that with
the medication for cholesterol, you're missing the boat. So I
(20:33):
want our listeners to take note of what you just said.
It's hostility. Hostility is a rispective for and for premature
death as well. From whatever read it's not anger, it's hostility.
Anger could be the release of energy or an emotion,
but hostilities this desire to get even for vengeance, and
(20:58):
that eats your heart of and anger is actually, as
you mentioned, cathartic for a lot of folks, which is
why when someone says, you know, calm down to an
angry person, it's the worst thing to say, but you
wouldn't act. That's why we take this very simplistic perspection
um and perspective on our emotions. So depressed people, not
(21:18):
that you want to be depressed, but people who are
depressed who have depression for a good reason because their
life is not good, and then they change their life
because they don't want to be depressed about it anymore.
That's a good thing, right. People. Some of the most
creative people argue they do their best work when they're
depressed because they want to alter that reality. And now,
of course, if you have a chemical cause for it,
that's the whole different ball game. But there are a
(21:39):
lot of people in that category who would benefit from
just changing the world because it needs to be changed
for them. If you're angry about something, deal with it.
This this season on the show, one big theme that
I'm going to focus on is the power of one
it's the eleventh season. I mentioned I was born on
the eleventh, but I just focused on number one, which
is the number that I've always enjorged just looking at.
And it's not just that, you know a selfish desire
to be number one, and we all aspire to that
(22:02):
number in a way, but we realize it's just a path. Right.
We want to be we have we we want to
any part of a community, but yet we want to
be special. And those two feelings go opposite to each
other because to be with the community, you want to
be like everybody else, but to be yourself you want
to be a little unique. Well, I think you need
to do both. That. You have an obligation and responsibility
(22:23):
to use the power you're given to be the person
you can be so that you can make the community
work better. And I think part of the debate that
we're seeing happening in America, especially in politics, is a
result of people not believing they do have that power.
They have much more control over the world around them
than they would ever imagine, and if they don't use
that power, things begin to fall apart. And the best
(22:45):
way to use your powers tell the truth. Tell the
truth about the things that are happening to you. Tell
yourself the truth first. That's the biggest person you lie
to is yourself. And then start telling the truth to
people around you. And that's what's always allowed our species
to thrive. We have a unique ability to can pleasely
disagree with each other, but that particularly in a way
that you respect the view. And then once in a while,
(23:06):
not usually, but once in a while, you change your mind,
which is why it's supposed to be. Since I was
trained during that whole period. Now I've realized that, and
I'm asking you this question. The risk factors for coronary
artigies or stroke are also the risk factors for diabetes
(23:28):
type two risk factors ultimately even for cancer and and
autoimmune illness, propensity to infection. It seems like they're all
connected to inflammation in the body at some level, and
too from again from what I've read, there's a low
(23:50):
grade anxiety, depression, inflammation in all these conditions that precedes
even Alzheimer's. It's it's actually we might be by focusing
on different illnesses. This is cancer. This is a minimalist
than doing this whole diagnostic thing that we were trained in.
We forget actually that you might have predisposition to certain diseases,
(24:15):
but epigenetically the disease that you get is actually has
the same common rispect as exactly the same common rispect.
Is that true powerful insight. And I think it's beautiful
stated by you. It's it's easier to teach medical students
the codified system when you break everything down to its
(24:36):
silo and you teach them nephrology and then neurology and
cardiology and whatever alogy you want to learn. A real
artism pulls it all together, like teaching an artist how
to use individual colors, but you gotta put the colors
together at some point. You can't make a painting. You
can't take care of people the way they need to
be taken care of. And the people that I respect
(24:56):
the most medicine were the generalists who could do just that.
And you articulated beautifully what the journalists would begin to find.
And I think we've proven that, which is the fundamental
role of inflammation, which we want in a way, right,
we want inflammation to protect ourselves. Of course, information your
life saves your life, so like most things. There's a
great book written by Frank called Survival of the sickest.
