0:00 [Music] who are you and where are you going what do you want for the next 24 minutes we're going to design and attain your ideal life [Music] on the way to wow show together we'll find the ideal path to get you back on the track to success and happiness
0:36 on the way to wow show with your host kevin bemel hola and welcome to eccentric los angeles more specifically welcome to jigger's place jiggers was my jack russell terrier that i had for many many years was originally was my wife's dog but i stole his affections he was really the most charismatic dog i ever met we would walk down the street and people would stop me because they wanted to meet my dog and i so i made up a motto for
1:11 jiggers and it was that there are no strangers in the world just friends we haven't met yet in any event i hope you'll join us here each week when we talk with some of the most interesting and innovative people when it comes to living the life that you want and answer two questions together who are you and what do you want we're gonna find out here at jigger's place [Music] in addition to being the composer of the theme song for the way to wow brennan mccullough also builds and tends
1:48 bars he's the founder of the innovative bar sunset and vinyl brandon welcome to the way to wow thank you what are you gonna mix up for us today uh today i was gonna do a classic tennessee old-fashioned all right so i'm gonna stir this up so what did you put in what did you put in yours so i go i start with the sugar cubes um since we're making two i used two and doubled up my recipe and then uh i like working with the sugar cube because it's just really tactile to mush it up and it feels better than just simple sugar and then uh angstrom bitters which is like my favorite you know
2:23 pretty much the standard classic absolutely because i feel like with the old-fashioned you want to go like the standard classic as much as possible no one wants like a play on this drink yeah but then but then i use um rye bourbon that's my favorite oh okay so yeah it's a little spicier than that huh yeah gives a little more flavor and then yeah just um stirring it up in the glass pouring it in and then we will express the orange oh okay i love that term it's like so fancy for just squeezing like you're right expressing yes the orange is going to give it its
2:58 truest but it really does something at first i used to be like come on that's not doing anything but the oil um the oil from it can i do something weird yeah open your mouth isn't that crazy oh yeah the first time a bartender did it to me i was like oh you're not just like doing extra stuff for the tip that really works yeah it might have been but but it was real it might have been but then some people like that because you can light this on fire and it's a little more pizzazz but it actually wrecks it so you want to not light it it's just so the oil cause that'll burn the oil and the oil just wants to sit on the surface of the cocktail
3:33 oh two classic old-fashioned series voila thank you sir i'm gonna i'm gonna try mine ah delicious absolutely wow here megan this is a little gift from brandon once you try that out tell me what you think cheers cheers delicious a genuine old-fashioned huh love it my next guest is megan rettarath she's a advan certified advanced nurse
4:09 practitioner right perfect you got it more importantly perhaps she's the chief medical officer for next health this is a health optimization organization and a little you know snippet of personal information um almost a year ago i showed up at next health's door referred by a friend of mine who's a sleep specialist and you know at the time i was overweight sometimes my energy level was so bad i would get up in the morning and i would it would be all i could do not to crawl into bed an hour later
4:46 within four months of working with megan and her team i had dropped weight down to an optimal level i was sleeping well i had energy in fact i had the energy to put together this show so so in a way megan you're responsible for us being here today i'm going to let megan talk about the work that she's doing and just start out tell me what do you feel are the if you will signs of optimum health yeah i mean that is first off thank you
5:21 for having me um but really i think now today more than ever we are taking and defining what health is you know we're in the middle of a pandemic uh and we're seeing our health is being put to the test so i like to view health is on like a pillar or maybe better yet for the context of this conversation like a bar stool so at the seat of that bar stool we see if i can choose it says optimal health and the five things that i think are the foundation of optimal health are the first is biomarker testing so understanding where is your current
5:56 health state at today and how do we make pivots to get those values to where we want them to be the second thing we would consider through optimal health is sleep so what are your sleep patterns what type of sleep or what type of quality of sleep are you getting the third would be nutrition so what type of diet are you consuming uh the fourth would be movement or exercise not just working out with your trainer every day but what does moving your body look like and the last would be stress management so mindfulness meditation any sort of aspect of where you're going
6:31 to be coming back to yourself and focusing on eliminating that stress so that's interesting because aside from the biomarkers which is how as a professional i guess you determine whether someone's making progress so you've got sleep diet and exercise which are the three realms of the physical pillar and the three pillars of attainment and then you've got mindset which is one of the realms in the mental pillar so we're exactly aligned on that so talk to me first of all give me an example if you would about what is a biomarker i mean it sounds you know very you know mysterious and scientific but
