Optimize Your Body and Brain Right Now | Ben Greenfield on Conversations with Tom

[Music] what's up everybody welcome to another episode of conversations with Tom I am here with a very intriguing person who I I would say that were I want to think the one a collision course was course with real friendship so I'm certainly communicated off yeah Mike sometimes so I call you if you are a your your random acquaintances randoms okay yeah but we we could what how did you phrase it I said friendships were on a course yeah heading friendship course an F Sierra yeah but my first alcohol was stealing a bottle of fine bourbon from my dad's like big wooden roll-up cabinet in his office because alcohol was totally forbidden in our house remember so to frame it for the audience you were saying you grew up in a very restrictive household you had a squeeze box which I've never heard on a TV that would somehow auto-translate in real time swear words it was a feat of Engineering yeah it would it would silence the movie or the show whenever swearing occurred and then showing closed caption the substitute word right so like [ __ ] was Wow and [ __ ] it was [ __ ] wasn't even crap they would because crap can be offensive to any people or I forget what what [ __ ] was but my brothers and I would stare there transfixed at the screen like watching the mouths move trying to figure out what they were saying and then we'd go and look up these curse words wait so we got very very good at swearing from it you know so kind of backfired you know my my parents edition of the squeeze box the only thing I have installed on our TVs a blue light blocking box okay so that's our version of swearing in the green field has stereo blue lights at night but yes that style of parenting that dictates that the best way to protect a child is to just have forbidden fruit everywhere right don't expose them to any semblance of porn or swearing or alcohol or anything because you know God forbid that their innocent little get exposed to that and in my opinion you know coming back to me stealing a bottle of bourbon from my dad's desk and going to get drunk in my bedroom all you do is set up forbidden fruit and a very inappropriate view of these things and complete lack of knowledge over the responsible use of them right so in our house there are no rules right it's it's actually a style of parenting called love and logic okay meaning that rather than saying no to your children or setting up boundaries or strict rules you simply educate a child about the consequences of any decision that they might make and then you let them make the decision and if they make the wrong decision to suffer from the consequences of that so that so obviously the prefrontal cortex isn't fully formed right they're gonna make moronic decisions at a biological level you don't want to let your two-year-old go and stick their hand in the fireplace because you want them to experience what fire is right there there are certain boundaries but in in do you explain to vary your kids like yes logic system but in a very common-sense way okay yeah so you know gluten for example we don't say oh you can't eat gluten you can't go to Jimmy's birthday party and have a cupcake or a slice of birthday cake you instead educate them about some of the biological impact of gluten you know some of the ways that you could undo some of the damage like there are even enzymes like dipeptidyl peptidase-4 digest gluten it turns the soup right so kids say that word I don't know but so you don't you don't analogize it for them you just tell them straight up this is the enzyme they either remembered or they don't right you or this is the damage and then you make the decision and they'll come home from a birthday party and they'll say something like dad they had cupcakes there I had a quarter of a cupcake because they looked really good took some gluten Guardian and sometimes they'll make the wrong decision their tummy will hurt the next day and they'll know why like don't volunteer that information and how you help them process who that is there any judgement in your voice is there a haha told you so no just like hey this is how gluten is yeah it's just the facts and then the consequences and that goes for good things too we're like supplements so they like they've done genetic testing I had their genome sequenced and I don't want to sound like I'm some helicopter tiger parent I just want to quit my kids for you know having every advantage in life that I can give them so I had their genome sequence so that they could make intelligent decisions about their health and so that I could help them with that so they for example don't have the gene that allows them to make vitamin D from sunlight they're twins yeah I've been eleven-year-old identical twin boys ma I was like hey yes good word they don't have the gene that lets them make glutathione right the one of the master antioxidants they have low levels of the one called brain derived neurotrophic factor that's like the Miracle Grow through the brain so in the pantry and in the refrigerator I've got glutathione I've got like this vitamin D vitamin K liquid blend and I have lion's mane mushroom extract which is a good kind of precursor for BDNF okay and I never say yo kid go take your supplements did you take yourself once yeah take your supplements today but I will go to the fridge and open it up when they're they're having breakfast and I'll say hey guys I'm taking my glutathione taking my fish oil mmm this vitamin D is so good right and so you simply set an example for them and educate them on the consequences of their decisions and you know same thing for screen time right like there's no rule that they can't be on their iTouch or they can't be on their MacBook or they can't go play video games but the norm in our household is set by mom and I meaning that when there's downtime at the Greenfield house I'm strumming on my guitar or I'm a reading a you know a hardcopy book laid out on the couch or I'm outside you know foraging for plants or shooting my bow or shooting the basketball in the driveway and so our kids when there's downtime you know they go outside throw the football around they they lay in their bed for long periods of time just reading books they they their go to is not a video game or a screen but that's because they didn't grow up in a household where that was the norm so a big part of it is you you can't tell your kid like be careful with gluten and screen time can be difficult on your sleep rhythms at night and then go watch Netflix need a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on the couch and you know and display to them something that's the complete opposite yeah I remember my mom I love her to bits and pieces but her famous phrase was do as I say not as I do and yeah not not not probably the best strategy yeah yeah although it's weird I've often wondered how my mom managed to help my sister and I avoid stupid things so my sister and I didn't get in a lot of trouble either of us we didn't steal we didn't drink we didn't do drugs I was probably afraid of it is the honest answer when I was a kid I had a lot of extended relatives my mom and my dad didn't drink but most of my aunts uncles and everybody else did and there was a lot of alcoholism in the family and so watching them act the fool was a pretty big turnoff so it was sort of like the kid that's ultra screaming and freaking out all times like that's pretty good prophylactic right there that does not make me want to have children so yeah just seeing everybody act weird I didn't get into it I met my first drink until I was 26 so there was even though it was sort of forbidden fruit my mom would have flipped the [ __ ] out if we had gotten drunk but they did let us have a sip of alcohol or if we wanted to try my dad's beer or something but I was found it disgusting you know so I didn't but the real reason that I waited and waited and waited was because I was afraid I wasn't I didn't want to act stupid yeah and that's the problem is there are many compounds on this planet that we live on that are very helpful but irresponsible use of them has painted them in a horrible light for a lot of people I mean you know alcohol is a very simple example when you look at a lot of the blue zones I mean they're drinking aunt rich wines and bitter forward cocktails and these lend better digestion you know when you have them with a meal actually think that's real like this wine actually do something positive yeah yeah so is it antioxidants so that one is one where I've heard evidence for the evidence against and it's a little bit of the antioxidants a little bit of the tannins the resveratrol thing was kind of blown out of proportion you would need to drink a lot of wine and there are better ways to get the resveratrol like some kind of a great skin extract supplement or something like that but if we're not talking about a big California cab where there are a lot of pesticides and herbicides and chemicals and sulfites allowed in wine that is produced in the US and we're talking about more like an organic biodynamic European wine like a French or an Italian wine that has grown under hardy er conditions right less irrigation on the crops so you're basically concentrating the antioxidants you're inducing that xeno hormetic effect which refers to this idea that certain plant compounds even though they're they're mildly damaging to the human body just like UVA and UVB radiation from the Sun or heat from a sauna or cold from a cryotherapy unit in small doses can actually induce cellular resilience can actually cause the body to bounce back stronger and when you look at a grape that's been stressed and grown with low irrigation you do concentrate the antioxidants you concentrate some of these xeno hormetic compounds you even concentrate there is Vera trawl so it depends on the alcohol but part of it is the antioxidants the tannins and some of these compounds that do induce cellular resilience the other component and this would be especially with like a bitters forward cocktail and anything that that's bitter from nature whether it's the mint family or thyme or rosemary or berberine or anything like that it actually increases your insulin sensitivity after you've consumed it meaning that it would lower the intensity of the blood glucose response to the carbohydrates that you would eat in conjunction with that alcohol so there are some benefits from it from a digestive standpoint and from a cellular resilience standpoint and I don't think that you have to drink to be able to live a long time but there is some evidence that a lot of these blue zones are having you know for the women one to two drinks a day for the men two to three drinks a day of like a good clean alcohol and some of it could just be the relaxation the fact that it's being consumed at the end of the day and you know during lunch in a social setting you know with family with friends you know and of course the absence of loneliness itself is is enormous ly important for longevity and yes that stuff to me really confounds the issue of so I I look at this stuff from the perspective of I want something prescriptive I want to know exactly what to do if I want to extend not only life but functionality I want to be sort of high power for a very long time and so you start looking at this stuff and I know and I need to get Peter attea to talk to this on his own but I know when he was back with new C and then he ended up leaving new C part of it was the frustration of really running experiments that are are just obviously causative instead of getting a whole bunch of correlative data so is it the drinking that has the effect or is it chilling with your friend is that the timing is it the tannins is that the antioxidants like if [ __ ] so part of what makes me always skeptical about alcohol may be entirely personal in that when I drink I get a high inflammatory response and as somebody who's prone to inflammation very prone to information I'd actually be really interested to do some genetic testing and to see if there are any markers that I have that show so I have Naga there's a name for it but where you can like right in the skin so if I were to scratch myself I would welt in like so I could write my name in my arm or something and it was just welt ups not as bad anymore certainly now that I've changed my diet and I've introduced a lot of quality fats and taking my carbohydrates basically to zero I don't have that but growing up when my diet was an atrocity I was just wildly inflamed so if I go out and I have even one drink I will feel it the next day for sure and I'm no I am NOT a heavy drink or anything yeah I would well first of all if they do do the test where they where they determine whether it's drinking with your friends in a social setting that induces longevity or something in the alcohol itself and they have the group that drinks bottled water at night hanging around the campfire in the group that gets the wine I want to be in the wine group I'm just gonna just gonna sit right now for the psychological or I just enjoy a glass of wine more than a you know bottle of sparkling water cause the way it tastes or because of the way it feels both both you know and you also get a little bit of that inhibitory neurotransmitter release it's a gaba right in response to a glass of wine or a cocktail that just kind of relaxes you at the end of the day kind of d stresses you so there's that too but related to what your timer with the skin and some of the issues that you've had you know that that sounds eerily similar to like kind of an autoimmune condition for short ah t response and there is one lab testing company that I do place a good amount of faith in in terms of not giving you a host of false positives like foods or or chemicals or toxins that your body is producing an immune response to and that's cyrex Laboratories okay and any any good functional medicine doc can order you a cyrex lab panel for for mold for mycotoxin for fungi for antibody reaction to foods but they tests the white blood cell response to both the cooked and the raw version of the protein so you're not getting all these reactions that would normally be produced anyways if the blood cells got exposed to say like raw egg or a chick and so they're looking at the cooked version they're looking at cross reactivity between some of these protein compounds so that's a good test to see if you have some autoimmune issues and then you could say oh well here's the you know the list of eight foods that are inducing that kind of inflammatory reaction now do you think that autoimmune is driven entirely by food or things you consume no or no not necessarily I mean you can produce an an antibody response to two you know something like like fluoride for example you know you can produce elevated thyroid antibodies in response to that you know mold mycotoxins fungi there's a lot of things that can cause the body to go into almost like this cell danger response so it doesn't just have to be food so super random and this may be just a complete departure from what we're talking about but I am really curious to talk to you about a particular ll 37 so as you know Lisa has struggled my wife for any first-time listeners welcome my wife has struggled profoundly with microbiome issues profoundly for years we're going into year four we may have just completed year four which is terrible I think we did so four years since she had a threshold event and all hell broke loose and it's been pain and suffering and trying to figure out what's going on and what she did all that so now we've made massive progress for an entire year that our life was on hold there was a period