Barbell Shrugged - Why Supplements Aren’t As Helpful As You Think with Ryan Frisinger — The Bledsoe Show #132

Starting point is 00:00:00 I believe we're on the edge of a revolution in fitness. Gym owners know it, coaches know it, and you likely do too, since you're listening to this right now. I want to share a quick story and a quote to put things in perspective. Last week I was doing some video work at my buddy's gym here in Austin, Texas, and I could tell he was over it. He was tired of watching people bang their heads against the wall because of their mental game, and then go out and hit the barbell trying to fix it.

Starting point is 00:00:28 And that's when it hit me. It doesn't matter what someone's skill level is in here. They're all fighting the same fight. It's crazy how much time and energy and talent people are wasting fighting with their own mind. I immediately thought back to one of my favorite movies, A Bronx Tale. Especially the scene where Robert De Niro is taking on his son, Q, and he says, The saddest thing in life is wasted talent. That's such a powerful quote.

Starting point is 00:00:56 Here it is in a nutshell, folks. The physical fitness scene is saturated. The ancient Chinese secrets are all out and people know how to train. We're all just splitting hairs now with the technique, intensity, timing, macros conversation. I believe the next big leap in physical performance is going to be an inside job. It's going to come from people training their mentality as passionately and as thoroughly as they train their bodies. Most people's approach to fitness has been way too general and way too one-dimensional.

Starting point is 00:01:27 It's all been rooted in the typical mental toughness conversation around having a positive attitude. If you're having problems staying motivated, get tougher. If you're being really hard on yourself, be more positive. If you aren't going hard enough, go home. That's the equivalent of only doing leg extensions, preacher curls, and good old pec debt for the workouts. Think about that for a not-so-hot second. Now imagine your level of fitness and strength after five straight years of consistent, healthy progress.

Starting point is 00:01:57 Imagine turning the corner on your approach to your food, eating for fun sometimes, enjoying going out and maintaining a consistent diet that fuels your fitness and health. Imagine feeling good about your body. Imagine feeling good in your body. Imagine dropping that shit talk negativity and comparison that creates all that anxiety and stress around something that should be fun and healthy. Imagine sharing these principles with the people in your gym. Imagine sharing these concepts with your friends and loved ones outside the gym.

Starting point is 00:02:31 Imagine passing this wisdom, yes, wisdom, onto the next generation and beyond. So my life's work has brought me to this. Hundreds of interviews, thousands of conversations, my own injuries and experiences, it's all led to one powerful conclusion there is more in us and more to us I know it and so do you it's time to get cognitively fit it's time to be

Starting point is 00:02:56 strong sexy and sane it's time to get in lifted transform your cognitive fitness by taking our five-minute assessment by visiting Enlifted.me slash shrugged today. That's Enlifted.me slash shrugged. And for you coaches out there, we're ramping up our next round of The Strong Coach in less than six weeks. More coaches have signed up in the last class than ever before, and we're reaching our capacity for each round.

Starting point is 00:03:23 Ensure your seat for June by going to thestrongcoach.com. We spend the first six weeks getting you dialed into your existing clients, then get into how you can replicate your favorite clients to create a coaching business you actually love. When you go to thestrongcoach.com, you will receive three emails that have tips to improve your business immediately. Put them in place and improve your game. Now I've got to mention our sponsors, our lovely sponsors. We've got Organifi. Go to Organifi.com slash shrugged.

Starting point is 00:03:55 Get your green juice. It's the best tasting, awesome ingredients. They have a red juice that I like to drink in the afternoon, and I drink their gold before bed. If you have a hard time getting your veggies in, this is a quick way to do it. One thing I noticed too is not only am I getting my vegetables in that day, I actually feel it. It's got ashwagandha and some other things in it that will help cause your organs to function better. And if you're experiencing any stress, it'll help

Starting point is 00:04:22 mitigate any stress. So it does all sorts of stuff. It keeps the stress low, keeps the energy high, and gets your greens in all at the same time. Make sure to go to Organifi.com slash shrugged. You'll save 20% today. Now for a show, we got Ryan Freisinger. He lives here in Austin, Texas. He runs something called Cosmic Animal. You can go to his website, cosmicanimal.com. That cosmic is spelled with okay. He's weird, like me. He thinks about things differently. So I think you're really going to get what he's saying. So hit me up. Let me know on Instagram what you think of the show. Enjoy. All right. So we are going to get into how cognition and emotional states impact physical well-being, physical performance.

Starting point is 00:05:19 And as we were talking here, though, we got into, already started talking about stuff that's really interesting there's a lot of conversations around mitochondrial health longevity density all these things and you were talking about some supplements that aren't as helpful as people may think or the way they're being marketed but then you also started getting into uh light therapy and things like that, which I've been using daily. Yes. So, yeah, what's your take on the whole mitochondria? Well, so mitochondrial supplements are generally designed for kind of a global population,

Starting point is 00:05:58 so they're nonspecific. And you'd probably get different answers from different people, but because of my background in genetics, I can look at a person's mitochondrial DNA and see the complexes in the respiratory chain that are mutated and oftentimes a nutrient that would be appropriate for a certain region of the mitochondrial energy production. For one person, it might work. For another person, it might cause inflammatory products so to give you an example there's a kind of a handoff between the krebs cycle and oxidative phosphorylation and they happen within a millisecond on one another and basically you just need to keep the electron moving through the chain efficiently to generate the maximum amount of energy you also need to be fat adapted typically speaking to get that 38 molecules of ATP made and you also have

Starting point is 00:06:46 to methylate well so a lot of the mitochondrial nutrients you mentioned a friend of yours mentioned fish oil earlier DHA EPA those things have methyl donors in them so they're methylated so let's say I don't methylate well and I take in methylated things like l-carnitine and many of the other types of things that will flow through the mitochondria and help generate energy, you can actually just get inflammatory damage by upregulating ammonia production and toxic forms of nitric oxide like peroxynitrate. So you have to be careful. If you look at how they stimulate mitochondria in Europe, for instance, you think of something like CoQ10, ubiquinol, ubiquinone, which is in all of these supplements

Starting point is 00:07:25 or NAD plus or NADH, all these precursors to complex one nutrients. What ends up happening is you can have inhibiting effects on the chemistry cycle of the body. And there's a law in pharmacology that strangely is not really studied that much by people that develop supplements. It's called the Arndt-Schultz rule. And what that means is that small doses of a substance stimulate, moderate doses inhibit and stimulate, and then high doses actually inhibit entirely and can actually have inhibiting effects on all the adjacent structures in a particular chemical cycle. So what you're looking for when you design a supplement is for about 64% of people to have a good response to it. 60%?

Starting point is 00:08:04 Yeah. But the people that are most likely to buy those supplements are the people with chronic fatigue and the people that are having performance issues. And those people often aren't set up in terms of scaffolding in the body to use those supplements appropriately. And so that's kind of the big thing is that you're better off, for instance, fixing your circadian biology than you are taking supplements. So restricting your eating windows, eating during the daylight hours, getting into the

Starting point is 00:08:29 sunlight, staying well hydrated and having adequate levels of minerals will do more for your mitochondria than supplements. Too simple. Yeah, exactly. Too simple. Yeah, it's free. So doing that lays the groundwork. I want the complicated, expensive version.

Starting point is 00:08:44 Absolutely. So it's not like they can't be effective, but that's kind of the nutshell of you have to have tempered expectations when you take them. Unless you're going to go infuse massive doses of NAD plus or something, which is quite expensive, that can be extremely effective. And that would be a blood infusion, like an IV. Yeah, IV infusion. There's not many places to do it.

Starting point is 00:09:08 It's expensive. It's about $13,000 to do enough of it to really shift the body over. Yeah, I've got a few friends that are like, oh, let's go do an NAD infusion and do some work. You know, like a few guys get together, and they're all rich af yeah and can afford you know a five to fifteen thousand dollar infusion yeah and also you're looking you're going to generate a lot of inflammatory damage from those infusions so i mean i'm the guy that's very conservative when it comes to that for because for me when the circadian biology is where it needs to be your body tends to function optimally for where you should be as a person unless you're

Starting point is 00:09:46 talking about dealing with infectious agents and toxins in the body that's another layer to look at again before trying to supplement damage in the body is to take care of the base foundation get that as functional as possible and see what you look like at that point in time before determining whether you should do these things one caveat in my practice, I use a Krebs cycle stimulant kit four times a year that includes the 10 major nutrients that run the Krebs cycle. And they're in sub-physiological doses. And you take it all at once. Can you explain what the Krebs cycle is?

Starting point is 00:10:18 The Krebs cycle is the... I imagine there's 99% of people listening are going, what? So the Krebs cycle, quite simply... If they haven't turned it off yet, we're about to get into what is the Krebs cycle. The simplest thing to understand. It's important. Yes, it is. It's the energy generation chemical cycle within the mitochondria that makes the cellular ATP.

