Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #102 Wallace J. Nichols

Episode Date: August 20, 2019

Formerly a Senior Scientist at Ocean Conservancy, Nichols holds a B.A. degree from DePauw University in Biology and Spanish, an M.E.M. degree in Natural Resource Economics and Policy from Duke University, and a Ph.D. degree in Wildlife Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Arizona. He received a Bradley Fellowship to study the impacts of sea level rise at Duke University Marine Lab, a Marshall Fellowship to study at the University of Arizona, and a Fulbright Fellowship to study at the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico marine station in Mazatlan. I travel to his woodsy home and discuss his book Blue Mind. We also dive into and ways water can enhance our quality of life and how water effects us on a physiological and psychological level.    Connect with Wallace: Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/wallacejnichols Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/wallacejnichols Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wallacejnichols/   Buy his book Blue Mind: https://amzn.to/2TKt7ZH   Show Sponsors: MindBullet https://mindbullet.com/kingsbu (Use code word KINGSBU at Checkout for 20% Off)    Waayb CBD www.waayb.com (Get 10% off using code word Kyle at checkout)   Onnit Foods & Supplements Get 10% off all foods and supplements at Onnit by going to https://www.onnit.com/kyle/   Connect with Kyle Kingsbury on: Twitter | https://bit.ly/2DrhtKn Instagram | https://bit.ly/2DxeDrk    Subscribe to the Kyle Kingsbury Podcast Itunes | https://apple.co/2P0GEJu Stitcher | https://bit.ly/2DzUSyp Spotify | https://spoti.fi/2ybfVTY IHeartRadio | https://ihr.fm/2Ib3HCg Google Play Music | https://bit.ly/2HPdhKY

Hey friends, today's guest is a guy named Wallace J. Nichols, and he's a dude that I've been following for some time now. I first heard him a couple years ago on Ben Greenfield's show. He wrote a book called Blue Mind, and it's all about the ways we can enhance our quality of life and what water does to us on a physiological and psychological level. He's absolutely amazing. I know you guys are going to dig this one. And also a quick note on our sponsors. They are absolutely crucial to the success of this show. We have a lot of costs getting out there, traveling around to our guests, and you really can help the show by checking out what these sponsors have to offer. And today we have a new sponsor. It is called MindBullet from my dude, Mark Bell. And it is absolutely one of the greatest things I've ever added to my life. It is an all natural plant-based pre-workout, pre-work supplement

that's a perfect Kickstarter for CEOs, entrepreneurs, athletes, or students who want to own the day. Mind Bullet can help boost your energy, help focus, and increase your creativity. It's absolutely amazing. It's backed by real people and real studies, been featured on CNN and the Rolling Stone magazine. It enhances mood with an uplifting effect. There is a euphoria. It elevates energy and increases focus. It's just an incredible product. And this works synergistically with any other nootropics or things that you might be taking. It is phenomenal. I take this stuff every single day. I take usually one. I like to microdose it. I don't take the full dose of two capsules, but I'll take one first thing in the morning and then another one early afternoon.

It's absolutely incredible stuff. It helps relieve pain. I've had some old jujitsu injuries that have been quite nagging, and it also helps keep me elevated without being cracked out, which I've started to notice from going to the pain a little too hard with coffee. So this is a balanced approach. It really helps me in all ways. And you can go to mindbullet.com forward slash Kingsboo. That's like my Instagram handle, K-I-N-G-S-B-U for 20% off everything in the store. That's K-I-N-G-S-B-U at checkout for 20% off from mindbullet.com. You will not make a mistake by ordering this.

It is one of the greatest things I've ever added into the arsenal. And there's another great product that I use absolutely religiously. It is the best CBD that I've ever come across. It's from a company called Wave. And they source 100% organic USDA certified hemp in a farm from Colorado. They make the best tasting CBD. In fact, my son's taken it before when he had a hand injury. I've taken it before because Lord knows I've had hand injuries

and I take it all the time for general aches and pains and dealing with systemic inflammation. It helps me sleep better at night. It is something that I think should be in everyone's household. Go to w-a-a-y-b.com and use code word Kyle at checkout

for 10% off. And as always, head to Onnit.com slash Kyle, and you'll get 10% off all foods and supplements. Thanks for tuning in, guys. And let me know what you think of this episode. All right, we're clapped in. It's real. I love it.

I first heard about you, I think, on Ben Greenfield's fitness podcast. Yeah, that's right. And it was right when your book came out, Blue Mind. And you're talking about some of the science behind it. And I was really blown away. So I got the book and that blew me away even further. I want to take a deep dive into that and obviously get into what you're working on now. But as I do with nearly every guest, I want to get some background on you. So let's talk about growing up on the East Coast and what got you to move out West and drew you to the water.

Yeah. So yeah, I grew up, I was born in New York City. I'd say like a lot of people had a childhood that, you know, there's a lot of water around them. There are pools, there's the East, you know, the beaches on the East Coast, lakes, rivers. And I felt my best, you know, whenever I was in the water, whenever I was near the water. I was adopted. And that brings a little baggage with it, maybe a little confusion, a little searching, a little unknown.

I'm not going to psychoanalyze myself right here, right now, but maybe that was part of it. I stuttered. So in the water, nobody talked to me. I didn't have to answer any questions so i was pretty happy uh if you're underwater you don't have to talk you can just be yeah you're in your own world yeah it's like a you know um place to explore and and uh so i liked the way I felt when I was near, in, on, or underwater. And I realized that I wanted whatever my job was to take me to the water professionally so that I could sustain this, not just on vacation, but as a lifestyle. And so I ended up going into marine biology. Got my undergrad, my master's my masters my PhD studying sea turtles

spend a little time and traveling around tracking turtles studying their DNA looking at what they eat helping to save them and bring them back from extinction from the brink of extinction and uh so that satisfied my my desire to be in the water a lot but i i always wondered what so what is that thing that that feeling that felt so good as a kid that basically hijacked my life my career is the pursuit of that feeling and i noticed that in other people who, whether they're pro surfers or lifeguards, fellow marine biologists, people who gravitate to the water in lots of ways.