where I was actually afraid she was gonna die it was [ __ ] crazy and somebody said to me oh you should look into ll 37 and then you were the first person I pinged to say hey is this real and now's our chance tell me about it well ll 37 is a peptide okay sounds like a robot it's a peptide and a peptide is simply an amino acid sequence and I'm actually very excited about peptides because they're inventing in researching all sorts of new peptides that precisely target specific cell responses like I first learned about peptides when I had a joint injury and someone told me about this one called BP c 157 and many peptides are like this but it's it's an injectable right the same as a diabetic would inject with an insulin syringe very small needle you know you pinch away a little fat from typically around like the the stomach some people will go closer to the area of injury like like around the knee for example there's debate back and forth about whether it works best locally or systemically but BP c 157 is actually what's known as a gastric healing peptide BP C stands for body protection compound your body naturally makes it but you can synthesize it and get it into the body in higher amounts and it has this very profound anti-inflammatory effect when I found out about that one you know I started to go down the peptide rabbit-hole I learned about one called TB 500 that repairs actin and myosin fibers in torn up tissue right for something like achilles tendonitis or or a knee injury or something like that and then it turns out that these companies there's one in Kentucky called tailor-made compounding they have amino acid sequencing machines where they can make all manner of different peptides like you know I think the last time I was on your show we talked about nootropics and smart drugs while they're now making peptides that do things like shut down neural inflammation increased blood flow to the brain healed the blood-brain barrier and those are not even injectable like ones called dye hexa and it's a topical like a transdermal lotion another one is called C max and it's like an intranasal spray and you know a lot of people are into whatever daffodil or micro dosing with LSD or lithium or you know all these different nootropics and these things work very very precisely in a very clean and immediate manner have you tried those no yeah I do walk through them I want to know like nasal spray topic one anything so make something for the brain and you know about will circle back to will come back to ll 37 for sure so for the brain particularly BP c 157 the one i mentioned earlier is also a neural anti-inflammatory okay so that was like a mentioned emic anti-inflammatory to stomach yeah so it'll work on amazing myself or your wife on the gut yeah that's something I would include in a peptide protocol okay come back to ll 37 but BP c 157 would be one and again for muscle injuries that would be co-administered with tv:500 for the brain the lotion that you smear on either side of your neck like when you get up in the morning is call dye hexa we'll give you about six to eight hours of clean-burning energy without any side-effects not like ephedra herb amate no synthetic nervous system stimulation like it's it's it's very clean like you don't feel like your hearts racing anything like that the intranasal c-max it works very well combined with the dye exa and again that's a couple sprays and each nose you kind of snort for about thirty to sixty seconds and that hits the brain so those two are very good although the first ones giving me energy your description sounds a bit like caffeine with no jittery it's kind of like that and so then the other one is doing what it's like a mode a Finnell without any I've taken modafinil yeah and the easiest way for me to describe modafinil is you still feel tired but you don't feel like you need to go to sleep exactly so not as cool as I had hoped it would be I had I had scheduled in addition to modafinil when I heard that it was given to narcoleptics when it was given to fighter pilots to be able to stay up all night and stay sharp and not get any of the jitteriness of caffeine I thought [ __ ] sign me up doing anything that means that I don't need to sleep when I don't want to obviously you pay the piper at some point so this was never gonna be something that I did all the time but I thought they were there were certainly times where it would have been incredibly beneficial to not need a night's sleep so you're saying it's like that where you don't feel the need to sleep but you still feel tired if you're tired you don't feel tired though that's the thing is it's it's clean your head is more clear and clean than if you're using mode Athena and are you taking it when you're fatigued or are you taking it first thing in the morning to jumpstart you can do either you can do either I like to stay ahead of fatigue right so so you know I track my sleep if I've had let's say you know for me six-and-a-half hour sleep night would dictate from me the need for something like that or or the knowledge that I'll be more productive if I put something like that into my system for me you know seven and a half to eight hours is a sweet spot I feel good I don't you know when I wake up and I've had seven and a half to eight hours of good sleep not just time in bed but actual time asleep I know it because I don't wake up thinking about coffee that's one of my litmus tests I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt I wake up and I'm thinking about coffee and then I check my sleep score afterwards it almost always shows like my deep sleep was too low or my REM sleep is too low or I was in bed for eight hours but I was up and down and only got you know six six and a half hours of sleep so that's a situation in which I would use something like that and the c-max the it's also known as cerebral lysine apparently what that does is improves the integrity of the blood-brain barrier so essentially it means that compounds that you would be consuming from the diet like you know acetylcholine for example from walnuts or eggs you would be able to cross the blood-brain barrier more readily and you would get less inflammatory molecules into the brain there are two others that would not be necessary but that are interesting as cognitive peptides one is called cordage --n and that one is used for memory i don't know the mechanism of action it's apparently as the name implies related to your cortex but it is supposed to improve I don't even remember if it's short-term or long-term memory but apparently if you want to improve your memory that's one to take I don't have my I don't have a bad memory I've tried it noticed I didn't notice much but what I should have done and I'll probably do this at some point in the future is use do you know that that app called n-back No okay so n-back is one of the few brain training apps that's been shown to actually increase both short-term and long-term memory with repeated use and back the letter N and back so for example it goes from N 1 training all the way up to n 10 training ok and in N 1 training it would show you a square that lights up on a grid of 10 squares on a screen and you would see where that square lit up and then another square would light up and then a final score would light up after that and if the third square that lit up was the same that occurred as N 1 ago you push a button and if it didn't then you don't push the button and at the same time it's doing sounds so you might see the square on the upper right-hand corner of the grid will light up and you'll hear the letter K and then the square in the middle will light up and you'll hear the letter G and then the square on the lower right will light up and you'll hear the letter K well in that situation you would know that the letter K occurred n times ago but not the square so all you'd push in this case on that by use the picture of the ear instead of the eye and sometimes it'll leave both the ear in the eye so as you can tell yeah you'll smoke coming out your ears once you get up to like n4 I've never gotten higher than n4 and and with repeated training you probably could sue because you're trying to remember the square in the sound that occurred for four instances ago and what I'd like to do is try that chord again and see if it proved again and adding and then the final one is called penny Allen and that works on the pineal gland this one's interesting because a lot of people and this is what does the pineal gland do the pineal gland among other things is responsible for melatonin and DMT production okay right so it'll help out with sleep but then also you know DMT is of course now well known by many folks as being associated with like the use of plant medicines or journeying or tripping like your body's releasing massive amounts of DMT and that type of scenario but it's also releasing it when you're lucid dreaming when you're engaged in creative thought patterns you know it's it's it's related to that left and right hemispheric coordination of the brain the merging of analytical and creative thinking so this penny Allen is supposedly increasing the amount of activity in the pineal gland like increasing its ability to produce something like DMT or melatonin and some people can actually have low pineal gland production due to what's called calcification of the pineal gland and that can occur in response to large amounts of fluoride consumption all right that's why there's this whole conspiracy theory about fluoride in the water being used for mind control because it somehow scaling up the pineal gland and I'm not a conspiracy theorist I don't think anybody's trying to control our minds but I do think fluoride has an impact on the pineal gland that could be reversed by the use of this penny Alan or even if that wasn't your goal and your goal was to instead have a more exaggerated response to plant medicines or better creative and analytical thought patterns yes please or increased melatonin release it could be reasonable for that type of stuff so top of the totem pole the dye hexa and c-max the topical lotion and the intranasal spray oh the cordage in and the pinyon are interesting but I don't think completely necessary and then well that's do you say that but you have a crazy [ __ ] memory I can this stuff that you can rattle off is insane I would say that only in the realm of health fair but don't ask me who's 38 president was but that's where you spend the bulk of your time so I get a lot of credit from the public for having a great memory and I always want to laugh because I remember such a miniscule fraction of the information that I encounter it's just that I read so much that I'm encountering so much data that sure if I read sort of in swarms enough I'm going to be circling around the same ideas enough that I'll start to retain and adjust you know they sort of stack but if if I could even remember ten percent of what I read it would be a game-changer for me so things that this is part of the reason I'm such a psychopath about getting sleep is I'm so aware of just cognitive optimization I feel like I've always been at a deficit cognitively and so I'm always trying to do things like get sleep or whatever that will have that kind of impact so I guess I'm secretly hoping that the reason that you didn't because I'm very happy to take supplements drugs if they're real and they work I will give them a shot all day every day so my hope is that you have a good memory and that you didn't notice it cuz you're on sort of the upper ends of the spectrum and that for somebody like me that it might actually have a noticeable effect it could be awesome could be we can talk we can talk sleep hacking later if you want to if you want to talk a little bit sleepy I'm game for that all right cool so back to this peptide ll 37 yeah so one my friends Karl 1 or Carlin or radio yeah yeah he got SIBO small intestinal bacterial overgrowth and normally you would limit your consumption of what are called fodmap foods fruit and yes although saccharides monosaccharides disaccharides and pauline and onions and wheat and you eliminate those and it helps with the bloating you can take certain antibacterials or what is known as an elemental diet those are often prescribed for a SIBO based diet as well usually the the standard at this point for SIBO testing even though it's not super accurate is you do a breath test right you swallow a glucose or a lactulose based sugar solution you breathe into a tube and it monitors the amount of gases that are produced and will tell you you know whether or not these bacteria and their small intestine are fermenting much much more than what would be expected and you have this so-called small intestinal bacterial overgrowth ll 37 apparently does a very fishing job knocking out that bacterial overgrowth to such an efficient extent that and I tried it and I experienced this myself you feel pretty crappy for about two days up to a week after you begin using it because you're getting what is known as a herxheimer reaction like a detox reaction as your nuking all this bacteria in a small intestine and this is either just a peptide it's just a peptide you all you're doing is injecting it subcutaneously and in many cases you do be PC 157 at the same time to knock down some of the gut inflammation there are other things that I think would help depending on what the condition is like if it's aggravated by leaky gut for example or gut inflammation glutamine is wonderful for that l-glutamine you can buy like you know l-glutamine powder yeah I amaz we tried out glutamine and no noticeable impacts and some of the stuff stacks you know bone broth is enough like yeah heavy consumption like four to five cups of bone broth per day I would say bone broth was a winner for us and colostrum is amazing Robin colossi is that most of it is sold in capsules colostrum is the first part of any mammalian mother's milk and all babies are born with the permeable gut lining and the way that that's healed up is the exposure of that colostrum from mother's milk this is why kids who are raised on infant formulas based on soy oftentimes have immune system issues or leaky guns as they age because they didn't get the colostrum which would cause this it's a protein called zon Yulin but it down regulates the levels of zon Yulin in the gut and that causes that got to be less permeable how long is the female producing colostrum I don't know yeah yeah anyways though the problem is that most of its oldest capsules but by the way the way that it works when a baby is suckling the colostrum is inside its mouth first and it's the salivary amylase in the mouth that activates all the healing growth factors in the colostrum so you have to buy the powder and that's what I do is that I use it because you get spouter colostrum powder o'clock I can't you get it as milk is it just you can't I think you can if you get if you get raw milk it should have some colostrum in it and probiotics and enzymes but a lot of people these days are pretty cognizant of their weight and the best way to turn a baby mammal into a big fat big you know adult mammal is by giving it lots of milk right and so if you're concerned about calories or gaining too much weight or staying lean or even just inhibiting constant anabolism which is somewhat associated with carcinogenicity you know you don't want to be in a constant pro-growth state then maybe consuming all the calories along with the colostrum so this is how does the loss terminal pulling out the sugars like what are they yeah you don't you don't get the milk proteins you don't get the lactose right the milk sugars some things you can isolate 15 calories in a heaping tablespoon of it