Starting point is 00:10:39 ATP is what runs the body, adenosine triphosphate. So it's made. It's how you produce energy. It's how you produce energy. So those energy molecules essentially activate all the chemistry runs the body, adenosine triphosphate. So it's made. That's how you produce energy. It's how you produce energy. So those energy molecules essentially activate all the chemistry in the body, and they allow your muscles to fire and your brain to work and all that kind of stuff. So it's just your power plant. So what are these 10 things that contribute?

Starting point is 00:10:56 They're all the different nutrients that come in, like fumarate, isocytrate. They're just 10 of the complexes. I've never seen this on the shelf at GNC. Yeah, it doesn't come from GNC, unfortunately. How are we alive if it's not in a bottle somewhere? I don't know. But this basically keeps you moving forward and it basically moves the structure of the mitochondria forward evenly and doesn't allow it to break. And that's really what you need to do is you need to move that electron all the way through the entirety of the mitochondrial respiratory chain to get the energy made.

Starting point is 00:11:29 Most of us have glitches, so stuff happens. We get oxygen that's supposed to slot in at the end. We get nitric oxide. Hang on one second. So I heard someone the other day talking about most people's issues, they're not getting enough new electrons. They're not renewing their electrical status. So you what i mean by that going back to simple circadian biology yeah one thing one thing i want to point out too is the i've been i've been looking at health

Starting point is 00:11:57 wellness fitness for 20 plus years and i just in the last few years have gotten more hip to the the dialing in the circadian rhythm. If you're not doing that, then everything else is a fucking waste. It is. It's like if you want to do something on top of that, that's a different story. But most people are completely jacked up with artificial light. I use red light therapy in the morning because I look at a screen half my day. Absolutely.

Starting point is 00:12:21 And so I got to offset some of this you know damage that i'm doing and i'm curious what you think about well yeah so let's say but what's with the electron yeah we'll talk about both so at any given time on the planet earth there are 5 000 storms that generate 2 000 surface lightning strikes a minute and they're striking bodies of water that electrical system within a kind of water vapor bubble is renewing free electrons. Those free electrons would be coming through our body if we were walking on the earth without shoes and if we hadn't buried telephone lines. Those negatively charged ions are moving into the body

Starting point is 00:12:58 and they're renewing the electrical capacities of the body. They're keeping those stores there. The water in the body holding that electrical charge, as long as it's mineralized, allows the sunlight to beam into the body and to keep your cells firing at the appropriate voltages. Most people, even what we would consider healthy people, their cell voltages are about 50% less than they should be. So there's a great difference between like the hearts at around 70 to 80 millivolts, negative millivolts, and then the other cells are around 35. Most people I work with are around 10 to 15.

Starting point is 00:13:30 So if you're constantly misfiring, you can think about, you could put an amazing engine into a gas-fired vehicle, but if the plugs are not right and the wiring and the timing's off on the car, how well is the fuel going to burn when you put it in the system? That's exactly what you're alluding to when you say your circadian biology is the foundation. If it's not there, you're essentially trying to do high-order things through a detuned automobile or a detuned vehicle. So you can think about this as whether you're tuned or not

Starting point is 00:13:56 for higher-order expressions in the body, and the reality is most people are not. And it's so simple. Their engine's misfiring, and then they're just like putting new tires and brakes and absolutely or just upgrading gas put nos in my system yeah i'm gonna add a nitrous booster and all these other things and what's happening is you're more likely to get inflammatory damage because if you have a system that doesn't run properly it's going to create negative effects in the body and that's the problem you know jack cruz is what he is but one of the things i like that he says problem. You know, Jack Cruz is what he is. But one of the things I like that he says is that he doesn't like the mitochondria. He hates them

Starting point is 00:14:29 because he said for as much energy as they give us, they also damage us pretty significantly. So that is a big problem. And you mentioned blue light. There's a guy named Dr. Russell Ryder down in San Antonio here in Texas that has shown when you shine blue light on cancer cells, when it's dark outside, they metastasize. So the blue light's a major problem. Also, electromagnetic radiation actually activates retroviruses in the body that damage the body. It destructures the water in the body. And we're going to 5G networks now, which you'll see catastrophic rise in cancer

Starting point is 00:15:01 in the coming years as a result of that kind of stuff. Well, this is interesting because I think there's, I know that there's a hyper focus on food and nutrition. Absolutely. And, you know, that's the way I see that now is food is basically our environment that we happen to be putting in our mouths. Yes. And I think that we have created this line where that part of the environment is something we'll talk and think about and is acceptable to have a conversation about. But if it's not going in our mouth or directly into our nose, for some people up their butt, then it's not something that's even considered what do you what's it take for someone to start considering other things in their environment like a computer screen the lights electromagnetic field like wi-fi all these things okay so i agree with you i mean there's you can talk about nutrition and molecule supplements and diet are kind of the things that are on the table. It's information and it's information that has to be processed.

Starting point is 00:16:10 Light is information. So I kind of started to reframe what the body is and reconceptualize it. But really, and this goes back to our previous conversation we had a year ago, when somebody's body... Do you remember all of it? Some of it. We talked about trauma and TRE and those kinds of things. Well, let's say my body, I'm very traumatized. I don't take care of my stress levels. Well, my ability to perceive things in a way that's meaningful is already greatly reduced. So you kind of have to sometimes

Starting point is 00:16:36 start with food, but I try to work to make the person's body more sensitized to kind of the signals that it sends out. So do we do TRE? Do you send them to get a massage? Do you have them do cold contrast? There is something that brings them back into contact with the body so they can start understanding the difference between good sunlight hitting your body versus the blue light off of your devices at the wrong time. So you can be sensitive when your phone's on airplane mode versus plugged in right by

Starting point is 00:17:04 your head. You can start to see those shifts when you actually know how to register it physically. Yeah, I know a lot of people, I go, oh, you should check this out. I can feel a difference. And they look at me like I've lost my fucking mind. Not at all. Not at all. I mean, I think if you talk to anybody that does good work or whether they follow like Wim Hof and do their breathing and cold work,

Starting point is 00:17:22 the first thing they tell you is that their ability to sense the environment is much higher. And the interesting thing, vitamin D, for instance, coming from sunlight, allows your oxytocin and vasopressin levels to be sufficient because it's a rate limiter to some extent for those molecules. And so that allows you, again, to feel the world more intensely. So there's that but it's also a problem with how we think about what a human is which we also talked about like if we think of ourselves as beings living in fully human urban environments that have been separated from the natural world

Starting point is 00:17:59 it becomes very difficult to have a conversation about something that's bigger than us and that's a natural force but the reality is all the epigenetic modifiers are not going to go into your mouth they're going to go into your eyes your skin you're going to inhale them they're not visible what uh what would you say the percentage of the impact is so is food and say the nutrients uh things you're putting in your mouth making up 50 percent or is Or is it less or more than that? It depends on the individual, but I think it's far less than we think it is. Let's imagine someone... 20% to 30% would be where I'd rate it.

Starting point is 00:18:36 For the food. Because for me, and it's kind of what you were alluding to, if I'm eating but my physiology isn't really set up properly, how much of the energy from that food am I liberating? I'm just kind of taking things in and properly processing them. I think that the sunlight and the electromagnetic fields and adequate sleep and respecting kind of the biological parameters of our life have much greater impact.

Starting point is 00:19:00 And I would go as far as to argue that if I took all the genetic mutations that I see daily into my practice and moved back three or four thousand years in time, they would probably not cause the type of health problems that they do now. And if you look at genetic SNPs in a city versus a country environment, they're always more significant in urban environments because you're being damaged by unnatural effects generated from human activities. So I think it's all the other things that comprise most of our health. And I would even argue that having a properly tuned nervous system by getting your emotional reality more balanced

Starting point is 00:19:35 has far better effects on the body than changing your diet. Yeah. If you would have told me five years ago, if you would have come to me five years ago, six years ago and said, uh, you're not in touch with your body. I actually had a coach who, who asked me if he thought I was in touch with my body. He goes, do you feel like you're in touch with the body? I'm like, totally. I'm an athlete. I have good body awareness. Like I can do gymnastics. I can walk on my hands. I can do all these things. Yeah, of course I do.

Starting point is 00:20:07 And what I've learned since then is that I was very good at dominating my body. But I could not hear a word it was saying to me. Absolutely. Not a thing. So how do you get this information to somebody who's, you know, the male athlete who's just like, fuck it, I got this. I'm still working on that. Oftentimes you just have to,

Starting point is 00:20:36 the way that I kind of even initially connect is to start to tie things that they self report and the timeline that they give me that they fill out about their life to kind of physical change and oftentimes it has to be something very neutral like they'll talk about breaks in their bones and sprained ankles and things but emotional injury that manifests physically is hard but i haven't really seen that honestly that population is one that i struggle with immensely and helping to get to a better place of being also because their brains are typically highly organized, which is what you're speaking to.