(25:19):
It's a great story of humans and how we evolve
to have certain illnesses that were tolerated because the side
benefits were good. I mean, everyone knows about sickle cell anemia,
which we had the first cured patients of. By the way,
these crisper just saw they were able to read re
engineer red cells, so they go back the way they
are in in utero. Uh, a different kind of red
(25:42):
cell that allows you not just to jump past the
sickle cell problem, but there's other problems that that many
folks know about that actually have survival benefits, including signal
malaria resistance. Sickle cell is a classic one. But hemochromatosis,
which is the iron storage disease, well, it's a weird
problem to have it to store iron in your liver,
and when you get older sometimes you can cause liver failure.
(26:04):
But if you have that problem of storing iron in
your white cells in particular, you cannot get the plague.
The bubonic plague couldn't affect you, which means when the
quarter of Europe was being slaughtered by the Black plague,
you couldn't your family couldn't get it. I means you
survived they didn't, So there's much more of you now,
you know, even visually, like both of us have a
(26:26):
reacent amount of hair in our arms, right my my
My friends always joked that I've got hair in my blood.
I'm Turkish. Now why do I have hair my my
my arms? Why do some people have hair and others don't. Well,
we think it's because people with hair grew up around mosquitoes,
and where there's mosquitoes, there's malaria. And my dad, who
had malaria, could test what it was, how miserable it
(26:48):
was to have malaria. But mosquitoes don't like hair, and
we can sense mosquitoes when they touch our hair before
they sting us. So it makes people with hair a
bit more resilient. So if you've got a lot of
hair in your family, you probably were near a river,
basin or a body of water that had a lot
of mosquitoes on it. You know, their Eskimos don't have
a lot of hair because in the in the Arctic circle,
(27:10):
you're not going to be stung that often. They can't
get through the you know, whatever tide you're wearing. But
people who grew up in Eastern Mediterranean that by almost
for sure had mosquitoes in their lives. So that's just
an example. I mean, that's that's a great example that
Actually I want to share a story since you mentioned
Mediterranean areas. You know, when I was intern in New
(27:31):
Jersey at a community hospital nineteen seventy, um married, my
wife was pregnant, and my chief of medicine called me
one day and he said, um, your wife has tyle
a semia. And I said, if she had tall semia,
(27:52):
she shouldn't be alive. And she's pregnant and she's you know,
I've seen a lot of tallisemia in India and kids
and so on. He said, come look at the red cells.
So you know, I went to his lab and sure enough,
the cells didn't look normal. So at that time, there
was no Google, nothing that I came to the New
(28:13):
York Library. I spent the whole weekend in the library
looking for tallisemia trade And you know, now, of course
we do hemoglobin testing. You know, it's easy to diagnose,
but then it was not so easy to diagnose even
then though there was hemoglobin electrophoresis. But this is what
(28:37):
I found out, which was amazing. What I found was
that there was tall simia trade along the exact route
that the armies of Alexander the Great took um in
three d and twenty three BC from Macedonia, all through Greece,
(29:00):
all through Afghanistan to the exact village in Multan which
is now part of Pakistan, where my wife's ancestors come
from from her parents come from Ultan along the exact route.
So you know, I said to my my wife, you know,
some ancestor was growing around. You know, either it was
(29:20):
a rape but which is frequently what conquerors do, or
it was a one night stand or whatever. But we
have evidence right here. And you know my kids have
tall semi trade to now. But you know, your genes
are actually the history of human kind. Everything from what
happened as an epidemic and malaria and by cycle cell came.
(29:44):
What is the protective value of as you just said,
you know, iron storage, and you can now look at
jeans and track the history of our culture and of
our civilization. Well, one thing I love about what's happening
in the world now is we're getting a new found
amongst scientists, especially new found appreciation of our legacy, of
(30:07):
our of our history. I was in a place called Gebee,
which is it means pot belly hill in Turkish. It's
the oldest civilization we know of, twelve thousand years old.
They had temples there, these big tea temples about seventeen
eighteen feet tall. They were worshiping ancestors probably, But here's
why this is important. This is three times older than
(30:28):
the Pyramids, four times older and stone Hedge. I mean,
it's a long time ago. And just to make make
the intrigue deeper, the civilization fell apart at some time
for reasons we don't know. But Abraham met Sarah there
same place, and hodd On It's in the Bible. So
this place somehow kept coming back. Something is in the
water there. They caught everyone's attention. But here's why it's critical.