right so it's so it's not like you're getting all the calories you'd get from raw milk which is close to the equivalent of just like mowing down ice cream right from four just from a body composition stand right so you get the powdered colostrum and then you put that in your mouth and you swish it around in your mouth for a little while one to two minutes and then you swallow that like white saliva coated solution that you've got in your mouth and that's incredible that's probably top of the totem pole for me we've got held in ll four seven four gut health specifically gut permeability they've even done studies and athletes right and this is how I first discovered colostrum because I was competing in triathlon like Ironman Hawaii in very hot conditions but having still eat you know 350 400 calories an hour during that race exercise makes the gut permeable heat and exercise makes the gut even more permeable in real time it breaks them that fast exactly so I take the colostrum I load with it for two weeks leading into the race and it makes the gut less permeable and as a total aside this is why one of the worst things you can do if your marathon or triathlete just pop ibuprofen or Advil during the race or before the race because that just it goes straight into your bloodstream and can induce kidney toxicity Oh hit your system so fast well it gets one of the worst things you can do for your liver and your kidneys to consume ibuprofen or Advil when your gut is already permeable and doesn't add news bears so for your wife I would definitely consider ll 37 and bbc1 57 if she knows and is aware that she might feel kind of crappy for two days up to a week after the ll 37 now do you keep taking the ll 37 and does that go away or it goes away when you stop taking should kill the bacteria so when you're asymptomatic and I am I don't want anyone to think I'm a doctor I'm not I don't want them to misconstrue this is medical advice I'm just like a I'm a hacker right like I just I study up on this stuff and find interesting information and try and synthesize it for people but ll 37 would be until you're asymptomatic bpc 157 I take that regularly just as it's just such an teamraiser great systemic anti-inflammatory I feel wonderful now so a guy that's living your lifestyle I imagine well maybe you work out enough that is that what's triggering them from it seems like you would live it seems like you do live a lifestyle that is so healthy that whatever information you have seems like maybe that's the information that we want yes you don't want zero inflammation exactly is that to combat the level at which you work out yeah you are you are correct and you know I'm glad you made that point that if you're taking a host of antioxidants especially based on research has shown high dose synthetic antioxidants like vitamin C or vitamin E or interestingly most recently metformin all of these can blunt the hormetic response to exercise so you'd produce less mitochondria you'd produce fewer satellite cells which allow for for muscle growth and muscle repair so you don't want a time anything that quells inflammation too close to the exercise session and that would even include like a long cold soak right like a quick cold shower after workout to two minute cold shower like slaps athletes into a post-workout and bad news better strategy especially if you're working out in the afternoon or the early evening would be to use a quick cold shower to cool the core temperature so you sleep better because a cold temperature is one of the best ways to activate good sleep cycles but you don't do a big long ice bath you time that separate from the workout like later on in the day at least a couple hours after the workout so that natural inflammatory response has had a chance to occur there are some exceptions that rule there are there are some antioxidants that they have tested on exercising individuals and they don't quell the inflammatory response to exercise or quell the the natural hormetic response to exercise some of the more well-known ones are green tea extract I like EGCG matcha like any of the components of green tea you can take that after exercise and it has an anti-inflammatory that doesn't blunt the Hermetic response to exercise another one is care seating it's a compound you would find in things like red apples and onions but it's also available as a supplement and it's got a lot of really great properties kare Seaton does but it's specifically a anti-inflammatory that doesn't blood the hormetic response to exercise hydrogen hydrogen rich water you can buy hydrogen tablets now put them in water they have a really good antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effect but again don't blunt the hormetic response to exercise it's just hydrogen rich water yep exactly there's a if you go to the website of the molecular hydrogen foundation they have a lot of research on the benefits of higher concentrations of hydrogen in water there's also a growing body of research showing that a much larger isotope of hydrogen called deuterium is actually something that's very damaging to the body and you find about this very here in God's Word yeah very concentrated levels of deuterium are found in crops that are sprayed with pesticides and herbicides your body would normally make its own deteriorated water if it's in a state of fatty acid oxidation like if you're limiting starches and sugars but if you're eating a high carbohydrate diet you're gonna tend to have higher levels of deuterium and if furthermore you're not selecting organic produce so you got a lot of glyphosate herbicides pesticides you're gonna also have a big deuterium load so lots of hydrogen is good along especially with low amounts of deuterium when it comes to your water so back to me and why I take steps to shut down inflammation number one I am an exercise fiend like not only have I up until this past month competed professionally in Spartan racing and an Ironman before that body building but a great deal of unnatural beat down put on the body not that I profess that to be healthy like that's that's my personal Mount Everest you know I get a kick out of going out and competing on the field of battle I get a little bit kind of pent up if I don't get out to the gym to throw some weights around like it's kind of my happy place to be competing to be exercising and I think that there are probably fewer people in prison because gyms exist right it's a chance for us to get out and kind of kind of get cathartic you know do what we might have in primal times done while hunting or being on the field of battle or you know or you know venturing exploring whatever the case may be you know we are when you're doing that because I find this particularly interesting do you intentionally channel aggression that may not be the word you would use it certainly is the word I would do not I'm not the angry guy at the gym I did as a matter of fact for aggression Touche I am pretty aggressive at the gym I am yeah to me like man there is something about aggression there's a level of intoxication and so when I think about things that intoxicated I think about all right there's an evolutionary reason that this exists to make it pleasurable to make it hunger and I won't quite say that aggression has the same sort of push or pull that like a sex drive has which really feels like a hunger we just feel compelled to do it but when I tap into being aggressive it makes me feel so good like there is something there and as a kid I was not taught to be aggressive and so I spent my entire childhood never tapping into that and then as I became an adult and I got married and then I wanted to add muscle mass and there was a whole like protect my wife thing and so I used to work out in the gym thinking of my wife is being attacked and I'm too weak to stop her and so that would like push me so [ __ ] hard and by learning to be able to step into the aggression and then actually so one thing is you look at somebody like Arnold Schwarzenegger and you think okay he's been able to translate what he's done to the body into so many other areas of his life the level of discipline focus and tension all of that follow through and then yet so few bodybuilders were able to translate that now when I started working out it ended up having these echoes through every aspect of my life including business so in the beginning because I didn't have a developed sense of aggression was very soft in my my journey as an adult male my journey as a business person has very much been one of toughening the [ __ ] up and so it started with lifting it started with going in and realizing that whoa there's this channel in my mind of aggression and that when I step into that there is a power there is an urge there's this sense of like whoa there's something really primal in me and it is only ever a sort of stage if the way and then I can actually I won't say on a dime but it's [ __ ] close man like I I have learned over the years to be able to step into a level of aggression it's not anger which is very different actually don't get angry very easily it takes a lot to make me angry but I've learned to leverage aggression now whether that's aggression to attack the weights and to get stronger or whether that's in business to be like no this [ __ ] obstacle is going to fall like I am going to figure this out and there's a level of intensity to that for sure that is intoxicating I agree and I think furthermore it's helpful for the nervous system because when you look at all these wearables now that are measuring HRV or heart rate variability which is the interplay between the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system right you get the vagus nerve innervates the heart via the electrical pacemaker of the heart called the sinoatrial node the SA node and when the parasympathetic rest and digest branch and the sympathetic fight and flight branch are innervating the heart in balance there's mild but detectable beat to beat variation in terms of the amount of time between each heart beat and that is what is known as high heart rate variability such as zero point eight eight milliseconds zero point eight nine milliseconds zero point eight five milliseconds versus one millisecond one millisecond one millisecond the latter example would be someone who has poor vagal nerve tone poor interplay between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system that's so counterintuitive you would think the metronome a Qi study that goes yeah right but but it's not the case now when you are engaging in activities that really prime and push that sympathetic nervous system the entire time you're in the gym in that state of aggression if you were to wear a real-time like Bluetooth enabled chest rate strap or there there are there there's one wrist band called the woop the the aura ring that I'm wearing has it has a moment function you can put onto it there's one called a nature beat meaning if you activate moment you can see what your HRV is in real time what where do you say moment moment moment M om en T M om en T how did I mispronounce it no that's just I can't yet make it make sense okay it's called a moment moment yeah cuz it's like this is the moment that I'm in right so like this is real time measurement of HRV when you do that you'll find that especially for the harder exercises where your body's really stressed like the back squat more the deadlift you have a very low HRV rise you're all aggression there's no sympathetic right a parasympathetic is stepped back it's all sympathetic but in response to that once you finish you know kind of along the lines of that same concept of things that are bad for you in large amounts are good for you in small amounts your body bounces back from that session with greater nervous system resilience and people who train their sympathetic nervous system a few times a week have a higher overall HRV even though it's lower during that session so in the same way that meditation kind of over activates the parasympathetic nervous system but long-term results in steady increases in HRV the opposite of meditation or what you might call more easy tresses remember the meditation you can absolutely meditation is one of the better ways to increase HIV actually but the hard weight training session you know it's low during but then higher after so I think there you know in addition to just like you know like the way we got on this topic releasing pent-up anger I think that there's or pent up aggression I should say there are a lot of other you know nervous system benefits and then of course there's some of the reasons you mentioned you were doing this you know make yourself harder to kill increase muscle mass be able to get up off the floor better and have higher bone density when you're old I mean there's a lot of reasons for that and and I don't think everybody needs to beat themselves up to the gym to the point where they need to use BPC 157 daily or you know a little bit of help from better living through science with you know the use of antioxidant formulations or something like that but if the gym is your happy place and you good and it just set you up for the day and you feel like you've you've gotten rid of some pent-up aggression you're just more stable if you hit it hard in the gym a few times a week yeah you might need a little bit of help with an anti-inflammatory compound what do you think about dudes and muscle mass have to have it nice to have doesn't matter it depends on your definition of muscle mass so in studies that they've done on telomere length in response to exercise like the anti aging longevity enhancing effects of exercise there are certain activities that have been shown to reduce the rate at which telomeres shorten more than others racquet sports like table tennis racquetball pickleball tennis something like that probably is great also because you're getting that cognitive training effect cycling swimming and weight training and weight trainings at the top of the totem pole I mean if you choose any activities you play some tennis or table tennis or racquetball you'd swim every once in a while you'd ride the bike and you lift weights if you're gonna choose that the lowest hanging fruit for longevity when you look at weightlifting the type of muscle that imparts the greatest improvements in longevity is the development of small quick wiry explosive muscle right so powerlifting style muscle where you're doing short intense bouts high weight low rep style exercise if you look at it from a pure longevity standpoint that's very beneficial the problem is that's also associated with a higher risk of injury but not a lot of people can get in you know a few times a week and do power cleans and overhead push press and these super explosive lifts when you look at bone density grip strength the blood pressure response to exercise you get a lot of benefits from just like the basic you know slow moving you know there's even a book by dr. Doug macguff called body by science like super slow training I love that for for a lot of the people who all coach or help out with their workouts because they can do that a couple of times a week or up to three times a week every week of the year and not get injured rep but still maintain strength and still maintain bone density and then I what I read men in addition to that is explosive bodyweight exercises like you've got your super slow training two to three days of the week and on the in-between days you might do something like the New York Times seven-minute workout which is 30 seconds of 14 different moves done very quickly and explosively but since you're not loaded there's a lower risk for injury but you're still tapping