Podbit · The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Hospital dietitians give cancer patients corn syrup meal replacement shakes, ice cream, and refined sugar foods to prevent weight loss during chemo. From a metabolic perspective, this floods the bloodstream with glucose and insulin — directly feeding the tumour. Maintaining weight and feeding cancer are happening simultaneously.
Where this was said
At 1:09:30 · chapter starts 1:08:10
The emotional peak of the episode arrives here as Bartlett reads out the American Cancer Society's 2026 projections: 626,000 deaths, 2.11 million new diagnoses, 5,800 new cases every day. [1] — Thomas Seyfried "There's 1,700 people a day in this country dying from cancer. That's 70 an hour, and it gets worse every single year. When is the people go…" 00:43 Seyfried has heard these numbers before and they clearly don't get easier. He describes watching cancer centre advertisements in Boston promise breakthrough after breakthrough while the death toll climbs. 'Where's the accountability for all the money you're raising?' His critique is systemic, not personal: the oncologists are not bad people, but the system trains them to see cancer as a genetic disease and equips them only with tools that target DNA — chemo, radiation, targeted genetic therapies. Metabolic biology is absent from their training, absent from the NCI website, absent from the clinical trials that set the standard of care. The result is a well-funded, well-intentioned machine producing increasingly bad outcomes at increasing scale.
The American Cancer Society projects 626,000 Americans will die from cancer in 2026, with over 2.11 million new diagnoses — roughly 5,800 new cases per day.
AI nailed Andrew Huberman's vertigo-vs-low-blood-pressure diagnosis because that pattern has been reported millions of times. But every patient's liver is different and data on liver surgeries is scarce worldwide — making solo robot surgery dangerous. The rule is simple: data abundance means AI can help; data scarcity means keep the human in the loop.
Fei-Fei Li's father had liver surgery performed by a da Vinci robot guided by a surgeon. The result: 10 times less blood loss than a typical procedure. This isn't replacement — it's the gold standard of human-machine collaboration, where the human's judgment and the robot's precision combine.
US drug overdose deaths fell from 110,000 to roughly 70,000 — the biggest CDC-recorded single-year drop ever. Men's rates fell 27% in one year, and the steepest decline of all was among 15–24-year-olds, down 37%. The crisis narrative around young men needs to make room for signs of genuine progress.
Kessler thought his grief expertise would protect him. It didn't. When his son David died unexpectedly, he found himself on the floor — and eventually realized that acceptance alone wasn't enough. That unmet need became the sixth stage: finding meaning.
Grief isn't just death — it's any unwanted change. Kessler lectured at Coca-Cola and General Mills not because they had lots of funerals, but because change management is grief management. People who grieve well live well.
Witnessing someone's grief isn't just emotional support — it's an essential act of healing. Kessler argues grief is a severance and connection heals it. But real witnessing has two steps: seeing the pain AND affirming the person's capacity to recover.
Avoiding grief isn't free — it's exhausting. Kessler's beach ball metaphor nails it: pushing a small balloon down is easy, but holding a massive beach ball underwater takes constant, draining energy. Unattended feelings don't disappear; they just consume you.
Most people try to control their environment to avoid triggers. Kessler flips this entirely: triggers aren't problems to manage around — they're a detailed map to your pain and your healing. Every trigger points directly to what needs attention.
Running from pain doesn't leave it behind — it accelerates the chase. Whatever we run from pursues us, and whatever we face transforms us. Both Kessler and Lewis Howes testify to knowing both roads firsthand.
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