We on boss talk one-on-one, one-on-one. Yeah, we gon' talk, we gon' have fun. We be on fire, we be lily. It's a unique hustle, big, big time. Name another podcast like this. Check it, check it, check it. It's a unique hustle. It's your boy, he's CEO, and I'm here with the lovely official, Miss Jamaica. Yeah, my dad will walk on. Hey, man, say it, man. Hey, we in Las Vegas, man. Yes, sir. Hey, man, I'm loving it, man. It's, hey, the weather was quite, it's like dry heat. It's dry heat. That's how everybody, it feels like a microwave. We in the middle of a desert. Check it, man. Hey, man, we got a guest today, man. He don't need, really need no introduction, man. You've heard his story. And a lot of times, man, you've seen his life story. A lot of things that he has experienced. He gave us good show, movies. You know what I'm saying? He been in clips of movies. I went down at Rabbit Hole and tried to figure out, man, who is Norman Tillman, man? How's it going, man? Man, it's going, man. Man. Come up to the mic a little bit. Oh, I gotta get up closer so they can. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Cause it's a podcast, man. We be on like Apple, Spotify, all that as well. He go out to everything, but we just, like I said. Yeah, man. That's how I stand. Hey, man, we enjoy it, man. So how you doing, man? Man, I'm fabulous. I'm fabulous. You know, I went and played golf, my passion, my, you know. Are you good at it?  You know what I'm saying? Hey, man. So is it, how, the golf course of, my cousins used to come up here and play golf, man. How long have you been doing it? Ooh, 30 years. 30 years. How did you get into it? You know what? That's a long story, but the long and short of it is, I used to play ball with my two youngest sons, mom's uncle. And we're never like around 96. When Tiger started getting famous, a lot of brothers started playing golf. And I was like, man, anybody gonna play no golf, right? But he and I used to go to YMCA and play, pick up basketball on the weekends. So he was like, he had stopped coming. I was like, what you doing, man? I'm playing golf. I say, really?  Competitive. Oh, man. And I just could not let that inanimate object whoop me. It whooped me. So I had to figure out how to control that ball until this day. I still ain't figured out how to control that ball. Let me tell you, I went to one of those, you know what it was like, hoodie places you can go to. Put in golfing game. Yeah. Put in golf, that's what. Let me tell you, I went to one of those once, only once. Man, you can do us a lot of money out there. Let me tell you, I could not hit the ball. I'd be one of those people, like you see in the movies, throw the golf club. Because.  I'm one of these people that, you know, because you see it on TV and in your mind, you're saying, okay, I know, I need to go with the look on the grass and see which way it's going. So in my mind, I'm already mathin' out everything. And I know exactly what I think I'm supposed to do. So when I go out here and try it, it don't go the way I want it. What I know. You know, golf is a lot of life though, because it's about making decisions and not getting frustrated when you make a plan to, you know, to do what you're trying to do with the ball and it don't work out. You got to go to that. And like I posted on social media the other day, you know, I don't, I just wasn't, I'm not built like that.  No mistake your way to success. That's how you learn. But you got to keep going. Because you gonna make mistakes.  Hey, that sounds right. So then when they make a mistake, whoever it was that sparsed them, you know, they keep sparsing them. So they really don't understand what it's like to fail. You know, when you make a decision to use your last to do something and it don't work out, now you got to recoup, keep sighted, you know, keep focused of, you know, your goal that you're trying to accomplish, but you got to back up and do something. Like I tell people all the time, if I had to, if I went flat broke, wouldn't have no problem getting out here, picking up pop bottles and coming out to that man. I say the same thing, man.  Yeah. Then it's another step to another step and I'll be right back on course, the way I'm going. I had a question. Well, I just want to say first of all, everything's a mindset as well. Period. If your mind is willing to understand a certain place, I always tell people that, you know, if you give, say, Donald Trump or if you give Jeff Bezos just a million dollars, they would consider themselves broke because they speak, they think billions. They don't think millions. So that's a whole different ball game. It's how you think. It's all about how you think. Well, you know, I don't even look at money as money. I look at it as a resource. You know, all it does is really give you the option not to buy stuff.  