into that explosive powerlifting style muscle now once you reach a certain point of muscle mass like the big bodybuilders that takes a lot of energy to carry and it takes a lot of energy to cool it requires a lot of antioxidants to be able to maintain that type of muscle and if it's not that functional like if it's muscle built through you know bicep curls and whatever seated leg extensions and all these kind of non functional moves you know I I question whether having to maintain all that muscle is really worth the toll that it takes on the body probably the only saving grace of having a large amount of somewhat non-functional muscle is that muscle is a glucose sink meaning that carbohydrates are gonna be a little less damaging because when you eat carbohydrates it's gonna get shoved into liver and it's gonna get shoved into muscle before it gets converted into triglycerides or forms adipose tissue on the waistline or hangs around in the bloodstream a long time and becomes inflammatory so if you have a little bit of extra muscle you've got a greater sink for glucose isn't there also a little more ice cream which is nice don't get me wrong or breast milk isn't there that is exactly the second thing I was gonna say well said isn't there some correlation at least between longevity and the amount of muscle mass that you carry isn't there like some crazy predictor like the size of your glutes and your hamstrings and your quads or something predict your longevity I've never heard that but I wouldn't be surprised and I'm really terrified that I'm making it up misremembering something but there's a lot of interesting corollaries for a lunge it like grip strength walking speed the ability to be able to do a certain number of push-ups or get up and down off the floor a certain number of times with as few limbs as possible so I wouldn't be surprised if there was some muscle measurement but I haven't come across it do you know what the world record is for push-ups it's like push-ups without breaking posture or something cuz I think they can pause at the top I mean I guess 1500 yeah I would have guessed something like that as well I'm gonna have to look this up for just accuracy here but I'm almost certain it's over ten thousand and I was like nope that's absolutely impossible and then that is the record that sounds like a David Goggins type of thing yes that really my problem with like the whole like Dean Karnazes 50 marathons in 50 days or you know the David Coggins pull-up record is I get bored I just ten thousand five hundred and seven dude yeah Minoru yoshida of Japan that's [ __ ] crazy the most number of non-stop push-ups there'd have to be a pretty damn big care on the end of a stick for me well I could need to be like the 2.5 million dollar you know push-up challenge or so yeah it would not ring in chief but what's crazy me is it's that's one where I would say anybody in their right mind sort of guessing at what's possible will be just factors too small yeah that's just like even 1500 sounds absurd I thought 500 maybe a thousand I just couldn't fathom anything more this guy's arms are probably like 2 inches long let's see the photo here well he's Japanese to the odds of him being super gangly on low yeah I mean he doesn't do a picture of him doesn't look unusual I'm assuming this is him though I can't swear let's say oh yeah he's he's like Bruce Lee built yes yeah yes so he's light enough to be able to I have to push up a lot of whoo yeah yeah he's not 240 short lives there's explosive wire see that's the type of body that I think is most conducive to longevity cuz yeah some muscle mass your functional but your explosive your wiry like if I'm 78 years old and that's why I'm Bill I'd much rather be built like that you know with with like a big like cannonball shoulder bodybuilder tiny'mon parents what are you your physique now obviously you work your ass off is this exactly the physique that you want is this the physique that is realistic giving having kids longevity and all that or if you could snap your fingers and still live forever would you be bigger I don't think it'd be bigger you know I like to be able to run I like to be able to chase a tennis ball play some Ultimate Frisbee like I do I get kind of sluggish once I get up above about 190 I'm a 185 right now I was at 215 in college when I was bodybuilding and was just massive but had very low energy ultra low body fat 3% body fat 215 yes right now I'm four and a half percent body fat in 185 and I feel pretty good at this level arguably now that I'm done doing a lot of endurance sports my body fat percentage will go up a little bit and that will be healthier just from a pure hormonal standpoint but I feel pretty good I eat too appetite I'm doing a lot of organ meats and a lot of colostrum which I think are very beneficial for me when you get your Vito hormones energy levels when I'm at home I primarily organ meats that I've harvested from animals that I've beau hunted or order them from us wellness meats they've got these big sausage shapes meats that are like braunschweiger and head cheese where they mix kidney and heart and liver but they taste really good and they taste like like sausage rather my kids have them scrambled up with eggs so they're pretty tasty they're convenient and they they have all grass-fed grass-finished stuff so it's just all super clean and it's a convenient way to get organ meats what's your ratio like how much vegetable is in your life I'll tell you about that I've been kind of experimenting with that but when I travel I am right now I'm kind of experimenting with this this has only been three weeks that I've been doing this I'm taking yeah encapsulated organ meats so I found this company called ancestral supplements and I'm not financially affiliated with them at all but they make brain liver heart adrenal thyroid and lung all encapsulated organ means you get an adrenal and get a sated organ me yeah and bring various was yeah so I've been it comes out to like 30 capsules that I'm taking right now like mid-morning but I'm taking all these organ meats when I travel because it's hard to get good organ meats when you're on the road and I feel a lot more energy I'm not getting sick sniffles anything like that at all and I think part of it is that I am in way interested in organ meats so I'm doing what I'll call a lazy man's carnivore which is probably really bad I have a feeling that you either do carnivore or you don't so I'm hedging my bets um vegetables but I would really like to find a way that's easy a way that is edible I haven't tried we're gonna be so for all I know it tastes like pumpkin pie but I've never tried it so pecan pie it depends on how it has been cooked so like liver if I'm gonna cook liver and I just if I just take it and whatever throw it on the grill it's got like this gamy kind of chewy flavor that I do not enjoy yeah but it disgusting if I take that same liver and I put it in a ziplock bag any organ meat you can do this with and it just removes all the gaming us because it gets enzymatically broken down with raw milk which is the best but if you don't have raw milk anything kind of acidic like lemon for example and you leave it overnight that removes some of the gay meanness then you dump it out of the ziplock bag or whatever you've got it in that marinade with or a Pyrex glass container if you're concerned about plastic and you rinse it you know you've rinsed the the milk or the lemon off it and then the way that I do heart the way I do kidney the way I do testicles the way liver is all thin slice it and get a couple like nice pastured eggs kind of whisk the eggs and then I'll dredge the thin sliced organ meat in the then drag that through a little coconut flour or a little almond flour and fry it up in grass-fed butter and it's like chicken nuggets it tastes really good Wow yeah you actually put through a rollover in your Kelowna bakery money's in Drive how much energy and ever you go to for some of the things you eat it's fun this vessel I enjoy cooking my kids have like a cooking podcast like my whole family is super into cooking but we have these grand family dinners at home where you know we all gather in the kitchen like 7:30 and we're all cooking and chopping soaking and rinsing and frying and so yeah it's a nice guy as part of the greenfield you guys just listen to music then we sit down at the table we play board games we play Table Topics we finished dinner we all clean up we go up to the bedroom I play the guitar that ukulele read a story to the kids like are our nights are are amazing yeah I think that's important for family you know it's interesting you I heard you talk about that and I thought that was really cool so I've heard you talk about prayer though I don't think you're religious heard you talk about obviously spirituality family love connection hearing you describe your routine sounds like it's not just lip service like you actually engaged in that walk me through that what is the what was the thing that started that is it coming from just a more sort of natural plays hey I just like human connection was there something that you came across in terms of its effects that led you down the process and then it became just something beautiful or how did that all begin I'll tell you what I do first I wake every morning and I always have something very spiritually enhancing that I can read so I'm caring for my spirit before I am before I care for the body lately it's been Ryan holiday stillness is the key before that it was a book by I believe is Nestle mrs. Keller Thomas Keller book on the spiritual disciplines like fasting meditation silence solitude etc but not something fitness and health related I also have a gratitude journal if I don't have time to read something inspirational or devotional or scriptural or spiritually enhancing that gratitude journal has a Bible verse on the top of each page it's like something something inspirational you know something about hope or something about you know God helping you get through the day and I read that and then I answer three questions what truth did I discover in today's reading whether it's from another book that I've read or whether it's just something that left out to me from that verse that I read what is one thing I am grateful for today and then what is one person or who is one person who I can pray for or help or serve on this day and it allows me 365 days a year to not only be grateful and discover one little kind of nugget that helps me to grow spiritually but it also means 365 days a year there's one person who I'm going out of my way to help and you know that might mean that I'm actually you know trudging up the forest through our backyard and going and bringing a bottle of wine to the neighbor up the street and sometimes it might just mean I'm saying a prayer for grandma right so it kind of depends on the day and what I'm able to do and then at the end of the day we have these wonderful family dinners where we do gather around the table and we pray a blessing over the food and we share what it was because my wife and my kids also gratitude journal each morning what it was that we completed in our gratitude journals and you know again we go upstairs and we play songs and I say a nighttime prayer I was raised as a Christian Reformed Baptist and I still believe in God I still pray everyday I read something scriptural every day and to me there is a great deal of confidence and comfort that I find having hope right that no matter how bad things might get or if [ __ ] goes south on any particular day that I can cast my cares upon this being who's in charge of this great magical story written for our lives you know almost like you know j.r.r tolkien esque hero's journey that we're all able to live out and for me that that belief that were were part of magic like there is this spiritual dimension we're not a bunch of chunks of flesh and blood flying through space on a rock trying to see who can [ __ ] the most or have the best car make the most money or whatever but that there's something deeper out there that life goes on after we kick the can physically life go ahead I'm a believer in them well life goes on spiritual life we're all spiritual beings like you and I are souls we are spirits are more than just you know cardiovascular networks and capillaries and bone matrices right like I think there's a little bit more to being a human than that this is all [ __ ] interesting so yesterday in that very seat that you're in now I had Richard Dawkins arguably the most aggressive atheist on the face of the planet and hearing people who are just I mean unimaginably intelligent interpreting the world one way and then you equally unimaginably intelligent interpreting the world in another direction it's really interesting it's I would say there's like I'm not religious at all and so in terms of your description of being spiritual or being Souls like that doesn't resonate with me but hearing the way that you describe it like the sense of poetry and wonder like that I find it it sucks me in like I just want to listen because this is one where I I certainly have no investment in being right I have a strong opinion that I am right but I don't have any I don't have a sense of like moral high-ground or anything like that I didn't know that you were religious and how how do you you're so effortless in the science of understanding the biology and all of that and is it is it a sense of ineffable wonder - to contemplate what it means to be a soul and you I think you'd use the word magic is is okay so you've said they're sort of great comfort in that but what I'm really trying to ask is when you imagine it with your mind of being able to imagine bones and flesh and capillaries and permeable gut lining and permeable brain lining and all that is there what does that imagining look like is it sort of a different partition in your mind like how do you conceptualize the idea of a soul or a spirit yeah and I guess I'm I'm sort of looking if the answer is poetry I'm very open to that I just am trying to understand somebody who is clearly very able to look at scientific objective reason but also find such tremendous wonder and freedom in the I want to use the word you used in the in the spirituality in being a soul the the soul is not something that I think can be quantified or measured that's why religion often gets such a bad rap because there is a certain amount of blind faith that can often be associated with stupidity or like how could someone believe that this crazy complex planet got designed by something or someone and I will completely accept the fact that that is blind faith that you cannot explain something like that through science I think that we can get clues you know for example you know I've done a great deal of plant medicine and I have encountered during experiences you know such as five Meo DMT this overwhelming sensation of being in the presence of a being that was just pure light pure love this overwhelming sense that we are not there is a knot in the way that there are you know alien spaceships coming down with antennae sticking out their head but that there's some kind of a spiritual invisible dimension that surrounds us that we can occasionally get glimpses into whether that's through a near-death experience or a plant medicine experience and so I think we can see little clues but even quantum physics I don't think can fully explain this idea that there's just like this invisible energy inside us this spark from which we all originated and that that spark somehow goes on forever you know and and that we're all these deep souls and deep spirits at the end of the day even more importantly and on a far