So I was curious about that feeling, the science of it, and went looking for a book about it and I couldn't find one. And like, you know, like tends to happen when you, when there's a vacuum that you see needs to be filled and nobody seems to be feeling it. Sometimes you feel compelled to be the person to step in and do it, whatever it is in whatever realm. And so in this case, case i i tried to get some other people to write this book that i wrote and i failed at that so it just came back to me i pitched it to a guy named oliver sachs who's a great neurologist also from new york and when i pitched to him he said that's a that's a fine idea you do it and he

was a pretty heavy guy big intellect powerful mind and great writer and a water lover so I thought this is the guy to write the book and then he just threw it right back at me and I said oh, I'm gonna have to do this. So it took five years. And I read this book called Blue Mind that you referred to. And it's just interesting, that's sometimes how life goes. I thought I was gonna study sea turtles to the very end, you know, and retire as an old sea turtle biologist and this other

sort of turn came along and you know and here we are there's um there's a quote i'm sure you you know i know you guys have met at least uh we met for the first time at our good buddy kyle terman spot he had a hosted dinner and there was many people that i that i it was like a kid in a candy store i mean dr jim fadiman was there and and um oh man bruce uh what's the guy's name bruce bruce damer yeah yeah i was like man he showed up in a burning man outfit this guy's a legend but so many people and of course you were there and we got to hang and chat for a minute um it's it's it's cool to see like those how many people were each experts in their own field and the ways like a lot of the people that were there

have kind of pulled back layers to look at things from up above right and see things and connect dots that have not been connected before. And that was something that I noticed from a lot of people. But one of the guys who was there, Dr. Chris Ryan, who I'm a huge fan of and friend now, we were just hunting out in Hawaii not long ago. He said, you don't write a book about the thing you know. You write a book about the thing you want to know. So there's a lot of learning in the process of writing a book what were some of the things that you discovered as you were getting into this

you know one of the immediately discovered that the realm of neuropsychology is just utterly amazing and we are so lucky to be alive in this time where we're all if we're paying attention learning about ourselves our our own brains, almost on a weekly basis, there are, I use the word revolutionary and I don't use that mildly, but there are revolutionary breakthroughs into how our own brains work. And just that, you know, just starting to learn.

Now I studied economics, biology, ecology, wildlife ecology, evolutionary biology. I didn't have a background in neuroscience or psychology, so I had to get up to speed in that realm. And so I attended a lot of conferences, sat in the front row and took copious notes and listened to courses. I would swim laps while listening to MIT neuroscience

courses just to boost the uptake. And I had a lot to learn in order to try to write this book. And in the process, really humbling, right? The science that's going on, how little we actually know about the human brain really when it comes down to it. Yet this is the first generation that has a working user's guide to our own brain, to the mind. Wow. Right. The user's guide is pretty handy. We had a pretty bad one, you know, up until 10, 20 years ago,

and it just keeps getting better and better every day now. So fast forward 10 years, 20 years, as we continue to learn about how our nervous system works and how it interacts with other nervous systems, how it interacts with the world around us, it gives me optimism. I guess that's really at the end of the day, that's really what I come away.

And maybe that was a little surprising. I thought I would find optimism about the natural world from other places other than brain science. But that's where i found it yeah yeah i think like getting in i think when i when i retired from fighting one of the things that i was searching for was you know as everybody is the magic bullet like what is the magic pill the magic thing that that does the best and of course there's this term gets thrown around loosely biohacking and and it's funny because the best hacks hack something that has

to do with nature they have some way that we used to live in our in our that's far removed from our modern day era yeah and um when i was reading your book that was one of the things that blew me away and it was just like oh but of course so obvious of course right of course that makes sense of course trees give off pheromones and then now they're talking about, what's the term, Ryan? We just did a thing on it about it. It's forest bathing. Forest bathing, right. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. We used to live that way. We used to walk, take walks in the woods or go hunting in the forest. Yeah. Yeah. Well, interestingly, we're calling it forest bathing. So the second part, the first part is forest the second part is aquatic and so it even comes back to water metaphorically even when we're

talking about trees and plants we're still using a water reference a bathing reference and what is it so what is it about i mean water is powerful metaphorically symbolically but it literally is well and that that's often left out it's interesting that a lot of the a lot of the mindfulness work uses strong water metaphors our language uses a lot of water metaphors the cover of books about positive psychology and in mindfulness practice have water on the cover but you go flipping through the book and you find very little mention of actual water real water and that's kind of what i wanted to do is say you know it's not just a powerful metaphor it's not just forest bathing you know metaphor the water metaphors is useful there.

It's the water itself, like get in the water. Like I wrote this whole book, 300 pages of nonfiction. And the last page, I remember sitting there thinking, what do I really wanna say? We've got one, maybe two sentences left. It's like the last sentence of your book you want it to be a home run and so i remember writing all i really want to say is this dot dot dot and i just sat there and stared at the screen and i was like what what do i really want to say and i wrote get in the water that's all i really want to say is get your ass in the water.

Just wherever you are, whenever you need it, get in the water. That might be your shower. It might be a bathtub. It might be a cold plunge. It might be some icy cold water. It might be a hot tub. It could be a lake, a river, an ocean, a pool, Pacific Ocean, out the window. But just get in the water.