Starting point is 00:21:11 They don't really feel the symptoms that a person otherwise would. So they mask their symptoms so much that they're not even able to flow into the nervous system for registration. So I think there's a lot of that going on, but I have built up a lot of walls. Well, it's just, their body is so efficient at sending signals that it basically creates the most effective routes to deliver the information, even if that body's injured pretty significantly. So if I had to look at like, would you say they're, they're experiencing injuries they wouldn't otherwise experience? Have they been listening been listening? I think that they would actually be injured more if they were more in tuned in their bodies. Oh, really? Yeah, because if I look at a person that has like stage four cancer or very advanced autoimmunity,

Starting point is 00:21:54 their labs, at least on the biomarker side of things, will look very similar to an NBA player. It's just this one person is experiencing tons of symptoms. The brain has been disorganized because the athlete has one thing going for it. It's conditioned and a conditioned person resists the damage from ongoing stressors much more easily, but it also has longterm effects because these guys tend to suffer more of the repercussions of their life post career. Right. And that's the, the big thing. It's like a lot of, a lot of's a lot of guys in my audience,

Starting point is 00:22:26 like everything's cool until they hit about 35, and then the wheels come off. They're like, what the fuck happened? I was perfect. I was in amazing shape. Absolutely. You mentioned dominating your body. You can absolutely do that.

Starting point is 00:22:41 So when I look at a person's genetic performance, I look at how well the chemistry in their body works. Most of us are living on willpower and we can will our way through really broken genetics. But the problem is, is that it's inconsistent. So I may substitute emotional health for physical performance because I'm putting all my finite resources into that outcome. And I see that quite often. So if I'm an NBA guy and I want to get through my season and make an all-star team, I can do that, but I might be a terrible father and spouse. I might have no personal happiness, all those kinds of things.

Starting point is 00:23:15 But that's what I have to do to accommodate for my inefficient resource availability. So what I see oftentimes, there's a cycle and methylation called the folate cycle that generates energy and basically what it's doing is repairing the nervous system and brain. When people get balance there, cause it's a little bit downstream, they'll take quantum leaps and personal development, spiritual development, and it'd be consistent and they don't have to rely on the will. So they get more balance in the nervous system. So I think it's a both and kind of of thing, but approaching it from an emotional perspective, from an emotional richness perspective,

Starting point is 00:23:49 hasn't been successful whatsoever. Gotcha. Yeah, I would say my experience of doing a lot of emotional and spiritual work made a lot of my training easy. Absolutely. All of a sudden, I didn't have to will it anymore. I was like, oh yeah, I'll do things that are healthy for me. Eating healthy is easy now.

Starting point is 00:24:10 Absolutely, because you're actually caring about and loving yourself, which is a word that you don't hear, right? Like people say self-love, self-care, but it doesn't mean much until you actually deepen in connection to it. And it is effortless. I mean, I can't tell you. I've got a friend named Matt Fitchcher who runs this company called reconnected human with another guy named justin gardner and those guys have done a lot of personal work and matt just came back from a

Starting point is 00:24:35 mankind weekend and his ability to be a father to be an athlete to be anything in his life physically is greatly enhanced because he went through that that weekend of work with other men and really learned what it's like to be fully embodied. And now it's easy. It's easy to accept others. You're less competitive in the toxic senses. Everything about it changes everything. You'll also find out, I mean, I'm not in the greatest shape that I used to be. I was a division one basketball player, but I don't actually care about it like I did because every reason that I had previously is bankrupt to do that work every day. Now I'm just happy to kind of walk around and enjoy life. And my body composition isn't where I probably wanted it to be years ago, but I don't care as much anymore. That's because I actually think I'm worthy of being here no matter if I'm 6% body fat or 25.

Starting point is 00:25:27 What do you mean by bankrupt? Most of my athletic successes were driven by running from my history, from fear, from very unhealthy things. Very little of it had to do with competition itself. For me, everything that I did on a basketball court was all about making sure that I was worth being here. So I was always making sure that I could perform, but not to be a good player, but to be worthy of living. Yeah. What was the inner dialogue like for you? I don't even think there was one. It was all just, you know, wake up, rinse, repeat, survive. And a lot of it came from some of that trauma that I mentioned earlier in my life where I was hit by a drunk driver at five years old.

Starting point is 00:26:11 I didn't realize that that was operating in the background along with poverty and a bunch of other stressors to keep me in survival mode. And I was running 100 miles an hour constantly, and basketball was the perfect sport for that. It's where I dealt with my rage and anger and I noticed that I had severe anger and rage problems when I stopped playing but it was a sanctioned environment to to do that kind of stuff and it wasn't until I got severely sick and was bedridden for two years that I could even start to begin the process of loving myself because I basically ran until the wheels came off and couldn't do it anymore and had to

Starting point is 00:26:45 deal with a year or so of very painful, uh, basically paralyzation. So, so you went from being a D one athlete to bedridden at 30. So how did, uh, what was that transition? Like, did you, did you just stop playing basketball or, or was it years later? It was years later. So, 21, 22, my basketball career was kind of over. I had six ankle injuries in two years, and I was fed up with the politics of being an athlete. You couldn't have any political participation, so that naturally went away. I then went to do triathlons and CrossFit and all that kind of stuff.

Starting point is 00:27:22 Really, what took me down was burning that candle for all those years playing four sports a year. Because triathlons and CrossFit won't burn you out. Yeah, exactly. Along with being a PhD student where the stress was enormous, dealing with, at that time, a long-term relationship that wasn't healthy that I was hanging on to, changes in my relationship with my mom. There was a lot of things that coalesced and then picking up the right pathogen at the right time the weird thing is for two years i knew that i was headed for a brick wall and i couldn't stop it you're just on autopilot well i just knew that i was didn't know what to do about it or what i didn't know how to stop myself because i

Starting point is 00:28:00 i had worked my whole life to be an academic. I grew up really poor. So I wanted to really make sure I made this thing happen. And I had a lot of things really predetermined for myself that I was unwilling to compromise with. And it was very obvious. One of those was I needed to leave Los Angeles where I was doing my PhD at USC. There was a bunch of things that I was being asked to change by that higher self. And I just knew that I couldn't. And then when I would, it would regress right back to that point and I thought I was gonna get like you know I was eating

Starting point is 00:28:30 a lot of sugar and not taking care of myself and I was like well I'll get type 2 diabetes maybe but I'll be able to reverse that because I know how to do my dietary change and I have a health background it was way worse than that you know and then I picked up a thing that hit my inner ears and that was the end of it and it just spiraled into some very awful bedridden symptoms and many nights not knowing if I'd wake up the next day at life geez so inner ear stuff does it cause vertigo or no no it was severe pressure in both ears tinnitus and then I just started falling apart severe level 10 pain all over my body. Found out later to be a combination of mold and viral problems, but it broke me down and I couldn't recover because I had

Starting point is 00:29:12 so much stress in my life that my nervous system was fried. So I had no ability to heal. So I had to lay there for a year, reconciling all the things and dealing with, I can't get up and go work my way out of this. And then the second year was all about asking for help and being vulnerable and reaching out to people and having to give up control to others. Because, you know, that's what I did. I controlled everything in my life. And so that was the biggest change. And I'm still working on that. I'm not even close to being finished. I mean, I battle demons all the time, but the ability to feel like I'm worth something is, I actually feel that these days.

Starting point is 00:29:49 I didn't ever until probably three or four years ago. How long was that journey? Around 30 is when you got sick. Around 30 is when I was forced to continue with it, but I've been working on it since I was 16, but it was more kind of, what's the word? It was more intangible. It was about meditation and kind of mindfulness work and like Jedi style training. It wasn't so much

Starting point is 00:30:11 about healing and actually being vulnerable. It was more about that, but that was kind of the inroads into it where I noted that there was a difference between that person that I could witness in meditation and the person I was, but it didn't become real and integrated until I got sick, until my body broke down. And that really is what it takes for most people, especially athletes. You know, you look at when they get injured, how well those guys handle injury tells you a lot about their future ability to live healthy, happy lives. Yeah. I was, um, I was already on a path of you know asking more questions than the average person but it wasn't until i had an injury that that basically made where i couldn't

Starting point is 00:30:54 move for a long time where i go oh i have to actually think about what got me here yeah what what did i what were the series of decisions got me me here it was just me completely ignoring all these signs it's so obvious in retrospect I go well how the fuck did I not see that but I remember looking in the mirror and going my body is really asymmetrical

Starting point is 00:31:18 but I'm the strongest I've ever been fuck it let's keep going push it till it breaks yeah I think there's a couple good things that you're referencing here Strongest I've ever been. Fuck it. Let's keep going. Push it till it breaks. Yeah, I think there's a couple of good things that you're referencing here. One is when you think about spiritual work, there's often a disdain for the physical body. And then if you think about physical culture, there's often a disdain for mindfulness and deep thinking and being philosophical. Oftentimes it is a liability on the playing field to be deeply philosophical, overthinking.