So, okay, so my question to you. Okay, my question to you was, I mean, this is from a woman's perspective. If a woman wanted to, because if I think about golf, to play golf, you have to have patience. Does that go for how a man treats his woman as well? A golf player, so to say, is a golf player patient with his woman? If he plays golf. In 62 years of trying to figure out who you're being. I tell you, because I got buddies that are married. I'm not married, but I have friends that I play golf with who are married. Some of them talk glowingly about their wives like they're their friends. And then, you know, other guys, they talk about them like they service. Because, you know, you can't play golf broke.  But, you know, they ain't suffer from missing a meal cramps, right?  I understand sometimes that, you know, she know you at the golf course, you know? But it's still that that's your wife. It's like, why do you let yourself go there when you know that she just wanna be with her guy? Exactly. You know what I'm saying? I think it just comes with conditioning and time and growing and evolving. And maturing. Maturing. Yeah. Because you, at some point, when you start to understand the basis of what a man really stands for and leadership, you start to take all of those responsibilities at all cost and put them on yourself. Yeah, I tell you. You know what I mean?  And I say, yeah, but watch this. The drug ever wasn't my fault, but it was my responsibility to make a better decision. That's true.  It's not your fault that that child hasn't been nurtured in such a way.     But if you're standing there, you're innocent bystander as an adult, as a grown person, you're supposed to stop that child from getting hit by that car. For sure. Now how do you grab that child back from the curb? Maybe you might want to sock their parents up a little bit. Say, get on your job. That's it. Get on your parent job, just like our communities right now. Our communities ain't safe for our women and our babies. And as men, that's our job. To make our community safe for our women and our babies.  We ain't never supposed to let our communities get to a place where our women and our children don't feel safe taking the baby to the park that could potentially get shot on the way to the park to let the baby play in the playground. It's crazy. So you say that, okay, so back then you made a poor decision with the choices that you made. You're older now and wiser. How are you trying to change that narrative right now and to help these young kids? And some of, sometimes even older men, women who are still trying to be industries, trying to do crazy stuff, how are you trying to change that? My primary focus right now are my three sons. I got a 36 year old, a 28 year old and a 24 year old. And they introduced me because I've never been, back in the day when we was involved in the drug trade, you couldn't allow yourself to be consumed by anything. You couldn't be, you couldn't exercise the disease of addiction in any kind of way.  So I really, after I stopped selling that poison, I became a drug treatment counselor. I started sending people to drug treatment to become clean off narcotics. I worked with Jim Brown, talked to the gang bangers about you know, is there a retirement plan to gang banging? Is there a 401K plan?  What's your success story? Like with all the people you've helped, because I'm sure there's some that you couldn't help. Yeah, and that's the other thing that I had to let go of.  But at the end of the day, keep doing what you're doing. And if you only save one, you've done a fantastic job. So, you know, right now I'm involved in the cannabis and hemp space because I personally think that cannabis and hemp are perfect compliments to the human anatomy in terms of the endocannabinoid system. And you know what I'm saying? I could get real technical. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But they still call that drug. They're still saying that drug. Because look at Carrie, Shaquery Richards and that got booted for, you know, smoking weed. And that was a tragedy because marijuana is not in any way a physically enhancing substance. It didn't make her be able to run faster. All it did was calm her. You know, they created a hemp strand called Charlotte's Web that the Stanley brothers out of Colorado gave to a little girl named Charlotte figure because she was having epileptic seizures. I heard it's good for that. And they get them kids rittlin' and all that other synthetic stuff. You know, when you take Tylenol and ibuprofen, you get rid of headaches, but then it mess up your liver. Anything organic that you put in your body, you know, I used to know Dr. Savie. We're a renowned herbologist. And you know, he went over there and they say he starved to death. How did that happen? So, I mean, all over there is controversy. You dig, but