Whatever is messing with you, I promise you it will be at least a little bit better. If it's an injury that you sustained in a fight, in a game, an injury, a mental, moral injury, get in the water. I promise you it will help you at least a little bit and maybe an awful lot. And so, like you said, so simple, nothing new. And this is an idea that's thousands of years old you find it in all the ancient texts all the ancient spiritual texts have at their core water all of them you know 23rd psalm in the bible that's uh you know an often quoted one basically says when the shit's hitting the fan get your butt in the water get down to the down to the creek uh i paraphrase that slightly but you know yea though i walk through the valley of the shadow of death i shall fear no evil that's red mind that's like that's a

bad day the valley of the shadow of death you've been there you're like man this can't get any worse um that's red mine and what is the deity saying get to the water it'll help get to the river sit down by the river and just chill so that's blue mind right that's basically you know ancient text that says having a bad day you know your head is full of red mind before you end up in what i call gray mind which is burnout which is useless get down to the water you know it'll soothe your soul and indeed that's the way it works yeah hell yeah yeah yeah exactly i mean you know that you you're i mean you're as familiar with the red mind mode as as anyone and gray mind too gray mind oh yeah the burnout i remember right when i got hired and on it i wanted to be a good employee and let everybody know how hard a

worker i was and just ran my fucking ass in the ground you know modafinil every day half half a pot of coffee each day yeah go go go no rest yeah and you know there was a thing i remember you saying this because um as you know this being an author or anybody who's an influencer even if you're not an influencer and you start to learn shit that maybe your family doesn't know you always get criticism right so i know one of the things that you've gotten is excuses on how they can't get to the ocean right well must be nice but i live in iowa and and one of the ways that you reframe that for people is that anything can be your body of water so what is your water right ask that question yeah and that's that's something that was really cool for

me because i felt i mean i i grew up in the Bay Area not far from where you live now and always had access you know whether it was Half Moon Bay or Santa Cruz or even coming down here to Carmel and you know kind of landing in the center of the country in Texas I was like shit man I'm not by the ocean anymore it's a four-hour drive to the Gulf and the second I was able to perceive it differently i realized like oh ladybird lake that lake is my water and i throw the frisbee there with my son and we even get in it's not the cleanest source of water but still i mean just being by it and seeing all the grain and seeing that water flowing through it's really a powerful way to connect and quiet the mind and

start to recharge and build back within whatever it is that I've been exhausting that drove me to gray mind in the first place. And you feel it, you get, you get to the water, even if it's just to see it and throw a Frisbee without getting in it or on it. And you just, you feel better almost instantly. And, and that interaction with the people you love is better for some reason. The conversations are better. So you connect to yourself, you connect to each other, and you connect to our little water planet that we call home. It's all good, right?

But Gray Mind, you know, the WHO, the World Health Organization, this month declared workplace burnout an issue. They named it. They said, this is a big problem that we want to give it a call out. We want to name it workplace burnout. It's an epidemic. We're seeing people really hit that wall. Gray mind is the ashes of red mind. So if you sustain that red mind through whatever means that you just keep grinding and grinding and caffeinating and medicating and not sleeping and pumping yourself up, you will burn out.

And gray mind is the ashes that's left. And where you just kind of don't care. And your ability to perform and be the person you were trying to be isn't there. Nothing in the tank. And so this is a problem, both anxiety and stress, but also, you know, depression, mild and severe, you know, this burnout thing. And it's creeping kind of from being an adult thing, you know, to being a college student thing, to being a high school student thing, now creeping into middle school age kids or you know experiencing anxiety stress and

burnout it's like wow that's what are we doing you know and what are we gonna do about it and so i have one little answer just get in the water as much as you can get take your kids get in the water take your phone and stick it in the glove box or leave it at home and don't bring it and just go and have screen free you know peace of mind uh and you know feel it all you know let let the water kind of kind of touch every part of your body and you know if it's cold you know lake austin can be pretty darn cold even in the summertime, up by the dam. Jump in. Feel the cold.

Just embrace it. In the wintertime, go to Barton Springs. Jump in. Swim some laps. Feel the cold. It doesn't need to be right around that perfect temperature year-round. The way our modern lives, we regulate the air temperature in our buildings and we regulate the water temperature in our pools and we regulate the temperature in our cars.

So we kind of move from that perfect temperature to the perfect temperature to the perfect temperature and pretty soon you get kind of mushy and don't even realize that you haven't felt an extreme, you know, of anything in a long time. And I think water is a good way to shock your system and feel alive like that. It's instant.

So whether it's red mind or gray mind, pulling yourself into that blue mind mode regularly, I would say daily if you can. And wherever you are, you find it. So you can reframe Austin as probably the blue mine capital of the world if you wanted to. You got float tanks, you got a wave park, you can go surf. It's a pretty damn good wave park. Yeah, it is. Yeah. I surfed opening week there. And it's like, look, as long as you don't try to compare this to an ocean, you compare it to itself.

It is what it is. It's a freshwater wave basically in the hills outside of Austin, like we're in the flats. So go out there and it is what it is and enjoy it. Smile, experience joy, get some paddling in. But Austin's full of great water. And I think that's the case wherever you go. I did my PhD in Tucson and we would go on long hikes

and search just for spring. And you get after a long, hot hike in the deserts and then into the mountains, you get to that spring and it's like, it's as epic as the Pacific Ocean, this little source of water. It's like your best friend. And it's awesome to jump in it.

And so wherever you are, even the desert, you still find your blue line. Yeah. I'm thinking back now since I saw the Arizona plates out front. So you went to U of A for the PhD. I went to Arizona State. Don't worry, I'm not. I no longer feel a rivalry.

Far enough removed from ASU football for that. But I'm sure that just pissed off a lot of a lot of sun devils for me saying that but um well we could fight it out here and i would lose so i mean we went to um we would go to man i thought i'm forgetting the name of the river but we'd go floating on this river so long ago you're inner tubing at the salt yeah yeah and it was and it was like you know it was drunken debauchery in college think of any like silly movie from the 80s like those types of shenanigans yeah but it was like some of the most peaceful times of my life peaceful drunken debauchery yeah like like when the dust settles and you're tired of talking shit to your friends and there's just a moment of silence for 30 seconds to two minutes,

that's like the instant drop in. Like, oh shit. And going through them, you see all these giant cliffs and just the beauty of Arizona. It's a very special place. I mean, even that, that's a case in point.

You can sit in a bar with music, may not be your choice. A lot of loud voices, a lot of visual stimulation, and you can do some drinking with your friends. And it's fun. Take exactly the same thing, get an inner tube and a river and do it. And it's not just fun. It can be transcendent.