7:06 see if you know for those of us who are my wife as an rn has had no impact on my ability to understand healthcare matters so talk to you know a complete lay person so biomarker testing is taking the scientific numbers that we have studied for example your hemoglobin a1c that's a cumulative report of the last four months of everything you've taken in into eat so alcohol consumption food consumption everything you've eaten and it gives us an overall average of what your blood sugar value typically is but then the second factor of that is looking at insulin how does your body
7:41 respond to the food the nutrition the alcohol consumption that you're putting into your body so it's looking at more of a cumulative factor looking at things like hormones aspects that are dictative or allowing us to see into your health from a larger perspective so that before you get to the degree of a disease before you get to the degree of a chronic ailment we're able to take these biomarker lab values and make impressions on them prior to you developing a chronic disease well that's fascinating although it is a little bit scary that you can look at my
8:17 hemoglobin i guess and see what there's there's no hiding no cheating no cheating right okay well can you get arrested for what's in that you know that's that's i mean you know you get pulled over for uh you know having what overly alcoholic hemoglobin or something i guess um so talk talk about sleep so you know we live in a highly stressful society and i know for myself i've struggled with sleep my whole life and it took me years to really understand what it meant to sleep well
8:53 tell us about that please and when we when i look at health what i think we're missing in in our society is we can't just look at the the disgruntled sleep patterns that you have we have to come back out take a few steps out and understand what is getting you to those poor sleep patterns and that is not just you have poor sleep but what are your hormones when you're not sleeping you don't produce hormones so i i it's very difficult for me to say it is only your disrupted sleep that's causing your sleep to continue to get worse there's always a multitude of factors and going back to the pillar
9:28 we go in and i evaluate what vitamin deficiencies are you lacking what is your melatonin level production like you know how are you moving your body how are you exercising and we're eight when we're able to impact the five main pillars of our health we start to see every other pillar every other aspect incorporates into really the overall systemic function and the improvement in our body so when we go and look at sleep for example we want to see our body go into accumulative five to seven sleep wake cycles and that's not you waking up but it's the degree or the amount of
10:03 rem sleep that you're actually accumulating through one night of restful sleep so when you know most of the time i'll ask people how many hours of sleep do you get so you let's say you're averaging seven to eight hours of sleep per night but what is the quality of that sleep that is most important so there's great tracking devices you know they're the aura ring there's so many different devices that you can track your sleep and that's what's most important is the quality of your sleep not just the quantity of your sleep so if you're getting poor sleep your inflammatory markers are going to be high the next day you have a 64 chance of increasing your metabolic response the following day
10:39 so you make poor food choices it's difficult to concentrate it's more difficult to focus just with one night of poor sleep so when we're looking at the overall you know how optimal are you how optimal is your health we can't just say it's your sleep because lack of exercise lack of movement you know high stress all of these factors are contributing to poor quality sleep so you know we want to look at a couple things when we're just you know simply talking about sleep is what is your sleep hygiene like like what is your bedtime routine you know limiting screen time before and making sure you have a good sleep
11:14 hygiene prior to going to sleep but then really tracking your sleep what type of sleep quality are you actually getting and that's when we can do a deeper dive and say how do we fix your sleep because fixing just your sleep isn't going to fix your experiences that you're you know noticing the following day like your brain fog fatigue you know poor workouts or poor performance so in order to get a true you know quantitative result of sleep looking at biomarkers leads us into impacting numbers to help improve the quality of your sleep so and and i'm trying to put this in my
11:50 own words and make sure that i'm getting this so it sounds like what you're saying is um sleep is is one factor in a more holistic approach to optimizing our health would that be is it completely okay so so then would you say it's it's the same thing with respect to to diet with respect to movement or exercise even with respect to stress or mindset each one of those is just one piece of putting this overall puzzle together completely and you know when we look at the amount of nutrition
12:25 you know one of the pillars in my perspective of health optimization is nutrition and even within the last nine years we've been studying the amount of iron in our spinach and the amount of iron in our spinach has declined by 97 so even if we are eating an organic healthy diet our our foods are nutrient poor they're not nutrient dense so you know understanding where your vitamin d where are your vitamin deficiencies where are your micronutrient deficiencies because if your cells are nutritionally depleted no matter what impact that you have of you know working
13:01 on your sleep your body doesn't have a high functioning cell in order to perform what its specific function is for so for example let's say you have a brain cell and you have poor sleep will couple you know a micronutrient or depleted cell or poor functioning mitochondria that brain of your cell here the cell function is not going to be carried out effectively and then couple poor sleep on top of it so we very it's very much a compounded effect so if we can begin to address kind of these five main pillars we work on your exercise we work on your sleep we work on your nutrition we start to see all of them even with an