Starting point is 00:31:54 But I found it interesting that I remember being turned off by both the spiritual kind of removal of the body and the physical cultural removal of the mind. And it took more like shamanic stuff to kind of start to bridge that. And then getting more at peace with like some of my own demons and just saying, hey, that's part of me. missed the signs i ignored it i should have done something different but i didn't and i never would have done that so i'm where i need to be do you think uh having that division between the mind and the body is cultural or do you think that's a natural tendency as a human being? I think it's probably to some extent a natural phenomenon that's been accultured because there is something about kind of navel gazing being philosophical that is anti-life. You know, you're not in the playing field of life. You're trying to determine what life is. So I think there probably was more of a healthy balance of that because the work-life balance of our ancestors was much greater.

Starting point is 00:32:48 Most primates just hang up in the trees and rest most of the time. They're idle. And then it becomes a culture, and I think it breaks down along gender as well. Like there's a lot of problems with being intellectual or being sensitive emotionally that I think create a lot of problems for you in hierarchical societies. And then the way that we look at it, let's think about cognitive training because we were talking about that before we got on. We can think about our brains in that concept, but is that really the brain that we're talking about in terms of existence and witnessing

Starting point is 00:33:21 our higher self? No, it's not. It's still a mechanistic view that we're incorporating, but it doesn't allow you to think about the whys of what you're doing. Yeah. Like I've never had once a conversation, hey, why do we play basketball? What are we getting out of this game? You know, it's a beautiful game. It's taught me everything I know in my life,

Starting point is 00:33:40 but at the same time, it's like, what are we doing? Just ten guys running around on the court, throwing balls and hoops. Yeah, exactly. I've gotten to that point before where, you know, I remember being a massive sports fan. And then, I don't know, I woke up one day and I go, this is really, I no longer get this. It was like all those rules and stuff all of a sudden didn't make any sense. Yeah, it's kind of strange. I've been reading Dr.

Starting point is 00:34:11 Nazemith's creation of the game and all the iterations he went through to make it. And he created basketball basically to get people physically active at the University of Kansas. There was no big goal. He had no participation in gym gym class and he created this game and it's changed significantly but i find that shocking you know it's really just a way to get us moving but i also think one of the things i think about a lot is like the idea of working out in general is a strange one like we got to go to the gym to get labor in it's like we didn't now we got that it is it's you know it's fucking strange strange. It only occurs when you divorce yourself from, like, the actual participation in natural systems that you can even start to, like, do CrossFit and things like that. Yeah, even stranger.

Starting point is 00:34:53 Not only do I go, I wake up in a box, you know. Like, we made all the lines really straight, made the floor super flat, made the walls flat, made the ceiling flat. We put ourselves in this box and then we walk out the door for about 20 feet and we get in another box and we drive to another box where we go to a box inside of a box and we stare at a box. And then after that, we got to go inside of another box to work out. Yeah, exactly. Where everything is perfectly measured, like all the barbells are perfectly round. Yeah. Everything is, you know, round numbers, you know, 55, 60, 65. And then, not only that, now I put electricity through my body on top of that. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:35:41 Because, you know, got to activate things from being in a box too much. Yeah. Got to fix the box culture absolutely and then i go home go back in the box stare at another box you probably get your food in a box too get food in a box and just fucking go to bed and i do it again yeah it's weird again the only time i get out of a box is when i get on an airplane then i'm in a tube yeah flying in a tin can through space but no i agree with you i mean it's weird and when you start to think about it after many years of doing it just becomes harder to motivate yourself to go back into it and it's funny to me that we talk a lot about functional strength and it's translation of the natural world well i'll tell you when i was a big crossfitter and i went out and had to double dig a garden it didn didn't translate at all. It was brutal.

Starting point is 00:36:26 And I was done within 10 minutes. So, I mean, it does not translate super well. But it's not to criticize. People should move, and I do. But the reasons that we do it are typically to dispel our stress, to basically make ourselves worthy of attention, of affection. And I think that those things are inherently not going to get us from point A to point B.

Starting point is 00:36:48 And the motivation waxes and wanes. Unless you're obsessed with that solely, then you do it throughout your life. But I've never seen anybody consistently keep up with their training. Yeah, it's very rare. Jack LaLanne? What do you think about Jack LaLanne? These men, they're women that do it from birth to death. Yeah, they're very rare.

Starting point is 00:37:05 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Huh. Yeah. And if we lived in more natural lives, we probably wouldn't have to do any of that. I mean, the amount of people that go and fix their circadian biology that effortlessly maintain good body comp with no training is pretty amazing to me. If they're doing circadian rhythm.

Starting point is 00:37:23 Yeah, where they're eating in condensed windows and they're eating with the sunlight and eating seasonally it takes care of a lot of the effects i um i eat less and i work out less and i'm in better i'm in overall better health better shape and i attribute a large part of it as i i moved to the west coast and I am in a house where there's big windows and I get a lot of natural light. At the end of the day, I don't use a lot of artificial light and I turn things off when the sun goes down and I sleep longer in the winter and I work less in the winter. And in the summer, I work longer and play harder because there's more sunlight sunlight and I find that it's a lot easier to just be healthy lower body fat percentage and and just more happiness and more physically capable too

Starting point is 00:38:16 if I can go sign up for a race and you know a Spartan race and I can run the race with very little training and people are like oh you must have trained really hard for that i'm like not really i just kind of you know did what the sun told me to do and people think you know i think i imagine some people think that's crazy but yes yeah um it's pretty it's pretty simple and then i also have a lot of things that throw me off like i travel a lot but then i use red light therapy in the mornings like this you know every morning I've been here in Austin, I flip that on. I crawl out of bed, flip that on, stand in front of that naked for about 15 minutes, and then restart my day. Do you think that's a good idea?

Starting point is 00:38:54 I think so. I mean, I love red light therapy. There are different spectrums that are effective. But, yeah, it's one of the best tools that anybody could have. It pays itself back very quickly in terms of what it does physiologically to the body, and it does many things. But, yeah, one point that I think also has to be said about knowing you, I mean, part of the reason you're able to step back and do minimal effective training

Starting point is 00:39:19 and participation is just by filling in the rest of your life with stuff that matters so that's the whole thing is that when people train obsessively to to get to these ends there's typically nothing else in their life i mean and i'm judging them but i know when i used to train six days a week there were things that i needed to fill that time with and that was training but i didn't have sometimes other things going on so that idleness or that emptiness in those spaces kept me where I needed to be active and moving yeah I trained coaches trainers and that's part of the conversation is this is your clients best part of their day you have a client come into the gym the rest of their day sucked it is this is this is their bright spot it is and they

Starting point is 00:40:05 need it to to get through that that hell that they're kind of living a lot of people if i don't get my workout and i'll go crazy absolutely if i miss a whole week of workouts you give you you know it's therapy it is yeah it is and i think that's an important distinction to make but i even know with athletes like most of the masculine culture that dominates athletic training right it's harder longer you know who's going to out grind who and the reality is like grinding doesn't work grinding is not where best performance is and if you look at the chemistry of the body when you grind you actually upregulate all the stress molecules you don't upregulate all the dna repair and the protein synthesis that you need to be successful

Starting point is 00:40:47 so i think there's a lot of problems but i don't know how to fix that because that's more cultural which is something that i talk a lot of people to people about n equals one kind of the era of genetic medicine i can look at your blueprint but your blueprint is still unfolding itself in a culture that it does not set itself up for that blueprint's maximum potential so we always talk about the cultural affects that are part of everything because that's what you're coming through and that's what you're constantly responding to to find that place that you were talking about off air about just being and being with your process and making that process unique in and of itself and committing to it no matter where it takes you.

Starting point is 00:41:27 And I think that that work is very difficult because you're always relating that work to what society will value your time and what it's producing, the productivity of your time. Do you think that we're going to have – so things are moving very quickly. If we look at human history and we have more people... Everyone's leaving

Starting point is 00:41:51 the country and moving into the city. It's becoming way more urban and we're exposing ourselves to way more boxes and Wi-Fi and 5G coming up. And I can't believe they tried to serve me tap water.

Starting point is 00:42:09 They tried to give me government water at the restaurant last night. But there's all these things that are going on. And we're talking about genetics, epigenetics. Do you think that there's going to be a segment of the population that's going to thrive in this urban environment? And then there's going to be a large portion of the population that, I mean, evolution has shown this to happen much over time, where there might have been a big, robust population, and then it got small real quick. And then there were some that were able to carry on the genes. Do you see that happening now?