Like exactly the same group of people, the same good or not so good beer, and the same conversations. And you just stick it on a river and it's going to be better. It's going to be better every time. I always say balloons are cool. Water balloons are really fun. Slides are great.

Water slides, next level. You can go right on down the list. So drinking in a bar is fine. Drinking out on a river, it's better. It's just better. And so you add water to any situation. It's more romantic, right? Just hanging out, having a conversation

with your sweetheart, hanging out, having a conversation by the water with your sweetheart it's just better so something that the water does for us and with us and to us that is worth naming cherishing talking about teaching and protecting it's kind of the end of the day that's that's kind of the end of the day. That's kind of my key motivator is that when we understand that these lakes, rivers, oceans, pools, creeks, springs are giving us so much more than the ecological and economic benefits. They're giving us these deep emotional benefits, emotional, spiritual benefits. And maybe we'll do a lot more you know to to take care of those places and i think it's true that's the big experiment that we're we're conducting here with this blue mind idea yeah

i think it's um it's something you don't necessarily i mean i wouldn't necessarily think about it but that's something that came up quite a bit when I was doing so I went on this hunting trip with with T-Man and and uh Chris Ryan and Ben Greenfield and Dr. Peter Attia and it was like everyone there was somebody I either knew or wanted to know yeah and really cool people but um when I was taking my hunter safeties course they were talking about how you are a conservationist and environmentalist like you are trying to preserve the land you wish to hunt on and that was embedded into the learning almost as much as which gauge to use in the shotgun for which type of fowl you were going to hunt you know like it was that in depth and that's something that i remember talking to my uncles about because you know that's um they

had hunted since i was a little boy and i'd been on a couple trips with them but didn't participate it was more like camping for me but being out in nature with them um was always really special to me but that was something they would talk about quite a bit was like making sure we have lands to hunt on right and how important that is to them and it's not necessarily you know from a an outsider looking in i wouldn't necessarily think like hunters give a about the earth yeah but it that tends to be the case you know from a an outsider looking in i wouldn't necessarily think like hunters give a shit about the earth yeah but it that tends to be the case you know so that consciousness aspect of if you can get people to fall in love with the water they'll fucking care if there's an oil spill

they'll care if people are dumping shit into the water yeah you know yeah i think you can say you can see the same sort of thing with whether it's fishers, hunters, surfers. If you're in contact with it, if you're out there and your life depends on your relationship with nature, then that generally will create a deeper level of respect certainly they're you know butt head surfers hunters fishers who don't give a damn they just want to get theirs and they don't care who they cut off or or you know what they destroy and of course right there's there's sociopaths and psychopaths in every industry and every every sector in every realm um they give that give everyone else kind of a bad name. But I think, I mean, one of my greatest fears is that there's a generation that's, their experience of nature is simply beautiful films.

Yeah, all these specials on Netflix we were talking about before the show. Yeah, I mean mean they're great and they but they're they're they work when they map onto real life experiences real reality not just virtual reality and uh i'm you know i'm not an anti-film i think films are great i think photography and art is great to compel people and keep them motivated. But it's usually a personal experience, a fully immersive personal experience that flips your switch, right? We just need to bring David Attenborough

on the hunting trip. Yeah, right. The ex is dead. That would be fun, actually. I'd like to bring him anywhere and just have him narrate what was going on like dinner yeah bring him on a surf trip so you you you finished up in arizona and you came out west yeah right after i uh yeah did my phd i did a master's degree at duke in North Carolina in economics and PhD at

University of Arizona. Spent a lot of time in Mexico. So my Mexican colleagues would consider me an honorary Mexican. Speak fluent Spanish. Did a lot of my field research in Baja, California, Mexico, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and studying sea turtles. And then kind of decided West Coast, stick with the West Coast. And my wife's from here, from California, so kind of gave her the, after I was dragging her around a few places,

I said, where are you going to drag us? Your turn. You pick. You should pick here. So here we are. Yeah, it is absolutely incredible here. I'm not complaining at all. We got a view right out of the window of one of my favorite beaches here, Carmel-by-the-Sea.

And yeah, it's definitely incredible. You know, I want to dip back into your book, book blue mind before we start talking about the next one yeah um one of the things that that blew me away and you touched on this a little bit just by playing at ladybird lake and not actually getting in the water is this this change that happens on a on a subconscious level or maybe even a physical change that happens within the neurochemistry just from seeing water right um can you unpack that a little bit yeah so i think the let's just go way back so if you're you're an animal and you're a mammal you're a big mammal let's just go with that as we are and you cannot position yourself correctly relative to a source of water, you're dead, right? That's just sort of evolution 101. If you can't perceive, find, perceive, and then locate yourself relative to a useful

source of water, you're not going to make it very far, no matter what you are, a fox, a human, monkey. So that we have this aesthetic appreciation for the sound and the sight of water makes perfect sense from a really deep, sort of primal perspective. That we consider this view from where we're sitting beautiful is a remnant of that survival instinct, I think. It's hard to study this stuff because you can't go back and do experiments, but the idea that water triggers this feel-good flood

of neurochemistry is highly adaptive to survival. If you don't get it right, you're dehydrated. is highly adaptive to survival. If you don't get it right, you're dehydrated. If you're dehydrated too long, you're toast, literally in less than a week. And that's not news to anyone who's ever been in those extreme circumstances. And it's a horrific way to go. So that we are good at responding

when we hear the sound of water, when we see the reflection of water, and then we move towards it, and then we make our home in the right spot relative to that water safely, is not really a surprise. So now fast forward, modern humans, you're never more than, let's just say 50 steps throughout most of your life. You're never more than 50 steps from a knob you can turn from which water emits. That's the modern human life. You're never far away from water. It's not a big concern. 1.6 gallons. Yeah, right.