13:37 improvement of your nutrition alone we start to see an impact in your sleep as well so it's literally looking at the big you know five components of that healthy or health optimization and where we want you to go that's going to allow us to achieve an improvement of your sleep by addressing all of those main foundations as well so i can i can almost hear this question boiling up from the production team you know that's surrounding us i mean this all sounds great um you know eat well you know sleep better pay attention my sleep hygiene all these things sounds like
14:12 a lot of work a lot of a lot of self-discipline and you know i i forget if i mentioned before but you know i i tried dieting for you know a couple of years um you know before i came to see you folks and um i think i managed to gain a pound you know that kind of right so it's just it's so frustrating so um if we want to optimize our health how do we get started in a way in particular in a way that that is sustainable and and you know what i'm saying there's nothing
14:47 more frustrating than i think it started and then uh finally you just throw up your hands i'm done yeah and and the beautiful thing about today is we have so many different health platforms it's almost now today it's we're drinking out of a fire hose there's so much information coming at us but the the big plan and you know you can say i've tried the diet i've you know done the workouts and i actually gained weight that is key that is key for any person that i see is when you acknowledge it you are in realistic expectations of what you want but i think
15:22 the reason most diets fail most you know health objectives fail is because one it maybe wasn't your objective to begin with and so when you're looking to get healthy it's defining what does that look like for you and i always ask my patients what are your top three health goals and maybe they can't describe it in a way that i understand but repeating that goal back you want to lose weight but you want to lose you know how much weight you want to lose three pounds of weight five pounds a weight but why so what is that motivating factor is it to fit in that dress is it to look better is it to feel better what is that motivator for you and a lot
15:58 of times it has nothing to do with that personal individual goal has to do with someone else so i think really getting a good description working with someone who is is that that focused on meeting your goals rather than coming to me and saying um you know my goal for you is going to be a little bit different than what you want to achieve but ideally we'll meet in meet in the middle because as a health optimization practitioner i want to make sure i'm setting you up for success and that looks like meeting your goals and objectives as well but you know it's also important to understand that if you tried 50 times to
16:33 lose weight and failed all 50 times i'm confident that when you're working with the right practitioner to understand what are your health goals and what are your health objectives those goals will be met and it starts with coming up with a plan that is achievable so maybe it's not losing 20 pounds right away maybe it's losing three and it's understanding what is contributing to that weight gain what is contributing to those things that are causing you to gain weight and for a lot of people it's interrupted sleep if you're having interrupted sleep there's no way you're going to be able to lose weight how are you exercising how are
17:08 you moving your bodies believe it or not there's not one study for women suggesting you should continue to do high intensity interval training some people have genetics that say you should not do high intensity interval training and instead you should do more body weight training so understanding and finding someone who's going to work with your specific health goals and objectives and coming up with an actionable treatment plan that's actually that's achievable on a day-to-day basis and i i feel like everyone is getting giving all of this information and we're trying to drink it out of a water hose and it's too much um and it's you know people get very
17:44 specific in in in one people become very uh specific and very knowledgeable in one diet type in one one element or one specialty but in all actuality when you can compound those effects and improving those five pillars you're going to notice a benefit in so many other so many other avenues so it's really finding someone who can help understand your goals and break it down and come up with with realistic time frames of when you're going to achieve those goals because eating healthy is a lot of work changing and modifying your sleep is a ton of
18:20 work and all of this is incredibly frustrating because if you are spending and committing the time and the money um to to change your nutrition change how you eat change your sleeping patterns you're going to want to see a benefit or change see a result um and so it's it's coming up and helping someone really break down the science of what is stopping you from getting there and being able to change those to help get you to where you need to go so last question what is a question and i know you've been interviewed many many times what is a question you've always wanted to be asked in the interview and never have do blondes have more fun
18:56 [Laughter] they do they do i've seen your instagram feed and if there's anyone having more fun than you i'm not sure who she is well so megan before we go um we have your thing here for our collage um we're building a collage up here on this board behind up above the fireplace if you want to go ahead and and stick that up there just any old place doesn't have to be yeah it can be it doesn't have to be you know square to the the grid it can be at an angle or wherever you wherever you want it to be i'm going front and center front and