greater level than we are flesh and blood and you know they say the eyes are the window to the soul and you know my wife and I and my boys and I have this practice of I gazing where we just look do you really just gonna ask you that deep into each other's eyes how long do you do it for about a couple minutes you know my wife and I sometimes ten fifteen minutes as we sit in bed we even have these chairs called back Jack chairs in the bed and like we kind of sit in the chairs legs intertwined just staring into each other's eyes and talking to each other and the deep deep connection that we have with each other from that the feeling that we are literally spiritually intertwined during that time like we are one and the same thing during sex right that I gazing during sex turns sex from mutual masturbation into as david deida you know discusses in his book experiencing God through sex like this spiritual connection where you feel as though you were in the presence of another soul like something that you can't quite feel something that you can't describe but like this deep sense of light and love and spirituality that you know again I can't explain i can't put molecular dimension description on its or you know say how many atoms it's comprised of or say how it came to be but I do have faith that there's there's a lot more to this planet that we're walking around on than just flesh and blood and atoms it's really interesting so I was asking Dawkins if he and I used a colloquial term if he believed that there was a God neuron because like hearing you talk about it like the sense of reverence and Wonder and awe and then especially because you relate it to a plant medicine experience and I some of this clearly just comes down to faith right so I have faith that leans towards the science and I have the sense of wonder that you get from the magical from the being a spiritual being having a soul something that isn't quantifiable that same sense of awe and reverence I get from realizing like oh my god like this is all biology but this is just bone and sinew this this is we're on a rock [ __ ] hurtling through space like that same sense of deep wonder comes to me when I think about like these are laws and there clearly is something that we don't understand I think we can say that safely about every human and there's certainly something I don't understand so I know there's something beyond what I'm able to grasp I can't even like tie in to mathematics at least you know a physicist or somebody like that is able to begin to see some of the the beauty of nature in the laws of mathematics and all of that I can't even grasp that so I certainly don't claim to speak from an educated position this is me coming from what captured my imagination so I drank very deeply of religion when I was younger very deeply starting in a Western tradition moving on into an Eastern tradition and sort of not finding anything that really felt right for me in either of those places but when I think about like plant medicine and I it comes back to that notion of is there a God neuron is there something like is there a reason that for you - the plant medicine because admittedly I've only micro dosed I've never done like a full-blown macro dose so I don't know that may shift things for me that I couldn't quite predict but is there a reason that for you you look at the same body of evidence and it awakens something in you that it doesn't awaken in me and so is there something ultimately that we would be able to look at and say ah yes you have a reaction a neurochemical state that I have yet to access or can't access without exogenous substances but you do like I've often wondered if some people just naturally produce a more DMT than somebody else and so they're more likely to feel that dissolution of the self and maybe I don't and so I have this constant and ever-present sense of myself which then locks me into the body which makes me more likely to believe and perceive life through the notion of we're just our biology I don't know that I find that question very interesting I think it's a reasonable hypothesis that perhaps something like the extent to which you clear serotonin from a synaptic cleft you know we know that high high levels of serotonin can do things like you know induce or enhance this state of wonder or a plant medicine experience or the same could be said of how much DMT that your pineal gland produces there may be some people who are hardwired so to speak to grasp spirituality or experience God more readily than others at the same time I don't think that that means that there are certain people who are screwed from ever having a deeply religious experience because they just don't make neurotransmitters the right way and it's interesting like to even define a deeply religious experience so obviously I can't speak for you I don't know what it feels like but the watching you talk about the awe that you feel thinking about that like I recognize that I know that feeling but we get it from very different things and that's what I find interesting and I mean look you've already said that there's just no way to quantify it and so it is sort of a blind faith what do you think about somebody who where their personality is shifted profoundly in this lifetime through dementia through traumatic brain injury whatever the case may be is it reconstituted once they're detached from the body do you mean is is their is their soul somehow changed once it's attached from the body what I'm really trying to get at is so if I were to part of what I found so compelling as to why we are but this flesh and bone which I don't say as sort of a grounding principle I say is like there's so much on that but stories like Phineas Gage right the railroad worker who shoots a tamping rod through his head never loses consciousness but is never the same again and it's personalities fundamentally change or the murderer who is found to have a brain tumor right like we know that that anatomical changes can induce you know emotional and and you know arguably spiritual shifts that are pretty profound so my question is when you think about sort of the life beyond the body how much of the life beyond the body is still tied to your current personality and if your current personality is shiftable by changes in your brain structures or neuro chemistry or you know like you said a tumor simply applying pressure to a region of the brain then is there like a true personality that you revert back to or like if you if you died with dementia and you enter this mutual plane yes are you coming back to a pre dementia state see that's the tricky part because we are used to describing people based on personality based on characteristics you know associating someone with a certain certain set of reactions of emotions of character traits that I'm not sure persists when we are in a different dimension again this would be largely based on plant medicine but I've had experiences where I can feel myself as just this bee of light completely carefree in in a state of absolute bliss right complete bliss and I'm you know I'm traveling as this being of light without a care in the world through this dimension of colors and and I don't feel as though I have a personality I don't feel as though I'm analyzing anything probably because my ego is dissolved in a situation like that and I would not be surprised although again I have no freaking clue but I would not be surprised if the afterlife were something like that where we're just basically floating and in total bliss and honestly I wouldn't mind if that were the case cuz it's a pretty good feeling you know when I'm in that state is like not dude like chill here forever this is great so that might be the state and and in a case like that if you have dementia or some type of anatomical or physiological or biochemical issue you know as your soul is is trapped inside this this flesh and blood based body you know and until you go into that afterlife scenario I think probably a lot of those issues would go away in a situation like that you wouldn't retain those as you go into the afterlife so do you believe that there's a divine purpose or meaning to our lives I do I think that the ultimate purpose of any any human being well they're alive in the state that we are on this planet is to love and care for our fellow human beings as deeply and intensely as possible I think that if you ever questioned what your purpose in life is or you ever question what to do in any specific scenario it's kind of funny how love seems to cover up just about anything even just the words I love you or projecting the emotion of love towards someone or giving yourself self-love by you know simply taking a breath in and being grateful for being alive and loving yourself no matter who you are I think that that that is the the deepest purpose that we can have is to simply love and care for our fellow human beings and if if there's a greater purpose than that and you know there's there's something else we're supposed to be doing I could be wrong but I think the most fulfilling thing that you can do no matter what your calling is is to ensure that it is based around loving others going back to love and logic how do you introduce this to your kids is it this is what I believe is it this is what is true like how do you introduce the night so it's absolutely this is what I believe right it's it's absolutely living out my life loving my wife loving my children doing the best job that I can being at being an ethical moral upright guy you know trying to take care of my family showing my children what what hard work and persistence is showing them what what loving my wife and being a good husband is showing them what caring for them and and and being there for them is and you know I've for example said to them you know I I believe that something created all this that that we're living in and I have no way to explain it but that's what I think to me it's it's it's a more returning to that word magical and compelling idea that I'm in this you know JRR tolkien esque story with you know demons and wizards and Dragons and hobbits and dwarfs and elves and and all sorts of crazy magic and that's more interesting to me than that we somehow just gradually evolved to become this way but I don't tell them look you you must believe this is the way things are like you you have to believe that there is a god or you are going to go to hell like that's not the style of parenting again very similar to eating gluten right or screentime right I do my thing I try to be the best example for them and love them as much as possible for everything that they are no matter who they are or who they become I will always love them and do you do you believe in evolution do you believe that was something that like God started the rules or I believe in micro evolution absolutely like I believe in epigenetic adaptations I believe that you know humans can change generationally even faster than that if you induce or introduce CRISPR DNA technology and so yeah I believe that for example if you look at like you know the probability that at some point humans went through a very cold time right and we know that any liquid will freeze at a higher temperature when there are there when there are a greater number of solids floating around in that liquid so you know diabetes could have evolved as a response to some type of an ice age type of scenario right like humans evolved this protective mechanism that now isn't that great of a mechanism in the scenario that we're living in I believe that that animals can change over time based on their environment to grow you know thicker fur or you know thicker pads and their feet or anything like that I don't believe that we all came from nothing I believe that in the beginning there was there something there was some kind of deep spiritual light and love-based being that decided to make this crazy funky place that we're all living in now super interesting talk to me about where we go from here then so you brought up CRISPR Castine the ability to edit genes essentially the ability to play God where do you come down on the issue as somebody who experiments like transhumanism yeah I mean I guess we can push it that far but even just like right now are you comfortable with gene editing you you experiment on you more than like the next person so you've done stem cells you've done all kinds of crazy [ __ ] like so I wouldn't say that you take the typical like this body is a temple bestowed upon me by God like you definitely are like hey he gave me some material yeah I mean I think I think science is cool where like I always have and the idea that we could perhaps increase our bioavailable stem-cell pool so that you know and again my big-picture overview of longevity and anti aging is that the reason you would try to extend your health span and your life span is so that you're simply putting yourself into a vessel that allows you to fulfill your life's purpose with much greater impact and at a far deeper and more productive level then you would be able to do if you died orally or lived half of your life sick you know what a bodhisattva is no it's very interesting it sounds kind of like what you're talking about so if my memory is correct and I'm almost certain that it is a bodhisattva is so you've got Buddhist or seeking enlightenment and then once you get enlightened then you're out of the Karma wheel and you know this part I don't remember you ascend or something I don't know but a bodhisattva is somebody who purposely does not become enlightened so that they can help other people which sounds like what you're saying from look if if after this it is like just never-ending bliss and blinding light of love then why the hell would somebody want to extend their life why wouldn't you be rushing towards that well the reason is that if your purpose and fulfillment is to love other people as much it's to bring as many people as I can along for that ride with me right it's very interesting and look at this does not drive at all with how I see the world but I find it so fascinating to like really crawl inside your belief system and hear how you think it's super [ __ ] interesting to me yeah so so the anti-aging lunge evety piece it's kind of funny because I get this question you as a biohacker tell me about the crazy stories of how much you've messed yourself up like when did you really hurt so there's there's nothing like I've hurt myself more training for an Ironman Triathlon or you know getting barbed wire back soon a Spartan Race or I I do have certain filters that I put things through that I'm going to do like anymore if if something produces a great amount of dirty electricity or non-native electromagnetic frequencies such as high amounts of Bluetooth or Wi-Fi or something like that I don't strap it on my head I don't use wearables that emit signals I've seen evidence that those can affect things like calcium channels and may be associated with damage to the brain which is why I mean you're not supposed told your Apple watch closer than ten millimeters to your head and it actually yeah we're not supposed to hold a cell phone up to your ear like there's a certain distance from the human body then the warning labels on those say you're supposed to follow so I'm careful with a lot of the dirty electricity stuff the you know Wi-Fi Bluetooth high EMF if you go and visit my home like the whole thing is is hardwired with metal shielded cat6 Ethernet cable there's no Wi-Fi there's no Bluetooth it's not a smart home there's no Alexa there's no Phillips hue all the bulbs are old-school incandescent bulbs because they produce less flicker and less dirty electricity like it's a very clean