Yeah, exactly. Just for urine. So where we're sitting right now, there's probably three, right out the door here, there's three knobs you could turn and water would come out. Through that door, there's a couple more. Through that door is the bathroom. There's a couple more. Through that door, there's about four or five more. So just where we're sitting, we're surrounded by almost at least a dozen,

almost 20 knobs that you can turn and the water would come out. And I could probably find them with my eyes closed. So that's our modern lifestyle. But we carry this memory, you could say, this ability to feel good when water is around. So I've done this very simple experiment I'll do. If I have a room that I'm speaking to, let's say a thousand people giving a keynote, I say, my team has locked the doors and taken away all the water bottles

and you'll get some water in five hours. And then I'll just be quiet for a second. Then I'll say, did you feel that? Did your mouth just get dry? And yours probably did. If you're listening right now, your mouth probably got dry. You know that I didn't lock the door. You know I didn't take the bottle away because it's probably still under your chair. But just the mere suggestion of the lack of water for five hours, your body responds and it doesn't waste water on saliva. It starts conserving water. So this is a pretty deep instinctive connection to water. Water is the basis of life. And so in our modern lives, we kind of use that and sometimes it's used in marketing to sell you, you say Corona beer, like all those water images.

It's used the Nestea plunge or, you know, Mountain Dew ads or whatever it is, it's sort of magazine articles for travel. It's just everywhere, but it kind of, the image of water hijacks this deep primal connection that we have to survive by the water. interesting so if if the sight of water the sound of water can calm us and it and it does then how can we use that as a healing modality for a generation of red-minded people how can we you know leverage this this response this mammalian response to water this reflexive response to water that that all mammals have and use that as a

as a as a hack I guess you could call it or as a force for good to help people heal but also help us there in response a heal our own planet and that's kind of the the dynamic that we're in right now with with blue mind and uh so what happens is well let's start with red mind when you're in red mind mode you know fight or flight or freeze that's the you know kind of the cliche uh that's red mind you feel like the back is against the wall and it's time to you know come out strong um, RedMind is very useful. We need it to survive. We need it to get to the finish line.

We need it to meet our deadlines. We need it to compete, right? RedMind's really useful. But there's adrenaline, there's cortisol. So your stress hormones go up and you get activated. You're very attentive in a heightened state extremely useful but if that's maintained or you try to sustain that too long as we talked about earlier burnout gray mind will come in and so understanding blue mind is you know really useful to start with red mind and the desire to avoid

gray mind. And so start to peel away the things that are causing red mind. Screens, all the noises, maybe it's a motorcycle going by, maybe it's a jackhammer outside your window, maybe it's deadlines, it's the thing buzzing in your pocket telling you there are things that you should be doing. Start peeling those things away. The auditory overstimulation, the visual overstimulation, the somatic overstimulation.

Start peeling those away. And that happens when you step up to the water. Visually, it's simplified. Auditorily, if there's water lapping on the beach, it's simplified. So you start getting the bandwidth back. You get in the water and you float. Now all of a sudden your brain is not coordinating the 200 muscles that it's doing right now. So you get that bandwidth back. That's a lot of bandwidth. What are you going to do with it? You don't just turn off. You don't just go into standby mode. You do move into a different mode that we call blue mind or the default mode,

which turns out to be very creative. You enter in this sense of oneness, more connected. Some people call it the zone. They call it flow. Lots of names that we use for it, but it's really useful and it's restorative it's connective to the people that you may be with sorry should have done that earlier and it turns out it's a spam call scam likely that's my good buddy that calls me often throughout the day scam likely yeah so that's kind of the you know the the dynamic um and sort of like a long carve through our evolutionary history you know of course we forget it but we all spent 9.21 months underwater in the dark hanging out in our own private ocean called mom more or less 9.21 months

we all had that experience. We don't remember much about it, but it's part of us. Like it's in there. I have a neuroscientist, a neuropsychiatrist friend whose next book is about those nine months, but our sensory experience and the development of our nervous system during the first nine months of life, which we don't think about too much we don't talk about it but that that's a chunk of time

that you were you right and you lived entirely underwater in the dark in your own personal you know float tank and uh there's something to that there's got to be and that's that's where where your your nervous system formed and that's where you started to develop started to become you and and so when we get into these these environments that that hint at that you know warm calm safe water at night you know warm ocean a warm lake at night or a float spa a float float tank, sensory deprivation tank, warm water, salty, buoyant, dark, quiet, you start to kind of get into these deeper states and where very different things happen. We access those states, you you know chemically as well but I

think the I think standing by the ocean just letting it trip you out and giving it giving you a blue high or diving under a lake or underwater going into a float tank produces a some very similar kind of transcendent experience where you feel these insights, you experience these insights that it's harder to do in this mode that we're in right now, in the active processing mode, which is more of a red line mode.

You touched on so many good things there. I love what you're talking about with flow tank flow float tanks as well because um flow and float take i'm combining those right now um i often talk about psychedelics and altered states of consciousness and and one of the things that i sometimes forget to mention is that that is kind of the the bridge between the two because there's not they're not for everyone you know like there's plenty of people who would benefit greatly from plant medicines and plenty of people who really have no business working with them yet that's the case their entire life but i feel like there are some prerequisites necessary for that one of

which being the ability to sit with yourself right right because if you can't if you're uncomfortable in your own skin and you can't get quiet and meditate it's going to be very hard when the the sea of is coming up and it's being stirred up right but um what an amazing bridge the float tank is yeah so you know if you give that a shot give that a try yeah see how that goes and if you're completely freaking out uh then then your practice maybe starts over here and and keep keep giving that try try it for 15 minutes or or just try to sit quietly with everything off in your own living room that might be a stretch for some people yeah yeah it's it's uh there was a book by my buddies brian mckenzie and dr andy galpin called

unplugged and a lot of it has to do with unplugging from um you know fitbit and different things and i'm into gadgets and gizmos i have a whoop watch on and i love it but they say take it off for a week and see how you feel yeah you know and i mean it's almost like leave your cell phone at the house and go for a drive and see how you feel like you feel fucking naked you know maybe lost literally that disconnect but i think that's one of the coolest things about the float tank is that it deprives you of all external right you're in pitch dark you can't hear anything you obviously didn't bring your cell phone in with you hopefully you know so so i mean that, just to carve that space, to create space for yourself to return to stillness, I think is so important. But as you were talking about the