at the end of the day, it was amazing. And watch this, true story. My brother, my oldest brother who died in 2007. He had liver cancer. He was told five years prior to him dying that if he kept drinking, he was alcoholic. If he kept drinking, he was gonna die. He started drinking that odorless alcohol, ever clear unbeknownst to us. And then one day, because he used to go play golf with me, he was sick and he didn't wanna go. In the next day, he started gradually not eating. And we was like, man, what do you already do? And he, full disclosure, I'm still drinking. It was like, oh man, I call Dr. Savie. Dr. Savie said, man, come on, get these pills. It was herbs and you know, that stuff that he deal with, right? He said, get that to your brother, he'd be fine. And he said it real nice and like, I've been doing this, bro. I've been dealing with, you know, all disease in your body has to do with mucus. That's what he said. Yeah, that's what he says. Yeah. So he said, man, get that to your brother, shoulda go away. And it did. You know what my brother told me?  He didn't wanna deal with it. You see what I'm saying? So, man, you know. But something as simple as some pills just to see if it works. Like, why not? But it was pills, it was powders, it was all kinds of combinations of- He don't wanna have to deal with, have to make it and do this and do that. You just wanna take Tylenol.  Yeah, but it's got side effects. Of course it does. Is your brother still living? No, my brother passed away in 2007. But the thing I looked at was the Nipsey hustle with the Chronicles. What was it? That one movie, yeah. You was playing- Love Chronicles 2, Seekers Reveal. Yeah, yeah. That Love Chronicles. And he produced it, part produced too. Executive produced, co-executive produced. So how was it like acting as his father on that scene? You know what? Ironically enough, that was really just a last minute thing. Yeah, how did it happen? You know, that was a black female that wrote, directed and produced that film. So that was when our homeboy's wife, Tyler Maddox, and while she was filming, and we were on the set watching her film, she was like, we need somebody to play Nipsey's daddy.  Well, that's what she said. Yeah. And they all started saying, come on Uncle Shitty, man, come on, man. You can play it. I'm like, you can play it as daddy. Cause you know, I've never, you know, anybody that knows me that know that you know Freeway Rick Ross was my best friend. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I ain't never wanted to be famous ever. That's why I didn't nobody know me. Yeah, yeah. Period until the documentary came out. So this was your first time acting? Yeah. And I had been to film school. You know, I'm a stud that wants to be the man behind me. I know Slim, you know, behind baby. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Lil Wayne. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know the guy behind the guy. Man, love those guys, man. Just love the way that they, I love the way Slim, he just stays back and you don't never even hear or see him. But you know, that's another thing that we love to do because we also interview a lot of videographers, producers and so forth. Because if it wasn't for them, this artist wouldn't be the person that they are. So we try to give shine to the people behind the scenes. And so many have came on our platform and say, this is my first interview. I don't do this. I don't like to be, but we want to say, homage, we want people to know this is the person who's doing this. Even if you never do another interview again, we need to know, let people know this is the person you hear when you don't see anybody. And I did it out of respect for him because that's my man, a hundred grand. He told me, and I say, he ain't, you know how I feel about that. He said, I know him, but do this one for me, right? I said, okay. Something about them guys that say, do this one for me, you're right. Because I know that if he asks me to do it and he know my disposition, right? It must be something to it. So I said, okay, well, I gotta support it. Wow, man, we definitely appreciate it, man.  And I want to interview some interesting people who can come on the platform and help others. What you've said tonight, it'll help others. Some people don't, that's the whole game. That's the whole point. And to stop things and staple it in time right now with the way that we have all this technology is a very important thing. And so to do it from a perspective to where we control the narrative as well. Period. So that's the whole game for us, man. We gotta take something and make it our own. Even the short films and movies, all the stuff. We got capability now. I just interviewed C. James, who has the new movie. What is it? Nice guy's finished last. He's out of Arkansas. He ain't out of Hollywood. He ain't out of, you know what I mean? He ain't out of New York. He did that whole movie, did the casting and everything. And it's a brilliant piece of work. We can do things now.  