feeling when you get there so I'm pretty careful from that standpoint you talk about gene editing I don't [ __ ] with my DNA like I forget what happened you might know this to those Chinese they genetically modified those Chinese embryos yeah a few months ago something happened to them though there was some kind of downstream effects it's like the butterfly effect like we don't know if we modify one gene I didn't feel this way about fruits and vegetables right I'm all for selective breeding to make a better tomato I'm not yet a fan of going in and genetically modifying the tomato to speed up what you know returning to micro evolution or return to selective breeding would be able to accomplish through more natural means so I'm careful with things like genetic modification I am pretty selective about which chemicals that'll put in my body like I wouldn't do metformin for some of the reasons I stated earlier as a person I've heard throw shade at metformin you giving me [ __ ] pause I really wanted to do metformin and I just always hesitated because exhaustion Asst of the anything I don't even [ __ ] with supplements other than vitamin D look the the vitamin b12 deficiency some of the microbiome upset things like that can be fixed with vitamin b12 supplements probiotics but it reduces your vo2 max by 5% it's it's inhibits like I mentioned earlier the mitochondrial proliferation and satellite cell response to exercise and considering there are healthier alternatives to do the same thing like berberine or apple cider vinegar or Ceylon cinnamon or any these other things that control blood glucose metformin is out the window for me rapamycin due to some of the immune system damage that that can cause yet decreases that mTOR response you know it would potentially increase your longevity if you were to do that but get that from fasting and get from exercise some of the components in rapamycin can even be simulated via the consumption of fermented foods due to the spermidine molecule that they contain that can have some of the same effects as rapamycin so long story short is I actually do analyze pretty carefully some of these things that I'll do to enhance longevity and I am careful like I'm a father I'm a husband like I don't want to you know kick the can because I put the wrong stem cells in my body or you know did something dumb with some electrical helmet I'm wearing while I'm asleep or something like that so I am careful I mean I I spent a couple hours every day just you know it sounds it sounds like you also are a bookworm you love to read that's my happy place you know stuck in PubMed stuck with my nose in a book so I am pretty careful I try to educate myself on this stuff yeah very smart what do you think about fmt fecal microbial transplant yeah so the the this idea of a stool transfer you know initially made popular by Jeff leach who I think hung himself upside down or did some kind of an chelation while living with the hosta hunter-gatherer tribe to see if he could pass on some of the resilience of that warriors gut to himself and he noted and I was speaking at a conference about this he said he felt changes in his emotions and has moved in his resilience after he did this and now we know there's a host and a growing body of research showing that by if you have gut issues or you have something like Clostridium difficile which is a pretty debilitating colon issue that you can fix that and normalize the biome within a few hours after either consuming an encapsulated form of stool from a healthy donor or inoculating yourself Veon enema with donor with the healthy stool donor or going to an actual certified medical clinic like the team out clinic in in Britain or the Bahamas and actually having this overseen under medical supervision which from what I understand at this point based on the legality in the US is something you'd have to do travel overseas if you wanted a doctor to oversee but there are all these underground web sites now or you can you can get you know stool from a healthy donor and instructions and it's not rocket science like you can encapsulate it and swallow it which appears to be as effective as inoculating it up your backside and using as an enema but I think that especially for people with with a very unbalanced microbiome if you can get stool from a healthy donor it's extremely compelling yeah that's the one I've been pushing these if for a while there's a couple things I think she needs to try cuz look we've gotten to a point where I'll say homeostasis she's fine but every now and then I like will be out eating at a restaurant and they probably mixed the oil or something like that so even though she says olive oil only it ends up being like partly vegetable oil and it just ends up being a [ __ ] nightmare and she's doubled over in pain for two days it's just it sucks and so I've said look fmt and the carnivore diet are sort of the two remaining things yes why am i hearing you talk it's like [ __ ] there's maybe even more complicated she should thrive there's you know it you stack these modalities it's like Dell beretta syns book the end of Alzheimer's right it's not just ketosis but they're also doing like high-dose fish oil and DHA laser lights on the head hyperbaric oxygen therapy chamber like there's a lot of stuff that you have to do all at once to tackle that problem but he's got case studies and people who he has his I wouldn't say cured but really move the dial on for dementia and Alzheimer's and when you look at a lot of these gut issues yeah sometimes it is ll 37 colostrum bone broth l-glutamine an autoimmune based clean diet possibly a fecal transplant I was speaking with a guy yesterday who has struggle with gut issues for the past year and just got eight separate fecal microbiota transplants from his wife who has healthy stool and a healthy gut he had to do it eight times because it doesn't yeah hey apparently it doesn't take or that was gonna be my heated administration is more effective than one time I'd be really curious if you're gonna do any follow-up with that guy I want to hear the [ __ ] answer because my big concern is some people are saying look getting the soil ready for the seed is as important as the seed itself so that this so they say you need to take antibiotics and kill all the bad bacteria first and then but it's like God antibiotics and we gotten this problem in the first place so I don't love that idea and then thinking about people who take probiotics it's like if you're not taking prebiotics as well then they may not stay and it's right you have to what seed in feet or whatever many of them will not survive the acidic nature of the gut yeah that that's why I think doing it under a medically supervised or at a medically supervised clinic like the the timon clinic is the one I know of that hey the madness ta y mo UN T but it's like a seven it's like a seven to ten day trip yeah England and I think they have a like a sister clinic in the Bahamas good news is my wife from England so yeah hazy then the carnivore diet is interesting I mean you briefly alluded to it and you said you have like what you called a lazy I do a lazy man or diet and it's awesome I feel like a million bucks me too when I'm at home my diet is very simple and I call it the bastardized version of the carnivore diet it might be similar so I eat animal meats nose-to-tail yes I'm not need list because math I Ania don't you get just from the ribeye and the steak and the meat that when it's not balanced out with glycine actually can have an inflammatory effect and may accelerate aging miss LKC that's when you get into like I don't have inflammatory problems when I'm eating like that but I do worry that there's something going on unseen and you're missing out on the proper balance of what you would get you know it's kind of like Tomatoes right we know that you get more the like opinion from the tomato when you eat the whole tomato versus when you eat the isolated supplement like a pea so when you eat the whole animal nose-to-tail you're getting the glycine you're getting the methionine you're getting more of the the collagen the different amino acid blends you're getting more of the micronutrients from the liver and some of the organ meats so the idea is you either take supplements like Osama but I really like the encapsulated version of the organ meats then just eat your meat or you order from us wellness meats or one of these other websites or you can order really good organ meats and you eat nose-to-tail so when I'm at home I eat nose to tail organ meats I eat a lot of I'm a big customer of wild planet sardines like I get a ton of their sardines anchovies mackerel herring salmon like all these good clean low metal fish those are the staples and then in addition to that I do bone broth a cup of coffee in the morning glass of wine at night and then because I'm athletic and I need some carbohydrates I do almost all underground storage organs or tubers like sweet potato grounds underground storage organs that's the term that anthropologists give to like this very ancestral form of carbohydrate that burns super clean especially if you don't consume it with the skins on it right so I'll give my examples like pureed pumpkin and pureed sweet potato I buy those like the BPA can I have Japanese sweet potato organic canned version Japanese sweet potato purple potato so good and I do a little bit of raw honey and salt on those right so nose to tail meat fish bone broth little coffee little wine and underground storage organs and when I travel that goes out the window when I travel I'm not you know I was at terra wan earlier eating Buffalo cauliflower and spaghetti squash lasagna because I'm a foodie where I can and I liked and I still eat clean when I travel but at home I kind of push the reboot button I very simple very clean and I can tell you even though my my happiness and my entertainment level of food is a little bit higher when you know in Japan eating sushi or you know down here eating some of these crazy California cuisines when I'm at home like it's so simple and so clean it's so easy and if I ever had autoimmune disease of all the different diets I would go to it would be a nose to tail organ meat based diet just because like there's so few immune system assailants in that diet yeah yeah I look I haven't done anything that I would say even mildly approaching scientific but I love the idea of not eating animals from like I love me some animals so it'd be great if I didn't need to eat them and so I started doing a very sloppy primarily vegetable diet I've never gone vegetarian that would be a very misleading lie but I started feeling worse so I was trying to work my way to doing a vegetarian thing I just didn't feel great so I was like look I get it there's a transition period and all that but it was so easy like just going back to a primarily meat based diet I feel [ __ ] awesome and keeping in mind that's not like oh that's what I grew up with I grew up eating the standard American diet eating trash eating me to [ __ ] pop-tarts and bagels and toast and french toast and I never did crunch cabin closed my jet in fact shame on you it's Cap'n Crunch Cap'n Crunch butter Cap'n Crunch and make your own roof of your mouth all itchy yes everything yes my salads were iceberg lettuce floating in ranch dressing erect the works 100% correct except of course just so many croutons yeah all the croutons oh the big Costco croutons the giant ones we used to buy popcorn buy a bag the size of a bean bag from Costco it was amazing and I have miss that my mom used to go to McDonald's on 29-cent hamburger $0.39 cheeseburger bag she wrecked the elects the back of the suburban with these white greasy bags take him home put him in the fridge and that's what we feed on for like the next five days like your mom already there was a period in my life where I subsisted on three for $0.99 Tina burritos which I don't even know if they make them anymore they were god-awful but they were so cheap I loved them to the end of time and then McDonald's but now I guess called the value menu back then it was called the 99-cent menu and we used to just go crazy because you could get those burgers for two or three for 99 cents I mean it was just yes means that's the next big wave I think for companies that do well in the health food space is to reinvent healthy versions of all these comfort foods like us do a Kraft macaroni and cheese it's the same shape of the noodle the same color right but you're flavoring it with tumeric and it's like a rice noodle you know and and you know do a Captain Crunch but it's you know some kind of I don't know almond butter flavoring and high-protein low-carb or that was literally the thesis at Quest like really fine foods that people you know they're going to eat anyway all the things that get people in trouble like the not an accident that we came out with cookies and chips and all that stuff so well absolute goal is just to take all that food I predict mark my words I predict that you guys will be successful with that company well thank you that's very good prediction I would say that's relatively safe but yeah yeah that was that was the whole idea man it was like when I was thinking about my mom and my sister I was like alright what food are they going to eat anyway because my whole thing is don't try to change behavior try to leverage it so if I know you're going to eat chips anyway what if I could make chips you chose based on taste and they happen to be good for you so that you're just choosing them because you think they're rad and they're in that form factor because look there are companies that spend dollarz figuring out things like vanishing caloric density and all that stuff to make sure that stuff tastes awesome that it makes you want to come back for more all of that and then what if you could take somebody that actually understood the ingredients and the metabolic effects but use all of those things so that you would be as drawn to or more drawn to our stuff than you would be to something that's bad for you and there we are were you know made of ingredients that are actually good for you and healthy and was that was the whole idea I dig it yeah very very powerful are you working on any new books not anymore because I finished this last one so boundless actually I'm writing fiction I'm writing fiction because I took a break from my fiction to work on boundless so boundless is it's been my project for the past three years this idea of how could you create boundless energy at your beck and call all day long whenever you'd want it and you know comes down to like caring for the brain like the right dressing mold and mycotoxins and lime and fungi in your personal environment and then looking to nootropics and smart drugs and biohacking technologies and you know those the n-back apps that we talked about all these different ways that you could care for the brain by the the program that's running everything and then I turned to the body and get into the immune system jetlag sleep like two huge chapters on sleep and sleep hacking you know grounding earthing it's a green cover II that they were the same thing they are the same thing okay I just said it twice to make myself so nice I know yeah grounding is the same as everything same thing so technically grounding would be the use of like the mats or the technologies earthing would actually be outside a little bit but there is the same same idea and then a ton of anti-aging longevity you know I get into peptides and Psalms and the Blue Zones and you know some of the ancestral wisdom some of the modern science and then sexual performance relationships a lot of spirituality grata I just wanted it to be you