float and its comparison to being in the womb, it really brought up for me something that's come up in quite a few ayahuasca ceremonies. And I just returned, as I told you before, the podcast from Costa Rica, where I did ayahuasca out at Sultar. It was beautiful, absolutely beautiful, one of my favorite experiences. Not on this trip, but in many closing ceremonies where we discussed some of the things we went through, quite a few people at different points have talked about remembering not being wanted as children in the womb, as far back as being in the womb, feeling the energy of either their father not wanting them and their mom freaking out about

that, the worry of I'm going to have to raise this kid by myself or both parents not wanting them. Yeah. And how that is imprinted from birth, right? Like we are so much more perceptible and aware than we think we are at that point in time because, well, this isn't formally, or, you know, completely finished and this isn't developed yet. And, you know, so, you know,

it's just a sack of cells growing. It's like, no, no, no. Well, the insights that I can bring to that as my wife and I were both adopted and I've hung around people who study the world of adoption quite a bit pretty strong if adoption is the inevitable outcome right after birth. But then there's that first few months and for some few years of just being handed off and in limbo.

And I'd say arguably one of the more traumatic things you could do to a kid, a baby, would be to just say, okay, we're going to just hand you off to some strangers for a little while until we figure out what happens. to our mother's breast is what we should be doing but when that that natural connection is you know precluded by the circumstances um so maybe kind of back to where we started my desire to be underwater where nobody could ask me any questions i didn't have to talk from deeply connects to what you just said there and i sometimes i don't really like to talk about it because it makes me feel bad, but it's good to go there sometimes and in a safe place ceremonially or with someone you trust

and have those conversations and dig in. And that probably can help explain the things you do that are harder to explain maybe to your partner or to, you know, your interactions with the world. into just in utero time, but early childhood experiences that we forget or forget on purpose and try to bury for different reasons. The peace that you get, the peace of mind that you get from plant medicine or from just spending time on in retreat in nature and just getting really quiet, whether it's water or the forest or combination of the two that's helping you achieve that floating free diving all these

experiences people embrace in order to kind of get get to the back to the core you know get back to the source whatever name you give it um and i think that's part of what what's wrong with us right now the disconnect we have from each other uh from from the from nature from the planet uh from our own happiness our own joy we get you know comes from this sense of you know moral injury and you know we were just seeing things going on that are disturbing you know relative to what we learn is right and wrong and then we just have to deal with it and digest it and carry on and bury it and just keep burying stuff. You're going to run out of room in the landfill. There's so many options too.

In any book in health and wellness that has to do with diet and nutrition, they talk about cleaning out the pantry. You don't want to have Twinkies and garbage on site where it's easy access. It's hard enough to eat clean when you have the right food, but don't give yourself the option, right? And yet, when we talk about stillness and mindfulness,

that requires a great deal of commitment to say no to constantly being on the phone and digging into social media and getting that dopamine hit from all the likes you just got from the photo in Costa Rica or whatever the thing is, right? You know, it's like, it's almost impossible to clean out the pantry when it comes to, all right, no emails for a week. Well, you're going to come back to a landslide of, you know, hundreds of emails if you have any kind of job that, you know, requires you to connect to the outside world. And I think that can be really hard for people. I think where we find balance is in making it a daily practice. And that's one of the things that I really

appreciate about Blue Mind is that it's not, you know, quarterly, I could go to Hawaii and have a hunting trip and be out there and be on the ocean and it'd be absolutely incredible. But then it's not going to last me a full quarter yeah maybe a week or two yeah you kind of still carry that stoke with you for a while but then it it fades and you want you want to renew it some way and yeah and uh well we you know every summer for the past six years we've done this thing we call it the blue mind challenge we do it for 100 days 100 days of blue we we call it. And basically, it's just get your blue mind on every day in some way and just be aware of it, be mindful of it.

And it could be a glass of water. Could be. Could be a mindful shower. It could be a jump in the lake in Austin. It could be just sitting here on this deck and just looking out at the ocean. Could be art, could be virtual, but every day do it and spend minutes, longer if you can, and just be aware of it. And you start to build new habits and those habits then stick, ideally. If you do it for a hundred days, then that just becomes build new habits. And those habits then stick, ideally.

If you do it for 100 days, then that just becomes your new normal. And you start thinking with your blue mind more often. And when you feel red mind coming on and potentially gray mind coming on, you have this tool that you've developed and practiced for 100 days that's there. And you can say, hey, read the book, think about it, listen to the podcast. But if you've done the practice for 100 days, it's going to sink in, right? So whatever you're trying to achieve, you want to build new habits. And there are people who say at least 21 days to build new habits. Some say it's you you want to build new habits and there are people say

at least 21 days to build new habits some say it's a little longer we just went with 100 days because it's the whole summer from memorial day to labor day the unofficial boundaries of you know the north american summer the summer vacation sort of and uh and i you know i hear from people all the time like i did it you know i missed a few days here and there but you know no harm no foul no guilt keep moving forward and after that hundred days or like i it's it's it's helped me recalibrate my relationship to my water and all the different ways i can i can experience it and it isn't you said, isn't just a saving up and waiting for that trip to Hawaii once a year or the big vacation or even the vacation weekend.

It's figuring out how to dial it in daily in some way. And your water is available. Just ask everyone I meet, what's your water? And then I listen. And they have the best stories, like most beautiful stories. And the water they first fell in love with, the water that's near them now.

For some people, their water is a person. For some people, it's the water in their food. It's the water that's used in agriculture. Just beautiful answers. Lakes, rivers, oceans, of course, pools, showers, baths. So everyone's got a different answer. This isn't about telling people what to do. That doesn't really work very well.

It's about asking the right questions, listening, and then using those answers to form the thing that will work ultimately. Any kind of coaching, ultimately, that's gotta be part of it. Any sort of training, retraining. Ultimately, you gotta figure out where people are, what they have available,

and then work with what's there, rather than forcing a whole new structure, particularly as we get older and it gets harder and harder to make those shifts. So I like to ask that question. If anybody's listening, just think about it. Write it down. What's your water?

