Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 399: Brian Mackenzie

Episode Date: September 11, 2020

Brian Mackenzie, human performance specialist, marathoner, ultra-marathoner, and trainer joins the DTFH! You can learn more about Brian on his website. Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by: BetterHelp - Visit betterhealth.com/duncan to find a great counselor and get 10% off of your first month of counseling! Squarespace - Use offer code: DUNCAN to save 10% on your first site. Purple - Visit Purple.com/Duncan and use promo code DUNCAN for $150 Off any mattress order of $1500 or more!

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to the Ducket Trussell Family Hour podcast. This podcast that you're about to listen to actually happened with some synchronicity behind it. I've been looking into a kind of spiritual breathing, I guess you could call it, called TUMO. And then, of course, I got into Wim Hof. I'm sure you all have heard of him. He's somebody that uses a breathing method

to shift the energy in his body so they could swim through glaciated water, like some kind of human polar bear. And then I started reading a little bit about pranayama, which is another form of energy breath work. And in the midst of my research into breathing techniques, I was contacted by today's guest, Brian McKenzie, who is not only a super athlete

in ultramarathons, but is also an expert on various breathing techniques that can help you calm down or help you focus. I've been trying some of them, and they work, and it's super cool. And so if you're interested in breathing as more than just a thing to get oxygen in your body and CO2 out, this is the episode for you.

Who would have thought that breathing is one of the ways to experience high-level psychedelic moments? It's true, and we talk about it in today's podcast. My dear loves, if you enjoy the DTFH, why not take the deep dive by going over to patreon.com forward slash DTFH, where you will get commercial-free episodes

of this podcast, along with a lot of other stuff, including access to our Discord server, which is a thriving community of geniuses. And we have a video tier, where we all hang out three times a week. I hope you'll check it out over at patreon.com forward slash DTFH. We also have a shop located at dugoutrustle.com with beautiful ceremonial garments

for you to adorn your precious, lotioned body with. And now, without further ado, I would like to introduce you to today's guest, Brian McKenzie. He is a human performance specialist. He runs marathons. He runs ultramarathons, and he trains people to get in amazing shape.

This is a really fascinating conversation that has altered my life. I'm now using some of the breathing techniques that he taught me, and also that are on his website. And it really is helping me fall asleep at night. It's pretty incredible. So, without further ado, everybody please welcome to the DTFH Brian McKenzie.

Welcome, welcome on you. That you are with us. Shake hands, no need to be blue. Welcome to you. It's the dugoutrustle. Brian, welcome to the DTFH. Man, I'm so excited to talk to you, and I got a lot of questions.

So, forgive me if I start machine gunning you with questions. It's rare to get a chance to talk with someone like you. And somebody like me right now, I guess you could say I'm in hibernation when it comes to working out, though I used to love running, and I just can't get over that hill. And so, I just want to start with a question

that's going to seem like juvenile, idiotic, stupid attempt to be funny, and it's none of those things I really mean. You are a comedian. Yeah, but I would never do this. I would never do this with a guest, a joke up front. But really, man, when I'm reading about, like, Goggins, and then I'm reading about you

running these ultramarathons, and then, you know, getting ready for this conversation, I was just looking at videos of the Angelus Crest ultramarathon, and it just looks brutal, and I have to ask this. Where do you poop when you're running 100 miles? Well, I mean, in the woods, if that's where you're at. If you're at an aid station, there's usually a porta-potty. Oh, I get it.

Okay, I feel so dumb. You know, in my head, I was making the... I was over-rugged. No, no, I mean, but make no mistake. I mean, I wouldn't... I mean, look, I mean, I don't run Ultras anymore, but, you know, when doing it, there probably isn't an Ultrarunner out there

who hasn't shit in the woods. Okay, gotcha. I mean, it just makes sense. I don't know why... I figured it was something like that. I don't know why I thought... What did they... I don't know.

In my head, it's such a brutal, rugged thing that you don't even shit, or you're... I don't know. Now it all makes sense. That was a dumb question. If you're out there... No, if you're... I mean, if you're out there long enough,

you're going to, at some point, because you do have to take in calories, and you're... You know, at some point, your digestive system is going to have to expel things. So... Okay, I gotcha. And that leads into the next question,

because, you know, when a lot of people hear about the type of workouts that you have advocated, you are a controversial figure in the exercise world, they... A lot of people think that's how you get hurt. The workouts in power, speed, and endurance, your book,

one of your books, you know, when I was researching you, I was pretty surprised by how controversial you are. How many articles there are out there saying, like, you could really damage yourself. And certainly with ultramarathons, you can hurt yourself. And I'm not asking you that question to be controversial.

I'm asking you that question in the hopes that you can sort of banish that fear from some people's minds who maybe are interested in the type of exercise regimen you advocate, but are sort of afraid of brutalizing their bodies or something. Certainly.

So, I mean, the foundation of what it is, what I teach, is really a skill-based approach to anything. So think of it kind of as like the martial arts in essence. You enter the martial arts and basically every single system, you're a white belt for like a year,

where you're just basically learning the skill and something like jiu-jitsu, which everybody's really aware of at this point, that's like, you basically are just learning to defend yourself, even though you're not really defending yourself very well. And that's essentially what we've done is we've taught more or less

a skill-based approach to human movement, whether that's with endurance and understanding principles behind how to run in a way that's not going to damage you and then actually increasing intensity. So take, for instance, if we were to teach you how to run better, right? And using these principles.

You'd go out, you'd do some drills and some work around this, and you'd spend the majority of your time doing that. Then you'd enter into doing something like, let's say 200 meter repeats. You'd only be doing those repeats till you could not maintain form and recover from those things.

The basic idea that the public and the vast majority of people have taken on is I'm just going to go out and run until I hurt. Yeah. And then I'm going to stop. We don't advocate that in the slightest. So the approach we've taken is totally

the opposite of what people are doing. And pain, I saw this in a recent Johnny Depp movie, but it's awesome, but it's like he said, pain is the only truth. Now, pain is not the only truth, but the fact is,

pain is nature's way of saying wrong and understanding what that pain is. There's differences in pain, like psychological pain, et cetera. When I'm talking about working out or taking care of yourself, pain's there for a reason. It's there to tell you to stop doing this this way.

Unfortunately, most people who get caught up in exercise regimes or even in movement practices, including yoga, will take things to the point where they're in pain and this may take some time to get there, like years to get there, and then all of a sudden they're in chronic pain

and then they have to stop doing what they're doing until the pain goes away, and then they repeat the same process to getting back to where they were at and then run right back into that pain again, never correcting what the problem was, which is ultimately just a manifestation of how you're not paying attention

to the physiological signals that are going on in your body in the first place. It seems like that flies in the face of every shitty gym coach I've ever had in high school, which is the idea is like, pain is weakness leaving your body. That's how you know you are working out

the right amount as you start hurting and then you continue working out even though you're hurting and then the next day you're incredibly sore and then you think to yourself, wow, I did a great workout. So that's all wrong. Well, in essence, yeah.