And a lot of time our mindset, as we were talking earlier, your mind still stuck on yesterday, but things have changed now. And we have to be a product of the change that we are in. We gotta help people. We gotta show people that they can make it, you know? So and the younger generation is gonna be more powerful. We just do a little bit of things right, right? Well, you know, one of the things that I learned during the time in the 80s was that we had a lot of money. Yeah. You know what I mean? I remember when Magic first came to LA to play for the Lakers, right? He was the first million dollar basketball player to get a contract for a million dollars. We were in a club called The Paradise and one of the little kids that, you know, was one of our little customers. He wasn't even old enough to be in the club. He was already a multi-millionaire. Wow. He was flirting with, we was up in the VVIP room. And Magic had left. He was there with a little female and the kids started rapping to the female and he told, she told him, I'm with Magic Johnson. He was, man, who is Magic Johnson? Wow. He played basketball. Oh, for real? Oh, OK. Well, you know, he persisted and just at it, right? Magic come back and he said, oh, that's my girl, man.  He was like, that ain't what she told me. Yeah. And he's talking to Magic and he's up there at 6'9". He told Magic, he said, yeah, oh, man, I know you. You that tall brother that the Lakers just gave a million-dollar contract to, huh? And Magic started smiling with pride, like, yeah, that's me. You say, I might have had that in my pocket. You want to sell your contract to me? He's a child. Wow.   Yeah. What we should have been trying to do is embrace Magic in them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And become involved in investing in some of the things that Magic and them not got going on now, you know? We were, for the most part, Magic was 19, and I was like 24. Well, I was really his big homie. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And if I had really thought about it back then, but we was, you know, we was living a day just like- It's a competitive world back then. It's, people weren't trying to invest in anybody. People weren't trying to see other people coming up. But nobody trusted anybody. And there weren't enough people that looked like us. Yeah, I was about to say that. That we could confer, you know, defer to, to ask them questions about what is an annuity? Correct. What is a time share? What is a, you know, all these different types of investment vehicles? What is a key role? I didn't know nothing about none of that stuff. Until I got out the game, like you said, you went back and got your degree in engineering. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I went back and got my degree in business administration. Wow. And after dropping out of college to sell that poison, I had a full scholarship to the Citadel Military Academy. Wow. Got in trouble, got suspended from the team, called my mom, say, Mom, you know, I'm hungry, send me some money. She told me to call Rick. And when I left going to the Marine Corps three years earlier, Rick was illiterate. All the homies was illiterate. Wow. They couldn't read or write. You see that in the documentary. You see, he taught us a lot of reading and penitentiary. So I said, what could possibly they have done that, you know what I'm saying, would be of a benefit to me? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Me not knowing, he a multi-millionaire selling that poison. Wow. In fact, he the biggest poison seller on the planet. Yeah, yeah. I'm not knowing. So it took me six months. I was a millionaire. Wow. And it's right around in between the time that I should have gone back to school. I was like, go back to school for what? What they going to teach me in school? I got a million dollars now. Yeah. That's when we were chasing money. Exactly. We didn't understand wealth formation. You know what I'm saying? Yes, sir. We didn't understand that. We've on this show, I've met so many people who are very, very talented. And some of them are on the street. And they are not willing to give that up because that feeds their family. That gives them the lifestyle that they want. How could you advise a young kid who is in that position?  Because that's the lifestyle that comes with that. How can you really tell them, no, here's another option. Because all the other options that I hear people telling them, they're like, well, that can't give them our family money right now.   