Just really think that one through. And when was the last time you got in it? How did it feel? Who first took you there? Who was your guide? Thank them for that. Maybe you never said thank you to the person. Could have been a family member, a friend, a coach,

a guide, a teacher. Call them and say, hey, thanks. That water that you introduced me to, it's so thanks for for for taking me there the first time and uh that's that's good stuff to do and get you know stay in touch with your water yeah yeah well let's jump into your upcoming work yeah because i find it fascinating and um obviously there's been quite a bit written about flow in probably the last five to ten years. Mostly recently, I'd say. But between Steven Kotler and the rise of Superman, and then Stealing Fire with Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal.

Jamie's a good buddy of mine out in Austin. Quite a bit around this, but I don't think anybody's tackled it quite the way you are so i'd love to dive into this well so i you know the flow the concept of flow or being in the zone is is pretty it's gotten very familiar to people and i and i think anybody who's in uh working on on themselves in any way as an athlete as a performer um working on themselves in any way, as an athlete, as a performer, working on your mind and your body. But it's a very me-focused concept. It's a very you-focused concept. It's a very individual approach. And what and what the science is beginning to look at is how we flow together so if if i had an eeg on on my brain right now and you had one in your brain and we were throughout this conversation

we may have started off um as just two guys that just kind of sat down, but once we get into the conversation, we start to get in some kind of synchrony. Our breathing rates might start to approximate each other. Our body language, you cross your legs, I cross my legs, you don't cross your legs. Those things start to happen. You start to read each other.

The micro emotions. and the more time we spend in the same place we start we get into something i call groove and when we flow together we create a groove so just let's go let's use the the water analogy or metaphor again when when rivers come together and flow together they create grooves like the size of the Grand Canyon, like these majestic grooves. And that's what we want as a team. That's what we want as a family. That's what we want as a community. And arguably, that's what we want as a nation.

We want a groove. Wouldn't it be great if we as a nation were in some kind of groove? There's room for conflict. There's room for disagreement. And that's all part of being on a team. But when we've grooved as a nation, we've done some good stuff. And when we don't groove, we beat each other up and we don't get as much done. When we groove as a family, you know it, right? You know, you're communicating well, you're communicating almost non-verbally, maybe less conflict, less strife, more financial stability, more cooperation. And when you listen to, you know, the music you love, when your favorite band is really grooving

and you're at the live show, you know it. You know they know it. They know you know it. Everybody in the room knows it. And you're like, man, I'm glad to be here. This is magic, right? Our favorite sports teams, when they groove, they win. They win championships multiple years in a row when

they're we're in they're in this groove state so i've been trying to you know kind of unpack what are the ingredients that we need i don't want to give it all away here because i want to come back i want to come back and talk about it oh yeah there's plenty of time before this is the teaser trailer yeah um but when the book comes out um we'll we'll cycle back but you know i i challenged people who are listening to kind of think think for yourself what when you've been in groove which is bigger than flow it's flowing together with with the people you work with the people you play with the people you perform with uh the people you love, what are the ingredients that were necessary to make that work? There's, of course, a level of trust. There's a level of competence, of skill,

practice. So the Beatles, for example, they grooved. And they're, as a result, one of the greatest bands of all time. Those four guys weren't all the same they had a couple replacements came you know an early drummer replacement ringo was not the first drummer but they subbed in uh ringo and and um they didn't always get along they fought a bit but there was resilience so that's a piece of it that's one of the ingredients like we're we're gonna stay connected we're gonna we're gonna develop our skill set we're going to trust each other and a good coach is probably helpful we kind of see that in in sports teams but the coach is not the high mighty you know overlord They're carrying some humility as well.

So that's another ingredient, humility. Any team member knows that as soon as arrogance gets in the way, then the trust breaks down and the groove goes away. And so, you know, I went to high school in Chicago and I remember going and watching the Bulls play in old Chicago Stadium. And Michael Jordan would score 40, 50, even 60 points in a game and they'd lose. He was in flow. The team was not in groove until they got it together. And so Coach Jackson started putting together a team. They started to play together. They started to develop trust.

Some humility, I think, was involved, occasionally at least. And then they started to groove, and they started to win championship after championship over the course of the era that they defined. And it's a great thing, you know, on any stage, whether it's your family, you know, your partner, just you groove when there's more than one person. And I think it's an idea, kind of like Blue Mind, that's intuitive. Like you know it, you've experienced it, you taste and smell it, you know it you've experienced it you taste and smell it you see it you feel it when it's there just like blue mind but you never you didn't have a

name for it exactly and you certainly didn't learn the science of groove uh in high school you didn't learn the science of blue mind in high school either yeah um but if you're fortunate you experience blue mind uh often yeah as a school kid and uh that's my hope with with these ideas with these these these words and phrases that that you know we can kind of describe and develop and then share that they become uh common knowledge so i mean my goal for Blue Mind is that it becomes common knowledge, that 7.7 billion people understand and have access to their blue mind. That'd be phenomenal if every human understood this conversation. And when they got some red mind going on that they wanted to limit, and they felt like, oh, this is going to lead to gray mine,

they had that tool in their toolkit. They could say, I'm going to jump in the water. Time for a reset. Time for a reset. Yeah. And whether their water is literal water or metaphoric water, it doesn't matter if it works.

But I think when we don't have that tool, we resort to devices and strategies that create bigger problems. So whether it's, you know, look at the epidemic of all kinds of addictions, destructive addictions. I think there are potentially good addictions as well, but the destructive addictions that tear us apart, that wreck our bodies, wreck our minds, wreck our relationships, our families, and ultimately our communities and our country. When we self-medicate in ways that are destructive, that's what happens. We can self-medicate in ways that are regenerative. And I know that's what your whole podcast really revolves around is those ways of

self-medicating before you end up in the emergency room. You listen to a podcast and you learn, you read and you learn, you try things and you learn and you take care of yourself so that it isn't an expensive, disastrous outcome. And I think Blue Mind is one of the tools, like all the conversations you have on your podcast, it's this collection of great, great tools that you offer your listeners. And I think Blue Mind, just one more to throw in the toolbox right in there on the shelf. A damn good one. A good one, yeah.