Look, I understand that and I can empathize with that and there's actually some truth to that, like pain is weakness leaving the body. Like there isn't a cell in your body that doesn't benefit from stress. And I mean, ultimately what we teach right now is we've actually gone down,

we've gone back to the beginning of everything with what we do in understanding breath work as kind of something that like, I mean, look, like yoga's been taught and like yoga's been talking about breath work for 5,000 years at the baseline of the foundation of its practice, right? So it's the oldest movement practice we know of

and at the foundation of it, they've been talking about breathing, pranayama, right? And there's various forms of, or various methods within inside the idea of yoga, but the fact is, is a yoga practice itself has breath work attached to it. And so we've actually, we've actually cattle it,

use this to kind of bring a reality check to fitness. And so coming back to your idea about pain as weakness leave you the body, there's a real reason why you actually have acidic pain in your body when you're working out hard. And that's because you're actually becoming acidic. And your cells are actually getting stressed to the point

to where they're going to make some real adaptations, but we as a society or we as a kind of, yeah, we as a society globally look at this as, well, I got to get right back to working hard the next day. Right. And that's not how that really works. So that's where, yeah, you should take it to the limit on certain days, but then you're going to need some time

and some in other places like maybe mobility or yoga or going easy and then coming back to going hard another day. Okay. But understanding that. Yeah. I'm interested in the breath in breath work. I've been looking into it because the David Nickton, I work with him.

He's my meditation teacher. And he was just talking about this, this teacher, Delgo Kensei Rinpoche, who was the Dalai Lama's teacher. And he was talking about tumor breathing, which is reminded me of some of the breathing techniques that I saw in some of your YouTube videos also reminded me of Wim Hof a little bit, but he was just saying that some

of these like Rinpoches, they don't even, they don't sleep that much, but they have this breathing technique that makes it so that they have just all this energy and it sounds insane, but that, and I'm sure you've heard this, that some of them can lay in the snow and from this exercise melt the steam or rise out of their bodies. Can you explain what that is physiologically and how that parallels the type of breath work that you teach?

Yes, sir. So what I do is, so basically everything I do is we teach principles. So we teach truths, right? We teach physiological facts and orchestrate those so that people can actually navigate them, right? So in that, I've gone and studied some of Tumo. I've gone and studied Wim Hof.

I used to be very close to Wim Hof. I've studied a number of yoga, yogic breathing exercises. We've studied all this stuff, but where our work really sits is really understanding why we breathe and what this does. And so with Tumo, what, the reason some of these individuals don't need to sleep that much is because they can put themselves into such a deep state of relaxation that their body's actually mending itself almost in a sleep-like state.

That's what you will see with high-level meditators. Like any science that's done on high-level meditators, you'll see brain waves that are reminiscent of deep sleep, of sleep that's very deep, right? So this is why they, and they're not very reactive people, kind of like, you know, like you and I, like you're a stand-up comedian by trade, right? Sure.

Like you've got to be on, dude. And that on, if that carries on throughout your day, well, that's what these people don't really do. They're very calm and responsive to things. And it's not one way is right or one way is wrong. It's everything comes with consequences. They're not going to be a stand-up comedian. They're not going to empower the world through comedy.

You are, right? Yeah. They're going to empower people through getting more interceptive, right? And getting deeper layered into themselves. Something that actually, you know, you are interested in. So Tumo then takes it a step further with understanding the breath control and how to actually manipulate the

physiology to shut down some of the sympathetic and bring in more parasympathetic or bring in more sympathetic and, and, and decrease parasympathetic. Would you mind doing a quick sympathetic, parasympathetic refresher course for some of the listeners? Certainly. Very, very simple. So our autonomic nervous system has three parts,

but the two main parts are the sympathetic, which is our survival state, which is our stress state. Okay. And then our parasympathetic is our rest state or our, our response state. This is where we make adaptations to everything we do. So think of like learning to swim or learning to ride a bike as a kid, like how frustrating that might have been

or if you've got kids, you've watched your kids do this and how frustrated they are at first. But then all of a sudden it's like one day they wake up and they go in and they do it and they're doing it perfectly fine. Yes. That's, that's that transfer over of using these states, right?

But we're in, in flux with this throughout our entire day. Our autonomic nervous system is always on and it's on as it alludes to autonomic. So autopilot. The beauty of this is, is that our survival state or our stress state, we actually know and we, we, we need, right? And we're the only species on this planet that understands that we can actually self induce a high stress situation to create

adaptive processes. It's how you got good at doing standup comedy. Right. Whoa. That's crazy. You know, it's like trauma bonding or like when you're in an intense situation, like you got it. You're in it with, you become friends with them.

Yeah. Whoa. Think of the first time you went up on stage, how good were you? So horrible. So horrible. And how, and then how long did that take till you were really good at it?

I never got good at it. Well, you're, you're pretty good. I've seen you do stand up. Like, look, look, look, and like I talk in front of crowds, right? And my life, like talking in front of 10 people was very different than talking in front of thousands of people. Right.

Like that's like a very big difference, but that's all in my head. So the better I can control that. And so check this out. We have a way of controlling that that we're not really aware of. Some people are, but not everybody. And our breathing is a direct connection to taking control of our autonomic arousal states.

And so if I'm in a high stress situation, if I choose to engage my breathing in a specific way, I can actually calm myself down and bring more parasympathetic tone into it so that I'm actually more aware of what's going on. Think of a high stress situation, like our current situation with, you know, like what's going on in the political scene and everything is like, like the cops, think of a cop controlling his breathing versus just not controlling his breathing and

not being aware of it. I actually teach this with cops and with operators like special forces folks. And, you know, even doctors in high, high stress situations, ERs, things like that, we teach this stuff. Thanks to BetterHelp for sponsoring this episode of the DTFH. Is there something interfering with your happiness or preventing you from achieving your goals?

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are recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states. And right now, DTFH listeners get 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com forward slash Duncan. That's 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com forward slash Duncan. This is what I've noticed when I'm stressed out because I meditate and sometimes I'll apply mindfulness to when I'm really stressed out just to look at what's happening.

And one thing I noticed is my breathing gets really shallow and it, you know, like how it's a weird thing. Like if you, if you're not drinking enough water, obviously get dehydrated, but then to get back to hydration, you kind of almost have to go against what your body wants. It's really weird. Like you just have to just start chugging water. Then all of a sudden you get, you get back in the flow of

drinking enough water. I've noticed with breathing that, you know, when the more stressed out I get, the more shallow my breathing gets. And I don't want to take deep breaths. You know, there's some force. Yeah. What is that? That's your sympathetic nervous system going haywire.

So we, we're, we're this, most of our work right now is right in the world of what you're talking about. And the, you know, although we've also brought this into high performance training, whether we're talking with MMA fighters or big wave surfers or whatever type of athlete, we're also introducing this, the concepts of these things because it's, it's really all the same. So from, from a psychological standpoint, high stress, you

know, like shallow breathing, that has metabolic consequences meaning there is caloric output that is happening for that. Right. Like, like a grandmaster chess player can burn 6,000 calories a day sitting at a table playing chess. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

We're under the impression that we need to go work out all day in order to do that. And that's not true. So what, what's happening is, is these, when we get into these high stress situations, when the shallow breathing is kicking in as our sympathetic nervous systems on override and we're not paying close enough attention to the physical, the signals that most animals would, right?