(30:50):
We always thought I always taught Most of the guys
people listening now probably feel the same way that the
reason we started having religion was because we were able
to domesticate animals and get agricultural crops going, and then
we had a little free time. And with free time, well,
you know, a couple of people can take some extra
effort and study religion and the stars and creat stories.
(31:11):
Always in the desert, seeing right. However, in Quebeca Tepe,
they had a religion, but they didn't have any free
time because they were not agricultural. These people were hunters.
And what happened is that they began to worship their
ancestors or gods, and they began to realize that they
(31:32):
could talk to the deities, they could begin to control
the world around them, and they could begin to hunt
in packs, and they could begin to take them those animals,
not kill them, but do mesticate them, and take some
of those wild wheat crops to iron horn wheat, the
oldest wheat and we know of is in that area,
and begin to domesticated. And so it wasn't that they
started their religions because they were agricultural and had free time.
(31:53):
They became agricultural and got free time because of their religion.
And so the role of believing in something beyond yourself,
the role of consciousness comes in the question. And they
were probably I don't know this for sure, but they're
the archaeologists that I've been working with there. Some of
them believed that they were probably doing peyote or other
types of hallucinogens and de shamans in order to transcend
(32:17):
what they could see and get a vision to what
could be. And that's pretty cool that it's that process
that allowed us to become agricultural and prosper in the
way we have, which means you can't throw it away
so easily. So when people ignore the learned behaviors, the
learned behaviors that they've appreciated from watching other humans for
(32:39):
twelve thousand years, there's a risk to that. You know,
you mentioned Abraham right now, and you mentioned religion, and
of course today when we look at the world, religion
is Quarrelsome divisive genetics here could help us a little bit,
because if you examine the genes right now of somebody
(33:00):
like in Osama bin Laden and Abraham, the father of
both the Jews and the Arabs, you probably won't be
able to tell the difference between the genes. They're both
semis rightly. And and yet we're fighting over which version
(33:21):
of transcendence is ideologically accurate or art because all religious
experiences just that transcendence, the emergence of platonic truth, love, compassion, joy, equanimity,
and the loss of the fear of death. Because the
transcendent is not in time the rest is all theory,
(33:42):
you know, it's all ideology and philosophy and theology. The
religious experience is common to every religion and every gene
expression of every human that has ever So let me
if I can't ask you some advice and thoughts that
might be valuable for a lot of the listeners. If
(34:03):
that common platonic, blissful experience that it seems to transcend
all religions is there, and yet people still feel the
need to have a codification of that a series of
rules and rules, again essentially watching people who seem to
succeed in life and writing it down. You know that
(34:24):
guy finished school, got a job, got married, to care
of his family, lived long, and seemed to be happy.
I want to do that, which, by the way, is
but we now statistically seems to result in people living longer,
doing better, feeling that they did the right thing. And
that's in a lot of different religions expressed in very
different ways because people those rules are different in different
(34:45):
tribes and different parts of the world. Uh not. Sometimes
you know, how you carry out your social relevant for
the culture and the period and the age and so,
but we become intolerant of other people's rules because our
rules were better in our culture. But this based on
the same experience the rules, and you know, self righteous
morality ultimately ends up being jealousy with the halo, you know, right,
(35:09):
But morality is a byproduct of the experience. It's not
a quotified set of rules like the tell ten Commandments.
You know how many people follow the Ten Commandments or
how many people say it turned the other cheek, but
you know that comes only from the experience. It cannot
come from a codified set of rules. What happens is
(35:30):
the person, whether it's Jesus or Mohammad or whoever, or
Abraham or Moses, has an experience, tries to explain it
to the people who haven't had the experience, and instead
of wanting the experience, that by into the rules and regulations,
which are a byproduct of the experience, and that creates
(35:51):
problems ultimately, because it's not easy to follow those rules
just because you want to follow the rules. It has
to come from an experience where you feel inseparability and
love and compassion. As a result of the transcender h
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