Yeah, and one that's available, we're a water planet, so it's available to us wherever you are, even in the desert. So Blue Mind has informed my understanding of this idea of groove in a lot of ways. Working with and for the ocean and its inhabitants informed blue mind and you know one thing sort of leads leads to the next and and uh it's a joy to to be on that path of discovery and you know curiosity and learning. People like you, people like Kyle, the whole gang that gathered at Kyle's house for dinner,

all the incredible minds that you interact with, people you converse with. It's just, it's a kind of, it's a cool time. There's a lot going on. There's a lot of it's a cool time there's a there's a lot going on there's a lot of bubbling up of sort of ancient wisdom given an extra bit of umph by modern science yeah you know that combination is is impeccable and so useful and i think disruptive and and the way of some of the old paradigms. And there's a little friction there sometimes. The profit motive that exists to keep us all kind of medicated

on some things that are not so good for us. They don't want to give up too easily um so yeah i probably have experienced and had conversations about that kind of stuff i haven't had any death threats about blue mind but i know it is in conflict with with some other industries that would rather sell you their stuff than have you take this pill the rest of your life yeah right i have your blue mind it's right here exactly don't don't get 60 at a time at walgreens don't jump in that in that lake or don't you know go to that that float spa you just come here and and and take take these pills that'd be a fun ad though like float spa on a bottle yeah right serene and it's nothing but oceans and waterfalls and lakes yeah this shows uh it's

mark sissons on his stand-up paddleboard outside in malibu yeah on the water you know if you watch i i pay attention to uh to the advertising world and if you watch there are a lot of pharmaceutical ads that have blue mind imagery so they might be selling a pill for psoriasis, but the imagery is people running down the beach, jumping in a pool. Or they're pouring like pristine water into a glass. Yeah, yeah. So the wellness image of being near, in, on,

and underwater is used to sell things that really don't have a lot to do with wellness uh whether it's you know i mean corona whatever you think about corona beer they they built their brand on blue mind it's all about you you see that logo and you think beautiful blue water white sand beach i'm there with my friends even though you might be popping that beer in a basement in canada and then we had a winner right it's kind of like you still get the that little that little feeling um and that's that's interesting uh but you know let's harness all all of the the actual goodness of clean healthy water water as a force for healing for our bodies

and our minds, for emotional healing, spiritual healing, as well as physical. The workout side of it is something that I think has a lot of potential. And you probably appreciate that moving the whole workout scene into the water. I'll be onursday going down to train with gabby reese and laird hamilton i think i'm gonna miss laird but yeah i've worked with xpt and you know they ryan's gonna be down on my podcast producer with me recording a lot of the underwater workouts oh excellent it's it's just incredible it really is special there's a guy up in uh oakland and you're gonna be i don't know if you were passing through

Oakland this trip at all, but his name is Pionki Gibson. I'm just going to give him a shout out. And people can look him up on Instagram, but he's a former competitive swimmer, swam at Auburn. But now he's basically taken, he trains some of the Oakland Raiders, but he trains, he has one client that's a performer, a rapper who started out at 670 pounds, not too mobile on land. But when he gets in the water, he says, I feel like an angel. And I've never felt like an angel. Is it E40?

I'm trying to think of East Bay rappers. I can't remember his name. I'll pull it up. Big guy, obviously. But he's shrinking because he's been moving. And he's been moving because he gets in the water. He's able to do pull-ups and dips and jog on a treadmill in the water and do all kinds of movement that on land he was unable to achieve, but in the water,

it gives him that support. And even to say, I mean, it's such a beautiful thing for a guy to say, I feel like an angel for the first time. I just think, imagine that. It reminds me of the kids that we work with, the at-risk youth that get in the river with a wetsuit and a mask and a snorkel, and they say, I feel peace of mind for the first time in my life. Imagine having your whole childhood and never feeling peace of mind. You know, like how traumatic that would be.

And then the gift of peace of mind by just putting on a wetsuit and mask and snorkel and getting a camera and getting into a river in wisconsin you know it's like blue mind is everywhere and it's uh these kids are now you know river warriors because the river gave them their life back and uh they're going to defend that river to the end and so that's what you kind of see as these people are in different kinds of healing journeys or wellness journeys or self-improvement journeys the water helps and then you want to give back help the water that's when the groove starts right about there just want to get outside of yourself and the switch from me the me perspective to the we perspective and uh

it turns out water is the number one source of awe and wonder for humanity for all of our history and that when we feel awe and wonder we it builds our empathy and our compassion like neurologically the sense of awe and wonder builds our empathy. And this generation could use a lot more empathy. And so water is one place to go, an empathy school. Think about that when you're in Hawaii with Gabby and Laird and working out, if that water gives you a different sense

of empathy and compassion that you might not feel on land as much um yeah cool stuff dude it's been amazing having you brother yeah so much good stuff yeah thanks for coming over uh where can people find you obviously we'll link to uh your book on the show notes and one link to your website yeah my name wallacejnichols.com is probably the starting point and then that will branch out to all the various projects that that i'm engaged in and and uh collaborating on and um any questions that pop up i'm pretty easy to find just ping me and i'll i'll set you in the right direction to find the answer yeah awesome

thank you so much thank you yeah it's been great really good thank you guys for tuning in the right direction to find the answer. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you so much, Wallace. Thank you. Yeah. It's been great. Really good. Thank you guys for tuning in the show with my man, Wallace J. Nichols. Head over to the show notes, click a link on his book, Blue Mind. It is fantastic. As always, check out onnit.com slash Kyle for 10% off all supplements and food products. Thanks for tuning in, guys. Leave us a review. Hit subscribe and tell your friends.

Tell your mama all about me.