Like we, I have a very, we have a theory that, you know, like we like to talk about, well, I need to go get out into nature, right? Yeah. Well, here's, here's something shocking. You are nature. Right. You need to get into you.

And, and that's what we need to do and start to pay attention to. And this is why we live in such a reactive society is because we're not actually paying attention to ourselves. And we think this nature thing is something that we're not a part of when in fact we are as much a part of it today as we were at any point. We're just not participating in the wild.

Okay. I gotta stop you man because you're tripping me out because today. Yeah. I don't mean to keep saying I was, I'm not, it's not like I'm proud of meditating. I'm here to, yeah. But I'm, I was sitting today, you know, watching my breath and I

started thinking just what you're, I was like, what's the difference between watching my breath and like watching tides go in and out or watching wind blow through trees? It was this moment of like, holy shit, this is like, this is this ancient river that runs through everybody and it's like, it is all of your, your existence depends on it. It's flow. But yeah, people don't, when they're watching their breath or

thinking about their breath, they don't think, well, this is identical to glaciers or forests or all the beautiful things in the natural world. It's interesting. So you would think, oh, I need to go outside. I got you. That's cool. It's like,

so what I do is I take that woo woo psychedelic thing and I make sense of it because the fact is, is that's all energy and alls we are is a, is, is the universe using energy in a human form. And the only way we have to manage energy is through breathing and that just so happens to be connected into our psychology as well. So there's no escaping what it is, right?

So if I'm tripping out, if I'm freaking out or if I'm depressed, I'm going to have a breathing pattern that's attached to that because carbon dioxide is the reason that we take a breath. It's not oxygen. So contrary to what we all believe or behave as is like, hey, I need to breathe because oxygen. Well, yeah, you need to breathe because of oxygen, but you're not breathing because of oxygen.

You're actually breathing because carbon dioxide is triggering in something in your brainstem to tell you when to breathe. That's why when we hold our breath, we need to breathe, right? Like you're freaking, you start to freak out if you're holding your breath, right? That's carbon dioxide. That's not oxygen. If we were to put a pulse ox on you, your oxygen levels wouldn't

drop real far. Like they would be in normal ranges. Wow. But your CO2 levels would go up. And so this is the, this is where we need to understand kind of this, this yin-yang concept of like inflow with nature, right? Yeah. Like oxygen is like the yin and carbon dioxide is the yang.

And so when we actually move energy because we don't create it. Okay. And this is another myth. We don't create energy. We just move it. There is no less or more energy in this universe than, than has ever existed. It's always been here.

Right. It's just moving it from one thing to the next. All stuff you kind of understand, right? Yeah, sure. And so we're taking oxygen in and we're, we're using beta oxidation or aerobic metabolism to break that down, whether with carbohydrate or fats. And the byproduct of that becomes, and this is very simple

stuff that I'm breaking down. It gets more complex than this, but we don't need to do that. So the byproduct of that becomes water and carbon dioxide. And the only way for that carbon dioxide to leave is the same way the oxygen came in. And ironically, the oxygen only becomes bio available if there's enough carbon dioxide in those cells, the red blood cells. Wow.

And then, so if I'm high stress and I've got shallow breathing and I'm breathing out of my mouth, I'm offloading more carbon dioxide than I need to. And so I start to burn through more carbohydrates, which is also triggering fast energy sources, which is limited. And so we start to move towards this more sympathetic, like we started off with this sympathetic place in our autonomic nervous system that puts us in this high stress environment.

So if I am somebody who's constantly on making animated shows on Netflix and going and doing standup TV and like all this stuff, I've got to really learn how to manage my shit. So that I can actually sleep at night so that I can recover enough to like bounce back the next day. And also I've got a kid and a wife, right? I've got this whole process of life going on. And it's like, well, what do I do?

Do I do two mode? Do I do a Wim Hof? That's right. You do what works for you. But first we've got to understand where that really, why we're actually doing these things. And we're doing it because CO2 is actually telling us to breathe and how to move energy.

And so when I slow the breathing down and I breathe more out of my nose, right? So if I'm nasal breathing, I'm automatically putting in more parasympathetic tone. And so the reason for this is because I'm limiting how much carbon dioxide comes out. So if you take a breath in through your nose and out through your nose right now, just...

Right? Yeah. Now do one through your mouth. See the difference in how fast that happened? Yeah. Yeah, totally. All right. So check this out.

So we're going to run a little experiment for you and the listeners, right? So just 10 control... Oh, let's just go five. We'll go five controlled breaths with the nose. Okay? All the way in, all the way out. There's two, all the way in, all the way out.

There's three, all the way in, all the way out. And four. Last one and five. All right. Solid. How do you feel after doing that? Great. A little calmer?

Yeah. All right, perfect, perfect. Now check this out. Let's do 10 mouth breaths all the way in, all the way out. Okay. Three, four, five, seven. And 10.

Good. Hold on one second. Hey, it's just, it's just beneath. Go say hi. So here's what happened. Well, how do you feel? Like, you know, slightly hyperventilated. Yeah, but stressed more, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Just like, yeah. So one activated your sympathetic nervous system. One activated your parasympathetic nervous system. That's so cool. Right? Yeah.

But we can use these things in special ways in order to manipulate our own physiology, right? Right. Like, so if I actually were to continue breathing through my mouth, if I'm intentionally doing this, I can start to up-regulate myself pretty good. 10 breaths is pretty good for most people, right? Yeah. And you can go 20 or 30 and like Wim Hof does 30 breaths like this, right?

Then you hold your breath on an exhale and people hold their breath on an exhale for a really long period of time because we'll go back to this thing that I was talking about with carbon dioxide because we got rid of most of the CO2. So we've gotten rid of the trigger mechanism to tell us when to breathe. So now the oxygen levels plummet when we do something like the Wim Hof method and we, and the body's idea or understanding of this is, oh, shit, the oxygen levels are really low right now. I'm going to prepare you for death.

So we go into this kind of deep, euphoric, death-like place. What? Well, and if you've read anything like about, like, like, I mean, like, I have some theories about Christianity. I mean, if you've read the sacred, you know, the, the, what's the cross and the sacred mushroom? The sacred mushroom and the cross. Oh, yes.

John Marcus. Yep. Yeah. I know what you're talking about. Right. So, so look, like when you, like a lot of these things people have been playing with, there are actually, there are actually sects of Christianity that used to use breath work, but got banned. Like you can keep going layers deep with this stuff and starting to look back and, and there's

things that have been used within many different religions and many different indigenous cultures that people avoided because for whatever reasons, control, whatever's going on, it got a little out of control. Who knows, whatever. Yeah. But the fact is, is when the body gets ready for death, there's this process that happens where you kind of go into this euphoric state and that process is indicative is across the boards that happens to every one of us when our oxygen levels get low.