19:31 center all right and brandon you've got your thing here why don't you come and uh and and paste this up there as well okay again i'll just be like a rhythm guitar player for her oh yeah feed right into that optimal sleep so brandon megan thank you very much for being here it was such the cocktails were delicious the information amazing thanks for being on the way to wow show thank you [Music] [Laughter] rhino williams is the founder and
20:06 proprietor at lost property my personal favorite bar i've spent quite a bit of time bending the elbow there with my favorite welshman right and rhino is here today to mix something up special for my next guest who you also know well michael hartman right so what are you going to make for us i'm going to make a gin gibson a gin gibson okay very easy cocktail but uh it's one of those two ingredient cocktails if you don't know exactly right it can be terrible if you do it right it's gonna be excellent you know so okay you've got no way to hide behind flavors on that one so do you want to grab those two uh when i get going on this so i'm gonna
20:42 put two cocktails i'm gonna throw two ounces if you find it right here there you go two ounces of the uh driver move okay thank you there i won my stripes's bar assistant there you go there you go i can pass that to you then if you want to do that there you go and then right here two i'm gonna do four ounces of a london dry you can find the measurement right here where is it there it is okay so this is the same ingredients as a martini but
21:18 kind of a different mix so just uh just the garnish is the difference oh okay we're doing the uh the cocktail onions uh-huh my personal favorite when it comes to flavor profiles i love the vinegar you know so i'm a big vinegar component so give it a little stir get like yeah i definitely like onions better than uh yeah i don't hate olives but i just prefer the uh the cocktail onion so we're just gonna pour these two in
21:55 there no waste wow super simple it's nice and simple garnish with a cocktail onion and there you are beautiful oh i'm gonna take them over there well actually i'm gonna take i'm to i think i'm going to take a sip first i'm thirsty beautiful there you go thank you sir enjoy thank you so this is from rhino our our favorite
22:30 bartender right awesome all those all those years cheers cheers one of my favorites yeah so an atheist and a rabbi walked into a bar now coincidentally the bar happened to have been lost property one of the establishments that our friend rhino williams started it's on the corner of hollywood and vine a very famous intersection and thus started a conversation that goes on to this day on every subject that you can imagine and
23:06 i tell people about my friend michael hartman and and they they say but but but he's an atheist and i say yeah i'm the most jewish atheist i've ever met um but you know it's in good terms because um michael seems to feel that i'm the most atheistic jew he's ever met so you know it's it's it does the doubles right yeah uh we met every tuesday night at lost property um sometimes you know creating a little bit of a crowd like what are these two guys talking about here and i think we've we've solved pretty much all of the world's problems
23:41 at this point that's how i remember it yeah okay well you know after three or four drinks it's pretty easy to remember that way so i think people have the wrong idea about what it means to be an atheist honestly how did you come to this what because you you didn't grow up as an atheist right so how did you come to understand the world in the way that you do if that's a fair question sure um so i was i was raised a jehovah's witness as you know and when i became a teenager a few
24:17 different things happened and i started to realize that i didn't necessarily agree with that only the jehovah's witnesses would be saved that they were the only people who were good people and as and that upset me and i actually went through a period that i kind of described as spiritual suicide where i basically felt that i was going to die because i was not a jehovah's witness and that i wasn't going to to do those
24:52 things um and but i i felt that if there really was a god there was a living a loving god that he would not only restrict to a particular faith or a particular belief system but i still believed it like i still remained a believer in it and then it was many years later over the process of learning more about biology and astronomy and physics and things like that that i just increasingly didn't see a need for god and then it was uh eventually i realized
25:28 that although i could not and will not exclude the possibility of god i didn't believe in a god and that's when i started calling myself an atheist but i i think i'm not necessarily like other atheists in the fact that i'm not what i would call an anti-theist i'm not against religion i think religion is important i think it adds a lot of value there's a lot of culture there and i so i don't want to see it eliminated and i appreciate it i think it adds a lot of value but i personally don't see the need for god okay and so um so many things
26:03 you said are so interesting um i mean we've talked about this so from a jewish perspective like we don't believe that you have to be jewish in order to have a relationship with god or go to heaven or something like that and i remember in college a college friend of mine saying to me he was he was a practicing catholic at the time he said he said you know one of the biggest problems i have is is is that i'm supposed to believe that you're going to hell yeah and i said well you know like mark twain it might be okay probably a lot of my friends are there you know um so talk a little bit about