And with the media giving them this constant barrage of images of quote unquote being rich, then they see their peers. They see the Cardi B's and the offsets and the Beyonce's and the Jay Z's and all these celebrities with the jewelry and the whole opulent lifestyle. And that's what they aspire to. But they don't really get to see the behind the scenes. They don't see the blisters and coins that Beyonce got on her feet from the hours and hours and hours that she had to be in that gym. Or that local gym practicing that presentation that she's going to present to you and charge you $250 to come and see it. They don't see that. Wow. You know? Definitely. So I don't know. I just tell them, you know, your health is your wealth. You need to really understand that this life journey is not a dress rehearsal. This is it.  You know, we used to teach in the American program when I used to work with Jim Brown about life skills. You know, I didn't even know the phrase goal-setting process, decision-making process, conflict resolution. What is that like, huh? Like you're talking about stopping a fight, but you know, you get exposed to new ways to say something but using different words. You know what I mean? So when you think conflict resolution, yeah, OK. So basically you're saying that there's a technique that I can employ when I see two people in a heated debate or argument or about to have a fist fight. You know, I can escalate or de-escalate that situation based on a process that I can use to get inside their head and say, what is this really about? What is this really about? What y'all really mad about? Just like wealth creation. I know that y'all didn't start out with all this equipment. You got some very technical stuff in here. You didn't know how to use this stuff before you knew how to use it. But what you did have is the perseverance and the patience. Because I know you bumped your toe. Nobody's successful. No, no, no, it's a lot of late nights. A lot of late nights. Didn't have some hurdles to jump. That's right. Some speed bumps.  But you never lost sight of your goal.  I think it's just like hustling back in the days. It's the same thing as in the streets. When I was in the streets, you know what I'm saying? I'm extremist. Whatever I do, I take it to the max. So when I was in the streets and I was hustling, getting to the money, I remember occasions where, you know, things would happen. Think we would get massive amounts of loads of stuff that came to the community. Well, when I got my pack and my partner got his pack, I'm breaking everything down. I'm running circles around anything and anybody, you can't deal with me. And it's the same way with any other thing I'm doing. I always say in sports, when you meet a guy that does sports, I said this earlier today, he don't just run track. He can play basketball. He can play football. He can even play baseball. He will whoop you in kickball. He can do it all. Usually that challenges over exceeds each, you know, category of sport that he touches. And that's just when you're dealing with somebody who has favor, right? And so we didn't know that when we was in the streets that we didn't know we was entrepreneurs or, you know, we were thinking about... You never even knew that word. Didn't know it. Didn't care to know it. You was a hustler. Never thought about it. And that's who you were. That's it. And there was a pride in that. Exactly. There was a pride in the fact that you didn't allow yourself to accept the idea that the lifestyle you wanted to live required that you got up and went and did something for eight hours a day and had to take orders or instruction or whatever you want to call it from somebody else. And you didn't have to do that. Yeah. Now that might have been an ends to a means, but you were still focused on trying to get away, like, you know, now being an entrepreneur, being a self-sufficient human being, being able to control your own time. Definitely. I wanted to ask you something. I wanted to ask about coming from Chicago to LA. What was that move like? When you first done it? Initially, it was because I was acting, you know, I got kicked out of Chicago Public School System for being ignorant. Okay. Literally.  Okay. And I'm sure that you know that being intelligent in the hood sometimes can be frowned upon. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's crazy. Now, we endorse, and I find, you know, when people talk to me, the first thing they want to know is, man, what was it like having $100 million when you was 25?  Right? All they know is, man, you was driving around in a Corniche Rosewood. You was just that other time. Don't they be talking about some stories? They love, like, I'll be like, ain't nobody else did nothing? I don't want to talk about that. Nobody cares to hear about it, but they keep bringing it back up because it's exciting to them.  You've heard that over the years. Because they've never done it and they strive for that life. And it's like, really, that's what it is. I could never go back.  