Host Amelia Phillips goes behind the scenes with Dr Norman Swan and Lara Cook, giving an insight into each episode, what went well, what didn’t and helps us get to know the guests a little better.
Below is an unedited transcript of the podcast episode:
Welcome to another episode of Behind My Show, where you get to know my recent guests that little bit better and learn what went on behind the scenes This month I interviewed Dr. Norman Swan on longevity and anti-aging. There’s just so much in the media at the moment with David Sinclair and others conducting this incredible research, and Norman has released a book called, So You Wanna Live Younger, Longer, And he’s really disseminated a lot of that research into a really fun and fascinating, but also very practical book.
Now, interviewing Norman is a little bit like landing a giant jumbo. He just knows so much, and science is so often very complex and nuanced that you have to take that big brain of his and really narrow down to exactly the conversation you wanna have and the topics you wanna talk about and make it relevant to moms and relevant to my audience.
But he also has a very strong personality. And so keeping him on my chain of questions and on the topics that I think moms are most interested in is also a challenge for me. I have to keep jumping in or I have to make sure that we’re answering questions in a relatively concise way. So I really love interviewing Norman because number one, he has such amazing knowledge and information for us.
But number two, it also challenges my interviewing skills. So anyway, here are a fast few with Norman Swan.
Norman, what’s your anti-aging protocol? Cause you’re actually 97 years old, right? That’s right. Well I was gonna, you know, I’m glad glad you said that because, well actually 96, 97 extra fit . I’ll have what he’s having then. , what do you do? What do I do? I, um, I’ve got no intention of giving up work, so I find work stimulating.
I exercise most days of the week and I try and make that as intense as possible. You do intense exercise. Yeah, I try to, yes. And then I, uh, eat a diverse diet and those are the main things that I do. Mm-hmm. . And it’s really encouraging to hear you say in our episode that supplements aren’t the answer. It saves us a lot of time and money.
What’s a popular anti-aging or longevity product that you see marketed out there that you think is just complete bollocks? Look, I think that high doors, vitamins, Okay. You’re taking a drop, not a vitamin. If you actually take high dose vitamins, I think that antioxidants in the bottle are not doing us any good at all.
And we don’t know if they’re doing us any harm, but I’m skeptical of most supplements. The sad thing at the moment is that some of these supplements should work and they don’t, and it’s really frustrating cause all the animal work suggest they should work. And if you read my book, you’ll find out why they, they don’t work at the moment, but they might work in the future in a different formula.
What’s an emerging trend? It could be a supplement or it could be a trend, but a longevity area that we should maybe keep in mind or keep our ears and eyes open to. . I’ve got a friend who’s got a fair bit of money and he’s, he’s booked in for a cryonics, so he, he, he’s gonna freeze his body when he dies.
Oh, my. And, you know, he thinks this is the way that he’s going to be fired. Like, uh, in that movie was, it don’t look up. I don’t know if you saw that Leonardo DiCaprio movie, but the closing scene with the , with the cryo characters was hilarious. Yeah. Emerging from the spaceship. That’s right. Yes. I’m not seriously suggesting that, but he, you know, he’s spend, he’s gonna spend his money on it, which is fine.
So besides freezing ourself, what else is there? , I don’t think there’s any harm in looking young and making yourself feel young because it’s liable to change your behaviors. Word of advice is that if it sounds too good to be true, it is too good to be true. Yep. And a lot of these absolutely. What’s one factor that affects our community health that we may not realize is so impactful?
Having a job is essentially the structure of the way we live, how much money we have to spend on food and housing, our children’s education. Those are very powerful determinants of how long we live and how well we live and how young. Increasingly we’re breathing in air that’s not clean, and that that has an influence on our body and that can activate inflammation and aging in our body, and we don’t know the effects of climate change.
So you’ve hit on something that is incredibly important that I do talk about in my book. Yes, you do. It’s fascinating that have a huge impact, and that’s where government plays a. Who we vote in plays a role in how long we live. If you could wave your magic health wand and make a health focused societal change across all of us, what would that be?
Look at the current time. It has to be reversing climate change. Or stopping it because we’ve got no idea what that’s going to do in the future. Already we’ve got Japanese en capitis emerging in Australia, so you’ve got these diseases coming farther south than the house before. You’ve got heat stress in Europe.
We’ve got water stress. Um, almost every natural system is being stressed. So will we have the food to eat in the future that we need? Will we have too much exposure to heat that is an existential crisis beyond anything you’ve, we’ve talked about so far. Isn’t that interesting? You know, the health expert waving his magic health wand, but actually over in the environmental space, it just goes to show it doesn’t matter how healthy our bodies are.
If we can get ourselves healthy, if we don’t have a healthy planet, it will eventually affect our own health. Thank you so much, Norman. You’re welcome.