But oxygen's not the reason we're taking a breath. It's carbon dioxide. So when we take it to the other side of things, like slow controlled breathing, pranayamas, things like that, we're actually developing a higher tolerance to this carbon dioxide, which is actually teaching us how to use more of the oxygen efficiently. So aerobic metabolism. So this is why so many people who take, take, like dedicate their lives to breath practices and meditation are deep level thinkers.

They are hot. Like they can handle loads of stress without reacting to it. Yeah. They're very responsive to it because their body is actually using oxygen at a very, very high level in a deep meditative place because they're controlling that carbon dioxide. It's weird to me. You know, there's, it's weird to me that, that you really do have to learn how to breathe. It's one of those things that people assume they're experts at.

And you know, when I hear about breath work, it's wild because you realize, oh, shit. This is a, actually it can in some, like if you look at some of the pranayama practices in particular, holding the nostrils and like, it's, it can get quite complex. It's not just like you know how to breathe because you can breathe anymore than, you know, you know how to have sex just because you can fuck, right? It's the same thing. Just because you think you're compassionate doesn't, you're not born with compassion. That's another idea is that you have to develop it.

It's a thing you cultivate deep. Can you talk a little bit? This is a place in pranayama where I have gotten kind of, I've kind of rolled my eyes a little bit, but listening to you talk now, I think, oh, it's probably, obviously it's I'm rolling my eyes at a 5,000 year old practice. But what's the deal with the not pushing one nostril down and like breathing in and out of different nostrils? Is that bullshit?

Why does that really? No, no, you can actually activate more things just because there's more activity on one side of particular branches of things and then the other, right? So you're getting activation of certain things, like, you know. And so our physiology actually, like, look, the system is perfect, except we've just fucked it up because we've decided to live these very non natural lifestyles where we sit more often than we've ever had, like we eat foods that are more processed. We, you know, we we we're less active, you know, like, this is why we have to actually

teach breathing. If we were out in the wild, we wouldn't have to actually teach the breathing because you would actually fall right into place, like you'd fall in like an animal. And if you watch animals, like it's radical, man, like most of them, you know, like, like you won't see animals breathing out of their mouth unless they're overheating or dying. Whoa. So you can watch a lion hunt and you can watch antelopes run and you can watch dogs do things. But the moment they're either overheating, like, look, a horse doesn't actually open

its mouth. Unfortunately, they've got a bit in its mouth, but it can't actually really breathe through its mouth, even a racing horse, because it's not efficient enough to get the air through the system, which works high level for a horse. Right. So like, but we're really like the nose was designed with the respiratory system in mind. It was not designed like the mouth was designed with the communication and digestive system in mind, even though in emergency situations, like emergency type efforts, like when we

talk or when we're working really, really, really, really, really hard, you're going to divert to the mouth breathing, right? Right. So going back to the nose and your pranayama on one side or the other, you actually have a rectile tissue in your nose. What? Yes. So like your nipples and your scrotum and your wiener, right?

Like, or the clitoris for the ladies, you have a rectile tissue in your nose and it's constantly adjusting based on the needs of the system. Whoa. And so one nostril will be open, one nostril will be closed. And so when we manipulate these things through specific pranayamas, we're manipulating specific things, but you actually have to get to a specific level to actually even be able to feel these sorts of things. You mean what you're saying?

You're stimulating or you're stimulating a rectile tissue in your nose. Yes. Yes. Yeah. There's a reason why when you start moving, like if you like, let's say you started walking up the stairs and you had your mouth shut and all of a sudden your breath rate goes up, but your nose was clogged or you had a cold, your nose will open up. As soon as your metabolic rate goes up enough, that erectile tissue will be triggered to

open up more. That is insane. I had no idea that that's. Yeah. You have, like look, you've got as many hair follicles in that nose as you do on your head. What? Yeah, like look, that alone should tell you that there's a filtering system in there for a reason.

And it's the first line of defense for your immune system. Wow. The air you breathe. Holy shit. This is crazy. Like that's a completely redefines the rest of my life, knowing that there is a rectile tissue, nose boners that I could like. Yes.

That's the craziest thing, but it totally makes sense. Wow. That's really intense, man. And so you're saying like, I mean, this is, if someone is a non-discipline breather, it's a classic insult. You call them a mouth breather, right? It's like associated with lack of discipline. It's associated.

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order of a website or a domain. Again, that's Squarespace.com. Head over to Squarespace.com to get 10% off your first order of a website or a domain. Thank you, Squarespace. When you see people who are mouth breathers, you know something is wrong. There is something wrong. And unfortunately, I would say about 80% of the population is dealing with something like this.

There's dyspnea about a breathing disorder that is probably 80% of the population. So how do you fix it? What's a way? Because whenever I've read about Pranayama, I do feel a little intimidated by it. It seems like it's the kind of thing that you have to, even the Wim Hof method, it's a big lifestyle change. So when you're starting to work with people, what are the beginning steps to get your breathing in order?

Really, it's really understanding what works for you. And most people are just looking to get something to get them calmer, to just chill out. And their methods are many, principles are few. And so what we do is we actually, what we've started to understand, what we're discovering is, is that CO2 is the metabolic stress messenger. And this is language we're coming up with, because we've been looking at this so much. And so getting an accurate snapshot of that, we found that there, so there's a lot of ways that people have used to understand how well they tolerate CO2.

One's a breath hold, one's called a bolt test that was done by the butaiko method, but that's just a method and it's a very subjective test. The other one we stole from the freediving world, we feel it's probably the most valid one test. And that is a max exhale test. And so just chilling out and doing some very calm breathing, after calming down, you want to test how long you can inhale, trying to inhale, exhale as slow as you possibly can under a timer, without watching the time until you have to run out of air, you need to breathe,

right? Right. And so you exhale as long and as slow as you possibly can. That time can then be equated to some specific rhythms that we have. And on our website, which is shiftadapt.com, under breathing, there's a breath calculator. It's free. And there's seven different protocols that we offer. There's three different apneas and four different cadences.

And the first cadence for most people, they're going to fall under a 30-second CO2 tolerance test. The first rhythm that they should actually start with is just an inhale, an equal, in and out. And using your CO2 tolerance test, that'll kind of tell you exactly where you should start, whether it's like a three-second in, three-second out, which is also known as like coherent breathing. But that goes right past that method if that doesn't calm you enough, right?

So then you go four in, four out, or then maybe five in, five out. You just work up a ladder, right? Like I just did a whole series on this on my Instagram, which I broke down each of these different kind of rhythms in understanding. And so the rhythms change where it's just inhale, exhale. And then it goes up to inhale, hold, exhale. Then it goes inhale, hold, exhale, hold, which is box breathing. Then you do a pranayama, which is an inhale, hold, double time, exhale, hold.

And so all of these are on there, and you can just input your CO2 tolerance test if you do it, and you can get all these protocols and play around with them. And there's instructions there to what you could do and how you can use this in an appropriate way to actually understand, well, how am I going to get myself to chill out? Well, play with this and see how this makes you feel. And here's why this is why we give seven different protocols is we all deal or manage stress very differently. Like Duncan and Brian handle stress very different, right?