Starting point is 00:42:43 Well, if you talk to like the Ray Kurzweils of the world and the Dave Aspreys of the world, I think that they believe that our technological interventions will allow us to evolve in relation to an urban setting successfully. I don't think anyone will argue that we're not going to lose a ton of people. We are. I mean, that's inevitable. the problem that i have is that no matter how technological we get and it's the problem that i had when i was doing research in the humanities where everything was about the human is that the world that we've created for ourselves to inhabit still has no capacity to modify the genes like the biosphere that we live in and if you look at the difference to give you an example there are two sets of genes that people inherit

Starting point is 00:43:27 that have kind of European ancestry that have a line that goes back far enough that they can travel. One set of genes responded to a lot of infectious pandemics and those people are capable of generating massive amounts of inflammation. When those people move into urban areas, they're screwed

Starting point is 00:43:44 because the person cutting you off in the car, the exhaust fumes, all those things are just going to upregulate all that inflammation. There's another group that we looked at that survived the ice age and those people sort of substituted brain health and other things for immediate antioxidant manufacture to protect them from the damage in the environment post ice age so it's not to say that we won't evolve in relation to it but the amount of genetic damage that occurs just from electromagnetic field radiation is something that's insurmountable so to me it's i look sometimes at urbanization processes as our our kind of global species apoptosis you know we're actually removing ourselves from the planet unknowingly. And I don't think that it's a pretty picture.

Starting point is 00:44:30 Like there's nothing, even if you look at, let's look at a different example, lectin-containing foods. They've only been in our food supply for 10,000 years. What's the inherent problem? Not that those foods are bad for us, but that our microbial populations haven't evolved to digest them because we outsourced our digestion to microbes so there's a lot of things like that it's whether or not we can stay alive long enough for the very slow process of change in the genetic level of the body to occur to allow us to survive it i don't know and it's very likely

Starting point is 00:45:00 that who does survive that is not going to be a robust species. If you want to look on another level. The people who survive in an urban environment. Yeah. Well, look, you put that person out in the forest and they won't, they're not going to make it. Well,

Starting point is 00:45:14 their genes are going to be weaker. So basically the genes that survive any really traumatic change in the environment are always going to involve higher levels of inflammatory response. That's great for survival, but that's not great for quality of life over time. So all those people that survived the Spanish flus and all that with it are our ancestors. That was great. They survived.

Starting point is 00:45:35 But now we have that in a genetically mismatched environment, and that's why we have two-thirds of our population that probably have autoimmune disorders active. So that's the thing, whether or not we survive, but whether we can survive and have good quality of life is very much up to debate. How do we design a world where we get to have good quality of life? Well, I think, so a lot of, when I was at USC, I was a researcher in the Center for Sustainable Cities, and we were thinking about these things. And one of the projects I worked on and that I was the lead designer for was changing the city into a forest,

Starting point is 00:46:10 turning all the skyscrapers into tree structures, restoring all the kind of water infiltration in the city, allowing other animals to be around, using renewable energies and things like that that kind of marry what we call biophilic design. But really doing that in mass and also checking what a human believes its agency to be like the fact that you can drive around and hit animals and not have to pay any that's a big problem for our future survival because the richness of the biodiversity around us matters so i feel like there has to be

Starting point is 00:46:43 a massive shift in the cognitive vision of the human where it locates itself and how we design cities because the resource sinks that exists outside the cities to take care of it are basically shutting down those systems you look at like the cost of the eating meat for instance in Los Angeles you need a country the size of connecticut just to deal with the carbon footprint of that you think people should be eating are eating too much meat is it the industrialization of the meat what's the it's part of it but i mean the if we all ate grass-fed pasture meat which is re heretical right like the reality is that we're going to lose a lot of the planetary resources unless you're like Joel Salatin and

Starting point is 00:47:26 you're doing regenerative agriculture, which is something Rob Wolf, for instance, is into now. I'm very much into that. I think you can eat meat, but I think smaller amounts, seasonal foods with localized food systems getting restored, which is going to, again, change all of our expectations about what our diet is constructed like you know do we have bacon and eggs for breakfast every day on our kind of baseline payload no we don't in that system we eat seasonally i think it could be done but it's how do you intervene in the dominant structures that keep perpetuating that and then the consumer expectations of variety to do that i don't know i think that what's going to happen is we're going to have

Starting point is 00:48:03 a massive depopulation of people and then whoever survives that either is going to have a different mindset or they're not and if you look at on a different level think about what the shamanic and some of the metaphysical traditions they're saying they believe that a new human is coming online the shaman call them homo luminous so there is shift psychologically and identity and i think spiritually that are occurring but i don't think those people are going to be six billion in number nine billion in number there's just we've overshot our carrying capacity a long time ago as a species and i don't think this is a bad thing i don't think like apocalyptic futures are something that we should inherently view as horrible

Starting point is 00:48:49 i think there's a lot of regenerative potential to come from that but it's just going to be who survives it all right how do i survive how do you survive i think you have a lot of industriousness you know how to grow food you know how to deal with scarcity and you know how to kind of mitigate conflict between people. I mean, getting a doomsday bunker out in British Columbia or somewhere probably isn't going to work. And hope that you don't pick up any super pathogens. I mean, I think that, I mean,

Starting point is 00:49:17 that's, that's kind of really building up all my hope right now. I, I, almost every plant I've grown aside from cactus have died. I've been hunting in two decades. Yeah. I've already told people if, if I'm, I'm eating meat now, I'm a former ethical vegan, but like, if I have to start hunting animals, I'm probably going to go back to being a vegan at the Tetra. Maybe I'll do some fishing.

Starting point is 00:49:48 What I would like to say in that case is make friends with a gardener and a hunter and then try to organize micro communities. No, I, I, it seems like an easier task for me than actually doing the work. Honestly, I was probably out gathering the berries and thinking through like how to do the, the work rather than doing it. and i have no problem admitting that you know i wasn't the big hunter uh in previous lives my girlfriend and i joke this is my first life in a male body so it's her first life in a female body so we make a good team but the point is yeah really the the things that you're going to need are clean water that's renewed locally. So I look at places in British Columbia, decent enough soil to grow, potentially the ability to generate light through nontraditional means like electrical light through solar or something to deal with that kind of stuff. But I have no idea. I mean, and it may not even happen like this. But I do think that in five years, all the signs are there.

Starting point is 00:50:45 I keep up with the climate science. We're going to start seeing some massive changes. I hear a lot of people talking about, all right, the two hot topics that people are afraid to talk about. We have vaccines and 5G. Yeah. You already alluded to 5G. We'll do 5g and then vaccine plus i was at a talk last night where i was an entrepreneur uh was he an entrepreneur speak on something and then at the end someone got up and

Starting point is 00:51:11 started talking about vaccines i don't have kids so i'm not and i've been avoiding vaccines my adult life um once once i once i started understanding how vaccines worked, I was like, it's kind of pointless for me now. I'm sure there's some vaccines I got when I was a kid that may have saved my life and all that kind of stuff. But when it's like, here, you should take this flu vaccine. I'm like, you mean out of how many? You're going to give me one strain out of how many potential scenarios? You don't even know which one's coming but there's a best guess it sounds dumb well at best it's a 10 chance of being effective at best

Starting point is 00:51:52 yeah and i always feel like shit after one so vaccinations i know that's i'm talking about stuff that's not even the issue yeah well it's part of it all because the vaccination discussion is very polarized. And I was interviewed by NPR about vaccines in 2014. They didn't air my segment. And what I basically said was. Those motherfuckers. What I said was you should never vaccinate. I don't like NPR either.

Starting point is 00:52:17 It's okay. Yeah. I basically said don't vaccinate a person unless you know how well they methylate. You know, that was my political answer. There's a book if people want to check it out called Vaccines, Autoimmunity, and the Changing Nature of Childhood Illness by Dr. Thomas Cowan. Go to that book. You know, it's not an inflammatory book. It's not written by a pro or an anti-vaxxer. It's written by someone who actually understands what they do. So what I say about vaccines is a couple fold.

Starting point is 00:52:46 One, you need to know your genetic status because your biochemistry needs to interact appropriately with the vaccine. Your immune system needs to be able to generate the appropriate responses for those to even have a chance to be effective. Can we have the technology for that now? Yeah. I mean, even just basic genetic testing with somebody who's qualified can look at some of those genes. A couple of things that I'll say generally speaking about them, I'm, even just basic genetic testing with somebody who's qualified can look at some of those genes.

Starting point is 00:53:05 A couple of things that I'll say generally speaking about them, I'm generally against them. And the reason for that is, one, if not every member of a population is vaccinated, you lose herd immunity. There's a lot of people in the paleo world, including Sarah Ballantyne, who's very pro-vax. And if you actually listen to how she talks about it, it's not based on science. It's based on the fact that a family member was saved from polio by getting that vaccine. And if you look at the science around that, there was no cases of paralysis for the polio virus unless there was also a not-concumbent DDT spray. There were actually three viruses that were isolated. Polio was the only one that they could actually identify, so it got penned.