It's just when God delivered me. Wow, I never thought about it like that, but that's exactly how it's done. No, when God delivered me, man, yeah, it is. It's like, I made a vow to God. I could never go back, you know, in 95. I made a vow, and I've been true to it. I don't drink, smoke, nothing. I ain't trying to do my own horn, but when I made a vow, I changed my life. And I think that's credible, you know? Absolutely credible. And I think a lot of it doesn't make you no better than nobody else.  You go through things, but at the end of the day, those are things that I held dear to me. I knew my vices, and my vices with this is gonna trigger this and I'm gonna do that.   So yeah, that's what I'm trying to get to, man. I just know that I'm doing a thing called a remorse and redemption tour.  I did, right?  When I became a drug treatment counselor, you know who my best customer, the people who were referring, the most people to send the treatment, the same studs I've been selling that shit to. That is.   It ain't nothing they won't do.  What happened that made you decide, man, I got to stop doing this. Dool told me he was letting drug dealers have relations with his 12-year-old daughter. Wow. I was done. My objectivity went straight out the window. Mm-mm-mm. Yeah, let's know. Go ahead, I'm sorry. I want to touch on, you were mentioning earlier off camera about what you're doing with a cannabis to be able to help young entrepreneurs, billion entrepreneurs. Can you go ahead and tell me a little bit about that? You know, I'm a numbers person. So, you know, I deal with the ones and the zeros, the matrix, right? So when I look at stuff, even back when I was dealing with the poison, you know, I knew what my cost of good soul was. Therefore, I could know what my profit margin needed to be for me to accomplish the goal, which I was trying to accomplish. So when you look at cannabis from seed to sale, you look at the cultivation, right? Right now, and I spoke to a lady in Massachusetts, she told me that a wholesale pound of marijuana is worth $5,300. My research shows that it don't take $250 to grow a pound of weed. What's the in-between profit in that? How many jobs do we got to be cut off the tree? It's got to be clipped, it's got to be packaged, it's got to be marketed.  The same way I said in the documentary when I've seen how much bread these youngsters was getting and I want some of that, I want some of that now. I want some of that. Yeah, it ain't about me.   Oh really? So if I do everything I can to create in people economic stability, I discreate my ability to be a victim to somebody hungry, you know? So that's why I'm involved in it, man. So take it.  So you give back to these women, you were saying something about- Well, what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to get entrepreneurs, existing entrepreneurs, to allow themselves to embrace the concept of each one, teach one. You become a mentor and you literally adopt a person and you walk them through the process of becoming a business owner. And you don't sugarcoat it or blow smoke, you know what I'm saying? Do you give them a grant to help them get started? Well, not so much a grant, but just it's like a- Or a stipend. You start a gift, a stipend, exactly.  How can a black woman qualify to get what you're giving out? You just, you just got to be, do you? Oh, you're talking about for my personal program? Yeah, personal program. Well, again, I have a, it's the social media page called Clubhouse and I have a page on there called Freeway to Business. And what I do is I hold meetings every week for the members, people that have joined and I asked them to tell me, why do they want to become entrepreneurs?    I know what I wanted to ask you. And I'm skipping, but I wanted to ask you about how you and Freeway, when y'all did come together, how did y'all, I know the operation was already in motion when you came to it, but being that you scaled up like you did, was there ever a time where you seen some cross, you know, others and basically did others try to say, you know, input things to say, man, you this or you that. You see what I'm saying? And that still goes on right now? Cause that's the way I would think it would be gone when that time of money is being made. You speak with this insurrection thing that happened on January, which is six and these people are sitting up saying that what we saw with our eyes didn't happen. We didn't see people stabbing police and, you know, it was just like regular tourists. So back in the day, you can imagine, you know, they did that movie with about Alpo where he killed his supposedly best friend over the fact that he bumped into the Kinect, but y'all was both winning. Correct. So jealousy and envy and all those ugly kinds of things, that's what really