Right? That's a no-brainer. Well, since carbon dioxide is the stress molecule and the metabolic stress molecule and my brain stem is what dictates how I take a breath based on CO2, this would mean that we all vary in where we should be with inside the spectrum of a breath practice. So finding a rhythm that works for you is entirely in your creative wheelhouse. We're just kind of giving you the tool and kind of the idea to start and not pigeon holding you into, hey, you need to go do five-in, five-hold, five-out, five-hold and repeat that.

And that's going to be your method. That's going to work for some people, but not everybody. Gotcha. Let me ask you, on a scale of like one being stressed out and 10 being Xanax, do you think breathing can get you as relaxed as like a benzo or some of the medications people have for anxiety? Oh, yes. For sure.

For sure. I've heard that, and that's another thing. I've scoffed at, you know, this is... Well, I mean, what is addiction? Addiction is nothing more than the nervous system trial, an attempt to regulate the nervous system. Right. And so, literally, like I'm going after a reward here, and, you know, that, getting an understanding

of that and going, okay, well, I mean, I've just, like, breathing is literally the remote control to the nervous system. Wow, that's nice. You have your interceptor point with breathing. Now, I'm not going to say just going, inhale, exhale is going to be, you know, like a benzo. Like, we may need to do some serious breath work in order to get you to really get yourself to calm down and understand things, but there's a good damn reason why breathing is at the foundation of every single serious meditation practice that exists.

Everything. The one I do is not change your breath, it's just follow your breath, but when you look at all the other... Are you doing vipassana? Well, yes, but it's even, I hesitate to even call it that, just, but it's like, I'm a basic student, man. It's just a, yes, but yes, that is what you would call, that's actually, I think, probably the next...

Just paying attention to your breath, breath is basically, is the, you know, the foundation of the course. Yes, but it hasn't gotten into the body scanning and stuff, not to get like meditation nerdy or whatever, but it's very close. But yeah, this is the, you know, these are things that one of the, you know, one of the things that Ram Dass would say is that there are practices that involve breath that will get you as high as any of the psychedelics out there, that there is a way to... Oh, I mean, I've gone, I've done, I mean, I've, I've experimented in the psychedelic

realm, my friend. And I, the biggest trip I ever had was breathing. From holotropic breath work. Is that what you did? The graph stuff? Yeah. Yeah. It was a version of holotropic breath work.

I started a time warp, like went into a wormhole, like I blacked out one of this wormhole, came out 15 years later where I lived out my life, like in the past. What the fuck? It was crazy, dude. And I can't... It's hyperventilating. I'm sorry. Before I want to hear how I definitely want to hear this experience.

Yeah. But I also want to know how to do it myself. So did you, what was it? Just like hyperventilating or, you know, I've, I've been so, and this is so my own stupid hippie hubris that whenever I hear, and people I really trust will say, no, you holotropic breath work will, you will trip. And I always think, oh yeah, I did that when I was in elementary school. We, you know, hyperventilate.

Yeah. Hyperventilate and choke ourselves. Yeah. Go lights out. Yeah. That's, is that what it, that's not what it is. That's, it's... No, so sort of, it's sort of similar, similar, right?

Like, so, you know, you, there is a hyperventilation component to it. And there's, you're, you're looking to change blood pressure after you've gotten the, the pH of the blood to shift up a little bit, to become more alkaline. And the system, again, only, like it recognized, like your, your physiology, like your mind is the only thing that's actually comp, like creating the stories around the shit that you're doing, right? Right. The system, the rest of the, the system works perfectly fine and only, only responds to

what it understands. And so if I become too alkaline and then I create some pressure, or if I, or if I become too acidic and do things, my, my physiology will respond, right? Right. And so the physiology responds by preparing you for death. This is what this stuff is, man. And you know, it should be done. I don't want to get into too much of the detail because it's like, you know, like people could

get really hurt. That's what everyone says, too. Oh yeah. This is probably the third time when I've been asking someone to explain all the tropic breath work in a flippant way that someone, well, all the tropic breath work simply hyperventilating for a very long period of time. It's a pain in the ass. There's quicker ways to get to the place.

But even those people are like, this is actually dangerous. Like this is a powerful thing. It is dangerous. Like, I mean, look, if you have, if you have any sort of cardiac issues, you should not be invested in any sort of hyperventilation technique breathing. We call it superventilation work because it's actually intended. Hyperventilation is a chronic problem, so superventilation work is like I'm intending to do something right now to myself.

And so the, you know, holotropic breathing is simply, you know, you're simply lying there hyperventilating for a long period of time, but you have somebody there because what happens is is respiratory alkalosis kicks in. And so your system starts to shut itself down and you start to go into these states and a guide is there for two reasons, to keep you hyperventilating and to make sure nothing shitty happens to you because you can have, you can go into cardiac arrest because what happens when we engage this hyper superventilation techniques is when you become more sympathetic, you constrict the blood vessels.

So when you did the fast 10 breaths with the mouth, you felt a little high, you felt a little stressed out, right? Those were the blood vessels in your brain constricting. Those were the blood vessels in your heart constricting. Okay? So the system's going, okay, fine, I'm going to make you a little bit more euphoric so you slow the fuck down and you chill the fuck out so that like, it's the system's beautifully designed.

There is no problem with the system. The problem is, is the thinker, right? The storyteller. And this is why, you know, you're a storyteller. I'm a storyteller. That's what I do when I talk is I like to weave stories about nature and what we're not paying attention to, right? Yes.

And like what animals naturally do. Animals are like, even though we're the most evolved species and the only reason we're the most evolved species, like we haven't been able to prove this with science. But what I can factually say is that because we understand adaptation, we understand we can actually make a stressful situation and then back off and adapt to that process like becoming a big rave surfer or, you know, skateboarding around or becoming a stand-up comedian. Yeah.

Right? Like I know I can engage in this and if I repeat these because I'm frustrated enough to engage in this and then take a break from it, I will get better at it. Right. And this is my passion and what I want to do, right? Yes. Every other animal just basically does like whatever it's like, it's genetics are actually telling it best to do, but they pay attention to that, right?

We also have the ability like we have. We put ourselves in every single environment on this planet. No other animal can do that. No other animal has done that. Right. So, right? Like, and so where animals are excellent is in transitioning. Like an lion that sits there and hunts antelope, they exist with antelope, no problems.

Like 99% of the time. And the antelope don't hold no grudge. Right. And we just know when the big animal moves in a specific way to get the F out of there. That's so funny. Antelopes don't get revenge. There's no antelope vendetta. No.

Lions will be fucked. No. If you're like, look, dude, like, I mean, you know, like this is the reality of it. So the lion won't even hunt really during the day, but then at night, like all of a sudden nocturnal turns on, right? And so the lion actually engages and it's like, all right, I'm going to screw around. The antelope knows instinctively that if the lion is within 200 meters, it's screwed, right? So it never lets it within 200 meters.

So it just meanders in 200 meters. So when the lion gets within 200 meters, it's on, right? And so what happens is, is let's say the antelope gets away immediately. Like moves. Okay. So what does the lion do? It goes and lies down and chills out and cuddles with its cubs and pride and that maybe takes another nap and then it gets back up, sees an opportunity and goes for it again.