know almost like the for our body on steroids just like everything that goes into the complete human blueprint let's go right to sex let's go right to sex it's a sex so we're sitting in bed with our special chairs our legs are entwined we're gazing into each other's eyes so I'm saying tongue-in-cheek but I actually think that's [ __ ] awesome what are we doing to optimize for sexual enjoyment I'm guessing it wasn't for sexual performance that sort of baseline yeah that that practice is more relationship based but for sexual performance I mean you know for example you know there's this idea of you know having a big fatty steak to get your hormones up you know before you go out on a date nights or you know before lovemaking and that's the worst thing that you can do because you draw a bunch of blood away from your nether regions and into your gut the best thing you can do is to consume foods that are rich in nitric oxide precursors or arginine or citrulline so you would have for example a beet salad with a glass of red wine a little bit of dark chocolate some extra-virgin olive oil watermelon is another great example of a lot of cubed watermelons and beets like this very light blood flow enhancing meal the same type of thing that you'd use if you if you wanted to increase vascularity right or look good at the beach right like that's at watermelon and beets extra virgin olive oil pumpkin seeds arugula is very good for this feeds see it's pumpkin seeds for the arginine and the citrulline baked when I bake them good baby pumpkin see they [ __ ] seasons what are you good we're kind of the season for that right now yeah we are serving less sea salt and so it's this idea of putting a lot of nitric oxide precursors into your body because it's like viagra for your whole body and then there are other things that you can do that are that are kind of cool little hacks like nitroglycerin cream reviews that no just a little dab of nitroglycerin cream and you get this massive vasodilation it's like in Stevi Agra all right so normally you'd have to if you're going to use a little he'll like that you'd have to time it and you know take two hours before whatever makes sure it's in your system and you know maybe you're gonna use it maybe not but it's nitroglycerine must keep that of the bets a little dab of that like on her clitoris or on your balls and indeed blood flow just rushes to the region you know there's amazing orgasm never get rid of it right away that well the problem is that it's so effective it can drop your blood pressure especially if you do for example take viagra like that's a that's a fast ticket to passing out you know during sex sounds like you've just improved money you can get a physician to compound nitroglycerin cream you can also find websites that will sell you I don't know I don't nitroglycerine go if it's on Amazon it might be but nitroglycerin another really really good one and this is something that you would have to get compounded by a doctor but it makes sex absolutely amazing and go is a ketamine oxytocin spray ketamine is in like ketamine ketamine is a home isn't a whole kit okay talking about small amounts you get a slight release of inhibitions and where did I just brave and it's it's intranasal how exciting is that see max sorry I've seen stuff had I mean in what ketamine and oxytocin oh [ __ ] the trust hormone yes that you wouldn't want in your body if you're gonna go negotiate to buy a used car soap like that because it might would rather we want them to have credibly loving do you get this stuff not all the after-effects of like MDMA which has a similar effect but longer lived and it depletes your serotonin your 5-htp a lot more but the cool thing about oxytocin is it also makes any touches on the skin feel absolutely amazing so well your sensory perception goes through the roof I have a doctor who prescribes it and calls it his K spray if you asked me afterwards I can I can connect to a size amazing but it's hard because I've used ketamine intranasally by itself ketamine plus oxytocin is a whole different wild ride and the other thing I told you about the natural glycerin cream that's handy to have on hand for this because ketamine can cause a little bit of droopy deck but you can you can overcome that you just need a few few things I'm here with a nitroglycerin that's a crazy new nitroglycerin isn't extremely explosive I think that's if it's in dynamite okay might not be the extra mess I don't want anybody to blow up their penis but so far mine has not exploded just by that that see that stuff is super interesting yeah yeah I mean you're essentially by obviously a friend yeah very happy yeah hook you up later on but but yeah so I just cover soup-to-nuts everything in boundless and when I turn it in to the publisher it was 1,200 pages we cut it down to six hundred and eight pages every big New York publishing house turned it down because they wanted you know to be like the two hundred three hundred page you know trendy airport bookshelf type of book but I like big books I like works of art right diagrams illustrations photos it's a big beautiful hardcover massive tome that's you know I would imagine it's gonna take somebody you know six to eight months to get through everything and discover everything but it's not designed to read cover to cover you just kind of you know if you're gonna travel you flip to the immune system section or you know you're wanting to enhance your your sexual experience you flip to the chapters on sex well now I want to talk about the spirituality side of sex so we've got the glycerine cream we've got the K spray the oxytocin we're doing good we're ready to rock but as somebody who is a huge believer in love and connection and that like as much as I would have believed as a kid I would like one-night stands they actually weren't that interesting and so for me like connection and makes it far more interesting far more meaningful the any any animal can have intercourse I mean and you know like I mentioned many many humans their idea of sex is indeed mutual masturbation right like you're rubbing your genitals together until something fun happens and you feel really good and then it's over and you know they fall asleep or you know whatever the case may be but when you view sex as this very sacred intertwining of souls this deep level of connectedness that has the potential to do something as magical as create another freakin human being and you treat it with that level of reverence even if you're you're using contraceptives and your goal is not to create another human being which is typically not my goal when I'm having sex it's more the connectedness component but coming at it with that amount of reverence and preparedness and looking at your partner in the eye deep eye gazing having having the idea that it is this special time that you create for each other and making sure that you spend time afterwards you know talking and and caressing and holding and snuggling sure that might turn you know especially if you're married and a lot of times you've got 15 minutes a sneek way into the bedroom sometimes it does make it a little bit more difficult to schedule I would rather have sex in a very deep spiritual manner that lasts you know one and a half to two hours twice a month then I would to have a quickie twice a week and so now you know when I get home I've been traveling for two weeks like I have a hotel reserved already like there will be Friday November first right like all will go to this hotel disappear we have we have the overnight babysitter and it's a full-on experience that we plan for all day and you know it nothing's planned the next day until at least noon and like it's a full deep spiritual connectedness I can tell you right now like our relationship at home no no my relationship with my kids because they just feel this deep sense of love and connectedness between me and my wife Jessa but the relationship between Jessa and I it just flows like everything is better when sex is better and sex is better when sex is more meaningful and spiritual yeah man I actually really get that I really get that and part of the reason that Lisa and I have stayed together as long as we have is really making sure that we take the time to stay sexual with each other I won't lie like your description of you'd rather two very meaningful experiences ie fall may be somewhere in the middle I'm not just looking for mutual masturbation I'm definitely looking for connection I want to be with my wife I want to be engaged with the very specific human being that is Lisa bill you it'll be interesting to experiment with things like I gazing which we've never done you're the second person to bring it up to me and definitely makes me want to try that to see what it's like I think something like that is meaningful Lisa and I don't have kids so the only thing that ever gets in the way for us is sometimes work but basically I just don't think about it during the week and then on the weekends it's we have the time we have the space you know don't have to worry about interruptions and so we're able to you know do something that's far more connected what you're talking about staying afterwards and touching it's like man there there is something about human touch it is so important and like I read the study that was talking about how people will go and get a massage just because they don't have anybody to touch them anymore like yeah gone are the days where you're hugging coworkers and things like that and it's putting people in a really [ __ ] weird place where they just don't have that level of connection and Lisa and I wrote this I forget how many bullet points like a bullet points to keeping your marriage spicy or whatever and one of them was just have sex like people don't have sex they don't take time to connect and then you know something like what you're talking about which is to really make it this sacred thing and to make it a union and a real connection and not just you know two ships briefly docking and then parting ways I think that's really important and so often lost and communicating and talking and just like really understanding where the other person is at and it was interesting early in my life there was a moment where I realized that this woman who I had been with several times but I could never get her to orgasm it wasn't until she really connected with me then then she was able to and it was interesting cuz my mom my mom if all people when I was a kid told me if you really want to make a woman orgasm it's all about trust I was like what and my mom making that offhanded comment made me think I really need to read Cosmo magazine I need to like under because that was so foreign from how a 15 year old boy fantasizes about what sex is going to be like that I was like okay wait a second like that it was like so jarring that it slapped me away kind of and I thought okay like that is so far outside of what I understand that let me really try to conceive of this from my partner's perspective and when I was a teacher in film school I was used to tell students you have two choices before you as an artist option number one masturbate and make movies only for yourself option number two is you make love and you actually take into consideration your audience and to your point about so many people they come together they're not thinking about their partner it's really just about them and how do I get myself to the place that I want to be and not realizing one if you're in a heterosexual relationship the odds of you coming at the experience from like these entirely different places is essentially a hundred percent and so for you to really be able to take your partner somewhere where they're going to experience something hopefully beyond the physical something to a level of connection that that sort of deep wellspring of awe that exists in the human experience even though you and I sort of see like the origin of humans differently I think we both share that glimpse into true wonder of just like John the floor like [ __ ] I can't believe that this is the experience I get to enjoy like imbuing that relationship and viewing that moment with that is is to understand or at least try to understand your partner to think about them to understand what that experience is psychologically and physically from their perspective yeah there's a lot that happens even the electromagnetic fields like they sink the HRV the heart rate variability I was talking about it tends to align with the heart rate variability of the other being in the room and it is really interesting this whole idea of electromagnetism right like your heart our heart produces an electrical field your brain produces an electrical field it's detectable by humans and animals I now own this suit called a hex suit HECS it blocks the electromagnetic field from coming off my body and it's designed for hunting whoa and I go out into the field so so hunting season actually opens for me at the end of November I'll go out for late season elk archery up in Washington but I've been practicing with this suit just walking around my property putting up trail cams and I can walk within 20 feet of a deer that would normally just be off sprinting you know when I'm within 60 yards and it just stands there watching me because it can't detect the field coming off my body they make these as wetsuits for sharks too because the Sharks can't detect your field so it's really interesting how we can all detect each other you know even if we're not touching through this electromagnetism and how the electromagnetic fields actually align when you when you're with your partner to the extent where you're HRV becomes very similar to that of your partner it's like your electrical rhythm is regulating their electrical rhythm so there's a lot going on you know behind the scenes so to speak that makes me feel bizarrely a bear think about like that's really interesting like [ __ ] is there does anybody have a sense of where we're picking up on that and like how we're reading it so I know that women will if they live together they will get into immense rhythm together which is interest aged on the moon cycles and whoever's considered the Alpha that's who they sink up to not let that [ __ ] yeah for a minute so that's super interesting and it's something like if you have a boyfriend it doesn't work like you won't sink but anyway so the hypothesis there is maybe it's pheromones or something like that like do we have any sense of how like I have no sense that I'm picking up on your signals were my wife signals even when I'm pressed against her right so do they know how we're receiving those signals I don't know if if the mechanism of action has been identified but birds I believe there are some fish that may have this as well have a mineral called magnetite in their skulls kind of like right where our where our third eye or than what we call our third eye is you know kind of up towards the top of the nose and this allows them to detect the magnetic fields of the earth and to way find without a compass and humans have this same magnetite built in there are Aboriginal populations that simply know when they're facing north south east and west just based on that ancestral primal mechanism of being able to detect the Earth's magnetic field using their head so it's possible that part of it could be something related to our pineal gland our third eye that magnetite mineral that we actually have in us being able to detect that magnetic field of not just the earth but another human being might be something else too my god you know I don't know if it's if it's the you know we know that the cells in the heart pick up on electrical activity we know