My other interview this month is on animal therapy to help relieve anxiety in kids. Now I’ve been quite interested in this because we have a dog and Charlotte, my eight year old is obsessed with horses and she goes riding on a regular basis. And I’ve just observed what Charlotte’s energy levels are like when she gets around horses.
She really changes. She softens, she becomes connected with them and intuitive with them and I can just see a kind of a softness in her eyes. And so I wanted to understand if animal therapy really does have efficacy with working with children, particularly children that suffer anxiety, and how we can maybe take some of this and apply it to our own pets, Or did we need to have kind of specially trained therapy animals?
So it took me a while to find the right guess. So that’s actually taken me about three months of researching and a couple of full starts having pre-conversations and pre-interviews with potential guests. I finally landed on Lara Cook, so she’s a qualified, experienced counselor. She operates out of Sydney Equine Assisted Learning and a private practice in the Blue Mountains.
She holds qualifications in counseling, community services, early childhood education, dog psychology, and obedience. But what really interested me is that she also had lived experience growing up with trauma. She has six children. Yes. Six age between nine and 22. And she’s also worked in these child protection.
Area for decades. So particularly specializing in out of home care programs and crisis care and early intervention. So she’s literally right there with kids when they’re going through this trauma and she tells a story of how she observed animals in those situations immediately being able to calm and change the demeanor of kids that were going through trauma.
Such a fascinating. So anyway, I hope you enjoy the interview with her and hear a fast few. We did as well.
LA what was the last meal you? I am a really busy mom. , like I said, , the, the kids crumbs. The kids are toast with toast crumbs, . One better than that, No. So I like to go for quick convenient meals. I work out here on the farm. We don’t have many takeaways, so anything I can zap in the microwave, I’m a big fan of the Good Chef meals that I can just throw in.
So healthy. Oh, good. Yeah. Excellent. Yeah, I’ve heard great things about them. Great. What’s a song on repeat on your playlist at the moment? These days by Thema Plum. It is a cover of these days, these days. Thema Plum. I will definitely add that to my 2022 playlist. Here’s one for you. A pet that had the most impact on your life.
Man, that’s such a hard one because every animal has taught me so much, whether it’s about myself or. No, just myself. . Well, what not to do? No. I would have to say a beautiful miniature horse that we had here named Biscuit. We recently lost her. She was an old mini biscuit, was a rescue horse, and had experienced many of neglect and trauma before coming here.
And our equine specialist, Liz, spent. Many hours, you know, building this horse’s trust in humans. And it was the most amazing thing to watch them develop this beautiful bond. And like I said, initially I hadn’t worked around horses all ever. I had been around horses, you know, the girlfriend’s sleepover and go for a few horse rides, but never in this kind of context.
This little miniature taught me how to trust, how to trust horses, how to understand they have these beautiful personalities, these hearts that are as big as balloons, fires, . Yeah, that’s right. But she did it in such a way that. She just knew her job and and just made me connect. But to also, I imagine in that coaching and therapy role you play to actually see a being transformed from mistrust into trust, and then go on to be the.
The teacher to see it in a four-legged fluff ball is probably just as rewarding as seeing it in a two-legged teenage boy. Exactly right. And yeah, she taught me how to communicate with horses and I, Yeah, was privileged. Was it biscuit? Biscuit, yeah. Why did you choose this career path? I mean, rewinding, not just ait, animal assisted therapy, but the crisis support.
Why did you choose that? Isn’t six children enough to be responsible for ? That’s right. I know you woman. Uh, tell me about it. Gluten for punishment. Yeah. No, I chose. This career path from my own childhood. Yeah. You didn’t have an easy childhood. No, I didn’t, and I went into the outta home care field with this understanding of what it’s like to be the motherless child.
I had that understanding and I wanted. To be a part of somebody’s journey through that, with this understanding of what it was like. And from there, I just wanted to help who I could and then kind of shifted over to the therapy to be like, Hey guys, like I’ve done it and you guys can do it too. Like it’s, we can be there.
That would be so inspirational for the youth to know that. But you’re not just reading out of a textbook here. You’ve lived in their shoes. Been through what they are going through. Yeah. Yeah. The last movie or TV series that made you feel something? Oh my God, I’ve just fallen in love with love on the spectrum.
Oh, you’re the third person that’s told I’ve got to get into this. I’ve done all the Australian series, now I’ve moved over to the American. You know what? It just, it feels me with so much hope and it feels me with so much joy and it is so real. We’re not dealing with people that are just actors and doing it.
These are real people, you know? And I love that. Are they all autistic or on the spectrum of some kind? Autistic spectrum. Yeah. Or have a disability of some description. I’ve got to watch it. Yeah, it is, It is one of those ones where you just like, it melts your heart and it just fills me with hope. It, it really does.
I love it. Great suggestion. Thank you so much, Laura. No.
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