ugly is. I heard a lady called me today and told me that the person who I'm now working with to form my company backstabbed her to meet me. Wow. I was like, wow, people just throwing each other under the bus. Why you don't embrace the fact that now that we're working together, you jump in and we all jump in and work together to reach a common goal. Which is to provide people with opportunities to identify resources so that they can become a blessing to somebody else and keep the blessing going. Amen. You know what I'm saying? I just want to say, man, thank you for coming on this show, man. Thank you for coming and blessing the platform, man. Shout out to Uncle Hennie. Shout out to Freeway. Yeah, yeah, yeah, man, spoke very highly of you, everybody that I ran into. I keep calling him Echoes because of ALJ that came up. Echo? Echo. Shout out to Echo, man. As soon as I said your name, bam, yeah, man, that's my guy. You know, it's just a wonderful thing to see brothers that look like each other, able to get along on the level that you guys are doing it. And it's successful. That's the reason why our Freeway boys were so successful is because we've always had a philosophy that if there were 10 of us and one of us had $10, and nobody else had no bread, that meant each one of us had a dollar. Hey, man, that's the way it got to be. That's the way we got down. Well, thank you so much, man, for coming on the show, man. We love you, brother. Absolutely, I love y'all right back. Hey, man, it's been another great segment of Boss Talk 101. And we out.


Regular apple consumption may contribute to a lower risk of dying prematurely. Moderate apple consumption, meaning like an apple tour a week, was associated with a 20% lower risk of dying from all causes put together, whereas those who ate an apple a day had a 35% lower risk. You'll often hear me talking about a lower or higher risk of mortality. What does that mean? I mean, isn't the risk of dying 100% for everyone eventually? Let's look at some survival curves to help visualize. If you follow thousands of older women over time, for example, you might see a survival curve like this. They all start out alive, but over a period of 15 years, nearly half succumb. Okay, but this is the survival curve of those who rarely, if ever, ate apples less than 20 a year.  Over the same time period, closer to only about 40% died, and those who ate an apple a day, one small apple, or about a quarter of a large apple a day, did even better survive even longer. Why is that the case? It seems to be less the apples of ones eye than the apple of ones arteries. Even a fraction of an apple a day is associated with a 24% lower odds of having severe major artery calcifications, a marker of vascular disease. And if you're like, duh, it's a fruit, of course it's healthy. The effect was not found for pears, oranges, or bananas. Both these studies were done on women, but a similar effect was found for men, for apples and onions. We think because of the flavonoids naturally occurring phytonutrients concentrated in apples, thought to improve artery function and lower blood pressure leading to improvements in blood flow throughout your body and brain, thereby decreasing the risk of heart disease and strokes. But you don't know until you put it to the test. When I first saw this paper on testing flavonoid-rich apples, I assumed they had selectively bred or genetically engineered some special apple, but no. The high flavonoid apple was just an apple with its peel on, compared to the low flavonoid apple, which was just the exact same apple, but with the peel removed. Over the next three hours, flavonoid levels in the bloodstream shot up in the unpeeled apple group, compared to the peeled apple group, which coincided with significantly improved artery function, peeled versus unpeeled. They conclude that the lower risk of cardiovascular disease with higher apple consumption is most likely due to the high concentration of flavonoids in the skin, which improve artery function. Though it could be anything in the peel, all we know is that apple peels are particularly good for us, improving artery function and lowering blood pressure. Even compared to spinach, I mean give someone about three quarters of a cup of cooked spinach, and within two to three hours their blood pressure drops.  The researchers conclude that apples and spinach almost immediately improve artery function and lower blood pressure. What's nice about these results is that we're talking about whole foods, not some supplement or extract, so this could easily translate into a natural low-cost method of reducing the cardiovascular risk profile of the general population. I've got more videos coming out on other natural low-cost methods for preventing and treating our leading killers, so keep your eyes peeled, but keep your apples unpeeled.