Starting point is 00:53:42 And that's one of the most modern vaccine kind of success stories, the polio vaccine alongside penicillin, right? So polio wouldn't cause an issue unless there was DDT. That's what people saw when they actually went back and looked whether or not that's true or not is up to debate, but it's compelling to me because polio damages the nervous system and the nerve horns. But vaccines, generally speaking, there's a couple problems I have with them. One, we would never argue, for instance, that a sleeping pill like Ambien works the same in every single person in a population. They are a genetic or they're a medical creation. So we would never argue that pharmaceuticals work evenly across all populations, but we do that with vaccines unequivocally. And the reality is,

Starting point is 00:54:25 is immune systems are not built the same across the population. So I got into a Twitter debate with a lady. Yeah. I stepped out and she basically, you know, said they're safe, they're blah, blah, blah. They're safe. They're this, they're that. And I basically said, no, I mean, what you're saying isn't true. And how could you ever argue that every child would respond favorably to a vaccine? It's asinine. No real scientist would argue that. Weirdly also, people will talk about, oh, well, you know, vaccines are only given to us in the quantity they are because it's a corporate conspiracy. That's not exactly true either. The reality is, is that if your child is one of the ones that dies from one of these viruses, you're going to be pro-vaccine. You're going to wish the child got

Starting point is 00:55:04 it. You're going to hold on to that hope. We would lose on average 30 out of every 100,000 individuals to one of these diseases on average or one of these infections. So it's not that they're trying to injure the entire population. It also fits the rubric of orthomolecular medicine where we're attempting to sanitize the environment. What is not arguable, if you actually look at longitudinal studies of vaccines, people that have had vaccines, people that have not, what you'll see is that the people that go through infections unvaccinated tend to have protection against multiple forms of infections. So if I don't get the measles, I survive it, the measles vaccine,

Starting point is 00:55:43 I survive measles, I'm protected against mumps and rubella and other adjacent viral infections i also have cancer immunities that are higher than a person that gets vaccinated to look at some other things the mmr vaccine does it cause autism no it does not so that's a misnomer of the anti-vax community what it does do in many cases is cause antibodies to be generated to folic acid what does that do it repairs your nervous system and brain why would an autistic child have problems in that regard because that's one of their areas aside from the gut that's messed up there are people that will respond to your podcast when i say that let's say the research doesn't show that the research in the

Starting point is 00:56:19 u.s doesn't the research and every other developed world does. So know your science. The thing I tell parents is if they don't give it in Europe, don't give it to your child. We allow things on average. Why in Europe? Why is it different in Europe than in the United States? Well, typically they're more protective. I mean, in Europe, do you have the things in municipal water that we do in the United States?

Starting point is 00:56:37 No. Do you allow particulate air pollution like we do in the United States? No. A lot of the public health problems that we have that can be legislated away are all legislated away in places like France and England and Germany. Here they're permitted because of the corporate control of the government. So those are things that I think about. The other thing was look at another common vaccine, DPT. It's a tri-part vaccine. It creates antibodies to the GAD enzymes that convert glutamate into GABA.

Starting point is 00:57:07 Why do we have so many amped up, ramped up people, especially children with ADHD? Because they have to be able to effectively convert those molecules back and forth. So we know that. That's generated. That's just a big problem. And also vaccines injure the handoff between the cell-mediated side of the immune system and the humoral immune system. So what they effectively do long-term is they turn us into antibody-generating machines.

Starting point is 00:57:32 And when we become that, we react to our environment more sensitively. And what does that mean? So if you think about why are up to half of Americans allergic to eggs, well, eggs and egg white proteins are in vaccinations. They're part of the materials of the vaccine. Why would any person in America or in the world be allergic to an egg? An egg outside of breast milk is probably the most perfect food that nature could have made in terms of macros. So those are the kinds of questions that I ask.

Starting point is 00:57:59 When people say, I even ask the ladies, why don't you explain to me what happens in cell-mediated immunity and humoral immunity, and then you tell me how well the vaccine works. She just, you know, shouts it because they will just say it works. The other thing is a bigger question. It's a free society. This is biopolitics. You know, whether or not it's good for us is up to debate, clearly, but whether or not we have a choice in the matter should be the bigger question. Because I can willingly choose to drive my car 100 miles an hour and

Starting point is 00:58:30 get into a fiery crash, but I should also probably be able to choose things even if I end up with the measles or mumps. By the way, people act like these measles outbreaks are like the impending apocalypse. The ways that we do other things are far more dangerous. The treatment-resistant fungal infections that are proliferating through the world right now as a result of antibiotic overuse. To me, the vaccine debate is a straw man to distract from a lot of the other pathogenic problems that exist in the world. But the reality is you need to be robust chemically and methylation in order to have a good response to a vaccine. And at that time, you may have a favorable outcome from it. But you're still introducing things like aluminum

Starting point is 00:59:08 that interrupt neurotransmission and other things. So it's a tricky thing because the smartest people in the U.S., people that would be pro-climate science, will be pro-vaccine as well. And the climate deniers get lumped in with the anti-vaxxers, and there's this weird thing when those are not apples to apples. I mean, it sounds like people who want to control the environment, people who also want to control what's happening in the human body.

Starting point is 00:59:36 Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And they misunderstand. It sounds like a control issue. It is, yeah. It's a sanitation problem. It's a sanitation design problem. So if you look at, if people want to actually look at legitimate vaccine science, go to vaccinepapers.org. You know, it will show all the studies that have been used to demonstrate their efficacy, and you can read those studies for yourself, and you can make your own conclusions. But generally speaking, when you look long-term, the effects that people claim, they're not really there. And I can tell you definitively that almost every person that I work with, because of the nature of their illnesses, has been injured at some point by

Starting point is 01:00:13 vaccination, especially younger women that have been given things like the Gardasil vaccine. So to me, it's just a vaccine to protect against HPV. Oh, that's right. That one's troublesome? There's 250,000 current lawsuits against the maker of that vaccine, and they just released a version for women over 27. The reality is we know that if you methylate well and your immune system is robust, HPV will leave the body usually within seven years. So there's a lot of problems with all these things. I try to stay out of it because of the crosshairs

Starting point is 01:00:46 that get put on your forehead for being someone who will talk about vaccines. You're referring to before people like to categorize whether you're on one side of the fence or another based on politics and it's people rare, they lack the ability

Starting point is 01:01:02 to have individual thoughts and if you believe one thing then they just imagine that you believe everything else that someone might. It goes along with that. Yeah. People aren't thinking for themselves. And it's strange because I'm just trying to evaluate how the body would react to the actual intervention. And I do think that in an era of pharmacogenetics, that arguing for unitary vaccine response is problematic because I can tell you I could give someone one drug

Starting point is 01:01:29 and another person another drug, and they'd have wildly different responses based on their CYP enzymes. So it's something that I think needs to be talked about, and that potentially creates a chance to develop better vaccines, vaccines that are more bio-individualized. Those kinds of things have been done throughout history. The idea of a vaccination has been something that you can find going way back into ancient medicines.

Starting point is 01:01:52 I mean, people made vaccination-style things medically for decades, centuries. So it's not like it's necessarily bad. And homeopathy, they're called nosotherapies, and they're very effective. So I use homeopathic influenza for a flu shot and it works much better than the flu shot but it's non-harming to the body so i mean but i do think that those are two really important points water is a whole nother debate that we can talk about at some point in time but yeah i mean go ahead tell me about the water well i mean water in the united states me about the water. Well, I mean,

Starting point is 01:02:26 water in the United States, one of the most problematic shifts in the treatment of it is the addition of chloramine. Chloramine is a chlorine and ammonia molecule, hybrid molecule that was introduced here in Austin most recently.

Starting point is 01:02:37 When I'm at home, I have a... Filter that pulls that out. A filter in my shower. Yeah, it's good. I found out about it and I immediately was like, okay, I'm already drinking spring water, but here I am in the shower yeah i found out about it i immediately was like okay i'm already drinking spring water but here i am in the shower absolutely inhaling that's probably

Starting point is 01:02:50 smarter drinking is probably less problematic than the shower that's what i've heard yeah i've heard the shower can be worse so i mean there's there's all kinds of things like here in austin seven years ago we probably had the third most worst water in america had the most kind of highest levels of pollutants and they were all right on thresholds of federally acceptable limits and things of that nature but chloramine has particular problems when it interacts with transsulfuration because those extra ammonia molecules have to be broken down by the kidneys through the urea cycle they can upregulate ammonia in the body and cause all kinds of inflammatory stuff. It was added not to poison us, but because it's cheaper and it doesn't off-gas an open system, whereas ammonia will dissipate.