Lies down, takes a nap and goes for it again. And then all of a sudden it gets on it and it's on it and it's chasing it. It's going and going and going. Here's the trippy part, right? Like, like we've all seen this on the nature channel. Boom, the lion's chasing the antelope. And all of a sudden we remove the visual and you put up a dashboard of each animal and their physiology, the heart rate, the respiration rate, the pupil size, like everything that's

going on that you can think of physiologically. But I mix up the dashboards, which, which animals, which you don't know. There is no, we don't know. And now we insert a human being who's in the situation. Right. They've got a dashboard and they're at work freaking out, which animal was which. You can't tell because they're all in a survival state and their physiology is all doing the same thing.

Wait, wait, wait. You're saying a human stress that at work, the fizzy physiologically looks like a guy. High stress. Yes. Yeah. You are correct. No joke. No joke.

High stress workout. High stress at work. This is why I said chess players burn 6,000 calories, right? It's like that mind, all the physiologies going off, respiration rate changes. Everything starts to change. And so all of this is going on, but here's the beauty in what we're missing and where the opportunity exists for us. What happens when the lion doesn't catch the antelope after that gnarly attack?

No, no, he goes, he goes and takes off. He goes and takes a map and he doesn't go on Instagram and talk about it. Right? Like he doesn't have to go take a selfie about it. And I'm not saying no, go on Instagram, but what does the antelope do? The antelope goes back to within two minutes. Within two minutes, that antelope is back to grazing and maybe mating if it can. Or if it's in season, it doesn't matter.

It'll mate and it'll shit. So that that in there, right there within minutes, that animal has down regulated to a parasympathetic process. We also know the parasympathetic side of things is our rest, digest, reproduce, modern day version, sleep, eating, shitting and sex life. What's going on? How are those things? If those things are in shambles, guess what?

You are sympathetically dominant and charged. And so what happens to the human in this? The human at work who stressed out goes and sits in traffic and gets pissed off and validates himself about how angry is that he gets about being in traffic, then goes home and doesn't know how to deal with the kids and is pissed off and then has an emotional reaction to something that he doesn't even understand. He has his emotion too because he wasn't paying attention to the physiology before that. Gotcha.

Gotcha. Yeah. This is this is like people who have been to Trump problems with trauma. Is there constantly strut? They can't think there's they don't know how to unwind. They can never relax in that is deadly, right? Correct. And I'm, it doesn't mean go take a nap after a high stress situation, but it does mean

if you went into a meeting or you just got charged up with your kids or something, if you don't learn how to downshift real quick, that is going to own you. And then you're going to blame it on something you do not understand. My friend of mine has a quote. We cannot control what we do not understand even if we could control it in the first place. Right. And that's, that's the thing is it's like, well, I don't like, I don't even understand the emotions I'm feeling right now because they're so out of whack because they're so

far back down like at the beginning of my day that I didn't pay attention to and shift or process. And I mean, what is trauma, dude? It's unprocessed information. That's it. And it's like, I'm not invalidating trauma. We all have trauma. But if I don't process this correctly and come down off that mountain and figure out

another way to look at that thing, I will never move on from that. And that will trigger an emotional response to everything and anything that I have. And this is why breathing is so important is because it gives us the opportunity to intercept the physiological response that's going on. Much thanks to purple for sponsoring this episode of the DTFH. My friends, I have a purple pillow and it's like owning something that fell off the Starship Enterprise. They use high tech, bizarre materials, maybe quantum materials.

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It's, it levitates your head basically. It feels good. It's weird. I love it. So give them a shot. If you're looking for a new mattress or you want a cool pillow, purple, thanks for sponsoring this episode of the DTFH. Do you think, so particularly with trauma, there, there's, there's a lot of different

ideas about it, but it won't, the similarity with the MDMA therapy. And I can't remember the name of the therapy where they get people to move their eyes. Yep. That is, is what you're saying. This idea of it's, this is data that hasn't been stored. It's a problem with memory. But do you think that breathing, like let's say you don't, you have repressed memories. You can't remember what the fuck happened.

You just know something bad happened. Do you think just learning how to breathe in a way that is, no, no, no, no, I don't fit. So I want to be very clear. I don't think breathing is the answer. I think breathing is the tool is a tool. Gotcha. It is a, it is a motherfucker of a tool though.

Like look, it's controlling all the energy, right? And so it's giving me an opportunity when I'm in a situation that I don't like to not have, remember the L.I. and the antelope and the, and the dashboard? Yeah. Well, guess what? If I actually control that breathing, I control that dashboard. Now you know which animal is which. If you just can see that, right?

So if I can control that, then I give myself an opportunity and here's very Victor Frankel. Between stimulus and response is a choice and I have a choice in every single situation I'm in. I, you know, I, I go, so I live like five miles from San Quentin and I go in and I run a program there with these guys on understand, on understanding this stuff. And this is my contribution to a world that I could have wound up in. Any of us could have wound up in and I know that there's like these dudes are in a very big uphill battle, especially when they get out.

But it's like, what do you want to learn? And one of the stories that I give them is it's like, look, and you brought up the Dalai llama, right? And, and, and this meditation and it's like there, I literally told them this story. There are a group of human beings who decide to give up all possessions, leave their current life, move to the middle of the mountains or middle of nowhere, typically in Asia, isolate themselves with a group, another group of people, eat maybe once a day and meditate and breathe and find enlightenment.

What is the difference between them and you right now? That's cool. You don't have a choice in being where you're at. Right. And that's right. You don't have a choice, but you have a choice in how you handle it and the story that you're telling yourself. And although I'm not serving time or doing time, the choice I have been in, in many situations

that I put myself in, whether it's a hundred miles or, you know, swimming with great white sharks or whatever, it's become a choice in how I manage that situation. And how can I use this tool that I know does something in order to help me find another way up that mountain? Well, let me ask you this. So like, yeah, I want to bring it to the, to just the root. Like you're about to go swimming with sharks, something I've always been perplexed by that particular desire in people, but I enjoy watching the videos that prior to jumping in to a place

where there are deadly sharks, do you do nose breathing or is this, you know, do you, do you have a routine that you go through to chill you out that you could maybe relate to some of us? Yeah. I mean, like, I mean, I have a breath, a standard breath practice that happens every day. Like I, you know, a meditation, I sit there and breathe, and that happens for anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour, right? Just depends on what, what I'm doing that day and what my timing is like.

And so that doesn't change no matter what happens, even if I get the opportunity to go to Mexico and get out of a cage, you know, 200 miles off of the coast of Mexico. Don't do it anymore. How? Don't do that. Now, well, like, look, it was like, this was actually bait. This was predicated off of a getting involved in a research project at Stanford. And then my buddy who was running, who I ended up becoming buddies with with a scientist who

is running the project on fear, he's like, Hey, we're going back out to Guadalupe Island. Yeah. Do you want to come? No. And I was like, hell, yes. You gotta know. It wasn't like, it wasn't like I ever like dreamt of going and swimming with great white sharks.

