Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside Podcast. My name is Ginny Urich. I'm the founder of 1000

Hours Outside and I have an exciting, wonderful guest for you today. His name is Dr. Brennan Spiegel, and he is a professor and a doctor, and I've just read his book about gravity. It's so fascinating. It's the things I've never heard about. It's called Pull, how gravity shapes your body, studies the mind, and guides our

health, find balance, stand stronger, live longer. Dr. Spiegel, welcome. Well, thank you so much for having me. This is incredible. I mean, I never heard of these things. I was going through this book and I was like, you know, you don't really know what you're going to get when you pick up a book that's like how gravity shapes your body.

And I was like, I have not heard of so much of this.

So, Brandon, can you talk about you know you

you even said this a little out there like you're maybe the forerunner of some of these things

you're using phrases like gravity intolerance yeah i've never heard of that so can you talk

about you your gastro and it's a hard word to say. I'm not going to, I don't want to, it's a gastro and you're a gastro. Yeah. But what is the long word? Gastroenterologist. Enterologist. A gastroenterologist. You're a doctor and a professor and you were talking about how your mother-in-law moves to this assisted living facility, and all of a sudden they're starting to spend more time lying down, and all of a sudden there's all of these health problems. So can you talk to us about the journey into talking about something that people haven't heard of, like gravity intolerance? Yeah, well, you've hit it on the head, because I haven't been sitting around my whole career thinking about gravity at all. And that's kind of the point. You know, our relationship to gravity is kind of like a fish to water. You know, the fish swims in water. It's designed to survive and thrive by moving through water, but I doubt the fish thinks much about water at all, if it has any idea. We're the same way. We're designed to survive and thrive by moving through this force of gravity.

And it turns out if you look at it that way, this physics of our planet came first, and our biology came second.

And then our psychology emerged from that.

So there's this through line all the way down to

the very forces of this planet that forged us. So despite all that, I never really thought about that

until, as you mentioned, my mother-in-law had developed cognitive decline, and she was in an

assisted living facility, and I dedicate the book to her, by the way.

And she found herself lying flat a lot like a lot of our patients do, whether it's in the

hospital or nursing homes, just not moving.

And at the same time, her belly started to swell up.

She got bloating, slow digestion, depression.

And, you know, her diet hadn't changed, her medicines hadn't changed,

and I started thinking, you know, we're not designed to lie flat all day. We are two-legged, upright

creatures. If we can stand, we move around the world in an upright posture. And I ended up getting

really deep into what happens in the gut when you're flat for too long.

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