Starting point is 01:03:31 So you used to fill up a bucket. You could smell it. Yeah, or sorry, chlorine would dissipate, and you could water your plants once it left. We started seeing a lot of deleterious effects from chloramine on aquatic species and plants. So friends that I have that do aquatics research at ut will talk about what happened to their tanks when we switched and the fish they all developed algae blooms and fish died and things of that nature then there's things like fluoride you know that is obvious that people talk about fluoride's main problem is it displaces iodine in the body

Starting point is 01:04:02 because it's a halogen like iodine so it's a heavier weight molecule that blocks the reception of iodine in the receptors for the thyroid and other things. But what about your teeth? Let's get to that study. So this is the biggest joke. This is typically how American public policy, health policy gets written. There's one study. Somebody cites that who's politically powerful and it becomes

Starting point is 01:04:25 doctrine and we can think about some of the carbohydrate studies by the cereal industry in the 50s that laid the food pyramid somewhere back in the day there was a town i can't remember if it was in iowa it was a midwestern state they noticed that this particular population individuals had great dental health. Their teeth were amazing. They're very strong, no cavities, no periodontal disease. And so they started looking for reasons why. Well, they figured out, well, there's lots of fluoride in these people's bodies. And they were able to kind of look at that. And they isolated that. And I believe it was added to the water in that particular municipality the reality is is that the soil environment of that community was robust so it was loaded with

Starting point is 01:05:10 nutrients so the mineralization of the food that the people were eating was was higher quality and it was the abundant mineral content of the soil that was responsible for the good dental health not the fluoride but the fluoride got extrapolated out so they're like well if it worked here then let's add it to water everywhere another molecule that they want to add now people buy it in a tube and yeah yeah brush your teeth and fluoride is again it it it's a halogroup chemical so it blocks other do something good for your teeth i mean all the dentists say yeah yeah it does a lot of good stuff for your teeth you kind of rob p Peter to pay Paul good teeth for bad thyroid. So that's kind of something to look at.

Starting point is 01:05:49 Another one is lithium orotate. So is there other ways to take care of your teeth other than fluoride? Yeah, absolutely. Just making sure. Yeah, the thing I recommend. I'm just imagining people freaking out because I brush my teeth with basically – actually, I have the craziest toothpaste on the planet. It's the best from Elemental Wisdom i know it yeah it's it's got uh i mean it's like frank

Starting point is 01:06:11 frankincense myrrh gold charcoal like it's like you read the ingredients let's be like i've got like jesus mouth over here it's fucking great. I recommend Livian X, the dental gel that was developed at UT Austin. And then I use a Russian toothpaste is actually remineralizing kind of in my dental protocols, but so that's better than elemental wisdom. There's no gold in it. No, not no gold. It won't, it won't give you Jesus mouth, but it would probably remineralize a little bit better. Um, but lithium or alternate between the two. Yeah, sounds good. That's what I recommend. But lithium orotate is another thing that people wanted to add to water, which if you look at populations where there's lithium in the soil substrate, where there's good topsoil,

Starting point is 01:06:58 there's on average 95% less depression in that population. So people have thought about adding lithium orotate, which is the naturally occurring lithium which is actually an important cofactor for b vitamins that actually makes more sense than than fluoride and could potentially do some degree of benefit but water in general it has many things in the particulate content that shouldn't be in our body one thing that i'll say i know I've been a little apocalyptic, but I'll take it to another level. There's the average newborn baby that is spending its first hours on our planet

Starting point is 01:07:34 already has 7,000 man-made chemicals in its body. You're already fucked. It doesn't matter. Well, no, here's what I want to say. When I talk to people, people worry about genetic mutations. They worry about the environment. They worry about climate change. Our genes are broken down by the environment and kind of injured about 50,000 to 60,000 times a day naturally.

Starting point is 01:07:55 DNA repair keeps up with that. It's when you start adding the levels where the cup fills faster than you can empty it that you have problems. So what I tell people is we're not a pristine ecosystem we're designed to have infection we're designed to have pollutants in our body we are an ecosystem that's alive we have more microbes obviously the average healthy person has six active infections that affect nothing in their body in their terms of their quality of life so you got to get away from this idea that we can go back to this Edenic condition where there's no toxins.

Starting point is 01:08:26 That never was the case. All life creates damaging effects as it lives. So, I mean, that's not something that I think is important, but it's that we're adding toxins so many steps of the way that we're not able to keep pace with that. Gotcha. So, filtering your shower water, taking care of your teeth, eating the cleanest food possible, eating seasonally. Like these are all very simple ways to prevent toxicity from accumulating. The other thing is a lot of the toxins and shampoos and deodorants and household products, they're very short lived in the body. So if you pull them out of your house within 30 days to two months, a lot of them will

Starting point is 01:09:00 leave the body. They'll be secreted. So that's the other thing. There's a lot of the things that we're dealing with, they have relatively short half-lives. All right, last topic. Sure. 5G.

Starting point is 01:09:13 What's your prediction? I'm nervous about it. I think that it's going to skyrocket the amount of cancer and autoimmunity that we'll see in the environment and our communities because of its damaging effects of DNA. I thought EMF people who were really against them were a little bit cuckoo for a long time. And I dismissed it until I started reading Mei-Wan Ho, who's no longer alive, probably because of reviews on Wi-Fi. All right, we're turning this podcast off right now. Exactly. Edit that part out.'s i think it's incredibly damaging and will probably cause some significant

Starting point is 01:09:51 alterations to the electrical environment of the body including the water systems in the body that are going to be highly problematic and probably more negatively affecting than blue light i mean and there's going to not be much control over it. So there are some 5G towers already available or already up and running. There was a New York Times article about a school that was nearby to one of the LTE towers where they have the highest rates of childhood cancer in the world. One out of five of the children at one of these schools had the cancer before the age of eight. So I think it's going to be problematic in many ways because it's damaging genetic material.

Starting point is 01:10:33 It's also known to activate endogenous retroviruses. Epstein-Barr, like a seven-minute iPhone call will activate Epstein-Barr in the system. So its effect on viral actors in the body isn't well understood, but we know that it awakens them, so to speak. So why is 5G more dangerous than the other powers? It's just a higher, more ubiquitous kind of signal. It's more powerful. It's more amplified. It's carrying more information. It's similar to, let's say, I'm on ground level with my feet on the earth. Whatever electromagnetic radiation that's hitting me at that given point in time, my body can successfully handle. So if you think about like if you're a 110 device and you can handle 110 volts of current,

Starting point is 01:11:13 well, let's say I go up to the second, third, 50 story of a skyscraper. The amount of electromagnetic energy as I go up in altitude begins to be too much for my body to handle, so it damages. So I have a lot of friends that live in buildings around downtown in austin and a lot of them will complain that their ears start ringing incessantly when they're in these buildings so you'll see a lot of problems that just start popping up that are often a combination of viral activation and nerve nerve kind of sensitization so i think that we know some things that we can expect

Starting point is 01:11:45 because we already have that research, but I just think that they're going to be damaging to the actual structural integrity of the body, not to mention to what they do to other animals. So I think we're playing with a lot of things. It's similar to going to human trials with CRISPR editing, the DNA editing. We're doing our first human trials. These are things that we've rushed to market,

Starting point is 01:12:08 and there's been no real concern about the ethical potential for these things and also whether or not the long-term public health protection is there, which it's not. So, you know, we'll see. We're creating Gattaca. Potentially, yeah. Oh, shit. Yeah. so you know we'll see we're creating gattaca potentially yeah oh shit yeah so i mean you can do things to neutralize emfs grounding sheets and there's devices out there some of them probably don't do anything some of them may but i just tell people control what you can and i don't understand that stuff i've had i've had people like use this thing i can. I don't understand that stuff. I've had people like, use this thing.

Starting point is 01:12:47 I'm like, I don't know what that thing does to block EMF. Well, basically all the EMF blocker does is it changes the shape of the wave. And that neutralizes supposedly its effect. So if the wave is closer to a native EMF frequency, it doesn't damage you because native EMFs are coming out of the core of the earth all day long. So that's essentially what they do. They redistribute the wave. I mean, I have one plugged in over on that wall who knows what it's doing to neutralize it.

Starting point is 01:13:20 But that's just one of the things. But grounding sheets are the easiest. It's like, why not just put it in? Well, I have a client who's a physicist, a retired physicist from the University of Wisconsin, and he's looked at some of the Wi-Fi reduction technologies, and he believes that some of them are valid, and he's actually measured them with devices. But I don't have anyone I can recommend because I'm still on the fence about whether they work. But yeah, I think we're running into some big things. I don't know exactly how to tell you whether or not they're going to be an apocalyptic effect or whether they'll just minorly be affecting or the accumulative problem is something that you need to look at or whether they're not going to do anything.

Starting point is 01:14:01 I don't know, you know, who you go to to find sane information about that stuff yeah the way i look at it it's not a i don't think it's gonna be any one thing it's like the things are piling up and then people are finding breaking different people are breaking at different points yeah depending on their exposure and and what their tolerance is of different things and i mean all i know is that when i go when i leave the country and spend a week out in a forest somewhere everything gets really quiet the buzz leaves my head yeah there i feel different yeah i feel and then i come back i'm like i can it's like i can hear it's like a there's a hum going on in the city yeah absolutely yeah i have

Starting point is 01:14:45 some clients in like finland and i did the console and they were kind of laughing oh wait you don't have that or we don't have that oh wait we don't have that you know to contend with i was like yeah we're kind of in a we're like the ant farm of society in the united states you know we're just seeing how many toxins we can imbibe and survive. We're sort of the grand experiment over here, but yeah, I don't know. But I think it gets back to what we talked about in the beginning. If your circadian biology is at least somewhat intact, you have a much better chance of healthily moving through an urban environment. If it's not, you're going to just accumulate damage more quickly. That's really all we can do. Aging only occurs when damage outstrips repair.