I was going to go, alls I understood was, Hey, I'm going to go get in a cage and look at great white sharks. Right. I'd love to do that. Yes. And he goes, I got three tags to get out of the cage with the shark. Do you want to get out? And I was like, yes.

Fuck man. And he said, okay, go get certified to dive. And so anyway, the morning, like the, the morning I got to go do it, I did breath work like I normally did. And then before I got in the cage, I listened to what the guys who pioneered this had to say. And they were like, look, don't get mesmerized by one. Just move around like you normally would as best you can.

And since you're the breathing guy, control your fucking breathing, dude. And that's what I did. I just slow controlled my breath. I didn't let my breathing get away from me. And I kept looking around and it was interesting because if you, like that whole thing on getting mesmerized by one was probably one of the most important things I've ever heard. And it's not just for sharks. It's like, I mean, look, like anybody, like don't just get mesmerized by one thing or

you're going to miss the rest of the show. Like there's other things going on, right? And like you look at a great white shark swimming by you about 15 feet away and you're like, that's a fucking dinosaur that could end my life. And then it's like, well, wait, oh, there's three below me. There's a one above me. And oh yeah, that's why I've got to keep an eye on what's going on. But the interesting thing is, is it's like, look, this is an animal that understands being

an apex, well, kind of an apex predator. The orcas, it's, you know, the apex, but it only understands what prey is, right? Like what does a seal do in the water? If there's a shark, it runs or it doesn't know that the shark's there. So it's just laying there. So if I freeze, that is part of my sympathetic nervous system, I freeze, it recognizes that. If I run, it recognizes that flight. So it understands sympathetic activity.

What it doesn't understand is parasympathetic activity. And so the shark, dude, you could see in these sharks eyes and their behavior in how they were moving, they were very curious. They weren't destructive. I mean, I was out of that cage for 45 minutes. No, it was like, whoa, like, this makes sense, man. I don't know. Did you see the video of that guy feeding the, the sharks?

Do you know he, he takes, there's a guy popped up on the internet who goes to this one place where there's sharks and he pulls hooks out of their mouth and they swim up to him to, because like somehow they recognize what he's doing and let him pull hooks out of their mouth. These are highly tuned animals, dude. Like that's why I was like, you know, just because we don't have any real scientific proof of, of like us being the most intelligent species, it's like those animals can detect shit real, real quick.

I mean, I've been in, in Hawaii and we swam with, with a bunch of Galapagos and reef sharks. Like, I mean, we're talking like 80 to 100 of them. They're not real big, but you know, you know that they could, one of them turns on you. It's over. Like, but it was so interesting because two of my buddies who were in the water with us, they got all freaked out at for like, like halfway into this swim with these sharks and all the instantly, like I had no idea they got freaked out, but you saw the sharks behavior

change instantaneously. Like it went from calm all of a sudden to erratic and moving really fast. And the dude who was guiding us was like, who the fuck's tripping out? Like he like got on these guys and they're like, sorry, we're freaking out. And he's like, get out of the, but get in the boat or chill out. You know, and, and literally, so they had to chill out and relax so that the sharks would chill out and relax, you know. Now I'm not telling people to go to, I'm not a professional shark diver.

All this, these were just my experiences and going and getting in the water with sharks to understand things that I'm doing with the work I'm doing. So don't just go jump in the water with sharks thinking you're going to be fine, right? You got to go with a professional. I mean, like, look, these guys who pioneered this stuff, like they figured out that if a shark's coming directly at you, if, if like we had big cameras in our hands, if you go at the shark with the camera, it'll turn away. It won't not turn away.

A shark's not used to something coming directly at it. So it's like, whoa, it's tripping out the shark. So like they're doing things that like I would, you know, it'd be very difficult for me to do. Right? I need serious training to spend time. So look, man, I don't worry. I don't think we're in any danger of somebody listening to this and like, you know what?

I'm going to go find some sharks and be calm. But I am also like not a pioneer in this stuff, but I am what I am a pioneer and is an understanding how to control our autonomic arousal state and how to manipulate that in order to make the thing that we care about the most happen, which is adaptation. We are not adapting as a species. We like biologically, we are going in reverse. And this has been the problem with and I'm not demonizing like tech and medicine have their place, but they are ruining us because we don't want to take responsibility for ourselves.

And so we're literally leaning into these things as though they're going to solve our problems that we that none of that technology like can be better than what we are, right? None of it. And though we're under this guise that that's going to change and it's not, we're actually retarding ourselves and and relying heavily on something that could do something better for us. And so this is putting too much weight on those industries like the medical community and like the tech industry to start to continue to do things that where look, dude, no amount

of tech can actually tell you what's going on physiologically better than you can. No heart rate monitor, no respiration rate monitor, nothing. You actually have the ability to understand that stuff. If you actually take the time to listen to those things. Oh, right. Like the Apple watch, all the wearables, what you're saying is the loopstrap, the aura ring, all of that stuff. It's so inaccurate and it's like, look, dude, I've spent thousands upon thousands of dollars

on this stuff to study and understand and it cannot do what I am capable of doing. Are you saying that it creates almost like a kind of deafness? The more you use the technology, the less you hear what your body is actually telling you. Well, you got five senses for a reason, dude, and it is dulling those senses. Like what you see, like every other animal uses their senses to understand what's going on in their environment. Our uniqueness to this is that we curate stories and through that prefrontal cortex, we can

trigger emotional responses to things that our senses normally did, right? Like I see a bear, fuck, I got to run, like I smell smoke, something's going on, right? I hear a loud noise, like what is that? Or I hear a stepping of something, what is that? Right? I just touch something sharp. What is that? Right?

Like, oh, I can feel my heart. It took me a few years, but like I can literally, if I sit here and just shut up, I can feel my heartbeat. And I have very low blood pressure, like we're talking 99 over 50. So I can still feel my heartbeat, even though, but that's just the ability to kind of sit with yourself and listen and pay attention. What am I feeling? Well, just because this makes me feel happy or angry, why is that?

What is that? Why am I doing? Am I looking for confirmation bias off of this? Do I actually even want to take the time to understand what this is? Or am I going to allow somebody or some media outlet to dictate what it is, or social media for that matter, to dictate to own my emotions? Yeah, it's like, are you going to let a mood ring tell you how you feel? Exactly.

It's like that's so fucked up. But I want to ask you this, it is a good, I think a good last question, man, because you seem to have really developed an acute ability to listen to your, and to control your body. When I was in, when I was studying in college, in a psychology class, I remember in one of the textbooks, there's a picture of this yogi dreadlocks sitting on the Ganges River and he was covered like they did a study on him because he could lower the temperature on one side of his hand, five degrees and on the other side up five degrees and they, you know,

didn't fit in with the way we're understanding how people work. How deep can this stuff go? How much, if you can, if you can feel your heart, then you can control your heart. If you can, you know, get into the nuances of controlling your breath, can you, can you get to the point that they say you can, do you believe that shit that we can almost reverse age, cure disease, you know, the, the, the stuff they say is possible just sounds insane to me, but then when I hear what you're saying, it makes me think, whoa, maybe, maybe, maybe that's a possibility.