26:41 um so i i perceive you as a deeply spiritual person right so talk about if you would where where that spiritual nature or where that spiritual spark for you comes from well you know i think it's interesting because i don't consider myself spiritual and i don't think an atheist can be spiritual because of the definition of the word so technically i don't however i think that spiritualness is i think there's value in it i
27:17 see the i see it as a understanding of of feelings emotion in intuition and that sort of thing and so i don't want to throw the the baby out with the bathwater as they say you know and and so for example if i have a friend who is religious and they're going through a tough time i might encourage them to pray i don't think they're talking to god i think they're conducting introspective meditation but i'm not really concerned about the metaphor that they're using which is how i see it
27:52 they may really believe it and that's fine as long as it's not causing harm i mean for me i'm totally okay with religion except when it starts to cause harm to particularly other people but also to the individual if it's someone i care about but for the most part i don't see that and so a lot of times people will think that i'm a spiritual person and it's kind of a struggle because on one hand i want to correct them but on the other hand it's like what is the benefit in doing that right right so yeah i mean i think there's always the balancing between our beliefs and the relationship right i find myself in that
28:27 situation quite often as a rabbi especially since people are expecting me to behave in a particular way right um you know another topic that we've talked about many many times that often is connected with religion and and and i find among um religious people they often think well you know an atheist you know they they can't have a strong you know moral core because because that's that is the exclusive territory of religion and yet uh again you're one of the most moral people i
29:02 know so you succeed so so where where does where did that come from i mean i well for me personally i kind of feel like it's an innate thing um in fact my my journey to become an atheist was somewhat driven by my compassion for other people and my belief that it wasn't moral for a choice to be made arbitrarily about a a person having a particular faith or following a particular set of beliefs but i you know i i kind of object to the
29:39 concept because morality i don't believe really comes from religion i think religion is more of a trailing indicator and professor mark smith who happened to be someone i went to high school with wrote a book called secular faith that talks about this uh in some detail but so for example for most of the history of christianity charging interest rates charging interest on loans was considered immoral and slavery was okay and obviously we have different beliefs and we even see today the changing attitudes towards divorce sexuality um
30:16 and and things like that the the religions have more followed what or at least this is the argument that's made and i believe have more followed this morality rather than leading it and so i think i think that that is interesting and so you know for me i feel like i have a privilege in that i can draw moral lessons not just from a single religion but i can learn morality from you know the the christian faith that i was raised in from talking to you from buddhism from stoicism from many sources and i think you know i i take a personal
30:51 responsibility and i'm you know my my moral values have changed over time as i've learned more and and i think you know at the very basis though is there's a sense of justice there's a sense of how do i want to be treated how do i how does society function well and i and i think it's important to think about those things all right so and that that kind of answered i think my next question is um you know if if there isn't if if there is no god um you know who um to whom we're ultimately responsible so then you know why why be moral right
31:27 i mean that that's i think that's a very central issue right and i i think you kind of you kind of answered that yeah you know one of the examples i think of is if i go on vacation someplace and i eat in a restaurant that i'm incredibly unlikely to eat and again why do i tip the server um and it's because that's how i would want to be treated like there's a when i go and sit down to have that meal i've created an implicit contract that if the service is good if i appreciate it that i'm going to tip that person and i think it's important to follow through on those implicit contracts and you know sometimes you don't know what the implicit contracts if you're in
32:02 a different country a different culture what have you and you're not going to get it perfect but i think it's important to try and to you know and you can i think you end up with a serendipitous um benefit from that very good so i i got the high sign unfortunately we can't do our normal three hour sessions but right um but but you know i really appreciate you coming and and sharing your thoughts so these are you know deeply personal on a certain level and but hopefully um we can have we can get a better understanding and and uh
32:38 you know my hope is is is rather than make this you know one more battleground that you know people can can come together in mutual understanding i i totally agree i mean i think i think that you know as an atheist i try not to ignore the value of religion and at the same time i would like religious people to understand that just because i don't believe there's a god doesn't mean that i don't see value in their beliefs and and what they have i guess i think that's the reason why we're friends right
33:13 michael thanks so much thanks very much thank you for having me yeah my pleasure that's our show for this week stay tuned next week when my guests will be jennifer marcinelli holistic health specialist and burnout recovery specialist and derrick smith fashion designer and men's wear consultant courage at all times my friends belle still my marine courage at all times my friends marie you're still my bell
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34:46 you