Starting point is 01:15:28 So the more you control that ratio, the better and healthier you'll be, and 5G may have very few effects on you. I actually heard someone else talking about that. If your circadian rhythm is in place, then a lot of the stuff won't impact you so much. It won't impact you so much. So top three to five things someone can do to make sure their circadian rhythm is in rhythm.

Starting point is 01:15:51 In rhythm. The easiest one is to pick awake and bedtime and stick to it and really try to plan for eight to nine hours of sleep. Nine hours is actually preferable for adults over the age of 30 for recovery. Eat all of your meals while the sun is out. Nothing after, and it's not what Dave Asprey and others say, anything after the sun is down is just water. No tea, no coffee, no supplements. Water only at night.

Starting point is 01:16:20 No bulletproof supplements? No, I'm sorry, Dave. 24 hours a day? No, I'm sorry, Dave. 24 hours a day? No, yeah. And the third thing, honestly, and this is a bit cliche these days, but I really think people should start growing some of their own greens and herbs in a kitchen window. So for me, gardening, sleeping at sane times, waking at sane times naturally,

Starting point is 01:16:41 and then eating during the daytime seasonally are things that go a long way and preventing you from getting sick and getting in the sun as much as humanly possible getting out in the woods if they're available to you regularly even if it's a trail in the city get out there 10-15 minutes a day and stop over training stop over training is a big one like figure out how to get the same thing out of your work in two workouts versus six. I think a lot of people don't think they're overtraining. They probably think they're not training. They're like, I'm fat. I'm not training enough. If you're fat and you're working out regularly and eating well, you're obviously overtraining. That's just one of

Starting point is 01:17:23 those things. Overtraining to training to me i mean it can be measured lots of ways basal body temps when you wake up heart rate variability for me anything over you know four times a week if it's intense enough probably is going to venture into that territory and unless you're a professional athlete you have no business doing six that's what the juice is for man do the juice you can train as much as you want start with a big green smoothie too and you know everything's taken care of not that juice yeah no you know you know what i'm talking about the real juice speed up your cell turnover and get some cancer later on to get yoked out today but yeah um training is is individual but i i recommend if

Starting point is 01:18:06 you have existing health conditions three times a week maximum if you have severe health conditions maybe walking only some restorative corrective stuff yoga but but 10 years ago i would have said you were nuts oh yeah now now i've trained enough people and done enough myself yeah drinking water and walking is a good idea for most people yeah for now yeah yeah a lot of people i'm kind of the the bad cop in the world i'll recommend the the most conservative the the least amount of interventions yeah but i've seen that produce more results more manageable, and yeah, you don't need to shock the system. It's already, it's already shocked enough. It's also expensive to chase all these biohacks. Yeah. But red light therapy, as you mentioned many times, that's a wonderful, and that works consistently. I mean,

Starting point is 01:18:56 there's no argument against that. And there's devices. I use the red light code device. It's only like 450 bucks and that one's equivalent to $3,000 Red Light devices. Yeah. I've got the Juve at home, and then I've got one from Red Light, or Red Therapy Co. Red Therapy Co., right. Yeah, they sent me one that travels well in my car. That's the one I have, the little small panel.

Starting point is 01:19:20 It works excellent. The light bed we have in our space here is 8 feet long, but that's just a shorter treatment and don't overdo light therapy you know it's a biphagic response so find your sweet spot there two more is not better and everybody's probably different there too god damn it yeah typically daily use is not going to produce great long-term results daily use yeah i've been using it every day yeah i mean yeah a lot of people five days on two days off some people every other day i typically i probably naturally do it

Starting point is 01:19:51 that way yeah i if i try to do it every day i probably do it five days yeah that's probably better like meditation but you the higher the the device potential and it's kind of overall power and stuff like my our light bed you couldn't do it more than twice a week for 10 minutes. It would just destroy your system. And you need Ross. It's not a bad thing. It's a signaling molecule. It's just dose makes the poison.

Starting point is 01:20:16 But, yeah, red light therapy is a great one. That one works amazingly well. Building a cold tank, doing cold exposure, not cryotherapy, but cold water or cold air exposure. Those are awesome. A lot of people ask me about that. They're like, do you do cryo? I'm like, no, but I'll jump in an ice bath.

Starting point is 01:20:31 Yeah, I did. A lot of people ask me the difference. Big difference. Where in nature do you get exposed to 270 degree, negative 270 Fahrenheit? But more is better. Yeah. Didn't you hear? It's just faster.

Starting point is 01:20:43 It does work for my NBA guys to rapidly recover, but I did a 30-day cryo hack once consecutive every day, and I had nothing but negative outcomes. I gained a bunch of body fat. I had nerve damage to some sensitive areas. Don't want that. That was the effects of cryotherapy, and then if you look at cold water work.

Starting point is 01:21:05 Unless you're an early finisher, then it might be a good idea. I've seen some Chinese little medicines for that too. Yeah, some lidocaine. Yeah. But those are the two interventions that I see consistently work and then other things just cost a lot of money. I do think water ionization is important

Starting point is 01:21:32 but there's a lot of people that fight me on that. But things that are under like $500 to $1,000, those are the things that consistently produce. What are they though? They're things you see in nature. Super easy. Just localized. Yeah. Alright right the biggest change i'm gonna make after after this show is uh i've been i've been taking all your advice

Starting point is 01:21:52 already except for i eat meals after dark some people do all right but try to try doing it consistently give yourself about six weeks though to adjust um i've made way bigger dietary changes before this this will be because i've been eating at about eight o'clock yeah most nights in the winter and so uh i mean it's almost sun's going down almost at that time now so yeah you you get a little more bandwidth in the summer to extend it out to seven but in the winter it's probably easy little more bandwidth in the summer to extend it out to seven. But in the winter, it's probably easy, easy to do in the summer, harder to do in the winter. So start it in the summer. It's harder to do in the winter.

Starting point is 01:22:31 Yeah, because people tend to get off work at five or six, but it's unequivocal. I used to think you could move those windows around and I had people doing that regularly until I found out that I started looking at Ruth Patterson's research at UC San Diego. And it's like, as soon as the sun went down, higher C-reactive protein damage to the liver, mitochondria, like all these inflammatory markers started going through the roof. And then when I got everybody doing the journal eating, the results of everybody improved.

Starting point is 01:22:58 And they weren't improving just doing IF alone. So that idea of skipping, especially if you want to restore leptin sensitivity and other things, having a protein loaded breakfast meal is actually important to that end as well. So there's the whole endocrine side of the equation too that benefits from journal eating in the beginning.

Starting point is 01:23:15 Or if you're thyroid, suboptimal, etc. So I used to believe different things but through clinical work you start to see what actually is real and sort out all the the noise lots of noise out there lots of noise we're working on it well there's a lot of like influential biohackers where they do something and it works on their body and they promote it to everyone and the reality is it doesn't work like that and you have no evidence for that i'm not saying you have to have some science paper. I'm just saying enough people that you've tested it on to see if it's reproducible. It's true. It typically isn't.

Starting point is 01:23:49 Yeah. And those guys are already, you know, pretty healthy to some extent. So the biohacks work more on healthy people than unhealthy people. Yeah. That's one of my complaints about a lot of things in the biohacking, that, that whole world is you have a lot of people who are not doing the basics, who are following, like taking a biohacker's advice, who has been doing the basics their whole life. They've nailed the health thing, and now it's not the same game. I'm a biohacker, but biohacking for me is a political gray space to take control of your own health.

Starting point is 01:24:26 It's not, it's a political orientation. It's not just to tinker around with physiology. It's a little bit different for me, but. I like that. Yeah. I like that. That's cool. So.

Starting point is 01:24:36 All right. Where can people find you? Uh, cosmic animal with a K.com. And then the new business that will have all these high-tech machines is called Xenogenesis.co. Xenogenesis with an X. That site's up in a couple weeks. Dope. All right.

Starting point is 01:24:51 This will be up. Your site should be up. Cool. The show's up. Very good. Go check it out, folks. Thank you. All right.

Starting point is 01:24:56 Thanks, Ryan. Absolutely. All right. We know you love the show. Make sure you go to Enlifted.me slash shrugged. Take your cognitive fitness assessment today and make sure you go over to, for your coaches out there, go over to thestrongcoach.com and yeah, just go. I got some free tips over there for you. You got to sign up for the list, send you some emails, get you dialed in, things you can put in place immediately and yeah, you're really going to like it. Again,

Starting point is 01:25:28 make sure you go over to Stitcher iTunes. My show is moving off the network here in about six weeks. So if you want to keep listening to me, go over there right now and subscribe. Do it.

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Barbell Shrugged - Why Supplements Aren’t As Helpful As You Think with Ryan Frisinger — The Bledsoe Show #132

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