I think scientifically we're just scratching the surface of what a lot of, you know, people have been saying for quite some time, you know, namely, if you talk about these yogis, it's like 5,000 years they've been, they've been talking about this stuff. Like, look, Wim Hof can, can do that same thing. Like he can, he can literally shut down the peripheral, right? And I'm getting to a point where I'm able to shut down one side and, you know, or shut down the limbs, you know, the peripheral of my body in order to just protect or be more dialed into the core, right?

So and that's what happens like when you're in cold water. That's what you're doing is you're teaching your body how to protect itself in cold exposure, right? And that's what these yogis do in the cold snow where they take the, you know, the, the, the tumo guys take the sheet, sit in the snow, put it on in the river, put it on top of them and they don't move until that sheet's dry, right? Because they heat their body up with temperature. Yes.

Yes. You can heat yourself up. There was a gal who did the survival show and she came to me about some stuff and she's like, look, we're going into the cold. Like I'm going to be up. I think it was in Alaska or something and like winter. How do I help myself do this without having to go spend 30 years doing this shit? And it's like simple, can slow your breath down.

You will heat yourself up by controlling how the, how much CO2 comes out of you. So you can control because it vasodilate. So this actually train teaches us how to actually heat ourselves up in cold situations. The problem is, is that we get cold before we know it. And then we're like, and guess what, when we hyperventilate, yeah, we constrict things. So if I can learn how to control or constrict things, then I can start to shut down things. Right? So it's the exact opposite.

So versus heating up and cooling off. So if I speed up the breathing, I can actually cool myself off. Right? Right. And, and, and, and there's subtle, there's subtle, there's a lot of, there's nuance in there, but these are basics into what we can do and like, look, I really think it all comes down to energy. I believe it's about energy.

We don't understand energy totally, like down to the quantum. It's like beyond that, it's like there's energy going on that we don't understand, right? And so like in the cell, like there's trillions and trillions of cells in our body that are functioning and doing things. And this is energy and we're, we're merely matter. I mean, go back to the Bill Hicks thing, right? Like today, a young man on acid notice, the whole thing. Look, dude, it's like, this is all energy and how we control that energy is our own,

like we have that power. And so learning how to control that, I think is going to be the premise of you understanding what's going on within your system. All disease is predicated off of stress, basically, unless it's genetic, right? Yeah. And so all disease comes down to stress and how I'm managing that stress and what I'm doing with that stress. And this is where it's like, I'm not suggesting, oh, you could just breathe into this and de-stress

it. And no, that might be one route. But there's a many routes to this and understanding how you're managing stress and what you're doing with it. And we've gotten so far off this page of understanding the stress that we're dealing with that we're blaming it on the thing that's making us emotional. And yet the thing that's making us emotional and react had really has nothing to do with why we're upset and angry.

It has to do with something way far deeper than that, that I believe breathing, meditation, and this stuff can get us to. And this is also why we're introducing this into the human performance realm and training is it's like we're missing some very big things with inside the human performance world. And I think breath is one of those things in controlling that variable that controls the energy and how we're using that energy to actually make ourselves or heal ourselves. And I do think medicine has its place. I do think we're going, we need to have medicine and we need technology, but our reliance on

it is too big. And we have an opportunity to learn how to actually manage our own stress, which for the first time in our history, we're at the point where we are creating self-disease. We are at the point where we create self-disease. Metabolic disorder, problems like that are self-generated diseases. These are not things that are just like, whoops, I got this disease called diabetes, type two diabetes, and it just fell out of the sky. That's not how that worked.

Obesity didn't work like that. But the medical, some people in the medical universe inadvertently put that out there to people. So there is that because it is, you know, it is a real ego exists. Yep. Ego exists. But I want to go deeper with this, man. What is your, I'm so sorry.

I'm a shitty guy. I would love to. Brian McKenzie, what is it? It's Brian McKenzie.com or is there you have? Yeah, you can go there. You can go to Brian McKenzie.com or go to shiftadapt.com. And so look. Where is the breath, where is the meter that you were saying?

Shift, shift, shift, adapt. So my company's name is shift and show shiftadapt.com is our website. And so we run a subscription service there where we actually have the breath work. You can get the breath calculator free. You don't need the subscription. But here for your, for your listeners, if they want to go screw around with this, right, go and sign up under performance and use the code Duncan pod. So your name and POD pod and they'll get a free month of our subscription to get

an understanding of how to use the breath work and what we do to develop this, love, like develop our ability to adapt better. What I'm talking about with training, in essence. And then we have all of our webinars on there, which is our education in expanding on everything we've been talking about, like way more. Like it's giving the very basics and details of this stuff so that people can learn. So it's, it's free to subscribers. Hey, let me just say this real quick.

I didn't know that he was going to give you all that. This was not some kind of long set up. I had no idea. That's very sweet of you, man. And I'm going to, I'm actually going to use that code too. That's cool. Uh, thank you for your, your time. You know, this podcast, I feel so lucky because it's like, I, I get to trick.

I get to trick people like you into giving me free one on one. I don't, but it's, I really do appreciate it, man. Thank you so much. Like this is something when, when we came into contact, uh, it was, it came at the perfect time because I was, it was literally right when I was starting to look into TUMO and studying breathing. So this is a real synchronicity for me and I'm, I'm really grateful for your time, man.

Well, you're welcome. And I, I mean, look, I want to say thank you too. Cause I, you know, your show is probably one of the most important shows out there. And I'll say this episode seven is the most important episode that has been done to date of any series out there. Oh man. Thank every, every human being needs to go watch or listen to that episode. As far as I'm concerned, thank you.

I am so grateful to you for watching the show. I'm so lucky that you connected with me. And I hope that you'll come back on, on this podcast sometime. Anytime, my friend, anytime. Thanks, Brian. I really appreciate it. And, uh, Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, that was Brian McKenzie. Everybody, you could find him at Brian McKenzie.com.

Much thanks to Squarespace purple and better help for sponsoring this episode of the DTFH. All those offer codes are located at dougatrussell.com. And remember, if you want to join your true family, have commercial free episodes of the DTFH and hang out with us on a weekly basis, go no further than patreon.com forward slash DTFH. Thank you everybody for listening. I will see you next week.

Until then, Hare Krishna. A good time starts with a great wardrobe. Next stop, JCPenney, family get-togethers to fancy occasions, wedding season two. We do it all in style, dresses, suiting and plenty of color to play with. Get fixed up with brands like Liz Claiborne, Worthington, Stafford and Jay Farrar. Oh, and thereabouts for kids. Super cute and extra affordable. Check out the latest in store and we're never short on options at JCP.com.

All dressed up everywhere to go. JCPenney. We are family. A good time starts with a great wardrobe. Next stop, JCPenney, family get-togethers to fancy occasions, wedding season two. We do it all in style, dresses, suiting and plenty of color to play with. Get fixed up with brands like Liz Claiborne, Worthington, Stafford and Jay Farrar. Oh, and thereabouts for kids.

Super cute and extra affordable. Check out the latest in store and we're never short on options at JCP.com. All dressed up everywhere to go. JCPenney.