the entire body relies upon electrochemical gradients so it's possible at this electrical field that's being generated as being somehow picked up by the cells of the body I don't know but it is kind of cool to think about the fact that we all emit this electromagnetic field that is impacted by our emotions by our thoughts by our beliefs that can affect other people around us bring us closer to or farther from us we're from from them and can also affect for kind of animals to the to where you can cover it up and be a better hunter dude that's bananas yeah and I mean this is once removed and I kind of want to get back to why you saying that made me feel super emotional but so have you ever seen the video of the shark attacking a metal plate because they were they were pumping electricity through it they wanted to show that a shark isn't using its eyesight it is simply following electrical signals and so they put a plate on the bottom of the ocean if I remember it's actually done in Seattle and they said we're now pumping this electrical signal that mimics a fish flopping around like it's injured and the shark just wouldn't let up no matter how many times it rammed into the plate it just kept going because it's it seemed as if it just could not accept that that wasn't a flopping fish and I thought whoa that's really and you could really see that it's picking up on something like we're anthropomorphizing and we're thinking of it as a human but really there's something else entirely going on yeah and there's something about the notion that we give off these signals that we don't realize there's a level of connection to other people that we're picking up you know they say that 80% of your brain is actually below the surface it's the subconscious so like when I think about like what was it that drew me to my wife like it was I went from saying I'm never getting married to under no I'm actually marrying this woman and I remember before I decided to propose I said well I'm either never getting married I'm marrying her and it was so and I'm not I didn't don't believe in love at first sight it didn't feel like love at first sight or anything like that it definitely developed over time but it's interesting how one person in my entire life has ever held that sway over me and it is just my wife and so it just makes me wonder like how much of that like you know like the fact that we have light receptors on the back of our knees or in our ears it's like places you never think you know how much are we really picking up how important this touch how important are the things you were saying before it's like there's a lot of we probably don't know like we know that gas discharge visualization cameras and actually pick up somebody's aura like the type of light that's coming off their body all right and there's got to be some kind of a faux pas together go back as well I've never looked if you look up gdv camera analysis what they can do is actually take a photograph of the light that's being emitted by the body and when people have different emotions and thoughts and belief patterns the amount of light coming off their body can either increase or decrease and I interview this guy read like what kind of light are we talking I don't know what kind of light it is I interviewed this guy on my podcasts Matt maruka who studies light like sunlight infrared light red light he said that they photograph people and when when like as soon as someone dies like there there's absolutely no light like a corpse emits none of this gdv based light but when someone's alive walking around like there's tons of light just pouring off their body we know that cells can communicate using photons of light but it's interesting that it can now be quantified and photographed these these photons of light the the interesting thing about the the the electromagnetism the ability to be able to detect somebody else's electrical field is that I've experienced that before like where my wife is lying in bed and I know something's up like you feel like something's wrong right in and you can't tell if she's sleeping and it's kind of a scenario if you're watching the movie right this would be the scene in which you know the spouse is laying facing the wall but their eyes are wide open and they look concerned and the person lying across from them like they kind of detect it you know I'll be like honey is everything okay you'll rise if something you talk about and that's without you know it's in the dark in the bedroom and the dark but you can kind of like sense they're awake they're facing the other direction maybe their eyes are open and I think a large part of that is somehow detecting that electromagnetic field that that slight decrease in HRV because they're stressed out or that sympathetic nervous system is a little aroused and so I do think we can did it's just difficult to quantify some of that yeah that [ __ ] is so interesting to me I don't wait for more and more to be known about that that's really really interesting what's something that you cut out of boundless that you thought I really wanted that to be in oh let's see one thing was like the whole like I had a whole sidebar on like how to mitigate the damaging effects of partying like what to eat going into the party you know what form of glutathione that you should take and the different histamine blocking enzymes that limit your histamine response to alcohol and then you know during the the trace liquid minerals and some of these l.joe based solutions that you can take to ensure that your body stays very hydrated during and then after you know the activated charcoal and the aloe vera extract and you know the the next day the the repeat dose of glutathione and these these different things that you can do to enhance the delivers antioxidant phases and you know it's like a three page long sidebar like the total guide to partying and feeling feeling good afterwards and you know the publisher will come to me for a section like that just like this is interesting but yeah it might be a little much we don't know how many people reading this book are off at raves and party animals and you know Vegas jockeys so everything though lives on like I put everything so the websites boundless book calm for the book and I just left everything alive on that website is like bonus material when you get the book so it's not like I had to to you know say goodbye to my babies as much as move them out of the limelight a little bit yeah and maintain the more important stuff in the book they said that you're writing fiction now yeah tell me more of a as a matter of fact the the the wingless dragons in book 1 which comes out actually in December book 1 is called the forest it's part of a five book series called the worldly / series in which these children can leap from world the world and have power of the elements like one has power water another over Earth another for water and another over fire and each of the different worlds the first world is a forest world the world I'm in the middle of writing right now about halfway through is the the ocean world like the water world a desert world a snow world and my kids want the last one to be a space world and I haven't yet settled on the space world but we'll see it's it's it's young adult fiction what's it come out to like 10 to 15 and I think is young adult in book one though the forest the wingless dragons they detect their prey using electromagnetism and their snouts which I actually got after having learned what you told me about sharks and so I try to weave a lot of survivalism and and some of the health concepts some of the wilderness you know plant foraging and some of the fitness you know when they're training for battle I try to weave some of that into the book cuz it's fun for me to still maintain some amount of connectedness to the stuff I'm learning in my quote real job unquote into this magical world that I'm creating and everything's based on the hero's journey you know every book is architected around the hero's journey and these children you know resistance to the call and their ordinary world crossing the threshold meeting their mentors meeting the allies going to battle you know defeating the enemy returning home with the elixir and then you know kind of passes on into the next series of books and they're just a little bit older from book to book what made you want to write fiction I've always written fiction I've absolutely loved it there's been times in my life when I haven't had time to do it already a published fiction writer no aside from like short stories and in magazines for example you know when I was a kid I used to tons of short stories and submitted all these different magazines and I wrote a novel you know I was 13 this big fantasy fiction novel and never published it I published book 1 of the world leaper series last year but just very small launch you know I did like my own small print run for my kids and their friends in the school library but I actually have my own imprint now and I'm doing a big print run and getting ready for this December launch so that parents can order it in time for Christmas of the forest and then the ocean will come after that that's so cool I'm you know I don't know how much you know about my whole thesis about the impact so the reason it's called impact theory is because what I found was I was working in the inner cities a lot and I would just tell people think like this act like this and 2% of them would and it changed her life forever as it had changed mine I really had to learn how to think in a new way to become an entrepreneur and so I don't have entrepreneurial instincts that wasn't raised like an entrepreneur anything it was just it just ultimately ended up being a learnable skill and in trying once you learn something you realize okay I'm not that special but I've been able to do something extraordinary with my life how do I pass that on and at Quest we had at one point 3,000 employees about a thousand of them grew up in the inner cities their frame of reference was just absolutely [ __ ] it just didn't make any sense and it was never gonna lead them anywhere interesting so I thought okay I recognize the path that they're on it's very similar to the path that I was on so if I can learn these things that took me down a different direction then I should be able to teach them and so we started calling it quest University and I was trying to teach people like how to think and I wrote the twenty five point bullet belief system and like all this stuff trying to give them the thought patterns that they would need to go on and learn the skills that they would need to do whatever they want to work at quest and rise up go to another company start a company whatever they wanted to do and it was really distressed that 98% of people did nothing with the information and 2% it was life-changing but that's a very small number so I started asking okay what would it take no [ __ ] what would it take to reach the 98% of people and talk to neuroscientists look at studies data all of its gonna tell you that the way that humans are similarly truly disruptive information is your narrative so you hit people at a limbic level you get them to have an emotional reaction then all of a sudden it's like okay cool I can drink this information in if you talk to Jordan Peterson and the way that he comes out at very archetypal like you're talking about they're just certain things that were wired to take in in a certain way humans are meaning-making machines so obviously we have all of this neural circuitry for making sense of the world through metaphor and all of that it's you know great for heuristics to understand how to navigate your way in the world in a very socially complex world in a very dangerous world for the vast majority of the you know human time span so it's like okay cool one that's my first passion anyway so the fact that that road led me back to something that I already am good at and I loved I thought okay this if that's really true can we create this sort of graduation system so you hit people at a limbic level but you're never gonna be able to like give them really powerful lessons you'll give them what I'll call sort of rootkit things you can introduce a growth mindset the hero's journey but it's like hero's journey has been around for how many thousands of years has not exactly stopped your zip code from becoming the number one predictor of your success which sadly it is more than your IQ the zip code that you grew up in will predict your success crazy so thinking all right well one of the problems that I can solve is mindset so you get people at Olympic level through narrative graduate them to a show like this where you're going to encounter people that understand something about their given domain of expertise and you realize whoa I can shape my own body of knowledge and then our ultimate thing is impact Theory University so you you graduate your way up and by the time you get to impact Theory University it's just straight curriculum so you're learning how to build a business or you're learning how mindset how to build the ultimate mindset for success whatever so that's our sort of three-step thing so the reason that we exist this actually make film and TV and books and video games and all of that stuff and as is in your gift basket there is our first comic book that hit the market were we have four more in active development right now we're going to be hopefully be turning me on future into probably anime seems to be the more we're getting more interest in that that would be cool that would be very cool so working on all of that have a bunch of projects that we're trying to develop straight for film but everything is around empowerment that's it hero's journey it's like all about making sure that a kid cannot get to the age of 15 without at least encountering a growth mindset in a character that they loved it I love it plus I don't have to read the airplane magazine on the way home now there you've got comic books you do yes you do that's very cool yeah so that is literally the impact theory is that you can impact people through story far more than anything else I dig it so yeah I'm super intrigued to see to read your books the first ones out you're saying the first one is out but the better printing of it with the gold foil and the insert with the character cards and the the the better more detailed map that is coming out in the first week of December and then from there I think the next book should depending on how quickly I write it I'm I'm on a two-sentence a day rule right now okay it's better than zero sentences it's maintaining momentum and then it's you know now that boundless is about wrapped up that'll get increased to hopefully 2,000 words a day but I am literally a to sentence as a day right now however I wanna have a book - done by next summer Wow so wow that is wonderfully aggressive yeah I dig it man well sign me up I will read that thing to death very excited and also enjoy awesome thank you man yeah and thank you for coming today it is amazing to see you again you too you you are a colorful man as always both with fashion and also with with your entire show I love what you do it's very dynamic and I can't wait to read the comic books and yours wonderful to talk to so I appreciate it yeah man thank you I feel the same any time you're in town let me know I'll be back on awesome we have many thanks for joining me all right peace out like right now I'm supposed to go up for a for a two-week hunt for grizzly and doll sheep and caribou in the Arctic Circle and I plan on taking no food with me that will be a bow hunt I will rely upon fish and plant foraging to get through that